He took Christophe to the Theatre Francais.

* * * * *

That evening they happened to be playing a modern comedy, in prose, dealing
with some legal problem.

From the very beginning Christophe was baffled to make out in what sort of
world the action was taking place. The voices of the actors were out of all
reason, full, solemn, slow, formal: they rounded every syllable as though
they were giving a lesson in elocution, and they seemed always to be
scanning Alexandrines with tragic pauses. Their gestures were solemn and
almost hieratic. The heroine, who wore her gown as though it were a Greek
peplus, with arm uplifted, and head lowered, was nothing else but Antigone,
and she smiled with a smile of eternal sacrifice, carefully modulating
the lower notes of her beautiful contralto voice. The heavy father
walked about like a fencing-master, with automatic gestures, a funereal
dignity,--romanticism in a frock-coat. The juvenile lead gulped and gasped
and squeezed out a sob or two. The piece was written in the style of a
tragic serial story: abstract phrases, bureaucratic epithets, academic
periphrases. No movement, not a sound unrehearsed. From beginning to end it
was clockwork, a set problem, a scenario, the skeleton of a play, with not
a scrap of flesh, only literary phrases. Timid ideas lay behind discussions
that were meant to be bold: the whole spirit of the thing was hopelessly
middle-class and respectable.

The heroine had divorced an unworthy husband, by whom she had had a child,
and she had married a good man whom she loved. The point was, that even in
such a case as this divorce was condemned by Nature, as it is by prejudice.
Nothing could be easier than to prove it: the author contrived that the