Georges Feydeau
Bio for John Good, 2013
The French playwright who was to put the Naughty into the Nineties and give theatrical expression to the Belle Epoque was born Georges Leon Jules Marie Feydeau in Paris on 8 December 1862. His father, officially at least, was the writer and scholar Ernst-Aime Feydeau; rumour had it at the time that he was in fact the natural son of the duc de Morny, statesman, art collector, failed playwright, and half-brother to Napoleon III. Feydeau himself would later claim that his mother, the beautiful Polish socialite Lodzia Bogaslawa Zeleweska, told him he was actually the son of the Emperor himself.
Whatever the truth of this, uncertain conception was followed by a comfortable and bohemian childhood. Through Ernst-Aime he was introduced to the leading figures of the burgeoning realist movement – art critic Theophile Gautier, the Goncourt brothers and the novelist Gustave Flaubert – and, encouraged by his father, the young Georges neglected his studies to concentrate on the stage at a time when Paris was the intellectual and artistic capital of Europe. When his father died hemiplegic in 1873, Feydeau founded a theatre company, Le Cercle des Castagnettes, hoping to make his name performing monologues in Paris salons, but the attempt ended in failure after just a few years.
The following decade was to prove equally frustrating. After briefly serving in the military, the Feydeau saw his first one-act play Par la fenetre (Through the Window) performed professionally in 1882, but its two successors, Amour et piano (Love and Piano) and Gibier de potence (Jailbird), met with only critical approval. Then at the age of 24, his three-act farce Tailleur pour Dames (A Gown for His Mistress) premiered at the Theatre de la Renaissance, where Feydeau had been working as a general secretary, and became his first big success. But this was to be followed by another six lean professional years during which he made a precarious living as a theatre correspondent on a paper founded by his step-father Henry Fouquier, who had married his mother in 1876.
On 14 October 1889 he married Marie-Anne Carolus-Duran, daughter of the successful society painter, and under the influence of his new father-in-law Feydeau became a fan and enthusiastic collector of works by the new French school, Impressionism. The marriage – never a good one, although it produced a daughter and three sons – proved a lucrative connection for Feydeau. His wife’s wealth was sufficient to fund the two-year sabbatical he then took from writing in order to study the technique of previous experts in the art of farce, like Eugene Labiche, Henri Meilhac and Alfred Hennequin, with whose son Maurice he would collaborate on some of his later successes. As a result, 1892 marked a turning point in Feydeau’s fortunes: first Monsieur chasse! (Monsieur Goes Hunting) followed by Champignol malgre lui (A Close Shave) written with Maurice Desvallieres then Le systeme Ribadier (The Ribadier System) with Hennequin, marked the start of steadily increasing success and fame both at home and abroad, establishing him within just a few years as the ‘roi du vaudeville’ and the most popular writer of boulevard theatre of his day. By the middle of the 1890s, with the help of Dumas fils and despite his relative youth, he had been dubbed Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur (he was made an Officier in 1916).
This period saw his best, if not his most famous, plays including Un fil a la patte (Cat Among the Pigeons), L’Hotel du libre échange (Paradise Hotel) and Le Dindon (The Turkey). He had taken the popular old format to a higher level with keener satire and a more unsentimental treatment of his puppets, forcing them to face up to and act upon the unseemly urges that seethed beneath their bright and brittle facade of manners. His technique relied on fast and furious exchanges, increasingly hysterical attempts to cover up unconscionable behaviour, and repeatedly ‘bringing together as quickly as possible two people who on no account should ever meet’ – the essence of farce. By the turn of the century, La dame de chez Maxim (The Lady From Maxim’s) had received more than a thousand performances, and had become a tourist attraction as familiar to out-of-towners as the Eiffel Tower.
A solitary man who nevertheless craved company, Feydeau was highly regarded by his peers and adored by his public. He enjoyed his celebrity too, living the high life and gambling heavily at Maxim’s, the swanky new Parisian club which had quickly become a favourite haunt of the rich when it opened in 1893. He took cocaine to keep the creative juices flowing and cheated on his wife with, it is said, both sexes. But even his outrageous success could not keep pace with this even more outrageous lifestyle and shortly into the new century he had to auction off a large part of his art collection to meet his mounting debts. It was only the first of such crises.
The turbulence of his private life was played out in the first plays of the new century, which began to bite deeper and more savagely into the truth of bourgeois life, ridiculing its petty obsessions and mediocrity. In 1909, following a final bust-up with his wife Marie-Anne who had taken a younger lover, Feydeau left the family home in the rue de Longchamp and took up residence at the Hotel Terminus in the quartier Gare St Lazare where he proceeded to live alone for the next ten years, surrounded by his books and what paintings he could still afford to keep.
His final plays seem to reflect his bitterness at this turn of events, where the comedy is often seen to take a back seat to more realistic situations and language, and again and again the wife is seen persecuting her husband, innocent or not, to distraction. These ‘conjugal farces’ are ferocious attacks on the couple and the institution of marriage itself.
But the master’s hand was already beginning to lose its grip. Many of his last works remained unfinished – Cent millions qui tombent (The Falling One Hundred Million) was meant to be in three acts, though only its first two were ever performed, and the two-act On va faire la cocotte (We’re Going to be Coquettes) remained unfinished at the author’s death, even though the Theatre Michel had put on its first six scenes in February 1913, suggesting that for appreciative audiences of the time, even incomplete Feydeau was better than no Feydeau at all. He completed his last play, Hortense dit ‘je m’en fous!’ (Hortense Says, I Don’t Give a Damn!) in 1916, the same year he finally got divorced from Marie-Anne.
For the playwright, there was to be no happy conclusion. Obsessive gambling, incautious habits and ultimately the failure of his marriage had led to financial difficulties. His final plays were collaborations; one was started with the dramaturge Sacha Guitry, another was completed by Yves Mirande. It was as if his heart wasn’t in it any more. In 1918 he began a love affair with Odette Darthys, a dancer, but within a few months he was already showing signs of the syphilis-induced madness which would kill him. He was moved to the sanatorium at Reuil-Malmaison, where he died insane, two years later, on 5 June 1921. He lies buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris, next to his father.
In all Georges Feydeau wrote some 20 monologues and 40 plays. Dismissed at the time by some critics as merely low-brow entertainment, his works have since become recognised as major contributions to the French theatre, prefiguring such movements as Dada, Surrealism and the Absurd. In 1941, Feu la mere de madame (Madame’s Mother is Dead) entered the repertory of the Comédie Française, the first of many of his titles to do so, establishing the world’s most popular boulevard playwright as a modern classic. He continues to be translated and adapted the world over.