However, Paul Hervieu's reputation does not stand or fall on this drama any more than it does on his novels, Flirt and L'Armature. Les Paroles Restent has a theme cleverly invented, above all cleverly handled. A man sets in motion a lie about a young girl in society, though he believes it is the truth. Later he meets and loves her. His remorse is great when he discovers that she is innocent. To make reparation (oh, masculine vanity of vanities!) he resolves to confess both his love and his fault. He does so. The woman, Régine de Vesles, is outraged in her pride, in her love, to discover that her secret calumniator is the man she has adored. She parts from him. A duel is precipitated—lugged in by the hair, really—and De Nohan is dangerously wounded. Naturally Régine goes to his bedside and pardons him. They are sure to be happy. Alas! les paroles restent, and after De Nohan hears repeated his vile slander he dies. The situations are effective throughout, the character-drawing subtle.
This play is full of melodrama, and, as has been pointed out, contains "several weapons borrowed from the arsenal of the inexhaustible Scribe." Hervieu followed it with Les Tenailles, which was at once a challenge to his critic and a greater play. Tenailles (nippers)—horrible word! Here the author gives us human nature in the raw. A woman is married to a man she does not love. He, it appears, makes no attempt to secure her love. She really loves a famous man, a traveller. She tells her husband so. She will not deceive him, as other feebler women would; she must leave at once. But the husband of Irene Fergan is cool-headed. He asks his wife how she proposes to escape the hateful marriage tie. She must give the law a reason, a motive. Collusion is the only remedy, and he will not enter into any such conspiracy. Then she declares she will run away. Not far, he calmly replies, for there is always the police. No matter what she does, he will not let her go. Bowing her head, the woman submits. The wife is the prisoner of the husband, the woman bond-slave of the man, despite all our gabbling about emancipation and equal rights in this enlightened century.
Ten years pass, when the curtain again rises. There is a child; the home is seemingly a placid one. The little son must be sent to school. Another crisis. There is a terrible duel of words and will. Enraged she cries, "The child is not yours," and then confesses—no, confesses is not the word, rather boasts, that she had a lover, the man she always loved, the traveller. The husband now no longer claims the other's son; he will even grant the divorce. The culmination comes when Irene refuses to be thrust out of doors,—the child has just passed through the room,—she has borne the agony of ten years. They must go hand in hand manacled to the end, let the nippers gall as they will. There is the child. Its future is at stake. "But," the man whimpers, "you are guilty and I am innocent."—"No," she says, "we are only two miserable people, and misery knows none but equals." The answer is like the harsh stroke of a savage alarm bell. It startled all Paris for many months. Les paroles restent!
The Law of Man is even more tense and disagreeable than its predecessor. Herein the problem posed is this (for with Hervieu the play is always a problem; like Ibsen he asks questions and seldom answers them, though it may be premised that while he has much of Ibsen's gloom and love for the unusual, he lacks the cold, concentrated logic of the Norwegian): A woman surprises her husband by means of letters, but does not leave him. Her daughter falls in love with the son of the woman who has caused the trouble. Poor wife, poor mother, she is confused at these crossroads of misery. Sacrifice her daughter and appease her vengeance, or—hold her silence for evermore? She prefers the former, and summoning the husband of her own husband's mistress, the father of the young man who seeks the hand of her innocent daughter, she tells the secret. After the first natural rage, this undeceived man, more merciful than the woman, insists on her silence. Two innocent young folk must not have their happiness slain because of their parents' sins. And as it is his right, the selfish and wretched woman must submit. A way is found to make the lovers happy, and the play ends, leaving all sorts of interrogation marks in the air. There are big things in this drama.
La Course du Flambeau played by Réjane with such striking effect is judged by some of Hervieu's admirers as his masterpiece. It is not, though an exceedingly interesting work replete with wisdom and several strong studies of character. Sabine Revel, who sacrifices her mother for the sake of her daughter and is in turn herself sacrificed, illustrates the not uncommon fate of a selfish daughter and a too fond mother. The Greek motto embodied in the title—the passing on of the illuminated torch, according to Lucretius, at the "lampadophories" festival in Athens—is employed by the dramatist as a symbol of the chain of life, the light passed on from one generation to another with the sacrificing of the old by the young which characterizes human existence.
Yet there is no hint of Ibsen in this symbol; Hervieu is a painter of manners, and a psychologist, not a poet. He confessed to me, while graciously submitting to be "interviewed," that Ibsen has had little part in his development. He is a true Frenchman and really derives from Dumas fils in his love of the problem posed; while his cerebral temperament makes him more of a disciple of Stendhal and Becque than of the very emotional, modern Germans and Scandinavians. Yet he has an emotive temperament—a glance at his sympathetic eyes will prove it. He is a man with too large a head for his frame. He feels too deeply to be happy. M. Alfred Binet, in his precise psychological study of the dramatist, describes his sober methods of travail, his slow composition, his philosopher's dislike of the hasty or the improvised, and his fondness for clearly articulated dialogue. He has the logical imagination, he disdains the Zola "human documents" in preparing his story, and while he is by nature an ironist, he is too serious in his outlook on life to play the part of a mystifier. "Irony is the speech of the timid man," he said to me, when we spoke of Becque and his too cynical disciples. An anxious sincerity is the key-note of M. Hervieu's character. He abhors the facile triumphs of the Parisian play-maker who dallies with ignoble themes. A finely attuned intellect, a plentiful sympathy with suffering, a special sensitiveness to the soul feminine, combined with real artistry,—though he despises mere technical dexterity,—all have made Paul Hervieu the present master-psychologist of the French stage.