Les cent vierges

brightly coloured theatre poster showing a bald, stout white man of middle age trying to embrace a younger woman, who is eyeing him suspiciously
Poster for a 1910 revival

Les cent vierges (The Hundred Maidens) is an opérette in three acts, with music by Charles Lecocq and a libretto by Clairville, Henri Chivot and Alfred Duru. It was first produced at the Théâtre des Fantaisies-Parisiennes, Brussels, on 16 March 1872. The plot concerns the British government's efforts to ship brides out to a distant colony for the all-male colonists. Two French women are accidentally on board the ship taking the brides out, and are pursued to the island by their husbands. The four French intruders are threatened by the colonial governor, but after plotting and farcical goings-on, all ends satisfactorily.

The work was rewritten many years after the deaths of its authors and composer, and staged in a version by Albert Willemetz and André Mouëzy-Éon in Paris in 1942 and 1946.