under the title of l'Inconstant. But Destouches is less satisfied with intrigue alone, and makes an effort to trace character. His next play is le Médisant (1715), showing a type of character which was better done later by Gresset in le Méchant. This play had the merit of its style, but not enough study of character. Then followed le Triple Mariage (1716), said to have been derived from an incident in the life of the Marquis de Saint-Aulaire, and l'Obstacle imprévu (1717).

With the exception of le Philosophe marié (1727), les Philosophes amoureux (1730), a mediocre affair, and le Glorieux (1732), his masterpiece, it is necessary only to mention the names of the works of Destouches, which continued to be produced one after the other until well after his death: l'Ambitieux, l'Enfant gâté, l'Amour usé, le Trésor caché (imitated from the Trinumus of Plautus), la Force du naturel, le Dissipateur (imitated from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, and too mild to picture the dissipations of the time), le Tambour nocturne (imitated from Addison), la Fausse Agnès, reminding us of Regnard's Folies amoureuses and another of Destouches' few attempts in the really comic genre.

Destouches is less gay than Regnard, less witty than Dufresny, less natural than Dancourt, less profound than Le Sage. He is the representative of the saner, colder type of comedy, with excellent qualities of observation, style, and composition. He is more of the gentlemanly type of writer, a disciple of Boileau in regularity and correctness. In le Glorieux he comes nearest to the creation of a real character. All the qualities of the Comte de Tufière are degraded; all his defects are dominated by one particular vice, and this vice is continued up to the end in all his relations, when the heart gets the upper hand and he is converted. But this last expression suggests something quite different from the method of Molière, who had taken particular pains to see that the heart and tears and conversions should have no place in his comedies. He insisted that comedy must follow classical traditions and remain humorous, with no mingling of types. In l'Avare, when Anselme recognizes his long lost loved ones, there is an opportunity for tears, but old Harpagon remains comic up to the very last speech. And in Tartuffe, when Orgon feels himself moved at the pathetic appeal of Mariane, he checks himself up short: "Allons, ferme, mon cœur, point de faiblesse humaine." We have, therefore, arrived at the appearance of something new in comedy, the appearance of the type known as comédie larmoyante, in which the tearful and the pathetic predominate. This type, destined to modify the drama profoundly, will be discussed more fully under La Chaussée.

The vogue of moralizing in literature was no longer confined to fables and maxims, and the laity had begun to preach as well as the Church. A sentimental type of ethics, apparently derived, at least in part, from the essays of the Earl of Shaftesbury, and in conflict with traditional Christian doctrines, was gradually taking root and expressing itself in literature. Marivaux had already begun his moral teachings in his Spectateur français. Even before his literary career was interrupted by his diplomatic mission to England in 1717, Destouches had written in his Prologue du Curieux impertinent :

L'auteur de notre pièce, en tout ce qu'il écrit,
Évite des auteurs les écarts ordinaires :

Il a pour objet principal

De prêcher la vertu, de décrier le vice.

Destouches returned from England to France in 1723. He had produced nothing since 1717, but he had spent six years in a country where sentimentalism was rapidly advancing with the sentimental comedies of Cibber and others, with the sentimental tales of Steele, and with the sentimental philosophy of Shaftesbury. His next work was le Philosophe marié (1727). It was hardly possible that this should not be influenced by his experiences, especially since he had married an English wife (although he wished to keep the affair secret, at least for a time). The play is directed against the prejudice of the period that husband and wife should not love each other, or at least not let it be known. This theme is taken up again by La Chaussée in le Préjugé à la mode. Professor Bernbaum 1 maintains that this play of Destouches is the origin of sentimental comedy in France. Lanson,' although he states that the honor of the invention of la comédie larmoyante belongs to La Chaussée, at least acknowledges that the new taste made itself felt in the comedies of Destouches, and also that Piron might have claimed the honor of creating_tearful_comedy, in 1728, with les Fils ingrats. Here the father impoverishes himself for his children and receives only ingratitude and bad conduct. This bourgeois King Lear, this Père Goriot of the eighteenth century, might have made us weep, says Lanson, but for the effort of the author to make laughter dominate.

Destouches produced le Glorieux in 1732, a year before the appearance of La Chaussée's la Fausse Antipathie. It is a sentimental comedy, rather than a comedy of character, and looks forward to La Chaussée rather than backward to Molière. In the preface Destouches says: "J'ai toujours eu pour maxime incontestable, que, quelque amusante que puisse être une comédie, c'est un ouvrag imparfait et même dangereux, si l'auteur ne s'y propose pas de corriger les mœurs, de tomber sur le ridicule, de décrier le vice, et de mettre la vertu dans un si beau jour, qu'elle s'attire la vénération publique." Virtue is indeed put in a favorable and sparkling light: old Lisimon is not perfect, but he is a good, honest, sensible man; the vainglorious Tufière is made so only to disgust the public with this defect, and when he has displayed his haughtiness sufficiently he corrects himself by a sudden repentance; in the case of the other characters there is a perfect tournament of virtues,-in Philinte, in Valère, in Isabelle, in Pasquin even, the valet who is at bottom simple and good, in Lisette, who has too many virtues to be a simple soubrette and turns out to be the sister of le Gloricur, and finally in old Lycandre, the father, "vrai père larmoyant, proche parent du père du Fils naturel, qui a mêmes vertus et mêmes haillons" (Lanson). The rôles of Lisette and Lycandre are full of sentimental and pathetic passages. The tearful recognition scene of the father and daughter, the confusion of the haughty, and the triumph of love over vainglory, are all characteristics of sentimental comedy which Molière avoided.

"Toute la comédie larmoyante est donc dans le Glorieux: moralité, caractères vertueux, fictions romanesques, scènes touchantes aucun élément ne manque. ? La Chaussée n'eut, semble-t-il, rien à inventer. Qu'eut-il donc à faire? Et comment l'honneur de l'invention lui revint-il? Destouches était arrivé au genre larmoyant, mais par la force des choses, et sans le vouloir. Il avait prétendu faire 1 See Bibliography.

une comédie de caractère. S'il était plus sérieux que plaisant, il ne renonçait pas néanmoins à faire rire: il voulait être plaisant. La Chaussée n'aura qu'à renoncer aux prétensions de Destouches: le comique et les caractères. Il étendra le romanesque et la sensibilité sur toute la pièce; ce qui était épisodique deviendra le principal, et la comédie, renonçant au rire décent, au rire de l'âme, ne cherchera que l'émotion et les larmes. Le larmoyant était pour Destouches une exception, pour Piron un défaut dans la comédie: La Chaussée en fit l'essence et y fonda le mérite de son drame. En cela consiste son invention” (Lanson).

Bibliography: Œuvres, Paris, 1754, 4 vols.; édition Crapelet, 6 vols., Paris, 1822. E. BERNBAUM: The Drama of Sensibility, New York, 1915. LANSON: Nivelle de la Chaussée et la comédie larmoyante, Paris, 1903. LENIENT: La Comédie au XVIII siècle, Paris, 1888. HANKISS: Philippe Néricault Destouches. L'homme et l'œuvre, Debreczin, 1918.

1 (a) Text of the 1822 edition. (b) Le Glorieux, the vain man. Throughout the play gloire is used in the sense of vanity.

1 chanter pouille, to reproach in an insulting manner.