French dramatist, born in Paris of poor parents on the 19th of January 1858. A one-act play, Bernard Palissy, written in collaboration with M. Gaston Salandri, was produced in 1879, but he had to wait eleven years before he obtained another hearing, his Ménage d’ artistes being produced by Antoine at the Théâtre Libre in 1890. His plays are essentially didactic, being aimed at some weakness or iniquity of the social system. Blanchette (1892) pointed out the evil results of education of girls of the working classes; M. de Réboval (1892) was directed against pharisaism; L’Engrenage (1894) against corruption in politics; Les Bienfaiteurs (1896) against the frivolity of fashionable charity; and L’Évasion (1896) satirized an indiscriminate belief in the doctrine of heredity. Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont (1897) is a powerful, somewhat brutal, study of the miseries imposed on poor middle-class girls by the French system of dowry; Le Résultat des courses (1898) shows the evil results of betting among the Parisian workmen; La Robe rouge (1900) was directed against the injustices of the law; Les Remplaçantes (1901) against the practice of putting children out to nurse. Les Avariés (1901), forbidden by the censor, on account of its medical details, was read privately by the author at the Théâtre Antoine; and Petite amie (1902) describes the life of a Parisian shop-girl. Later plays are La Couvée (1903, acted privately at Rouen in 1893), Maternité (1904), La Déserteuse (1904), in collaboration with M. Jean Sigaux, and Les Hannetons, a comedy in three acts (1906). He published four plays after 1910: La Foi (1912); La Femme Seule (1913); Le Bourgeois aux champs (1914) and Les Américains chez nous (1920). He also wrote some accounts of travel, Voyages aux Indes et à Indo-Chine (1910) and Au Japon par Java, la Chine, la Corée (1914), as well as a couple of pamphlets addressed to soldiers, one before and one during the World War, during which he devoted himself with particular ardour and activity to the care of those blinded by wounds. See also “A Proposal of Marriage,” “Justice and the Law,” “The Destruction of the Gods,” “The Eternal Hope” and “Love and Necessity.”
