Mélanide fully develops the type known as comédie larmoyante.

For the comédie larmoyante see Gustave Lanson, Ninette de la Chaussée et la comedie larmoyante (1887).

In the opening years of the next century Marivaux was to show himself a Modern in establishing a new genre of theatre, unknown to the Ancients, the sentimental comedy (comédie larmoyante).

She thus played a significant part in creating the vogue for comédie larmoyante (tear-jerking comedy), and it is not surprising that she later helped Francoise de Graffigny write her very successful example of the genre, Cénie (1750).

Voltaire maintained that the comédie larmoyante was a proof of the inability of the author to produce either of the recognized kinds of drama, though he himself produced a play of similar character in L'Enfant prodigue.

With the dispatch of the Italian comedians from France in 1697, the form transmogrified in the 18th century as genres such as comédie larmoyante gained in attraction in France, particularly through the plays of Marivaux.

Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée (born 14 February 1692 in Paris; died 14 May 1754 in Paris) was a French dramatist who blurred the lines between comedy and tragedy with his comédie larmoyante.

By blurring the distinctions between comedy and tragedy, the comédie larmoyante formed the basis for the subsequent genre known as Drame Bourgeois, the form of realistic comedy heralded by Denis Diderot's Le Fils naturel (published 1757, performed 1771).