ic literature) you will find little or nothing relating to
Octave Mirbeau and Georges Feydeau. True, Mirbeau did not do his best
work in the theatre. That stinging, cynical attack on the courts of
Justice (?) of France (nay, the world!), "Le Jardin de Supplice" is
not a play and it is probably Mirbeau's masterpiece and the best piece
of critical fiction written in France (or anywhere else) in the last
fifty years. However Mirbeau shook the pillars of society even in the
playhouse. _Le Foyer_ was hissed repeatedly at the Theatre Francais.
Night after night the proceedings ended in the ejection and arrest of
forty or fifty spectators. Even to a mere outsider, an idle bystander
of the boulevards, this complete exposure of the social, moral, and
political hypocricies of a nation seemed exceptionally brutal. _Le
Foyer_ and "Le Jardin" could only have been written by a man
passionately devoted to the human ideal ("each as she may," as
Gertrude Stein so beautifully puts it). _Les Affaires sont les
Affaires_ is pure theatre, perhaps, but it might be considered the
best play produced in France between Becque's _La Parisienne_ and
Brieux's _Les Hannetons_.

It is not surprising, on the whole, to find the critical tribe turning
for relief from this somewhat unpleasant display of Gallic closet
skeletons to the discreet exhibition of a few carefully chosen bones
in the plays of Bernstein and Bataille, direct descendants of Scribe,
Sardou, _et Cie_, but I may be permitted to indulge in a slight
snicker of polite amazement when I discover these gentlemen applying
their fingers to their noses in no very pretty-meaning gesture,
directed at a grandson of Moliere. For such is Georges Feydeau. His
method is not that of the Seventeenth Century master, nor yet that of
Mirbeau; nevertheless, aside from these two figures, Beaumarchais,
Marivaux, Becque, Brieux at his best, and Maurice Donnay occasionally,
there has not been a single writer in the history of the French
theatre so inevitably _au courant_ with human nature. His form is
frankly farcical and his plays are so funny, so enjoyable merely as
_good shows_ that it seems a pity to raise an obelisk in the
playwright's honour, and yet the fact remains that he understands the
political, social, domestic, amorous, even cloacal conditions of the
French better than any of his contemporaries, always excepting the
aforementioned Mirbeau. In _On Purge Bebe_ he has written saucy
variations on a th