[In the following essay, Fisher explores the significance of the eighteenth-century writer, Florian, whose harlequinades are “listed” in Dr. Faustroll's library, to the works of Jarry, especially Ubu Roi.]

In his little read and even less understood novel Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (written in 1898 but not published until 1911, four years after its author's death), Alfred Jarry presents a list of twenty-seven livres pairs supposedly in the doctor's possession. They include a broad sweep of literature ranging from the Gospel of St. Luke to the latest novel by Rachilde, from Rabelais to Léon Bloy. The list includes five dramatic works: Ubu Roi is there, without any author's name attached to it, along with Grabbe's extraordinary Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung, a play that Jarry made efforts to promote, translating it as Les Silènes. Two plays reflect contemporary tastes that are to a greater or lesser degree lost to us today: Maeterlinck's Aglavaine et Sélysette (Pelléas et Mélisande in the primary state of the manuscript) and the Sâr Péladan's wagnérie Babylone, staged for the Salon de la Rose-Croix in 1893 and 1894, and the subject of a minor and self-generated querelle. If there are relatively easy explanations for the inclusion of the above plays, the remaining dramatic work in the ‘livres pairs’ has attracted virtually no critical attention, which is unfortunate as its inclusion has much to tell us about the formative stages of Ubu Roi, which have in the past attracted as much controversy as the play itself. This choice appears as the ninth ‘livre pair’, the list being arranged alphabetically:

Un volume dépareillé du Théâtre de FLORIAN.¹

Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1755-1794) is remembered in our age for his translation of Don Quixote, and as a writer of novellas and fables; indeed these fables would probably still attract a wide readership if the shadow of La Fontaine were not quite so large. His theatre is of lesser value, and has not been performed or indeed read in any depth for some decades. The last performance of one of his plays that I have been able to trace was for the ‘abonnés du mardi’ of the Comédie-Française in 1910, who apparently found La Bonne Mère perfectly acceptable.² The texts, however, are relatively freely available despite the length of time that has elapsed since Florian's complete works were last in print; the author's popularity in his own time led to substantial print runs, and many academic libraries hold one edition or more of Florian from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.³ Also, the plays sometimes appeared in the manner of an appendix in later editions of Florian's fables, for instance in that published by Garnier in 1867. In early editions the theatre usually formed one or more independent volumes within the complete works, and it is certain that Jarry had also read Florian's fables, as he quotes briefly from La Guenon, le singe et la noix in L'Amour Absolu, written very soon after the completion of the second manuscript version of Faustroll,⁴ and in Le Surmâle (1901).⁵ Exactly which edition of Florian Jarry used we do not know, but it is likely that it was an early, pre-Revolutionary one; this can be demonstrated through the credentials given to Florian on the title-pages of his works printed in this period. The following example comes from the three-volume Théâtre published by an un-named Geneva printer in 1787,⁶ and places the reader of Ubu Roi on familiar ground:

                                                  Théâtre de M. de Florian
Capitaine de dragons, et Gentilhomme de S.A.S. Mgr. LE DUC DE
                    PENTHIÈVRE; de l'académie de MADRID, etc.

This cannot fail to remind us of Act I, Scene 1 of Ubu Roi:

MÈRE UBU:
Comment, Père Ubu, vous estes content de votre sort?
PÈRE UBU:
De par ma chandelle verte, merdre, madame, certes oui, je suis content. On le serait à moins: capitaine de dragons, officier de confiance du roi Venceslas, décoré de l'ordre de l'Aigle Rouge de Pologne et ancien roi d'Aragon, que voulez-vous de mieux?

The similarity in tone and content is too considerable to be a coincidence. Much is already known about the genesis of the Ubu plays among the pupils of the Lycée de Rennes in the 1880s, largely through the partisan research of Charles Chassé in the 1920s,⁷ but the origins of Ubu's improbable military rank—vital to the plot of Ubu Roi—have not previously been identified. Florian campaigned little, though with more success than Père Ubu, and preferred life in the Duc de Penthièvre's household.

Florian wrote a variety of plays, including quasi-mythological pieces and some truly insipid pastorales, but he was best known for his harlequinades. It is in this last group that Jarry is demonstrably interested (though Henri Béhar does propose Florian's pastorales as a possible inspiration for the form of Jarry's L'Objet aimé, while conceding that it has acknowledged sources elsewhere);⁸ this may be seen in chapter VII of Faustroll, in which Jarry/Faustroll brings forth a three-dimensional object or objects from each of his twenty-seven books. These extrapolations, a mixture of animal, vegetable and mineral, are intended to join Faustroll and his companions in their boat for the subsequent périple by dry land around Paris. The ninth extrapolation, matching the ninth book, is:

De Florian, le billet de loterie de Scapin.⁹

This is drawn from Les Deux Billets, the first of Florian's harlequinades. It is a one-act play of extreme simplicity, involving only three characters: Arlequin, Argentine (his beloved), and Scapin (his rival for her hand), and the plot revolves around two billets; one is Arlequin's billet de loterie, which is known to be the winning ticket, and the other is a billet doux from Argentine to Arlequin. After a few surreptitious and comic exchanges of billets between Arlequin and Scapin, who aims to usurp Arlequin's general good fortune, Argentine states that she will marry whoever has her letter (Scene V), thus creating the only substantial plot device. There is so much coming and going of billets and characters that it hardly seems worth commenting that Jarry's chosen extrapolation is ‘le billet de loterie de Scapin’ whereas it rightfully belongs to Arlequin, and ultimately all ends well for Arlequin and Argentine, and even Scapin seems relatively unconcerned. Scapin, incidentally, seems to be a character for whom Jarry has a definite reverence; in responding to a questionnaire on drama he cited Molière's Les Fourberies de Scapin as one of the rare high points in French theatrical history that he was prepared to recognise.¹⁰Les Deux Billets, like the other harlequinades, carries a simple moralité, and the overwhelming impression of the level of moral discourse, incidental comedy and construction of plot is very much the same as in any episode of a typical modern domestic situation comedy—in other words perfectly agreeable, but unprofound. This is of course quite deliberate, and C. Lenient recognises it as a function of the audience for whom the plays were destined, with Florian placing deliberate restrictions on the character of his comedy.¹¹Les Deux Billets was first performed in February 1779, and was an undoubted success among the élite audience for whom it was intended.¹² Jarry also produced pieces governed by the same kind of cultured superficiality, when working on libretti for Claude Terrasse; one might imagine that Florian, working in Jarry's age and within its changed social and moral constraints, would not have disowned a piece such as Jarry's L'Amour maladroit.¹³

Jarry's particular interest in Les Deux Billets may have further inspirations, hinted at in the choice of the lottery ticket. The puppet theatre set up by him and his friends in Rennes was known, so it seems, as the ‘Théâtre des Phynances’—and Les Deux Billets, with all its arbitrary comings and goings involving the lottery ticket and the way it can determine people's fortunes, could be taken as an example of ‘théâtre à phynances’, to coin a phrase. My belief is that this play, along with the proto-Ubu compositions glorifying ‘le P.H.’, would have been in the repertory of the Rennes puppets; indeed Florian's Harlequin plays have certain definite affinities with mainstream puppet theatre traditions in the French language. Notable among these is the way Florian frequently emphasises that his Arlequin is a native of Bergamo, an aspect of the tradition that has frequently been neglected both before and since, but one which is reflected in puppet tradition, more strongly in French-speaking countries than elsewhere. For instance we think of Guignol as a citizen of Lyon (as does Jarry, in the Prologue to Ubu sur la Butte) far more than we do of Mr. Punch as a citizen of London, and other manifestations of the same character cling more tenaciously to their home towns than in other languages; examples are Tchantchès of Liège and the violent bon viveur of Amiens, Lafleur.¹⁴ Given this affinity, along with the conveniently short playing times of the harlequinades and their uncomplicated level of discourse, my belief is that the several known harlequinades by Florian,¹⁵ and certainly Les Deux Billets, would have served the Théâtre des Phynances as an excellent ready-made source of plots and characters that could be used and adapted at will.

As it is so hard to be sure which plays Jarry had read, there is little point in pursuing specific echoes between his work and Florian's plays at any length, but there are one or two that are worth quoting in passing. One is a possible source for one of Bougrelas's outbursts in Ubu Roi, and which Jarry and/or the other progenitors of Ubu may have had in mind if, as may be suspected, the volume or volumes in their possession did indeed contain a reasonable number of the harlequinades. This extract comes from Scene XVII of Le Bon Père (again, this is a one-act play), and is spoken by Cléante, the lover of Arlequin's daughter Nisida:

… je me suis trouvé dans le monde, à l'âge où l'on a tant besoin de ses parents, sans fortune, sans guide, sans appui, seul, isolé dans la nature, n'ayant pour tout bien que la connoissance de mes malheurs …

And from the sub-Hamlet of Ubu Roi, Bougrelas:

Encore une victime du Père Ubu! … O mon Dieu! qu'il est triste de se voir seul à quatorze ans avec une vengeance terrible à poursuivre!

(Ubu Roi Act II, Scene 5)

This similarity may be ephemeral, but there is a sufficient resemblance for it to be worth noting in passing. Another possible connection is with Le Bon Ménage, ou la Suite des Deux Billets, in which Arlequin and Argentine are married, with two children. Florian ignores the convention that small children are a bad idea on the stage, and gives them a substantial part in the play, presenting them with a charm which overcomes the potential for the insipid in their inclusion. One cannot help wondering if these two sons might not have inspired the creation of “nos fils Ubu et nos filles Ubu … des gens fort sobres et fort bien élevés”,¹⁶ who never actually appear and must be considered lost in the Rennes versions of what was to become Ubu Cocu.

Such direct affinities between Florian and Jarry's plays are of limited extent. Indeed, we can see the direct influence of Florian diminishing even within Jarry's juvenilia. In the first of his known compositions, Les Brigands de la Calabre and La Clochette, ou Shadow's Home et Death-Castle, Jarry follows Florian's lead in mixing stock Commedia dell'Arte characters with those drawn from other sources, though he never writes a Harlequin of his own; yet after these pieces, Jarry soon moves away from the literal Commedia dell'Arte tradition, though obviously much of its spirit persists. Given this early distancing, it seems odd to find Florian included in Faustroll, a work of great range and considerable depth, written ten years after the first adolescent pieces. Were Jarry's knowledge of Florian confined to the plays, one would be tempted to follow Philippe Vauberlin in assessing Florian's presence as a mere joke, a red herring to divert our attention.¹⁷ To a certain extent it undoubtedly is a joke, but it remains such a curious entry as to demand investigation. And having established that links with the plays themselves are tenuous, we are obliged to turn to the remaining Florian text with which Jarry was familiar. This is Florian's Avant-Propos to his theatre. Two distinct forms of this text exist, though without real divergence of meaning. The more common and probably first version is used here. The variant exists in a 1791 four-volume Théâtre de M. de Florian, and features a digression on Harlequin's origins. In all editions I have consulted, the Avant-Propos is printed immediately before Les Deux Billets, so it seems safe to assume that Jarry would have read it. Furthermore, he would have encountered this text at an impressionable age, when the ideas it expounds would more easily be absorbed into his own practice. The Avant-Propos shows dramatic theory that is in harmony with that which we associate with Jarry, at least as far as central characters are concerned, though naturally the two authors' purposes are very different. In his designation of Florian in Faustroll, Jarry can be seen to admit to his own inspirations—the same is true of other livres pairs—and it is in Florian's self-critical exposition of his plays that his acknowledged influence on Jarry is most evident of all.

Florian's presentation of his work in the Avant-Propos shows great and not particularly affected humility, as well as a realisation that he is working in something of a vacuum in comedy, in the absence of a second Molière. He admits that the intention of his plays is modest, that he merely wishes to create a divertissement for his peers. However, he is not immune to quite profound considerations on the purpose of the theatre, and he makes an intelligent discussion of concepts of catharsis, which ultimately leads him to set down a constructive reflection that is worth quoting at some length—constantly bearing in mind that it is drawn from a text subsequently read, at an impressionable age, by an author who created a character capable of such a wide range of emotions and reactions as undertaking war against Russia (Ubu Roi Act III, Scene 7) and being scared of his own alarm clock:¹⁸

J'ai pensé que le sentiment et la plaisanterie pouvoient tellement être unis, qu'ils fussent quelquefois confondus, que le spectateur s'égayait et s'attendrait dans le même instant, en un mot que le même personnage fit rire et pleurer à la fois. Pour cela j'avois besoin d'Arlequin.

Ce caractère est le seul peut-être qui rassemble l'esprit et la naïveté, la finesse et la balourdise. Arlequin, toujours bon, toujours facile à tromper, croit tout ce qu'on lui dit, donne dans tous les pièges qu'on lui tend: rien ne l'étonne, tout l'embarrasse; il n'a point de raison, il n'a que de la sensibilité; il se fâche, s'appaise, s'afflige, se console dans le même instant: sa joie et sa douleur sont également plaisantes. Ce n'est pourtant point un bouffon; ce n'est pas non plus un personnage sérieux: c'est un grand enfant; il en a les graces, la douceur, l'ingénuité: et les enfants sont si aimables, que j'ai cru mon succès certain si je pouvois donner à cet enfant toute la raison, tout l'esprit, toute la délicatesse d'un homme. […]

J'étois presque sûr que mon héros étoit intéressant; son masque et son habit le rendoient comique: il ne fallait plus que trouver des situations attachantes, et je devois faire rire et pleurer.

This important reflection by Florian has a number of directly identifiable echoes in the character and emotions of Père Ubu, as will now be demonstrated.

We could not exactly say that Ubu makes us laugh and cry; certainly he makes us laugh, but like Florian's Arlequin he is intended to create highly polarised responses—hence the partisan reactions that were created at the notorious générale of Ubu Roi in 1896. Ubu certainly has esprit—for examples of it see the whole of the Almanachs du Père Ubu—bounded only by his overwhelming naïvety, a trait that makes him exceptionally easy to deceive, for instance when he is sent off to war, allowing Mère Ubu to appropriate his phynances and enjoy the company of the unfortunate palotin Giron in his absence. Ubu implacably believes all that he is told, unless it is particularly bad news, for instance that of Bougrelas's triumph in Warsaw (Ubu Roi Act IV, Scene 3), and once convinced he invariably acts with a largesse befitting his royal status:

CAPITAINE BORDURE:
Mais, Père Ubu, si tu ne fais pas de distributions le peuple ne voudra pas payer les impôts.
PÈRE UBU:
Est-ce bien vrai?
MÈRE UBU:
Oui, oui!
PÈRE UBU:
Oh, alors je consens à tout. Réunissez trois millions, cuisez cent cinquante boeufs et moutons, d'autant plus que j'en aurai aussi!

(Ubu Roi Act II, Scene 6)

In the light of such munificent behaviour, Ubu, who has no sense of permanent guilt, believes himself ‘toujours bon’:

Je veux être bon pour les passants, être utile aux passants, travailler pour les passants, Mère Ubu.

(Ubu Enchaîné, Act I, Scene I)

‘Rien ne l'étonne, tout l'embarrasse’:
UN CAPITAINE:
arrivant: Sire Ubu, les Russes attaquent.
PÈRE UBU:
Eh bien, après, que veux-tu que j'y fasse? ce n'est pas moi qui le leur ai dit.

(Ubu Roi Act IV, Scene 4)

‘Il n'à point de raison, il n'à que de la sensibilité; il se fâche, s'appaise, s'afflige, se console dans le même instant: sa joie et sa douleur sont également plaisantes’:
PÈRE UBU:
Ah! Oh! Je suis blessé, je suis troué, je suis perforé, je suis administré, je suis enterré. Oh, mais tout de même! Ah, je le tiens … Tiens! recommenceras-tu, maintenant!

(Ubu Roi Act IV, Scene 4)

Other points relating to the Avant-Propos, such as those concerning Harlequin/Ubu as an overgrown child rather than as any other category of character, will be self-evident from the plays; Florian's Arlequin as he appears in Les Deux Billets is meant to be an agreeable child, ‘tres-jeune et amoureux’, while Ubu is an ill-tempered and spoiled brat, but they are both overgrown children nonetheless. While Ubu's costume is not comic in itself (‘Complet veston gris d'acier …’),¹⁹ Jarry was keen to have him played, like Harlequin, with a mask (letter to Lugné-Poe of December 7th 1896).²⁰

It will be seen that Florian's intentions for his Harlequin, taken completely literally and translated into a different world, that of a tradition of epic schoolboy skits inspired by an unfortunate teacher and bolstered with features drawn from Rabelais and Le Sage, among other authors, find a very definite parallel in Ubu, who exploits Florian's concept of a character synthesised out of contrasting responses and emotions to the full—and beyond. Furthermore, it is possible that the Avant-Propos provides inspiration for the contrasting plots of Ubu Roi and Ubu Enchaîné, which illustrate, in a burlesque version, the theme of duality that is constant in Jarry's work; Florian admits that in 1779 he wrote and burned an unsuccessful play entitled Arlequin roi, dame et valet. Ubu never becomes a lady, except in the form of his ‘Madame ma femelle’, Mère Ubu, but Ubu Roi and Ubu Enchaîné illustrate the other two elements of the title. According to G. Saillard, Arlequin Roi survived as a fragment and was published posthumously,²¹ though it does not appear among the posthumous publications reproduced in any of the editions unearthed in the preparation of this article; and as it appears more than likely that Jarry was using an early edition of Florian, probably one published in the author's lifetime, it is not safe to assume that he knew more of Arlequin Roi than the erstwhile existence of the complete play of which it formed a part.

It is hard, from our perspective in the late twentieth century and with our aesthetic values so profoundly changed from those of two hundred years ago, to say how successful Florian was in creating a new type with his synthesised Harlequin; the deliberate and extreme simplicity of the plays makes it hard to give profound observations on them, there being a risk of ill-using what are, in their own terms, perfectly competent examples of a type of drama to which modern critical apparatus is not very well suited. What can be said with some certainty, however, is that these reductively simple plays, and more particularly the conception behind them, exert a definite influence on the creation of a character who now casts as large a shadow on the world of the theatre as Harlequin did in his own age.

Notes

1. Alfred Jarry, Oeuvres Complètes, two out of three volumes published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1972 and 1987, vol. I, p. 661. References to Ubu Roi and Ubu Enchaîné will be given by Act and Scene numbers.

2. Florian, La Bonne Mère, comédie en un acte, publiée, conforme à la représentation, avec une notice par M. Jules Truffier, Paris: Stock, 1910 (reprinted 1926), p. 5. This rare volume appears to be the most recent printing of this play.

3. Many early editions of Florian are very similar, and only really differ in physical size and the number of volumes. Typical of these are Paris editions by Dufart (1803 and 1805, in eight volumes, the theatre forming vol. 3) and Briand (1810 and 1820, in twenty-four volumes with theatre featuring in vols. 15, 16, 17 and 23). Rather different is an eight-volume Oeuvres complètes de M. de Florian published by Fleischer of Leipzig in 1796 and held by Keele University Library, and different again (though similar in some ways to Briand) is a three-volume Théâtre de M. de Florian published by an un-named Geneva printer in 1787. The title page of this edition, a copy of which is held by the University College of North Wales Library, will shortly feature in my discussion.

4. Oeuvres Complètes I, p. 953.

5. Oeuvres Complètes II, p. 249.

6. Near-identical credentials can be found in a plate between pages xvi and xvii of Florian, Nouvelles, Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1974, showing the title page of a 1784 Les Six Nouvelles de M. de Florian.

7. Charles Chassé, Dans les coulisses de la gloire: d'Ubu-Roi au Douanier Rousseau, Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1947. Some of the vital material from this credulous and misguided work is reproduced in Henri Béhar's excellent Ubu Roi in the Classiques Larousse series.

8. Henri Béhar, Jarry Dramaturge, Paris: Nizet, 1980, p. 146.

9. Oeuvres Complètes I, p. 666.

10. Oeuvres Complètes I, p. 410.

11. C. Lenient, La Comédie en France au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols., Paris: Hachette, 1888, vol. 2, p. 311.

12. Concerning the play's success, see a letter of February 18th 1779 from Florian to his uncle, in Florian, Lettres au marquis A. de Florian, 1779-1793, Paris: Gallimard, 1957, p. 20.

13. This text is due to be included in the third and final volume of the Pléiade Oeuvres Complètes, but in the meantime it can be found in Alfred Jarry, Le Manoir enchanté et quatre autres Oeuvres inédites, présentées par Noël Arnaud, Paris: La Table Ronde, 1974, pp. 109-142.

14. Lafleur, whose fertile tradition is kept alive today by a number of troupes, notably Chès Cabotans d'Amiens, presents an interesting point of comparison with Ubu. They both represent, according to tradition, a progression from a real person to a puppet figure; in the case of Ubu the move is part of a lampoon on a hapless schoolmaster, and Lafleur is thought to have his roots in the popular glorification of an executed eighteenth-century servant, glorified to the point of resurrection.

15. Other published harlequinades include Le Bon Ménage, Le Bon Père, La Bonne Mère, Les Jumeaux de Bergame, L'Enfant d'Arlequin perdu et retrouvé (which re-introduces Scapin) and Arlequin maître de maison. At least two other harlequinades existed: Arlequin Roi, Dame et Valet, of which more anon; and Arlequin Picard, which also went under the title Arlequin Normand.

16. Oeuvres Complètes I, p. 182 and p. 497, in different manifestations of the Ubu Cocu material.

17. Philippe Vauberlin, “Les Livres pairs et la parité”, Cahiers du Collège de 'Pataphysique no. 22/23 (22 Palotin 83 E.P., i.e. 1957), 16-22, pp. 20-2. The Collège's peculiar pataphysical calendar by which their publications were dated is explained in Ruy Launoir's Clefs pour la pataphysique, Paris: Seghers, 1969, pp. 119-127.

18. Oeuvres Complètes I, p. 581.

19. Oeuvres Complètes I, p. 403.

20. Oeuvres Complètes I, p. 1059.

21. G. Saillard, Florian: sa vie, son oeuvre, Toulouse: Édouard Privat, 1912, p. 16.