Two brothers, Raymond and Gerard de Gourgiran, are in their country house, with their two wives, Giselle and Leonore, and two guests, the old Marquis de Neste and the young M. de Vivarce.  The brothers surprise Vivarce on the stairs:  was he coming from the room of Giselle or of Leonore?  The women are summoned; both deny everything; it is impossible for the audience, as for the husbands, to come to any conclusion.  A shot is heard outside:  Vivarce has killed himself, so that he may save the reputation of the woman he loves.  Then the self-command of Leonore gives way; she avows all in a piercing shriek.  After that there is some unnecessary moralising ("La-bas un cadavre!  Ici, des sanglots de captive!” and the like), but the play is over.

Now, the situation is perfectly precise; it is not, perhaps, very intellectually significant, but there it is, a striking dramatic situation.  Above all, it is frank; there are no evasions, no sentimental lies, no hypocrisies before facts.  If adultery may not be referred to on the English stage except at the Gaiety, between a wink and a laugh, then such a play becomes wholly impossible.  Not at all:  listen.  We are told to suppose that Vivarce and Leonore have had a possibly quite harmless flirtation; and instead of Vivarce being found on his way from Leonore’s room, he has merely been walking with Leonore in the garden:  at midnight remember, and after her husband has gone to bed.  In order to lead up to this, a preposterous speech has been put into the mouth of the Marquis de Neste, an idiotic rhapsody about love and the stars, and I forget what else, which I imagine we are to take as an indication of Vivarce’s sentiments as he walks with Leonore in the garden at midnight.  But all these precautions are in vain; the audience is never deceived for an instant.  A form of words has been used, like the form of words by which certain lies become technically truthful.  The whole point of the play:  has a husband the right to kill his wife or his wife’s lover if he discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him? is obviously not a question of whether a husband may kill a gentleman who has walked with his wife in the garden, even after midnight.  The force of the original situation comes precisely from the certainty of the fact and the uncertainty of the person responsible for it.  “Caesar’s Wife” may lend her name for a screen; the screen is no disguise; the play; remains what it was in its moral bearing; a dramatic stupidity has been imported into it, that is all.  Here, then, in addition to the enigma of the play is a second, not so easily explained, enigma:  the enigma of the censor, and of why he “moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.”  The play, I must confess, does not seem to me, as it seems to certain French critics, “une piece qui tient du chef-d’oeuvre ... la tragedie des maitres antiques et de Shakespeare.”  To me it is rather an insubstantial kind of ingenuity, ingenuity turning in a circle.  As a tragic episode,