La Fille de Madame Angot

Synopsis

Act one

The Halles district of Paris, during the Directory period.

The population of Les Halles are happily preparing the marriage of their protégée Clairette Angot to the wigmaker Pomponnet. The orphan’s late mother was a famous local character, a pretty fishmonger with a sharp tongue, whose amorous adventures supposedly took her all the way to the Grand Turk’s seraglio in Constantinople! The poet and singer Ange Pitou arrives: he is in love with Clairette, but a mysterious benefactress has just arranged a romantic tryst with him. Clairette joins him and announces that she intends to refuse the intended match. The financier Larivaudière, who is mixed up in corrupt business dealings with the government minister Barras while having an affair with the latter’s mistress, the actress Mademoiselle Lange, buys the poet’s silence on the subject in exchange for a sum of money which should allow him to obtain Clairette’s hand in marriage. Since this proposal is not well received by the Halles stallholders, Clairette has the idea of singing Pitou’s latest song, a slanderous number about the Barras-Lange-Larivaudière triangle, in order to get herself thrown into prison... and thus escape marriage.

Act two

Mademoiselle Lange’s salon.

Mademoiselle Lange and Larivaudière organise a secret meeting of conspirators against the Republic for that very evening. Pomponnet comes to beg the actress to use her influence to get his fiancée out of prison; so she sends him to fetch the song in question and brings in the guilty party to hold her accountable. The two women are astonished when they recognise each other as former friends from boarding school. Lange quickly gets Clairette out of the way. For it is she who arranged the tryst with Pitou, on whom she has set her sights, and who seems just as infatuated with her. Larivaudière is warned that Mademoiselle Lange is receiving a lover and returns in a rage, but she wangles her way out of the situation by pretending to have taken the two young people under her protection in order to persuade the singer to join in their conspiracy – she is quite unaware that they are genuinely in love... When Pomponnet returns with the song, Mademoiselle Lange has him searched by the police and thrown into prison instead of Pitou. The conspirators’ meeting has just begun when a regiment of hussars bursts in to arrest them. Mademoiselle Lange and her friends then improvise a sham ball, during which she hears Clairette speaking words of love to her poet. She swears vengeance.

Act three

The garden of a tavern in Belleville.

Clairette has assembled the people of Les Halles, to whom she announces her intention to prove herself worthy of her mother by taking revenge on her unfaithful lover. She has also sent for Larivaudière, and Pomponnet, who has escaped from prison, happens to be there too. When Mademoiselle Lange and Pitou meet at the rendezvous engineered by Clairette, the whole company comes out of hiding to confound them. Clairette finally decides to marry Pomponnet, who has remained loyal to her, while Ange Pitou hopes she will prove to be as fickle as her mother was...