Page "Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée" Paragraph 3

Mélanide fully develops the type known as comédie larmoyante.

Comedy was no longer to provoke laughter, but tears.

The innovation consisted in destroying the sharp distinction then existing between tragedy and comedy in French literature.

Indications of this change had been already offered in the work of Marivaux, and La Chaussée's plays led naturally to the domestic drama of Diderot and of Sedaine.

The new method found bitter enemies.

Alexis Piron nicknames the author " le Reverend Père Chaussee ," and ridiculed him in one of his most famous epigrams.