The caricaturist B. Colomb (1849-1909), better known as "Moloch" for his devastating cartoons, shows Georges Courteline sweeping up with his pen the five categories of "vermin" that inhabit his plays. In Moloch's celebrated caricature policemen, judges, army officers, bureaucrats, and manipulative women tumble about at Courteline's feet, while the chronicler and playwright gazes out at the world, weary, knowing, and complicitous. This stance and these five subjects characterize the entirety of Courteline's dramatic production: some twenty-eight plays, almost all adapted from weekly newspaper columns he contributed from 1880 to 1896 to Parisian dailies, notably L'Echo de Paris and the literary supplement to Le Journal. Courteline's style, a combination of social commentary, slapstick depictions of systems gone awry, delightful portraits of a vivacious capital city, and reluctant tenderness for human folly, has made him one of France's most popular playwrights. Both during his lifetime and after his death innumerable editions of...