Feydeau

Eig, who has also written artful biographies of Muhammad Ali and Lou Gehrig, describes how several young women attended King’s graduation from Crozer and how — as if in a scene from a Feydeau farce — each expected to be introduced to his parents as his fiancée.

He drew particular notice in 1976 for his performance in the company’s production of Georges Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear,” playing a character who can pronounce only vowels.

I was finally able to see the 1974 production of Jean Giraudoux’s “Ondine” that starred a teenage Isabelle Adjani and has attracted a cult following; I laughed alone in front of my computer watching a zippy staging of the Feydeau farce “Le Système Ribadier.”

He would call me into his office under some pretext, and before I could scream ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape,’ his office door would be slammed shut, and he would be playfully chasing me around his desk as though we were in a Feydeau farce.

According to Bertrand de Feydeau, vice-president of French preservation group Fondation du Patrimoine, France no longer has giant oak trees of the same size and maturity that were used to build the original structure.