of such plays as Ibsen's A Doll's House and Gabriele D’Annunzio's La Gioconda as well an overview of the structure of contemporary theatre published in L'Ermitage in February. In July 1905, he took on a job at the Georges Petit Gallery where he assembled exhibits and wrote the catalogues. He stayed at the Petit Gallery until May 1909. During this period he continued to write theatre reviews and garnered a reputation as an astute and principled judge of the theatre arts. The sale of the factory in Raucourt gave him the financial independence that allowed him to pursue his literary activities. Copeau was one of the founders of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF),:61 a publication that was to become one of the leading arbiters of literary taste in France. "Liberated", as he said, from his duties at the gallery and from management concerns at the Raucourt factory, Copeau launched himself into his work. In 1910, he bought Le Limon, a piece of property in the Seine-et-Marne département, away from the distractions of Paris. He worked tirelessly on a stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov along with his friend from school, Jean Croué, finishing it by the end of 1910. He was now ready to work in the theatre as a practitioner not only as critic. The play was staged in April 1911 under the direction of Jacques Rouché at the Théâtre des Arts, receiving favorable reviews. Charles Dullin, who played the role of Smerdiakov, was particularly singled out for a fine performance. A second staging of the adaptation the following October, with Louis Jouvet in the role of Father Zossima, confirmed the earlier critical claim. The Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier The idea of the renewal of the French stage that Copeau had had in mind since his earliest days as critic and that had been part of his theatre criticism now began to take shape as early as January 1912. He wanted to rid the Paris stage of the rank commercialism and tawdriness represented by the boulevard theatre, and also of the "ham acting" that had become entrenched in the ranks of the professional actors of the day. He realized that the exaggerated realism that had been part of earlier reform movements at the end of the previous century as an obstacle to a substantive understanding of the text and to the real development of character. In his opinion, even