say a letter, happens to be of supreme
importance to a certain person and must be recovered at all costs. This
thing, which always vanishes just when you think you have caught it,
pervades the entire play, "rolling up" increasingly serious and
unexpected incidents as it proceeds. All this is far more like a
child's game than appears at first blush. Once more the effect produced
is that of the snowball.

It is the characteristic of a mechanical combination to be generally
REVERSIBLE. A child is delighted when he sees the ball in a game of
ninepins knocking down everything in its way and spreading havoc in all
directions; he laughs louder than ever when the ball returns to its
starting-point after twists and turns and waverings of every kind. In
other words, the mechanism just described is laughable even when
rectilinear, it is much more so on becoming circular and when every
effort the player makes, by a fatal interaction of cause and effect,
merely results in bringing it back to the same spot. Now, a
considerable number of light comedies revolve round this idea. An
Italian straw hat has been eaten up by a horse. [Footnote: Un Chapeau
de paille d'Italie (Labiche).] There is only one other hat like it in
the whole of Paris; it MUST be secured regardless of cost. This hat,
which always slips away at the moment its capture seems inevitable,
keeps the principal character on the run, and through him all the
others who hang, so to say, on to his coat tails, like a magnet which,
by a successive series of attractions, draws along in its train the
grains of iron filings that hang on to each other. And when at last,
after all sorts of difficulties, the goal seems in sight, it is found
that the hat so ardently sought is precisely the one that has been
eaten. The same voyage of discovery is depicted in another equally
well-known comedy of Labiche. [Footnote: La Cagnotte.] The curtain
rises on an old bachelor and an old maid, acquaintances of long
standing, at the moment of enjoying their daily rubber. Each of them,
unknown to the other, has applied to the same matrimonial agency.
Through innumerable difficulties, one mishap following on the heels of
another, they hurry along, side by side, right through the play, to the
interview which brings them back, purely and simply, into each other's
presence. We have the same circular effect, the same return to the
starting-point, in a more recent play. [Footnote: Les Surprises du
divorce.]