Taking Comedy Seriously: Laughter and Pathos in Beaumarchais's Eugénie

Taking Comedy Seriously: Laughter and Pathos inBeaumarchais’s Eugénie

J O S E P H H A R R I S

Abstract: This article explores Beaumarchais’s conflicting impulses towardscomedy and pathos through the dynamics of onstage laughter in hisproblematic play Eugénie. While this drame’s early scenes encourage a broadlycomic response, the audience becomes progressively aware of laughter’smoral shortcomings – not least in one crucial scene, where the pitiful heroinelooks on in agonised compassion as her father’s cruel mockery of her ownseduction and abandonment unwittingly backfires upon himself. Father anddaughter thus come to embody two conflicting spectatorial modes, those ofcomedy and the drame respectively, and Beaumarchais paints a touchingportrait of the latter’s moral superiority.

Keywords: laughter, pathos, Beaumarchais, comedy, drame, tears, comédielarmoyante

Beaumarchais’s reputation as writer of two classics of the French comicstage still blinds us all too often to the attachment that more sentimentalgenres held for him throughout his dramatic career. Like many of hiscontemporaries, Beaumarchais was well attuned to the cultural climate ofsensibility, which valorised the capacity to experience emotion as an idealworth striving for. This taste for the sentimental is reflected above all inBeaumarchais’s continued attraction to the new theatrical genre thatcame to be known as the drame: he started his serious dramatic career withtwo such works, Eugénie (1767) and Les Deux Amis (1770), and returnedto the genre with his final play, La Mère coupable (1792). Furthermore,Beaumarchais’s first theoretical writing on the stage, the ‘Essai sur le genredramatique sérieux’ that accompanied Eugénie, offers a classic portrait ofeighteenth-century sensibility coupled with some incisive criticism of comedyand laughter more generally.

Needless to say, these elements of his output sit only uneasily alongsidewhat Beaumarchais calls his ‘gai caractère’,1 which shows through soabundantly in his more famous comic works. Indeed, Figaro’s famous remarkin Le Barbier de Séville that ‘je me presse de rire de tout, de peur d’être obligéd’en pleurer’2 casts laughter and tears as mutually exclusive, the presence ofone forcibly excluding the very possibility of the other. Although many of

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 32 No. 2 (2009)

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Beaumarchais’s comments in the ample prefatory material to his variousplays would seem to back up this incompatibility of laughter and tears,the fantasised conjuncture of comedy and pathos appears to have held acontinued fascination for him throughout his dramatic writings – as isperhaps most notably reflected when Figaro claims in the recognition scene ofLe Mariage de Figaro that ‘je veux rire et pleurer en même temps’.3 Yet Figaro’sapparent volte-face here is only one example of a tension between pathos andcomedy that surfaces across Beaumarchais’s dramatic works. As BéatriceDidier has argued, the drame remained a ‘passion’ for Beaumarchaisthroughout his career, and its themes and techniques continually surface,whether parodically or sincerely, in his comedies.4 Yet if Beaumarchais’scomic aesthetic is indeed subject to (in Didier’s terms) a ‘contamination’5

by the drame, his forays into the ‘genre sérieux’ are, as this article willdemonstrate, no less contaminated by processes and techniques moreappropriate to comedy. Indeed, just as a latent sensibility gradually comes tothe fore in the Figaro trilogy (culminating, of course, in the self-avowed drameof La Mère coupable), so elements of humour and comedy surface withsurprising frequency in Beaumarchais’s first venture into the drame. In fact,as we shall see, Beaumarchais’s twin impulses towards comedy and emotionare perhaps nowhere as apparent or as problematic as in his first full-lengthplay, Eugénie.

The plot of Eugénie is broadly typical of its sentimental genre. The virtuousyoung heroine, Eugénie, has been seduced and tricked into undergoingwhat is, in fact, a fake wedding ceremony with her lover, the rakish CountClarendon. Although the Count initially plans to abandon Eugénie foranother, more lucrative match, he is finally brought to regret his actions andgenuinely to marry Eugénie. Such a plot, of course, allows the author muchscope for creating a range of emotionally arresting episodes, from Eugénie’sdiscovery of her abandonment, via her admission of her clandestinemarriage to her stern father, to her tearful and touching reunion with therepentant Count. Perhaps less typical of the genre, however, are the variouselements of potential humour and comedy that repeatedly surface, inparticular in the play’s early acts. Of course, sentimentality can be apotential source of great humour in itself, especially when it is parodied orset in burlesque contrast with a rather more demeaning context, as theparodic recognition scenes in Act III of Le Mariage de Figaro and the prefaceto Le Barbier de Séville well demonstrate. Yet it is not, as an emotionally jadedmodern reader might expect, sentiment per se that Beaumarchais subjectsto his comic treatment in Eugénie: the comedy of the play’s opening acts lieselsewhere.

The comic potential of certain elements within Eugénie has not goneentirely unnoticed by critics, although its function within the play’s overallviewing experience has not, I feel, been adequately explored. Indeed,commentators have responded differently to the comic impulses withinEugénie. Some tend simply to overlook the work’s comic impulses, implicitly

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following Beaumarchais’s own claim that ‘il n’y a pas le mot pour rire’6 andassuming that the work’s very genre precludes a priori any engagementwith humour and laughter.7 Others read any comic impulses within theplay as a simple throwback to the parades of Beaumarchais’s early careeror as an anticipation of the plays on which his future reputation wouldlie; Beaumarchais’s Pléiade editors Pierre and Jacqueline Larthomas, forexample, find in the play ‘déjà un sens du comique que l’auteur refoule’.8 Yetwhile it is certainly true that Beaumarchais did take steps to attenuate muchof the potential comedy of Eugénie, what humour remains, I shall argue, playsa very precise role within the play itself. In this article I propose a morecomplex reading of Eugénie as a work that engages with laughter on variouslevels, both theoretical and practical. Starting with a discussion of laughter inBeaumarchais’s theoretical writings, this article explores how Eugénie sets upan uneasy relationship between the laughter of its on-stage characters andthe potential laughter of its own audience. The ‘genre sérieux’, I argue, doesnot necessarily exclude laughter, as Robert Niklaus at one point claims9;rather, it can incorporate laughter precisely by taking it seriously – and byleading us as an audience to do the same.

Beaumarchais was not, of course, the first person to be drawn to the comicpotential of pathos and the emotional potential of laughter. The advent of thecomédie larmoyante in the first half of the century had prompted many debatesabout the possibility and appropriateness of mixing laughter and pathoson stage. Revealingly, despite its popularity with audiences, the comédielarmoyante had been roundly criticised by all manner of intellectuals, fromleading Enlightenment thinkers to such anti-philosophe writers as Fréron. Thereasons for this distaste, however, are revealing. Generally speaking, fewcritics had an objection to the proposed extension of the genre of comedy toinclude emotionally affecting plots. Rather, the sticking point for many wasthe comédie larmoyante’s apparent attempts to awaken both laughter andtears in its audiences. For some critics it simply went without saying that theemotion produced by the comédie larmoyante could not in any way be mixedwith laughter; Fréron, for example, demanded that dramatists produce ‘desPièces purement attendrissantes, sans aucun mélange de comique’.10 EvenDiderot, who acknowledged a potential continuum of intermediate genresbetween tragedy and comedy, insisted that any play that constantly leapsbetween comic and touching scenes will lack any unity of tone and thusnever be ‘sans défaut aux yeux d’un critique sévère’.11 Revealingly, Voltaire,one of the few dramatic writers explicitly to acknowledge the human capacityto move ‘insensiblement de l’attendrissement au rire’, suggested that this shiftwas considerably easier to accomplish in real life than in the theatre – a factthat may explain in part his considerable unease with the generic label of thecomédie larmoyante.12

The wariness of eighteenth-century critics towards attempts to blendcomedy and pathos stems in no small part from the period’s increasingtheoretical and practical mistrust of laughter. As Anne Richardot’s study Le

Taking Comedy Seriously: Laughter and Pathos in Beaumarchais’s Eugénie 199


Rire des lumières reminds us, laughter was widely regarded across the periodas anathema to developing ideals of empathetic sensibility.13 In the ‘Essai surle genre dramatique sérieux’ Beaumarchais generally follows the acceptedtenets of eighteenth-century sensibility, privileging emotion over laughterand serious drama over comedy. Laughter, he claims, is conducive neither tointrospection nor to empathy. That said, if Beaumarchais here rejects comedyin the name of sensibility, then he also discards tragedy along similar lines.While both tragedy and the drame seek to produce tears, those of tragedy hedismisses as invariably ‘pénibles’, ‘rares’ and ‘brûlantes’ – a far cry from themore touching, refined emotion of the drame.14 The affective power of tragedyis nonetheless great enough to make any subsequent shift towards laughteressentially unpleasant. Indeed, Beaumarchais criticises the long-establishedtheatrical practice of following serious plays with a shorter comedy, claimingthat this shift from high emotion to laughter is regrettable:

Pour moi, lorsqu’un sujet tragique m’a vivement affecté, mon âme s’en occupedélicieusement pendant l’intervalle des deux pièces, et je sens longtemps que jeme prête à regret à la seconde. Il me semble alors que mon coeur se referme pardegrés, comme une fleur ouverte aux premiers soleils du printemps se resserrele soir à mesure que le froid de la nuit succède à la chaleur du jour.15

Such a claim would seem to align Beaumarchais with those writers who holdthat a sustained tone of high pathos is scarcely compatible with the inclusionof comedy. Although Beaumarchais’s criticism of laughter is expressedhere in primarily aesthetic terms, an ethical charge is also discernible withinhis allusion to the gradual closing-off of the heart. Yet despite this affectivewithdrawal, Beaumarchais nonetheless characterises laughter as afundamentally social experience: ‘La gaieté légère nous distrait; elle tire, enquelque façon notre âme hors d’elle-même, et la répand autour de nous; on nerit bien qu’en compagnie.’16 However, lest we see in this opening-up of the selftowards others an echo of positive Enlightenment notions of sympathy andempathy, Beaumarchais swiftly insists that such laughter does not engageour hearts: ‘Mais, si le tableau gai du ridicule amuse un moment l’esprit auspectacle, l’expérience nous apprend que le rire qu’excite en nous un traitlancé meurt absolument sur sa victime, sans jamais réfléchir jusqu’à notreCoeur.’17 Although laughter is a social experience and requires company,then, it simultaneously closes off our hearts, both to the possible sufferings ofthose we mock and to the possibility that we too might be included within theoverall mockery.

Beaumarchais’s curious recasting of laughter in terms of both opennessand insensibility is echoed in his comments on tears:

Si le rire bruyant est ennemi de la réflexion, l’attendrissement, au contraire, estsilencieux; il nous recueille, il nous isole de tout. Celui qui pleure au spectacle estseul; et plus il le sent, plus il pleure avec délices, et surtout dans les pièces dugenre honnête et sérieux qui remuent le cœur par des moyens si vrais, si

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naturels. Souvent, au milieu d’une scène agréable, une émotion charmante faittomber des yeux des larmes abondantes et faciles, qui se mêlent aux traces dusourire et peignent sur le visage l’attendrissement et la joie. Un conflit sitouchant n’est-il pas le plus beau triomphe de l’Art, et l’état le plus doux pourl’âme sensible qui l’éprouve?18

Pathos and laughter are thus diametrically opposed in a curious chiasmus.While attendrissement is a solitary process which nonetheless engages ourempathy for others, laughter is a collective act that simultaneously preventsempathy. It is for this reason, among others, that comedy cannot have thecorrective function that some attribute to it. Indeed, Beaumarchais holds thatcomedy can even have a positively corrupting effect, leading us to side withthose who make us laugh, even if these characters are morally reprehensible– a possibility played out on various levels within Eugénie itself.

As Niklaus has pointed out, the ‘Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux’ ismore an apology for the drame than a theoretical discussion of it.19 Yet ifBeaumarchais’s challenge in the ‘Essai’ is to win over a public still scepticalof new theatrical developments, then this problem would seem to be all thegreater in the play itself. At the start of the ‘Essai’ Beaumarchaisacknowledges that it would be misguided to ‘vouloir convaincre par leraisonnement dans un genre où il ne faut que persuader par le sentiment’20;accordingly, the strategies of persuasion he adopts when attempting to winover his theatre audience are revealing.

As we might expect, many of Beaumarchais’s misgivings about comedyand laughter in the ‘Essai’ are played out in Eugénie. In various respects, andparticularly in his paratextual material, Beaumarchais is keen to delineate hisplay as belonging outside the realm of traditional comedy. Unlike otherwriters such as Diderot and Sedaine, who had tended to label their dramesgenerically as ‘comédies’, Beaumarchais initially toyed with the idea ofassigning his play to the category of domestic tragedy21 – and in this respect,his final decision to choose the term ‘drame’ itself marks his continued desireto mark out his independence from the traditional genres. In the publishedversion, too, Beaumarchais supplies a footnote insisting that the actor Prévillehad been assigned the role of Baron Hartley only ‘parce qu’il est grandcomédien’ rather than because of his specifically comic skills, and warnsagainst any attempt to play the role comically.22 Likewise, as we have alreadyseen, the accompanying ‘Essai’ itself insists that the drame as a whole lacks ‘lemot pour rire’.

Despite the insistence of these various paratexts, however, the play itselftells a rather different story. For a start, as I have already suggested,Beaumarchais is not averse to inserting brief and mildly comic episodes andscenes of light-hearted banter into even his serious plays. Yet, as I hope tosuggest, if these devices may suggest something of a compromise between thegeneric demands of the drame and of comedy, this compromise is deliberateand plays a particular role in the overall theatrical experience. A key factor in



this experience is Beaumarchais’s handling of on-stage laughter, which playsa very precise role in Eugénie, as it will in Beaumarchais’s later plays. Indeed,in Eugénie Beaumarchais shows himself very attentive to the dramaticpotential that happiness, joy and laughter can have, particularly in thevarious contrasts they can create with sadness and tears. As I shall argue,Eugénie is less profitably read, at least where laughter is concerned, as a playthat simply follows the dictates of the ‘Essai’ than as a dramatisation of someof the essay’s main concerns.

Before focusing on more specifically comic techniques, however, it is worthnoting the overall theatricality of the play as a whole. In particular, despitethe drame’s overall pretensions to naturalism, Beaumarchais makes abundantuse of such patently artificial devices as asides and monologues. Offering, asthey do, a convenient dramatic shorthand for revealing a character’s innerthoughts and emotions, such techniques had, of course, long been acceptedas often necessary transgressions of vraisemblance. Yet it is striking thatBeaumarchais at one point compounds the artifice of the device in a mannertypical of only the very ‘stagiest’ forms of comedy. At one point, in anexchange reminiscent of Act I, scene iii, of Molière’s L’Avare, Beaumarchaiseven has one character overhear another’s private musings and challengehim on what he has been saying.23 Perhaps it is unsurprising that thecharacter being overheard here is the valet, Drink, on whom much of theplay’s potentially comic theatricality centres. Despite his earlier claims aboutthe drame’s incompatibility with laughter, even Niklaus acknowledges thatthe presentation of Drink is somewhat ‘grossier’ in its humour,24 and it is clearthat Drink offers in various respects a tangible link back to traditional forms ofcomedy. The theatricality that often surrounds his appearances is heightenedby the reactions he produces in the other characters, who typically expresstheir exasperation with him in a manner that would not be out of place in astraight comedy. When Drink absent-mindedly refers to Eugénie as ‘Milady’rather than ‘Miss’, for example, Eugénie’s aunt exclaims: ‘Encore Milady? Onlui a défendu cent fois de vous nommer ainsi!’25 Similar outbursts are alsocommon from the Count, who at one point draws particular attention to hisservant’s credentials as a stock comic figure, announcing to Drink that ‘Jedéteste les valets raisonneurs, et je me défie surtout des fripons scrupuleux’.26

The repeated use of such third-person formulations as these serves to typifyand objectify Drink still further through a patently theatrical appeal to a wideraudience.

Yet Drink is only the most obvious character to be treated in this quasi-comic manner. Indeed, despite Beaumarchais’s insistence in the ‘Essai’ thathis characters were not chosen in order to ‘contraster ensemble’,27 thevarious conflicts between Eugénie’s father, the Baron, and her aunt,Madame Murer, often give rise to similar moments of comic theatricality.Some critics have seen Madame Murer in particular as an essentially comicfigure in her preoccupation with wealth and status; Niklaus, for instance,claims that she is reminiscent of some of Molière’s characters in this

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respect.28 Certainly, Madame Murer’s high social aspirations lead her intoconflict with her short-tempered brother. Yet perhaps more important thanthe potential comedy of her role is the role that this comedy plays withinthese on-stage clashes.

In a deleted manuscript version of the opening scene Beaumarchais bothhighlights and to some extent defuses the first on-stage argument betweenthe Baron and his sister through the insubordinate laughter of the maidBetsy. Evidently amused by her master and mistress’s squabbling, the maidleaves the stage ‘en riant’, much to their annoyance and distraction.29

Beaumarchais’s choice to excise this laughter from the finished play has twoimportant consequences. In the manuscript version Betsy’s laughter not onlysets up a fairly traditional comic dynamic between insubordinate servant andridiculous master but also establishes laughter from the start as somethingable, if only momentarily, to neutralise and stifle dispute. By removingthe laughter, Beaumarchais thus tones down the comic framework of theopening scene and paves the way for a more serious engagement withlaughter as an ethical issue. Indeed, as we shall see shortly, later scenesestablish laughter squarely as a source of discord rather than as itsresolution.

In fact, if we examine the debate that gives rise to this laughter in greaterdetail, we find further reasons why Beaumarchais may have chosen tosuppress the entire exchange. The Baron exclaims that the Count’s house, inwhich the family is now lodging, is so full of imported trinkets that it isimpossible for him to set down his wig, handkerchief or hat on any surface‘sans risquer de casser pour plus de cent guinées de porcelaines, et qui pisest, des porcelaines de France’.30 He soon pursues his train of anti-Frenchsentiment by bemoaning his country’s habit of continually exchanging‘notre or contre toutes les fariboles de cette nation’.31 Two things areparticularly striking here. To start with, this early draft suggests that it is theBaron, rather than his sister, who is presented as the main source ofhumour.32 Not only is it the Baron’s various complaints about the Count’stastes that prompt Betsy’s laughter, but it is also he rather than MadameMurer who becomes indignant at her insubordination. Second, a significantpart of the humour of this scene for Beaumarchais’s Parisian audiencewould have derived from the specifically anti-French nature of the Baron’soutbursts. Despite Howarth’s observation that Beaumarchais’s play as awhole is symptomatic of the ‘anglomania’ of the French public of thetime,33 such an outburst so early on in the play would nonetheless haverisked drawing undue attention to the national differences between theplay’s setting and its audience, thus impeding the ease of audienceidentification which the ‘Essai’ presents as being essential to the drame’ssuccess.34

Rather than excising all comedy from the final version of the play,Beaumarchais chooses rather to displace it. While various characters in theplay have personality flaws that could potentially be developed to comic effect,



Beaumarchais does not present these flaws as a direct source of humour inthemselves; rather, he has each character cast the other as ridiculous.Madame Murer, for example, dismisses her brother’s plan to marry Eugénie toan old man who is ‘encore plus ridicule que son frère le capitaine’.35 The Baronis somewhat more direct in his mockery, not least when he parodies his sister’spreoccupation with status in a fit of utter exasperation:

Madame Murer (le ton de Madame Murer, dans toute cette scène, est un peudédaigneux): J’espère que vous n’oublierez pas de vous faire écrire chez le lordcomte de Clarendon, quoiqu’il soit à Windsor: c’est un jeune seigneur fort demes amis, qui nous prête cette maison pendant notre séjour à Londres, et voussentez que ce sont là de ces devoirs ...Le Baron, la contrefaisant: Le lord comte un tel, un grand seigneur, fort monami; comme tout cela remplit la bouche d’une femme vaine!Madame Murer: Ne voulez-vous pas y aller, monsieur?Le Baron: Pardonnez-moi, ma soeur; voilà trois fois que vous le dites; j’irai ensortant de chez le capitaine Cowerly.36

This exchange sets up the comic dialectic rather more successfully than thedeleted one. Instead of laughing directly at his sister, the Baron stylises andobjectifies her by parodying her language and stressing the repetitivelymechanistic nature of her behaviour; a little later, in another fit of theatricalexasperation, he will simply exclaim ‘Quelle femme!’37 The Baron thusrepeatedly casts his sister as a comic figure, or at least as a figure whoseirritating preoccupation with social advancement can best be toleratedthrough comic exaggeration and mockery. The shift from the first draft isnoticeable; while Beaumarchais had previously located comedy in theresponse of the observer (the audience’s surrogate Betsy), he now drawsattention to the process through which the two antagonists muster anddeploy ridicule in their attempts to outmanoeuvre each other.

Of course, similar techniques of indirect mockery are commonplace instandard comedy too, and often to greater comic effect; indeed, it is often morecomic when on-stage characters joke about others and thereby facilitate theaudience’s laughter than it is when they laugh themselves.38 Yet if there isany risk of the audience laughing at this early exchange, it soon becomesapparent that the situation is rather more complicated than it may at firstseem. As it turns out as soon as the Baron leaves the stage, Madame Murer isnot the socially aspirational automaton that her brother takes her to be.Indeed, believing that Eugénie has genuinely married the Count, MadameMurer is compelled to sing the Count’s praises – and thus to play up to herbrother’s rather limited image of her – in order to try to sway her brother’sdecision to marry Eugénie to another. Partially misled by the Baron’s attemptsto cast her into a comic mould, the spectator is now surprised to find thatMadame Murer’s behaviour has been, in part at least, a mask.

So despite the play’s apparent allegiance to the ‘genre sérieux’, the earlyscenes of Eugénie pick up in various respects on the discourse and practices of

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comedy. This is achieved both through the use of bold, at times almostcaricatural, characterisation and through more overtly theatrical devicessuch as overheard monologues and third-person exclamations. The overalleffect of the first act, in particular, is quite striking, On the face of it, the firstact constructs for itself an addressee – an ‘implied’ or ‘ideal’ spectator –broadly akin to that of regular comedy. At some points this appeal to thespectator is only too apparent – for example, in those sporadic moments ofincreased theatricality when those on stage offer each other up to thejudgement of a projected third party. At these moments the spectator is, onsome level at least, invited to laugh. Yet the very ‘staginess’ of such momentsshould make us wary, especially once it turns out that the charactersthemselves cannot always be typecast as easily as others make out – indeed,for all his apparent conventionality, even Drink shows pangs of moralconscience that are atypical of the role assigned him. In other words, thefeasibility of watching the play according to the parameters of traditionalcomedy is progressively eroded as the act draws on. Rather than witnessingcharacters who can be comfortably (and irrevocably) relegated to the realm ofthe ridiculous, the audience is confronted with the more troubling sight ofcharacters who do their utmost to cast each other into just such a realm.

So far, of course, Beaumarchais has done little more than trouble theaudience’s security in its own laughter. In the following act, however,laughter becomes the object of a far more direct and emotionally arrestingcritique. Indeed, the potential comedy of the play’s early scenes gains its fullsignificance only in the second and third acts, when laughter becomes moreexplicitly thematised. In Act II Eugénie suddenly discovers to her horror notonly that the Count plans to marry another but also that their own secretrelationship has become a matter of public speculation and ribald banterbetween her father and a family friend, Captain Cowerly. The irony and pathosof Eugénie’s situation reach a climax when her father, blithely unaware of theidentity – let alone the physical presence – of the unknown girl, laughsoutright on hearing about this seduction:

Le Capitaine: [...] Je me souviens effectivement d’avoir entendu dire qu’un goûtprovincial l’avait retenu quelque temps éloigné de la capitale.Madame Murer, dédaigneusement: Un goût provincial?Le Baron, riant: Quelque jeune innocente à qui il aura fait faire des découvertes,et dont il s’est amusé apparemment?39

Beaumarchais heightens the poignancy of this scene by casting a sharpdistinction between the dismissive jocularity of the male characters and theindignation and suffering of the two women, who soon leave. Interestingly,the earlier manuscript version of the play insists more heavily on thespecifically comic pleasure that the Count’s latest seduction affords the twomen. Here the Captain shortly reaffirms his friend’s amused response,announcing that ‘rien n’est plus plaisant effectivement’ and attempting towheedle further details of the affair from the distraught Madame Murer.40



This early scene also ends on a more explicit note of offence; her dignityslighted, Madame Murer bitterly announces to the men that ‘Vous aveztoujours des plaisanteries si plates, venues des sociétés si extraordinaires!’before telling them that ‘les clameurs de votre grosse gaieté’ can hardly betolerable to her exhausted niece.41 In the published version of the play,however, the treatment of laughter is less insistent and somewhat morepoignant. Here Madame Murer simply escorts Eugénie away, leaving theBaron and the Captain to ‘se raconter leurs merveilleuses anecdotes’.42

Beaumarchais’s decision to suppress the earlier version’s more explicitdiscussion of humour marks a general shift from diegesis to mimesis. In theearlier version Madame Murer openly condemns the men’s jocularity andexplicitly directs attention to Eugénie’s physical and emotional response totheir behaviour. By removing these speeches, Beaumarchais concentratesthe spectator’s attention more pointedly on the dramatic action – both theBaron’s laughter and Eugénie’s physical response – and thus on thepoignancy of Eugénie’s situation itself. In other words, the spectator is invitedto recognise Eugénie’s silent suffering without having it spelled out by heraunt.

Yet however emotive this scene may be, it is worth noting that the situationthat Beaumarchais sets up here has something of a precedent in Frenchcomic theatre. As I have discussed elsewhere, a key moment of Molière’sL’Ecole des femmes is the scene in which Arnolphe is symbolically punished forhis own laughter at others’ marital misfortunes by suddenly discovering thathe has been inadvertently laughing at himself.43 Attempting to cajole somejuicy gossip out of a family friend, Horace, Arnolphe learns to his horror thatthe young man has been successfully seducing his own intended bride, Agnès,and thus that his own claims to patriarchal authority over his charge havegone seriously awry. The parallels between this scene and Act II, scene xii, ofEugénie are striking. Both paterfamilias figures laugh at tales of seductions,and both times their laughter backfires on them. Like Beaumarchais, Molièrealso takes care to stress the laughing character’s homosocial approval of theseducer at the expense of the young woman and of those who are incapableof keeping her under control. Yet Beaumarchais also tailors this potentiallycomic scenario to suit his own more emotive ends. In particular,Beaumarchais significantly defers the Baron’s realisation that he is in fact theunwitting object of his own laughter. Whereas Arnolphe suddenly realisesthe truth of the situation in a comic coup de théâtre, the Baron remains blithelyunaware that both he and his daughter are the objects of his own mockingscorn.

This change is in keeping with a technique proposed by Diderot andembraced by Beaumarchais for maintaining audience interest. In histheoretical writings Diderot spurns the use of coups de théâtre, insisting that afar more sustained and successful emotional engagement can be preserved ifthe audience is aware from the start of the full situation – or at least moreaware of it than the characters themselves.44 As Beaumarchais explains in

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the ‘Essai’, not only does this increase the spectators’ overall involvement inthe plot, but it also attunes them to the poignancy of situations not evenexperienced as poignant by the characters themselves. As a result, he argues,it is precisely those scenes in which Eugénie imagines herself to be ‘enpleine sécurité’ that move some sensitive souls to cry out ‘Ah! la pauvremalheureuse!’45 Beaumarchais thus proposes a radical disjuncture betweenthe audience’s interest and its identification with the heroine; the former liesnot in experiencing the plot from a particular character’s point of view but inunderstanding the situation from a perspective that the character does notsee. Of course, Beaumarchais’s observations may not appear to have anyimmediate bearing on Act II, scene xii, where Eugénie is only too aware ofher own suffering. Yet, if we follow Beaumarchais’s reasoning, it is preciselyhere that we should feel pity for Eugénie’s father, since we realise that he isthe unwitting object of his own laughter. Indeed, while Eugénie’s all tooconscious suffering in this scene may seem to defy Beaumarchais’s proposedmethod for heightening pathos in the audience, it is motivated in no smallpart by the very scenario that the ‘Essai’ outlines. After all, if Beaumarchaisimplicitly sets up the Baron as a typical spectator of comedy, Eugénie herselfoccupies a position analogous to that of the drame spectator. Like the actualspectator, Eugénie is considerably more aware of the full situation than theBaron is, and she is thus – according to Beaumarchais’s reasoning – all themore emotionally alert to the bitter ironies of his situation. Eugénie thusbecomes a form of surrogate spectator, articulating to an audience thewretchedness of a situation of which her father is unaware and thus leadingus to feel pity for a character whom we might otherwise see as unsympathetic.In short, then, while the first act may have invited us to laugh alongside theBaron, his laughter in this scene prompts us to feel a mixture of pity anddistaste, and hence to reassess the validity of our own comic response.

The symbolic and dramatic significance of this exchange was not lost onBeaumarchais’s illustrator Gravelot, who chose this scene to sum up Act II ofthe play (Fig. 1). The play of dark and light in his frontispiece starkly opposesthe virtuous Eugénie with the two men, and in particular with the black-cladBaron, whose broad gestures likewise heighten the contrast between hisdemonstrative laughter and Eugénie’s own restrained suffering. Combinedwith the bold whiteness of the girl’s dress, Gravelot’s choice of accompanyingquotation – Eugénie’s aside that ‘Je ne puis plus soutenir le supplice où jesuis’46 – further draws attention to the marginalised female figures who areshortly to leave the stage. Indeed, as Gravelot’s image makes particularlyapparent, the Baron’s laughter here plays a crucial homosocial function, notonly establishing a bond of jocularity with his friend the Captain but alsosetting his seal of approval on the Count’s actions at the expense of the ‘jeuneinnocente’ who has been seduced and abandoned.

What is particularly striking, however, is the comment that triggersEugénie’s aside about her suffering. Perhaps aware on some level that hislaughter may appear cruel, the Baron now justifies this initial response by



1. Frontispiece to Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act II, scene xii)From Beaumarchais, Eugénie: drame en cinq actes, Paris: Merlin, 1767.

Drawn by H. Gravelot; engraved by A. J. Duclos, C. Levasseur, J. J. Leveau,L. Masquelier, François-Denis Née. By kind permission of the Taylor

Institution Library, University of Oxford.

208 JOSEPH HARRIS


dressing up his attitude in more general, moralistic terms. He professes toapprove of the seduction, claiming to be happy to see the occasional girl serveas a cautionary example for other people:

Le Baron, d’un air content. C’est bon, c’est bon. Je ne suis pas fâché que de tempsen temps une pauvre abandonnée serve d’exemple aux autres, et tienne un peuces demoiselles en respect devant les suites de leurs petites passions. Et les pèreet mère, moi, c’est cela qui me réjouit.47

In this speech the Baron implicitly justifies his own laughter by adopting themoral high ground and casting the whole affair as a spectacle laid on formoral edification. The readiness of some to assume that laughter holds someimplicit moral worth – the castigat ridendo mores of the previous century – is,of course, something that Beaumarchais harshly denounces in the ‘Essai’.Echoing generations of anti-theatricalists, Beaumarchais asks whethermockery is really the best weapon with which to attack vice. The laughterprovoked by comedy, he claims, can have no real corrective function since ourown amour-propre, ‘soigneux de se soustraire à l’application, se sauve à lafaveur des éclats de l’assemblée, et profite du tumulte général pour écartertout ce qui pourroit nous convenir dans l’épigramme’.48 Most comedies, hecontinues, actually have entirely the opposite moral effect to that expected: ‘àla honte de la morale, le spectateur se surprend trop souvent à s’intéresserpour le fripon contre l’honnête homme, parce que celui-ci est toujours lemoins plaisant des deux.’49 Our laughter thus encourages us to be complicitwith the very vice we mock, or at least with the ‘fripon’ who invites ourinterest. (Beaumarchais’s reasoning here owes much to Rousseau, whoclaims that knavish characters such as Eraste and Crispin in Regnard’s LeLégataire universel invite spectators to become criminals, at least in theirminds.50)

Various aspects of Beaumarchais’s critique of laughter in the ‘Essai’ arethus played out in Eugénie itself. We have already seen how, ‘à la honte de lamorale’, the Baron’s laughter marks his homosocial complicity with theimmoral Count Clarendon over the anonymous young girl. Yet although hisbanter with the Captain hardly constitutes a ‘tumulte général’, the Baron alsofalls into the trap described in Beaumarchais’s earlier quotation; distracted byhis hilarity, he completely fails to recognise his own potential implication inhis laughter. In this scene Beaumarchais thus turns his theoretical critiqueof comic laughter to poignant dramatic effect. With his final jibe at theanonymous girl’s father and mother, the Baron’s haughtily moralistic stanceand mocking laughter backfire still more fully on himself. Revealingly,Eugénie herself has until this point been strong and selfless enough to put upwith her own personal humiliation; it is only once her father becomes theobject of his own moralising mockery that her suffering reaches its peak andshe is led away by her aunt. The pathos of this exchange is lost in the earlierversion, which separates the father’s moralistic self-defence from Eugénie’spained response with several lines of dialogue between Madame Murer and



Captain Cowerly. The immediacy of Eugénie’s response in the final versionthus sharpens the poignancy of her situation by locating the peak of herdespair as a direct result of her concern for her father’s honour.

In this scene, then, Beaumarchais shows himself attentive to the power ofon-stage laughter as a dramatic device for producing pathos. His attachmentto this device is also suggested by its – somewhat less successful –reappearance in his second drame, Les Deux Amis. Here the tax-farmer Mélacresolves to save his friend Aurelly from bankruptcy without his knowing,and even – as it turns out – at the cost of his own reputation. Mélac’sdetermination to keep his charitable deeds secret from his friend means thatAurelly’s blithe confidence in his own financial situation repeatedly causeshim great private anguish. Not only does he have to endure the unsuspectingand confident laughter with which his friend brushes aside any unwelcomeconcerns, but Mélac is also at one point forced to disguise his own sufferingaside of ‘Ah! Dieux!’ and to laugh along with Aurelly.51 Interestingly, in bothplays Beaumarchais takes care to maintain the emotive effect of the earlyscene of laughter by alluding back to it at a later moment. His handling of thissecond scene is, however, considerably defter in Eugénie. While Mélac simplyrecalls the earlier situation in a brief but anguished monologue,52 Eugénie’scontinued distress at her father’s laughter is integrated rather more fully intothe plot, finally even prompting her to admit that she is the abandoned girlwhom he so mocks. In Act III the Baron realises that his mocking attitude andbanter with the Captain have upset his daughter, although he cannot entirelytell why. Still too blinkered to realise the true cause of his daughter’s distress,he again attempts to justify his laughter in moral terms, this time locating hissister, rather than the anonymous girl, as the ultimate object of the mockery.As he explains: ‘je badinais avec le capitaine, et le tout pour la contrarier unmoment: car elle est engouée de ce milord qui franchement est bien le plusmauvais sujet.’53 For him Madame Murer is simply ‘une drôle de femme’whose obsession with the Count as a prospective husband for Eugénie is somisplaced that it deserves to be frustrated and mocked.

The Baron’s laughter, it seems, has scarcely prompted any further self-reflection on his part since the previous act. Indeed, his continued attempts tojustify his laughter become a source of increased suffering for Eugénie: ‘Quenous importe qu’il se soit amusé d’une folle et qu’il l’ait abandonnée? Ce n’estpas la centième. On ferait peut-être mieux de ne pas rire de ces choses-là; maislorsqu’elles n’intéressent personne, et que les détails en sont plaisants ...’54

Originally dismissed as a ‘jeune innocente’, Eugénie is now cast as ‘unefolle’ in the Baron’s attempts to defend his laughter. Forced to listen to herfather’s version of events as though she were not a participant in them,Eugénie feels herself, perhaps unsurprisingly, torn ‘hors de moi’.55 The Baronthus does little to present himself positively in this scene, and his hypocrisy isshortly highlighted still further in his dismissive portrait of the Count as ‘unlibertin dont le coeur corrompu regarde comme un ridicule la tendresse et lafidélité qu’il exige de sa femme’.56 He singles out as particularly blameworthy

210 JOSEPH HARRIS


the ridicule with which the Count treats Eugénie’s misplaced tenderness andfidelity – a stance, of course, pointedly ironic given his own earlier willingnessto laugh at the unidentified object of the Count’s seductions.

As we have seen, while the ‘Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux’ offers anengaging and perceptive account of audience psychology and emotion,Eugénie takes these observations one stage further. Rather than simplyfollowing the guidelines outlined in the ‘Essai’ in order to produce anappropriate audience response, Eugénie extends the essay’s observationsabout laughter and pathos to apply to its on-stage characters as well. The playand essay thus attain a degree of unity, or at least of complementarity. Insome respects this implied psychological overlap between the charactersand the spectators strengthens the supposedly lifelike, realistic aesthetic ofEugénie; by behaving in similar ways to the spectators, the on-stagecharacters ratify the essay’s claims about audience response.

Yet the implied overlap of character and spectator psychology has another,perhaps contradictory, consequence. After all, the theatrical paradigmthrough which the ‘Essai’ discusses emotional response also alertsBeaumarchais to the theatricality of even supposedly naturalistic scenes.Hence the two metatheatrical configurations we find superimposed in thelaughter scene: while the Baron’s laughter casts him as a comic spectator ofanother’s misfortune, his obliviousness to his own self-mockery sets him up inturn as an object of compassion and pity for a second spectator, his daughter.In this scene’s awkward symmetry father and daughter thus come to embodytwo conflicting modes of responding to the world – the comic and (to angliciseBeaumarchais’s own term) the ‘dramic’ – and we, the spectators, are nowcompelled to choose between the two. Of course, so far we have been invitedbroadly to adopt the former perspective, but this scene emphaticallydemonstrates the insufficiencies and contradictions of the comic mode. TheBaron’s comic laughter is presented as sterile, self-defeating and founded onignorance, while Eugénie engages us both emotionally and intellectually.She excites our compassion as object of her father’s indirect scorn but alsoinvites our intellectual identification as someone who shares our awareness ofthe bitter ironies of her father’s laughter – a double position that allowsBeaumarchais to transcend the implicit opposition that the ‘Essai’ sets upbetween identification and interest.

As we have seen, then, Beaumarchais’s first ‘serious’ play dramatisesvarious ideas that are present in the essay itself and turns them into a sourceof dramatic pathos. Far from simply excluding laughter from the start,Eugénie encourages and then progressively dismisses the adoption of a comicviewing position through a succession of pseudo-comic configurations,culminating in Act II’s emotive showdown between Eugénie and her father.Rather than – or perhaps as well as – being a fully fledged drame, then, Eugénieengages with the expectations of an audience used to more traditionalconceptions of comedy, turning to poignant effect the failures of the comicmode.



NOTES1. Beaumarchais, ‘Préface’ to Le Mariage de Figaro, in Œuvres, ed. Pierre and Jacqueline

Larthomas (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p.358. All subsequent references to Beaumarchais are tothis edition.

2. Beaumarchais, Le Barbier de Séville (Act I, scene ii).3. Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro (Act III, scene xviii). Figaro’s comment here also

reflects the particular combination of emotive and parodic techniques that Beaumarchaisemploys in the recognition scene of Le Mariage. An analysis of this scene, of course, lies beyondthe scope of this article; for discussions of the tension between parody and pathos in this scene,see W.D. Howarth, ‘The Recognition-Scene in Le Mariage de Figaro’, Modern Language Review 64

(1969), p.301-11, and Jean-Pierre de Beaumarchais, Beaumarchais: ‘Le Mariage de Figaro’ (Paris:PUF, 2005), especially p.115-7. Whether it is sincerity or parody that dominates in this scene,however (and I strongly suspect the latter), it is important to note that Figaro instantly followshis claim about wanting both to laugh and to cry by stressing the uniqueness of suchcontradictory impulses: ‘on ne sent pas deux fois ce que j’éprouve’ (Act III, scene xviii).

4. Béatrice Didier, Beaumarchais ou la passion du drame (Paris: PUF, 1994).5. Didier, Beaumarchais ou la passion du drame, p.5.6. Beaumarchais, ‘Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux’, p.119-40, in Œuvres, ed.

Larthomas, p.121.7. For example, as I have already suggested, for all her insight into the pertinence of the

drame for Beaumarchais’s comedies, Didier fails to address how Beaumarchais’s practice ofthe drame is itself indebted to comic techniques. Although attentive elsewhere to emotiveand comic effects, another work that overlooks the role of comedy in Eugénie is ViolaineGéraud’s Beaumarchais, l’aventure d’une écriture (Paris: Champion, 1999). Even René Pomeau,who apparently distances himself from those critics who see none of Beaumarchais’s‘penchant pour le comique’ in his drames, dismisses Eugénie and Les Deux Amis as having atbest an ‘intérêt historique’; see Beaumarchais ou la bizarre destinée (Paris: PUF, 1987), p.49-50,at p.43.

8. Larthomas, in Œuvres, p.1241.9. Robert Niklaus, ‘Beaumarchais et le drame’, in Missions et démarches de la critique:

mélanges offertes au Professeur J.A. Vier (Paris: Klinksieck, 1973), p.491-9, at p.498.10. Elie-Catherine Fréron, cited in Nivelle de La Chaussée, Œuvres, 5 vols (Paris: Prault, 1762),

vol.I.xvii.11. Denis Diderot, Entretiens sur ‘Le Fils naturel’, in Œuvres, 5 vols, vol. IV, Esthétique-Théâtre,

ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Laffont, 1996), p.1131-90, at p.1167.12. Voltaire, Preface to Nanine, in Zaïre – Le Fanatisme – Nanine – Le Café, ed. Jean Goldzink

(Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2004), p.222.13. Anne Richardot, Le Rire des Lumières (Paris: Champion, 2002), esp. p.72-9.14. Beaumarchais, ‘Essai’, p.124.15. ‘As for me, when a tragic plot has moved me deeply, it continues to occupy my soul

exquisitely during the interval between the two plays, and for a long time I feel that I can followthe second one only reluctantly. It seems to me then that my heart closes off in stages, just as aflower that opens on a spring morning draws itself together in the evening as the night-time coldfollows the heat of the day.’ Beaumarchais, ‘Essai’, p.128.

16. Beaumarchais, ‘Essai’, p.126.17. Beaumarchais, ‘Essai’, p.126.18. ‘If noisy laughter is the enemy of reflection, tenderness, on the contrary, is silent; it draws

us inwards, it isolates us from everything. The theatregoer who cries is alone, and the more hefeels this, the more delicious are his tears – especially with plays of the decent and serious genre,which stir the heart by such truthful and natural means. Often, in the middle of an enjoyablescene, a charming emotion makes one’s eyes shed abundant, free-flowing tears, which mix withtraces of a smile and paint tenderness and joy on one’s face. Is such a touching conflict not thefinest triumph of Art, and the sweetest state for the sensitive soul that experiences it?’Beaumarchais, ‘Essai’, p.127.

19. Niklaus, ‘Beaumarchais et le drame’, p.492.20. Beaumarchais, ‘Essai’, p.119.21. Œuvres, p.1240.22. Beaumarchais, Eugénie, in Œuvres, ed. Larthomas, p.141n.

212 JOSEPH HARRIS


23. Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act I, scenes vi-vii).24. Niklaus, ‘Beaumarchais et le drame’, p.495.25. Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act I, scene v).26. Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act I, scene vi).27. Beaumarchais, ‘Essai’, p.135.28. Niklaus, ‘Beaumarchais et le drame’, p.495.29. Beaumarchais, Eugénie, notes et variantes, in Œuvres, ed. Larthomas, p.1253.30. Beaumarchais, Eugénie, notes et variantes, p.1252.31. Beaumarchais, Eugénie, notes et variantes, p.1252-3.32. This judgement of the Baron is also shared by Didier. See Beaumarchais ou la passion du

drame, p.40.33. W.D. Howarth, Beaumarchais and the Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 1995),

p.132.34. For more on Beaumarchais’s choice of setting, see Pomeau, Beaumarchais ou la bizarre

destinée, p.45, and Didier, Beaumarchais ou la passion du drame, p.43.35. Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act I, scene iii).36. ‘Madame Murer (her tone throughout this scene is a little disdainful): I hope that you will not

forget to send word to Milord Count Clarendon, even though he is in Windsor; he is a young lordand a very good friend of mine, who is lending us this house for our stay in London; as youappreciate, such are our duties ...’

The Baron, imitating her: “Milord Count So-and-So”, “a great lord”, “a very good friend”: howall that fills the mouth of a vain woman!

Madame Murer: Do you not want to visit him, Monsieur?The Baron: I beg pardon, my sister; I’ve told you three times now: I shall visit him once I have

visited Captain Cowerly.’ Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act I, scene iii).37. Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act I, scene iii).38. Indeed, on-stage laughter in comedies was condemned by Claude-Joseph Dorat as an act

of usurping the spectator’s rights. See La Déclamation théâtrale, in Écrits sur l’art théâtral, ed.Sabine Chaouche (Paris: Champion, 2005), vol I.163-305 (ll. 669-78). (While Dorat istechnically speaking of actors’ unscripted laughter at their roles, his comments can easily beextended to cover scripted laughter as well.)

39. ‘The Captain: Actually, I do recall hearing it said that some provincial dalliance had kepthim away from the capital for some time.

Madame Murer, disdainfully: Some provincial dalliance?The Baron, laughing: Some innocent young thing to whom he’s shown a thing or two and

from whom he’s taken his pleasure, it seems?’ Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act II, scene xii).40. Beaumarchais, Eugénie, notes et variantes, p.1257.41. Beaumarchais, Eugénie, notes et variantes, p.1257.42. Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act II, scene xii).43. ‘ “Ne puis-je pas en rire?” Onstage Laughter in L’Ecole des femmes’, Romance Studies 24:1

(March 2006), p.3-13, at p.8-10.44. See Diderot’s critique of Voltaire’s Zaïre, in De la poésie dramatique, in Œuvres, vol. IV.1271-

1350, especially p.1305-10. For further discussion of Beaumarchais and Diderot’s theories ofdramatic interest, see my ‘Between Interest and Identification: Early Modern Theatre and theInvention of the Spectator’, in Theatre, Fiction, and Poetry in the French Long Seventeenth Century,ed. William Brooks and Rainer Zaiser (Oxford, New York, Frankfurt, Bern: Lang, 2007), p.143-56.

45. Beaumarchais, ‘Essai’, p.137.46. Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act II, scene xii).47. ‘The Baron, contentedly. Good, good. I don’t mind if from time to time some poor

abandoned girl serves as an example to others, and warns these young ladies where their littlepassions might lead. And their fathers and mothers – that’s what I like best.’ Beaumarchais,Eugénie (Act II, scene xii).

48. Beaumarchais, ‘Essai’, p.126-7.49. Beaumarchais, ‘Essai’, p.127.50. Lettre à d’Alembert, ed. Marc Buffat (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), p.96.51. Beaumarchais, Les Deux Amis, in Œuvres, ed. Larthomas (Act I, scene xi).52. Beaumarchais, Les Deux Amis (Act II, scene vi).53. Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act III, scene v).



54. ‘What does it concern us if he has taken advantage of some mad girl and abandoned her?These things happen all the time. Perhaps we shouldn’t laugh at such matters, but when theydon’t concern anyone, and if the details are funny ...’ Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act III, scene v).

55. Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act III, scene vi).56. Beaumarchais, Eugénie (Act III, scene vi).

joseph harris is Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London, specialising inearly modern French literature, especially drama. His research interests include: gender,sexuality and queer theory; comedy and laughter; reception and audience response. He is theauthor of Cross-Dressing in Seventeenth-Century France (Tübingen: Narr, 2005) and the editor ofIdentification before Freud: French Perspectives (special issue of Nottingham French Studies, 2008).He has published numerous articles on early modern French drama and prose and is currentlyworking on the psychology of spectatorship in the dramatic theories of the sixteenth to theeighteenth centuries.

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Documents

Taking Comedy Seriously: Laughter and Pathos in Beaumarchais's Eugénie