Le Voyage De Monsieur Perrichon

Le Voyage De Monsieur
Perrichon

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Title: Le Voyage De Monsieur Perrichon Comedie En Quatre Actes
Author: Eugene Labiche and Edouard Martin

Release Date: December, 2005 [EBook #9453] [Yes, we are more than
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Language: French
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LE VOYAGE DE MONSIEUR PERRICHON
COMÉDIE EN QUATRE ACTES
PAR EUGÈNE LABICHE
De L'Académie Française
ET ÉDOUARD MARTIN

TO MY 1905 «EXTRA-FRENCH» CLASS
IN THE WILLIAM PENN CHARTER SCHOOL

INTRODUCTION
Because Le Voyage de M. Perrichon is a delightful comedy and

particularly suitable for use in the class room, it does not follow that the
place of its author in the literature of France should be unduly
magnified.
Eugène Labiche's chief claim to fame is that, as a distinguished critic
said of him, «for forty years he kept his contemporaries in laughter.»
From 1838, when he wrote his first play, till 1876, when he voluntarily
retired, he produced, generally in collaboration with writers known
mainly through their association with him, over one hundred and fifty
comedies, in each of which is heard the same dominant note of fun and
merriment. But of these plays only a very small number possess the
qualities that alone make for durability; neither their form--in most
cases photographically true to the looseness of the most familiar
conversation--nor their substance--often grotesquely impossible
adventures, situations supremely laughable because colossally
absurd--is calculated to embalm his plays against the ravages of time.
He thought so himself, and declined for a long time to have them
collected into a complete edition; and when, in 1880, he was proposed
for a vacant seat in the Académie Française, he doubted whether he
would have voted for his own admission into that illustrious company.
Thus Labiche must stand simply as the most prolific and genial of the
fun-makers for France during almost half a century. This praise would
have satisfied the modest man that he was. Born in Paris in 1815, he
had been destined to the bar; but, preferring literature, early betook
himself to the newspaper and the drama. Here he «found himself,» and
from the age of twenty-three until he was over sixty filled the comic
stage with his light and laughable productions. After his retirement in
1876 the distinctions that were bestowed upon him with no grudging
hand brought him as much surprise as pleasure. His published Théâtre
Complet was received by the public with altogether unexpected
enthusiasm; he was elected to the Academy, and his speech on his
reception into that body made a marked sensation. He died in 1888 at
his country-place in Sologne, full of years and of wonder at the
gratitude of his contemporaries for the amusement he had so long
afforded them.

Had more of his comedies possessed the qualities of Le Voyage de M.
Perrichon, this high esteem would not have been restricted to his
contemporaries. For, underlying the humorous dialogue, there is in this
work a shrewd observation, an analysis of character, that lift it far
above mere farce. Its insight into the ungrateful heart of man,--a
cheerful and reformative, not a gloomy or hopeless, insight,--its lifelike
delineation of the parvenu, the self-made man who worships his maker,
and who, because he has been successful in business, thinks all things
are his, culture included: these raise Le Voyage de M. Perrichon to the
plane of true comedy.
Like all Labiche's plays, this one deals with the middle-class, the
bourgeois element in French life, where natural foibles are not
varnished over with the gloss of education and conventionality, but
appear in all their nakedness. M. Perrichon's self-complacency never
once suspects itself; Majorin