Muerte y Eros

Dorival proves worthy to take that commission - If he pleases my daughter, quite happily

I will see him enter my family.^^

Ariste therefore wholly believes in the need for the administrator to be bon époux,

bon père, bon citoyen: what is more, the truth of this formula of revolutionary virtue is so clear to the minister that he believes that, if Dorival is a good employee, he will surely make a good husband for Laure.

Such idealism is quickly manipulated by Dorival, whose art of flattery and

deception bears instant fruit. An unrepentant charlatan, he profits from the

minister's naïve belief in conspicuous virtue, acting the good employee with gusto. He has little trouble In appropriating a memoir compiled by Firmin on the reorganisation of the Ministry, passing it off as his own. Firmin is the second paragon of Revolutionary virtue in Picard's play: he is a modest and virtuous employee whose only ambition is to serve the Nation, and who prefers the obscurity of his office to the entertainments of the Minister's drawing room. Aware of Dorival's ambition (though not of the depth of his corruption), Firmin prefers to remain in the background rather than to challenge his colleague: unlike

Dorival, he is reluctant to "stage" his virtue. With such inconsequential

opposition, Dorival realises the possibility of marrying Laure and sealing his career. Manoeuvring to that end, he claims credit for a love poem, written for

the virtuous role given by Picard to the Minister, but saw no other political

allusion in the play, once he had suppressed the word "Monsieur". Schiller's Der

Parasit, on the other hand, situated the play in Narbonne's Ministry of W ar (perhaps a popular choice of Ministry given Napoleonic expansion).

L.B. Picard, Médiocre et Rampant ou Le Moyen de Parvenir, comédie en cinq

actes et en vers, représentée pour la première fois sur le Théâtre Français, le 1er Thermidor an V, 2 edition, (Paris: Huet, 1802), p. 13 (act one, scene three).

Laure by Charles, Firmin’s son, and flatters Ariste's mother, Mme Dorlis, with the ease of a practiced courtier.

Laroche, Dorival's childhood friend, alone stands in his way.^^ The first victim of the bureaucrat's machinations, and subsequent narrator of his deceit, Laroche makes repeated denunciations, which all fall on deaf ears. Instead of believing him, Firmin and Ariste suspect him of lying, prompted by jealousy and unwarranted hatred. Despairing of ever being able to expose the true intentions behind Dorival’s words and actions, Laroche becomes an actor (like Dorival). Masking his own virtue in conversation with Dorival, and hiding Ariste's in an elaborately constructed deception, Laroche entices Dorival to reveal himself before the astonished Ariste. As Dorival offers to house the minister's fictive mistress, Ariste has to recognise the truth of Laroche's accusations, and his own complicity in Dorival's success/^ Finally, pretending that both Ariste and the author of the memoir on the reorganisation of the Ministry that he presented to government are to be dismissed, Laroche lures Dorival into revealing that he took credit for the timorous Firmin's work. Yet, even after Laroche has exposed all of these deceptions (by engaging in his own petty tricks), Dorival is treated with pity rather than anger. For Picard, Dorival's guilt is not wholly his: rather the "means of success" available to him predisposed the administrator to intrigue.

Médiocre et Rampant turned on the disjuncture between appearance and truth, necessitating not only star turns from several well-known actors (St. Phal, as Laroche, garnered particular praise in the radical journals^^), but also a fundamental agreement between audience and actors on how virtue could be represented and misrepresented. In the theatre, the administrative villain had to be instantly recognisable to audience, as did the innocent Laure, the virtuous, mild Firmin, and his young, brave and charming son, Charles. Yet Picard played with the audience’s preconceived notions of how a villain should act, having

Picard recognised that Laroche, not Firmin, is Dorival’s nemesis: Picard, Oeuvres, vol. I, pp. 399-400.

"His friendship for me made him offer his services; / Are our friends therefore those who serve our vices?", ibid., p. 89 (act five, scene five).

For example. Feuilleton de Littérature [Supplement à la Quotidienne du 3

Dorival change his attitude and gestures from one scene to the next. Before the

enraptured audience of the Théâtre Louvois, Dorival made lightning-fast

transitions from mean-hearted compatriot to loving son and prospective husband^®, from lazy, feeble bureaucrat to intrepid administrator.^® Before the audience's eyes, Dorival adapted himself to the Minister’s line of thought, mimicking his phrases, aping his attitudes, and finally attaining his rhyme and

syntax exactly.^^ Dorival’s ability to mould his words and to fool the other

characters (and to engage the audience in his deception) was the key to his

success. As a consummate dissimulator, he could manipulate the office

hierarchy by force of his eloquent protestations of virtue and his ringing declamations of his colleagues' vice.

While Picard's critics welcomed this script as wildly innovative, they still

considered it inherently flawed. Vérités à l'Ordre du Jour could not understand

why the play was entitled "Means of Success" when it ended with Dorival losing all hope of regaining his colleagues’ esteem and confidence.^® This journal clearly didn’t like the fact that virtue had finally triumphed in the play: its reviewer had found the plot device with which Laroche unmasks Dorival too tenuous, remarking that the Minister’s patience would not have been so elastic in real life.

Picard, Médiocre et Rampant, pp. 39-43 (act 2, scenes 6 - 8). Mme Dorlis

requests Dorival to write a romance in couplets to sing with Laure that evening. Dorival is on the point of acceding (though incapable of writing the couplets himself), when surprised by the appearance of his cousin, Robineau, newly

arrived from the country. Robineau, in an amusing récit of local gossip, reveals

that: "Everyone’s well, except for your mother / Who says it is hard to be living in misery, / With a child who’s as rich as Croesus." Dorival, in response, feigns surprise, while whispering viciously to Robineau to shut up. He had, he claimed,

sent a thousand écus to his mother. Mme Dorlis swallows this tale, praising his

concern: "He who is such a good son, should be a good husband." Mme Dorlis’ departure then allows Dorival to turn on his cousin. Robineau can only marvel at Dorival’s about-turns: "But how all of a sudden, you change your tune! / First you are angry, but then you take a [pleasant] tone!"

^® Ibid., p. 65 (act 4, scene 3).

Ibid., pp. 23-25 (act 2, scene 1). In a highly crafted dialogue, Ariste broaches the subject of the embassy to Dorival, hoping to divine whether the latter has the

necessary qualities. Dorival begins in a stuttering fashion, failing at first to

understand that Ariste wants an honest clerk, not an agile diplomat, to fill the post. By mid-way through the conversation, he has "achieved the minister’s phrasing".

Where the Vérités looked for an out-and-out denunciation of "bureaucracy", Picard’s critique of the offices was much more nuanced. By averring that appearances could be manipulated, Picard cast virtue firmly into the shadows: Firmin and Ariste were weak and vulnerable heroes who had no defence against

the resolute villain, Dorival. It was hard to sympathise with Laroche, even

knowing that his denunciations were true. His narration of Dorival’s deceit served

only to recall that there is no natural means to defeat the médiocre et rampant

Laroche succeeded only through a pretence as shameless as Dorival’s own.^® The subtitle "Means of Success", therefore, applied not only to Dorival but also to Laroche: after he deceived his former colleague in the interest of virtue, to bring the play to a happy ending, the audience was left with the age-old philosophical question: does the end justify the means?

The Vérités’ other criticism - that a trifling romance took away from the action of the main plot - also demonstrates the paucity of the reviewer's understanding.^ The theft of Charles' poetry not only parallels the message of the main plot, but plays an important role in bolstering a black-and-white condemnation of the villain. Dorival's requisition of Firmin's memoir, which seems at first sight to be a cut-and-dried case of intellectual theft, is no such thing. If Picard could play with audience certainties about the "truth" of physiognomy, their ability to tell a good clerk from a bureaucrat, "authorship" of an administrative report was a much more ambiguous signifier. Firmin, despite doing three-quarters of Dorival’s work, does not recognise that he is being cheated. He declares:

But we relieve each other of work reciprocally; If I do [Dorival’s] work, he often does mine.^^

Firmin’s belief that he and Dorival share their workload is, moreover, reinforced by the passage at the end of the play in which he and Ariste share responsibility for the memoir, which Laroche pretends has been received badly by the

Ariste calls it a "shameful proof": Picard, Médiocre et Rampant, p. 92 (act 5, scene 7).

Despite Vérités' characterisation of this subplot as a trivial romance, Dorival’s

theft of Charles Firmin’s love poetry is far less ambiguous than his appropriation of Charles' father's memoir. Dorival immediately credits Charles as being their "master", grabs them from Charles' hand as he hesitates briefly, and presents

them unchanged Xo the minister’s daughter.

government.^ Ariste, who had worked through the memoir before sending it to

his superiors, accepts his (fictionai) destitution equanimously. So too does

Firmin, who declares his responsibility as soon as he realises that the author will

share Ariste’s fate. In the moment of fabricated self-sacrifice, however, the

question of individual authorship is left unresolved. Firmin does not assert that the memoir is his alone; Ariste does not claim sole responsibility for sending it to their political masters. Dorival, as editor of Firmin’s rough notes should also have fallen on his sword. However, his failure do so is not the crime for which he is condemned. Laroche's "shameful proof", in fact, fails to prove Dorival’s duplicity when it accuses him of intellectual theft, not of lacking administrative spirit. In the end, Picard falls back upon the melodrama of Charles’ love for Laure, and Dorival's theft of his poetry, to condemn the deceitful administrator as a bogus

author. Like playwrights in the eighteenth century, he uses a sentimental

narrative to provide a ciear-cut critique of an ambiguous social institution.^^

Picard's manufacture of the proof of Dorival's guilt undermines the certainties of

theatrical physiognomy he uses to announce the médiocre et rampants rapacity

to the audience. In the final scene, Firmin finally recognises the real Dorival, quick to change face to save his skin. Ariste discovers the villain behind the pleasantries, when Dorival leers towards him, offering his services as pimp. However, it is Laroche’s superior deceit which manufactures such clashes of physiognomy, signalling that the visual proof of Dorival’s deception was, in fact, an unnatural proof constructed by an actor turned bureaucrat turned actor. For Laroche and Dorival share their means to success, constructing both fictional authorship and fictional physiognomy. If Picard’s play was successful, it was ^ A separation between "Ministry" and "Government" is maintained throughout Picard’s play, one administrative and the other political.

Sarah Maza describes how eighteenth-century lawyers borrowed narrative techniques from the melodrama to write a new genre of trial briefs which allowed them to create sharp moral and social dichotomies in favour of their clients: Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, LA., London: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 63-64.

Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de

Siècle' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) locates a similar trend in the late nineteenth-century, where melodrama was a form that women could call on to describe the abuse they received from men. Harris explains how representations

because he did the same, inventing a world of bureaucracy for the stage. The

lack of a coherent political charge in the play, lamented by Vérités à l'Ordre du

Jour, was only one of the ramifications of Picard's exploration of the administrator’s "means of success". It is hard to escape the ambiguity of his charge: taking the offices’ problem of surveillance and institutional control onto the stage exposed the perilousness of using either physiognomy or production to judge merit within the bureaux.