Arizona republican., 1910-10-30
THE FAMILY AND THE DRAMA IN
 FRANCE

Every one knows that 1t is in i France that the family has reached its apotheosis, that marriage nine | times out of ten is a reasonably hap py and safe adventure to undertake. and yet all French drama and most French novels depict a curious SOC iety, in which all the characters of an attractive age are engaged in break ing the seventh commandment.
 "Now French sOciety-one of the best organize and cohesive in the world-could not endure for a year if As a matter of fact, these unlawful intrigues are no more typical of French family life than of English family life; indeed I should imagine rather less so.
 'The young French wife is observ- ed. chaperoned, surrounded by moth ers-in-law, aunts and cousins, who watch all her doings with lynx-like assiduity, and she has to account for her time to a whole circle of affection ate but experienced women of the world. In summer and autumn they fill their villas and chateaux with relatives, and not with friends, so that the chances of monsieur or madame being able to indulge in a love affair or even the mildest 'flirt' are exceed ingly remote
 '' To the chateaux come the sons or daughters in law and their chill dren, uncles, aunts, grandmothers and cousins from the most distant pro- vinces, but rarely does the French
 
 house parties such as we are accus- toned to in England. The young wife must sit in the drawing room of an afternoon and of an evening, surrounded by her husbands female relatives, assiduously doing wancy work, making clothes for the poor of the village or embroidering a new al- tar cloth or a robe for the Madonna in the little parish church.
 ''She is the woman in Europe who Is least able to live her own life, to go about without malicious comment or to see masculine friends with any sort of cordial intimacy. Thenagain there is the tie of her religion-the necessity of confessing all her misdo- ings-to make her adhere to the mar row path of duty.
 Yet so observant a dramatist as M. Maurice Donnay is apparently un- able to embark upon a description of modern life and fodern people with out using the motive of conjugal in- fidelity. La Verge Folle,' M. Henri Battaille's great Parisian success of last spring, Is still more improbable than the pieces of M. Maurice Donnay for here we have a lovely young girl of IS. the daughter of a duke. running off to London with a middle-aged married lawyer.
 Such an oncoming minX has sell dom been seen on any stage, least of all on the Parisian boards. and If there is something strangely distaste- full in the love scenes there is, accord ing to modern ideas, a still more un- pleasant flavor in the abject attitudL of the sorrowful abandoned wife. The foolish virgin certainly has the cour- age to live her own life, destroying the happiness of two families in the process, but the Grisela wife, so won derfully acted by Bertha Badz, does not resemble any vultivated woman of any nationality in this twentieth century.
 Certainly no wife of northern race would act in the way that M. Henri Battaille's heroine acts; the feminine pride which is so marked a charac- teristic of the modern woman would prevent her adopting so mediaevtl an attitude to her erring spouse. Per | haps in a few years it will occur to the French playwright that there are other themes than the somewhat threadbare one of the erring hus- band or the unfaithful wife."-Aln Englishwoman in London Ladies' Pic | torial.