Le Voyage De Monsieur Perrichon: Comédie En Quatre Actes
1919
Le Voyage De Monsieur Perrichon: Comédie En Quatre Actes
1919
Monsieur Perrichon, prosperous carriage maker and master of self-regard, departs for Switzerland with his wife, his daughter Henriette, and two eligible young men vying for her hand. At the Paris station, Perrichon already cuts a magnificent figure in his own estimation: impatient, pompous, and utterly convinced of his own importance. What he does not yet grasp is that his journey will become a theater of wounded pride, absurd competition, and the particular blindness that afflicts the comfortably self-satisfied. Labiche, the unmatched chronicler of French bourgeois folly, constructs a comedy of errors where the real voyage is not through the Alps but through the labyrinth of human vanity. Daniel and Armand scheme, Perrichon struts, and the comedy builds through misunderstandings that expose the hollowness beneath the carriage maker's magnificent exterior. The play endures because Perrichon's particular affliction remains perfectly recognizable: the man who takes himself seriously while everyone else watches, amused. A sparkling specimen of theatrical satire that proves the French bourgeoisie has always been ripe for ridicule.
