“CIRCENSES”

Here, in the “Courrier des Théâtres”, the latest news from the intellectual movement:

“We are going to build a swimming pool at Folies-Bergère. » “At the Empire, there is a freight elevator for wild animals; it directly connects the stage to the stables. ». All in good time! These are directors who understand what it takes to attract and interest the public.

The theater of ideas is a chimera, which finds its last refuge in a wooden hut on Boulevard Saint-Germain. After bankruptcy, we have just sold the wooden hut at auction; I suppose the buyer will install it in some funfair to house a troop

Learned chips. Scholarly fleas will play pieces that are far superior to pieces belonging to an old-fashioned repertoire, because they will not have the disadvantage of articulate language, articulate language having the mistake of claiming to express ideas. The theater of ideas has had its day, even the theater of stupid ideas which, since the war, has succeeded the theater of strong ideas... Today, Phi-Phi would seem subtle, symbolic, metaphysical, and would tire the intelligence of the spectators.

The spectacle has returned to what it was at the time of high Roman civilization. Do not believe, because of Horace and Virgil, that the Roman people were made up of intellectuals.

The high Roman civilization was military and sporting. The Roman people took pleasure in circus games, that is to say in chariot races and in the fights between two- and four-legged brutes;

the Roman senators, more refined in their entertainment, relaxed at the spectacle of beautiful naked girls, who danced, after drinking, to the sound of the flute...

Was a play by Plautus or Terence being performed by chance? If word spread that a bear handler had just appeared in the neighboring square, the stands emptied as if by magic; the Senate and the Roman people, standing, crowded around the bear trainer.

Roman wisdom made the spectacle truly relaxing; theatrical skull stuffing, after the day's work, is additional and unpaid work (on the contrary).

French spectators, for a long period, underwent sporting and military training; it is no longer through natural taste that they seek to understand; Even vaudeville requires intellectual gymnastics which discourages a Roman brain enamored of strength and physical harmony. The spectator is willing to pay to laugh; but, for fun, he doesn't want to work.
He sits in an armchair and, without exerting himself, he waits for someone to amuse him with a grimace or somersault (note that the fashionable comics come from the simian school) or to be moved physically. , sensually, by insidious or brutal reflex.

The biggest revenues are made, each evening, by the music halls, where the grimaces of the mimes and the graces of the beautiful naked girls, formerly reserved for the aristocratic dinners of Trimalcion, are offered to the plebs for a few sesterces. And the big star, among the comedians, is reserved for the boxers, whose portraits are published on the first page of the newspapers, alongside the political comedians, while the actors are relegated to the fourth page, with the portraits of the miracle workers who benefited from prodigious pills.

Now our boxers are degenerate gladiators, who, instead of gutting themselves in conscience and tearing themselves apart on the thorax, are content to boast about the nose and decorate the epistaxis with polychrome bruises gracefully encircling one or the other eyeball.

What revenue would not be made in Paris from the fights of andabates, gladiators hooded like soldiers whom a trench mask protects, not against death, but against the sight, the sound and the smell of death!

But our morals are too gentle to support the organization of individual murders. We will therefore be content with the Folies-Bergère swimming pool, where black slaves will not be fed to moray eels, but where we will be able to admire the impeccable anatomy of delightful moorhens.

And we will see the wild animals arriving by a freight elevator from their cages onto the stage, with the secret hope that one evening they will devour some theater director...

Now, as theater directors are rarely Christian, you see that, since Roman antiquity, there has nevertheless been something changed in the habits of the lions and in the circus games.

G. DE LA FOUCHARDIÈRE.