Reading Order
Le ChandelierLe Chandelier Reading Order
Le Chandelier (The Candlestick, 1835) by Alfred de Musset is the most formally brilliant of his Proverbes dramatiques and the one most often described as a comedy of manners — a play in which the young clerk Fortunio is introduced as the false lover to distract a suspicious husband from his wife Jacqueline's real affair with the officer Clavaroche. The device (the 'chandler,' i.e. the candle-holder who provides light for someone else's love) is a classic comic tradition, but Musset subverts it: Fortunio genuinely falls in love with Jacqueline, his love is so pure and so moving that she cannot continue to use him cynically, and by the end it is Clavaroche (the calculating officer who devised the scheme) who has been replaced by the pure feeling he dismissed as naive. The play is a defense of genuine Romantic feeling against the calculating cynicism that the world rewards — Fortunio's naive love, which everyone around him finds ridiculous, turns out to be the only force capable of disturbing the self-satisfied mechanics of the arranged affair.
Where to start
Le Chandelier is a short three-act play — read it in the context of the Comédies et Proverbes collection, where it forms an interesting contrast with Les Caprices de Marianne (both involve a young man used as cover by a woman already attached elsewhere, with very different outcomes).
Complete Le Chandelier Book List
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Le Chandelier
Alfred de Musset·1835·Available in French in the Comédies et Proverbes collection (Gallimard Folio or GF Flammarion) and in the Pléiade Théâtre complet. Translated into English as The Chandler or The Candlestick in some anthology collections. - Buy
Les Caprices de Marianne
OptionalAlfred de Musset·1833·The structural parallel — the young man used as cover in an adulterous arrangement, with very different emotional outcomes; the contrast is illuminating.
Le Chandelier — Frequently Asked Questions
What does 'chandelier' mean as a dramatic term?
In French theatrical slang derived from this play, 'chandelier' refers to the innocent dupe who holds the light (the chandelle) for a more calculating lover — the person whose presence, by creating a false trail or a distraction, enables a more sophisticated love affair to proceed without detection. Musset takes this traditional comic figure (which appears in many eighteenth-century comedies) and does something unusual with it: he makes Fortunio's naivety not a fault to be laughed at but a quality that is morally superior to the cynicism that surrounds it. Clavaroche devised the Fortunio scheme as a purely practical calculation, and he is confident that Fortunio will serve as the uncomprehending instrument of someone else's pleasure. What he cannot anticipate is that genuine feeling, when it appears in the middle of a purely strategic situation, cannot be contained by the strategy. Fortunio's love for Jacqueline is real, and its reality gradually forces Jacqueline to acknowledge what she has been treating as a game.
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