The Cornelius Theater.

This winter, at the Théâtre des Fantaisies Parisiennes, n there was staged a charming operetta titled The Elixir of Cornelius [L’élixir du docteur Cornélius: opérette en un acte par Henri Meilhac … By Émile Durand, Henri Meilhac, Arthur Delavigne - Google Books.], in which reincarnation is the very heart of the plot.

Here is the account that the Siècle gave of it, in its issue of February 11, 1868:

“This Cornelius is an alchemist who occupies himself particularly with the transmigration of souls. All that is told to him in this regard he listens to with eager ears, as though the thing had really happened. Now, he has a daughter who did not wait for his permission to find herself a suitor. No; but he refuses his consent. How then is one to overcome his resistance? An idea: the suitor tells him that his daughter, before being his daughter, a long time ago, was a lansquenet, n given to adventures and a frequenter of back alleys. At that same time he, the suitor, was a charming young woman, who was deceived by the adventurer. The roles are reversed, and he asks him to restore his former honor. ‘Ah! you tell me so much!’ replies the old doctor, convinced. And thus does one more marriage take place before the public, which so often takes it upon itself to take the place of the Mayor. “The music is as cheerful as the subject that inspired it. Particular notice was taken of the serenade, the verses of Cornelius, the comic duet, and the finale, written simply and easily.”

As we see, the plot rests here not only on the principle of reincarnation, but, further, on the change of sex.

Dramatic subjects become exhausted, and often authors find themselves embarrassed to escape from commonplaces. The idea of reincarnation is going to offer them, in profusion, new situations for every genre; the way being opened, it is likely that all the theaters will soon have their play about reincarnation.

At the end of May the Théâtre Français staged a play in which the soul plays the principal role; it is The Cock of Mycillus, by Messrs. Trianon and Eugène Nyon. Here is the plot:

Mycillus is a young cobbler of Athens; opposite his stall lives a young magistrate, the archon Eucrates, in a charming marble mansion. The poor cobbler envies in Eucrates his riches, his wife, the beautiful Chloe, his cousin, his numerous slaves. The opulent archon, prematurely aged, crippled by gout, envies in Mycillus his fine figure, his health, the disinterested love that a pretty slave, Doris, devotes to him. Mycillus has a cock given to him by the young Doris, which, by its morning crowing, awakens the archon. The latter orders the slaves to beat the cobbler, should he not silence the cock; in turn the cobbler wants to beat the cock; but at that moment the animal metamorphoses into a man: it is the philosopher Pythagoras, whose soul had come to animate the body of the cock, according to his doctrine of transmigration. He momentarily took on his human form to enlighten Mycillus about the foolishness of the envy he feels toward the position of Eucrates. Not being able to convince him, he says to him: “I shall give you the means to enlighten yourself by your own experience. Take this feather that you made fall from my cock’s body; place it in the lock of Eucrates’ door: at once the door will open; your soul will pass into the body of the archon and, reciprocally, the soul of the archon will pass into your body. However, before doing anything, I advise you to reflect well. Then Pythagoras disappeared. Mycillus reflects, but the thirst for gold draws him on and, prompted by various incidents, he makes up his mind and the metamorphosis takes place. Behold, then, the cobbler transformed into the rich archon, but sick and gouty, and the archon made a cobbler. This transformation leads to a host of comic complications, as a result of which each one, discontented with his new position, takes back the one he had before. As we see, this play is a new edition of the story of the cobbler and the financier, already exploited under so many forms. What characterizes it is that, instead of being the cobbler in person, body and soul, who takes the place of the financier, it is the two souls that change bodies. The idea is new, original, and the authors exploit it wittily. But it is by no means taken from the Spiritist idea, as had been said; it is drawn from a dialogue of Lucian: The Dream, or the Cock. We speak of this only to bring out the error of those who confuse the principle of reincarnation with the transmigration of souls, or metempsychosis. The Cornelius play, on the contrary, is entirely Spiritist, although the supposed reincarnation of the young man and the young woman is nothing but an invention on their part to attain their ends, whereas the latter departs from it completely. In the first place, Spiritism has never admitted the idea of the human soul retrograding into animality, because that would be the negation of the law of progress; in the second place, the soul leaves the body only at death. When, after some time spent in erraticity, it begins a new existence anew, it passes through the ordinary phases of life: birth, infancy, etc., and not by the effect of a metamorphosis or instantaneous substitution, such as is seen only in fairy tales, which are not the Gospel of Spiritism, whatever the critics may say, who know little of it. Nevertheless, although the data are false in their application, they are no less based on the principle of the individuality and the independence of the soul; it is the soul distinct from the body, and the possibility of living again in another envelope, set in action, an idea with which it is always useful to familiarize public opinion. The impression that remains from it is not lost for the future, and is more salutary than that of plays in which the shamelessness of the passions is staged.

[1]

[The Théâtre des Fantaisies Parisiennes was built in 1864 on the Boulevard des Italiens and in 1878 became the Théâtre des Nouveautés.]

[2] Translator’s note: A German soldier who, in the 15th and 16th centuries, served in France as a mercenary.