In the new naturalistic drama a striving for the significant motif was felt at once. Therefore, the action was usually centered around life's two poles, life and death, the act of birth and the act of death, the fight for the spouse, for the means of subsistence, for honor, all these struggleswith their battlefields, cries of woe, wounded and dead—during which one heard the new philosophy of life conceived as a struggle, blow its fertile winds from the south.

These were tragedies such as had not been seen before. The young authors of a generation whose school had so far been a school of suffering—the most terrible, perhaps, which exists: severe intellectual oppression, even in such cruel forms as persecution with imprisonment and starvation—these young authors themselves seemed reluctant to impose their suffering on others more than was absolutely necessary. Therefore, they made the suffering as brief as possible, let the pain pour forth in one act, sometimes in a single scene. Such a little masterpiece was, for example, Entre Frères by Guiches and Lavedan. The play is so brief that it is performed in fifteen minutes, and the genre immediately was called quart d'heure.

The action, if it can be called action, is as follows: In a bed lies an old woman dying, and beside her stand her three sons. The dying person makes a sign that she wants to speak, and then she reveals the secret of her life: one of the sons was conceived in adultery. She falls back unconscious, apparently dead, before she has had time to tell which of the sons is the illegitimate one.

The sons deliberate and on certain grounds decide that the youngest one is legitimate. The marquis, the head of the family, suggests that they keep the secret, but that the illegitimate heir leave.

At that moment the mother comes to and is able to utter only these words: "It is the marquis!" The end!


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