[zhee-roh-doo'] (1882-1944) Wrote fifteen plays, most initially staged by the actor-director Louis Jouvet and later internationally acclaimed. Giraudoux was also a prose writer and served France as a diplomat and government official. Wounded twice in the First World War, he was the first writer to be awarded the Legion of Honor in wartime, Giraudoux’s dramatic and narrative style is a rich and inimitable blend of allusive prose, allegory, fantasy, and political and psychological perceptions. He tempered tragic themes with rueful comedy, as though he wished to unite the contrasting qualities of Racine, Molière, Maeterlinck, and Baudelaire.
Ondine (1939)—in which knight and sea-maiden prove incompatible—belongs to his later period, which is often described as ‘pessimistic’. The tale of the ondine itself has a long pedigree, based upon the medieval originary legend of Melusine (renamed Ondine) the primary elements of the present story first appear briefly in Paracelsus’ Treatise on Elemental Sprites (1566). It was the German folklorist, Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de La Motte-Fouqué who first brought the legends together as a story. La Motte-Fouqué’s story proved very popular; and, consequently, was adapted many times: first by E.T.A. Hoffmann as an opera and eventually for the theater by Jean Giraudoux. Thus what we have here is an adaptation of an adaptation of Giraudoux’s adaptation of La Motte-Fouqué’s gathering and retelling of medieval legends and the insane ramblings of a notorious alchemist.
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