SOURCE: Araujo, Norman. “The Language of Business and the Business of Language in Becque's Les Corbeaux.” The French Review 63, no. 1 (Oct 1989): 72-79.

[In the following essay, Araujo delivers an in-depth discussion of The Vultures, which opened with mixed reviews.]

Henry Becque's Les Corbeaux was presented for the first time on 14 September 1882, at the Comédie-Française. The work of a bookkeeper's son whose earlier plays had been little noticed, Les Corbeaux opened to mixed reviews, but would later be generally acclaimed as Becque's masterpiece and one of the finest and most original plays of the late nineteenth century.¹

The plot, stark and simple, turns on the tragic vicissitudes of the Vigneron family, suddenly rendered vulnerable to the machinations of unscrupulous businessmen by the untimely death of Vigneron himself, a manufacturer. Act I begins with a description of the Vigneron family preparing for a dinner party to celebrate the forthcoming marriage of the youngest daughter, Blanche; it ends with the sudden death of her father and the lacerating grief of her mother. The following two acts detail the progressive psychological disarray and commercial decline of the family, as its business “friends,” led by the deceased's partner, Teissier, conspire to ruin it financially: Blanche is thoroughly devastated by her aristocratic and opportunistic would-be mother-in-law's cancellation of her marriage because of her inability to provide the dowry agreed upon; her brother, Gaston, forsakes the family and joins the army; in their business transactions, the sorrowful and inexperienced Mme Vigneron and her two remaining daughters, Judith and Marie, prove no match for the double-dealing Teissier and his cohorts. Finally, in act IV, with Blanche lost to insanity, and absolute financial ruin threatening, the Vigneron family is seen resigning itself to the only possible solution to its plight: Marie's marriage of convenience to Teissier, who, having taken a fancy to her, guarantees that, as her husband, he will protect the family's monetary interests. Thus Becque's disillusioning commentary on the harsh realities of the bourgeois world of business comes to an end, surprisingly, not by means of a conventional dénouement, but through the quiet—though no less painful—resignation of the victims to their ironic fate.

Modern critical opinion has been somewhat divided as to whether Les Corbeaux is to be labeled a naturalistic drama or regarded as a technically unclassifiable work, closer in certain respects to Molière's classical treatment of character; but there has been fairly wide agreement to the effect that the play is realistic in its observation of bourgeois manners and morals under the Second Empire, and more than one critic has viewed it as a protest against the sentimental, economic, and intellectual oppression of women.²

A fresh analysis of Les Corbeaux suggests, however, that there is more to the work than social realism in the traditional sense and psychological insight based on classical paradigms. Indeed, possibly inspired by Balzacian imagery, the play's title, with its connotative resonance, invites the critic to explore other levels of meaning.³ As the action unfolds, it quickly becomes obvious that the “vultures,” or “ravens,” or “crows” of the title are not birds in the literal sense but people, and that, however “realistic” his intended approach to his subject matter, Becque is concerned with the figurative use of language, and, as will be seen shortly, other uses as well.⁴ Whatever lingering doubts there are about the figurative use of language in the title of Les Corbeaux are swept away when the faithful servant of the Vigneron household, Rosalie, declares in act IV, “Voyez-vous, quand les hommes d'affaires arrivent derrière un mort, on peut bien dire: v'là les corbeaux! Ils ne laissent que ce qu'ils ne peuvent pas emporter” (602).

But well before this elucidation of the title's meaning, it is clear that a central motif of Les Corbeaux has to do with language as such, with the problem of verbal communication as it arises between the Vigneron family and the vultures who exploit the weaknesses of the family. These weaknesses involve not only an ignorance of the law and of business practices, but also an ignorance of how language can be employed systematically to deceive; how, more fundamentally, meaning in language is relative, and reflective of the dominant social conventions rather than of any moral absolute.

The centrality of language itself to the fabric of the play's action is apparent from the very first scene, when Mme Vigneron and her daughter Blanche discuss the propriety of the expression plus mauvais, an expression that Mme Vigneron is convinced that she is using properly because she has seen it in the Cuisinière bourgeoise (565). The metalingual dimension implicit in this discussion will be developed later on in the play, as further commentary on language reveals both the Vignerons' inadequate grasp thereof and the hypocritical or destructive uses to which verbal expression is put by the materialistic false friend of the Vigneron family, Mme de Saint-Genis, and the vultures themselves.

A case in point is the conversation in act III between Mme de Saint-Genis and her would-be daughter-in-law, Blanche. As the conversation progresses, Mme de Saint-Genis explains that her son Georges will never go through with the marriage, given Blanche's changed financial status due to her father's sudden demise. Shaken by the thought that Georges would so easily give her up, it is Blanche who first broaches the question of sincerity in language, exclaiming, “Je saurai d'abord si votre fils a deux langages, l'un avec vous, l'autre avec moi” (600). Blanche makes this remark unaware, of course, that, in the monologue of the preceding scene, Mme de Saint-Genis has acknowledged that Georges was indeed sincere in his love for her and agreed to abandon his marriage plans only when threatened with banishment from his mother's sight.

But Mme de Saint-Genis is not about to admit the sincerity of the sentimental language shared by Blanche and Georges. Rather, she counters with an attempt to equate that sincerity, at least as far as Blanche is concerned, with immorality. Thus when Blanche, confessing that she has been intimate with Georges, declares that she would willingly become his mistress rather than become the wife of another, Mme de Saint-Genis seizes the opportunity afforded her for a counterattack. First protesting that she has not called off her son's wedding for a mere “question d'intérêt” but because of Blanche's immoral attitude, she then proceeds to chastise Blanche for her licentious language: “Qu'est-ce que c'est que ce langage de fille perdue!” (601). The truth of the matter is that Mme de Saint-Genis's action was in fact prompted by the “question d'intérêt.” But Blanche does not know that, nor is she capable of detecting that a major difference between her own language and that of Mme de Saint-Genis is the hypocritical content of the latter.

Blanche is not the only member of the Vigneron family to lose a costly battle of words. In her discussions with the lawyer Bourdon, one of the vultures, Mme Vigneron is similarly victimized, except that, in the case of Bourdon, language is at times both a vehicle for hypocritical expression and an instrument of obfuscation. Contrary to the manner of Mme de Saint-Genis, which is relatively uncomplicated in its hypocrisy—and, on occasion, even brutally frank—Bourdon's verbal technique is designed to overwhelm the unsuspecting, financially and legally unsophisticated Mme Vigneron with erudite and sonorous language. Seeking to convince her to sell her property, Bourdon refers to Roman history and Ciceronian oratory, warning Mme Vigneron that, while she hesitates, “Catilina est aux portes de Rome” (583). In a subsequent conversation that she has with her daughter Judith, Mme Vigneron indirectly reveals that she has not in the slightest understood Bourdon's stratagem. She complains of the considerable amount of “obscurité” in Bourdon's words, and asks Judith if she knows what he meant by the reference to Catiline (587); but what has escaped Mme Vigneron's attention is that Bourdon's allusion to Roman history—reminiscent of the obfuscatory practices of some of Molière's characters (Chardin 87)—is merely a learned cover for his scheme to conceal from her the true nature of her financial situation, which is less desperate than he claims.

Another encounter between these two characters confirms Mme Vigneron's verbal disadvantage when dealing with Bourdon and, in so doing, provides a key to a fuller understanding of the Vigneron family's inability to keep the vultures at bay. When, upset at Teissier's plan to sell the Vigneron factory, and unaware of this vulture's collusion with Bourdon, Mme Vigneron tells the latter that she is going to point out to Teissier that he is committing a “mauvaise action,” she betrays the puritanical moral code that she is striving to apply in the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” atmosphere of financial conspiracies threatening her and her daughters (Hyslop 53). Bourdon's reaction to her words is equally revelatory: “Je doute fort, madame, qu'en tenant ce langage à votre adversaire, vous arriviez à l'émouvoir” (595; my italics). One critic has viewed this exchange as an illustration of the difference between the Vigneron family's naïvely idealistic language of “rights” and the vultures' cynically pragmatic language of “facts” (Chardin 84-85).

Whatever the validity of this distinction, further analysis of Les Corbeaux demonstrates that, beyond the question of the vultures' deceptive and cynical uses of language, the more basic issue involved is the very relativity of meaning itself, and how that relativity is linked to prevailing social customs. Two facts become obvious: one is that certain essential expressions of the language still employed by the Vigneron family and absolutely clear to it are no longer intelligible to most, if not all, of the vultures; the second is that other essential expressions have taken on new or more restrictive meanings, or have been altogether stripped of meaning in the vultures' lexicon.

An example of a term which, absolutely clear in meaning to the Vigneron family, has become unintelligible for the most part where the vultures are concerned is the adjective honnête, in its couplings with homme or gens. In the monologue that she delivers in act IV, Marie reflects on the temperament of her sisters and expresses particular concern about the vulnerability of Judith because the latter is “honnête” (608). Marie is talking about moral honesty, as is her father in act I, when he describes Mme de Saint-Genis as an “honnête femme” (567), or even, ironically, Mme de Saint-Genis herself when, cautioning Mme Vigneron against the pitfalls of her naïveté, she says to her, “Vous voyez des honnêtes gens partout” (578). The word honnête continues to retain its moral sense when Mme Vigneron wonders aloud, in the presence of Mme de Saint-Genis, whether her deceased husband is now “au ciel où vont les honnêtes gens comme lui,” refusing, at the same time, to believe that he left any serious business problems behind because, as an “honnête homme,” he did not have complicated financial transactions (577).

Unfortunately for the Vigneron family, the morality implicit in these uses of the word honnête is alien to the mentality and verbal code of the vultures. It is true that a vulture-come-lately, Dupuis, is not above employing the adjective honnête in a pseudomoralistic sense when he tries, in act IV, to collect from the grieving Vigneron family on a nonexistent debt. Attempting first to reassure Marie of his own honesty by praising that of her dead father, he recalls the supposedly congenial history of his dealings with the deceased, noting that “entre honnêtes gens, ça devrait toujours se passer ainsi” (609). A short time after this utterance, confronted by Teissier, he argues nervously that, as an “honnête homme,” he would not be asking for the money if it were not due him (610). But the hollowness of Dupuis's hypocritical appropriation of the word honnête becomes apparent when, pressed menacingly by Teissier, he makes his wife the scapegoat, allowing the inference that she might have made an error of computation.

While it might be submitted that Dupuis is at least paying lip service to the meaning of honnête as understood by the Vigneron family, for Bourdon it appears that that meaning has ceased to exist. When, in view of her possible marriage to Teissier, Marie asks Bourdon whether her prospective husband is an “honnête homme,” Bourdon's initial response is to ask Marie what she means by such a question (605). Then, without waiting for her clarification, he proceeds to interpret the question in the narrow framework of commercial law as related to Teissier's fidelity to his given word—on which fidelity Bourdon then casts doubt, advising Marie to have contractual agreements drawn up carefully stipulating her rights. Goaded on by an unsatisfied Marie, who is finally allowed to elaborate on her question, Bourdon now concedes that Teissier has probably not made his fortune honorably—but quickly adds, in a notable exemplification of the vultures' belief in the primacy of “fact” over “right,” that the majority of fortunes in France have been made in the same way (605-606).

What is particularly significant in this exchange between Bourdon and Marie is that, in the course of Bourdon's reply, the notion of the honnête homme as a moral concept has been so eroded as to lose its referential consistency. Still struggling to exhaust, as he perceives them, the clarified implications of Marie's original question, by the end of his answer Bourdon is endeavoring to reassure her that, in his role as husband, Teissier will be more “honnête” than not; but the gist of his comments permits the inference that he takes “honnête” to mean “exercising sexual restraint” (606).

It is already demoralizing enough, from the standpoint of the members of the Vigneron family, to discover that, in the world of the vultures, a world dominating and absorbing their own, expressions such as honnête homme and honnêtes gens no longer have a definite meaning. More devastating still is the discovery that, in the language of the vultures, words like affaire have suffered a less readily apparent but more ominous fate: they continue to exist and to be employed, but the meaning ascribed to them has become exclusively commercial and self-servingly so. As in the case of honnête, the action of Les Corbeaux is designed in part to measure the moral distance separating what the word affaire means for the Vigneron family from what it means for the vultures.

At the beginning of the play, the word affaire, as used by the Vigneron family, continues to have two primary meanings, the general one of “matter” or “affair” and the commercially oriented one of “transaction” or “deal.” Even when Mme Vigneron appears to intend the commercial sense of the word, that sense retains a benevolent neutrality. Hence she describes a joint business venture undertaken by her husband and Teissier in the following fashion: “M. Teisser et monsieur Vigneron ont fait une affaire ensemble; elle a été bonne pour tous les deux, partant quittes” (568). The intrinsic merit of this “affaire” was its balanced outcome: it was not consummated at the expense of one of the two associates.

On the lips of the vultures, however, the term not only loses its general meaning of “matter” or “affair” but has its commercial meaning circumscribed by the notion of a transaction or deal to be turned to the advantage of one person, or group of persons, at the expense of the designated victim, or victims. When, in a discussion with Mme Vigneron about the suitability of having Marie marry Teissier, Bourdon notes that such a union would not be a “mauvaise affaire” for Marie, he means that she would be the one to profit financially from it; and all his succeeding remarks on the subject only serve to embroider on this theme (595).

With the subsequent elaboration of his thought, the meaning of Bourdon's words penetrates even the naïveté of Mme Vigneron. Perceiving that he means “business deal” when he uses the word affaire, Mme Vigneron replies defiantly with a reiteration of her opposition to the selling of her factory and with the statement that she is not expecting anything from Teissier's fortune (595). But it is clear that she has not grasped the accent, the intensity of Bourdon's use of the word affaire. Nor will she do so in time to save her family from capitulation to the vultures. Her failure in this regard is foreshadowed in act I, when she offhandedly observes to Mme de Saint-Genis that the reason why Vigneron and Teissier do not fraternize more is that, once they have talked out their “affaires” at the factory, they have little more to say to each other (572). While Mme Vigneron does not indicate, at this early point, which of the two men pursued these business conversations with the greater ardor and single-mindedness, the evolution of the play's action and the emerging character portrayals will lend credence to the assumption that it was Teissier. Indirectly and unbeknownst to her, Mme Vigneron has touched here on the vultures' invasive conception of the affaire: an all-absorbing, intense activity devoted solely to the making of a profit. Indeed, one of Les Corbeaux's tragic themes is the laggard development of Mme Vigernon's verbal awareness in this connection, tragic because that development is too little and too late.

The intensity with which the word affaire is charged for Bourdon, and by implication for Teissier, is again suggested to Mme Vigneron—and again with little effect—in another conversation with Bourdon, when the lawyer comes initially to announce that Teissier has made arrangements to sell the Vignerons' factory. Pretending indignantly to discern in Mme Vigneron's attitude a trace of suspicion directed against him, Bourdon criticizes in turn her passivity: “Pendant que vous vous agitez sans rien conclure, attendant je ne sais quel événement qui ne se présentera pas, Teissier, lui, avec ses habitudes d'homme d'affaires, a marché de l'avant” (593). Whatever the duplicitous character of Bourdon's manner and presentation, his account of Teissier's action reflects the vultures' conviction that it is with relentless intensity that the successful “homme d'affaires” pursues his affaire to its profitable conclusion. Not, by the way, that Teissier himself has not already directly indicated to Mme Vigneron just how seriously he regards that phenomenon represented by the word affaire. The value that Teissier attaches to the business deal is rendered forcefully evident as early as act II, when he firmly prevents Mme Vigneron from intervening in a heated exchange between Bourdon and the architect Lefort, another vulture. Teissier justifies his preventive action by observing, sententiously, that one never interrupts a “conversation d'affaires” (586).

As much as an attestation of the fervor that Teissier brings to the upholding of the conventions in vogue among the vultures with respect to the conduct of business matters (this “fripon honnête” carries with him at all times the book of legal statutes in effect in French territory⁵), this scene provides a more accurate gauge of the distance separating Mme Vigneron's naïveté from the callousness of the vultures' ardent business practices. Not only is she incapable of determining the meaning that the vultures give to the word affaire; she is unable, in a broader context, to distinguish between a “mere disagreement” on business tactics and a truly violent altercation. Teissier, on the other hand, possesses the necessary sophistication to place such disagreements in perspective, the accomplishment of the successful—if morally condemnable—business deal being the very rationale for his existence.

Mme Vigneron's inability to grasp the practical ramifications of the ardor that Teissier brings to the promotion and defense of the “conversation d'affaires” is all the more detrimental to her family's material well-being since this ardor is the mark of a particular hierarchy of values for the vultures. It is not merely that, according to this hierarchy of values, the sole objective of the affaire is the generating of a profit; it is rather, and far more fundamentally, that generating a profit emerges as the only value of any true importance, the money question being the only question worth discussing at all. This truth becomes fully explicit when Bourdon, Mme Vigneron, and Marie are considering the latter's prospective marriage to Teissier. After rudely informing Mme Vigneron, in Darwinian terms, that she has simply experienced “la loi du plus fort,” but now, through Marie's marriage to Teissier, has a chance to recoup financially, Bourdon comes back to Marie and to the nub of the issue at hand:

Vous avez entendu, mademoiselle, ce que je viens de dire à votre mère. Faitesmoi autant de questions que vous voudrez, mais, abordons, n'est-ce pas, la seule qui soit véritablement importante, la question d'argent. Je vous écoute.

(606; my italics)

The asserted primacy of the question of money is all the more striking in this context, it should be remembered, since Marie and Bourdon have just finished discussing Teissier's moral character.

But a more precise measure of the primacy of the question of money for the vultures is to be found in their manner of reacting to the very concepts of death, love, and marriage. Scholarly research has already shown how Becque utilizes the early death of Vigneron to unmask the vultures (Araujo 623-628). On the more specific level of the play's language, however, Vigneron's demise also serves to illuminate the fact that, for the vultures, the meaning of death has little to do with a sense of loss or grief but is purely relative—relative to the financial advantage to be derived therefrom, to the opportunity created for a lucrative affaire.

There is already more than a hint of this relativistic outlook in the approach that the materialistic Mme de Saint-Genis adopts in the face of Vigneron's death. To a Mme Vigneron in tears, Mme de Saint-Genis's attempt at consolation is hardly grounded in sentimental or spiritual sensitivity. She suggests, rather, that she herself was more to be pitied when she lost her own husband—because all he left her were debts and a fouryear-old child to raise (577). As revealing as is this effort to comfort Mme Vigneron monetarily, more revealing still is the verbal framework in which the effort is conveyed. Mme de Saint-Genis's lead-in statement is “Je sais ce que c'est que de perdre son mari,” which, in the lexicon of the Vigneron family, would be the prelude to an expression of emotional communion in suffering. But, as is now evident, Mme de Saint-Genis intends a “communion” of a different sort.

As for the vultures themselves, their employment of a language even more impersonal in its final significance than that of Mme de Saint-Genis plainly demonstrates that for them death is absolutely devoid of any sentimental or spiritual meaning. Seeing Mme Vigneron for the first time after the death of her husband, Bourdon is completely closed to the propriety of condolences. He begins with a cold question designed to elicit financial information: “Dites-moi, madame, pendant que j'y pense: est-ce avec votre autorisation que madame de Saint-Genis s'est présentée chez moi pour connaître la situation que vous était faite par le décès de votre mari?” (583). Under similar circumstances, Teissier and Lefort behave in the same fashion, their queries differing only very slightly in form from Bourdon's (578, 586). In the particular case of Bourdon, not only does he fail to offer condolences to Mme Vigneron, but he has the effrontery to be shocked that she has not immediately inquired about her husband's financial arrangements. After all, he observes, giving his comments the form of a solemn truism, such inquiry is of the essence: “Quand on perd son mari, c'est la première chose dont on s'occupe” (583).

No different, basically, is the tenor of Teissier's remarks to Marie on the subject of selling her dead father's factory. The emphasis has merely shifted from the question of ordering one's material priorities when one's husband dies to the equally matter-of-fact question of how one best avails oneself of the death of a factory owner to promote a profitable affaire: “La mort de son directeur est une occasion excellente, qui ne se représentera pas, pour nous en défaire, profitons-en” (580). Once again, it is the impersonality of the allusion which is striking in the language of the vultures. Teissier elevates—or reduces—the matter of Vigneron's death to the level of a vague generality, as if Marie were not all all connected to this anonymous “directeur” whose demise has created an “occasion excellente.” The qualification “excellente” is further evidence, as if such were needed, of Teissier's glacial indifference to Marie's bereavement.

Love and marriage fare no better than death in the code of the vultures. Given the foregoing analysis, it would not be illogical to assume that love and marriage would be of interest to the vultures only if related to a prospect of making money. But both concepts suffer even more cruel compression at their hands. Love is so compressed, in fact, that it disappears entirely; and marriage becomes only another form of “the only game in town”—the affaire or business transaction. Such are the profound conclusions to which Bourdon comes when conversing with Marie in act IV:

Je parle, n'est-ce pas, à une jeune femme raisonnable, bien élevée, qui n'a pas de papillons dans la tête. Vous devez savoir que l'amour n'existe pas; je ne l'ai jamais rencontré pour ma part. Il n'y a que des affaires en ce monde; le mariage en est une comme toutes les autres. …

(607)

In what Bourdon imagines to be his reasonable perspective, “love” and “marriage” are now signifiers that have no signifieds: the former is nothing more than a myth; the latter has disappeared as an end in itself to become only a means toward the end of making money. It is not only Marie, however, who has failed to grasp these “truths.” The whole Vigneron family shares in this failure, and, perhaps most ironically, Blanche. In act III, still naïvely expecting that her marriage to Georges will become a reality, Blanche vows to be more decisive in that marriage than her family has been in its business transactions (591). Not having been treated to Bourdon's “insights,” what she cannot perceive is that there is no real distinction, in the world of the vultures, between affaire and mariage. Because of that absence of distinction, her marriage, now viewed by Mme de Saint-Genis as a mauvaise affaire, will not take place.

The vultures are not content to redefine or eliminate entirely essential concepts of the world of the Vigneron family, such as death, love, and marriage. Their code is designed to reflect a new “worldly wisdom” by the creation of maxims which dissipate the myths and illusions cultivated by the likes of the Vigneron family, myths and illusions predicated, in the vultures' opinions, on an irrelevant morality.⁶ Dupuis, for example, takes philosophical note of the unpredictability of business: “… vous savez ce que sont les affaires, bonnes un jour, mauvaises le lendemain … (609). For Teissier, on the other hand, true to the tenor of his other remarks on the subject, what is to be stressed is that in business one comes quickly to the point: “On ne fait pas de cérémonies dans les affaires” (609).

Since for the vultures, as noted above, the affaire has necessarily to do, in the final analysis, with money, its acquisition and accumulation, it is not surprising that some of the maxims should address this paramount issue. Speaking of Vigneron, Teissier ventures a global definition of a man's worth in financial terms: “Un homme vaut davantage quand il possède quelque chose” (575). As far as Bourdon is concerned, if the love of money is the root of all evil, the lack of money is the root of spinsterhood. His words to Mme Vigneron on this matter are quite explicit: “C'est qu'en effet, madame, faute d'argent, les jeunes filles restent jeunes filles” (607). It is Bourdon again, finally, who utters the comprehensive proverbial expression that puts all the preceding maxims in context and provides a broad philosophical backdrop for them. Referring to what he takes to have been Vigneron's outlook on life, he assumes that the latter would have viewed with utmost concern the predicament of his wife and daughters, and advised the sacrificial gesture of Marie's marriage to Teissier: “Il connaissait la vie; il savait que tout se paye en ce monde …” (607). In Bourdon's world, then, the beginning of wisdom is not the fear of God but the realization that everything has a price—or, to try to match the intended literalness of Bourdon's expression—a price tag.

By its systematic exploration of the difference between the language spoken by the Vigneron family and that spoken by the vultures, with the attendant tragic consequences of this difference for the Vigneron family, Les Corbeaux points to a function of realistic literature consistent with Roland Barthes's reading of Balzac's Sarrasine and J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts. According to the conclusions reached by these writers, realism demonstrates not only how words become detached from their referential source in the process of social and economic change but also how, despite this detachment, language continues to enjoy representational authority. This authority stems from language's ability to continue to indicate, faithfully and effectively, that meaning is derived not from an “objective” reality but from social convention, from what society—in the case of Les Corbeaux that dominant segment of society comprising the vultures—chooses to accept as real.⁷

Against this onslaught of conventional meaning, the “truths” which constitute the moral predicate of the Vigneron family's verbal expression simply evaporate, having no independent means of support in the social context. That the evaporation of these “truths” is complete by the end of Les Corbeaux is powerfully underscored by the play's final verbal irony. Having intimidated and chased away Dupuis, Teissier feels duty-bound to alert Marie to the danger that Dupuis and others like him represent for her and her family now that her father is dead: “Vous êtes entourées de fripons, mon enfant, depuis la mort de votre père. Allons retrouver votre famille” (610). With his own friponnerie—as the Vignerons might have defined it—having become so second nature that he is not at all aware of it, Teissier literally gives new meaning here to the word fripon. It now simply designates anyone who poses a threat to his financial security and that, by “natural” extension, of his wife-to-be and her family.

Thus the ending of Les Corbeaux marks more than just the financial victory of the vultures. It also marks, in resounding as well as ironic terms, their definitive verbal victory. In the latter connection, the play's dénouement takes on a special significance: while one cannot directly trace back to Becque the twentieth-century French theater's concern with the problem of how meaning is created, it is evident that he anticipates that concern in Les Corbeaux and conveys it with unusual dramatic insight and artistry.

Notes

1. The circumstances surrounding the first presentation of Les Corbeaux are noted in Hyslop 5-6. Becque's earlier plays were L'Enfant prodigue (1868), Michel Pauper (1870), L'Enlèvement (1871), La Navette (1878), and Les Honnêtes Femmes (1880).

2. For the view that Les Corbeaux is essentially a naturalistic play, see Senart 189; Martino 178-181. For the view that Les Corbeaux is unclassifiable, and more in the Moliéresque tradition of character analysis, see Lindenberg 7-8; Hyslop 47, 81-83; Blanchart 49-50. For a discussion of realistic techniques in Les Corbeaux, see Hyslop 49, 81; Descotes 122; Wooton 72, 78; Martino 180-181. Interpretations of Les Corbeaux as a protest against the oppression of women are to be found in Chardin 82-83 and Arnaoutovitch 1: 426-429.

3. The idea of a Balzacian source for the title of Becque's play is advanced in Arnaoutovitch 2: 273-274.

4. For “vultures,” “ravens,” and “crows” as English translations of corbeaux in the title and body of Becque's play, see Wooton 72-73 and Becque 564. The author of the present article employs “vultures” throughout to designate corbeaux.

5. The expression fripon honnête is to be found, with reference to Teissier, in Senart 190.

6. According to Chardin, this new “worldly wisdom” reflects a historical shift from the ideology of the lower middle class to that of the world of finance and industry (82-83).

7. For a discussion of the ideas of Barthes and Austin regarding the opposition between constative meaning and referential truth in realistic prose, see Petrey 153-55, 161-62.

Works Cited

Araujo, Norman. “The Role of Death in Becque's Les Corbeaux.” Revue des Langues Vivantes 36 (1970): 621-631.

Arnaoutovitch, Alexandre. Henry Becque. 3 vols. Paris: PUF, 1927.

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970.

Becque, Henry. Les Corbeaux. Nineteenth-Century French Plays. Ed. Joseph L. Borgerhoff. New York: Appleton, 1931. 563-610.

Blanchard, Paul. Henry Becque: son œuvre, portrait et autographe. Paris: Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1930.

Chardin, Philippe. “Quelques problèmes idéologiques posés par Les Corbeaux d'Henry Becque.” Les Cahiers Naturalistes 52 (1979): 81-92.

Descotes, Maurice. Henry Becque et son théâtre. Paris: Minard, 1962.

Hyslop, Lois Boe. Henry Becque. New York: Twayne, 1972.

Lindenberg, Daniel. “Un Dissident théâtral: les luttes d'Henry Becque (1817-1899).” Comédie Française May 1982: 7-12.

Martino, P. Le Naturalisme français (1870-1895). 2nd ed. Paris: Colin, 1930.

Petrey, Sandy. “Castration, Speech Acts, and the Realist Difference: S/Z versus Sarrasine.” PMLA 102 (1987): 153-65.

Senart, Philippe. “Henry Becque: Les Corbeaux.” Nouvelle Revue des Deux Mondes, Oct. 1982: 187-192.

Wooton, Carl W. “The Vultures: Becque's Realistic Comedy of Manners.” Modern Drama 4.1 (1961): 72-79.