The Amazing City

by John Frederick Macdonald

3. M. Brieux, “La Déserteuse,” at the Odéon

“Brieux at the Odéon? Brieux passing from the grim playhouse of M. Antoine, to the calm, placid, highly respectable Odéon?” Such must have been the startled exclamations of hundreds of playgoers when it was announced that the “Second Theatre of France” had “received,” and was actually rehearsing, a new drama by the author of Les Avariés and Maternité.

Amazing tidings, certainly. And especially amazing, even alarming, to the regular mature patrons of the Odéon, whose peaceful way of life, whose tranquil train of thought, could not but be upset by the ardent, revolutionary M. Brieux. They desire no disagreeable awakenings, and, above all, no “social problems.”

I fancy the neighbourhood has affected our mature ones! They live round about the Senate, whose members, we know, are renowned for a constant drowsiness. Is not the Upper Chamber popularly described as the “Palace of Sleep”? The alert, frisky Parisian cannot endure the Palais du Sommeil. He wants emotions, excitement—and he finds them in the Chamber of Deputies, which never sleeps.

“A restful sanctuary” is Mr Bodley’s idea of the Senate. “It does very little; it is not highly considered. The idea sometimes suggested is that of a retreat for elderly gentlemen.”

Well, the regular mature patron of the Odéon may be likened to the Senator: his intellect is impaired by the same constant drowsiness. And the “Second Theatre of France”—most Parisians dispute its right to that distinguished title—may be likened to the Senate. It is not highly considered; it renders but small services to the dramatic art; and, at times, it presents the appearance of a restful sanctuary.

But—arrives M. Brieux. Arrives, actually, upon this tranquil, drowsy scene, the ardent, revolutionary author of Maternité and Les Avariés. What—oh, what—is in store for the regular mature patrons? No doubt they were all anxiety, all indignation, until it was understood that M. Brieux had not arrived in their demure domain alone. With him, M. Jean Sigaux. With him, a collaborator who might be expected to exercise restraint. Has M. Sigaux fulfilled those expectations? Is M. Brieux of the Odéon the M. Brieux of the Théâtre Antoine? Or, has M. Brieux been intimidated by Odéon traditions?

Not unanimous on this point are the leading French dramatic critics. Three or four of them profess themselves disappointed with La Déserteuse, because unable to recognise M. Brieux’s change of attitude. They are still under the spell of Maternité, where the author so vigorously and so ruthlessly attacked the “established morality” and “dominant passions.” The change of attitude is undeniable. But La Déserteuse is a strong, generous, human play; and all the more interesting from our own special point of view, as students of the French stage in its relation to French life, because it does not represent a dramatic exposure of injustices and impostures, prevalent (if we believe the reformer) in all European societies, but a dramatic illustration of universal passions and emotions, as these manifest themselves under the influence of traditional sentiments and habits of thought and feeling that belong essentially to France.

The French bourgeois: wherein he differs from, and as a type of humanity is superior to, the English shopkeeper; the French jeune fille—and the French sentiment about her—and wherein this sentiment explains her jealously and tenderly guarded inferiority in attractiveness, intelligence and independence to her English prototype—here are the secrets which La Déserteuse may assist a foreign spectator to penetrate....

We are in the town of Nantes, in the home of Forjot, music publisher, husband, father and confirmed bourgeois. Forjot also gives concerts, but he himself is nothing of a musician and would regard music with contempt, were it not a means of making money. Not so his wife, Gabrielle, young, beautiful and vivacious, who has been assured by the director of the local theatre that she is possessed of a rare voice. Gabrielle sings at little Nantais concerts and is admired and applauded. Gabrielle is told that she would triumph on the operatic stage—and sighs. She loves excitement, she longs for fame, she is full of dreams and ambitions and fancies—but she finds no sympathiser in the music publisher, her husband, who, looking up impatiently from his ledgers, bids her pay more attention to her house, her child and “the rest.”