he financiers, who were the curse
of France at the time; and this it is in part. But there are combined
with this satire of the loose morals of the nobility, the follies of
provincial coteries, the meanness of the trading classes; while each
character, instead of being an abstraction, is as sharp and individual
as Gil Blas himself. Like Lesage, Piron worked much for the theatre;
indeed he made his _debut_, as has been said, by venturing on a task
which even Lesage had declined,--the writing of a comic opera with a
single actor only. Like Lesage, too, he has left one comedy of durable
reputation, _La Metromanie_, which, if it falls short of _Turcaret_ in
holding up the mirror to nature, equals it in wit, and has for a French
audience the attraction of being written in very good verse, while
_Turcaret_ is in prose. With perhaps less genius than Piron, and
certainly with less than Lesage, Destouches devoted himself to a higher
class of work on the whole, and has left more pieces that are
remembered. _Le Philosophe Marie_, 1727, and _Le Glorieux_, 1732, are
among the classics of French comedy. _Le Dissipateur_, _Le Tambour
Nocturne_, _L'Obstacle Imprevu_ have also much merit; and if _La Fausse
Agnes_ has something of the farcical in it, it is farce of the right
kind. Destouches wrote seventeen comedies; and, if bulk and general
merit of work are taken together, he deserves the first place among the
comic dramatists of the century in France.

[Sidenote: Comedie Larmoyante. La Chaussee. Diderot.]

In contrast to these three writers, who all followed the traditions of
the comedy of Moliere and Regnard, Nivelle de la Chaussee invented, or
at least brought into fashion, what was called _comedie larmoyante_, or
_drame_. La Chaussee was a good deal ridiculed by his contemporaries,
notably by Piron, who devoted to him some of his most admirable
epigrams. But he was popular, and not altogether undeservedly popular,
though his drama occupied in French literary history something of the
same place as that of Lillo and Moore in English. La Chaussee was
followed by a greater writer, but a worse dramatist, than himself. While
La Chaussee was a clever versifier and an adroit playwright, Diderot
understood the theory both of poetry and of the theatre much better than
he understood the practice. Thus _L'Ecole des Meres_, _La Gouvernante_,
_Le Prejuge a la Mode_ are better plays than _Le Pere de Famille_ or _Le
Fils Naturel_. It ought to be