René Fauchois

His best-known play is Prenez garde à la peinture (1932), a comedy of bourgeois avarice, adapted for US and British stage and screen as The Late Christopher Bean.

[1] The following year he successfully auditioned for a small role in Edmond Rostand's play L'Aiglon, presented by and starring Sarah Bernhardt.

[2] The work was a success when presented at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, but its fame was short-lived: the furore of the premiere of The Rite of Spring in the same theatre less than a month later relegated the opera to the background.

[4] During the First World War Fauchois wrote and acted less, although three of his plays were presented at the Comédie-Française: La Veillée des armes (1915), L'Augusta and Vitrail (1916).

His Boudu sauvé des eaux (1919), in which he played a leading role, was a succès de scandale,[n 1] but it was not until Sacha Guitry produced Fauchois' La Danseuse éperdue in 1922 that the writer's gift for comedy was widely recognised.

[1] In the view of the writer Clifford Parker, Fauchois' masterpiece is Prenez garde à la peinture (1932): He has laid the action of his play in Provence and has filled it with the atmosphere of that cheerful region.

Into the household of a small-town doctor come the "sharks" from Paris, lured by the bait of a dead artist's canvases, now discovered to be of tremendous value.

To reveal these practices and these tricks, through the medium of an alert, amusing, and satirical comedy, was undoubtedly the chief purpose of the author.

The French film version (1932), which retains the original title, follows the action of the stage play more closely than the American and English adaptations.