its butterfly wings as the modern comedy of
intrigue.

Scribe's course was now an uninterrupted triumph. During the whole
Bourbon and Orleanist period he was first, with no second, in light
comedy. Beginning at the humble Theatre du Vaudeville and the Varietes,
he passed in 1820 to the newly founded Gymnase, for which he wrote one
hundred and fifty little pieces, of which the most significant are "La
Demoiselle a marier," "La Chanoinesse," "Le Colonel," "Zoe, ou l'amant
prete," and "Le Plus beau jour de ma vie," the last two familiar to us
as "The Loan of a Lover" and "The Happiest Day of My Life." Most of
these pieces were written in collaboration with various dramatists, of
whom the least forgotten are Saintine, Bayard, and Saint-Georges, men of
whom it is quite pardonable to be ignorant. It is, therefore, reasonable
to infer that the essential dramatic element in them is due to Scribe
alone; and indeed one sees that, while all are slight in conception,
they are all ingenious and amusing in intrigue.

In his more ambitious comedies Scribe at first preferred to work alone,
and here, too, he learned success by failure.[C] The new conditions,
social and political, that followed the Revolution of 1830, helped him
also; for new liberties admitted, and the new bourgeois plutocracy
invited, the good-humored persiflage in which he was an easy master. On
the other hand, he was hardly touched by the accompanying Romantic
movement in literature that was then convulsing the theatre-going public
with "Hernani" and "Antony." He cared much less for the critics than for
the box-office, and now transferred his work almost wholly to the
national Theatre Francais. Here were produced during the eighteen years
that separate "Bertrand et Raton" from "Bataille de dames" (1833-1851)
almost all his pieces that still hold the stage, notable among them "La
Camaraderie," the most popular of his political comedies, "Une Chaine,"
"Le Verre d'eau," "Adrienne Lecouvreur," and "Les Contes de la reine de
Navarre." The last two, the present comedy, and the somewhat later
"Doigts de fee" (1858), were written in collaboration with Legouve; and
as these are certainly his best plays, we may expect to find an element
in them that Scribe alone, or with other collaborators, could not
supply. But of this presently.

During all these years his inexhaustible fertility was pouring out a
stream of novels,[D] tales, farces, and librettos.[E] Everything that he
t