Augustin Filon

“ In none of his plays did he ever venture into the depths of feminine psychology, and womankind is only represented in them by pretentious old maids and silly, insipid, almost dumb, young ladies. He ridiculed marriage according to the invariable custom of French playwrights, but in a friendly and good-natured manner which always left a door open to repentance and timely amendment. He is never coarse, never suggestive. After he died the French farce, which he had raised to something akin to literature, relapsed into its former grossness and unmeaning complexity. ”

“ Prior to that date Labiche had been only a successful vaudevilliste among a crowd of others; but a twelvemonth later he made a new departure in Le Misanthrope et l’Auvergnat. All the plays given for the next twenty-five years, although constructed on the old plan, contained a more or less appreciable dose of that comic observation and good sense which gradually raised the French farce almost to the level of the comedy of character and manners. “Of all the subjects,” he said, “which offered themselves to me, I have selected the bourgeois. ”

“ Geoffroy impersonated the bourgeois not only to the public, but to the author himself; and it may be assumed that Labiche, when writing, could see and hear Geoffroy acting the character and uttering, in his pompous, fussy way, the words that he had just committed to paper. Célimare le bien-aimé (1863) , Le Voyage de M. Perrichon (1860) , La Grammaire, Un Pied dans le crime, La Cagnotte (1864) , may be quoted as the happiest productions of Labiche. ”