The ridiculous will not be absent, for the madness of actions and speeches, when they are suggested by the misunderstanding of interests or by the transport of passion, is the truly ridiculous thing in men and in life.[287] Besides his own two pieces, Diderot would probably have pointed to Terence as the author coming nearest to the _genre serieux_.

If Goethe's bad play of _Stella_ had retained the close as he originally wrote it, with the bigamous Fernando in the last scene rejoicing over the devoted agreement of the two ladies and his daughter to live with him in happy unity, that would perhaps have been a comedy of the _genre serieux_, with the duties of man gracefully adapted to circumstances.
The theory of the _genre serieux_ has not led to the formation of any school of writers adopting it and working it out, or to the production of any masterpiece that has held its ground, as has happened in tragedy, comedy, and farce.

Beaumarchais, who at last achieved such a dazzling and portentous success by one dramatic masterpiece, began his career as a playwright by following the vein of _The Father of the Family;_ but _The Marriage of Figaro_, though not without strong traces of Diderotian sentiment in pungent application, yet is in its structure and composition less French than Spanish.

It is quite true, as Rosenkranz says, that the prevailing taste on the French stage in our own times favours above all else bourgeois romantic comedy, written in prose.[288] But the strength of the romantic element in them would have been as little satisfactory to Diderot's love of realistic moralising as the conventional tragedy of the court of Lewis XIV.

The Fable of most of them turns on adultery, and this is not within the method of the _genre serieux_ as expounded by Diderot.