L’Acquitté, another one-act comedy, presents the adventure of a vagabond, Jean Guenille, who, having carried to the police station (in an access of honesty) a purse of 10,000 francs which he found in the street, is browbeaten and put under lock and key by the commissaire because he has no legal domicile. M. Mirbeau’s other plays, Vieux Ménages (1900), Le Portefeuille and Scrupules (1902), and Les Affaires sont les Affaires (1903),—the last-named[118] an exposition of the power of money to destroy natural sentiments,—are only a shade less subversive in tone.
Lucien Descaves has to his credit a one-act anarchistic play, entitled La Cage. The Havenne family (consisting of father, mother, a son Albert, aged twenty-one, and a daughter Madeleine, aged twenty-six), threatened with eviction and unable to pay their rent or find work, are in black despair. The father and mother, in the temporary absence of Albert and Madeleine, drink a vial of laudanum and light a brazier of charcoal. The children return, find their parents dead, and, desiring to die likewise, submit themselves to the poisonous fumes of the brazier, which is still burning. They bethink themselves in time, however, decide that it is less cowardly to steal than to die, and set out together for a career of outlawry and revolutionary apostleship. “Are we quite sure, Madeleine, that there is nothing better to do than to kill ourselves?” queries Albert. And then he quotes the famous letter of Frederick of Prussia to D’Alembert: “If there should be found a family destitute of all resources and in the frightful condition you depict, I should not hesitate to decide theft legitimate.... The ties of society are based upon reciprocal services; but, if this society is composed of pitiless souls, all engagements are broken.”
La Cage was suppressed by the censorship[119] very early in its career. Descaves, who dedicated his work “Aux désespérés pour qu’ils choisissent,” foresaw and publicly predicted its interdiction. “Let me try,” he said, “to put on the stage, instead of adulteries and embarrassing liaisons, the distress of a bourgeois family at the end of its resources, its illusions, and its courage,—the parents reduced to suicide and the children precipitated into revolt. Ah! you’ll hear a fine clatter!”
The severity of the censorship towards La Cage called out numerous protests, notably this from Alexander Hepp (in his Quotidiens), little suspected of doctrinal sympathy with Descaves: “As soon as we show to the gallery the reality of the miseries, the despairs, the injustices of society, a fragment of real life, of the true cross people carry, our delicate sensibilities are shocked; and it is always before that which is truest that we cry out improbability. The innovating tendencies, the harsh accent of retribution, the virile sincerity of Descaves, who puts on the boards a family driven to suicide, have disturbed the digestions of the orchestra.”
The critic Henri Bauer, commenting on Les Mauvais Bergers and La Cage, wrote: “An anti-social dramatic literature is born in France.... It required authors of the power and eloquence of Mirbeau, of the devouring passion and the admirable soul of Descaves, to dare to ring out in dramatic dialogue this conclusion, On n’améliore pas la société, on la supprime.... Society is a lie, social progress a lure, the social pact is broken: nothing is left but the individual,—his temperament, his law, his conscience, and his will.”
Descaves’ Tiers Etat is an eloquent plea for the faithful mistress who is debarred from marriage by legal technicalities. He is also joint author with Georges Darien of Les Chapons (to which this legend was prefixed: “Aux Mânes des Bourgeois de Calais nous sacrifions ce spécimen de leur pitoyable descendance”), and with Maurice Donnay of La Clairière and Oiseaux de Passage. La Clairière, which was one of the notable features of the theatrical season of 1898-99, pictures the life of an anarchist phalanstère, which succeeds admirably until the members send for their compagnes, when it is demoralised and disintegrated by petty intrigues and jealousies.
The moral? Not the obvious and absurd one that men alone will constitute the society of the future; but this, that women have not been enfranchised long enough to have developed the maturity of character necessary to the practice of anarchist precepts. Oiseaux de Passage deals with the experiences of anarchists in exile. “I am proud,” says M. Descaves, apropos of the piece, “to have been able to transfer to the stage the theories of a Bakounine, and to introduce them to the public thus.”
Maurice Donnay is a railing nihilist, subtle, graceful, and gracious, somewhat after the Anatole France pattern,—a smiling révolté, a refined recalcitrant, whose recipe for a play is said to be “a little love, much adultery, an enormous amount of esprit, a pinch of politics, and a gramme of sociology,” and whose psychology is “a sparkling, effervescing affair, the analyses of which explode merrily with the welcome noise of popping champagne corks.”
In Amants, La Douloureuse, La Bascule, Le Retour de Jérusalem, and Georgette Lemonnier, Donnay is prodigal of bons mots and malicious pleasantries, by which he gives the most piquant conceivable flavour to the social and political infamies of the time. Le Torrent, his most ambitious work, has this much of the serious, that death is its dénouement; but its general method and attitude do not differ essentially from the method and attitude of his other plays.