TURCARET

Comédie en cinq actes, en prose

Représentée pour la première fois à la Comédie-Française le 14 février 1709

LE SAGE

Alain-René Le Sage (1668-1747) was born at Sarzeau, in Brittany, in 1668. Son of Claude Le Sage, a notary, and orphan at the age of fourteen, he came to Paris at the age of twenty-five to seek his fortune. He began to study law, but deserted it for literature. Under the influence of his friend the Abbé de Lyonne, he first devoted himself to Spanish literature, translating and imitating some of the Spanish masters. Father of the picaresque novel in France with Gil Blas (1715), and prophet of realism, he also made the nearest approach to Molière in real comedy. After a quarrel with the actors of the Comédie-Française, he devoted his energies to the Opéra-Comique and the Théâtre de la Foire, writing and collaborating in some hundred plays, all of which are forgotten. He married the daughter of a maître menuisier and was soon the father of a family, three sons and a daughter, to whom he was devoted. Unlike Regnard, who inherited riches, and Dancourt, who was a theatre director and a friend of Louis XIV, he enjoyed neither fortune nor favor, but had to struggle for a livelihood and for recognition of his works. Although afflicted with deafness, he did not become morose, but counted it a blessing, for when he removed his ear-trumpet he could. defy fools to bore him. Pressed by his needs and struggling against opposition, he did not attempt to curry favor, but hewed to the line. If he lost thereby in idealism, he at least gained in realism. No more in our day than in his own would he be a favorite with the classes. Notwithstanding his quarrels with the actors, two of his sons entered the profession, one the celebrated Montménil of the Comédie-Française; and the third was a priest with great histrionic gifts. It was with the last-named son that he passed his last years; he died in 1747 at Boulogne-sur-Mer.

Like Molière, Le Sage was forty years old when he won his first real successes in literature. In 1707 he produced his novel le Diable_boiteux, and on the stage of the Comédie-Française his play Crispin rival de son maître. This play, a lever de rideau in one act and in prose, but a forerunner of his one great play, is the story of the valet substituted for the master. Such a substitution had already been used by Scarron in le Maître Valet and by Molière in les Précieuses ridicules; Marivaux used a similar device later in le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard. Crispin works on a larger, bolder scale and not only presages Turcaret two years later, but looks forward to Beaumarchais at the end of the century. The significant soliloquy of the valet is: "Que je suis las d'être valet! Ah! Crispin, . . . tu devrais briller dans la finance."

As with Dancourt and Regnard, so with Le Sage we are still in the reign of Louis XIV; but the latter years of his reign had already begun to show signs of the abuses that were so extreme during the Regency. These abuses Le Sage saw and recorded. As a result of his temperament and his experiences, his record was all the more biting. But his was not yet the age of the revolutionary philosophy of the eighteenth century. His comedy in this respect continues the classical type, in that it would correct the vices of society by ridicule in an orderly