Pierrot is harassing his rich neighbour Mrs Trifouillon to get her to marry him. He locks her out of her house, then hides in her wardrobe. He beats her, breaks her dishes, throws her furniture in the street and deprives her of food and rest to make her give in. They fight, then she goes out to find a gendarme. When the gendarme arrives, Pierrot mistakes him for Mrs Trifouillon and pretends to marry him. Then Pierrot beats the Gendarme and throws him out. He finds Mrs Trifouillon's piggy bank, but she manages to take it back. Under threat, she agrees to marry Pierrot, who beats her to the rhythm of a wedding song that she is forced to hum while dancing.

Glove-puppet

Manipulated object

All audiences

France

Paris

Duranty Louis Émile Edmond

Printed

Silver wedding

Harassment

Cipidity

Stock exchange

Blackmail

Forced marriage

Violence

Threat

Battered woman

Comical

Farcical

French

Pierrot

Constable

Monologue

Misunderstanding

Blow-with-a-stick

Song

Beating with a broom

Hidden character

Ambush

Off-stage voice

Lazzi

Stone throwing

Aside

Headbutt

Throwing objects

Liquid spray

Final song

Running gag

Chase

Le Mariage de raison

The Marriage of reason

Polichinelle and Pierrot rob a vegetable garden every night. The gardener sets up scarecrows. At first, the thieves tremble with fear and give up their loot before they discover the trickery. Then they put on the scarecrows' clothes to scare and hit the Gardener. The Gardener runs away, but he has recognised Pierrot and Polichinelle. He returns disguised as a ghost, but Pierrot and Polichinelle are not fooled and hit him again. When the Gardener wants to prevent Polichinelle from escaping, Polichinelle plants him in a pot with Pierrot's help. The wife frees her husband. They both fill a melon with powder and a wick. Pierrot and Polichinelle, mistaking the wick for a cigar, light it. The explosion sends Polichinelle and Pierrot flying out of the garden, but causes the house to collapse on the Gardener and his wife.

Garden

Theft

Vegetables

Scarecrow

Phantom

Fear

Hoax

Rake

Firecracker

Blast

Melon

Trap

Gardener

Polichinelle

Gardener (woman)

Disguise

Plot twist

Pyrotechnics

Explosion

Collapse of the set

Le Revenant

The Ghost

Marianne – the wife of a poor lumberjack – sends her starving children Hansel and Grethel in the woods, so that they pick some berries. But the children are captured by the cannibalistic naturalist Fleischmann, at the same time as the travelling tailor Kasperl Larifari, who believes he will find bed and board at his house. They are locked inside chicken coops and fattened. Kasperl is enraged. To calm him down, Fleischmann allows him outside the cage to drink some wine with him. He intends on eating him right after. But they both get drunk, while the professor’s maid, Katharine, helps the children escape and reports the cannibal to the police. Kasperl takes advantage of the general confusion to escape too. The professor chases him and then gives up. He wants to find the children but falls asleep in the end, exhausted. Kasperl finds him and sews the two legs of his pants together. Eventually, the court bailiff arrives with the children’s father, Peter. When they find Fleischmann, he is unable to move, and Peter kills him with an axe. The children come out of hiding and, at the end of the play, Kasperl declares that wickedness has been punished, virtue rewarded and that they all need to go to an inn now.

String marionette

Young audiences

Pocci Franz von

Germany

Munich

Cannibalism

University

Natural sciences

Philosophy

Tale

Poverty

Misery

Cage

Forest

Justice

Hunger

Drunkard

Drunkenness

Cruelty

Perversity

Fantasy

Burlesque

Parodistic

Title page illustrated by the author in the original collection

German

Der Menschenfresser

Teacher

Kasperl

Night

Moon

Murder on stage

Animated natural element

Dialect as a social marker

Caricature

Confinement

Versified passages

Hansel und Grethel

Hansel and Gretel

The rich Niflanguille goes to buy a bag of coal. He comes across the hungry Pierrot, who asks for his help in vain. The coalman cheats Niflanguille out of the weight of the bag. Pierrot hides in the bag and beats up the coalman, Niflanguille and the servant. Back home, Niflanguille looks for a sword to pierce the recalcitrant bag, but Pierrot gets it out in time and forces the servant to take his place. While Niflanguille pierces the bag and his servant with it, Pierrot runs away with a bag of money. A Gendarme wants to hang Niflanguille for murder, Pierrot for theft and the coalman for swindling. Pierrot kills the Gendarme and puts him in the sack, which he throws away, while Niflanguille flees through the window. Pierrot kills the coalman to avoid sharing the money, then orders wine which he pays for by beating the innkeeper with a stick. The Commissaire arrives with Niflanguille; he hangs Pierrot, but confiscates the money to punish the bad rich man.

Charcoal

Swindling

Trade

Deception

Contempt

Punishment

Money

Bad rich

Didactic

Coal merchant

Domestic servant

Police Superintendant

Hanging scene

Le Sac de charbon

The Bag of Coal

Polichinelle has cloistered himself in a barrel to escape the world’s malice. Despite the pleas of Pierrot, Cassandre and a pork butcher, he is determined to stay cloistered (although he took the wine, the money and the ham they brought to try and lure him out). Everyone misses the old Polichinelle and his love for life, but Pierrot comes up with an idea. He makes sure that Polichinelle watches a puppet show in which a harmless Polichinelle has withdrawn from the world. The real Polichinelle is outraged – he knocks the booth over and drives the puppeteer out. Meanwhile, Pierrot takes the barrel away. Polichinelle sorely misses his barrel, which he claims was a trick to better swindle people. The policeman arrives to arrest Polichinelle, for “disturbance to civilisation”, but the latter escapes. Pierrot, who fled when he saw the policeman, comes back with his arms full of the wine, ham and money he found in the barrel.

Hypocrisy

Misanthropy

Cunning

Vanity

Wine

Depression

Withdrawal from the world

Frontispiece of Polichinelle withdrawn from the World.

Pork butcher

Cassandre

Cassandra

L’Acteur faisant le personnage de Polichinelle

Actor

Manipulator

L’Acteur faisant le personnage de Pierrot

Theatre within the theatre

Apparition of the puppeteer

Characterisation through onomatopoeia

Polichinelle retiré du monde

Polichinelle withdrawn from the world

In Jeu-Maloches, a village in the French department of Indre, flageolet player Arthur Graboyos became a waiter at the inn Hôtel du Veau Qui Désire Téter (Hotel of the Calf That Wants To Suckle) in order to grow closer to Dorothée – the daughter of the innkeeper Friturin. Arthur and Dorothée both want to marry each other, but Friturin refuses to let an artist marry his daughter. Arthur is expecting a donation from an uncle in America. Bidet – the postman – brings a letter of marriage proposal to Friturin. Bidet himself would also like to marry Dorothée; however, she rejects him. The shipowner Chandelle, who sent Friturin the letter to offer his nephew to Dorothée, arrives at the hotel with an enormous trunk filled with pepper. Friturin dismisses Arthur after they quarrel. The latter comes back disguised as a cook and hides in Chandelle’s trunk to abduct Dorothée during the night. But the trunk snaps shut on him with a padlock. Several misunderstandings and quarrels happen one after another – Dorothée believes that Chandelle is Arthur in disguise, Friturin mistakes Chandelle for Arthur and Chandelle does not understand that Arthur is his nephew because he assumed the name Graboyos for his career as a musician. Arthur comes out of the trunk and makes himself recognised. All the misunderstandings are clarified and Chandelle gifts Arthur forty thousand French francs so that he can marry Dorothée.

Not specified

Maurice Sand (Maurice Sand)

Nohant

Rivalry in love

Situation comedy

Love

Dowry

Father-daughter relationship

Musician

Wedding

Maurice Sand, Le Flageolet (first page of the manuscript)

Le Danger des malles à cadenas

Innkeeper

Postman

Daughter

Popular speech

Letter

Disguised character (false identity)

Instrumental tune

Le Flageolet

The Flageolet

A policeman must arrest two criminals. Clown proposes to Pantaloon to accompany him fishing and boasts that they will need a large pan to cook all the fish he will catch. He thinks he caught a great prize but reels in only a cast iron pan. While Pantaloon mocks him, he insists that he did it on purpose. Pantaloon learns that Old Buffer is looking for a parrot and tries to sell him a talking parrot. When Old Buffer expresses his wish to eat it, Clown threatens to eat Old Buffer. The latter calls the police officer, who promises to help and hides to catch the scoundrels. Dude, a passerby, wants to know the time. Pantaloon advises him to not address the police officer since he is not himself. He shows him the time on a watch upon which the arrows are turning very rapidly. Harlequin and Columbine dance, and the police officer chases them since dancing is forbidden in the streets. A man hides in a letterbox, which troubles the mailman. This man is none other than Clown. The police officer notices Pantaloon and Clown, but he forgot his club at home; his family uses it to whisk the batter for birthday cakes. He decides to hide and to listen to them. All of the characters enter the scene to capture Pantaloon and Clown, who reveal themselves to be the two criminals being searched for.

Toy theatre

Ireland

Strete

Arrest

Fishing

Eating

Investigation

English

Policeman

Captain

Clown

Pantaloon

Arlecchino

Colombine

Comic distortion of language

Arrest scene

Dance

The Wonderful Travellers or The Gamesome Princes and the Pursuing Policeman

Cockatrice is made aware that he must not look at himself in a mirror, otherwise he will die. As he wants to admire his own beauty, he runs away and visits a painter to get a portrait of himself painted. To flatter him, the painter portrays him like an English gentleman. Blind-Boy finds Cockatrice and takes him away with him without paying the painter. Blind-boy tells Cockatrice that Columbus the Parrot and himself met a very old man named Old Man Adam, who owns a donkey, a table, and a stick which have magical powers. All three of them go to Old Man Adam’s house, and Old Man Adam gives them the objects as presents as they will lose their magical powers should they not change owners.

Le Mariage de raison

Le Revenant

Hansel und Grethel

Le Sac de charbon

Polichinelle retiré du monde

Le Flageolet

The Wonderful Travellers or The Gamesome Princes and the Pursuing Policeman

The Painter and the Three Magics

The Second Prologue

Something Prophetic

Battaglia tra Bradamante e Marfisa