Bébé (play)

Hennequin had recently enjoyed two considerable successes with Le Procès Veauradieux (1875) and Les Dominos roses (1876), both written with Alfred Delacour.

He is engaged to be married to Mathilde, a rich heiress, whose guardian, a country cousin named Kernanigous, has just arrived in Paris with his wife, Diane.

When he hears Gaston's mother boasting of the perfect purity of her son, he cannot restrain himself from declaring that in his opinion no man can be a good husband unless he has sown his wild oats before marriage.

Finally it turns out that Aurélie is Pétillon's estranged wife, and he is delighted to find that her infidelities mean that he can discontinue his ruinous maintenance payments to her.

Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique noted the enthusiastic reception, and welcomed a real success for the Gymnase after a prolonged series of failures.

[3][n 1] The Paris correspondent of the London theatrical paper The Era wrote that the play "deserves a niche in the Panthéon of dramatic works alongside those already assigned to the Procès Veauradieux and the Dominos Roses, as one of the most laughter-provoking pieces ever placed on the stage".

[8] For Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique the scene in which Pétillon sings extracts from the legal code remained "surely one of the most hilarious inventions that can be seen.

The New York Times found the play amusing, but suspected that "the process of adaptation, while it may have brought much of the language of the original within the bounds of propriety, has weakened both the characters and the dialogue".

[11] The reviewers in The Era and The Times both felt that some of the fun of the original French version had been lost along with the discarded risqué elements,[11][12] but the piece ran exceptionally well, achieving 404 performances.