Eugène Brieux

“ LUCIE. Send it in.
BRIGNAC. Yes, and what should we live upon then?
LUCIE [after a silence] Then that is society’s welcome to the newborn child!
BRIGNAC. To the child born outside marriage, yes. If it wasn’t for that there would soon be nothing but illegitimate births. It is to preserve the family that society condemns the natural child.
LUCIE. If there is guilt two people are guilty. Why do you only punish the mother?
BRIGNAC. What am I to say to you? Because it’s easier.
LUCIE. And that’s your justice! The truth is, you all uphold the conventions of society. ”

“ JULIE. But, Caroline, if people see me accepting hardship with courage, living alone deliberately, because I choose, surely the dignity of my life will make them respect me?
CAROLINE. No one will believe in the dignity of your life.
JULIE. Then it is monstrous! That is all I can say. Monstrous! And since to pay for bread to eat and clothes to wear and a roof to cover me I must either give myself to a husband I hate or to a lover whom, perhaps, I may love, I choose the lover. If I must sell myself to someone, I prefer to choose the buyer.
ANGÈLE. You are mad! Mad! Be reconciled to your husband. ”

“ LIGNOL. If making love to you means yielding to an overmastering attraction—to a fascination—
JULIE [laughing] You certainly make the most of your time as friend of the family. But I shouldn’t hurry if I were you. You will only be wasting a lot of pretty speeches which you could employ to greater advantage elsewhere. I have old-fashioned views on the subject of marriage.
LIGNOL. Whatever they are I am sure they will be lofty and noble.
JULIE. You are too good. But you are mistaken. My view is commonplace enough. All I ask of life is that I may love my children and love my husband. ”

“ Those of us who as adults saw it face to face in that last moiety of its days when one fierce hand after another—Marx’s, Zola’s, Ibsen’s, Strindberg’s, Turgenief’s, Tolstoy’s—stripped its masks off and revealed it as, on the whole, perhaps the most villainous page of recorded human history, can also recall the strange confidence with which it regarded itself as the very summit of civilization, and talked of the past as a cruel gloom that had been dispelled for ever by the railway and the electric telegraph. But centuries, like men, begin to find themselves out in middle age. ”

“ The manufacture of well made plays is not an art: it is an industry. It is not at all hard for a literary mechanic to acquire it: the only difficulty is to find a literary mechanic who is not by nature too much of an artist for the job; for nothing spoils a well made play more infallibly than the least alloy of high art or the least qualm of conscience on the part of the writer. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is the formula of the well made play, meaning in practice ‘Success for money’s sake.’ Now great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort. ”

“ ANTONIN. I mean that I have more common sense than you. I mean that it is my duty to guard you from these exaggerated fancies of yours. The bonds that join us are not to be broken by a whim. You are my wife and my wife155 you will remain. A divorce is impossible. I have given you no cause. You may leave me, of course, but you know the life of the woman who lives apart from her husband, a life without respect and without social position. No: you will stay with me.
JULIE. And it is this prison that we call marriage. ”

“ BRIGNAC. But Jacques Bernin is engaged.
LUCIE. He must break it off, that’s all.
BRIGNAC. He won’t break it off, because it means lots and lots of money, and because he is the most ferocious little fortune-hunter I ever met. Yes, he is; I know him, I see him at the club. I’ve heard him holding forth about women and money; his opinions are edifying. By the way, has Annette any letters from him connecting him with this business?
LUCIE. No.
BRIGNAC. He’s not such a fool as to compromize himself. He’ll deny everything.
LUCIE. You must threaten them with a scandal. ”

“ But you understand, Julie. You can guess. You can imagine what my life was when you see that even now I can’t bring myself to tell you about it. [Mastering herself] . You think women—women like me—are happy because you see us laugh. But to laugh is our trade. We are paid for that. And I swear to you often we would ask nothing better than just to sit and cry. And you talk of choosing! You poor child. Do you suppose we women choose? Oh, if you could but know how one comes to loathe the whole world, to be wicked, wicked! They despise us so. We have no friends, no pity, no justice. ”

“ BRIGNAC. You’re always worrying about the future; now what makes me the man I am is my persistent confidence in the future. If Balureau doesn’t get into office again we’ll stay quietly at Châteauneuf, that’s all. You can’t complain, as you were born here.
LUCIE. But it’s you who complain.
BRIGNAC. I complain of the want of spirit in the people. I complain that I cannot get them to love and respect our political institutions. I complain above all of the society of Châteauneuf: a set of officials entertaining one another.
LUCIE. Society in Châteauneuf doesn’t open its arms to us, certainly. ”

“ LUCIE. And everyone will welcome M. Jacques Bernin.
BRIGNAC. Of course they will. And when the child is born, what then? I’m not thinking of the expense: fortunately for her she has us to fall back on, so she wouldn’t starve. Suppose she put the baby out to nurse? Afterwards she’d have to keep it with her—imagine what people would say! She might pay for it to be brought up elsewhere, but that’s only a way of deserting it. She would never be able to marry. All her life she would be a pariah. No; the only thing is to send her away. ”

“ Not only is the tradition of the catastrophe unsuitable to modern studies of life: the tradition of an ending, happy or the reverse, is equally unworkable. The moment the dramatist gives up accidents and catastrophes, and takes ‘slices of life’ as his material, he finds himself committed to plays that have no endings. The curtain no longer comes down on a hero slain or married: it comes down when the audience has seen enough of the life presented to it to draw the moral, and must either leave the theatre or miss its last train. ”

“ LUCIE. I! No, indeed. Most likely you have said as much to my husband. Won’t he believe you?
HOURTIN. You must make him realize that the responsibility of having a child, great as it always is, becomes terrible when, so far from its being born into normal circumstances, it runs the risk of going into the world worse equipped than usual. To give birth to a child doomed to unhappiness or likely to be an invalid or incapable of growing up is like crippling someone. It is as much a crime as robbery or murder. ”

“ MADELEINE [who is in evening dress] There is only one thing to do. Tell your husband everything and make him go to the Bernins.
LUCIE. My God!
MADELEINE. The doctor is a long time with him. I absolutely must go to this party.
LUCIE. Yes, go. But you’ll come back?
MADELEINE. As soon as I can. Don’t despair. Poor little Annette!
LUCIE. Do you think—?
MADELEINE. Good bye for the moment. Don’t move.
Madeleine goes out, and the servant is seen giving her her cloak. Lucie, alone, walks restlessly to and fro. As she comes to the door of Brignac’s study, she stops to listen. ”

“ LOCHES. I have never had any shameful disease, sir!
DOCTOR. I was not asking you that. I was asking you if you had never exposed yourself to catching one. [He pauses. Loches does not reply] Ah, you see! Then it is not virtue that has saved you: it is luck. Few things exasperate me more than that term ‘shameful disease,’ which you used just now. This disease is like all other diseases: it is one of our afflictions. There is no shame in being wretched—even if one deserves to be so. ”

“ Instead of being a husband and wife helping one another, we have been two business partners, watching each other like enemies, perpetually quarrelling, even on our very pillow, over our expenditure or our mistakes. Finally we succeeded; and now we can’t enjoy our wealth because we don’t know how to use it, and because our later years are poisoned by memories of the hateful past of suffering and rancor. No; I shall never expose my children to that struggle. I only stood it to preserve them from it. Good bye.
LUCIE. Good bye.
Madame Bernin goes out. ”

“ HOURTIN. Never having been drunk proves nothing.
BRIGNAC. Oh, come!
HOURTIN. No. There are a large number of men who drink, perhaps, a glass of vermouth before lunch, a bottle of wine at lunch, and two or three glasses of liqueur after. The same at dinner, after an absinthe and a glass or two260 of beer in the afternoon. They would be much astonished to learn that they are thoroughly alcoholized.
BRIGNAC. Well, I do all that, and I’m as well as can be. What is more, as a baby I was very delicate. I couldn’t walk till I was eighteen months old or talk before two years. ”

“ MME. BERNIN. No; we are not so well off as people suppose. And then we must give Gabrielle a dowry.
LUCIE. You’ll find her a husband who will want her for herself.
MME. BERNIN. Even if we did, which I doubt, I would not desire a man like that for her, because he would be blind to the realities of the situation. Gabrielle has not been brought up to poverty, but to a life of luxurious surroundings.
LUCIE. Give your children an equal amount, then.
MME. BERNIN. All that we can give Gabrielle will not be too much. Life is hard, and becomes a harder struggle every day. ”

“ I should like to know how many of these rigid moralists, who are so choked with their middle-class prudery that they dare not mention the name syphilis, or when they bring themselves to speak of it do so with expressions of every sort of disgust, and treat its victims as criminals, have never run the risk of contracting it themselves. It is those alone who have the right to talk. How many do you think there are? Four out of a thousand? Well, leave those four aside; between all the rest and those who catch the disease there is no difference but chance. ”

“ Oh, no. He’s gone to Paris, ostensibly on business, really to another woman. I know it. I pretend not to know because I’m afraid of forcing him to choose between her and me. That’s my life, Annette. Many women whom you think happy live like that.
ANNETTE. Poor Madeleine!
LUCIE. And I. One of my little girls is an invalid, the other is ailing. Perhaps she’ll die.
CATHERINE. Two of mine died of want.
MADELEINE. I don’t want to have another child for fear that my husband would leave me altogether. A divorce, if I got one, would leave me a kind of half-widow and make my girl an orphan. ”

“ Now the formula of tragedy had come down to the nineteenth century from days in which this was not recognized, and when life was so thoroughly accepted as a divine institution that in order to make it seem tragic, something dreadful had to happen and somebody had to die. But the tragedy of modern life is that nothing happens, and that the resultant dulness does not kill. Maupassant’s Une Vie is infinitely more tragic than the death of Juliet.
In Ibsen’s works we find the old traditions and the new conditions struggling in the same play, like a gudgeon half swallowed by a pike. ”

“ This drama of Racine and Corneille, with the music of Gluck, gave the French in the XVII and XVIII centuries a body of art which was very beautiful, very refined, very delightful for cultivated people, and very tedious for the ignorant. When, through the spread of elementary education, the ignorant invaded the theatre in overwhelming numbers, this exquisite body of art became a dead body, and was practised by nobody except the amateurs—the people who love what has been already done in art and loathe the real life out of which living art must continually grow afresh. ”

“ Nearly every woman carries about with her the corpse of the woman she might have been.
ANNETTE. Ah, Lucie, dear, it’s easy for you to talk.
LUCIE. Darling, you mustn’t think you’re alone in your sorrow. I seem to you to be happy with my children and my husband, and you think my happiness43 makes light of your distress. But you’re wrong. Your misery makes me so weak, I must tell you what I wanted always to hide from you. My husband does not love me. I don’t love him. Can you realize the loneliness of that? If you knew what it means to live with an enemy and to have to endure his caresses! ”

“ Don’t be too quick to condemn worldly women who shrink from motherhood, Annette. Man’s baseness is such that they must often choose between their husbands and their children. And if some choose their husband, let those who have never loved throw the first stone at them! I felt that if I nursed my baby I should lose my husband for good, and to win him back I put my child out to nurse. ”

“ LOCHES. What, then, good heavens?
DOCTOR. Any number. You can tell her that a separation will be a calamity for all parties and that her husband is the only person interested in helping her at any price to save her child. You can tell her that out of the ruins of her first happiness she can construct a life of solid affection that will have every chance of being lasting and most sincerely enviable. There is much truth in the saying that reformed rakes make the best husbands. Take your son-in-law. If your daughter consents to forgive and forget, he will not only respect her ”