La Boule

Overview

La Boule is a comedy in four acts by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, first performed at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, Paris, on 24 November 1874 ("Représentée pour la première fois, à Paris, sur le théâtre du Palais-Royal, le 24 novembre 1874", title page of the Michel Lévy edition, 1875, and vol. IV of Théâtre de Meilhac et Halévy; the date also in Wikipédia fr, "Henri Meilhac", list of works). The printed cast sets it "de nos jours, à Paris". (The researcher's inventory gave 1871; that is wrong.)

Marie and this work

Marie met the play at the French theatre in Nice (Théâtre Français), a few months after the Paris premiere; the diary does not say who staged it.

• 1875-03-19 (030.0260): "Salle vide et stupide, mais on donne «La Boule» et ce que j'eus le temps d'en voir m'a paru amusant." She saw only part of it.
• 1875-05-14 (032.0457): "Le soir au Français on donne «La Boule» et Ravel joue." ("Ravel" is an actor of the Nice company, presumably; he is not in the Palais-Royal cast of 1874, and the glossary stub RAVEL, which describes a carriage, does not fit this paragraph.) She notes she is "en blanc et jolie, pourquoi ?"
• 1875-06-18 (034.0399): she answers her family's repeated retelling of the story of her birth and childhood sayings "par la phrase que Tiste répète tant de fois dans La Boule" -- the quotation itself is missing from the text (paragraph 034.0400 reads only "La première fois que je l'ai rencontrée, etc.").

Open question

No character called "Tiste" appears in the printed cast of the 1875 edition (the roles are Paturel, la Musardière, Camusot, Modeste, Pietro, Martineau, Cornillon ...). "Tiste" may be Marie's spelling or a nickname for one of them; it could also be a stage name from the Nice production. Left unresolved. The phrase Marie quotes could in principle be located in the full text linked above.

Sources

• Title page and cast of La Boule, Paris, Michel Lévy frères, 1875 (Internet Archive); Théâtre de Meilhac et Halévy, vol. IV, 1901.
• Wikipédia fr, "Henri Meilhac".