loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the feelings of her adored daughter.  Then, when the adored daughter herself marries, the mother must make every possible sacrifice for her, and the daughter must accept them all with indifference, as mere matters of course.  But what is the final, triumphant proof of the theorem?  Why, of course, the mother must kill her mother to save the daughter’s life!  And this ultra-obligatory scene M. Hervieu duly serves up to us.  Marie-Jeanne (the daughter) is ordered to the Engadine; Sabine (the mother) is warned that Madame Fontenais (the grandmother) must not go to that altitude on pain of death; but, by a series of violently artificial devices, things are so arranged that Marie-Jeanne cannot go unless Madame Fontenais goes too; and Sabine, rather than endanger her daughter’s recovery, does not hesitate to let her mother set forth, unwittingly, to her doom.  In the last scene of all, Marie-Jeanne light-heartedly prepares to leave her mother and go off with her husband to the ends of the earth; Sabine learns that the man she loved and rejected for Marie-Jeanne’s sake is for ever lost to her; and, to complete the demonstration, Madame Fontenais falls dead at her feet.  These scenes are unmistakably scenes a faire, dictated by the logic of the theme; but they belong to a conception of art in which the free rhythms of life are ruthlessly sacrificed to the needs of a demonstration.  Obligatory scenes of this order are mere diagrams drawn with ruler and compass—­the obligatory illustrations of an extravagantly over-systematic lecture.

M. Brieux in some of his plays (not in all) is no less logic-ridden than M. Hervieu.  Take, for instance, Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont:  every character is a term in a syllogism, every scene is dictated by an imperious craving for symmetry.  The main theorem may be stated in some such terms as these:  “The French marriage system is immoral and abominable; yet the married woman is, on the whole, less pitiable than her unmarried sisters.”  In order to prove this thesis in due form, we begin at the beginning, and show how the marriage of Antonin Mairaut and Julie Dupont is brought about by the dishonest cupidity of the parents on both sides.  The Duponts flatter themselves that they have cheated the Mairauts, the Mairauts that they have swindled the Duponts; while Antonin deliberately simulates artistic tastes to deceive Julie, and Julie as deliberately makes a show of business capacity in order to take in Antonin.  Every scene between father and daughter is balanced by a corresponding scene between mother and son.  Every touch of hypocrisy on the one side is scrupulously set off against a trait of dishonesty on the other.  Julie’s passion for children is emphasized, Antonin’s aversion from them is underlined.  But lest he should be accused of seeing everything in black, M. Brieux will not make the parents altogether detestable.  Still holding the balance true, he lets M. Mairaut