Love and marriage have always been a principal theme of comedy, but Scribe placed more emphasis on the pragmatic than on the romantic side. In contrast to Romantic drama, Scribe never condones the excesses of violent passion, and in particular, he condemns marital infidelity on the part of husband and wife alike. As a champion of middle-class values, he chooses for the sympathetic characters of his comedies honest, caring, simple, hardworking people. In such a milieu, love, although sincere and abiding, is not an explosive or antisocial force. Instead, it is a gentle and respectful emotion that needs to be grounded in mutual esteem, together with compatibility of personality, education and, usually, social rank. Despite the charges of Scribe’s detractors, it is simply not true that he viewed money as the main consideration in marriage: Le Mariage d’argent, his first experiment in the five-act form, is a clear condemnation of those who betray love and principles for the sake of ambition and greed. Even in Malvina: Ou, Un Mariage d’inclination (1828), in which he takes the side of the parents over the young lovers, he gives his blessing to love, provided that the young people are mature enough to know what they are doing and that they act in accord with their parents. It is also true that bourgeois parents in Scribe’s plays are normally idealized figures, extremely caring and indulgent and situated at the furthest extreme from the tyrannical fathers that one associates with the comedies of Molière.