[In the following essay, Wooton discusses The Vultures and its importance in the early development of modern realism.]

Henry Becque's The Vultures, although important in the early development of modern realism, seems to be, for the most part, a forgotten play, or at least one that has received little critical attention in America. Its inclusion in John Gassner's, A Treasury of the Theatre, in an English translation by Freeman Tilden,¹ however, is likely to make it a familiar play, at least to undergraduate students. It is, perhaps, of value then to examine some of the assumptions made concerning the nature of the play and how well they fit the work as art. In an introduction to the play, Gassner writes of the characters as believing that, “their social conduct and sentiments are norms of the social level on which they live and thrive.” He notes that although Becque has employed the slice-of-life technique of the realist, the play does not belong to the naturalistic school of Zola and his other contemporaries in the French theater. Indeed, as Gassner points out, Becque removed himself from Zola's brand of naturalism when he wrote in his own preface to The Vultures: “I have never entertained much liking for assassins, hysterical and alcoholic characters, or for the martyrs of heredity and victims of evolution.” Becque's intent was to portray reality as he saw it, to be completely faithful to the nature of the language, the thoughts and the actions that the characters would exhibit if they could be seen operating within the real society Becque was mirroring on the stage.

An American critic, Samuel Montefiore Waxman, contends that The Vultures is excessively bitter. In his study, Antoine and the Théâtre-Libre, Waxman praises Becque's dialogue and characterization, but he says, “And the words of the ravens are cruel, sometimes needlessly cruel. They reflect Becque's black view of life.” Waxman holds that this “black view” is a result of Becque's unfortunate financial experiences. He considers the play more as a comment on the defined vultures than as a revelation of the manners of all the characters within their world. By means of this point of view, he is able to find an element to offset Becque's natural pessimism: “The most beautiful sentiment of Les Corbeaux is the closeness with which the mother, daughters, and faithful servant cling to each other in their unequal battle with the ravens.”²

The play is a slice-of-life, a realistic play. To stop with this analysis, however, is to fall short of the mark, short of Henry Becque's intent and artistry. The Vultures presents a group of characters who are both products and producers of their society. Becque examines their code and their manners by presenting them without commentary. Any condemnation of their behavior is implicit, inferred from the disparity between the characters' evaluation of themselves and their society and the audience's opinion of them. In addition to employing these realistic techniques, Becque indirectly assists the audience in forming its opinion by satirizing the characters' manners with a heavy irony and a grim humor, unlikely to provoke laughter. Becque thus seems to have created a realistic play, in which the techniques of the comedy of manners are used for moralizing purposes.

This blending is substantially intimated in James Huneker's, Iconoclasts. Huneker writes in one instance that “Les Corbeaux is unique in modern comedy,” and, later, that “Les Corbeaux is the Bible of the dramatic realists.” Huneker also argues, however, that “Molière is his [Becque's] real master,” and he asks, “Are we returning to the Molière comedy of character?” Huneker's awareness of Molière's influence on Becque and his opinion that Becque's new realism was a modified, a subdued naturalism, makes him see the play as a blending of these two forms. Becque, he concludes, was “nearer classic form” than his contemporaries.³ The Molière influence on Becque is seen in his plots, which are, as Adolphe Thalasso points out in Le Théâtre Libre, “… très simples, très simples aussi ses moyens d'exécution.”⁴ It is true that Becque's plots are very simple and his technique relatively free of complex symbols and mechanical conventions.

The plot of The Vultures is extremely simple, and Becque relies only once on a mechanical convention to unfold his drama. The action centers around the Vignerons, a middle-class family of means. Mr. Vigneron is a manufacturer in partnership with a Mr. Teissier. The curtain goes up on a seemingly ideal home as the Vigneron family is preparing a dinner party to celebrate the impending marriage of their youngest daughter, Blanche. Mr. Vigneron leaves as the guests begin to arrive. After the guests have been introduced, and while they are laughing at Gaston Vigneron's impersonation of his father, an unwelcome guest, a doctor, arrives to announce the sudden and unexpected death of Mr. Vigneron. The next two acts present a procession of “vultures” who attempt to take advantage of Mrs. Vigneron's inability to comprehend the problems of settling her husband's estate. The “vultures” preying on the family are many, but the most rapacious is Teissier, who, with the help of the lawyer, Bourdon, reduces the family to a state of penury. Blanche's wedding is canceled because of her inability to provide the contracted dowry; the family is forced to move to surroundings incongruous with their former social status. In Act IV, Blanche has drifted into insanity, Gaston has joined the army, and the eldest daughter, Judith, and Mrs. Vigneron cannot resolve their plight. The family is finally saved by Teissier, who develops an interest in the second Vigneron daughter, Marie. The solution of the Vignerons' difficulties is effected by an agreement between Teissier and Marie to form a union admittedly without love, a marriage that is in actuality a business contract. The death of the father brought the “vultures” into action, but it also revealed that in a society where money has superseded moral values, all must be “vultures” if they are to survive.

The first act opens with an idyllic scene of family singing and fun-making. Yet, the untenable basis of the Vigneron world and its moral code is immediately suggested by their concern with propriety and with the place and function of money. In the first conversation between Blanche and her mother, Becque intimates the tenuous source of the Vignerons' standards. Blanche questions whether the placing of a menu at each plate will add anything to the dinner. When Mrs. Vigneron replies that it will not detract from it, Blanche is immediately concerned with the question of its propriety, regardless of the effect. Mrs. Vigneron is “absolutely sure” it is the proper thing to do because she “saw it in the Ladies' Home Companion.” The satire is immediately aimed at society's subscription to an artificial code. Mrs. Vigneron further admits to being flattered by the prospect of having a “son-in-law from one of the oldest families.” It is ironical that she should qualify her pride by adding, “But I wouldn't sacrifice one of my girls to mere vanity,” when sacrificing one of her girls is just what she ultimately must do in order to salvage her world. The relative nature of the Vigneron morality is further revealed in the discussion about the witnesses for the wedding. Mr. Vigneron is impressed by his prospective son-in-law's witnesses, “a high government official and a general,” because in the Vigneron world, the worth of the individual is determined by his relative position in the social scale.

Blanche is depicted as a romantic, and Becque uses her to expose the shortcomings of the Vigneron society's definition of sexual purity and of the nature of marriage. Her mother describes Blanche as “a child, as modest and innocent—the dear little girl—as can be.” But Blanche's innocence is seen, after the economic collapse of the family, as ironic and, moreover, strangely dependent upon the family's social status. When the probability of her marriage to George de Saint-Genis becomes dubious, she admits to Marie that the marriage must take place because she has already granted her fiancé the privileges of marriage. Becque exposes the economic nature of marriage in a materialistic society in two interviews between Blanche and Mrs. de Saint-Genis, George's mother. Blanche admits her imprudence to Marie after Mrs. de Saint-Genis warns her that the marriage might not take place if the Vignerons' economic status is drastically altered. Blanche, the romantic, continues to believe in the certainty of her marriage to George de Saint-Genis until her second, and final, interview with Mrs. de Saint-Genis. When it becomes obvious that Mrs. de Saint-Genis is likely to succeed in her efforts to prevent the marriage, Blanche suffers the humiliation of admitting her mistake a second time. Her appearance of innocence and naïveté is disproved, but even with her purity negated, her guilt is a matter of question in the light of Mrs. de Saint-Genis' standards. The error of the young lovers offers Mrs. de Saint-Genis a socially acceptable reason for prohibiting the marriage. Yet, Becque makes it clear that, in the eyes of the world, Blanche's real guilt does not arise from her act of passion. The ambiguous relationship between Blanche's guilt and economic stability is established when Mrs. de Saint-Genis tells Blanche, “You see, I do not attach any undue importance to the result of a moment of forgetfulness, justified by your youth, and all the surrounding circumstances. You ought to want your fault to remain a secret; my son is an honorable man who would never betray you. So much said, the next question is: is it necessary for both of you to sacrifice your whole lives for the sake of a slip?” (Italics mine.) Blanche's moral guilt is minimized, and the real danger to both of the lovers is the risk of making an economically unwise match. Mrs. de Saint-Genis, angered by Blanche's obstinacy, ends the interview by condemning Blanche as a “fallen woman.” However, Blanche's guilt does not lie in her fall from virginity; her guilt is not a moral guilt. The crime of Blanche was to fall from her previous economic status; her guilt lies in the failure of her father to provide for his family in the event of his death and in her inability to fulfill the dowry agreement. Her ensuing breakdown results from her inability to recognize the dichotomy of the two types of guilt, one moral and the other social and amoral, and from her inability to cope with the problems posed by the change in her social position.

Mr. Vigneron defines the position and function of money in his family's world and emphasizes the importance of propriety. In his only reliance on a mechanical convention, Becque has Mrs. Vigneron tell the story of Mr. Vigneron's rise from struggling respectability to upper-middle-class properness. Mr. Vigneron praises Mrs. Vigneron as the ideal businessman's wife, standing by through all the lean years and helping him to enjoy the full ones. He admonishes his children to “measure up to her standard,” because she is “a model woman.” This creates the question, what are her standards? Ironically, they collapse with the loss of her economically determined position. Becque hints at the hypocrisy of bourgeois social values when he reveals Vigneron's ignorance of music. It is proper to listen to music, but it is not necessary to have a sound knowledge of the subject. The power and place of money in their lives is emphasized again when Vigneron speaks to his family of the future: “Just let the old man put in a few more years to ensure the future of this little family, and then he'll have earned the right to take a rest.” In a society based on money, the future can be ensured only by economic gains, and the very “right” to rest is bought, not really earned. Vigneron has no opportunity to know that in the event of such an accident as his death, the same perverted emphasis on money that effected his family's rise will be the cause of his family's downfall.

The family's fall from status affects Judith and Gaston as much as it affects Blanche. Judith is a shy musician who has been led to believe by Merckens, her music teacher, that she possesses real talent. However, when she loses her social position, Merckens ceases flattering her and tells her brutally that her talent is insufficient for a career and that “there are no resources for a woman; or, at least, only one. … If you are good, people will respect you without doing anything for you; and if you're not, they'll do things for you without respecting you.” Merckens' callousness and the collapse of her hopes to provide a living for her family force Judith to be the first to admit that the family can be saved only if Marie makes the “greatest sacrifice a woman can make” and marries Teissier. Gaston appears at first as a happy-go-lucky youth, bothered only with the problem of how best to entertain himself. He also cannot adjust to his new status and escapes by joining the army. Gaston and Judith, like Blanche, have not been prepared to cope with the reality of their society. Wealth permitted them to see only appearances, the lip service paid to traditional morals and sentimental values. Poverty forces them to realize that they possess neither charm, nor talent, nor position if they do not possess money.

The more obvious “vultures,” Bourdon and Teissier, recognize the nature of their society, subscribe to its relative code and utilize the code to maintain their acquired position. To Bourdon, the Lawyers' Club is “meant to be a protection for us—not for the public.” The club's standards must benefit those subscribing to them and protect the members in their pursuit of wealth. Standards are no longer established by comparison with an absolute scale of good and evil; utility alone validates them. Since the appearance of respectability is desirable, Bourdon is indignant when Lefort, the architect, suggests he is not trustworthy. He accuses Lefort of libeling “the most respectable body of men” he knows and of “bringing under suspicion the Law itself.” Bourdon's flexibility enables him to operate at both the level of reality and the level of appearance.

Teissier needs to operate only at the level of reality. His wealth and position are secure enough to make respectability irrelevant. He does not see his parents anymore because they ask for money. “They are starving,” he admits. When he sees Marie, he is attracted to her. He first wants to keep her as his mistress, and, when she refuses those terms, he offers her marriage. Marriage is the price she sets, and he is willing to pay it. People are justified by their usefulness in the same manner as codes and standards.

Since the Vigneron family is no longer useful to Marie, Teissier cannot understand why she is not willing to let her “family stay in the ditch and go out and do something” for her own account. Her refusal to be his mistress to escape poverty is motivated by her family loyalty, not by an absolute moral standard. Family loyalty is a human virtue, normally to be commended. However, in the perverted society of The Vultures, it is the instrument which brings Marie to sell herself. The standards she uses in judging her action are those accepted by society. She considers only the result, not the act.

Marie and Teissier both recognize the nature of his proposal. He considers it a practical arrangement and seeks in her the same qualities Harpagon, in Molière's The Miser, wanted in a wife. The girl Harpagon considers, likes neither “a well served table … nor splendid clothes, nor rich jewels, nor sumptuous furniture.” Teissier wants a woman with “simple taste … who will conduct herself decently in … [his] house, and who won't steal everything in sight.” Marie accepts the proposal, knowing that it will be a “dishonest, self-seeking marriage,” but in the world they both accept, such is the nature of marriage. This marriage, as Blanche's was to have been, will be economically motivated. The Vignerons' former position allowed them to hide the economic basis of Blanche's proposed marriage, but their new condition prohibits a cloak of sentiment. Marie, knowing that Mrs. Vigneron and Judith might object, makes it clear that such a marriage is their only salvation, and she reminds them of their dependence upon a society of which they had once been a part and its relative standards and values. The Vigneron world, with its emphasis on reputation acquired by economic progress, in this respect, echoes the seventeenth-century world of the cynical wits. It is not difficult to envision Marie speaking to Judith and her mother in the words of Congreve's Mirabell: “Why do we daily commit disagreeable and dangerous actions? to save that idol, reputation.” For all the difference in tone between the two plays, the world of The Vultures is still run by the rules of The Way of the World.

Becque's play employs such realistic techniques as realistic dialogue and settings. Its action is based upon a realistic concept, a slice-of-life, a series of accidents which affect the Vigneron family. However, Becque's approach is classical rather than realistic. He is not satisfied to represent life; he holds up vices for condemnation. But unlike his master, Molière, he offers no corrective. Molière's solution was temperance: learning is all right for women, in moderation; caring for one's health is all right, in moderation; frankness is all right, in moderation. Such a solution was possible for Molière because he lived in a stable, hierarchical society which recognized absolute moral values. Becque's society is flexible and dislocated; its code is utilitarian and relative. He does not reject the utilitarian code, but he dislikes it. His moralistic intent distinguishes him from the true realists.

His intent is to reveal a society composed entirely of “vultures.” Some of the “vultures” are obvious, such as Bourdon and Teissier. Others, such as Marie, seem to become “vultures” in order to survive. When Teissier says to Marie, “Child, since your father died you've been surrounded by a lot of scoundrels,” Marie seems to be victimized by the “vultures,” while, in fact, she, by accepting Teissier's terms, has joined their ranks. In fact, Becque suggests that by being a part of this society she has always been a “vulture.” The Vignerons owed their fortune to Teissier and his ruthless methods, as Vigneron acknowledges: “I reckon it's Teissier and his factory that have made me what I am.” In a corrupt society, only those willing to accept the perverted standard and basis of that society can achieve success. In The Vultures, Becque reveals that what appeared in the beginning to be an ideal home, and later became a group of economic relationships, had actually never been anything but a group of economic relationships. In this exposition of society and manners, however, Becque has created a comedy of manners based upon a realistic concept; he has not presented “life as it is,” the goal of the realistic playwright, but life as the satirist sees “it ought not to be”—the goal of the classical comic dramatist.

Notes

1. A Treasury Of The Theatre, ed. by John Gassner (New York, 1959). All references to the play are from this edition.

   I am indebted to Mrs. Mathe Allain for aid in translating critical material as well as for making an analytical comparison of certain passages from the French edition of Les Corbeaux with the English translation.

2. Samuel Montefiore Waxman, Antoine and The Théâtre-Libre (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), pp. 41-44.

3. James Huneker, Iconoclasts (New York, 1921), pp. 163-81.

4. Adolphe Thalasso, Le Théâtre Libre (Paris, 1909), p. 43.