In his more ambitious comedies Scribe at first preferred to work alone, and here, too, he learned success by failure.[C] The new conditions, social and political, that followed the Revolution of 1830, helped him also; for new liberties admitted, and the new bourgeois plutocracy invited, the good-humored persiflage in which he was an easy master.  On the other hand, he was hardly touched by the accompanying Romantic movement in literature that was then convulsing the theatre-going public with “Hernani” and “Antony.”  He cared much less for the critics than for the box-office, and now transferred his work almost wholly to the national Theatre Francais.  Here were produced during the eighteen years that separate “Bertrand et Raton” from “Bataille de dames” (1833-1851) almost all his pieces that still hold the stage, notable among them “La Camaraderie,” the most popular of his political comedies, “Une Chaine,” “Le Verre d’eau,” “Adrienne Lecouvreur,” and “Les Contes de la reine de Navarre.”  The last two, the present comedy, and the somewhat later “Doigts de fee” (1858), were written in collaboration with Legouve; and as these are certainly his best plays, we may expect to find an element in them that Scribe alone, or with other collaborators, could not supply.  But of this presently.

During all these years his inexhaustible fertility was pouring out a stream of novels,[D] tales, farces, and librettos.[E] Everything that he touched seemed to turn to gold in his hands.  No dramatist, hardly any writer of our time, has accumulated such wealth.  His annual income from copyrights often reached $30,000, and he died worth nearly half a million.  He might well take for his crest a pen and panpipes, and the motto “Inde fortuna et libertas” for he passed the latter years of his life in wealth and ease in the palatial country-seat of Serincourt, over whose door he inscribed the characteristic lines:—­

    Le theatre a paye cet asile champetre
    Vous qui passez, merci!  Je vous le dois peut-etre.

But as he had gained easily he spent liberally, and many stories tell of his ingenious and delicate generosity.

Scribe’s popularity has become a tradition, and his works have proved a veritable bonanza to the dramatic magpies of every nation in Europe; but among the French critics of the past generation he has found a very grudging recognition.  It was with a tone of aristocratic superiority that Villemain welcomed him to the French Academy with the words:  “The secret of your dramatic prosperity is that you have happily seized the spirit of your age and produced the kind of comedy to which it best adapts itself, and which most resembles it.”  In the same tone Lanson says that Scribe “offers to the middle class exactly the pleasure and the ideal that it demands.  It recognizes itself in his pieces, where nothing taxes the intellect.”  Dumas fils goes even further, and compares him to the sleight-of-hand performer with his trick-cups and thimble-rings, in whose performance one finds “neither an idea nor a reflection, nor an enthusiasm, nor a hope, nor a remorse, nor disgust, nor pleasure.  One looked, listened, was puzzled, laughed, wept, passed the evening, was amused.  That was much, but one learned nothing at all.”