In his Négligent (1692), Charles Dufresny has an aspiring playwright exclaim: ‘Molière has spoiled the theatre all right. Follow his example and immediately critics cry out that you pilfered his work; deviate from it in the slightest, and they complain that you are not staying close enough to Molière!’ – an ironic but fitting encapsulation of the ‘post-moliéresque’ era, when authors, facing increasingly challenging conditions, still somehow managed to reinvent comedy. The growing aura of commedia dell’arte and opera influenced productions of the newly formed Théâtre-Français, which for almost twenty years struggled in the shadow of the hugely successful Théâtre-Italien, then allowed to stage plays partly in French. When the latter was shut down by royal decree in 1697, the taste for ‘irregular’ comedy remained dominant, ultimately leading to the emergence of a new venue – the fairgrounds – and a new genre: the opéra-comique. Contrary to a long-standing negative vision, the Fin de Règne (1680–1715), with dramatists like Dancourt, Dufresny, Regnard and Lesage, was an apex of comedic innovation that never forgot or betrayed what Molière had accomplished.

Chapter 5 offers an account of how vaudevilles were introduced on the Fair theatre stage, and how they were developed as an operatic medium. ‘Raw Materials’ provides contexts for understanding what vaudevilles were and how they were transmitted. ‘Vaudevilles on stage’ uses official reports to build a history of process: how musical dialogue in vaudevilles evolved from 1709. ‘Lyric pantomime’ formed an intermediate stage. Contemporary reactions to Italian recitative are used as a deductive basis for imagining vaudevilles in sound; the enquiry is extended in ‘Accompaniment’ and ‘Continuity’ by historical evidence and through scrutiny of Le Théâtre de la Foire, but also by the author’s report made of a 1991 performance. Historical evidence suggests that performance in Paris was regularly dialogic and spontaneous, not tied to fixed keys or accompaniment, but also sometimes lyrical. Highly expressive vaudevilles were sometimes grouped to form either narrative or sentimental scenes in operas by Lesage and d’Orneval, some works having affinity with common tropes in contemporary novels. ‘La Chercheuse d’esprit’ is an account of Favart’s famous vaudeville opera, here interpreted through unique performative information deduced from a manuscript in the Bibliothèque municipale, Versailles, hitherto unknown to scholarship.

This chapter focuses on the proliferation of novels in the early decades of the eighteenth century that assumed the form of personal memoirs. Acknowledging arguments that link this new style of writing to demands for greater narrative plausibility, it also considers the popularity of the form in relation to the social upheavals driven by the increasing mobility of people and the flow of money associated with modernity and globalisation. It argues that the first-person form enabled novelists in this period to explore the importance of the novelistic imagination as a tool for adapting to difference and cultural change, foregrounding the use of narrative by those on the move in negotiating personal identity and social relationships. With particular reference to novels by Crébillon, Prévost, Marivaux and Lesage, it examines the different ways in which protagonists struggle to become authors and thereby exercise greater control over their lives, pointing to how the memoir-novel played a formative role in constructing the concept of an autobiographical subject and the contours of modern autobiography.