Ô mon bel inconnu

Synopsis

Act One

The atmosphere is stormy in the Aubertin household. Each of its members (father, mother, daughter, maid) remonstrates with the others, and the breakfast they are eating together is less nourishing for their stomachs than for their resentments and dissensions. But doesn’t everyone have their own little secret? Through the medium of the personal ads in a newspaper, Prosper Aubertin, no longer enchanted by either his married life or his profession as a hatter, has entered into correspondence with a woman who claims to be a countess; but he has also received, among the 130 other letters replying to his advertisement, impassioned declarations of love in the handwriting of his wife Antoinette and his daughter Marie-Anne. Moreover, the two women have changed considerably in the past few days: do they not modify their character as Aubertin’s successive letters ask them to? They even go so far as to repel the suitors who come to the shop and who, on the pretext of purchasing its wares, woo them assiduously. These gentlemen (Jean-Paul in pursuit of Antoinette, Claude Aviland of Marie-Anne) cannot sweep them off their feet like the handsome strangers of their epistolary relationships. Meanwhile, a family friend named Hilarion Lallumette (a mute whose inability to speak guarantees his discretion) acts as confidant to all the characters.

Act Two

Prosper Aubertin decides to take his revenge; he makes a date with his countess and narrowly avoids his maid Félicie, who has initially confused the Louvre Museum with the department store of the same name (Les Grands Magasins du Louvre). Then he invites Antoinette and Marie-Anne to join him in a villa in Biarritz he has rented for the occasion; the two women easily find good reasons to leave the family home for a while, and it is with a rousing refrain of ‘Let’s go’ (in which Claude, Jean-Paul and Lallumette also join) that the curtain falls on the second act.

Act Three

A comfortable villa on the Basque coast serves as the setting for Act Three. Its owner, M. Victor, a middle-aged man whom all three ladies will mistake for the ‘handsome stranger’, makes it his business to deal with the threefold denouement that lies ahead. He begins by reasoning with the frivolous wife, who is overwhelmed by repentance and finally comes round to the same conception of married life as her husband. Again pretending to be the penfriend, Victor seduces the maid Félicie. On the other hand, he lets the father receive his own daughter: Prosper convinces Marie-Anne that Claude, who arrives at just the right moment, is the real author of the correspondence she has received; this is all the more welcome since the girl had imagined her ideal beloved in the persona of the young man who visited her at the shop. And, of course, Lallumette finds his... voice in time to take part in the final festivities, thanks to the advice of a Scottish doctor.