Le Mariage de mademoiselle Beulemans

Le Mariage de mademoiselle Beulemans is a Belgian play by Fernand Wicheler and Frantz Fonson. It opened at the Théâtre l'Olympia in Brussels on March 18, 1910 and was reopened in Paris, at the Théâtre de la Renaissance on June 7, 1910.

Combining French with the dialect and particular humour of Brussels, the play was a great success both in Belgium and abroad from the beginning. This play is an integral part of the folklore of Brussels and still undergoes regular revivals. Although numerous actors have interpreted the play, Gustave Libeau and Jaques Lippe have notably marked it with their personalities.

The play is set in Brussels, where Suzanne Beulemans, the daughter of a rich brewer is promised to marry Séraphin Meulemeester, the son of a rival brewer. The young man and his father both seem particularly motivated by the dowry of the young fiancée.

But Séraphin has a rival in Albert Delpierre, a young Frenchman who is learning brewery from Beulemans and who is discreetly enamoured with the young woman. Albert learns Séraphin's secret that he is having an affair with a worker and that they have had a child. He promises Séraphin that he will never reveal any of it to Suzanne, but she is told be Isabelle, her maid.

Suzanne breaks off the engagement with Séraphin and convinces him to return to the woman he loves and his son. This rupture leads to another between the two brewers who are both in contention for honourary presidency of the brewers society. In the final act, Suzanne and Albert strive to promote the election of Beulemans which instills him with a deep gratitude toward Albert.

In a message dedicated to the people of Brussels in 1960 for the 50th anniversary of Le Mariage de mademoiselle Beulemans, Marcel Pagnol himself recounted the origin of his Trilogie Marseillaise:

"Around 1925, because I felt exiled in Paris I realised that I loved Marseilles and I wanted to express this love by writing a Marseilles play. My friends and my family dissuaded me from it: they told me that a play so localised, that put on show characters with such a particular accent, would certainly not be understood outside of Bouches-du-Rhône, and that in Marseilles itself it would be considered an amateur work. These arguments seemed sound and I gave up on my project. But in 1926 I saw Le Mariage de mademoiselle Beulemans; this masterpiece was already 16 years old and its success had gone around the world.

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