In his more ambitious comedies Scribe at first preferred to work alone, and here, too, he learned success by failure.[C] The new conditions, social and political, that followed the Revolution of 1830, helped him also; for new liberties admitted, and the new bourgeois plutocracy invited, the good-humored persiflage in which he was an easy master. On the other hand, he was hardly touched by the accompanying Romantic movement in literature that was then convulsing the theatre-going public with "Hernani" and "Antony." He cared much less for the critics than for the box-office, and now transferred his work almost wholly to the national Théâtre Français. Here were produced during the eighteen years that separate "Bertrand et Raton" from "Bataille de dames" (1833-1851) almost all his pieces that still hold the stage, notable among them "La Camaraderie," the most popular of his political comedies, "Une Chaîne," "Le Verre d'eau," "Adrienne Lecouvreur," and "Les Contes de la reine de Navarre." The last two, the present comedy, and the somewhat later "Doigts de fée" (1858), were written in collaboration with Legouvé; and as these are certainly his best plays, we may expect to find an element in them that Scribe alone, or with other collaborators, could not supply. But of this presently. During all these years his inexhaustible fertility was pouring out a stream of novels,[D] tales, farces, and librettos.[E] Everything that he touched seemed to turn to gold in his hands. No dramatist, hardly any writer of our time, has accumulated such wealth. His annual income from copyrights often reached $30,000, and he died worth nearly half a million. He might well take for his crest a pen and panpipes, and the motto "_Inde fortuna et libertas_" for he passed the latter years of his life in wealth and ease in the palatial country-seat of Sérincourt, over whose door he inscribed the characteristic lines:-- Le théâtre a payé cet asile champêtre Vous qui passez, merci! Je vous le dois peut-être. But as he had gained easily he spent liberally, and many stories tell of his ingenious and delicate generosity.