French poet and dramatist. His work, like Rostand's represents the late flowering of romantic verse drama. His poetry is in the vein of François Villon (1431-1463?), celebrating the life of the tramps and beggars of his time, and his free use of slang shocked and titillated many readers. Richepin tried his hand at just about every theatrical genre-adaptations of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Sem Benelli; musical comedies; fairy tales; melodramas-but he is best remembered for his engagingly sentimental comedies, the most celebrated of which is The Tramp (Le chemineau, 1897), a bittersweet tale of a carefree vagabond who temporarily returns after a twentyyear absence to help a woman he once seduced and abandoned. Other plays of interest include Nana-Sahib (1883), written for Sarah Bernhardt; Monsieur Scapin (1886), about the later days of Molière's rascally creation; The Sleeping Beauty (La belle au bois dormant, 1907), in which he collaborated with Henri Cain on a dramatization of Charles Perrault's immortal fairy tales; and The Vagrants (Les truands, 1899), a play set in the medieval Paris of François Villon.

The Tramp (Le chemineau, 1897). A carefree young vagabond seduces and abandons Toinette, a village girl, and returns twenty years later to discover that she bore him a son, Antoine, whose putative father is her present husband, François. Antoine is in love with a girl whose father refuses to let her marry him, and François is bedridden and dying. Setting to work, the tramp manages to win Antoine's bride for him by curing her father's ailing cattle. At a Christmas celebration the tramp recounts his vagabond life, and everyone urges him to remain. In a burst of insight, just before dying, François tries to slip his wedding ring onto the tramp's finger as a sign that he wants him to marry Toinette. Though tempted by his love for Toinette, his pride in Antoine, and the security of domestic life, the tramp eventually decides to return to his vagabond life. Produced Paris, Théâtre de l'Odéon, February 6, 1897.