e word in it offensive to good
morals"[2267]: thus was the piece accepted against reasons of State,
against the king's will, and through the connivance of all those most
interested in suppressing it. "There is something more irrational than
my piece, and that is its success," said its author. The attraction
was too strong. People devoted to pleasure could not dispense with
the liveliest comedy of the age. They came to applaud a satire on
themselves; and better still, they themselves acted in it.--When a
prevalent taste is in fashion, it leads, like a powerful passion, to
extreme extravagance; the offered pleasure must, at any price, be had.
Faced with a momentary pleasure gratification, it is as a child
tempted by fruit; nothing arrests it, neither the danger to which it is
insensible, nor the social norms as these are established by itself.

VII. Theater, Parade And Extravagance.

The principal diversion, elegant comedy.--Parades and
extravagance.

To divert oneself is to turn aside from oneself, to break loose and to
forget oneself; and to forget oneself fully one must be transported into
another, put himself in the place of another, take his mask and play his
part. Hence the liveliest of diversions is the comedy in which one is
an actor. It is that of children who, as authors, actors and audience,
improvise and perform small scenes. It is that of a people whose
political regime excludes exacting manly tasks (soucis virile) and
who sport with life just like children. At Venice, in the eighteenth
century, the carnival lasts six months; in France, under another form,
it lasts the entire year. Less familiar and less picturesque, more
refined and more elegant, it abandons the public square where it lacks
sunshine, to shut itself up in drawing-rooms where chandeliers are the
most suitable for it. It has retained of the vast popular masquerade
only a fragment, the opera ball, certainly very splendid and frequented
by princes, princesses and the queen; but this fragment, brilliant as it
is, does not suffice; consequently, in every chateau, in every mansion,
at Paris and in the provinces, it sets up travesties on society and
domestic comedies.--On welcoming a great personage, on celebrating the
birthday of the master or mistress of the house, its guests or invited
persons perform in an improvised operetta, in an ingenious, laudatory
pastoral, sometimes dressed as gods, as Virtues, as mythological
abstractio