Emile Augier inherited Denis Diderot's commitment to serious drama and Honoré de Balzac's dream of capturing in his art the ugliness and exaltation of a specific moment in French history. Like his younger compatriot Emile Zola, Augier wanted to make theater more "truthful." His brand of truthfulness, however, struck the fiery Zola as pretentious and cheaply moralizing. Augier may have taken Molière as his model, but his social dramas, unlike Molière's, were so relentlessly anchored in their own period as to be limited by it. Nevertheless, his attention to the concerns of the bourgeois public and his skillful grasp of the mechanics of Eugène Scribe's well-made play made him, in his lifetime, one of France's most respected playwrights. Nineteen of his works are still in the repertory of the Comédie Française, and the House of Moliè...