The hero of my play, Paul Kauvar, has for his prototype Camille Desmoulins, one of the most conspicuous and sincere sons of liberty of his day, who—in spite of his magnificent devotion to freedom—when he dared oppose the Jacobins, was beheaded at the guillotine—a martyr to national, as distinct from personal, liberty.
The typical anarchist in my play is portrayed in Carrac, whose prototype was Thomas Carier, sent into La Vendée as a representative of the Jacobin convention. It was this man who, without process of law, guillotined or destroyed most horribly over one hundred thousand innocent men, women, and children—in the name of liberty. He it was who invented the "republican marriage"—the drowned bodies of whose naked victims dammed the river Loire, and rendered its water pestilential.
The Duc de Beaumont portrays a type of the true noblesse of
France—proud, fearless, often unjust, never ignoble.
Gouroc depicts the intriguing type of noblesse whose egotism
and cruelty engendered the tyranny of the monarchy, and
justified its destruction.
The prototype of General Delaroche was the brave and generous
Henri de la Rochejacquelin, young leader of the royalists in
La Vendée.
By the interplay of these types, I have sought to emphasize what is truly heroic in the struggle which must ensue in all times between men and classes possessed of differing ideas. Especially it is the purpose of my play to remind the American masses, by the history of the past, not to assist foreign influences to repeat that history on this continent in the future.
A sound attitude, and one supported now (1920) daily in the conservative press, whenever I.W.W. and Bolshevist demonstrations shake the country! But "Paul Kauvar" is, to-day, not the kind of drama to drive home the lesson; fashions have changed.
On December 24, 1887, "Paul Kauvar" opened at the New York Standard
Theatre, with Joseph Haworth and Annie Robe, and thereafter started
on a stage career whose history is long and varied. It reached London,
May 12, 1890, under the management of Augustus Harris, at the Drury
Lane, with William Terriss and Jessie Millward heading the cast.
Nym Crinkle liked "Paul Kauvar" because of its vigourous masculinity. To him there was in it the "scintillant iron," "the strong arm, ruddy at times with the tongues of promethean fire." It is a big canvas, avowedly romantic. "It is," he wrote, after the play had been running in New York some months, "a work of great propulsive power, of genuine creative ingenuity, of massive dramatic effectiveness." On that account it is well worth the preserving and the reading.