Early years Feydeau was born at his parents' house in the Rue de Clichy, Paris, on 8 December 1862. |alt=young white woman and bald, bearded middle aged white man Feydeau's mother was Lodzia Bogaslawa,
née Zelewska, known as "Léocadie". When she married Ernest Feydeau in 1861, he was a forty-year-old childless widower and she was twenty-two. She was a famous beauty, and rumours spread that she was the mistress of the
Duc de Morny or even the Emperor
Napoleon III and that one of them was the father of Georges, her first child. In later life Léocadie commented, "How can anyone be stupid enough to believe that a boy as intelligent as Georges is the son of that idiotic emperor!" She was more equivocal about her relationship with the duke, and Georges later said that people could think Morny his father if they wanted to. Ernest was a friend of
Gustave Flaubert,
Théophile Gautier and
Alexandre Dumas fils, and Feydeau grew up in a literary and artistic environment. After being taken to the theatre at the age of six or seven he was so enthusiastic that he started to write a play of his own. His father, impressed, told the family's
governess to let the boy off tuition that day. Feydeau later said that laziness made him a playwright, once he found he could escape lessons by writing plays. He sought out
Henri Meilhac, one of the leading dramatists in Paris, and showed him his latest effort. He recalled Meilhac as saying, "My boy, your play is stupid, but it is theatrical. You will be a man of the theatre". After the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War in 1870 the family left Paris for
Boulogne-sur-Mer. Soon after their return to Paris in October 1871 the nine-year-old Feydeau, who had so far received only private tuition, was sent to a boarding school. In October 1873 Ernest died and in 1876 Léocadie remarried. Her second husband, nearer her own age than Ernest, was a prominent liberal journalist,
Henry Fouquier (1838–1901), with whom Feydeau got on well. In 1879 Feydeau completed his formal education at the
Lycée Saint-Louis, and was engaged as a clerk in a law firm. Still stage-struck, he began writing again. Comic monologues were fashionable in society, and he wrote
La Petite révoltée (The rebellious young lady), a humorous monologue in verse, of about seven minutes' duration, which attracted favourable attention and was taken up by the publisher Ollendorff.
1880s The first of Feydeau's plays to be staged was a one-act
two-hander called
Par la fenêtre (Through the window) presented by the
Cercle des arts intimes, an amateur society, in June 1882. In his biography of Feydeau
Henry Gidel comments that it was not a representative audience, being composed of friends of society members, but it was nonetheless a test of a sort, and the play was enthusiastically received. The typical Feydeau characters and plot were already in evidence: a shy husband, a domineering wife, mistaken identities, confusion and a happy ending. It depicts the confusion arising when a young lady receives a young gentleman who she thinks is her new piano teacher; he has come to the wrong house and believes he is calling on a glamorous
cocotte.
Le Figaro called it "a very witty fantasy, very agreeably interpreted". After completing his compulsory military service (1883–84) Feydeau was appointed
secrétaire général to the
Théâtre de la Renaissance, under the management of his friend
Fernand Samuel. In that capacity he successfully pressed for the premiere of
Henry Becque's
La Parisienne (1885), later recognised as one of the masterpieces of French naturalist theatre. In December 1886 the Renaissance presented a three-act comédie by Feydeau,
Tailleur pour dames (Ladies' tailor).
Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique thought the play insubstantial, but, it enthused, "what gaiety in the dialogue, what good humour, what pleasing words, what fun in this childishness, what unforeseen things in this madness, what comic invention in this imbroglio, which obtained the most outright success one could wish to a beginner!" The critic of
Le Figaro said that the piece was not a comedy at all in the conventional sense of the word: The critic
Jules Prével correctly predicted that the young author would struggle to repeat this early triumph: it was not until 1892 that Feydeau had another success to match
Tailleur pour dames. He had a series of poor or mediocre runs in the late 1880s with
La Lycéenne (a "
vaudeville-
opérette" with music by
Gaston Serpette, 1887), (1888),
Les Fiancés de Loches (1888 co-written with
Maurice Desvallières), and ''L'Affaire Edouard'' (1889). In 1889 Feydeau married Marie-Anne, the daughter of
Carolus-Duran, a prosperous portrait painter. The couple had four children, born between 1890 and 1903. The marriage was ideal to Feydeau in several ways. It was a genuine love-match (though it later went awry); he was an ardent amateur painter, and his father-in-law gave him lessons; and marriage into a well-to-do family relieved Feydeau of some of the financial problems arising from his succession of theatrical failures and heavy losses on the stock exchange.
1890s In 1890 Feydeau took a break from writing and made a study of the works of the leading comic playwrights, particularly
Eugène Labiche,
Alfred Hennequin and Meilhac. He benefited from his study, and in 1891 wrote two plays that restored his reputation and fortune. and it ran far into the following year for a total of 434 performances. Feydeau's next play,
Le Système Ribadier (The Ribadier System, 1892), had a fair run in Paris and was successfully produced in Berlin, and subsequently (under the title
His Little Dodge) in London and New York. In 1894 Feydeau collaborated with Desvallières on
Le Ruban (The ribbon), a comedy about a man desperately manoeuvring for appointment to the
Légion d'honneur. At the same time, after a certain amount of similar manoeuvring on his own account, Feydeau was appointed to the legion, at the early age of thirty-two, joining a small élite of French playwrights to receive the honour, including Dumas, Meilhac,
Ludovic Halévy,
Victorien Sardou and Becque.
Le Ruban ran at the
Théâtre de l'Odéon for 45 performances. Feydeau and Desvallières returned to winning form in the same year with (The Free Exchange Hotel). The
Annales du théâtre et de la musique, noting that the laughter reverberated inside and out of the auditorium, said that a reviewer could only laugh and applaud rather than criticise. Another critic, predicting a long run, wrote that he and his colleagues would not be needed at the Nouveautés in their professional capacities for a year or so, but would know where to come if they wanted to laugh. The play ran for 371 performances. a London version,
A Night in Paris, opened in April 1896 and outran the Parisian original, with a total of 531 performances. During the rest of the 1890s there were two more Feydeau plays, both highly successful.
Le Dindon (literally "Turkey" but in French usage signifying "Dupe" or "Fall guy") ran for 275 performances at the Palais-Royale in 1896–97, and at the end of the decade Feydeau had the best run of his career with
La Dame de chez Maxim, which played at the Nouveautés from January 1899 to November 1900, a total of 579 performances. The author was used to working with and writing for established farceurs such as
Alexandre Germain, who starred in many of his plays from
Champignol malgré lui (1892) to
On purge bébé! (1910); for
La Dame de chez Maxim Feydeau discovered
Armande Cassive, whom he moulded into his ideal leading lady for his later works. Finance became a continual problem. Feydeau never regained the success he had enjoyed with
La Dame de chez Maxim. A collaboration in 1902 with the composer Alfred Kaiser on a serious romantic opera,
Le Billet de Joséphine, was not a success, closing after 16 performances. Of his first four plays of the 1900s, only
La Main passe! (1904) had a substantial run. it was not seen again in Paris until 1952. '', 1908|thumb|upright=1.4|alt=Contemporary drawing of a scene from the play: a young man is sitting up in bed addressing a young woman in 1908 day-wear (including large hat), while another young woman, in a nightdress, hides on the other side of the bed In 1908 ''
Occupe-toi d'Amélie! (Look after Amélie) opened at the Nouveautés. The reviewers were enthusiastic; in Le Figaro'',
Emmanuel Arène said: In
Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique Edmond Stoullig wrote: The piece ran for 288 performances at the Nouveautés during 1908–09, and at the
Théâtre Antoine for 96 performances later in 1909.
Last years as witnesses at the wedding of
Sacha Guitry and
Yvonne Printemps, April 1919 In 1909, after a particularly acrimonious quarrel, Feydeau left home and moved into the Hotel Terminus in the
Rue Saint-Lazare. He lived there, surrounded by his paintings and books, until 1919. He and Marie-Anne were divorced in 1916 and in 1918, now aged fifty-five, he embarked on an affair with a young dancer, Odette Darthys, whom he cast in the lead in revivals of his plays. ''Occupe-toi d'Amélie!
was the last full-length play Feydeau wrote on his own. Le Circuit
(The road race, 1909) with Francis de Croisset made little impact. Je ne trompe pas mon mari'' (I don't cheat on my husband, 1914) with René Peter did well at the box office, with 200 performances, but in the view of Feydeau's biographer
Leonard Pronko it has signs that "the dramatist had almost reached the end of his brilliant inventiveness". From 1908 Feydeau focused chiefly on a series of one-act plays, which he envisaged as a set to be called
Du mariage au divorce (From marriage to divorce). Pronko describes the last of these, ''Hortense a dit: "je m'en fous!"'' ("Hortense says 'I don't give a damn'", 1916) "astringently funny … Feydeau's last dazzling gasp". Feydeau had long been subject to depression, but in mid-1919 his family, alarmed at signs of a severe deterioration in his mental condition, called in medical experts; the diagnosis was
dementia caused by tertiary
syphilis. The condition was incurable, and Feydeau's sons arranged for him to be admitted to the Sanatorium de la Malmaison, a leading sanatorium at Rueil (present-day,
Rueil-Malmaison). He spent his last two years there, imagining himself to be
Napoleon III appointing ministers and issuing invitations to his coronation. Feydeau sank into a coma and died in the sanatorium at Rueil on 5 June 1921, aged fifty-eight. After a funeral at
Sainte-Trinité, Paris, he was buried in the
Montmartre Cemetery. ==Works==