“Everything is settled! nothing to think about,” he continued. “What fault then do the public find in the modern plays? It is not that they finish badly, but that they do not finish at all!
“The ‘dénouement’! Ah! There is a word,” cried the Baron, “that has the gift of exasperating all our young authors. They cannot resign themselves like Augier, Dumas and Sardou, to see on the stroke of midnight the hero marry the heroine and virtue get its reward.
“All this is to them old-fashioned. The dénouement of Denise makes them smile, and Francillon, whose heroine hasn’t really deceived her husband, seems to them a farce. So, to finish in a newer way, they do not finish at all. _Voilà!_ It is simpler, _Hein!_ but confess that it isn’t any more difficult!
“It is this which depresses the bourgeois, who has come to the theater to amuse himself. He comes out at the end of the play with one more worry on his conscience. He leaves pensive and saddened and oppressed by the gloominess of it all.
“In ‘L’Envers d’une Sainte,’ François de Curel sends his heroine back to her convent, and Henry Becque ends ‘Les Corbeaux’ by a marriage which makes you foresee a loveless life of misery and oppression. And the proof of the growing distaste for these sad plays is, that when they played ‘Ties’ at the Français lately, they felt obliged to give at the end a little play in one act full of gaiety, so as to dry the eyelids and expand the chest of all those who were going to bed.”
The hour had grown late, the café was deserted, and the Baron’s _écrevisses_ had become cold. Outside two nighthawk cabs stood waiting for a chance trip. Fog rose from the slime of the boulevard.
“Come and dine with me to-morrow night at the Café Anglais,” said the Baron, as he tucked up the collar of his coat and entered his cab, “and we will go up to the Rabelais and see ‘Le Corset de Germaine.’”
You must not judge the Théâtre du Châtelet by the melodramas which accompany the gorgeous spectacles given there; where the ballets are superb and the arts of scenic painting and stage mechanism are seen in their perfection.
The melodrama I saw at the Châtelet concurrent with the spectacle in twelve acts and twenty tableaux, was written especially for the chief actor. The hero finds himself, as the curtain rises, in the interior of India, where he soon falls in love with a beautiful princess, Zuléma by name, the only daughter of a rich sheik.