LABYRINTH, The. In The Labyrinth' Decla10), played in 1903, Paul Hervieu, the most logical and abstract of contemporary French dramatists, has developed a theme sug gested five years earlier by Brieux in The Cradle' Berceau)). What, both writers ask, will be the results of divorce and remarriage when a wife meets again her first husband at the sick bed of their child? Will she revert to the first husband or remain true to the second? Will the husbands contend to the death or be reconciled? According to both playwrights, the wife's reversion to the father of her child is inevitable but Hervieu has sharpened the conflict and given it a tragic conclusion. Marianne, having divorced her temperamental Max, has married the brusque but correct Guillaume. Max resents the rigor ous education proposed for his son by Guillaume, and Marianne, to avoid legal complications, agrees that the boy shall visit his father. Dur ing this visit, little Louis falls ill, and Marianne, summoned to attend him, is thrown daily into the closest companionship with her former husband. In their mutual relief after an agony
of anxiety, they forgot everything except their original love. When Marianne confesses her error to her parents and to Guillaume, the latter is enraged, but her mother excuses her deed as only natural. Since divorce is reli giously unlawful, Marianne has never been truly wedded to her second husband. Guillaume is now ready to renounce her, upon condition that Max will do as much. But Max, refusing, taunts his rival; and, as the two men clinch, they fall from a cliff into the Rhone. Although the play is strongly emotional in its crises, it is little more than the illustration of an idea, every word and scene being nicely adapted to that end. Its characters live only to confirm the playwright's thesis. The piece was played in English in 1905; it may be read in the trans lation of B. H. Clark and L. MacClintock, pub lished in 1913.