The play is set in Orleans in 1867. Madame Pétenvert (a widow) and Mademoiselle Euphémie are accommodating two captains – Vachard and Chiclair – for three months. They quickly fall in love with their guests and would like to marry them. However, the two captains take advantage of the situation and spend their time talking, in a light-hearted manner, about politics, the army and, at the same, about women, billiards and their love of good food. One day, they are invited to dinner at the colonel’s house. The dinner ends with the two captains being drunk and getting the landladies’ houses mixed up. Thus, the two men being sick, captain Vachard spends the night with Mademoiselle Euphémie while captain Chiclair sleeps with Mademoiselle Pétenvert. The following day, after leaving the houses, they both accuse each other of having disrespected them, because of the state of their slippers and of the beds. However, this conversation about honour ends up being a commentary on the night they have just spent with the two women. The captains accuse the colonel of having treated them “too well” and the latter, in response, orders them to go back to their respective landladies and to marry them.

Glove-puppet

Not specified

Maurice Sand (Maurice Sand)

France

Nohant

Printed

Politics

Army

Soldier

Dinner

Glutton

Entertainment

Unfaithfulness

Wedding

Satirical

Comical

Eugène Lambert, George Sand, Maurice Sand : marionette de Madame Pétenvert.

French

La Garnison d’Orléans, Les Deux Capitaines.

Captain

Colonel

Waiter

Widow

Host

Servant

Domestic servant

Allusion to current political events

Comedy of language

Situation comedy

Nous dînons chez le colonel

We are dining at the colonel's

The Viennese public attends a puppet show in the Prater. The play in question features a hero who is unwillingly involved in a foursome with his lover Liesl and the Duke and Duchess of Lawin. The duel between him and the Duke is cancelled, but he loses the interest of the Duchess and the love of Liesl in the process. Death comes. The audience, which has not stopped commenting on the play, intervenes more and more loudly and the performance turns into a scandal. It is no longer clear who is a spectator, who is a puppet, until a man in a blue coat enters the stage... and cuts the strings of the puppets with a sword, thus discriminating between animate and inanimate.

String marionette

Schnitzler Arthur

Austria

Vienna

Germany

Berlin

Spectator

Duel

Self-consciousness of puppets

Local color

Argument

Wrangle

Hanswurst

Noise

Lust

Burlesque

German

Marionetten

Burleske in einem Akt

Director

Poet

Bourgeois

Daughter

Count

Child

Duke

Father

Husband

Raisonneur

Wrestler

Dead woman

Valet

Death

Puppet theatre within the theatre

Metadiscourse on puppet theatre

Address to the public

Pantomime

Parody of formal language

Prologue

Versified passages

Stichomythia

Metamorphosis

Character thrown out of the scene

Zum großen Wurstel

To the big sausage