Page:The Captive by Édouard Bourdet and Arthur Hornblow Jr.pdf/15

 ity and anguish, reveal her as a young lady of fine instincts; she is in no sense the neurotic debauchee of tawdry melodrama. Jacques Virieu, likewise, is a young man of high impulses; and of sufficient strength of character to fly recklessly in the face of danger to support an ideal. Unlike the contemporary school of pettifogging novelists and dramatists, with their garish sophistication, M. Bourdet does not excuse his characters on the score of congenital weakness or worldly disillusionment or pseudo-scientific buncombe. No, indeed, he is not interested in excuses; his is a tragedy of consequences. He shows Irene estranged from her father, playing false to her ingenuous sister, and fast losing all the friends with whom she once associated freely. He tortures her before Jacques. Once she was his ideal, a woman to whom he looked up; now she comes as a petitioner for mercy and pity rather than respect. In the second act, M. Bourdet shows the husband of the unseen Madame d'Aiguines—a simulacrum of a man, gray before his time, wretched and tormented, unable to escape from a poisoned home. All these characters, involved in various ways, have been withered a little by their proximity to the festered one. And if any proof were needed of the sincerity of M. Bourdet's purpose, his treatment of Madame d'Aiguines would be sufficient. They talk of her occasionally, but by keeping her in the background and by describing the blighted fruits of her influence, M. Bourdet retains the fine objectivity and austerity of his drama.

M. Bourdet casts his tragedy in the familiar