SKETCH OF LOUIS FIGUIER. 839 



lieu, Louis XIV, Mazarin, take Denis Papin, Gutenberg, Kepler, 

 Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton. Before my time no one of 

 these persons had been made the subject of a play, simply because 

 dramatic authors are unfamiliar with the events in the lives of 

 naturalists and physicists. Nevertheless, illustrious savanis are 

 just as good as political or military personages for dramas or 

 comedies. A savant is a man. Like every man, he has had his 

 hour of youth and of love, his moments of sorrow and of bitter- 

 ness. Because he has enriched his age and country by an immor- 

 tal work is he less interesting than an imaginary personage ? 

 There are in the different periods of the lives of all savants sub- 

 jects for dramas or comedies, situations capable of moving, of 

 exciting to laughter or to tears." 



A word on a few of the plays of M. Figuier will show how he 

 carried out this theory. Take the " Marriage of Franklin," which 

 turns around the difficulties which Franklin had to surmount to 

 secure Miss Deborah Read. The tricks which electricity plays at 

 the last moment untie the complications. A complete series of 

 the physical, mechanical, and physiological effects of thunder and 

 lightning are worked into the play. 



" Miss Telegraph " portrays the situation of Samuel F. B. 

 Morse before the passage of the bill appropriating money for car- 

 rying on his experiments on the electric telegraph, and describes 

 the means by which Miss Ellsworth succeeded in getting the bill 

 through at the last moment. 



" The Blood of the Turk " is a " Mr. Isaacs " situation, showing 

 what may result from the infusion of foreign blood into the veins 

 of an old man. The hero has been treated with the blood of a Turk, 

 and finds himself in the extraordinary situation of being half the 

 time a passionate, quarrelsome, amorous Oriental, the other half a 

 weak old man without the courage to fight the duels the Turk has 

 provoked, the appetite to eat the meals the Turk has ordered, the 

 gayety to do the love-making for which the Turk has contracted. 



The " Six Parts of the World," in the style of Jules Verne, 

 characterizes the five continents of the globe and discovers a 

 sixth. Dumont d'Urville is the hero, and his expeditions to the 

 south pole form the plot of the play. Lessons on navigation and 

 discoveries, on desert fevers and phosphorescent beetles, on the 

 customs of Madagascar and Australian progress, on American 

 business methods and the character of the lands at the south pole, 

 are all included in five acts. 



One day, some time after I made the acquaintance of M. Fi- 

 guier's theater, I asked him if he believed his idea would be car- 

 ried out in the future. 



" I expect to carry it out myself," he said sturdily. 

 " Yourself ? " I exclaimed. 



