Le Petit-Maître corrigé

Although Marivaux is now the most frequently performed eighteenth-century author, his style and originality are not unanimously appreciated in his time. Poorly understood, he suffered many setbacks, both at the Comédie-Française and at the Comédie-Italienne, the two troupes who produced his plays at the time.

After the failure of Annibal (1720), his first tragedy at the Comédie-Française, he abandoned the noble genre and turned his attention to the Italians, playing an important role for this new troupe, which through Marivaux, acquired a quality French-language repertoire. But in 1724, he again presented a play to the Comédie-Française, entitled Le Dénouement imprévu (The Unforeseen Dénouement), in the minor genre of one-act comedies. Once more, it fared poorly, prefiguring a series of failures.

From then on, Marivaux alternately offered plays to each of the two troupes without appearing to be loyal to either one, a hazardous strategy that sometimes worked against him. The Théâtre-Français considered him as a second-rate author, but he had to be careful in his dealings with the only theatre capable of offering him public recognition, for he harboured the ambition of entering the Académie.

Although he never directly stated his view on the subject, the testimonies of his contemporaries suggest that he preferred the acting style of the Comédiens-Italiens. D’Alembert compared the famous actress Adrienne Lecouvreur to Silvia of the Comédiens-Italiens on the occasion of the premiere ofLa Seconde Surprise de l’amour (The Second Surprise of Love) at the Comédie-Française in 1727: Silvia had become “Marivaux himself”, but “the same could not be said of the famous Lecouvreur, who performed the same kind of roles in [his] plays at the Théâtre-Français [...]. We have often heard the author say that in the first performances she captured the spirit of these subtle, metaphysical roles quite well; that the applause encouraged her to do even better, if possible; and that by dint of doing better she became precious and mannered. [...] Thus, as Marivaux put it himself so well, the actors must never feel the value of what they are saying, yet at the same time the audience should be able to feel it and piece it together.”

If these remarks attributed to Marivaux are accurate, it leaves little doubt as the difficulty of his relations with the Comédiens-Français, too full of their own talent. This independence of mind must certainly have cost him.

Marivaux was not the only author to be affected by cabals, but he was targeted particularly frequently. In order to thwart them, he often had his plays performed without mention of the author’s name, and for Le Prince travesti in 1724, he invented a new way of “defrauding critics’ rights” by not publicly announcing the day of the premiere.
The most famous cabals took place at the Théâtre-Francais: that against the Serments indiscrets (1732) was led by Voltaire, himself preparing to premiere Zaïre a few weeks later. The conspiracy against the Petit-Maître corrigé (1734) was probably the work of Claude Crébillon: “The Petit-Maître, after which you were enquiring, was treated and considered like a dog in a game of skittles. [...] The audience consequently made its views heard in very clear and very loud terms; and even those whom nature has not favoured with the gift of being able to express themselves with those Argentine sounds which, in good French, are called whistles, these, I say, tied several keys together on the cords of their sticks, then, raising them above their heads, they made such a fracas that you would not have heard the boom of God’s own voice.” (Correspondence of Mademoiselle de Bar). Despite this plotting against him, Marivaux was elected to the Académie over Voltaire in 1742.

Today, the rediscovery of the Petit-Maître corrigé more than 280 years after its creation shows, if need be, that initial prejudices can be persistent, even for an author as well-known as Marivaux.