s: was he coming from the room of Giselle or of
Leonore? The women are summoned; both deny everything; it is impossible
for the audience, as for the husbands, to come to any conclusion. A shot
is heard outside: Vivarce has killed himself, so that he may save the
reputation of the woman he loves. Then the self-command of Leonore gives
way; she avows all in a piercing shriek. After that there is some
unnecessary moralising ("La-bas un cadavre! Ici, des sanglots de
captive!" and the like), but the play is over.

Now, the situation is perfectly precise; it is not, perhaps, very
intellectually significant, but there it is, a striking dramatic
situation. Above all, it is frank; there are no evasions, no sentimental
lies, no hypocrisies before facts. If adultery may not be referred to on
the English stage except at the Gaiety, between a wink and a laugh, then
such a play becomes wholly impossible. Not at all: listen. We are told
to suppose that Vivarce and Leonore have had a possibly quite harmless
flirtation; and instead of Vivarce being found on his way from Leonore's
room, he has merely been walking with Leonore in the garden: at midnight
remember, and after her husband has gone to bed. In order to lead up to
this, a preposterous speech has been put into the mouth of the Marquis
de Neste, an idiotic rhapsody about love and the stars, and I forget
what else, which I imagine we are to take as an indication of Vivarce's
sentiments as he walks with Leonore in the garden at midnight. But all
these precautions are in vain; the audience is never deceived for an
instant. A form of words has been used, like the form of words by which
certain lies become technically truthful. The whole point of the play:
has a husband the right to kill his wife or his wife's lover if he
discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him? is obviously not a
question of whether a husband may kill a gentleman who has walked with
his wife in the garden, even after midnight. The force of the original
situation comes precisely from the certainty of the fact and the
uncertainty of the person responsible for it. "Caesar's Wife" may lend
her name for a screen; the screen is no disguise; the play; remains what
it was in its moral bearing; a dramatic stupidity has been imported into
it, that is all. Here, then, in addition to the enigma of the play is a
second, not so easily explained, enigma: the enigma of the censor, and
of why he "moves in a mysterious way hi