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JAMES AND DUMAS, fils HENRY JAMES'S REVIEW OF L~Etrangere in his March 25, 1876 newsletter to the Tribunel has an asperity about it which seems oddly exaggerated. He calls it a "rather desperate. pi&e of floundering in the dramatic sea," and even the presence of "that very interesting actress, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt" could not soften him. (p. go) He sums up the plot satirically, sprinkling loaded words and belittlingly colloquial language: it is the old story of the wealthy girl married to a "shaky, unclean little Duke," so that her bourgeois father may have a title in the family and the title may have financial support. Gerard, a poor young man, son of the Duchess' former governess, has renounced the poor Iittle rich girl because of the discrepancy in their fortunes. James rather unfairly calls him her "lover," adding the corrective parenthesis "a lover who is as yet, I hasten to add, sincerely platonic." (p. 88) The "as yet" is uncalled for, since the presence of the impeccable young man contradicts James's judgment: "There is not a person in the play who is not, in one way or another , misbehaving grossly." (p. 90) There are, James' says, three distinct faults in the play: it "hangs very loosely together," and the story is not only "extremely improbable," but "profoundly disagreeable ." It is "saturated with" an "aroma of bad company and loose living." M. Dumas' muse is incapable of making even rudimentary distinctions between what is "possible, for decent people," and what is not. James bases his disapproval, therefore, on both technical and moral grounds. The greatest technical defect is a looseness of construction due mostly to the irrelevance of Sarah Bernhardt's role, which she played with a "strange physiognomy" and a "fantastic toilet of yellow and black." She is Mistress Clarkson, a "baleful beauty," who has been fascinating every man in the Duchess' circle. Although she never receives ladies, she does intrude upon the Duchess in her private apartment when the ducal dwelling is being lent for a charity fair. She gets in by offering to donate 25,000 francs to the cause if the Duchess will personally hand her a cup of tea. That lady agrees to do so (the little exchange is carried on by notes delivered by a servant) if some gentleman of the ducal circle will escort the pariah in. The Duke himself obliges. In very short order, Mistress Clark1 Leon Edel and Ilse Dusuir Lind, ed., Parisian Sketches, New York, 1957, pp. 86-g1. 34 01967 JAMES AND DUMAS, FILS 'son~ by revealing sympathy for the noble Gerard (who has just returned upon the' scene, and whose life the mysterious lady once saved) wins the Duchess' confidence. She imparts to her the unusual -and to James irrelevant-information that she is a former slave who, after having been sold by her white father, won freedom and a fortune, and has since devoted herself to revenge upon males in general, whom she lutes to ruin while always maintaining-in the narrow sense-her "virtue." Now, for the first time, a man has won her love. It is the noble Gerard, and she warns the Duchess to steer clear of him. That spirited young lady refuses. The baleful enchantress thereupon provokes a duel between the' Duke and Gerard, since the latter will then either die or-if he kills the Duke-be prevented by law from marrying the widow of his victim. In either case, the Duchess cannot have him. However, the situation is saved by the intervention of Mrs. Clarkson's ex-husband, to whom James, in his review, pays no attention except to note that he is usually engaged in gold-washing in Utah, and that he is very well dressed, "quite in the occidental taste, and yet without the least exaggeration"-.an ironic phrase, as anyone familiar with James's dramatic history will recognIze. This odd casualness about Mr. Clarkson, who functions as the play's deus ex machina, may be a clue to James's severity in judging of L'Etrange'fe. The review was written in February-March 1876. Leon Edel tells us that on December 1, 1875, James had announced...

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