De Banville's more serious plays
ends with the same scene, with slight differences. In Florise
(never put on the stage) the wandering actress of Hardy's troupe
leaves her lover, the young noble, and the shelter of his castle, to
follow where art and her genius beckon her. In Diane au Bois the
goddess "that leads the precise life" turns her back on Eros, who
has subdued even her, and passes from the scene as she waves her
hand in sign of a farewell ineffably mournful. Nearer tragedy than
this M. De Banville does not care to go; and if there is any deeper
tragedy in scenes of blood and in stages strewn with corpses, from
that he abstains. His Florise is perhaps too long, perhaps too
learned; and certainly we are asked to believe too much when a kind
of etherealised Consuelo is set before us as the prima donna of old
Hardy's troupe:
"Mais Florise n'est pas une femme. Je suis
L'harmonieuse voix que berce vos ennuis;
Je suis la lyre aux sons divers que le poete
Fait resonner et qui sans lui serait muette -
Une comedienne enfin. Je ne suis pas
Une femme."
An actress who was not a woman had little to do in the company of
Scarron's Angelique and Mademoiselle de l'Estoile. Florise, in
short, is somewhat too allegorical and haughty a creature; while
Colombine and Nerine (Vaudeville, June 1864) are rather tricksy imps
than women of flesh and blood. M. De Banville's stage, on the
whole, is one of glitter and fantasy; yet he is too much a Greek for
the age that appreciates "la belle Helene," too much a lyric
dramatist to please the contemporaries of Sardou; he lends too much
sentiment and dainty refinement to characters as flimsy as those of
Offenbach's drama.
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