The latest social subject dealt with by French dramatists has been the fertile one of divorce, which M. Sardou has treated both seriously and comically. Before _Odette_ and _Divorçons_, he had, however, written the less known _Daniel Rochat_, which ends with a divorce in Switzerland, the divorced persons being of course citizens of the Helvetian Republic; and though the main subject of _Daniel Rochat_ is the union, followed immediately afterwards by the separation, of two persons who are prevented from living together as husband and wife by incompatibility of religious convictions, it may all the same be classed with M. Sardou’s other divorce pieces. The author lets it be seen that the mistake made by _Daniel Rochat_ can easily be remedied in Switzerland, a country, where divorce is easy; whereas it would have been without remedy in France, where divorce was at that time impossible. The case, however, though an effective one for the dramatist—at least for such a dramatist as M. Sardou—is of too exceptional a character to merit attention from the dramatic moralist or legist. The practice of treating subjects of the day in dramatic form is one which, from a purely artistic point of view, cannot be commended. The process involves almost necessarily forced motives and distorted characters. Works, too, produced on this system must, from the nature of the case, be of ephemeral interest. Who, for instance, now that France, like England, Germany, and the United States, has a law of divorce, can care for pieces in which the interest turns upon the iniquity of treating as indissoluble every contract, to whatever painful consequences it may have led, which has once been signed in presence of Monsieur le Maire? In Shakespeare and Molière so little are affairs of the day touched upon (without ever being made the subject of an entire work) that a reader might find it difficult to determine from internal evidence at what period either of these writers lived. The characteristic talk of _Les Précieuses_ is about the only indication in the case of Molière of the time to which the piece belongs. There is scarcely a work, on the other hand, from the pen of M. Sardou (who may be taken as the representative comedy writer of modern France) which does not bear the impress and color of the time, and which (especially in the case of his later pieces) does not in a very direct manner reproduce the incidents or reflect the ideas of the life around him. If immediate and striking success with a Paris audience be the author’s aim, it must be admitted that M. Sardou’s method is more effective than that of his predecessor, Scribe, whose comedies are masterpieces of ingenuity, but are for the most part independent of place and time. Many of Scribe’s pieces have been quite as successful in England as in France. This cannot be said of any of Sardou’s plays, with the solitary exception of “_Les Pattes de Mouche_,” one of his earliest works,