"Bouchardy would have untangled Chaos, if God hadn't been there to save him the trouble," Jacques Arago wrote in his Physiologie des foyers de tous les théâtres de Paris (1841). Joseph Bouchardy, whose name was a byword for a certain type of melodrama with an extremely complicated plot, was one of the most popular dramatists of the late 1830s and the 1840s. His output was not prolific (he seldom wrote more than one major drama a year), but his three most popular plays, Gaspardo le pêcheur (Gaspardo the Fisherman, 1837), Le Sonneur de Saint-Paul (The Bell Ringer of Saint Paul's The Bell Ringer of Saint Paul's, 1838), and Lazare le pâtre (Lazarus the Shepherd, 1840), all had an initial run of nearly a whole season; in so doing, they helped change theater production from a standard repertoire system to the idea of the long-run play...