m
UC-NRLF
SB 313 517
(f) v^
BY LEON H. VINCENT
THE BIBLIOTAPH AND OTHER
PEOPLE i2mo, $1.50
BRIEF STUDIES IN" FRENCH SOCI-
ETY AND LETTERS IN THE XVII.
CENTURY
h6tel db rambouillet and the
PRECIEUSES l8m0, $1.00
THE FRENCH ACADEMY l8mo, $1.00
CORNEILLE i8mo, $1.00
MOLIERE i8mo, 85 cents, net
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
MOfFITT
9-
Copyright, ip02, by Leon H. Vincent
All rights reserved
Published December, iqo2
To
FRANCIS WILSON
In memory of days and nights in the library of
* The Orchard*
5^— I I , „^w
CONTENTS
Introduction I
Youth and Dramatic Beginnings . . 1 1
A Provincial Thespian 39
-+ III h-
First Pat isian Triumphs : les Precieuses
ridicules, l'Ecole des Maris, and les
Facheux 65
L'£cole des Femmes, Tartuffe, and le
Misanthrope ....... 95
CONTENTS
The Actor and the Man 143
Les Femmes savantes, 1' Avare, le Bour-
geois gentilhomme, and le Malade
imaginaire . . . . . . . .175
-H VII h-
Death, Burial, and Posthumous Fame . 201
Bibliographical Note . . . . . .227
MOLIERE
-J^e
s^.
jLHE play was over and the audi-
ence was dispersing. The streets adja-
cent to the Petit-Bourbon resounded
with laughter, argument, protestation.
A passer-by who mingled with the
crowd and overheard the talk could
hardly have failed to note how va-
ried and discordant the opinions were.
These people had just witnessed a per-
formance, by the ' Comediens de Mon-
MOLlkRE
sieur frere unique du roi,' of a new and
clever little dramatic satire. It was evi-
dent from their manner that the piece,
though amusing enough, had displayed
some unwonted quality, that its humors
were not of a superficial kind.
A number of spectators confessed
to having enjoyed the performance in
spite of themselves. Others had been
vastly entertained because the wit
seemed to be directed at people they
knew. A few were downright angry,
and hinted at the vengeance it was
possible to wreak upon profane satir-
ists. Their immediate neighbors, with
more reason to be indignant than
themselves, laughed and were disposed
to take it all in good part. Whatever
else was accomplished the play had un-
questionably aroused discussion. The
4 * m As m ^ v
MOLIERE
dramatist had held the mirror up to
nature. People looked into the glass
and were so astonished that they be-
gan at once to protest that the mirror
was distorted. Little as they were grati-
fied by the spectacle, they seemed in
no danger of forgetting what manner
of men they were.
This fashionable audience was ap-
parently less concerned about the au-
thorship of the play than about the play
itself. Not half of them knew, or cared
to know, who wrote it. The bystander
might now and then have caught the
name of Moliere, coupled with some
phrase expressive of admiration for this
actor's brilliant performance in the role
of Mascarille. But the whole affair
was of far less importance to the spec-
tators at the Petit-Bourbon than to us,
MOLIERE
who look back upon that day as epoch-
making in the history of dramatic lit-
erature. The players, for all that they
bore a high-sounding title, were not
especially noteworthy. In the opinion
of Parisians this was only a little pro-
vincial troupe, newly come to town
within a year, fortunate in having taken
the fancy of the young king, who liked
to be amused, and who found the new
players able to do and say very laugh-
able things. Had the people of quality
who assisted at the performance that
day been questioned they would have
explained that comic actors, though
quite diverting, were a much lower or-
der of being than the stately kings and
queens of tragedy who chanted the
great verses of Corneille, for example,
at the Hotel de Bourgogne.
j m m u m m *.
M0L1ERE
Among the spectators thronging the
hall of the Petit-Bourbon that Novem-
ber afternoon of the year 1659 was J ean
Chapelain, of the Academie francaise,
he who, four years later, was to figure
conspicuously among the King's bene-
ficiaries as 'the greatest French poet
that ever was ' — a characterization
which he accepted with unabashed con-
tent and no apparent sense of incon-
gruity. Gilles Menage was also pre-
sent. The two scholars met when the
play was over. Menage took Chape-
lain by the hand and said to him,
'Monsieur, you and I approved all
those follies which have just been criti-
cised so ingeniously and with such
good sense; but now, as Saint Remi
said to Clovis, we shall be obliged to
burn what we adored and adore what
lH rrtrn KW
MOLlkRE
we burned/ Menage, who himself re-
cords the incident, says that it turned
out as he predicted. After that first
performance of the Precieuses ridicules
there was an end to verbal absurdities
and affected style.
Menage is suspected of having made
his ' prediction ' after the event. In
any case it is a question whether the
reform was as sudden or radical as he
affirms. The revolt from the jargon of
the 'ruelles' had begun long before
1659. But up rx/this moment no wit
had ridiculed the coteries with such fresh
gayety as Moliere displayed. Other
satirists had tried, in a dull, heavy fash-
ion, to make preciosity ' absurd. The
chief result of their efforts was to con-
firm the precieuses in their folly and
to make the spectators yawn. Moliere
H-6-I-
MOLIERE
almost convinced the precieuses that
it was worth their while to join in the
laugh at their own expense.
The year 1659, of such high impor-
tance in Moliere's life, is of no little
significance in the life of the Hotel
de Rambouillet. It is like a sign-post
which points two ways. It is an early
date in the history of the great drama-
tist, and a late date in the history of
the great house. The fact should be
kept in mind, inasmuch as one object
of this series of brief studies is to show
the influence of polite society on litera-
ture. The story of the Hotel de Ram-
bouillet really comes to an end with the
production of les Pr'ecieuses ridicules.
The aged Marquise herself is believed
to have been present on this occasion
and to have joined in the applause at
^ 7 ^
MOLIERE
the many palpable hits made in the
comedy. She was a woman of wit, and
it is wholly unreasonable to suppose
that she could not enjoy a satire upon
the third and fourth rate salons, the
feeble and absurd imitations of the once
famous, and justly famous, Blue Room.
So far as Moliere is concerned, this
play may be accounted an index show-
ing the path which the new comedy was
to take. All the characteristics of the
great Frenchman's art are epitomized
in this lively attack upon the affecta-
tions of the ruelles. In the Precieuses
ridicules Moliere completely emanci-
pated himself from the fetters of the
traditional comedy of intrigue. He
took his subject from the vivid Present.
He learned that he had only to study
Nature. Above all he became mili-
-h 8 -»-
MOLIERE
tant; and among the many character-
istics of Moliere's drama none is more
marked than its militant spirit. The
man was ever a fighter. It is no inad-
equate account of his Ji fe- which cfc -
g/M-ihpg \\ pg am imrp mitting war aga inst
hypo crisy, rTo forget this would be to
forget Moliere's own words : It is my
belief that in the work in which I find
myself engaged I can do nothing bet-
ter than to attack, through mocking
portraiture, the vices of my time^/He
was militant at the outset of his career
as a dramatist, and during the fourteen
years of his Parisian life, a period
crowded to the full with responsibili-
ties and labors of all sorts, he was never
anything else.
& & fl j»
p
JL ARIS is so rich in historical and
literary shrines that it is able to gratify
the pilgrim with the bewildering spec-
tacle of two houses in which Moliere
was certainly born, and two in which
he unquestionably died. In such an
embarrassment of riches one can
hardly be too conservative. The stu-
dent learns at the outset that about
half of all he reads and hears is almost
of necessity untrue.
The tablet of black marble placed
-+ ii -i-
MOLlkRE
on the front of No. 96 Rue Saint-
Honore, about a quarter of a century
ago, bears an inscription to the effect
that it marks the site of the house in
which Moliere was born, January 15,
1622. /The admirer will be fairly safe
in paying his tribute of sentiment at
this place. For if it is difficult to
prove that the poet was born here, it
is even more difficult to show that he
must have been born somewhere else.
The house now standing at the cor-
ner of Rue Saint-Honore and Rue des
Vieilles-Etuves is comparatively mod-
ern. The original edifice of Moliere's
time was a 'picturesque construction
of the sixteenth century,' with gables
and projecting stories, and small
arched windows of leaded glass. At
the corner of the house was a carved
-* I2-H-
MOLIERE
wooden post of the sort not uncom-
mon in old Paris. This 'poteau cor-
nier' represented the trunk of an
orange-tree, up which swarmed a
group of young monkeys eager for
the fruit, while an old monkey waited
below. The house was known as the
4 pavilion des Singes ' from this deco-
ration. The eyes of the future poet
must often have rested with amused
delight upon the quaint figures. It is
believed that when Moliere invented
a coat of arms for himself and placed
for supports on either side the shield
a monkey, one holding a mirror and
the other a theatrical mask, he had
in mind the grotesque and laughable
carvings on the old house in Rue Saint-
Honore.
The family to which Moliere be-
~n 3 ^
M0L1ERE
longed came originally from Beauvais.
Jean Poquelin, a tradesman of that
place, had a son Jean who established
himself in Paris as a ' marchand tapis-
sier.' He married Agnes Mazuel, a
daughter of one of the ' Violons du
Roi.' They had ten children, the eld-
est of whom, Uean, became the father of
the dramatic poet. This Jean Poque-
lin was also a 'marchand tapissier.'
His wife was the daughter of a ' tapis-
sier,' Louis Cresse./They were mar-
ried April 22, i62i.|Their first-born,
known to all the world as Moliere,
was baptized on Saturday, the 15th
of January, 1622/IThe entry in the
register of the parish of Saint-Eustache
calls him 'Jean, son of Jean Pouguelin,
upholsterer, and of Marie Crese, his
wife.' The name of the mother should
-»• 14-1-
MOLlkRE
have been spelled with a double s.
But in those days correct spelling was
an undiscovered art. The orthography
of names (if orthography be the right
word), was altogether in a « fluid and
passing ' state. The name borne by
Moliere's father is found in the civil
records spelled in eight or nine differ-
ent ways, among which are Pocque-
lin, Poclin, and Pauquelin. * The true
name of his family was Poquelin.'
Two years later ahothet child of
this house was christened Jean, and
therefore the elder son received the
name of Jean-Baptiste. When he
went upon the stage Jean-Baptiste
Poquelin took the name of Moliere,
for reasons satisfactory to himself and
inexplicable to other people. The
change could hardly have been made
MOLIERE
for the purpose of acquiring distinc-
tion, since the assumed name was not
only rather common but was also
borne by a well-known master of bal-
let, Louis de Mollier or Moliere, with
whom the poet was often confounded.
However, these improvements and
changes of style are so nearly univer-
sal in the theatrical profession, and so
frequent in the literary, as to require
no special explanation in the case of
the great French dramatist.
The father of Moliere held the posi-
tion of * tapissier valet de chambre ' to
the kingJ It was a hereditary charge,
and was considered highly profitable
if only because of the prestige it car-
ried in the minds of people who like a
sofa cushion a little better for having
been made by royalty's own uphol-
—1-16-1—
MOLIERE
sterer. There were eight of these
craftsmen, each of whom bore the title
of valet de chambre. The period of
their service was three months. They
received three hundred livres in wage
besides gratuities to the amount of
about thirty-seven livres and six sous.
{ Jean Poquelin was a respectable, well-
to-do, and influential member of the
middle class., He was thought to be
close-fisted at times, but he lived in
something like luxury and took no
small comfort in the wealth he had
acquired.
( The mother of the poet was a
woman of taste and distinction. If
she had but few books we know that
the few included a Bible and a Plu-
tarch.) She died at the early age of
thirty-one, leaving four children ; little
MOLlkRE
Jean-Baptiste was in his eleventh year
at the time of this his first great be-
reavement. After twelve months of
widowerhood the father married again.
Catherine Fleurette, the second wife,
bore her husband two daughters and
then died, just three and a half years
after her marriage.
We are warned by that conserva-
tive scholar and sound critic, Louis
Moland, not to accept with rash en-
thusiasm or reject with disdain the
various traditions concerning Moliere's
youth and dramatic career. One of
these traditions says that the boy's ma-
ternal grandfather, Louis Cresse, used
to take him to the performances at the
Hotel de Bourgogne, and therefore
must be held chiefly responsible for
having opened Moliere's eyes to the
MOLIERE
possibility of a career so glorious that
the profession of upholsterer to the
king seemed commonplace in con-
trast. To assume this is, as Moland
says, to assume too much. Few boys
have not had at some time or other a
passion for the stage. Moliere doubt-
less enjoyed his first play-going expe-
riences in the company of his grand-
father, but jit seems more reasonable to
trace his deeper interest in theatrical
things to the practical experience in
dramatics got at the famous Jesuit
schooLknown as the College de Cler-
mont. I
M
Moliere was a pupil here from
October, 1636, to August, 1641.^ The
school was large and fashionable,
numbering seventeen hundred day-
pupils and three hundred boarders,
-i- 19-1-
j * m u m ^
MOLIERE
Among the names enrolled were to be
found representatives of such great
families as Conti, Rohan, Montmo-
rency, Richelieu, and Crequi. There
was a faculty of three hundred mem-
bers. The instruction combined the
best offered by the traditions of the
past with an unusual amount of mod-
ern science ; it has been remarked with
surprise that the Jesuit fathers taught
chemistry, 'or what passed for such/
They paid unusual attention to what
Lord Chesterfield in his day called the
graces/ In this school, where every
recitation was rigorously conducted in
Latin, and where Latin was used in
the dining-room and even on the play-
ground, no little care was bestowed
upon the art of dancing. At certain
times in the year, notably when the
-»-20-»-
MOLIERE
general distribution of prizes took
place, plays and ballets were pro-
duced. The reverend fathers wrote
many of these little pieces, in which
the more gifted pupils displayed their
talents both elocutionary and terpsi-
chorean. To the influences brought to
bear upon him at the Jesuit college
Loiseleur attributes Moliere's ' un-
happy taste ' for tragedy and his con-
summate skill in the composition of
ballets.
Among his fellow pupils young
Poquelin could reckon the Prince de
Conti, younger brother of Conde ; also
Hesnault, Bernier, and Chapelle. The
three last mentioned were his intimate
friends. If Moliere met the young
prince at all it would be only in the
classroom.
MOLIERE
Chapelle was a natural son of Luil-
lier, the * maitre des comptes,' a friend
and patron of Gassendi. To Luillier
must be given the credit of having
made it possible for these four lads,
Hesnault, Bernier, Chapelle, and Jean-
Baptiste Poquelin, to enjoy lessons
from Gassendi. Cyrano de Bergerac
also became a member of the circle.
Grimarest says that the Gascon forced
himself upon the little party of youth-
ful philosophers, and that it was a
problem how to get rid of him. They
solved it by letting him remain. Cy-
rano may have used adroit and insinu-
ating ways to get admitted, but he had
wit enough to make himself agree-
able and amusing when once of the
number.
After finishing his ' humanities '
-I- 22+-
MOLIERE
and completing such studies under
Gassendi as his father's plans allowed,,,,
I Moliere went to Orleans to study law.)
No small pains have been taken to
determine the extent of the poet's
legal knowledge. This much at least
is clear, that when Moliere uses the
phraseology of law he not only uses it
exactly, but also with the ease and
spontaneity of one who is not parad-
ing knowledge got up for the occa-
sion. Some emphasis too may be laid
upon the fact that Moliere never satir-
izes the lawyers as he does the physi-
cians. Perhaps, knowing them as he
did, he liked and respected them ; per-
haps he had some traces of sentiment
about a profession with which he was
at one time closely allied.
It is amusing to find that after
MOLlkRE
graduating from the College de Cler-
mont and taking his law degree at the
University of Orleans, Moliere was
put to the study of arithmetic and
penmanship. This was a special train-
ing for a mercantile pursuit, a paral-
lel to which could easily be found at
the present day. If we may conclude
that the study of law was looked
upon merely as part of a liberal edu-
cation, it is safe to assume that the
young man was now at issue with his
father on the subject of his career in
life. The question was whether or
not he should be allowed to give up
the honorable profession of hereditary
upholsterer to the king for the disrep-
utable business of play-acting. The
problem is constantly recurring, and
has every time to be solved anew on
-+ 24-1-
MOLlkRE
the individual merits of the case. No
general principle can be found to gov-
ern all instances. It is still possible to
find an occasional actor who would
have graced the upholstery business.
On the other hand, what scholar or
critic will presume fully to estimate the
loss to the stage and to literature had
not Moliere followed his bent with al-
most blind recklessness? The testi-
mony of friends and enemies alike
goes to show that his passion for the
theatre in all its forms had become a
frenzy. There is no cure for madness
of this sort; it must run its course.
The young man probably scandalized
his father by the ease with which he
put aside all the important concerns
of life to run after players.) Charles
Dickens, it is said, had so profound an
MOLlkRE
interest in the stage that he would
witness the most commonplace act-
ing patiently and sympathetically. He
derived a certain pleasure from the
efforts of these people — a pleasure
totally unmixed with cynicism. In
much the same spirit only with greater
intensity young Moliere, after his re-
turn from Orleans, proceeded to slake
his thirst for things dramatic. He
drank in greedily whatever Paris had
to give. " Great comedians and small,
Italian and French, tragic and comic,
buffoons and jugglers, he followed and
saw them all.'
Nor was he content to be a mere
spectator. The story of Moliere and
the two • charlatans ' of the Pont-Neuf
is thought to have a foundation in
fact, though told upon the authority
-»• 26 -I-
MOLIERE
of the poet's bitterest enemy. It is
found in a satiric comedy entitled
Elomire hypocondre ou les Medecins
venges, by Le Boulanger de Chalussay.
The name Elomire is an anagram of
Moliere. The author of the play was
intimately acquainted with many facts
of Moliere's life. He knew so much
that it often requires the most delicate
criticism to determine the line between
truth and fiction. He sneers at the
poet for having in those early days so
completely devoted himself to what-
ever in the remotest way touched
upon theatrical affairs. Moliere is ac-
cused of having lost his head to the
extent of applying for a position of
assistant to the sleight-of-hand per-
formers of the Pont-Neuf. Moland
2 7
^ 5 \ / S&te ft ^
MOLlkRE
characterizes this story as ' an absurd
invention.'
There is more ground for believing
the tradition that Moliere studied the
method of the famous Italian mime
known to the public under the name
of Scaramouche. Vermeulen's por-
trait of Scaramouche has under it a
quatrain, one line of which says, —
Ilfut le maitre de Moliere.
The author of the play of fclomire hy-
pocondre elaborates this tradition, and
pictures Moliere standing before the
Italian comedian with a mirror in his
hand in which he studies the varying
expressions of his own face as he tries
to master the lesson of Scaramouche.
Now he personates the unhappy or
the deceived husband, jealous, raging
at heart. 4 There is no movement,
-+28^
MOLIERE
posture, or grimace which this great
scholar of the greatest of buffoons does
not do, over and over again, hundreds
of times.' Livet's edition of fclomire
hypocondre contains a facsimile of the
rare old engraving showing Moliere,
looking-glass in hand, taking his les-
son in facial expression. A story told
in such detail and with such liveliness
of manner undoubtedly has some basis
in truth.
The break with his father and with
all the traditions of his family came
when in June, 1643, Moliere signed
the contract drawn up by ten actors
and actresses (including three mem-
bers of the famous Bejart family) for
the purpose of organizing a new dra-
matic company to be known as the
4 Illustre Theatre.' The name of Jean-
-+ 29 -»-
MOLIERE
Baptiste Poquelin comes third on the
list; he was then twenty-three years
of age. The seventh name is that of
'Magdelaine Bejart/ a clever young
actress with whom Moliere was known
to be deeply enamoured. Tallemant
des Reaux states the common opinion
of her merits when he speaks of her
as a gifted comedienne, and records
the current gossip when he says that
1 a young fellow by the name of Mo-
liere left the benches of the Sorbonne
to follow her.' Tallemant is in error
more than once, as when he speaks
of Moliere at the Sorbonne ; enough
remains, however, to show that love
of Madeleine Be] art as well as love of
comedy must be reckoned among the
motives which prompted Moliere to
embark upon a theatrical career. The
MOLIERE
company is thought to have been
composed at first of amateurs, who,
after playing several months for plea-
sure, determined to make a profession
of what had hitherto been a pastime. 1
The audacity and light-heartedness
of youth must partly account for this
title of the ' Illustre Theatre.' In a
contract made with the dancer, Daniel
Mallet, occurs for the first time, so far
as we know, the name which was to be-
come world-famous through the genius
of him who adopted it — the name of
Moliere. Young Poquelin was not
merely content to assume a more
euphonious cognomen than the one
borne by his father and grandfather,
but he must needs improve upon im-
1 Larroumet : La Comedie de Moliere, Paris,
1887, p. 77.
MOLIERE
provement by giving that name the
prefix de. The new company of play-
ers was illustrious, and of its members
one, at least, was noble ! All this was
innocently done, and perhaps wholly
in the spirit of that member of the
Petit Cenacle described by Gautier
who turned plain Jean into Jehan and
got indescribable satisfaction from his
Gothic h. Moreover, there are many
things one can do at the age of twen-
ty-five for which he will have no
heart after he is forty.
y The elder Poquelin by no means
gave over his efforts to persuade the
prodigal son to relinquish a foolish
undertaking.} He sent Georges Pinel,
who had been Moliere's writing-mas-
ter, to argue with the young man and
if possible bring him to hear reason.
MOLIERE
Pinel undertook the mission with en-
thusiasm and presented his patron's
cause with eloquence. Moliere's elo-
quence, however, was the greater. He
not only was not persuaded, but he
actually induced Pinel to leave his
pupils and join the new dramatic com-
pany. The susceptible writing-master
was flattered by being told that his
stock of Latin would perfectly fit him
to play the role of ' docteur,' and that
he would find acting a far more agree-
able mode of life than keeping a
boarding school. Pinel's name ap-
pears in the agreement for organizing
the « Illustre Theatre.'
The fortunes of the new company
were almost wholly disastrous. The
comedians, no doubt, played their
parts with vivacity and skill ; the pub-
MOLIERE
lie, however, was not greatly moved.
Auditors came, but not in sufficient
numbers, and salaries cannot be paid
in appreciation. The 'Illustre Thea-
tre ' tried various quarters of Paris
only to meet with the same rebuff, in
each new locality. They were like
a well-known character in a certain
book of humor in that they were en-
dowed with the very genius of ill-luck.'
Their first performances were given
in the jeu de paume (tennis-court)
known as 'Metayers/ from Nich-
olas and Louis Metayer, its first pro-
prietors. Six months later they moved
to jeu de paume ' de la Croix-Noire P
near Port Saint-Paul. It was thought
that they might thrive among the wits
and amateurs of literature who fre-
quented this quarter. Disappointed
MOLIERE
here, they moved again, this time to
6 Croix-Blanche ' in the Faubourg
Saint-Germain; 'and for the third
time they found only the desert.'
For Moliere himself the next four
years constituted a period of personal
disappointment and mortification in
addition to the misery he shared with
his fellow-players. Paraphrasing a fa-
mous epigram : To make a failure is
at any time a sin ; but to make a fail-
ure in the presence of unsympathetic
neighbors and critical relatives is worse
— it is a blunder. A young man who
proposes to play the fool should go
away from home to do it. Nothing
illustrates better the tenacity of Mo
liere's purpose than the history of his
connection with the ' Illustre Theatre.'
He made intimate acquaintance with
MOLIERE
the seamy side of Seventeenth Cen-
tury theatrical life. He knew the
money-lenders and usurers, the pawn-
brokers and the sheriffs. At one time
he was imprisoned in the Chatelet
for a debt of a hundred and forty-
three livres owed to Antoine Fausser,
dealer in candles. There were yet
other debts for which he might have
suffered detention had not a friend,
Leonard Aubry, * paveur des batiments
du roi,' come to his help. Moliere's
father has been roundly abused for not
showing himself active and conspicu-
ous in backing up his son in these
theatrical ventures. Such abuse is
both superfluous and uncritical. The
doctrine may be old-fashioned, but
not necessarily unsound, that fathers
should be allowed some independ-
-t.36.H-
MOLIERE
ence of judgment and action even
when they happen to be the fathers
of distinguished men. Twelve years
were yet to elapse before Moliere
should have fully justified his choice
of a profession. Jean Poquelin, the
upholsterer, lived to see his eldest son
almost at the height of his contem-
porary fame. Yet it were gratuitous
to assume that the old man cared to
or could fully appreciate the nature
of the son's triumph. For the sake of
sturdy human nature and to the end
that examples of the ' man of char-
acter' may exist in all ages and in
every country, it is to be hoped that
Jean Poquelin died unreconciled to
is son's course.
There being no immediate future
for the * Illustre Theatre ' in Paris,
j s \ z e ste d / s ^
MOLl&RE
save a future made up of poverty and
failure, they determined to go into the
provincial towns. Where dramatic
entertainments were fewer than in the
metropolis they might at least get a
hearing. The precise moment of de-
parture is unknown ; it probably oc-
curred some time ' during the last
months of 1645 or the beginning of
1646/ Nor is it certain what members
of the original company united with
Madeleine Bejart and Moliere in this
new venture. For the next twelve
years the poet led the nomadic life of
a provincial Thespian. With all its
hardships and deprivations, its vulgar-
ity and ennui, this section of Moliere's
history is to be accounted of highest
importance in his intellectual and ar-
tistic development.
^38-
II
T
JlHE most superficial acquaint-
ance with the methods of biographers
makes clear how absolutely essential
it is that the lives of great men should
' fall into periods/ Imagine the blow
to the orthodox conception of bio-
graphical criticism if we were not al-
lowed to picture a great dramatic poet
repeating the syllables in each line of
verse to ascertain if they developed
the style of metre it was his duty to
posterity to be using at that special
-*39-*-
MOLIERE
period of his life.' In other words, the
critics must have periods,' if they
have to invent them.
It is a relief to find that now and
then these divisions actually occur in
the life of a man of letters quite of
their own accord. The mere change
of locale makes the years of Moliere's
provincial wanderings stand out in
marked contrast to all that goes before
and all that follows.
/(There fell to his share certain re-
sponsibilities of which he had hitherto
known but little. He became the di-
rector of the troupe, if not at once,
certainly very soon after the beginning
of the provincial tour. He rose to this
position by his gift for leadership.
He was a born drill-master.! It rarely
happens that men with the faculty for
-»-40-»-
MOLIERE
control do not find something upon
which to exercise their powers; and
if they have the ability to control in a
great way the opportunity is sure to
arise. The doctrine of mute inglori-
ous Miltons ' and ' village Hampdens '
is a very pretty one, but it is as absurd
as it is poetical ; your real Hampden
does not find the 4 village tyrant ' a
foeman of sufficient importance.
f Moliere was not only an actor and
a manager, but he became a writer./
This might have happened in Paris
quite as well as in the provinces, but
I believe the pressure of necessity
helped to awaken his inventive pow-
ers. \ In the city he could have pro-
cured plays ; in the country it was not
an easy matter, and he must make
them. Aside from that always power-
-+41 +-
0k * & * / ^K,
MOLlkRE
ful motive, mere gratification of the
instinct for authorship, [such an addi-
tional incentive as the positive need
to have a new play at a given time
was an immense stimulusj We can
hardly overestimate its force. J
The provinces, too, were an excel-
lent field for the observer of human na-
ture. Society was immobile. Strange
characters abounded. Men lived, died,
and were buried in the towns where
they were born. He who travelled a
hundred miles was something of an
adventurer, and was held in becoming
reverence when he got home. Men
who had been to Paris took marked
precedence over their fellow-citizens
and had argument, not for a week but
for the rest of their natural days.
Strangers coming to these lesser towns
-H42 4-
k m & m < %.
MOLIERE
and villages were as great a curiosity
to the inhabitants as the inhabitants
were to them. Even to a youth who
had been brought up in the shadow
of the Parisian markets ' where wit
had flourished from time immemorial,'
who knew the varied life of the Col-
lege de Clermont and the halls of the
University of Orleans, and who had
endured the buffets which Fortune
bestows upon most dramatic tyros, —
even to such a youth the provinces
must have seemed rich in material for
the study of human nature.
The most marked contrast of all
would be found in the opening up of
vast tracts of unfilled time. The busy
hum of men may be heard in market-
towns as well as in towered cities, but
it is never so unremitting in the one as
MOLIERE
in the other. ' What do you do with
your time ? ' inquires the cockney of
the villager, and the latter cannot give
a really satisfactory answer. Busy as
he was and exacting as were his re-
sponsibilities, Moliere must have had,
now and then, the sense of a larger
leisure than he had hitherto known.
And it was in part due to this, I
firmly believe, that he became 'so
deep contemplative.'
The early history of Moliere's pro-
vincial campaigns is quite obscure.
When Taschereau published, in 1828,
the second edition of his Histoire de
la Vie et des Ouvrages de Moliere, he
was compelled to acknowledge that
'all the circumstances of Moliere's
life from the beginning of 1646 up to
1653 were a ^ most entirely unknown.'
MOLIERE
By a careful study of the civil regis-
ters in various parts of the south
and east of France, many blanks in
our information have been supplied ;
though it is not yet possible to trace
the wanderings of the company step
by step. However, as a biographer
has happily expressed it, while we
may not know at a given instant just
where Moliere and his people are,
we may be sure that they will not be
long out of sight.
The two sorts of documents which
furnish indisputable proof of the pre-
sence of the company in a given place
are the registers in which were in-
scribed the permission of the munici-
pal authorities to give a performance
in the town, and the 4 actes de Petat
civil' which contain records of the
moli£re
baptism of such children as were born
into the theatrical profession. If we
may believe the records these domes-
tic events were not few. 1 ' * The child
was baptized where it was born and
the members of the company were
godparents or witnesses.'
There is an ancient tradition to the
effect that when Scarron wrote his Ro-
man comique he had Moliere's troupe
in mind. The very place and the ex-
act time of the meeting between the
great dramatist and the famous satirist
have been indicated. The tradition
enjoyed a long life, but has no stand-
ing at the present day. Scarron hardly
needed a particular group of models
1 Les comediennes de la troupe etaient d'une
singuliere fecondite. — Moland.
-+46-1-
MOLIERE
from which to paint his realistic can-
vas ; nor was Moliere's the only com-
pany of itinerant players to be met
with in the Seventeenth Century. It
is thought that when Scarron was
about composing his study of provin-
cial Bohemia the troupe in which our
interest centres was not fully organ-
ized, or at least that it had not ac-
quired reputation sufficient to make it
the object of satire. Moreover Scar-
ron's picture is too broad. The man-
ners of the time were easy, theatrical
manners included. Le Breton says
that the arrival in a town of a band
of strolling players was a signal to
the inhabitants to look out for their
poultry-yards. None the less it is an
unjustifiable exaggeration when one
proposes to identify Moliere and his
-+47-«-
MOLIERE
companies with a vagabond troupe
such as Scarron has described. Even
if Moliere was not always — as Mo-
land insists that he was — allied with
la haute societe of his time, he was as
far as possible removed from the other
extreme. The pupil of Gassendi may-
be imagined arriving in a town of
South France • with one foot shod and
the other bare ' and accompanied by a
troupe only a little better clad than
FalstafPs regiment; but this picture
can only be evoked by the aid of an
unbridled imagination.
After turning over an infinite num-
ber of dry parchments, and after weigh-
ing obscure references with a care only
equalled by that of a goldsmith in
handling precious metals, the scholars
have determined with reasonable accu-
-1-48 -*-
MOLIERE
racy the course taken by Moliere and
his people.
In 1647 ne * s believed to have
visited Toulouse, Albi, and Carcas-
sonne. In April of the following year
he was certainly at Nantes, for his
name, disguised as 'Morlierre,' is
found on the register of the Hotel de
Ville. He is described as ' one of the
comedians of the troupe of St. Du-
fresne.' In 1649 ne a gain visited
Toulouse, going thence to Montpellier
and Narbonne. In February, 1650,
he was at Agen and in December at
Pezenas during the session of the Es-
tates. In 1651 his troupe gave per-
formances at Vienne, and in 1652 at
Carcassonne.
Beginning with the year 1652 Lyon
was the headquarters of the company.
^49+-
MOLlkRE
Moliere and his people would make
excursions to the surrounding towns
and villages. These trips were some-
times of long duration, lasting perhaps
a half year. For example, in 1653
Moliere went from Lyon to Pezenas
and remained during the entire session
of the Estates, that is, from March 17
to June 1. In the latter part of the
same year he was at la Grange-des-
Pres. He returned to Montpellier in
December, 1654. After a long stay
in Lyon he went to Avignon and
then back to Pezenas. From Pezenas
he went to Narbonne and thence to
Beziers. In 1657 ne was at Lyon,
Dijon, Pezenas, and Avignon. From
Avignon he went to Grenoble for the
Carnival, thence to Rouen. On the
24th of October, 1658, they reached
MOLIERE
Paris, coming directly from Rouen.
This in brief is the itinerary of one of
the most interesting organizations with
which dramatic history has to do.
The troupe had two distinguished
patrons. From 1646 to 1652 they
were known as the 4 comediens de M.
le due d'Epernon.' The Due d'Eper-
non was the governor of Guyenne.
From a personal interest in Madeleine
Bejart this nobleman was led to take
her companions under his powerful
protection.
In September or October, 1653,
Moliere offered his services to the
Prince de Conti. The Prince was
making merry like a young Sardana-
palus, filling the cup of life to the
brim during those days of bachelor-
hood which were left him. His resi-
MOLIERE
dence was the Chateau de la Grange-
des-Pres near Pezenas. Hither came
Moliere and his troupe. When the
Prince presided, as representative of
the King, at the Estates of Languedoc,
this company of players was sum-
moned to furnish entertainment. The
documents show how increasingly im-
portant Moliere's position was becom-
ing.
Larroumet has brought out very
clearly in his admirable chapter on
Madeleine Bejart the division of re-
sponsibilities between the three most
important members of the company.
Dufresne, 'an old stager,' who had
conducted a theatrical troupe in the
provinces before now, was the nomi-
nal head. \ Moliere was the inspiring
and directing force in all that apper-
— »- 52 -*—
MOLIERE
tained to the actual production of the
plays. ) Mademoiselle Bejart had an
eye to the stage settings and cos-
tumes, and kept a firm hand on the
department of finance. That Moliere
was a man of affairs admits of no
doubt ; but Madeleine Bejart, who was
so skilful an actress that she could
play with equal success the part of
soubrette or of a princess of tragedy,
was a ' man ' of affairs too. Larroumet
calls her the steward and ' intendant '
of the association. There are many
proofs of the ' vigilance and strength '
with which her administration was
conducted.
With the little city of Pezenas
Moliere's name is intimately associ-
ated. He passed an entire winter
here, making excursions from time to
MOLlkRE
time in the surrounding country. It
was rough-and-tumble work, veritable
barn-storming. The towns were very
small, from one to three thousand in-
habitants ; and how slender the ac-
commodations must have been either
for uncommercial traveller or player
may be readily conceived by any one
who has tried their hospitality in the
broad light of the present civilization.
In 1655 the inns were unspeakably
wretched. Nor was the pay much
better than the fare. It is evident that
a village of a few hundred families
would not be able to contribute any
great sum of money. The company
must often have given a performance
with the feeling that the sacrifices to
be made for art are limitless. Loise-
leur adduces as direct proof of the
MOLIERE
slenderness of the receipts the fact that
the cost of travel was often levied
upon the townspeople; they were
compelled to furnish horses and wag-
ons to convey the actors and their
luggage from one town to the next.
We often hear of soldiers being
quartered upon a community; it is
something new to hear of a theatrical
troupe being billeted on its audiences.
A requisition of this kind would
need to be made at the instance of
some powerful nobleman like the
Prince de Conti; for the Prince was
famed for his 'cheerful prodigality
with other people's money/
The theatrical accommodations
were of the most primitive sort, and
varied in poorness with the character
and size of the individual towns. A
j m a to m m,
MOLIERE
play-house especially constructed and
equipped with theatrical appliances
was almost unknown. Even in Paris,
the ' Illustre Theatre ' had played in a
tennis-court; to be sure, these courts
were supplied with a stage in cases
where the owner could depend upon
a tolerably regular demand for such
a thing. Happy were the wandering
tragedians of the provinces if they
could find a 'jeu de paume' or a rid-
ing-school which might readily be im-
provised into a theatre. In the smaller
places they had to be content with a
barn lighted with lanterns. In such
a theatre the hero of tragedy might
at any moment find his periods punc-
tuated by « the braying of an ass or
the bellowing of a bull.'/
56
MOLIERE
Rigal * has shown what and how
many were the tribulations of wander-
ing theatrical companies in the early
Seventeenth Century. His chapter re-
fers to a time just before the classic
period. Not all the sources of dis-
comfort had been removed when Mo-
liere was touring the south of France.
Sometimes the Church set herself
against the strollers who made their
appearance at an inopportune time;
the priests went so far as to threaten
to discontinue Lenten services unless
the players took their departure. The
death of a distinguished man would
keep the public from a performance.
Not infrequently the authorities re-
fused a license, pleading ' hard times '
1 Eugene Rigal : Le Theatre Fran$ais y pp.
8-26.
MOLlRRE
and urging the necessity of protecting
the people from temptation. Or the
license was granted provided the com-
pany would agree to play its best
piece for the benefit of the local hos-
pital. But the worst misfortune of all,
says Rigal, was the meeting of two
theatrical troupes in the same town.
This occasionally happened in spite
of their precautions.
At Pezenas was situated the shop
of the barber Gely, whose name is
often linked with Moliere's. A bar-
ber-shop filled a more important func-
tion in the Seventeenth Century than
in the Twentieth. It was a centre for
news, for political discussion, for gos-
sip. It was a sort of club, open to all,
a place where one might pleasantly
beguile many a moment on the plea
MOLIERE
of waiting one's turn. The barber
himself was a privileged person, often-
times clever, at all events sure to be
filled with modern instances if not
with wise saws. Moliere, during his
long stay in Pezenas, used to go with
great regularity to Gely's shop and
watch the queer characters who con-
gregated there, hear their talk, take
mental note of their absurdities and
whims. Like ' Democritus junior ' he
made himself for the moment ' a mere
spectator of other men's fortunes and
adventures, and how they act their
parts.' The ancient armchair in which
he used to sit is still in existence. Its
authenticity seems to be unusually
well established. Whatever form of
scepticism may seize Pezenas, in com-
mon with the rest of the world, the
-+5<
j k\ e state ^^.
MOLIRRE
inhabitants at least never lose their
faith in the genuineness of the • fau-
teuil de Moliere.'
In 1655 (some biographers put the
date two years earlier) Moliere made
his beginning as a dramatic author
with rJELtourdi, a comedy of intrigue
in the Italian style, an imitation in
part of the Innavertito of Barbieri. It
has the merit of originality, not be-
cause of the ingenious construction
but because of the beauty of the style.
Victor Hugo, always magnificent in
denunciation or in praise, declared
that Vfitourdi was the best written
of all Moliere's comedies. Not every
critic is prepared to go to this extreme
of eulogy. Few will dissent from the
opinion that these earlier comedies of
Moliere, such as VfLtourdi, represent
MOLIERE
perfectly the genius of the French
language.
Moliere's second comedy, le D'epit
amoureux, was given at Beziers in
1656. The troupe had been sum-
moned there at a meeting of the Es-
tates, and this play was one of the
novelties with which that honorable
body was entertained. Like its pre-
decessor, the D'epit amoureux is taken
from the Italian. The Interresse of
Secchi furnished many of the motives.
Mesnard believes that the piece was
composed rapidly, and perhaps with-
out other intention at first than to give
a French rendering of an Italian play.
But the design grew under Moliere's
hands, and the result was a play too
original to admit of being classed as a
mere transcription. It will be remem-
-+6n-
MOLIERE
bered perhaps that when the Comedie-
Fran9aise celebrated Moliere's birth-
day during the siege of Paris in 1871,
the director selected the D'epit amou-
reux as one of two plays to be per-
formed on that occasion. An im-
mense audience gathered to do honor
to the national poet. The sparkle and
gaiety of the piece were rendered
more striking by the grim accompani-
ments of war. Cannon muttered and
roared in the distance, and shells were
bursting in the streets.
Vktourdi and the D'epit amoureux
were certainly written and for the
first time produced during the latter
part of Moliere's provincial wander-
ings. It is even possible that a more
brilliant work than either of these
should be referred to the same period.
-»- 62 -»-
MOLIERE
If, as Grimarest affirms, the Precieuses
ridicules was also produced in the
provinces long before its famous de-
but at Paris, the fact is one of high
interest. Nothing would be more rea-
sonable than to suppose that Moliere
found a motive for his lively satire in
the ridiculous antics of the country
precieuses. The disease of preciosity
had excited Chapelle's mirth. 'Mo-
liere was quite as capable as Chapelle
of making observations upon the
strange malady.'
6 3 ^
in
OLIERE'S thoughts must
often have turned towards his native
place during these years of work and
travel. After all, he was a Parisian;
and what true Parisian looks upon
time spent in the provinces as other
than time wasted ? He may grant,
perhaps, that it is good for him to
undergo the discipline of an enforced
absence from the beloved city; it
sharpens the power of appreciation
as fasting whets the appetite. None
MOLIERE
the less will he insist that it cannot be
called living.
Such day-dreaming as Moliere may-
have indulged in was probably not of
the sentimental type. The busy life
of an actor-manager afforded but a
minimum of time for idle reverie or
nostalgia. He thought of Paris, but
he thought of it as a general planning
a campaign thinks of some point of
strategical importance. 4 Here,' he says
to himself, the question at issue will
be decided/ Every month of work in
the provinces fitted this troupe of stroll-
ers a little better for the test to which
they were presently to be put. It
could not be otherwise with a man
like Moliere at the head. Moliere had
a conscience in respect to his art. He
knew that the duty lay upon him and
MOLIERE
his players of giving the best that was
in their power, whether the audience
was large or small, distinguished or
common. Impelled by such a motive
and guided by such a leader, this band
of comedians steadily grew in force
and skill amid conditions which others
might have accounted hard or even
antagonistic.
In the summer of 1658 Moliere
made several visits to Paris. His ob-
ject was to secure that high patronage
without which launching an unknown
dramatic company upon the sea of
Parisian life were a useless and heart-
breaking venture./ Through his old
protector, the Prince de Conti, he was
recommended to Monsieur, the King's
brother, and by him presented to the
King. On the 24th of October the
-+ 67-1-
MOLIERE
troupe made its first appearance be-
fore the royal family in the 4 salle des
gardes ' of the old Louvre, which had
been fitted up as a theatre for this oc-
casion. The play was Corneille's tra-
gedy of Nicomede.\\At its close Mo-
Here came forward. Apologizing in
the name of his company for their
rashness in attempting to entertain the
distinguished audience with a type of
performance in which the King's own
players so greatly excelled, — an allu-
sion to the comedians of the Hotel de
Bourgogne who were present, — he
begged that they might be allowed
to offer • one of those little divertise-
ments ' through which they had given
some pleasure and acquired some
repute in the provinces.! Permission
being granted, the lively farce of the
-+68+- '
MOLIERE
Docteur amoureux was at once played.
It is said that shouts of laughter were
raised by Moliere's irresistible imper-
sonation of the chief character. J
Having proved itself worthy of the
charge the company received the cov-
eted title of ' Troupe de Monsieur,
frere unique du roi.' Besides the
honor shared in common with his fel-
lows, each player was granted a pen-
sion of three hundred livres. The re-
ward was less splendid than it seemed.
A pension in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury was a peculiar thing, as the Abbe
Fabre has so amusingly shown. It
was granted with a smile, paid in part
and that grudgingly, too often not
paid at all. Those were the days when
an indigent man of letters could say
to an almost equally indigent actor:
— »- 69 h—
M0L1&RE
4 What, have you a pension ? I, too,
have one. Let us condole with each
other/
The new dramatic favorites were
installed in the Salle du Petit-Bour-
bon,' where they played every other
day, alternating with the Italian come-
dians. The head of the latter troupe
was the famous Scaramouche. Mo-
Here's company included at this time
the following men : Joseph and Louis
Bejart, Duparc, Dufresne, and DeBrie.
The actresses were the Demoiselles
Madeleine Bejart, Duparc, DeBrie,
and Herve (Genevieve Bejart). Three
of these women were noted for their
beauty; all were more or less human
in a willingness to find occasion for
professional and personal jealousy.
In November and December of this
-H- 70+-
MOLIERE
same year Moliere produced the two
comedies which had been so warmly-
received in Lyon and Montpellier,
namely VfLtourdi and the Depit amou-
reux ; their success at the Petit-Bour-
bon was no less complete than it
had been in the provincial towns.
Moliere was now on the eve of a tri-
umph much greater than could be
hoped for through the inadequate
resources of the Italian comedy of
intrigue. He was to begin that incom-
parable series of studies in contempo-
rary manners, that brilliant and flash-
ing group of satires on contemporary
foibles, upon which his fame chiefly
rests. The Moliere of the Depit amou-
reux or of VEtourdi was merely a
skilful craftsman in a type of work no
longer new, and which could be lifted
-+ 71 +-
MOLI&RE
to no higher level than that upon
which it had been placed long before
his time. ( The Moliere of the Pre-
cieuses ridicules was original, a creator, j
This sparkling comedy was first
played on the 18th of November,
1659. The to&c alone was sufficient
to attract >the universal attention of
play-goers. Everybody knew what a
precieuse was, and many a man had
already fitted Moliere's adjective to
some individual precieuse whom he .
liked least. It was for Moliere him-
self with his gaiety, his daring, his
flashing dialogue, his overflowing good
humor, to make the word * precieuse ?
and the word • ridicule * so insepa-
rable that it has taken years of study
and many hundred pages of critical
writing to convince the world that a
-i- 72-1-
MOLlkRE
precieuse would be anything but ab-
surd.
That Moliere intended to satirize
the Hotel de Rambouillet and its
famous mistress is altogether unlikely.
A lovable and gracious lady now past
sixty years of age, a woman of irre-
proachable character and noblest an-
cestry, a loyal wife and a devoted
mother, a generous hostess whose draw-
ing-rooms had been for thirty-five years
the centre of the most refined society
of the age — such a woman now in her
widowhood and burdened by many
other sorrows neither is nor can be
made an object of raillery and satire.
To suppose Moliere capable of such
lack of taste and brutality as would be
evinced by his singling out the Mar-
quise and holding her up to public
MOLlkRE
laughter is to do him injustice. In
depicting Madelon and Cathos di-
viding their time between washes and
cosmetics, madrigals and the 'Carte
de Teridre,' and ignorant of the world
to the point of not knowing the dif-
ference between a valet and a gentle-
man so long as the valet was disguised
in the master's clothes, Moliere was
manifestly laughing at the foolish wo-
men in the outermost rim of polite
society whose only hope of distinction
lay in aping the manners and talk of
great ladies. Such women had not
even the merit of being first-hand
imitations. They were the copies of
copies, the distorted reflections of
other reflections.
The great days of the Hotel de
Rambouillet began about 1630, when
0k m to m H k
MOLIERE
Moliere was a lad of eight. This pe-
riod of social splendor and pre-emi-
nence continued at the outside about
twenty years ; some scholars make it
a little less, putting the close at the
time of Voiture's death, 1648. When
Corneille, the most popular dramatic
poet of the hour, famous for his tra-
gedies of the Cid, Horace, and Cinna,
was introduced to the mistress of the
Hotel de Rambouillet, about the year
1640, Moliere, eighteen years of age,
had finished his « humanities ' and was
taking lessons in philosophy in com-
pany with Chapelle. When the boy-
preacher, Bossuet, was presented to
the Marquise in 1643 and improvised
his famous midnight sermon, Moliere,
a youth of twenty-one* had had a va-
riety of experiences. He had been for
MOLlkRE
some months at Narbonne in attend-
ance upon the king, Louis XIII, in
the capacity of presumptive tapissier
valet-de-chambre ; he had pursued his
law-studies at Orleans, and he was
on the eve of founding the « Illustre
Theatre/ After the failure of his first
dramatic venture he went to the pro-
vinces, and for twelve years saw little
of Parisian life save in brief and hur-
ried visits made at long intervals.
Therefore he could know nothing of
the Hotel de Rambouillet from first-
hand report during the period when
the influence of that great house was
most potent, and potent chiefly for
good. In the provincial towns, how-
ever, Moliere must have seen many a
coquette whose affected manners and
whose speech tricked out with the
— «- 76 -•—
MOLIERE
foolish phrases of third-rate salons and
ruelles would serve as a model for
Madelon or Cathos of the Precieuses
ridicules.
On the day when this famous com-
edy was first given 'all Hotel de
Rambouillet was present,' and ap-
plauded with an enthusiasm rather
difficult to comprehend if it regarded
the satire as directly applicable to it-
self. There was no spectator of taste
and judgment to whom the winsome
little piece was not a revelation of new
resources in dramatic art. The air of
reality given to the whole performance
made people feel as if they were be-
holding an actual scene from con-
temporary life. Here was something
fresh, spontaneous, irresistible. Gri-
marest relates that one day at a per-
MOLlkRE
formance of the Precieuses ridicules, an
old man in the parterre cried out,
1 Courage, courage, Moliere, voila la
bonne comedie ! ' Destructive criti-
cism has set aside most of the pictur-
esque stories collected by Moliere's
first biographer. But this one might
easily be true. The incident is not
out of reason, and the old man's com-
mendation neither extravagant nor
extravagantly expressed. Here was
indeed the true type of comedy for
which the public had been waiting so
long. An attempt on the part of some
outraged 'alcoviste' to interdict the
play only served to inflame public
curiosity. When it was presented
again after its brief suspension the in-
terest was so great that the price of
MOLlRRE
admission was doubled; this rarely
happened at the Petit-Bourbon.
LNot unnaturally Moliere was
arged with plagiarism ; /the world
often finds it difficult or impossible
to believe that the man most likely
to have written a certain thing was
the man who really wrote it. He
was accused of having robbed the
Abbe de Pure. The intellectual riches
of the Abbe de Pure were not so
abundant that he could be robbed
without serious inconvenience to him-
self, a fact less apparent then than now.
And so the tale was gravely told of
how the Precieuses ridicules was taken
from a piece of de Pure's, written
in Italian and played in 1656. Mo-
liere himself seems not to have thought
the ridiculous charge worth the trouble
MOLI&RE
of a denial. The true answer to such
an accusation consists in writing yet
another play, as good or better, and
another after that. It was easy to say
that Moliere stole the idea of the Pre-
cieuses ridicules, but what was to be
done about VEcole des Maris, the F&-
cheux, and / '£c ole des Femmes ? The
most gifted robber, if he be really a
robber, must be caught at last.
It was thought a backward step
when Moliere, after marking out a
new path for himself, returned to
the Italian comedy of intrigue and
wrote Sganarelle, ou le Cocu imaginaire
( 1 660). Taschereau criticises the chief
personage of this play as too unreal
to interest, and too often a buffoon to
admit of his being strictly a comic
character. The freshness and gaiety
-h8o+-
MOLIERE
of the piece attracted a crowd of spec-
tators day after day for more than
forty days. Even if Moliere lost
ground with the finer judges of dra-
matic literature, he at least held his
own with the play-going public. They
were thoroughly amused, and in no
mood to welcome Don Garcie de Na-
varre, ou le Prince jaloux, a comedie
heroi'que, which was produced at the
Palais-Royal in February, 1661.
\Don Garcie is classed among the
few failures of this great dramatist
The play has been abused beyond
reason. Moliere later incorporated
some of its best passages in the Mi-
santhrope, 'not from a motive of
economy, but because he knew they
were worthy of being preserved.' He
did not yield to the popular verdict
MOLlkRE
without a struggle. Don Garcie was
played before the King in 1662, and
a year afterwards before the Prince de
Conde, then again before the King.
Hoping the public would revise its
opinion after it had time to reflect
upon the matter, the author once
more put the piece upon the boards
at the Palais-Royal. This time the
verdict was unmistakable, so unmis-
takable that the play was not even
printed until after Moliere's death.
</ In June, 1661, Moliere reasserted
his claim to originality by the pro-
duction of the famous Ecole des
Maris, and in August of the same
year the ' court comedy { Les Facheux
was played at the fetes which Fou-
quet gave at his country-seat of Vaux
in honor of Louis XIV. In the first
MOLlkRE
of these two studies of contemporary-
manners Moliere returns to the type
of comedy in which he had once be-
fore shown himself an absolute mas-
ter. The Ecole des Maris is original
in precisely the way in which the Pr'e-
cieuses ridicules is original. The dra-
matist borrows an idea from the an-
cients here and there. Terence in his
Adelphi had contrasted two types of
education, the genial and the severe.
But what gives vitality to Moliere's
piece is taken from the vivid present.
The scenes throb with life. The char-
acters appealed at once to every spec-
tator by their human qualities.
Two brothers, Ariste and Sganarelle,
have as wards two sisters, Leonor and
Isabelle. Each undertakes the care of
one of the young girls and brings her
-+83 4-
MOLlkRE
up according to his theory. Ariste, who
is genial, open-handed, a man of the
world in the best sense of the word,
says: 'Give a girl some liberty, she
will be none the worse for it/ Sga-
narelle, who is harsh and suspicious,
says: 'By no means, keep a girl at
home, and then you know where she
is.' Ariste thinks that old as he is his
ward will love him none the less for
having seen life. Sganarelle thinks
that if his ward mends his linen and
knits stockings she will be having
excitement enough; if she rebels he
proposes to take her back to the
country to live with the cabbages and
turkeys. Sganarelle reaps the natural
reward of undue severity. Isabelle
says to herself that a man so intoler-
able as a guardian will be a hundred
MOLlfiRE
times worse as a husband. She is
fairly driven to the arms of her lover,
Valere. Isabelle's ingenuity in mak-
ing the egoistic guardian act as a go-
between, carry letters, repeat messages,
and in all possible ways further Va-
lere's suit, is intensely comic.
The construction of the Rcole des
Maris is ingenious ; on the other hand
les Facheux has almost no plot what-
ever.
An amiable marquis, firaste, anx-
ious for a meeting with his inamorata,
is beset by bores, each of whom de-
tains him on some ridiculous pretext.
His efforts to escape furnish the audi-
ence no end of merriment. Every one
who witnesses the play recalls his own
experience in running into all the
people whom at a given moment he
MOLlkRE
least cares to meet, firaste meets Li-
sandre, who is music-mad, and insists
on humming over a tune he has just
composed, and pacing the steps of a
dance to accompany it. Once rid of
this bore feraste encounters Alcandre,
who wants his services as second in a
duel. £raste has his doubts about
duelling, and makes his escape only to
fall into the clutches of Alcippe, who
has had wonderful ill luck at a game
of piquet and must needs go into all
the details. Two other bores insist
that Eraste settle a dispute for them.
Another desires to read a petition he
has drawn up urging an orthographi-
cal reform in sign-boards over tavern
doors. The next bore wants to make
firaste's fortune for him, not through
copper stocks, but by an invention
-►86^
MOLIERE
which will so please the King that in-
ventor and intermediary must profit
beyond the dreams of avarice.
The play is in three acts and the
'facheux' are ten in number. With
characteristic audacity Moliere ex-
plained to his public that he could
easily have made a five act play, so
many bores are there both at court and
in the city. The value of the piece for
readers of to-day is in the fidelity of
the character painting. Eraste's first
monologue, in which the whole race
of bores is anathematized, gives one
a better idea of the manners of the
time than could be got by reading a
dozen historical essays.
The Facheux is often cited as an
illustration of Moliere's power of rapid
invention. Only fifteen days elapsed
MOLlkRE
between the giving of the commission
and the production of the play. In
that brief time the piece was con-
ceived, written, learned, and put into
rehearsal. Other playwrights have
worked with equal rapidity, but an
examination of their product shows
the marks of haste rather than of
speed. If Moland is to be believed,
the Facheux is quite free from the
class of faults usually thought to be
involved in hurried composition.
Faults of this sort would be apparent
in the style. In this case fc neither pre-
cision nor clarity is wanting/ On the
other hand, it is utterly absurd to as-
sume that Moliere had not in mind
some latent idea which to be brought
out needed but an occasion, like that
afforded by the fetes at Vaux. He
MOLIERE
may even have had a first sketch • in
his portfolio. According to de Vize
the portfolio contained more materi-
als than the distinguished comedian
could use. • Moliere received from
people of quality memoranda of
which they begged him to avail him-
self. One evening after the play,' says
de Vize, \ I saw him in great embar-
rassment searching everywhere for tab-
lets in order to write down what was
said to him by the people of condi-
tion who gathered about him.' De
Vize's narrative would lead one to
suppose that each of these fine gentle-
men had some friend whom he wished
to see held up to ridicule by the arch
satirist of the day. Finally these me-
moirs accumulated to such an extent
that Moliere would have been kept
-+89-*.
MOLliRE
busy with them all his life had it not
occurred to him to put a number of
the sketches into one piece. • He then
made the comedy of the Fackeux, the
subject of which is as bad as could be
imagined/ Indeed, according to de
Vize, the piece does not deserve to be
called a play ; it is nothing more than
4 a series of detached portraits' all
taken from these ' memoirs ' furnished
by representatives of polite society.
The critic grants, however, that each
character is hit off so admirably, each
portrait is so naturally drawn and so
finely finished, that Moliere deserves
great praise.
The most credible point in all this
is the willingness and anxiety on the
part of the people of quality to hold
one another up to ridicule. Even
-••go-*-
w^ v m u m ffi *
MOLIERE
Louis himself did not fail to add his
quota by calling Moliere's attention to
M. de Soyecourt the hunter, as an
4 original ' worthy the satirist's atten-
tion. De Soyecourt was very much
of a gentleman, but when he began
to tell stories of the hunt he was like
the Ancient Mariner ; he had his will.
The listener's attitude may not have
been in any sense that of a two years'
child; none the less he listened be-
cause it was impossible to get away
from this ' narrateur impitoyable.' In
its original form the Facheux con-
tained no scene quite comparable to
that presenting the encounter with
Dorante. Poor £raste meets bores
enough, and many varieties of them,
for the number is inexhaustible. After
the first performance Louis said to
— »- 91 •»-
MOLIERE
Moliere, indicating de Soyecourt,
4 Voila un grand original que tu n'as
pas encore copie.' The hint was suf-
ficient. Within twenty-four hours the
scene where Dorante buttonholes the
unhappy Eraste was written, and at
the second performance it was incor-
porated in the play.
To any one interested in Fouquet's
career the comedy of the Facheux
will always have significance apart
from its value as dramatic literature.
It was almost the last spectacle upon
which the eyes of this unhappy victim
of a chance turn of Fortune's wheel
rested. No mere stage pageant can
compare in splendor with the ' chron-
icle-history ' of the grandeur and fall
of Nicholas Fouquet. It is said that
before the King accepted his hospi-
-H-92-I-
^ 5\ / 5*te a A sy
MOLIERE
tality for the fetes at Vaux, the surin-
tendant's ruin had been decreed, and
that only the entreaties of the queen-
mother prevented an immediate arrest.
The King's jealousy because of Fou-
quet's display of wealth and power
was alone sufficient to bring about
his downfall. Yet it may be doubted
whether that sharp note of personal
antagonism would have been intro-
duced had not the King learned that
Mademoiselle de Valliere had been
singled out for such questionable
honors as Fouquet chose to bestow
upon beautiful women. When Fou-
quet discovered that his rival was
none other than Louis himself, he had
the rash courage to congratulate the
girl upon her conquest. Overwhelmed
with confusion, she appealed to her
MOLIERE
protector. The monarch's anger was
great, and on September 5 the power-
ful minister of finance was placed
under arrest.
These events followed so hard one
upon another that it is believed Mo-
liere was compelled to forego the no
doubt splendid compensation which
the minister had promised. And if
Moliere went unpaid, so must a myriad
of less important people who had been
summoned to contribute to the splen-
dor of Fouquet's entertainment. A
man of the surintendant's position was
like a prince. He could not exactly
be said to hold lives in the hollow of
his hand, yet when he was ruined,
misery and want came to hundreds of
his dependents and to not a few of his
friends.
IV
N the 26th of December, 1662,
the famous play entitled I'Ecole des
Femmes was produced at the Theatre
du Palais-Royal. With the excep-
tion of Tartuffe, no work by the great
dramatist aroused such irritation and
awakened such jealousy.) It is diffi-
cult fully to understand the grounds
of the antagonism. Perhaps old time
play-goers took their diversion with a
degree of severity unknown to us. A
play was an affair of importance in
MOLlkRE
the second half of the seventeenth
century. It seems to have mattered
very much what a man like Moliere
put into his dramas ; just as at the pre-
sent day, when the author of Adam-
zad and the White Man's Burden pub-
lishes a new poem, the journalistic
dovecotes are fluttered for weeks af-
terward. For whatever else was said
of him, Moliere was never charged
with lack of directness, force, wit, and
the power of satire. People heard his
latest piece and always found some-
thing in it to excite discussion. With
his marked personality and strong
views, it was inevitable that he should
antagonize half of his auditors. With
his habit of close observation, his skill
in grasping the salient features in in-
dividual character, he seemed often to
-+96-1-
MOLIERE
be descending to personal satire when
perhaps he meant nothing of the kind.
People insisted upon recognizing
themselves. Then they went away to
proclaim loudly that they had been
abused.
The fccole des Femmes is a continu-
ation of the thesis laid down in the
Ecole des Maris. It might be called
a second part. The same characters
do not appear, but the situations and
a number of the ideas are repeated
with the emphasis laid in new places.
Moliere puts a most interesting per-
son on the stage, namely, a man of
the world who holds the doctrine that
the only way to get a satisfactory wife
is to train one for one's self. Such a
character must be of necessity both
amusing and pathetic. Arnolphe's
-+97 +-
r* Trtr n ^
MOLI&RE
theory of how a young woman should
be educated is very simple. Let her
be brought up in such ignorance of
the ways of the world that she won't
know enough to go wrong. Make a
fool of her if necessary; what matter,
so one preserve one's own good name !
Arnolphe, who, it must be remem-
bered, is a monomaniac on the ques-
tion suggested by the ' word of fear, ' *
never loses an opportunity to rail at
married men for their complaisance,
or their stupidity. But he proposes
to profit by their misfortunes. He
takes the beautiful Agnes from her
peasant mother, immures her within
four walls, puts trusty servants in
charge, and, at frequent intervals,
1 The song in Love' s Labor 's Lost, Act V,
scene 2.
^98^
moliMre
visits her under an assumed name
for the purpose of instructing her in
the duties of wifely obedience. Few
scenes are more amusing than that in
which Arnolphe explains to his young
protegee how great an honor he will
confer in making her his wife ; nay,
more than that, how godlike is the
condescension of any man in stoop-
ing to marry a mere woman. Agnes
accepts this with adorable patience.
She is already in love, but not with
her protector. Horace, the son of
Arnolphe's friend Oronte, has seen
this naive beauty and become enam-
oured of her. His ardent wooing
and the girl's demure response are in
Moliere's most charming vein. Un-
conscious that Arnolphe is the guar-
dian of Agnes, Horace tells him the
-+99+-
* <«retoft ( 9k
MOLIERE
whole story, thus putting him on his
guard. The scenes in which the
horrified, middle-aged egoist listens
against his will to the young man's
enthusiastic outpourings, are strikingly
vivacious and humorous. It is of
course impossible to keep the lovers
apart. Agnes follows Horace as
trustfully as the Princess in the Day-
Dream. And then, perfectly to meet
that prejudice against an alliance be-
tween people of breeding and the
lower classes, Agnes is found to be
no peasant's daughter, but a lady her-
self, by birth as well as by instinct.
The Ecole des Femmes appeared just
ten months after Moliere's marriage
with young Armande Bejart.
The critics have read into the play
not a few autobiographical facts,
-i- ioo •»-
MOLIERE
They have reason to do so, for the par-
allel between the history of this pair
and that of Moliere and Armande is
close at times. The great comedian
was not an Arnolphe, and the bril-
liant, fascinating little actress with
eyes smaller than eyes should be to
be beautiful, and a mouth that was a
trifle large, though it could not have
been more seductive, — this piquant
being, an embodiment of bewildering
charm and wayward grace, was not in
any sense the original of Agnes. Yet
the relation between Arnolphe and
Agnes suggests one phase of the rela-
tion between the poet and his young
wife. It is possible that Moliere may
have reflected more times than once,
as he watched the course of his own
passion, how foolish in general is the
** ioi -i-
MOLIERE
man of forty who imagines he can
win and hold the love of an eighteen-
year-old girl.
The attacks upon the £,cole des
Femmes prompted its author to make
a counter attack in the Critique de
FEcole des Femmes. He brings upon
the stage a group of people discussing
his own play. A precieuse prude
and a foolish marquis are offended be-
cause of the piece, the one by its gross-
ness, the other by its lack of wit. The
marquis needs no further proof of the
soundness of his position than the fact
that the parterre goes into shouts of
laughter over the performance. How
can that fail to be bad which amuses
the parterre 8 Uranie, Elise, and Do-
rante defend the author, and ridicule
the prevailing craze for stilted lan-
-+ 102 •«-
MOLI&RE
guage and affected niceness. They
are for good sense, and they incline
to the belief that plain people have
more of this commodity than by right
belongs to them, since marquises and
precieuses are so conspicuously lack-
ing in it.
The wit is at times superlatively
mordant. One must marvel at Molie-
re's courage. Yet, on the other hand,
audiences are pretty evenly balanced,
and there is a bottom of good sense '
in human nature which makes the ap-
plause come at the right point. An
audience as an audience is morally
sound, whatever it may be taken indi-
vidual by individual. Moliere, to be
sure, had the King on his side ; and
Moliere with Louis XIV was a ma-
jority. But even then, there remains
^103-^
MOLlkRE
a large residuum of courage, for which
the dramatist must have credit. Louis
could not spend his time protecting his
favorite at every point, and there were
men of sufficient power in France to
make Moliere uncomfortable. More-
over, kings are notoriously fickle, and
if the monarch's fancy should veer to
another quarter, the quondam favorite
might be regarded as in a worse case
than before. Moliere seems not to
have disturbed himself with idle spec-
ulations. He had his work to do, his
mission as a satirist to fulfil, and he
went about the task with a minimum
of anxiety for immediate or ultimate
consequences.
The merry war by no means came
to an end with the production of the
Critique. Having received insulting
-+ 104 •»-
MOLIERE
treatment at the hands of a certain
nobleman who thought he had been
attacked in the play, Moliere appealed ^ '
to the King. The monarch gave the
poet permission to lampoon his ene-
mies to the top of his bent. Moliere
made use of the privilege • in a
manner truly Aristophanic.' The Im-
promptu de Versailles was a last and
brilliant assault in this particular cam-
paign against precieuses, foppish mar-
quises, and the rival performers of
the Hotel de Bourgogne. As a docu-
ment the Impromptu is of inestimable
value. Moliere brings all his people
upon the stage, each in his own person.
We enjoy the always coveted privi-
lege of fc going behind the scenes.'
We see the great actor-manager sur-
rounded by his company. Nor does
■"*• 105 *?
MOLlkRE
he spare them in the general distribu-
tion of caustic criticism. ' Ah ! les
etranges animaux a conduire que des
comediens!' he exclaims.
In 1664 he produced le Mariage
force", la Princesse d'Elide, and the
first three acts of Tartuffe. i The Ma-
riage forc'e, a comedie-ballet, is one of
the many pieces which Moliere wrote
less to please himself than to please the
King. ' By ministering to the mon-
arch's passion for fetes and spectacles,
the poet obtained for himself the
privilege of writing Tartuffe and the
Misanthrope.' \ Critics have seen fit to
lament that Moliere should have been
compelled to waste, upon ballets and
farces, precious time and still more
precious powers, which might other-
wise have been given to the 'haute
-»• 106 *=
MOLIERE
comedie.' The attitude of the critics
is not surprising. It is idle, how-
ever, to worry because men who have
worked successfully in a certain envi-
ronment did not have more time and
more favorable circumstances. The
implication is that under other con-
ditions the geniuses would have pro-
duced in larger measure that type of
literature which critics justly admire.
Such a result is by no means certain.
A deal of creative energy is bound
to be wasted in one way or another.
Who knows whether the repression
did not ultimately act as a stimulating
force or motive, and whether Moliere
did not work with greater energy
at Tartuffe, the Misanthrope, and the
Femmes savantes because he was com-
pelled to write ballets in which Louis
-i- 107 •«-
MOLlkRE
could display the grace of his manner
and the splendor of his costume.
The young King was now twenty-
six, and eager for pleasure. The fash-
ionable world took immense delight in
the ballet. The entertainment differed
much from the type of performance
usually associated with the word at the
present time. The dances were for
the most part stately, and in court
ballets a high decorum reigned. • So-
ciety * not only witnessed these spec-
tacles but took part in them. For
example, when le Mariage force was
given, Louis himself appeared i in the
costume of an Egyptian.' There were
eight 4 entrees de ballet/ Among the
dancers were many representatives of
the nobility. This performance at the
court in January was ' only a prelude
-+ io8-»-
MOLIERE
to the brilliant follies ' which were to
take place at Versailles in May of that
same year.
Certain ideas and situations in the
Manage force appear to have been
suggested to Moliere by his study
of Rabelais. The piece is a commen-
tary on that state of affairs which will
permit a young girl to welcome mar-
riage with a man who, besides being
a brutal sensualist, is enough older
than herself to be her father, simply
because marriage means freedom. The
play has a cynical quality by no means
agreeable, though it may be that this
tones down and is partially lost in the
broad comedy effects when the play
is played. There are some liberties
of expression which drive the critics
into apologizing for Moliere. English
MOLlkRE
critics need hardly feel called upon
to attack the Frenchman for a lack of
delicacy if they stopped to reflect that
Moliere was contemporary of the re-
spectable John Dryden. It would be
difficult to find anything to match for
grossness certain passages in the Wild
Gallant and the Spanish Friar.
The Princesse a 1 ' Elide was composed
for the fetes which were held at
Versailles in May, 1664. Ostensibly
given in honor of the two queens,
Anne of Austria and Marie-Therese,
they were really intended for the grat-
ification of Mademoiselle de La Val-
liere. The plan of the celebration
was drawn up by the Due de Saint-
Aignan, who took his idea from Ari-
osto. In the sixth and seventh cantos
of the Orlando furioso is the story of
-H IIO-«-
MOLIERE
Roger's visit to Alcine in the en-
chanted isle. So the entertainments
during the first three days of the fes-
tival were known as the Plaisirs de
Vile enchant ee. One of these days was
given to Moliere's Princesse d' Elide.
The piece was composed in great
haste, as may be seen from the fact
that it begins in verse and ends in
prose. Moliere had not time to com-
plete it according to his original plan.
The story was taken from the Spanish
dramatist, Moreto.
In the festivities and ceremonies
which were held out of doors, the
King played the part of Roger.
The description of the triumphal en-
try reads like the programme of the
grand march around the arena of
some 'stupendous and unparalleled
-•- in •*-
MOLlBRE
aggregation of wonders belonging
to a three-ring circus. There were
Barnums in those days. It is easy
to laugh at this childish passion for
color, pomp, and display ; but the
affair was too important to be dis-
missed with a laugh. The magnifi-
cence was real. The costumes were
the most beautiful and costly that
could be devised by unlimited ex-
penditure of money and inventive
power. The actors in the pageant
were a real king, real queens, real no-
blemen, real ladies of quality. The
congratulatory poems and the plays
were the work of real poets, a Bense-
rade and a Moliere. A • float,' as it
would be called now, represented
Apollo seated on a throne with the
Four Ages at his feet. On either side
i* II2-J-
MOLIERE
of his chariot marched the Twelve
Hours and the Signs of the Zodiac,
costumed * as the poets represent them/
After the recitatives the 'course de
bague' took place. This was the
riding with lance for the ring, a form
of amusement which displayed much
of the old time spirit of the tourna-
ment with a minimum of danger. A
collation was served at night by the
light of flambeaux, and the Signs of
the Zodiac and the Hours danced
' one of the most beautiful entrees de
ballet ever seen.'
On the second day, Moliere's co-
rn edie galante, la Princesse d' Elide,
was presented. The author played the
part of Moron. Armande Bejart won
such a triumph in the role of the prin-
cess that her pretty head was turned
-+113-^
MOLIERE
by it, so tradition says. The pleasures
of the enchanted isle lasted for a week.
Moliere was the favorite entertainer.
His Facheux was played on the even-
ing of the fifth day. On the sixth,
the first three acts of Tartuffe were
given, at the King's request; and on
the seventh day there was a perform-
ance of le Mariage forc'e.
The biographers of Moliere account
the moment of the production of Tar-
tuffe as ' one of the most celebrated
dates in the annals of our dramatic
literature.' The poet had never been
without courage, but in Tartuffe, dar-
ing was carried to the point of bra-
vado. It may be said that the antag-
onism aroused by this piece found
expression in one way or another from
that moment up to the day of Mo-
-h 114-*-
MOLlkRE
Here's death and for many years after
his death.
Without doubt a large part of the
hostility to Tartuffe was not in the
least excited by the moral aspect of
the question. It was a play by Mo-
liere, and that was enough. Any play
of his would have met with the same
reception. His professed enemies were
predisposed to frown upon anything
he might do. The student of biogra-
phy is under no obligation to account
for those antagonisms which appear to
be stirred up by men of marked indi-
viduality for no other reason than the
sufficient one that dulness is envious
of genius.
Two sorts of enemies were real and
powerful. The first class consisted of
the Tartuff es themselves — men who
-»• 115 •»-
MOLIERE
make a cloak of religion to hide their
true nature. When Moliere tore away
the sanctimonious mask behind which
was concealed a vicious face, he
aroused all hypocrites to the pitch of
malignant anger. They lifted up their
voices and cried * Blasphemer ! ' accus-
ing Moliere of injuring the cause of
religion. The poet was singled out
for opprobrium such as the extreme
Puritans heaped upon Christopher
Marlowe. The instances are not par-
allel, but the abuse was very like.
There was an earnest cry in Moliere's
case for some one in authority who
should ' put a hook into the nostrils of
this barking dog.'
The lamentations of the Tartuffes
were mingled with, and not always to
be distinguished from, the sincere ex-
MOLliRE
pressions of regret which fell from the
lips of those who held the view that
religion must never be involved in a
jest, even when the jest was directed
towards spurious devotionalists. The
danger was too great. Who was able
to distinguish ? Who could say with
infallible accuracy which was the false
and which the true ? After all, might
not the man who seemed a hypo-
crite be more nearly genuine than we
know *? The marks which distinguish
spurious from true devotion are not
easily found in every case. The atti-
tude of these critics is perfectly under-
stood when we bear in mind the case
of Swift and the Tale of a Tub. Swift's
satire was directed against Romanists
and Presbyterians in behalf of the Es-
tablished Church. Devout churchmen,
MOLIERE
however, felt that the cause of religion
as a whole was made ridiculous, that
such scandalous freedom did more
harm than good. And in the same
spirit critics of Moliere, who were ani-
mated by no particular hostility toward
the man, asked themselves whether
the attack upon false devotion was
not likely to be interpreted as a satire
upon all religious profession. They
believed that it was so interpreted,
and hence their opposition.
Then began that long struggle for
the removal of the interdiction. The
play could not be given to the public,
but apparently no other ban was laid
upon it. Moliere gave readings of
Tartuffe to select audiences. The con-
flict of opinion was so violent that
curiosity was very great; an oppor-
-hi8h-
MOLIERE
tunity to hear the author read his own
play was eagerly sought for. ' It was
the most attractive sort of entertain-
ment that could be devised for people
of quality/
The dispute over Tartuffe was in-
flamed by the great contemporary
theological quarrel. It was said that
in one of the scenes the author made
mock of the Jesuits. The Jesuits on
their part were very sure that Moliere
had the Jansenists in mind ; Tartuffe
was in its way a reply to the Provin-
cial Letters. All, however, managed
to be offended alike. The case of
Tartuffe was not unlike that of the
valetudinarian in the play quoted by
Erasmus; one physician affirmed, an-
other denied, yet another thought the
matter should be taken under consid-
-+ ii9«»-
MOLlkRE
e ration, but all agreed that the patient
was in a very bad way.
In addition to the readings, there
were private performances of Tartuffe.
The King visited his brother at Vil-
lers-Cotterets, the last week of Septem-
ber, 1664, when three acts of Tartuffe
were played for his diversion. One
month later, the entire comedy was
given at the chateau of the Prince
de Conde. The suppression, therefore,
was only partial, and was perhaps
intended to be no more. The mon-
arch's frown was official rather than
actual. That Louis himself could not
fully understand the grounds of the
public disapproval would seem to
be clear from the following anecdote.
The King asked a certain 'great
prince ' (probably Conde), why it
-»• 120 •«-
MOLlkRE
was that the zealots who were shocked
by Tartuffe made no outcry over the
play of Scaramouche ermite. The great
prince is said to have replied some-
what to this effect: 'The reason is
that the comedy of Scaramouch
merely ridicules heaven and religion,
about which these gentlemen care no-
thing ; but Moliere's comedy ridicules
the zealots themselves, and that they
cannot endure.'
One of the principal attacks upon
Moliere was made by a doctor in
theology, Pierre Roules, cure of Saint-
Barthelemy. It was a volume de-
voted to fulsome panegyric of the
King, and bearing the title Le Roi
glorieux au monde ou Louis XIV le
plus glorieux de tous les rois du monde.
The brief extract given by Moland
-+ 121 +-
MOLlkRE
illustrates the type of flattery which
sycophants could give and monarchs
could stomach two hundred and forty
years since. Some of the expressions
used are positively blasphemous. The
cure says that if ever a king had glory
on this earth and if ever the earth had
a glorious king, ' without flattery,'
Louis is the man. God never leaves
any work imperfect or half finished.
He makes no sketches or crayons,
only chefs d'ceuvres. And among his
masterpieces Louis XIV is one of the
most notable. In plain terms, accord-
ing to Pierre Roules, Louis is ' a ter-
restrial god and a divine man, without
a precedent and without a peer.'
We do not know how great a sense
of humor the cure of Saint-Barthelemy
had, but he could not have had much,
■H- 122 +-
MOLIERE
if he thought Tartuffe was impious
and his own panegyric was not.
While the ostensible motive of
Roules's book was praise of the mon-
arch, the real motive was abuse of
Moliere. The priest speaks in no un-
certain terms, whether he utters praise
or blame. He describes Moliere as
'a demon clad in flesh and dressed
as a man, the most outrageous blas-
phemer and atheist that ever lived,'
one who should be punished at the
stake as a preliminary to the inevita-
ble fires of hell. It would seem as if
such violence might defeat its own
end. According to Larroumet, the
King gave Roules to understand that
his zeal was without discretion.
The poet remitted no effort to
have the interdiction raised. The ex-
-+123+-
*? 9\ — f JCUfr ^ V
MOLlkRE
periment was tried of changing the
title of the play, softening the expres-
sions which gave most offence, and
costuming the chief character in a
way less likely to reflect upon those
who, from religious scruples, affected
austerity in dress. The interdict lasted
five years; not until 1669 was Tartuffe
given the freedom of the public stage. J
Let us recall one or two of the strik-
ing incidents in this celebrated play.
Tartuffe does not appear until the
second scene of the third act ; but not
a word is spoken up to the moment
he comes upon the stage that does
not define his character with utmost
nicety. We can see the insinuating,
unctuous hypocrite, whose presence is
a menace to all healthy, reasonable
delight, as it is a menace to the spirit
-»• 1244-
MOLlkRE
of true devotion. Tartuffe has won
the heart of the master of the house,
and thereby seems to have won all;
for the phrase 'head of the house'
was not an idle and meaningless one
in those days ; if Orgon wills that his
daughter shall break her troth with
Valere and marry Tartuffe, there
seems to be no help for it. That
Mariane is unwilling only makes mat-
ters worse. The exalted passion which
Orgon has conceived for the character
of Tartuffe is intensified by the hostil-
ity of the rest of the family. Orgon,
we must remember, is defending not
his guest alone, or the cause of reli-
gion; he is also working against that
invidious spirit of rebellion which
would subvert his authority.
One cannot sufficiently admire the
-»- 125-1-
MOLI&RE
skill of the great dramatist in placing
TartufFe's entrance with his famous
4 serrez ma haire avec ma discipline '
so close to the scene with Elmire.
Tartuffe takes advantage of the hospi-
tality he enjoys to make love to Or-
gon's young and pretty wife. Damis,
Orgon's son, overhears the loathsome
proposals and tells his father in Tar-
tufFe's presence of the dishonor that
has been done him. But the father is
so besotted with the hypocrite that he
will not credit the story. The more
Damis protests, the more is Orgon
strengthened in the conviction that a
shameful plot is on foot to blast the
reputation of a good man — doubly
shameful because his own son is chief
among the conspirators. The testi-
mony of Elmire does not move him ;
-+ 126 •«-
MOLIERE
she is mistaken, no doubt; she has
not heard aright ; the virtuous are so
apt to be misunderstood. In short,
Tartuffe is a saint. How can one be
with him and not know it % His mere
presence irradiates virtue. After all,
it is a trick on the part of Dam is to
humiliate Tartuffe.
A man infatuated to this degree
becomes unnatural. Orgon disinherits
his son and makes over his property
to Tartuffe. He even abases himself
in the hypocrite's presence, falling on
his knees before him, almost worship-
ping the man whom he conceives to
be incarnate goodness. When Elmire,
making one supreme effort to persuade
her husband of Tartuffe's treachery,
asks him what he would say, could he
hear the damnable words with his own
-H 127 ^
r ^ rttm ti
MOLlkRE
ears, Orgon replies that he would say
— nothing, for the thing is an impos-
sibility.
Though slow to be convinced, Or-
gon is convinced at last. Having sent
for Tartuffe, Elmire conceals her hus-
band beneath the table and compels
him to learn from the hypocrite's own
lips the extent of his depravity. En-
trapped, as he is, TarturTe can do no
better than show himself a downright
villain and bring a charge of treason
against the friend who has lifted him
from poverty and overwhelmed him
with benefits. But the great prince who
can read all hearts is not misled by
the baseness of a hypocrite. TarturTe
is carried to prison, and the house of
Orgon is once more at peace.
Objection is frequently made that
-i- 128-1-
^ g\ m u m ^ w
MOLlkRE
the denouement of Tartuffe is weak
and conventional. But it has long since
become a commonplace of criticism
that Moliere is often conventional and
never altogether happy in his denoue-
ments.
While waiting for the removal of
the interdict Moliere produced eight
plays, of which the most notable were
Don Juan ou le Festin de Pierre and
le Misanthrope. The Festin de Pierre
was a bold advertisement to Moliere's
enemies that he had no thought of
abandoning his position. It was a fresh
challenge to the hostile party to do
their worst.
The classic Spanish play of Don
Juan, from which all the others de-
rive, was the work of Tirso de Molina.
The legend passed into Italy and
-+ 129-1-
MOLlkRE
France. At least two versions were
played in Paris in Moliere's time.
The romantic and supernatural ele-
ments of the legend had always fasci-
nated the popular imagination. The
story is briefly this. Don Juan, the
embodiment of exultant atheism and
sensuality, kills the aged commander
d'Ulloa, whose daughter he had made
one of the many victims of his passion.
He escapes the vengeance of the law
by reason of his birth and influential
connections. He then disappears. The
story is presently bruited abroad that
Don Juan went to the tomb of his vic-
tim and there defied and insulted the
statue of the commander. Whereupon
the statue came to life and hurled the
impious wretch into the flames of Hell,
which, greedy for their prey, burst
-••130^
MOLlkRE
through the yawning stones of the
chapel pavement.
The libertine of the Spanish legend
becomes in Moliere's play a type of
the modern French seigneur, powerful,
lawless, insolent, a blasphemer; but
magnificent in his audacity and wholly
incapable of fear. The play is the com-
plement of Tartuffe. In the one piece
Moliere lashes hypocrisy ; in the other
he assails blatant and high-handed vice.
The element of comedy is supplied by
Sganarelle, Don Juan's valet. The first
of Moliere's attacks upon the medical
profession occurs in this play. Sgana-
relle, disguised as a physician, tells his
master how he prescribed for the pea-
sants who consulted him ; and Don
Juan hurls a gibe at the doctors, whose
art, he says, is pure grimace. The last
-+13H-
MOLI&RE
scene of the play, with its superb op-
portunity for a final struggle before
inevitable defeat, seems tame after a
reading of the fifth act of Marlowe's
Faustus. On the other hand, it is pos-
sible that a Frenchman might find the
Faustus bombastic and swollen.
With P Amour medecin^ a comedie-
ballet in three acts (1665), Moliere
began in earnest his attacks upon the
medical profession. The little sketch,
written at the king's command, was
composed, put into rehearsal, and pro-
duced, within five days. The chief
physicians of the court were taken off
It was possible to recognize them by
gesture and carriage. One may well
doubt whether the actors played the
parts in masks made expressly to rep-
resent the unhappy doctors.
MOLIERE
\On June 4, 1666, the great play
entitled le Misanthrope was presented
for the first time. It is Moliere's mas-
terpiece. ) Boileau's judgment upon its
merits has been reaffirmed by a multi-
tude of exacting and delicate critics.
Shakespeare is not more truly 'the
author of Hamlet ' than is Moliere ' the
author of le Misanthrope' This is that
greater comedy, by virtue of which
its author at once takes his right-
ful place in the first rank of literary
creators.
The chief character is a type to be
found in all ages and all civilizations,
and one of perennial interest. He is a
man of the world who despises the
world, though he lives in it and plays
his part amid its pomp and vanity. He
is a pessimist, but that most admirable
^ /fr Kto a fl y
molijSre
specimen of all his despairing kind, a
generous pessimist. He knows too
well that the time is out of joint. He
is not so vain as to think that he was
born to set it right. Whatever his ob-
ligation may or may not be, it is not for
him to acquiesce stupidly in the world's
shams and pretences. He has, too, his
mission of cursing, and this is a mis-
sion not to be underestimated, least of
all despised. Happy the world when
it finds itself abashed' before the • rude
sincerity ' of an Alceste.
| The Misanthrope, like so many of
Moliere's plays, is an attack upon
hypocrisy — in this case s the petty *
hypocrisies of the fashionable world.' )
When the arraignment of society is
put into the lips of one who, as in the
case of Alceste, is a part of the social
* / 5K toft * k
MOLI&RE
stratum he so condemns, the effect is
withering.
It has sometimes been remarked
that Alceste's humor is too violent,
his rage needlessly brutal, that his
hatred for mankind is * based on a
whim, not on reason.' It is important
to bear in mind that Alceste is pre-
sented to us at a highly critical mo-
ment in his history. A man like the
'Misanthrope* may be imagined as
having once conformed more or less
reluctantly to the manners of his time
and his class. To be sure he thinks
those manners absurd and the fashion-
able world utterly insincere, but he
makes no protest beyond a biting sar-
casm now and then. Gradually the
monstrous nature of this artificial life
appalls and then embitters him. What
MOLIERE
was once only folly now seems wick-
edness; society is enmeshed in lies.
Alceste passes through a sort of crisis.
At this juncture to keep silence were
to become equally guilty with those
whom he condemns. Moliere depicts
his hero at this moment of supreme
psychological interest. Who knows
whether Alceste may not in time be-
come philosophical ?
A play as thoughtful as the Misan-
thrope is not likely to command a wide
hearing. People said at the time that
it was a failure ; by which, apparently,
they meant that it was not received
with tempestuous applause on the part
of the general public. It was in no
sense a failure, though it is plain to see
that more people were able to compre-
hend the fun of le Medecin malgr'e lui
-+136^
MOLIERE
than the deep and passionate quality
of the Misanthrope.
Without being vulgarly popular,
the story of Alceste and Celimene was
a marked triumph. For a performance
must surely be regarded in the light of
a triumph which commands the admi-
ration of discerning critics at the same
time that it holds the attention of the
play-going public. The vivid interest
of the play itself, as a play, was strength-
ened by a usage which the author of
The Reverberator holds unspeakably
vulgar when applied to fiction. One,
at least, of the dramatis personam in the
Misanthrope was identified with a man
well known in the military and social
life of the time. However reprehensi-
ble may be the practice of putting
well-known living people into fiction
moli£re
and drama, Moliere must be allowed
the privilege granted without protest to
all writers of his time. The making
of pen-portraits had been one of the
delights of fashionable society when
Moliere was a boy. The characters in
Mademoiselle de Scudery's novels not
only were, but were intended to be,
recognized. If people were shocked
by Bussy-Rabutin's Histoire amour euse
des Gaules, it was not because they
found themselves described in its
pages, but because the descriptions
were unflattering, or even outrageously
malicious. La Bruyere in his Char-
acters, published twenty-two years
after the epoch of the Misanthrope,
painted from life and made no con-
cealment of the fact. In short, the
practice was a common one. In this
-+138-4-
MOLlkRE
respect Moliere was not an innovator ;
he made use of a method that was
frequently employed, and, so far as we
know, not frowned upon. The public,
sitting for its portrait, only asked what
it insists upon at the present time,
namely, that the portrait painter or
photographer do his best: in other
words, show Nature what she might
have done if she had had her wits
about her.
Tradition has always declared that ^
the Due de Montausier was the ori-
ginal of Alceste. Few traditions are
better grounded. The likeness was
remarked when the play was first pro-
duced. Some charitable individuals
hastened to the Hotel de Rambouillet
to tell Montausier that Moliere had
caricatured him. After seeing the
-+139-1-
MOLIERE
play, the nobleman thought otherwise.
Montausier had as few failings, taking
into account the weakness of human
nature, as the best of men may pre-
sume to have. He was not suscep-
tible to vulgar flattery, but he would
have been of an austere mould indeed,
had he shown himself incapable of
being pleased at his identification with
Alceste.
Montausier was a conspicuous and
wholly attractive figure in the ' great
world ' of his day. It will be remem-
bered that he married Julie d'An-
gennes, eldest daughter of the Marquis
de Rambouillet. He was governor to
Louis XIV during the young king's
minority. He was a patron of all good
people and of all noble enterprises,
whether in statecraft or literature.
-+ 140 +-
M0L1ERE
Through his instrumentality the fa-
mous Delphine edition of the Greek
and Latin classics was projected and
made. Mademoiselle de Scudery de-
scribed Montausier in the Grand Cyrus,
under the name of Megabate. Accord-
ing to her analysis he was a born
enemy to flattery/ Had the continu-
ance of his fame depended upon the
novelist's shallow but not ungraceful
characterization, he would be forgot-
ten ; as Alceste he lives and must con-
tinue to live so long as the work of
Moliere shall endure.
141
*5 \ /3 fc
OLIERE was not a hand-
some man, though fulsome panegyric
has tried to make him out an Apollo.
Of the many so-called ' portraits ' only
two, according to Emile Perrin, are
worthy of serious attention. The
poet was below medium height rather
than above it. His figure was thick-
set and heavy, the legs long and thin.
His head was large, the neck short,
the nose and mouth of a type which
careful people describe as ' generous/
-+H3*-
MOLIERE
In many a face the lack of physical
charm is fully compensated for by the
beauty of the eyes; but Moliere's
eyes were small and set wide apart.
There was need of that inner flame/
that undoubted genius, to give to his
features the power of fascination
which they certainly possessed.
For one whose art was so largely
compounded of declamation, gesture,
and grimace, Moliere was strangely
silent and dignified in private life.
His friends used to rally him on his
self-absorption. He has put a descrip-
tion of himself into the lips of Elise
in the Critique de r£cole des femmes.
filise describes the supper which Cli-
mene gave in Moliere's honor : how
the guests stared at the great actor-
dramatist with round eyes, and ex-
h-144-i-
moliMre
pected him to say something extraor-
dinary every time he opened his
mouth. But he only astonished them
by saying nothing.
He could talk well, but he seemed
to prefer being silent. He was a
dreamer. He listened, watched, pon-
dered what he saw and heard. Boi-
leau called him ' le contemplateur/
To many people such a man seems
uncanny. They fear his thought the
more for being unspoken. There is
an often quoted passage in Donneau
de Vise's play of Zelinde which brings
out this idea. The merchant of the
play describes Moliere leaning up
against the counter of the shop in the
attitude of one who dreams. • His
eyes were fastened upon two or three
people of quality who were cheapen-
-H-I45H-
MOLlkRE
ing laces. He appeared attentive to
their talk ; and it seemed, by the look
in his eyes, as if he would gaze into
the depths of their souls in order to
learn the things they did not utter.
I believe he had a writing tablet and
that he put down, under cover of his
cloak, anything they said worth re-
membering. " Perhaps," remarked a
bystander, " it was a crayon, and he
was sketching their grimaces in order
to reproduce them on the stage." •
He was not entirely affable, in the
common and superficial meaning of
the word. He had lived too ear-
nestly, worked too hard, suffered too
much to be merely affable. One
cannot imagine him as self-conscious,
'studious to please/ cultivating the
ready smile and the look of unctuous
rf 146-1-
MOLlkRE
gladness which stamp the manners of
the small social politician.
He was noted for independence of
spirit. The story of how he abased
himself before Montausier rings false,
and one is glad to believe that it is
only a legend. The phrase 'poor
Moliere' is made up of ill-assorted
words. Unhappy this great man
might be and often was or depressed
or worried, — in fine, anything save
what would be expressed by the pity-
ing adjective 'poor/ The story in
question is told on the authority of a
note in Saint-Simon's copy of Dan-
geau. Montausier, says the annotator,
was incensed by a gossiping report
that he had been held up to public
ridicule as Alceste in the Misanthrope ;
and he threatened Moliere with a
MOLIJERE
caning. A threat of this kind was not
wholly idle. Granting that Mon-
tausier could entertain so brutal an
impulse, it must be remembered that
there would be many to give him
their moral support in the exercise of
his privilege. In the Seventeenth
Century the right of the aristocracy
to beat the lower classes was undis-
puted. The Earl of Rochester's
' chivalrous ' conduct is a matter of
history. Being incensed at Dryden,
the Earl hired two or three ruffians
to cudgel the poet. They are said to
have earned their money. This view
of the relation of the aristocracy to
people who had the misfortune not
to be born 'noble,' underwent no
change when a new century came in.
A Chevalier de Rohan, in 1725,
-+ 148 +-
MOLIERE
caned young Voltaire at the door of
the Due de Sully's palace ; the Duke
thought it very amusing, and shouts
of laughter went up when Voltaire
challenged the Chevalier.
According to Saint-Simon's note,
1 poor ' Moliere, frightened because of
the great nobleman's wrath, knew not
what to do. The event turned out
fortunately; the Duke was pleased
with the dramatic portrait, and sent
for Moliere that he might congratu-
late him. The poet ' thought he
would die,' and could only be per-
suaded by repeated assurances that
Montausier cherished no ill will.
Even then he came • trembling.' The
great Duke publicly embraced the
poor player and thanked him.
All this sounds like the veriest
MOLIERE
rubbish. Taschereau, a biographer
never unfavorable to anecdotage, finds
much that is \ evidently false ' in the
narrative, and thinks Moliere is made
to play a role out of keeping with
the dignity of his character. But
Taschereau, in the laudable effort to
do one of these eminent men justice,
seems to do the other injustice. He
hints that the publicity of the saluta-
tion was chiefly due to fear on Mon-
tausier's part, lest all might not have
recognized in himself the original of
Alceste.
By virtue of his sincerity and
thoughtfulness Moliere was capable
of friendship; and like his fellows
everywhere he doubtless knew all
phases of the regard continually
springing up among those who meet
-»• 150-1-
&\ m to m /^.
MOLlkRE
one another in business, in society, or
in the practice and enjoyment of the
arts.
Moliere's relations with the Prince
de Conde and the Marechal de Vi-
vonne did something to break down
contemporary prejudice against actors.
Voltaire likens the friendship of de
Vivonne and Moliere to that of Lelius
and Terence. When Grimarest pub-
lished, in 1706, a response to the crit-
icisms in his life of Moliere, he added
a paragraph illustrating Conde's atti-
tude towards the poet. It is one of
the few anecdotes which destructive
criticism has not entirely set aside.
Grimarest says, in substance, that
Conde greatly enjoyed Moliere's soci-
ety and used often to send for him.
Fearing to disturb the poet in his
-* 151 •»-
MOLIERE
work he resolved to send for him no
more; but he begged Moliere to
choose his own time and come and
come whenever he had a vacant hour.
' I shall leave everything to be with
you/ said the Prince. Whenever
Moliere came Conde dismissed those
who were with him and devoted him-
self to his guest. He was heard to
say publicly after one of these inter-
views :'I am never wearied when I 'm
with Moliere. He is a man who
furnishes everything; his knowledge
and his judgment are never at fault/
Conde and Moliere could meet as
man with man. Not so the King and
Moliere. Yet Louis accorded his sub-
ject a measure of kindness almost
brotherly at times. Admirers of the
poet have exaggerated the intensity of
-f 152-4-
MOLI&RE
the monarch's regard. It is charming
to think of Moliere seated at the
King's breakfast-table while Louis
carves the fowl and helps his guest
first, having summoned the courtiers
that they might profit by this lesson
in manners. But the legend of the
'en-cas de nuit' is very properly de-
nominated a legend. It is wholly dis-
credited since Depois subjected it to
rigorous analysis. That the legend
could have come into existence, been
repeated by every biographer, made
the subject of picture and story, is a
proof of popular confidence in the
greatness of the King's favor. Admir-
ers of the dramatist are ready to be-
lieve any tale illustrative of the mon-
arch's favor. Admirers of Louis XIV
are equally positive that the King
MOLlkRE
could have written Tartuffe and the
Misanthrope if he had a mind to; but
he generously stayed his hand and
gave Moliere a chance.
Among the poet's intimates were
Boileau, La Fontaine, and Racine.
The friends used to meet two or three
times a week in Boileau's apartment.
Their talks were easy and informal,
without a trace of the academic.
Later a misunderstanding arose be-
tween Racine and Moliere, but no
outsider profited by it, and he did ill
who attempted to recommend him-
self to one of these men by deprecia-
tion of the other. Moliere praised
les Plaideurs when not a few were
bent upon condemning it. To an of-
ficious person who spoke contemptu-
ously of the Misanthrope, Racine
MOLIERE
said : ' It is impossible for Moliere to
make a bad play.'
Boileau was Moliere's always loyal
partisan. They differed on minor crit-
ical points, but the full strong current
of their friendship encountered no ob-
stacles. Boileau, who wrought with
pains and produced in small quan-
tity, admired the spontaneity of Mo-
liere's productive power and the pre-
cision of his touch. Though younger
than his friend he criticised freely
and found Moliere always patient
and amiable under such criticism.
When Louis XIV asked Boileau to
name the rarest of all the great writers
of his century the satirist replied :
'Sire, it is Moliere.' The King re-
sponded that he did not believe it,
and then added with princely good
MOLlkRE
humor that Boileau ought to know
better than he.
With the venerable Corneille the
younger dramatist always maintained
cordial relations in spite of the efforts
made to embitter them against each
other. Moliere produced a number
of Corneille's later pieces, and was
open-handed in his financial dealings
with the old poet.
Mignard the painter was Moliere's
life-long friend. To him posterity is
indebted for at least one, and it may
be two portraits of the author of the
Misanthrope. With Lulli the com-
poser Moliere's relations were less
cordial, and in time they ceased alto-
gether. The musician profited by his
professional connection with the dra-
matist, but as his success increased he
-* 156-*-
MOLI&RE
became forgetful of his ancient obli-
gation. Incongruous as it appears
Moliere numbered among his friends
two physicians, one of whom, Ro-
hault, was an intimate. The other,
Armand de Mauvillain, was sus-
pected of having furnished Moliere
with notes for the last ' intermede ' of
the Malade irnaginaire, in which the
ceremony of conferring the degree of
doctor of medicine is so brilliantly
and mercilessly parodied.
Chapelle, who had been Moliere's
companion in student days, was a de-
voted friend and liegeman in the
years of the poet's triumph. They
were an oddly assorted pair. Chapelle
was a Bacchanalian idler who looked
upon life as a prodigious jest. Mo-
liere drank only milk, toiled like a
MOLI&RE
galley-slave, and was profoundly seri-
ous in his mirth. Chapelle used to
spend much of his time at Moliere's
little country-place at Auteuil, then
an isolated village, far from the noise
of the city. When the poet was in-
disposed Chapelle would play the
part of host. Auteuil was the scene
of that famous supper over which
Chapelle presided, and under whose
ministrations the guests became suffi-
ciently drunk to be able to maintain
the ancient thesis that the highest
happiness consists in not having been
born at all, and the next highest in
dying as soon as possible. Moliere
was in his own room too ill to join
the convivialities. But when one
came running to tell him that all his
guests, true to their new philosophy,
-+ 158-*-
MOLIERE
had gone to throw themselves into
the river, the poet forgot his illness
and ran after them. He urged upon
them the necessity of waiting until
morning that they might commit sui-
cide by daylight, bravely, in the face
of the whole world, that the moral
effect of their heroic action might not
be lost. The philosophers hailed Mo-
Here's proposition with enthusiasm,
and all staggered back to the house.
Security in the affection of his
friends, in the regard of the philo-
sophic La Mothe Le Vayer, in the
devotion of young Baron the actor,
in the worshipping fidelity of old La
Foret his servant, to mention widely
contrasting instances, availed little to
lift the cloud which darkened Mo-
liere's spirits.
MOLlkRE
The poet's home life was almost
unqualifiedly wretched. He had the
misfortune to fall in love with a girl
twenty-two years his junior, and the
want of judgment to marry her. The
disproportion in the ages of the pair
and the fact that his wife was a co-
quette, perhaps a dangerous one,
poisoned Moliere's happiness during
those years when this great man could
most have appreciated domestic quiet.
But the day when men will univer-
sally employ vulgar prudence in the
selection of their wives will be the
day when the word love has ceased to
have a meaning. Moliere married
Armande Bejart because he was de-
sperately enamoured of her. To say
that she was completely unworthy of
him would be to do her injustice.
-+ i6o-«-
MOLIERE
She has probably been abused out of
reason. To blame her for her youth,
her power of fascinating all who came
within her reach, her beauty, and her
willingness to let it exert that potent
force by which beauty everywhere
triumphs, is to blame her for the pos-
session of qualities which Moliere
most adored in her. His fortune was
none the less pathetic. He sought
for happiness and realized it in a
measure; but in its train came sus-
picion and * dull-eyed care/
The history of Moliere's wife in-
volves biographical problems wholly
outside the scope of this little book.
The scandalous charge made against
Moliere by an envious actor, Mont-
fleury, in a 'requete' addressed to
Louis XIV, was held of so little mo-
-H- 161 •»-
MOLIERE
ment that Louis himself stood god-
father to Moliere's first born. The
calumny has been none the less per-
sistent because they who best knew
the poet rejected it with contempt.
The discussion will be found elabo-
rated, in some cases to disproportion-
ate fulness, in all the standard bio-
graphies of Moliere.
Armande-Claire-filisabeth-Gresinde
Bejart was the youngest daughter of
Joseph Bejart and Marie Herve.
Little or nothing is known of her
childhood. Coming of a family of
actors and actresses and having nat-
ural qualifications, she was predesti-
nated to a theatrical career. Moliere
took the greatest pains with her dra-
matic training, and, as has happened
before and since, fell desperately in
-»• 162 +-
0k m ti m mmm»
moliMre
love with his pupil. Their marriage
was celebrated February 20, 1662, at
Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, in the pre-
sence of representatives of both fami-
lies, Moliere's father being of the
number. The contract antedates the
religious ceremony by one month.
Armande entered the troupe of the
Palais-Royal that same year, and
made her debut as Elise in the Cri-
tique de I 'Ecole des femmes. She played
the part of Elmire, the wife of Orgon.
in Tartuffe. In the Malade imaginaire
her acting of the lesson scene with
La Grange was thought to be partic-
ularly happy. She was Angelique in
Georges Dandin, Henriette in les
Femmes savantes, and Psyche in the
tragi-comedie of that name. Her charm
was so great in the role of Psyche
MOLlkRE
as to cause the venerable Corneille a
momentary flutter of the heart. Made-
moiselle de Moliere's greatest tri-
umph was in playing the part of Ce-
limene in the Misanthrope. Larrou-
met speaks of it as ' the most famous
of her creations/
Moliere's adoration of his wife was
so intense as to be pitiful. Their in-
compatibility brought about long peri-
ods of estrangement during which the
poet was unspeakably wretched. He
freely confessed his weakness under
the spell that Armande cast over him.
One does not need the testimony of
the anonymous author of la Fameuse
Comedienne to be persuaded that Cha-
pelle and Moliere may have had a
conversation not unlike the one they
are reported to have had in the garden
-+ 164 H-
MOLIERE
of the house at Auteuil. Chapelle re-
proved Moliere for his want of phi-
losophy, and being asked whether he
had himself ever been in love, re-
plied : • Yes, in the way in which a
man of sense may be.' ' I see very
well,' said Moliere, 'that you have
never loved; you have taken the as-
pect of love for love itself.'
Always a hard worker, Moliere
found such distraction as work can
give in the varied and exhausting re-
sponsibilities of dramatic author, man-
ager, and principal comedian in his
own troupe. He was so excellent in
each of these departments that you
would say it had been ' all in all his
study.'
He was an incomparable actor, ' a
comedian from head to foot.' Few
-§•1654-
j m /re us rv ,
MOLIERE
men have possessed in higher degree
the histrionic gift. 'By a step, a
smile, a glance of the eye, a turn of
the head, he expressed a multitude of
ideas — more than the most energetic
talker could have given utterance to
in an hour.' He neglected none of
the means which are held legitimate
in his art. He understood the charm
of costume and accessories. Nothing
could be more vivid than Madame
de Villedieu's description of this great
artist making his entrance as Masca-
rille in the Precieuses ridicules. He
must have been a fantastic figure with
his immense perruque which swept
the stage when he bowed, his exag-
gerated ' canons,' and his slippers com-
pletely covered with ribbons. The
4 marquis ' was mounted upon heels
-»• i66-»--
J 6\ /ft gfa fr /5 j,
MOLIERE
so high and slender that Madame de
Villedieu professed her inability to
comprehend how they could in any
way support this vast bulk of silk,
lace, and powder.
The emphasis in this description is
laid upon the fantastic and exagger-
ated costume ; but there is no lack of
testimony to show how independent
Moliere's power was of the accessories
of dress and make-up. He was not
of that race of comedians whose wit
may be chiefly referred to the skill of
the wig-maker, the manufacturer of
grease-paint, and the costumer.
We associate Moliere's name so
intimately with comic roles and have
always uppermost in mind his tran-
scendent success in these parts that it
becomes difficult to think of him as a
-* 167-1-
MOLIERE
tragic actor. For all that he played
heroic and tragic characters the greater
part of his life we are forbidden by-
common consent of the scholars to
think of him as a tragedian. It is said
that his passion for attempting such
roles was as great as his ability in
them was small. Not that the work
lacked technical excellence. If I in-
terpret the critics aright they accuse
Moliere of failing to have been born
a tragedian; they never say that he
was not an artist. In other words,
Moliere could summon spirits from
the vasty deep, and while the spirits
would not always come at his bid-
ding, the formalities of the incantation
were perfect.
As an actor he stood for natu-
ralness and simplicity of manner in
~ 3* T 68 +- — — !
< &\ a efcu n — ^ w
MOLIERE
opposition to^the stilted and conven-
tional school of the art. He opposed
the violent type of declamation so
greatly in vogue in his day. Noise
was a conspicuous element in this act-
ing of the old school. Men strained
their lungs to the point of splitting.
Marvellous in his power to tear a pas-
sion to tatters was Mondory, who lit-
erally bellowed himself into apoplexy
and died from the violence of his elo-
cution. Moliere disliked the bombas-
tic and vehement style of the Hotel
de Bourgogne. He attacked the
'Grands Comediens,' as the cele-
brated players of that celebrated thea-
tre were called, and was attacked by
them in turn.
He was no less gifted as a drill-
master than as an actor. His company
-+ 169 •*-
MOLlkRE
of players may be likened to a per-
fect instrument in the hands of a skil-
ful musician. He knew exactly how
to fit the people to their parts. He
studied even their personal prejudices,
making use of those undercurrents of
thought and emotion too often neg-
lected in the determination of an
actor's fitness for a given role.
Moliere's art was highly profitable
financially. He made a great deal of
money and kept much of it. Yet he
was free and open-handed. His
friends prospered through his prosper-
ity. When he died his papers showed
to how great an extent he had helped
whoever came to him ; it was a thou-
sand livres here, and eight hundred
livres there, and four or five hundred
in some other direction.
-+ 170 +-
MOLIERE
He had ' an actor's passion ' for
luxurious surroundings ; though why
should we say 'an actor's passion'
when so many men not actors display
the same amiable weakness ? His
house in Rue Richelieu was sumptu-
ously furnished. He lived 'like a
lord.' This was thought to be infa-
mous; people who did not live like
lords, or even like gentlemen, hotly
resented the use Moliere made of
money that he had earned himself.
How splendid were his surroundings
did not become generally known un-
til 1863, when Soulie published the
remarkable volume entitled Richer-
ches sur Moliere, with its appendix
containing among a multitude of doc-
uments the inventory of Moliere's
h- 171 •*-
MOLIERE
effects. This inventory fills twenty-
two printed octavo pages.
He loved old books, and was of
course reproached for this innocent
fancy. Soulie has recovered the titles
in Moliere's library to about the num-
ber of three hundred. At the head
of the list are the two books which
the poet inherited from his mother, the
folio Bible in two volumes, and the
Plutarch. The list includes many of
the classics, not a little history and fic-
tion, a number of philosophical trea-
tises, travels, and over two hundred
volumes of plays in French, Italian,
and Spanish.
One might quote almost endlessly
from the documents which painstak-
ing scholarship has brought together
since 1823, — documents which throw
-«• 172 ■«-
MOLlkRE
a flood of light not alone on the de-
tails of Moliere's history but upon
the entire civilization of the times.
There is keen pleasure to be had in
the dryest of these old papers. For
Englishmen and Americans, however,
the pleasure is always qualified by the
regret that Fate, so lavish in revela-
tions about Moliere's life, should have
been so strangely reticent about
Shakespeare's.
J 73
VI
A HE M'edecin malgr'e lui (1666)
was a fresh setting of an old theme.
In brillancy and comic force it is un-
surpassed. Beginning with Septem-
ber 3 of this year Moliere played the
Misanthrope and the Medecin together,
• making his exit in the court costume
of Alceste to return in the garb of
Sganarelle.'
For the fetes at Saint-Germain
which commenced in December, 1666,
Melicerte (based on an episode taken
j ^ m u m / ^
MOLlkRE
from Mademoiselle de Scudery's Grand
Cyrus), the Pastorale comique, and the
Sicilien. The first of the three was
never finished; two acts only were
given in the Ballet of the Muses. The
Sicilien contains the germ of the mod-
ern opera-comique, and is accounted
a perfect thing in its way.
In 1668 Amphitryon was produced,
the piece which made Voltaire laugh
so merrily when he first read it that he
fell off his chair backwards and had
like to kill himself. Taschereau mar-
vels that this play, so broadly comic, so
gaily subversive of what are commonly
called the proprieties, did not in the
least disturb the peace of mind of
those sensitive beings who had been
deeply offended by the blasphemy of
Tartuffe. One explanation is that pub-
-+ 176 -1—
MOLlkRE
lie virtue always expresses itself by fits
and starts. The critics were a-weary
of their strained and unnatural posi-
tion, and welcomed the opportunity to
be normal once more. By an odd cir-
cumstance, their hour of moral relax-
ation came just when they might, with
some reason, have knitted the brow
and pursed the lips. Episodes of this
curious type are constantly recurring.
The publication of some book, the
production of some play, the exhibi-
tion of some picture, will awaken a
storm of indignation. Then close upon
the heels of the supposed indecency
comes a real one ; but the public has
exhausted its energy, and this time
makes no audible complaint. It is said
that Amphitryon is not delicate, but it
is never said that it is not amusing. It
i n T trr i i Tt .
MOLlkRE
was first played at the Palais-Royal,
and had twenty-nine performances.
The printed play bore a dedication to
the Prince de Conde, expressed in
terms not more florid than the custom
of the times required. This particular
dedication has a note of sincerity quite
unusual in pieces of this sort.
In July, 1668, Georges Dandin was
played before the King and the court
It was one of the many brilliant
novelties presented during the fete
de Versailles, that great festival with
which France celebrated the conclu-
sion of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
There is an amusing tradition relative
to this play. Some friend of Moliere
warned him that in dramatising the
story of Georges Dandin he was but
giving marked publicity to a similar
MOLI&RE
drama enacting itself right under his
nose; that among the habitual fre-
quenters of his theatre, and more en-
thusiastic than most admirers, was a
veritable Georges Dandin. As a pre-
cautionary measure Moliere decided to
read the play to the victim whom he
had unwittingly satirized. The man
was so flattered by the honor done him
that he failed to recognize himself.
They say that Honore de Balzac took
malicious delight in reading to people
the studies he had made from them ;
he had unspeakable joy in their ina-
bility to see themselves as Balzac saw
them.
I On September 9, 1668, VAvare was
produced. It had but few represen-
tations, and seemed to make its way
slowly into the public consciousness ; )
-1-179-1-
MOLIERE
yet it was not long before the word
Harpagon became generic. The play
was considered a novelty at the time,
because it was a five-act play in prose.
There had been a few pieces of this
sort, but the rule was that five-act
dramas should be composed in verse.
Harpagon is not the conventional
miser of old-fashioned plays and ro-
mances, who creeps about with a can-
dle late o' nights to gloat over his gold,
and whom the footfall of a passer-by
throws into an ecstasy of terror. He
is more real than one of these, and at
once ridiculous and loathsome because
so real. He keeps up an establishment,
has servants and an equipage, and at
least goes through the form of making
a figure in the world. But he is con-
stantly retrenching until at last re-
-* i8o-»-
MOLIERE
trenchment has become a mania with
him. His son has a valet. Harpagon,
under the pretence that the valet is spy-
ing upon his own financial operations,
drives him out of the house, but first he
searches the fellow's pockets. It is a su-
pererogatory performance; the pockets
are empty, as are all pockets in that
household except Harpagon's own.
He keeps horses, but he starves them,
until they are unable to drag them-
selves about, let alone dragging a car-
riage. Maitre Jacques, who fills the
double role of cook and coachman in
Harpagon's house, protests that to
keep the beasts alive at all, he must
take the food out of his own mouth.
Jacques is not without courage; he
tells his master what the neighbors say
about him ; for example, that Harpa-
-+ 181 •*-
MOLI&RE
gon has a special almanac printed with
twice the usual number of fast-days so
as to profit by the rigorous observance
of these days in the servants' dining-
room.
Harpagon is a fool as well as a
miser, and becomes the easy dupe of
an adventuress who persuades him that
a young girl is in love with him. The
older men are the more fascinating to
this young beauty, so the go-between
reports. The girl actually broke off a
match which was on the eve of being
celebrated when she discovered that
the groom was only fifty-six and did
not put on spectacles to sign the mar-
riage contract. Harpagon is overjoyed,
and declares that if he had been a wo-
man, he thinks he would have disliked
young men, too. He plans a feast for
MOLIERE
this marvellously sensible girl whose
ideals of manly charm are Nestor and
Anchises, but is staggered at the ex-
pense he must undergo. Valere agrees
to manage the affair. Harpagon trusts
him because the youth has taught the
miser that beautiful sentiment about
eating to live instead of living to eat.
The old miser's frenzy over the loss
of his gold is conventional, perhaps,
though one must needs have lost a
box of money in order to know ex-
actly the feeling, and should be of
Latin blood in order to comprehend
the greatness of the temptation to be
violent at such a juncture.
Farcical as the scenes often are, it is
possible to comprehend the state of
mind of that Harpagon of Paris who
liked to attend performances of I' A v are
-+1831-
MOLlkRE
because it was a play which taught
such excellent lessons in economy.
The farce entitled Monsieur de Pour-
ceaugnac was presented before Louis
XIV at Chambord in October, 1669.
Like a number of Moliere's pieces in
this style, the humor of the situations
and liveliness of dialogue are set off
by a charming embroidery of music
and dancing. The poet, though his
health was visibly failing, and though
he had every reason for wishing to be
on good terms with the medical pro-
fession, lashed the doctors unmercifully
in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac. The fa-
mous consultation scene is so true to
life as to give reason for the belief that
the conferences on the weighty subject
of the King's health were communi-
cated to Moliere by some familiar at
-+ 184-1-
MOLIERE
the chateau to serve him for a model.
Nor is it impossible that a hint might
have been given by the King himself.
Louis once asked Moliere what rela-
tion he and his physician sustained to
each other. Said the poet : • We talk
together. He gives me a prescription
which I do not take. Then I get well.'
If Louis could suggest to Moliere that
Soyecourt would make a diverting
stage character, no great stretch of
imagination is required to picture the
King as giving his favorite comic poet
a hint of the methods employed by
those 'princes of contemporary sci-
ence,' who had the physical well-being
of majesty in their charge, methods
concerning which the King himself
may have had moments of scepticism.
The monarch not only offered an
-+ 185 -i-
MOLlkRE
occasional hint as to the characters of
the plays, he even did Moliere the
questionable honor to collaborate with
him in a spectacular piece — if indeed
that can be called collaboration, where
the man of letters does the work, and
the prince more or less stands in the
way of its being rightly done. Louis
gave the subject for the Amants magni-
fiques,axi& perhaps made suggestions as
to the conduct of the incidents, which
had of necessity to be followed. Such
a penalty must one pay for the honor
of having a king as a literary coadjutor.
Whether due to this cause or not, the
Amants magnifiques is one of the weak-
est of the few weak plays with which
Moliere's name is associated.
It was followed, in October of the
same year (1670), by a sparkling com-
-+186^
MOLIERE
edy-ballet, the Bourgeois gentilhomme.
Of the many characters created by Mo-
Here, it may be doubted whether any
one is better known than Monsieur
Jourdain. He was made to be laughed
at and liked. His honest astonishment
on finding that he has been talking
prose all his life without knowing it, is
one of the few expressions from dra-
matic literature with which the world
is perfectly acquainted. King Rich-
ard's proffer of his kingdom for a horse
is not more familiar.
Psych'e, a spectacular piece, written
by Corneille, Moliere, and Quinault,
in collaboration, with music by Lulli,
the * swan of Florence,' was first given
at the theatre of the Tuileries in Jan-
uary, 1671. Moliere was responsible
for the general plan of the piece, and
-+ 187-1-
MOLlkRE
for the composition of these scenes and
passages where there was opportunity
for the play of his peculiar wit and vi-
vacity. Comeille, then sixty-five years
of age, displayed the tender passion of
his poetic youth in the scene where
Psyche tells Amour of her love. These
parts were assigned respectively to
Baron and to Armande Bejart, Mo
liere's wife. Moliere himself played the
part of a ' Zephyr,' which, considering
his age and his figure, seems odd and
grotesque enough. This fact has been
often cited as a proof of Moliere's per-
fect willingness to sink his own person-
ality and take a minor role when there
was no place for the exercise of his
peculiar quality.
Les Fourberies de Scapin and la Com-
tesse d'Escarbagnas belong to this same
MOLlkRE
year, 1671. The first of these is taken
in part from Terence ; it represents a
return to the comedy of intrigue, the
work of Moliere's youth. The Com-
tesse d'Escarbagnas is a picture of pro-
vincial manners, drawn with that shade
of malice which the best-natured Pa-
risian can be depended upon to make
use of when he depicts town ways.
Les Femmes savantes, a five-act com-
edy in verse, was produced at the the-
atre of the Palais-Royal, on March 1 1,
^167^. It was intended in part for a
satire on the latest intellectual craze,
the passion for science and philosophy.
Moliere was of course more or less un-
just, not because it was any part of his
nature to be, but because satire in its
very quality is unjust. The case must
be overstated, or half the effect is lost.
-♦• 189 -*—
MOLlkRE
This is altogether true in dramatic and
pictorial satire, where exaggeration is
the essence. No one believes for a
minute that there was any measure of
justice in Arbuthnot's description of
Marlborough as ' Hocus, the old cun-
ning lawyer,' yet how much spirit and
energy would be wanting to that in-
imitable satire of Law is a Bottomless
Pit had its author dealt more leniently
and delicately with his victims. Mo-
liere wished to show the disastrous ef-
fect of pedantry in warping a woman's
nature from the course Heaven marked
out for her. Exactly what course this is,
seems to be even yet a moot point. Not
every woman who understands Greek
is an Armand or Philaminte. Do we
not all know of a famous woman of
the last century who was none the less
-»• 190-*-
MOLIERE
foolish and charming over her dog, and
none the less devoted to her husband
and her baby, because she was able to
read the Fathers in the original Greek !
However, Moliere's point of view was
grateful to many people, and he prob-
ably had as much basis for his conten-
tion as have the majority of satirists.
The reigning sensation was the phi-
losophy of Descartes. A few under-
stood it, and more than a few thought
they did, while everybody talked about
it. ' Society ' repeated the phrases of the
Discours de la Methode. Denizens of
the ultra-intellectual circles had Des-
cartes's name continually upon their
lips. A typical woman of the salons
where the new pedantry flourished was
Mademoiselle Dupre, a niece of Des-
marets de Saint-Sorlin. She was be-
-»• 191 +-
MOLlRRE
lieved to be fully as clever as her
famous uncle, and altogether free from
his intellectual whims. She knew Latin
and Greek. • At a time when Descartes
could reckon so many disciples and
admirers she was thought to merit the
name of la Cartesienne.' Somaize de-
scribes her in the Bictionnaire des Pr'e-
cieuses as one who has made ' open pro-
fession of the sciences, of letters, of
poetry, of romance.' She was equipped
with a ready knowledge of those things
which supplied topics of conversation
among the frequenters of the ruelles
and salons.
1 The play of the Femmes savant es «et
~©»ly satirized an intellectual move-
ment, but it was believed at the time
that two well-known men, a noted
scholar and a noted bel-esprit, were
-* I92 +-
MOLlkRE
held up to ridicule in its scenes. Play-
goers found this piquant. The public
is always happy when it is able to iden-
tify characters of fiction with real peo-
ple. The portraits labelled respectively
Trissotin and Vadius were not so
closely drawn as to admit of no dis-
pute over the question who was the
unconscious model for each. About
Trissotin there was never much doubt ;
he was intended for the Abbe Cotin.
Moliere had a reason for making the
attack, and the allusions fit the case so
well as to make ambiguity impossible.
In the Femmes savantes. Act III., scene
2, Trissotin offers the ladies a ragout
of a sonnet - which has had the fortune
to please a certain princess. In the
opinion of its maker it is a delicacy
well seasoned with Attic salt; he is
MOLlkRE
convinced they will like it. Trissotin
then recites his 4 Sonnet a la princesse
Uranie sur sa fievre.' This little piece
is found among the CEuvres galantes,
en prose et en vers, which Cotin pub-
lished in 1663. The sonnet was actu-
ally inscribed to the Duchesse de
Nemours, sur sa fievre quarte.' The
' Epigramme sur un carrosse,' which so
excites the admiration of Philaminte,
is taken from the same volume. These
two allusions alone were thought to
be sufficient to prove the identity of
Cotin a\id Trissotin.
Menage was less vulnerable to the
shafts of satire than Cotin. He was a
man of force of character and of learn-
ing. He belonged to several literary
coteries, but that in itself is not suffi-
cient to damn an author. They only
-* 194 -«—
MOLIERE
are open to an attack who live in the
hot -house atmosphere because they
have not the stamina to get on in the
open air. Menage was not a man whose
powers could be summed up in an
epigram or disposed of in a caricature.
He had good sense, and he was not
without good nature. The Abbe Fabre
thinks that Moliere was very unjust.
At all events, Menage refused to be
made ridiculous. He determined not
to recognize himself in Vadius, and
he joined heartily in praise of the
Femmes savantes. The Marquise de
Rambouillet asked him if he was go-
ing to allow Moliere to make a mock
of him in that way. Menage replied :
' Madame, I have seen the piece, and
it is altogether charming. It is not pos-
sible to find anything in it to change
-1.195^
MOLlkRE
or to criticise/ Whereupon Moliere,
not to be outdone, disavowed any
intention of attacking the amiable
scholar. 1
Cotin undoubtedly suffered, though
he made no reply. A story once cir-
culated to the effect that among the
causes contributing to Cotin's death
was mortification at the ridicule heaped
upon him in Moliere's play. Cotin did
not die until 1682, that is, ten years
after the production of the Femmes sa-
vant es — a fact which leads Taschereau
to observe that mortification must have
been for Cotin, as coffee was for Vol-
taire, a slow poison.
(^ Early in February of the next year,
1673, me Malade imaginaire was
1 Taschereau, p. 285.
-* 196 •*-
MOLIERE
played for the first time. Moliere was
now a very sick man, but he remitted
neither his efforts for his art nor his
sarcastic attacks upon the medical
profession. The play was immediately
and completely successful.) The actor-
author himself filled the role of Argan.
How pathetic and ironical it all was,
this unhappy and desperately ill man
playing the part of the imaginary in-
valid !
On the day of the fourth represen-
tation, he was so much worse than
usual that his friends besought him
not to go upon the stage. He answered
in his characteristic way: 'What would
you have me do? Here are fifty poor
work-people who have only their day's
wages to live upon. What will be-
come of them if I do not play ? '
-4 197 -1—
MOLI&RE
This, in the opinion of some critics,
was but a pretext ; Moliere was rich
enough, they say, to pay for the day he
might have taken to be ill in. Prob-
ably it was a pretext in a way. Only
by thinking of the people dependent
upon him could he drive himself to
his task. Like all strong men, men
who have dominated circumstances,
who have raised themselves to places
of influence, Moliere could endure least
of all the thought that the day of his
effectiveness might be over. When a
man like this, with a passion for work
such as Moliere was possessed of, once
falls behind, he is lost. He knows it,
and therefore struggles desperately to
keep up. He thinks to outface disease
and to shame death. There are illus-
trations of this thing in the history of
-it 198 -»—
m m tomm ,, ^
M0L1ERE
men of action. By making a supreme
effort, these great souls have managed
to survive a crisis which promised to
be fatal. Moliere's case, however, was
desperate. The effort was none the less
courageous because misplaced. Per-
haps it was better that this great artist
who, from the time when a little child
he held his grandfather's hand as they
walked to the theatre, had known no
thought and formed no ambition which
did not centre in the mimic life of the
stage — perhaps it was better that he
should meet the stroke of death right
where he had known the most intense
joy of life.
199
VII
URING the mock ceremony
of conferring the degree of Doctor of
Medicine in the Malade imaginaire,
and at the instant when he was pro-
nouncing the word ! juro,'(^Moliere
was taken with a convulsion;! He
tried to pass it off with a laugh, but
even the spectators could see that he
was very ilj/ The performance, how-
ever, went on without further inter-
ruption. Moliere was carried to his
home in Rue Richelieu. The vio-
-H- 201 +-
MOLlkRE
lence of his cough increased until it
brought on hemorrhage. [Believing
the end was near he expressed a wish
to receive the sacraments. The great
need of the dying man was not suffi-
cient to move the hearts of the two
priests who were first summoned.
They repeatedly refused to come,
though Jean Aubry waited upon
them in person to beg their attend-
ance. More than an hour and a half
was consumed in this running back
and forth. When finally a priest ar-
rived, the third who had been called,
it was too late; Moliere had ceased
to breathe.) He died in the arms of
two sisters of a religious order, who
were at that moment guests in his
house.
A wretched dispute arose over the
-J-202-t-
MOLlkRE
question of his interment. jThe cure of
Saint-Eustache, taking his stand upon
the law which forbade the admin-
istration of the viaticum to usurers,
' concubinaires,' sorcerers and /players J
unless they have confessed and given
satisfaction for their notorious offenses,
refused to sanction the burial in con-
secrated ground. A petition was at
once addressed to Harlay de Champ-
vallon, the archbishop of Paris, while
Moliere's wife hastened to Versailles
to throw herself at the King's feet,
and beg for her husband what these
haughty churchmen would refuse
him, the privilege of Christian burial.
Mademoiselle de Moliere, as she was
called, was a good actress, albeit not
uniformly successful in playing a
part on the stage of real life. She had
MOLIERE
the temerity to say that if Moliere
was a criminal his crimes were such
as the King himself had sanctioned.
We may well believe that bitterness
and passion, rather than bravado,
moved her to this unfortunate speech.
The King dismissed her with but
little encouragement. Nevertheless
he sent word to the archbishop that
the affair must be conducted in a way
to avoid noise and scandal.
Consent was finally and grudg-
ingly given to the interment of Mo
liere's remains at Saint-Eustache. The
funeral was to be held by night,
1 without pomp,' and it was forbidden
to carry the body into the churchy
The act of inhumation on the parish
register naturally makes no mention
of Moliere the actor, only of Moliere,
-* 204-1-
01 m m &* * b l
MOLIERE
'tapissier, valet de chambre ordinaire
duRoi. ,
Ugly epithets have been showered
upon Harlay de Champvallon because
of his attitude in this matter. The
instance is one of many illustrating
how a man may get a bad name by
keeping strictly to the letter of the
law. The ecclesiastic whose reputa-
tion with posterity was most likely to
suffer by a display of intolerance was
the one selected through the irony of
fate to be the official instrument of an
affront to Moliere dead. Had the
duty fallen to some rigid moralist, a
man of the life and temper of Bour-
daloue for example, there would have
been nothing to say. But Harlay de
Champvallon of all men ! a prelate
who was notorious for his gallantries,
-1-205 **■
MOLIERE
though he unquestionably held sound
views on the wickedness of playact-
ing. When he died, in 1695, it was
found difficult to get any one to pro-
nounce his eulogy. Madame de Se-
vigne observed that there were two
trifles which made the undertaking an
embarrassment to the eulogist: one
was the archbishop's life and the other
was his death.
If Harlay has been roundly abused
he has also been warmly defended.
There is no little reason in Brune-
tiere's remarks that the position of
those zealous partisans is singular
who insist that the archbishop, be-
cause he failed in some of his duties,
should have transgressed in all. ' In the
eyes of the public/ says Brunetiere,
4 he at least preserved the proprieties.'
-••206-I-
MOLlkRE
On Tuesday, February 21, 1673,
at nine o'clock in the evening, the
funeral of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de
Moliere took place. J The bier, cov-
ered with the pall of the guild of up-
holsterers, was borne by four priests
and followed by a great crowd of
mourners. The body was taken to
the cemetery of Saint-Joseph and
buried ' at the foot of the cross/ Af-
ter the interment there was an almost
prodigal distribution of alms among
the poor.
The stone slab which Mademoiselle
de Moliere placed over her husband's
grave was in existence as late as
1732. There is a tradition, in support
of which some not wholly convincing
arguments have been made, that the
body of the poet was surreptitiously
-*• 207 •«-
,& \ m & m ^
MOLI&RE
removed from the grave at the foot of
the cross, and buried in a remote part
of the ground. The tradition gained
enough credit to satisfy the commis-
sioners who, in 1792, were authorized
by the government to seek for Molie-
re's remains. These gentlemen made
their investigation in a place where,
according to the best authority, those
remains could not have been found.
For which performance the commis-
sioners have been accused of • legerete
et inconsequence/ The relics ex-
humed at that time, after suffering
some neglect, found a resting-place
in the garden of the Petits-Augustins,
in a tomb erected for them by the
pious care of Alexandre Lenoir.
Here they remained until 1817, when
they were taken to the cemetery of
-J-208-J-
MOLIERE
Pere - Lachaise. (Paraphrasing a re-
mark by an eminent scholar, it may-
be said that this mausoleum in Pere-
Lachaise, albeit nothing more than a
cenotaph, is at least a reminder of
the attitude of France towards one
of the literary reputations which she
holds dearest. J
Moliere's theatre remained closed
only a week. Three days after the
funeral the Misanthrope was an-
nounced, and Armande made her ap-
pearance as Celimene. To any one
familiar with the exigencies of theatri-
cal life her conduct needs no justifica-
tion. The question did not concern
herself alone — the existence of a no-
table dramatic organization was im-
perilled by the death of its great chief,
-i- 209 ♦*
MOLlkRE
In 1677, Armande became the wife
of Francois Guerin d'Estriche, a fel-
low player. This second marriage is
accounted almost a crime by certain
devotees of Moliere who cannot for
a moment stop to realize that the
woman upon whom they persist-
ently heap abuse was, after all, the
woman whom Moliere loved. A son
was born of this second marriage.
He seems to have been brought up
to honor the name Moliere. That
he was not wanting in ambition
would appear from the fact that
he courageously attempted to finish
Moliere's unfinished pastoral of Meli-
certe.
Moliere had three children. His
two sons died in infancy. The daugh-
ter, Esprit-Madeleine Poquelin, born
•H-2IO-J-
MOLlkRE
in 1665, survived her illustrious father
a full half century. At the time of
her mother's second marriage she was
placed in a convent in the hope that
she would choose to remain. But she
displayed such repugnance to conven-
tual life that it became necessary to
take her home. The presence in the
house of a growing daughter was a
constant source of annoyance to the
always coquettish Armande. The
child was a glaring advertisement of
the mother's age. Esprit-Madeleine
knew this and had the wit to com-
ment upon it. Her father's old friend
Chapelle, who for a time had lost sight
of her, met her one day and in the
course of the conversation asked how
old she was. 'Fifteen and a half,'
she replied, and then added with a
-+2II -t-
MOLlkRE
smile, 4 but say nothing about it to
mamma ! '
In 1705, when she was forty years
of age, Esprit-Madeleine became the
wife of Claude - Rachel de Monta-
lant, a widower with four children.
They who will may credit the roman-
tic story that twenty years prior to
this date Montalant carried off Mo-
liere's daughter because he could not
obtain her mother's consent to their
marriage. The authenticity of the
story is thought to be extremely
doubtful. Cizeron - Rival describes
Madame de Montalant as tall, well-
shaped, not pretty, but making up for
her lack of beauty by her wit. Gri-
marest, who knew her, speaks of the
solidity and charm of her conversa-
tion. She died, childless, in 1723.
-n 212-1-
MOLlkRE
The history of Moliere's posthu-
mous fame offers no anomalies. For
the most part it is a record of nor-
mal growth and always widening in-
fluence. There are few successful dra-
matic writers the brilliancy of whose
reputation has not at some time been
darkened by partial or entire eclipse.
But Moliere appears to have been
one of the few. Some fluctuations in
public regard may be noted, but on
the whole these fluctuations are neither
pronounced nor numerous. Moliere's
fame has never been markedly dimin-
ished. He has never been relegated
to the limbo of authors who are
praised by the critics, and neglected
by everybody else.
There was a moment when the
King became wearied of the theatre,
-+2131-
MOLlkRE
as he did of most pleasures and vani-
ties; but this monarch, for whom
much of Moliere's best work was done,
went back in old age with renewed
satisfaction to the plays in which he
had taken unbounded delight in the
days of his youth. Bossuet assailed
Moliere in phrases which will always
be read, and which once read can
never be forgotten. But the terrible
denunciation leaves us undisturbed in
the conviction that the author of Tar-
tuffe and the Misanthrope had a deep
moral purpose in his work. And in
illustration of the liberal spirit of our
time it may be noted that the histori-
ans of French literature who render
most ample tribute to the splendor
of Bossuet's qualities never fail to
apologize for the severity of the great
MOLIERE
orator's attack upon Moliere. The
Eighteenth Century has been accused
of belittling and neglecting the great-
est comic dramatist of the Seven-
teenth. On the other hand the Eight-
eenth Century produced the first
formal biography of the poet, and the
earliest of many noble annotated edi-
tions of his works. The public, usu-
ally so capricious in its literary tastes,
has never been alienated from Moliere.
The great master has risen easily and
naturally to the rank of a classic. He
has suffered but little from criticism.
Admirers are almost in danger of for-
getting that it is possible to pick flaws
in his art and to question the sound-
ness of his ethics. The attacks upon
Moliere's literary workmanship are
not wholly without reason. Never-
-•-215 •*-
MOLIERE
theless there is a point beyond which
Academic criticism cannot go; there
are reputations which it is powerless
to injure.
Trust an Englishman to be severe
upon a Frenchman for want of moral
sense. Yet it was an English critic
who said : f Of all dramatists, ancient
and modern, Moliere is perhaps that
one who has borne most constantly
in mind the theory that the stage is a
lay-pulpit and that its end is not
merely amusement, but the reforma-
tion of manners by means of amusing
spectacles/ J
The celebrated scholar who ex-
plains Moliere's popularity by the
characteristics of his genius which are
summed up in the word ' Gaulois,'
does not take account of us who, al-
-H- 2l6-»-
MOLIERE
beit of other race and different tradi-
tions, certainly love, and fancy that
we understand these marvellous plays.
We, too, read and enjoy Moliere.
We, too, feel his power, though we
feel it in our own way. Doubtless we
miss something, perhaps much, that a
Frenchman delights in. We may not
pretend to understand subtilties of
humor and expression only to be per-
ceived by a mind saturated from ear-
liest childhood with the French spirit,
ideas, language. These things are a
Frenchman's inalienable possession,
as to us belong certain peculiar plea-
sures in the reading of Shakespeare,
pleasures which neither Gaul nor
Teuton can completely understand.
Grant, as we must, that Moliere
was ' Gaulois ' in his fashion of going
-* 217 H-
MOLIERE
straight to old traditional sources of
wit, ' Gaulois in the possession of
a temperament equally removed from
the romantic on the one hand and the
heroic on the other, ' Gaulois ' in his
frank manner, in his willingness to use
the plain word and the daring ges-
ture; it is still true that even in
France a goodly measure of Moliere's
popularity is due to the possession of
qualities which appeal to universal
human nature. There is that in Mo
Here which all men, irrespective of
nation and race, can admire.
The pages of a standard bibliogra-
phy, like Paul Lacroix's, afford a
striking if rude test of the extent of
Moliere's- influence. The section de-
voted to recording the versions in for-
eign tongues is most illuminating.
~»-2l8-*-
MOLIERE
That these plays should have been
translated into English and German,
into Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese,
into Polish, Swedish, and Dutch, oc-
casions no surprise. But when we
find the Precieuses ridicules in modern
Greek, the Misanthrope in Persian,
the M'edecin malgr'e lui in Armenian,
and the Mariage ford in Turkish, it
becomes necessary to readjust pre-
conceived ideas of the size of Mo-
liere's audience. These versions are
not made at the mere whim of a
scholar, as was the version of Robinson
Crusoe in Latin.
The staple of Moliere's comedy is
not Gallic ; it is the staple of every-
day life. He depicts characters that
are typical of what may be found
everywhere, the world over. He
-*■ 219 -»-
MOLI&RE
lashes affectation and vanity in all
forms: the vanity of men who pre-
tend to learning they do not possess :
the vanity of men who aspire to shine
in society for which they are wholly
unfitted: the vanity of men whose
only claim to distinction is in the ex-
tent and variety of their diseases, and
who are flattered by doctors and apo-
thecaries as monarchs are flattered by
courtiers. Moliere shows us country
girls infatuated with the reigning lit-
erary craze, who try to talk the lan-
guage of the critics, struggle to be
wise in madrigals and sonnets, and at
the same time keep perfectly informed
on the important questions of washes
and cosmetics. He shows us two
pedants quarrelling over their respec-
tive attainments, and thus emphasizes
-+220 +-
MOLIERE
anew the fact that learning does not
imply culture, and that ability to read
the Greek and Latin classics will not
insure a man against boorishness.
Moliere disturbs us in our belief
that politeness is a virtue. Is there
not too much of bowing and compli-
menting, too much of pretentious so-
licitude about one another's health?
May it not be accounted to us for
sin that we smile hypocritically when
we meet ? Is it not better, since we
detest cordially, to let our detestation
be known ? But again Moliere makes
it as clear as daylight that he who
speaks the truth without respect of
persons or circumstances not only of-
fends by a rough honesty, but also
runs the risk of undoing the effect of
his good deeds. And if this plain-
-H- 221 •«-
MOLIERE
speaker allows his mind to dwell on
the sum total of social hypocrisy he
is in a fair way to become a misan-
thrope and a cynic. And in the de-
gree in which he expresses his con-
tempt for mankind he furnishes new
occasions for laughter on the part of
those who believe that virtue is never
so unattractive as when it is militant.
Moliere laughs at a dull conserva-
tism which shuts its eyes to scientific
progress ; which believes that an idea
is good because it is old, which would
rather be wrong with the past than
right with the present; which sup-
poses that truth is of necessity tradi-
tional and that all the wise men are
dead ages since.
If he ridicules the absurd preten-
sions of professors of music and dan-
-+ 222 -i-
MOLIERE
cing, who exalt their several arts at
the expense of other and more im-
portant studies, he leaves room for
the inference that professors of philo-
sophy may be equally superfluous.
Musicians talk about 'crotchets,' but
philosophers have their crotchets, as
well ; dancing-masters teach the art of
cutting capers, and are perhaps less
harmful than they who teach the
questionable art of cutting capers with
the mind.
One marvels, as he reads Moliere's
plays, and studies the narrative of
his life, that the career of an actor-
dramatist devoted to pleasing the
public should contain so many ele-
ments usually associated with the arts
of war rather than the arts of peace.
Moliere was ever a fighter. He be-
-+223-1-
MOLIERE
longs to that splendid group of hu-
morists which includes men like Cer-
vantes, Fielding, and Heine, men to
whom life is something more than a
spectacle. And having courage to
fight he was blest in his enemies,
whether they were quacks, hypocrites,
precieuses, or silly and malignant
marquises. Perhaps he suffered more
than we know from the hostile atti-
tude of ' society.' Nothing is more
galling to a man of genius than the
lofty pretensions and condescending
airs of people of rank and birth. So-
ciety frowned upon Moliere because
he was an actor. This is inconceiv-
able to us. We sometimes forget, in
our more considerate day, how long
it has taken the world to get over
the idea that actors must be treated in
-+ 224-1-
MOLIERE
accordance with the benevolent old
English law which classified them as
4 rogues and vagabonds ' and occasion-
ally flogged them at the cart's tail.
Moliere, who endured much for his
chosen profession, would have been
astonished to learn that the day was
to come in which actors would be
accounted the spoiled children of so-
ciety, to be petted and indulged with-
out stint. As it was, however, the
influence of a powerful King and the
possession of transcendent genius
were hardly able to secure to this
great man the measure of respect from
society that was so evidently his due.
Because he was an actor it was im-
possible for Moliere to be elected to
the French Academy ; it were a waste
of words to abuse this famous society
-§• 225-1-
MOLlkRE
for neglecting to bestow upon the
dramatist an honor that was not in its
power to grant. He became a mem-
ber by 'posthumous adoption/ In
1778 Houdon's bust of Moliere was
placed in the hall where the Academy
held its meetings. The learned body
did itself no little honor by the in-
scription engraved beneath :
RIEN NE MANQUE A SA GLOIRE,
IL MANQUAIT A LA NOTICE.
226
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
NOTE
1 he indispensable library companion is
of course the Bibliographie moli'eresque, by
Paul Lacroix. (Paris : Fontaine, 1875.
2 e edition.) c C'est un souvenir de Pa-
bominable siege de Paris,' says its author.
It may be supplemented by the l Notice
bibliographique ' in the nth volume of
Despois and Mesnard's edition of Moliere.
In the following note the books and
essays on Moliere are divided into three
groups : —
First : Brief notices in the standard
manuals of French Literature.
1. Nisard (D-)> Histoire de la Littera-
227
MOLlkRE
ture franfaise. Paris, Firmin-Didot. I7 e
edition. Vol. iii, pp. 84-128.
2. Godefroy (Frederic), Histoire de la
Litter ature franfaise : XVII siecle, Poetes.
Paris, Gaume et O, 1879. 2* edition,
pp. 177-206.
3. Pergameni (Hermann), Histoire ge-
nerale de la Litterature franfaise. Paris,
Alcan, 1889, pp. 284-294.
4. Faguet (£mile), Histoire de la Lit-
terature franfaise. Paris, Plon, 1900.
Vol. ii, pp. 122-122.
5. Lanson (Gustave), Histoire de la Lit-
terature franfaise. Paris, Hachette, 1898.
5e edition, pp. 502-528.
6. Brunetiere (Ferdinand), Manuel de
l y Histoire de la Litterature franfaise. Paris,
Delagrave, 1898, pp. 1 69-1 81.
7. Saintsbury (George), A Short His-
tory of French Literature. Oxford, Claren-
-K2284-
MOLlkRE
don Press, 1897. 5th edition, pp. 281-
287.
Second : Biographies and critical es-
says.
1. Taschereau (Jules), Histoire de la
Vie et des Ouvrages de Moliere. Paris,
Hetzel, 1844. 3 e edition.
2. Moland (Louis), Vie de J.-B. P.
Moliere, Histoire de son Theatre et de sa
Troupe. Paris, Gamier freres, 1892. Con-
sult also Moliere et la Comedie italienne, by
the same author.
3. Loiseleur (Jules), Les Points obscurs
de la Vie de Moliere. Paris, Liseaux,
1877.
4. Baluffe (Auguste), Moliere inconnu.
Paris, Perrin et O, 1886.
5. Chardon (Henri), M. de Modernises
deux femmes et Madeleine Bejart. Paris,
-h229-»-
MOLlkRE
Picard, 1886. Also la Troupe du Roman
Comique d'evoilee, by the same author.
6. Larroumet (Gustave), La Com'edie de
Moliere, Yauteur et le milieu. Paris, Hachette,
1887.
7. Lang (Andrew), Article, ' Moliere,'
in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th edition.
8. Brunetiere (F«)> Etudes critiques sur
FHistoire de la Litter ature fran$aise. Paris,
Hachette, 1896. In the first series will
be found the notable essay entitled ' les
dernieres recherches sur la vie de Moliere ; '
in ' the fourth series a study entitled < la
philosophic de Moliere.'
9. Petit de Julleville (L.), Histoire de
la Langue et de la Litt'erature francaise.
Paris, Colin, 1898. Vol. v, chapter 1.
The seventy-two pages devoted chiefly to
Moliere are by Andre Le Breton.
The student who follows these slight
bibliographical indications will have no diffi-
MOLIERE
culty in getting track of what he wants.
He would do well to have always at hand
le Theatre francais sous Louis XIV, by
Despois, and le Theatre francais avant la
p'eriode classique, by Rigal. There are in-
numerable essays on special points, such
as Reynaud's les Medecins au temps de Mo-
liere, and Nivelet's Moliere et Gui Patin.
Third : Direct sources.
i. Moliere (J. B. P.), (Euvres com-
pletes, edited by Louis Moland. Paris,
Gamier freres, 1863, in seven volumes.
Consult also the monumental edition, by
Despois and Mesnard, in the series of
1 Grands £crivains de la France.'
2. Lagrange (Charles Varlet), Registre
(1658-1685), c publie par les soins de la
Comedie-francaise, Janvier 1876.' Paris,
J. Claye. The 4 notice biographique ' is
by Ed. Thierry.
MOLlkRE
3. Beffara (L.-F.), Dissertation sur
J.-B. Poquelin Moliere. Paris, Vente,
1821.
4. Bazin (A.), iV<?/« historiques sur la
Vie de Moliere. 2 e edition, Paris, Techener,
1851.
5. Soulie (Eud.), Recherches sur Mo-
liere et sur sa Famille. Paris, Hachette,
1863. The extraordinary collection of
documents in this book, sixty-five in num-
ber, begins with the marriage contract of
Jean Poquelin and Marie Cresse, and ends
with the inventory made after the death of
Montalant, September, 1738.
6. Grimarest (Jean-Leonard le Gallois,
sieur de), la Vie de M. de Moliere. Paris,
Le Febvre, 17 05.
This is the first edition. A reprint
under the editorial care of A. P.-Malissis
was published by Liseux in 1877. Grima-
rest got many of his anecdotes from Mo-
^ 5 \ > s ste ft ^ k
MOLIERE
Here's friend and pupil, the actor Baron.
It has been the fashion for many years to
abuse the book. A tempered defence will
be found in the appendix of Larroumet's
Comedie de Molie're.
Of the many defamatory pamphlets
written against Moliere and his wife, two
at least must be accounted in a way
1 sources/ One is the Alomire hypocondre,
and the other is la Fameuse comedienne ; both
can be easily found in modern reprints with
notes and critical estimates.
233
Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A .
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW
AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS
WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN
THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY
WILL INCREASE TO 50 CENTS ON THE FOURTH
DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY
OVERDUE.
AUG 1 1934
NOV 19 1935
9 ; 9Jun52SS
JUL 31 1936
:..L-.._..
•n*
' ■_..
OCT ism
PEC U1940M
U8RARYUSE
JM 4 1Q43
MAR 281 96 2
JAN iM 1 91 3
:
WM R**«E
m 8 iste
RE(f D LD
&i*i
4Pcc^.\;.>rt\tt
YB 50045
/
Jf> / ''*ft£>
UliiOW