MO LIERE 
 
 From the Picture attributed to Pierre Mi6,nari 
 By permission of Mess 1 ? Hachette & C 
 
THE LIFE 
 
 OF 
 
 M O L I E R E 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY M. TROLLOPE 
 
 "Moliere, c'est la morale des honnetes gens." 
 
 SAINTE-BEUVE, Port-Royal, 
 Book in. ch. xv. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 AKCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY 
 
 LIMITED 
 
 1905 
 
Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty 
 
PEEFACE 
 
 I OUGHT at once to express my acknowledgments and my 
 thanks to the many French authors who within the last two 
 generations or more have done so much to elucidate the story 
 of Moliere's life. Of these writers Taschereau was the first 
 who collected and put together in a biographical form the 
 facts an'" , doings in the career of the great comic dramatist. 
 His Histoire de la Vie et des Outrages de Moliere, the first 
 edition of which appeared in 1825 and the fifth in 1863, has 
 served as a sure foundation for many subsequent labours. 
 The third edition of this book, published in 1844, is the one 
 I have generally used ; and in my footnotes I have, though 
 perhaps wrongly, given Vie de Holier e as its title. In 1863 
 Eudoxe Soulie' published his invaluable Recherches sur Moliere 
 et sur sa Famille. The greater part of Soulie^s book is devoted 
 to the publication, for the first time, of legal documents relating 
 to Moliere and his affairs ; and I have referred to these docu- 
 ments chiefly in my earlier chapters. Also in the year 1863, 
 M. Louis Moland published the first edition of his CEuvres 
 Completes de Moli&re, in which he gave the biography of the 
 poet at different periods of his life. This biography was given 
 in a more connected form some twenty years later, when M. 
 Moland brought out a second and much enlarged edition of 
 his book. The edition of Moliere which I have used habitu- 
 ally, and to which I generally refer, forms part of the Collec- 
 tion des Grands Ecrivains de la France, published by MM. 
 Hachette. It is unfortunate for the purpose of reference that 
 in the various editions of Moliere's comedies the Scenes in the 
 different Acts should not begin and end in the same place. 
 
 V 
 
 272751 
 
vi LIFE OF MOLIlfcRE 
 
 All my references to the numbers of the scenes in Moliere's 
 plays apply to the edition last mentioned unless, of course, 
 any other edition is specified. I have, however, tried to 
 simplify the references. The first volume of the Moliere in 
 the Collection des Grands Ecrivains de la France appeared in 
 1873, the last two, vols. xii. and xiii., containing a Lexique de 
 la Langue de Molttre, in 1900. Eugene Despois was its first 
 editor, but he lived to finish only the first three volumes and 
 part of the fourth. After his death M. Paul Mesnard con- 
 tinued and completed the work except the Notice biblio- 
 graphique (vol. xi.), which was compiled by M. Arthur Des- 
 feuilles, and the Lexique, by MM. Arthur and Paul Desfeuilles. 
 I should say that M. Mesnard's Notice biographique sur Molitre, 
 which forms the tenth volume in this edition, has been of 
 very great assistance to me in unravelling the facts in the 
 story of Moliere's life. 
 
 Thus, all my authorities are French. I know that within 
 the last twenty years some English writers have made a study 
 of Moliere, and have brought out editions with notes of the 
 chief of his plays. But as the greater part of my work was 
 done out of England, where I had not access to these books, 
 it is not altogether my fault that I have not been able to apply 
 to them for assistance. 
 
 I acknowledge very gladly my obligations to many French 
 authors, for they have taught me much ; and it is only natural 
 to suppose that to some extent my thoughts have followed 
 theirs. But I wish to say that I have not knowingly stolen 
 their ideas and given them as my own. It is generally easy 
 to quote the source of authority when dealing with facts, and 
 I believe I have done so sufficiently. I trust I shall not be 
 trespassing too far on the goodwill of French writers on 
 Moliere if I assume that literary courtesy is willing to allow 
 fair borrowing of facts and details when due acknowledgment 
 is made of the loan. But literary courtesy does not extend 
 its hospitality to robbery of ideas with silence about the theft. 
 I hope I have not sinned in that respect. 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 Besides the authors already mentioned I have made use of 
 the labours of others. Their names will be found in my 
 footnotes with references to their pages. Some of them, how- 
 ever, should be mentioned here. MM. Victor Fournel ; A. Jal ; 
 Jules Bonnassies; fidouard Fournier; Paul Lacroix; Jules 
 Loiseleur ; Georges Monval ; again Eugene Despois, my earliest 
 instructor in his book Le Thtdtre Franqais sous Louis XI V. ; 
 and also again, Louis Moland, another instructor at about the 
 same time in his Molikrc et la Comddie Italienne, and later in 
 the two t-v.- .ons of his (Euvres Completes de Moliere. And 
 though I have spoken of it at the beginning of Chapter vi., 
 I should not omit to mention here the publication in 1876 by 
 the Come'die Franchise of La Grange's Register ; for that book 
 gives a knowledge of events in connection with Moliere's troop, 
 and of the successes or the failures of his plays when they 
 first appeared on the stage, which no one can hope to obtain 
 who has not carefully studied its pages. 
 
 I have mentioned by name the registers of La Thorilliere 
 and of Hubert. Both of these men were members of Moliere's 
 troop. A small book, Le premier registre de La Thorilliere, 
 has been published; it deals only with the year 1663-64, and 
 it tells nothing of importance that is not to be found in La 
 Grange. I do not know if Hubert's Register has been printed ; 
 it is not in the British Museum Catalogue. My one quotation 
 from it was taken from a volume already published. There 
 is a source of contemporary authority from which I have 
 not quoted the doggerel verses by Loret and by Robinet. 
 These men were weekly chroniclers of events, and they 
 were bound to describe everything that they related in 
 glowing colours. Their lines may have their charms, but 
 terseness of expression is not one of them. I could not repeat 
 their verses because of their long-windedness, which often 
 ceases to be amusing. When their verses refer to Moliere's 
 plays they have already been quoted sufficiently by Despois, 
 by M. Paul Mesnard, and by M. Louis Moland. 
 
 It will be seen that in speaking of a theatrical company of 
 
Vlll 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 actors I have used the word "troop" very frequently. To 
 some persons this word will have a peculiar or an ugly look. 
 A short word, however, was necessary, and I soon found that 
 "company" would not do. Early in the first scene of his 
 Critic, Sheridan uses the word "troop" in the sense of a 
 theatrical company of actors ; also Malone, in his edition of 
 Shakspeare published in 1821 (vol. iii. p. 175), uses the word 
 "troop" in the same sense. I must quote them as my authority. 
 Perhaps I may be wrong, but I prefer " troop " to " troupe." 
 
 Both of the portraits of Moliere in this volume are from 
 paintings by Mignard. The frontispiece is the same as one 
 of the portraits in the Album to the edition of Moliere in the 
 Collection des Grands ficrivains de la France, and has been 
 reproduced here by the kindness of MM. Hachette. The 
 original is in the Conde' Museum at Chantilly, and is the 
 finest of all the four portraits of Moliere by Mignard. It 
 was painted in 1668. The artist preserved it until his death 
 in 1695. Then it became the property of his daughter, the 
 Comtesse de Feuquieres. After her death all traces of it were 
 lost, until it was purchased by the Due d'Aumale in 1876. 
 The other portrait, facing page 410, was painted probably in 
 1666. Paul Lacroix describes this picture in his IconograpJiie 
 Molitresque, No. 46, and says that there are engravings from 
 it in five different states. The one reproduced here corre- 
 sponds with the fifth state, and is the same as that seen in 
 vol. i. of Charles Perrault's Hommes Illustres, published in 
 1696. The best known portrait of Moliere was painted by 
 Mignard at Avignon in 1658. Moliere is there represented 
 as Caesar in Corneille's tragedy Pompde. This picture was 
 bought by the Come'die FranQaise in 1869. 
 
 Hardly more than two qualifications are necessary for an 
 enjoyment of Moliere : a liking for and an appreciation of 
 comedy and of comic personal characterisation, and a fair 
 and easy reading knowledge of French. The first of these 
 qualifications rnust be possessed by everybody who wishes to 
 understand how Moliere thought, how he wrote, and how he 
 
PKEFACE ix 
 
 mixed together earnestness and mockery, farce and comedy, 
 and how he used his ridicule to show a serious purpose. 
 The second qualification, which goes with the first, is not so 
 difficult to English readers as it may seem to be, for Moliere's 
 humour is large, true, and sympathetic, and it will appeal to 
 all who havv. . open sense of fun, and also to those who are 
 heartily pleased when they see the usually dangerous gift of 
 satire turned to good and noble uses. 
 
 H. M. T. 
 
CONTENTS 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 GENERAL VIEW OF FRENCH COMEDY BEFORE MOLIERE 
 
 *ly one permanent French theatre in Paris at the time of Moliere's birth, 1. 
 Or The Hotel de Bourgogne, 1. The Theatre du Marais, 3. Truer spirit in 
 ja French comedy in 1550 than a century later, 5. Before 1550 comedy was 
 meant- to be popular, 6. The Renaissance of the French drama, after 1550, 
 was founded on imitation, 7. Jodelle's Eugene was an exception, 8. Larivey, 
 a semi-originator, 9. Comedies in the second half of the 16th century were 
 Italian in manner, 10. Comparatively few comedies until Corneille's first play 
 in 1629, 11. Alexandre Hardy, 12. The laws of the unities, 14. Mairet, his 
 pastorals and his one comedy, 16. Pierre Corneille's comedies, 17. Desmarets' 
 Visionnaires, 27. Rotrou, 28. Scarron, 29. Boisrobert, 31. Thomas Cor- 
 neille, 32. General estimate, 33. 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 MOLIERE'S BIRTH AND PARENTAGE 
 
 Preliminary, 45. Birth of Jean Poquelin, afterwards Moliere (Jan. 1622), 47. His 
 ancestors, 47. Family proclivities, 48. Moliere's birthplace. 49. Interior of the 
 Maison des Singes, 50. Moliere's father becomes tapissier du roi, 51. He has a 
 large order given to him, 51. Death of Moliere's mother, 52. Her six children, 
 52. Moliere's father marries again, 53. Indications that Moliere felt the loss 
 of bis mother, 53. Grimarest's Vie de Moliere, 54. Louis de Cresse takes his 
 grandson to the theatre, 55. "La loge des anciens maitres" and "le Paradis," 
 56. Paris tradesmen were fond of the theatre, 56. Young Moliere inside the 
 theatre, 57. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 YEARS OF SCHOOLING 
 
 Young Moliere asks to be educated, 59. Moliere at the College de Clermont, 60. 
 Jean Poquelin did not wish to keep his son ignorant, 61. The office of tapissier 
 valet de chambre du roi, 62. Moliere's schoolfellows, 63. Moliere reads philo- 
 sophy with Gassendi, 64. Gassendi's teaching had influence on Moliere, 65. 
 Moliere translates Lucretius, 66. Moliere was called to the bar, 67. Uncer- 
 tainty of Moliere's journey to the south of France in the king's suite, 68. 
 
 xi 
 
xii LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 MINOR THEATRES 
 
 nain, 69. 
 
 Young Moliere went to see buffoon actors, 69. At the Foire de Saint GerA "). Two 
 On the Pont Neuf, 70. The farceurs at the Hotel de Bourgogne, 7<^ i actors 
 kinds of Italian comedy, 71. Italian impromptu comedy, 72. Spanis 
 in Paris, 74. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE ILLUSTRE THEATRE 
 
 A -ly 
 
 Moliere did not become an actor because he loved Madeleine Bejart, 76. His e 
 
 inclination for the stage, 77. Importance of facts, 79. Moliere gets 630 livre . 
 from his father, 79. He takes lessons in acting, 80. The Bejart family, 8( 
 Formation of the Illustre Theatre, 82. The Jeu de Paume des Mestayers, 83. 
 The troop goes to Rouen, 84. Opening of the Illustre Theatre, 84. Authors of 
 their plays, 85. The Duke of Orleans becomes their protector, 85. Jean 
 Baptiste Poquelin changes his name, 86. Two other Molieres in the 17th 
 century, 87. The actors borrow money, 87. Joseph Bejart leaves the troop 
 temporarily, 88. The troop change their theatre, 88. Bad days in store, 89. 
 Moliere borrows money from Jeanne Leve, 89. Moliere, as chief of the troop, 
 is put into prison, 90. The actors give a bond to L. Aubry, 90. Improbability 
 of a third venture in another part of Paris, 91. Money transactions between 
 Jean Poquelin and his children, 91. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 STROLLING IN THE PROVINCES 
 
 Scarron's Roman Comique, 96. Only scanty information exists about Moliere's 
 strolling, 97. Who accompanied him, 98. His troop gain the protection of 
 the due d'Epernon, 99. Charles Dufresne becomes leader of the troop, 100. 
 The troop were at Albi in the south in October 1647, 101. At Nantes in 
 Brittany in April 1648, 101. Thence into La Vendee, 101. At Toulouse in 
 May 1649, 101. Not allowed to play at Poitiers in May 1649, 102. Description 
 of a provincial theatre at that time, 102. At Narbonne in Languedoc in the 
 winter of 1649-50, 103. Thence to Agen in Guienne, 104. The troop loses the 
 protection of the due d'Epernon, 104. The Provincial States what they were, 
 104 An autograph receipt given by Moliere, 105. Probable beginning of the 
 pecuniary success of the troop, 106. In April 1651 Moliere was in Paris, 107. 
 The troop at Vienne and at Carcassonne, 107. Moliere makes Lyons his head- 
 quarters, 108. La Fameuse Comedienne, 109. Corneille's Andromede played 
 at Lyons, 110. The JEtourdi, Moliere's first comedy, played at Lyons, 111. 
 Moliere plays before the Prince de Conti, 112. His troop obtains a pension 
 from the prince, 114. At Montpellier, 114. Le Ballet des Incompatibles, 114. 
 Joseph Bejart dedicates a book on heraldry to the prince, 115. Moliere declines 
 to be secretary to the prince, 115. Madeleine Bejart lends money, 116. The 
 troop stays all the summer of 1655 at Lyons, 116. Charles Coypeau d'Assouci, 
 116. Again at Pezenas in November 1655, 117. Another autograph receipt of 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Xlll 
 
 Moliere's, 117. The Prince de Conti probably forces the States on two occasions 
 to give money to Moliere's troop, 118. At Narbonne in February 1656, 118. 
 Conversion of the Prince de Conti, 119. Moliere loses his wallet, 119. Inscrip- 
 tion on a drinking-fountc 3ignac, 119. Moliere's armchair at Pezenas, 120. 
 Le Dtpit Amo^^,reux, Moliere's second comedy, first played at Beziers, 121. 
 Joseph Bejart presented a second volume to the States, 122. The troop was at 
 Lyons in May 1657, 122. Thence to Dijon, 122. " Une affiche de Comediens 
 en 1662," 122. Again at Pezenas at the end of 1657, 124. Moliere meets 
 Mignard at Avignon, 124. The troop go to Grenoble, 125. Thence to Rouen, 
 125. The actors wish to return to Paris, 126. Lease signed for a Paris theatre, 
 127. Moliere goes to Paris, and is promised the protection of Monsieur, 127. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 RETURN TO PARIS 
 
 La Grange : his Register and his Preface to the first complete edition of Moliere, 
 128. Moliere and his troop play before the king, 131. Situation of the Hotel 
 du Petit Bourbon, 131. Failures at first, afterwards success, 132. Composition 
 of Moliere's troop, 133. Death of Bejart aine, 133. Moliere's early farces, 134. 
 The Etourdi, his first comedy, 137. Names of some of the actors who played 
 in it, 140. Origin of the name Mascarille, 141. The Depit Amourevx, 141. 
 Who played in it, 142. Difference between Moliere's borrowings and those of 
 his predecessors, 143. Moliere owed much to Italy, but little to Spain, 145. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 SOCIETY IN PARIS BETWEEN 1620 AND 1660 LES PRECIEUSES 
 RID 1C ULESSGANARELLE 
 
 Receptions at the Hotel de Rambouillet from 1620 to 1648, 147. Who were the 
 guests, 148. Their affectation has been exaggerated, 150. Not a literary 
 society, 151. Verse-making and Platonic love, 153. Extract from Flechier, 
 154. Who were "les precieuses," 154. Increase of the precieuses after the 
 Fronde, 155. Mile, de Scudery's salon, 155. Her novel Le Grand Cyrus, 156. 
 Afternoon visiting was popular, 157. Instances of the jargon of the precieuses, 
 158. Extracts from La Bruyere, 158. His satire referred more to the precieuses 
 after the Fronde than to those before it, 159. Bedlam biology, 159. Moliere's 
 comedy, 160. The object of his satire, 164. Old custom revived of playing two 
 pieces, 166. Names of the actors in the Precieuses, 166. Brilliant success of 
 the comedy, 166. Moliere obliged to print his play, 167. Somaize's and Gil- 
 bert's comedies on the same subject, 167, 168. Sganarelle ou Le Cocu Imnginaire, 
 168. The play was of Italian origin, 171. Names of two of the actors who 
 played originally in Sganarelle, 171. Story of the printing of the play, 171. 
 The troop expelled from the Petit Bourbon, 172. They go " en visite," and they 
 play before the king, 173. Results of their work at the Petit Bourbon, 173. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 MOLIERE'S IDEAS OF COMEDY SHAKESPEARE AND MOLIERE 
 
 How Moliere understood comedy, 175. Laughter in comedy, 178. Moliere's teach- 
 ing, 179. A likeness between Thackeray and Moliere, 183. Moliere's sadness, 
 
xiv LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 184. Grouping of his personages and their characteristics, 186. Moliere 
 thought more of characterisation than of plot, 187. How he characterised his 
 personages, 188. Middle or temperate characters, 191. Moliere's caricature 
 was fair comedy, 193. Seeming lightness of Moliere's comedy, 196. Moliere 
 and the laws of the unities, 197. His love-scenes, 198. His style, 202. Shake- 
 speare and Moliere, 210. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 STAGE CUSTOMS 
 
 Names of the three Paris theatres and their descent, 225. Chappuzeau and his book 
 on the French stage, 227. The French theatres in the 17th century were republics, 
 227. The theatrical year began at Easter, 228. The actors shared their pi ofits 
 equally, 229. Fractions of shares, 230. Pensions given by the king, 230. 
 System of retiring pensions among the actors, 230. Value of a share at the 
 Palais Royal, 232. Difference in the value of money, 232. Author's profits, 233. 
 Authors read their plays to the troop, 236. Distribution of the parts, 236. 
 Days of performance, 237. The '"annonce," 237. The "affiche," 238. 
 Musicians, 240. Seasons for new plays, 240. Hours of performance, 241. The 
 inside of the Palais Royal theatre, 241. Prices of the places, 243. Size of the 
 Palais Royal theatre, 244. Seats on the stage, 245. Scenery, 245. Costumes, 
 247. Disorders in the theatres, 248. "Le droit des panvres," 249. Per- 
 formances given "en visite," 249. Performances before the king, 250. Moneys 
 given by the king to Moliere's troop, 250. Louis xiv. was a good friend to 
 Moliere, 252. 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF THE H6TEL DE BOURGOGNE AND PALAIS 
 ROYAL THEATRES MOLIERE AS AN ACTOR 
 
 Different aspects of the Hotel de Bourgogne and Palais Royal theatres, 254. Style 
 of acting common at the Hotel de Bourgogne, 261. Moliere as an actor, 263. 
 Portrait of Moliere by Mile. Poisson, 271. 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE FORTUNES OF MOLIERE'S COMEDIES WHEN NEW 
 
 Hearsay gossip is usually the evidence of the success of an old play, 273. Number 
 of performances and the receipts are a surer test, 27& Analysis of the yearly 
 receipts at Moliere's two theatres, 275. The receipts varied considerably, 276. 
 Average daily receipts of Moliere's comedies when new, 277. Average daily 
 receipts of other plays acted at Moliere's theatre, 281. Number of performances 
 of each of Moliere's plays from 1659 to 1870, 282. Remarks on the foreeoine- 
 tables, 283. 
 
CONTENTS xv 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 DON GARCIE DE NAVARRE L'ECOLE DES MARISLES FACHEUX 
 MOLIERE'S MARRIAGE 
 
 Moliere's troop began to play at the Palais Eoyal in January 1661, 286. His Don 
 Garde was a failure reasons why, 286. Feeling at ihe time about the play, 
 287. Second appearance of Don Garde, without success, 288. Partial like- 
 ness between this play and the Misanthrope, 288. Indifferent commencement 
 at the Palais Eoyal, 289. Moliere alludes to his coming marriage, 289. 
 Comedies by Chappuzeau, 289. The Ecole des Maris, 290. Names of the actors 
 who played in this comedy, 291. The troop leave Paris "en visite," 292. 
 Moliere prints his play, 292. Moliere writes the Fdcheux for Fouquet, 292. 
 The comedy in the Fdcheux, 293. The play was a satire on the foppishness of 
 the grandees, 294. Louis xiv. suggested the " scene du chasseur," 295. The 
 Fdcneux was the first instance of a comedie-ballet, 296. Moliere's habit of 
 close and quick observation made him a quick worker, 296. The Fdcheux 
 played at the Palais Eoyal, 4th November 1661, 297. Names of the actors in 
 the various parts, 297. Moliere prints his play and dedicates it to the king, 
 297. La Thorilliere and Brecourt join the troop, 298. Moliere's marriage with 
 Armande Bejart (Feb. 1662), 298. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE ECOLE DES FEMMES AND THE WARFARE THAT FOLLOWED 
 THE MARIAGE FORCE THE PRINCESSE D' ELIDE 
 
 Gradual improvement in the comedy in Moliere's early plays, 308. The Ecole des 
 Femmes, 309. The actors in the various parts, 312. Boileau's stanzas on the 
 comedy. 313. The first edition of the Ecule des Femmes, 313. Moliere's 
 Remerdment au Roi, 314. La Bruyere's Caracteres a complement to Moliere's 
 comedies, 314. Two of Moliere's adversaries De Vise and Boursault, 315. 
 Moliere's Critique de VEcole des Femmes, 317. The actors in the various 
 parts, 322. Printing of the comedy, 322. The success of this play exasper- 
 ated the actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne, 322. De Vise's Zelinde, 322. 
 Boursault's Portrait du Peintre, 324. Moliere's Impromptu de Versailles, 326. 
 Moliere showed his anger, 333. Moliere did not print this comedy, 334. Other 
 writings that followed, 334. Le Mariage torce, 336. Eevival and printing 
 of the comedy in 1668, 338. Changes in the troop at the Palais Eoyal, 339. 
 La Princesse d'Elide, 339. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 LE TARTUFFE AND DON JUAN 
 
 Difficulty in assigning a date to the Tartuffe, 341. Biographical reasons for choosing 
 1664, 341. Louis xiv.'s prohibition of the Tartu/e, 342. Personally the king 
 thought well of the play, though he forbade its performance, 343. Pierre 
 Eoulle's pamphlet, Le Roi Glorieux au Monde, 344. Moliere's first petition to 
 the king, 345. Court performances and private readings of the play, 346. 
 One public performance, 5th August 1667, 346. Extract from Moliere's second 
 petition to the king, 347. Perhaps Louis had conditionally given Moliere 
 verbal leave to play his comedy, 347. Changes made in the comedy before 
 
xvi LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 August 1667, 348. Meaning of the word " Tartuffe," 349. Moliere's visit to M. 
 de Lamoignon, 349. Lettre sur la Comedie de I'Imposteur, 350. Mandate of 
 the Archbishop of Paris against the play, 351. Was its censure just ? 351. A 
 likeness between Pascal and Moliere in their ridicule, 353. Moliere's comedy 
 was an actuality, 354. Moliere felt the seriousness of his comedy, 355. A 
 Tartuffe is hardly possible in England, 355. An outward change in religious 
 feeling in France in the 17th century, 356. The office of the "directeur de 
 conscience," 356. What La Bruyere thought about the directors, 358. The 
 "de"vots." 360. Tartuffe was meant to show a dishonest director of conscience, 
 361. His character was not drawn from one individual, 362. The king's 
 permission to play the Tartuffe in public, 362. Interpretation of some of the 
 
 v personages in the comedy, 363. As a comedy the Tartuffe is a little heavy on 
 the stage, 367. The denouement to the play has been blamed, 368. The 
 Tartuffe was an original comedy, 370. Names of the actors in the different 
 
 w parts, 370. First and second editions of the comedy, 371. Don Juan ou le 
 Festin de Pierre, 371. Why Moliere wrote this play, 372. Legend from which 
 it was taken, 373. Don Juan was first seen on the stage in Spain, then in Italy ; 
 the subject became popular in Paris, 374. Differences in personal characterisation 
 between Spanish and Italian Don Juans and Moliere's, 375. Textual differences 
 in the editions of Moliere's play, 376. The comedy in Moliere's Don Juan, 377. 
 Names of the actors in the different parts, 392. Pamphlets for and against the 
 play, 392. Don Juan not printed in its author's lifetime, 393. Moliere's 
 prose rendered into verse by Thomas Corneille, 393. " La troupe de Monsieur" 
 becomes "la troupe du Hoi," 394. 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 L'AMOUR MEDECIN LE MISANTHROPE 
 
 The Amour Medecin first played at court, 395. Bad year at the Palais Koyal 
 theatre, 395. What was the satire in the new comedy, 396. Moliere had a 
 poor opinion of doctors of medicine, and the reasons for his distrust, 396. 
 Caricature in the comedy, 400. Personalities in the Amour Medecin, 401. The 
 comedy in the play, 404. Which actors played in the different parts, 408. 
 Printing of the comedy, 408. Racine's disloyalty to Moliere, 408. Date of the 
 Misanthrope (1666), 410. This play is perhaps Moliere's finest comedy, 410. 
 Partial likeness between Alceste and Don Garcie de Navarre, 411. Some of the 
 features in the comedy, 412. The characters of Alceste and Philinte, 414. The 
 comedy in the play, 416. Alfred de Musset's tribute to Moliere, 431. Moliere 
 did not mean to show himself in Alceste, nor his wife in Celimene, 431. Names 
 of the actors in the various parts, 435. The first edition of the comedy and 
 de Vise's Letter, 435. Interview between Moliere and Chapelle at Auteuil, 437. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 LE MEDECIN MALGRE LUILE BALLET DBS MUSES OTHER EVENTS 
 AMPHITR YON-L'A V ARE-GEORGE DANDIN 
 
 The Medecin Malgre Lui, 441. Moliere was successful in high and in popular 
 comedy, 441. His new play was taken from an old farce, 442. Last appearance 
 of a Sganarelle, 443. The words "Nous avons change tout cela," 443. The 
 actors in the comedy and the printing of the play, 444. Moliere's work for the 
 royal Ballet des Mmes, 444. Moliere's troop buys Attila from P. Corneille, 445. 
 Mile, du Pare leaves thr /Palais Royal theatre, 446. In the year 1667 Moliere 
 
CONTENTS xvii 
 
 was less often on the stage, 447. Amphitryon, a mythological comedy, 447. 
 The play was meant as a general satire, 448. Amphitryon shows that Moliere 
 had not the gift of poetry strongly, 449. A few well-known quotations from 
 the play, 450. Moliere played the part of Sosie ; printing of the comedy, 450. 
 Date of the Avare and its failure as a new play, 451. Playgoers then liked 
 serious comedies to be in verse, 451. Main ideas shown in the Avare, 452. The 
 comedy in the play, 453. The grimness of the comedy may have told against its 
 success as a new play, 459. Actors in the various parts and the printing of the 
 comedy, 460. George Dandin, its first appearance at court ; afterwards in 
 public, 460. General aspect of the comedy, 461. Some of Moliere's comedies 
 written to complement the idea in a former play, 464. Actors in the various 
 parts, and the printing of the comedy, 465. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 MONSIEUR DE POURCEAUGNAC-LES AMANTS MAGNIFIQUES CHANGES IN THE 
 TROOP LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME LES FOURBERIES DE SCAPIN 
 PSYCHE. 
 
 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac acted at Chambord, 466. Description of the play, 467. 
 The actors who filled the different parts, and the printing of the comedy, 469. 
 Les Amants Magnifiques, 470. Changes in the troop at the Palais Royal at 
 Easter 1670, 470. The Bourgeois Gentilhomme first acted at Chambord, 472. 
 The play was intended as a ludicrous comedy for a court festivity : it is true 
 in its caricature, 472. The raillery againgst M. Jourdain is not ill-natured, 474. 
 Instances of the comedy iu the play, 475. Supposed portrait of Moliere's wife, 
 479. M. Jourdain's "visions of nobility aud of gallantry," 481. How the idea 
 of the masquerade in the comedy arose, 483. Covielle hoaxes M. Jourdain, 484. 
 The Turkish Ceremony, 486. M. Jourdain shows that he is happy, 489. How 
 the play was received at court, 490. The Bourgeois Gentilhomme at the Palais 
 Eoyal theatre, 491. Actors who played in the comedy, and the printiug of the 
 play, 482. Les Fourberies de Scapin and its origins, 492. It was a comedy of 
 intrigue, 492. Moliere wa* bound to fill his theatre, 493. Boileau's judgment 
 on Scapin, 493. Moliere is said to have borrowed a scene from Cyrano de 
 Bergerac, 495. Names of three actors who played in the comedy, and the 
 printing of the play, 495. Moliere was told to write a spectacular play to be 
 performed before the court, 496. How the authorship of Psyche was divided, 
 496. Why the legend of Cupid and Psyche should have been chosen, 497. 
 Trouble was taken with the mise en scene of the play, 497. Psyche was put on 
 the stage at the Palais Royal theatre, 498. It is a play to read rather than 
 to see acted, 498. Tale about Baron and Mile. Moliere, 499. Baron's great 
 reputation as an actor began with his r&le of Cupid, 500. Names of the actors 
 in the different parts, and the printing of Psyche, 500. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 LES FEMMES SAVANTESLA COMTESSE D'ESOARBAGNASLE MALADE 
 IM AGIN AIRE POESIES D1VERSES 
 
 Object of the satire in the Femmes Savantes, 501. Differences between this play and 
 the Precieuses Ridicules, 502. There were two epochs among the precieuses : 
 the first was the best, 502. Amusing comic raillery the chief feature in the 
 Femmes Savantes, 503. Opening of the comedy in the play, 504. Moliere agreed 
 
xviii LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 with Mile, de Scudery in her dislike of a femme savante, 506. A comic picture 
 of the abbe Cotin was shown in the personage of Triosotin, 507. Trissotin reads 
 his verses to the three ladies, 510. The femmes savantes had their objects, 513. 
 Scene between Trissotin and Vadius, 515. Vadius was more or less like Menage, 
 517. The character of Belise was partly borrowed, 518. The personage of 
 Chrysale, 519. Duel between Clitandre and Trissotin, 522. The latter deserved 
 Moliere's satire, 524. The denouement of the comedy begins with the choice of 
 a husband for Henriette, 525. Names of the actors in the various parts of the 
 comedy, and the printing of the play, 526. Some well-known lines from the 
 Femmes Savantes, 526. La Comtesse d 1 Escarbagnas, 527. Le Malade Imagi- 
 naire, " comedie me!6e de musique et de danses," 528. Moliere meant much of 
 what he said in his attacks on the doctors, 529. The personages in this play 
 will give a good idea of its comedy, 530. Moliere was more interested in his 
 comic characterisation than in his plots, 530. The comedy in the Malade Imagi- 
 naire, 531. Moliere was more careful to show the spirit of comedy than to 
 express his own opinions against the doctors, 535. Scene between Argan and 
 Beralde, 536. Further satire against the doctors, 539. The denouement to the 
 comedy, 541. La Cer6monie du Malade linaginaire, 541. Death of Moliere 
 (17th Feb. 1673), 542. Shameful trouble about Moliere's burial (21st Feb.), 
 544. Why Moliere was not a member of the French Academy, 545. Poems 
 by Moliere, 546. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND CONCLUSION 
 
 Few more facts about Moliere and his friends forthcoming now, 549. La Fontaine's 
 novel Psyche, 549. Anecdote about Moliere and his friends drowning them- 
 selves at Auteuil, 550. Boileau and Moliere, 551. Louis xiv. and Conde were 
 friends to Moliere, 552. Moneys earned by Moliere, 553. The inventory taken 
 after Moliere's death, 555. Mile. Moliere remarries, 556. Moliere's two sons 
 were short-lived, 556. His daughter survived him and married, 556. Dates of 
 the deaths of the Bejarts, 557. The inventory taken after Jean Poquelin's 
 death, 558. Hints as to the best of Moliere's plays to read, 559. Moliere as a 
 teacher of French, 560. 
 
 INDEX 
 
 561 
 
 PORTRAITS 
 
 Moliere in 1668, after the Chantilly portrait . frontispiece 
 
 Moliere at the period of the production of Le 
 
 Misanthrope . . . to face p. 410 
 
 [For details of the portraits, see p. viii.] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 GENERAL VIEW OF FRENCH COMEDY 
 BEFORE MOLIERE 
 
 AT the time of Moliere's birth, in 1622, the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne was^the only permanently established French 
 theatre~in~~Paris. AnotKer theatre, whether then known or 
 notby thefname of the Theatre du Marais, had probably 
 had an interrupted existence for some years ; but it is likely 
 enough that it had not then acquired sufficient renown to 
 keep its doors open with constant regularity, and that it did 
 not become established permanently until some years later. 
 The Hotel de Bourgogne, however, was always regarded as 
 tfie chief theatre, and the majority of French actors who did 
 not belong to it hoped, often vainly enough, to be enrolled 
 among its members upon some future happy occasion. Before 
 speaking of early French comedy a few words may be said 
 showing how these two theatres arose; for their members and 
 those of Moliere's troop, after his death, were the ancestors of 
 the!5om6die Francjaiaft of the present day. 
 
 The playhouse known as the Hotel de Bourgogne carries us 
 back historically to the ancient brotherhood, j^es Confreres de 
 la Passion. They were the earliest representatives of dramatic 
 -aft'ln" Tans", "and they formed a society made up from the 
 artisans of the capital for the purpose 'of representing Les 
 Mysteres de la Passion de Jesus Christ They used to act at 
 first at Saint Maur, near Vincennes. In 1398 their perform- 
 ance was forbidden, but in 1402 Charles vi. allowed them 
 to form themselves into a dramatic corporation. The brother- 
 hood then began to play at the hospital de la Trinite, outside 
 the Porte Saint Denis ; and there they founded the first known 
 Parisian theatre at which a money payment was demanded 
 for entrance. They continued their performances there until 
 1539, when they migrated to the Hotel de Flandre, inside the 
 
 A 
 
V . ;-'':' : ...LIFE OF 
 
 i |4 : A little later, Francois i. ordered that 
 house, and the old Hotel de Bourgogne. which was not a 
 theatre and other houses to Te pulled down. In 1548 the 
 Confreres bought part of the land on which the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne stood, and on that site they built for themselves, 
 in the Kue Mauconseil, a theatre which they called the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne, after the old house. But in the same year 
 the Parliament, while confirming their ancient privilege and 
 giving thenTaTmonopoly for theatrical representations in and 
 near to Paris^ saidjhat-they might act seculaiLplapibut forbade 
 for the fiitnr^pftrformance of the " mysteries." The mysteries 
 therefore died out in Paris, but in the provinces they were 
 feted for some years. 1 From this Act of Parliament, in^ 
 1548, datesjflie opening of the Hotel de Bourgogne theatre. 
 r fhe Act^proTaBIy expressed the "feeling of the better- 
 minded persons, for the reverential feeling which for many 
 years had accompanied the performance of the mysteries 
 was lost ; what had been looked upon as a holy office came 
 to be a pastime, and at length fell into unseemly buffooneries. 
 The Confreres continued to play in the Hotel de Bourgogne, 
 but thejnew Jaw jbook ^fn>m_them.jtheir chief means of attrac- 
 tion. Dramatic performances had always been popular in 
 Paris, but the brotherhood could not act worldly plays in a 
 way that the people liked. Their position was unfortunate, 
 and it would seem that they did not take the best means to 
 improve it. The peo_plejiad always supported them, and they 
 set themselves resolutely against the popular will. They still 
 had their monopoly, allowing them to play where they liked 
 in or near Paris, but they were unable to use it; and they 
 prevented at different times troops of provincial actors from 
 trying to gain a living in the capital. A roving company 
 would now and then surreptitiously give one or two perform- 
 ances, but as soon as the Confreres heard of what was going on 
 they quoted their privilege in a law court, and the interlopers 
 were ordered to shift. 2 JThe_ancient brotherhood found that 
 their theatre was no lopgp.r a. paying p.onp.pm ; so in 1578 they 
 
 1 Victor Fournel, Les Contemporains de Moliere, vol. i. pp. xvii-xix ; Soulie, 
 Recherches sur Moliere et sa famille, 27 and 152, under dates 30th August 
 and 17th November 1548. 
 
 54 Suard, Histoire du Theatre Fran^ais, in vol. i. of his Melanges de 
 Litterature, p. 110. 
 
INTEQDUCTION 3 
 
 hired_a theatrical company. 1 _But ten years later, in 1588, 
 forty years after they had been forbidden to act the mysteries', 
 they let the Hotel de Bourgogne to a troop of actors who 
 wished to amuse the public and to make some money by it. 
 From 1588, therefore, the troop known afterwards as "la 
 troupe de 1'Hotel de Bourgogne " began to play at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne theatre, and they continued to play there until the 
 year 1680. Moliere had then been dead seven years. 
 
 Though the Qonfreres^ deJaJPassion had let their theatre, ( 
 they were always stoutly determined to maintain their privi- 
 lege forbidding any other pJ^yJiQnaeJiLx^^ear-taJEajds. Other 
 actors made their appearance at various times, and the Con- 
 freres went to law to have them ousted, or to claim from 
 them penalties for acting elsewhere than at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne. Sixty sous, or three francs, was the fine imposed 
 for each irregular performance ; and there are several instances 
 proving that this penalty was judicially awarded to the 
 members of the brotherhood. 2 These sentences, though con- 
 demnatory, show a certain toleration. Other troops of actors 
 were to be allowed to play in or near Paris if they paid a fine 
 of three francs for each performance. The fine went to the 
 Confreres, 3 not to the actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne, 
 though they must have lost patronage by the temporary 
 rival playhouse. The theatre-loving Parisians liked the actors 
 who amused them, and they cared nothing for the super- 
 annuated religious brotherhood whose only interest in the 
 theatre was that of a money-making investment. The old 
 guild existed until 1677, when Louis xiv. suppressed the 
 Corporation of Les Confreres de la Passion, and ordered that 
 their property should be sold for the benefit of the general 
 hospital; the actors who were tenants of the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne were to pay their rent to the same hospital. 4 ~ , / 
 
 The Theatre du Marais had but an uncertain existence iW~ 
 during the first three decades or more of the 17th century. 
 The origin of this theatre is doubtful even now. Some writers 
 have said that it was founded in 1598, some in 1635, others 
 
 1 Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere, 27 ; 152-3. 
 
 2 Ibid. 155, under dates 10th and 13th March 1610; 157-8, under date 
 16th February 1622; and 162-3, under date 25th February 1631. 
 
 3 Parfaict, Histoire du Theatre Francois, iii. 244, and note c. 
 
 4 Eugene Despois, Le Theatre Fran$ais sous Louis XIV., 5 and 241. 
 
4 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 at various dates in the interval. M. Victor Fournel, who 
 may be taken as a sure guide in matters relating to the 
 dramatic history of his country, says that during this interval 
 "there was not one Theatre du Marais, there were several, 
 and even after a settled resting-place had been found different 
 troops succeeded each other." 1 The word "theatre" is here 
 taken to be synonymous with the company of actors who 
 played inside it. 
 
 In the 1 7th century in France the theatre virtually belonged 
 for the time to the troop of actors who paid rent for the use 
 of it, and all the members of the company had equal rights. 
 Those who think that the Marais troop was first formed when 
 Alexandre Hardy a terribly prolific playwright, but who is 
 not known to have acted upon the stage came to Paris from 
 the provinces with a strolling company, and tried with them 
 to found a new theatre in the Marais quarter of the town 
 about the year 1600, have at any rate rational grounds on 
 which to establish their belief. Perhaps that was the earliest 
 determined attempt to found the Theatre du Marais, though 
 there is no authority for saying that it was then called by 
 that name. A company was playing at the Hotel d'Argent, 
 near the Place de Greve, in 161 0, but most probably they did 
 not stop there very long. Owing to the precarious livelihood 
 to be obtained, there were frequent changes in the troop. At 
 times it was broken up and had 110 existence ; at other times 
 a " scratch " team was formed and played in Paris for a while ; 
 then, if its members would hold together, they left Paris to go 
 strolling in the provinces. Kouen was the town to which they 
 would be most likely to go ; and there, under the direction of 
 Mondory, their leader, Corneille's first play, Mdite, a comedy, 
 was acted in 16297 This play was afterwards brought out by 
 Mondory__at a theatre in the Marais quarter of Paris in the 
 same year. Corneille says~~that hisT play~set on foot a new 
 troojTof actors in the capital. It may be doubted, however, 
 if this establishment of a new troop was more permanent than 
 the others had been. In 1632 or 1633 a company, bearing the 
 title of "Le Theatre du Marais," used to play in a tennis-court 
 known as La Fontaine, in the Kue Michel le Comte. But the 
 
 1 M. Fournel gives the best and fullest account of this theatre in his book 
 Les Contemporains de Moliere, iii. 7, etc. Despois in his Le Theatre Francais 
 sous Louis XIV., 10-18, has also a chapter on the subject. 
 
INTEODUCTION 5 
 
 inhabitants of the neighbourhood addressed a complaint to 
 the Parliament of Paris, saying that the theatre caused great 
 obstruction by the number of horses and carriages that went 
 to its doors. The theatre was then closed. At last, in 1635, 
 the Marais troop found a home in the Eue Vieille du Temple. 
 There they stayed, and quite at the end of the year 1636 they 
 brought out Cjamejlle's tragedy, Le Cid. They had their red- 
 letter days before and afterwards, but their theatre was pro- 
 bably never so well filled as during the few weeks after the 
 first performance of the Cid. Before a month had passed 
 young Poquelin, whom we are to know later as -Moliere^liad 
 his fifteenth birthday; and there are fairgrounds for thinking 
 that, standing or seatedjby his grandfather's side, he^ joined in 
 thej^eneral admiration of tlie'new'jgav^ Corn^lle-gav^ mo**- 
 of hisjbragedies to the Hotel de Bourgogne, for tragedy was 
 ]^tter_acted at that theatre. He returned, however, to the 
 MaraisTlirT542 with4tis-eomedy Le Mentewr, and his Suite du 
 Mntey&~w&s also performed there in the following year. To 
 the first of these plays the town gave a very warm welcome. 
 
 It is intended in this introductory chapter to say in what 
 spirit the French comic dramatists before Moliere wished to^i 
 make comedy show her face and features, and that when they 
 were not successful, their failure was largely due to imitation. 
 I take it that comedy means an amusing dramatic repres~ehta- 
 tion of the humours of men in a broad sense, and comic what 
 is fit for such representation or having the attributes of 
 comedy. What passed for comedy in France before the 
 renaissance of the drama, say before_..ljgJD gave on the 
 whole a truer and more lively picture of the essential office of 
 comedy, satirising or plajingjwith general faults and foibles, 
 and thus creating amusement, than in I6BD7a few years after 
 Moliere began to write. ^aTc^Jia^jIwjLysJbfien the mother 
 of comedy, and before 155^th^date of Jodelle's Eugene, 
 the word comedy was hardly used in France ; the old term 
 " farce " was employed, and authors tried to make their plays 
 amusing, and people liked to laugh in the theatre. Gradually 
 the word comedy was adopted. \ And later, by degrees, those 
 who were considered the best judges of plays- thought that 
 farce was low. It was banished from the Hotel de Bourgogne 
 about the middle of the 17th century, and comedies acted 
 
&1 
 
 LIFE OF MOLlERE 
 
 H^r 
 
 there were written .more_to be admired intellectually than__ 
 to aHbrd hearty amusement. Indeed there is generally very 
 IMTe cause for laughter to be found in them. They were 
 called comedies, but they were sadly wanting in animation. 
 This severance of inanimate or pretended comedy from farce 
 was due to pedantic officialism rather than to the wishes of 
 the playgoers. The change was, so to say, administrative ; it 
 was not natural. It was made, however, partly with good 
 intentions, to show a greater refinement of manners. But it 
 came too quickly to mark a step really accomplished in the 
 right direction. As years went on dramatists grew more used 
 to their work, and thanks very largely to the efforts of Pierre 
 Corneille, high comedy began to try to show itself. 
 
 Such theatrical performances as were given before the 
 mysteries were prohibited in 1548 were of a popular kind 
 Mysteries, moralities, soties, and farces had been acted, and it 
 was to the people that they owed their success. There were 
 connecting links, more or less strong, between all these plays ; 
 but as the mysteries, acted by the Confreres de la Passion, and 
 the moralities, acted by the Clercs de la Bazoche, had only a 
 very distant influence upon French comedy, it is not necessary 
 to speak of them here. The soties and farces, however, though 
 crude and coarse as we should look at them now, were lively 
 and amusing ; they^ represented the manners of many who saw 
 thern, and they were, in fact, comedies of the time. Con- 
 sequently_ they were understood and enjoyed by the people. 
 Much of the sotie was improvised." It was at first a kind of 
 satirical allegory in the form of a dialogue, with little or no 
 action ; by degrees the spoken words were accompanied by 
 gestures, and action was introduced. The actors loved to 
 attack what they thought- ^eie^puMia^abnseSj and, to make 
 their satire more telling, they indulged freely in personal 
 allusions. 
 
 " It is chiefly in these small pieces," says Sainte-Beuve, 1 " that we 
 should look for the satirical wit and raillery of our grandfathers and 
 their inborn love of making fun of ridiculous things and of criticising 
 authority. . . . The- sotie was lighter-handed and more delicate than 
 the farce, and its satire was more direct. From the first it was full 
 
 1 Tableau de la Poesie France au X VI* Siede, ed. 1843, 201 and 203. 
 
INTKODUCTION 7 
 
 of the sharp, biting wit wMch showed itself in philosophical tales and 
 in political pamphlets. It showed almost at the same moment the 
 banter of Marot and the audacity of Aristophanes." 
 
 The spirit of Moliere^s^Qmdi^-4s-^ar^ly reflected hem J. 
 HiTjiad plenty of satirical wit, though it was good-natured. 
 and he certainly loved making fun of ridiculous things. ^His 
 person alities^as far as they existed, were those of comedy, and 
 they werejiever pffejiaiYe in the sense ofJieing-UHJustifiable. 
 He did not directly criticise authority, for in his day authority 
 was stronger than it was a hundred and fifty years before his 
 time. The latter part of Sainte-Beuve's sentence shows a like- 
 ness, which he has mentioned elsewhere, between the spirit in 
 men in the 16th and in the 18th centuries. This was a taste 
 in some for scepticism, in others for mere unbelief, and a love 
 of quizzing mockery or of persiflage. Moliere also was 
 sceptical, but his love of ridicule was shown in another and a 
 better way. Both he and Eabelais had a much better idea of 
 reverence than Voltaire. / 
 
 Quite early in the second half of the 16th century a new jg 
 school of French dramatists arose who tried to improve the - c 
 condition of the stage. This has been called the Kenaissance f 
 of the French drama. Greek tragedies were imitated in French, 
 and the new plays were perhaps admired in the colleges before 
 picked audiences, but they lacked the spark that would kindle 
 enthusiasm in a popular assembly. But it would be hazardous 
 to say if any of their performances took place at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne while the theatre remained in the hands of the 
 Confreres de la Passion. Very likely, of the tragedies there 
 was no performance there at all. Most of these plays were 
 written by young men about the time they had finished their 
 college education. The author often acted a part in his own 
 play, the other parts were filled by his colleagues or by his 
 friends. The lads were proud of their skill, and they were 
 ambitious to show off their learning before a well-selected 
 audience. 
 
 These were the days when the seven authors, known 
 
 jMciade Konsard, du Bellay, Dorat, Eemi- Belleau, Jodelle, 
 
 Baif, and Pontus du Thyard wrote poetry far sweeter than 
 
 anything of its kind that was produced in the 17th or 18th 
 
 centuries, and which is still read with pleasure. But the men 
 
8 LIFE OF MOLlfiKE 
 
 who formed the Pl&ade were not distinctively playwrights. 
 Three of them did not write plays at all. Nevertheless, the 
 four who did, and others who are not known as belonging to 
 this circle of friends, formed a school, as it were, and their 
 example was followed. 
 
 Besides the tragedies, taken from the Greek, comedies, 
 which were far less numerous, were written, and they were 
 for the most part borrowed from Latin and afterwards from 
 Italian authors. In both kinds of plays imitation was the 
 groundwork. This revival of what was thought to be the Greek 
 and Latin form of play is worth noticing, because it shows in 
 what way the earliest definite attempt was made to put 
 tragedy and comedy on to the French stage ; and we shall see 
 presently that the French dramatists of two generations later 
 thought they were doing right in discarding their own observa- 
 tions, and instead taking Aristotle and Horace for their guides 
 when they were writing plays for the amusement of the 
 people. 
 
 One member of the Ploiade Jodelle wrote a single 
 comedy, Eugene, .acted at the College of Reims in 1552. It 
 would have been well if other comic dramatists had followed 
 the lead given to them by Jodelle in trying to form their 
 comedies on the manners of people round about them. Eug&ne 
 is a satire on the self-indulgences of the clergy. It is 
 thoroughly good-natured, and may easily have provoked 
 laughter ; and it spoke to the people about their own affairs 
 in a style and language which was their own. Setting aside 
 the plays commonly known as farces, this was the earliest 
 instance of a French comedy intending to show the manners 
 of contemporary life. A claim, therefore, has been made on 
 behalf of Jodelle that he was the founder of French comedy. 
 But he left no school, for succeeding dramatists did not follow 
 his good example. He chose for his play a subject that was 
 French, and wrote about it in a French manner ; those who 
 came after him, instead of trying to do the same, imitated 
 dramatists from a foreign land. He gave them a line to follow, 
 but they chose another and a worse direction, and made a detest- 
 able track of their own. In his prologue to Les Corrivaux (1562) 
 Jean de la Taille takes credit to himself that his play is a 
 comedy, not a morality nor a farce idle follies which corrupt 
 
INTKODUCTION 9 
 
 the language and which should be banished from the kingdom. 
 Written comedy of a very dull kind, and borrowed directly 
 from the Latin, had existed in Italy before it came into France, 
 and the new school of French playwrights of which it would 
 be unjust to Jodelle to call him the founder wished to put 
 on to their stage comedies that might not be despised by other 
 nations, and which their own countrymen would regard with 
 satisfaction. But as the feathers were not fine they did not 
 make fine birds. The plays at first were almost farces put 
 into the guise of comedies, and Jean de la Taille's play, in 
 spite of his boast, was no better than others of his time. The 
 chief evil, however, did not lie there. Not until many years 
 later did the French playwrights free themselves from Italian 
 influences, and before this was accomplished they began 
 take Spanish dramatists for their models. 
 
 Among the comic playwrights that are known to have 
 written about this time, the most fertile was_L_arivey. He was 
 a scholar and a canon of Troyes. Six of his comedies were 
 printed in 1579, three others in 1611. It is not known 
 where or when his plays were acted, but it has been said, on 
 the authority of one who was conversant in such matters, that 
 it is doubtful if they were acted publicly in the theatre. 1 
 Perhaps Larivey's connection with the church prevented this. 
 But they may have been played in some of the colleges, and 
 so have had a semi-public performance; or they may have 
 been acted under the patronage of a nobleman in his own 
 house. Larivey translated Italian plays, or borrowed scenes 
 from them or fro^^LatiiL-Jc.omedJes, and manufactured his 
 comediejrtojsliit French tastes. He was therefore more of a 
 playwright than a dramatist. It seems to me that he worked 
 quickly and carelessly, and that his habit of borrowing his 
 plots or bits of stories where he could find them made him 
 think more of joining his threads together than of working out 
 the idea of a story which would lend itself to dramatic action. 
 At rare intervals there is a bit of strong natural character- 
 isation ; it is shown in a few lines, or in a few words ; it was a 
 happy inspiration at the moment of writing, but he does not 
 make it lead to anything. If he got a good scene here and 
 there he was satisfied ; he was either incapable of doing more 
 1 Charles Magnin, Journal des Savants for 1858, p. 202, and note 1. 
 
10 LIFE OF MOLlfiKE 
 
 or he did not attempt it. Aiid yet, with a dramatic instinct 
 keen in some respects, Larivey thought that a humorous 
 representation of events would please upon the stage. He did 
 /more than any other writer before Moliere to put the dialogue 
 ^ W ( of comedv u P on easy-rolling wheels. His dialogue is his chief 
 ^recommendation to merit. It is lively, and shows that he 
 knew how to make his actors move and speak as though they 
 had life in them, not as talking machines. He insisted upon 
 using homely and familiar language, and all his comedies are 
 in prose. He formed his personages upon the types in vogue 
 in Italian comedy. These are constantly reproduced, and 
 though the outward events in each play may vary, the same 
 sort of incidents are to be found in them all. ^Les Espriis is 
 one of the best of Larivey's comedies. The chief circumstance 
 there is a valet persuading an old man that there are devils in 
 his house in order to rob him. 
 
 There is much sameness in the comedies written in the 
 latter half of the 1 6th century. They do not differ essentially 
 in manner Irorn those~of Larivey, except that they have not 
 his sparkle ; but it is probable that the writers learned some- 
 thing from him. The plots are, mainly Italian ; the interest 
 was meant to lie in e trie schemes laicfTo bring the lovers 
 together, and sometimes in the consequent troubles that 
 arise. Besides the lovers, there are the valets ; they play the 
 principal parts, and always gain the upper hand over their 
 masters. Sometimes a professional intriguer is introduced. 
 There is generally an old man to be cheated, or there may be 
 two ; there is often an old woman, a nurse or a servant, and 
 perhaps a neighbour. One of the old men may have a wife ; if 
 so, not much is seen of her. As a rule the heroines in the play 
 have not an actively arduous part to perform ; they are made 
 to remain on the stage saying very little. As their parts were 
 taken by boys or young men, their chief task was to make 
 themselves look pretty. Not unfrequently an old man is 
 made to be in love with a young girl. She naturally hates 
 him, for he is " old, rotten, and toothless " ; and she is of course 
 won by his son or by his nephew. The old man is ridiculous 
 in his love for the girl, and the schemes laid to prevent his 
 designs are so trivial or base that little commendation is due to 
 the intriguing valet who succeeds in entrapping him. One 
 
INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 sees easily from all this how Moliere was affected by Italian 
 influences, especially in his first two comedies, the fitourdi 
 and the D6pit Amoureux. But Moliere's plays very rarely 
 show anything objectionable ; and besides, he had the gifts of 
 strong characterisation and liveliness of manner. His valet in 
 the Etourdi, though a rascal of romance, is an honest-minded 
 fellow at bottom ; if he found a 5 note of his master's, he 
 would give it to him. In most of the 16th century comedies 
 stock types of men and women are reproduced with certain 
 variations, but the predominating point in them all is a dis- 
 play of roguery and cheating, of one man trying to outwit 
 another. The groundwork of most of the plots was Italian. 
 And they showed, one would say, a less bright intelligence 
 than the wit, doubtless often rough and coarse enough, dis- 
 played in the older soties and farces which had been written 
 before the French playwrights thought of giving a smart ap- 
 pearance to their comedies by clothing their own people in an 
 Italian dress. Crudeness of manner is excusable, for it may 
 amuse by its simplicity. We often see, especially in the plays 
 in verse, that while two of the personages are on the stage 
 together, they are both made to deliver at considerable length 
 speeches that the other is not intended to hear. Long mono- 
 logues spoken in this way are frequent, reminding one curiously 
 of the pictures of the early Egyptians. These ancient people 
 did not know how to make a picture of a group of men, so 
 they drew them in profile, one standing behind the other. 
 Nevertheless, the plays should be classed perhaps as comedy, 
 not as farce, for the events described are made to follow each 
 other with a tolerable sequence of ideas. 
 
 From such lists as the historians of the drama have been 
 able to compile, it would appear that from 1552, the date of 
 Jodelle's Eugene, to 1629, when Corneille 'wrote his first 
 comedy, the number of tragedies, tragi-comedies, and pastorals, 
 exceeded the comedies in the proportion of about ten to one. 
 At first the plays were tragedies, or they were comedies or 
 farces; and the tragedies were very greatly in excess. The 
 taste of the people in favour of tragedy may be partly seen 
 from the fact that the tragedies were generally printed ; while 
 the comedies, more often than not called farces, were acted a 
 few or more times, and then very many of them were lost and 
 
12 LIFE OF 
 
 disappeared from memory. It should be said that more light 
 comedies or farces were printed before the renaissance of the 
 drama than after it. Before dull tragedy and comedy had 
 appeared, people were contented with such simple farces as they 
 could get. These plays had a show of life and fun in them, 
 and the audiences were amused at the homely wit displayed. 
 Consequently the farces were printed and were read. The 
 newer comedies might be more elegant, but there was very 
 little wit or fun in them. Tragi-comedies and pastorals were 
 not introduced until near the close of the 16th century, and 
 they did not become common until some years after the begin- 
 ning of the 17th. The difference between tragedy and tragi- 
 comedy was more nominal than real: it was thought that 
 tragedy should be taken from ancient history; if the story 
 came from a more modern source, the play fell from tragedy 
 to tragi-comedy. When the French dramatists began to 
 borrow romantic incidents from Spain, what was called the 
 romantic drama crept in and was recognised. Tragi-comedies 
 and pastorals became common about the same time, and in 
 1629 about the same number of each had been represented. 
 A few years before this a more hybrid kind of play was intro- 
 duced, called tragi-comedy-pastoral. Thus in* France, as in 
 England, and at about the same period, plays were of almost 
 all kinds " tragical-comical-historical-pastoral." The actors 
 thought, too, that " Seneca was not too heavy for them, nor 
 Plautus too light." For after the performance of the impor- 
 tant piece a farce nearly always followed, so that those who 
 liked laughing should be sent home in a good humour. Farce 
 died out at the Hotel de Bourgogne perhaps between 1640 
 and 1650 ; at the Marais it was probably played for some time 
 longer. After Corneille began to write his comedies other 
 comedies appeared with greater frequency. But before this 
 the style and the outward form of comedy had changed. 
 Fewer comedies were written in prose, and in those in verse 
 the short eight-syllabled line had given way generally to the 
 long Alexandrine line of twelve syllables. There is no in- 
 stance of a French play in blank verse. The " genre noble," 
 too, was introduced, and in the best interests of comedy too 
 much was thought of stateliness of manner. 
 
 Some notice should be taken of Alexandre Hardy, and of his 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 position as a dramatist, though he is not known to have written 
 a single comedy. He was born about 1560 and died about 
 1632, and is said to have wandered about the country with a 
 troop of strolling players who succeeded for a time in estab- 
 lishing a new theatre in Paris in the Marais quarter of the 
 town. Hardy's pen was fabulously fertile. He speaks himself 
 of having written six hundred plays; the brothers Parfaict 
 ascribe to him seven hundred ; l while Scudery, his contempor- 
 ary, charges him with eight hundred. A few years before his 
 death he printed forty-one of his tragedies and tragi-comedies, 
 each in five acts and in the long Alexandrine verse, and it 
 should be presumed that to many more he gave the same full 
 measure. Like many of the dramatists in England and in 
 France at this period, Hardy appears to have been a scholar ; 
 but wiser in his generation than his compatriots, he was willing 
 to throw his scholarship to the winds. He knew instinctively 
 that if a dramatist wants to please the public he must write 
 plays that they like. He was a wonderful improviser at 
 second-hand, for he could make the most of what he had read. 
 He drew a great deal from ancient history and from the writ- 
 ings, then new, of Cervantes and of Lope de Vega. The idea of 
 plagiarism in those days was not much considered. And the . 
 French dramatists had not yet invented for their own torkire 
 and self-destruction the so-called laws of the unities. Like 
 Lope, Hardy allowed himself to be very slightly bound by 
 rules : the only law which he made for himself was to please. 
 Tradition, which generally magnifies when it wants to admire, 
 says that his plays charmed the public because of the impossible 
 adventures related. It is probable enough that his plays were 
 rough and ready, and that they did please those who saw them. 
 Classical and romantic ideas were huddled together and were 
 enjoyed by a non-critical audience. For some thirty years 
 Hardy was lord and master of the Paris stage, and he, more 
 than any one else, introduced the romantic drama. I was not 
 surprised to see the opinion of a well-known critic of our day, 
 M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, who says it is evident enough that 
 though Hardy has been written about a good deal, he has been 
 little read. 2 Speaking of Hardy's work generally, M. Brune- 
 
 1 Histoire du Theatre Francois, iv., preface, p. 1. 
 
 2 Revue des deux Mondes, 1st October 1890, p. 706. 
 
14 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 tiere says : " Jamais peut-etre on n'a pas plus mal ecrit en 
 vers, d'un style a la fois plus emphatique et plus plat. 
 Jamais non plus on n'a depense plus de mots pour dire moins 
 de choses, ou entasse* plus d'invraisemblances pour produire 
 uu total avec moins d'effet." I had read three of Hardy's 
 plays, Mariamne and two others, and found it impossible 
 to read more. Page after page caused a still, painful dul- 
 ness, relieved only by the harshness of the verses, which 
 grated on my ear like the noise made by the sawing of 
 a stone. In many French tragedies, especially at this 
 early period, the idea of the writers was to produce a play 
 in which the action should be simple, but in Mariamne the 
 simplicity is appalling. There is but one point of interest, and 
 everything is made to centre upon it. There is no under-plot 
 and no by-play. And though we are told that Hardy liked to 
 put some appearance of gaiety into his plays, there is none of 
 it in this tragedy. There are few personages, and all they have 
 to say relates to one incident. Consequently there arises the 
 necessity for long speeches to make up the prescribed five 
 acts. The result is monotonous and very dreary. Any 
 dramatic interest the play may have is terribly maimed when 
 the narrative is spun out to a great length. The story is 
 over-weighted with words, the action becomes stifled and is 
 virtually lost. 
 
 If there is fair ground for believing in the traditional idea 
 that Hardy occupied a high eminence above his fellows, I 
 cannot help thinking, though there is no direct evidence of 
 his having written a single comedy, that he did write or sketch 
 the outlines of many light comedies or farces which were not 
 thought worth printing and of which nothing now remains. 
 His reputation is said to have declined quickly after his 
 death ; but if we accept his own estimation of the number of 
 his plays which was the lowest of the three that have been 
 given it is certain that he must have worked with startling 
 rapidity, and that most of his work has perished. 
 
 The -laws of the unities, which were held to govern all 
 plays that were seriously meant, were observed for the first 
 time in France in a tragedy by Mairet called Sophonisbe^ 
 acted in 1629. The laws were that in every drama there 
 should be a unity of time, a unity of place, and a unity 
 
INTEODUCTION 15 
 
 of action or of interest; in other words, all the incidents 
 described in a play should be supposed to happen within 
 twenty-four hours, the place of the scene should remain 
 unchanged, and the action or the interest in the play 
 should be confined to one event. The French dramatists 
 in the early part of the 17th century imagined, not very 
 correctly, that these laws had been laid down by Aristotle ; 
 and they adopted them, or were made to follow them by the 
 pedants of the day, not knowing quite what they were doing. 
 They were actuated by some preconceived idea that rules 
 denning the purpose and aim of the drama would be valuable ; 
 they thought that laws of restraint preventing an author 
 from incongruities or from absurd complications in his story 
 would have a salutary effect on his play. 
 
 If human actions were regulated by logic these laws might 
 perhaps be rational; but in tragedy we have to consider 
 men's deeper passions, and how they are drawn, and comedy 
 endeavours to give a picture of men's humours, and to show 
 how contradictory they often are. If a play is to be at all 
 true to nature, hard and fast or cut and dried rules limiting 
 or defining human conduct are manifestly out of place. The 
 best of all rules to guide an author in writing his play will be 
 found in Voltaire's preface to his comedy L' Enfant Prodigue : 
 "Tous les genres sont bons hors le genre ennuyeux." For, 
 short of flagrant iniquity, dulness is the worst fault a play 
 can have. Had the French dramatists of nearly three hundred 
 years ago made the action of their plays extend over ten or 
 twenty years, and had they crowded their plots with incidents, 
 or had they placed a scene on the sea-coast of Bohemia (as 
 Shakespeare did in Act in. sc. 3 of his Winter's Tale), they 
 might have written plays that appealed to the imagination, 
 instead of making a listener or a reader feel the constraint of 
 their self-imposed mechanical contrivances. Suard relates 1 
 amusingly the outline of an old French play, which, in spite 
 of its absurdities, inclines one to a belief that the author 
 may have interested his audience. The scene is laid at the 
 North Pole. Nevertheless, two lovers walk about together in 
 a wood. During their interview, the gentleman, a Frenchman 
 by birth, is warned that his ship is waiting for him in the 
 
 1 Histoire du Theatre Fran^ais, i. 113 of his Melanges de Literature. 
 
16 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 harbour. As he leaves his mistress to go to his ship he meets 
 his rival. They fight and kill each other. Then the young 
 lady kills herself. In the meanwhile her father has died. 
 Suard adds naively : " It is very clear that this play was a 
 tragedy." Whether the unities were preserved here or not, 
 it is certain that abstract notions and strict ideas of propriety, 
 formed with the belief that they would have been sanctioned 
 by Aristotle, find no place in this play. The system of the 
 laws of the unities was inaugurated by Mairet in his tragedy, 
 Sophonisbe, but it did not begin with him. The ideas which 
 he promulgated had been for some time in the air, and in a 
 preface to an earlier play he had pleaded the same cause. The 
 actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne knew what was being said 
 among the dramatists and their friends, and they declined at 
 first to have anything to do with a play conducted on the new 
 principles. Perhaps they were strengthened in their opinion 
 by advice given to them by Hardy. But either through per- 
 suasion or compulsion they consented to what was proposed 
 to them. Sophonisbe appeared on the stage : unfortunately it 
 was very successful, and the pedants were triumphant. They 
 formed themselves into a sort of literary administration ; some 
 writers followed implicitly the instructions that were given 
 to them, others the minority obeyed against their will ; 
 and so a new doctrine was set up against those who wanted 
 to work with a free hand. The new-fangled creed with its 
 dogmas applied of course to comedy as well as to tragedy. 
 It makes one think that it would have been better for the 
 French stage if its writers, instead of considering the ancient 
 drama which had been formed on ideas long dead and gone, 
 had chosen, and especially in comedy, to look at their own 
 daily lives and record as best they might what was passing in 
 them. Their work would, at any rate, have left upon it the 
 impress of the feelings of the age, and thus have shown one 
 of the essential features of comedy. At a time when the 
 stage was becoming popular in Europe it is curious that a 
 lively, sensitive people, in whom the gift of perception was 
 quick, and who enjoyed the love of ridicule, should not have 
 given dramatic expression to their own thoughts, that they 
 should not have shown better comedy of their own. They 
 would have done so if they had left old books alone, if they 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 had used their wits in their own way, and had not tried to 
 imitate the comedies seen on the Italian and the Spanish 
 stages. There is necessarily some imitation in every art, but 
 an author will generally show whether he is working out his 
 own thoughts or trying to reproduce those of others because 
 they have been considered fine. La Fontaine, who knew what 
 the early dramatic literature of his country was like, says at 
 the end of his fable, Le Singe : 
 
 " N'attendez rien de bon du peuple imitateur, 
 Qn'il soit singe, ou qu'il fasse un livre : 
 La pire espece c'est 1'auteur." 
 
 Besides his Sophonisbe Mairet is known as the author of one 
 comedy and some pastorals. These latter gave him a great 
 reputation at the time, but as pastoral plays with their love- 
 sick shepherds and shepherdesses are hardly included in the 
 denomination of comedy, I need not say much about them. 
 People then liked the conceits of language that were common 
 in pastoral plays : what we -now think is ridiculous they con- 
 sidered as ornament. The taste for pastorals came from Italy, 
 and they became popular in France after the publication of the 
 first part of d'Urfe's novel Astrte, in 1610. In 
 
 comedy, Les Gralanteries du due d'Ossonne. was acted at the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne. The scene is laid at Naples, but the 
 events betray a conception partly Italian and partly Spanish 
 clothed in a French garb. Like nearly every other comedy at 
 the time, it seems wooden as one reads it now, for the lines 
 spoken by the different personages do not show their real char- 
 acters. Yet those people who saw the play when it was new 
 were pleased at what they thought were its beauties. This 
 was Mairet's only comedy, but it sealed his reputation, and he 
 became the fashionable author. His glory was not undeserved. 
 Les Gfalanteries du due d'Ossonne was a step in advance of the 
 comedies which preceded it. The language, too, was better 
 chosen, and shows that the writer knew how to hold his pen. 
 What he wanted most was a knowledge of men and women 
 and how they should show themselves on the stage. 
 
 ^ 
 
 A few pages must be given to the comedies of Pierre 
 Corneille, for he was one of the-fathers of corned}^ in France, 
 as he was, in a fuller sense, the father of French tragedy. 
 
 B 
 
18 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 It was to his_tragedies that he owed his greatest triumphs ; 
 his comediesTiave always been considered much less highly. 
 Though they are not now widely read, they should not be 
 passed over as plays of no account, for they show an im- 
 portant step in the progress of comedy in France. One 
 cannot expect as much enjoyment from them now as was 
 felt by those who first saw them acted, or even as much as 
 was felt in a quieter way by those who first read his lines. 
 Then the comedies were new, and of a new kind. They had 
 a freshness of their own that had not been seen before, and 
 for truthfulness of portraiture they were the best that had 
 been written. 
 
 Pierre Corneille was born at Eouen in 1606. He was called 
 to the bar when he was eighteen, but got little practice. It 
 may be that, apart from his dislike to the profession, his 
 timidity or his shyness prevented him from setting about in 
 the right way to get work. His first play, Melite, a comedy, 
 was performed at Rouen in 1629. Apparently it was successful 
 in the provincial capital, for when Mondory's troop returned to 
 Paris they acted the comedy before a metropolitan audience, 
 who were surprised and charmed with its new style and 
 natural manner. In the Examen of his play, published in 
 1660, Corneille says: 
 
 "This was my trial piece, and it was far from being written 
 according to the rules, for at that time I did not know that there 
 were any. I had only a little common-sense to guide me, and the 
 plays of the late Hardy, whose pen was more fertile than polished, 
 and a few modern writers who were not more correct than he was. 
 . . . The novelty of this kind of comedy, of which there is no 
 example in any language, and its naif style, which gave a picture of 
 the conversation of well-bred people, were no doubt the reason for 
 this surprising good fortune which then made so much noise. Up to 
 that time there had been nothing laughable in comedies except the 
 ludicrous personages, such as the jesting valets, the Spanish Captains, 
 the doctors, and so forth. This play gained approbation by the lively 
 good humour of people in a rank above those that are seen in the 
 comedies of Plautus and Terence, for they are only tradesmen. With 
 all that, I confess that the audience were very simple-minded to 
 applaud a play in which there was no sort of regularity in the 
 plot." 
 
 Instead of a boasting air, which these lines convey if they 
 are read too literally, we should understand rather the expres- 
 
INTEODUCTION 19 
 
 sions of an honest, open-minded man, justly proud of his 
 own success, and who wished to tell his readers the satisfaction 
 that he himself had felt. Corneille was a proud man, but he 
 was not a braggart. 
 
 Corneille was the first French dramatist who strove to write 
 comedies which should represent in a natural manner the way 
 in which people of the upper middle classes met each other in 
 the world. He tried to show how those of his own rank 
 talked and bore themselves among their equals. He explains 
 himself in the " Avis au lecteur " to his second comedy, La 
 Veuve : 
 
 " Unless you are a man who is pleased with a simple style and 
 with the subtlety of the plot, I will not ask you to read this play ; 
 its excellence is not in the brilliancy of the verses. It is a fine thing 
 to make lines powerful and majestic. This display usually delights 
 the mind, or at least dazzles it ; but the subject should give rise to 
 the occasion, otherwise you are making a show out of place, and 
 though you gain the name of a poet you lose that of a judicious 
 man. Comedy is only a picture of our actions and of our speech, 
 arid the perfection of the picture consists in the resemblance. On 
 this principle I try to make my actors say nothing which those 
 whom they are intended to represent might not reasonably say in 
 their place, and to make them talk as well-bred persons, not as 
 authors." 
 
 There is much here that is admirable, and thirty years 
 later a better reading of the same ideas was given by Moliere 
 in his Critique dc rjtJcole des Femmes. But Moliere knew 
 intuitively what was wanted on the stage, and he carried 
 out the lesson given by Corneille more fully and with stronger 
 effect than he who had first tried to teach it. 
 
 When Corneille began to write he set to work gallantly, and 
 in his early plays he did something to improve the tone of 
 comedies. He set his face resolutely against indecencies and 
 coarse laughter, and his example was noticed. Other in- 
 stances besides Corneille's might be mentioned of dramatists 
 between 1630 and 1660 who glorified the improved condition 
 of the stage, especially in comedies ; l but as we are now 
 
 1 See Quinault's play La Comedie sans Comedie, Act I. sc. 5, given by 
 M. Victor Fournel in the third volume of his Contemporains de Moliere, 
 and M. Fournel's note on page 85. There were of course exceptions to the 
 general tone of improvement. 
 
20 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 speaking of Corneille, some often-quoted lilies from the last 
 scene of his comedy, L' Illusion Comiqiic, may be cited here : 
 
 " A present le theatre, 
 
 Est en un point si haut que chacun 1'idolatre, 
 Et ce que votre temps voyoit avec mepris 
 Est aujourd'hui 1'amour de tons les bons esprits. 
 
 D'ailleurs si par les biens on prise les personnes, 
 Le theatre est un fief dont les rentes sont bonnes." 
 
 At that time the remuneration given to dramatic authors 
 was very small, and it may be that the successes of Corneille's 
 early plays helped to make the condition of the dramatist 
 more lucrative. The practice of an author sharing in the 
 profits made by his play had not been introduced. The actors 
 as a body rented the theatre, they generally paid the author 
 so much for each performance of his play, and they divided 
 the profits amongst themselves. Mile. Beaupre, an actress at 
 the Hotel de Bourgogne, is supposed to have expressed the 
 feelings of the troop to which she belonged when she said : 
 " Monsieur Corneille has done us great harm. We bought our 
 plays formerly for three ecus " [the ecu was three francs] " a 
 night ; everybody was accustomed to it, and we used to make 
 money. Now Monsieur Corneille's plays cost us a great deal, and 
 we make very little." It is impossible to say now how much 
 money Corneille received for his plays ; he appears, however, to 
 have been satisfied with what he got, and he expressed his 
 delight at receiving his honorarium. That he, a provincial, 
 who lived at Eouen, and only came up to Paris when his plays 
 or other business demanded his presence, should have made 
 men in the capital talk about him as one who, by his honest 
 labour, had helped to clear away many of the disadvantages 
 with which a career otherwise honourable was surrounded, 
 was to him a source of much natural gratification. He was a 
 man of high spirit, with a full idea of his own worth, but he 
 deserves all the praise he gave to himself a few years later in 
 his own proud line : 
 
 " Je ne dois qu'a moi seul toute ma renommee." 
 
 When Corneille began to write,^character-paintmg, as a 
 distinctive feature in comedv, did not exist in France. He was 
 
INTRODUCTION 21 
 
 the lirst dramatist, or one of the first, who really attempted it ; 
 he was perhaps the first who wrote comedies that were 
 honestly French in thought and in manner. Some of his 
 plots those in the Illusign^oma^ue and in the Menteur 
 were borrowed from Spain, but even there he discarded imita- 
 tion and trusted to his own powers. He wished to portray 
 men and women as he saw them, or as he imagined they 
 might appear ; and this endeavour was an innovation, for the 
 idea of revealing the natural comedy of life in a well-bred 
 manner had not been shown. So far Corneille was an 
 originator. He had admirable intentions, but he followed the 
 lessons that he set before himself too closely. When he said 
 that "comedy is only a picture of our actions and of our 
 speech," he spoke truly enough in a limited sense, but he 
 omitted to say that other qualities are necessary to make the 
 picture of comedy amusing or instructive ; while of the higher 
 purposes of satire, so well exemplified by Moliere, as a means 
 of showing men's foibles and condemning their faults, Corneille 
 had apparently little idea. And a natural manner of talking 
 will not suffice to make a natural comedy, though alone it will 
 make a very dull one. But what is naturalness ? Conversa- 
 tion which is natural in a room will not appear to be natural 
 on the stage, and vice versd. The naturalness of time, place, 
 and manner must be taken into account, even though the 
 same subject be related. Most of Corneille's scenes are 
 embellishments of the actions of daily life, given in polished 
 language and with some poetry ; but usually they want mirth 
 and merriment, and those light but pointed touches that really 
 paint and which are so necessary for defining and showing 
 clearly a character or a situation on the stage. Some of the 
 traits in the character of Dorante in the Menteur are well told, 
 and also in a different sense those of the braggadocio in the 
 Illusion ; but it would seem generally that Corneille feared to 
 draw an original character in comedy lest he should give an 
 exaggerated picture : 
 
 " Poets, like lovers, should be bold and dare, 
 They spoil their business with an over care ; 
 And he, who servilely creeps after sense, 
 Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence." l 
 
 1 Prologue to Dryden's tragedy, Tyrannic Love. 
 
22 LIFEOFMOLI&RE 
 
 In tragedy Corneille was as bold as the laws of the French 
 stage allowed him to be, but in comedy, which we are only 
 considering here, he never attained his highest level. His tone 
 is always delicate and refined, he has shown that he remarked 
 the verses of other playwrights, and he almost said when he 
 was a young man that he took pains with his own; but 
 as a rule his style wants playfulness and varied humour. 
 His comedies betray too often a want of fun or sparkle, and 
 they rarely make one laugh. So at least they appear to us 
 now. Instead of seeing the comedy of life through the 
 natural humours of the personages portrayed, we see formal 
 representations of people who meet each other with the 
 intention of being friendly, but who are prevented from 
 showing themselves for what they are by the etiquette of 
 conventionality. And yet Corneille was far from meaning 
 this. He wished to be gently amusing, and there is evidence 
 to show that he did amuse those who saw his plays when they 
 were first acted. Unfortunately or not, our more modern 
 tastes have become more exacting. One feels now that 
 Corneille's scenes in which men and women are brought 
 together and made to converse are wooden, and give a doll- 
 like resemblance. There is plenty of love-making of an 
 insipid kind, or rather it seems to be playing at making 
 love; but even then it shows no comfortableness or jollity. 
 Ladies are introduced for this purpose, and they generally 
 prove themselves to be masters of the situation. There is a 
 pleasant notion of gallantry about it all, in irreproachably 
 good taste, but shown with monotonous effect. The lovers in 
 one play are of the same type as the lovers in another play. 
 The men have no individuality, no distinctive features by which 
 Philiste may be recognised from Florame, or Leandre from 
 Alcidor. The heroines appear to be captivating at first sight, 
 they are amiable and willing to accept the attentions paid to 
 them; but when known they are either strong-minded, a 
 quality which no man likes in a wife, or they love only by 
 duty, which no man looks for in a mistress : 
 
 " His gallants are all faultless, his women divine, 
 And comedy wonders at being- so fine." 
 
 The stateliness or the magnificence of the manners shown does 
 much to kill the life and soul of the play. 
 
INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 Yet there must have been something in Corneille's comedies 
 which pleased the people of those days ; there must have been 
 the expression of some sentiment which found an echo in the 
 hearts, or at least in the minds, of those who heard his lines 
 spoken and saw them acted by men and women who were 
 the representatives of ladies and gentlemen in good society. 
 The age of chivalry had passed away. Cervantes' novel had 
 helped to kill it in France as elsewhere ; but noble feelings in 
 man die hard, they rarely pass away altogether. Chivalry 
 had given way to gallantry a watered form of chivalry, but 
 which was practised more easily and on the whole was more 
 agreeable. At that time gallantry was not only an amuse- 
 ment, it was a school through which every young man of 
 birth had to pass who wished to be well considered or who 
 hoped to gain soft smiles. Every fine gentleman paid his 
 court to some lady, if only to show his breeding and to 
 establish his claim as an lionndte homme. In the 1 7th century 
 an lionnete homme meant a man of good address and polished 
 mariners, who could talk well and take his part agreeably in 
 society, say pleasant things to ladies, knew what was being 
 said and done in the world, was intelligent, considerate 
 liberal-minded, obliging, and who on occasion could use his 
 sword either for himself or for his friend. This was the type 
 of hero Corneille wished to portray in his comedies, and 
 the best instance of the type is Dorante in the Menteur. 
 His lies are so charmingly told that they are among his 
 qualifications. 
 
 In the Examen of his Galeric du Palais there are a few 
 lines referring to a matter that is worth noticing. Corneille 
 says that the personage of the nurse belonged to old comedy ; 
 it was preserved because few actresses appeared on the stage, 
 and men used to play these parts wearing a mask; but he 
 changed the nurse into the "suivante," and made a woman 
 represent a woman. The suivante usually agreed with her 
 mistress in everything; if the young lady had a lover, the 
 waiting-woman was her confidante. In the fourth scene of 
 a comedy by La Tuilerie, called Crispin Bel Esprit, 1 of a much 
 later date (1681), there araa few bright lines that maybe quoted. 
 
 1 Reprinted by M. Victor Fournel in the first volume of his Petites 
 Comedies Rares et Curieuses du X VIl e Siecle. 
 
94 LIFE OF MOLltEE 
 
 Lise says to her young mistress : 
 
 " Comment ? Vous e"tiez 1'un de 1'autre amoureux, 
 Et vous m'avez pu faire un secret de vos feux ! 
 Allez, vous avez tort : 1'emploi d'une suivante, 
 Madame, de tout temps, fut d'etre confidente ; 
 Et c'est faire 1'amour irregulierement, 
 Que d'avoir pu manquer en ce point seulement." 
 
 The part of the suivante was not often interesting or 
 amusing. For this reason, perhaps, Moliere did not make 
 much use of her; or he altered the character, giving her a 
 more active part to perform. She is seen with a brightness of 
 her own as Dorine in the Tartuffe. After Moliere's time the 
 character of these women changed : they were always self- 
 interested, and they were made to lend their hands to ignoble 
 trickeries. 
 
 It is said that Corneille was one of the five authors whom 
 Richelieu employed to write the verses of plays that the 
 autocratic minister wished to have acted on the stage. But 
 whatever the total labours of his colleagues may have been, 
 Corneille's part in this singular joint undertaking appears to 
 have been small. Richelieu arranged in his own mind the 
 plan of a play, La Comtdie des Tuileries, and set his five 
 pensioners to work upon it after having told each of them 
 what he was to do. Corneille was entrusted with the third 
 act, and he deviated from the instructions he had received. 
 The Cardinal got angry, and told him " qu'il fallait avoir un 
 esprit de suite " ; that is, bring himself into line with the others 
 and obey orders. The play, however, was acted before the 
 queen in the year 1635. Little else is known of the work 
 done by Corneille under Richelieu's command. The poet was 
 evidently hurt by the treatment he had received, for he with- 
 drew from Paris to Rouen, where he then lived, saying that he 
 was called there by his private affairs. 1 
 
 In the Illusion Comique Corneille introduced a personage 
 known as " Le Matamore." He is well shown, after his kind ; 
 he is the best French example of a poor type. This was a stock 
 character well known on the older French stage, but hitherto 
 it had been confined to farce, and with one exception it had 
 not appeared in a play in verse until Corneille showed it in 
 
 1 (Euvres de P. Corneille, Edition des Grands iScrivains de la France, ii. 
 305-308. 
 
INTRODUCTION 25 
 
 the Elusion. 1 The Matamore was a descendant of the Miles 
 Gloriosus in Latin comedy, like Bobadil and Bessus on our 
 English stage ; he was put on to the stage in France to make 
 people laugh, but after the middle of the 17th century 
 the character was not seen. A few quotations will be given 
 to show that Corneille put the rhodomontades of his Mata- 
 more into full sounding lines. His valet advises him to wait 
 until he has collected his army before beginning fresh con- 
 quests, but he is indignant at the idea that his own arm 
 should not be thought sufficient : 
 
 "Le seul bruit de mon nom renverse les murailles, 
 Defait les escadrons et gagne les batailles. 
 Mon courage invaincu centre les empereurs 
 N'arme que la moitie de ses moindres fureurs ; 
 D'un seul commandement que je fais aux trois Parques 
 Je depeuple 1'Etat des plus heureux monarques ; 
 Le foudre est mon canon et les Destins mes soldats : 
 Je couche d'un revers mille ennemis a bas. 
 D'un souffle je re"duis leurs projets en fumee, 
 Et tu m'oses parler cependant (Tune armee ! " 
 
 There is a good bow-wow noise here which serves admir- 
 ably to show the ridicule that the dramatist wished to cast 
 upon his personage; and Corneille was always at his best 
 when moved by some inward passion of indignation or of 
 tenderness. The Matamore is made to affect gallantry because 
 other men did the same. As he is a warrior some lady must 
 be dear to him, and when he recollects his mistress, his 
 thoughts fly instantly from deeds of glory to acts of love : 
 
 " Et pensant au bel ceil qui tient ma liberte 
 Je ne suis plus qu'amour, que grace, que beaute." 
 
 The man is of course an arrant coward. Hit him hard and 
 he is like an air-ball exploded by a pin prick. At one time 
 he is alone, he thinks he sees his enemies coming towards him, 
 and he prepares to run away : 
 
 " J'ai le pied pour le moins aussi bon que I'e'pee. 
 Tout de bon je les vois : c'est fait, il faut mourir ; 
 J'ai le corps si glace que je ne puis courir." 
 
 Corneille's lines do much to put an appearance of life into 
 an absurd character ; but, except as an example of what used 
 to amuse people long ago, these " Spanish Captains " do not 
 offer much interest now. 
 
 1 (Euvres de P. Corneille, ii. 424. 
 
26 LIFEOFMOLIEBE 
 
 ( -orneille's best comedy, La, Mcnteitr, acted in 1G42, six years 
 after the Illusion, contains some scenes which, when well 
 played, produce a capital effect on the stage. Dorante lies 
 splendidly, and he is always a gentleman. His narrative to 
 his father (Act II. sc. 5, 7), telling him how he had been com- 
 pelled to marry a girl who did not exist, is amusing and 
 graphic, but it is too long to quote. In the next scene 
 Dorante says to his valet, Cliton : 
 
 " Oh ! Futile secret que mentir a propos ! 
 
 Cliton. 
 Quoi ? ce que vous disiez n'est pas vrai ? 
 
 Dorante. 
 
 Pas deux mots ; 
 
 Et tu ne viens d'ouir qu'un trait de gentillesse 
 Pour conserver in on ame et mon coeur a Lucresse. 
 
 Cliton. 
 Quoi ? la montre, I'epe'e, avec le pistolet . . . 
 
 Dorante. 
 Industrie ! " 
 
 In Act iv. sc. 1 Dorante tells Cliton that he has just had a 
 duel with Alcippe : 
 
 " Je le mets hors d'etat d'etre jamais malade. 
 II tombe dans son sang. 
 
 Cliton. 
 
 A ce coinpte il est mort ? 
 
 Dorante. 
 Je le laissai pour tel. 
 
 Cliton. 
 
 Certes, je le plains son sort. 
 II dtait honnete homme." 
 
 Immediately these words are spoken Alcippe appears, and 
 Cliton whispers to Dorante : 
 
 " Cette place pour vous est commode a rever." 
 And a few lines later : 
 
 " Les gens que vous tuex se portent assez bien." 
 In the next scene : 
 
 " Dorante. 
 Quoi, mon combat te semble un conte imaginaire ? 
 
INTRODUCTION 27 
 
 Cliton. 
 
 Je croirai tout, Monsieur, pour ne vous pas deplaire ; 
 Mais vous en contez tant a toute heure, en tous lieux, 
 Qu'il faut bien de 1'esprit avec vous, et bons yeux. 
 More, juif, ou chretien, vous n'epargnez personne." 
 
 Cliton asks his master to tell him his secret of being able 
 to lie so well, and he will serve him without wages. The 
 secret consists in knowing a few words of Hebrew, but these 
 are difficult to pronounce : 
 
 " Cliton. 
 Vous savez done 1'he'breu ? 
 
 Dorante. 
 
 L'hebreu ? parfaitement. 
 J'ai dix langues, Cliton, a mon commandement. 
 
 Cliton. 
 
 Vous auriez besoin de dix des mieux nourries 
 Pour fournir tour a tour a tant de menteries ; 
 Vous les hachez menu comme chair a pate's. 
 Vous avez tout le corps bien plein de ve"rite"s, 
 II n'en sort jamais une." 
 
 There is some humour in these lines, but mirth was not 
 Corneille's strongest characteristic. Had he shown it oftener, 
 his comedies would hold a higher place. 
 
 In 1637 Desmarets brought out his comedy Les Vision- 
 naircs, and it was very successful. This is one of those plays 
 that please the town for a few years while the crazes it laughs 
 at are followed, and then is forgotten when people no longer 
 take an interest in the follies they have ceased to admire. 
 It would be unfair, however, to belittle Desmarets because 
 he had not the strong or playful humour which makes the 
 satire in a comedy appreciated by people who live long after 
 the play was written. Though the Visionnaires was com- 
 monly spoken of as "I'inimitable comedie," the characters 
 are so forced that many who saw it must have regarded the 
 ,, play as a piece of elegant fooling. When that is well done 
 it may give very good amusement. The play was meant to 
 be a caricature, but it certainly gives an indication of good 
 comedy. It is pleasantly satirical, though the raillery is a 
 little heavy. The plot is slight, and the scenes are linked 
 together only just enough to give an idea of a story. The 
 
28 LIFE OF MOLlfiEE 
 
 comedy laughs at some of the absurdities that were current 
 among fashionable men and women in Paris in the latter part 
 of the reign of Louis xni. The visionary ideas are ridiculed 
 in a way that pleased those who saw the play, and they 
 enjoyed the satire all the more because it was thoroughly 
 French, and because it was handled in a French spirit without 
 the aid of foreign imitation. 
 
 After Corneille, Jfotrou was the most popular dramatist in 
 the second quarter of the 17th century; and he enjoyed the 
 position, enviable or not, of poet to the troop at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne theatre. I must speak of him shortly, for though 
 he wrote a great many plays of all sorts between 1628 and 
 1650, his comedies have been less highly thought of than his 
 tragedies. Jf^SoBuris perhaps the best of his comedies, and 
 it contains someTfight lines which for the moment are 
 pleasant reading. The valet in the comedy, who has con- 
 cocted the story which forms the subject of the play, says to 
 his master's father : 
 
 " Nous venons de Turquie, et dans cette contre"e 
 Des plus religieux Peglise est ignore ; 
 C'est un climat de maux, de"pourvu de tous biens, 
 Car les Turcs, comme on sait, sont fort mauvais chre"tiens." 
 
 If any one after reading Moliere's fitourdi had been told 
 that these lines were to be found there, and that they had 
 been spoken by Mascarille, he would not probably be much 
 surprised. Rotrou's plays showed an improvement in style 
 and in language, but they were for the most part substantially 
 borrowed from Latin, from Italian, or from Spanish authors. 
 In this way, in his comedies, he was an imitator like other 
 playwrights of his age. A romantic plot, if well handled, will 
 always be popular on the stage, and it was in romantic plots 
 and incidents that the Spanish dramatists were strong, though 
 they show no careful delineation of character. Their plays 
 and their novels were used freely ; their plays were put on the 
 French stage often with no more alteration than was necessary 
 to suit French requirements. The -marriage of Louis xni. to 
 the daughter of Philip in. of Spain gave greater vogue to the 
 French taste for Spanish subjects. This marriage took place 
 in 1615. The year following, the first part of Don Quixote 
 was translated into French ; the second part appeared two years 
 
INTRODUCTION 29 
 
 later. The translation of the immortal novel naturally con- 
 firmed the liking for Spanish incidents of romance. 
 
 _Sc_ajOJils_ comedies, like others of the time, are now dull 
 reading, but he had a certain vivacity and strength of style 
 which was his own ; and Moliere seems to have thought well 
 of them, for he put them on to his stage oftener than the 
 comedies of any other playwright before his day. Scarron's 
 plays (l_645-165^niay all be ranked as comedies. Two are 
 called tragi-comedies, because somebody is killed in them or 
 dies ; but Scarron was essentially a comic writer. His tone 
 was often burlesque; had he attempted a high style he would, 
 in spite of himself, have botched his lines with absurdities. 
 All his plays were borrowed from Spanish authors, the plots_ 
 are Spanish clothed in a French dress. Scarron took the 
 incidents as he wanted them, and attempted to introduce 
 character by grafting his own wit on to a Spanish story. The 
 result is not splendid, but it has a show of brightness and 
 gaiety, in comparison with other comedies of the time, due 
 rather to his sense of fun than to his imagery or powers of 
 observation. He held his pen easily; and even in his long 
 speeches he endeavoured to give the idea of a man speaking 
 because he had something to say, and not of a person making 
 a soliloquy with the principal object of talking. The audiences 
 in those days expected at least one long speech from each of 
 the principal personages. They liked listening to an actor 
 who could speak well the lines that were set down for 
 him; and the actors liked having to speak thirty or forty 
 consecutive lines, for they could thus show their powers of 
 elocution. 
 
 In the dedication of Le Marquis Ridicule Scarron says that 
 " in his opinion this is the best written play he has given to 
 the public." The story told is not especially good, but there 
 is a certain pleasure in following it out, because some of the 
 scenes are well described and the situations clearly shown. 
 Perhaps Scarron's best character appears in this play in the 
 person of the fantastic Marquis. 
 
 Don Japket d'Armdnie has been considered the best of his 
 plays, and here, as in all his other comedies, the merit lies 
 chiefly in the humour of the scenes described. Don Japhet 
 wishes to sav who he is. He begins : 
 
30 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 " Du bon pere No6 j'ai 1'honneur de descendre ; 
 Noe, qui sur les eaux fit Hotter sa maison 
 Quand tout le genre humain but plus que de raison." 
 
 At that time there was a rage for burlesque; it suited 
 Scarron's humour, and of burlesque writers he was the chief. 
 His fun is not generally refined, and it may descend into 
 buffoonery. But he is bold and straightforward ; he says 
 what he wants to say and has done with it. Nearly all of 
 his plays were acted at the Marais. He was one of the prin- 
 cipal writers for that theatre ; his plays were welcomed by the 
 troop, for they found favour with those who went to see them. 
 
 When speaking of Scarron something should be said of the 
 position of the valets in old French comedy. They are the 
 best part of Scarron's work. But the best instance by far of 
 these characters is Mascarille, in Moliere's Etourdi. The 
 motive for the valet in comedies was to plan schemes for his 
 master, to amuse the audience, and to make them laugh. The 
 man was a thief, a rogue, a liar, one who, if he got his deserts, 
 would be in his proper place chained to a galley ; yet following 
 the idea given in the play he enlists our sympathies, we pity 
 him and wish hini success in his undertakings. He knew 
 right from wrong, and did wrong, not because he was vicious 
 and liked evil things, but because he could not help himself. 
 He had an idea of honour among thieves. He served his master 
 faithfully, thought of nobody else, was eager and willing in his 
 service, though for his pains he often got blows and no wages. 
 His lot was cast, and the poor fellow had to make the best of it 
 and be contented with fine promises. He lived on terms of 
 great intimacy with his master ; that was the bright spot in his 
 existence. He compensated himself by his freedom of speech, 
 and by telling his master in plain words what he thought of him. 
 He was free with his tongue in giving good counsel. The master 
 did not want a lecture, but he did want assistance in his love 
 affairs. The servant's head was the best for planning schemes, 
 hence in many comedies his was the most important part. In 
 Scarron's play Jodelet ou le Matire Valet, Don Juan asks his 
 valet to change clothes with him, and Jodelet answers : 
 
 " Et ne pourrai-je pas, pour mieux representer 
 Le seigneur Don Juan, quelquefois charpenter 
 Sur votre noble dos ? Bien souvent, ce me semble, 
 Vous en usez ainsi." 
 
INTRODUCTION 31 
 
 Don Juan replies : 
 
 " Quand nous sommes ensemble, 
 Tous seuls et sans temoins, oui, je te le permets." 
 
 Kecognising the position of the valet on the stage, there is 
 a note of comedy in these lines, and they probably amused the 
 young men among the audience who heard them spoken. 
 
 It is in these little touches that Scarron is seen at his best ; 
 unfortunately they are not very frequent. He sought for his 
 materials among Spanish novels and plays, and so long as he 
 produced a comedy that was liked, he was easy in his mind 
 how he had done it. His narratives, of which there is an 
 ample share, and his dialogues, show a freshness of speech 
 which was all his own. Freshness of speech is a great element 
 in a comedy. But little of it is seen in the early French 
 comedies that have been printed, though in the unprinted 
 farces it was probably abundant. It will hardly be found, I 
 think, to a fair extent before Scarron's time in any dramatist 
 who wrote more than one comedy except Larivey. All of 
 Larivey's comedies, however, were in prose. Corneille is no 
 doubt superior as a writer to Scarron, but Scarron's comedies 
 show more raciness of language, and his style is more truly 
 comic than that of any dramatist who wrote in verse before 
 Moliere. Corneille had not Scarron's sense of humour, he had 
 rather the feeling of a man of letters ; but poor Scarron sought 
 relief from his bodily infirmities by indulging in his fun. 
 M. Louis Moland says : l " The burlesque poet has generally 
 been treated with some contempt. Moliere did not feel this. 
 Perhaps he borrowed from Scarron more than from any of his 
 contemporaries. He did not forget how popular had been 
 Jodelet Maitre Valet, or Don Japliet d'Armtfnie, and he did 
 ^justice to their author on many occasions." 
 
 In the middle of the 17th century, and about the time that 
 Scarron's comedies were being acted at the Theatre du Marais, 
 Boisrobert's comedies were for the most part played at the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne. The abbe Boisrobert was nominally a 
 churchman, but he seems to have likecl the~~stage better than 
 ecclesiastical work, and was nicknamed the abbe Mondory. It 
 is doubtful whether Mondory, the late chief of the troop at the 
 Marais, would have felt that a compliment was paid to him. 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, 1st ed. ii. 316. 
 
32 LIFE OF MOLlRE 
 
 Boisrobert was a sort of gentleman-jester to the Cardinal de 
 Richelieu. It was from Boisrobert that Eichelieu heard of the 
 meetings of a small circle of men who came together once a 
 week to talk about books ; and from these meetings, against 
 the wish of the nine or twelve friends, Kichelieu founded the 
 French Academy in 1635. Boisrobert wrote five tragedies and 
 one tragi-comedy before his first comedy was acted. Then 
 other comedies followed, of which La Folle Gageure, Les Trois 
 Orontes, and La Belle Plaideuse are the best. At a time when 
 comedy was bound by fetters of different kinds Boisrobert 
 tried to make a step towards freedom. He borrowed from 
 various sources, but did not take Spanish plays as the ground- 
 work for his comedies so completely as did Rotrou, Scarron, 
 and Thomas Corneille, and he wished to give a French tone of 
 thought to his characters and to the incidents that he related. 
 His comedies had their day, and more should not be expected 
 of them than a feeble picture of people when they chose to 
 indulge in romantic ideas. Boisrobert tried to show the 
 feeling of romance, but fell short in his attempt. It would 
 seem that he liked writing for the stage, though he could not, 
 from want of imagination, succeed as well as he wished. He 
 knew partly what was required, and his dialogue runs quickly 
 and is easily read. There is a note of comedy in his plays, 
 but he was not big enough to make it strongly felt. His 
 scenes are washy. They give the notion of wanting a firmer 
 hand than his to knit them together. While for real charac- 
 terisation and for the lessons to be taught by honest satire, 
 they will not be found in any comic dramatist before Moliere. 
 Thomas Corneille the brother of Pierre, "le grand 
 Corneille/ and nineteen years his junior wrote eight 
 comedies before the time at which this sketch is brought to 
 a close. They were all borrowed from. Spanish authors, and 
 do not otherwise deserve remark. They have an appearance 
 of forced brightness, but as comedies have little interest. 
 They are not unlike the comedies of Scarron, though higher 
 in tone, but have not his vivacity or sense of humour. 
 Thomas Corneille was a facile and a very successful play- 
 wright; and some of his plays, either those composed by 
 himself or in collaboration with another, in which he probably 
 did the lion's share, had the good fortune of being acted 
 
INTRODUCTION 33 
 
 oftener than any other plays in the 17th century. But these 
 successes came while Moliere was at the Palais Eoyal theatre 
 or after his death, and came perhaps more from tragedy than 
 from comedy, though among his comedies Le Baron Albikrac 
 and La Devineresse were very popular. It is singular that 
 among the dramatists and other French writers in the first 
 half of the 1 7th century a large proportion were born in the 
 province of Normandy. Boileau said of Thomas Corneille: 
 " Pauvre Thomas ! Tes vers, compares avec ceux de ton alne*, 
 font bien voir que tu n'es qu'un cadet de Normandie." In fact, 
 the greater reputation of Pierre Corneille has damaged Thomas 
 in the world's esteem. In tragedy he was far from his brother's 
 equal, and was much inferior to Eacine ; and in comedy he 
 was a very long way indeed below Moliere. These men were 
 his contemporaries, consequently he has been overshadowed 
 by them. 
 
 I have not been lavish of praise in speaking of French 
 comedies before Moliere's day, but as a matter of fact very 
 few Frenchmen who know what their early comic drama was 
 like have extolled it highly. According to an anecdote, which 
 need not be repeated for the sake of a bon mot, Boileau said 
 to Louis XIV. that until_Moliere wrote there was no gnnd 
 comedy in Frajif.p; 1 a.nrl I believe that his verdict has not 
 been substantially set aside. 
 
 There is some difficulty in speaking of the pleasure to be 
 found in these old comedies. I have tried to like them and 
 to interest myself for the time in the characterisation of the 
 personages and of the incidents described, but on the whole 
 with small success. I imagine comedy to be a mirthful 
 * dramatic representation of the humours of a people, and if 
 their humours are shown fairly they will tell what the people 
 are like better than any other kind of description. In comedy 
 we look for a mirthful picture, with some satire or raillery, of 
 men's likes and dislikes, their thoughts, their actions, their 
 aspirations, their amusements, their hopes and their fears, 
 their foibles and their faults. It is only partially true to say 
 that human nature is everywhere the same. Manners are not 
 
 1 (Euvres de Jean Racine, Edition des Grands Ecrivains de la France, 1st 
 ed. i. 290 note continuation of note from previous page : and 2nd ed. i, 
 297 note 2. 
 
34 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 everywhere the same; and as time progresses they change 
 gradually, especially in the better classes of society. It is, 
 of course, difficult to see in old comedies the humours of a 
 people of nearly three hundred years ago with the same eyes 
 as did those who were alive when the comedies were written. 
 Still, one may look at the plays broadly and try to learn from 
 them how far they exhibited the tastes and the pleasures of 
 the age intended to be represented, and try to see how the 
 men and women who took their parts in them were made to 
 show themselves and what they were like. Much is left to 
 the imagination; yet if the idea just given of comedy be 
 accepted, I think that comedy will not often be found except 
 in a dead-alive way in French plays before the second half of 
 the 17th century. 
 
 When we consider what a delicate thing is the comedy of 
 manners, how slow was its birth in England, and how long it 
 took to grow and nourish amongst ourselves, we cannot be 
 surprised that its birth should have been slow also in France. 
 Before JMoliere's day thejr^comic writers were apprentic.es.- 
 Manx of them set bra.y3y:JbQ-work to learn their art, but 
 instead of trusting to their own brains they used too much 
 those of others. Consequently they fell into the vice of 
 imitation. As in other countries in the youthful days of the 
 drama they wrote much in verse, and this created a wish to 
 exhibit fine ideas. Their ambitions had their good sides, for 
 it is certainly well that a drama should seek to elevate by 
 inspiring wholesome sentiments ; and high ideas are perhaps 
 seen to more advantage in verse than in plain-running prose. 
 The desire to appear fine prompted also the English dramatists 
 in the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth and under James I. 
 That was a proud age in England, and the writers for the 
 stage who courted popular favour expressed themselves 
 proudly. The great dramatists had something more to show 
 than their pride, but the lines of many of the others are often 
 hollow enough and have little meaning. The glories of the 
 drama came later in France than with us, and were not won 
 by so many competitors. But when their comic dramatists 
 tried to show what were* tlie thoughts _and ways of living of 
 the people described, one feels that they were hampered by 
 the laws of the unities and by the laws of versification, and 
 
INTRODUCTION 35 
 
 that they thought too much of exhibiting a grand behaviour 
 and nice deportment in their personages. Their plays are 
 neither imaginative nor poetical ; they are so stilted and stiff 
 that comedy is crushed out of them. The comic stage, instead 
 of giving hearty amusement, became too largely a school for 
 mental exercises. This did not arise so much from a wish 
 on the part of the public, or of the actors, as from advice 
 given to authors by pretended critics. Pedantry got the upper 
 hand of popular sentiment ; and formal comedy, without sap, 
 without freshness, without strength, was admired and thought 
 to be fine. A hundred years earlier, when farce was current, 
 people enjoyed it; but farce with its laughter was now 
 thought to be coarse. And it would seem that at the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne theatre pedantry thought that laughter was 
 irregular in comedies, because it was loudest when farces 
 were being played. It was therefore degraded and put out 
 of court. This was a pity, for, like charity, laughter covers 
 a multitude of sins. Something good would have come from 
 it, and by degrees the coarseness would have diminished. In 
 the 15th century and the first half of the 16th, when farces 
 were common in the theatres, they were printed and presumably 
 read; but few of the early 17th century farces were printed, 
 and of those only a small number have been preserved. Yet 
 in our day editions have been made of the Chansons de Gaultier 
 Garguille and of the (Euvres de Tabarin \ 
 
 The following paragraph, written by George Henry Lewes, 
 may be quoted here with advantage : 
 
 " It is worthy of remark that in each country, when the separation 
 of the profane from the sacred element took place in the representa- 
 tions originally founded by the priests when, in short, the first step 
 was taken towards the first formation of a drama there was a 
 struggle between the scholars and the popular writers. As soon as 
 the drama became an art the scholars naturally looked to the ancient 
 models. They could conceive no other form of excellence. What 
 the ancients had done the moderns strove to imitate ; otherwise they 
 would never rise above the vulgar. In Italy and in Germany the 
 scholars were triumphant. A lifeless abortion was the result. Italy 
 had to wait for Alfieri and Goldoni before it had a drama ; Germany 
 had to wait for Lessing. But in England and Spain the scholars 
 were beaten." l 
 
 1 The Spanish Drama. Lope de Vega and Calderon, p. 18 a small volume 
 published by Charles Knight in 1846. 
 
36 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI&KE 
 
 Though Lewes omitted to take into account the popular 
 improvised drama in Italy, known as "La Commedia dell' 
 arte," what he says shows a large part of the foundation of 
 the history of modern dramatic literature in Europe. In 
 France for many years the scholars had the upper hand, and 
 their influence was visible long after the popular writers 
 had arisen. What the ancients had done Frenchmen strove 
 to imitate, because they could not imagine anything better. 
 After the renaissance of the drama they tried to form their 
 tragedies on Greek models; and the most highly accredited 
 writers for the comic stage, wishing to discard farce, took 
 their comedies from Italy and from Spain Italy having 
 borrowed in the first instance from Greece and from Eome. 
 
 The^chief drawbacks to the enjoyment nf-raHeh comedy 
 before Moliere's time ar^j^mji/bpinion^Jthat -the. ..plays WP.VP, 
 imitations; that the dramatists kvere content to follow each 
 other too much in the same groove, taking existing comedies 
 for their models, instead of woriing from the world as they 
 saw it and trying to imagine fir themselves how men and 
 women speak and act when they/ are together. As regards 
 imitation and routine, Pierre Comeille should be honourably 
 exgeptedjJfojHre did try tcTcarve out a way of his own7anbT so 
 far he was original. On the whole, some show of comedy was 
 doubtless produced in the long run by the mechanical methods 
 in vogue, and the plays were gradually becoming more French 
 and a little more inspiriting ; but the writers would have done 
 better if they had trusted more to their own observation and 
 less to books. The plays and the composition of the plays 
 were borrowed, first from Latin, afterwards from Italian, and 
 later from Spanish models ; long speeches form a large part 
 of the dialogue; characterisation in any animate sense was 
 unknown; therefore to us who live more than two hundred 
 and fifty years after the plays were written they appear life- 
 less, barren of almost everything that is human except long- 
 winded talk. There is a great deal too much talking and far 
 too little done ; the action is drowned in a sea of words. You 
 want to interest yourself in the personages before you, whether 
 you like them or not, and in their concerns, in the way they 
 tell their story and show themselves to be what they are ; but 
 this is set forth in such a heavy-handed manner that you are 
 
INTRODUCTION 37 
 
 awfully bored by the dulness of the picture. As plays, these 
 comedies are essentially undramatic; for the sense of quick 
 movement, of touch and go, of sparkle, of raciness of thought 
 or of expression, is not in them. In the great majority of 
 comedies the language spoken by one man is like that spoken 
 by another of the same rank, that of one woman is like that of 
 another of the same condition ; consequently it is half colour- 
 less in portraying the features of the various personages. And 
 one is tempted to think that not unfrequently a leading part 
 or two might be taken out of the middle of one comedy and 
 put into the middle of another, without showing much differ- 
 ence in the mental attitude of the speaker. At the same time, 
 it is only fair to add that vitality in characterisation has always 
 been a difficult matter, and that within the last three hundred 
 years the power of showing people's characters clearly by the 
 way they talk to each other has not been given to many writers. 
 Running abreast with the spirit of imitation, the obedience- 
 Jbo authority, which became almost compulsory with those 
 "authors who wished to have their plays accepted and to stand 
 well with the critics, exercised a baneful influence on French 
 comedy. The restraints which limited the scope of the action 
 in a play compelled the dramatists to plan their comedies after 
 some imaginary model of excellence which existed nowhere. The 
 writers did not try to show the humours of life, taking human 
 characteristics as their guide, but rather strove to interest their 
 audiences in intended romantic or heroic scenes and incidents. 
 These, however, were painted coldly and in a pompous manner. 
 The Spanish drama was romantic. The French playwrights 
 tried to be romantic also ; but the French fettered themselves 
 by rules which the Spaniards disregarded, and which, instead 
 of guiding them, prevented a natural use of their powers. The 
 rules were too strict, and bound those who used them too 
 severely. Comedy is like a free horse that should be ridden 
 with a firm but light hand and a close but easy seat ; and the 
 writer of a comedy, as he is planning his incidents and forming 
 his characters, should feel that he is free to dispose of them as 
 he will, governed only by the laws of composition and by the 
 habits and fancies that guide men and women in their different 
 walks of life. But the " genre noble " was a feature a great 
 deal thought of in French comedy, and all the personages were 
 
38 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 made to behave according to the customs of a strictly conven- 
 tional etiquette. And they were not allowed to do anything 
 contrary to the administrative laws of the unities. As we 
 look now at the comedies that were acted at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne theatre for a generation after Moliere's birth, it 
 would seem that there was no comic dramatist strong enough 
 and lively enough with natural fun, or wit, or humour, to take 
 the matter into his own hands, overthrow bad custom, and 
 write a play that was really good comedy and which would 
 heartily amuse an audience and send them to their homes 
 rejoicing. The critics held that farce was low ; they tabooed 
 it, and put it outside the pale. Farce is not high art, but 
 perhaps it is better than pretended -comedy so dull that there 
 is no comedy in it. 
 
 The comic ideal sought after was a high one, but its 
 principles were too abstract and too authoritative. The play- 
 wrights were young at their work, they were often conscien- 
 tiously ambitious ; but they had not learned that the play of 
 life must be shown mirthfully, often irregularly, and without 
 absoluteness. They aimed at conceiving a drama which should 
 be at once romantic and formally decorous. The romance was 
 maimed because it was not allowed to be carried out fairly ; 
 and in plays that should amuse, ceremonious decorum, un- 
 relieved by laughter or by poetical or imaginative pictures, is 
 worthless. In the course of one play a reader thinks to him- 
 self ten times : 
 
 " J'aime mieux un vice commode 
 Qu'une fatigante vertu." 
 
 The Parisians of one or two hundred years earlier were bright- 
 witted, and they had their current topics of conversation as 
 well as those who live now. These found their place in the 
 soties and other impromptu plays, satirical personal allusions 
 were introduced and were put into words which were either 
 spoken or sung ; and so the Vaudeville song of the town 
 was created. This is the meaning that should be given to 
 Boileau's line : 
 
 " Le Frangais ne malin forma le Vaudeville." 
 
 These light plays were really the comedies of the time. 
 From the farces which had been popular before the middle of 
 the 16th century, if they had not been too hardly and unfairly 
 
INTRODUCTION 39 
 
 j udged, comedy would have come to life gradually ; but ac- 
 cording to ideas that were ruling in the second quarter of the 
 17th century, farce bore much the same relation to comedy as 
 the slang of young men in Paris of the present day does to 
 an academical discourse. 
 
 Of the dramatists who wrote between 1550 and 1650 a few 
 names stand out of men who tried to originate ; but though 
 changes took place gradually, they came perhaps rather from 
 a slow and general awakening to better ideas than because 
 good examples were followed. Jodelle, in 1552, in his single 
 comedy Eugene, drew a picture of contemporary life ; nearly a 
 generation later, Larivey,, a manufacturer of plays, but a 
 semi-originator, frenchified in a way of his own Italian 
 comedies, and gave to his plays a good deal of vivacity and 
 quick movement ; (a generation afterwards jlardy was working 
 at his tragedies and tragi-comedies like a young horse in a 
 plough to break away from the older classical school and if 
 report speaks truly he did more than any one else to initiate 
 a new system but if he wrote any comedies, they have not 
 come down to us;) shortly before Hardy's death Pierre^ 
 Corneille appeared, and he strove to conceive comedy that 
 should represent a natural and a decent way of living, and he 
 tried to introduce characterisation into his plays, though he 
 succeeded but feebly in this attempt. I have mentioned the 
 names of a few who wrote comedies after Pierre Corneille ; but 
 for the most part, though their style may be a little easier, 
 they worked on the well-beaten lines and showed little 
 originality. They did as their fathers had done before them, 
 and in this way tradition was maintained and inanimate 
 types kept their place on the stage. The chief change that 
 took place, was working from Spanish instead of from Italian 
 models, and this brought with it a change of manner. Italian 
 impromptu comedy was light ; their written comedy, born 
 later, was heavy : at first the former prevailed in France, 
 afterwards the latter. Spanish comedy, though romantic and 
 dignified and lacking in real characterisation, was light- 
 handed, but it was not suited to the tastes of the French 
 people; yet French writers adopted it, less fully than they 
 had previously adopted Italian comedy, but still working from 
 it because it furnished them with incidents. 
 
40 LIFE OF MOLlfiEE 
 
 And though French comedies were written in carefully 
 prepared verse, their language does not often command atten- 
 tion by the expression of poetical ideas. It is prosaic in 
 sound and in feeling, it was meant to be stately, and it is 
 usually devoid of humour or wit. Most French playwrights 
 until about 1640 or 1645 did not show a style suitable to 
 comedy when they were exhibiting their personages before 
 their audience. They wished to avoid a conversational 
 manner, they meant to create a show of magnificence, often 
 out of place, and they were dull. They were formal instead 
 of being refined, and they do not seem to have understood that 
 comedies in verse as well as in prose should be mirthful, and 
 that the audience should be made merry over them. 
 
 Any sort of fun to be seen in the regular Paris theatres in 
 the first half of the 17th century, was reserved for the farce 
 which was played as an after-piece. Before farce was allowed 
 to die out at the Hotel de Bourgogne, perhaps in the fourth or 
 fifth decade, the actors had quite enough vitality and mother- 
 wit of their own to amuse their audiences without borrowing 
 a show of gaiety which did not belong to them. But not 
 much opportunity was given to them to exercise their powers. 
 Good-humoured farce full of satirical banter " malice," though 
 riot in its natural sense, has always been essentially a French 
 quality, and from this, if authors and actors, unconstrained by 
 laws which they were told had come from Aristotle, had been 
 allowed to have their way, comedy would have sprung. The 
 light plays, or farces, acted when Moliere was a boy, were crude, 
 silly, and coarse, but they often had vitality ; they sprang from 
 the thoughts of the people, they showed roughly in a ludicrous 
 manner the lives of those who acted them, and of those who 
 enjoyed them. They were their own offspring, their own 
 flesh and blood, not adopted bastards borrowed from a foreign 
 land. Farce has always been the mother #f comedy, and 
 from it comedy would have at length emerged, at first nearly 
 invisible, but it would have come to light after a slow birth. 
 Decently behaved farce might have been allowed to exist by 
 the side of comedy as its humble rival; but the theatrical 
 critics, who did not know what comedy was because they had 
 hardly seen it, gave themselves pretentious airs, and wished to 
 send farce ruthlessly into banishment. We are told, however, 
 
INTRODUCTION 41 
 
 that farce was played at the Theatre du Marais for some years 
 after it was driven from the Hotel de Bourgogne, the older and 
 more important theatre. By farce I fancy we should under- 
 stand here small light comedies or trifles, written only with 
 the intention of affording amusement, and which were often 
 thought to be not worth printing. 
 
 oJiere_Jgiewthe tastes of his Countrymen, and he 
 
 how absurd were~The laws whTcTi~tried to govern those tast.ps 
 Itwould seem that he wished to learn his lesson gradually, for 
 he foresaw that it was difficult. But he set about it in his own 
 way. He began by writing farces, two of which only have 
 been preserved. Then he wrote two plays taken straight from 
 Italy, but into which he introduced vivacity and his own 
 characterisation. Then came the Prtcieuses Ridicules^ his first 
 purely French comedy, though it was at the same time a cari- 
 cature. In his next play the plot was mainly Italian, but the 
 style was altogether French. The comedies seen on the Italian 
 stage often influenced him in his later work, but the tendency 
 of his mind was always to make characterisation the most im- 
 portant feature in his plays. Such a lesson has never been 
 learned all at once. Moliere's predecessors, if they attempted 
 it, succeeded but a little way. They began their work at the 
 wrong end. They wrote their five-act comedies in verse before 
 they had learned how important are the details and smaller 
 incidents in a play, that these should be told graphically ; and 
 they did not see how essential it is that comedy should show 
 the features of characterisation, both of the personages and of the 
 incidents, in a true and lively manner. One should remember, 
 however, that the special requirements of the stage were little 
 understood then, and that audiences were more easily con- 
 tented than they are now with what was given to them. 
 Before the days of gas people used candles or small lamps 
 after dark, and were contented with the dim light because they 
 knew of none brighter. As they stand, the comedies in verse 
 that were acted in the French theatres in the first half of the 
 17th century appear to us now to be more like dramatic 
 poems sadly deficient in poetry and in the thoughts that 
 poetry should inspire than plays intended to amuse an 
 audience. The presence of long speeches does much to give this 
 appearance. Yet Moliere, who ranks much higher as a. drama- 
 
42 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 tist than as a poet, even in most of his early comedies in verse 
 gave long speeches that were instinct with life in marking the 
 features of his personages or in describing the incidents in his 
 story. A show of quickness of thought, a more or less rapid 
 exchange of opinions upon the event of the moment, and a 
 brightness of expression, are very necessary in comedy ; and 
 Moliere's first plays in verse Don Garde de Navarre excepted 
 show that he understood the business of a dramatist very 
 much better than his predecessors. Their plays gave far too 
 often pictures of men making speeches while others had to 
 stand by and listen to them until it was their turn to talk. 
 However fine the lines may be, work of that kind shows self- 
 importance and egotism rather than comedy; and reading 
 plays which leave such an impression is not exhilarating. 
 
 It is difficult to determine how far any one dramatist was 
 the founder of comedy in his own country. For comedy did not 
 arise suddenly ; it was not created all at once by the strength 
 of one man's genius, any more than was Greek sculpture or 
 the art of painting in Italy. Its birth, like that of other arts, 
 was gradual, formed by successive attempts until a picture, 
 idealistic or real, or, better still, one that shows a mixture of 
 both, of what might be supposed to happen in the play of life had 
 been drawn. And the comedy of manners will hardly be found 
 in any state of excellence until society had so far progressed 
 that a cultivated and familiar intercourse between men and 
 women took place with tolerable frequency. It cannot be said, 
 of course, that the art of comedy has always been progressive. 
 As in other arts, there have been times when it nourished ; 
 then for a generation or more it has been decadent ; and it has 
 afterwards acquired a fresh and generally a different kind of 
 strength. But as regards the early French comic drama, when 
 all is urged about the claims of Jodelle, of Larivey, of Pierre 
 Corneille, as founders of comedy in France, Moli&se was in 
 truth the first French comic dramatist who gavea true,jamus- 
 ing, and lively represbfrt^niuir"uf the htlrnoufs^and actions of 
 men and women in his own country. Moliere was the first who 
 knew how to form his characters so well that their personations 
 are still studied with care, and whose scenes or whose lines 
 are remembered for their pleasantry or their wit. He, too, was 
 the first who taught that strong satire in comedy may be put to 
 
INTKODUCTION 
 
 43 
 
 noble uses, and who knew at the same time how to show it with 
 good comic effect. There had been earlier comic dramatists 
 Mairet, Desmarets, Scarron, Boisrobert who deserved the dis- 
 tinctions they had won, but neither their grasp of human life 
 nor their sympathies were shown broadly or vividly enough to 
 attract much notice after Moliere's more spirited representa- 
 tions had appeared. They had created no pictures, showing 
 the features of comedy, which could stand the test of com- 
 parison with his. Corneille's Mentewr was the last but one of 
 his comedies, and it has been thought to be the best; the 
 Etourdi was the first of Moliere's after his farces and it is 
 certainly not his best. These are the only plays of these two 
 writers that can be spoken of together ; and I think it is 
 felt that Moliere's comedy is the brighter of the two and more 
 natural in the improbabilities related, because they are better 
 told and shown with greater fun. 
 
 '?' 
 
THE LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 BIRTH AND PARENTAGE 
 
 OF all the writers commonly included in the term " le siecle 
 de Louis xiv.," there are none so widely popular as LaJFontaine 
 ^mVTolierft Thoy WPVP f,]if> f, W Q most original authors^ 
 Seir^tinie^and of French classics_they are among the most 
 frequently quote&r^J& = 3?ria&&^L& jj\mtain& is the prince of 
 
 Moliere os^the greatest; and per- 
 
 f haps they will both be studied when their contemporaries are - 
 forgotten. Sympathy and ]3jimanity^_ a fellow-feeling with 
 and for others, were their strongest characteristics. For these 
 writers speak from the heart to the heart, they appeal to the 
 intelligence and become favourites with everybody. They 
 knew so well the feelings of the men and animals they wished 
 to portray, that in making them talk to each other they could 
 counterfeit their words, imitate their tones of voice, and so 
 characterise them by their speech and personate them. 
 Without the touch peculiar to familiarity, which comes gene- 
 rally from sympathy, no man can be a dramatist or a novelist 
 in the sense of representing the thoughts or manners of his 
 fellow-creatures, and of making others interested in his 
 pictures. Brain-power alone is not sufficient. We may all 
 be sure that without the instinctive chord of sympathy, Scott 
 could not have created the strong interest in his scenes and 
 characters which these undoubtedly possess ; Dickens's fanciful 
 or idealistic pictures would not have their clearness ; Shake- 
 speare could not have given us Coriolanus, Eosalind, or Falstaff ; 
 nor Moliere Alceste, Agnes, or his different Sganarelles. La 
 Fontaine's name will only be mentioned incidentally in these 
 pages, but it will be part of my endeavour to show in what 
 
 45 
 
46 LIFE OF MOLlfiKE 
 
 spirit Moliere looked at the men and women among whom he 
 lived and in what tone he satirised them. 
 
 To feel the seriousness of Moliere's comedies a reader must 
 first learn for himself what his laughter was like and what it 
 meant. The tone of mirth or of laughter in any comedy is 
 one of its most important features. Kacine's Plaideurs, his 
 only comedy, is bright and amusing, but his fun is not so open 
 as that of Moliere; and the sparkle in Moliere is more 
 spontaneous than in Beaumarchais, whose effort to appear gay 
 is a little too evident. And both Eacine and Beaumarchais 
 lacked Moliere's earnestness and his power of making us laugh 
 at people's oddities, while he sympathises with them in their 
 troubles. Some of us Englishmen who enjoy the hearty 
 laughter in Shakespeare's comedies can hardly force a smile 
 from the wit of Congreve. If the smile does come there it is 
 painful. The comedy in his plays is real enough, though the 
 manners exhibited are artificial. Actual men and women are 
 shown, and they are reprobates against honest living. With 
 no comfortableness or jollity, they make sport with vice and 
 are as cold-blooded as fishes. They were wicked, not because 
 they liked it, but because it was fashionable to be so. The 
 pictures are true of their kind, but no sorrow, no anger is 
 shown in painting them. That was not the case with Moliere, 
 and his plays are singularly free from objectionable scenes. 
 Sheridan comes nearer to Moliere in thought, and is more like 
 him. He has something of his playfulness, of his kindliness, 
 though none of his grimness ; and several of Sheridan's scenes 
 recall to mind those of Moliere as though he had been prompted 
 by them. But Moliere wrote many more plays than Sheridan, 
 and he had greater powers of personal characterisation; his 
 "vis comica" was stronger, and his pictures of comedy are 
 fuller and leave a more lasting impression. The way in which 
 Moliere mixed together earnestness and ridicule, comedy and 
 farce, sadness and laughter, and showed his purpose in a light- 
 handed manner and with true comic effect, is very wonderful 
 indeed. To learn this you should read his big comedies and 
 his lighter ones together, conciliate them and see how the 
 different pictures came from the pen of one writer. A strong 
 characteristic in Moliere's satire is that it is honest and 
 pleasant; it leaves a clean taste in the mouth. Though he 
 taught by laughter, he was never ill-natured ; neither was he a 
 
CHAPTEE I 47 
 
 scoffer, for his mind was too reverential. As satire was his 
 humour, he portrayed men's natures by means of ridicule, in 
 which there is always some worldly cynicism, emphasising and 
 colouring their features more or less, and necessarily with 
 some caricature. A humorist may well use caricature without 
 exceeding the lawful province of comedy; indeed he must 
 often use it if he wishes to give force, truth, delicacy or the 
 effect of naturalness to his picture. 
 
 In 1821, Louis Francois Beffara found among the registers 
 of the church of Saint Eustache, in Paris, the certificate of 
 baptism ofjJean Poquelin, better known by his assumed name, 
 Moliere; md the certificate shows that he was christened o 
 the 15th of January JU) 2 2. Nothing is said about the boy's 
 birth in this document. It was then customary in France to 
 have a child baptised the day it was born ; if the baptism was 
 tlelayed, the certificate stated the day of the birth. 1 It has 
 therefore been generally supposed that the 15th of January 
 was the poet's birthday. Though he had only one Christian 
 name, Jean, given to him at his baptism, he had a second 
 Christian name, Baptiste, given to him early in life, perhaps to 
 distinguish him from a younger brother also christened Jean, 
 and who is spoken of as " 1'autre Jean " in the inventory made 
 after their mother's death. 
 
 Not much is known of Moliere's ancestors, but something 
 may be shortly told. His father's father, Jean Poquelin, left 
 Beauvais, probably towards the end of the 16th century, and 
 established himself as an upholsterer in Paris, in the Eue de la 
 Lingerie, then in the centre of the commercial part of the 
 town. He carried on an apparently prosperous business ; he 
 married in 1594, had eight or ten children, and died in 1626. 
 His eldest son, also a Jean Poquelin, father of the poet, was 
 born probably in 1595. He began his work in the world as an 
 upholsterer and was enabled to marry young. His marriage 
 settlement, 2 dated 22nd of February 1621, shows that his 
 father was still living in the Eue de la Lingerie, in the parish 
 of Saint Eustache, and that he (the son) then qualified as a 
 
 1 Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 205 ; (Euvres de Moliere, x. 9. As I 
 said in the preface, this last quoted volume is altogether devoted to the 
 Notice biographique sur Moliere by M. Paul Mesnard. 
 
 2 Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere et sur safamille, 127. 
 
LIFE OF MOLI&KE 
 
 tapissier, lived in the Kue Saint Honord in the 
 same parish. He was betrothed to Marie Cresse* on the 25th 
 of April 1621, and they were married on the 27th of that 
 month. 1 They each contributed to their marriage settlement 
 2200 livres in money or in kind, of which each was to keep one 
 half as his or her share, and the other half was to go to them 
 jointly. 2 Nothing is known of the commercial relations 
 between this Jean Poquelin and his father, whether the son 
 was admitted into partnership with his father, or whether he 
 began his business life in partnership with anybody else or 
 on his own account. The son, however^jnust have prospered, 
 for ten years after his 
 
 tapissigrs- du roi, and some few years later one of the still 
 more privileged tapissiers valets de chambre du roi. Moliere's 
 mother's father was Louis de Cresse, another upholsterer. There 
 had been le sire Simon de Cresse, echevin of Paris in 1570, 
 possibly his father ; 3 so that Louis de Cresse, who liked to see 
 the particle before his name, thought he had a right to use it. 
 He had a son Louis Cresse, an upholsterer in Paris, at least in 
 the year 1656, 4 but little or nothing more is known about him. 
 "This maternal grandfather of Moliere's, of whom we are to hear 
 a little and who may have been responsible for a great deal, 
 lived and carried on his business in the Marche SLMX Poire'es 
 in Paris. 5 He was a rich man, he had a house of his own at 
 St. Ouen, 6 a northern suburb of the capital, and he died in 1638. 
 Moliere was descended therefore on both sides from a line of 
 upholsterers ; and when as a lad his father wished to make an 
 upholsterer of him, after much anxious thought on his part 
 and probable unpleasantness between them, he said No, and 
 stuck to it. In its descent the members of his family belonged 
 to one class, they had one interest, and they would be likely 
 to have hereditary ideas and to cling to them tenaciously. 
 Such people often participate each other's thoughts; and if 
 this creates narrow-mindedness, it also often creates a peculiar 
 strength of instinct in family affairs not easily acquired by 
 those whose male ancestors have successively followed different 
 
 1 Jal, Dictionnaire critique de biographie et d'histoire, 989, col. i. 
 
 2 Soulie, Eecherches sur Moliere, 12, 128, 129. 
 
 3 E. Reverend du Mesnil, La Famille de Moliere, 28 and note 2. 
 
 4 Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere, 197. 
 
 5 E. Re>6rend du Mesnil, La Famille de Moliere, 28. 
 
 6 Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere, 16, 142. 
 
CHAPTEE I 49 
 
 callings. Moliere was certainly not narrow-minded, and he did 
 not get his skill in writing from his grandfathers ; but perhaps 
 his deep and thorough nature and the consistency of his 
 opinions came in some measure from his unmixed or undivided 
 ancestry. Every old family has a breeding and a training of its 
 own, and in social intercourse this will generally show itself. 
 No one can see Moliere now. As with other authors, the best 
 way to try to learn what he was like is to read his own words. 
 From them I think it will be gathered that the tone of his 
 remarks about men and women of the world affords good 
 evidence that he possessed both a strength and a delicacy of 
 feeling which may be seen in the expression of his thoughts. 
 In his quarrel with the actors at the rival theatre, in his satire 
 against men well known at the time, he showed his wit, but he 
 was not charged with unfairness or coarseness. He ridiculed 
 the ladies of fashion with so much good grace that he has 
 always had honest laughter on his side. And when young 
 women and girls of our day laugh at his comedies, they feel 
 that his fun is pleasant and wholesome. That alone is a lesson 
 in morality. Moliere was a large-natured man, and he did not 
 write idly. When his satire is strong it is healthy and com- 
 passionate ; you feel that he is angry, but he gives you also 
 his play. He taught by laughter that often shows a vein of 
 sadness, but he was able to throw aside his bad blood and 
 show with ridicule the harm produced by evil ways. 
 
 The house now generally believed to have been Moliere's 
 birthplace was pulled down in 1802 on the score of old age. 
 This was the Maison des Singes so called because of its 
 signboard, or because at the outside left-hand corner there 
 was a wooden post fastened into the wall with some monkeys 
 climbing up a tree carved upon it. 1 The old house was 
 numbered 16 Eue Saint Honore, and stood at the angle of 
 that street and the Rue des Vieilles Etuves, now the Eue 
 Sauval. The house now standing on its site bears the number 
 96 Eue Saint Honore; and upon it in 1876 was placed a 
 marble tablet saying that Moliere was born there on the 15th 
 of January 1622. 2 The tradition that Moliere was born in the 
 
 1 There is an illustration of this corner post, or " poteau cornier," in 
 the album forming part of the (Euvres de Moliere. 
 
 2 Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 206, 207 ; also two articles by M. 
 Romain Boulenger in the Molieriste for July and October 1879 (i. 108, 
 
50 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 Maison des Singes is not quite free from doubt. 1 But it 
 appears to be better established than the idea current at the end 
 of the 1 8th century that the house then known as No. 3 Eue de 
 la Tonnellerie, where now stands No. 31 Eue du Pont Neuf, was 
 the birthplace of the future dramatist. And there is now on 
 this house a bust of the poet by Coysevox, with an inscription, 
 wrongly dated, saying that he was born there. The idea set 
 on foot in 1705 by Grimarest, Moliere's first Jriograph or, that 
 he was born in the market-place " sous les piliers des halles," 
 may be dismissed. 
 
 It should be said that the Maison des Singes had been sold 
 in 1638 to one Le Camus; but he was bound to continue to 
 Moliere's father the lease already made to him of the front 
 portion of the house facing the Eue Saint Honore. There was 
 also a back portion, divided from the front by a courtyard, 
 that looked into a side street, the Eue des Vieilles Etuves : 
 this portion had been let to a tenant, and the lease of it had 
 expired. Then Le Camus, who became Poquelin's landlord, 
 occupied the back part of the house, facing the Eue des 
 Vieilles fituves, at a right angle with the Eue Saint Honore. 
 This Le Camus was an apothecary, so that Moliere's ac- 
 quaintance with the Faculty began at an early period of 
 ,his life. 
 
 Some idea of the interior of the Maison des Singes may be 
 formed from the description given of it by Soulie, aided by 
 enumeration of the various articles found in each room of the 
 house after Marie Cresse's death. 2 I may state here, in 
 parenthesis, that it will be most convenient to follow the usual 
 practice of calling Moliere's mother by her maiden name : 
 French writers nearly always speak of her as Marie Cresse, 
 rarely as Marie Poquelin, and in law documents this was the 
 common custom. On the ground-floor of her husband's house 
 there was a shop, and behind it a kitchen, probably used also 
 as a dining-room ; over this room there was a loft or garret. 
 Between the ground-floor and the first story there was a sort 
 of entresol, in which there was a bedroom and a cabinet. The 
 first story was turned into a room for business purposes. 
 197) ; and an article by Auguste Vitu in the same periodical for September 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 6, 7. 
 
 2 Eecherches stir Moliere, 14^16, 132-147. 
 
CHAPTER I 51 
 
 Apparently the house did not go higher. 1 Marie Cresse's 
 bedroom was in the entresol, and there Moliere was born. In 
 the 17th century the bedroom of the mistress of the house 
 was a room of importance. It was her room, in which she 
 used to receive her friends, and much of her social life, apart 
 from her duties in the kitchen, was passed there. Moliere's 
 mother had many beautiful articles of furniture and other 
 things betokening the wife of a man in easy circumstances, 
 showing also that she had been nicely brought up and liked 
 to have pretty things about her. 
 
 Jean Poquelin was evidently thriving in his profession, for 
 on the 2nd of April 1631 he bought from his elder brother 
 Nicolas, his appointment of tapissie^^oKlinaire du. roij 2 the 
 title of valet de chambre does" not appear to have been in- 
 cluded. 
 
 In spite of the smallness of his premises in the Maison des 
 Singes, it would seem that Moliere's father had the capacity 
 for doing business on a large scale. For on the 29th of May 
 1631 Jean Poquelin alone signed a contract binding himself 
 and one fitienne Lhoste to deliver to the War Office within 
 twenty days 300 mattresses, 300 palliasses, 300 bolster-covers, 
 300 counterpanes, and 600 pairs of sheets. 3 Nothing, I 
 believe, is known about Lhoste ; the document which records 
 this transaction says little more than that he and Poquelin 
 were to be joint providers in the affair. 
 
 In the meantime Poquelin's family was growing, and our 
 little Jean was allowed some years of play with his younger 
 brothers and sisters. How they romped together may be 
 known from the games of other children, though their play- 
 ground must have been a scanty one. But death took away 
 some of them at an early age, and of those that grew up it 
 would only be a surmise to say that there was much oppor- 
 tunity for pleasant intercourse between them. They probably 
 received some early rudimentary instruction at home ; and 
 perhaps their father engaged the services of George Pinel, 
 " maltre e'crivain a Paris," to teach them how to write. Their 
 mother is said to have been of delicate constitution and to 
 
 1 See the etching of the outside of the house in vol. i. of the Molidriste, 
 facing p. 108. 
 
 2 Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere, 13, 146-147. 
 
 3 Le Molierite, January 1888 (vol. ix. 313). 
 
52 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 have transmitted her weakness to her children. She died at 
 the early age of thirty- one, in May 1632. 1 In January 1633 
 an inventory 2 was made of the effects in her house at the 
 time of her death, and from this it may he seen that her 
 hushand was a man well-to-do in the world. Among his 
 customers some were bourgeois like himself; others were of 
 noble birth, showing that he sent his wares into good houses. 
 
 Marie Cressets inventory tells the names of the four of her 
 children who were alive at her death; two others had died 
 previously. Beffara thought that she had given birth to 
 eight children, but subsequent and better knowledge makes 
 it evident that he mistook two of Moliere's uncles for his 
 brothers. Here are the names of Marie Cresse's six children ; 
 the date following their names is that of their baptism : 
 
 (1) JEAN (Baptiste), 15th January 1622. 
 This was Moliere. 
 
 (2) LOYS, 6th January 1623. 
 Died before his mother. 
 
 (3) JEAN, 1st October 1624. 
 
 Called " 1'autre Jean " in his mother's inventory. In 
 documents of after years this second Jean was called " Jean 
 le jeune," to distinguish him from his father. Became 
 tapissier valet de chambre du roi. Married Marie Maillard, 
 15th January 1656. Had one son, and died in 1660. 
 
 (4) MARIE, 10th August 1625. 
 Died before her mother. 
 
 (5) NICOLAS, 13th July 1627. 
 
 Alive at his mother's death; died, Soulie thinks, a few 
 years later. 
 
 (6) MARIE, 13th June 1628. 
 
 So christened, but always called Madeleine or Marie 
 
 1 The register in the parish of Saint Eustache says that Marie Cresse was 
 buried on the llth of May (Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 208, 
 note 6) ; but the inventory taken after her death (Soulie, Recherckes sur 
 Moliere, 131) says that she died on the 15th of May. This was not a 
 wilful attempt to put the cart before the horse ; it is rather an instance 
 showing how careless people used to be in recording the dates of important 
 matters in their family affairs. I mention the circumstance because other 
 examples will be brought forward later showing probable inaccuracies in 
 the dates of burial certificates. 
 
 2 Soulie, Eecherches sur Moliere, 13-17 ; 130-147. 
 
CHAPTEK I 53 
 
 Madeleine. Married, 14th January 1651, Andre Boudet, 
 marchand tapissier in Paris. Had two children. Died, 
 Soulie" says, in 1665. 
 
 Of the four children that survived their mother none 
 long-lived. Moliere, the eldest born, died last. Their 
 did not long remain a widower. On the 30th of May 1633 
 he married Catherine Fleurette, the daughter of a Paris 
 tradesman. She had two daughters: Catherine, christened 
 15th March 1634, who took the veil in 1655 ; and Marguerite, 
 born 1st November 1636, but who did not live long. On the 
 15th of that month Poquelin's second wife died; he did not 
 marry a third time. 
 
 French writers may possibly be correct in saying that 
 Marie Cresse was a pattern of motherly goodness, and that 
 Catherine Fleurette was a harsh stepmother; but in fact 
 little ^is Known about Poquelin's first wife, and nothing 
 about his second. To suppose that Moliere intended to 
 portray his stepmother in the character of Beline in the 
 Malade Imaginaire is ungenerous towards himself and towards 
 the woman who had been dead close upon forty years. Beline 
 was a stepmother, but so also was Elmire in the Tartuffe, a 
 woman whom we should all be glad to reckon amongst our 
 friends. Yet perhaps it may be said that the poet recollected 
 his own loss, and that he wished to show how strongly girls 
 might be made to feel the want of motherly affection at a 
 time when they were most likely to be guided by its influence. 
 Le'onor and Isabelle, the two sisters in the ficole des Maris, 
 are orphans brought up very differently by two brothers, 
 friends only of their late father; Agnes in the iZcole des 
 Femmes is left to the care of a selfish, silly man who is also 
 no relation ; and Cleante and filise in the Avare have good 
 reason to regret the loss of their mother, for no sense of 
 duty can make either of them respect their father Harpagon. 
 Moliere's father has been represented as a man close in his 
 money affairs, and who, as he advanced in life and saw his 
 business diminishing, became difficult to deal with and miserly. 
 Part of this accusation may perhaps be not untrue; yet if 
 Jean Poquelin had really possessed the characteristics of a 
 miser, I doubt very much if his son would have written the 
 Avare and painted his Harpagon even in the spirit of excellent 
 
54 LIFE OF M 
 
 comedy. Everything that is known of Moliere's personality 
 would preclude the idea of his drawing a picture of his own 
 father. 
 
 Grimarest's Vie de Molibre, printed in 1705, was the earliest 
 biography of the poet written and published as such in book 
 form. 1 Other biographical documents had appeared earlier, 
 but they were short, or they relate only to particular 
 events. Speaking of Grimarest's work, Boileau wrote to 
 Brossette on the 12th of March 1706: "As regards the Vie 
 de Moliere, it is really not a book worth talking about. It 
 is done by a man who knew nothing of the life of Moliere. 
 He is perpetually falling into error, for he does not even 
 know the things which everybody else knows." It is 
 admitted now that this judgment is too harsh. Grimarest's 
 book is still readable, though it contains many errors. Some 
 of the anecdotes he relates are on the face of them absurd, 
 but others show the character of the dramatist more or less 
 truly; and in an account of an author's life, biographical 
 details were not then always examined very scrupulously. 
 Jal says that Grimarest was born in 1659. As a small boy 
 therefore he may have seen Moliere, but he could have had no 
 other personal recollection. He knew Baron, however, who as 
 a lad was Moliere's pupil, and he says that from Baron he got 
 many details and some stories about Moliere. But though 
 Baron may have endeavoured to give facts that did not concern 
 himself as well as he knew them, there were other matters as 
 to which his word would be worthless. For the rest, Gri- 
 marest picked up information from those who could give him 
 any. On the whole, we may be thankful to him. He tried a 
 generation after Moliere was dead to tell his readers in an easy 
 manner what the great man was like, and with all his faults of 
 inaccuracy and of omission he did not fail altogether in his 
 object. Had Boileau been the biographer his style would have 
 been more severe; he would have said what were the chief 
 elements in Moliere's nature, and he would have tried to 
 describe his comedy. Boileau respected Moliere as a man and 
 admired him as an author, ranking him above Corneille and 
 Eacine; and in those days that was high praise. He was 
 
 1 All references made here to Grimarest's Vie de Moliere apply to the 
 modern edition of 1877. 
 
CHAPTER I 55 
 
 honest-thinking himself, with strong common-sense, and he 
 tried to do right for right's sake. His chief strength lay there. 
 He often criticised severely, but he had the power of looking 
 into things and seeing their meaning. His opinions of the 
 verse writers of the time are still of value ; but we should prize 
 more highly his judgments of Moliere, who from his double 
 calling was honoured and made much of by some because they 
 felt his power, and was condemned ignorantly by others be- 
 cause they thought that he laughed at God's ministers and 
 made virtue appear ridiculous. Boileau has often been called 
 " le le'gislateur du Parnasse " a title which now raises a smile 
 but in spite of the taunt at being thought dull which is 
 sometimes made against him, it should be remembered that as 
 a critic he did most valuable service to the writers of the time, 
 that he tried to defend Moliere when unjust attacks were 
 made upon him, and that he was very loyal to Eacine. The 
 year after the king's prohibition of the Tartuffe, Boileau, in 
 his Discours au Eoi (1665), writing of the eagerness shown by 
 bigots to crush any attempt to decry their hollow piety, says : 
 
 " Leur coeur, qui se connoit, et qui fuit la lumiere, 
 S'il se moque de Dieu, craint Tartuffe et Moliere." 
 
 One of the first things related of young Jean Poquelin is 
 that he was often ^takenjto the theatre by his mother^ father^ 
 Louis de CressjL, No dates can be given to these visits, except 
 that they cannot have taken place after 1638, for the old man 
 died in that year. The boy and his grandfather were fond of 
 each other, and the lad naturally enjoyed the excitement and 
 the fun of the plays. His fancy was pleased, his imagination 
 was kindled, and doubtless he described to his younger brothers 
 and sisters the fine or the droll things that he had seen. But 
 Papa Poquelin did not think that so much theatre-going was 
 good for little boys, and he told his father-in-law that he took 
 his son to the theatre too often. " Do you want to make an 
 actor of the boy ? " he asked. The old man answered warmly : 
 " Would to God he was as good an actor as Bellerose ! " 
 Grimarest, who relates this story, 1 adds that the lad was so 
 much struck by his grandfather's answer, that though he had 
 shown no predilection he began to conceive a distaste for his 
 father's profession, and seeing that his grandfather wished him 
 1 Vie de Moliere, 4, 5. 
 
56 LIFE OF MOLlfiRE 
 
 to go on the stage, he thought he might aspire to something 
 better than his father's business. There may be some fable 
 hereTyet the storyls'not in all points incredible. Very likely 
 Grimarest had it from Baron, to whom the dramatist may have 
 told something of the sort as he was teaching him how to 
 become an actor. That young Poquelin, then or a few years 
 later, did dislike very much the idea of being brought up as 
 an upholsterer may be taken for granted, but it is doubtful if 
 his grandfather, who died when the lad was sixteen, persuaded 
 him to become an actor. Louis de Cresse's exclamation in 
 praise of Bellerose was in all probability merely an outburst 
 at the moment, and meant nothing more. 
 
 It was said in the introductory chapter that the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne was the only theatre in Paris where, perhaps as 
 late as Moliere's birth, dramatic representations were allowed 
 without payment of a fine to its owners; and that these 
 owners, known as Les Confreres de la Passion, let their theatre 
 to a company of actors in the year 1588. But it was not said 
 that in the lease there was a clause by which the Confreres 
 reserved to themselves a box in the theatre called " la loge des 
 anciens maitres," and also a space above this box called " le 
 Paradis." These two places still belonged to the brotherhood, 
 and they were allowed to give a seat to their friends, but not 
 to take money for it. The Confreres were all men belonging 
 to the bourgeoisie of Paris ; and in the days of Moliere's boy- 
 hood their doyen or oldest member was one Pierre Dubout, a 
 tapissier du roi, and therefore a colleague of Jean Poquelin. 
 Dubout, we may be sure, was applied to with tolerable fre- 
 quency for an order into the Hotel de Bourgogne. 
 
 The Paris tradesmen of those days enjoyed going to the 
 theatre quite as much as they do now. The honest shop- 
 keepers of the Rue Saint Denis, one of the most actively 
 commercial streets in the town, were specially eager to see the 
 first performance of all new plays. 1 Louis de Cresse appears 
 to have been no exception to the rule. He seems to have 
 liked going to the theatre and having his grandson by his 
 side. The Hotel de Bourgogne was only a short walk from 
 the Maison des Singes in the Eue Saint Honord. It lay not 
 half a mile off to the north-east in the Rue Mauconseil, which 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 16 and note 1 to p. 17. 
 
CHAPTEE I 57 
 
 small street still runs from east to west between the Rue 
 Saint Denis and the Eue Montorgueil. Louis de Cresse's 
 house in the Marche aux Poire'es was about a quarter of a mile 
 to the east of the Poquelins. So that a family party may now 
 and then have been made up for an afternoon's enjoyment. 
 
 Taking young Moliere to the play was like preparing a 
 soil which would in return yield an abundance of the rarest 
 fruit. We know now that the comic instinct was born in 
 him, and we can fancy that as he watched a play that he 
 liked he must have felt himself all ablaze, like a well-laid 
 fire recently kindled. Inside the theatre hisyoung imagina- 
 tion was stirred, and while he was observmg~wilh~~lreerr^ 
 delight much that he saw, he was learning the most important 
 lesson of his life how to please others. If any part of his 
 early self-instruction can be traced, I should say that he soon 
 became convinced that movement of some kind is the life and 
 soul of a play intended for representation on the stage, and 
 that a play must appeal to the feelings and enlist human 
 sympathies before the audience can be interested in it. So 
 much, at least, he understood before the beard began to grow 
 upon his face. But even with Moliere this did not come all 
 at once. At the time of his early visits to the theatre, farce 
 had not been quite banished from the Hotel de Bourgogne, 
 and after the performance of the set piece there was a lively 
 entertainment by Gaultier Garguille and his companions, or 
 their successors. These the lad could laugh at and enjoy, 
 though it is difficult to imagine how he could enjoy the 
 heavy tragedies, the tragi-comedies and the pastorals, which 
 were then the mainstay of the chief theatres. It is probable 
 that the Theatre du Marais attracted him more than the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne. Comedies were given there more fre- 
 quently than heretofore, yet they were largely exceeded by 
 plays of a more exalted kind. But it is impossible to say 
 what may not have pleased a very quick-witted boy nearly 
 three hundred years ago. 
 
 Tastes have been so much altered by circumstances, that 
 one is tempted for a moment to think that our natures have 
 altered also. Education, or bringing-up, has changed our 
 habits and ways of thought, and this is more observable 
 among the young than among their elders. It is certain, 
 
58 . LIFtf OF MOLIEEE 
 
 however, that many of us, whether young or of more mature 
 age, can enjoy an amusing play without understanding the 
 spoken words. The actor may so perform his part that his 
 movements and gestures speak to us. We then learn what 
 is going on upon the stage, and may become intensely 
 interested. Many persons with a small knowledge of French 
 have felt a very lively sense of pleasure from a representa- 
 tion of Moliere's lighter comedies, such as the Mtdecin Malyrt 
 Lui or the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, but their excitement has 
 been less keen during a performance of the Tartuffe. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 YEARS OF SCHOOLING 
 
 THAT Moliere when he was a boy should have made evident 
 his delight at being taken to the theatre is not wonderful, but 
 it may be that he showed a keener pleasure and a more 
 appreciative enjoyment of the plays he saw than other boys 
 of his age would have done. The delights of the play-house, 
 however, did not satisfy all the requirements of his mind. 
 Apparently he was unhappy and wanted something. One 
 evening after he had come back from the theatre, his father 
 asked him why he had lately been so melancholy. The lad 
 made a clean breast of the thoughts that were oppressing him, 
 and said that he disliked very much the idea of being an 
 upholsterer. His father had a good business and wished his 
 son to enter it. The boy was brought up with this idea, but 
 it was extremely distasteful to him. Selling stuffs and keeping 
 accounts of what he sold did not appeal to his imagination. 
 He wished for a different life. He asked to be sent to school 
 to be educated. At that time he was about fourteen years 
 old, and had only been taught reading, writing, and some 
 arithmetic. But he wanted more than that. He felt that 
 knowledge is the first step to any sort of success that mighT" 
 come in after life. And his young human instincts told him 
 that he wanted to be with other boys, to mix with them and 
 learn from them how they thought and talked and how they 
 acted their parts in their daily lives. Louis de Cresse* was 
 present at this interview between the father and son, and 
 supported the boy in his demand. The father consented to 
 do what was asked of him, and sent his son to the College 
 de Clermont, which was directed by the Jesuits, and was the 
 best school in Paris. 1 Grimarest's story is engaging, and 
 traditionally it has been accepted, for there is no other. But 
 
 1 Grimarest, Vie de Moliere, 5, 6. 
 
60 LIFE OF 
 
 it need not be supposed that things passed quite in that way. 
 Jean Poquelin must have been a very dull man indeed if he 
 had not seen for himself that his son did not like being in his 
 shop, and it is not probable that after a first intimation of his 
 son's wishes he should suddenly have abandoned his own 
 long-cherished desires. 
 
 M. Jules Loiseleur has shown that young Poquelin first 
 went to the College de Clermont at the beginning of the 
 October term in 1636, and that he finished his education there 
 at the same time that the Prince de Conti (the brother of 
 Conde and of Madame de Longueville) had finished his 
 rhetoric at the same school in 1641. The prince took his 
 degree of maitre es arts in 1644, when he was fifteen years 
 old. 1 La Bruyere might well write : " Les enfants des dieux 
 naissent instruits." The preface to the first complete edition 
 of Moliere's plays, published in 1682, nine years after his 
 death, says, in speaking of the school career of the future 
 dramatist : 
 
 " As he had the advantage of going through all the classes at the 
 same time as the late Prince de Conti, his quick intelligence, which 
 distinguished him from all the others, won for him the esteem and 
 the favour of that prince, who always honoured him with his goodwill 
 and his protection." 2 
 
 Perhaps there was some double flattery here, though the 
 eulogistical tone about the prince may have had its purpose 
 when the sentence was written. But it is not to be supposed 
 that young Poquelin was a school friend of the Prince de 
 Conti. If they met in a class-room, they were strangers there ; 
 outside it they did not see each other. The Jesuits who 
 directed the College de Clermont were admirable masters in 
 the art of teaching, and they knew also how to divide their 
 pupils. Fathers of the best families in France used to send 
 their sons to this school, but it was understood that young 
 noblemen should not mix familiarly with boys of inferior 
 rank. The preface goes on to say : 
 
 " The result of his [Moliere's] studies was what might be expected 
 from a mind so well constituted as his. If he was an excellent 
 
 1 Les Points Obscurs de la vie de Moliere, 40-43. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, vol. i. pp. xii and xiii. 
 
CHAPTEE II 61 
 
 classic, in philosophy he became stronger still. His inclination for 
 poetry made him study the poets with very great care. He knew 
 them well, and especially Terence, whom he chose as the best model 
 he could put before himself ; and nobody has imitated him so well 
 as he has done." 
 
 Five years was the term prescribed for education at the 
 College de Clermont, and it may be believed that Poquelin 
 made rapid progress in his studies. The teaching was good, 
 and that, joined to a quick intelligence, would naturally 
 produce a happy result. Latin was, of course, one of the 
 subjects to which much attention was paid. And the Jesuits, 
 wishing to cultivate a literary taste in their pupils, allowed 
 them now and then to act a Latin play sometimes composed 
 by one of themselves. 1 Similar performances took place in 
 the colleges in the provinces as well as in Paris, 2 and as 
 entrance money was demanded a certain publicity was given 
 to the representations. Perhaps young Poquelin was one of 
 the actors in the performances given at his school, and perhaps 
 his admiration for Terence came from his having to study a 
 part he had to play. Admitting so much in the way of sup- 
 position, we may easily go a step further and imagine that 
 these school theatricals may have helped to strengthen an 
 idea, already not improbably floating in his mind, that he 
 would like to become an actor and make the stage his profes- 
 sion. One thing is certain, that when he had made up his 
 mind, he was not to be turned from his purpose. 
 
 Too much has been said as to the illiterate condition in 
 which Jean Poquelin wished to keep his son. To my mind 
 there is very little evidence to show that the father wished 
 to keep his boy ignorant, thinking that too much learning 
 was a bad thing and that it would distract his thoughts 
 from the work he had to do. The father had become settled 
 in business early in life, he had married early, and his 
 affairs were prosperous. It may be urged rather that Jean 
 Poquelin wished to see his son better educated than was 
 usually the case with lads of his rank of life. There was 
 then a feeling among the upper middle classes in Paris that 
 knowledge one sign of which was the ability to read Latin 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 23. 
 
 2 E. Despois, Le Theatre Franqais sous Louis XIV., 96-98. 
 
62 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 gave a young man an advantage over the nobility, who piqued 
 themselves upon not being obliged to learn. The boy was sent 
 to a school where the instruction was as good as could be 
 obtained, and the next year the father took active steps to 
 procure for his son the right to succeed him in the office of 
 court upholsterer. These two facts may be taken as showing 
 that Jean Poquelin wished to see his son "better himself" in 
 the world. 
 
 The offices of tapissier du roi and valet de chambre du roi 
 were distinct, though they were sometimes joined together. 
 We have seen that Nicolas Poquelin held the first of these two 
 offices, and that on the 2nd of April 1631 he sold it to his 
 brother Jean, Moliere's father. There were some restrictions 
 in the sale, but in March 1637 the transaction was completed, 
 and Jean Poquelin was then at liberty to ask that his son 
 might have the reversion of his appointment. In December 
 of that year, Moliere, when he was not quite sixteen, went 
 through the formalities which would enable him at a future 
 date to succeed or replace his father in the office. The warrant 
 which gave him this power conferred upon him also the office 
 of valet de chambre du roi. 1 His father had probably bought 
 this last-named office from somebody who had the power to 
 sell it. Jean Poquelin, therefore, had not abandoned the 
 thought of putting his son into his own business. He had 
 shown himself willing to give up his position as court up- 
 holsterer and chamber valet to the king in favour of his son, 
 so that his boy might be well established early in life and rise 
 a step in the social scale. 
 
 There were eight tapissiers valets de chambre du roi ; the 
 office might be bought and sold, though usually it passed from 
 father to son. The holders of this appointment formed part of 
 the domestic officers and messmates of the royal table. Two 
 served together at one time for a period of three months. 
 Jean Poquelin's quarter of service was from the first day of 
 April to the last day of June, and he performed his service 
 in 1631, the year that he bought his office from his brother 
 Nicolas. 2 His duty was to help the valet de chambre, strictly 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 14, referring to Soulie's Recherches sur Moliere 
 288 cote dix. 
 
 Ibid. x. 64, note 4, referring to Soulie's Recherches sur Moliere 
 146 cote vingt-huit. 
 
CHAPTER II 63 
 
 called, to make the king's bed ; and during the royal progresses 
 he had to watch over the king's effects. The appointment was 
 worth three hundred livres a year, besides 'thirty-seven livres 
 given as honorarium, and eating and drinking during the period 
 of service. The tapissiers valets de chambre du roi had also to 
 make the royal furniture, hang the tapestry, and prepare the 
 king's apartments when the court was travelling. The post 
 was an honourable one, the holders bore the title of ecuyer, and 
 during their term of service each one had his valet. Except for 
 a period of about six years, to be spoken of at the end of the 
 next chapter, Moliere bore the title of tapissier valet de 
 chambre du roi until his death. Fortunately or not, little is 
 told of his duties in connection with the office. 
 
 Besides the Prince de Conti there were three of Moliere's 
 schoolfellows whose names are more or less remembered : 
 Francois Bernier, Jean Hesnaut, and Chapelle. For any good 
 they did in the world, Bernier was worth the other three three 
 times over. He lived twelve years in India, was physician to 
 Aurungzebe, the Emperor of Hindostan; and the value of his 
 account of the conquest of Cashmere and his description of 
 the country has been well recognised. Later he wrote several 
 books on philosophical subjects which gave him reputation. 
 The Prince de Conti was a friend to Moliere when the future 
 dramatist was strolling with his troop in the provinces ; later 
 he became a bigot and wrote a treatise abusing the stage 
 which he had so much admired. Hesnaut was one of the 
 small Epicurean poets of the 17th century. He composed a 
 satire against the minister Colbert; then, fearing the con- 
 sequences, he destroyed all the copies he could find. He wrote 
 his verses easily, and lived on the reputation they gave him. 
 Chapelle is the only one of Moliere's schoolfellows who is 
 known to have kept up his friendship with the dramatist in 
 after life, and if a certain well-known conversation between 
 them at Auteuil took place as is reported, their intimacy 
 must have been close. Chapelle was one of those clever, idle 
 ne'er-do-wells who, if they could only give themselves a 
 chance, might succeed now and then by a brilliant flash. In 
 fact, Chapelle did make one happy hit, but his glory ended 
 there. He is credited with having written the greater part of 
 a short account in prose and in verse of a journey he made 
 
64 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 with Bachaumont in the south of France in or about the year 
 1656. The book is entitled Le Voyage de Chapelle et de 
 SacJiaumont. Though much of this narrative relates to 
 gastronomic pleasures, the style is easy and agreeable. It was 
 intended as a jeu d'esprit and nothing more. Other men have 
 tried their hand at the same kind of thing, but have not 
 succeeded so happily. Chapelle could talk well at times, and 
 his brightness made him known to most of the literary men in 
 Paris. They enjoyed his conversation and his wit, and they 
 envied his brilliancy, but they lamented that steadiness was 
 beyond his power; and some of them endeavoured to make 
 him overcome his habit of drinking too much wine. Louis 
 Kacine, the son of the poet, tells a story that Boileau met 
 Chapelle one day in town and began to admonish him. 
 " You are quite right," Chapelle said, " and I feel the truth of 
 all you say. Let us go in here where you can talk more 
 easily." Chapelle led the way into a wine-shop and called for 
 a bottle. This was followed by another. Boileau got so 
 animated with the advice he was giving to his friend that he 
 continued preaching and drinking until both he and the 
 intended convert got tipsy. 1 
 
 We come now to a short period of Moliere's education after 
 he left school, and it appears that two of his school friends 
 were associated with him in it. As a boy Qhapelle had shown 
 himself to be apt at his books, and when he left the College de 
 Clermont, his father engaged Gassendi to give him further 
 instruction at home. At this time .Bfirnier, though young, 
 was Gassendi's secretary, and he was allowed to join in the 
 lessons. Then, at Chapelle' s request, Moliere and Cyrano de 
 Bergerac were also admitted. 2 Cyrano was clever, and it was 
 said of him that he was greedy of learning, but not in after 
 life that he was remarkable for quiet behaviour. He had 
 imagination which he allowed to run riot, and he became 
 notorious for lawlessness and wild buffoonery. He spent a 
 good deal of his time in fighting duels. He had a violent 
 quarrel with Montfleury, an actor at the Hotel de Bourgogne, 
 a man who was very fat ; and Bergerac said of him : " Because 
 
 1 Memoires sur la Vie de Jean Racine, in the (Euvres de J. Racine, by Paul 
 Mesnard, 1st ed. i. 227 ; 2nd ed. i. 235. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 43, 44. 
 
CHAPTEE II 65 
 
 this rascal is so big that one cannot beat him all round in one 
 day, he gives himself grand airs." Moliere was about nineteen 
 when he was reading philosophy with Gassendi, and at that 
 age an eager, intelligent lad would welcome anything that 
 stimulated his thoughts. Grimarest says that Gassendi was 
 struck with his ready understanding and that he took pleasure 
 in teaching him. Of the four pupils, Cyrano de Bergerac, the 
 eldest, was about twenty-two; Moliere, nineteen; Bernier, 
 sixteen ; Chapelle, fifteen. Is it to be supposed that the 
 master gave the same lessons to lads of such different ages ? 
 One of the points of Gassendi's teaching was freedom and 
 independence of thought, and it is likely that this doctrine 
 would find a ready acceptance among his four pupils. The 
 ultimate advantage that each might derive from the lessons 
 would depend on many circumstances. Neither Bergerac nor 
 Chapelle showed that they did benefit materially from the 
 teaching. Bernier was a thinking man, and he retained a 
 grateful recollection of the professor's lessons; and in 1678 he 
 published his Abrege' de la philosopTiie de Gassendi. 
 
 The soberness of judgment and the well-balanced mind 
 which were characteristic of Moliere in his mature years leads 
 one to think that the same faculties were at work when he 
 was young. Gassendi's teaching doubtless strengthened those 
 faculties ; had they been non-existent no Gassendi could have 
 created them. From such knowledge of Moliere's disposition 
 as may be gathered from his comedies, it is not difficult to 
 imagine that lessons on the value of self-dependence and 
 freedom of thought would be grateful to him at a time when 
 his boyish strength was budding into manhood. Free thought 
 is our highest liberty, but those who have made the best use 
 of it have shown that besides enthusiasm they possessed also 
 modesty and common-sense as balancing qualities. Speaking 
 generally, the man who deliberately tries to think differently 
 from others runs great risk of being led away into strange 
 vagaries by wrong-headedness and self-conceit. In after years 
 the dramatist gave an immortal picture of this form of 
 egotism, among other features, in Alceste in the Misanthrope. 
 As a young man, Moliere wished, I imagine, to be allowed to 
 think of men and things as he found them, and to form his 
 opinions from what he saw and heard. His written words 
 
 E 
 
66 LIFE OF MOLlfiEE 
 
 do not show that he was theoretical or that he tried to 
 be a reformer. He knew that censure alone was not his 
 proper function, and he did not believe that mere stric- 
 tures on the world's conduct would do much good. He 
 was a satirist, of course, but in making ridicule his weapon 
 of attack he used it without coarseness or petulancy. He 
 thought much of his teaching, but in his earnestness he 
 always showed the spirit of comedy. His irony, his raillery, 
 shows a strong and open nature, and it provokes healthy 
 laughter. Constituted as Moliere's mind was, always thought- 
 ful, never transcendental, observing closely the ways of men, 
 prone to melancholy but not morbid or dreamy, it is not 
 wonderful that he should have trusted to his own senses 
 where others were ready to believe blindly what was told 
 to them. If unorthodoxy means thinking differently from 
 accepted authority, Moliere was content to remain unorthodox 
 and form for himself his own views. Probably enough, even 
 when young, he was not ruled by dogmas, for his mind was 
 naturally sceptical. Scepticism of course means want of 
 belief, but it is not synonymous with disbelief or incredulity. 
 It has, I imagine, a further and a higher signification, and means, 
 in secular as well as in religious matters, looking or searching 
 through doubt for some truth, some belief, some end. If 
 Moliere's mind was sceptical, his heart was not until distrust 
 had been forced upon him. He was not what many persons 
 would have called religious ; yet unless he had been actuated 
 by the spirit of religion he would not have written the Tartuffe, 
 nor afterwards Don Juan. In his conduct he was earnest, 
 hearty, and considerate ; and his sympathetic style shows that 
 he held naturalness of expression to be the best way to make 
 his ideas understood easily. 
 
 G-assendi taught Moliere to admire Lucretius, and at the 
 master's request the pupil translated the poem De Rerum 
 Natura partly into verse and partly into prose. 1 He kept the 
 manuscript until he died; how it disappeared afterwards is 
 not known. It is most probable that his translation of 
 Lucretius, and seven of his still unprinted comedies, were 
 sold after his death by his widow for 1500 livres to Thierry, 
 
 1 Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 5th ed., 108, 109 ; (Euvres de Molttre, x. 53, 
 54 ; and for some corrections see pp. 481, 482, 
 
CHAPTEE II 67 
 
 the bookseller, who in 1682 published the first complete edition 
 of his works. Thierry had wished to publish the different 
 passages of Moliere's translation, but did not do so, because 
 he thought they were too strong in their bearing against the 
 immortality of the soul. So much may be seen from an extract 
 from the MSS. of Nicolas de Tralage, first printed by fidouard 
 Fournier in his La Valise de Holier 'e. 1 All that remains of 
 Moliere's translation of Lucretius is a paraphrase of certain 
 lines on the blindness of love in a speech by filiante, in Act IT. 
 sc. 4 of the Misanthrope, commencing by : 
 
 " L'amour pour Pordinaire est peu fait a ces lois, 
 Et Ton voit les amants vanter toujours leur choix." 2 
 
 The chief value that these lines have for us now is that the 
 dramatist thought they were suitable to the character of the 
 girl who spoke them. 
 
 In the last paragraph of his book Grimarest assures his 
 readers, as though there were doubt in the matter, that Moliere 
 went through his law studies and was admitted as an advocate. 
 And there is an earlier authority to the same effect in a comedy, 
 Elomire Hypocondre ou les Medecins Vengds, published in 1670, 
 by Le Boulanger de Chain ssay. Little is known of this author, 
 perhaps the name he wrote under was not his own. His play 
 was not acted and was suppressed, perhaps at Moliere's request, 
 the year after it was printed. 3 As a comedy it is wretched 
 stuff, but it contains certain passages which, in spite of the 
 writer's hostility to Moliere and certain mistakes made, show 
 that Le Boulanger de Chalussay was not ill informed on the 
 early part of the poet's dramatic career. His lines have been 
 quoted constantly, and I must refer to them as occasion de- 
 mands. Elomire is an anagram of Moliere, and had been used 
 some years earlier. De Chalussay was clearly of opinion that 
 Moliere had been called to the bar. He makes Moliere say 
 of himself, that after he left school he went to Orleans to take 
 his law degree, and that during the vacation he was made an 
 
 1 Introduction, p. xvii ; (Euvres de Moliere, x. 53, 54. There is a short 
 article on Nicolas de Tralage (or Trallage) in the Molieriste for October 1880 
 (vol. ii. 216). 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, v. 559, 560. 
 
 3 Paul Lacroix, Bibliographie Molieresque, No. 1159; (Euvres de Moliere, 
 xi. 124, par. 3, and 182, 183 ; also Paul Lacroix's notice to his edition of 
 the comedy, published at Geneva in 1867, forming part of the Collection 
 Molie"resque. 
 
68 LIFE OF M 
 
 advocate [in Paris] ; that he followed the bar for five or six 
 months, but as he got no practice he left it, shaking the law's 
 dust off his feet. 1 Later in the same play de Chalussay 
 repeats, through Angelique, who is very bitter against Moliere, 
 much of what he had said before, and then he tells with rough 
 satire that Jean Poquelin had made his son become an advo- 
 cate. Soulie seemed inclined to cast a doubt on Moliere's 
 lessons from Gassendi; but he says that in all probability, 
 after Moliere had finished his course of philosophy, he read 
 theology and canon law. 2 On the next page Souli^ says, that 
 young men " used to go to Orleans, not to read law, as they 
 went there generally during the vacation, but to take their 
 degrees in civil and canon law, and that they returned imme- 
 diately to Paris to be called to the bar." 
 
 We all know that men of genius have a quickness of their 
 own in adapting unfamiliar phraseology to their own uses. 
 Nevertheless, in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (Act II. sc. 10) and 
 Les Fourberies de Scapin (Act n. sc. 5), there are instances of 
 complicated legal terms shown with exactness and apparent 
 ease ; and it is quite possible that in both of these instances 
 the dramatist was using, with the good comic effect that was 
 natural to him, some of his early legal training. 
 
 It is uncertain whether Moliere, in the capacity of tapissier 
 valet de charnbre du roi, formed part of the king's suite in a 
 journey to the south of France in the spring of the year 1642. 
 There are some who favour this idea, but I cannot help think- 
 ing that the wish to believe it to be a fact forms part of the 
 ground for their belief. 
 
 1 filomire Hypocondre (p. 77 in the edition of 1867), Act iv. sc. 2 of the 
 Divorce Comique. This last is an intercalated play, given after the first 
 scene in the fourth act of the longer comedy. 
 
 2 Recherches sur Moliere, 19. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 MINOR THEATKES 
 
 THOUGH Louis de Cresse took his grandson to the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne and Marais theatres, it is probable that the future 
 dramatist's keenest early recollections of histrionic display 
 were the performances of mountebanks and buffoons close to 
 the Foire de Saint Germain, then just outside Paris. Also he 
 was probably taken, or went later of his own accord, to see 
 entertainments of various kinds given by charlatans on the 
 Pont Neuf and in the Place Dauphine. When he was older 
 he certainly learned much from Italian actors in Paris, and 
 their influence may be seen in an altered and better form in 
 many of his lighter comedies. Something, therefore, should 
 be said shortly of the minor or irregular theatres in Paris 
 during the first half of the 17th century. 
 
 The Foire de Saint Germain, the chief of the Parisian fairs, 
 was established by Louis XL in 1482, and was meant for the 
 benefit of the abbey of Saint Germain des Pres, and also for 
 the advantage of the Parisians. Merchants placed their stalls 
 there, and paid annual rent for them to the abbots. At the 
 time which now concerns us the fair lasted from the 3rd of 
 February until Easter Sunday, or often later. It was held 
 upon the site at present occupied by the Marche de Saint 
 Germain. Good articles of almost every description were to 
 be bought there, and Moliere's father was one of the traders. 
 Our little Jean had sometimes to watch his father's stall, or 
 was sent to deliver messages ; and when he could escape he 
 would run off to look at the fun going on in front of one of 
 the theatres. But the fair was a noisy place ; card-playing 
 and cheating went on there, and Jean Poquelin could not have 
 allowed his son to wander about in it as he pleased. 
 
 The first appearance of a theatre in the Foire de Saint 
 Germain was in 1595, when Jean Courtin and Nicolas 
 
70 LIFE OF MOLlfeRE 
 
 Poteau pitched their tent just outside the fair; and they 
 prospered so well that the actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne, 
 who, as we have seen, enjoyed a monopoly for theatrical 
 performances in or near Paris, brought an action to restrain 
 the irregular exhibitions. But the case went against them. 
 Courtin and Poteau were allowed to play as long as the fair 
 lasted on payment of a fine of three francs for each perform- 
 ance ; and they became the pioneers of the theatre de la foire 
 for which Le Sage afterwards wrote so much, and which in 
 the latter half of the 18th century developed into the Opera 
 Comique. 1 
 
 When the Foire de Saint Germain was closed, open-air 
 entertainments were frequent elsewhere. The Pont Neuf 
 became, what it long remained, in a popular sense, the centre 
 of Paris. The people used to assemble on the newly built 
 bridge, and there Orvietan and other charlatans used to amuse 
 the people, sell them their drugs and draw their teeth. Not 
 far from the Pont Neuf was the Place Dauphine, then also 
 new. Mondor and Tabarin used to put up their booths there, 
 and recite their jests and play their antics before an admiring 
 populace. 
 
 Perhaps there was a better show of acting in a small tennis- 
 court in the Faubourg Saint Jacques at the southern extremity 
 of the town, where Gros Guillaume, Turlupin, and Gaultier 
 Garguille were often seen playing together. They were three 
 clever buffoons, and after some migrations they all appeared 
 at the Hotel de Bourgogne, where they were acting in 1634. 
 Report says that when one of them died the two others were 
 so inconsolable that they both died within a week. But in 
 the Hotel they had other employment besides farce-acting. 
 They were called upon to play the king's parts or those of 
 his councillors. Then they dropped their popular names 
 and took others more befitting their positions. Buffoonery, 
 however, was their speciality ; much of it was more or less 
 impromptu, and sallies of Jackpudding wit were abundant. 
 Each of the three men had his own line, each had a distinc- 
 tive part assigned to him which never altered very materially. 
 
 1 Emile Campardon, Les Spectacles de la Foire, Introduction ; V. Fournel, 
 Les Spectacles Populaires et les Artistes des Hues', and Jal, Dictionnaire 
 critique de biographic et d'histoire. 
 
CHAPTER III 71 
 
 Turlupin was a comical rogue; he was a valet who at the 
 same time was a bit of a sharper, and his natural quick wit 
 enabled him to play the part admirably. Gros Guillaume was 
 a very fat man, and he appears to have been a sort of Sancho 
 Panza. He used to appear with his face thickly covered with 
 flour, and sometimes he blew a great volume of flour out of his 
 mouth. Gaultier Garguille played the parts of old men, of 
 doctors, or pedants, and he astonished the spectators by his 
 extraordinary agility. Such were the three most popular 
 farceurs at the Hotel de Bourgogne. They were succeeded by 
 Bruscambille, Guillot Gorju, and probably others. These five 
 names, by their appearance and by their sound, almost tell 
 what kind of wit was then enjoyed. But outside or inside the 
 theatre men of this stamp were much alike. A friendly 
 rivalry existed among them. They stole from each other and 
 quizzed one another as they pleased. The jesters who acted at 
 the Hotel de Bourgogne and made part of " la troupe royale " 
 were not more highly considered than those who played before 
 the crowd in the open air. Farce is not a high form of art, 
 but good comedy had not been born when Moliere first went 
 to the theatre. I mention farce here to say that it was then 
 common in Paris, and that people liked laughing at a farce 
 after the heavy set piece for the day had been performed. 
 Had good comedies been written in those days, French 
 actors would have been found to play them well. Instead, 
 playwrights manufactured tragedies, tragi-comedies, and 
 pastorals, all terribly ponderous and lifeless, which were no 
 doubt acted in the same spirit. 
 
 Italian comedy seems to have been popular in Paris, judging 
 from the number of companies of Italian actors who came 
 there in the 16th and 17th centuries; and the successes 
 gained by these foreign troops aroused the susceptibilities of 
 the men at the Hotel de Bourgogne. In 1599 matters were 
 arranged ; and then the Italians were to play in that theatre 
 on alternate days with the French actors, though later they 
 generally played in a large room, lent to them by the king, 
 in the Hotel du Petit Bourbon. Long before this time there 
 had been in Italy two kinds of comedy which, in spite of 
 mutual borrowings, showed such broad distinguishing features 
 that one could not be mistaken for the other. There was the 
 
72 LIFE OF MOLlfiRE 
 
 written and the unwritten comedy. Written comedy began in 
 Italy in the 15th century, but the names of authors and of 
 their plays were not known until early in the 16th. J. Ad- 
 dington Symonds said there were very many comedies and 
 comedy writers in Italy in the 16th century; thousands of 
 plays are supposed to have been written. But, " in spite of 
 this extraordinary richness in comic literature, Italy cannot 
 boast of a great comedy." 1 This was because of its hybrid 
 nature. Plautus and Terence were taken as a necessary basis, 
 and on this the writers tried to graft Italian manners. And 
 on p. 141 of the same volume: "The Pegasus of the Italian 
 drama, if I may venture on a burlesque metaphor, was a mule 
 begotten by the sturdy ass of the Latin on the fleet mare of 
 the Italian spirit ; and it had the hard sterility of the mule." 
 To a great extent French comedy was sterile from the same 
 cause until Moliere gave it a life and a spirit of its own. But 
 I am glad to quote Symonds' opinion that one of the causes of 
 the poverty in Italian comedy was because its writers dis- 
 carded their own natural instincts in favour of an imitation of 
 a Latin model. 
 
 The unwritten or impromptu comedy in Italy, the "corn- 
 media dell' arte," was famous before her more pretentious 
 sister was born, and remained famous long after the younger 
 sister had died from inanition. Impromptu comedy in Italy 
 began first at the fairs and with the amusements during the 
 weeks of Carnival. 2 Rude theatres were put up in the open 
 air or inside booths. They were to be seen in every country 
 town and on the commonest stages. Play-acting was a 
 national amusement, and the people liked it. By degrees 
 types were created which were followed. Different provinces 
 furnished their own peculiar personage, each characteristic of 
 itself. The idea of the pedant or the doctor who interlarded 
 his talk with Latin arose in one of the university towns, such 
 as Padua or Bologna; Venice gave the merchant and the 
 pantaloon; from Naples came the cheat; and from Spain, 
 
 1 Renaissance in Italy : Italian Literature, part ii. 181 ; ed. 1881. 
 
 2 My chief authority on this matter is M. Louis Moland's interesting 
 volume, Moliere et la Comedie Italienne. See also Masques et Bouffons by 
 Maurice Sand. And J. A. Symonds has written at length on the same 
 subject in the Introduction to his translation of the Memoirs of Count Carlo 
 Gozzi. 
 
CHAPTEE III 73 
 
 whose influence was then strong in Italy, came the braggart 
 captain, though no doubt the idea of the Miles Gloriosus of 
 Plautus had not died out in Italy. To these the lovers were 
 added, and the valets and the intriguing waiting-women to 
 deceive the old men. These were the chief parts ; they were 
 the stock characters who had to play stock parts. The whole 
 thing was arranged to go in a machine-like way as much as 
 possible. The subject and a sketch of the play was written 
 down and posted up in what passed for the greenroom. This 
 the actors had to learn. They got by heart a number of 
 sententious sayings, conceits, and funny phrases, suitable to 
 the occasion and to the parts they had to play. Each actor 
 knew his own line, and the public knew what to expect from 
 him when he first came on the stage. They knew also from 
 his dress the part he had to play. There was much improvisa- 
 tion, but the constant repetition of the same parts by each 
 actor made the improvisation easy to those who had a talent 
 for it. The pieces were short, and gesture largely supplied 
 the place of words. Action was the life and soul of every 
 piece that was played. To make a dramatic show lively and 
 amusing was the only end kept in view. Clown wit was 
 given in large doses. And much of the roaring fun that is, 
 or used to be, seen in English pantomimes is of Italian origin, 
 though it has been considerably modified. But buffoonery 
 was not the only element on the Italian stage. There were 
 plays in which sentiment and passion had their place. There 
 was generally a love story showing the wrongs on the part of 
 the husband or of the wife, and the situations were often of a 
 doubtful character. Whether they were moral or not, they 
 represented the lives of the people who saw them acted, and 
 in that sense the plays were comedies. The plays were 
 very like each other, and no attempt at individual character- 
 painting was attempted. The spectators were interested to 
 see how the piece would end, and they enjoyed still more 
 the acting of the play. They were intensely pleased with 
 any dramatic representation of events which might be likely 
 to happen amongst themselves. Burlesque was added, for it 
 was popular ; but serious plays would have been foreign to the 
 nature and the understanding of the people. The audiences 
 knew what they wanted, and the amusement they liked was 
 
74 LIFE OF MOLIEKE 
 
 given to then. Among a people who loved acting for its own 
 sake the art or knack of acting simple pieces would come 
 easily; therefore in a simple way it was likely to be well 
 done. In their "commedia dell' arte" the Italians thought 
 very much more of outward show, of a lively personification 
 of the thing to be represented, than of the language used or of 
 the elegance with which the actor spoke what he had to say. 
 They were in no sense literary, but they had simple critical 
 tastes which came to them easily and without fastidiousness. 
 
 Moliere learned his lessons willingly from Italian impromptu 
 comedy, and he never wished to forget them altogether. They 
 taught him that action of some kind should be the principal 
 feature in the representation of a play ; and there is no doubt 
 that before his day French plays were sadly deficient in this 
 quality. M. Louis Moland, after fully recognising that Moliere's 
 tastes and the traditions that were floating in his mind were 
 those of his own country, says : " Moliere owed the animation 
 in his plays chiefly to the Italians. Dramatic action does not 
 seem to have come very naturally to the French mind, which 
 has always shown itself much in favour of talking." l This does 
 not mean that we should not remember what Moliere owed 
 to himself, nor that the Italian actors changed the bent of his 
 nature. They could not have given him his strong powers 
 of personal characterisation nor his rare faculty of teaching 
 by satire, for in their comedies these features did not exist. 
 Incidents were characterised plainly enough on the Italian 
 stage, but they were shown with buffoonery, as were also 
 their personages ; and both personages and incidents were of 
 a stock kind, and were repeated very constantly. Moliere 
 soon became master of his thoughts and of his style ; what 
 he had learned from Italian comedy he altered and improved 
 by his love of healthy satire, even in his smaller plays which 
 betray Italian influences most clearly. There he gave types, 
 of real personages, and showed by broad and pointed touches 
 that he knew how to form a character and make a man talk 
 with the feelings of a man, not like a puppet. 
 
 Though Italian companies attracted large numbers of French 
 theatre-loving people, the troop of Spanish actors, brought to 
 Paris by Queen Maria Theresa in 1660 shortly after her 
 
 1 Moliere et la Comedie Italienne, 5. 
 
CHAPTEK III 75 
 
 marriage with Louis xiv., and maintained by her there until 
 1674, fared indifferently. When they played at court they 
 appear to have been tolerably fortunate, but people would 
 not go to see them in the public theatre. In a show of the 
 humours of life intelligence and sympathy must precede 
 success, and as the French could not understand the Spaniards 
 they naturally did not like them. Men in the pit of the 
 theatre may have been as ignorant of Italian as of Spanish, 
 but the conventional types among the Italian actors prepared 
 the audience for what was going to happen ; and the very 
 large part that expressive pantomimic gesture had among 
 the Italians, and which they knew so well how to use, supplied 
 in a great measure the meaning of the spoken words. Though 
 after the French translation of the first part of Don Quixote 
 in 1613 French playwrights began to borrow the plots of many 
 of their comedies from Spain, and continued to do so for a 
 hundred years or longer, it cannot be said that, the acting of 
 the Spaniards in Paris had the slightest influence on the 
 French stage. There is certainly no trace of it in Moliere. 
 If the Spanish acting was good it did not appeal to French 
 tastes. 1 
 
 1 Despois, in his Le Theatre Francais sous Louis XIV., has a short 
 chapter on this subject, pp. 70-76. 
 
CHAPTEK IV 
 
 THE ILLUSTRE THEATRE 
 
 IT is time to dismiss Tallemant des Keaux's story that Moliere 
 became an actor because he fell in love with Madeleine Bejart. 
 She was the daughter of Joseph Bejart, huissier des eaux et 
 forets, and of Marie Herve', his wife I follow the usual 
 practice of calling Bejart's wife by her maiden name and 
 was born in January 1618; consequently she was four years 
 older than Moliere. She was a good-looking young woman of 
 fair complexion, with reddish hair, was clever, and supposed 
 to be capable of managing her own affairs. She had been the 
 mistress of a Comte de Modene and had borne him a child, 
 christened Franchise on the llth of July 1638. Though 
 Madeleine had never played at the Hotel de Bourgogne, nor 
 probably at the Theatre du Marais, she had gained some 
 experience at the small and temporary playhouses in Paris, 
 and very likely also by strolling in the provinces. Tallemant 
 des Keaux mentions her when speaking of the actors of his 
 day : 
 
 " I must conclude with the Bejart. I have never seen her play, 
 but I am told she is the best actress of them all. She belongs to 
 a strolling company. She lias played in Paris, but that was in a 
 third troop which was only there for a short time. . . . A fellow 
 called Moliere un gargon nomm6 Moliere left his studies at the 
 Sorbonne to go after her. He was in love with her for a long time, 
 and at last he made up his mind to marry her. He writes plays in 
 which there is some wit. He is not a wonderful actor, except in 
 ludicrous parts. It is only his company that play his comedies; 
 they are amusing." l 
 
 There is a mixture of truth and fable here such as Tallemant 
 loved. What he said of Madeleine Bejart was written while 
 Moliere was travelling with his troop in the provinces ; the 
 rest of the paragraph was added after Moliere returned to 
 
 1 Les Historiettes, by Tallemant des Reaux, 3rd ed. (1854-1860), vii. 177 
 and note 2. 
 76 
 
CHAPTER IV 77 
 
 Paris. But it is tolerably certain that Moliere was never a 
 student at the Sorbonne. And it is quite certain that he did 
 not marry Madeleine Bdjart, for she signed the certificate of 
 his marriage with another woman. It may be taken for 
 granted that Moliere had an affection for Madeleine Bejart, 
 and that he told her so; they were both young and in- 
 telligent, and both were interested in the same cause. But 
 his fondness for her did not give him his earlier love for the 
 stage, it did not create in him his love of satire and irony and 
 the desire for dramatic characterisation. These faculties must 
 have existed, if hazily, before he first saw her. Had he not 
 been born with comic insight he could not as an actor have so 
 constantly amused the public in his theatre, nor could he have 
 written so many comedies which still delight readers and 
 spectators even in our day. 
 
 I think that Moliere would have gone on the stage if 
 he had never seen Madeleine Bejart, though possibly she 
 strengthened his determination. De Vise*, in his Nouvelles 
 Nouvelles, a sort of novel, published in 1663, says: 
 
 " The famous author of the Ecole des Maris, having in his youth a 
 strong passion for the theatre, took to the stage, though he might 
 have done without this occupation, as he had money enough to live 
 honourably in the world." J 
 
 And La Grange says in his preface in 1682 : 
 
 " When he [Moliere] had finished his legal studies he chose the 
 profession of an actor because he had a liking for the stage he could 
 not overcome. All his study, all his thoughts, were bent towards 
 acting." 2 
 
 And Charles Perrault, also a contemporary, says : 
 
 " Moliere was born with such a strong inclination for the stage 
 that he could not help becoming an actor. He had hardly finished 
 his course of study, in which he acquitted himself admirably, when 
 he allied himself with other young persons of his own age and way 
 of thinking ; and he determined to form a troop of actors and go 
 and play with them in the provinces." 3 
 
 Moliere had made up his mind not to go into his father's 
 business, and in all probability his father felt himself bound 
 to give up his long-cherished desire that his eldest son should 
 work beside him in his well-established house. Nevertheless, 
 
 1 CEuvres de Moliere, x. 464, 465. 2 Ibid. vol. i. p. xiii. 
 
 3 Les Hommes Illustres, ed. 1696, vol. i. art. Moliere. 
 
78 LIFE OF MOLlfeRE 
 
 Jean Poquelin was much annoyed when he heard that his 
 son meant to forego the advantages of stepping into a good 
 business for the sake of joining a band of actors of no 
 reputation and whose calling was thought by many to be 
 disreputable. Moliere did not make his choice so much from 
 love of gain as from love of liberty. I think that his natural 
 inclinations prompted him, and that an ambition equally 
 natural did the rest. He loved the art of acting. He admired 
 it so much in others that he wished to perform the same parts 
 himself. Dramatic personation of character stirred his fancy, 
 and he wished to be in a position to indulge his tastes. Of 
 course he had ambition "that last infirmity of noble minds." 
 It was ambition that spurred him on, but throughout his life 
 he showed great perseverance and soberness of judgment. It 
 is easy for us who are wise after the event, and had no 
 personal care whether he made his fortune or was ruined, to 
 think that he was impelled by laudable desires ; but we may 
 recollect that his father, who saw only the disobedience of a 
 wayward boy and who felt that his son was dishonouring 
 himself, would not look upon this ambition with favourable 
 eyes. In vain did Jean Poquelin try to dissuade his son. 
 He sent his friends to him, offering through their mediation 
 to buy for him any situation that he could afford. Charles 
 Perrault relates, in his article on Moliere already mentioned, 
 that Jean Poquelin sent as a special ambassador one who had 
 been his son's master, hoping that by his influence his son 
 might be brought to reason. But this embassy fared worse 
 than the others, for the young enthusiast got the better of his 
 would-be converter and persuaded him to give up his teaching, 
 and made him promise that he would join his (Moliere's) 
 friends and play the part of the pedant in their comedies. 
 There are two charming lines in the fitourdi in which Mas- 
 carille ironically tells his master what he ought to think of 
 his father's counsels : 
 
 " Moquez-vous des sermons d'un vieux barbon de pere, 
 Poussez votre bidet, vous dis-je, et laissez faire." 
 
 When Moliere wrote these lines he had not forgotten the dis- 
 agreeable interviews with his father. He did not scorn his 
 father's advice because he could not accept it ; but in writing 
 his play he turned what had been his own heavy thoughts 
 
CHAPTER IV 79 
 
 into a piece of drollery. And this was not the only time that 
 he did so. 
 
 The legal documents which form the greater part of Soulie's 
 volume Recherches sur Molikre et sur sa Famille are the chief 
 authorities for showing the fortunes of Moliere and his 
 comrades when he first went on the stage. Here many facts 
 are found which before their publication in 1863 were un- 
 known, and these must now engage our attention. I shall 
 be as sparing as possible on these matters ; but facts are 
 stepping-stones to the biographer on which he tries to found 
 his opinion how the man he is writing about acted under 
 certain conditions, and from them attempts at characterisation 
 are made. I do not wish to weigh the knowledge of details 
 in the story of an author's life against an intelligent under- 
 standing of what he has written. If all the books printed about 
 Moliere were put into a room together they would not be 
 worth the Misanthrope. What one wants most to know about 
 an author is what he has to say and how he expresses himself ; 
 and with an imaginative writer the last point is important. 
 Nevertheless, it is part of the province of biography to try to 
 get at and explain the facts in a man's life those which show 
 him in his boyhood, in his youth, in his struggles to gain for 
 himself a place in the world ; which show later how he per- 
 severed and where he failed; what were the causes of his 
 failures and how he met his disappointments ; what were his 
 successes, to what they were owing, and how he bore his 
 triumphs. All these circumstances, when they can be dis- 
 covered, belong to biography, and they may perchance be made 
 interesting if they are handled judiciously and without ill- 
 nature. Facts may then possibly bring a great man closer 
 to our eyes and help to show us what he was like. 
 
 The inventory taken after Jean Poquelin's death in 1669 
 says, among other things, that on the 6th of January 1643 
 Moliere gave his father a receipt stating that he had received 
 from him 630 livres for the purpose mentioned therein "pour 
 1'employer a 1'effet y mentionne." J If this receipt had been 
 preserved the words " pour 1'employer a 1'effet y mentionne " 
 might have been made clear. The most natural supposition is 
 that Moliere asked for the money to prepare himself for his new 
 
 i Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere, 28 ; 227, par. 2. 
 
80 LIFE OF 
 
 career. The year of majority then in France was twenty-five, 
 and the lad was not actually twenty-one. Jean Poquelin was a 
 close man with his money, and it is not likely that he would have 
 given his son 630 livres, equal in value to 125 now, except 
 under pressure. But in giving his son this money the father 
 became, against his will, a consenting party to his son's desires. 
 Le Boulanger de Chalussay makes Moliere say in the pres- 
 ence of the charlatans Orvietan and Bary, that he had taken 
 lessons from both of them, 1 also from a celebrated Italian 
 actor Tiberio Fiorilli, popularly known as Scaraniouche. Part 
 of the passage relating to Moliere's lessons from this man 
 deserves to be quoted : 
 
 " . . . Par exemple, Elomire 
 Veut se rendre parfait dans 1'art de faire rire ; 
 Que fait-il, le matois, dans ce hardi dessein ? 
 Chez le grand Scaraniouche il va soir et matin. 
 La, le miroir en main, et ce grand homme en face, 
 II n'est contorsion, posture ni grimace, 
 Que ce grand ecolier du plus grand des bouffons 
 Ne fasse et ne refasse en cent et cent fagons." 2 
 
 Then follows a description of the characters he was learning 
 to represent. I have spoken of these lessons from Orvie'tan, 
 from Bary, and from Scaraniouche, after the 6th of January 
 1643, because I imagine that Moliere felt he wanted tuition 
 before going formally on the stage, and that these men would 
 not teach him without payment. But before beginning the story 
 of his public life it is necessary to speak of the Bejart family. 
 Joseph Bejart died most likely early in 1643. 3 He was the 
 father of Joseph and Louis, of Madeleine and Genevieve, and 
 nearly certainly of Armande, all of whom were connected with 
 Moliere's history until the end of their joint lives. When 
 Joseph Bejart died he left large debts which his widow Marie 
 Herve had no means of paying; and soon after his death, 
 she, acting under the advice of her friends, renounced by deed, 
 on the 10th of March 1643, both in her own name and in that 
 of her five children, all share in her late husband's inheritance, 
 as it was more likely to bring them loss than profit. 4 All of 
 
 1 filomire Hypocondre, Act I. scs. 1 and 3. 
 
 2 Ibid. Act i. sc. 3^ 
 
 3 Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere, 31 ; Jal, Dictionnaire, 185, col. 1. 
 
 4 Soulie", Recherches sur Moliere, 31 ; 172, 3; (Euvres de Moliere, x. 471. 
 (In quoting the text of this deedM. Mesnard has printed "Georges" Bejart; 
 Soulie" also printed Georges, but showed in note 2 that the name should be 
 " Joseph." In his text, M. Mesnard always speaks of Joseph Bejart.) 
 
CHAPTER IV 81 
 
 the five children were mentioned in the deed. Both Soulie 1 
 and Jal 2 thought that Joseph, known later as " Bejart aine*," 
 was the eldest because he was mentioned first, though the 
 date of his birth is not known ; Madeleine, already spoken of, 
 was christened on the 8th of January 1618; 3 Louis, known 
 later as "Bejart cadet," was christened on the 4th of December 
 1630 ; 4 Genevieve, known later, until her marriage in 1664, 
 as Mile. Herve, was born probably in 1631 ; 5 and a "petite 
 non baptisee," that is at the time of the deed of renunciation, 
 was born probably at the end of 1642 or early in 1643, shortly 
 before her father's death. 6 This last child, though her 
 baptismal certificate has not been found, was almost certainly 
 Armande. 7 I will say here in parenthesis that, though I am 
 strongly inclined to agree with those who hold that Armande 
 was the legitimate daughter of Joseph Bejart and of Marie 
 Herve, her parentage has not been proved absolutely; and 
 that this question will be dealt with when speaking of her 
 marriage with Moliere, at the end of chapter xii. In the 
 deed of 10th March 1643, five of Marie Herve^s children were 
 named, but many others were dead ; Soulie* 8 and Jal 9 thought 
 there had been eleven or twelve. 
 
 Joseph Bejart, the father of these five children, had been 
 huissier des eaux et forets, but Soulie thought that in the 
 latter years of his life he gave up his office to join a strolling 
 company of actors in the provinces. 10 In the marriage settle- 
 ment between Moliere and Armande Bejart, he is spoken of as 
 the late " Sieur de Belleville." His widow, Marie Herve, owned 
 some small properties producing altogether only a small 
 
 1 Recherches sur Moliere, 32. 2 Dictionnaire, 185, col. 1. 
 
 3 Ibid. 177, cols. 1 and 2. 4 Ibid. 177, col. 2. 
 
 5 Jal says that Marie Herv4 had two children called Genevieve : the 
 eldest christened 2nd July 1624, but she died before March 1643 (Diction- 
 naire, 111, col. 2, and 185, col. 1) ; the younger Genevieve, the one mentioned 
 above, whom he presumes to have been born about 1631 (Dictionnaire, 177, 
 col. 2, and pp. 182, 183). As I read Soulie's text, he seems not to have known 
 that there were two Genevieves, and to have taken the elder one for the 
 
 S>unger (Recherches sur Moliere, 33 and 75). As the elder one died before 
 arch 1643 it is only the younger one that can concern us. She married, 
 first, Leonard de Lomenie, in 1664 ; in 1672, Jean Baptiste Aubry. And see 
 (Euvres de Moliere, ix. 48, note 2. 
 
 6 Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere, 33, 34. 
 
 7 Besides Soulie (p. 33), Jal (pp. 184, 185), M. Mesnard is also strongly 
 of this opinion, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 251. 
 
 8 Recherches sur Moliere, 30, 31. 9 Dictionnaire, 177, 178. 
 10 La Gorrespondance Litteraire for 25th January 1865, p. 80, col. 1. 
 
82 LIFE OF MOLI^BE 
 
 income ; she appears to have done the best she could for her 
 children, and one hears of her chiefly as assisting them in 
 becoming a guarantor in their undertakings. The names of 
 these children have been given ; what more there is to be 
 said about them will appear by degrees as their names come 
 forward. 
 
 In the first half of the year 1643 Moliere saw a good deal 
 of Madeleine Bejart. He had left his father's house and was 
 living close to where she lived with her mother in the Marais 
 quarter of the town. An enterprise was on foot ; and on the 
 30th of June, Joseph, Madeleine and Genevieve Bejart, with 
 Moliere and four other men and two women ten in all bound 
 themselves to act together, and their troop was to be known as 
 the Illustre Theatre. In those days the word " illustre " was 
 often used in rather a smart sense; socially it was synony- 
 mous with " pre'cieux." " Une precieuse " meant a lady of 
 distinction, though the title was a little affected, and the 
 ladies at the Hotel de Kambouillet called themselves " prd- 
 cieuses " or " illustres." The name Illustre Theatre was 
 intended to tell the public that the new troop of actors wished 
 to attract all the intelligent playgoers in Paris. The exist- 
 ence of this troop has long been known, but the " Contrat de 
 Societ^ entre les come'diens de 1'Illustre Theatre" was first 
 published by Souli^, though not in full, in La Correspondence 
 LitUraire for 25th January 1865 (pp. 80-81), two years after 
 the publication of his volume, Recherches sur Moliere. The 
 deed, with the names of those concerned in it, is given at 
 length by M. Mesnard in vol. x. p. 462 of the (Euvres de 
 Moliere. It shows when Moliere definitely undertook to begin 
 his career as an actor, though not that he had then changed 
 his name. 
 
 Besides Moliere and the Bejarts, there is not much interest 
 attaching to any of these actors. But one of them, George 
 Pinel, was perhaps the " maitre dcrivain " whom Jean Poquelin 
 had engaged to teach his young children how to read and 
 write; also perhaps he was the ambassador whom Poquelin 
 had sent to his son to try to dissuade him from choosing the 
 stage as a profession. Besides the actors there were three 
 other signatories to the deed : A. Mare'chal, then known as a 
 dramatic author ; Franchise Lesguillon, the mother of Catherine 
 
CHAPTER IV 83 
 
 des Urlis, a young actress ; and Marie Herve, whose name we 
 know already. 
 
 The deed of agreement of the 30th of June 1643 stipulates 
 that when a new play is brought to the troop the author 
 shall have the undisputed right to distribute the parts as he 
 pleases ; that in cases of printed plays, if the author has not 
 previously distributed the parts, they shall be determined by 
 the majority of votes among the troop, unless the agreement 
 is followed which already exists between Clerin, Poquelin, and 
 Joseph Bejart, that they shall be allowed alternately to play 
 the hero. Madeleine Bejart was to be allowed to choose what 
 part she pleased. In other respects the document was drawn 
 up in the spirit of republicanism common in the French 
 theatres in the 17th century. Informal acting associations 
 were not uncommon in those days, and it is likely that before 
 the date of this document, most of those who signed it had 
 played together for amusement, or with the intention of 
 learning how to act, giving their performances gratis ; and the 
 clause between Clerin, Poquelin, and Bejart points that way. 
 But when the new troop had bound themselves by a formal 
 deed to play together, they would demand the payment of 
 entrance money. 
 
 The young actors had to determine where to pitch their 
 tent. They decided to cross the Seine, and on the 12th of 
 September 1643 they hired a tennis-court known as Le Jeu 
 de Paume des Mestayers, situated on the rampart and near 
 to the Porte de Nesle. Tennis-courts were very frequently 
 used for theatres in olden days in France, and they were some- 
 times built upon the trenches or ramparts surrounding a town. 
 The theatre where Moliere first tried to earn fame, and, if 
 might be, a little money, stood at the angle of what is now the 
 Rue de Seine and the Kue Mazarine, immediately behind the 
 present Institut de France, which was not then built. Auguste 
 Vitu gave an elaborate description of the tennis-court trans- 
 formed into the Illustre Theatre. 1 The inside of the building 
 was a rectangular oblong, and as a theatre was exceedingly 
 primitive. Besides some curtains which had to be drawn aside 
 to let the actors pass, there was no other stage decoration. 
 The lighting was of course by candles. Of musical insfcru- 
 1 Le Jeu de Paume des Mestayers, 36 et seq. 
 
84 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 meats there was a flute, a drum, and one or two violins. 
 There was a gallery running along each side of the room and 
 along the wall facing the stage. Here were placed the boxes, 
 the price of each seat being ten sous ; the groundlings stood 
 during the performance, and paid five sous. The doors were 
 open at one o'clock, the performance began at two ; and by six 
 the visitors were on their way home. 
 
 There was delay in getting the theatre put into order. In the 
 meanwhile the troop went to Eouen, and played there during 
 the fete known as " la f oire du pardon," or " la fete de Saint Ro- 
 main," which began on the 23rd of October and lasted for some 
 days. Of the large towns in France, Rouen was the nearest to 
 Paris, it was the capital of the province of Normandy, and it 
 was customary with strolling companies when they left the 
 capital to begin their performances there. It was at Rouen 
 that Mondory, the head of his troop, brought out Corneille's 
 first play Mtlite, in 1629 ; and it is probable that in the same 
 city Jean Baptiste Poquelin, afterwards Moliere, first appeared 
 on the stage as a professional actor. Apparently the young 
 enthusiasts were kept at Rouen longer than they liked, for 
 on the 3rd of November, Moliere and his comrades signed a 
 power of attorney there, urging Noel Gallois, from whom they 
 had hired the Jeu de Paume des Metayers in Paris, to bestir 
 himself and get the theatre ready for them. This document 
 was discovered by E. Gosselin, and was published by him in 
 the Eevue de la Normandie for April 1870, 1 and with it may 
 be seen a facsimile of the signatures of all the members of the 
 troop. They had found a new recruit in the person of Catherine 
 Bourgeois. 
 
 On the 28th of December they were back in Paris, and it 
 has been thought that the Illustre Theatre was first opened on 
 the 31st of December 1643. 2 On the front of the house now 
 numbered 12 Rue Mazarine there is a tablet bearing the 
 following inscription : 
 
 " Ici s'elevait le Jeu de Paume des Metayers, oil la troupe de 
 Moliere ouvrit en D&embre 1643 I'lllustre Theatre." 
 
 But it is not known what was the play chosen wherewith to 
 
 charm the public. Le Boulanger de Chalussay seems to say 
 
 1 Vol. x. pp. 239, 240. 2 A. Vitu, Le Jeu de Paume des Mestayers, 6. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 85 
 
 that the theatre was opened on a jour de fete, when the 
 applause was continually given at the wrong moment ; and he 
 adds that on the following days nobody entered the house 
 except a few watermen and the friends of the actors to whom 
 orders had been given. 1 A few lines previously he had made 
 some very uncomplimentary remarks upon the members of the 
 troop. His evidence is altogether hostile, but much of what 
 he says cannot be contradicted. , 
 
 Yet the troop had done their best to make a bid for the 
 public favour. They bought and paid for plays by authors of 
 reputation. One play was Scdvole, a tragedy by Du Eyer ; 
 Tristan 1'Hermite furnished two others, La Mori de Crispe and 
 La Mori de Stfntyue. Both of these writers were Academi- 
 cians. If any of Marechal's plays were acted in the Jeu de 
 Paume des Mestayers they passed into oblivion, like so many 
 plays acted elsewhere after the few days on which they were 
 performed. And the troop had lately admitted into their 
 membership Nicolas Desfontaines, who was not a novice in 
 stage matters. He had written several tragedies or tragi- 
 comedies, some of which appear to have been acted by Moliere 
 and his friends. 2 It would seem that he was an actor as well 
 as an author, for his name appears at the foot of five docu- 
 ments relating to the Illustre Theatre. 
 
 Some friend of the actors the Comte de Modene, according 
 to SouKe*, 3 Tristan 1'Hermite, according to M. Mesnard 4 in- 
 troduced them to Gaston, Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis 
 XIIL, and tnis prince oecame their patron. Perhaps because 
 of their new honour the troop hired on the 28th of June 1644 
 Daniel Mallet, a dancer not to be one of themselves, but to 
 be at their service both for acting and for ballets at the rate 
 of thirty-five sous every day there was a performance, and 
 five sous more each day that he took a part in a play. 5 The 
 engagement of Mallet points to an employment outside the 
 ordinary business, for dancing was not then customary in 
 the Paris theatres. Ballets, however, were a favourite court 
 amusement, and M. Fournel thinks that the troop hired 
 Mallet with a view to his dancing before their new protector 
 
 1 filomire Hypocondre, Act iv. sc. 2 of the Divorce Comique. 
 
 2 Itecherches sur Moliere, 38. 3 Ibid. 39. 
 
 4 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 89-95. 
 
 5 Soulie, Recherches sur Holier e, 38, 175. 
 
86 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 at the Luxembourg Palace, where they sometimes went " en 
 visite" when the duke wished to entertain his guests. 1 
 Perhaps Moliere and his comrades, with Daniel Mallet as 
 a dancer, appeared in an entertainment at the Luxembourg 
 in August 1644. 2 It is not known when the patronage of 
 the Duke of Orleans was first accorded to the members of the 
 Illustre Theatre, but it had certainly been given before the 
 9th of September 1644. 3 . 
 
 The agreement concerning Daniel Mallet shows the first 
 instance of young Poquelin having changed his name. He is 
 there described as " Jean Baptiste Poquelin, dit Moliere," and 
 at the end he signed himself boldly DE MoLiERE. 4 In later 
 documents he signed himself occasionally by his family name, 
 though generally as Moliere; but after the 28th of June 1644 
 he never omitted to give also the name Poquelin, or its initial 
 letter. As for the particle de, that was not always intended 
 or accepted as a sign of nobility ; actors often used it, and 
 nobody thought of depriving them of the privilege. I do not 
 know that Moliere of his own accord ever used the particle 
 again, though it was afterwards given to him on the title- 
 pages to his plays, and La Grange constantly wrote of him as 
 M. de Moliere. It is to be remarked, in this and later docu- 
 ments concerning all the members of the Illustre Theatre, 
 that the name Jean Baptiste Poquelin is the first mentioned, 
 as though, says Soulie', he were the leading man in the troop. 
 
 It will probably never be known why he chose the name 
 Moliere. He was often asked the reason for his choice, but 
 always refused to answer, fidouard Fournier said that the 
 pseudonym was perhaps taken from the name of a small 
 property owned by a distant relative which was called Moliere 
 or La Moliere. 5 It was common for actors to give themselves 
 well-sounding names, and if Moliere when he was quite a 
 young man chose a territorial title as his nom de guerre, he 
 was wise in not saying that he had done so. This reason for 
 the choice of his name is of course doubtful, but it is not 
 altogether fanciful. In the Ecole des Femmes(Act I. sc. 1, near 
 
 1 Les Contemporains de Moliere, ii. 185. 
 
 2 Souli6, Recherches sur Moliere, 39. 
 
 3 Loiseleur, Les Points obscurs de la Vie de Moliere, 379. 
 
 4 Soulie, fiecherches sur Moliere, 176. 
 
 5 Le Roman de Moliere, 38, note 2. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 87 
 
 the end), Chrysale rallies Arnolphe for wishing, because 
 he owns a tumble-down farmhouse, to be called by the 
 seigneurial title, M. de la Souche ; and I should not be sur- 
 prised if in fact Moliere was here laughing at himself for 
 having been actuated by the same idea. A little later in 
 the same scene are the lines : 
 
 " Je sais im gros paysan qu'on appeloit Gros-Pierre, 
 Qui n'ayant pour tout bien qu'un seul quartier de terre, 
 Y fit tout a 1'entour faire un foss bourbeux, 
 Et de Monsieur de 1'Isle en prit le nom pompeux." 
 
 The ridicule here is manifest, and perhaps there was an allusion 
 to Thomas Corneille, who called himself Corneille de 1'Isle. 
 
 This place will do as well as another to say that besides 
 the comic dramatist, whose name everybody knows, there was 
 a Louis de Mollier, a musician and a dancer at the court 
 ballets in the middle of the 17th century. His name was 
 pronounced Moliere, and was sometimes so written. And 
 there was also a writer of novels, Francois de Moliere, the 
 author of Leu Semaine Amoureuse, Le Mtpris de la Cour, and 
 La Polixdne; he was assassinated, perhaps in 1632. 
 
 The protection of the Duke of Orleans does not appear to 
 have enriched the troop materially, and money was what they 
 most wanted. On the 9th of September 1644 they borrowed 
 1100 livres from Louis Baulot to pay for the plays already 
 mentioned and for expenses connected with the theatre. 1 
 And on the 17th of December following they borrowed from 
 Francois Pommier 2000 livres in two bonds 300 livres in 
 one bond, and 1700 livres in the other. 2 And in both they 
 declared that the lender might seize the profits taken at the 
 theatre until his debt was paid. From the second bond to 
 Pommier it may be seen that they had paid off 500 livres of 
 their debt to Baulot, so that they then owed 2600 livres, or 
 about 520 of our money now. They passed a deed of agree- 
 ment amongst themselves not to divide any profits until their 
 debts were cleared. 3 Most of the members found a guarantor 
 for their share of liability. But it is curious to learn that 
 Marie Herve became guarantor for Moliere, as well as for her 
 two daughters ; and from this one may infer that Moliere had 
 
 1 J. Loiseleur, Les Points obscurs de la Vie de Moliere, 379. 
 
 2 Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere, 177, 178. 
 
 3 Ibid. 181. 
 
88 LIFE OF MOLlfeEE 
 
 not asked his father to help him, or that his father had refused 
 to give assistance. 
 
 In these last documents Joseph Bdjart's name is not seen. 
 He had probably left his companions for a while ; for on the 
 14th of April 1644 his mother promised to pay to Alexandre 
 Sorin, " me'decin de la faculte d' Angers," 200 livres to cure him 
 of an impediment in his speech. 1 His name is next seen with 
 those of his comrades on the 13th of August 1645. De 
 Chalussay twice alludes to the stammering of Joseph Be" j art, 
 and out of spite he mentions the lameness of his brother 
 Louis. But Louis Bej'art did not become lame until many 
 years later, and his name does not appear in any of the 
 documents connected with the Illustre The'atre. 
 
 In the lease of the Jeu de Paume des Mestayers there was a 
 clause saying that the actors might terminate the tenancy by 
 giving three months notice to quit in writing. On the 19th of 
 December 1644 the lease was cancelled, and the surrender 
 was signed by Moliere alone in the name of the company. 2 
 Undismayed by failure, they went to a different part of Paris 
 and hired another tennis-court, known as La Croix Noire, in 
 the Hue des Barrel at the Port Saint Paul. It was near the 
 river, on the north side, a little higher up than the He Saint 
 Louis. Here, too, on the present Quai des Celestins, No. 32, 
 may be seen a marble tablet which tells its own tale : 
 
 "A cette place s'elevait le Jeu de Paume de la Croix Noire, ou 
 Moliere et la troupe de 1'Illustre Theatre jouerent en 1645." 
 
 The actors engaged a master carpenter to take away the boxes 
 and other woodwork from their old theatre and put them up 
 in the new one, and everything was to be ready for them on 
 the 8th of January 1645. 3 The troop still retained the 
 privilege of belonging to Son Altesse Eoyale Gaston, Duke of 
 Orleans ; and on the 7th of February the duke gave a ball at 
 the Luxembourg Palace and engaged his actors to entertain his 
 guests. 4 It is not unlikely that on this occasion the ballet 
 L'Oracle de Sylile et de Pansoust was danced, and that some 
 members of Moliere's troop took a part in it. 5 The only play 
 
 1 Soulie's article in the Correspondence Litteraire for 25th January 1865, 
 pp. 83, 84. 
 
 2 Le Molieriste for July 1885 (vii. 123). 
 
 3 Soulie, fiecherches sur Moliere, 41 ; 183-185. 4 Ibid. 41, 42. 
 5 V. Fournel, Les Contemporains de Moliere, ii. 263. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 89 
 
 known to have been acted by the members of the Illustre 
 Theatre at the Port Saint Paul, was a tragedy by Magnon 
 called Artaxerce. It was printed in 1645, and bears on the 
 title-page the words, " Bepresente'e par 1'Illustre Theatre." 
 Magnon was the author of seven other tragedies or tragi- 
 comedies. Dest'ontaines was perhaps still in the troop when 
 they went to the Jeu de Paume de la Croix Noire ; if so, 
 probably some of his tragi-comedies were acted there, for two 
 of his plays were printed in 1645. 
 
 As the troop was not in a position to buy new plays, it must 
 be supposed that they acted old ones, that is plays that had 
 been printed and in which there was no dramatic copyright. 
 It appears, however, plainly enough, that the members of the 
 Illustre Theatre could not make their business a paying con- 
 cern. The Hotel de Bourgogne was the old-established theatre, 
 and most plays of importance were brought out there ; some- 
 times the Theatre du Marais was well filled, though ordinarily 
 it was less fortunate. Playgoing was becoming a fashionable 
 amusement among the Parisians, but the town was not large 
 enough to support three theatres with profit to them all. And 
 if it was the custom for people to go to the Hotel de Bour- 
 gogne, the less lucky members of the Illustre Theatre could 
 only recognise the fact as disadvantageous to them. They 
 were in debt when they began their new venture at the Port 
 Saint Paul, and while they were there their troubles increased 
 upon them. 
 
 On the 31st of March 1645 Moliere signed a bond acknow- 
 ledging that he had borrowed 291 livres from Jeanne Leve", a 
 "marchande publique," 1 and he was careful that his title 
 tapissier valet de chambre du Koi should be given to him. As 
 there is no mention in this bond of anything connected with 
 the theatre, it is probable that Moliere had borrowed the 
 money for his own personal needs. The debt was not finally 
 extinguished until the 13th of May 1659, and then he was 
 described as " ci-devant valet de chambre du Koi." 2 It will 
 be seen presently that he had allowed the title to be given to 
 his younger brother. 
 
 It is sufficiently evident that the affairs of the members of 
 the Illustre Theatre were in a bad way ; and it would seem. 
 1 Souli, Recherches sur Moliere, 42 ; 185. 2 Ibid. 42 ; 201. 
 
90 LIFE OF MOLI&RE 
 
 that for money owing by the troop Moliere, as their leading 
 man, was put into prison at the Grand Chatelet two or three 
 times in quick succession. The first term of imprisonment 
 is not known, but probably it was quite short. Antoine 
 Fausser had obtained two sentences against him, amounting 
 to 142 livres, for candles; and when on the 2nd of August 
 1645 Moliere presented a petition praying that he might be 
 let out of prison, saying that the claim made against him was 
 very small, and that he did not owe anything, he was dis- 
 charged on parole, unless he were confined for more than 142 
 livres. 1 Later in the same day Francois Pommier, who had 
 lent 2000 livres to the troop, brought a claim against Moliere 
 for that amount ; and the same judge who had heard Moliere's 
 petition against Fausser, liberated him from prison and from 
 the claim made by Pommier, on the condition that a substantial 
 person would pay for him 40 livres a week for eight weeks. 2 
 A guarantor was found at once in the person of Leonard Aubry, 
 and Moliere was set free. 3 And on the 4th of August Moliere 
 obtained a third release from the Chatelet, again by the same 
 judge, on the same conditions as were given in the first dis- 
 charge, against a claim made by one Dubourg, a linendraper, 
 for 150 livres. 4 These details are taken from the documents 
 published by Soulie* and from his text in the earlier part of 
 his volume ; but Soulie acknowledged that all the facts have 
 not come to light with perfe'ct clearness. If a man has been 
 imprisoned for such causes as these, and five-and-twenty years 
 later he writes the Tartuffe and the Avare, posterity will look 
 upon the fact of his having been sent to jail as a bright feather 
 in his cap. The Leonard Aubry who came to Moliere's rescue 
 was a man of good repute ; he was a " paveur ordinaire des 
 batiments du Eoi," and it was he who had paved the ground 
 in front of the Jeu de Paume des Metayers in December 
 1643. 
 
 On the 13th of August 1645 the members of the Illustre 
 Theatre, including Joseph Bejart, gave a bond to Leonard 
 Aubry that they would refund to him the 320 livres he was 
 about to pay for Moliere's release from prison. 5 The}' were 
 
 1 Recherches sur Moliere, 43, 44 ; 186. a Ibid. 44, 45 ; 187, 188 
 
 3 Ibid. 45; 188. 4 Ibid , 45 46 jgg' 
 
 5 Ibid. 46 ; 189, 190. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 91 
 
 no longer styled "come'diens de Son Altesse Ptoyale"; but 
 apparently they meant to continue their acting, for among the 
 signatures to the bond is that of Germain Kabel, a new recruit. 
 And in this bond there was another self-denying ordinance, 
 that they would divide no profits among themselves until 
 Aubry was paid. The profits from the theatre, we may be sure, 
 were very small, and money must have been scarce with the 
 young actors. No one can tell if Pommier ever got all the 
 2000 livres owing to him ; the only known instance of repay- 
 ment, except that made by Aubry on behalf of Moliere, was 
 made by one Prieur, who paid 120 livres on behalf of Catherine 
 Bourgeois. 1 But how did Leonard Aubry get back the 320 
 livres he had so generously advanced? Jean Poquelin did 
 pay his son's debts later, and he seems to have done so with 
 a very bad grace. The inventory taken after his death, made 
 in 1670, shows that sixteen months after Moliere and his com- 
 rades had given their bond to Aubry, Poquelin gave Aubry a 
 written promise (on the 24th of December 1646) that he would 
 refund to him what heliad spent on his son's behalf "unless 
 his son himself paid the money." The promise was kept, but 
 not until two years and a half later. Poquelin also paid 125 
 livres to Pommier's wife (or to his widow) on his son's behalf, 
 on some 4th of August before the year 165 1. 2 
 
 If the members of the Illustre Theatre meant to continue 
 their acting after their meeting on the 13th of August 1645, 
 there is no evidence of their performances in any part of Paris. 
 Their numbers were reduced from eleven to seven, and after 
 Moliere had been imprisoned the Duke of Orleans withdrew 
 his protection from the troop. They had met with great 
 reverses in the two theatres where they tried to gain the 
 public favour, they had no money in their pockets, they were 
 in debt, and could not show that their credit was good. It is, 
 therefore, most unlikely they should have thought that by a 
 third venture they could gain their once coveted glory. 
 
 I will say something now of the money accounts and other 
 business transactions between Jean Poquelin and his children. 
 When Moliere gave his father a receipt for 630 livres on the 
 6th of January 1643, he promised to surrender his claim to the 
 office of tapissier du Koi in favour of "such other of his 
 
 1 Recherches sur Moliere, 47 ; 191. 2 Ibid. 47, 48 ; 227, 228. 
 
92 LIFE OF MOLlfiRE 
 
 father's children as his father should please to name." l Jean 
 Poquelin had then only one other son. This boy was also 
 named Jean, and was born in 1624. He was described in the 
 inventory taken after his mother's death as "1'autre Jean," to 
 distinguish him from his elder brother Jean, afterwards 
 Moliere; and in a document to be mentioned presently he is 
 spoken of as "Jean le jeune," to distinguish him from his 
 father. M. Loiseleur thinks 2 that Moliere's surrender of the 
 title to his brother was only a private family arrangement 
 demanded by the father, and that while Jean Poquelin the 
 father was alive, it would have been both useless and 
 dangerous to have troubled the Gentlemen of the King's 
 Chamber, who had granted the letters patent for the office, 
 with the family disagreements. It would seem also that the 
 surrender of the title by Moliere was not voluntary on his 
 part, but that his father exacted from him the promise when 
 he gave him the 630 livres in January 1643. But Moliere 
 did not cease to use the title for some years after 1643. We 
 have seen that when he borrowed money from Jeanne Leve in 
 March 1645, he qualified himself as "tapissier et valet de 
 chambre du Koi"; and later, when he was travelling with his 
 troop in the provinces, on two occasions when he stood god- 
 father to a child, he was described as " valet de chambre du 
 Roi" the first time was at Narbonne, on the 10th of January 
 1650, 3 the second at Montpellier on the 6th of January 1654. 4 
 Some time later in 1654 the title was taken from him and 
 given to his younger brother Jean. 
 
 Moliere's maternal grandfather, Louis de Cresse*, was a rich 
 man when he died in 1638. His daughter, Marie Cresse, Jean 
 Poquelin's wife, was then dead; but three of her children 
 Moliere, "1'autre Jean" or "Jean le jeune," and Marie Made- 
 leine were due to receive, as from her, 5000 livres. It is 
 nowhere stated at what times Marie Cresse's children were to 
 get their money, but their father kept their portions in his own 
 hand as long as he could do so. On the 14th of September 
 
 1 Soulie", Eecherches sur Moliere, 28 ; 227. In the analysis of the receipt 
 given in the inventory taken after Jean Poquelin's death, the court title is 
 styled "tapissier du Roi." I do not gather that the omission of the words 
 " valet de chambre " had any bearing on the matter. 
 
 2 Les Points obscurs de la vie de Moliere, 112. 
 
 3 Le Molitriste for April 1881 (iii. 20) ; (Euvres de Moliere, x. 120. 
 
 4 Le Molidriste for May 1879 (i. 45). 
 
CHAPTER IV 93 
 
 1654 Jean Poquelin sold his business in Paris to his younger 
 son Jean, then close upon thirty years of age, who in the 
 deed of sale was called "Jean le jeune" and was qualified, 
 like his father, as " tapissier et valet de chambre ordinaire du 
 Roi," for 5218 livres, at which sum Poquelin's stock had been 
 valued. The father took his son's 5000 livres, which were due 
 to him from his mother, and so paid himself the greater part 
 of the purchase money; the remaining 218 livres the son paid 
 his father in the following November. 1 Also on the 14th of 
 September 1654, Jean Poquelin leased to this son Jean his 
 house " sous les piliers des halles " for five years at a rent of 
 600 livres, stipulating that he should have for himself, or 
 might use, certain parts of the house. 2 Poquelin had bought 
 this house in 1633, but he did not live in it until nearly ten 
 years later ; 3 and these two last facts refute the idea set on 
 foot by Grimarest that Moliere was born there. On page 257 
 of the article referred to in the last note, Vitu remarked that 
 Moliere's father seems to have relinquished his business at one 
 time and to have taken to it again later. It has been supposed 
 by more than one writer that Jean Poquelin was much less 
 prosperous in the latter part of his life than he had been 
 formerly. He was probably a hard man of business, and as he 
 got older and as his affairs declined, he became close-fisted in 
 money matters. Before he went to live in his house sous les 
 piliers des halles, he had let it to an old-clothes man ; he was 
 nearly fifty years of age when he did go to live there, and old- 
 clothes men were common in the immediate neighbourhood. 
 He married his second son Jean in 1656 to Marie Maillard, 
 who could neither read nor write, but who brought her husband 
 11,500 livres in money and effects. This Jean died in 1660, 
 leaving a son, christened Jean Baptiste after his godfather, 
 Moliere. 4 At some date after his brother's death Moliere 
 again took up the title of tapissier valet de chambre du Roi, 
 and kept it until he died. 
 
 There was still left, besides Moliere, one child of Marie 
 
 1 Soulie, Eecherches sur Moliere, 51 ; 192, 193. 
 ' 2 Ibid. 51, 52 ; 193, 194. 
 
 3 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 8, 9 ; and a long article by A. Vitu, referred to by 
 M. Mesnard, on the Maison des Poquelins aux Piliers des Halles in the 
 Mdmoires de la Societe de I'Histoire de Paris et de I' lie de France, vol. xi. 
 p. 256. 
 
 4 Jal, Dictionnaire, 989, col. 1. 
 
94 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 Cresse, Madeleine (who had been christened Marie). She 
 married Andre Boudet, an upholsterer, in 1651, and died in 
 1655, leaving two sons. She also was due to receive 5000 
 livres as from her mother, but her father did not pay the whole 
 of this money until after her death. 1 
 
 There is a certain interest in learning what were the sums 
 of money Moliere received out of the 5000 livres owing to 
 him from his mother, for it will be seen either that he was not 
 greedy of money, or that his father could not or would not 
 give him his due. The original accounts between father and 
 son have not been preserved ; the reckoning is to be found in 
 the inventory taken after Jean Poquelin's death in 1669. 
 Before Moliere left Paris for the provinces, his father had paid 
 for him 630 livres, 320 livres, and 125 livres making so far 
 1075 livres. During the next few years Moliere got from his 
 father, in addition, 890 livres ; for on the 19th of April 1651 
 he gave his father a written acknowledgment that he had 
 received from him altogether 1965 livres. 2 That sum, when 
 Poquelin's estate came to be divided among his heirs, Moliere 
 declared he had paid back to his father, with the knowledge of 
 his brother-in-law Andre Boudet, and of his brother's widow, 
 though neither of these two persons accepted his statement. 3 
 Also between 1660 and 1664, Poquelin had paid to his son 
 various sums amounting to 1512 livres, 7 sous. These sums, 
 too, Moliere declared he did not owe to his father's estate, and 
 this declaration his brother-in-law and sister-in-law were 
 willing to accept. 4 Nothing is known of Andre Boudet or of 
 the widow of Moliere's brother ; but I think that the fact of 
 Moliere having lent his father unknown to him, through the 
 intermediation of a third person 10,000 livres the year before 
 his death, 6 may be taken as a sign that he would not have 
 made a false declaration about a much smaller sum. Except 
 to the intermediator Moliere said nothing about this loan to 
 his father, he asked for no interest for the money, and the cir- 
 cumstance was not discovered until after his own death. Is it 
 likely, therefore, that he would have wished to cheat his co- 
 
 1 Soulie, Eecherches sur Moliere, 63 ; 215. 
 
 2 Ibid. 48 ; 227. 
 
 3 Ibid. 64, 228, 1st paragraph signed by Moliere, and 2nd paragraph 
 signed by Boudet. 
 
 4 Ibid. 64, 65 ; 234, 235. 5 Ibid. 65, with references in notes 2, 3, and 4. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 95 
 
 heirs about 2000 livres ? Taking his declaration as true, Soulie 
 has shown that Moliere received from his father no more than 
 3477 livres, thus leaving in his favour at his father's death an 
 unpaid balance of over 1500 livres. 
 
 It is evident that Jean Poquelin gave his children the 
 money due to them from their mother with a sparing hand. 
 He did not give his son Jean le jeune his money until he was 
 close upon thirty years of age, when the father sold his busi- 
 ness to his son ; he did not pay his daughter during her life- 
 time all that was owing to her ; and as to Moliere's share of 
 the inheritance, the facts which have come to light show that 
 the father was loth or unable to give money, or that his son 
 was unwilling to ask for it. Some French writers have 
 assumed that Jean Poquelin's once prosperous business had 
 declined very considerably. It is not known when Moliere 
 got the 890 livres for which he gave his father a receipt on the 
 Hth of April 1651. Moliere had then been absent from Paris 
 for some years ; for after the members of the Illustre The'atre 
 had failed so signally, the future dramatist and some of his 
 comrades left Paris and went strolling in the provinces. 
 
CHAPTEK V 
 
 STROLLING IN THE PROVINCES 
 
 SCARRON'S novel, Le I^gma/n^omi^^publishQd in 1651, may 
 serve nominally as an introduction to this chapter. The idea 
 present to the author's mind was that of a romance which 
 should tell of the doings of a company of strolling players in 
 a humorous manner. The term "la comedie" was used in 
 France in a wide sense, and meant a play of any kind acted 
 in a theatre; "aller a la comedie " meant going to the play." 
 ~And if the tastes of the Parisians can be taken as a guide, 
 provincial audiences expected that the company which came 
 to their town should be able to play tragedy as well as 
 comedy. But Scarron does not say much about the concerns 
 of a troop of strolling actors that would be most interesting to 
 us now. If he speaks of the performances given or of the 
 successes and failures of the troop, if he tells how the plays 
 were put on the stage, how_ the troop travelled from place to 
 place, and what were the usages and customs observed, he only 
 does so incidentally. He does describe in a way of his own 
 some of the adventures which he supposed might happen to a 
 band of provincial actors, the shifts they were put to, and how 
 they lived together among themselves. But he narrated the 
 events as they arose in his mind, without other wish than to 
 say what happened in the form of a novel. A tone of bur- 
 lesque, of buffoonery, runs through all his tale. Buffoonery 
 was Scarron's humour. The picture he has drawn is not 
 flattering, and perhaps it was his intention to paint in dark 
 colours rather than with a show of gay magnificence. If so, 
 it is probable that his novel gained in truth what it may have 
 lost in outward brightness. In spite of what is considered to 
 be the dulness common to most old novels, the Roman Comique 
 is written in a clear and rapid style ; but a modern reader who 
 refers to it with the idea of learning what were the theatrical 
 
 96 
 
CHAPTEE V 97 
 
 customs in France two hundred and fifty years ago may find 
 himself disappointed. The footnotes to M. Victor Fournel's 
 edition of this book, published in 1857, tell us much that 
 Scarron's first readers knew without explanation. It must not 
 of course be assumed that Scarron intended to depict Moliere 
 and his comrades during the first years of their travels in the 
 provinces. M. Louis Moland may be believed when he says 
 that " Le Roman Comique was not intended to show any one 
 special troop. What Scarron . . . had seen of provincial 
 actors furnished him with a colouring. His fancy led him to 
 imagine a troop of actors, and he introduced various incidents 
 which he had seen at various times." 1 The characteristics of 
 the personages in Scarron's novel are not so like what is known 
 of the principal actors in Moliere's troop as to lead one to suppose 
 that his imaginary persons were intended to show actual men 
 and women ; and the events which the novelist related are not 
 known to have happened in Moliere's troop. Scarron's novel 
 is fiction, as a novel of the present day is fiction ; two hundred 
 years hence people will refer to Mr. Vincent Crummies and 
 his company as we refer nowadays to the Roman Comique. 
 
 Nearly everything that is known about Moliere and his 
 comrades during the thirteen years between 1645 and 1658 
 has been obtained from scraps of information collected here 
 and there, telling that they were at a certain place at a more 
 or less certain time. Certificates of baptism and registers of 
 marriages, witnessed by one or more members of the troop, 
 form one large source of authority; or their presence has 
 been sometimes revealed by a request to the magistrates of 
 a town asking permission to allow theatrical representations. 
 Occasionally these were given in a large room or hall; but 
 tennis-courts, where they existed, were preferred. It must 
 always be remembered that Moliere's company gave perfor- 
 mances in other places than those of which any record has 
 been preserved. They probably played at the fairs, or they 
 may now and then have been invited by some nobleman to 
 give a performance at his chateau, though the instances have 
 not been related. Extremely little is known, however, of 
 instances of their successes and failures. It is hardly doubtful 
 that the greater number of plays they acted had already been 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, 2nd ed. i. &3. 
 G 
 
98 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 printed; in these there was no dramatic copyright. For 
 tragedy Corneille was more under requisition than any other 
 author, and some of his comedies may have been played. Also 
 the comedies of Scarron, Boisrobert, Desmarets and others; 
 and Kotrou, who wrote plays of all sorts, must have been seen 
 upon their boards. And Moliere's own two comedies, the 
 fitourdi and the D6pit Amoureux, were probably acted pretty 
 constantly during the last years of their strolling. It is 
 believed that Moliere wrote several farces while he was in the 
 provinces, and that these were acted to the great delight of 
 the country people; other farces, too, now quite unknown, 
 were probably acted and enjoyed. I shall be as brief as I can 
 with the dry bones of dates and names of places ; but in con- 
 nection with the subject other matter is sometimes introduced 
 which may perhaps lend a little interest to the narrative. 
 
 Soulie thought that Moliere and his friends who had been 
 so unlucky at the Illustre Theatre were preparing to leave 
 Paris at the end of the year 1646, 1 though later writers say, 
 probably with reason, that they must have left fully twelve 
 months earlier. 2 The actors had no cause to love Paris, and 
 they could do themselves no good by remaining there idle. 
 Madeleine Bejart had played in the provinces before ; to do 
 so again was her only hope. She was still under thirty years 
 of age, and what is known of her does not show her to be a 
 feckless woman. Moliere, too, was eager in his wish to 
 succeed. He had chosen his own career against his father's 
 wish, and he felt that he must go on with it. It was not love 
 for Madeleine Bejart that prompted him. He was driven on 
 by the earnestness and by the persistency of his own nature. 
 If he had had his youthful ambition, that had well-nigh dis- 
 appeared ; if there had been romance, that also had vanished. 
 The gilt had been taken off his gingerbread, but he would eat 
 his dry cake even though it choked him. It is probable that 
 the actors who volunteered to join in the new campaign were 
 few in number. That Moliere was accompanied by the four 
 Bejarts Joseph, Madeleine, Genevieve and Louis may be 
 conceded. And Marie Herve, the mother of the Bejarts, was 
 
 1 Recherches sur Moliere, 47. 
 
 2 Louis Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 2nd ed. i. 60 ; (Euvres de Moliere, 
 X. 102, 103. (Notice biof/raphique, by M. P. Mesnard.) 
 
CHAPTER V 99 
 
 with them for a few years. She was then au elderly woman, 
 and in the printed plays of the time elderly women did not 
 often have parts given to them. Not improbably she gave 
 her services as cook. As to the other members of the troop, 
 no one can guess who they were. Some of the old friends 
 may have clung together, or there may have been new recruits. 
 But it appears that the high-sounding title of the Illustre 
 Theatre was dropped. 1 All French acting companies were 
 strongly imbued with a spirit of republicanism, owning no 
 master to govern their actions ; still, there must have been one or 
 more ruling head to direct the affairs of the troop. As far as can 
 be judged, this responsibility was shared quite at first by Moliere 
 and Madeleine Bejart. If they were agreed in their counsels 
 most of their comrades would wish to follow their advice. 
 The one or two leaders would probably say in what towns the 
 troop should play, though all the actors had a voice in the 
 matter. There is a clause to this effect in a minute of agree- 
 ment between the actors of a strolling company passed in 
 Paris in the year 1664: "Et les voyages se feront dans les 
 villes et lieux qui seront accorde's entre eux a la pluralite des 
 voix, pour y repre'senter la comedie." 2 Even at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne in Paris matters were arranged on social principles, 
 no one being allowed to dictate his will or to expect obedience 
 except on the stage. This system had long been in force, and 
 it continued for many years. All strolling companies 
 governed themselves by the same laws, as far as circumstances 
 would permit, that prevailed at the two theatres in Paris. 
 
 It was customary in those days for strolling companies to 
 put themselves under the protection of some nobleman of 
 importance. He was their patron, and besides lending to 
 them the support of his name he gave them material assist- 
 ance. Moliere's name is now so well known that the actors 
 who played with him in the provinces are commonly spoken 
 of as belonging to " la troupe de Moliere," but for the first 
 few years of their strolling they were known as belonging to 
 " la troupe du due d'fipernon." This duke was then governor 
 of the province of Guienne ; and he was already the patron of 
 a troop of actors, headed by Charles Dufresue, when Moliere 
 
 1 Louis Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 2nd ed. i. 61. 
 
 2 Soulie, Recherches sitr Moliere, 211, first par. 
 
100 LIFE OF 
 
 and his friends became their allies the two companies joining 
 their forces together. The duke's protection, thus given to 
 Moliere, was first accorded probably late in 1645 or early in 
 1646. There is a tradition that Bordeaux was the first town 
 where Moliere acted in the provinces ; and though it seems 
 most likely now that, because the plague was strong there in 
 1646, he did not play at all in Bordeaux, he may nevertheless 
 have acted in a small neighbouring town or in some chateau 
 belonging to the Due d'fipernon, the governor of the province. 1 
 Dufresne was some years older than Moliere, and had a 
 longer theatrical experience. He saw that in Moliere's troop 
 there were at least two persons of more than ordinary intelli- 
 gence. Overtures were made, the companies were united, and 
 the post of captain, so far as it existed, was given to Dufresne. 
 It was then a less difficult matter to collect a company of 
 strolling players than to keep them together for a length of 
 time. When an engagement was made it might have lasted 
 from one Easter to another, the beginning and the close of the 
 theatrical year. For the while the actor belonged to the 
 troop, had his vote in its concerns and shared its fortunes ; 
 and he, like the older members, wished to maintain his feelings 
 of independence. Some actors, known as "gagistes," were 
 hired temporarily and were paid for their services, but they 
 did not belong to the troop. If the troop, known afterwards 
 as Moliere's, held together better than most others, it was, 
 perhaps, because they made more money. In later years 
 Moliere knew very well what he was saying when he cried in 
 a fit of vexation : " Ah ! les etranges animaux a conduire que 
 des comediens." 2 After the union between Dufresne and 
 Moliere, Dufresne became, nominally at least, the director of 
 the troop; he was now and again the spokesman of the com- 
 pany in petitioning the authorities of a town to be allowed 
 to give theatrical representations. In this way Dufresne's 
 presence argues Moliere's presence also. By degrees Moliere 
 came to the front ; his name stands forward while that of 
 Dufresne falls into the shade. But they continued to be 
 allies until the troop went to Paris in 1658. 
 
 1 Louis Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 2nd ed. i. 66, 67 ; (Euvres de Moliere, 
 x. 103-109 (Notice biographique, by Paul Mesnard) ; Arnaud Detcheverry, 
 Histoire des theatres de Bordeaux, 12-16. 
 
 2 Early in sc. 1 of the Impromptu de Versailles, 
 
CHAPTER V Am 
 
 In the autumn of 1647 Moliere was at Albi, now the capital 
 of the TarnTTn the south of France. In October of that year 
 the town of Albi gave 500 livres to the troop of actors 
 belonging to the Due d'fipernon, and the receipt for the money 
 was signed by Charles Dufresne, Rene Berthelot, and Pierre 
 Revelhon. 1 The name of this last man should read Reveillon, 
 but no great interest is attached to him. Rene Berthelot is 
 better known by his stage name du Pare ; he was the Gros 
 Rene in the Dtpit Amoureux, and he was the husband of a 
 handsome wife. When the patron of a strolling company did 
 not desire the presence of his actors, they were free to go 
 where they pleased, and it would seem that in 1647 Dufresne, 
 with Moliere and the Bejarts, played at Toulouse, Albi, and 
 Carcassonne, towns in the province of Languedoc. 2 
 
 From the south the troop went as far jiortlL_a&- Brittany. 
 The registers of the Hotel de Ville at Nantes show that on 
 the 23rd of April 1648, "le sieur Morlierre [sic] 1'un des 
 comediens de la troupe du sieur Dufresne," went to the office 
 and humbly asked to be allowed to play their comedies. After 
 a delay caused by the illness of the governor of the province, 
 Dufresne was sent for on the 1 7th of May, and was told that he 
 might give a performance the next day for the benefit of the 
 hospital of the town, according to the custom which other troops 
 of actors had observed. Dufresne complied with the stipulation 
 demanded, and the money taken at the door of the tennis- 
 court on the first day's performance was given to the hospital. 3 
 This hospital money, or means of taxing the theatre for the 
 benefit of the poor of the town, was an old institution. The 
 fine was levied, I believe, only on the first day ; on subsequent 
 days the actors were allowed to keep what they had earned. 
 
 After leaving Nantes, Dufresne went to Fontenay le Comte 
 in <La Vendee: and there on the 9th of June a petition was 
 granted to him in a court of law that one Benesteau should let 
 to him a tennis-court for twenty-one days, at the rate of seven 
 livres a day. 4 
 
 Nearly a year later Dufresne was at Toulouse ; and there on 
 
 1 L. Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 2nd ed. i. 69, 70 ; P. Mesnard, Notice 
 biographique sur Moliere, 107, 108. 
 
 2 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 113-115. 
 
 3 Benjamin Fillon, Recherckes sur le sejour de Moliere dans I' Quest de la 
 France en 1648, pp. 3, 4. 4 Ibid. 1. 
 
JD2- WlFE OF MOLlfiKE 
 
 the 16th of May 1649 Messieurs les Capitouls ordered that his 
 troop should be paid seventy-five livres for having "joue et 
 fait une coinedie" in honour of the arrival of the king's 
 lieutenant, the Comte de Eoure. 1 
 
 It would be difficult to say what effect the Civil War in 
 France, known as La Fronde, had upon Moliere's troop during 
 their travels. The Fronde broke out in Paris in 1648, and 
 for some months the theatres there were closed, and the actors 
 were under arms. 2 Skirmishing went on for some four years. 
 The number of new plays acted in Paris from 1648 to 1653 
 was rather less than half of those that had been acted from 
 1642 to 1647; and comparatively few new plays were acted in 
 Paris until the year 1659. 3 While the Fronde lasted the 
 people were in distress in many parts of the country ; and for 
 this reason, when Moliere made a request to the civic authori- 
 ties at Poitiers, on the 8th of November 1649, to be allowed 
 to come there " avec ses compagnons pour y passer un couple 
 de mois," the maire and his colleagues refused to give their 
 consent. 4 
 
 In the introductory chapter I mentioned Kotrou's name. 
 He wrote very many plays between 1628 and 1650; and for 
 an account of what a French provincial theatre was like in his 
 day, perhaps I may be allowed to quote part of a speech made 
 by ]douard Thierry, at one time administrator of the Comedie 
 Frangaise, on the occasion of the unveiling of a statue of 
 Kotrou at Dreux, in Normandy, in the year 1869. The extract 
 is from pages 120, 121, of a pamphlet called Rotrou le Grand, 
 published at Dreux in 1869 : 
 
 " There were at that time more troops of strolling companies than 
 those which were permanently stationed in one place. The same 
 customs governed them all. Performances were given when they 
 were possible. On each occasion they were announced by a drum 
 played in the street. A harlequin used to follow the drum, and all 
 the little children came out to see the fun. If the call was not re- 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 118, 119 (Notice biographique, by M. P. Mesnard). 
 
 2 (Euvres de P. Corneille, by Ch. Marty-Laveaux, v. 248-251. (Edition 
 des Grands Ecrivains de la France. ) 
 
 3 See the chronological table of plays at the end of the Histoire philo- 
 sophique et litteraire du theatre franqais, by Hippolyte Lucas (1843). 
 
 4 Bricauld de Verneuil, Moliere d Poitiers en 1648 et les comediens dans 
 cette ville de 1646 a 1658 ; 26, 27, and 55 ; Le Molieriste for January 1886 
 (vol. vii. 300, 301). 
 
CHAPTEE V 103 
 
 sponded to with sufficient liberality, somebody said a polite ' Thank 
 you ' to those who had been willing to disturb themselves, and the 
 thing was put off till the next day or that day week. But if it 
 happened that there might be a tolerable audience, the candles were 
 lighted and the performance began. The actors got their supper that 
 night ; for after each performance, the money taken at the doors was 
 put upon the table and the house-porter gave to each actor his share 
 of the receipts. To find a theatre was not difficult, though it might 
 not be so good as the Hotel de Bourgogne nor as the Theatre du 
 Marais. A tennis-court was hired ; at one end a raised platform was 
 erected with two primitive ladders by which the actors could descend 
 into the pit before the performance began and show themselves in 
 their fine clothes. The pourtour arid the galleries formed part of the 
 tennis-court, and the rope network put up to prevent the balls from 
 hitting the spectators were not taken down. The remembrance of 
 this is still preserved by the network in front of the pourtour in some 
 of our present theatres. The fine gentlemen had the privilege of 
 being allowed to sit on the stage. They pushed their chairs about 
 as they pleased, and they hid what was going on from the small 
 people in the pit. They used to get up during the performance, 
 gossip with the actresses behind the stage, talk in a noisy manner, 
 and oblige the actor who was playing to halt in the middle of his wail 
 of despair or of his cry of passion, so that silence might be observed." 
 
 This is a lively description of a provincial theatre in France 
 about the time that Moliere and his troop were strolling in 
 the country towns. It will be said in a later chapter how 
 men used to sit upon the stage and often behave themselves 
 badly. I have seen somewhere, though I cannot put my 
 finger on the authority, that in some provincial theatre a 
 player was so constrained in his movements that he uttered a 
 loud aside : " Allow me, my lord ; I must pass to kill Orestes." 
 Things may have been done a little better in the capital than 
 in the provinces, but a countryman going from Rouen to 
 Paris would not have found many material differences. 
 
 Two certificates of baptism witnessed by some members of 
 Moliere's comrades show that the Jroop was at .Narbonne, 
 in the province of Languedoc, in the winter of 164F-50. 1 3tT 
 one of these ceremonies Moliere was godfather to the child, 
 and was described as " Jean Baptiste Poquelin, valet de 
 chambre du Roy." The godmother signed herself Catherine 
 du Rose'. This was then the stage name of Catherine Leclerc. 2 
 
 1 Le Molierisle for April 1881 (vol. iii. 20, 21) ; L. Moland, (Euvres de 
 Moliere, 2nd ed. i. 75, 76; (Euvres de Moliere, x. 120, 121 (Notice bio- 
 graphique, by M. P. Mesnard). 2 Jal, Dictionnaire, 282, col. 1. 
 
104 LIFE OF 
 
 Mention is first made of her this winter at Narbonne. It is 
 most likely that she joined Moliere's troop at Lyons in 1653. 
 She was then married to an actor named de Brie, and as Mile, 
 de Brie for actresses were never called Madame she gave 
 most valuable service to Moliere's troop when she played in 
 Paris in after years. 
 
 From Narbonne the actors returned to the province of 
 Guienne, and on the 13th of February 1650 Dufresne appeared 
 before the municipal authorities at Agen to pay his respects 
 and to say that he had come there by the order of the 
 governor, the Due d'fipernon. 1 
 
 The duke remained at Agen until the 25th of July, when he 
 gave up the governorship of the province of Guienne, and 
 probably his patronage or "protection" of Moliere and his 
 friends ceased at the same time. At first his support had 
 doubtless been useful to the actors, but as they found that 
 they were at the beck and call of a nobleman who was every- 
 where very unpopular in his province, it is easy to suppose 
 that they were glad to be released from serving a master who 
 made himself generally disliked. 2 
 
 It was an object with strolling companies of importance 
 to go to the town where the Provincial States were holding 
 their session. The Provincial States Les tats Provinciaux 
 
 were something like our English County Councils, but with 
 larger powers. These assemblies, dating from the middle of 
 the 13th century, used to take place periodically. They were 
 held under the king's authority, and were presided over by a 
 nobleman appointed for that purpose. But every province 
 did not have the honour of holding a separate assembly of its 
 own. This was originally confined to the pays des Mats, a 
 name given in the ancient French monarchy to those pro- 
 vinces which, by virtue of treaties with the crown, had 
 maintained the right to govern themselves. The Provincial 
 States were in fact local parliaments, in which the church, the 
 nobility, and the tiers etat were represented. In the province 
 of Languedoc, which concerns us now, the clergy and the 
 nobles each sent twenty-three deputies; the tiers etat sent 
 sixty-eight. But lest the tiers etat should outvote the more 
 
 1 Adolphe Magen, La Troupe de Moliere cl Agen, 2nd ed. 21. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 121, 122 (Notice bioyraphique). 
 
CHAPTEE V 105 
 
 noble orders, their sixty-eight votes were counted as forty-six, 
 and these men were considerably under the influence of the 
 clergy and the nobility. 1 At all events, the number of 
 deputies was one hundred and fourteen, so that the town 
 where they met was often full while the session lasted. 
 There is a letter from an Archbishop of Toulouse, saying that 
 Montpellier was not suitable for the purpose, for it was a 
 town of pleasure ; that small towns such as Beziers or Pezenas 
 were more convenient, for there the deputies would soon get 
 tired, and be likely to do their business with greater despatch. 2 
 Eightly or wrongly, some of the deputies liked to amuse 
 themselves in the afternoon, and for this purpose an order 
 was often sent to a troop of actors commanding their presence. 
 There is some evidence to show that when strolling companies 
 were engaged in the service of the States, their travelling 
 expenses were defrayed by the province, 3 though it might be 
 hazardous to say this was always the case. From 1648 to 
 1658 sessions were held by the States annually in different 
 towns in the province of Languedoc. When, as was frequent, 
 the session began in the latter part of one year and finished in 
 the next, that session was said to belong to the year in which 
 it terminated. 4 
 
 An autograph receipt by Moliere for 4000 livres shows that 
 he and his friends were at Pezenas in December 1650, and 
 that they played there before the States. This session lasted 
 from the 24th of October 1650 to the 14th of January 1651. 
 The receipt was discovered by M. de la Pijardiere among the 
 departmental archives of the Herault, and was published by 
 him with a facsimile of the original in the Molieriste for 
 November 1885. 5 From the records of moneys spent by the 
 States during this session, M. de la Pijardiere gave the follow- 
 ing extract: "To the actors who have served for three 
 months while the States were on foot, the sum of four 
 
 1 Emmanuel Raymond, Histoire des peregrinations de Moliere dans le 
 Languedoc, 121. 
 
 2 Correspondance administrative sous le regne de Louis XIV., par G. B. 
 Depping (in the Collection des documents inedits sur 1'histoire de France), 
 vol. i. introduction, pp. xx, xxi. 
 
 3 Le Molieriste for August 1879 (vol. i. 142, 143). 
 
 4 There is an article by M. de la Pijardiere in the Molieriste for December 
 1880 (vol. ii. 264), where the places and dates of these sessions are given. 
 
 5 Vol. vii. 233. Another facsimile is given in the album to the (Euvres 
 de Moliere in the Collection des Grands Ecrivains de la France. 
 
106 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 thousand livres which has been paid to them after delibera- 
 tion of the States, and by their receipt 4000 livres." Then 
 follows the receipt written and signed by Moliere : 
 
 " J'ay receu de Monsieur de Penautier 1 la somme de quatre mille 
 livres ordonnees aux comediens par Messieurs les Etats. Faict a 
 Pezenas ce 17 e decembre mil six cent cinquante. 
 
 " Pour 4000 liv. MOLIERE /." 
 
 It may be seen that though the actors were paid for three 
 months' service, they had not served quite eight weeks when 
 they got their money. M. Mesnard thinks that as soon as 
 they were paid they were released from their engagement. 2 
 This facsimile of Moliere's handwriting, though it is only a 
 short receipt for money, is of interest. The writing is almost 
 as legible as print, in something of a running hand, but the 
 character of it is singularly bold and firm. Besides the mere 
 signature of his name, I think there is only one other known 
 instance of Moliere's handwriting. It will be spoken of 
 presently. Examples of Moliere's signature are not very . 
 uncommon. Jal reproduced two, 3 written in 1667 and in 
 1668; in the album of Moliere's works lately referred to there 
 are facsimiles of the poet's signature, written in 1662, 1668, 
 and 1672. Three of these are written " J. B. P. Moliere," and 
 two " J. B. Poquelin Moliere." And there is in the Manuscript 
 Room at the British Museum, among the Foreign Literary 
 Autographs, in Case vin., an instance of Moliere's signature 
 attached to a Notarial Certificate, dated 25th January 1664. 
 The character of all of these signatures is strongly the same, 
 and Moliere seems to have used the mark or sign following 
 his name consistently. 
 
 From what has been said and from what follows, I should 
 be inclined to date the pecuniary success of Moliere's strolling 
 in the provinces from about the latter part of the year 1650, 
 when mention is first made of his troop playing before the 
 States. Success may have come before this time, but perhaps 
 it will be seen upon the whole that for the remaining seven 
 or eight years that his troop were in the provinces they were 
 in easy circumstances as regards money. Henceforward 
 Moliere's name comes to the front, he is spoken of as though 
 
 1 Tresorier de la Bourse de Languedoc. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 122. 3 Dictionnaire, 874. 
 
CHAPTER V 107 
 
 he were the virtual head of the troop. Dufresne, on the other 
 hand, is not mentioned ; he was one of the company, but is 
 not now distinguishable from the other members. 
 
 In the spring of 1651 Moliere was in Paris. All that is 
 known of his visit there is that on the 14th of April in that 
 year he gave an acknowledgment that he had received 1965 
 livres from his father. 1 But there is no evidence to show 
 that he was accompanied by his friends. Samuel Chappuzeau, 
 the author of a volume called Le TIMtre Francois, published 
 at Lyons in 1674, from which I shall make a good many 
 extracts in a later chapter, says that few people in the pro- 
 vinces went to the theatre during Lent, but that at that time 
 strolling companies often went to Paris to learn good lessons 
 from the masters in the art of acting as well as to make new 
 engagements. Chappuzeau thought there might have been 
 some twelve or fifteen strolling companies in the provinces, 
 that the art of acting was first learned there, and that from 
 these strolling troops the best actors and actresses were taken 
 as they were wanted to fill the theatres in the capital. 2 The 
 theatrical customs in Chappuzeau's day had been doubtless 
 the same twenty years earlier. But there is nothing to show 
 that Moliere's comrades made any visit to Paris while they 
 were strolling in the provinces. In the year 1651 his troop 
 was pretty well filled ; there is reason to think that the actors 
 were learning their business satisfactorily in the country 
 towns, and one would say that they would not have under- 
 taken a journey to the capital without a definite object 
 before them. 
 
 In endeavouring to follow the traces of Moliere's wander- 
 ings through the provinces, when there is any fair indication 
 of his having been at a given place it is well to mention the 
 circumstance, though the interest in these bare details is not 
 of a lively kind. There are towns to which he is believed to 
 have gone, but at what period cannot be easily determined. 
 Among these places is Vienne in the Dauphine, some twenty 
 miles south of Lyons. M. Mesnard thinks that Moliere was 
 at Vienne in 1651, other writers say in 1653 or 1654. 3 And 
 
 1 Soulie, Eecherches sur Moliere, 48 ; 227, 228. 
 
 2 Page 134 of the modern edition of this book published in 1875. 
 
 3 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 124-26 ; Le Molieriste for June 1882 (vol. iv. 72). 
 
108 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 it is likely that he played at Carcassonne while the States of 
 Languedoc held their session there from the 31st of July 1651 
 to the 10th of January 1652. 1 
 
 From 1652 to 1655, both years more or less inclusive, 
 Moliere was a good deal at Lyons. It is not known when he 
 came or when he went, but during these years he probably 
 made Lyons his headquarters. On the 19th of December 
 1652, Pierre KeVeillon, one of his troop, was godfather to a 
 child christened in that town. 2 And at Lyons, on the 19th 
 of February 1653, J. B. Poquelin and Joseph Bejart signed 
 the marriage contract between Eene Berthelot, otherwise 
 du Pare, and Marquise Therese de Gorla. 3 The marriage itself 
 was solemnised at Lyons four days later, and was witnessed 
 by Dufresne and Reveillon. 4 Du Pare and his wife were then 
 members of Moliere's troop. Mile, du Pare is said to have 
 possessed beauty of an elevated kind, and perhaps for this 
 reason some writers have thought that Marquise was a nickname 
 given to her in a friendly way ; but it is more probable that 
 she was so christened. Jal 5 gives the year 1633, doubtfully, 
 as the date of her birth ; and her burial certificate, also given 
 by Jal, states that she died on. the llth of December 1668, 
 " aged about twenty-five years." Perhaps thirty-five years 
 was meant. Before she saw Moliere she had played in a troop 
 of clowns and mountebanks, of which her father was the head ; 
 and doubtless she was glad to find herself promoted into a 
 troop of actors who endeavoured to amuse in a more intelligent 
 manner. She and her husband were comrades with Moliere 
 for many years. 
 
 Mention was made a few pages back of Mile, de Brie, 
 and now Mile, du Pare is heard of for the first time. Both of 
 these actresses belonged to Moliere's troop in 1653, but' it is 
 not certain that either of them was a member of it before that 
 date. Mile, de Brie was then perhaps thirty-three years of age, 
 her figure was thin and graceful, and she continued to act at 
 least one young part until she retired from the stage in 1685. 
 
 1 Le Molieriste for September 1884 (vol. vi. 174-180) ; L. Moland, CEuvres 
 de Moliere, 2nd. ed. i. 81 ; P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 128. 
 
 2 C. Brouchoud, Les Origines du theatre a Lyon, 51. 
 
 3 Ibid. 31, 32 (the facsimile of this contract is given facing p. 56 of (Euvres 
 de Moliere, x. 129). 
 
 4 Brouchoud, work just cited, pp. 45, 46. 5 Dictionnaire, 936. 
 
CHAPTER V 109 
 
 We are told that Moliere loved both of these women, and tradi- 
 tion has said that Madeleine Bejart had been his mistress. If 
 all these reports are true, he must have had some embarrassing 
 moments. In the fourth paragraph of a libellous little book, 
 La Fameuse Comedienne on Histoire de la Gutrin auparavant 
 femme et veuve de Molikre, 1 probably first published at Frankfort 
 in 1688, and of which the authorship is not known, we read 
 that when Moliere and his friends arrived at Lyons they found 
 another troop of actors there in which were Mile, du Pare and 
 Mile, de Brie. Moliere, we are told, was charmed with the 
 good looks of Mile, du Pare, but she, hoping for a more glorious 
 conquest, treated him with disdain ; he therefore turned his 
 thoughts to Mile, de Brie, who received him more favourably. 
 Madeleine Bejart, the writer goes on to say, bore this attach- 
 ment with much pain, but as she saw she could not prevent it, 
 she consoled herself by exercising over Moliere an authority 
 which she had always maintained, and obliged him to conceal 
 his intercourse with Mile, de Brie ; and they remained for some 
 years on this understanding. It is impossible to prove or refute 
 these assertions now. Some of them may be more or less true, 
 though a good deal depends on the way one looks at them. 
 It is easy to say that in those days among a troop of actors 
 a husband's presence did not count for much, and that he 
 allowed his wife to go her own way so long as she did not 
 interfere with him. That does not mean that Moliere made 
 love openly to another man's wife. It may mean, however, 
 that there was a friendship, Platonic or not, between Moliere 
 and Mile, de Brie which her husband had neither the power 
 nor the inclination to prevent. But before accusing Mile, de 
 Brie of faithlessness to her husband, there should be some 
 grounds for the accusation better worthy of belief than the 
 pages of La Fameuse Comedienne. 
 
 The authorship of that book has been ascribed to Chapelle, 
 to La Fontaine, to Racine, and to an actress named Boudin, 
 of whom nothing is known except her name. On first thoughts 
 suspicion might easily fall upon Chapelle. M. Jules Bon- 
 nassies, however, published an edition of the book in 1870, 
 and at the end of a preliminary notice he refused to believe 
 
 1 Four years after Moliere's death his widow married an actor named 
 Gu6rin. 
 
110 LIFE OF MOLlfeKE 
 
 that Chapelle was its author. He thought that on the whole 
 the least unlikely theory is that it should be attributed to 
 Mile. Guyot, an actress, and that she was perhaps assisted by 
 a woman named Chasteauneuf, who was or had been the wife 
 of the portier at the Palais Royal theatre. M. Bonnassies is 
 well versed in the details of the French stage in the 17th 
 century, but I cannot think that either of the women just 
 named had much to do with the actual writing of the story 
 told. Their tongues may have been nimble enough, but I 
 doubt altogether that either knew how to write two lines 
 without showing an entire absence of any sort of literary 
 education. Possibly these women may have related the story 
 verbally, but the printed narrative shows that it was written 
 by some one who could say what he thought with a pen in his 
 hand. The responsibility was put upon Chapelle because of 
 his old friendship with Moliere, and because of an often told 
 tale, to be given in a later chapter, of a scene in the poet's 
 garden at Auteuil, for which Chapelle may, consciously or not, 
 have furnished the substance. Even assuming so much, it 
 would be unfair to Chapelle to say that, for all the rest of the 
 book, he had compiled or written at anybody's instruction a 
 pamphlet of spiteful garbage, showing a certain small intimacy 
 in Moliere's affairs and with the doings of his wife and later 
 of his widow. Paul Lacroix hinted that La Fontaine was 
 the author, but there is no evidence to justify the insinua- 
 tion. As to Eacine, he had for at least ten years before 
 this book appeared totally disconnected himself from the 
 stage and from persons belonging to it, and the charge 
 against him is unwarrantable. Like other books of its 
 kind, La Fameuse Comedienne should be received with caution. 
 It was dictated by ill-will chiefly against Moliere's widow, 
 and was not published until some thirteen years after the 
 poet's death. 
 
 While Moliere was at Lyons two important performances 
 took place there, but to neither of them can a certain date be 
 assigned. One of these was Corneille's tragedy Andromkde, 
 played some time before the autumn of 1653. 1 This play was 
 first acted in Paris in January 1650, and was printed in 
 March in the following year. The fact of the performance of 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 138 (Notice biographique). 
 
CHAPTEE Y 111 
 
 Corneille's tragedy by Moliere's troop at Lyons has been 
 revealed in a curious way. In a copy of the first edition of 
 the play which had belonged to the Comte de Pont de Veyle, 
 by the side of the names of each of the personages represented 
 was written the name of the actor who took that part at 
 Lyons. 1 If this list is trustworthy it shows with fair pro- 
 bability a pet name, " Mile. Menou," given to a little girl who 
 afterwards became Moliere's wife. She played the part of 
 Ephyre and had to recite only four lines. The list also shows 
 that many of the actors had to take more than one part ; and 
 there are some whose names are found for the first time in 
 connection with Moliere, though one cannot say whether they 
 were members of his troop or whether their engagements were 
 merely temporary. One name must be mentioned, that of 
 Mile, de Brie. She had three parts given to her to play 
 in the tragedy. Her husband also appeared as an actor, and 
 it is most likely that both of them had been enrolled in the 
 troop. 
 
 The other performance at Lyons about this time, and more 
 important for us now, was that of Moliere's first comedy, 
 L'fitourdi. This was the earliest of his plays if we except 
 < in%^rces"he wrote while in the provinces, but as to none of 
 which can a date be given and it was certainly produced for 
 the first time at Lyons. It is generally believed that the 
 fltourdi first ajxpeared on the stage in 1653; but from the 
 evidence it may be urged with at least equal reason that the 
 play was not acted until 1655. On the fourth page of his 
 Eegister, 2 La Grange, speaking of the fitourdi, says : " Cette 
 piece de theatre a ete repre'sentee pour la premiere fois a Lyon, 
 Fan 1655" The language of that sentence cannot be miscon- 
 strued. But in the preface to the first complete edition of 
 Moliere's plays, published in 1682, which is usually credited 
 to La Grange, and of which he must have shared the responsi- 
 bility if he did not write it for La Grange and Vivot were the 
 joint editors of the whole work are the words : " II [Moliere] 
 vint a Lyon en 1653, et ce fut la qu'il exposa au public sa 
 premiere comedie : c'est celle de VEtourdi" There should be 
 
 1 (Euvres de P. Comeille (ed. Marty Laveaux), v. 255 ; (Eurres de Moliere, 
 x. 136 (Notice Uographique). 
 
 2 I shall speak of La Grange's Register at the beginning of the next 
 chapter. 
 
112 LIFE OF M 
 
 no reasonable doubt what these words mean, though Despois 
 criticised them, 1 as they do not agree with what La Grange 
 had written in his Eegister twenty-three years earlier. La 
 Grange's testimony is the only authority on the matter. The 
 manuscript of his Eegister is still in existence, but not that of 
 the preface. Probably there has been a mistake between the 
 figures 3 and 5. French writers have generally followed the 
 date given in the preface, and have said that the titourdi was 
 first performed in 1653. They have, very naturally, thought 
 that La Grange would have taken pains to be careful in his 
 last words about his late intimate friend whose plays he was 
 editing. On the other hand, I am disposed to think that after 
 La Grange had joined Moliere's company in Paris at Easter, 
 1659, and many of those who had taken part in the perform- 
 ance at Lyons still belonged to the troop, human memory 
 would be fresher and more trustworthy than twenty-three 
 years later when the preface was written. At that time both 
 Moliere and most of his old comrades were dead, and Mile, de 
 Brie is the only one of those who played with him at Lyons 
 who is now known to have been alive and in Paris in the year 
 1682. Both the editors of Moliere's plays in the edition to 
 which I usually refer Eugene Despois, and after his death 
 M. Paul Mesnard refuse to pronounce affirmatively in favour 
 of either year, though M. Mesnard evidently inclines to the 
 later one. 2 M. Louis Moland holds to the earlier date. 3 No 
 direct record appears to have been left expressing approbation 
 of the new play. But it will be seen presently that Moliere 
 stayed all the summer of 1655 at Lyons, and that fact may 
 lead one to think that the fitourfti was well enjoyed by the 
 Lyons public. It will be better to defer speaking of the 
 comedy in this play until the next chapter. 
 
 Some time in 1653, perhaps early in September, 4 Moliere 
 saw again the Prince de Conti, his former schoolfellow. Conti 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, i. 80. "This sentence means only one thing: that 
 the first performance of the Atourdi took place at Lyons after 1652, but it 
 does not specify the date." 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, vol. i. , Notice on the Etourdi, by E. Despois, specially 
 pp. 84, 86 ; and M. Mesnard's Notice biographique sur Moliere, pp. 133, 154, 
 161, 162. 
 
 3 (Euvres de Moliere, by Louis Moland, 1st ed. vol. i. p Ixiii and 2nd ed 
 vol. i. 82 ; 95. 
 
 4 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 150. 
 
CHAPTER V 113 
 
 had left Bordeaux in August, and he sent his mistress, Madame 
 de Calvimont, whom Sainte-Beuve describes as being as " silly 
 as she was handsome," to his chateau, La Grange, near Pe'zena? 
 Among the prince's household were Sarrasin his secretary, a- 
 the abbe de Cosnac, the first gentleman of his chamber, late 
 Bishop of Valence and afterwards Archbishop of Aix. Cosnac 
 has left a curious account of how Moliere was summoned to 
 appear before the prince : 
 
 " As soon as she [Madame de Calvimont] came to live at La Grange, 
 she wished that a troop of actors should be summoned. As I was 
 entrusted with the prince's private purse I had to negotiate the 
 matter. I had heard that Moliere's company was in Languedoc, and 
 I sent word to them to come to La Grange. While this troop was 
 preparing to obey my orders, another troop headed by one Cormier 
 arrived at Pezenas. The prince's natural impatience and the presents 
 made to Madame de Calvimont by Cormier's troop prevailed, and 
 their services were bespoken. When I told the prince that by his 
 order I had engaged Moliere, he answered that lie had engaged 
 Cormier, and that it was more fitting that I should break my word 
 than that he should break his. In the meantime Moliere arrived, 
 and when he asked that his travelling expenses at least should be 
 paid, I could not satisfy him, though there was much justice in his 
 demand. M. le prince de Conti thought well to hold to his own opinion 
 in such a trifling matter. This unfair dealing annoyed me so much 
 that I determined that Moliere and his friends should show them- 
 selves on the stage at Pezenas, and I gave them a thousand ecus of 
 my money rather than break my word to them. When they were 
 ready to open their theatre in the town, the prince, importuned by 
 Sarrasin, whom I had enlisted on my side, found that his honour was 
 in question after what I had done. He allowed them, therefore, to 
 give one performance at La Grange. This did not please Madame de 
 Calvimont, consequently the prince did not like it, though everybody 
 else thought them infinitely superior to Cormier's troop, both in their 
 acting and in the magnificence of their costumes. A few days after- 
 wards they played again, and Sarrasin, by dint of extolling their 
 praises, made the prince see that he must employ Moliere in place of 
 Cormier. Sarrasin had watched them and had upheld them from the 
 first on my account ; but later, becoming smitten with Mile, du Pare, 
 he thought of furthering his own ends. He brought Madame de 
 Calvimont to his way of thinking, and not only did he get Cormier's 
 troop sent away, but he obtained a pension for Moliere's." l 
 
 In this affair the narrator of the story, then a young man of 
 twenty-three, appears to the best advantage ; but one would 
 like to know if he told quite the truth when he said that " he 
 
 1 Mtmoires de Daniel de Cosnac, published by the Societe de Phistoire de 
 France, i. 126-128. 
 
 H 
 
114 LIFE OF MOLltiKE 
 
 gave Moliere's troop a thousand ecus [three thousand francs] 
 of his money." It would seem, however, that Moliere was for- 
 tunate in having in his company a handsome woman to engage 
 the attentions of Sarrasin. M. Mesnard may well be right in 
 thinking that, as Cosnac does not mention the title of any play 
 acted before the Prince de Conti in the autumn of 1653, it is 
 probable that the fitourdi was not acted then. A clever- 
 witted man like Cosnac would have noticed the brightness of 
 the verses in Moliere's play, he would have seen that the 
 sparkle of fun in that comedy was much stronger than in 
 other comedies of the time. 
 
 Both Soulie* l and M. Mesnard 2 think that it was about the 
 end of 1653 that Moliere's troop obtained a pension from the 
 prince, and that they first became known by the title of " les 
 come'diens du Prince de Conti." 
 
 From Pezenas, Moliere probably went to Montpellier. 3 He 
 was godfather to a child christened there on the 6th of January 
 1654, and in the certificate of baptism he was described as 
 " valet de chambre du Eoy." 4 It is likely that he stayed there 
 for some weeks, as the States held their session that year at 
 Montpellier. Two baptismal certificates seem to show that 
 his troop was at Lyons on the 8th of March. 5 Authorities 
 differ as to whether he remained at Lyons during the summer 
 of 1654, but two of his comrades, Eeveillon and Mile, du Pare, 
 were there on the 3rd of November in that year. 6 
 
 It is tolerably certain that the troop played before the 
 States at Montpellier during the session of 1655 ; and it was 
 probably in the carnival of that year 7 that there was a gala 
 performance of a ballet, known in its printed form as " Le 
 Ballet des Incompatibles, dansd a Montpellier devant Mgr. le 
 prince et Mme. la princesse de Conty." Twelve months, more 
 or less, previously, the prince had married in Paris, Anne 
 Martinozzi, niece of Cardinal Mazarin ; and very likely the 
 ballet had been composed in her honour. Those who took part 
 in it were chosen from the gentlemen of the prince's household, 
 
 1 Revue du Lyonnais, 3rd series, vol. i. 291. 
 
 2 Notice biographique sur Moliere, 154. 3 Ibid. 155. 
 
 4 Le Molieriste for May 1879 (vol. i. 45). 
 
 5 Brouchoud, Les Origines du theatre a Lyon, documents ii., iii. 
 
 6 Ibid., document iv. 
 
 7 (Euvres de Moliere, i. 524 ; Le Molieriste for April 1887 (vol. ix. 24). 
 
CHAPTEK V 115 
 
 from those who had been called to serve in the States, and 
 certain parts were given to some of the actors in Moliere's 
 troop but they were not required to dance. At that time it 
 was not thought right that any woman should take a part in 
 the performance of court ballets ; a generation later they did 
 so, and the custom was introduced among the nobility. 1 
 Ballets were always considered as aristocratic amusements. 
 The title "Le Ballet des Incompatibles " meant that the 
 different personages forming part of it were of a very hetero- 
 geneous character. A printed copy of the pamphlet the 
 programme or "livre," as it was then called was found by 
 Paul Lacroix, who reprinted it twice in the conviction that it 
 was written by Moliere. 2 Despois also printed this ballet in 
 the appendix to the first volume of the CEuvres de Moliere, but 
 he did not think that the future dramatist was its author, 
 though perhaps he may have written a small part of it. His 
 opinion, I believe, is general. 
 
 As a mark of respect to the prince, Joseph Bejart dedicated 
 to him a book on the heraldry of the nobility of Languedoc. 
 The book was published at Lyons in 1655, and it will be 
 said presently that the States gave him 1500 livres for it. 
 
 Moliere's troop were now known as " les comediens de son 
 Altesse le Prince de Conti." They were in receipt of a pension 
 from their patron, and they were bound in a measure to be 
 under his orders. Grimarest says that during this session at 
 Montpellier, the prince had entrusted to Moliere the manage- 
 ment of all the entertainments; and he adds a story which 
 has the merit of being engaging. 3 Conti wanted to make 
 Moliere his secretary, but Moliere begged leave to be ex- 
 cused : 
 
 " Ah ! gentlemen," he said to those who urged him to accept the 
 offer, " we ought not to misplace ourselves. If I can believe public 
 opinion, I am a tolerable author, but I might make a very bad secre- 
 tary. I amuse the prince by the pieces I play before him, but I 
 should annoy him by serious work badly done. Do you think, too, 
 
 > . > ! 
 
 1 The best and fullest account of the ballets de cour has been given by 
 M. Victor Fournel in the second volume of his Gontemporains dt Moliere. 
 
 2 At the end of his little book, La Jeunesse de Moliere ; and the same 
 subject forms one of the small volumes of the Collection Molieresque, to which 
 there is an Introduction. 
 
 3 Vie de Moliere, 13, 14. 
 
116 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 that a misanthrope, such as I am, capricious even, if you like, can be 
 of any use to a great man 1 My ways are not flexible enough for such 
 domesticity. And more than all that, what would become of those 
 people who have come with me from so far ? Who would lead them ? 
 They count upon me, and I should reproach myself if I were to 
 abandon them." 
 
 There is a lifelike character about this story that makes it 
 interesting, though, unfortunately, no date can be given to the 
 circumstance related. Whether Moliere had then written the 
 fitourdi or not is uncertain ; if not, he had composed some of 
 his farces. But he had seen enough of the ways of the grands 
 seigneurs to know that he of all men was not fitted for the 
 post offered to him. And he did not wish to surrender his 
 liberty and jeopardise the fate of those who were dependent 
 upon him, in order to become the factotum of a royal prince. 
 He felt, too 
 
 " The wish which ages have not yet subdued 
 In man to have no master save his mood." 
 
 From Montpellier the troop went again to Lyons, passing 
 by Mont&imart. There, on the 18th of February 1655, 
 Madeleine Bejart lent to one Antoine Baratier 3200 livres. 
 She never saw her money again. After her death some of it 
 may have been recovered, though there was endless cheating 
 on the part of Baratier and of his widow. 1 And on the 1st of 
 April in that year Madeleine Bejart is said to have lent 
 10,000 livres to the province of Languedoc, 2 but this circum- 
 stance has not been fully verified. 
 
 Moliere was at Lyons on the 29th of April, for on that day 
 he and four of his friends signed the marriage certificate of 
 two of their comrades ; 3 and the troop remained there until 
 October. 4 
 
 At Lyons Moliere met Charles Coypeau d'Assouci, a poor 
 burlesque writer. M. Mesnard says of him happily enough 
 that he was " much further from being a fool than a madman." 
 Though d'Assouci has left behind him an unfortunate reputa- 
 tion, and in after years he fell under Boileau's lash, he sang 
 
 1 Soulid, Reclierckes sur Moliere, 48, 49 ; E. Campardon, Nouvelles pieces 
 sur Moliere, 113, 128. 
 
 2 Louis Lacour, Le Tartuffe par ordre de Louis XIV., 99-111. 
 
 3 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 161. 
 
 4 Ibid. 164. 
 
CHAPTER V 117 
 
 the praises of Moliere and his friends in prose and in verse. 1 
 But whenever a man does not stand well in the world's esteem, 
 people generally do not believe all that he says. D'Assouci 
 meant that when he was in trouble Moliere and the Bejarts 
 comforted him and gave him food to eat. Probably on his 
 side he made himself an amusing table companion. But he 
 remembered the hospitality shown to him and was grateful. 
 
 D'Assouci said that he went with Moliere down the Ehone 
 as far as Avignon. There the troop received an order to go 
 to Pezenas, where the States met on the 4th of November. 2 
 
 I said a few pages back that M. de la Pijardiere had found 
 a receipt for money from the States of Languedoc, written 
 and signed by Moliere at Pezenas in December 1650. But 
 M. de la Pijardiere had made a previous similar discovery 
 also a receipt for money, written and signed by Moliere at 
 Pezenas under similar circumstances, dated 24th of February 
 1656. This he published in a pamphlet in 1873, with a 
 facsimile of Moliere's handwriting. 3 The latter written ac- 
 knowledgment runs : 
 
 " fay recu de Monsieur le Secq thresorier de la bource des E stats 
 du languedoc la somme de six mille liures a nous accordez par messieurs 
 du Bureau des comptes de laquelle somme ie le quitte. Faict a Pezenas 
 ce vingt quatriesme iour de feburier 1656. 
 
 MOLIERE /. 
 quittance de six mille liures." 
 
 The character in both of these instances of Moliere's hand- 
 writing is what might be called old style, when men wrote 
 less quickly than they do now and took more pains to form 
 their letters ; but both specimens present the same features in 
 a clear and firm hand. They show, as M. de la Pijardiere 
 says, "a man sure of himself." 4 These two receipts are, I 
 believe, the only instances of Moliere's handwriting that have 
 been preserved, with the exception of some bare signatures of 
 
 1 Aventures burlesques de Dassouci, ed. Colombey, chap. ix. 
 
 2 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique de Moliere, 169. 
 
 3 Rapport sur la decouverte d'un autographe de Moliere, pre'sente' a M. le 
 Prefet de 1'Herault, par M. de la Pijardiere, archiviste du departement. 
 Montpellier, 1873. Another facsimile of this receipt is given in the album 
 of the (Euvres de Moliere to which I usually refer. 
 
 4 In the Molieriste for July 1886 (vol. viii. 110) there is an article, Moliere 
 juge par son ecriture, by the Abbe Michon, who had previously written a 
 volume on the handwritings of Frenchmen since the Merovingian era ! 
 
118 LIFE OF 
 
 his name. Other examples have been put forward, but they 
 have been found to be spurious. 
 
 M. de la Pijardiere was very strongly of opinion that 
 this sum of 6000 livres was given to the troop under 
 pressure from the Prince de Conti ; and he says that although 
 all smaller sums granted by the States are duly recorded in 
 the official minutes, there is no mention in these reports of 
 the large amount given to Moliere and his comrades. 1 This 
 was not the case in December 1650, when Moliere gave the 
 States an acknowledgment for 4000 livres. And there is 
 also no official record of 1500 livres which the States granted 
 this session to Joseph Bej'art for his book on heraldry which 
 he dedicated to the Prince de Conti and presented to the 
 States. Bejart, however, got his money and gave his receipt 
 for it on the 24th of February 1656. 2 
 
 The author of a volume already mentioned tells a story 
 with some diffuseness, to the effect that after the close of the 
 session of the States at Pezenas on the 26th of February 1656, 
 the Prince de Conti gave Moliere an order for payment of 5000 
 livres to be charged on the taxes of the province. 3 It would 
 seem that the prince had no right to do this, and that the 
 order was not signed by the treasurer. Eaymond was the 
 first writer who mentioned this matter. Apparently he took 
 his story from the proceedings in a court of law, but he related 
 them two hundred years after they took place without giving 
 any authority by which his statements can be controlled. 
 The whole affair has not yet come to light, though it may be 
 that the prince's order for 5000 livres was for an arrear of 
 pension due from him to the troop which bore his name. 4 
 
 From Pezenas Moliere and his comrades went to Narbonne, 
 and there on the 26th of February 1656 leave was given to 
 them to play in the hall belonging to the consuls of the town. 5 
 The use of the hall had been granted to them for a fortnight, 
 
 1 Rapport sur la decouverte d?un autographe de Moliere, 13. 
 
 2 Ibid. 8 and note. 
 
 3 Emmanuel Raymond, Histoire des peregrinations de Moliere dans le 
 Languedoc, 103-153. 
 
 4 Jules Loiseleur, Points obscurs de la vie de Moliere, 179-182 ; Le Molieriste 
 for August 1885 (vol. vii. 149, 150) ; P. Mesnard, Notice bioyraphique sur 
 Moliere, 177, 178. 
 
 5 Le Molieriste for April 1881 (vol. iii. 22, 23) ; P. Mesnard, Notice bio- 
 graphique sur Moliere, 176, 177- 
 
CHAPTEE V 119 
 
 but it is impossible to say how long Moliere remained at 
 Narbonne. A troop of actors, whether his or not is uncertain, 
 was there on the 12th of June ; x but he cannot be traced with 
 sureness until the November or December following, when he 
 was certainly at Beziers. 
 
 We have seen that the Prince de Conti was for a while 
 Moliere's friend, and that the troop bore his highness's name, 
 but now we must take our leave of him. Some time in the 
 year 1656 Conti had been admonished by Nicolas Pavilion, 
 Bishop of Aleth, and he had gone to Paris intending -to lead a 
 new and a better life. Sainte-Beuve says that after his con- 
 version " he changed his conduct, but his character remained 
 unaltered. He went to extremes both before and afterwards." 2 
 From a weak-minded man of uncertain temper no real change 
 for the good was to be expected. At one time he was the 
 friend and protector of a troop of actors, and some years 
 after his conversion he wrote a treatise against the stage, 
 denouncing it with all the fury of a fanatic. His TraiU de la 
 Com6die et des Spectacles, etc., published at the end of 1666, 
 was a posthumous work, for he died early in that year. By 
 nature Conti was cruel and a bully, and his newly found 
 religion did not teach him charity. 3 
 
 I will now tell a few stories that have been related of 
 MoIieTe as happening about ^his time. The future dramatist 
 on one of his journeys is said to have lost his wallet with 
 some of his early farces/ As heTwas going from Gignac to 
 Montagnac his pack became unfastened and dropped from the 
 saddle of his horse. Moliere, as soon as he perceived his loss, 
 turned back to make inquiries for his wallet, but to no pur- 
 pose. It was gone. Some time afterwards he related the 
 event and said : " How could I have helped losing it ? 1 had 
 left Gignac, I was at Brignac, I was going to pass Lavagnac 
 on the way to Montagnac; among all the gnacs I lost my 
 wallet." 4 ' 
 
 A drinking-fountain had been erected at Gignac, and the 
 
 1 Le Molieriste for April 1886 (vol. viii. 19, 20). 
 
 2 Port-Royal, 3rd ed. v. 33. 
 
 3 See a letter written by Racine to Vitart, 25th July 1662, given by 
 M. Paul Mesnard in the (Euvres de Racine, vi. 497. An extract of this 
 letter is given by Sainte-Beuve, Port- Royal, v. 34, 35. 
 
 4 Altered from the story given by Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 
 17, 18. 
 
120 LIFE OF MOLlfiRE 
 
 magistrate of the town caused an inscription to be engraved 
 upon it : 
 
 "Quse fuit ante fugax, arte perennis erit." 
 
 Moliere passed by one day and saw an admiring crowd 
 collected wondering what these words meant. He gave as his 
 translation : 
 
 " Avide observateur, qui voulez tout savoir, 
 Des anes de Gignac c'est ici 1'abreuvoir." 
 
 Then the* magistrate caused this inscription also to be 
 engraved upon the fountain. 1 " Abreuvoir " means a watering- 
 place for cattle, so Moliere revenged himself for the loss of his 
 wallet. 
 
 Moliere's armchair at Pezenas is one of his few relics that 
 have been preserved, though at one time it was thought that 
 it had perished in the fire at the Odeon theatre in Paris in 
 1799. The Ode'on was then the home of the Comedie 
 Franchise. A few words may be said about the chair. Before 
 cafe's were introduced into France, the barber's shop was one of 
 the places where loungers used to meet to see their friends 
 and talk over the news of the day. We have seen that 
 Moliere's troop was a good deal at Pezenas, and at that time 
 there was in the town a barber named Gely, whose shop was 
 well known, and there every market-day Moliere used to go 
 to hear what the world of Pezenas was talking about, and 
 observe the manners of the people. He would note the words 
 of the speakers and watch their faces. This was a natural 
 habit with him; it was his way of learning how thoughts 
 passed in men's minds. He was a very close observer, and 
 would see more in five minutes, and see it better whether in 
 a barber's shop or elsewhere than another would see in an 
 afternoon. The power of keen, quick, and accurate observa- 
 tion is given only to a few, and it is one of the most distinc- 
 tive and important features in those who have it. Tradition 
 says that Moliere, when he went into barber Gely's shop, 
 used to sit in a large armchair with a very high, straight back. 
 He was liked and respected in the place, and when it became 
 known in Pezenas many years later that he had been a great 
 mah in Paris, the chair was prized all the more highly. This 
 
 1 Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 17. 
 
CHAPTEE V 121 
 
 chair, made of walnut, bears now the honourable name of " le 
 fauteuil de Moliere." It stands 6 ft. 4 in. high, the seat is 
 20 in. high by 22 wide and 16 deep. A picture and descrip- 
 tion of it are given in the Magasin Pittoresque, quatrieme 
 annee (1836), pp. 247, 248. The first written notice of it was 
 in a letter dated " Pezenas, 7 Ventose an 7" (19 January 
 1800), addressed by Poitevin de Saint Cristol to Cailhava, and 
 published by the latter in his volume Etudes sur Molikre. 1 
 ^douard Fournier traced the history of the chair, 2 and said 
 that it had been brought to Paris early in the 1 8th century. 
 The owner tried in vain to sell it, so it was taken back to 
 Pe'zenas. But in 1873 it was brought again to Paris for the 
 Muse'e Moliere, and in Paris it has since remained. 
 
 We come now to Moliere's second comedy, Le D6pit 
 Amoureux. Speaking of this play, La Grange says on the 
 fourth page of his Kegister : " Cette piece de theatre a e'te 
 represented pour la premiere fois a Beziers, Tan 1656 " ; and this 
 testimony has been nowhere contradicted. The first perform- 
 ance is believed to have taken place on the l&th of November. 3 
 But the Prince de Conti was not there ; he did not enforce 
 his wishes upon the deputies of the province. When the 
 prince ceased to preside over the States the deputies were less 
 friendly to Moliere's troop, and at an official meeting on the 
 16th. of December the majority of them complained that the 
 actors were giving to the members of the States free passes 
 into the theatre with the hope of getting some reward, and it 
 was determined to tell the actors to withdraw these orders, 
 and that no recompense should be given. 4 Probably enough 
 there had been some cause for friction which has not been 
 explained. At the same time, the deputies did not decline 
 very graciously the offer of free seats from the troop, who, as 
 they had received past favours, desired, not unnaturally, to 
 show that they were grateful. 
 
 The Dtpit Amoureux will be spoken of in the next chapter, 
 after the Etourdi. 
 
 1 P. 305. See also the Molitriste for November 1881 (vol. iii. 238). 
 
 2 Roman de Moliere, 175 et seq. 
 
 3 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 485, showing a correction 
 in his text on p. 183. 
 
 4 De la Pijardiere, Rapport sur la ddcouverte d'un autographe de Moliere, 
 15, 16. 
 
122 LIFE OF MOLIliKE 
 
 Joseph Bejart wrote a second book on heraldry, which he 
 presented to the States this session. But the deputies did not 
 want the book, or they disliked having to pay for it. They 
 had given him 1500 livres for his first volume, and he was 
 now petitioning again. The States voted him 500 livres, but 
 declared they would pay nothing more for any other book 
 unless it was written by their order. 1 
 
 The session of 1657 at Beziers lasted until the 1st of June. 
 There is no reason for thinking that the deputies made any 
 payment to Moliere's troop that winter, nor can it be said how 
 long the actors remained at Beziers. Very likely they went 
 from there to Lyons, for the registers of the Hotel Dieu at 
 Lyons show that on the 19th of February 1657 there was a 
 theatrical performance in the town for the benefit of the poor, 
 which brought 234 livres to the hospital after 14 louis d'or 
 (154 livres) had been deducted for the actors. 2 Some writers 
 have thought that Madeleine Bejart was at Nimes on the 2nd 
 of April. 3 The troop appears to have been at Lyons on the 
 15th of May, for on that day the Prince de Conti wrote to his 
 confessor, the abbe Ciron: "II y a des comediens ici qui 
 portoient autrefois mon nom ; je leur ai fait dire de le quitter, 
 et vous croyez bien que je n'ai eu garde de les aller voir." 4 
 
 From Lyons Moliere went to Dijon. 6 Though Conti had 
 told the actors that they were no longer to bear his name, the 
 order was not obeyed immediately, for the municipal registers 
 of Dijon show that on the 15th of June in this year permis- 
 sion was granted to " les comediens de M. le prince de Conti " 
 to give performances in the tennis-court known as La Poisson- 
 niere. But the actors were to pay 90 livres to the hospital for 
 the poor ; and they were not allowed to charge more than 
 20 sous when the pieces played were new, and when they 
 were old not more than 10 sous. 6 
 
 I will copy here " Une affiche de comediens en 1662," as 
 given by M. Monval in the periodical under his management. 7 
 
 1 De la Pijardiere, Rapport sur la decouverte d'un autographe de Moliere, 
 16 note. 
 
 2 J. Loiseleur, Points obscurs de la vie de Moliere, 211 and note. 
 
 3 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 188 ; Emile Campardon, 
 Nouvelles Pieces sur Moliere, 118. 
 
 4 Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, 3rd ed. v. 33. 
 
 5 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 189. 
 
 6 Henri Chandon, La Troupe du Roman Comique, 72. 
 
 7 Le Molieriste for May 1886 (vol. viii. 33-35). 
 
CHAPTER V 123 
 
 It will be seen that this affiche or playbill was issued by the 
 troop belonging to the Prince de Conde* Conti's brother but 
 in all probability the playbills of different strolling companies 
 were not much unlike. It would have been more interesting 
 if a playbill issued by Moliere had been found, but these relics 
 of the 17th century are scarce. The affiche published by 
 M. Monval runs as follows : 
 
 "LES COMfiDIENS 
 DE SON ALTESSE S&RENISSIME 
 MONSEIGNEUR LE PRINCE 
 
 " Nous ne pouvons pas faire mieux connoitre Ten vie que nous 
 avons de plaire a tout le beau Monde, dont tous les jours nous sommes 
 honorez de la presence, qu'en leur donnant aujourd'huy 16 Novembre 
 Vne magnifique Representation de 1'incomparabe EUDOXE de M 
 DE SCUDERY. La vertu de cette grande Princesse est si approuvee 
 qu'elle dort seruir d'exemple a toutes les dames de venir a sa repre- 
 sentation, dont sans doute Elles n'emporteront vne satisfaction 
 entiere. Ensuite vous aurez la comedie du COCU IMAGINAIRE qui 
 vaudra seul la piece de vingt sols. En attendant le Grand 
 SERTORIUS. 
 
 " C'est au lieu ordinaire a trois heures precises." 
 
 This playbill does not mention the name of any place, but 
 the absence of such indication, and the fact that the only date 
 given is the 16th of November, made M. Monval think that 
 Conde's troop of actors were staying for the time in some 
 large town. And the words at the end, " C'est au lieu ordi- 
 naire," tend perhaps towards this supposition. The suggested 
 date, 1662, is at any rate approximate. Scudery's Eudoxe 
 gives no clue, for that play had been printed in 1642; the 
 Cocu Imaginaire was a one-act comedy by Moliere, first played 
 in Paris in May 1660; and the promise that Corneille's 
 Sertorius was to be acted a day or two hence shows that the 
 playbill could not have been issued before 1662, for that play 
 was first brought out in Paris in February in the same year. 
 M. Monval thinks that the provincial audience was to be 
 treated to an early representation of the tragedy of the great 
 dramatist. The remark near the end of the playbill that the 
 performance of the Cocu Imaginaire was alone worth twenty 
 sous, seems to show that the comediens de M. le Prince charged 
 
124 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 the public at a higher rate than was allowed to Moliere's 
 troop when they were at Dijon in 1657. I cannot say if 
 strolling companies ever doubled the prices in the greater part 
 of the theatre, as was sometimes the case in Paris when a new 
 play was performed ; but Moliere's comedy was not then a new 
 play. It would perhaps be unsafe to make a conjecture as to 
 how much was the entrance money into the pit of a provincial 
 theatre at this time. If Le Boulanger de Chalussay can be 
 trusted, it was only five sous. 1 But he was speaking quite 
 generally, as though in all towns the price was the same ; or 
 as he was sneering at Moliere's early attempts on the stage, 
 perhaps he wished to give a low estimate of what Moliere 
 thought he could ask from the public. It may be, however, 
 that in large towns the charge made was generally higher than 
 in smaller places. 
 
 We have seen that Moliere was at Dijon in June 1657. 
 From there he probably returned to the south. The States of 
 Languedoc opened their session on the 8th of October at 
 Pe'zenas, and if Moliere then went to play before the deputies, 
 he found himself in the presence of a rival troop belonging to 
 the Duke of Orleans, which had been called officially. The fact 
 that such an order was given to a company of actors under the 
 patronage of the Duke of Orleans, seems to show that they 
 were preferred to Moliere and his comrades. M. Mesnard says 
 that a meeting of two rival troops in the town where the 
 States were sitting was a very ordinary occurrence. 2 He is of 
 opinion that Moliere was at Pezenas in the latter part of 1657, 
 and quotes a story from Grimarest showing that Moliere, some 
 years later, said that he had acted with one Mondorge who, at 
 the time of which we are now speaking, was an actor in the 
 troop belonging to the Duke of Orleans. 
 
 Probably at the end of 1657 Moliere made the acquaintance 
 of Mignard, the artist, at Avignon ; and perhaps it was here 
 that Mignard painted the portrait of Moliere as Caesar in 
 Corneille's tragedy Pompde. At that time Moliere was nearly 
 thirty-six, and the portrait shows a man of about that age. 
 Mignard was apparently on terms of close friendship with the 
 Bdjarts ; for in 1 664 he signed the marriage contract of Genevieve 
 
 1 Elomire Hypocondre, Act iv. sc. 2 of the Divorce Comique (p. 80, ed. 
 1867). 2 Notice biographique sur Moliere, 190. 
 
CHAPTEE V 125 
 
 Bejart, and later Madeleine Bejart by her will made him 
 trustee of all the money she possessed at the time of her death. 
 It appears that Mignard's friendship was, in the first instance, 
 with the Bejarts rather than with Moliere. 1 However this 
 may be, Moliere in 1669 addressed to Mignard his poem La 
 Gloire du Val de Grdce, in honour of the painter's fresco in the 
 cupola of the church of the Val de Grace in Paris. By " La 
 Gloire " we are to understand a painting of heaven and the 
 angels. 
 
 From Avignon it is most likely that Moliere's troop went 
 to Grenoble. They appear to have incurred a reprimand 
 from the civil authorities there on the 2nd of February 1658, 
 for having put up their playbills without permission. It was 
 ordered that these should be taken down until they were 
 allowed by the Consuls. 2 Moliere must have made his peace 
 with the Consuls, for he stayed at Grenoble until after Easter. 
 It would seem that on the 1st of May following, Mile, du 
 Pare was at Lyons, for on that day a son of hers was christened 
 there, 3 but nothing is heard of the other members of the troop 
 being at Lyons at that time. 
 
 From Grenoble they went to Eouen and remained there for 
 some months. And at Rouen Mile, du Pare won compliments 
 from the two Corneilles Pierre and his younger but less 
 illustrious brother Thomas. Pierre Corneille was then fifty- 
 two years of age. It was long since he had written the plays 
 that had made him famous, but he still had the heart to appre- 
 ciate the charms of a pretty woman. And one would like to 
 think that there had been some friendly intercourse between 
 Corneille and Moliere. There is nothing known, however, of 
 the relations between them to justify a belief that they saw 
 much of each other at Eouen during the summer of 1658. 
 Nevertheless, one would willingly lend an ear to the thought 
 that they had met, and that the acquaintance did not stop after 
 
 1 Notice biographique sur Moliere, 191-193; Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere, 
 62, 71, 214. (I may say, perhaps, that at the end of the last line but one, 
 on page 192 of M. Mesnard's Notice biographique sur Moliere, there is a mis- 
 print. The date 1662 should be 1664. The reference to Soulie"'s volume, 
 given in note 1 on p. 193 of M. Mesnard's Notice, shows that the date was 
 1664.) 
 
 2 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 195. 
 
 3 Brouchoud, Les Origines du theatre a Lyon, 48 ; Soulie, article in the 
 Revue du Lyonnais, 3rd series, vol. i. 292. 
 
126 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 the first civilities had been exchanged. With such knowledge 
 as we have got of their characters it would seem that the 
 advances, if they were made, came from Moliere. He was the 
 younger man, and he would naturally be ambitious to know 
 the great dramatist whose plays he must have seen and admired 
 when he was a boy, and which, without doubt, he had since 
 often placed on his own stage and in which he had played 
 one of the principal parts. Moliere would surely have been 
 glad to be allowed to pay his respects to him whose name 
 stood highest among the dramatists of his country. Corneille, 
 on the other hand, was timid, his great glory had gone from 
 him ; he was then an elderly man of a retiring disposition, and 
 perhaps not eager to make new friends. Yet it was to the 
 chief of a strolling company, Mondory, that Corneille owed 
 the success of his first play in 1629 ; and it might be supposed 
 that he would have welcomed Moliere who was now the chief 
 of a strolling company, and also one of the interpreters of his 
 own plays in the tennis-court known as the Jeu de Paume des 
 Braques at Rouen, his own native town. 
 
 For some time past Moliere and his friends had been longing 
 to get to Paris. They thought themselves strong enough to 
 satisfy the tastes of the theatre-goers in the metropolis, and they 
 wished to make a fair bid against the actors at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne. For thirteen years the troop had been strolling in 
 the provinces, where they had won success ; and their purses 
 were fuller than when they had started upon their travels. And 
 they knew their business better than when they had been 
 driven out of Paris by their repeated failures. Le Boulanger 
 de Chalussay, alluding to their former attempts at the Jeu de 
 Paume des Mestayers and at the Port Saint Paul, puts some 
 words into Moliere' s mouth which may be quoted here : 
 
 " Pique de ce;b affront, dont s'echauffa ma bile, 
 Nous primes la campagne, oil la petite ville, 
 Admirant les talents de mon petit troupeau, 
 Protesta inille fois que rien n'etait plus beau. 
 
 Enfin dix 1 ans entiers coulerent de la sorte, 
 Mais au bout de ce temps la troupe fut si forte, 
 Qu'avec raison je cms pouvoir dedans Paris 
 Me venger hautement de ses sanglants mepris." 2 
 
 1 Dix here should be douze or treize. 
 
 2 Elomire Hypocondre, Act iv. sc. 2 of the Divorce Comique, pp. 79, 80, 
 edition 1867. 
 
CHAPTER V 127 
 
 While the troop were at Rouen in the summer of 1658 they 
 were making preparations for their return to the capital. On 
 the 12th of July Madeleine Bejart signed an agreement with 
 the Comte Louis de Talhouet to take from him the remainder 
 of his lease, of eighteen months, of the Theatre du Marais at 
 Paris, from the 1st of October 1658 to the 1st of April 1660, 
 at a yearly rent of 3000 livres. 1 Though this agreement fell 
 through from some cause unexplained, it offers a point of 
 interest. Madeleine Bejart gave as her address in Paris : 
 " La maison de Monsieur Poquelin, tapissier valet de chambre 
 du roi, demeurant sous les halles, paroisse Saint Eustache." If, 
 as is most likely, this Monsieur Poquelin was Moliere's father, 
 it may be gathered that the old man had become reconciled to 
 his eldest son's profession. 
 
 During that summer Moliere was more than once in Paris. 
 The preface to the edition of his plays published in 1682 
 says : 
 
 "In 1658 his [Moliere's] friends advised him to come near to Paris 
 and bring his troop to some town not far distant. That would be 
 the best way to take advantage of the favour his reputation had 
 won for him among many persons of importance ; for those who were 
 interested in his future prospects had promised to introduce him to 
 the court. He had passed the carnival at Grenoble, he left there 
 after Easter and went to Rouen. He remained at Rouen during the 
 summer, and after some private journeys to Paris he was fortunate 
 enough to have his services and those of his comrades accepted by 
 Monsieur, the king's only brother, 2 who promised him his protection 
 and said that the title of the troop should bear his name. Monsieur 
 also presented him in this capacity to the king and to the queen- 
 mother." 3 
 
 After Moliere and his comrades were entitled to say that 
 they belonged to Monsieur they all, with the exception of 
 Pierre Reveillon, 4 went to Paris. What is first heard of them 
 there happened on the 24th of October 1658. 
 
 1 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 199, 200 ; Le Molieriste 
 for January 1886 (vol. vii. 202, 203). 
 
 2 In France the title of Monsieur was always given to the king's brother 
 next after himself in age. 
 
 3 (Euvres de Moliere, i. pp. xiii, xiv. 
 
 4 Revue du Lyonnais, 3rd series, i. 294. 
 
CHAPTEK VI 
 
 RETUKN TO PARIS 
 
 BEFORE relating how Moliere's troop became established in 
 Paris after their strolling in the provinces, I must speak of 
 La Grange, whose name is so well known as the author of 
 a Eegister of the future performances of the company. La 
 Grange was also one of the editors of the first complete edition 
 of Moliere's works, published in 1682, nine years after the 
 poet's death ; and he was the reputed author of the preface to 
 that edition, to which allusion has already been made. 
 
 La Grange joined Moliere's troop at Easter 1659, six months 
 after they had begun to play at the Hotel du Petit Bourbon, 
 and he described himself as an " acteur nouveau a Paris." 
 He was then not more than twenty years old. His real name 
 was Charles Varlet, but when he went on the stage he took 
 his mother's name. He used to j^lay the lovers in Moliere's 
 comedies, not the most important_parts, but they had to be 
 acST carefully and with nice taste. If, as is most likely, 
 he played Don Juan, that certainly was his most important 
 role. He was a man on whose good sense and tact Moliere 
 could depend, and in November 1664 he replaced his chief 
 as " orateur " in the troop. The functions of the orateur 
 will be described later. 
 
 As soon as La Grange became a member of Moliere's com- 
 pany he began^to keep a diary or daily register, merely, for 
 his own use or gratification. He recorded every day the play 
 that was acted, antTTh the case of new plays he said when 
 they were new ; and he noted daily the amount of money 
 taken at the box-office of the theatre, and the share due to 
 each actor out of this receipt after the expenses had been 
 deducted. Every now and then he stated shortly particulars 
 connected with the affairs of the troop. Sometimes, too, in 
 his pages one sees a coloured disk or lozenge blue being 
 
 128 
 
CHAPTEK VI 129 
 
 meant to show joy and black sorrow. To anybody looking 
 at the Kegister for the first time it will seem little more than 
 an account-book with annotations; but when its pages are 
 studied they prove to be the key to much valuable know- 
 ledge, fidouard Thierry called it " le livre d'or de la Come'die 
 Franchise." The best way for Englishmen to realise the value 
 of La Grange's Eegister is to suppose that either Heming or 
 Condell had given similar information about Shakespeare's 
 plays when they were new. Had such a book appeared 
 in England it would doubtless have been studied very 
 closely. Though we have had no such luck, we may con- 
 gratulate Frenchmen on their good fortune. But it should 
 be remembered that the Eegister was La Grange's own 
 property, which he might have burned without doing legal 
 injury to anybody. There is nothing to show that its exist- 
 ence was known to Moliere or to any of his comrades. La 
 Grange went on with his diary until the end of August 1685. 
 Why he stopped it then is not known. He was at that 
 time the foremost man in the Come'die Franchise. He re- 
 mained on the stage until the day of his death, which 
 happened suddenly on the 1st of March 1692. He was then 
 fifty-three years old. 
 
 It would seem that after his death the manus^rirjt_of^Jiis 
 Eegister went into his brother's family : that it descended to 
 a Madame Varlet, the widow of the grandson of La Grange's 
 elder brother, Achille Varlet, who at the time of Moliere's 
 death was an actor at the Theatre du Marais, and whose stage- 
 name was Verneuil. This Madame Varlet gave the manuscript 
 to the Comedie Frangaise^ in 1785"; '"and "in return for the gift, 
 iiT1^ptembeT~~of"th air year, the socie'taires issued an order 
 " de payer a Mad. Varlet pour un registre la somme de 250 
 liv." M. Monval has shown that for a good many years the 
 actors did not know the value of their treasure. 1 Little notice 
 was taken of the Eegister, and it was not quoted by any 
 writer on the French stage before the year 1825. 2 Some ten 
 
 1 Le Molieriste for April 1885 (vol. vii. 3-9). 
 
 2 Edouard Thierry's biographical notice on La Grange prefacing the 
 printed publication of the Register, pp. xliii. and xliv. (In the numbering 
 of these pages there is a misprint : the first of the two is numbered Ixiii. 
 instead of xliii. ) See also an article by Despois in the Revue Politique et 
 Litteraire for 18th March 1876, pp. 265-271. 
 
 I 
 
130 LIFE OF MOLI&RE 
 
 or twelve years later Regnier, then a societaire of the Theatre 
 Francois, was one of the first who recognised its value, and 
 it was used occasionally by him and by a few writers of 
 articles in periodicals. Taschereau also used it in his accurate 
 history of the dramatist's life and works. At last, on the 
 15th of January 1876, the anniversary of Moliere's birthday, 
 La r jlrange's Register was published by the Come'die Franchise, 
 with a long biographical notice of its author by fidouard 
 Thierry, a late administrator of that institution. Since that 
 time it has become public property, and frequent reference 
 will be made to it here. 
 
 La Grange's co-editor in the first complete edition of Moliere, 
 published in 1682, was one Vivot, whose name until lately has 
 been written Vinot. 1 The earliest mention made of the author- 
 ship of the preface to this edition was in a manuscript note 
 written some time late in the 17th century by Nicolas de 
 Tralage. He ascribed it to Vivot and La Grange : " La preface 
 qui est au commencement de ce livre est de leur composition." 2 
 Thierry upholds very strongly the general belief in crediting 
 La Grange with the work; and he rejects altogether the 
 claim to its authorship made on behalf of one Marcel by 
 Bruzen de la Martiniere, editor of an edition of Moliere, 
 published at Amsterdam in 1725. 3 And it is surely very much 
 more likely that La Grange would have chosen to say a few 
 words himself in honour of his late friend than that he should 
 have left the duty to another. The preface errs only in 
 saying too little about one of whom the world would willingly 
 have learnt more from so safe a hand. 
 
 La Grange married Marie Ragueneau de 1'Estang on the 
 25th of April 1672. Before her marriage she had been 
 engaged in some employment in connection with the theatre, 
 and quite occasionally she acted a small part, and was paid 
 for her day's service ; after her marriage she was admitted 
 into the troop with half a share. When La Grange died he 
 left one daughter; his widow survived him fifty-five years, 
 but little is heard of her. 
 
 It was stated at the end of the last chapter that Monsieur 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, xi. 72, end of first paragraph. 
 
 2 Paul Lacroix, Iconographie Molidresque, No. 557 ; (Euvres de Moliere, 
 xi. 72. 
 
 3 As to Marcel, see (Euvres de Moliere, t. i. p. xxii. note 3. 
 
CHAPTEE VI 131 
 
 the king's brother promised his " protection " to the troop 
 which was henceforward to bear his name. He promised also 
 300 livres a year to each actor; but after recording this 
 fact in his Eegister, La Grange added in a marginal note : 
 " Nota, que les 300 1. n'ont point ete payees." Nevertheless, 
 Monsieur's protection may have been of service to his actors ; 
 for on the 24th of October 1658 they played before their 
 Majesties and all the court in the Salle des Gardes (now the 
 Salle des Cariatides) in the old Louvre. La Grange tells 
 in his preface that the play chosen was Corneille's tragedy 
 Nicomkde, that the acting of the women gave especial pleasure, 
 and that " the famous actors who made the reputation of the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne stand so high were also present." After 
 this performance Moliere addressed the king from the stage 
 in a tone of apology on behalf of his comrades, and said at 
 the end : 
 
 "But since the king had been kind enough to tolerate their 
 country manners, he very humbly begged his Majesty to be pleased 
 to allow him to show one of the trifles which had won for him some 
 reputation, and with which he had entertained the people in the 
 provinces." 
 
 Then Moliere gave one of his own now long-lost farces, the 
 Docteur Amoureux. La Grange goes on : 
 
 "As many years had passed since small comedies were in vogue, 
 the invention appeared to be new, and the little play which was acted 
 that day amused everybody as much as it surprised them. M. de 
 Moliere acted the part of the Docteur, and the manner in which he 
 acquitted himself placed him in such high esteem that his Majesty 
 permitted him to establish his troop in Paris. He was allowed to 
 play in the large room in the Petit Bourbon alternately with the 
 Italian actors. They [Moliere's troop] began to play in public on 
 the 3rd of November 1658, and they gave as new plays the fitourdi 
 and the Depit Amoureux, which had never been acted in Paris." 
 
 The Hotel du Petit Bourbon was royal property. It con- 
 tained a large room which had been used for court ballets, and 
 here the different troops of Italian actors played when they 
 came to Paris. It was situated near the Seine, and stood 
 between the old Louvre and the church Saint Germain 
 1'Auxerrois. 1 
 
 Though Moliere and his company began to act there on the 
 
 1 Despois, Le Thtdtre Francis sous Louis XIV., 23 et seq. ; 407 et seq. 
 
132 LIFE OF MOLlilKE 
 
 3rd of November, neither the fitourdi nor the Dtpit Amoureux 
 was put on the stage quite at first. Both de Vise in his 
 Nouvelles Nouvelles, 1 published in 1663, and Le Boulanger de 
 Chalussay in his Elomire Hypocondre, printed in 1670, agree 
 as to this. De Vise says : " After he [Moliere] had brought 
 out old plays for some time, and when he had in a manner 
 established himself in Paris, he gave his own Btourdi and the 
 Dtpit Amoureux." According to de Chalussay the first play 
 that Moliere produced in public was Corneille's tragedy 
 Htraclius, and this was followed by four other plays by the 
 same author. There may have been more than one perform- 
 ance of each; in any case, all were damned. After de 
 Chalussay had made Moliere relate his failures at the Petit 
 Bourbon, he goes on to make him tell of the great successes of 
 his own two comedies, the fitcmrdi and the Depit Amoureux? 
 Before beginning his daily Kegister La Grange says that each 
 of these plays gave to every actor in the troop seventy 
 pistoles. The pistole was then worth eleven livres or francs. 
 Despois thinks that in all probability neither of these plays 
 was acted until about the middle of November ; 3 and this, 
 taken with de Chalussay's statement that they ran for three 
 months, shows that they remained on the stage almost until 
 Easter 1659. 
 
 At the theatres in Paris the theatrical year always began 
 after the Easter holidays, which lasted for about three weeks ; 
 and at Easter 1659 there were important changes in Moliere's 
 troop. Du Pare and his wife left their old friends and went 
 to the Theatre du Marais. From a letter written by Chapelle 
 to Moliere in the early spring of 1659 it would seem that 
 there were bickerings among the actresses at the Petit Bourbon 
 as to the parts that each was to play, causing Moliere much 
 annoyance, and that Mile, du Pare and her husband left the 
 troop in consequence. 4 Dufresne caused another vacancy, for 
 he retired from the stage ; and Croisac, the gagiste, was dis- 
 charged from his temporary services. On the other hand, 
 
 1 M. P. Mesnard has given extracts from this book in the (Euvres de 
 Moliere, x. 464-68. 
 
 2 Elomire Hypocondre, Act iv. sc. 2 of the Divorce Comique (pp. 80, 81, 
 ed. 1867). 
 
 3 (Euvres de Moliere, i. 86-88. 
 
 4 F. Mesnard, Notice bioyraphique sur Moliere, 146-48. 
 
CHAPTEK VI 133 
 
 L'Espy and his brother Jodelet left the Marais for the Petit 
 Bourbon. Du Croisy and his wife joined Moliere, as also did 
 La Grange. 1 The troop was then made up of twelve " parts," 
 each actor having one share in its concerns. Their names 
 were : 
 
 Moliere. Miles. Bejart. 
 
 Bejart aine. ,, De Brie. 
 
 Bejart cadet. ,, Herve. 
 
 De Brie. Du Croisy. 
 
 L'Espy. 
 Jodelet. 
 Du Croisy. 
 La Grange. 
 
 The four Bejarts, we know, were with Moliere during his 
 thirteen years of strolling in the provinces. Mile. Herve 
 was Genevieve Bejart; she took her mother's name on the 
 stage to distinguish her from her elder sister Madeleine, but 
 she was not a good actress. De Brie and his wife, it may 
 be remembered, joined Moliere's troop, probably at Lyons, in 
 1653. The husband was an indifferent actor; he was said to 
 be a bully, and Moliere did not like him. His wife gave very 
 valuable service to the troop, and her greatest triumph was 
 as Agnes in the cole des Femmes. Of the new recruits L'Espy 
 and his brother Jodelet were old stage hands, for they were 
 both at the Hotel de Bourgogne in 1634. 2 Not much is known 
 of L'Espy, but Jodelet had gained a reputation at the Marais 
 in the part of Cliton in Corneille's Menteur in 1642. Scarron 
 had named many of his valets after him ; and there are other 
 instances of characters in French plays being named after the 
 actor entrusted with the part. Jodelet was an amusing actor, 
 though he spoke strongly through his nose. He died, unfor- 
 tunately, in March 1660. Du Croisy always remained staunch 
 to Moliere, and did not leave the stage till many years after the 
 dramatist's death. It was he who was first entrusted with the 
 part of Tartuffe. His wife, however, was a poor actress. We 
 shall hear again of Du Pare and his wife, for they returned to 
 the troop at Easter 1660. 
 
 Unfortunately Moliere soon lost Bejart aine, one of his 
 oldest friends. La Grange says on page 6 of his Kegister : 
 
 1 La Grange's Register, 4 and 5. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, ii. 39, note 2. 
 
134 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 " Le Samedi, 1 1 Mai, joue au Louvre L'fitourdi pour le Eoi. 
 M. Bdjard acheva son role de I'Etourdi avec peine." A little 
 later, after mentioning the performance on the 20th of May, 
 La Grange wrote : " Interruption a cause de la mort de 
 Monsieur Bejard." If, as is believed, he took originally the 
 parts of Lelie in the fitowrdi, and of firaste in the Dtpit 
 Amoureux, he must have been accounted one of the best actors 
 in the troop. The story that Joseph Bejart left 24,000 ecus 
 in gold when he died is pure fable. 1 
 
 Something may be gained in considering for a moment 
 Moliere's earliest attempts at authorship. Of the farces he 
 is said to have written while strolling in the provinces only 
 two remain. They are La Jalousie du BarboutiU and Le 
 Mtdecin Volant. 2 They were printed for the first time in a 
 pamphlet entitled Deux pieces inedites de J. B. P. Moliere, 
 published by Viollet le Due in 1819 ; and they are now 
 generally included in good editions of Moliere's comedies. 
 The text of these plays was taken from a manuscript which 
 belonged to Jean Baptiste Kousseau in 1731. It is not known 
 where this manuscript came from, nor how Kousseau acquired 
 it. Kousseau did not think that Moliere was the author of 
 these plays in the present sense of authorship, and he did not 
 wish to see them printed. What he says may be quoted as 
 showing how light comedies were then put upon the stage : 
 
 " Touching the small pieces which our author played in the provinces, 
 it is true that two of them have fallen into my hands, but it is easy 
 to see that it was not he who wrote them. They are outlines which 
 he gave to his actors, who filled them up on the spot, as the Italians 
 do, each one according to his ability. But it is certain that he did 
 not finish either play upon paper, and what I have got is written in 
 the style of a clownish country actor, and is worthy neither of Moliere 
 nor of the public." 3 
 
 Again : 
 
 " The gist of the farce may be Moliere's. At that time nothing 
 higher had been seen ; but as all these farces were played in an im- 
 promptu manner, as was the custom with the Italian actors, it is easy 
 to see that it was not he who put the dialogue upon paper ; and these 
 
 1 Le Molitriste for July 1885 (vol. vii. 115-122). 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, i. 3-14; 17-19; 47-51; and xi. 49-51. Also M. L. 
 Moland's 2nd edition of Moliere's plays, vol. ii. p. 3 et seq. 
 
 3 Letter of J. B. Rousseau to Chauvelin de Beausejour, quoted by Despois, 
 (Euvres de Moliere, i. 10, 11. 
 
CHAPTEE VI 135 
 
 sort of things, even when they are better done, ought never to be 
 counted among the works of a celebrated author." 1 
 
 Despois took his text of tlie two comedies from a manuscript 
 in the Bibliotheque Mazarine. He thought it likely that the 
 manuscript he copied was the same as that owned by Eousseau, 
 and he had no doubt it was the same as that used by Viollet 
 le Due. In La Jalousie du BarbouilU, which in part seems to 
 have been an early sketch of George Dandin, Moliere ridiculed 
 the pedants or the so-called scholars. This was a groundwork 
 which had been common in the French theatres for many 
 years, both at the Hotel de Bourgogne and on the open-air 
 stages where Tabarin and other buffoons used to hold forth for 
 the amusement of the crowd. And though Moliere put into 
 the dialogue of his farce a better idea of comedy than Tabarin 
 had done, he was working upon an idea that had long been 
 popular. Le Medecin Volant shows his first attack upon the 
 doctors of medicine whom he afterwards satirised so fre- 
 quently ; and in the early farce may be found sentences which 
 occur again in his later comedies. The chief fun in this play 
 is in Sganarelle's representing himself to be a doctor and the 
 doctor's brother at the same time. Part of the groundwork 
 of this comedy is seen again in Le Medecin Malyre Lui. And 
 Boursault, of whom something will be said later, brought out 
 a play in 1661 called Le Medecin Volant, taken from the same 
 source as Moliere's. Boursault said in his " Avis au lecteur " 
 (1665): "The subject is Italian, it has been translated into 
 our language and has often appeared on our stage." 
 
 It would be idle now to criticise J. B. Rousseau's opinion 
 that the Jalousie du BarbouilU and the Medecin Volant were 
 not written by Moliere. At the same time it may be remarked 
 that the author of these little sketches knew how to form a 
 character; and that in these sketches one sees the easy 
 language and the direct form of expression which was always 
 characteristic of Moliere's prose. Perhaps these latter qualities 
 are more necessary to a comic dramatist than to any other 
 class of writer. 
 
 Names have been given to other farces which Moliere is 
 said to have written, but the names give rise to some uncer- 
 tainty. Those who are curious may refer to the authorities 
 
 1 Letter of J. B. Rousseau to Brossette, quoted by Despois, ibid. p. 12, 
 
136 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 given above. It may be assumed that the farces which have 
 been lost were not unlike the two which are extant. What- 
 ever Moliere may have thought himself of his first attempts at 
 dramatic composition, he was endeavouring to please the 
 public with what he knew would amuse them if the work 
 were done in an amusing way. I imagine that he wished to 
 write plays, and that perhaps he looked forward to a day when 
 he should write a comedy in accordance with the prescribed 
 rules ; but that he kept his ambition in check and set about 
 his task in what he thought was the surest way to please his 
 audience. He saw that the small Italian plays were full of 
 vitality, and this he tried to give in his own attempts. 
 Comedy of a better kind, if he could achieve it, would come 
 later. In the meantime he would do what was nearest to his 
 hand, and not strive after what might be beyond his reach. 
 He partly followed some of the types well known on the 
 Italian and French stages before his day the doctor or the 
 pedant, the jealous lover and the more urbane lover, the 
 rustic and perhaps the bragging soldier and though most of 
 these personages were meant to be grotesque, Moliere's sense 
 of fitness would not allow him to go beyond the limits of fair 
 caricature. He tried to characterise in a fanciful manner the 
 ridiculous personages, and to show that, however much they 
 were buffeted about, they were men who had thoughts and 
 wills of their own. This was not a feature in the stock 
 personages on the Italian stages. It was customary that the 
 actor who performed one of these parts considered that on his 
 theatre the character should belong to him and be his stage 
 property. The frequent repetition of the name Gros Rene in 
 the titles of the plays makes one feel tolerably sure ,that the 
 fat Rene Berthelot, whose stage name was du Pare, must have 
 been popular with the audience. None of Moliere's farces had 
 more than one act, they were all in prose, and they were 
 performed after the set piece of the day to send the people 
 home in a good humour. One cannot tell how often they 
 were acted before La Grange joined the troop, but it may be 
 noticed that Moliere put them on the stage occasionally, and 
 that the Medecin Volant was played oftener than any of the 
 others. The last time that La Grange records a performance 
 of one of Moliere's early farces was on the 7th of September 
 
CHAPTER VI 137 
 
 1664, when Gros Rent was acted after Corneille's Sertorius. 
 Almost the only word of mention of these imprinted farces is 
 the testimony of Monchesnay, given in the middle of the 
 18th century, to the effect that Boileau "regretted very much 
 that Moliere's little comedy, Le Docteur Amoureux, had been 
 lost, because there was always something bright and instructive 
 even in his lightest works." Boileau was quite a young man 
 when he saw this play, for there is no mention of a perform- 
 ance of the piece after Easter 1659, when he was twenty-two 
 years old ; and if we are to trust the opinion he is reported to 
 have expressed, the play must have left a lively impression 
 upon his memory. 
 
 It has been said already that the fitourdi was first played 
 at Lyons in 1653 or 1655, and the D&pit Amoureux at Beziers 
 in 1656 ; and mention has been made of the welcome given to 
 both comedies in Paris when they were first acted there. I 
 must now speak of the two plays and try to show what kind 
 of comedies they were. 
 
 In writing his first comedy in verse, Moliere followed ideas 
 that were prevalent at the time on the French stage. Plays 
 with stirring adventures and striking incidents were liked 
 best, and these the dramatists tried to give, throwing over 
 them, if they were able to do so, an air of romance to make 
 them engaging. The fitourdi was meant to be a " comedy of 
 intrigue " ; that is, a comedy in which the intrigue or the plot 
 of the play lies chiefly in the schemes laid to entrap some one 
 or more persons for the benefit of another. A comedy of 
 intrigue is not necessarily the same therefore as a comedy of 
 incident. But besides the scheming, the Btourdi shows an 
 interest of a higher kind for those who read it with the idea of 
 seeing how Moliere made his personages talk, and how much 
 life he threw into their characters. He wrote better plays 
 afterwards of a different kind, showing true comedy, but 
 every one must feel that this play has a freshness and a vigour 
 of spirit that for the while are very amusing. 
 
 The style of the fitourdi, or the manner in which it is 
 written, resembles the agility shown by an athlete in winning 
 a hurdle race ; or it is like the boldness of a bright young 
 orator in a dull assembly who astonishes his hearers by his . 
 wit, by his hard-hitting, and by his eloquence. He is per- 
 
138 LIFE OF MOLIEEE 
 
 suasive, if nothing more, and great expectations are formed of 
 his future. The promise thus held out Moliere kept after- 
 wards, but in a better way. The events told in this play are 
 improbable as are many of those in Lever's delightful Irish 
 novels, they are described in something of the same joyous and 
 racy manner and are made to appear veracious thus fulfilling 
 legitimately the purposes of fiction. In imitating Italian 
 comedy, Moliere has given in Lelie and Mascarille, the master 
 and valet, excellent pictures of the type each is meant to 
 represent, and he has sketched their manners in such a lively 
 way very different from the play from which he is said to 
 have borrowed most that his work shows all the charm of 
 originality. 
 
 I think that in writing the Etourdi, Moliere had two objects 
 in view: to please his audience by the lawless adventures 
 related, and to satisfy himself by the way he told them. The 
 superiority of treatment over the subject already shows itself 
 in his mind, and in this play, which may be called his first 
 comedy, he was aiming at dramatic exposition and dramatic 
 characterisation. These were two objects which he always 
 kept steadily before him, and he showed the characterisation 
 of his personages as clearly as the style of his comedies would 
 permit. He was not imaginative in creating strong plots; 
 but if he had been forced to describe the thoughts of three 
 men as they broke stones on the roadside, he would have given 
 a picture of the feelings of each, and would have made an 
 acting comedy out of their dialogue. 
 
 The fitourdi betrays an Italian origin throughout. It was 
 borrowed mainly from L'Inavvertito, a comedy by Niccolo 
 Barbieri, called Beltrame, though some of the amusing in- 
 cidents in it are not found in that play. Moliere makes 
 Mascarille, the valet, play the principal part ; nearly all the 
 interest of the comedy is thrown upon him. He is a son of 
 the valets who were common upon the Italian stage, but he is 
 represented here with so much natural feeling that he might 
 be anybody's countryman of three hundred years ago, of to-day, 
 or of three hundred years hence. He has no self-interest, his 
 wish is to serve his master by any means that he can imagine. 
 His master profits by his cunning, lauds his skill when he is 
 successful, and beats him when he is unlucky. This master, 
 
CHAPTEE VI 139 
 
 Lelie, is the " e'tourdi"; and the word describes him exactly, for 
 a more inattentive, giddy-pated fellow never was seen. He 
 has found out that Leandre is his rival for Celie, a beautiful 
 slave, and if he had not Mascarille at his elbow to assist him 
 his chance of success would be small. Celie is the slave of 
 Trufaldin, and there is another girl, Hippolyte, but neither comes 
 much on to the stage. In the older French comedies beautiful 
 girls were a good deal talked about, but they were not often 
 seen. This arose from the fact that it was not customary to 
 allow unmarried daughters to come prominently forward in 
 private life, and from the objectionable situations in which 
 they would have to appear before an audience. The fyourdi is 
 free from this drawback, but one feels now that the comedy is 
 deficient in female interest. The nurse, too, was a feature in 
 old comedies ; she was put in more from necessity than from 
 choice, but she was never interesting, and here she is not seen. 
 But there are three old men, and they are all fair game to the 
 valet for displaying his mischief. 
 
 I can only allude indirectly to Mascarille's schemes for assist- 
 ing his master to obtain possession of Celie, the beautiful slave. 
 These schemes might go on for ever if Lelie was not made to 
 tumble on his feet at last in spite of himself. At the end of 
 the first act he has already by this thoughtlessness thwarted 
 three plans devised by his valet ; and Mascarille goes out in a 
 towering rage, vowing that any evil may happen to himself, 
 and that the devil may twist his master's neck, before he will 
 give him more assistance. But in the second act they are again 
 together. Mascarille's anger has disappeared, and he has been 
 persuaded to make another effort. He is again good-humoured 
 and ready for another frolic. He says of himself: 
 
 " Je suis ainsi facile, et si de Mascarille 
 Madame la Nature avait fait une fille, 
 Je vous laisse a penser ce que g'auroit eteV' 
 
 At the end of the second act there is a capital speech 
 by Mascarille. Lelie had been boasting of his imaginative 
 powers ; he thought he had invented a plan which could not 
 fail to win Celie. Of course his plan was only another 
 blunder. Mascarille turns upon him with a look of con- 
 temptuous anger, but still showing comedy, and asks : 
 " Vous avez fait ce coup sans vous donner au diable ? :J 
 
140 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 Then he rallies his master, at first with cool and elevated 
 irony ; afterwards he heaps up invective against him until he 
 can no longer find terms in which to express himself. 
 
 Eleven times at least Lelie has by his blundering frustrated 
 Mascarille's devices to obtain possession of Celie. Hence, no 
 doubt, the comedy. In one sense the interest in the play 
 flags when it is seen that Lelie cannot keep what he has got, 
 and that he is little better than a greenhorn. But the 
 character is admirably drawn. The young man is impulsive, 
 full of vitality, self-confident, and he blurts out his love 
 affairs almost to the first friend he meets when reticence is 
 especially needed. He is a type of an irrepressible blunderer 
 whom no experience can cure, or teach not to be giddy-headed 
 when running after a sweetheart. But Mascarille is the chief 
 feature in the comedy. He is a perfectly honest rogue. He 
 is a rascal of romance without one atom of meanness in him. 
 He is full of stratagems, one half of which would at that time 
 have sent a man to the gallows. Yet you can fully trust him, 
 knowing him to be noble-hearted. His freshness and vigour 
 throughout are amazing. His plans are perpetually baffled by 
 his master's folly, but he perseveres in spite of many resolu- 
 tions that he will do nothing more. The quick-witted valet 
 is like a good hound when he comes upon the scent of a fox. 
 He cannot help himself. If his game is before him he must 
 follow it. Mascarille re-enlists himself in Lelie's favour, not 
 from a wish to forgive his master, but from his own love of 
 devilry and a determination not to be beaten. We all give 
 him our good wishes and subscribe heartily to the inscription 
 he would like to see written of himself: 
 
 " Vivat Mascarillus fourbum imperator ! " 
 
 Aime-Martin published his first edition of Moliere in 
 1824-26, and gave for the first time the names of the actors 
 who played originally most of the characters in the poet's 
 comedies, assigning each role to a particular actor. His 
 information was doubtless valuable, though in a good many 
 cases no certain attribution could be made; and later 
 knowledge has shown that some of his surmises were not 
 correct. It is fairly certain, however, that in the Etourdi 
 Moliere played Mascarille, and Bejart aine, until he died, Lelie. 
 
rout an engraving in the British Museum. 
 
CHAPTER VI 141 
 
 But as there were only six men in the troop, and there were 
 eight male characters in the comedy, some of these parts were 
 doubled or were taken by actors hired for the occasion. For 
 the women, Mile, de Brie most likely played Celie, and Mile, 
 du Pare Hippolyte, while she remained in the troop. 1 
 
 It is supposed generally that Moliere was the first who used 
 the name Mascarille on the stage in France, though in 1620 
 there was a book published at Lyons entitled Les CEuvres du 
 Marquis Mascarille. In any case Mascarille is the French 
 form of mascarilla, a Spanish word signifying a small mask 
 which covered the upper part of the face. As may be seen 
 from old prints, Italian actors of those days often wore masks ; 
 and as Moliere formed his valet upon the types of valets 
 common on the Italian stages he may have worn a mask while 
 acting this part. 2 There is a Marquis de Mascarille in his 
 Prfoieuses Ridicules, a comedy of a very different kind from the 
 Btourdi ; but to suppose that the actor wore a mask in that 
 part would be absurd. 
 
 Lc D6pit Amour eux is another comedy of intrigue, and in 
 writing it Moliere copied again from an Italian model. His 
 play was an imitation of L'Interesse by Niccolo Secchi, printed 
 at Venice in 1581. Practically it may be divided into two 
 parts. There is the imbroglio of romantic and startling 
 incidents, told more in the form of a consecutive story than in 
 the Etourdi, of which I shall say nothing; and there are two 
 scenes of lovers' quarrels which have caused the comedy to be 
 remembered. It has long since been found that on the stage 
 this play is too long ; therefore abridgments into two acts 
 not differing materially one from the other have been made. 
 The version followed is that made in 1773 by Valville, an 
 actor then belonging to the Comedie Franchise. 3 
 
 One perceives, even in the first part of the D6pit Amoureux, a 
 better note of actual comedy than in the fitourdi, though other- 
 wise the play is less brilliant, firaste is in love with Lucile ; 
 and Gros Keiid, firaste's valet, is in love with Marinette, Lucile's 
 waiting-woman, firaste is jealous. Moliere here touched 
 upon a subject which he afterwards described with better 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, i. 93-95. 2 Ibid. 90 ; 536. 
 
 a See M. Moland's 2nd edition of Moliere's plays, iii. 3 et seq., where the 
 present acting version is given. Also CEuvres de Moliere, xi. 124, 125. 
 
142 LIFE OF MOLlfiRE 
 
 success when experience had taught him to rely more fully 
 upon his own powers. He has often described jealousy because 
 he thought that a man's jealous feeling of anger towards his 
 mistress was a good subject for comedy. 
 
 The lovers' quarrels are in the third and fourth scenes of the 
 fourth act. firaste and Lucile give back presents they have 
 received from each other, they tear up each other's verses and 
 letters ; while their servants, who also have quarrelled, stand 
 by abetting them. A Latin poet has said that the quarrels of 
 lovers mean only a renewal of love; for if lovers are in 
 earnest in their affection they do not enjoy being thoroughly 
 angry with each other. At length, after beating about the bush, 
 firaste asks Lucile if she will forgive him. 
 
 " Je le demande enfin ; me Paccorderez-vous, 
 Ce pardon obligeant ? " 
 
 She answers him : 
 
 " Kemenez-moi chez-nous." 
 
 These last words, "take me home," are charming in their 
 subtlety ; they are worth all the rest. Lucile keeps the upper 
 hand all through the dispute, and at the end she gives way, 
 maintaining her supremacy but telling Eraste that she loves 
 him. Gros Rene and Marinette, the valet and the waiting- 
 woman, are both angry at this reconciliation. They now 
 wrangle as their betters had done, but more fiercely. The 
 same tune is played over again, but with more noise. They 
 are both determined to separate, though they know they are 
 two fools for their pains. And this scene ends as the other did, 
 but with heartier expressions of love. 
 
 " Gros Rene. 
 "Mon Dieu, qu' a tes appas je suis acoquine ! 
 
 " Marinette. 
 " Que Marinette est sotte apres son Gros Kene"." 
 
 Despois has shown 1 that among the men in the troop 
 Moliere played the part of Albert, Lucile's father : Bejart aine 
 firaste, and du Pare Gros Rene. There is no evidence to show 
 how the four female characters were distributed among the 
 four actresses ; the most likely guess would be Mile, de Brie 
 as Lucile. 
 
 1 CEuvres de Moliere, i. 395, 396. 
 
CHAPTER VI 143 
 
 This is the place to say shortly in what way Moliere's 
 borrowings in his two first comedies differed from those of 
 French playwrights who preceded him. In all probability he 
 borrowed more than they had done, but he made a much 
 better use of his loan. The result was as if he had borrowed 
 money which he could spend in any market, and as if his 
 predecessors had bought "reach-me-down" clothes which 
 would not fit them. In his two first comedies there was a 
 good deal that Moliere did not invent: the outlines of the 
 plots and of the characters were not his. But because he 
 knew how men thought, how they spoke to each other, what 
 they did, how they ought to be made to appear before an 
 audience; and because he could invest these attributes of 
 comedy in lively and appropriate language, he made his plays 
 seem natural in spite of the improbabilities related, and he 
 gave to his work a freshness and a vigour which had not 
 existed in French comedy before his time. Hitherto French 
 comedies had been sadly deficient in characterisation. This 
 Moliere was able to give, even in his two first plays, where he 
 borrowed most. The presence or the absence of characterisa- 
 tion was the chief distinguishing feature between his comedies 
 and those of his predecessors. He portrayed human beings 
 instead of personages which hardly showed the signs of 
 humanity. Hitherto in French comedies characterisation had 
 been at best of a dummy kind. In reading them now, one has 
 to force oneself to imagine that a man is behind the words he 
 is supposed to speak. The effect is not inspiriting. But 
 Moliere did make his personages move and talk with all the 
 appearance of people acting their parts on the stage. His 
 pretended pictures appear to be so natural, that without effort 
 you think you see his men and women, hear them, and feel 
 their pulses beat. Unless these signs of outward life are 
 present, characterisation cannot have real vitality. 
 
 In the middle of the 17th century the sense of plagiarism, 
 unless it was very barefaced, did not exist. Moliere borrowed 
 other men's plots, but he used them in his own way, and not 
 in a spirit of imitation. Our English dramatists before his 
 day had done the same. It might be more difficult to say now 
 what is plagiarism than it was two hundred and fifty years 
 ago. About that time Pascal wrote : " Let it not be urged that 
 
V 
 
 144 - LIFE OF 
 
 I have not said anything new. The disposition of the matter 
 is new. When men play at tennis, they both hit the same 
 ball, but one places it better than another." Moliere had the 
 inventiveness of a command of easy language always suitable 
 to the occasion. He makes each of his characters say what 
 might be expected from them at the moment. Even in his 
 earliest attempts he has shown that he knew how to form a 
 character and bring forward the features he wished to repre- 
 sent. This was not borrowed art ; still less was it imitation. 
 His borrowings either relate to external incidents, or they may 
 be defended in the way so wittily explained by Pascal. What 
 was dull he brightened ; to men and women who were hardly 
 more than speaking automatons he gave a flesh and blood 
 movement that transformed them into actual living creatures. 
 Anybody making their acquaintance perceives at once their 
 humanity. 
 
 Even in his two first plays, where Moliere was most actuated 
 by Italian influences, he dominated them and made them his 
 own. Later he wrote comedies that were purely French, and 
 some that had a wider application, though he constantly re- 
 verted in his lighter plays to the idea of outward show and 
 quick movement and of fun which formed the chief elements 
 in the plays acted on the Italian stages. What I mean by 
 purely French comedies is plays that in thought and charac- 
 teristics were in no way dependent upon a foreign origin. 
 The Prfoieuses Ridicules, the Fdcheux, the Tartuffe, the Femmes 
 Savantes, are purely French comedies ; but Monsieur de Pour- 
 ceaugnac is partly foreign, and the Fourberies de Scapin is still 
 more so. The main ideas and the tone of the Critique de 
 rilJcole des Femmes, Don Juan, the Misanthrope, and the Avare, 
 are general, and might be seen in any country, though the 
 skill shown in writing is another matter. It is of little con- 
 sequence whether the legend on which one of Moliere's plays 
 was founded was his own invention, or whether it came from 
 Italy or from the Andaman Islands; but it is important to 
 see what use he made of his story, and if his play betrayed a 
 foreign style of thought. Like Shakespeare, he did not care 
 much where he found his plot, but he was very particular as 
 to the way he used it so as to show the characteristics of the 
 personages he wished to introduce, and to make his scenes 
 
CHAPTEE VI 145 
 
 animated and amusing. It is not of prime importance to know 
 from what source an author has taken the plot of his play, but 
 his comedy can hardly be a good one unless it is bright with 
 his own work. And the play is not really his own unless it 
 bears the stamp of his own individuality. 
 
 There was another particular in which Moliere differed from 
 the playwrights a little before his time. They borrowed more 
 from Spanish tales and plays than he did. Italian influences 
 are seen in some of his comedies plainly enough, but Spanish 
 plays were never sympathetic to him. In the early part of the 
 1 7th century a taste for Spanish plays had arisen in Paris, and 
 this was fostered by the marriage of Louis xin. with the 
 daughter of Philip in. of Spain. Then the French translation 
 of Don Quixote, which followed very shortly, helped to confirm 
 the liking for romantic incidents. But romance on the French 
 stage had no real sense or being. It existed outwardly in a 
 formal way; it did not exist in fact and deed, because the 
 French are not a romantic people, and because the rules which 
 then governed their drama prevented the scope of its action. 
 When a man is told that he must woo and win a lady in 
 twenty-four hours on a given spot, he feels that he has a 
 difficult task to perform, and he has to ask for adventitious 
 aid. His valet assists him by stratagem, and the young lady 
 is won. If there be romance in courtship of this kind, you 
 only get the skin of it. Ingenuity is required, and when that 
 is successful it is generally applauded. Though Moliere saw 
 that all this artifice was hollow he generally complied with it 
 in point of form, and he tried to draw advantage from it in 
 other ways. His love-scenes, as such, are more often than not 
 indifferent. He was not romantic by nature, but he took what 
 show of romance he could find and used it as a peg whereon 
 to hang his satire and the play of his scenes. If a romantic 
 scene had been well handled by another he would have 
 applauded it, but he could look through his own thoughts 
 and see that he was not well fitted for work of that kind. 
 Occasionally he borrowed bits of Spanish plots, but he dis- 
 carded Spanish ideas as though he did not like them. He 
 found that he could not adapt them to his own thoughts, and 
 therefore did not use them. The Spanish dramatists wished 
 to interest their audiences by exciting stories told in a dramatic 
 
 K 
 
146 LIFE OF MOLltBE 
 
 form. Moliere cared little for tales of wonder ; his endeavour 
 was even from the first to show personal characterisation in a 
 comic manner and with comic effects. The movement on the 
 Italian stages was quick, and that attracted his fancy. The 
 scenes played by the actors of the commedia della bella arte 
 were crude and often coarse, but they contained the germs of 
 comedy in that they showed the manners of the people in- 
 tended to be portrayed and gave signs of personal character- 
 isation. In that way they appealed to Moliere, and by degrees 
 his genius substituted real characterisation and comic raillery 
 for masks and clever buffooneries. 
 
CHAPTEE VII 
 
 SOCIETY IN PA$IS RRTWEEN Tfren ^ND 1660 LES PRECIEUSES 
 RIDICULES SGANA RELLE 
 
 THE Precieuses Ridicules, more than most of Moliere's comedies, 
 demands some explanation in order to understand its fun and 
 who were the people_against whom its satire was directejL A 
 glance at the drawing-room society of those days will enable 
 us to see the environment of the scene, and will show Moliere's 
 object injwTitmgJiisjcomedy. Its date was 1659. 1 
 
 La Marquise de Eambouillet was a lady of high birth 
 gentle manners who, disliking the tone of the court, formed^ 
 for herself her own circle of acquaintance. For some yearir / 
 past a want had been felt among the more refined ladies of 
 aristocracy in Paris that they had no society of their own that 
 was independent of the court. Marie de Medici had been 
 appointed regent of the kingdom, and she was governed by 
 confidants and favourites whose main ambitions were greed 
 and love of place. Factions therefore arose, and the general 
 tone of court life was noisy and vulgar. Partly with the idea 
 of creating a circle of social intercourse among her own friends, 
 Madame de Eambouillet, while yet a young woman, built for 
 herself a house in the Eue Saint Thomas du Louvre a short 
 street which ran between the Louvre and the Tuileries. The 
 house was built early in the reign of Louis XIIL, between 1610 
 and 1617. Her receptions began soon afterwards, certainly in 
 or before 1620; they gained celebrity and maintained their 
 high reputation for nearly thirty years. No exact date can be 
 given to the dissolution of the Hotel de Eambouillet, but it is 
 not likely that the hostess, who was once so well known, 
 continued to receive her friends after the Civil War in 
 
 1 I am indebted for much of the matter in the first part of this chapter to 
 Roederer's Memoire pour servir a I'histoire de la soci6te polie en France ; to 
 Cousin's volumes on French society in the 17th century ; to M. Ch. Livet's 
 edition of Somaize's Dictionnaire des Precieuses ; and to M. Livet's volume 
 Precieux et Precieuses. 
 
 147 
 
148 LIFE OF MOLI6EE 
 
 Paris, known as La Fronde, which broke out in 1648. Pro- 
 bably, too, in 1645 the receptions were discontinued for 
 some time, for in that year Madame de Eambouillet lost 
 her son, the Marquis de Pisani, at the battle of Nordlingen. 
 Three years later Voiture died, and his absence deprived 
 the ladies of much of the sparkle and pleasantry of conversa- 
 tion. Then came social disturbances caused by the Civil 
 War, so that probably enough until that was over, in 1652 or 
 1653, afternoon visiting was discontinued. When the streets 
 became quiet after the Fronde receptions multiplied, and 
 then the late eclat of the meetings at the Hotel de Eambouillet 
 became somewhat lessened by other meetings in other places. 
 Though these newer assemblies never gained the same dis- 
 tinction, " at homes " became popular and were therefore 
 common. Society in Paris may have benefited by the larger 
 number of receptions, but the glory of the pioneer which had 
 for so long maintained its unrivalled supremacy faded away 
 until it was revived by the afterglow of tradition. 
 
 Who were the guests invited to the Hotel de Eambouillet ? 
 Perhaps it may be said shortly that many of the " best people " 
 in Paris might have got an introduction. But Madame de 
 Eambouillet wasjDarticular in the choice of her friends, and 
 would not have^agreecT with everybody ay to who the " beslr 
 people " were. " Best " in thisr sense means those whose minds 
 and manners_AYere_.the_best trained tErough hereditary descent 
 "ancTby custom in the general ways of good breeding and polite- 
 ness. ^Ladies~lnustrbe known to the hostess, or known well by 
 KeTlntimate friends, and they must be of good birth, before 
 the invitation would be given. If a gentleman had pleasant 
 manners and could talk well, and especially if he was in any 
 way distinguished, he might gain admittance inside her doors. 
 Doubtless at a time when society was divided by the line of 
 nobility, it was not so easy for a bourgeois to find himself 
 among his social superiors as it might be now when such 
 differences are less clearly marked. But Madame de Eambou- 
 illet did not wish to make her distinctions appear invidious. 
 Her house was not of easy access, and she wished it to be a 
 little difficult; yet if a gentleman was well spoken of, and 
 came to her with pleasant recommendations, she would have 
 smiled and bid him welcome. 
 
CHAPTER VII 149 
 
 Men of letters were generally well received at the Hotel de 
 Rambouillet, if they were of good repute. Some went rarely, 
 some went often and became more or less intimate in the house, 
 according to circumstances. Among the_earliest visitors were 
 Malherbe, Gojnbauld, Gomberville, and theMarqms tte~ftaean ; 
 later might be seen there Voiture, Balzac, Descartes, Pierre 
 Coraeille, Georges de Jgcudery, Bejasarade, Sarrasin, Costar, 
 BuSsyJriabutin, Vaugelas, Segrais, Menage, Cotin, and quite in 
 its latter days the gossip chronicler Tallemant des Reaux. 
 And when the FrenaLAcadsmy^Wtts established, in 1635, most 
 of its first members went at least once a year to pay their 
 court to the lady whojiad-fiist set the fashion for social 
 gatherings. Among them, besides those mentioned already, 
 were Chapelajn, Conrart, Desmarets, JFaret, Boisrobert. We 
 may be sure that churchmen also were present, though most of 
 their names are not remembered now. Of those who are known, 
 we read that Richelieu, Retz, Bossuet, Fle'chier, were guests at 
 different tifnes in the salon bleu^at the Hotel de Rambouillet ; 
 though even in its last days Bossuet was a very young man 
 and Flechier a mere boy. There was also Godeau, afterwards a 
 bishop, a very little man, who became popular and was liked by 
 the ladies. On account of his diminutive stature, and because 
 he was made much of by Mile, de Rambouillet, he was called 
 " Julia's dwarf." Among the nobility fewer names have been 
 recorded ; many probably found no pleasure in going into a 
 drawing-room in the afternoon, and of the others there was 
 often little to be said. Yet there were Conde', who at that time 
 was the Due d'Enghien ; La Rochefoucauld, who later was the 
 author of the Maximes ; the Due de Longueville, who married 
 Conde's sister; the Marquis de Montausier, who married 
 Madame de Rambouillet's eldest daughter, Julie d'Angennes ; 
 and Madame de Rambouillet's son, the Marquis de Pisani. 
 
 Amongst the ladies, besides the hostess and her two daughters 
 (she had indeed three other daughters, but they went into 
 convents probably before they were of an age to appear in the 
 world), there were Conde's mother, known as Madame la Prin- 
 cesse ; later her daughter, Mile, de Bourbon, afterwards Madame 
 de Longueville ; Madame de Sejaigne', for she married when 
 she was eighteen ; Madame de Motteville, lady of honour to 
 Anne of Austria, and about whom she wrote her Mdmoires ; 
 
150 LIFE OF MOLlfiRE 
 
 Mile, de Montpensier, la Grande Mademoiselle, the daughter 
 of Gaston, Duke of Orleans, and niece of Louis xm., also a 
 writer of memoirs; Mile, de Gournay, another writer, but 
 earlier in date ; Mile, de Scudery, whose novels, in spite of their 
 absurdities, are valuable in giving pictures of the time ; Madame 
 de La Fayette, another writer of novels, but at a later time ; 
 Madame de Sable, about whom Cousin wrote one of his plea- 
 santest volumes ; her friend Madame de Maure ; Madame de 
 Hautefort, also written about by Cousin ; Mile, de Vigean, 
 whom Conde wished to marry; Madame Cornuel, celebrated 
 for her bons mots ; Mile. Paulet, called " la lionne " ; and the 
 Vicomtesse d'Auchy and Madame des Loges. These two last- 
 mentioned ladies " held academies," that is, had receptions of 
 their own. I have given these names because they are all 
 known, and they may recall to some readers ideas or facts in 
 connection with the time. 
 
 It has been thought that the Hotel de Earnbouillet was a 
 jiotbed of affectation and of literary purists, but some modern 
 French writers repel the charge as a gross exaggeration. Pro- 
 bably enough there was affecTation ofasldiT-deep^ort. This 
 was shown chiefly in the use of words ; and Madame de Ram- 
 bouillet, who was sensitive in these matters, liked her friends 
 while they were in her house to be nice in the expressions they 
 used. In such things ladies would naturally set the example, 
 at least indirectly ; and it is more probable that there should 
 have been affectation in words or in language than false pre- 
 tensions in manners among people who belonged to the best 
 families in France. Affectation in language was then a play- 
 thiiig__among the better classes in other countries besides 
 France. In England there had 15een Euphuism at theend of 
 tf& 16th century ; in Spain, Gongorism at the beginning of the 
 1 7th ; and an Italian, Marini, wrote his Adonis, which was read 
 everywhere by educated persons at the time when the Hotel 
 de Rambouillet was gaining its reputation as a fashionable 
 assembly. These causes had their influence upon Madame de 
 Eambouillet's f riends,who took what they thought were the good 
 things provided for them, and played with them as children play 
 with their toys. There was an endeavour made to say things 
 nicely and with good taste, and when good taste is put forward too 
 prominently it defeats its own object, and affectation naturally 
 
CHAPTER VII 151 
 
 follows. At the same time, the intentions of these ladies were 
 not altogether ridiculous, and in the end they bore good fruit, 
 though it is difficult to trace the steps in the progress that was 
 made. Madame de Rambouillet was spoken of by all her con- 
 temporaries, with a singular unanimity of opinion, as being a 
 very charming woman. She was constant to her friends, kind, 
 considerate, and agreeable. And yet we are told that this lady, 
 whose position was unrivalled in having the best company in 
 Paris, among whom good breeding and politeness of thought 
 and of manners were essential, lent her countenance to un- 
 natural and forced behaviour on the part of her guests. In 
 point of fact, the salon 1 at the Hotel de Rambpujllet has been 
 confounded with others of a later date, and it has been largely 
 .the faults of its imitators. About these imitators 
 something willbe said presently 
 
 Probably, also, too much has been written about the literary 
 aspirations of the Hotel de Rambouillet. Bookwriters doubt- 
 less did go there, but these men were often poor and ill-dressed 
 or had not the charm of polished manners. In compariso ( 
 with our own time few books were printed then, and literary 
 ideas did not often exist except amongst the learned. In 1629 
 a knot of nine men used to meet once a week at Conrart's 
 house to talk about books, and their meetings were kept secret 
 for some years. When through the indiscretion of one of the 
 nine they became known to Richelieu, he approved of them, 
 and he determined against the wish of the small circle of 
 friends to make the members form themselves into a company. 
 This was the origin of the French Academy, established in 
 1635. But the Hotel de Rambouillet was not a literary 
 society ; as a body it was not ambitious of literary honours, 
 though a good number of the ladies who went there were or 
 were about to become authors. Still, the tastes of most of the 
 guests did not run that way. Even with the best will in the 
 world people do not suddenly acquire a taste for literature. 
 A love of reading for its own sake must come first, and this 
 was only in its childhood. Madame de Rambouillet did not 
 ask her friends to her house to discuss literature, though 
 perhaps in later years there was some hero-worship for the 
 
 1 I use the word "salon" because it has been generally adopted, but two 
 hundred and fifty years ago it was not in use: "cabinet" was the word 
 then generally heard. 
 
152 LIFE OF MOLltRE 
 
 literary oracles. She would gladly have left the talking about 
 books to the members of the newly formed Academy ; that 
 was their business, and she did not want to meddle with it. 
 Because Corneille read his Polyeucte in her drawing-room, 
 it is not to be supposed that other authors were commonly 
 invited to read aloud what they had written. In 1640 
 Corneille was at the apogee of his reputation, and his name 
 stood very high in France at that time. But the ladies did 
 not like his play ; they said that the Christianity shown in it 
 was too strong. This may have been only another way of 
 saying that they had been intensely bored by the reading, for 
 it is well known that Corneille read badly. Literature was 
 played with by some of the frequenters of the Hotel de 
 Eambouillet as a thing of fashion, but the greater number 
 did not care much about it ; they thought it rather tiresome 
 than otherwise. It is rational to suppose that ladies and 
 gentlemen went to the famous salon with the intention of 
 seeing their friends, being seen in return, and of amusing them- 
 selves by rubbing their wits together. In that way the art of 
 conversation was acquired by those who had a natural aptitude 
 for learning it. In such an assembly the vein of affectation 
 was not likely to run very deep. Doubtless it existed, but it 
 was shown with heartiness and enthusiasm, as though it were 
 a plaything ; and probably it was stronger in the last eight or 
 ten years than it had been in the twenty years previous. 
 People talked on all manner of subjects as they do in a 
 modern drawing-room, and those who were accustomed to the 
 place spoke with the same ease of manner. If a dozen ladies 
 and a dozen gentlemen were to meet each other frequently in 
 society now, one cannot suppose that their conversation should 
 constantly be about books. If they spoke of them they would 
 mention them as novelties, without attaching an over-impor- 
 tance to what they said. So it was generally at the Hotel de 
 Kambouillet. The opinions of two or three who liked to 
 express themselves sententiously were listened to by some 
 other two or three who liked sententious sayings for this was 
 a fashion that was just then beginning but on the whole 
 these opinions were not more noticed than those uttered on 
 the spur of the moment, and in most cases were less worth 
 hearing. A few very successful novels had been written, 
 
CHAPTEE VII 153 
 
 and plays also were printed and sold ; but most of the 
 ladies who read these things interested themselves in the 
 adventures related and spoke of them with the enthusiasm of 
 children. D'Urf^'s novel Astre'e was a source of much delight ; 
 also in a lesser degree the novels of Gombauld, Gomberville, 
 and La Calprenede. Among the plays, Eacan's Arttnice ou 
 Les Bergeries, Corneille's tragedies, Eotrou's tragedies and 
 tragi-comedies, Tristan 1'Hermite's tragedy Mariamne, and 
 Desmarets' comedy Les Visionnaires, were very popular on the 
 stage, and were talked about by those who went to see them. 
 I imagine, however, that many ladies did not go to the theatre 
 then. And people had not learned to read then as they read 
 now ; they would read more slowly and less often. They liked 
 talking better, and found more amusement in it. They talked 
 a good deal about themselves, and that was surely less tire- 
 some than reading. They were persons of understanding like 
 ourselves, but very few of the women, and not very many of the 
 men, had read so much as people read in our time. They came 
 together for social purposes, and though some perhaps wished to 
 show their cleverness and rather overshot the mark, there was 
 probably not more fastidiousness than might be expected from 
 a new society of friends who were aware that in belonging to 
 that society they were envied, and that their position was 
 more fortunate than that of others who wished to belong to it 
 but had not been admitted. ^^L/^ 
 
 ^mong theiramusements verse-making was considered^ 
 an__eje^ant^accomplishment for a__gentleman ; and enigmas" 
 epigrams, portraits, and madrigals were read aloud to be 
 laughed over and talkej ajinnt, TMs-society literature was 
 largely created by Voiture, and in his and similar productions 
 by other men there was an air of gallantry that pleased the 
 ladies. It was all meant and taken as pleasant frivolity, and 
 the man who could pay the most neatly turned compliment 
 was the most applauded. Discussions arose sometimes as to 
 the preference to be given to one set of verses over another. 
 The most famous dispute was the great battle, waged with 
 all the heat that good-humoured raillery and fun will allow, 
 between the " Jobelins " and the " Uranistes." Benserade had 
 composed a Sonnet de Job and Voiture a Sonnet d'Uranie. 
 Opinions were divided as to the merits of each, and when 
 
154 LIFE OF MOLlfiRE 
 
 Corneille was drawn into the contest he wrote a sonnet ex- 
 pressing his opinion. He said in effect : " This one is the best 
 done, but I would sooner have written the other." We might, 
 in England, imagine that while these games were being played 
 some flirtation went on among the younger members of the 
 party. But, then as now, the young people in a French 
 drawing-room were not permitted to separate themselves from 
 the others and sit apart in a corner where no ear could hear 
 what was being said. Platonic love-making was allowed and 
 admired at the Hotel de Rambouillet, but any warmer expres- 
 sions of enthusiasm were not considered respectful either 
 towards the lady of the house or her guests. The gallantry of 
 a gentleman who had an easy habit of saying nice things to 
 half a dozen ladies in turn, and in the presence of them all, 
 was highly esteemed, but love-making was not allowed to go 
 further. The conversation was open, and everybody was 
 supposed to take part in it. The man who could talk well on 
 the subject of the moment was sure to be listened to and 
 made welcome. 
 
 An extract from Flechier's Oraison Funebre on the abbesse 
 d'Hieres, one of Madame de Rambouillet's daughters, has often 
 been quoted. It shows that the Hotel de Rambouillet was 
 not free from affectation, but^jL-fihows also that nice mftfmers 
 an4 good taste were its predominating features. Flechier 
 said : 
 
 " Recollect, my brethren, those cabinets which men still look back 
 upon with so much veneration, where the mind was purified, where 
 virtue was worshipped under the name of ' the incomparable 
 Arthenice ' ; 1 where were brought together so many persons of high 
 birth and distinction, who formed a select court, numerous without 
 confusion, modest without constraint, learned without pride, polite 
 without affectation." 
 
 All this may seem to be farther off than it really is from 
 Moliere's comedy. One thing is certain : that if Moliere's 
 comedy had not been written, we should have heard much less 
 about the " precieuses." In a novel by the abbe de Pure, 
 La Prfaieuse ou Le Mystkre de la Ruelle, published in 1656, the 
 word " precieuse " is thus explained : " C'est un mot du temps, 
 c'est un mot a la mode, qui a cours aujourd'hui . . . ainsi on 
 
 1 Arthenice was an anagram of Catherine, Madame de Rambouillet's 
 ' Christian name. Such anagrams were then in fashion. 
 
CHAPTEE VII 155 
 
 appelle aujourd'hui les precieuses certaines personnes du beau 
 sexe qui ont su se tirer du prix commun des autres et qui ont 
 acquis un espece et un rang tout particulier." 1 In fewer 
 words Cousin said that une precieuse meant simply " une 
 femme distinguee." And Ninon de 1'Enclos wittily described 
 the precieuses as "les jansenistes de I'amour," meaning that they 
 were severe in love matters. But the abbe de Pure must not 
 be understood to say that the word was new when he wrote. 
 For at that time there were precieuses in the provinces. 
 Chapelle and Bachaumont were travelling in 1656, and they 
 spoke of the precieuses of Montpellier, whom they did not 
 like. " Elles ne paraissaient que des precieuses de campagne 
 et n'imitaient que faiblement les notres de Paris." Walckenaer 
 says that the word was in use at the Hotel de Eambouillet, 
 and that there the ladies were proud of the title ; they were 
 known as " les precieuses," or as " les illustres." The word 
 " illustre " was in vogue in 1643, for Moliere and his first 
 comrades opened the Illustre Theatre in that year, 2 and it is 
 likely that " precieuse " dated from before that time. Pre- 
 ciosity was taken up as a thing of fashion by the ladies at the 
 Hotel de Eambouillet. It was played with and laughed over 
 by those who adopted it for no other reason than because they 
 liked the fun of the thing. 
 
 A few years after the dispersion of the Hotel de Eam- 
 bouillet say between 1645 and 1648 t{ie_number of^pre- c 
 cieuses increased. The Fronde broke out in 1648, and for a 
 time Paris was in a disordered state. When the town had 
 become quiet after the Civil War, in 1652 or 1653, a good 
 many'societiesjiro'ie which took the late Hotel de Eambouillet 
 as their model ; but they were of a more bourgeois-character, 
 and the general tone was not so good. It was less refined, 
 and in some cases there was a " shoddiness " of manner that 
 was in truth ridiculous. 
 
 Of the " assemblies " after the Fronde, the best and most 
 famous was the salon of Mile, de Scudery. This lady had a 
 reception every Saturday, and her "at homes" were well 
 attended. Some of the old frequenters of the Hotel de Eam- 
 bouillet went to her house, but people's thoughts were not 
 quite the same in the two places, or they were shown in rather 
 
 1 Vol. i. 24, 25. 2 Ante, p. 84. 
 
156 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 a different way. What had been a good set in the Eue Saint 
 Thomas du Louvre before the Fronde, degenerated afterwards 
 into a clique in the Marais quarter of the town, not quite so far 
 eastward as the Bastille, where Mile, de Scudery lived. No doubt 
 there was merriment in the Marais, as there had been at the 
 Hotel de Rambouillet, which most of the visitors enjoyed ; but 
 beside the playfulness there was a greater pedantry in the con- 
 versation which tastecLof intellect, and by degrees much of the 
 
 This was fostered 
 , while Conrart and 
 Pellisson, men of better understanding though of less learning, 
 who would willingly have " dropped the shop," were led into 
 discussing matters which they felt were out of place in a lady's 
 drawing-room. The titles " academic " or " bureau d'esprit " 
 that were given to some of these weekly assemblies show 
 sufficiently that their conversation was high-flown. Ladies 
 who went to Mile, de Scudery's and to other receptions wrote 
 verses and maxims, they corrected each other's productions, and 
 they liked it to be known that the authors were their friends. 
 
 Mile, de Scudery was a very clever woman, with creative 
 faculties, though not of the best kind nor shown in the best 
 way. She was not at all pretty, and she disliked pretentious- 
 ness. But she liked to see and hear the quick movement of 
 opinions on the topic of the moment, and as she was in the 
 middle of the stream, she could not swim against it. She 
 publishedherjipjzLe_^ra^ Cyrus under her brother's name, 
 butr^wEen her secret became known she had to admit the 
 authorship. That book appeared at intervals between 1649 
 and 1653. It was an allegorical novel containing written 
 portraits of people well known at the time; it spoke under 
 assumed names about persons in high society, their love-affairs, 
 real or imaginary, and how they amused themselves; and 
 naturally everybody who wished not to be thought behind-hand 
 in social matters read it, or pretended that he had done so. 
 D'Urfe was the first who had written what were called 
 "portraits" of his contemporaries. This he did in his famous 
 novel Astrie, the first part of which appeared in 1610, others 
 at succeeding long intervals. Mile, de Scudery followed D'Urfe 
 in describing her contemporaries, and it was chiefly her por- 
 traits that gave to her book its great popularity. Cousin made 
 
CHAPTER VII 157 
 
 long and copious extracts from it in his Socittt Franqaise au 
 17 e siecle, with a key to the personages described. These 
 extracts have their value, but reading many of them seems to 
 fill one's mouth with cotton wool. Yet the style is clear and 
 graphic, though often terribly long-winded. To modern 
 limited ideas the portraits are hyperbolically flattering to an 
 extent almost beyond belief. This was the fashion of the day. 
 If the authoress described the people who came to her drawing- 
 room, she was bound to speak well of them ; but because she 
 wrote in very exaggerated terms her own feelings need not be 
 measured by the same standard, any more than we should 
 think now that ladies in the early sixties of the last century 
 were all pompous because they wore enormously wide 
 crinolines. These monstrosities were one of the fashionable 
 oddities of the age, and they also passed away. I feel as if I 
 should like to have known Mile, de Scudery. j3he_jffias---a 
 sen^blejEoman- who esu4d sec into things, and did not like 
 being ^bespattered with clap -trap by her admirers. She 
 would willingly not have spoken of her book in her own 
 house, though she was glad to listen to what was said of 
 the productions of others in the fiecueils which were then 
 popular. She enjoyed the verse-making, the portraits, the 
 enigmas, and the imaginary conversations, all of which were 
 written and sometimes printed, and then handed round 
 amongst her friends. She liked society, but she was not a 
 woman vain of her own work. Her novels had their vogue 
 because they were written according to the taste of the time, 
 and described its pleasures. But as pleasures are largely 
 artificial, people in every age are generally intolerant against 
 those which do not appeal to their sympathies. Every one 
 who went to Mile, de Scudery's house recognised her portraits 
 and liked talking about them. Forty years later, when all 
 these persons were dead, the new generation did not know 
 them and did not care about them. 
 
 Besides Mile, de Scudery there were, between 1650 and 
 1660, a good many ladies who kept a certain day of the week 
 for seeing their friends ; and apparently those who went to 
 these receptions thought they liked them. All the ladies 
 the hostesses and their guests took up the ball that had been 
 set rolling by the Hotel de Rambouillet, and made it roll 
 
158 LIFE OF MOLI&RE 
 
 farther. An air of distinction was aimed at by those who 
 wished to be considered as superior people. They affected 
 elegance of manner, and they ascribed to themselves a tone of 
 c . thought that was beyond the reach of those who were not 
 
 initiated in their mysteries. 
 
 " Nul n'aura de 1'esprit hors nous et nos amis " l 
 
 might have been their motto. 
 
 ^.t first the precieuses had tried to speak nicely ; later they 
 \) tried to speak differently from anybody plgp- Ikeir language 
 became as full of technicalities as the pleadings in a Court of 
 Chancery, or as the slang of thieves. It was, in fact, a jargon 
 of their own. They delighted in superlative adverbs, such as 
 " furieusement," " terriblement," " effroyablement " ; and they 
 used symbolical expressions for common words and common 
 things. For Us dents they said " Vameublement de la louche "; for 
 les yeux, " les miroirs de I'dme "; for le miroir, " le conseiller des 
 grdces"', for un 6v entail, " un Z6phir"\ for le secret, " le sceau de 
 I'amitie'"; for les sieges, " les commodity de conversation "; for une 
 laide, "une belle afairepeur "; for un nouvel amant, " un novice 
 en chaleur"', for le mariage, " I'amour fini," or " TaMme de la 
 libertd" These expressions help to show what was the pre- 
 ciosity then in vogue ; they are verbal instances of the " air 
 precieux," and ladies who followed this fashion were the 
 precieuses. Mojiere laughed at these women and called them 
 " precieuses ridicules," and wif-.h t.hft fair l^noe of p.nmftdy he 
 . carljgatiiiejd-somc of thoir absurdities. 
 
 La Bruyere, a moralist and a satirist, who wrote at the 
 end of the 17th century, said in his volume Les Caracteres, in 
 the latter part of the chapter "De la societe et de la con- 
 versation " : 
 
 " It may be remembered that there were, not long ago, a company 
 of persons of both sexes who came together to talk and to show their 
 wit. They left to the vulgar the art of speaking intelligibly. One 
 obscure utterance was followed by another still more obscure ; there- 
 upon they vied with one another in their enigmas. In everything 
 that they called delicacy, sentiment, turn and nicety of expression, 
 they went to such a pitch that no one could understand them and 
 they could not understand each other. For conversation of this kind 
 neither common sense, reason, memory, nor the smallest ability were 
 
 1 End of sc. 2 in Act in. of Moli^re's Femmey S avail tes 
 
 
CHAPTEE VII 159 
 
 required ; wit was wanted, not of the best sort, but make-believe wit, 
 in which imagination has too large a share." l 
 
 And three paragraphs later : 
 
 " For some years there was a craze for insipid and childish conver- 
 sation, turning altogether upon idle questions of sentiment, and what 
 one calls love or tenderness. Some novels read by the best-bred 
 people of the court and of the town brought on this fashion. They 
 shook it off, and it was taken up by the bourgeoisie who added to it 
 their silly phrases and their puns." 2 
 
 As the name of the Hotel de Eambouillet is better known 
 than that oFoTher and/Kter~societies, La_Bruy_ere!s words have 
 been taken to apply to the people who met in the salon bleu 
 iiTEKe Eue SamFTrTomas du Louvre. Therejadies and gentle- 
 men had their affectations, no doubt^and some were proud of 
 thera^specially during the last ten or twelve years before the 
 receptions were discontinued say from 1635 to 1645 or 1648. 
 But I do not think that the cause for La Bruyere's satire 
 existed so fully while Madame de Kambouillet's house was 
 open as it did afterwards. It should be borne in mind that 
 there were two epochs in the reign of the precieuses. The 
 
 " ^JEEB^Bt^^^--- "-' n ,. .Ah. 
 
 imitators hardly came into existence before the Fronde broke 
 out in 1648, and they were certainly known after its close in 
 1652. The tone of affectation then became more general, 
 much stronger, and showed itself to be extremely silly. There 
 were then the " vraies precieuses " and the "fausses pre*- 
 cieuses," and these two titles^ dividing the classes, show that 
 the second epoch had arrived and that the name had fallen 
 into discredit. 
 
 In the novel by the abbe de Pure, already mentioned, there 
 is a short passage that I must quote : 
 
 "The precieuse is not the child of its father nor of its mother. 
 She has neither one nor the other, any more than the sacrificer of the 
 ancient law. Nor is she the work of sensitive and material nature. 
 She is an extract of intelligence, the substance of reason. This 
 intelligence, this reason, is the germ which produces her." 
 
 After this Bedlam biology no one will be surprised to hear 
 that at one of the meetings of these exceptionally clever people 
 
 1 (Euvres de La Bruyere, par M. G. Servois, i. 236, 237. (In the Collection 
 des Grands Ecrivains de la France.) 
 
 2 Ibid. 238. 
 
160 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 a discussion arose as to whether it was right to say " J'aime le 
 melon." It was held that the word " aimer " would not so be 
 used correctly, and that it was proper to say "J'estime le 
 melon." 
 
 Enough has been said to show that there were prdcieuses of 
 different kinds. They were all actuated by a love of sociability 
 and good-humour, but they showed differences of manner 
 which must have been recognised. 
 
 The Prfoieuses Ridicules, tirsi acted on the 18th of November 
 1659, is in one act and in prose ; and here in his first comedy 
 of manners Moliere characterised his personages very plainly 
 by their speech. There is much that is extremely ludicrous. 
 If a comic dramatist has to portray the exaggerated manners 
 of a set of people, laughter is the only fair means by which 
 he can accomplish it. 
 
 Madelon and Cathos, daughter and niece of Gorgibus, a 
 burly, substantial bourgeois, have their heads filled with pre- 
 ciosity from reading sentimental novels, and they wish to 
 appear in the world like people in a rank of life above their 
 own. In turn they astound Gorgibus. Madelon gives a 
 highly romantic picture of how a courtship should be con- 
 ducted : " . . . But to come abruptly to the conjugal union, to 
 make love only while you are signing the marriage contract, to 
 begin the novel at the tail end, I say, father, that nothing can 
 be more commercial than such a proceeding." Cathos is not 
 behind her cousin in her opinions. She says, scornfully 
 enough, that the two gentlemen presented to Madelon and 
 herself as lovers " are altogether incongruous in gallantry. I 
 will wager that they have never seen the Carte de Tendre, 
 and that Billets Doux, Petits Soins, and Jolis Vers are un- 
 known countries to them." l Then she finds fault with their 
 
 1 I fear that a long note is necessary here. The Carte de Tendre is a map 
 in Mile, de Scudery's second allegorical novel, CUlie. The idea of a map to 
 this novel and to Bunyan's allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress, is the same. 
 The Carte de Tendre shows that Jolis Vers, Billet Galant, and Billet Doux, 
 are three villages that one has to pass to get from Nouvelle Amiti (a town 
 on the river Inclination), to Tendre sur Estime (a town on the river Estime) ; 
 and Petits Soins is a village on the other side of the river Inclination, 
 through which one has to pass to get from Nouvelle Amitie to Tendre sur 
 Reconnaissance (a town on the river Reconnaissance). In a word, Cathos 
 meant that her own and her cousin's suitor knew nothing of the fashionable 
 gallantry of the time ; and Moliere meant also to poke his fun at the taste 
 for allegorical novels then in vogue. 
 
CHAPTEE VII 161 
 
 clothes: "To come on a love visit with an untrimmed leg, a 
 hat deprived of its feathers, hair irregularly dressed, and a 
 coat which suffers from a poverty of ribbons ! . . . My stars, 
 what lovers are these ! " The main ioleajnthe play is to show 
 how Madelon and Cathos are thoroughTyliQaxed by a valet 
 named Mascarille, ajij3Cj3ejrtoc_ajidJoxdly fellow who writes 
 verses and sets up for being a wit, and who before introducing 
 himself to th^m-has-dubbed himself the Marquis de Mascariile. 
 We are^madaJia see in the early scenes that the two young 
 women are discontented and peevish, but that when they hear 
 that a marquis has come to call upon them they are moved to 
 immoderate joy. The sham nobleman, too, tries to hector the 
 men who have carried him in his chair ; but he has to pay 
 them when he finds that they mean to have their money and 
 that they do not care for his quality. 
 
 The ladies receive the marquis very graciously. When he 
 is seated he takes a small comb out of his pocket and combs 
 his wig, then he adjusts his canons. The canons were lace 
 ruffles worn below the knee ; smartly dressed men wore them 
 deep, but Mascarille outdoes the fashion with wild extrava- 
 gance. He asks the ladies what they think of Paris, . . . 
 whether they receive many visits, and who is the wit most 
 constant in his attendance upon them. 
 
 " Madelon. 
 
 " As yet we are not known, but we are in the way of becoming 
 so ; and we have a special friend, a lady, who has promised to bring 
 here all the gentlemen who figure in the Recueil des pieces choisies." 
 . [A collection of elegant extracts by different authors.] 
 
 " Cathos. 
 
 " And certain others whom we have heard spoken of as oracles in 
 polite matters. 
 
 " Mascarille. 
 
 " I will do what you want better than anybody. They all come 
 to see me, and I may say that I never get up without having half a 
 dozen wits in my room." 
 
 The ladies are enchanted. Madelon's answer is too long to 
 quote, but it shows admirably that she and her cousin want 
 to be reckoned among those who know what is going on in 
 society to know who has composed this sonnet, who this 
 madrigal, etc. " It is this that makes people think much of you, 
 
 L 
 
162 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 for if one is behindhand in these matters all the cleverness in 
 the world is not worth a button." 
 
 Mascarille's self-glorification is charming : 
 
 "For me, such as I am," he says, "I have some skill in these 
 matters when I like to use it ; and you shall see two hundred songs, 
 as many sonnets, four hundred epigrams, and more than a thousand 
 madrigals, without counting enigmas and portraits, that I have 
 spread about in the best ruelles in Paris." 1 
 
 He delivers an impromptu which he had made at the house 
 of a duchess, one of his friends : 
 
 " Oh oh ! je n'y prenois pas garde : 
 Tandis que sans songer a mal je vous regarde, 
 Votre ceil en tapinois me derobe mon cceur, 
 Au volour, au voleur, au voleur, au voleur." 
 
 Mascarille's criticism of his own verses is as delightful 
 nonsense as the verses themselves. He explains the last line, 
 and Madelon cries : " That shows the meaning of things, the 
 real meaning, the meaning of the meaning." And when he 
 has sung his impromptu, though " the brutality of the season 
 has furiously outraged the delicacy of his voice," Cathos 
 asks him : " Have you learnt music ? " " I ? not at all." " How 
 can that be ? " " People of quality know everything without 
 learning it." 
 
 He offers to take the two ladies to the theatre and 
 says : 
 
 " But I must beg of you to applaud properly when we are there. 
 For I have promised to push the play, and the author came to me 
 again this morning to ask for my assistance. It is the custom here 
 among us people of quality for authors to come to us to read their 
 plays to induce us to think well of them and to bring them into 
 reputation. And you cannot imagine that when we say anything the 
 pit should dare to contradict us. For me, I am most exact, and 
 when I have given my word to a poet I always cry out, ' That is 
 good,' before the candles are lighted." 
 
 This is strong satire, though it ends with a bit of intended 
 nonsense. A little later Mascarille says that he has written 
 a play himself. Cathos asks him to which actors he means to 
 give it. He replies : 
 
 1 The ruelle was a name then given to social gatherings. Ladies often 
 received their friends in bed, the head of which was placed against the wall, 
 and the space at each side where the visitors sat was called the ruelle, 
 R6duit and ruelle were almost synonvmous, 
 
CHAPTEE VII 163 
 
 " A nice question ! To the ' grands comediens,' of course. (That 
 is to the Hotel de Bourgogne.) It is only they who are able to 
 make the most of things. The others are ignoramuses who recite 
 just as one talks. They do not know how to declaim their lines, nor 
 to halt at the proper moment. How can we distinguish a fine verse 
 if the actor does not pause, and if he does not tell you that there 
 you should sing your bravos ? " 
 
 The matter in this speech will be referred to at length later 
 on, but it should be said here shortly that this was Moliere's 
 first attack against his rivals, the actors at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne. No one can say how far it was directly provoked. 
 It is certain, however, that Moliere was pretending here to 
 laugh at his own troop because they spoke their words simply, 
 and it is equally certain that he was satirising the inflated 
 declamation of the actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne, and that 
 they knew he was quizzing them. They felt his irony and 
 they did not like it. A few years later there was war between 
 the two troops. The actors of the Theatre du Marais do not 
 appear to have sided with either of the disputants. 
 
 Compared even with Oronte, the fop in the Misanthrope, 
 Mascarille is most ludicrously over-dressed. He is not a little 
 proud of his person, he knows his ground and he asks the 
 ladies to admire his trimmings. Scented gloves were then 
 fashionable, and he says : " Attachez un peu sur ces gants la 
 reflexion de votre odorat." Madelon replies, "they smell 
 terribly good " ; and Cathos, " I have never inhaled a perfume 
 of higher distinction." Then follows an amusing talk about 
 clothes. 
 
 This scene 1 (sc. 9) is the chief scene in the comedy, but it is 
 hardly fair that Mascarille should have all the fun to himself. 
 Therefore the Vicomte Jodelet, a friend of his, and of as noble 
 birth, is brought on the stage. I can only refer to this incident 
 and say that Mascarille and Jodelet offer to take Madelon and 
 Cathos outside Paris and give them a supper. This is impos- 
 sible, so a dance is improvised and musicians are called in 
 to play. In the middle of the amusement the masters of the 
 
 1 It is unfortunate for the purpose of reference that in the various editions 
 of Moliere's comedies the scenes should not begin and end at the same place. 
 As I have said in the preface, all the references made here to the (Euvres de 
 Moliere apply to the edition of his works published by Messrs, Hachette in 
 the Collection des Grands Ecrivains de la France, unless of course any othf>r 
 edition is specified. 
 
164 LIFE OF MOLlfeEE 
 
 two valets come in and find their servants dancing with the 
 ladies, and they beat them for their impertinence. The sham 
 marquis and the sham viscount are stripped of their clothes 
 and made to stand bare in their shirt sleeves. Their condi- 
 tion is almost pitiable, though very ludicrous. Then Gorgibus 
 appears and he roundly scolds his daughter and his niece. At 
 last he vents his anger upon the occupations of the precieuses 
 generally : 
 
 " And you who are the cause of all their folly silly nonsense, per- 
 nicious amusements of idle minds, romances, verses, songs, and 
 sonnets may the devil run away with you all." 
 
 There was a fortnight's interval between the first and the 
 second performance of the play. If Baudeau de Somaize, not 
 a man whose evidence was the safest, can be trusted, it would 
 seem that the comedy had given offence, and that one of the 
 society gallants had sufficient influence to get the play pro- 
 hibited for a time. 1 If the play was prohibited there is nothing 
 to show that Madame de Eambouillet was the cause of it. It 
 was said, however, that she was hurt by Moliere's satire, but 
 that she had the good sense and good taste not to show her 
 annoyance. The evidence on which this statement rests is 
 not convincing. I should imagine rather that Madame de 
 Kambouillet's good sense and good taste showed her that 
 Moliere's comedy was meant as a bit of fun, and that she was 
 proud enough to think that her late salon then a thing of 
 the past was not included in the picture. She would have 
 told herself that the satire was directed against other salons 
 where the attempt at distinction or notoriety was evident to 
 anybody who had eyes to see. The tone of high breeding at 
 the Hotel de Rambouillet had led to pretentiousness and 
 " shoddiness " elsewhere, and it was this that Moliere wished 
 to ridicule ; and I believe him when he said in his preface to 
 his play : " I should have liked to show that it nowhere ex- 
 ceeded the bounds of courteous and becoming satire, that the 
 best things may be aped by sorry imitators who deserve to 
 be laughed at ; that these pitiful imitations of what is really 
 excellent, have always offered matter for comedy. ... So also 
 the true precieuses would be to blame if they were offended 
 because one makes fun of the ridiculous precieuses who imitate 
 
 1 Le Grand Dictionnaire des Precieuses, historique, etc. See Predictions. 
 
CHAPTER VII 165 
 
 them badly." Madelon and Cathos in Moliere's comedy do 
 not perceive that the sham marquis is at times very vulgar 
 in his manners, nor that his wit, though excellent in its way, 
 is sometimes like the bantering familiarity of a pushing young 
 man who likes joking with a couple of pretty barmaids. 
 Moliere himself nowhere offends against good taste, and there 
 is all the difference between showing vulgarity in a character 
 and showing a character vulgarly. Moliere here was playing 
 with his personages in the vein of caricature, and there is too 
 much true comedy in his caricature to prevent his play being 
 a farce. Affectation of a more or less ridiculous kind had 
 been a foible of the guests at the Hotel de Rambouillet, but 
 in later salons it had grown stronger; and it was this that 
 Moliere seized upon as suitable for his purpose. He made the 
 most of it, and with fair caricature he showed that the pretence 
 and the language of the precieuses were in truth a fit subject 
 for comedy. He drew two young women of bourgeois rank, 
 ignorant of the ways of people whose manners they would like 
 to adopt, and he showed that their ambition to be known in 
 society was so great that they were gulled by a lackey out- 
 rageously over-dressed who introduced himself to them as a 
 person of high quality. 
 
 Did the caricature in the Precieuses give a truer picture of 
 the different salons in vogue after the Fronde than of the late 
 Hotel de Eambouillet ? On the whole I think it did, though 
 nothing can be less absolute than the customary thoughts of 
 men and women. As well as I can judge, the tone of the 
 Hotel de Eambouillet, the parent assembly, was simpler and 
 better than in that of its children, who exaggerated its playful 
 affectations and made a business of what had been introduced 
 more or less often as an amusement. The tone of high 
 breeding had given way to pretentiousness, and it was this 
 that Moliere wished to ridicule. Let those who know his 
 plays think for a moment how much of his satire was directed 
 against humbug of various kinds. Tartuffe's humbug was 
 wicked, and he was hated ; Philinte adopted gaily the con- 
 ventional humbug of the world, he knew what that meant, but 
 he knew nothing more ; Monsieur Jourdain so humbugged 
 himself that he was a laughing-stock. 
 
 When the Precieuses first appeared it followed Corneille's 
 
166 LIFE OF MOLIEEE 
 
 Ginna, as an after-piece. For the first twelve months at the 
 Petit Bourbon Moliere adopted the practice that was then 
 common of giving each day only one play in five acts ; but in 
 adding his own one-act comedy after the tragedy he was in 
 reality going back to the old custom of giving a short light 
 play after the set piece for the day. 
 
 On the stage Moliere was his own Marquis de Mascarille in 
 the Prfaieuses, and La Grange and Du Croisy played under 
 their own names. Jodelet also gave his name to his part. 
 The other roles were probably distributed as follows : Gorgibus 
 was acted by L'Espy, Madelon by Madeleine Bejart, Cathos by 
 Mile, de Brie, Marotte by Mile. Kagueneau. 1 
 
 There are three stories connected with the first performance 
 of the Prdcieuses. I will give the best, and no one will be 
 injured by believing it. An old man in the pit of the theatre 
 was so delighted with the play that he cried aloud : " Bravo, 
 Moliere ! That is good comedy." The two other stories appear 
 to be more spurious. Public curiosity to see the second per- 
 formance of the comedy, on the 2nd of December, must have 
 been great, for on that day the price of entry into the parterre 
 the largest place in the theatre was doubled. This was 
 done in accordance with a custom of which more will be said 
 in chapter ix. The success of the comedy was brilliant. It 
 was acted thirty-three times as a new play ; this for a play in 
 one act was very remarkable. The average receipt taken at 
 these thirty-three performances was more than double the 
 average receipt of the 228 public performances at the Petit 
 Bourbon theatre from October 1658 to October 1660 even 
 though the little comedy helped so largely to raise the general 
 average. 
 
 The acting copyright in a play was then governed by custom. 
 A play was held to belong to the theatre where it was first 
 acted until it was printed. Any other troop might then act it 
 if they pleased. On the whole the custom was fairly observed. 
 But sometimes booksellers interfered : they fraudulently got a 
 copy of the play, obtained the privilege to print it, which was 
 then often given easily enough, and sold it without the writer's 
 permission. 2 In the Notice to the Prfoieuses Ridicules Despois 
 
 1 L. Moland, (louvres de Moliere, 2nd ed. Additions at the end of vol. xii. 
 - Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 5th ed. 53. 
 
CHAPTER VII 167 
 
 says : " It is more than probable that this is the first of 
 Moliere's comedies that was printed ; it is quite certain that it 
 is the first that was printed with his sanction." J But it was 
 very nearly printed without his sanction. Jean Ribou, a book- 
 seller, obtained a stolen copy of the play, and got surreptitiously 
 on the 12th of January 1660 a privilege or leave to print it. 
 This is the meaning of Moliere's words in the preface to his 
 comedy : " I have had the misfortune to see a stolen copy of 
 my play in the hands of the booksellers, accompanied with a 
 permission to print it, obtained without my knowledge. . . . 
 I must either let my play be printed or have a lawsuit." He 
 had his play printed at once. A new privilege was made out 
 in favour of another bookseller, though Moliere's name was not 
 mentioned in it. This was dated 19th of January 1660, and 
 on the 29th the printing was completed. Ribou's surreptitious 
 privilege was annulled, and his intended theft prevented. 2 
 Moliere's preface to his Prfoieuses should be read. With sound 
 common sense and characteristic humour he mixed his serious- 
 ness and his ridicule together, but in reality he was very angry 
 at the fraud so nearly practised upon him. The little play 
 had been intended for the stage, and he was well satisfied with 
 its success there ; but " he had no wish to make it jump from 
 the Theatre du Bourbon to the Galerie du Palais" where 
 there were many booksellers' shops thereby affording the two 
 rival troops the opportunity, if they chose to use it, of perform- 
 ing his play in their theatres. He knew also that to complain 
 of injustice was not the way to propitiate the world in his 
 favour, and he was able to throw a tone of pleasantry into 
 what he said, as though he enjoyed the satisfaction of being 
 considered an author and of seeing himself in print for the 
 first time. 
 
 It is not worth while to give a page to say how Somaise wrote 
 two plays : Les Veritables Prfoieuses, and Les Prtcieuses Ridicules, 
 " comedie represented au Petit Bourbon. Nouvellement mises 
 en vers." They were both impudent attempts to gain some 
 success after the great popularity of Moliere's comedy. The 
 first at least of these two plays was probably acted at some 
 minor theatre in Paris, and both of the plays reached a second 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, ii. 41, 42; and L 98-100. 
 
 2 Ibid. ii. 42, 43 ; xi. 1, 2. 
 

 168 LIFE OF MOLI&RE 
 
 edition in print. And it would be useless to go into the ques- 
 tion whether Moliere's Prfoieuses had been acted in the provinces 
 before he returned to Paris. Despois argued strongly against 
 this idea, 1 and with every appearance of right on his side. 
 
 But it may be said shortly that Moliere put on to his stage 
 on the 7th of May 1660 a comedy by Gilbert called La Vraie 
 et la Fausse Precieuse. Gilbert was an author of reputation. 
 M. Victor Fournel reprinted one of his comedies in the second 
 volume of his Contemporains de Moliere, and in a short notice 
 tried to say a good word for him ; but if Gilbert was ever well 
 thought of, his reputation died with him. He was paid 500 
 livres for his comedy acted by Moliere's troop, but the play 
 was never printed. Though it was acted only nine times, it 
 had a good pecuniary success compared with other plays, 
 except Moliere's, that were put on the stage at the Petit 
 Bourbon theatre. 
 
 Moliere's next comedy, Sganarelle ou le Cocu Imayinaire, 
 was first played aTThe Petit Bourbon theatre on the 28th 
 of May 1660. The play is in verse, and as it has only one 
 act, it~was always performed after a longer piece. Its success 
 was very good, though less brilliant than that of the Precieuses. 
 While it was new it was given thirty-four times, it was 
 played three times before the king ; and during the author's 
 lifetime it was acted in public oftener than any other comedy 
 that he wrote. 2 Moliere gave the name Sganarelle to half a 
 dozen characters in his plays ; it is believed that he invented 
 the word. Etymologically, it means one who is undeceived 
 to his own discomfort ; and both the sound and the appear- 
 ance of the first syllable indicate that the name was meant 
 to have an ungracious signification. In nearly all cases the 
 name represents a man who is a churl and a poltroon, one 
 who is selfish, mean, and tyrannical. There is a typical like- 
 ness amongst them all. Sganarelle, the valet in Don Juan, 
 is the best of his race, but he differs from the others in that 
 he is a servant and must obey. He has not much chance 
 of being a tyrant, and by his master's side he shines as a 
 good man. Yet these six characters, bearing the same name 
 and belonging as it were to one family, have all their own 
 peculiarities. They are all recognisable one from the other. 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, ii. 7-10. 2 Ibid. i. 548 ; ii. 140-2. 
 
CHAPTER VII 169 
 
 The circumstances under which they appear are different; 
 the men therefore speak and act differently. By so constantly 
 bringing forward the same type under various guises, Moliere 
 shows how thoroughly he knew its nature. The character was 
 not a noble one, but the dramatist made admirable use of it in 
 bringing out the satire in his comedies. 
 
 In Sganarelle Moliere was laughing at the ignoble jealousy 
 of a man who fancied without cause that his wife was untrue 
 to him. The intrigue of the story lies in the mistakes made 
 both by Sganarelle and his wife, and in those made by the 
 two young lovers. They all believe things to be other than 
 they are. The amusement lies in the skilful manner the 
 events are worked out, and in the way that Sganarelle shows 
 his character. He is represented as a jealous husband, im- 
 puting thoughts to his wife which were groundless. No doubt 
 the woman was a vixen, but he was such a self-satisfied, 
 fretful poltroon, that if she occasionally " combed his hair," he 
 richly deserved it. 
 
 In scene 17 Sganarelle delivers a long monologue. He 
 knows that he ought to fight his enemy, but he excuses him- 
 self for his want of spirit. Despois po^s_pjtj 
 
 sijbuationj3_bi'ing about ther^sameTdea in different authors^ 
 and he refers to a passage in Shakespeare's Henry IV. Part i. 
 AcFvTend of sc. 1, where Falstaff shows himself to be not more 
 courageous than Sganarelle. Comparing these two passages 
 as far as one can, I prefer Moliere's, though his monologue 
 here is long. Sganarelle shows by his speech that he has 
 all the shilly-shally earnestness of a coward. He has only 
 strength to be frankly cynical. His wife, though a shrew, is 
 perfectly innocent of the imputed fault ; but as he thinks she 
 is untrue, he will proclaim her misconduct everywhere. He 
 shows a mixture of sham bravery and real cowardice, and this 
 with the humour and the aptness of language to the situation 
 makes his speech very entertaining. There is no passage of 
 any length in Moliere's comedies which shows more of the 
 oM " esprit gaulois "jth.n.Ti this spp.ach- ___ Ia-thogh4r -it seems to 
 ;n_tw nr more generations before his day. But none 
 writers in verse at the end of the 16th century had 
 
 1 (Enures de Moliere, ii. 200 note. This note begins on p. 198, but I omit 
 the first part of it where reference is made to a play of Scarron's. 
 
170 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 Moliere's largeness of style, and if they had possessed his 
 sense of humour they would have expressed themselves with 
 greater crudity. Those who wrote in prose showed a half 
 vigorous manner, rich perhaps in their own vernacular, but 
 their style was the language of the people, and was not literary 
 except in a simple and uncultured form. 
 
 There is nothing in Sganardle that should offend anybody. 
 The play is not a high class comedy, though there are excel- 
 lent points in it, and one may raise the objection that it does 
 not involve an exalted moral. It would, however, be more 
 just to say that the lesson given is so elementary that no man 
 ought to need it. Unfortunately there are in the world men 
 who are bullies and cowards, vain and proud of themselves, 
 jealous, selfish, obnoxious creatures, hateful to all who know 
 them. Such a one was Sganarelle in this comedy ; and Shake- 
 speare's Falstaff, though larger hearted and with more humour 
 in himself, was not otherwise very different. Moliere meant 
 to show some of the ugly sides of human nature, and from 
 his satire we see that such a husband will probably have a 
 querulous wife. It was not the dramatist's wish to extol his 
 Sganarelle, but to show what manner of man he was; and 
 it is for us to see how he accomplished his task. Nobody 
 respects him and nobody respects Falstaff, but many admire 
 the way the two personages are drawn. 
 
 Speaking of the French play, M. Mesnard asks : " But where 
 is the truth of the characters, and even the probability of the 
 incidents ? " 1 It may be answered that the dramatist took 
 certain incidents which would lend themselves to ridicule and 
 based his characters upon them. Both are ludicrous and they 
 were worked out on ludicrous lines, but the characters are 
 made to follow the natural ideas of the type of personages 
 described; therefore in their place they are true. Truth in 
 fiction does not necessarily exclude what is ludicrous, or even 
 grotesqueness, for a character or an incident may be ridiculous 
 without being absurd. Ridicule and absurdity in fable are 
 not synonymous. Truth in humour may often seem to be 
 irregular, but without it comedy descends to farce. Perhaps 
 there is some farce in Sganarelle, but by his faithful rendering 
 of a ridiculous character or grotesque situation, Moliere showed 
 
 1 Notice biographique sur Moliere, 228. 
 
CHAPTER VII 171 
 
 his power of realisation, or if you like of idealisation, very 
 strongly. Ludicrous comedy, therefore, when it is true to 
 itself, stands upon a higher level than farce, however amusing. 
 
 Like other French writers, M. Moland does not doubt 
 that the plot of Sganarelle came from Italy, but he says : 
 " Nothing is more French than the spirit and the gaiety which 
 animates the whole of the dialogue. This has all the piquant 
 flavour, all the ironical vigour that may be seen in the contes 
 and in the fabliaux. Those who know our ancient literature 
 recognise in Moliere's plays not only the broad touch of 
 pleasantry, the free traditions of the satire of the middle ages, 
 but also numerous reminiscences of old authors, of Noel du 
 Fail, of Rabelais, of the Quinze Joyes de Mariage, of the Cent 
 Nouvelles Nouvellcs" l 
 
 In this comedy Moliere played the part of Sganarelle ; and du 
 Pare, who with his wife had returned to the Petit Bourbon from 
 the Marais at Easter, played the part of Gros Rene. Despois 
 says that the attribution of the other roles is uncertain. 
 
 c Thestpry of the printing of Sganarelle is curious, but it is 
 long and only the outlines can be told here. On the 31st of 
 May, three days after the comedy had first appeared, Moliere 
 obtained a privilege or leave to print his play, which also 
 forbade any one else from doing so. He then thought he was 
 safe. But one Neufvillenaine also got, fraudulently, on the 
 26th of July, a privilege to print the play ; and on the 26th of 
 August the comedy, with laudatory arguments written by him 
 at the head of each scene, appeared in type. Neufvillenaine 
 said that he had seen the play six or seven times and had 
 written it all from memory. Most probably a stolen green- 
 room copy had been given to him. Moliere at once went to 
 law. Ribou, the bookseller, was punished, but Neufvillenaine 
 escaped punishment, or nothing is known of it. The version 
 of the play given by him must have been pretty accurate, for 
 Moliere allowed his edition of twelve hundred and fifty copies 
 to run its course, and the lines now read are those which were 
 printed fraudulently. 2 I have not been able to tell all of 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, by L. Moland, 2nd. ed. iii. 272. 
 
 - This story is told by Despois, (Euvres de Moliere, ii. 147-159; and com- 
 pleted by M. Desfeuilles in vol. xi. pp. 3 and 4 of the same work. See also 
 the prefatory notice to Sganarelle ou Le Cocu Imaginaire by M. Moland in 
 his second edition of Moliere, vol. iii. 
 
172 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 Neufvillenaine's barefaced impudence. The fact that nothing 
 more was heard of him might make one think that the whole 
 affair was a hoax, even that Moliere might have been an 
 accomplice in it. But the legal documents published by 
 M. Campardon prove that such an idea is impossible. Neuf- 
 villenaine was probably the invented name of some struggling 
 author, and I am much inclined to suspect de Vise. This man 
 will be heard of again. 
 
 Two months after the first appearance of Moliere's Sganarelle 
 ou le Cocu Imaginaire, one F. Doneau obtained leave to print 
 a comedy called La Cocue Imaginaire. This play was merely 
 an inversion of Moliere's : the principal characters were trans- 
 formed, and Doneau made a woman go through the same 
 scenes of anxiety that Moliere had shown in a man. His play 
 does not appear to have been acted, but two editions of the 
 printed copy were sold. 1 
 
 In the month of October an incident happened which 
 troubled the minds of the actors at the Petit Bourbon. They 
 were suddenly turned out of their theatre, and it would seem 
 unnecessarily for the reasons that were alleged. The idea 
 of building the present colonnade or facade of the Louvre 
 opposite the church of Saint Germain 1'Auxerrois had been 
 mooted, but the first stone was not laid until the autumn of 
 1665. 2 After chronicling the last performance at the theatre 
 on the 10th of October, La Grange gives an account of the 
 expulsion of the troop : 
 
 "On Monday the llth of October, M. de Ratabon, surveyor of the 
 royal buildings, began to pull down the Petit Bourbon theatre with- 
 out giving notice to the troop, who were much surprised to find their 
 theatre taken from them. Complaint was made to the King, to 
 whom M. de Ratabon said that the site of the theatre was necessary 
 for the building of the Louvre, and that as the interior of the theatre 
 had been planned for the royal ballets and belonged to his Majesty, 
 he had not thought it necessary to consider the claims of the theatre 
 while the work at the Louvre was being pressed forward. M. de 
 Ratabon evidently wished to play the troop a nasty trick. But as 
 the troop had the good fortune to please the King, his Majesty 
 gratified them by allowing them the hall in the Palais Royal, 
 Monsieur having asked for it to indemnify his actors for the wrong 
 done to them ; and the Sieur de Ratabon received a special order to 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, ii. 137-9. 
 
 2 Despois, Le Theatre Fran^ais sous Louis XIV., 29. 
 
CHAPTER VII 173 
 
 do the important repairs in the hall of the Palais Royal. There were 
 three rotten, propped-up beams in the timber work, and half of the 
 hall was uncovered and dilapidated. A few days afterwards the troop 
 set men to work at the theatre and petitioned the King to let them 
 remove from the Bourbon the boxes and other things necessary for 
 their new home. . . . Besides all these bickerings [relating to 
 decorations] our troop had to contend against another trouble. The 
 actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne and those at the Marais tried to 
 separate us, each troop making overtures to entice some of us into 
 their company. But every one in Moliere's troop remained firm. All 
 the actors liked the Sieur de Moliere, their leader, who besides his 
 good qualities and singular ability has also a polite and engaging 
 manner, which obliged them all to assure him that they would take 
 their chance with him whatever offer was made to them and whatever 
 advantage they might find elsewhere. 
 
 " Thereupon it was noised about in Paris that the troop remained 
 united and that it was to be established at the Palais Royal, with the 
 protection of the King and of Monsieur." l 
 
 For more than three months Moliere and his comrades were 
 without a theatre. They had been expelled from the Petit 
 Bourbon with high-handed officialism on the llth of October 
 1660, and they were not installed in the Palais Royal until 
 the 20th of January following. But in the meanwhile they 
 were not altogether idle. La Grange has chronicled that they 
 went " en visite " eight times at private houses, and for these 
 visits they received 2115 livres. They also played five times 
 at the Louvre and once at Vincennes, for which the king gave 
 them 3000 livres. But the demolitions at the Petit Bourbon 
 and getting into the Palais Royal cost them 2115 livres. 2 
 There still remained to them the gratification of 3000 livres 
 from the king, but they had to live for fourteen weeks and 
 were without their customary employment. 
 
 An examination of La Grange's Register shows that all the 
 real successes at the Petit Bourbon, with the partial exception 
 of Gilbert's comedy, La Vraie et La Fausse Prtcieuse, came 
 from Moliere's two one-act plays. And it will be seen, too, 
 afterwards at the Palais Royal that Moliere's comedies were 
 almost the only plays that were profitable to his troop. This 
 was partly because neither Moliere nor his comrades could act 
 tragedy, or the public thought they could not do so. Some- 
 thing will be said about this in a later chapter. During the 
 
 1 Registre de la Grange, 25, 26. 2 Ibid. 27, 28. 
 
174 LIFE OF MOLliCEE 
 
 two years that Moliere was at the Petit Bourbon the theatre 
 was open 228 times, and the average daily receipt was 311 
 livres. Gilbert's new five-act comedy was acted nine times, 
 and gave a daily average of 330 livres; but while they were 
 new Moliere's PrScieuses Ridicules, acted 33 times, gave a daily 
 average of 647 livres, and his Sganarelle, acted 34 times, an 
 average of 461 livres. It may seem unfair to estimate the 
 day's receipt as having been made by a one-act comedy ; but 
 a comparison of the daily receipts, when these two plays of 
 Moliere's were acted and when they were not, shows indisput- 
 ably that it was the one-act comedy in both cases that 
 attracted nine-tenths of the audience. 
 
 A play was considered new until its freshness had so far 
 declined that it was withdrawn, perhaps temporarily, from the 
 stage ; or, if it had any fair success, until it was printed. 
 Taking these, therefore, as the general dividing lines between 
 new and old plays, La Grange shows that among the contem- 
 porary authors of old plays acted at the Petit Bourbon, Pierre 
 Corneille was brought forward 26 times, Scarron 41, but 
 Moliere himself 59 the fitourdi was acted 27 times, and the 
 D6pit Amoureux 32. Sanche Pause, a comedy by an unknown 
 writer, and probably not then new, was acted 17 times; 
 Gilbert's tragedy, Endymion, 1 1 times ; and Thomas Corneille's 
 comedy, Don Bertrand de Cigarral, 8 times. Desmarets, 
 Tristan 1'Hermite, and Boisrobert were acted 7 or 8 times each ; 
 Kotrou only 3 times. Old plays were naturally not so well 
 liked as new ones, and when an old play was given alone, the 
 receipts exceed the mean average of 311 livres only 8 times 
 Moliere's fitourdi 3 times, his Dtpit Amoureux 3 times, and 
 two comedies of Scarron's each once. * 
 
 On the whole it may be seen from the last quotation made 
 from La Grange's Eegister that the actors were satisfied with 
 the results of their first two years' work in Paris. In after 
 years, at the Palais Eoyal, an actor's share in the theatre 
 became more valuable. This was owing chiefly to the 
 excellence of Moliere's comedies, or to the way in which they 
 were acted, though in a few cases the hostility which his plays 
 provoked doubtless increased the number of spectators. 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 
 
 MOLIERE'S IDEAS OF COMEDY, ETC. SHAKESPEARE AND MOLIERE 
 
 IF Moliere had written only half a dozen comedies this chapter 
 would not be necessary ; but as he was a very fertile author 
 some general remarks should be made about his ideas of 
 comedy, as to how he put them into effect and what may 
 be learned from his teaching. These ideas and the way he 
 showed them formed part of Moliere's nature, and they should 
 be noticed by any one who wishes to understand his plays. 
 A little forbearance, I hope, may be allowed to me for saying 
 here some things that are said in more or less different ways 
 in other parts of this book. Such repetition is almost un- 
 avoidable in trying to interpret the thoughts of a prolific 
 comic dramatist with large sympathies ; who, in spite of his 
 sadness, was a man of clear and sound judgment, who knew 
 the intricacies of human nature perhaps better than any of his 
 countrymen, and who loved to ridicule its vagaries. It might 
 seem that Moliere's ideas of acting should be spoken of here, but 
 it will be more convenient to consider the general style of act- 
 ing among his contemporaries and the judgments passed upon 
 himself as an actor before attempting on our part to say how 
 he strove to personate the characters he had to represent. 
 
 Everybody has not the same ideas about comedy and every- 
 body will not think of Moliere's plays in the same way, for 
 men's humours and their sympathies are often widely different. 
 As a branch of the representation of human nature it is useless 
 to speak about comedy in an absolute manner, and though 1 
 have expressed my own opinions, I trust it may not be thought 
 I have wished to lay down the law or to propound canons of 
 criticism where lines of thought are much involved. In 
 dealing with comedy, questions become very complicated ; 
 few of them stand alone. We should endeavour to consider 
 them together as forming a part of a great whole. I believe, 
 however, that truth, with its many-sidedness, is a fundamental 
 
 175 
 
176 LIFE OF 
 
 basis in all arts. It is extremely difficult to see into it, really 
 get at it in all its aspects, many of which seem to be divergent, 
 bring them together, co-ordinate them and conciliate them. 
 A man would be bold if he thought he had done so much. 
 
 Comedy may be seen in various branches of art ; but with 
 regard to the drama, which should show how people of 
 different natures are made to act and react upon one another, 
 I take it that comedy means a mirthful dramatic representa- 
 tion of the humours of men, and that some exaggeration or 
 caricature may be used to heighten the effect. Comic is an 
 adjective applying to the picture, and means appertaining or 
 belonging to comedy. Alceste in the Misanthrope, and the 
 Marquis de Mascarille in the Predeuses Ridicules are both comic 
 personages, because in different ways they show the attributes 
 of comedy the first with seriousness, though ridicule is cast 
 upon him, the other with jesting caricature. When the 
 Tartu/e was forbidden, Moliere, in pleading his cause, began 
 his first petition to the king : " The function of comedy is to 
 correct men while it amuses them." Comedy should before 
 all things amuse and be mirthful, it should appeal to the 
 heart and to the head, it should be written with the intention 
 of satirising men's bad or foolish qualities and their manners, 
 and also of showing the good sides of their natures ; and every 
 comedy apart from farce, which is the nonsense of comedy 
 should have a moral. 
 
 Moliere did not offer his moral as a precept. He made it 
 form part of the plot and of the characterisation in a play, 
 but he so disguised it by satire or irony that the reader or 
 spectator enjoys his lesson as though it were a thing of 
 delight. Moliere knew exceedingly well how to gild his pill. 
 It was he who wrote, in the last scene of Amphitryon : 
 
 " Le Seigneur Jupiter sait dorer la pilule." 
 
 He shows that it is distinctly not the office of the comic 
 dramatist to preach to his audience. When most in earnest 
 he wrote thoroughly in the vein of comedy, often mixing 
 strong ridicule with his censure, and his lessons nearly always 
 afford amusement, and are read with pleasure. He teaches 
 that it is the office of comedy to show how men and women act 
 and react upon one another in the play of life, and proclaim 
 
CHAPTEK VIII 177 
 
 themselves to be what they are by their speech and by their 
 deeds. Comedy concerns itself far more with men's likes and 
 dislikes, with their fads or their caprices, than with their 
 mental abilities. Man's nature is strangely interwoven ; but, 
 if we think of it, our humours and how we show them in 
 their frequent contradictions be they grave or gay, fickle or 
 persevering, mean or honest, generous or selfish, courageous or 
 timid will be a tolerably sure guide, from the point of view 
 of comedy, to our personal characteristics. A large part of 
 Moliere's comedy is seen in satire or irony against the world's 
 humbug. Carlyle called this sham, and growled over it con- 
 temptuously. Moliere showed wrong-doing more clearly and 
 in a better spirit, and he made people laugh at their own weak- 
 nesses. The comic dramatist is fully within his province if he 
 can by fair satire expose vices and foibles and thus exhibit 
 their harm and their folly ; and if it is given to him to make 
 others feel disgust or dislike by his laughter, he may perhaps 
 effect his object. When Moliere had a strong moral purpose 
 in view, he made true comedy the vehicle for teaching his 
 lesson, and he showed his purpose with great comic force. 
 When he condemned the cruelty or the selfishness of fathers 
 or guardians, the heartlessness of women, hypocrisy, and what 
 passed for atheism, and the dishonesty of doctors, his charac- 
 terisation gives so much pleasure that no one feels his lesson 
 to be wearisome ; though there have been some who have 
 missed its teaching because they have not understood the 
 intended caricature and its ridicule. It was not in Moliere's 
 nature to wish to preach. He gave satirical and comic 
 pictures of what he saw and heard, and he described with 
 censure or with ridicule the results produced by bad or 
 foolish actions. He loved pleasant raillery and the fun of 
 good satire and irony, and his wish to ridicule was always 
 governed by charitable intentions, and by a desire not to 
 wound when chastisement was not deserved. He was never 
 ill-natured, though, when he meant to punish, he knew how 
 to use his whip. But mere punishment for its own sake of a 
 bad man, say a Harpagon, is distasteful. It savours of 
 
 coarseness 
 
 " It is excellent 
 
 To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous 
 To use it like a giant." 
 
 M 
 
178 LIFE OF MOLlftRE 
 
 Moliere did not forget that he was a comic dramatist, whose 
 office it was to amuse by showing the comedy of life. Though 
 satire was part of his function, he recollected that the public, 
 who were his judges, would soon be listening to him; and 
 that when chastisement was necessary, unless it were given 
 fairly and in the spirit of good comedy, the censure would 
 recoil upon his own head and do him more harm than good. 
 No satirist ever knew better that he should be careful how he 
 held his rod ; no satirist was ever less of an over-zealous 
 policeman either in thought or in deed. 
 
 Laughter of some sort in a comedy is essential, for a comedy 
 that does not make one laugh or that has no mirth in it is like 
 a dull beast not worth feeding. Mountebank wit is rarely 
 comedy; setting that aside, therefore, and also pure farce 
 showing little or no comedy, there are different notes in the 
 laughter of comedy. They arise from the spirit of the play 
 and from the tone of the words used. The natural effect of 
 comedy should be to create merriment of some kind. It may 
 be loud, even uproarious, or appeal softly to the more delicate 
 sense of gentle humour. In all cases laughter should spring 
 of its own accord, gladly, as though it enjoyed its own 
 presence ; there should be some sense of thoughtfulness behind 
 it, and it is always happiest when it brings with it a feeling of 
 rejoicing. The laughter of a comic dramatist should at least 
 be sociable, so that many can join in it, everybody laughing 
 together in the theatre at the same time and at the same 
 thing. Inside the theatre emotional feelings are infectious. 
 Every one does riot think alike, but if the play really interests, 
 a sentiment of gladness or of mirth spreads itself through the 
 house ; if the play be tiresome, a sensation of dulness is diffused 
 in the same way. A sort of magnetic influence is at work, 
 carrying with it delight or boredom, and the infection is 
 caught. High and low comedy are terms sometimes heard as 
 general distinguishing marks, but the distinctions have very 
 frequently not been observed in practice. The so-called 
 divisions have naturally been confounded. It is impossible to 
 draw a line between the manners and humours of persons in 
 
 gentle life and of those who are socially below them between 
 
 the quality and the people. Moliere has shown humours in 
 different ways, but he did not divide men into classes. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 179 
 
 Though some of his plays belong to high comedy, there are 
 many others which, so far as they can come under any desig- 
 nation, would perhaps be better known as popular comedy. 
 The title is not precise, it is vague enough ; but our humours 
 or our fancies, instead of being precise, are generally complex 
 or contradictory. All comedy should appeal to natural 
 instincts, and its office is to delight as well as to amuse. The 
 tone of the wit or humour shown, of the pleasure it gives and 
 of the laughter it provokes, are good indications, as far as 
 they go, to tell you how to think of the comedy you have seen 
 or read. Is the humour displayed good or ill natured, is it 
 clean or is it coarse ? Is the laughter it causes only a giggle, 
 or does it show a meaning of its own ? Does the wit or the 
 fun seem to come easily out of the subject, or is it forced and 
 pretentious ? Does the play raise your spirits and make you 
 feel happier ? Is the folly or the vice spoken of shown with 
 complacence, or with rebuke and honest anger ? Answers to 
 these questions will not differentiate high from low or even 
 popular comedy, and they will not tell whether the incidents 
 and the personages have been well or ill described, but they 
 should help to characterise a comedy seen on the stage. 
 
 If I understand Moliere's teaching aright, his object was to 
 show amusing comedy from a frank and wholesome point of 
 view. In nearly all of his plays written after his return to 
 Paris from the provinces, he took for his groundwork a subject 
 that might be made to illustrate the thoughts of his country- 
 men ; and though, as he treated it, his meaning was clear, his 
 ridicule sometimes proved a stumbling-block, especially to 
 men in authority. With the licence of fair caricature allowed 
 to a comic dramatist he represented people's manners and 
 actions as he saw them, laughing at what was ridiculous, 
 satirising or condemning what was vicious, and extolling virtues 
 as being noble but he has done this latter more rarely, as 
 though he thought the province of comedy was rather to 
 reprove than to admire. He tried to show by comic examples 
 that from evil or foolish conduct bad results would follow, and 
 that the laughter coming from satire in comedy might pos- 
 sibly be beneficial. Beyond this he was not a reformer. He 
 had no idea that it was the duty of a comic dramatist to speak 
 with the tone of an enthusiast, or to endeavour to correct 
 
180 
 meiis 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 conduct by telling them what they ought to do. Such 
 teaching belongs properly to the divine. Spiritual instruction 
 was not Moliere's function, and his comedies do not lead one 
 to suppose that he thought of it. He wrote from an open and 
 honest worldly point of view ; and he thought that if by 
 comedy he could expose the harm or the folly caused by greed, 
 selfishness, injustice, dishonesty, over self-love, vanity or 
 humbug, he might indicate the evils coming from these faults. 
 It was not his office to do more, and he would not attempt it. 
 M(fli(>re was warm-hearted, but he did not let his enthusiasm 
 destroy his comedy. He did not forget that human nature is 
 strong, that it works in its own way, and that it is often 
 capricious and perverse. He wished earnestly to see many 
 things otherwise ordered, but he did not suppose that he 
 could do much to alter the world's ways. He could hardly 
 have hoped in the Tartuffe to give a death-blow to hypocrisy 
 and to the frauds of the directors of conscience, nor in Don 
 Juan to crush pretended atheism. His audience in the pit 
 might rejoice to see a daughter escape from the tyranny of 
 her father, but churlish fathers because they had power over 
 their children would continue to use it. Boileau tells us that 
 Moliere's satire did put down the nonsense talked by the 
 precieuses ; therefore his later comedy against the pretentious- 
 ness of the femmes savantes may have had some good effect. 
 These affectations, however, were transient follies, they were 
 social crazes of the time which gave pleasure and, ordinarily 
 speaking, were not morally wrong. His satire against the 
 doctors, a more important matter, was in the main justified, 
 but there is no evidence to show that it appreciably dimin- 
 ished the number of quacks. 
 
 Moliere's tendency to ridicule bad or foolish things and 
 his condemnation of them went hand in hand ; he gave the 
 world his play while he himself was often moved to anger. It 
 is remarkable that he should have combined the opposite 
 qualities of earnestness and love of ridicule in such a strong 
 degree. Ridicule with Moliere was not intended merely to 
 create laughter. It had in it a feeling of reverence, and he 
 tried to make it serve a good purpose. If ridicule in serious 
 matters is to command respect, it must be shown with rever- 
 ence, and not in a scoffing spirit, and with this thought in 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 181 
 
 our minds Pascal and Moliere may be considered together. 
 Those who say that Moliere's ridicule was only clever jesting, 
 or that it was misplaced, have, I think, not read it truly ; they 
 have not looked at his comedy closely enough, and seen the 
 meaning of his satire beneath his laughter. The comedy in 
 the Tartuffe and in Don Juan are two instances in point. La 
 Bruyere wrote some twenty years after Moliere, and what he 
 says of the " directeurs " and of the " esprits forts " is a strong 
 argument for thinking that the dramatist's pictures of the 
 hypocrite and of the atheist were justified. Take two other 
 instances. George Dandiri's wife receives the addresses of 
 a gallant very kindly; she lies impudently about them, and 
 she insults her husband. Can it be urged seriously in pallia- 
 tion of her offence that her husband is an egregious ass ? The 
 satire against Harpagon is often very amusing, but it is grim. 
 Surely Moliere meant to show that the miser was so odious 
 and tyrannical that even his children could not respect him, 
 and that happiness in his household was impossible. If the 
 comic writer knows how to teach, he may prove as able a 
 moralist as the professor who hangs up his signboard. I 
 have seen the words "Castigat ridendo mores" he laughs 
 at manners and chastises them applied to Moliere. I am 
 told they are not classical. They express, however, very truly 
 the moral purpose in his comedies. When he ridiculed those 
 whom he would punish, honest laughter was in his thoughts, 
 and he knew that people would not go to his theatre to see 
 a dramatic performance of a homily, however well it was per- 
 formed. Mere humbug, when it injures no one, is a less serious 
 matter, and though Moliere trounced Monsieur Jourdain for 
 his extraordinarily silly vanity, he did it very kindly. Who 
 does not join in Nicole's hearty laughter when she sees her 
 master dressed up in his fine clothes ? Moliere's mockery 
 of the marquises, and of their grand airs, is proverbial ; and 
 they liked it. Men of fashion used to go to his theatre to 
 see his pictures of themselves, many a one boasting to his 
 friends that he was the model of the personage exposed to 
 view. They would not have done so if the pictures drawn 
 had been ill-natured. 
 
 Teaching by laughter is not an easy thing to do. It comes 
 sometimes half by chance, as in conversation, and then, 
 
182 
 
 LIFE OF MOLlftRE 
 
 perhaps, it is remembered. We all know of comedies written 
 " with a purpose." The crux of their authors lies in teaching 
 a lesson in a tone of comedy. It has been found difficult to 
 draw by true and lively and interesting characterisation a 
 picture of men's faults that shall by the way they are shown 
 create both hatred and mirth. Yet both may be felt in the 
 Tartiiffe, in Don Juan, in the Avare. It has been found 
 difficult to mix together censure and raillery, condemnation 
 and ridicule, so that the spectator or the reader may rejoice 
 and laugh at both. Among comic dramatists I doubt if any 
 one has succeeded in the attempt better than Moliere. 
 
 Moliere's sentiments were never ecstatic or Utopian. He 
 did not give examples of transcendental virtues clothed in 
 magniloquent language. He was not an idealist who loved 
 to frame images of people whose conduct was abnormally 
 high. Instead, his lessons are worthy of the simplicity of 
 the nursery. Learn to think and speak honestly and avoid 
 vain pretence, do as you would be done by, give honour where 
 honour is clue, seem to form the code of morality in his plays. 
 In speaking of Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve lauds Moliere as being 
 more expansive, truer. He says finely : " Moliere, c'est la 
 morale des honnetes gens." A few pages earlier the critic 
 had explained what he meant by "la morale des honnetes 
 gens": "It is not virtue, but a mixture of good habits, 
 good manners, kindly actions, depending usually on a dis- 
 position more or less generous, on a nature more or less 
 well inclined." 1 Moliere shows this quality in some of his 
 characters, though he generally mixes satire with it. The 
 Misanthrope, one of his finest comedies, will afford a good 
 instance. Philinte, who is cool-blooded, has "la morale des 
 honnetes gens" slightly; he has the outside of it, and his 
 own words are ironical against him. filiante has it more fully, 
 and as hers is a warmer nature the irony against her is less 
 strong. Alceste, whose temper is high, has this quality deeply 
 implanted in his breast, and it remains there half-hidden ; he 
 would show it naturally, but from egotism and from passion 
 he throws away the pleasant appearance of it, and his manners 
 are a severe satire upon him. Celimene does not know what it 
 means, except in a perverted sense. In other comedies Moliere 
 1 Port-Roycd, 3rd ed. iii. 260 ; 271, 272. 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 183 
 
 drew three men in whom he wished to show its total absence : 
 Tartuffe, Don Juan, and Harpagon. It is easy to see their 
 crimes, but the harm coming from these crimes should be 
 noticed. 
 
 The hardness of life caused by injustice, by lying, and by 
 self-interestedness, made Moliere unhappy. There were 
 moments when he became misanthropical, and that he knew 
 
 to be wrong. 
 
 " Je hais tons les hommes : 
 Les uns parcequ'ils sont mechants et malfaisants, 
 Et les autres pour etre aux mechants complaisant.?, 
 Et n'avoir pas pour eux ces haines vigoureuses 
 Que doit donner le vice aux ames vertueuses." 
 
 These lines, spoken by Alceste in the first scene of the 
 Misanthrope, indicate a tendency of one side of Moliere's 
 mind, and they show how a sensitive and overflowing nature 
 can be made angry by meanness and dishonesty. I have 
 often thought that Thackeray was like Moliere in this. Their 
 hearts were high and generous, but frauds practised upon 
 others for the sake of profit pained them and made them 
 suffer. Then they got angry, and were not afraid to show 
 it, and their anger did not come from spite or injured vanity. 
 Honesty of intention, when you can get at it, is the best test 
 how far satire is well meant. But honesty lies truly in one 
 man's breast, in another's it may mean exposing wares for 
 sale whether they are nasty or not. Like Thackeray, Moliere 
 generally took an unhappy subject for his groundwork, and 
 upon the idea that he chose he based his comedy, throwing 
 into it his satire and his humour with earnestness and depth 
 of purpose. Like Thackeray, Moliere saw that men who know 
 the difference between the substance and the shadow often 
 prefer the shadow because it is easier to follow, or because the 
 act of following it gives a bright semblance in the eyes of 
 others ; or, again, there are those who like bad ways best. 
 There is some cynicism in both writers, but Thackeray showed 
 his more unguardedly, more openly, and a good part of the 
 world was angry with him because he spoke so plainly. Both 
 showed their censure and their subtle humour against faults 
 and foibles, which every one should try to avoid ; but they did 
 not use their satire quite in the same way. Thackeray laughed 
 at his readers and put them out of conceit with themselves, 
 
184 LIFE OF MOLIEEE 
 
 and that they did not like: some found their consciences 
 awakened by pricks and uncomfortable qualms ; others abused 
 their monitor, gave the lie to their conscience, and told them- 
 selves boldly that they had done no wrong at all. Moliere, 
 on the other hand, laughed with his audience and made them 
 laugh with him; everybody was thus laughing at himself, 
 while he thought he was laughing at his neighbour. Conse- 
 quently Moliere's satire shows more fun, which we all enjoy, 
 for his open laughter takes away from the sharpness of his 
 sting. However strongly Thackeray and Moliere may have 
 exposed deceit and humbug, they did not forget what one man 
 owes to another. They did not wear their hearts on their 
 sleeves, but their innermost cry was for honester dealing and 
 more sympathy among their fellow-creatures. If there be any 
 who do not feel the compassionate qualities in Thackeray's 
 and in Moliere's nature, I think they have missed seeing a 
 large part of their personality, and also much of what is 
 highest and best in their work as they strove to use the 
 faculties which had been given to them. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve speaks also of the great sadness of Moliere's 
 thoughts, and says that his nature was more unhappy even 
 than that of Pascal. 1 Moliere, however, was not an ascetic 
 like Pascal, he did not punish himself for uncommitted faults ; 
 he was, metaphorically speaking, more round-headed, and 
 though sceptical by nature was more free from pessimism. 
 Moliere had in him some pessimism ; but it was kept under by 
 his knowledge of the value of hard work both in himself and 
 in others, by generous feelings, and by a belief in the slow im- 
 provement in the mental and moral condition of mankind, 
 brought about by industry and by a sober and wise use of free 
 thought. He was unselfish and loyal as a friend, hot-tempered 
 perhaps and exacting in the performance of work, but always 
 thinking more of the wants of those who were dependent upon 
 him than of the trouble he gave himself, though his health 
 was not strong and demanded that he should labour less and 
 be free from the daily anxieties of his theatre. It was fortunate 
 for him that his life was a very busy one. His love of honest 
 satire and of pleasant raillery was a great blessing to him. 
 Between his unhappy thoughts and his keen appreciation of 
 
 1 Port- Royal, 3rd ed. iti. 275. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 185 
 
 what was ludicrous, his strong common-sense kept his mind 
 straight and free from ill-considered or warped ideas. And 
 he turned his powers of clear comic characterisation to good 
 account in describing so many of men's foibles and their more 
 serious faults. He had the sense of proportion, and knew that 
 if things were looked at beyond their proper sphere, wrong or 
 one-sided ideas would follow. He had strong convictions and 
 was persistent in them, but his mind was open and flexible 
 enough to consider the opinions of others when they differed 
 from his own. Like a wary advocate, he got up the case on 
 the other side. 
 
 Yet Moliere's sadness clung to him closely. It is not in- 
 fectious, and he often tried to hide it ; but it may be seen in 
 his smiles, even in his laughter. A hasty reading of some of 
 his plays may lead one to think that he loved to be joyous and 
 merry and to brim over with fun, and he certainly had a keen 
 appreciation of the delight that good-natured fun gives, liking 
 to see other people enjoy it ; but a careful study of his scenes 
 will reveal a sorrowful mind often sick at heart as he thought 
 of men's selfishness, their trickery, their greed, and their 
 vanity. The effect of his comedies is neither gloomy nor 
 depressing, and a man must be of a strange temperament if he 
 is made unhappy by reading them. Nevertheless, in the &ole 
 des Maris, the ficole des Femmes, the Tartuffe, Don Juan, the 
 Misanthrope, the Avare, George Dandin and especially in the 
 two last-named plays the subjects were chosen from unhappy 
 causes, and the comedies reveal the workings of an uneasy mind 
 made melancholy because of the wrongs men and women were 
 doing daily to one another. There are everywhere Philirites 
 who are callous to social evils, and there are Alcestes who roar 
 aloud at them. Moliere's strong sense of humour did much to 
 hide his unhappiness, and he brought amusement so easily out 
 of trifles that his fun seems to lie on the top of everything. 
 As a comic dramatist it was his duty to endeavour to amuse, 
 but his feelings were often moved to anger as he wrote, and 
 his comedies were conceived with seriousness of purpose. He 
 did not go out of his way to be melancholy, he did not like 
 sadness. I imagine that he did not laugh much or easily, that 
 he wished he could laugh more, and that he liked to see bright- 
 ness and joyfulness in those round about him. I think that he 
 
186 LIFE OF MOLlfcRE 
 
 looked for sympathy and for happiness, but he could not find 
 them as often as he wished. It was this that made him 
 sceptical and doubtful of the goodness of men's conduct until 
 he saw it. He was not an idealist, for his nature was too 
 practical, and he knew too much of the everyday knock-about 
 and rough-and-tumble life in the world to allow him to con- 
 template Utopian bliss. Yet he would gladly have seen more 
 fair dealing among men and greater concord. He looked for 
 truth, for kindliness, for charitable feeling, and thought he 
 found instead too much vanity and self-interest. If men's 
 conduct one to the other were better than he believed it to be, 
 Moliere would have been less unhappy. That was the reason 
 for his misanthropy, as far as it existed. His heart was high 
 and willing to trust, but he wanted more charity from the 
 world than it had got or was willing to show. His mind was 
 not morbid, though when annoyed he could be morose. He 
 showed his displeasure at many things which he condemned, 
 but with a hearty and vigorous dislike that could hardly have 
 come from a diseased mind, or from a man too much given to 
 brooding about himself. He was very unlike Jean Jacques 
 Eousseau, whose genius was spoiled by egotism, vanity, and 
 selfishness ; and, as well as I can see, these causes were at 
 work in Eousseau when he wrote against the Misanthrope and 
 against the Avare, and made his criticisms worse than worthless. 
 Had Rousseau a knowledge of the meaning of comedy he would 
 have written differently. Moliere, with all his sadness, was 
 obliged to live in the world and take his part in it ; Rousseau 
 lived more by himself and for himself, and with the faults 
 above named his judgments on an author who tried to give 
 pictures of the play of life are not likely to be of value. 
 Moliere saw unhappiness in men, and the causes which led to 
 it, and he could not help thinking sadly ; on the other hand, 
 he loved good-humoured satire and raillery, and one may see 
 that he laughed in his sleeve for worrying himself so closely 
 about the troubles of other people. 
 
 In some of his plays Moliere has one central character, and 
 he grouped others around it, bringing in the by-play of his 
 comedy ; but he threw his satire or his irony chiefly on his 
 most important personage, in order to show his salient features 
 as in Sganarelk, Don Juan, the Mtderin Malgrt Lui, the 
 
CHAPTEE VITT 187 
 
 Avare, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 
 and the Malade Imaginaire. Still, these are not one-character 
 plays. In his other comedies the method was virtually the 
 same, though the plan was enlarged and partly modified. 
 Instead of a personage he sometimes took the subject of his 
 comedy as his central idea, and worked up his characters and 
 the incidents in his play to show objectively that he meant to 
 satirise a general custom or general thoughts as in the 
 Precieuses Ridicules and the Femmes Savantes, the ficole des 
 Maris and the tlcole des Femmes, the Mariage Force and the 
 Amour Medecin, the Tartuffe, the Misanthrope. But in these 
 comedies the plan is not really different from that in the 
 others. The interest is properly confined chiefly to one event, 
 but the dramatist widened it by introducing more by-play, and 
 by distributing his satire more generally. In point of fact, 
 the groundwork of Moliere's comedies, when examined, shows 
 a broader foundation than may appear after a cursory reading. 
 This is seen in the Tartuffe, in the Misanthrope, in the Avare., 
 in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme. And in the Femmes Savantes the 
 three learned ladies guide the course of the action ; they are 
 all ridiculed together, yet each of them is individually exposed 
 to personal satire of a separate kind. 
 
 Moliere always thought more of characterisation than of 
 plot, as the words are usually understood. But plot and 
 characterisation in comedy are closely mixed up together ; for 
 though the term characterisation is usually applied to indi- 
 viduals, it is shown in narrating the incidents, as well as in 
 describing the personages. There are comedies of incident and 
 comedies of manners. It is difficult to define either exactly, 
 for there are involutions from one into the other. But in both 
 it is essential that the humours in the play of life should be 
 shown. And in the comedy of manners, with more or less of 
 caricature, clear personal characterisation is a prominent 
 feature. Moliere thought a great deal of writing in a spirit of 
 mirthful comedy, of making his incidents amusing, of the 
 natural play of the scenes, and of making one scene follow 
 easily from another ; also of forming his characters broadly and 
 with bold outlines, giving to each its own distinctive features, 
 and keeping each personage true to his nature and to his part 
 in the comedy. He thought mainly of his personages, and 
 
188 LIFE OF 
 
 contrived his incidents so that they should harmonise with the 
 characters he wished to portray. On the whole, his male 
 characters are the best remembered ; but it is worth noticing 
 that in the &ole des Femmes, in the Tartu/e, in the Misanthrope, 
 and in George Dandin, though the chief male character is out- 
 wardly the most important personage, yet in all of these plays 
 there is a woman who really determines the events, and is the 
 pivot on whom the comedy hangs. 
 
 The comedy in a play lies, of course, in the characterisation, 
 and more in that of the personages than of the incidents. 
 Taking Moliere's work all round, his power of personal 
 characterisation was intellectually his strongest point. In 
 portraying a character he recollected that though each feature 
 may be supposed to have its own place and play its own part, 
 there are frequent irregularities or inequalities in the composi- 
 tion, one trait often overlapping or contradicting another. He 
 looked at many things at once, considering the characterisation 
 as a whole, and especially in connection with the general comic 
 environment. He drew his personages clearly and firmly, and 
 he painted in strong colours. But in portraying men and 
 women he was careful to mark the lights and shades of their 
 features, to avoid hard and fast lines, yet by delicate and pointed 
 touches that define and illustrate, that give life and interest to 
 the characters, to show them to be active human beings with 
 wills and passions of their own. He used a plot to suit the 
 requirements of his own characterisation. He took, where he 
 could find it, the idea of a story that would lend itself to the 
 particular object of his satire, and to the characters by which he 
 meant to illustrate it ; then, by bringing half a dozen or more 
 men and women together and making them converse and act 
 their parts with dramatic movement, and putting into his 
 scenes an air of fiction and natural humour to heighten the 
 effect, he wove a plot out of their joint concerns in a manner 
 that each of the personages should tell something of the tale, 
 and that each one should show the individuality of the others 
 as well as his own. This was to him the real plot in his 
 comedies. His nominal plot was often slender enough, and 
 while writing I do not think he cared very much as to the 
 final issue of events. Here he was now and then at fault, for 
 the denouements are sometimes a weak point in his plays. But 
 he set all his mind to work to place upon the stage true 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 189 
 
 ., 
 
 pictures of human beings with -strong vitality ; to show the 
 distinctive features of each in a spirit of comedy, usually with 
 some ridicule, elucidating at the same time either the action 
 or the characterisation in the play; and he tried to make his 
 scenes animated and amusing. He looked upon comedy as an 
 exhibition of the play of human life, exposing people's faults 
 or their foibles with satire or with raillery, and showing in a 
 mirthful manner how men and women act and react upon one 
 another. With such ideas the characterisation of his per- 
 sonages would naturally be his chief object, and the plot in 
 his play only of importance in so far as it would lend itself to 
 the end he had in view. In a word, he wanted to show comedy, 
 but he cared little about telling a story except as a means to 
 that end. The outline of a good story was very well if he got 
 it, but he thought infinitely more of the way in which his 
 story was told. Are not the same features to be found in the 
 best remembered plays by other comic dramatists ? Youthful 
 or romantic taste that asks only to be excited or amused by 
 the incidents in a story, may be pleasant enough, and in fiction 
 of all kinds it cannot be disregarded; but there are more 
 important things to be considered before giving to a comedy a 
 large measure of praise. The main points, of course, are : does 
 the comedy amuse, does it interest, does it make one feel 
 happy ? It is of some consequence to feel that you like or 
 hate this man or that woman, especially if you see the comedy 
 acted ; yet for any sort of criticism it is essential to under- 
 stand the author's object, and what kind of characters he wished 
 to create, to see how the personages are drawn, and to mark 
 how the various characters and incidents are made to develop 
 one another. That personal characterisation stands above plot, 
 and takes a higher and a more lasting place, may be seen in 
 the best plays that have been written by the world's greatest 
 dramatists. It is impossible to separate things that are natur- 
 ally linked together ; yet, speaking generally, it is the human 
 characterisation, and the way it is shown, much more than the 
 subservient plot, that gives life to a comedy, and engages the 
 attention of readers perhaps for many generations afterwards. 
 Unless a comic dramatist creates a lively interest in his per- 
 sonages, what happens to them by way of good or ill fortune 
 is not felt to be of much consequence. 
 
 It is by no means certain that the supposed personalities in 
 
19 o LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 old plays were real. Those writers who have dwelt upon them 
 with the greatest pleasure have not always been the most 
 diligent in investigating the circumstances. There has been 
 more or less a foundation of fact, and this has been seized 
 upon with the idea of making a telling story, or of showing 
 the perspicacity of the critic. But in old comedies, say in 
 Moliere's, even if the facts related were true, and that the 
 personalities were real, what we should think of is : how far 
 did the author show them with comic effect ? The real interest 
 in the supposed pictures in the Misanthrope of the poet and 
 his wife is not how they quarrelled, nor even as a description 
 of what each of them was like, but how far do the imaginary 
 pictures show good comedy. I do not think that Moliere 
 meant here to draw personal likenesses, nor that he troubled 
 himself much as to what people said about the resemblances. 
 Perhaps these have been spoken about more in our day than 
 they were in his, and that without such talk the comedy 
 would have been judged more justly. It has been generally 
 accepted that Moliere gave a description of his wife in the 
 dialogue between Cle'onte and Covielle in Act ill. scene 9 of 
 the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, where the master and valet are 
 talking about Lucile, M. Jourdain's daughter. Here, again, 
 the dramatist was thinking of the play of his comedy, and he 
 cared little what people said about personal resemblances. 
 That is the way I look at the matter, though it implies a 
 certain cynicism. It might, however, be argued, on the other 
 hand, if facts and dates could be ascertained and made to 
 agree with the picture, that Moliere wished to say that he 
 and his wife had become reconciled. 
 
 It is just as easy to say decisively that Moliere intended 
 this or that personage to represent a certain man or woman, 
 as it would be difficult to maintain that in a given personage 
 he portrayed the features of a man or woman of whom he 
 knew nothing. He had first to think of the meaning of his 
 comedy, and adapt his characters to it; then he had to be 
 careful to show their features with suitable comic effect. And 
 though resemblances were found between his supposititious 
 personages and persons in daily life, I believe that he drew 
 the main characteristics of his men and women without in- 
 tentional purpose of representing particular individuals, of 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 191 
 
 drawing their likenesses, and that he often had little conscious- 
 ness that he was doing so. If his characterisation was good, 
 resemblances were inevitable. The salient or distinguishing- 
 features seen in his characters were, ordinarily speaking, of 
 his own invention. In small matters he sometimes took 
 certain natural traits of people from actual life when they 
 would adapt themselves to the spirit and the play of his 
 comedy, and when he could show them in a comic manner 
 suitable to his personage. But, as a rule, these were details, 
 valuable perhaps in their place, but not essential ; for other 
 details of a similar kind might have been substituted for them 
 equally well. 
 
 Moliere must have drawn his pictures from characteristics 
 of people planted and assimilated in his mind, for the power 
 of invention has not been wholly creative in the brain of any 
 man that has ever lived. The best chance of an attempt at 
 the pure creation of anything would lie with the greatest 
 impostor. Like a bee that gathers honey from many flowers, 
 Moliere collected what were to him his facts from many sources. 
 Without special forethought, but instinctively, he stored in his 
 mind his intuitively acquired knowledge, and used it at need, 
 most likely half unconsciously, disentangling and joining the 
 contrasts and the likenesses in human nature, and welding 
 them all together, and fitting them to the scenes and to the 
 personages he wished to portray. As other authors who have 
 been strong and exuberant in personal characterisation, Moliere 
 had an inborn faculty of clear, swift, true, and sympathetic 
 observation and discernment ; his memory, or perhaps rather 
 associations of ideas, helped him to recall half-forgotten 
 thoughts; and his imagination, or his fancy, aided by a 
 peculiarly graphic and natural comic style, fashioned images 
 of people and incidents out of what he had seen and heard, 
 may be the day before, or perhaps many years earlier. An 
 author who has these faculties loves to be free in his work 
 must, in fact, be free. He cannot copy. He knows that 
 modelling produces only wooden or unnatural figures. Wher- 
 ever there is a natural figure, there has been more or less of 
 creativeness behind it. 
 
 The middle or temperate characters in comedy, without 
 marked peculiarities for good or for ill, and offering small 
 
19 o LIFE OF MO LIE KE 
 
 ground for satire or irony, have always been difficult to por- 
 tray so that they shall create an interest directly on their own 
 account. They may be excellent models of characterisation of 
 people of their own kind, but they do not usually show strong 
 comic personalities. They may give good advice; and it is 
 amusing to notice how happily and instinctively, as it were, 
 Moliere has contrived that their sage counsels can be of no 
 avail. Clever people like to think that reason governs their 
 daily actions ; humours, however, which, after all, come more 
 from the heart than the head, perhaps play a larger part in 
 governing mankind when men are left to do as they please. 
 This is certainly the case in a comedy, or the comedy had 
 better not have been written. If men and women did not 
 show so many instances of wrong-headedness, there would be 
 fewer comedies, and it is not likely that many would give 
 much pleasure. Moreover, a plain reproduction of an ordinary 
 scene in daily life will rarely make a good scene in a comedy ; 
 it will want the excitement coming from natural exaggeration 
 to give to the picture a show of comedy, and in its general 
 characterisation it must have the freshness coming from 
 originality to make it interesting. Goodness, folly, villainy, 
 wisdom, are met with every day, and given merely as such in 
 a comedy they will not attract ; they want a setting to show 
 them off. They must be heightened by imagination or fancy, 
 and the picture should be enlivened by fun of some kind, even 
 though there be a little exaggeration, if we are to take pleasure 
 in it. One may be at first inclined to think that as Moliere 
 showed so much of men's feelings by means of ridicule, his 
 mind was not prone to consider their more equable qualities : 
 that as he depicted what was ludicrous in so many plays he 
 could hardly be trusted to draw fairly men and women who 
 had not some strongly marked eccentricity. This charge will 
 not be made, I think, by those who know his comedies and 
 what his laughter meant. A little thought will show that the 
 dramatist who in his lighter plays contrived so cleverly to 
 mix comedy and farce together, and with full purpose, knew 
 also the use of fair caricature and its effects. I shall speak of 
 Moliere's caricature presently, but will say now that caricature 
 without truth shows only absurdity, though possibly it may 
 be funny ; the writer who can give good caricature in comedy 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 193 
 
 must at least have an idea of the value of truth in comedy. 
 True formation of character implies, in the first place, strength 
 of insight, of observation ; and the more unusual or original is 
 the character drawn, the more imagination or fancy besides 
 observation is required to form that character on lines that 
 are fairly true. When Moliere put a middle or temperate char- 
 acter into the foreground of a comedy, he placed his personage 
 beside another of an opposite nature, to show their different 
 qualities and to bring the objects of his satire into fuller 
 relief. On the whole he managed his middle characters well. 
 Each has his own distinctive personality, one cannot be 
 mistaken for another, they all show their different natures 
 by the way they speak. The principal instances are Cle'ante 
 and Elmire in the Tartuffe, Philinte and filiante in the 
 Misanthrope, Clitandre and Henriette in the Femmes Savantes. 
 In any comedy of manners one or more of such personages 
 should be put more or less prominently forward to endeavour 
 to restrain a bad or foolish action, though Moliere did not 
 choose to make them successful in their efforts. The chief 
 difficulty is to invest them with an interest belonging to 
 themselves, and this can only be done by natural and delicate 
 characterisation strongly shown. 
 
 ^Caricature is generally almost inseparable from the work of a 
 humorist ; for his aim is to paint, and, if he can, to show truth, 
 by means of honest satire with mirth or laughter. And in the 
 pride of laughter there is usually some exaggeration. This is 
 especially the case with the comic dramatist. He cannot 
 banish caricature from the stage before an audience who have 
 come together to see and hear that they may be delighted and 
 amused. He must use caricature and ridicule more or less to 
 give full meaning to his ideas and colour to his picture. As 
 he may not preach he tries to produce his effect by laughter. 
 In most cases Moliere's caricatures are fully justified as giving 
 pictures of comedy. Take as examples: the admiration of 
 the three ladies when Trissotin reads his verses to them, 
 or Harpagon's meanness in his instructions about his supper- 
 party, or M. Jourdain's crazy desire to be like a man of 
 quality, or the chastisement of the ignorant routine of empiric 
 doctors. If there had been no caricature at all in these 
 instances the comic meaning would have been hidden and the 
 
 N 
 
194 LIFE OF MOLI&RE 
 
 fun of a feeble kind. Good caricature of a person or thing is 
 like the person or thing intended to be described ; it has its 
 truth, it does not allow disfiguration. Oddities or prominent 
 features may be accentuated, but unless a fair resemblance is 
 preserved caricature descends to farce. Eidicule in comedy 
 is not the same as absurdity. It is generally useless to speak 
 absolutely on matters connected with human nature, but it 
 would seem that caricature in comedy in its proper place and 
 not pushed beyond its fair limits may be quite natural. Both 
 the Prfaieuses Ridicules and the Femmes Savantes are comic 
 satires on the affectations of women. The affectations de- 
 scribed were not quite the same in the two comedies, and the 
 people depicted did not hold the same position in society. 
 Both comedies contain caricature that is fitting in its own 
 place; but if the caricature in either of these plays were 
 transferred to the other, for which it was not intended and 
 where the circumstances are different, it would be untrue and 
 unnatural. The question of what is natural in comedy is very 
 complicated. Time and place, however, are two determining 
 factors. Conditions also vary so much that each case should 
 be judged separately, for what is natural in one instance may 
 not or will not be so in another. 
 
 Moliere seized upon men's humours, and in his smaller 
 plays exaggerated them purposely more strongly than in his 
 serious comedies; but, speaking generally, by mixing his 
 lights and shades together, and, as I conceive, by not out- 
 stepping nature, he painted truly and showed how men's 
 humours tend very largely to make themwhat they are He 
 did nongnbo draw merTas they oughTtn^-j hi nh'ec'rfras 
 to sEow them as they are and very often as they ought not to 
 He knew that different and often contradictory humours 
 exist m the same person, and he has shown men's natures by 
 blending their humours together. It would be a great mistake 
 ) look upon Moliere as a caricaturist, or to think that because 
 he had and enjoyed the power of making foolish persons 
 appear very ridiculous, his chief talent lay in showing people 
 whose heads were screwed on in a wrong way. He did wish 
 to bring forward what was unwise or laughable in their 
 manners or in their actions, and to say that by their too 
 strong belief in their own opinions their thoughts^ere of en 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 195 
 
 one-sided or foolish. At the end of the first scene in the 
 Ecole des Femmes there is a charming bit of irony against 
 Arnolphe, who is silly, when he says of his friend Chrysalde : 
 
 " Chose Strange de voir comme avec passion 
 Un chacun est chausse de son opinion." 
 
 They separate, each one thinking that the other is so im- 
 practicable that no one can reason with him. If there be 
 caricature in this scene, it proves how closely comedy and 
 caricature are allied together. Moliere had the rare power of 
 heightening or caricaturing the ordinary characteristics of 
 men and women without altering their natures, and of showing 
 his personages in the spirit of comedy in a natural way. 
 Imaginativeness and realism are thus brought close together, 
 and are made to work into one another. 
 
 In revealing men's designs Moliere exposed their fads, it 
 may be thought, too persistently, and too strongly, as no doubt, 
 he well knew, for absolute realism, but he had the view of 
 stage representation always before his eyes. He saw with 
 perfect clearness what men's fads are, and he knew how to 
 make their crotchets appear ludicrous without altering the 
 main features in the characters of his personages. He kept 
 nature before him as his groundwork, using ridicule and 
 laying stress upon it in order to show the lessons he wished 
 to teach. In this respect Moliere and Dickens were not unlike. 
 The technical differences between the work of the dramatist 
 and of the novelist do not prevent their ideas being the same ; 
 each showed his own thoughts in his own way, at length 
 or in a few pages. Both of these writers saw the humorous 
 aspects in certain people and in the ludicrous situations 
 which might arise from their singularities, and both writers 
 made the most of their comic personages, and created laughter 
 in order to show the purpose they had in view. Of the two 
 the tone of Dickens's laughter is more cheerful, but its ring is 
 often more forced and is, on the whole, less true. Good lessons 
 may be taught by satire when it is rightly employed, and 
 neither Moliere nor Dickens abused their strong powers. As 
 humorists they were both within their province in using 
 caricature and ridicule as a means of unfolding the natures of 
 the men and women they wished to portray, and by comedy 
 true to itself they have created what our imagination leads us 
 
19 6 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 to believe are true pictures. So also in Don Quixote. There is 
 much ridicule and purposely intended caricature in that novel ; 
 but no one in his senses will contend that the gallant-hearted 
 knight and his foolish squire do not show pictures of true and 
 excellent comedy. 
 
 Farce is the nonsense of comedy. It is a medley of absurd 
 incidents and ideas stuffed into a play without natural 
 sequence of thought or of characterisation, so as to make the 
 personages pretend to be funny. If the acting is good the 
 result may be a happy one. Amusing nonsense, almost apart 
 from comedy, is seen in some of Moliere's lighter plays, as 
 in the Mtdecin Malgr6 Lui, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, the 
 Fourberies de Scapin. Yet when his light plays are ex- 
 amined, one cannot help remarking how cunningly he mixed 
 comedy and farce together as he also mixed his earnestness 
 and his mockery knowing well what he was doing, and 
 that upon the whole comedy will be found to predominate, 
 and farce will occupy a much smaller place, as in the 
 Prtcieuses Ridicules, Sganarelle ou le Cocu Imaginaire, the 
 Mariage Forct, the Amour Me'decin, George Dandin, the Bour- 
 geois Gentilhomme, and th.e Malade Imaginaire. The working 
 out of these plays belongs much more to comedy than to 
 farce, because the characterisation of the incidents and of the 
 personages is maintained with a natural sequence of ideas 
 and is truthful of its kind. The caricature in these last- 
 named plays does not destroy the comedy, because it char- 
 acterises the personages and the incidents; in its way it is 
 naturally shown. The incidents are well adapted to exhibit 
 the personages introduced, and the satire or the ridicule seen 
 in the characters is shown in a truthful manner, even though 
 it be very ludicrous. Before Moliere had completed the first 
 half of his career in Paris Boileau wrote to him : 
 
 " Et ta plus burlesque parole 
 Est souvent un docte sermon." 
 
 One of the peculiarities of Moliere is that he seems to have 
 done what is difficult very easily. He taught by laughter and 
 by ridicule; and many of his good things in his lighter 
 comedies are so true and so simple that they are often passed 
 over almost carelessly. The lightness of manner and the 
 
CHAPTER VIII 197 
 
 facile happiness of touch with which he showed mirthful 
 comedy in his personal characterisation in nearly all his plays 
 are in truth remarkable. His power as a comic dramatist 
 meant more than cleverness : it indicated high intellectual 
 faculties, though there was generally a wish to hide them. 
 He purposely avoided abstruse ideas, and before presenting 
 his thoughts to his audience he ground them down in the mill 
 of his brain, rejecting what he knew they did not want, and he 
 tried to say what would interest them if he could make it 
 serve his purpose. His, originality is seen in his strong per- 
 sonal characterisation and his racy style, in the way that he 
 drew true pictures of the comedy of life, and showed them in 
 a fresh and lively manner, so that persons of fair intelligence 
 should understand and take pleasure in his scenes ; but he did 
 not want to make a display of his abilities, and he had no sort 
 of wish that men should speak of him as a wonderful fellow. 
 A good comedy of manners demands, no doubt, a keen, bright, 
 and clear intelligence, but in its representation the last thing 
 a spectator wants to see is an exhibition of intellect ; and this 
 has been recognised instinctively by the ablest and best 
 writers for the comic stage. Moliere did not write poetical 
 comedy. The comic characterisation, with more or less of 
 satire and of ridicule, of men and women as they are seen in 
 daily life was his study, and in telling how they thought and 
 spoke to one another he showed the master's hand. He 
 was certainly not superficial ; his nature was too deep to 
 allow him to do superficial work. What seems to some 
 readers to take away from his greatness is that the simple 
 truths in his plays, and chiefly in those in prose, the easy 
 naturalness of his comedy generally, and his facile pen, make 
 his thoughts appear sometimes to be elementary, because he 
 showed them so readily or so lightly and so often in a vein of 
 ridicule. I repeat, he did what is difficult apparently very 
 easily. 
 
 It would seem that Moliere accepted the dramatic laws of 
 the unities because other playwrights of his time thought 
 themselves bound by them, and that he worked freely under 
 the narrow harness. He cut his coat according to his cloth 
 and adapted himself to circumstances. The rules were that 
 the duration of the action in a play should be limited to 
 
198 LIFE OF MOLi:feKE 
 
 twenty-four hours to this I think he always confined himself ; 
 the scene was to be unchanged that also he observed except 
 in a few instances ; the main interest in a play should be centred 
 in one idea or on one event and this he followed, as it was a 
 natural law common to every work of art, but he introduced 
 by-play, and so widened the scope of action a good deal more 
 than contemporary dramatists. In his Critique de I'ficole des 
 Femmes Moliere alludes to the farrago of nonsense that was 
 talked about the rules, and says : " If those plays which are 
 regular are not liked, and those plays which are liked are not 
 regular, it must follow necessarily that the rules have been 
 badly made. We may leave all this chicanery alone by which 
 they [the critics] want to govern public taste. The only thing 
 to be noticed in a play is the effect it produces. Let us enjoy 
 honestly the things that delight us; we need not look for 
 arguments to destroy our pleasure." The English and Spanish 
 dramatists were not governed by laws of time or place. 
 Their chief law was to please their audience ; to do this they 
 exercised their imaginations as they liked, for they meant to 
 be their own masters. But French dramatists were ruled by 
 officialism. They allowed themselves to be crippled by the 
 false reasoning of men who had set themselves up as their 
 masters, and disobedient pupils were punished as naughty 
 schoolboys for going out of bounds. To a large extent 
 Moliere made the rules his own, but they must have hindered 
 his range of thought. His imagination was not lofty, nor was 
 it strongly poetical. When he spoke of such tragedies as he 
 knew he did so in a tone of satire. But his mind was clear 
 and practical, he knew what he wanted and he rarely 
 attempted what he could not achieve. He was fettered by 
 rules, but he moved easily in the prescribed circle. His per- 
 sonages are full of comic dramatic vigour, and he has shown a 
 large number of men and women of various characters who 
 play their parts in comedy fairly and truly according to their 
 natures. 
 
 English readers of Moliere will find that, with a few excep- 
 tions, his love-scenes do not give them the pleasure they feel 
 they have a right to expect from a popular dramatist. In 
 most of his comedies we are told that a certain man loves a 
 certain woman, but a warm feeling of love on both sides is not 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 199 
 
 often seen. Before Moliere's day there had been almost no 
 poetical comedy in France. Though plays were written in 
 verse none showed much feeling of poetry. The comedy in 
 the plays was artificial, prosaic, matter of fact, and inanimate. 
 The dramatic laws of the unities stifled what imagination the 
 playwrights possessed, and they added to the natural difficulties 
 of creating strong love-scenes. An imaginative and romantic 
 writer might have done something to show a feeling of warm 
 love between two young people without offending too strongly 
 against the rules of the stage which limited the action of a 
 play to twenty-four hours and confined it to one place. But 
 real love-scenes are very rarely found in old French comedies. 
 As a matter of fact they did not often take place in daily life. 
 Young men and girls were not allowed to see much of each 
 other in a sense of intimacy, and in most instances they were 
 made to marry as they were told by their parents. Neverthe- 
 less, had the dramatists been able to portray real love-scenes 
 they would have done so ; had they been able to show natural 
 comedy they would have preferred it to dull plays in which 
 stateliness of manner and ceremonious observances held too 
 large a place. No doubt that in plays, as in other things, there 
 are formalities to be observed ; but on the early French stage, 
 though love-making of some sort had to be introduced, the 
 dramatists did not get beyond a formal show of it, they 
 hardly tried to make the fiction appear as a reality. It would 
 seem that they played with their love-making, which was an 
 easier matter, thinking much of decorum and deportment, and 
 that the audiences were satisfied if the play were well done 
 according to rule. 
 
 It is difficult to say why Moliere, so humane and sympa- 
 thetic in what he wrote, and who expressed the thoughts of 
 others so happily, should not have wished to describe oftener 
 one of the most natural sentiments in the human breast. 
 Various reasons may be alleged, but it is not easy to make 
 them appear to harmonise and work together. In addition to 
 those already given, it may be that his mind was set in an 
 unhappy cast, and that whatever he felt as a young man, as he 
 grew older he became indifferent to love-tales, thinking that 
 he had no time for them ; that with a keen sense for ridicule 
 he took refuge from his melancholy in indulging in good- 
 
200 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 humoured or well-intentioned satire ; and he certainly appears 
 to have thought more of the meaning of his satire than of 
 making lovers say soft words to one another. Much of his 
 satire where girls were concerned was directed against men in 
 authority over them, who made them marry so that they, the 
 guardians, might reap an advantage. Moliere's mind was 
 naturally sceptical. He doubted because he looked for some- 
 thing he could not find. He wished to trust, he wished to 
 love, but often found himself disappointed in his hopes. 
 Perhaps also he was difficult to please. Judging him by 
 other authors, one is justified in saying that if he had 
 possessed the power and the inclination to create strong love- 
 scenes he would have done so oftener. He did show a feeling 
 of poetry in some of his plays, but as a writer he was not 
 poetical. And if the manner in which Moliere portrayed 
 women in his more important comedies may be taken as 
 evidence, it would seem that he did not think of them very 
 highly.^ On the whole he does not present them in a too 
 favourable light. He has shown very few women of full, rich, 
 and generous natures ; he has shown others with indifferent 
 qualities, not meaning them to be attractive or fascinating; 
 while others he meant to be ludicrous or disagreeable. In the 
 Ecole des Femmes there is a good girl drawn brightly and in a 
 charming manner, and in the Tartuffe there are three women 
 who give pleasure ; but in the Misanthrope and in the Femmes 
 Savantes perhaps the two most important instances the 
 good women, so to speak, attract our attention less than 
 those who think chiefly of themselves or those who are foolish 
 or malicious. 
 
 Moli&re was not romantic, nor was he imaginative in 
 creating love-scenes. He felt the sense of love truly, but he did 
 not idealise it in a manner that made him wish to write about 
 it. His nature was too practical to allow him to draw pictures 
 of dreamy scenes of love with their passions of joy or of 
 despair. When he laughed at his Oronte for saying, 
 
 " Belle Philis, on desespere, 
 Alors qu'on espere toujours," 
 
 his mind was following its natural bent ; but he would not of 
 his own accord have set himself down to write a scene showing 
 
CHAPTER VIII 201 
 
 warm love, and without other purpose, hoping that when it 
 was finished he might find it satisfactory. He was warm 
 hearted and knew what love is, but he was also clear sighted, 
 and could look into his own lines and see if they showed the 
 picture he meant them to represent. 
 
 Still, it would be untrue to say that Moliere was unable to 
 portray the passion of love so that others could see it and feel 
 it for themselves. He has done so occasionally, though he 
 always had some other end in view. He played with his love- 
 scenes as other playwrights had done, but with different inten- 
 tions. He subordinated his love-making to what he thought 
 were the higher interests in his comedy, and he used it mainly 
 as an instrument for his satire. He certainly thought more of 
 interesting his audiences by his satire than of pleasing them 
 by mere love-pictures. He wrote the ficole des Femmes to laugh 
 at the folly and to condemn the selfishness of men like 
 Arnolphe, who wish to marry girls who care nothing for them. 
 As this was the chief purpose of the dramatist, we should follow 
 the comedy in the play, and see why and how the satire is 
 brought to bear against Arnolphe, and how in his real love for 
 Agnes he struggles against his misfortunes. Iti the Tartuffe 
 Orgon, as paterfamilias, can do what he pleases with his 
 children ; he does not wish to be unkind to his daughter, but 
 he regards her as a means of attaching Tartuffe more closely 
 to himself. Valere and Mariane do love each other, though 
 they are not much brought together ; what is chiefly interest- 
 ing in their loves is the amusing manner in which Dorine 
 reconciles them after they have quarrelled. In the Avare 
 there is another Mariane ; Harpagon tries to make love to her, 
 and is rendered more odious on that account. The love-scenes 
 of his children are in themselves not in the least engaging. 
 The dramatist's meaning was a grim one. He wished that 
 the interest in the play should be centred against the cruel 
 father who had no sense of his fatherly duties, and he made use 
 of the loves of his children as a means to that end. Moliere's 
 finest picture of love is shown in the Misanthrope. Alceste is 
 very unhappy, largely through his own fault. He loves 
 Celimene intensely ; she, who has no love in her, plays with 
 him, and he speaks to her according to his rugged and uncom- 
 promising nature. His love is bottomless and fearful in its 
 
202 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 reality ; but even there it was rather the man's wild conduct 
 in his passion than the passion of love itself that the dramatist 
 wished to portray. 
 
 In Moliere's lighter comedies the girls are not in themselves 
 interesting. They are hardly more than small pieces of the 
 machinery necessary for the action or the satire in the play. 
 They were meant to play their parts as puppets, as they did on 
 the Italian stages and in the older French small comedies, and 
 not much more was expected from them. They were made to 
 appear to be in love with some man, though the interest that 
 the reader feels for them is not in their love-story, but that 
 they may escape from the tyranny of their fathers and that 
 their fathers should be punished for their selfishness. A 
 quotation from the Amour Mtdecin (Act i. sc. 4) will serve as 
 a general instance. Lucinde is telling Lisette, her waiting- 
 woman and confidante, how she loves Clitandre, though she 
 has never spoken to him : 
 
 " Perhaps it is not delicate for a girl to explain herself so freely ; 
 but I must confess that if I were allowed to hope for anything he 
 would be the object of my wish. We have never had any conversa- 
 tion together, and in words he has never told me of his love ; but in 
 every place that he has seen me his looks and his actions have spoken 
 so tenderly, and the demand that he made for my hand seemed to me 
 to be so like that of a well-bred man, that my heart could not remain 
 insensible to his passion. And now you see to what a pitch the 
 harshness of my father has brought all this affection." 
 
 Many of Moliere's lighter plays were commanded for per- 
 formance at court, and were often hurriedly written. As 
 make-belief of love was necessary in a comedy, he gave it as 
 such, and used it as an instrument for his satire To his 
 mind that was its most important feature. In the Bourgeois 
 Gentilhomme date's love for Lucile is little more than a 
 levice for hoaxing M. Jourdain, it is given as part of a 
 big joke; and in the end M. Jourdain is completely bam- 
 
 >zled and is made supremely happy 
 
 In my remarks on Moliere's style I wish to speak of his 
 
 manner of writing m giving clear pictures of comedy and in 
 
 showing the thoughts of his personals, and to say hoi easily 
 
 seem s , he chose his words to portray his scenes and h 
 
 aracteis. His style is essentially that of a comic dramatist 
 
CHAPTER VIII 203 
 
 who wrote for the stage, and as such it should be considered. He 
 wrote for listeners, but for readers he cared less. In prose and in 
 verse he framed his language so that his men and women showed 
 themselves by their manner of speech. In almost every play 
 that he wrote each one of his characters has his or her distinc- 
 tive utterance peculiar to the speaker ; they all speak so that 
 one cannot be mistaken for another, the words of one would 
 be out of place if put into the mouth of another. He makes 
 his personages talk in an easy and sometimes familiar way, 
 changing more or less with the subject or the occasion, showing 
 their varying moods, and agreeing with their condition in life. 
 In the language of a true comic dramatist peculiarities of con- 
 struction will naturally be found ; and now and then Moliere 
 has phrases that are not easy for a foreigner to construe readily, 
 though his general meaning is not obscure. He thought more of 
 the effect his verses would have upon the stage than of literary 
 embellishment ; his lines were meant to be spoken and heard, 
 and when read the main object with which they were written 
 should be remembered. He did not forget his possible readers, 
 but he was intent upon giving his listeners a true picture. 
 Besides being an actor and playing important parts, he had 
 exercised during very nearly the whole of his career the chief 
 management of a theatre ; and this double employment must 
 have taught him the values of the sounds of words spoken 
 before an audience. It should be remembered that in plays in 
 verse, owing to their greater frequency, theatre-goers in those 
 days paid more attention to the rhythm of the lines than is the 
 case now. We can see from Moliere's comedies that his eye 
 for verbal refinement was keen, but had he much indulged in a 
 taste for literary varnish it might easily have taken away the 
 effects he desired most to produce. Those who know the 
 meaning of his comedies will not be the first to find fault with 
 his forms of expression. He once said to some friends that 
 he had not time enough to give to elaborateness of style. I 
 suspect this was only a natural subterfuge at the moment ; for 
 had he been less fully occupied, or had he written fewer 
 comedies, it may be doubted if his lines, with more labour spent 
 upon them, would have been more perfect in saying happily 
 what he wished them to say, whether he would have spoken 
 with better effect or truer intention. When his Marquis de 
 
204 
 
 LIFE OF MOLlfiRE 
 
 Mascarille was praising his own absurd impromptu he said : 
 "Tout ce que je fais a 1'air cavalier, cela ne sent point le 
 pedant." This is good burlesque, and it is also, in its place, 
 good comedy. And dropping the burlesque, the same ease of 
 manner is seen in Moliere's lines when he wrote his comedies 
 in verse. They have a free air, they do not taste of the oil, 
 they do not sound academical. Look at the tourdi> his first 
 play in verse : few would care now to read it a second time 
 but for the charm of lively and graphic style. The same may 
 be said of the Fdcheux, a comedy of quite a different kind. In 
 the Tartujfe, in the Misanthrope, in the Femmes Savantes, the 
 language adapts itself naturally to the spirit of the comedy. 
 The first of these plays was written against religious lying 
 and against those who were deceived by palpable imposture ; 
 the second was against various forms of amour-propre, social 
 lying and backbiting ; the third against softer kinds of social 
 humbug; and in each comedy the tone of the satire or of the 
 irony corresponds with the humours of the characters de- 
 scribed. Also in the three comedies each of the personages 
 has his or her own distinctive voice, and this sometimes varies 
 from one scene to another. As you read, the words fall upon 
 your ears with different sounds from each of the speakers, 
 distinguish their natures and show how their pulses were 
 beating at the moment. All this marks the spirit of charac- 
 terisation, and much of its value depends upon the distinctions 
 being easily observed. 
 
 In their avertissement to the Lexique de la langue de Moliere, 
 MM. Arthur and Paul Desfeuilles, the authors of the Lexique, 
 say admirably : 
 
 " Moliere kept something of the oratorical tone of his age. His 
 sentences are so constructed that they carry to the furthermost part 
 of the theatre : they are very rhythmical, they are sonorous enough 
 to be heard above the laughter of the pit, they are so full that if a 
 word or two be missed the right meaning will still be gathered from 
 them." * 
 
 The large number of Moliere's plays, about two in each year 
 from 1659 to 1673, in addition to his other work, is a proof 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, vol. xii. p. b. I did not see this volume until some 
 time after my own remarks had been written. The quotation helps to show 
 that Moliere's instinct told him that in addressing an audience he should 
 write more for the ear than for the eye. But the quotation has not led me 
 to alter anything of what I had written previously. 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 205 
 
 that he wrote quickly. And without facility in composition I 
 doubt very much if he could have drawn his characters with 
 so much vitality and ease of manner, if he could have shown 
 so freely how their thoughts arose and have made them talk to 
 each other in verse so naturally, and if he could have given to 
 his scenes the spontaneous effects that comedy should produce. 
 Supposing, as one must for the time, that men and women 
 speak their thoughts in measured rhyming verse, Moliere's 
 lines come as near to the style of speech as any language 
 should do when addressed to a public audience. They have an 
 air of freshness which it would have been almost impossible to 
 give if much time and labour had been spent in fashioning 
 them. Moliere, like other men, went through some form of 
 apprenticeship as a writer, though not much is known of it. 
 It is a mark of men of genius that they do their work better 
 and more quickly than other people. Doubtless Moliere had 
 his difficulties, for in writing there are many conditions to be 
 observed, and they have come blindly to no man. But 
 Moliere's difficulties were rather with thought and manner 
 than with the technicalities of composition. He had to show 
 comedy in a mirthful way and to portray his characters truly 
 and with dramatic effects. As we read his plays it would 
 seem that when he had formed an idea of a scene his pen, 
 obedient to his will, put it at once on to paper and acted it 
 there, his words coming to him readily and taking the form 
 and colour of his thoughts. Perhaps his work was not 
 done quite so easily as that ; but it has that effect, and the 
 efforts made are hidden very cunningly. We may at least be 
 sure that he was more interested in giving a vivid picture of 
 comedy than in polishing his verses. It was his nature to 
 work quickly ; had he not followed his instincts he would have 
 done his work differently, and I believe less well. Let those 
 who demand constant perfection of form in dramatic poetry 
 compare Moliere's lines with those of any other French drama- 
 tist, and see whose words or whose thoughts remain most 
 easily in their memory. 
 
 French writers have sometimes complained of inelegancies 
 and inaccuracies in Moliere's language. It would not become 
 me, a foreigner, to speak of them. Indeed, for the most part I 
 have not noticed them. I will say, however, that I do not 
 
206 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 think that they sprang from heedlessness, that rather they 
 were intentional ; and that on the other hand his words show 
 abundant instances of the best forms of literary scholarship. 
 There are numberless examples in his plays of sentences which 
 could only have been penned by one who knew instinctively 
 the value of the shades and finesses of language. It was partly 
 by these subtle signs that Moliere gave strength and truth to 
 his character-painting. His verses often show a delicate 
 texture not unlike the niceness of good lace-work. And in 
 many of these passages his faculty as a comic dramatist is 
 marked with manifest clearness. Seeing and feeling all this, 
 which only wants ordinary understanding, one learns that 
 academical precision may sometimes be out of place. 
 
 Both La Bruyere and F^nelon, almost Moliere's contempo- 
 raries, criticised his language. La Bruyere said in a few 
 words: "II n'a manque' a Moliere que d'eviter le jargon et 
 d'&jrire purement." l F^nelon said : " In thinking well he 
 often writes badly; he uses the most forced and the least 
 natural phrases. Terence says in four words and with the 
 most "elegant simplicity what Moliere says in a crowd of 
 metaphors which are not far from gibberish. I like his prose 
 much better than his verse. For instance, the Avare is less 
 badly written than his plays in verse. It is true that French 
 versification hampered him ; it is also true that he succeeded 
 better in the Amphitryon, where he chose to write in irregular 
 verses. But generally, it appears to me that even in his prose 
 he does not talk simply enough to express every passion." 2 
 These censures on Moliere's language are, I believe, read now 
 in France with some surprise by those who consider the mean- 
 ing of comedy. La Bruyere and Fenelon were large-minded 
 men ; they were both masters of style, but of different kinds, 
 because they wrote with different ends in view. And I think 
 that if Moliere had read their remarks he might (if he had cared 
 to do so) have gone a long way towards convincing them both 
 that they were wrong. The language of comedy has its own 
 purposes, its own uses. Its style should reflect its natural 
 qualities ; it should have a vernacular, a raciness, of its own, 
 
 * Les Caracttres, chapter "Des ouvrages de Pesprit," about the middle, 
 d'? arag be g innin g "II n'a manqu<$ & Terence que d'etre moins 
 
 Lettre sur les Occupations de PAcadtonie Fran^aise, sect. 7. 
 
CHAPTEK VIII 207 
 
 and be bright with the thoughts, expressed in a comic manner, 
 that the author wished to show in his personages. One of its 
 distinctive marks is an openness of feeling and of understand- 
 ing common to all. Even as one reads, these attributes are 
 more essential to good comedy than elegance of diction, and on 
 the stage a comedy without these attributes will hardly prove 
 to be a good acting play. 
 
 Grammar is only a means to an end. No one can do with- 
 otrtTits lessons, yet there are Limes when its rules may be 
 relaxed. Moliere knew very well that he allowed himself 
 some4refijdom_of. language, and that he here and there chose a 
 
 perhaps an 
 
 h^pther writers would have rejected; HeTwas a comic 
 dramatist who wrote for the stageTlmcTlie preferred a graphic 
 phrase which really gave the thoughts of his personage at the 
 spur of the moment to speech that was strictly regular shown 
 in an exact and methodical manner. We may see this from 
 his instruction, given in a tone of satire, to du Croisy, who was 
 to play the part of the poet in the Impromptu de Versailles. 1 
 And in a discussion with some friends as to the first or second 
 reading of a satirical verse which was not his Moliere 
 thought the first reading was the best. He said : " The first 
 is the most natural, and you must sacrifice all regularity to 
 get the right expression. Art ought to teach us how to 
 overcome the rules of art." 2 These last words seem to be 
 sententious as coming from Moliere, but he certainly acted 
 upon their meaning very largely as only those can do safely 
 who are masters of their art. In Shakespeare the same general 
 ideas about style may be seen, though his plays show a higher 
 elevation of thought than Moliere's. The man who found 
 fault with " This is the most unkindest cut of all " would be 
 set down as a dolt. The poetical dramatist is in fact allowed 
 a rather larger licence of language than the poet whose lines 
 are not intended for stage representation. 
 
 Moliere knew this, and they took the licence withaat-thiiiking 
 about it. Moliere's style, like Shakespeare's, isjso sympathetic, 
 it has so many attributes of a large humanity, that one feels 
 
 1 Scene 1, near the end. 
 
 2 Louis Racine's Memoires of his father, printed by M. Mesnard in the 
 (Euvres de Jean Racine, 2nd ed. i. 234, 235. 
 
208 LIFE OF MOLI 
 
 that he was not a precisian in anything. His nature was not 
 fastidious, he had not an over nice love for elegance of phrase ; 
 he might then have easily missed more important matters, 
 and the strength of his character-painting would have suffered, 
 and with it the various shades of colouring. Yet his insight 
 was true, and he thought clearly, whether in ridicule or in 
 seriousness, for his pictures show exactly the scenes he wished 
 them to represent. He was always master of his language, 
 and he made it his servant to do his bidding. This is one 
 of the tests of a writer; without it he can hardly hope for 
 strength, or accuracy, or persuasiveness. For firm portraiture 
 the choice of words and the manner of using them are very 
 important. Any dramatic character loosely described carries 
 no weight; the picture is soon forgotten after the lines are 
 read, or immediately after they are spoken on the stage unless 
 the acting has been unusually good. 
 
 There are many English readers of French plays who do 
 not like their perpetual rhyming lines. A more or less 
 monotonous and jingling sound is produced, unless the struc- 
 ture of the verses is hidden under the greater importance of 
 the meaning of the words. Even then, for the free expression 
 of spoken thought, blank verse is more apt than verse in 
 rhyme. But there is, I think, no instance of a French play 
 in blank verse. In the 16th century a few plays were written 
 in lines of ten syllables, and comedies in lines of eight 
 syllables were fairly common in the first half of the 17th 
 century. This measure had not quite died out in Moliere's 
 day, though he never used it. All of his plays in verse were in 
 the long Alexandrine line of twelve syllables except Amphi- 
 tryon and PsyM, in which last play Moliere and Corneille 
 were joint collaborators. These two plays were written in 
 "vers libres" or "vers irre'guliers," consisting sometimes of 
 lines of eight syllables and sometimes of twelve. There the 
 rhymes are less frequent than in the other metres, they do 
 not follow each other successively; and this measure, if 
 difficult, seems perhaps to give to the poet who can use it a 
 freer hand in the disposition of his words. Its greatest master 
 was La Fontaine. He was more truly a poet than Moliere, 
 and verses in nearly all measures may be seen in his Fables' 
 in his Tales, and in his other poems. La Fontaine also wrote 
 
CHAPTER VIII 209 
 
 plays, and there the most frequent measure is the line of 
 twelve syllables. As a comic dramatist Moliere was bound 
 to write according to custom, but he held his pen so lightly 
 that he made the rhymes and the rules of versification seem 
 to fall into their places unnoticed. Nobody wants to see the 
 trouble a poet has taken, and in a curious kind of way Moliere 
 reminds one of his own jesting words : " Les gens de qualite 
 savent tout sans avoir jamais rien appris." 
 
 I have alluded mainly to Moliere's plays in verse, for lan- 
 guage can show a higher form of expression in verse than 
 in prose, and poetry conveying the sense of passion which 
 poetry should always inspire has charms for many readers 
 which prose does not offer. Moliere fashioned in a poetical 
 form the plots and the characters in his plays, creating 
 pictures of the comedy of life which will long be studied with 
 pleasure, and he put them into excellent dramatic verse, 
 but he had not the highest feelings of poetry. With strong 
 and natural powers of characterisation, helped largely by the 
 excellence and the charm of style, it may be thought that he 
 exhibited his most native sentiments, his innermost ideas, 
 more delicately and more seductively in verse than in prose. 
 He must have had the desire to express himself in the form 
 of language that poets used. When still a boy he translated 
 much of Lucretius' poem partly into verse, showing that verse- 
 making came easily to him even then ; and the facile turn of 
 the lines in his comedies, written later, may lead one to think 
 that his inborn love of ridicule and of satire sprang from him 
 more happily when he wrote in verse, and that in verse he 
 gave the most delicate and most amusing pictures of his 
 thoughts. Excellence in verse, when found, is often more 
 attractive than in prose, perhaps because of its greater 
 technical difficulties. But Moliere made light of these en- 
 tanglements ; he walked over them as a spider does over his 
 web, and his lines are so easy that they seem to have cost 
 him no trouble. He knew at any rate how to hide the taste 
 of the oil. I have often found myself dwelling with pleasure 
 on Moliere's aptitude for putting words together so as to 
 produce a comic effect. Some Frenchman has said, " On ne 
 fait pas de drames avec des mots." That may be the case 
 with plays where the interest is confined chiefly to producing 
 
 o 
 
j 
 I 
 
 210 LIFE OF MOLIEEE 
 
 " powerful situations " ; but true comedy is more dainty and 
 wants a nicer handling. Good satire and good irony demand 
 a skilful use of words, and it was partly by this means that 
 Moliere showed both strength and delicacy in his personal 
 characterisation. His exquisite comic raillery is perhaps seen 
 more amusingly in the Femmes Savantes than any other play 
 that he has written. Yet if one compares half a dozen of his 
 best comedies in verse with as many of those in prose, one 
 hesitates before saying whether in prose or in verse he proved 
 himself to be the greatest master of satire, of irony, of banter, 
 and of pleasantry. I am not speaking now of Moliere gene- 
 rally as a dramatist, but of his style and of the skilful use he 
 made of language. Everybody likes to have an opinion of 
 his own about an author he has read, and it seems to me that 
 Moliere's satire or his raillery is on the whole more delicately 
 shown, or is given in a more refined way, in verse than in 
 prose, and that in prose it is more open or more popular and 
 will provoke the most laughter. Perhaps, too, in his prose 
 plays Moliere shows most fully his rare capacity for mixing 
 together comedy and farce, realism and caricature, earnestness 
 and mockery ; and it is also in prose that one sees the strongest 
 instances of his vis comica, or power of making an audience 
 merry, by his direct and simple speech. On the other hand, 
 there are two of his prose comedies that show his sadness 
 the most strongly, the Avare and George Dandin. But in 
 whatever he wrote, his humane and sympathetic manner was 
 among his characteristics. If his style is really humane, it 
 is tolerably certain that his thoughts were humane also. 
 Without his strong humanity his cleverness and sense of 
 humour would have taken a different turn, and his comedies 
 would not have been so pleasant to read. 
 
 Among comic dramatists Moliere ranks next, I think, to 
 Shakespeare. It sounds strange to speak of Shakespeare as 
 a comic dramatist, but had he written no other plays than 
 his comedies the qualification would literally be just; and 
 it is only with reference to comedy that I wish to bring him 
 and Moliere together for a moment, though hardly by way of 
 parallel or comparison. Shakespeare put some comedy into 
 almost all his plays, purposely mingling it with historical or 
 
CHAPTER VIII 211 
 
 tragic incidents ; but if one can consider his plays that are 
 called comedies apart from his other work, they are so different 
 from Moliere's that any fair comparison or judging of one 
 beside the other is nearly impracticable. Not only is Shake- 
 speare's level higher in general and in many particulars, but 
 complicated side issues constantly arise which show that their 
 intentions and their styles were much at variance. Lines of 
 thought that would be right when applied to one author 
 would soon lead us on to a wrong track if applied to the 
 other. This is remarkable in two dramatists who in their 
 pictures of comedy stand so high above others that they form 
 a class by themselves. They more fully than any others have 
 shown by their comic characterisation how largely our actions 
 result from our humours, how contradictory our humours often 
 are ; and that, so far as can be distinguished, our -hearts have 
 generally a greater share than our heads in forming our 
 characters and persuading us or compelling us to be what 
 we are. Shakespeare wrote more imagmat^vely^_w_ilh higher 
 idealism, with more__poetTnflTl ; ftp.hnP r p^n1iBr^ more playfully, 
 with~greater satire or irony and a stronger vis comica each 
 one drawing and painting his pictures truly/but with different 
 aims or ambitions. For each writer strove to please a people 
 who would not, when the plays were written, have enjoyed 
 the comedies which delighted the other. Nevertheless, per- 
 haps in spite of their dissimilarities, certain points of likeness 
 that were not merely casual may be found between them ; 
 and for this reason, in an English biography of Moliere, I 
 may be allowed a word on the matter, even with the cer- 
 tainty before me of being often at fault. I have, however, 
 just mentioned some of Moliere's characteristics, and I 
 have no wish to speak of Shakespeare's comedies in any 
 detail. 
 
 The mental temperament of the English dramatists in the 
 latter part of the reign of Elizabeth and under James I., and 
 that of the French dramatists a generation later, under 
 Louis XIIL, during Mazarin's government, and in the early 
 part of the reign of Louis xiv., was very different. The objects 
 aimed at by the writers for the stage in each country show 
 that the theatre-loving people of each nation had quite dif- 
 ferent tastes. In England the dramatists were large-minded, 
 
212 LIFE OF 
 
 fresh and buoyant with their own thoughts ; they were im- 
 patient of all control except that which they exercised upon 
 themselves ; they struggled with life hardly enough, but in 
 what they wrote they showed that they had strong ideas of 
 individual liberty ; they were vigorous, hearty, and glorious in 
 their own high spirits, and they poured forth their rich vein 
 of poetical feeling in the free measure of blank verse. In 
 France, on the other hand, there was less originality of 
 thought; the spirit of imitation had been predominant in 
 most cases since the renaissance of the drama about the 
 middle of the 16th century Corneille and Moliere, however, 
 were exceptions to the general practice of imitation ; and the 
 stiff but senseless laws of the unities, devised by the pedants 
 with the intention of preventing extravagant ideas, crippled 
 the imaginative powers of the writers, who as a class were not 
 poetical ; and long before Moliere began to write, poets com- 
 posed their verses in rhyming lines of twelve syllables, and 
 they were bound to make masculine and feminine rhymes 
 follow each other alternately. And the early French drama- 
 tists, following the Italian playwrights, were too often content, 
 having found a type, to reproduce it with such variations that 
 did not really alter the character, so that a personage once 
 known remained more or less a stock figure until the end of 
 the play. The presence or the absence of poetical feeling is a 
 strong distinguishing feature in the comedy of each country at 
 the periods already mentioned. In both the early English and 
 early French comedies there is much that, were it produced 
 now for the first time, would be thought excessively tedious, 
 and the reader would often feel that his sympathies were 
 not aroused, for poor plays were written in both countries ; 
 but there were very wide differences of design and of treat- 
 ment distinguishing one set of comedies from the other. It is 
 well known that in the last quarter of the 16th century 
 and in the first quarter of the 17th, English dramatists took 
 their plots freely from Spain, and nobody has thought worse 
 of them for doing so. Our old playwrights, like Moliere, took 
 their good things where they found them and moulded them in 
 their own way to their own uses. Whether they turned 
 everything they touched into gold is not the point in question, 
 But after the incidents in the story had been borrowed from 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 213 
 
 Spain or elsewhere, they set to work honestly and bravely to 
 give a life and form of their own making to the events and 
 characters in their plays. The drama, or the action in the 
 poem, was drawn from their own imagination, and the poetical 
 feeling was also theirs. They borrowed the skeleton, but the 
 flesh on the bones, the blood in the veins, the action of the 
 heart, were all of their own providing. They imitated and copied 
 nobody, because the desire for imitation did not exist among 
 them. There was no imitation in the sense of -copying, because 
 there was too much independence of thought. This reason 
 alone gave to our dramatists a large number of characters 
 an element much wanting in the French drama because 
 their writers had not acquired the power or the habit of 
 thinking and working out a character for themselves. That 
 independence of thought has much to do with the imaginative 
 powers may be seen from the fact that when in the second 
 half of the 17th century English dramatists, imitating those 
 of France, composed plays in rhyme upon what they believed 
 were regular models, they produced monstrosities or sterile 
 abortions. We have had our period of imitation, and have 
 small reason to be proud of its results. 
 
 Shakespeare and Moliere thus lived in different mental 
 atmospheres, and they wrote under different conditions. The 
 plays that pleasecLone peoplejwould^not have pleased the 
 other ; and though both writers spoke to tlieir ^fwTfences much 
 asTEeir own feelings prompted them, Moliere's hand was not 
 completely free. The contrast between- them is very wide, 
 and is seen at once in their thoughts and in their manner of 
 expressing~them. Shakespeare wrote poetical comedy and he 
 loved the^gjamour of romantic tales ; Moliere wrote comedies 
 of manner and heToved wholesome satire and pleasant raillery ; 
 and both writers in their very different ways have given the 
 best comedies the world has seen. Had they known each 
 other, their opinions on the conduct of men in the affairs of 
 life would have been fairly similar. Shakespeare was also a 
 satirist and he enjoyed its fun, and Moliere had the habit of 
 examining men's thoughts and tracing their actions from them. 
 But nature had given to Shakespeare higher ideals and greater 
 powers whej^wj1Ji-J^u-pic^u^e__^l^m. His knowledge of the 
 human heart and human mind has not been equalled, and the 
 
214 LIFE OF 
 
 greater richness of his intellect demanded a wider and a loftier 
 sphere than is to be found in Moliere. 
 
 The difference in their styles, in thought and in words, is 
 the first thing that strikes a reader. Partly from causes just 
 alluded to, Shakespeare's style is more imaginative, fuller, 
 stronger, and moreTHJetrcal than Moliere's, but his language is 
 not so easily understood. His words and phrases, there can 
 be no doubt, have a peculiar richness and flavour of their own, 
 they are particularly apt and well chosen and leave no trace 
 of effort ; but his lines appear sometimes to be overweighted 
 with thick luxuriance of ideas, so that their meaning is more 
 or less obscure or is not readily seen. Those who have learned 
 their Shakespeare have learned to love his language because 
 of its poetical imagery, its intensity, and the truth shown in it, 
 its eloquence, its largeness of manner and full sweep of 
 thought. Still, I take it, there has always been a period of 
 self-tuition, which may have been difficult, even though the 
 lesson has come gladly. But there are many English men 
 and women who like to be thought fairly well educated, who 
 have never accustomed themselves to Shakespeare's manner, 
 and who do not know his plays. The difficulties of language 
 hinder them. I confess I have felt more than once that 
 Shakespeare's comedy would have been more enjoyable if 
 his thoughts had been given in a simpler manner. His 
 diction is sometimes confusing. He wrote after the fashion of 
 the poets of his age, grandly, gloriously ; but however truly he 
 may have written, he has often long winded periods showing 
 involved constructions that are not easily decipherable when 
 read for the first time. I believe there are few persons who 
 really understand a great play after a first reading; but I 
 think also that after a first reading the meaning of Moliere'-s 
 lines conies home more readily to a young Frenchman of one 
 or two and twenty than the meaning of Shakespeare's lines 
 does to a young English lad of the same age. This is not 
 from mental superiority in the young Frenchman, but because 
 Moliere's thoughts are more definite, less complex, and are 
 given in less profusion, and that the construction of his 
 sentences is easier than that of Shakespeare's. fMoliere was 
 born six years after Shakespeare died, and J:lie_ diction in 
 French has altered less since Moliere wrote than it has in 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 215 
 
 English since the time of Shakespeare. In prose greater 
 differences may be seen in the manner of expression than in 
 verse. Look at Milton's prose and that of Pascal, who died in 
 1662; or at Moliere's prose and that in English comedies 
 written between 1660 and 1673. French prose had then taken 
 its present form, and cannot be considered old ; the manner 
 of expression in English prose has changed since that time, 
 and we now think the style of authors in Charles ii.'s reign 
 old fashioned. The national characteristics of a country show 
 themselves in language, and owing to many causes French 
 prose at the beginning of the second half of the 1 7th century 
 is more easily read now by one who has no acquaintance with 
 old authors, than English prose of the same date. 
 
 Both Shakespeare and Moliere were great humorists, with 
 more or less of scepticism and of worldly cynicism. They saw 
 men's meanness, their vanity, and their boastfulness with a 
 feeling of sadness, yet both were generous and large-hearted. 
 Neither probably were great laughers, though Shakespeare, one 
 would say, must have had a very large capacity for enjoyment ; 
 and Moliere had the greater power of giving fun and of making 
 others laugh with him in his satire. The laughter that 
 Shakespeare causes is louder and generally heartier; Moliere's 
 laughter is funnier, smaller in volume, and it shows a finer 
 and often a sadder note. The lines in the comedies of both 
 are full of mirth, but Moliere laid more stress upon ridicule 
 than Shakespeare. This is a form of satire well within the 
 province of a comic dramatist, though much will depend on 
 its object and the way it is shown. Moliere's ridicule was 
 generally reverential, it was used for a good purpose, and his 
 satire was not ill-natured when it was most severe. Shake- 
 speare has shown, perhaps in every comedy, that his love of 
 natural objects was intense. Moliere very rarely mentions 
 them ; he did not conceive that it was part of his work in 
 describing men and women to speak of earth, air, fire, and 
 water. Few of his countrymen did so, either in his lifetime 
 or for nearly a century after his death. Shakespeare's 
 comedies, too, are rich in strong love-scenes ; he took pleasure 
 in dwelling upon them, in picturing them in all the sweetness 
 and splendour that language can show, because he thought 
 that the love and trust of a woman for a man is in itself a 
 
216 LIFE OF MOLlfeKE 
 
 beautiful thing, and not merely an idea. He felt that it 
 alorifies and rejoices the heart, that it heightens our morality 
 and aives us a clearer perception that men and women are put 
 into "the world to help and comfort each other. Moliere's 
 heart was strong and high; he knew what love is, and occa- 
 sionally he painted it truly ; but he did not care about his 
 love-scenes as Shakespeare did, he did not take the same sort 
 of interest in them. He rarely idealised them, he used them 
 chiefly as an instrument for his satire. It does not appear 
 either that Moliere had any real love of music ; while Shake- 
 speare had it very strongly. Shakespeare had in his heart a 
 love for the " concord of sweet sounds " ; this is seen in the 
 flow of his verse and in his songs. Moliere has very few songs, 
 and the only one that anybody cares to remember is spoken 
 by Alceste, and that, in spite of the rhyme, pleases rather by 
 the sweetness of feeling than of sound : 
 
 " Si le Roi m'avoit donn 
 
 Paris, sa grand' ville, 
 Et qu'il me fallut quitter 
 
 L'amour de ma mie, 
 Je dirois au roi Henri : 
 
 Reprenez votre Paris : 
 J'aime mieux ma mie, au gu ! 
 
 J'aime mieux ma mie." 
 
 The meaning of these simple lines is that they were opposed 
 to Oronte's pretentious and nonsensical sonnet. Moliere's 
 other songs he knew to be trumpery ; he put them into his 
 plays to be laughed at. Every English reader of Shakespeare 
 recollects the pretty and mirthful lines : 
 
 " The man that hath no music in himself, 
 Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, 
 Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ; 
 The motions of his spirit are dull as night 
 And his affections dark as Erebus : 
 Let no such man be trusted." 
 
 Though Moliere had not known by name one note of music 
 from another, these words of Shakespeare's are no more applic- 
 able to him than to Handel or to Beethoven. Whatever 
 likeness there may be between the comedies of Shakespeare 
 and of Moliere is to be sought in the excellence and the 
 strength of their dramatisation, their characterisation and 
 their mastery of racy language, though each worked with 
 
CHAPTER YTII 217 
 
 different aims in view. Shakespeare's plots are better and 
 stronger than Moliere's, yet, like Moliere, he gave more thought 
 to unfolding and exposing his characters and to the working 
 out of his scenes than to the outward structure of his story. 
 These points of likeness between them should be noticed. 
 
 Moliere's humanity and his sympathies were unusually 
 large, but Shakespeare's were larger still. His outlook and 
 his range of thought was wider, his mind much more imagina- 
 tive, more comprehensive. The scope of action in each of his 
 comedies was greater, the idea worked out was more general, 
 and he showed the natural attributes of men and women 
 under more varied aspects to some extent because his 
 comedy stood on a broader basis than the laws of the French 
 drama permitted Moliere to use. Shakespeare, too, loved 
 romance ; Moliere mostly avoided it. They both revealed men's 
 purposes : Shakespeare with higher imaginative realism and 
 poetical feeling, Moliere on a smaller scale and with more 
 definiteness, so that to many readers he is more easily under- 
 stood. The style of thought in Shakespeare's men and women 
 hardly proclaims their nationality ; they spoke their feelings 
 with the open voice of nature that calls every country its own. 
 Moliere's men and women also spoke openly and very 
 naturally, but their tone of thought is generally French, and 
 would have sounded more or less strange if heard outside 
 France. As general instances : the comedy and the character- 
 isation in the Merchant of Venice might be seen anywhere in 
 Europe, but the Femmes Savantes is distinctly a French 
 comedy laughing at the affectations of a fashion then running 
 in Paris. On the other hand, the Merry Wives of Windsor is 
 a peculiarly English comedy; but all the chief features 
 described in the Misanthrope might be seen in any country 
 where there is polished society, and the same may be said of 
 the Avare wherever there is a miser who has to maintain a 
 position in the world. 
 
 Bearing in mind the arbitrary laws which governed the 
 drama in France, a partial comparison is perhaps possible in the 
 way that Shakespeare and Moliere characterised their person- 
 ages ; and as far as this goes it shows that Shakespeare gave 
 wider play to his thoughts, and that Moliere concentrated his 
 ideas more closely on the subject immediately at hand. 
 
218 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 Moliere's practice in the greater number of his plays was to 
 work up the incidents in his comedy in order to portray 
 strongly the features in his chief characters, and he used his 
 minor personages and his by-play with this end in view ; 
 whereas Shakespeare considered his personages more broadly 
 and thought of them more individually. Shakespeare did not 
 characterise men by their eccentricities so much as Moliere 
 did. As his power of ridicule was less keen he thought less of 
 it, he did not use it so fully. His characterisation took a 
 wider sweep, and he described men's moods more generally, 
 mixing better their good qualities and their weaknesses, and 
 letting each fall into their places in a more usual way. I do 
 not wish in the least to contradict now what I said earlier in 
 this chapter, for I believe that Moliere had very great and very 
 true powers of personal characterisation ; but with the natural 
 reflections that everybody makes while thinking of one author 
 beside another, it is quite impossible not to feel that Shake- 
 speare's strength in showing personal characterisation was the 
 greatest. The two dramatists had different aims, one larger, 
 one more definite than the other, and they wrote for audiences 
 with different tastes. The reader who enjoys comedy will try 
 to see how each writer described men's humours and what his 
 laughter meant. 
 
 Though Moliere was generally justified in the way he 
 showed his caricature, Shakespeare used this means of 
 ridicule more sparingly. Moliere has shown men's faults, 
 and he loved to portray their follies ; instead of poetical or 
 imaginative feeling we see a clear note of amusing and 
 satirical comedy, and happily of a healthy kind. It would be 
 a huge mistake to look upon Moliere as a character-monger. 
 His personages, if taken in connection with the incidents in 
 his plays, do not show this ; they are too true to nature ; and 
 there is real comedy in most of his plays that are acted and 
 read because they show good, honest fun. And it is remarkable 
 that after two hundred and fifty years his wit should have lost 
 so little of its brightness. Moliere wished that his light plays 
 should make people laugh, but there is behind his merriment 
 a deeper purpose which anybody may see if he will but open 
 his eyes. I must repeat that Moliere had a serious purpose in 
 most of his comedies. His plays show that he was in earnest 
 
CHAPTER VIII 219 
 
 in trying to do good work, though he wrote with a light hand 
 and used ridicule and broad and good-natured satire as his 
 instruments. Some distinction, however, should be made 
 between those plays that he wrote to be acted before the 
 court and those that he wrote for the public theatre. 
 
 I am not meaning to compare him with Shakespeare, 
 though I fear I have been led unavoidably more into com- 
 parison than I had intended. Real comparison is hardly possible, 
 for Shakespeare's design was broader, his plane was higher, 
 and his comedies were conceived and executed in a larger 
 spirit than Moliere wished or was able to adopt. Shakespeare's 
 imagination, too, led him to heights of fancy which Moliere 
 would have admired, but which he would not have attempted 
 to reach. The less liberal focus of events allowed on the 
 French stage made concentrated action more necessary than 
 was the case with us in England, or, at any rate, than was 
 Shakespeare's custom, and Moliere had to observe laws which 
 to Shakespeare would have been intolerable. The thought 
 
 " Let observation with extensive view 
 Survey mankind from China to Peru," 
 
 was not Moliere's wish, nor would he have been able to carry 
 it out as Shakespeare has done; but the idea expressed in the 
 next two lines 
 
 " Eemark each anxious toil, each eager strife, 
 And watch the busy scenes of crowded life," 
 
 Moliere did show with very great dramatic clearness as 
 regards what passed in his own country. And I feel sure 
 that if Shakespeare had known Moliere's comedies he would 
 have been wonderfully struck with the accuracy of observation 
 and of thought underlying his ridicule, with his strong dramatic 
 characterisation and the excellence of his style ; he would also 
 have enjoyed his irony and have laughed heartily at his fun. 
 
 Though the styles of their comedies were so dissimilar, 
 Shakespeare and Moliere, as dramatists, had some main ideas 
 in common. One broad likeness between them was in the 
 absence of formalism, and this is more singular in Moliere 
 than in Shakespeare, because routine had been more common 
 on the French than on the English stage. In the first half 
 of the 17th century French playwrights conceived their 
 characters too much after a methodical pattern, they thought 
 
220 LIFE OF MOLI&RE 
 
 too much of the " genre noble " in comedy ; and Moliere, as he 
 discarded their upholstery and drew his personages naturally 
 
 that is as men and women would speak and act under 
 
 the given conditions broke away from routine more widely 
 than Shakespeare had done. Also, both Shakespeare and 
 Moliere thought more of characterisation than of plot, and 
 they thought infinitely more of the effects their words would 
 have on the stage than of the literary beauties of their lines 
 when printed. Their chief labour was to get their thoughts 
 into the right shape, into the form of comedy proper at the 
 moment. It would seem that their words came quickly, 
 picturing their thoughts, acting their comedy on paper in the 
 way their minds had conceived it. Each had 'in his inner 
 mind an idea of the value of his own work. For it rarely 
 happens in the competition of life that a man who is much 
 stronger than others does not know that he can do more than 
 his fellows. I believe they both had with quite modest 
 thoughts an opinion of their own powers, and that they 
 trusted in them, writing often to please themselves or to 
 satisfy their own ideas of what was good or fitting in comedy. 
 Their audience was their first care, but they each had their 
 own aspirations which they wished to court not for the sake 
 of glory, not because they wished to say something fine, but 
 because the natural ambition in man urged them in a con- 
 scientious spirit to seek after excellence as far as they were 
 able to do so. They both considered very little the readers of 
 their own day, and to those in a future generation neither gave 
 more than a momentary thought. Few dramatists of the first 
 rank have been so little desirous of posthumous fame. 
 
 They would both have rejected the theory of a literary 
 drama, knowing well that an audience wants to be touched 
 with what it sees and hears, and that literary graces, rightly 
 never absent, hold a subsidiary place in the representation of 
 a play. A comedy, whether in verse or in prose, is intended 
 to be acted ; and as its words are to be spoken they should, 
 with the necessary proprieties, have the flavour of speech. 
 You may act comedy or tragedy; you cannot act literature 
 in the sense of giving on the stage a literary flavour or effect 
 to spoken words. If you try to do so you are working in a 
 wrong direction. In reading a comedy an idea of its repre- 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 221 
 
 sentation should, if possible, be kept in view ; but the literary 
 and the dramatic effects are to some extent antagonistic to 
 one another. Shakespeare and Moliere, the greatest masters 
 of comedy, have both shown in their verse and in their 
 prose that they were careful to give to their words the effect 
 of speech addressed by one living person to another ; and as 
 far as the literary flavour crossed the stage effect, it would 
 almost seem that they wished to avoid it. In good comedy 
 one looks for strong or natural feelings expressed in a 
 sympathetic and easy way, but its literary style should be 
 used to conceal itself. It ought to be there, like salt in a 
 soup, but even as one reads a play it should not be much 
 more noticeable. Take the six or twelve best comic drama- 
 tists: it will be seen that they thought much of their 
 language, for it helps to characterise a play in all its parts, 
 yet that they wished to hide its literary style rather than 
 bring it forward, and that their plays became known and are 
 remembered partly by this concealment the dramatic effects 
 taking the foremost place and outweighing all other needs. 
 The value on the stage of the scenes in a comedy is tested 
 by the dramatic very much more than by the literary merits ; 
 and even as one reads a printed comedy, if literary effort is 
 too prominent it will usually damage the worth of the lines 
 whether in verse or in prose. It has the appearance of an 
 exercise in mental gymnastics. Comedies of the first class 
 are very often examples of good literature; literary excel- 
 lence forms part of their merits. But the style has come 
 naturally from the orderly working of the author's brain. He 
 has, no doubt, aimed at giving good literary expression to his 
 thoughts ; but he has instinctively made it subordinate to 
 the comic effects in his play, even though appropriate lan- 
 guage has had much to do with producing comic results. 
 Goodness in a style in any branch of literature depends largely 
 on the fitness to the matter in hand. Comedy and comic are 
 words with large meanings ; and the most imperative needs in 
 a comedy are true comic thought and comic exhibition shown 
 truly and in a natural, lively and mirthful manner. Without 
 them there can be no real comic style, for style is the outcome 
 of thought and is generated by it. Mere style or language 
 has never yet made a good comedy, though it has often given 
 
222 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 invaluable assistance. Also, if the beauties of language in a 
 play are so great that you like to learn three or four passages 
 by heart and remember them, unless you keep in mind the 
 bearing of these passages to the rest of the play you will lose 
 much of their dramatic effects, and might almost as well have 
 learned Milton as Shakespeare, or La Fontaine as Moliere. 
 
 The literary charms in Shakespeare's and in Moliere's 
 comedies come naturally from the subject in each play, char- 
 acterise it and are one with it, and rarely, especially with 
 Moliere, obtrude themselves for their own sake. Shakespeare's 
 fancy was so exuberantly poetical that his language takes all 
 sorts of forms, for he delighted in framing images for the sake 
 of. their illustrative beauty. If Moliere had possessed the 
 poetic gifts which burn and must find an outlet, he would have 
 shown them. The styles of both writers, however, varied with 
 the subjects chosen and with the personages, and are peculiar 
 to them. Differences may be seen in Shakespeare's manner 
 in his comedies, and Moliere's comedies in verse were written 
 in different tones. As masters of the language of comedy in 
 verse, Shakespeare and Moliere stand as gods among men. 
 Examine their thoughts and the apt way they are expressed 
 in giving a clear picture of comedy and its personal charac- 
 terisation, their words will be found to have a fuller meaning 
 and to carry with them a stronger vitality than those of any 
 other comic dramatist who wrote also in verse ; and the ex- 
 cellence of the passages *that are most admired lies chiefly in 
 manifesting the genius of comedy, in suiting the occasion and 
 showing the character of the speaker. Take these passages out 
 of their setting, and much of their value will be lost. This does 
 not mean that the writers wished their plays to be examples of 
 literature ; it does mean that they were both masters of their 
 language, and that they made it very pliable to suit the needs 
 of comedy. Instances may be seen where both Shakespeare and 
 Moliere found what may be called a collision between correct- 
 ness of language and true comic expression. They have both 
 shown that correctness or strict regularity of language must 
 then for the moment go to the wall, and that ungrammatical 
 words giving a true picture of comedy should prevail. 
 
 Moliere wrote many comedies too in prose; and the lan- 
 guage in half a dozen of the best of these will bear comparison 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 223 
 
 with that in any English plays also written in prose. His 
 style for the purposes of comedy is not more old-fashioned 
 than that of Congreve, hardly more so than that of Sheridan. 
 These two Englishmen, between them, wrote about six comedies 
 that are now generally known, and for the excellence of his 
 language Moliere is on a par with either of them. In some 
 ways Congreve is more delicate in his delineations than 
 Sheridan, though he has repelled many persons by his cold- 
 blooded nastiness. But as you look at his and Sheridan's 
 scenes, they do not fill your rnind so intensely with dramatic 
 personations of character, nor do they give you such a big idea 
 of intellectual comic strength, or of the lessons that comic 
 satire may teach, as do the pictures drawn by Moliere. Style 
 and language have certainly much to do with this. 
 
 No real likeness, however, can be maintainejl/bety^een Shake - 
 spearVs jind Moliere's comedies._ Shakespeare^s_were_full_ of 
 ^poetry ; Moliere thought how he could best gain his purpose 
 bv^wholesorne~~and amusing satire^ .-If aJikeness exists between 
 any of "their "cFaracters, it is between FalstafLand the, race of 
 Sganarelles iu^shc 7 wirrgTrrTheir different.way.S- the- meanness 
 of nrerTwTTo'are boastful, vain-glorious, cowardly, domineering 
 and self-interested and in another to be mentioned imme- 
 diately. Admirable as is the character of Falstaff, it is often 
 felt that much of Shakespeare's low or popular comedy in this 
 character has lost its flavour for us now, and Moliere's graphic 
 portraiture of his Sganarelles is not the best part of his work. 
 But Moliere's fun is generally more really funny than Shake- 
 speare's, and his droll scenes are more amusing; the vis 
 comica in his plays creates laughter more easily than that 
 shown by Shakespeare. For an example of the difference of 
 design and treatment in their comedies, look at As You .Like 
 It and the Ecole des Maris or the ficolt des Femmes ; at the 
 Merry Wives of Windsor or the comedy in Henry IV. and tne 
 Bourgeois Gentillwmme ; at the Merchant of Venice and the 
 Avare. In these two last plays there is a likeness in the 
 conduct of Shylock and Harpagon to their children, and in 
 the absence of affection and respect that both fathers inspire. 
 Harpagon has a son and a daughter, but he loves his money 
 better than either ; Shylock has only a daughter, but he prefers 
 his ducats, and his revenge is sweeter to him than his gold. 
 
224 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 Both plays present terrible pictures of how greed can take 
 hold of a man, but it is shown in different ways. Shakespeare 
 has given a poetic and ideal conception of flint-hearted brutish- 
 ness ; Moliere in his picture of beastly avarice pours out his 
 grim irony and his satire. What Shakespeare says of Shy- 
 lock will apply to Harpagon: 
 
 " A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch 
 Uncapable of pity, void and empty 
 From any dram of mercy." 
 
 Moliere's Avare has some excellent scenes in which his 
 powers as a comic dramatist are manifest, but even if this 
 play had been written in verse one might look in vain for such 
 pictures of beautiful ideas as are to be found in the Merchant 
 
 Venice. 
 
 The frame of Moliere's comedies was smaller than of Shake- 
 speare's ; his plays were planned on a narrower scale, better 
 suited to his more definite understanding and his less poetical 
 nature. But inside his limits, which, when examined, will 
 be found to be more than ordinarily wide, his characterisation 
 was broad, easy, and bold, and his fancy was exuberant in 
 healthy and amusing satirical portraiture. He was somewhat 
 hampered by arbitrary rules, but as far as the rules allowed 
 he drew his personages with perfect freedom and showed their 
 humours with truth and clearness. I have said that Shake- 
 speare possessed powers that were beyond Moliere's reach : but 
 for firm and distinct portraiture and dramatic formation of 
 character; for a knowledge of handling events and small 
 incidents and making them agree with his characters and be 
 suitable for representation on the stage ; for the expression of 
 human sympathies; for a great command of racy language 
 peculiar to the speaker and to the occasion giving through 
 it all a clear picture of comedy Moliere, I think, comes nearer 
 to Shakespeare than any other comic dramatist. While for 
 his vis comica, or power of making an audience merry with 
 dramatic effects ; for pleasant and laughable irony ; for healthy 
 and humorous enjoyment to be found in his satire; for the 
 wonderful way in which he blended together his ridicule and 
 his censure with comic effect and earnestness of purpose 
 I believe that among men who have written for the stage 
 Moliere stands unrivalled. 
 
CHAPTEE IX 
 
 STAGE CUSTOMS 
 
 IT may be well to give again at the outset of this chapter the 
 names of the three French acting companies in Paris while 
 Moliere was playing there from 16j>8 to 1673, and to say 
 shortly how the Come'die Franchise was formed from them 
 though we are not to be concerned with that institution. It 
 would be useless to mention the minor companies, for they i 
 were short-lived and but little recognised ; nor is it necessary 
 to speak of the Italian actors, for though while Moliere was 
 in Paris they shared the same theatre with him they had no 
 other connection with his troop. 
 
 After permission had been given to Moliere in October 1658 
 to play^at the Petit Bourbon, there were three troops of actors_ 
 .mJParis : 
 
 (1) L'Hotel de Bourgogne, or "la troupe royale"; 
 
 (2) LeJEhe'atre du Marais ; 
 
 (3) La_jtroupe de Moliere, or " la troupe de Monsieur " until 
 
 1665 when it became "la troupe du Koi." In October 
 1660 Moliere and his friends were made to leave the 
 Petit Bourbon, and in January 1661 they began to 
 play at the Palais Koyal. 
 
 After Moliere's death in 1673, four of the actors who had 
 belonged to his troop went to the Hotel de Bourgogne ; the 
 others allied themselves with the troop at the Marais; and 
 the company thus formed left the old Marais theatre and went 
 to play in a new theatre at the Hotel Gue'negaud, under the 
 title of "la troupe du Roi." The Palais Royal theatre was 
 given to Lulli for the Opera. 1 Then in 1680 the king thought 
 that one theatre was sufficient; the actorsat- the Hotel 
 Gue'negaud were united with those at the Hotel de Bourgogne, 
 
 1 Eegistre de la Grange, 145, 146 ; and La Grange's preface to the edition 
 of Moliere in 1682, given in the (Euvres de Moliere, vol. i. p. xviii. 
 
226 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI&KE 
 
 and the new company played at the Hotel Gudnegaud under 
 the title of "les Come'diens du Koi." 1 For very many 
 years afterwards there was only one French theatre regularly 
 established in Paris; but the number of actors was greater 
 than had ever been the case in one house before, and the 
 theatre was open every day, whereas the custom at each 
 theatre had been to play only three times a week. Because 
 of the king's edict in 1680 the Come'die Frangaise is now 
 officially dated from that year, though I have seen no con- 
 temporary authority showing that the name was then in use. 
 The following diagram will show the descent of the different 
 theatres : 
 
 Hotel de Bourgogne, 
 1588-1680. 
 
 Theatre du Marais, 
 1600(?)-1673. 
 
 Troupe de Moliere, 
 1658-1673. 
 
 Theatre Guenegaud, 
 1673-1680. 
 
 Comedie Frangaise, 
 
 Thus it will be seen that tfre Come'die Franchise was formed 
 
 injiart frmr| him n.p.t-,orfl WJ^^Jh^Aln 
 
 some hnfLcome rom4be Theatre du Marais, 
 the r "oEhers from.^the Palais-JLoyal and had been taught by 
 Moliere, La Grange's Eegister has been spoken of already; 
 but he wrote only of what took place in his troop. Less is 
 known of what went on at the other theatres, for no one 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, i. p. xix ; Despois, Le Theatre Francais sous 
 Louis XIV., 2. 
 
CHAPTER IX 227 
 
 there kept a record of events or of money matters. I think, 
 however, it may be assumed that the Marais was the least 
 prosperous of the three playhouses, and that the public took 
 less interest in that theatre than in either of its rivals. 
 
 The first writer who gave general information about the 
 customs of the French stage was Samuel Chappuzeau. His 
 book, Le Thtdtre Francois, was published at Lyons in 1674, 
 and speaks therefore of the time that concerns us here. A 
 reprint of it was published in Paris in 1875, with a preface 
 and notes by M. Georges Monval, and my quotations from it 
 refer to that edition. Chappuzeau divided his small volume 
 into three books : the interest lies in the second half of the 
 second book and in the third. His optimistic tone here and 
 there provokes a smile, and one becomes tempted to think 
 that the picture he painted was the bright side. Nevertheless, 
 in the main he may be trusted. He was an inveterate play- 
 goer ; he had visited the theatres of other countries besides 
 his own ; and he wrote comedies which were acted at the Hotel 
 cle Bourgogne, at the Marais, and at the Palais Eoyal theatres. 1 
 His book, Le Thedtre Frangois, was evidently written from 
 actual observation, and shows that he knew what he was 
 saying. The facts he has given concerning the usages of 
 the Paris stage in the 17th century have been accepted by 
 modern French writers who have studied the early dramatic 
 history of their country, and many of his statements have 
 been borne out by other pieces of evidence. 
 
 M. Victor Fournel says on page 101 of his little volume 
 CuriosiUs Thtfdtrales : 
 
 "In the 1,7th century the Hotel de Bourgogne, the Marais, and 
 the Palais Royal theatres, were ^al republics [each] with a president 
 chosen by themselves. They werenolr-prtvftte enterprises under the 
 responsibility of a manager ; they were associations in which every one 
 had equal rights, and each member shared the gains and losses as is 
 now the case among the societaires of the Theatre Frangais." 
 
 These words should be remembered, for they describe the 
 keynote to the administration of the Paris theatres in the 
 17th century. The same customs governed them all, and 
 were observed as nearly as possible by strolling companies 
 
 1 Two of his comedies, with a biographical preface and notes, are given 
 by M. Fournel in Les Contemporains de Moli&re, vols. i. and iii. 
 
228 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 in the provinces. The principle of partnership was a very 
 old one with French actors, and it formed the basis of their 
 theory of government. Probably enough it arose among the 
 ancient Confreres de la Passion, the first owners of the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne theatre, who were all artisans of Paris, and 
 from them descended to the company of actors to whom 
 they let the Hotel de Bourgogne in 1588, forty years after 
 they were forbidden to play the mysteries and when they 
 found that they could not amuse the public by other per- 
 formances. However that may be, we see in La Comtdie des 
 Comedies (Act I. sc. 1), a play by Gougenot acted in 1633, that 
 when two actors had just become members of the troop one 
 says to the other in a tone of raillery : " Tu ne sais pas que 
 la condition comique ne connait point de maitrise ni de 
 servitude!" That points to a well-established custom, and 
 forty years later Chappuzeau wrote : 
 
 " There are no people in the world who love a monarchy more than 
 actors, who find it more advantageous to them, and who show a 
 stronger interest in its welfare; but they cannot endure it among 
 themselves. They will call no man master, and the idea of subjection 
 would frighten them." l 
 
 " But if actors do not like living under a republic, they are very 
 fond of a republican government among themselves. They will 
 admit no superior, the name alone hurts them. They all wish to be 
 equal, and they call each other comrades." 2 
 
 The theatrical year always ended a week_or_tendays before 
 Easter Sunday,and began a week or ten days after that day. 
 During the intervaVnew actors were taken mtcrrr troop if they 
 were wanted, and old actors who wished to leave one troop 
 and enter another did so then. There were two exceptions to 
 this custom at the Palais Royal : La Thorilliere and Brecourt 
 joined Moliere's troop on the 9th of June 1662. They both 
 came from the Theatre du Marais. 3 As a rule the actors in 
 Paris did not care to change their theatre without good cause. 
 Each troop had its own esprit de corps and more or less its 
 own traditions, and these things created a bond of unity among 
 the members. At the Hotel de Bourgogne their position was 
 assured; many of those at the Marais would perhaps have 
 been glad to better their fortunes, and in fact four of Moliere's 
 
 1 Le Theatre Francois, 97. 2 Ibid. 102. 
 
 3 Registre de la Grange, 44. 
 
CHAPTER IX 229 
 
 actors came to him from that theatre ; and at the Palais Royal 
 the receipts were good and the actors did not want to change. 
 As will be seen later, it is not surprising that during Moliere's 
 lifetime no actor went to the Palais Royal from the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne. But at Easter 1664 Brecourt left the Palais Royal 
 and went to the Hotel de Bourgogne. He was replaced by 
 Hubert from the Marais. As each actor entered his troop at 
 Easter the payment of his " part " dated from that time and 
 was continued until the Easter following. Du Pare, one of the 
 actors at the Palais Royal, died on the 4th of November 1664, 
 and his " part " for the remainder of the theatrical year was 
 paid to his widow, Mile, du Pare, until Easter 1665. 
 
 The_socialism amon_the_actors_was not merely_theoretical, 
 for tha-neJLrpfits from the theatre were_diyided into_as_ many 
 shares as jtl^r:e^jwej^_jnem^er^_^n__the_ troop. Chappuzeau 
 describes the way this was done : 
 
 " WheiTtEe play is finished and the public has left the theatre, the 
 actors every evening settle the day's account. They may all be 
 present, but the treasurer, the secretary, and the controller ought to 
 be there, as the money is brought to them by the clerk in the box- 
 office. . . . When the money has been counted the day's expenses 
 are divided, and sometimes in certain cases, either to pay oif a debt 
 gradually or to make an advance, a sum decided upon is set aside. 
 Then whatever remains is divided at once, and everybody takes away 
 with him his share." l 
 
 There is nothing said here to lead one to suppose that only 
 those actors who played on any given day got their share of 
 the receipt in the evening. La Grange's pages, too, would 
 contradict such an idea, for he mentioned the sum due to each 
 actor as though the shares were equally divided among all the 
 members of the troop. But when a " gagiste," or hired person, 
 was employed he was paid so much for his day's work ; he 
 did not form part of the troop. There can be no doubt that 
 the best actors at the Palais Royal gave the most constant 
 service ; yet there is nothing to show that Moliere, La Grange, 
 Mile, de Brie, and Mile. Moliere, were better paid for their 
 work than de Brie, Genevieve Bejart, or Mile, du Croisy, all 
 of whom might have been replaced by gagistes. From what 
 
 1 Le Thddtre Francois, 113. It may be seen also in Act v. sc. 5 of 
 Corneille's Illusion Comique, acted in 1636, that the same custom was 
 observed then. 
 
230 
 
 LIFE OF MOLlilKE 
 
 La Graiige says about Mile, du Croisy it would appear that 
 her share was taken from her. 1 The number of shares in 
 Moliere's two theatres, from Easter 1659 to Easter 1673, 
 varied from eleven to fifteen ; the fewer actors there were 
 gave, of course, to each greater profits. 
 
 ' It was not until the troop had been nine years at the Palais 
 lloyal that the plan of dividing the shares was introduced 
 there. At Easter 1670, Beauval and his wife joined Moliere's 
 troop. Mile. Beauval was a clever woman, and a whole share 
 was given to her; but her husband, who was almost a fool, 
 had but half a share, and from that large deductions were 
 made. 2 The only other instance of a fraction of a share at the 
 Palais Koyal was that of Mile. La Grange, who entered the 
 troop in 1672. A few years later at the Theatre Guenegaud, 
 and later again at the Comedie FranQaise, fractions of shares 
 were common. 
 
 Louis xiv. gave to the Italian companies when they were in 
 Paris- a pension of 15,000 livres a year; to the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne 12,000 livres; to the Palais Koyal 6000, dating 
 from 1665, and in 1671 this was raised to 7000 livres. When 
 Moliere's troop arrived in Paris, Monsieur, the king's brother, 
 promised 300 livres a year to each actor, but La Grange says 
 that the payment was never made. 3 So far as is known the 
 Theatre du Marais got no royal pension, nor the troop at the 
 Hotel Guenegaud. It would seem that the pension to the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne was stopped temporarily in 1674 ; 4 but 
 La Grange shows that in 1681 the Comedie Fra^aise received 
 a pension, and that it was continued to them for some years. 6 
 An actor who had a share or fraction of a share in the receipts 
 of his theatre, got the same proportion in the pension given 
 by the king. There were also other sums of money, known 
 as " gratifications," which Louis xiv. gave to Moliere's troop ; 
 they will be spoken of later. What gratifications the king 
 may have given to the other troops are not known. 
 
 Besides the pension given by the king, the actors estab- 
 lished amongst themselves a system of retiring pensions. 
 Chappuzeau says : 
 
 1 Registre de la Grange, 64, 72. 2 Ibid. Ill, 131. 
 
 3 Registre, 3. 
 
 4 Despois, Le Thedtre Fran^ais sous Louis XIV., 101 note. 
 3 Registre, 286. 
 
CHAPTEE IX 231 
 
 " They will not suffer that there should be any poor among them, 
 and they take pains to prevent any of their body from falling into 
 want. When age or illness forces an actor to retire, his successor is 
 bound to pay him during his lifetime a comfortable pension ; so that 
 when a man of worth comes on to a theatre in Paris, he is assured of 
 a good income of three or four thousand livres a year while he can 
 work and of a sufficient sum" to live upon when he retires. And at 
 the Hotel de Bourgogne, when an actor or actress dies the troop makes 
 a present of a hundred pistoles [the pistole was worth eleven livres, 
 or francs] to his or her nearest relation, thereby giving that relation 
 in the loss sustained a more solid consolation than any compliments. 
 It is noble of the king's players to behave in this way, so that those 
 who have grown old in the service should have sufficient to maintain 
 themselves honourably to the end of their days." 1 
 
 This was the principle acted upon both for men and for 
 women, and it would seem that it arose first at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne. At Easter 1664, Brecourt, who had left the Palais 
 Royal after he had been there two years, was admitted into the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne with a nominal whole share, fitiennette 
 des Urlis, his wife, was also admitted at the same time, 
 provisionally, into the troop, partaking of the same share as 
 her husband : on the conditions that if she owed her admission 
 to the retirement of an actress, she should pay to that actress 
 a yearly pension of 1000 livres, or if her admission was gained 
 by the death of any actress, she should pay the same sum 
 every year to Mile, de Villiers, who had retired from the 
 company. Not long previously the actors at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne had agreed to give Mile, de Villiers a pension of 
 1000 livres, but in admitting Mile. Brecourt, who was an 
 indifferent actress, into their troop, they wished to relieve 
 themselves from paying this pension. The agreement as to 
 Brecourt and his wife was passed on the 17th of March 1664, 
 and four days later the same company passed a resolution 
 that when any actor or actress left the stage on account of old 
 age or of illness, all those remaining in the troop should 
 contribute towards a life pension for him or her of 1000 livres 
 annually, each one paying in proportion to his receipts. 2 The 
 only instance of an actor at the Palais Eoyal receiving a 
 pension was Louis Bejart, who left the stage at Easter 1670, 
 after eleven years' service in Paris. Taschereau quotes the 
 
 1 Le Theatre Francois, 95. 
 
 2 Soulie, Eecherches sur Moliere, 205-210 ; Bonnassies, La Comedie 
 Franqaise : Histoire Administrative, 13, 14. 
 
232 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 document conferring 1000 livres a year for life on Bejart, 1 and 
 says that he retired from the stage in consequence of a wound 
 he had received. Apparently the injury had been caused 
 eighteen months or more previously, and in connection with 
 the theatre. At the end of the year 1669-70 La Grange 
 wrote : " Cette pension a 6t& la premiere etablie a 1'exemple 
 de celles qu'on donne aux acteurs de la troupe de FHotel de 
 Bourgogne." 2 After the break-up of the troop at the Palais 
 Royal, consequent upon Moliere's death in 1673, Bejart's 
 pension was paid to him until he died in 1678 by the troop 
 at the Hotel Gu^negaud. 3 
 
 The following extract from page 143 of La Grange's 
 Register shows that for the fourteen years Moliere was acting 
 in Paris, a share in the Petit Bourbon and Palais Eoyal 
 theatres averaged, one year with another, 3690 livres : 
 
 " Total of what I have received since I became an actor in Paris, 
 from the 25th of April 1659 up to the death of M. de Moliere on the 
 17th of February 1673, and the remainder of the said year" [that is 
 up to the 21st of March following] : 
 
 Livres. Sous. 
 
 1. To 12th March 1660, . . 2,995 10 
 
 2. To 1st April 1661, . . . 2,477 6 
 
 3. To 26th March 1662, . . 4,310 9 
 
 4. To 12th March 1663, . . 3,117 18 
 
 5. To 28th March 1664, . . 4,534 4 
 
 6. To 20th March 1665, . . 3,011 11 
 
 7. To llth April 1666, . . 2,243 5 
 
 8. To 29th March 1667, . . 3,352 11 
 
 9. To 17th March 1668, . . 2,608 13 
 
 10. To 9th April 1669, ,. . 5,477 3 
 
 11. To 23rd March 1670, . . 4,034 11 
 
 12. To 17th March 1671, . . 4 689 
 
 13. To 5th April 1672, . 4,233 
 
 14. To 21st March 1673, . . 4,585 13 
 
 French writers have said that to estimate the spending 
 value of money in Moliere's time by money in our day we 
 ought to multiply by five. 4 And Macaulay, whose first 
 volume of his History of England was published in 1849, has 
 
 d - ed ' preface ' * "' 
 
CHAPTEE IX 233 
 
 shown in his famous third chapter that in the reign of Charles II. 
 agricultural labour in England was paid on the average four 
 times less in nominal value than it was when he wrote. The 
 question of ascertaining the comparative value of money now 
 and two hundred and fifty years ago is very intricate. I accept, 
 however, the French estimate ; it differs little from that given 
 by Macaulay. La Grange's income of 3690 livres, multiplied 
 by five, would give now 18,450 francs, or 738 sterling. 
 
 It has been explained how the actors, who were the masters 
 in their theatre, got their livelihood ; we must now see how 
 the writers of plays were paid for their work. Dramatic 
 copyright, in Moliere's day, was governed by unwritten laws, 
 and on the whole the established customs were well main- 
 tained. It was commonly held that a play belonged to the 
 troop of actors who first put it on the stage, and that when a 
 new play had been brought out at one theatre no other troop 
 should put it on their boards until it had been printed. If 
 after the novelty had worn off the author chose to print his 
 play, the acting copyright lapsed, and any other French troop 
 might perform it if they pleased. If the author did not print 
 his play, it was usually not worth printing. 
 
 In the early part of the 17th century a poet was sometimes 
 in the pay of the actors, and was dependent on them. They 
 ordered a play of him as they would have ordered a piece of 
 work from a carpenter, and they paid him low carpenter's 
 wages. But for them he would have had no existence ; they 
 made him feel his dependence and often treated him with 
 indignity. Eotrou was at one time the poet of the troop at 
 the Hotel de Bourgogne, and there is a passage about him 
 which may be noticed in a letter from Chapelain to Godeau, 
 dated 30th of October 1632 : 
 
 " Le Comte de Fiesque brought to me Rotrou and his Mecsenas. 
 I am sorry that a young man of such good parts should have 
 accepted such shameful servitude ; and it will not be my fault if we 
 do not deliver him from it. He tells me that he has used your 
 name besides that of his introducer in order to give himself some 
 consideration in my eyes. Let me know if you will lend a hand in 
 the assistance which he expects from me, for I am determined to do 
 something for him." l 
 
 1 Lettres de Jean Chapelain, edited by Tamizey de la Roque in the 
 Collection des documents in^dits sur 1'histoire de France, vol. i. 6. 
 
234 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 Chapelain's words may be taken without comment as ex- 
 plaining the situation in which Eotrou had placed himself. 
 Pierre *Corneille, Eotrou's senior by three years, was never 
 poet to a troop. He lived at Rouen, and his plays were acted 
 in Paris. There are two lines in his Illusion Comique (Act v. 
 sc. 5) showing that play-writing had been profitable to him : 
 
 " D'ailleurs, si par les biens on prise les personnes, 
 Le theatre est un fief dont les rentes sont bonnes." 
 
 And from indications in his "Examens" of his own early 
 comedies though these examens were not written until a good 
 many years after the comedies were printed it would seem 
 that Corneille was proud of the position he had won for him- 
 self. Until the middle of the century the actors used to give 
 an author so much every day his play was performed, or they 
 bought it from him outright for a stipulated sum, " prix fait." 
 There is an often-told story to the effect that Tristan 1'Hermite, 
 in negotiating the sale of Les Rivales (1653), a comedy by 
 Quinault, to the troop at the Hotel de Bourgogne, proposed 
 that the actors should give the author one-ninth of the receipts 
 so long as the play was new, and that it should afterwards 
 become their property. This suggestion was agreed to, and 
 by degrees was established the system known as " les droits 
 d'auteur," based on a ninth of the receipts of each performance 
 of new plays in five acts. 1 But the plan of author's profits 
 was not followed invariably, at least for some years. For his 
 Prtcieuses Ridicules and a few subsequent plays Moliere 
 received presents of money; and La Grange shows that, at 
 this period, the troop to which he belonged used to pay other 
 authors in the same way. In 1667 and in 1670 Pierre 
 Corneille was paid 2000 livres for each of his two tragedies, 
 Attila and Tite et Bgrtnice, acted at the Palais Royal. And 
 even later, on the 8th of March 1677, the troop at the 
 Hotel Gu^negaud completed the payment of 200 louis d'or 
 (2200 livres) for the Festin de Pierre. This was Moliere's 
 Don Juan put into verse by Thomas Corneille. As Moliere's 
 play had not been printed it belonged to his widow, and she 
 
 1 Parfaict, Histoire du Theatre Frangais, vii. 428-430. M. Bonnassies 
 thinks that the anecdote told about a ninth of the receipt given to the 
 author is " a pure invention, at least as regards the manner of determining 
 the right." Les Auteurs dramatiques et la Comedie Fran^aise an 17 e e au 18 e 
 siecks, end of note to p. 4. 
 
CHAPTEE IX 235 
 
 received one half of the money and Thomas Corneille, for his 
 version, got the other half. 1 It would seem, however, when 
 Chappuzeau wrote, that the plan of buying plays " prix fait " 
 was nearly abandoned, and that a new method was in vogue 
 for giving an author profits on his play dependent upon its 
 success. Chappuzeau says : 
 
 " The most usual and the fairest way on both sides is to give the 
 author two shares in every performance of his play up to a certain 
 time. For instance, ... if one performance makes 1660 livres profit, 
 and the troop is composed of fourteen shares, the author will get 
 200 livres that evening for his two shares ; the other 60 livres, more 
 or less, are put aside for daily expenses, such as lighting and paying 
 the servants of the theatre." ' 2 
 
 This statement may not be clear to us now. Chappuzeau 
 supposed that there were fourteen actors in a troop, each having 
 a whole share ; then while a play was considered new two 
 more shares, called author's shares, were added to the fourteen, 
 and their value was given to the author in the evening after 
 the performance. So that if a net profit of 1660 livres were 
 declared from any performance of a new play, the author's two 
 shares from that performance were worth 200 livres, or T 2 g- of 
 1600 livres the remaining 60 livres, more or less, were put 
 aside, for expenses of the theatre. A play was considered 
 new, and the author entitled to his two shares, only as long 
 as the receipts continued to be satisfactory. In recording 
 the first performance of the ficole, des Femmes, on the 26th of 
 December 1662, La Grange gave the total receipt as 1518 
 livres, and he added : " Partage" en 17 parts, deux pour 1'auteur." 
 There were then fifteen actors in the troop at the Palais Koyal. 
 That was the only time La Grange mentioned the author's 
 shares. It may be imagined, therefore, that for all of his 
 subsequent comedies Moliere got as author his two shares in 
 the receipt, but only so long as his plays were considered new 
 on the stage. 
 
 I do not like to anticipate on a matter which will be spoken 
 of later, but to prevent misconception it may be said shortly 
 that, according to La Grange's Kegister, very few new plays 
 made as much as 1600 livres, as an average, on the first few 
 days. The exceptions were Moliere's Don Juan, his Tartuffc, 
 
 1 Registre, de la Grange, 188 ; (Euvres de Moliere, v. 50. 
 
 2 Le Thddtre Francois, 67. 
 
236 LIFE OF 
 
 and a spectacular play Circt, by Thomas Corneille and de Visd, 
 acted at the Thdatre Gudnegaud in 1675, after Chappuzeau had 
 written his book. There is no means of knowing what were 
 the receipts at the Hotel de Bourgogne nor at the Thdatre du 
 Marais, but it is not likely that even at the Hotel they were 
 generally higher than at the Palais Koyal. 
 
 It was the custom for an author to read his play aloud 
 to the members of a troop, who were to judge if they would 
 put it upon their stage. Between each act there was a pause, 
 when the actors made their remarks upon what they had heard ; 
 and when the reading was finished they gave their decision : 
 
 " The women," says Chappuzeau, 1 " out of modesty, leave to the 
 men the judgment of plays and are rarely present at the reading, 
 though it is within their right to be there. . . . Some of the most 
 celebrated authors read admirably. . . . But there are others whose 
 reading is pitiful, and who do their own work injustice." 
 
 Chappuzeau was usually quite impersonal in his remarks ; 
 but it is hardly doubtful that among the authors who read well 
 he was thinking of Racine, and among the others of Corneille. 
 
 As regards the distribution of the parts in a new play, it 
 may be remembered that one of the clauses in the " Contrat 
 entre les Comddiens de 1'Illustre Thdatre," in 1643, was that 
 when a new play came before the troop, the author should 
 have the undisputed right to distribute the parts as he pleased. 
 These words seem to imply that such was the custom. It 
 may be gathered from Chappuzeau that the same practice 
 prevailed, at least in theory, thirty years later : 
 
 " When the author knows the abilities of each of the actors . . . 
 the troop are glad that he should have the trouble of distributing the 
 parts, in which duty he takes counsel from one of the troop. But 
 even then he is often worried, and it is difficult for him to please 
 everybody." 2 
 
 In a later chapter, Chappuzeau says that in this respect 
 men are less troublesome than women : 
 
 " There is not one woman among them who would not always like 
 to appear young. . . . The poet has to be artful not to represent 
 mothers at an age when they are no longer charming, and not 
 to give them sons who show that they have passed their fortieth 
 year.' ' 3 
 
 1 Le Thtdtre Francois, 66. Ibid. 71, 727" Ibid. 85. 
 
CHAPTER IX 237 
 
 The three days on which the theatres were open were 
 Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday. Chappuzeau J gives the reasons 
 why convenience had established this custom : 
 
 " Monday is the great post day to Germany and to Italy, and for 
 all parts of the kingdom which lie on the route; Wednesday and 
 Saturday are business and market days, when the tradesman is more 
 engaged than upon other days ; and Thursday is kept as a holiday in 
 many places, especially in academies 2 and colleges." 
 
 When Moli^re's troop began to play at the Petit Bourbon, 
 they had to take the "jours extraordinaires," or the off-days; 
 for the Italian company who were in possession of the theatre 
 used to play there on the "jours ordinaires." At first Moliere's 
 troop often acted four days a week, until July 1659, when the 
 Italians left Paris ; after that date Moliere opened his doors 
 on the Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday, as was customary at the 
 other two theatres. Chappuzeau adds : " The first performance 
 of a new play is always given on a Friday, so as to prepare 
 people to come in greater numbers on the Sunday following, 
 after the praises have been given by the ' an nonce ' and by the 
 'affiche.'" At the Palais Royal new plays were generally 
 brought out on a Friday, but not always. In a note to page 
 70 of Chappuzeau's volume, M. Monval has given a list, 
 compiled from La Grange's Register, of the names of the 
 plays first acted on Fridays and of those upon other days. 
 
 The "annonce," just mentioned by Chappuzeau, was a 
 friendly communication from the management of the theatre 
 to the audience, delivered from the stage. It is not easy to say 
 when this custom arose, but it died out in the 17th century. 
 A popular member of the troop was chosen as " orateur," and 
 when the day's performance was concluded, or at the end of 
 the principal piece, the orator came forward, thanked the 
 audience for their attention, told them what play would be 
 next acted; and when a new play was to be brought out 
 he announced its performance for a future day. The follow- 
 ing extract is taken from page 4 of a pamphlet by fidouard 
 Thierry, Quatre Mois au Thddtre de Molidre (Novembre 1664- 
 Mars 1665) 
 
 1 Le Thfdtre Francois, 70. 
 
 2 Despois says that this word meant schools for gymnastic exercises for 
 youths. (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 395, note b to note 1. 
 
238 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 "The annonce was one of the most delicate and important 
 functions connected with the stage. The actor who spoke it, as 
 he declared what would be the programme for the next day, learned 
 in point of fact what were the wishes of those in the theatre. He 
 was the interpreter between the actors and the public, and between 
 the public and the actors. He said a good word for the play that 
 had just been given, or for the play still in rehearsal. He said nice 
 things of the play that had been well received, or he cleverly excused 
 the deficiencies of the author who had been less fortunate. Every 
 spectator had an undeniable right to ask him questions, and this 
 privilege was sometimes pushed too far ; but the orator of the troop 
 was always bound to give an answer. He either evaded the question 
 or he answered it plainly ; but his word was taken to be that of his 
 comrades, and once given they were bound by it. An old stage 
 hand was therefore chosen for the post of orator, a man who knew 
 from experience what he was talking about." 
 
 On the 18th of October 1671 and three following days, 
 after PsycM had been played thirty-four times at the Palais 
 Koyal, the receipts rose suddenly to twice as much as they 
 had been before the 18th of October. It may be imagined 
 from this that the orator had announced that there would be 
 a change in the programme on a certain date, and that those 
 persons who had not seen the play wished to do so. It 
 had been customary to make these " annonces " at length, but 
 people got tired of flowery speeches ; then the orator spoke 
 in a more businesslike way. At the end of his volume 1 
 Chappuzeau says : 
 
 "The troop at the Palais Royal had for its first orator the 
 illustrious Moliere, who, six 2 years before his death, was very glad to 
 be relieved of the office, and begged La Grange to take his place. 
 La Grange always acquitted himself admirably in this respect until 
 the break-up of the Palais Royal troop ; and he continues to exercise 
 the same function to the great satisfaction of the audience in the 
 nouvelle troupe du roi." 
 
 Then follows a eulogy on La Grange's merits as actor, as 
 orator, and as a capable and trustworthy man of business. 
 
 Chappuzeau confounds the "annonce" with the "affiche" 
 and says that they were much alike.* The affiche, in the sense 
 of a playbill, was composed by the orator of the troop It 
 was posted up at street corners, and was sometimes written 
 
 Le Theatre Francois, 165, 166 
 
CHAPTEE IX 239 
 
 in verse. At first it stated that the poet of the troop had 
 composed a new play, the title of which was given ; about the 
 year 1625 authors allowed their names to be used. 1 The two 
 rhymed affiches by Scarron, 2 to which Despois alludes, were 
 imaginary; and so also was the affiche given in the first 
 scene of Dorimon's play La Comedie de la Comddie. 8 The date 
 of this play was 1661 or 1662. The affiches of the different 
 theatres were distinguished by their colours, either of the 
 paper or of the printing. Those of the Hotel de Bourgogne 
 were red, those of the Theatre Guenegaud were green, 4 of the 
 Opera yellow, of the Petit Bourbon and Palais Eoyal red and 
 black. 5 These 17th century playbills are extremely scarce. 
 In the Molitriste for July 1880 (vol. ii. 99) M. Nuitter 
 published facsimiles of four one belonging to the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne, two to the Marais, and one to the Petit Bourbon. 
 They are much alike, the chief difference being that both of 
 those of the Marais are printed in red letters, those of the 
 other two theatres in black. Unfortunately the affiche that 
 belonged to the Petit Bourbon was so mutilated that only half 
 of it is left. M. Knitter tried to reproduce it, guessing, in 
 some measure, what might have been the words in the missing 
 half. The heading seems to bear the title : " Les Come'diens 
 de Monsieur, Frere Unique du Eoy " ; and in the half of the 
 bill that remains there is the word " Gorgibus." One of the 
 farces attributed to Moliere was called Gorgibus dans le Sac ; 
 it was played once before the king at Vincennes, on 31st 
 January 1661, and five times at the Palais Eoyal, from 4th 
 February 1661 to 15th July 1664. 6 I will copy one of the 
 affiches that came from the Theatre du Marais. It begins by 
 announcing that the troop were "Les Comediens Dv Eoy 
 Entretenvs par sa Maieste," which seems not to have been 
 quite warrantable and then goes on : 
 
 " Comme les diuertissemens enjouez aont de saison nous croyons 
 vous bien regaller en vous promettant pour Mardy iij iour de Fevrier, 
 
 1 Despois, Le Theatre. Fran^ais sous Louis XIV., 141 note 2. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Scarron, ed. 17*37, viii. 432, 433. 
 
 3 Reprinted by M. Fournel in his Petites Comedies Rares ou Curieuses 
 du ll e siecle, vol. i. M. Fournel had previously given the affiche in question 
 in his Guriosites Thedtrales, p. 104. 
 
 4 Chappuzeau, Le Theatre Francois, 150. 
 
 5 fiegistre de la Grange, 18, 45. 6 (Euvres de Moliere, i. 8. 
 
240 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 la plaisante Comedie du lodelet Maistre de Monsieur Scaron Avec une 
 Dame de Scaramouche qui ne pent manquer de vous plaire beaucoup 
 
 "A Vendredi sans faute les Amours du Capitan Matamore ou 
 L 'Illusion Comiqve de Monsieur de Corneille 1'aisne" 
 
 " En attendant les superbes machines de la Conqveste de la Toison 
 D'Or 
 
 " C'est a 1'Hostel du Marais Vieille rue du Temple, a deux heures " 
 . 
 
 This affiche appeared probably some time in the third quarter 
 of the 17th century. 
 
 The music in the Paris theatres in the 17th century was of 
 a simple kind. 1 Chappuzeau wrote : 
 
 " There are generally six musicians, and the most capable men are 
 chosen. Formerly they were placed either behind the stage, or in 
 the wings, or in a recess between the stage and the parterre, as in a 
 parquet. Latterly they have been put into one of the boxes at the 
 back, where they make much more noise than they would anywhere 
 else. It is well that they should know by heart the two last verses 
 of the act, so that they may begin to play at once without waiting for 
 some one to cry out louez ! which often happens." 2 
 
 In those plays of Moliere's which were called " Comedies- 
 Ballets," such as Les Fdcheux, Le Mariage Forct, and others, a 
 ballet with music was given as an interlude between the acts, 
 and at the end ; and the Theatre du Marais seems to have had 
 a specialty for what were called " pieces a machines," which 
 were probably accompanied by music of some kind. But 
 usually there was little music in the theatres at this period. 
 When the Palais Royal theatre was given to Lulli after 
 Moliere's death for the Acade'mie Royale de Musique, or 
 the Opera, he obtained from the king an order limiting the 
 number of singers in the 'theatres, properly called, to two, and 
 of the musicians (" les violons ") to six. 3 This order, it seems, 
 had to be renewed. 
 
 As a rule, tragedies were played in the winter months and 
 comedy in summer. " The great authors," says Chappuzeau, 4 
 " do not wish to have their plays acted except between All 
 Saints Day and Easter, when the court is at the Louvre or at 
 
 1 See the pamphlet by M. Jules Bonnassies, La Musique a la Comedie 
 Franqaise. 
 
 2 Le Thedtre Francois, 146, 147. 
 
 3 Registrede la Orange, 142, 169, 295. Also M. Bonnassies' pamphlet just 
 quoted, 14, 17, 20. 
 
 4 Le Theatre Francois, 69. 
 
CHAPTER IX 241 
 
 Saint Germain." But this custom was perhaps observed more 
 strictly at the Hotel de Bourgogne and at the Marais than at 
 the Palais Royal, for Moliere could not always bind himself 
 to it absolutely. He conformed to the usage with all the 
 tragedies played at his theatre except Racine's La TJi^ba'ide 
 (his first play), first acted 20th June 1664 ; but with many of 
 his own comedies he was probably guided by circumstances. 
 It may be said, however, that most of his own five-act plays 
 were brought out in the winter months ; and it is possible 
 that if the Misanthrope had appeared in the winter instead of 
 in June, the audiences might have been a little larger. The 
 Avare, a play in prose, was first acted on a 9th of September, 
 but one can hardly suppose that if it had been first played on 
 a 9th of January its failure would have been virtually less. 
 
 The hour at which the theatres opened got later as the 
 century advanced. 1 Under Louis XIIL performances began 
 generally at three o'clock. Twelve was the customary hour 
 for dinner, but as some of the better classes began to dine a 
 little later they wished to go later to the theatre. In Moliere's 
 time performances were due to begin at four. But four o'clock 
 meant if everybody was ready at that time. Grimarest has 
 told how Moliere insisted that the performance of the Malade 
 Imaginaire on the 17th of February 1673 should begin at four 
 precisely. 2 Alas ! it was the last time that Moliere ever went 
 on the stage. In 1685 the actors made a law among them- 
 selves that those who were not ready to begin their parts at a 
 quarter past five should be fined thirty sous. 3 
 
 We hav^ft^njjmt in t.hp. 1 7th p.p.ntury in Fr^ncr t.ennis- 
 courts were often converted more or less temporarily into 
 theatres. Such was the case with Moliere's two first theatres 
 in Paris ; and the Theatre du Marais had been originally a 
 tennis-court. The Hotel de Bourgogne had been built as a 
 theatre in the middle of the 1 6th century, but nothing has 
 been said to show that its shape inside was not like that of a 
 tennis-court. The Palais Royal theatre, where Moliere played 
 for twelve years, was the theatre in the Palais Cardinal 
 
 1 Despois, Le The&tre Francis sous Louis XIV., 144-46: V. Fournel, 
 Guriosites Thedtrales, 109. 
 
 a Vie de Moliere, 155. 
 
 3 Bonnassies, Comedie Frangaise: Histoire Administrative, 129 note 3 to 
 preceding page. 
 
 Q 
 
242 LIFE OF 
 
 which Richelieu had built for himself. The theatre stood in 
 the right wing of the palace, close to the commencement of 
 the present Rue de Valois, which begins at the Rue Saint 
 Honord, at one side of the Place du Palais Royal. And on 
 the side of the building now known as the Conseil d'Etat, at 
 the corner of the Rue de Valois, there is a marble tablet bearing 
 the inscription : " Ici s'&evait la salle de spectacle du Palais 
 Cardinal, inaugur^e en 1641, occupe'e par la troupe de Moliere 
 de 1661 a 1673, et par I'Acad&nie Royale de Musique depuis 
 1673 jusqu'en 1763." Sauval, one of the chroniclers of the 
 history of Paris, a contemporary of Moliere though his book 
 was not published until 1724, describes the theatre rather 
 ambiguously, though he seems to say that it had undergone 
 alteration. Inside, it was an oblong room with four walls at 
 right angles. Sauval says that "it was not more than 9 
 fathoms (toises) wide, the space intended for the audience was 
 10 or 11 fathoms deep, and yet it contained as many as 4000 
 persons." l This is clearly impossible. There were two rows 
 of boxes, one above the other, until Easter 1671, when a third 
 or top row was added. 2 But the boxes on the side -walls 
 were not rounded in front, and the occupants had to turn to 
 the right or to the left to see the stage. Ladies who went to 
 the play were seated there, and they enjoyed the comedy, A 
 few seats for men, chiefly for the dandies, were placed on the 
 stage. There was, of course, the parterre or the pit, and there 
 was the amphitheatre. I think that the amphitheatre con- 
 sisted of rows of raised seats behind the parterre and facing 
 the stage. People there were far from the scene, but the places 
 must have been considered good, for the price charged for 
 them was relatively high. An extract from Hubert's Register 
 for the year 1672-73, giving the prices of places in the theatre, 
 which I quote in the next paragraph but one, shows that on 
 one occasion there were 394 tickets taken for the parterre and 
 only 60 for the amphitheatre ; on another day there were 
 514 persons in the parterre. Hubert had been a member of 
 the troop at the Palais Royal for some years, and must have 
 known how the audience was placed. But a German pro- 
 fessor, Herr Fritsche, who tried to throw light on Sauval's 
 
 1 Les Antiquites de Paris, ii. 161, 162; iii. 47 (first pagination). 
 * Reyistre de La Grange, 123. 
 
CHAPTEE IX 243 
 
 account of the interior of the Palais Eoyal theatre, estimated 
 that the parterre might hold 300 persons and the amphi- 
 theatre TOO. 1 I cannot but think that Herr Fritsche was 
 mistaken. It is not likely that the parterre, the popular 
 and the cheapest part of the house, should have been so 
 much smaller than the amphitheatre. Sauval says that 
 Eichelieu's theatre was better than the others, in that 
 the floor of the parterre sloped downwards towards the 
 stage. 
 
 The prices of the different places at the Palais Eoyal were : 
 the parterre or pit, where no one was seated, cost 15 sous 
 (there were 20 sous in the livre or franc, as it is now called); 
 the third row of boxes, 1 livre ; the second row of boxes, or 
 "loges hautes," 1 livre 10 sous; the amphitheatre, 3 livres; 
 the first row of boxes and the seats on the stage (called " le 
 theatre"), 5 livres 10 sous. 2 In the 17th century "le theatre" 
 was held to mean that portion of the house devoted to the 
 stage. The charges for all places in the theatre were high in 
 comparison with those of our time, and sometimes the prices 
 of most of the places were raised. This was called " jouer au 
 double," or " a 1'extraordinaire." The prices in the parterre, in 
 the third and second row of boxes, were in fact doubled ; they 
 rose to 30 sous, 2 livres, and 3 livres respectively. A seat in 
 the amphitheatre rose from 3 livres to 5 livres 10 sous. The 
 first row of boxes and the seats on the stage remained un- 
 changed at 5 livres 10 sous. Performances were given "au 
 double " on one or more days when a new play by a known 
 author was being acted and public curiosity was excited. But 
 even with La Grange's Eegister before one, and comparing the 
 receipts taken on the first five, ten, or twenty days on which 
 any of Moliere's comedies were performed, it would be very 
 hazardous to try to determine when or for how long a play 
 was acted "a, 1'extraordinaire " and the majority of the specta- 
 tors were forced to pay double prices ; and there must have 
 
 1 Le Molieriste for June 1887 (vol. ix. 74, 75). 
 
 2 Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 5th ed. preface, p. ix ; Bonnassies, Come'die 
 Fran^aise: Histoire Administrative, 237, 238 ; Despois, Le Theatre Fran^ais 
 sous Louis XIV., 105-7. In note to p. 106 of his book just quoted, Despois 
 says that even in Moliere's day the prices were charged in an arbitrary 
 manner; but that Hubert's Register for 1672-73 proves that the places on 
 the stage and in the best boxes were always 5 livres 10 sous. And see 
 Despois' note to (Euvres de Moliere, ii. 13, note 3. 
 
244 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 been many persons who put off going to the theatre until the 
 ordinary charges were made. The only time during Moliere's 
 lifetime that La Grange mentions this custom was on the 
 occasion of the second performance of the Prfoicuses Ridicules, 
 on the 2nd December 1659. Chappuzeau leads one to think 
 that it was quite possible that a play should be performed 
 twenty times " au double." He says, " If a play has a great 
 success, and is acted ' au double ' twenty times consecutively, 
 the author is made rich and the actors also." 1 I cannot 
 contradict Chappuzeau, but I fancy that the hypothetical 
 event he mentions did not happen very often. It might have 
 happened with the Tartuffe ; and La Grange shows that the 
 first seventeen performances, or thereabouts, of the iZcole des 
 Femmes, of the Critique de VEcole des Fcmmes, and of Psycht, 
 gave very high receipts. 
 
 When the Palais Eoyal theatre was quite full it might 
 perhaps have held 1000 persons. 2 At a performance of Psyche 
 "a 1'ordinaire," which gave a receipt of 1316 livres, there were 
 944 persons present; and of these 514 were in the parterre. 
 From this perhaps it may be presumed that at the first 
 performance of the Tartuffe "au double," which gave 2860 
 livres the highest receipt at the Palais Eoyal not many 
 more persons were present than at the performance of Psyche 
 just mentioned. In the last-mentioned footnote Despois made 
 an extract from Hubert's Eegister for 1672-3 which I will 
 copy, as it shows how many persons were present at the first 
 performance of the Malade Imaginaire, given "au double," 
 and how they were placed : 
 
 "Theatre, 25 billets, . . . ^3? i 
 
 Loges, Cinq (5 loges entieres) et 59 billets, 544 10 
 Amphitheatre, 60 billets, . . . .330 
 Loges hautes, 81 billets, . . . . 343 3 
 Loges de 3me rang, 23 billets, . 46 
 
 Parterre k 30 sous, 394 billets, . 591 
 
 1992" 
 
 1 Le Theatre Francois, 68. 
 
 ! Despois, LeTMAtre Francis sous Louis XIV., 363 note 
 
 ves the total receipt at 1992 livres. 
 
CHAPTEE IX 245 
 
 Despois reckoned that there were eight persons in each of the 
 five loges, besides the 59 billets de loge; so that at this 
 performance there were 682 persons present. The receipt was 
 very high, but the theatre was by no means full. It is at all 
 events clear that the parterre was the popular part of the 
 house, and that when the parterre was full no other part of 
 the house contained so much money. Moliere knew the 
 meaning of his words when he said that he trusted to the 
 judgment of the parterre. 
 
 The seats on the stage were chiefly frequented by the 
 exquisites who liked to show themselves. At a time when 
 rich men of fashion wore expensive Venice point-lace, they 
 naturally wished to display it. But they might have done so 
 without annoying both the actors and the audience by their 
 folly. Moliere gives two instances of this : in the first scene 
 of the Fdclieux (verse 1 3 et seq.), and in the fifth scene of the 
 Critique de I'lZcole des Femmes. As well as for men of fashion, 
 there was a bench on the stage for poor authors, who entered 
 gratuitously. Despois quotes a short passage l from Scarron's 
 dedicatory epistle to Dame Guillemette, written in 1648 : " The 
 Hotel de Bourgogne is filled with authors even on the stage, 
 because, like the page-boys, they pay nothing." And Bour- 
 sault, in giving an account of the first performance (at which 
 he was present) of Eacine's Britannicus in 1669, speaks dis- 
 tinctly of an authors' bench. 2 The seats upon the stage were 
 not abolished in the Paris theatres until 1759. 
 
 With a hedge of spectators on each side movable scenery 
 was impossible. 3 There was a sort of rough scene-painting, 
 and if any kind of transformation was intended, the audience 
 was willing to believe that it took place. In a tragedy repre- 
 sented in 1662 one of the personages exclaims, "A moi, 
 soldats ! " and instantly a sheet was let down on which was 
 painted an army in battle array crossing a bridge. 4 In every 
 country, stage scenery was then of the simplest kind; but 
 it may be said that as the early French drama had been in 
 a large measure borrowed indirectly from that of Greece and 
 
 1 Le Theatre Fran$ais sous Louis XIV., 117, 118. , 
 
 2 (Euvres de Racine, in the Collection des Grands Ecrivains de la France, 
 ii. 226. 
 
 3 On this matter a small book by M. Ludovic Celler may be consulted. 
 
 4 Despois, Le Theatre Franqais sous Louis XIV., 127 note. 
 
246 LIFE OF MOLI&RE 
 
 Rome, the laws of the unities which governed time and place 
 helped to dispense French playwrights from the necessity of 
 changing their scenes. The rude tableau once given sufficed 
 usually for the performance of the whole play. In most of 
 the comedies anterior to Moliere the scenes were laid in a 
 street or open place in some large town, generally near to 
 the house where one or more of the principal personages 
 lived ; sometimes it was laid in the country, near a wood or 
 forest. Had these stage arrangements been more complicated 
 probably more would have been written about them ; but it 
 may be gathered that until the middle of the 17th century 
 the actors were supposed generally to play their parts in the 
 open air. The first of Moliere's comedies in which the scene was 
 laid in a house was the Prfoieuses Ridicules, but in many others of 
 a later date it was laid in a " place publique," in Paris or some 
 other town. Idle objections were made at the time against the 
 ficole des Femmes, because the incidents described were narrated 
 in a place where a passer-by could have heard what was said ; 
 but in putting the scene of his comedy " dans une place de 
 ville" the dramatist was only following customary usage. 
 For external details Moliere cared very little. In those days 
 plays were mounted with a simplicity of taste that ought 
 to have charmed a Puritan. Despois has given 1 from a 
 manuscript in the Bibliotheque Rationale indications of the 
 mise en scene that was required for the tragedies of Corneille 
 and of Racine and for most of the comedies of Moliere, as 
 they were played after 1680. For three-fourths of the 
 tragedies we read: "le theatre est un palais," or "un palais 
 a volontd," with some few accessory details ; and for Moliere's 
 comedies the directions given are hardly more complicated. 
 In Don Juan, however, there was a change of scene between 
 each act; 2 but in 1680 Moliere's comedy in prose had been 
 prohibited, and instead was performed a versified and altered 
 edition of the play by Thomas Corneille. I will quote the 
 indications for the rnise en scene of Moliere's three chief 
 comedies in verse; the indications for his other plays are 
 not very different, except in the case of the Malade Imaginaire, 
 where instructions for the interludes are given : 
 
 1 Le Theatre Frangais soils Louis XIV. 410-15 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, v. 77 note 3. 
 
CHAPTEK IX 247 
 
 " Le Misanthrope. Le theatre est une chambre. II faut six 
 chaises, trois lettres, des bottes (?). 
 
 " Le Tartuffe. Le theatre est une chambre. II faut deux 
 fauteuils, une table, un tapis dessus, deux flambeaux, une batte. 
 
 " Les Femmes Savantes. Le theatre est une chambre ; il faut deux 
 livres (?) quatre chaises et du papier." 
 
 The actors at the Theatre du Marais seem to have had 
 a specialty for plays known as "pieces a machines" plays 
 with movable scenery. The contrivances, however, must have 
 been simple, and if the other two theatres did not adopt them 
 the reason was that they did not wish to do so. Curtains 
 were employed for stage decorations, and the actors had to 
 pass through them when they made their entrances and their 
 exits. The inside of the theatre was lighted by candles. Some 
 amelioration took place in this respect as time went on. In 
 the earlier pages of his Eegister La Grange speaks of some 
 "chandeliers de cristal" bought by the troop; they cost 138 
 livres and were paid for gradually. 
 
 It is curious to notice that some of the customs that were 
 followed in the Paris theatres in Moliere's day had been 
 common in the London theatres when Shakespeare's and 
 Jonson's comedies were first acted fifty or sixty years earlier. 
 The necessities in each case were much the same, and they 
 were met in the same way. 
 
 But if French actors in the 17th century did not spend 
 much money on scenery or stage decorations, they made what 
 amends they could to the public by dressing themselves 
 splendidly. It was not unusual in the first half of the century 
 for a nobleman to give an actor a richly embroidered coat or 
 other article of clothing. 1 The gift was accepted gratefully, 
 for each actor had to provide his own costumes. In a chapter 
 entitled " Grande depense en habits," Chappuzeau says : 
 
 " This article of expense to the actors is greater than one would 
 imagine. There are few new plays which do not cost them new 
 clothing, and as gold and silver tinsel which tarnish very soon are not 
 employed, a single ' habit a la romaine ' will often mount to five 
 hundred ecus. [The ecu was three livres.] They would sooner be 
 
 1 See Soulie, JRecherches sur Moliere, 34, 35 ; V. Fournel's edition of 
 Scarron's Roman Comique, ii. 162 note ; and his Contemporains de Moliere, 
 iii. 83 note. M. Marty Laveaux shows that the legend is at least doubtful 
 which says that Richelieu gave Bellerose "un habit magnifique" to play 
 Dorante in Corneille's Menteur. (Euvres de P. Corneille, iv. 126. 
 
248 LIFE OF MOLI^BE 
 
 sparing in anything else to give satisfaction to the public, and there 
 is more than one actor whose wardrobe is worth more than ten 
 thousand livres. It is true that when they play a piece solely for the 
 king's pleasure the Gentlemen of the Chamber are told to give to each 
 actor a sum of a hundred ecus, or of four hundred livres, for his 
 apparel; and if it happens that one actor has to represent two or 
 three personages he receives money due for two or three." l 
 
 La Grange, speaking only for himself, drew up a memo- 
 randum " of the moneys he had received for clothes worn in 
 the plays that were written for court amusements." He shows 
 that 2000 livres were given to him, but he added : " As what 
 the king gave was not sufficient to meet the necessary expenses, 
 the said clothes have cost me more than two other thousand 
 livres out of my shares in the profits of the theatre." 2 
 
 The " habit a la romaine " mentioned by Chappuzeau was 
 worn in all tragedies taken from ancient history ; it was the 
 conventional term employed in contradistinction to the " habit 
 a la franchise " worn in modern plays. Tragedies were also 
 often played in court dress ; this was handsome and therefore 
 costly. Contemporary comedies were played in the costume of 
 the period, and, as may be understood, the clothing of the 
 men was more elaborate than that of the women. In the 
 Mtdecin Malgrd Lui, every one except Le'andre, the lover, might 
 have been dressed simply enough ; but in the Misanthrope an 
 expensive costume was absolutely necessary for all the actors. 
 La Grange's wardrobe must have cost him a good deal, for all 
 of his parts required that he should be nicely dressed. 3 
 
 Disorders in the Paris theatres in the 17th and 18th 
 centuries seem to have been frequent. 4 In 1635 pages and 
 footmen were forbidden to go to the theatre wearing swords ; 
 and Scarron in his Roman Comique (1650) complains bitterly 
 of the disturbances in the parterre. In Moliere's time all the 
 men belonging to the king's household arrogated to themselves 
 the right of entering the theatre without payment. Moliere 
 
 i Le Theatre Francois, 111, 112. 2 Registre, 144. 
 
 3 There is not much satisfactory knowledge on this subject. M. Fournel 
 has a chapter on theatrical costumes in his Curiosites Thedtrales, so has 
 M. Bonnassies in his Histoire Administrative de la Gomedie Francaise. I 
 have seen an article by M. Emile Lam6 in a review called Le Present (No. 13) 
 from which M. Fournel made short extracts, but this article refers only to 
 tragedy. 
 
 4 Chappuzeau, Le Theatre Francois, 153-55 ; Grimarest, Vie de Moliere, 70- 
 75; Bonnassies, La Comedie Francaise: Histoire Administrative 328-35- 
 V. Fournel, Les Contemporains de Moliere, iii. 196 note 1. 
 
CHAPTEE IX 249 
 
 obtained from the king a suspension of these free entries. 
 Then there was an uproar, in which the porter of the theatre 
 was killed in defending himself against the king's musketeers. 
 Men belonging to the king's household were great offenders, 
 and pages and servants in livery were often the cause of 
 disturbance. 
 
 The tax known as " le droit des pauvres " may be mentioned, 
 though it was not formally established until a quarter of a 
 century after Moliere's death. We have seen that when 
 Moliere was strolling in the provinces his troop were taxed 
 on several occasions for the benefit of the poor in the town 
 where performances were given. In Paris the prices of all 
 the places in the theatre were increased by a sixth in the 
 year 1699. 1 This extra charge was supposed to go alto- 
 gether to the poor, but probably some of it was spent in 
 another way. There is no reason to distrust Chappuzeau 
 when he says that the actors as a body were good to the 
 poor ; 2 but from the little La Grange has said on the matter 
 it would seem that the charities were individual. The only 
 considerable sum he mentioned as given by the troop was 
 on the 26th of March 1662, when he wrote: "Donne' au cure 
 de la paroisse 100 liyres pour les pauvres." La Thorilliere, 
 one of the troop at the Palais Eoyal, kept a register for the 
 year 1663-64, and there, where the details of daily expenses 
 are given with greater minuteness than by La Grange, it may 
 be seen that various small sums of money were given away in 
 charity. For the year they amounted to 1 1 4 livres 9 sous. 
 
 It would be interesting to know what was the feeling among 
 ladies of good birth in Paris in the middle of the seventeenth 
 century as to going to the theatre. We can understand that 
 some thought it more or less derogatory to go there, and that 
 others were not so fastidious. It is certain, at all events, 
 that rich people used to bespeak the services of a troop of 
 actors to play at their houses on a certain day. This was an 
 aristocratic entertainment, and it was a pleasant way for those 
 who could afford it to give amusement to their friends. There 
 is little information as to visits made by the actors at the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne, or those at the Marais, but La Grange 
 
 1 Despois, Le Theatre Fran^ais sous Louis XIV., 107 and 240-45; V. 
 Fournel, Curiosites TMdtrales, 116. 
 
 2 Le Thtdtre Francois, 90. 
 
250 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 shows that Moliere's troop often went " en visite " to private 
 houses during the first five or six years they were in Paris. 
 After that time fewer visits are recorded, though five were 
 made in February and March 1669, within the first month 
 after the Tartuffe was allowed to appear. I have reckoned 
 that from October 1658 to February 1673 Moliere's troop were 
 asked to play at private houses about sixty-five times. Com- 
 mands sent by the king are not included in this number. The 
 visit usually took place on a day when there was no public 
 performance, and the actors always received a gratification. 
 For all visits made by Moliere and his comrades the gratifica- 
 tion averaged about 400 livres. Chappuzeau has only a few 
 lines about the visits made by the troops ; he does say, how- 
 ever, that when a person of quality engages the services of a 
 body of actors, carriages, etc., are put at their disposal. 
 
 " Orders are given that they shall be received very civilly. They 
 are treated with kindness, and they always return in a happy mood, 
 as everybody prides himself upon showing good feeling and liberality 
 to the actors, who, on their part, spare no pains to give pleasure. 
 They do not stop to inquire if they are put to much expense ; and if 
 they get presents from the court and from the town, if they receive 
 money from the king and from the public, they do not deceive them- 
 selves. They regard it as a mark of honour, and all the actors and 
 actresses vie with one another as to who shall have the most magni- 
 ficent clothes." ! 
 
 Chappuzeau also tells (pp. 106, 107) how the actors were 
 treated when the king commanded their presence. They were 
 furnished with carriages ; and when they went to Saint Germain 
 or to Chambord, or wherever the court was staying, lodgings 
 were found for them, and each one had two ecus a day, their 
 servants in proportion, and certain articles of consumption 
 were given. Then follow some effusive lines extolling the 
 consideration of great noblemen who pleased the king by 
 receiving the actors in a kindly manner. 
 
 While Moliere's troop belonged to Monsieur, Louis xiv. 
 gave them at different times presents of money, known as 
 gratifications. In August 1665 the king signified his wish 
 that the troop should belong to him, and he promised them 
 6000 livres a year pension. 2 Nothing was given then, and 
 perhaps by some oversight no pension was paid to them 
 1 Le TMdtre Francois, 110. 2 Registre de La Orange, 76. 
 
CHAPTEE IX 
 
 251 
 
 in the spring of 1666; but in February 1667 they received 
 12,000 livres the promised pension for the two years, 1665-66 
 and 1666-67. 1 The reader will remember that the theatrical 
 year began after the Easter holidays ; it is necessary, there- 
 fore, to couple two years together. At Easter Ij671 the royal 
 pension was increased to 7000 livres, and so it remained until 
 Moliere's death. I will now put in a tabular form the 
 gratifications and the pensions that Moliere's troop received 
 from the king. The figures in brackets refer to the pages in 
 La Grange's Kegister, the source of authority. 
 
 SUMS OF MONEY GIVEN BY LOUIS XIV. TO 
 MOLIERE'S TROOP. 
 
 Livres. 
 
 
 October 1660 (28), 3,000, 
 
 gratification. 
 
 May 1662 (43), 1,500, 
 
 )> 
 
 August 1662 (46), 14,000 (in three instalments), . 
 
 j) 
 
 October 1663 (59), 3,300, 
 
 
 
 May 1664 (65), 4,000, 
 
 
 
 August 1664 (66), 3,000, 
 
 )) 
 
 October 1664 (68), 3,000, 
 
 ^ )> 
 
 February 1667 (86), 12,000 (for '65-66 and '66-67), 
 
 pension. 
 
 November 1667 (91), 6,000 (for '67-68), . 
 
 2 
 J) 
 
 November 1668 (99), 3,000, 
 
 gratification. 
 
 April 1669 (103), 6,000 (for '68-69), . 
 
 pension. 
 
 February 1670 (109), 12,000, 
 
 gratification. 3 
 
 March 1670 (110), 6,000 (for '69-70), . 
 
 pension. 
 
 March 1671(119), 7,000 (for '70-71), . 
 
 )j 
 
 April 1672 (130), 7,000 (for '71-72), . 
 
 55 
 
 March 1673 (141), 7.000 (for '72-73), . 
 
 55 
 
 97,800 
 
 There were two other gratifications given not included in 
 the above list, because La Grange did not state the total 
 amount received. He spoke (Eegister, p. 116) of a visit to 
 Chambord in October 1670, and (p. 129) of a visit to Saint 
 Germain in February 1672. In both cases he said how much 
 each member of the troop received, but he lumped together 
 
 1 Rtgistre de La Grange, 86. 
 
 2 The pension was paid this year in November 1667, instead of at the end 
 of the theatrical year at Easter 1668. 
 
 3 M. Mesnard reckons this gratification of 12,000 livres as payment 
 of two years' pension (Notice biographique sur Moliere, 403 and note 2). 
 But La Grange (p. 109) states that the 12,000 livres were given for two 
 journeys, to Saint Germain and to Chambord. Also (p. 110) in March 1670 
 La Grange states that 6000 livres pension were paid for the past year ; and 
 (p. 119) in March 1671 that 7000 livres pension were paid for the past year. 
 Moreover, the pension for these two years came to 13,000 livres, not 12,000. 
 
252 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 the gratification and the money (two e*cus a day) given for 
 " nourriture." I imagine from his accounts, which in these cases 
 are not very clear, that for the first visit the troop received 
 about 6000 livres as gratification, and for the second visit 
 about 2400 livres making together 8400 livres. These, 
 added to the 97,800 livres, make a total of 106,200 livres 
 which Moliere's troop received in pensions and gratifications 
 from Louis xiv. 
 
 But this money was given for services rendered, and I 
 believe that the actors fairly earned it all. No doubt they 
 had a full sense of the honour of receiving so often the king's 
 command to play before them, and this honour certainly gave 
 them a material support against their rivals during the first 
 few years they were in Paris. Yet the annoyance of being 
 called away from their work, often suddenly or for long 
 periods, must have been considerable, and must also have 
 entailed upon the actors individually expenses for smarter 
 clothes. I reckon, on account of their journeys to court, that 
 they were prevented from playing in their own theatre 196 
 times. Now, 106,200 divided by 196 gives almost 542; and 
 it will be said presently that the average daily receipt at the 
 Palais Eoyal was 511 livres. If these figures are correct, they 
 show that the actors gave their sovereign a good return for 
 his liberality. 
 
 It is unwise, however, to wish to put everything into a 
 profit and loss account, and often it cannot be done. Moliere's 
 prefaces show that he worked very hard for the king's 
 pleasure ; but Louis xiv., in spite of his colossal egotism, knew 
 that he was well served, and he proved himself a good friend 
 to the poet at a time when other assistance would have been 
 of no avail. For court festivities of different kinds Moliere 
 wrote twelve plays. All, or nearly all, of these were known 
 as come'dies-ballets, the subject of the play admitting a ballet 
 to be introduced at the end of each act. Some of these 
 comedies are admirable examples of his lighter humour, and 
 there is no doubt that the king preferred the poet's amusing 
 comedies to his more serious work. During Moliere's life- 
 time Sganarelle ou le Cocu Imaginaire was played at court nine 
 times, the Misanthrope not once. 1 The fact that Louis xiv. 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, i. 557. 
 
CHAPTEK IX 253 
 
 wished the actors of the Palais Royal to play so often before 
 him gave them a moral protection which was undeniably 
 valuable to them. Ten more places might not have been 
 taken in the parterre if the king were known to have laughed 
 at Monsieur Jourdain being hoaxed by the Grand Turk ; but 
 it is likely enough that the king's laughter would have sent 
 fifty more persons into the best boxes, and would have made 
 half of the gallants in the town rush to secure a place on the 
 stage. In a note to his Register (pp. 45, 46), La Grange, after 
 recording that the troop had been at Saint Germain from the 
 24th of June to the llth of August 1662, says: "The Queen 
 Mother sent for Floridor and Montfleury, actors at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne, who solicited her to procure for them the advantage 
 to serve the king, Moliere's troop giving them great cause for 
 jealousy." This expression of feeling was quite unusual with 
 La Grange, for he very rarely alludes to prejudices or rivalries 
 between the different troops. 
 
CHAPTEK X 
 
 DIFFERENT 
 
 AND 
 
 HEAKES MOLIEKE AS AN ACTOR 
 
 THERE sl think, sufficient evidence to show that the play- 
 going public in Paris regarded Moliere's theatre and the 
 .1 Intel de liuiirgogne from different points of view. It would 
 be "too much To" say that each theatre had its own followers, 
 yet the best plays acted in each house gave entertainment 
 of a different kind. Moliere's troop_ejxcelled ._in comedy ; the 
 otheT Cfoop Mes grands comediens," as they were called 
 were thon^ht_tr>_^x;gfi1 in t-ragHy The Hotel dej Bourgogne 
 had loftg 4>een the privileged and official theatre, and in days 
 when privileges were understood such distinctions were valu- 
 able. The actors there since the early part of the reign of 
 
 Louis xin. bore the title of "la troupe royale 
 many years later, under Richelieu's government 
 
 ; and not 
 they were 
 
 allowed a yearly pension from the king. 
 oL honour on which the/^jriiipied-4hemselves, and of which 
 they thought they had reason to be proud. The actors at 
 the Marais had_nj)_^uj^diati notions; and, as has been said 
 nere already, were less fortunate than either of their rivals. 
 ^o^s^yjtivji_^LiriQlfid--peQple liked J&JkejsrjLjipL th^_traditions_^ 
 ^the Hotel, they gave their support t.o thp. t.hpat.rp whir> 
 
 ..privileged^playiliouse; and 
 
 when Moliere and his friends came to Paris and made a third 
 troop, the same feeling of conservatism operated against them, 
 but with stronger force. 
 
 Many of those who went oftenest to the theatre regarded 
 Moliere's two first one- act comedies, the Prtcieuses Ridicules 
 and Syanarelle on le Cocu Imaginaire, as trifles they called 
 them farces and they looked upon the new troop at the 
 Petit Bourbon as interlopers who filled their pit by acting 
 plays without serious intention or ennobling purpose. A 
 
 254 
 
CHAPTER X 255 
 
 little later, during the first few years that Moliere was at 
 the Palais Royal, this feeling became stronger. There were 
 manv^men^who were accustom p.d to t.hp. old, dull sty IP., of c 
 plays, and thought they like^Lthem best; others, who were 
 not fastidipuSj^elcpjiieii-Moliere, because Jhe_ strove to make.) 
 the t_heatre_a_place of amusement where comedy might show 
 her features. Those who prided themselves on their good 
 taste were disagreeably astonished, for they thought him an 
 ^intruder who_vvished to destroy their long-established ideas, 
 ^and whp^ was bent on leading the public in a wrong direction. 
 It is curious to realise this condition of mind ; it is difficult 
 for us now to imagine that a quick-witted people should not 
 enjoy a good and laughable comedy when they saw it well 
 acted. But from one cause or another there were a fair 
 number who did not do so. Jealousy was one rp.fl.finn, annt.hp.r 
 was that men clung to custom because they were used to 
 it; and so prejudice got the better of their understanding. 
 As a new author, new actor, and chief manager of a new troop 
 in Paris, Moliere had many^difficulties to overcome. During 
 the performances of the Fdcheux, the Ecole des Femmes, the 
 Critique de I'J&cole des Femmes, and the Impromptu de Versailles, 
 his theatre was the rendezvous of the wags and idle men of 
 fashion, who went to laugh at his pictures of their own conceits 
 because they thought it was the proper sort of thing to do 
 
 " And coxcombs, alike in their failings alone, 
 Adopting his portraits are pleased with their own." 
 
 They thought him a clever and impertinent fellow who had 
 learned the knack of his trade, and though they were amused 
 by his wit they considered his business a poor one, and they 
 jeered at him because he did it very well. 
 
 The great dandies could go where they liked and do what 
 they liked ; they belonged to their own set. But men of 
 acquired positionjwere_bound to be careful of their reputa- 
 tion. They thoughtthey would be lowered in their friends' 
 esteem if they were known to be admirers of Moliere, and if 
 they^saioLopenly that they preferred his theatre to the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne. They spoke condescendingly of the Prtcieuses ; 
 and though the Cocu Imaginaire was quite inoffensive, few 
 judges, public professors, or doctors in good practice, would 
 have declared that they admired the cleverness of the char- 
 
256 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 acterisation shown in the personage of Sganarelle. Serious 
 plays were allowed to be a pastime for a gentleman, but not 
 plays at which all the crowd was delighted to laugh. " Noblesse 
 oblige," and to join in such laughter would be derogatory. 
 
 This was, I believe, the feeling during the first five or six 
 years of Moliere's career in Paris. The thoughts of those who, 
 between 1658 and 1673, looked upon Moliere as a clever 
 buffoon were in a measure mitigated as they learned by degrees 
 that so many of his drollest comedies were played and laughed 
 at in the king's presence before they were put on the stage 
 at the Palais Eoyal. By opening men's minds a little Moliere 
 did something to lessen their hostility. But even to the last 
 his position as an actor who played the most ludicrous parts 
 in his own comedies the various Sganarelles, George Dandin, 
 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Scapin militated against his posi- 
 tion as author of what were known to be the best comedies 
 that had been written in France. The author of the ficole des 
 Femmes, the Misanthrope, the Tartuffe, the Femmes Savantes, 
 could not live down the obloquy that was heaped upon the 
 actor who, of his own accord, made himself appear ridiculous 
 for the amusement of the pit. La Gazette, the official journal 
 of the time, sometimes mentioned plays that were played at 
 court, and added the author's name if the actors engaged 
 belonged to the Hotel de Bourgogne, but it was apparently 
 always hostile to Moliere. Mention was made in its pages 
 of the deaths of all the well-known writers of the time, but of 
 Moliere's it said nothing. 1 When a comedy of his was played 
 before the court some sort of good word was thought necessary 
 in speaking of the performance, but more often than not the 
 title of the play was not given. Envy and ill-will were shown 
 by the conductors of the official journal, because Moliere's 
 comedies drew the public away from the old and well-estab- 
 lished theatre. The fact that the author was also funny on the 
 stage made certain people look down upon him quite as much 
 as his supposed attacks upon religion annoyed others. Moliere 
 knew all this, but he went on with his work to his life's end. 
 It is easy to condemn ignorant superciliousness when it hap- 
 pened so long ago ; but if a parallel case presented itself now 
 
 pp 275 SP 276 ^ Th * dtTe Fran S ais sous Louis XIV 3 7 note 1 ; see also 
 
CHAPTEK X 257 
 
 would our thoughts be more charitable, more evenly generous ? 
 They might be more intelligent, for the spread of education 
 has made men more appreciative of high merit. Audiences 
 have become larger, consequently there would be more 
 admirers. Yet many detractors would be found because the 
 actor or the dramatist did not act or write according to 
 their ideas of what was best in comedy. A few months 
 before Moliere's death, Boileau begged him to confine himself 
 to writing, and to give up acting. "You are destroying 
 your health," he said, "for the stage is wearing you out. 
 Why do you not give it up ? " " Ah ! " answered Moliere 
 with a sigh, " it is a point of honour that forbids me." 
 Boileau replied: "You smear a Sganarelle's moustache on 
 your face, and come on the stage to get a drubbing with a 
 stick; that is a nice point of honour for a philosopher like 
 you ! " l Yes, with Moliere it was a point of honour that kept 
 him to his work. In days gone by one of the reasons why he 
 did not want to become secretary to the Prince de Conti was 
 that he knew that his troop, who had long been with him, 
 were dependent upon him for their subsistence. And about 
 twelve hours before his death he made the same answer to his 
 friends, who tried to induce him not to go on the stage that 
 afternoon; but. to no purpose. Moliere had his ambition, and 
 to shine as an actor was part of it. He felt that he had to 
 play his Sganarelles as well as his Orgon, his Alceste and his 
 Harpagon, and he thought more of the needs of those engaged 
 in his theatre than of his own comfort. The outside world 
 did not know his troubles, and his enemies wished only that 
 their rival's power might be stopped. 
 
 Many more new plays were acted at the Hotel de Bourgogne 
 than at the Palais Royal. The comparatively long runs 
 enjoyed by most of Moliere's comedies dispensed him and 
 his comrades in a measure from changing their programme 
 so frequently as was the case at the rival theatre. Yet they 
 would gladly have changed it oftener had moderately good 
 plays with some show of life been offered to them. It will, 
 however, be seen presently that both Moliere and the other 
 
 1 For Montchesnay's version of this story given in the Bolceana, see (Euvres 
 de Moliere, x. 414, 415 ; for Louis Racine's, virtually the same but shorter 
 and better told, see (Euvres de J. Racine, 1st ed. i. 262, 263; 2nd ed. 
 i. 270, 271. 
 
 R 
 
258 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 members of his troop found out by experience that an old 
 play that he had written filled their theatre better than a 
 new play by another author. Possibly, too, Moliere and his 
 fellow-actors were difficult to please in judging of other men's 
 work. But they all had a vote in the choice or rejection 
 of a new play, they were all working together for their 
 common welfare, and their object was to draw the public 
 to their doors. From 1658 to 1673 Moliere, as head manager, 
 put on to his stage twenty-eight comedies of his own, and 
 twenty-three new plays by other authors; at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne during the same period, more than one hundred 
 new plays were acted. 1 The repertory at the Hotel was 
 therefore larger and more varied. Most or all of Corneille's 
 best tragedies after the Cid (1636) were first acted there, 
 though that was before the time that concerns us now ; and 
 all of Kacine's plays, dating from Andromaque (1667), the 
 first that made his name famous, were also brought out there. 
 It is impossible to suppose that Moliere would not have 
 welcomed plays by well-known writers had they been willing 
 to entrust him and his comrades with their work. The feel- 
 ing that his troop could not play tragedy will not altogether 
 account for the difference in the number of new plays brought 
 out at his theatre and at the Hotel de Bourgogne, for among 
 the twenty-three new plays, not written by Moliere, pro- 
 duced at the Petit Bourbon and at the Palais Eoyal, there 
 were eleven tragedies, eleven comedies, and one pastoral. 
 And in all of these ventures there was but one moderate 
 success at the Petit Bourbon Gilbert's comedy, La Vraie et 
 la Fausse Prdcieuse ; and one substantial success at the Palais 
 Eoyal Corneille's tragedy, Tite et BMnice. By a substantial 
 success I mean a large number of performances as a new play, 
 which, when taken together, would give an average money 
 receipt well above the average daily receipt at the theatre. 
 On a later page I shall show the correctness of this assertion. 
 Of the eleven comedies five were by de Vise" ; and his plays, 
 judging by the receipts taken, seem to have had no other merit 
 
 T APfT 18 ' ^ Tmt Fran ! ais sous Louis XW* 8. On one point here 
 .think Despois was mistaken. He says that from 1659 to 1673 at Moliere's 
 theatre hardly more than L fifteen new plays were acted, other than those 
 written by Moliere himself. I have gone through La Grange's Register and 
 have counted twenty-three. 
 
CHAPTEK X 259 
 
 than making a temporary change in the programme. With 
 one exception, therefore, all the real successes gained at 
 Moliere's two theatres were in plays that he himself had 
 written. At the Petit Bourbon old plays, not written by 
 Moliere, were acted very often ; at the Palais Koyal they 
 became by degrees less common, and in the last years were 
 rarely seen. During the twelve years that Moliere was 
 at the Palais Eoyal, there were four periods of more than 
 twelve months each in which no new play, not written by 
 him, was brought out at his theatre. 1 But though his 
 comedies appeared again and again, when they were no longer 
 new, La Grange has shown that during the fourteen years 
 he was with Moliere the income of each actor in the troop 
 averaged, one year with another, 3690 livres equal now to 
 738 sterling. La Grange's Eegister shows also that at least 
 four-fifths of this sum was made from the production of 
 Moliere's comedies. 
 
 It is not known what were the number of performances of 
 Corneille's and Eacine's tragedies, nor the receipts they made ; 
 but it may at least be presumed that Moliere's comedies pro- 
 duced on the whole larger sums than did the comedies 
 at the Hotel de Bourgogne, acted between 1659 and 1673. 
 The best of these, as we should judge of them now, probably 
 are Quinault's La Mkre Coquette, Eacine's Les Plaideurs his 
 only comedy and Montfleury's La Femme Juge et Partie. 
 These may still be read with pleasure ; and there are others 
 that may well have given amusement at the time, for they were 
 intended as actualities, having reference to passing events 
 and contemporary manners. 2 Eival jealousies had much to 
 do with preventing authors from offering their plays to Moliere. 
 Also, to put the matter plainly, in the warfare that followed 
 the Ecole des Femmes, Moliere set the men of fashion against 
 him by telling them that they did not know a good play when 
 they saw one, and he angered authors by telling them that 
 they chose the worst possible way to determine whether a play 
 
 1 From 21 May '61 to 3 Nov. '62 ; from 22 Dec. '62 to 18 Jan. '64 ; from 
 21 Feb. '66 to 4 March '67 ; from 15 Jan. '69 to 1 Aug. '70. 
 
 2 M. V. Fournel has done a good deal to explain some of the comedies of 
 this period in his three volumes, Les Contemporains de Molidre, though for 
 the most part the plays he included in his collection are not the best known. 
 He omitted purposely comedies that had been often reprinted. 
 
260 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 was good or bad. The pedants had been surprised at the 
 success gained by his open way of looking at the comedy of 
 life, which to them was a new thing ; and they did not like 
 being told that Aristotle and Horace had little to do with 
 the matter, and that they themselves were dunderheads 
 for thinking about them. Such was the gist of Moliere's 
 meaning, but he wrote with comic satire and expressed him- 
 self with becoming courtesy. 1 
 
 Moliere looked at society from a much larger and more 
 liberal point of view, and he had a much truer knowledge of 
 the world and its ways, than any other French dramatist in 
 the 17th century. He wrote his light plays what were then 
 considered farces because he knew that light plays when 
 they are good are always enjoyed. Had he disdained popular 
 comedy his name would be less loved in France than it is 
 now, and I think also that as a comic dramatist he would be 
 less highly esteemed. One of the good signs of his intellect 
 is that he knew when and how to hide it. His smaller plays 
 show that he possessed the uncommon but most necessary 
 qualification for a comic dramatist the power of making an 
 audience merry and joyous with manly vigour ; and this same 
 quality was, during his lifetime, better appreciated by the 
 homely understanding of those in the pit than by the patented 
 culture of the critics. Fastidiousness is apt to be a bane in 
 all kinds of criticism. It may not always be easy to know how 
 to avoid it, but it will prevent good judgment as surely as 
 dulness, or destroy it as surely as ill-nature. 
 
 Ever since the renaissance of the drama in the middle of 
 the 16th century, tragedy had always been more highly 
 esteemed in Paris than comedy, and when comedies became 
 more frequent dating from the early plays of Corneille, 
 about 1630 they were generally of an exalted kind and 
 showed little of the humours of men. Moliere was in truth 
 the father of comedy in France. He was the first French 
 dramatist who introduced true arid sprightly characterisation 
 into written comedy. This was then a new thing, a new 
 event ; it was a departure from the well beaten track. ( But 
 
 1 See the speech of Dorante in the Critique de Vficole des Femmes, sc. 6, 
 beginning: " Vous etes de plaisantes gens avec vos regies" (CEuvres de 
 Molibre, iii. 357). But the whole scene should be read. In some editions 
 this is given as scene 7. 
 
CHAPTEE X 261 
 
 many people still preferred the old, half-stately, inanimate 
 pictures which to them had become classical. Those who 
 liked to be considered good judges of a play thought much of 
 decorum in comedies. They had seen no examples of faithful 
 and comic portraiture, and did not know what it meant, but 
 they insisted upon a show of outward good breeding in the 
 personages before them. They liked the " genre noble " on 
 the stage much in the same way that in everyday life they 
 preferred good manners to rusticity. Their misfortune was 
 that they thought good manners and laughter were not com- 
 patible. And when they first saw short comedies in prose 
 that were really laughable without being vulgar, they could 
 not disconnect them in their own minds from the coarse 
 farces which had been so long in vogue, but which because 
 of their vulgarity had almost disappeared from the large 
 theatres. For some years past comedy and farce had been 
 considered as things distinct, and in the middle of the 17th 
 century farce was banished from the Hotel de Bourgogne as 
 being low. The " grands comediens " piqued themselves upon 
 maintaining the " genre noble " at their theatre. The troop 
 at the Marais were obliged to be less proud, and they continued 
 to play farce, probably of an improved kind. 1 But, in fact, 
 comedy in an animate sense hardly came to life before Moliere 
 showed what it was and what might be learned from it. The 
 critics who talked over a play they had just seen got their 
 ideas of comedy from Aristotle and from Horace, and were 
 exacting that what they thought were rules should be observed. 
 Affectation of culture with regard to plays was quite the 
 mode, but three-quarters of the public, who took the good 
 things provided for them as they were meant, knew more 
 about the matter than the most determined of the pedants. 
 
 Before Moliere had been two years in Paris the troop at the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne perceived that the actors at the Petit 
 Bourbon theatre were guided by fresh ideas, and that new 
 principles in the art of elocution had been taught them. In 
 his Pr&ieuses Ridicules (sc. 9) Moliere pretended to laugh at 
 his own troop for reciting just as one talks, instead of speaking 
 in a high-flown manner and claiming the plaudits of the 
 audience when the verses were considered fine ; and four years 
 
 1 V. Fournel, Les Contemporains de Moliere, iii. pp. xvii, xviii. 
 
262 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 later, in his Impromptu de Versailles (sc. 1), he expressed the 
 same ideas at greater length. Though some of his satire may 
 have told against himself because he spoke his words truly 
 and with plainness of speech, what he wrote serves to show the 
 difference of manner at the two theatres. This difference in 
 the style of acting at the two theatres is a point that should 
 be remembered. The frequent use of the word " declamation," 
 employed when speaking of the acting at the Hotel de Bour- 
 gogne, helps also to show that the players there tried to 
 adopt a grand manner becoming to the dignity of tragedy. 
 "Declamation" may have been a conventional term; still, 
 had a simpler manner of utterance been common perhaps a 
 simpler word would have been used. A grand manner is 
 exceedingly impressive when it is carried out perfectly ; 
 otherwise the fall may be woful. Moliere saw that his 
 rivals were absurd, and he laughed at them ; they were made 
 to feel his ridicule, and they smarted under it. I say nothing 
 about the players at the Theatre du Marais, for in the hot dis- 
 pute occasioned by the success of the Bcole des Femmes (first 
 performed 26th December 1662) the actors at the Marais, 
 so far as can be judged now, were silent. They were known 
 to be inferior to the two other troops, and it is not told how 
 far they sided with either party in the quarrel. 
 
 Grimarest in his biography of Moliere (1705) refers to the 
 poet's satire against the acting of the troop at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne : 
 
 " He [Moliere] had very good reason to attack them for their bad 
 taste. They did not know any principles of their art, nor even that 
 there were any. Their only idea of acting was in high-flown* and 
 turgid elocution; all their parts were performed in the same way. 
 They showed neither emotion nor passion, and yet Beauchateau and 
 Mondory were applauded because they ranted their lines in a pompous 
 manner. Moliere, who knew what acting should be, was annoyed to 
 ; so badly done and that an ignorant public should applaud it. 
 He endeavoured to teach his own troop to be natural ; and before his 
 time, in comedy, and before Baron, whom he trained in serious parts 
 as I shall say later, the play of the actors was distressing to persons 
 who had a sense of taste. Unfortunately we see now that the 
 majority of actors do not study the principles of their art, and that 
 they are already losing those that Moliere had inculcated into his 
 
 1 Vie de Moliere, 30, 31. 
 
CHAPTEE X 263 
 
 It is not unlikely that Grimarest got most of his ideas of 
 Moliere's acting from Baron, who had been Moliere's pupil, 
 and to whom when a boy the poet had shown marks of affec- 
 tion. Baron was a proud and vain man, he was the greatest 
 actor of tragedy in his time, and Grimarest's depreciatory 
 remarks on the actors may have been Baron's thoughts rather 
 than his. 
 
 At all events, it may be fairly gathered from Moliere's satire 
 against the actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne, that a pompous 
 and declamatory mode of recitation was in vogue at that 
 theatre, and that he disapproved of it because it was ridiculous 
 and false. If a vicious style of acting was common in tragedy, 
 one cannot suppose that the same faults, with certain differ- 
 ences, were not also seen in comedy. Long speeches were 
 frequent in all plays in verse, and there an actor, in his 
 endeavour to maintain "le grand art," could show good 
 elocution or mouth his lines abominably. Though Moliere's 
 performances in tragedy were generally thought to be poor, he 
 had very good eyes to see, and his sense of what was fitting 
 told him that his rivals, in their enthusiasm to show fine 
 acting, passed the bounds of rational conduct. Nearly all the 
 five-act plays at the Hotel de Bourgogne were in verse, and the 
 actors there tried to set off the force of the lines and to display 
 their powers of elocution by loud and bombastic utterance. 
 They had not learned to speak their speech trippingly on the 
 tongue. Their manner was often terribly vehement. Several 
 tragic accidents bursting of veins, apoplexy dying from 
 sword-cuts, and so forth are reported to have happened to 
 men who could not contain their ill-judged fury while they 
 were personating the parts they had to perform. 1 Perhaps, if 
 similar faults had not been common in England two genera- 
 tions earlier, Shakespeare would not have made Hamlet give 
 his advice to the players. 
 
 Before speaking of Moliere's acting it was necessary to say 
 something about that at the Hotel de Bourgogne, the oldest 
 and principal theatre in Paris, and also of the public taste in 
 acting when Moliere came to Paris and for some years later. 
 Thinking moderately, one may say that both Moliere's troop 
 and their rivals might have learned something one from the 
 
 1 V. Fournel, Curiosites Thedtrales, chap. xiv. 
 
264 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 other, had they been able to do so. It is certain that Moliere's 
 ideas of acting in tragedy were much opposed to those of his 
 contemporaries. They liked the conventional bombast which 
 the tragedies of the time demanded more or less ; he was in 
 favour of simple speech, and perhaps pressed his point too 
 strongly. In tragedy he was generally thought to be a very 
 indifferent actor, and judging by the few tragedies that were 
 played at his theatre with the much larger number performed 
 at the Hotel de Bourgogne, it would seem that the common 
 opinion was not altogether wrong. If Moliere had been a 
 good tragic actor some expression of opinion to that effect 
 would have come down to us. Because he could act comedy 
 well and bring the public to his theatre to see him personate 
 his own characters, his rivals were not slow in jeering at him 
 when he failed in another direction. If Moliere's ideas as to 
 acting in tragedy were sound, they did not find favour with his 
 contemporaries, or he did not give them proper effect. The 
 public, however, liked to see tragedy on the stage, and for 
 some years Moliere tried to satisfy the public taste. But the 
 bent of his mind was too realistic for tragedy ; his instincts 
 ran in another way. He had long been the head of his own 
 troop, many of his comrades were his old friends, they trusted 
 him, and they submitted to be guided by his teaching. In 
 comedy his lessons produced very good effect, but tragedy was 
 never welcomed at his theatre. 
 
 Moliere's performances in tragedy were condemned even 
 more strongly than those of his fellow-actors; consequently 
 the best known dramatists generally took their plays to the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne. Few of the comedies or of the tragedies 
 acted there were good, but the tragedies were preferred both 
 by the actors and the public because they gave more oppor- 
 tunity for inflated gesture, pompous declamation, and tearing 
 poor passion to tatters. The public liked ranting, Moliere did 
 not; and it would seem from what he said that he would have 
 very little of it at his theatre. If he tried to teach his comrades 
 how to act in tragedy he was far from successful. In comedy 
 he taught them excellently, though some years had to elapse 
 before he could put many of his own plays on the stage. 
 Like all other acting associations, Moliere's troop had their 
 weak points. They could not get good new plays from other 
 
CHAPTER X 265 
 
 authors, and when they put tragedy on to their stage the 
 public thought they did not know how to act it. The troop 
 at the Hotel de Bourgogne were more fortunate in that 
 their worst faults were glorified by those who saw them 
 oftenest. 
 
 Very little direct contemporary evidence of Moliere's acting 
 has been preserved, and of what there is one half is hostile 
 and the other laudatory. He was thought to be an admirable 
 exponent ofcgjnedy, but to play tragedy ahnmiiiiLhlyr-- Thpsp 
 opinions appear to be extreme, but much may be said in their 
 favour, and perhaps they are borne out by later judgments 
 and by evidence of other kinds. The warm feeling between 
 the actors in Moliere's troop and those at the Hotel de Bour- 
 gogne grew deeper in the year 1663 when all the playgoers in 
 Paris were talking ahmTtJJTg finale, d Fp.mmes and Mnli'p.rp's 
 two subsequent-plays. Besides the actors at the Hotel there 
 were among their partisans authors and others who had a poor 
 opinion of comedy and who looked upon tragedy as much the 
 higher art. What passed for tragedy had always been the 
 mainstay at the Hotel, and when those interested in that 
 theatre saw that Moliere conceived and wrote comedy in a new 
 and better style than they had known before, they tried to 
 belittle it ; and when they found that his acting in his own 
 comedies was popular, they said that he was an excellent 
 buffoon. 
 
 Most actors of_iefiu4e--at that time were called upon to play 
 both in tragedy and comedy, and we are told that Moliere 
 wished to shine as an axii^riii-tJie "genre noble." If this was 
 the case, he was cured of his ambition slowly and against his 
 will. During his stay at the Petit Bourbon his troop played 
 tragedies much oftener than they did afterwards at the Palais 
 Royal, and it is tolerably certain that when he put one of 
 Corneille's tragedies on to his stage at either theatre he acted 
 a principal part in the play. La Grange's Register shows that 
 the receipts taken at the performances of these plays were 
 low, and from this and other indications it may be gathered 
 that Moliere's acting in them was not considered good. In 
 his Notice to Don Garde . de Navarre, Despois said : " It is 
 not known if in tragic parts which he persisted in playing 
 Moliere was really worse than contemporary actors whom 
 
266 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 people were in the habit of applauding in the same parts, but 
 it seems to be certain that he differed from them and that he 
 wished to break away from routine." 1 But even if Moliere's 
 dislike to the accepted style of declamation were well founded, 
 there might still have been fair grounds for objection against 
 his acting in tragedy. /It is difficult to believe that he could 
 have been anything but a very indifferent tragic actor, for all 
 the bent of his mind and of his sympathies was opposed to 
 the somewhat exalted ideas and expressions that tragedy 
 demands. In nearly all of his own comedies he took a prin- 
 cipal part, and played it with success. It would seem, that 
 few have understood better the art of representing comedy on 
 the stage; but he did not act tragedy to the satisfaction of 
 men of his own age, and in all probability would not have 
 done so to that of men in any other. He had a wish to play 
 tragedy, and was deceived in his aspirations. Liston, we are 
 told, had the same ambition ; and he also made a mistake. . 
 
 Acting is seeming to be, but it wants large and often high 
 qualifications. It certainly wants creative force and versatility. 
 In comedy Moliere seemed to be the character he wished to 
 personate. He could personate the part he had to play in a 
 supposed comic action so as to make the action appear lifelike 
 and true to others. He simulated and created a pretended 
 character so well that he awakened the ideal sensibilities of his 
 audience, and made them see and feel the passions he strove 
 to represent. In comedy, from a combination of various 
 causes sympathy, truthful observation, clear imagination or 
 fancy, love of fun and keen sense of the ridiculous, love of 
 good satire and knowledge of what it meant, and strong 
 mimetic powers he put on the right air of seeming ; but in 
 tragedy his appearance was against him, and his utterance 
 made the matter worse. He could put on the mask of comedy 
 and wear it as naturally as though it were his own face, keep 
 his presence of mind remain himself under it though he 
 seemed to be another while he showed comic features truly 
 and gave true and clear expression to them in their many 
 and various forms. But with tragedy the case was wholly 
 different. As he had no sympathy with its counterfeits he 
 did not understand their effects, could not get its note, could 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moltere, ii. 225 and 226. 
 
CHAPTER X 267 
 
 not put on its mask and wear it naturally ; and he could not 
 have acted Eodrigue or Don Diegue in Corneille's Cid any 
 more than Charles Mathews could have acted Othello. 
 
 We are now concerned with comedy, and there is the 
 evidence of a frequently well-filled theatre to show that 
 Moliere's acting was highly thought of by those who saw it. 
 He played in Paris for more than fourteen years, and unless 
 he had been welcome to his audiences his comedies would not 
 have been acted so often nor have made such large receipts. 
 The characters he represented are varied and full of life, and 
 if he could play them well, he would have been able to act 
 well in other comedies if the parts gave possibilities of animate 
 personification. Very shortly after his death it was said of 
 him in the Mercure Galant} probably by de Vise : 
 
 "The ancients never had an actor equal to him whose loss we 
 now lament; and Roscius, the famous actor in classic days, would 
 have yielded to him the first place if he had lived in his time. And 
 he [Moliere] would have deserved it. He was an actor from head to 
 foot. It seemed that he had several voices : everything spoke in 
 him, for by a step, a smile, a wink of the eye, or by a nod of his 
 head, he gave you more ideas than the greatest talker would have 
 done in an hour." 
 
 A generation after the poet's death Grimarest wrote of his 
 acting : 
 
 " Though the composition of Moliere's comedies was excellent, they 
 were acted in such a delicate manner that even had they been in- 
 different they would have passed for being good. His troop was 
 well formed, and he did not confide his characters to actors who did 
 not know how to play them. He did not let them trust to chance, 
 as is done now. He always took the most difficult part himself. He 
 was not a born elocutionist like Baron. At first, even when he was 
 in the provinces, many persons thought that he was a poor actor, 
 perhaps because of a hiccough or convulsive movement in his throat 
 which made his acting very disagreeable to those who did not know 
 him. But if one observed the nicety with which he conceived a 
 character and expressed its sentiments, one saw that he thoroughly 
 understood the art of speaking. Habit had given him this hiccough. 
 When he first went on the stage he found that he had a great flow 
 of language which he could not control, and which made his acting 
 unpleasant ; then from the effort to speak his words clearly he con- 
 tracted a hiccough which he never lost. But he concealed this fault 
 
 1 Vol. iv., premiere annee, p. 302. Quoted by Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 
 5th ed. p. 88. 
 
268 LIFE OF MOLI&KE 
 
 by showing all the cleverness with which a part can be played. He 
 did not fail in any intonation of voice or any gesture which could 
 move a spectator. In his manner of speaking he left nothing to 
 chance, as do those who, ignorant of the principles of elocution, are 
 not certain of their play ; he showed every detail of action that the 
 meaning of the words conveyed. But if he came back to life now, 
 he would not know his own words in the mouths of those who speak 
 them." l 
 
 Grimarest was repeating here what he had heard, and in 
 speaking of contemporary actors he wrote with some feeling 
 against them. He was not born until 1659, and must have 
 been a small boy when he saw Moliere. And Baron, if he 
 was his chief prompter, was only six years older. But Baron's 
 father and mother were both actors, and he had been brought 
 up, as it were, on the stage ; he had performed certainly two 
 parts at the Palais Royal theatre; he must have heard the 
 members of the troop there talk of Moliere's acting, and have 
 remembered seeing him in many parts that he played. 
 
 Mile. Poisson has long been credited with having written 
 the account of Moliere's acting in the Mercure de France in 
 May 1740. 2 The authorship of that article has lately been 
 disputed, but it will be better to speak of that a few pages 
 later. This account of Moliere's acting confirms in a measure 
 what was said in the Mercure Galant and by Grimarest. It 
 runs : 
 
 "Nature had highly favoured his intelligence, but she did not 
 
 give him those outward arts that are so necessary on the stage, 
 
 especially in tragic parts. A hollow voice, hard intonations, a volu- 
 
 Dihty of speech which made him precipitate his words, showed him 
 
 in this respect to be much inferior to the actors at the Hotel de 
 
 Bourgogne. He knew all this, and confined himself to plays in 
 
 which his faults were more easily pardoned. Even then, he had 
 
 many difficulties to overcome, and his constant efforts to master the 
 
 quickness of his speech, so adverse to clear articulation, brought on 
 
 a hiccough which he kept until his death, and which he now and 
 
 then turned to good advantage. To vary the inflexions of his voice 
 
 3 was the first who spoke in certain unusual tones which made 
 
 people say he was a little affected, but they got accustomed to it. 
 
 e not only gave great delight in parts like Mascarille, Sganarelle, 
 
 aVjjtc., but he excelled in characters in high comedy such as 
 
 1 Vie de Moliere, 111-13. 
 
 ~ ^printed, (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 383, par. 2 
 
 Ihere seems to be a mistake here ((Euvres de Moliere, vi. 224-26 294) 
 Hah is a character m the Sicilien, and the part was played by La Thorilllj re! 
 
CHAPTEE X 269 
 
 Arnolphe, Orgon, Harpagon. Then by truthful sentiments, by making 
 his play clearly understood, and by all the cleverness of his art, he 
 so fascinated his audience that they could not distinguish the per- 
 sonage represented from the actor who performed it. He always 
 undertook the longest and most difficult parts, and he kept for himself 
 the position of orator of the troop. " l 
 
 There are few things that some people resent in one who 
 often comes before the public more than a mannerism. Yet 
 it is common in other arts besides acting, and not many 
 persons who have practised their calling for a long time can 
 divest themselves of it completely. That Moliere had some 
 mannerism is probable, but underneath it might be seen a 
 broad intelligence and strong mimetic powers, real versatility 
 and creative force. And it is better to notice and admire 
 large gifts than to think of smaller matters and condemn 
 faults which so few can avoid altogether. Outside effects 
 have naturally much to do with the success or failure of what 
 takes place on the stage, but the reason for and the meaning 
 of those effects should be considered. The article in the 
 Mercure de France says that Moliere had a " hollow voice and 
 hard intonations." These sounds, which cannot have been 
 pleasant, came from his weak chest and delicate health. His 
 hiccough, too, must have sounded disagreeably ; it existed, no 
 doubt, but how strongly one cannot say. And apparently 
 most persons were willing to forgive him this fault because he 
 could personate a supposed comic action so as to make it 
 appear real, either with seriousness or to stir up laughter. 
 
 From the short accounts just given of his acting in comedy, 
 an idea may perhaps be formed of what it was like by those 
 who know his plays. Various conceptions will be formed ; I 
 will say how I look at the matter. It would seem natural to 
 suppose that Moliere wished to act comedy in the same spirit 
 in which he wrote it, and that on the stage he gave full effect 
 with satire or irony to the serious or to the ludicrous side of 
 his personage, but without disfiguring the man's nature. His 
 first care was to represent his personage broadly and boldly ; 
 then to show, in their place, by delicate and pointed touches, 
 the minor traits in his character. One can imagine Moliere 
 acting Arnolphe, Orgon, Alceste, Harpagon, Chrysale, so as to 
 
 1 That is, until the 14th of November 1664. 
 
270 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 show what manner of men they were, and to paint also their 
 picture in comedy. They all have their laughable sides, and 
 there is in them all a purpose serious enough to satisfy the 
 strictest ideas of legitimate but amusing comedy. To say that 
 ridicule should be excluded from high-class comedy would be 
 manifestly absurd. And in his lighter plays, a Marquis de 
 Mascarille, a Sganarelle, a George Dandin, a Monsieur de 
 Pourceaugnac, a Monsieur Jourdain, may be shown to be very 
 ludicrous, very comical in the best sense of the word, without 
 being farcical, if the actor understands his part and can play 
 it properly. Doubtless farce may be seen in some of these 
 characters; yet they all have a meaning of their own, they 
 were conceived with serious intention, though more or less of 
 ridicule is thrown upon them. 
 
 Taking the sense of what PreVille an actor in the 18th 
 century, and one of whose best parts was Monsieur Jourdain 
 wrote in his Mtmoires, M. Louis Moland says : " Certain 
 parts, such as Harpagon in the Avare and Monsieur Jourdain 
 in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and others, allow the actor to 
 use a kind of exaggeration both in his manner of speaking 
 and in his gestures; but to give the highest pleasure to the 
 spectators he must be able to excite them so that they cannot 
 scrutinise his play so calmly as they would in cold blood. 
 They should, in fact, meet him half-way, so to say, in the 
 acting of a part ; and the greater r lesser degree of fun he 
 makes them feel should be his thermometer to guide him in 
 being reticent in his acting and in his manner of speaking." 1 
 Moliere's hostile critics said that he exaggerated his parts on 
 the stage ; but beside their natural envy, which may be dis- 
 counted and pardoned to some extent, they did not understand 
 his own characters as well as he did, for they had not his 
 close insight nor his fancy. And he knew better than they 
 did how self-glorious men may grow or how mean they may 
 become under certain conditions, and how ridiculous they will 
 appear when their foibles are shown truly on the stage and in 
 a laughable manner. As he was creating his personage on 
 paper Moliere knew in most cases that he would afterwards 
 act it ; he had in his mind a clear idea of the character to be 
 represented, and he had also a healthy love of ridicule from 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, 1st ed. vi. 252. 
 
CHAPTER X 271 
 
 the mere fun that it gave. All this belongs fairly to comedy, 
 and one can imagine that when Moliere was acting his parts 
 he tried to bring out their human weaknesses so as to provoke 
 laughter. Grimarest says (p. 11 3) "that Moliere was always 
 successful in comedy, but that persons of delicate taste re- 
 proached him with grimacing too much." It may well be 
 that their taste was more delicate than sound, and that they 
 did not know how far ludicrous characterisation in comedy 
 may extend without being farcical. Before Moliere's time 
 there were very few examples to teach them. 
 
 Tradition has said that the article quoted a page or two 
 back from the Mercure de France, giving an account of 
 Moliere's acting, was written by du Croisy's daughter 
 Angelique, who, after she married, was known as Mile. 
 Poisson. 1 She retired from the stage in 1694, and died in 
 1756 at the age of ninety-nine. Despois thought, too, that 
 Mile. Poisson was the author of this article when he printed it 
 among some " Extraits des Memoires publics dans le Mercure 
 de France par Madame Paul Poisson, ne'e du Croisy, sur les 
 principaux comediens frangais." 2 But in a table of "Addi- 
 tions et Corrections " to this same edition of Moliere (vol. xi. 
 290, 291), M. Arthur De.sfeuilles seems to agree with M. 
 Monval that the only part of these extracts from the Mercure 
 de France, written by Mile. Poisson, is the well-known por- 
 trait of Moliere. The other and longer part of the extracts 
 may have been written by one of her sons or by Boucher 
 d'Argis. Here is the portrait : 
 
 " Moliere was neither too fat nor too thin ; his stature was large 
 rather than small, his carriage was good, and he had a well-made leg. 
 He walked thoughtfully, he had a very serious air, a big nose, a 
 large mouth, thick lips, a brown complexion, and the different move- 
 ments that he gave to them made him look extremely comical. As 
 regards his character he was kind, desirous to please, and generous. 
 He was very fond of speaking in public, and when he read his plays 
 to the actors he liked them to bring their children, to draw his own 
 impressions from their natural emotions." 
 
 Moliere probably conformed to the general rule that an 
 
 1 In the 17th century actresses were never called Madame. In strictness 
 this title belonged only to women of noble birth, but it was commonly used 
 by ladies in society. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 378-83. 
 
272 LIFE OF 
 
 author should read his play to the actors at the theatre where 
 the play was to be given ; and one can well believe that when 
 Moliere read his light comedies he liked his fellow-actors to 
 bring their children so that he might draw his own impres- 
 sions from what they thought of his reading of a play in 
 which he was to take a principal part. We are told, too, that 
 he read his comedies to his maid-servant, La Foret, for the 
 same purpose ; and that once he tried to take her in by 
 reading a play which was not his, but that she was not 
 deceived. 1 Tales more or less similar are told of other men, 
 and the most has been made of them. As a rule, persons of 
 strong powers Jearn confidence in their own judgment, they 
 are often jealous of interference and often obstinate against 
 correction. In the case of a comedy to be acted, even of a 
 light play, so much depends upon stage-craft that it is very 
 doubtful if an experienced hand would have trusted to such 
 a looking-glass. I can believe that Moliere enjoyed seeing 
 the delight of children, perhaps that of his maid-servant, at 
 his drolleries, and that he learned something from their 
 laughter ; but hardly that he would have altered his comedy 
 if the laughter did not come when he expected it. 
 
 1 Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 97, 98. 
 
CHAPTEE XI 
 
 THE FORTUNES OF MOLIERE'S COMEDIES WHEN NEW 
 
 IT is difficult to say how far any play acted at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne or at the Theatre du Marais may have been suc- 
 cessful, for at neither of these two theatres was a record or 
 register kept showing what was the business done. When an 
 opinion about a new play was pronounced it was reported 
 at second-hand ; and unless the gossip of the world was more 
 accurately spoken two hundred and fifty years ago than now 
 there are many who would put no great reliance upon it. Yet 
 the gossip of the world is a great element in making or marring 
 the fortune of a new play. People like talking about a new 
 piece they have just seen, and others like listening to them. 
 In this way judgments are soon formed. It may not, however, 
 be too paradoxical to say that in theatrical matters a critical 
 opinion was of more consequence then than it would be now, 
 for those who were qualified to speak had a better chance of 
 being listened to than with us. More reverence was paid to 
 authority. Men said what they thought about a new play at 
 the afternoon meetings of friends when the wits were assembled, 
 and judgments were passed from mouth to mouth as having 
 been spoken by such a person. At a time when there was no 
 daily press, hearsay evidence was the foundation of the greater 
 part of the theatrical traditions that have come down to us ; 
 and though the tendency of this was generally optimistic, yet 
 when various plays by different authors were discussed, it is on 
 the whole not unlikely that a fair expression of contemporary 
 thought was given. We must therefore take what evidence 
 we have got about the fortune of a play acted at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne or at the Theatre du Marais, and esteem the author 
 lucky who, unless his play was damned, was spoken of at all. 
 
 But the surest way of testing the success of a play brought 
 out more than two hundred years ago is by the number of 
 
274 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 times it was acted and by its receipts. If a new play, in the 
 reign of Louis xiv., was performed twenty times, it was more 
 than ordinarily successful. 1 A play was considered new so 
 long as it was acted on consecutive days or nearly so, or taking 
 its turn with another piece. Most of Moliere's comedies were 
 acted more than twenty times while they were new, and there 
 were a few plays by other authors acted very much oftener. 
 Timocrate, a tragedy by Thomas Corneille, first acted at the 
 Marais in 1656, was played 80 times; Circ6, a spectacular 
 tragedy, also by Thomas Corneille, was acted 75 times at 
 the Thdatre Gudnegaud in 1675; La Devineresse, a comedy by 
 the same author and de Vise, was acted 47 times at the 
 Gue'negaud in 1679-80. Thus Timocrate "made the record " of 
 the century, but Circt " caine in a good second." At the Palais 
 Royal only two plays, not written by Moliere, were acted 
 twenty times Pierre Corneille's Attila and his Tite et B6r6mce. 
 In considering the receipts the matter becomes more compli- 
 cated. The knowledge how much money each play brought 
 to the actors is only of importance in helping to determine 
 what was its success ; in that way, comparing one play with 
 another, it will afford valuable assistance. But the reader will 
 remember that La Grange's Eegister is the only authority 
 telling what receipts a play made, or, with a few exceptions, 
 how often it was acted ; and he wrote only of what took place 
 at his theatre. It would be interesting if we could compare 
 the fortunes of plays at the Hotel de Bourgogne and at the 
 Theatre du Marais with those at the Palais Royal, but as this 
 is not possible let us be thankful to La Grange for what he 
 has done. His pages show that a new five-act play by Moliere 
 generally gave a receipt of 1000 livres more or less often, and 
 so did many of his smaller plays ; but, as we shall see directly 
 a day's receipt of 1000 livres was high. Perhaps I should not 
 be far from the mark in assuming that when a new five-act 
 play by Moliere made 1000 livres two or three times that 
 might be taken as a sign that the play had a moderate success 
 as was the case with the Misanthrope; when it made 1000 
 livres half a dozen times, the success was a good one as with 
 the Femmes Savantes; and when it made 1000 livres nine 
 times or more, the success was brilliant in this class may be 
 
 1 Despois, Le TMtltre Francis sous Louis XIV., 197 note 2. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 275 
 
 counted the Ecole des Femmes, Don Juan, the Tartuffe, the 
 Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and Psyclie. Of course there is nothing 
 absolute in these assumptions, for the difference between a 
 receipt of 900 and 1000 livres was not enormous, and the 
 number of representations should also be considered. Of 
 Moliere's three-act comedies, the Fdcheux made over 1000 
 livres on five days, and the Malade Imaginaire on eleven ; and 
 of his one-act plays, the Prtcieuses Ridicules five times, and 
 the Critique de I'JScole des Femmes eleven. 
 
 I make no apology for the figures given in the next few 
 pages. My chief object has been to ascertain the comparative 
 successes and failures of Moliere's comedies while they were 
 new ; then to show shortly how often each one was performed 
 from 1659 to 1870. By speaking of his comedies together, 
 putting one beside the other, the reader, if he cares about the 
 matter, will see more easily what were the fortunes of each 
 play than if the figures were given in different chapters. 
 
 ANALYSIS OF THE YEARLY RECEIPTS TAKEN BY MOLIERE'S TROOP 
 AT THE PETIT BOURBON AND PALAIS ROYAL THEATRES. 
 
 Theatrical Year. 
 
 No. of 
 perform- 
 ances each 
 year. 
 
 Receipts from 
 public perform- 
 ances. 
 
 Average receipt 
 each day. 
 
 Value of one 
 share as given by 
 La Grange. 1 
 
 g 
 
 
 Livres. Sous. 
 
 Livres. Sous. 
 
 Livres. Sous. 
 
 .-SJa/ 1659-60 
 
 145 
 
 41,825 
 
 288 12 
 
 2995 10 
 
 \1660-61 
 
 tt 
 
 118 
 
 41,397 
 
 350 12 
 
 2477 6 
 
 
 ^1661-62 
 
 125 
 
 69,082 
 
 552 15 
 
 4310 9 
 
 
 1662-63 
 
 103 
 
 47,243 
 
 458 12 
 
 3117 18 
 
 
 1663-64 
 
 128 
 
 72,946 
 
 569 18 
 
 4534 4 
 
 Ti 
 
 1664-65 
 
 95 
 
 48,763 
 
 513 6 
 
 3011 11 
 
 > 
 
 1665-66 
 
 112 
 
 38,891 
 
 347 5 
 
 2243 5 
 
 PH 
 
 1666-67 
 
 92 
 
 43,701 5 
 
 475 
 
 3352 11 
 
 oa" 
 
 1667-68 
 
 90 
 
 36,262 
 
 402 19 
 
 2608 13 
 
 3 
 
 1668-69 
 
 124 
 
 59,895 5 
 
 483 
 
 5477 3 
 
 PH 
 
 1669-70 
 
 89 
 
 36,869 5 
 
 414 5 
 
 4034 11 
 
 
 1670-71 
 
 115 
 
 61,932 
 
 529 11 
 
 4689 
 
 
 1671-72 
 
 127 
 
 86,507 
 
 681 3 
 
 4233 
 
 
 1672-73 
 
 131 
 
 84,856 15 
 
 647 15 
 
 4585 13 
 
 
 1594 
 
 770,170 10 
 
 
 51,670 14 
 
 I worked out the above table from La Grange's Register. 
 It shows that the average daily receipt taken ly Moliere's troop 
 
 1 Registre de La Grange, 143. 
 
276 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 from, Easter 1659 to Easter 1673 was 483 livres. The first 
 two years, or nearly so, at the Petit Bourbon were not so 
 successful as the remaining twelve at the Palais Eoyal; for at 
 the Petit Bourbon the, average daily receipt was 311 livres, and 
 at the Palais Royal it was 511 livres. 
 
 Public performances only are counted in , this analysis. 
 Twelve are omitted : there were nine days at the Palais Koyal 
 for which La Grange gave no receipt ; and one day at the Petit 
 Bourbon and two at the Palais Koyal on which there was a 
 four " i.e. there were so few people in the theatre that the 
 orator of the troop came forward, and politely told those 
 present there would be no performance that day and that 
 their money would be returned to them at the box-office. 
 The average yearly number of performances was about 114. 
 The inequalities in this respect may be accounted for by the 
 absence of the troop at Versailles or other royal residences, 
 where they went at various times to play before the king, and 
 where they remained for a week, a fortnight, even a month or 
 longer ; and also by the frequent " interruptions " mentioned 
 by La Grange, which lasted generally for a week or ten days 
 at a time. The causes of these interruptions cannot be now 
 determined. But in 1667-68, owing to the sudden prohibition 
 of the Tartuffe, the troop was prevented from playing from the 
 7th of August to the 25th of September. 
 
 The receipts varied considerably. On twenty days less than 
 100 livres were taken, and on ten days more than 2000. On 
 four of these happy days Don Juan was the play performed, 
 on the six others the Tartujfe. The first performance of the 
 Tartu/e, after the comedy was definitely allowed to appear, 
 on the 5th of February 1669, gave 2860 livres to the actors. 
 That is the highest receipt mentioned by La Grange in his 
 Register. Soon after Moliere's death, the first nine perform- 
 ances of Circe at the Theatre Gue'negaud gave each day more 
 than 2000 livres ; and there were two performances of Andro- 
 mede, an old play by Pierre Corneille, at the Comedie Frangaise 
 in July 1682, both of which gave over 2000 livres. These are 
 the only instances of the receipt mounting to 2000 livres 
 recorded by La Grange, and he kept his register for six-and- 
 twenty years. New plays naturally attracted the largest 
 audiences, but some of Moliere's comedies showed strong 
 
CHAPTEE XI 277 
 
 exceptions. With Sganarelle, the Medecin Malgre Lui, and the 
 Bourgeois Grentilhomme, the receipts from the first ten perform- 
 ances were not so high as those from the second ten ; and with 
 the Fdcheux the second ten performances made less money than 
 the third ten. With an old play, especially if not written by 
 Moliere, the receipts might fall very low indeed. It is certain 
 that Moliere's comedies made much more money than the 
 plays of any other author acted at the Palais Koyal. Moliere 
 put on to his theatre Kacine's two first tragedies, but these 
 plays were by a young hand and were much inferior to Kacine's 
 later work. The second one, Alexandre le Grand, began very 
 well. On three of the first four days the receipts exceeded 
 1000 livres. On the fifth and sixth days they fell below 500 
 livres. Then Kacine withdrew his tragedy, thinking that it 
 was badly acted. When Corneille's Attila was brought out at 
 the Palais Eoyal in 1667 it fared indifferently; the first per- 
 formance only made 1000 livres. Three years and a half later 
 Moliere bought from him another tragedy, Tite et Btrfaice, 
 and ran it alternately with his own Bourgeois Grentilhomme, 
 which was then quite new. The two first performances of 
 Corneille's tragedy gave higher receipts than did any of those 
 of Moliere's comedy; but at the end of three months the 
 Bourgeois Grentilhomme had made over 1000 livres twelve 
 times, and TiU et B6r6nice only four times. The only other 
 instance of a play, not written by Moliere, acted at the Palais 
 Eoyal, making 1000 livres at one performance which indeed 
 it did twice is La Bradamante Ridicule, a comedy by an 
 unknown author and not printed. It was acted eight times 
 in January 1664. The Due de Saint Aignan, first gentleman 
 of the king's chamber, gave the play to the troop and told 
 them to act it; he also gave the troop 1100 livres "pour la 
 de'pense des habits qui etaient extraordinaires." 
 
 In order to test the comparative successes and failures of 
 Moliere's comedies while they were new, I have compiled 
 from La Grange's Eegister a table showing the number of 
 performances of each play when new, the total receipts of 
 each play, and the average daily receipt made by each play. 
 The comedies are mentioned here in the order they were 
 acted at the public theatre. But in some cases, dating from 
 the year 1668, transpositions would have to be made -if the 
 
278 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 performances of the plays at court were considered as the 
 first performances of those plays. Thus, in 1668, the Avare 
 was acted in public before George Dandin; but George 
 Dandin had been performed at court before the Avare was 
 seen in public. So also with the Fourberies de Scapin and 
 Psyche", with the Fern/rues Savantes and the Comtesse d'Escar- 
 bagnas. The Tartujfe, too, is given here as belonging only to 
 the year 1669 ; its single performance in August 1667 is not 
 counted. 
 
 AVERAGE DAILY EECEIPTS OF MOLIKRE'S COMEDIES WHEN NEW. 
 
 
 No. of 
 performances 
 of each play 
 when new. 
 
 Total receipts 
 of each new 
 play in livres. 
 
 Average daily 
 receipt of each 
 new play in 
 
 livres. 
 
 Les Precieuses Ridicules (1659) . 
 
 33 
 
 21,363 
 
 647 
 
 Sganardle (1660) 
 
 34 
 
 15,699 
 
 461 
 
 Don Garde de Navarre (1661) . 
 
 7 
 
 2,884 
 
 412 
 
 L'ticoledes J/am (1661) . 
 
 32 1 
 
 17,991 
 
 562 
 
 Les Fdcheux (1661) . 
 
 38 
 
 29,247 
 
 769 
 
 L'Ecole des Femmes (1662) 
 La Critique de Vficole des Femmes (1663) 
 
 31 
 32 
 
 29,141 
 28,639 
 
 940 
 894 
 
 L' Impromptu de Versailles (1663) 
 Le Mariage Force (1664) . 
 La Princesse d'filide (1664) 
 
 19 
 12 
 25 
 
 11,671 
 
 8,727 
 15,281 
 
 613 
 
 727 
 611 
 
 Don Juan (1665) 
 
 15 
 
 20,034 
 
 1335 
 
 L 1 Amour Medecin (1665) 
 
 27 
 
 14,646 
 
 542 
 
 Le Misanthrope (1666) 
 Le Medecin Malgrt Lui (1666) . 
 
 21 
 26 
 
 12,543 
 13,315 
 
 597 
 512 
 
 Le Sicilien (1667) 
 
 17 
 
 3,041 
 
 178 
 
 Amphitryon (1668) . 
 
 29 
 
 19,731 
 
 680 
 
 U Avare (1668) . 
 
 9 
 
 4,326 
 
 AQft 
 
 George Dandin (1668) 
 
 13 
 
 6J26 
 
 ^rOU 
 
 471 
 
 Le Tartuffe (1669) . 
 M. de. Pourceaugnac (1669) 
 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670) 
 Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671) 
 Psyche (l&]\) .... 
 Les Femmes Savantes (1672) 
 La Comtesse d'Escarbagnas (1672) 
 Le Malade Imaginaire (1673) . 
 
 43 
 
 20 
 24 
 18 
 38 
 19 
 14 
 13 
 
 43,554 
 13,464 
 24,102 
 7,519 
 32,962 
 16,537 
 6,967 
 17,214 
 
 1012 
 673 
 1004 
 417 
 867 
 870 
 497 
 1324 
 
 Moliere wrote also two other comedies, Mdicerte and the 
 Amants Magnifiques, which were acted before the court, but 
 which he did not put on to his stage at the Palais Eoyal. ' 
 
 The above table will show that Moli&re's comedies, when new, 
 
 ^..Performances to the ficole des Maris as a new play 
 
 reckon that its iast perf 
 
CHAPTER XI 279 
 
 taken one with another, gave a mean daily receipt 0/693 livres. 
 But in comparing the fortunes of the plays, besides looking at 
 the receipts, the number of performances should also be con- 
 sidered. Taking these two tests together, they give on the 
 whole a fair idea of the success of the comedies at the time. 
 More than that should not be expected from them. Counting 
 the number of times each play was acted, Don Juan gave the 
 highest daily receipt. But the comedy was played only fifteen 
 times. M. Mesnard thinks that Moliere was asked to with- 
 draw his play on the grounds of religious scruples. 1 Second 
 highest among the daily average receipts was Le Malade 
 Imaginaire. It had only thirteen performances as a new 
 play. The success was cut short by its author's death a few 
 hours after the fourth representation, and by the fact that six 
 weeks later the troop at the Palais Royal theatre was broken 
 up, and most of its members united themselves with their 
 former rivals at the Thdatre du Marais. Of the other 
 comedies which ran their natural course on the stage, the 
 most successful were : the Tartuffe, the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 
 the ficole des Femmes, the Critique de I'ficole des Femmes, the 
 Femmes Savantes, Psyche, the Fdcheux, the Mariage Force". 
 Each one of these plays while new gave a daily average 
 receipt of over 693 livres; the average daily receipt of all the 
 others was below that sum. 
 
 As to the short plays, it does not seem fair on first thoughts 
 to make the day's receipt dependent on a three, and more 
 especially on a one-act comedy performed as an after-piece. 
 But knowing that plays attracted the public most while they 
 were new, also looking at the circumstances under which 
 some of these short plays appeared, and comparing the 
 average daily receipts taken during the fortnight or month 
 before and after the short plays were first acted with the receipts 
 produced during their representation, I am disposed on the 
 whole to think that when a new three or even a one-act 
 comedy was given, the day's receipt depended much more on 
 the new short play than on almost any longer old play acted 
 with it on the same day. This was strongly the case with the 
 Prtcieuses Ridicules, and nearly as much so with the Critique 
 de VEcole des Femmes both of them comedies in one act. 
 
 1 Notice biographique sur Moliere, 325. 
 
280 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 Though the mean daily average of the Prtcieuses was below 693 
 livres and that of the Critique very much above it, I believe 
 that the above table will give a fair idea of the comparative 
 fortunes of Moliere's different comedies while they were new. 
 
 More often than not Moliere's five-act comedies gave the 
 best pecuniary results, though Don Garde de Navarre, the 
 Misanthrope, and the Avare were exceptions. Don Garde was 
 condemned the first day it appeared ; since Moliere's death it 
 has only once appeared on the stage, and then in an abbreviated 
 form. La Grange's Eegister seems to prove that the welcome 
 given to the Misanthrope was comparatively small ; also that 
 Grimarest was in error when he said that Moliere wrote his 
 Mededn Malgre Lui to assist the former play on the stage. 
 The Eegister shows that the Misanthrope was played 21 
 times before the Mtdecin Malgre Lui appeared; then that 
 comedy was acted 11 times before it was played on the 
 same day with the Misanthrope ; and the two comedies were 
 acted together only 5 times. 1 The Avare was certainly a 
 failure as regards popularity at the time. On the first day 
 only the receipt was over 1000 livres. This is on the whole 
 Moliere's best comedy in prose, and its want of success as a 
 new play is curious. And perhaps there may be some who 
 know Moliere's humour who will be surprised to hear that 
 George Dandin, a three-act play in prose, met with a poor 
 welcome. I find, speaking of his plays generally, that 
 Moliere's comedies in prose, when taken together, gave a 
 little higher money average as new plays than those in verse. 
 This is somewhat singular, because the taste of the time was 
 much in favour of verse when plays were in five acts ; but it 
 shows how thoroughly popular Moliere was as a dramatist. 
 The number of scenes that he wrote in verse and in prose is 
 about equal. 
 
 The reader will see that, in trying to form a comparative 
 estimate of how Moliere's plays were regarded by the public 
 at the time, I am taking the evidence of the box-office of the 
 theatre as the sole criterion. Trustworthy contemporary 
 opinions would be worth having if we could get such evidence. 
 Something of the sort, more or less true, may be found about 
 many of Moliere's comedies, though mostly of a scrappy kind 
 
 1 Registre de La Grange, 81-83. 
 
CHAPTEE XI 
 
 281 
 
 and quite useless for comparing the fortunes of his various 
 plays. I prefer the safer testimony of La Grange's figures. 
 
 Let us now look for a moment at plays which Moliere did 
 not write : 
 
 AVERAGE DAILY EECEIPTS OF NEW PLAYS, NOT WRITTEN BY 
 MOLIERE, ACTED AT THE PETIT BOURBON AND PALAIS 
 EOYAL THEATRES, 
 
 
 No. of 
 performances 
 of each play 
 when new. 
 
 Total receipts 
 of each new 
 play in livres. 
 
 Average daily 
 receipt of each 
 new play in 
 livres. 
 
 Tite et Berenice, .... 
 
 21 
 
 15,377 
 
 732 
 
 by P. Corneille (Nov. 1670). 
 
 
 
 
 Le Grand bendt de fils aussi sot que 
 
 
 
 
 
 9 
 
 4,472 
 
 297 
 
 by Bre"court (Jan. 1664). 
 
 
 
 
 Attila, 
 
 20 
 
 7,414 
 
 370 
 
 by P. Corneille (March 1667). 
 
 
 
 
 
 15 
 
 5,499 
 
 366 
 
 by Boyer (Nov. 1662). 
 
 
 
 
 La Vraie et la Fausse Pre"cieuse, 
 
 9 
 
 2,976 
 
 330 
 
 by Gilbert (May 1660). 
 
 
 
 
 La Pastorale, ..... 
 
 11 
 
 3,382 
 
 307 
 
 by de Vise (Oct. 1667). 
 
 
 
 
 CUopdtre, 
 
 11 
 
 3,329 
 
 302 
 
 by La Thorilliere (Dec. 1667). 
 
 
 
 
 Le Desespoir Extravagant, 
 
 12 
 
 3,419 
 
 285 
 
 by Subligny (Aug. 1670). 
 
 
 
 
 La Thebaide, 
 
 14 
 
 3,811 
 
 271 
 
 by Racine his first play 
 
 
 
 
 (June 1664). 
 
 
 
 
 La Mere Coquette, 1 .... 
 
 14 
 
 3,663 
 
 261 
 
 by de Vise (Oct. 1665). 
 
 
 
 
 Le Favori, 
 
 13 
 
 3,200 
 
 246 
 
 by Mile, des Jardins (April 1665). 
 La Critique d'Andromaque* . 
 
 17 
 
 4,084 
 
 240 
 
 by Subligny (May 1669). 
 
 
 
 
 If we contrast the average daily receipts of new plays not 
 written by Moliere, but acted by his troop, with those made 
 by his plays while they were new, we shall see at a glance how 
 great was the difference. In the above table I have taken the 
 twelve plays written by other authors that were acted oftenest 
 at the Petit Bourbon and Palais Eoyal theatres ; of those that 
 
 1 Quinault also wrote a comedy called La Mere Coquette, acted at the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne. 
 
 2 The first two or three performances of this play are not recorded by 
 La Grange ; but in any case it is hardly possible that its average for nineteen 
 or twenty performances exceeded 300 livres. 
 
282 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 had less than nine performances nothing need be said. We have 
 seen that all of Moliere's twenty-six comedies, while new and 
 taken one with another, gave a daily average receipt of 693 
 livres ; whereas of plays that he did not write, but which were 
 acted by his troop, the table just above shows that the twelve 
 that were performed the oftenest at his two theatres gave, while 
 new and taken one with another, a daily average receipt of 342 
 livres. Eemembering, too, that the daily average receipt for 
 all plays, both old and new, acted at the Palais Eoyal was 511 
 livres, it will be seen that Pierre Corneille's tragedy Tite et 
 Berenice, of which the average for its twenty-one performances 
 was 732 livres, was the only play, not written by Moliere, that 
 had what I have described already as " a substantial success " 
 at the Palais Royal theatre. Perhaps the same mark of good 
 fortune should be allowed to Gilbert's comedy La Vraie et la 
 Fausse Pr^deuse acted at the Petit Bourbon, where the mean 
 daily receipt from all plays averaged 311 livres. 
 
 Now, as to the number of representations of each of Moliere's 
 plays from 1659 to 1870. At the end of the first volume of 
 the edition of Moliere to which I usually refer, Despois gave 
 a "Tableau des representations de Moliere depuis Louis xiv. 
 jusqu'en 1870." This table is divided into two parts: the 
 performances in public and those given at court. I shall 
 speak only of the first part. If the reader will look at pages 
 548 and 549 of Despois' volume, he may see how often each 
 of Moliere's plays was acted at his theatre during his life- 
 time; afterwards from 1673 to 1680 at the Theatre Guene- 
 gaud; and at different later periods from 1680 to 1870 
 at the Theatre Frangais. Two gaps have, however, been 
 found in the registers of the Come'die Franchise: the first 
 during the theatrical year 1739-40; the second, more impor 
 tant, during the years of the First Republic, from 1793 to 
 [ have added up Despois' figures, giving the number 
 >t performances of each play in public from 1659 to 1870 as 
 this is the best ascertainable test of their comparative popu- 
 larity on the stage. 
 
 LeTartu/e. . 
 LeMtdecinMalgrtLui 
 Locale des Maris. 
 
 ' 
 
CHAPTEK XI 283 
 
 L'ficole des Femmes . . . . .1178 
 
 Le Misanthrope 1126 
 
 Les Femmes Savantes . . . . . .1027 
 
 George Dandin . . . . . . . 959 
 
 Le Malade Imaginaire ...... 883 
 
 Amphitryon, . . . . . . .788 
 
 Les Fourberies de Scapin . . . . . 715 
 
 Sganarelle ou le Cocu Imaginaire . . . .680 
 
 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac . . . . .677 
 
 Le Depit Amour eux . . . . .666 
 
 Le Mariage Force . . . . . .662 
 
 Les Prticieuses Ridicules . . . . .617 
 
 La Comtesse d y Escarbagnas ..... 584 
 
 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme . . . . .526 
 
 L'Etourdi .447 
 
 L' Amour Mtdecin 359 
 
 LesFdcheux. . . . . . . .334 
 
 LeSicilien 218 
 
 Psyche 213 
 
 La Princesse d'Mide 95 
 
 La Critique de Vficole des Femmes . . . 92 
 
 Don Juan (Le Festin de Pierre) l . . . . 60 
 Les Amants Magnifiques . . . . . 41 
 L' Impromptu de Versailles . . . . . 22 
 Don Garde de Navarre ..... 9 
 
 Mdlicerte ........ 3 
 
 This list shows upon the whole that those comedies which 
 are generally thought to be the best reading have been acted 
 oftenest. If any English reader, fond of Moliere, who has 
 never seen him on the stage, is curious in the matter, let him 
 put down on a slip of paper the twelve comedies he likes best, 
 and see how many of the twelve are among those that have 
 been performed the most frequently. There is one comedy, 
 Don Juan, which ought to find a place on any such list, but 
 which stands quite low among the representations. The 
 performances of Don Juan were stopped a month or five 
 weeks after the play first appeared, and Moliere's comedy was 
 not acted again until nearly two hundred years later. Then 
 there were plays which were very popular when they were new, 
 but which ceased to be so after the dramatist's death. The 
 Prtcieuses Ridicules was a satire upon a form of affectation in 
 
 1 A few years after Moliere's death Thomas Corneille versified this play ; 
 and in that form it was always acted until the year 1847. These 60 per- 
 formances refer to the representations of Moliere's play since 1847. 
 
284 LIFE OF MOLI&RE 
 
 vcxnie at the time, and which the laughter in the play did 
 much to destroy ; the Critique de V&ok des Femmes was a 
 short play full of banter evoked by the criticisms, some 
 silly, some hostile, that were passed upon the Ecole fa 
 Femmes ; the Fdcheux was " une piece a tiroirs "a play made 
 up of unconnected scenes and therefore not likely to have 
 a permanent interest as an acting comedy; Psycht, part of 
 which only was written by Moliere, was a " tragedie-ballet " 
 which owed much of its good fortune to scenic display,^but as 
 theatrical scenery continued to improve and as people's ideas 
 changed, the attractions of the play diminished ; and there was 
 Sganarelle ou le Cocu Imaginaire, which was acted oftener 
 than any other of Moliere's plays during his lifetime, but after 
 the poet had written comedies in a higher vein and when 
 French short comedies became more numerous, people were 
 tempted to lose sight of its dramatic qualities and to prefer 
 plays that were less visibly borrowed from the Italian stages. 
 There were, on the other hand, comedies that were not 
 popular at first but which were afterwards more justly appre- 
 ciated. As new plays the success of the Misanthrope was com- 
 paratively small, the failure of the Avare was great; and it 
 seems strange that George Dandin should have met with so poor 
 a welcome. The BcoU des Maris and the &oU des Femmes have 
 always been favourites. The Femmes Savantes is certainly one 
 of the best acting plays of Moliere's high-class comedies, yet 
 in more than two hundred years it was performed nearly nine 
 hundred times less than the Tartuffe. The preponderating 
 success of the Tartuffe and of the Mtdecin Malgr6 Lui, judged 
 by the number of representations, is remarkable. 
 
 The lists above given are only meant to show how the plays 
 mentioned in them were regarded by the public. What they 
 tell is interesting as far as it goes, but unfortunately little or 
 nothing is known of the number of performances or of the 
 receipts of the plays acted at the Hotel de Bourgogne or at the 
 Thdatre du Marais. Doubtless plays could be named showing 
 that both of these theatres had their red-letter days, though 
 the best of those at the Marais came before Moliere was 
 known. It is generally believed that while the three theatres 
 were in rivalry the actors at the Marais prospered least ; 
 but it would only be guesswork to try to determine if the 
 
CHAPTER XI 285 
 
 general level of success at the Hotel de Bourgogne was higher 
 or lower than that at the Palais Royal, or which theatre had 
 most constantly the largest audiences. Much more often than 
 not the merits of a play will decide its good or ill fortune on 
 the stage, though the talents of the actors have to be con- 
 sidered, and sometimes the public takes a freak. Absolutism 
 of opinion in such a matter may easily be wrong, and we have 
 seen that a few of Moliere's best comedies were not warmly 
 welcomed when they first appeared. Yet the lists help to 
 show indirectly Moliere's powers as a dramatist. And they 
 show, too, that the best of those plays not written by him, but 
 acted at the Palais Royal, were not on the whole performed 
 more than half as often as his plays were, and that his plays 
 gave receipts twice as large as those written by other authors, 
 also acted at his theatre. For one who wrote so much and who 
 was often compelled to write very hurriedly, his measure of 
 contemporary popularity was great. And both from a reader's 
 and from the stage point of view, the Femmes Savantes, and the 
 Malade Imaginaire with its burlesque ceremonie at the end of 
 the comedy, seem to prove that his later work gave no sign of 
 failing powers. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 DON OAR01E DE NAVARRE-L'ECOLE DES MAR1S-LES FACIIEUX 
 
 MOLIERE'S MARRIAGE 
 
 SOME description has been given of the inside of the Palais 
 Royal theatre. La troupe de Monsieur began to play there on 
 the JOtJLoLJ^uflrj^-frfc 1 ' aa4on tho 1th of ffetoiary appeared 
 /> Moliere's heroic-cpmedy Don Garde de Navarre. JThis play 
 was^TaTlureJrom the first, and from its first condemnation it 
 Tias^ne^eTrecovered. Moliere was ambitious there on a false 
 track. Hitherto he had drawn amusing pictures showing 
 human thoughts ; but in Don Garde he made an attempt at 
 the "genre noble" for which he had no aptitude; he cast 
 (y aside the comedy of life as his predecessors had ignored it, 
 and instead of showing men's natural propensities he drew 
 automata who were unfortunately gifted with the power of 
 making speeches. The heroine alone shows some lifelike 
 indications, but her lover, instead of engaging our attention, 
 is preposterous. The other personages are nonentities ; they 
 talk, but one forgets what they have said as soon as the words 
 are spoken. 
 
 The taste of theatre-goers was then more in favour of 
 plays in verse than of plays in prose ; they liked a show of 
 grand sentiments and noble ideas ; and Moliere, more or less 
 the child of his age when he wrote Don Garde, wished to 
 exhibit the same fine feelings that had actuated other drama- 
 tists. Don Garde is described as a heroic-comedy ; it bears a 
 different aspect from every other play that Moliere had written. 
 In the first place, we miss in it much of LhigJmmjjnjty. one of 
 i^ his strongest characteristics, and one of the causes which makes 
 him^o^Ieasant to read.^ This is stifled in the effort to be 
 romantic and to appear glorious ; and the comedy in the play 
 is very indifferent, or it is wanting. Had Moliere made a 
 burlesque of the incidents in his play he might have succeeded 
 
 -286 
 
CHAPTER XII 287 
 
 better. His predecessors in their tragedies and tragi- comedies 
 had tried to make their personages add a cubit to their stature 
 by putting them metaphorically on to stilts, and in his heroic- 
 comedy the poet showed partly the same ambition. The style 
 of thought is high-flown, but the style of the language is 
 generally simple. Hence there appears to be a sense of in- 
 congruity. This was probably felt rather than said at the 
 time, and was perhaps one of the causes of the failure of the 
 play. The verses throughout are superior_tojthose in any play 
 
 Written preyJQTIgljLJiSCept. pArliapa f.hnsft in amnp nf flnrnPJlVfi 
 
 tragedies ; but the excellence of versification will never redeem 
 a stage play. The spectator demands 
 
 imperatively, aBove all other things, a lively interest in the 
 personages before him and in their concerns, and he wants to 
 have the incidents and the characters in the story shown to 
 him in a dramatic way. However much his ear may be 
 flattered by the smoothness of the lines, the spoken words will 
 tell him before long whether they please by the action they 
 express, or merely by their sound. This was doubtless the 
 case even in Moliere's day, when men listened to the rhythm 
 of the lines more carefully than they do now. Subsidiary 
 graces may be very pleasant, and no play in verse can delight 
 in all respects without the charm of style, but during its repre- 
 sentation purely literary merits are felt to have a very secondary 
 value. , And it may be doubted if even the higher quality of 
 poetry, when found, can give, or ever did give, much lasting 
 success to the acting of a play on the stage. 
 
 As a new play Don Garde de Navarre was acted only seven 
 times, and the receipts were not good. The poet obtained a 
 privilege to print his comedy on the 31st of May 1660, but he 
 never used it. The play was first printed nine years after his 
 death. The^success_of Moliere's earlier_c( 
 him enenrrejsT Authors" became- ^mvioua^pf him, and the 
 memolSsTof the two rival troops tried to belittleTliTs merri- 
 ment; and ^hen the new play, or the acting in the play, 
 excited a spirit of censure they were delighted to foster it. 
 Moliere had quizzed the " grands comediens " at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne, so that when his Don Garde fell flat they jumped 
 on him. He met with a check, and they did not fail to make 
 the most of it. In common with the public they laughed at 
 
288 
 
 LIFE OF MOLlfiKE 
 
 his acting, and his -play was condemned without mercy. De 
 Vise wrote in his Nouvelles Nouvelles in 1663 : "The failure of 
 lus~Don Garde made me forget to speak to you of it in its 
 proper place ; but it is enough to say that it was a serious play, 
 and that he [Moliere] acted the chief part, to let you know that 
 it could not be very entertaining." l 
 
 Moliere had built hopes on this play, and he did not like to 
 be disappointed in them. In November 1663 he again put 
 Don Garde on the stage. It was played twice, before the first 
 two performances of his own one-act comedy L' Impromptu de 
 Versailles. This was a bold stroke on Moliere's part. His own 
 acting in the part of Don Garcie had been severely criticised, 
 and in the first scene of his Impromptu he ridicules the turgid 
 declamation of the actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne. But his 
 appeal from the first judgment of the public against his heroic- 
 comedy did not succeed. From the 6th of November 1663 
 until the year 1871 Don Garde de Navarre never appeared on 
 the boards of the Come'die Franchise. On the 26th of February 
 1871 some scenes of it were given at a matinee; four actors 
 instead of eight then came on the stage. 2 
 
 jjiere is, however, a point of interestjn the failure _ofjbhis__ 
 play which seems to show that Moliere afterwards recognised 
 Its faults^ Some ye^rs_Jater_E^"gave to the finest male 
 (jnaracterlie ever drew thesa^e~falIIiig~ESat~fae had triml l.o 
 depict in UQnJjarciev But this man is haunted by^a stupid 
 and unintelligible jealousy, and has no cause to be dissatisfied 
 with the loyalty of his mistress, whereas Alceste in the 
 Misa^lirope, amorig other faults, shows strong jealousy for a 
 hearuess coquette who can love nobody. In the first case 
 jealousy is shown to be despicably mean ; in the second it is 
 so mixed up with other qualities, good and bad, and is shown 
 in such a noble manner, that it is not regarded as a crime, and 
 its weakness is forgiven. Jfloliere must hav^ had T) on a arc i e 
 n his mind when he was writing thftJ^/m/frrq^ fon Alccstc 
 repeats the same sentimen^the_sa^^sojxl%fis^efe spoken 
 -J>yDon Ga,ic^^Ie~Prince Jaloux was added as a second 
 e, and there is evidence to show that the poet 
 
 "' SC * * ** * 8, with the 
 
CHAPTER XII 289 
 
 at one time intended to qualify his Misanthrope with a second 
 title, L* Atrdbilaire Amoureux, but he abandoned the idea. But 
 the plan and the composition of the two plays are so very 
 different that dry criticism alone would not show the progress 
 of ideas in the author's mind during the five years' interval 
 between the false and the real comedy. In the first case Moliere 
 forgot himself and ignored the nature of man in his attempt 
 to write something fine ; in the second the ideas expressed are 
 true and are consistent with the comedy of human life. 
 
 The first five months that Moliere anjjjhjg_frieinl&~ were at 
 thftjpfl.1fl.ia Royal were noLYfiiy -successful -A week after -Dow 
 Garde was withdrawn a new tragedy by Gilbert, Le Tyran 
 d'figypte, was put on the stage, but it fared poorly. Before 
 Easter 1661, however, the troop seem to have paid off the 
 expenses of getting into their new theatre ; and they also paid 
 550 livres to Moliere for his Don Garde de Navarre. As La 
 Grange says nothing about any payment to Gilbert for his 
 Tyran d'figypte, it may be presumed that he got his two shares 
 out of the receipts of the play. 
 
 After he had finished his accounts for the year 1660-61 La 
 Grange wrote in his Register : 
 
 " Before beginning again after Easter at the Palais Royal, Monsieur 
 de Moliere asked for two shares instead of one which he had. The 
 troop allowed [them] to him, for himself or for his wife, in case he 
 married. So that instead of there being twelve shares in the troop, 
 which had been the case since April 1660, another share was added 
 in 1661." 
 
 Ag Moliere's marriage took placej^nrnft t^ri w^eks aftpr his 
 play Les Fdcheux had been running. I will jnention the circum- 
 IstanclTagain a^TthlTend of this chapter. 
 
 Shortly after the Easter holidays the troop brought out a 
 new comedy by Chappuzeau, whose name was mentioned so 
 often in chap, ix., called Le Riche Impertinent. It was per- 
 formed eight times with indifferent results. Chappuzeau was 
 alive to what he thought was his interest, for he changed the 
 title of his comedy into Le Riche Mdcontent, and had it acted 
 the year following at the Hotel de Bourgogne. 1 Under that 
 name it was printed (Paris, 1662), bearing on the title-page 
 
 1 Preface to Chappuzeau's Le Theatre Francois, ed. 1875, by M. G. Monval, 
 p. ix. 
 
290 
 
 LIFE OF MOLIl^EE 
 
 the words " Kepre'seritee a 1'Hotel de Bourgogne," and the play 
 was dedicated to Mademoiselle the daughter of the Duke of 
 Orleans, brother to Louis xm. The comedy was again printed 
 with the title Le Partisan Dupe (Lyons, no date), and was 
 dedicated to the Princess of Anhalt. 1 The traffic in dedica- 
 tions in the 17th century is well known. M. Fournel, in his 
 two notices prefacing the plays of Chappuzeau, 2 shows that 
 the needy author was an adept at this kind of trickery, for he 
 practised it with at least four of his plays. The two versions 
 of each play were printed at different places ; in the case of 
 one play no town is mentioned on the title-page of the second 
 edition ; with the three other plays the first or the second 
 edition was printed either at Paris or at Lyons, but those of 
 Lyons show no date. I have read the two comedies given by 
 M. Fournel, L'Acadtmie des Femmes and La Dame d' Intrigue. 
 The former repays one best, for there something may be 
 gathered of the ways of thinking at the time by people who 
 gave themselves the airs of persons of quality or of women of 
 learning. But the comedy in Chappuzeau's two plays did not 
 tempt me to have a more intimate acquaintance of his work 
 as a dramatist. He has, however, written one book, Le Thtdtre 
 Francois, for which those who interest themselves in the 
 French stage in the 1 7th century ought to be grateful to him. 
 On the 24th of June 1661 Moliere brought out the Ecole des 
 Maris. This was felt to be his first high-class comedy, or at 
 least his first comedy that was seriously meant. In the first 
 
 LtM/kvfQ scenes we are reminded of the lines : - 
 
 o /*/} - ^ . -_. 
 
 " Look here, upon this picture and on this, 
 The counterfeit presentment of two brothers." 
 
 The whole of the play is intendedjtp^hDJaLjbow-difierently 
 two brothers bring up girls confideTtotheir care, and the 
 diB^ent_effects of thp.ir fp.fl.p.hjncr 
 
 Moliere took his main idea from the Adelphi of TWpnr.P, but 
 he substituted girls for young jaenjmd so altered much of the 
 groundwork of the comedy. ^His play was intended as a. sa.fr.irp 
 ^ on tli e harshness of parents or guardians who brought up their 
 as though tney were animals who existed only for 
 
 master's pleasure, instead-QUbeing^ human creatures with wills 
 
 1 Parfaict, Histoire du Theatre Fraru-ais, ix. 91 note. 
 
 2 Lea Contemporciins de Moliere, i. 359, 360 ; iii. 207, 208. 
 
CHAPTEE XII 291 
 
 and passions of their own. Mrs. Malaprop found it easy to 
 say " preference and aversion don't become a young woman " ; 
 it_was_against thejsruej^enforcement of this sentiment that 
 Moliere wished, to make his protest. Dome^i(Ttyrann^was 
 more common in his day thanliow7~am1r1iie-seenes which he 
 drew were being enacted with certain differences in many 
 households. The dramatist wished to show that harsh treat- 
 ment is likely to produce bad results, and that in the married 
 lives of the women so brought up both the women themselves 
 and their husbands would probably suffer. Sganarelle is a 
 despicable creature who believes only in himself; respect for 
 him is impossible. He holds with all the conviction hereditary 
 in a caste that liberty is a bad thing for young people, and 
 like a tyrant he keeps Isabelle, his w^rd, a close prisoner. She 
 is made miserable and takes her first opportunity to escape. 
 Ariste, on the other hand, believes in the beneficial exercise of 
 a healthy freedom ; he loves his ward Le'onor and is trustful ; 
 he allows her to enjoy herself, and says : 
 
 " II nous faut en riant instruire la jeunesse." 
 
 Consequently Leonor has been happy in herjiome and wishes 
 to remain in it. 
 
 In an under-plot in the play there is some scheming 
 borrowed from Boccaccio, given in an altered form and carried 
 out more or less in the style of Italian comedy. The action is, 
 however, dependent on the natures of the persons introduced, 
 and the characterisation is well maintained to the end. And 
 the kindly nature of one brother, and the vanity and the 
 churlishness of the other, are both shown very graphically and 
 with admirable comic irony. The dramatist treated the same 
 subject in a different manner in the ficole des Femmes, where 
 he showed more delicate characterisation, though the story 
 there is not so well told. 
 
 In the ficole des Mar is Moliere played the part of 
 Sganarelle, de TEspy was Ariste, La Grange was Valere, 
 Mile, de Brie was Isabelle. Of the other parts there is some 
 doubt, but in all probability Mile, du Pare was Le'onor, 
 Madeleine Bejart was Lisette, du Pare was Ergaste, and de 
 Brie the commissaire. 1 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moli&re, ii. 347. 
 
292 
 
 LIFE OF MOLltRE 
 
 In the middle of July the actors at the Palais Royal had a 
 week of hard work. They were invited by Fouquet, the 
 surintendant of finance, to play at his seat at Vaux. 1 Fou- 
 quet had invited there the Queen of England, Monsieur and 
 Madame, the daughter of Charles I. The troop left Paris on 
 Monday the llth of July, and on Tuesday, 2 at Vaux, they 
 played the ticole des Maris. The king was then at Fontaine- 
 bleau, not far from Vaux, and on Wednesday they played 
 before his Majesty 'the ficole des Maris and Sganarelle. The 
 same evening they were called upon by Fouquet's wife to 
 perform the same two comedies. On Thursday they were 
 engaged by the Marquis de Richelieu, and acted the ficole des 
 Maris. After this performance the troop travelled back to 
 Paris at night, they got to the Palais Royal at noon on Friday, 
 in time for their customary day's work there. When that 
 day's receipt had been divided, division was made of the two 
 gratifications they had received : 
 
 " Part de 1'argent de M. de Richelieu, 58 1. 10 s. 
 Part de 1'argent de M. le Surintendant, 115 1." 
 
 So that each member of the troop got 173 livres 10 sous. 
 
 was the first of Moliere's comedies that 
 
 he printed of his own free will. He says this himself in the 
 dedication of his play addressed to Monsieur, the protector of 
 the troop. The privilege was dated 9th July 1661, a fortnight 
 after the play had appeared on the stage. It was granted to 
 Jean Baptiste Pocquelin de Moliers [sic]; and in it are set 
 forth the wrongs that had been done to the dramatist by 
 surreptitious printing of his previous plays, and Ribou was 
 mentioned by name as a delinquent. The printing was 
 finished on the 20th of August. 3 
 
 Moliere's next play Les Fdcheux (the bores) is a disjointed 
 medy, and it is difficult to speak of it except in a disjointed 
 way. Fouquet invited the king, the queen-mother, Monsieur 
 and Madame, to a specially magnificent fete at Vaux on the 
 rJ^jjj 17th of August. Only a fortnight before he had engaged 
 Moiiere to compose for the occasion a new play in which there 
 
 1 Registre de La Grange, 34. 
 
 2 Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 5th ed. 62. 
 
 3 (Euvres de Moliere, ii. 349, 350 ; xi. 6, 7. 
 
CHAPTER XII 293 
 
 should be dancing and music as interludes. The notice was a 
 short one, but the poet, in spite of his daily work, had his comedy 
 of three acts in verse ready at the appointed time. Pellissou, 
 Fouquet's secretary, wrote a prologue ; the ballets with their 
 verses, the music and the decorations were entrusted to others. 
 The affair was very urgent, and Fouquet, whose greed and 
 dishonesty had made him colossally rich, wished to make a 
 display of magnificence before the king. La Fontaine was 
 present on the occasion, and in a letter to a friend, dated 22nd 
 August 1661, gave some account of the splendour of the scene. 
 We may best omit this and come to what he says of the play 
 and its author : 
 
 " C'est un ouvrage de Moliere. 
 Get ecrivain par sa maniere 
 Charme a present toute la cour ; 
 De la fagon que son nom court, 
 II doit etre par dela Rome : 
 J'en suis ravi, car c'est mon homme. 
 Te souvient-il bien qu'autrefois 
 Nous avons conclu d'une voix 
 Qu'il allait ramener en France 
 Le bon gout et 1'air de Terence ? 
 Plaute n'est plus qu'un plat bouffon 
 Et jamais il ne fit si bon 
 Se trouver a la comedie ; 
 Car ne pense pas qu'on y rie 
 De maint trait jadis admire, 
 Et bon in illo tempore ; 
 Nous avons change de methode ; 
 Jodelet n'est plus a la mode, 
 Et maintenant il ne faut pas 
 Quitter la nature d'un pas." 
 
 La Fontaim3J_j3rjjj3e_j^ light verses is 
 
 wofErTnoticing. He had read the plays of earlier dramatists 
 amTTmew what they were like, but when he came to Moliere 
 he tapped him on the shoulder and said, " C'est mon homme." 
 Such comedy as had existe'cT sufficed ; people were~contenTlo~ 
 laugh at Jodelet's buffooneries, but now that a better way had 
 been shown, nature's pictures must be followed. The Fdcheux 
 was evidently not the first of Moliere's comedies that La 
 Fontaine had seen or read, but unfortunately he did not say 
 what he thought of any other. 
 
 There is no sort of story in the Fdcheux. ]raste is in love 
 with Orphise and wants to see her, but is deTamecTat every"" 
 
294 LIFE OF MOLlfiKE 
 
 turn by his friends who bother him with their trivialities; 
 others who do not know him accost him and talk nonsense. 
 They present themselves one after another, each beset with 
 some crazy idea, and torture the impatient lover so that he is 
 continually thwarted in his attempt to speak to the woman he 
 loves. The fdcheux is what is called " une comedie a tiroirs " ; 
 it is made upoTdeTaciied scenes havk^-^Mr-t^mnectioB^with 
 on?TO5tiErF-Moli^re^ thefirs^nstance of 
 
 is~kmd of comedvli^rance^ LaTTgjj^ I>esmaretslhowed in 
 a comedy that was made up oTscenes nearly 
 detached, but yet having a thread of a story running through 
 the play connecting the scenes together. Desmarets' comedy 
 had been very popular, and Moliere had frequently put it upon 
 his stage at the Petit Bourbon. What was thought to be the 
 fun in the Visionnaires was that the exalted or visionary 
 ideas, then supposed to be held by a good many people, were 
 satirised with fair caricature. The play was so much enjoyed 
 that for some years it was spoken of as " 1'inimitable comedie " ; 
 and when Moliere was much pressed for time he may perhaps 
 have taken from Desmarets the idea of a play that would not 
 demand complicated dramatic exposition. As to the work- 
 manship, one reads Desmarets' comedy now with a sort of 
 fossil interest, but Moliere' s play is still instinct with life. A 
 To^eii^eo^--ftire^fioTTr ought together~ToT~the purpose of 
 dramatising a story out of their joint concerns ; a file of 
 different personages, mostly men, and generally only one at a 
 time, come before Sraste to worry him with their rubbish. 
 But the talk is so lively and so natural that one is amused at 
 the way each man shows his conceit and his self-sufficiency. 
 The clearness of the portraiture is shown with a raciness of 
 style that still makes the play very good reading. It is not 
 dramatic in incident, it is so in the humorous personification 
 of the different characters. The interest in the comedy lies 
 there. 
 
 ghe Mcheux_wo.s_thQ^i8t of the poet's comedies in whichjie 
 laughed at the foppishness of the grandgesjwho thoughtjbhat 
 thejY_should be considered as a raoft apart ppd fl h vfi pthqr 
 people. At a time when a line of demarcation was recognised 
 between the nobles and the non-nobles, offices which conferred 
 a title to nobility were bought often enough by rich men of very 
 
CHAPTER XII 295 
 
 inferior condition. 1 Moliere did not concern himself with the 
 social problem how far it was well that a state should be aristo- 
 cratic or democratic ; he took the order of men as he found it, 
 and drew his comedy from the prevailing manners of his time. 
 It is the business of a comic dramatist to show the humours of 
 men, not to discuss them, and it is impossible in reading 
 Moliere, who thought seriously about the meaning he wished 
 his work to convey, not to be struck by the open and healthy 
 tone in which he satirised the foibles of society. He disliked 
 pretentiousness, but instead of crying out at its vulgarity he 
 ridiculed it with the banter of good-natured irony, so that his 
 audience should see the nonsense and laugh over it. That was 
 his way of moralising upon the world's humbug. In^the 
 
 that he wrote for Fouquet he ^exposed to ridicule before the 
 royaJLuarky assembled at Vaux a number of importunate bores 
 fatuous noblemen who thought that the world was not big . 
 enough to hold them, and needy individuals who imagined 
 thajQ)y^Tnfl;rk of royal favour their fortunes would instantly 
 betmacle. No doubt there was flattery in the homage thus 
 inHirectly addressed to the king who was present. But the 
 comedy was felt to be an actuality ; for among the courtiers 
 invited were some who saw and laughed at their own follies, 
 while all saw similar weaknesses in other men shown in an 
 impersonal way and with an air of good breeding and good 
 humour. Sainte-Beuve was certainly right when he said : 
 " Moliere, c'est la morale des honnetes gens." Unless a writer 
 has this quality, if he cares for good reputation, he had better 
 leave satire alone and laugh at that of others when it contains 
 honest fun, or try to honour it when it shows honest anger. 
 
 There is a story taken from the Mdnagiana (1st ed. 1693) to 
 the effect that after the performance in Fouquet's garden, 
 Louis xiv., pointing to the Marquis de Soyecourt, said to 
 Moliere: "Voila un grand original que vous ii'avez pas encore 
 copie." M. de Soyecourt was very fond of the chase, and he 
 was known to bore his friends with his hunting talk. After 
 the king had spoken to Moliere, the poet set to work to add a 
 new scene to his play. It is probable that he received some 
 assistance, for the description of the stag-hunt as related by 
 
 1 See what La Bruyere says in his Caracleres, in the chapter "Des biens 
 de la fortune," and at the beginning of his chapter, "De quelques usages." 
 
296 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 Dorante (Act n. sc. G), though it is very spirited and shows all 
 the hot-headed eagerness of an enthusiastic sportsman who 
 likes talking about his favourite amusement, is so technical 
 that not many readers would understand it thoroughly without 
 explanatory notes. A few days after the fete at Vaux, the 
 actors at the Palais Eoyal left Paris for Fontainebleau, where 
 they played the new comedy twice before the king. Then 
 Louis xiv. had the satisfaction of seeing represented "la 
 scene du chasseur" which he had good-naturedly hinted to 
 Moliere. 
 
 TEe FdfihfM.r. was thp. first of the many comedies-ballets that 
 - be played before the king; and it is hardly 
 
 ' 
 
 _, 
 
 to be doubted that the dramatist owed much' of the favour or 
 protection that he received from his sovereign to the success 
 of his plays at the court fetes. Louis xiv. as a young man 
 liked to be amused, he liked things around him to be bright, 
 and he liked the show and the music of the ballets. In the 
 come'die-ballet the ballet was given as an accompaniment to 
 the play. It was meant to be a humorous illustration designed 
 so as to add a side lustre of gay splendour to some of* the 
 incidents in the comedy. In his Avertissement to the 
 Fdcktw Moliere says that the joint performance was "un 
 melange nouveau pour nos theatres." The joint performance 
 was highly applauded, and there were many who liked the 
 ballet part best, as a child likes looking at pictures better than 
 reading a book. 
 
 Grimarest could not have chosen a more inopportune 
 moment than in speaking of this play to say that no one 
 worked with greater difficulty than Moliere.* If he had said 
 at no one took more pains than Moliere to make each of his 
 personages say the right thing in the right way, he would have 
 >me nearer the mark. From his boyhood, Moliere's mind was 
 stantly busy in noticing how men thought, how they spoke 
 how they acted; he was, in fact, doing much of his work when 
 en ds thought that he was enjoying himself-as when on 
 Saturday afternoons he sat in barber Gely's arm-chair at 
 Pezena, Nature had given him the faculty for observing men 
 
 
 , 
 remained m his father's shop. It is mainly 
 
 1 Vie de Moliere, 26. 
 
CHAPTEE XII 297 
 
 by sympathetic and accurate observation that most of the best 
 work in the world is done, whether in literature or in science ; 
 imagination follows more or less hand in hand and builds 
 upon the first foundation. Molii!RjjisJbin^tiye_habit of close 
 observation, his wide synipathies and his rapid insight, gave 
 him his poweT^oT"quick production. Unless he had been a 
 
 notThave written the Fdcheux in a 
 
 fortnight; he could not in rather more than fourteen years 
 have written twenty-six plays in prose and in verse (two 
 others were not given at the Palais Royal, and there were also 
 two poems), besides the constant work of chief manager at his 
 theatre and his labour as an actor taking nearly always 
 himself the longest or most difficult parts in his comedies. 
 
 On the 4th of November the Fdcheux appeared on the stage 
 at the Palais Royal, and with it the ballet that had charmed 
 the royal party at Vaux. The new comedy was given un- 
 interruptedly until the end of January 1662; then in the 
 latter half of February there were six more performances, all 
 of which were consecutive. 
 
 In the first five performances the chief male part, that of 
 Eraste, was taken by La Grange ; then he fell ill and du Croisy 
 took his role. Soulie thought that Moliere acted four or five 
 parts in the comedy : " Lisandre the dancer, Alcandre the 
 duellist, or Alcippe the gamester, and perhaps all three with 
 some changes of costume ; also Caritides, the man who wants 
 to correct the signboards, and Dorante the sportsman." 1 
 Despois quotes this passage, as though agreeing with it, but 
 seems to doubt whether Moliere played Alcandre. 2 The 
 other men's parts are not known, but that of La Montagne, 
 the valet, was probably played by du Pare. As to the 
 women's parts guesses only can be made : Madeleine Bejart as 
 Orphise, Mile, du Pare as Orante, Mile, de Brie as Climene. 
 
 Moliere printed the Fdcheux in February 1662, and this 
 was the only play he dedicated to the king. He begins as 
 though in terms of bold familiarity : " Sire, I add a scene to 
 the comedy, and a man who dedicates a book is always a 
 bore." Then he graciously thanks his Majesty for his appro- 
 
 1 Kecherches sur Moliere, 88 ; 276, 277. 
 
 2 CEuvres de Moliere, iii. 15 and note 2 ; iv. 230, continuation of note 5 
 from p. 229. 
 
LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 bation and for having told him how to add another bore to 
 his play, and says that this scene was thought by everybody 
 to be the best part of the work. 
 
 Some weeks after the Easter holidays in 1662, La Thorilliere 
 and Brdcourt, two actors at the Marais, left their theatre and 
 joined Moliere's troop. It was said of La Thorilliere that he 
 was serious when he ought to be gay, and smiling when he 
 ought to appear serious. Such a disposition was perhaps 
 serviceable to him in the part of Philinte in the Misanthrope, 
 and it may have relieved some of the lecturing of Cleante 
 in the Tartufe. Nevertheless, La Thorilliere must have been 
 a good actor. He was also the author of Cltopatre, a tragedy 
 acted at the Palais Royal, but without much success and never 
 printed. The eldest of his two daughters married Baron, the 
 great tragedian; the other married Dancourt, well known as 
 the author of light comedies after Moliere's death. It would 
 seem that Brdcourt also had high capabilities as an actor. 
 While at the Palais Royal his two chief roles were Alain in 
 the J^cole des Femmes and Dorante in the Critique. He joined 
 the Comddie FranQaise in 1682. He was the author of several 
 plays, two of which were reprinted by M. Fournel in the first 
 volume of his Contemporains de Moliere. One of Brecourt's 
 comedies, Le grand benSt de fits aussi sot que son pere, was 
 acted at the Palais Royal on the 18th of January 1664, but it 
 was not printed. A few weeks later, in a fit of temper, 
 Brdcourt left that theatre for the Hotel de Bourgogne. The 
 year after Moliere's death he brought out at the Hotel a little 
 comedy, L'Ombre de Moliere. As a play it is poor, but Brecourt 
 seems to have been actuated by a desire to speak well of one 
 who had once been his friend, and with whom he had quar- 
 relled before he left the Palais Royal. 
 
 I come now to Moliere's marriage. The full name of his 
 future wife was Armande Gresinde Claire Elizabeth Bdjart ; 
 and it may be accepted that she was born late in 1642 or early 
 in 1643. Legal documents, to which I shall refer presently, 
 state that she was the daughter of Joseph Bejart and of Marie 
 Hervd, his wife. BujJieji_conteinpoxariesJifilie^fid without 
 much questioning that she was the illegitimate drmght.P.r nf 
 Madeleine Be.jart (therefore tb 
 
CHAPTER XII 299 
 
 and if this opinion, which prevailed for nearly two hundred 
 years after her birth, be correct, it is impossible to tell who 
 was her father, though the Comte de Modene may be reason- 
 ably suspected. Because Moliere's name is so popular much 
 interest has been taken to try to show the parentage of 
 his wife. On the whole, I cannot but think that Armande 
 Bejart was the legitimate daughter of Joseph Bejart and 
 Marie Herve, though it must be admitted that there is ground 
 for doubt on the matter. As the legal documents have not 
 been proved to be untrue, it is safer to trust to them than to 
 other statements which cannot be guaranteed or which may 
 admit of explanation. I cannot shirk this subject, but must 
 now go into details which I fear will be uninteresting to those 
 not familiar with the circumstantial names and facts, or to 
 those who, though they may admire Moliere's comedies, do 
 not care to bother themselves with the troublesome question 
 of the parentage of his wife. If they wish to do so they will 
 skip the remainder of this chapter. 
 
 It has been said already that Joseph Bejart, the father of 
 the Bejarts who were to become Moliere's comrades on the 
 stage, died probably early in 1643 ; and that shortly after his 
 death his widow, Marie Herve, acting under the advice of her 
 friends, renounced by deed in her own name and in those of 
 her five children all claim to his succession because he died 
 heavily indebted and his inheritance would be likely to prove 
 more onerous than profitable. Marie Herve's deed of renun- 
 ciation was dated the 10th of March 1643. It is the earliest 
 document (apart from registers of baptism) that tells who 
 were her children, and that states, though only approximately, 
 the date of the birth of Armande Bejart. Armande's baptismal 
 certificate has not been found ; but it is accepted, I believe by 
 all, that she must have been the child described in the deed of 
 renunciation as "une petite non baptisee." Soulie thought 
 that Joseph Bejart died at the beginning of 1643, 1 and that as 
 Armande was not mentioned in the deed as a posthumous 
 child, she was born very shortly before his death. 2 
 
 Towards the end of the third paragraph of an anonymous 
 book, La Fameuse Comedienne 3 (of which I spoke in chap. v. 
 
 1 Recherches sur Moliere, 31. 2 Ibid. 33. 
 
 3 Ed. by M. Jules Bonnassies, pp. 6 and 7. 
 
300 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 p. 109), it is said of Armande : " She passed her youngest years 
 in Languedoc with a lady of distinguished rank in the pro- 
 vince. Moliere, the head of the troop to which Madeleine 
 belonged, determined to go to Lyons; and her [Madeleine's] 
 child was taken away from the lady who, having become very 
 fond of her, was sorry to give her back to her mother to be 
 brought up amongst a company of strolling actors." This 
 statement refers probably to the year 1652 or 1653, and, 
 except in the question of Armande's maternity, it cannot be 
 contradicted. 
 
 In the performance of Corneille's Andromede at Lyons in 
 1653, the part of fiphyre, of only four lines, was given to a 
 Mile. Menou ; and it is now believed that this was a pet name 
 given playfully to little Armande Bejart, then a child of ten 
 years old. Many French writers think that Moliere took 
 charge of her education, and as evidence of this M. Mesnard 
 refers to passages in the JScole des Maris and in the ficole des 
 Femmes. 1 If we are to look to those plays for biographical 
 details, allowances must be made for the spirit of comedy in 
 which they are told. The idea, however, seems to be true 
 enough; though Armande's upbringing was not of the best 
 kind. To teach nicely such a girl, the child of a strolling, 
 company, whoever her mother may have been, was a difficult 
 matter. That Moliere was really fond of her seems to be 
 undoubted. Very little is known of her, but it may be easily 
 imagined that her young, bright, and pretty face was often a 
 source of great joy to him, and also of much anxiety. 
 Chapelle alluded to her playfully and poetically in a letter 
 to Moliere written in the spring of 1659; but though this 
 letter shows Moliere's affection for Armande, then a fas- 
 cinating girl of about sixteen, it hardly adds to our information 
 about her. 
 
 The next thing heard of Armande is her marriage with the 
 
 Beffara, who found in 1821 the certificate of Moliere's 
 
 baptism, found also in the same year the certificate of Moliere's 
 
 marriage. This document caused great surprise, for it stated 
 
 that Armande Bejart was the daughter of the late Joseph 
 
 lejart and of Marie Herv<, and that Madeleine Bejart was 
 
 The marriage ceremony took place in Paris in the 
 
 1 Notice biographique sur Moliere, 252. 
 
CHAPTEE XII 301 
 
 church of Saint Germain 1'Auxerrois, on Monday the 20th of 
 February 1662, and was in all respects perfectly regular. 
 Among the witnesses were Jean Poquelin, Moliere's father ; 
 Andre* Boudet, who had married Moliere's sister ; Marie Hervd, 
 his mother-in-law; Louis Bejart and -Madeleine Be'jart, the 
 brother and sister of Armande. 1 This evidence is in flat con- 
 tradiction to the old tradition that Madeleine Bejart was the 
 mother of Armaude. Some men believed the certificate to 
 be true, others did not. Forty years later it was supported 
 by the marriage settlement between Moliere and his future 
 wife, dated 23rd of January 1662, nearly a month before the 
 marriage ceremony, and published for the first time in 1863 
 by Soulie. 2 There it is stated that Armande Be'jart, "age'e 
 de vingt ans ou environ," was the daughter of Marie Herve^ 
 widow of the late Joseph Bejart, and that Louis and Madeleine 
 Be'jart were her brother and sister. But though Moliere's 
 marriage settlement corroborated the certificate of his marriage 
 ceremony in saying that Armande Bejart was Marie Herv^'s 
 daughter, everybody was not convinced that the old tradition 
 was false. And there are reasons which make it appear 
 difficult to conciliate the two contradictory opinions. I will 
 try to state the essential facts as briefly as possible. 
 
 One objection against the belief that Marie Herve' was 
 Armande's mother is her somewhat advanced age, say on the 
 1st of January 1643, about which time Armande was born. 
 It is not, however, possible to be sure how old Marie Herve 
 then was. She was buried on the 9th of January 1670, 3 and 
 the certificate of her burial states that she was eighty years 
 old. If that be true, she was born in 1590, and in January 
 1643 she was fifty-three and unlikely to have borne a child 
 at that age. But Madeleine Bej art's epitaph on her mother, 
 composed not long afterwards, according to one reading, says 
 that Marie Herve was seventy-five when she died, according 
 to another reading seventy-three. 4 If the first reading of the 
 
 1 The certificate is given by Jal, Dictionnaire, 871 col. 1 ; and by 
 M. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 471. 
 
 2 Recherches sur Moliere, 57, 58 ; 203-5. Also given by M. Mesnard, 
 Notice biographique sur Moli&re, 468. 
 
 3 Jal, Dictionnaire , 184 col. 2. Jal printed here "iy Janvier 1670" for 
 " ix Janvier," but he notified the small mistake among his list of errata. 
 
 4 For this difference of opinion see Le Molieriste for May 1883 (vol. v. 51), 
 and for October 1886 (vol. viii. 211). 
 
302 
 
 LIFE OF MOLlfeEE 
 
 epitaph be correct, Marie Hervd was forty-eight in January 
 1643; if the second is to be trusted, she was then forty-six. 
 Now,' Marie Herve's burial certificate was signed by her son 
 Louis Bejart, and by her son-in-law Leonard de Lome'nie (the 
 first husband of Genevieve Bejart) ; but Madeleine Be>rt is 
 perhaps more likely to have known her mother's age than 
 her brother Louis, twelve years her. junior, and certainly 
 more likely to have known it than her brother-in-law. 
 According to the epitaph Marie Henre* was either forty-six 
 or forty-eight at the time of Armande's birth, at the end 
 of 1642 or early in 1643; and this agrees fairly well with 
 Soulid, who says Marie Hervd was married in 1615 and was 
 more than forty-five at the end of 1643. 1 Even at the age 
 of forty-eight she is more likely to have become the mother 
 of Armande than at the age of fifty-three. And I am more 
 inclined to trust to either reading of the epitaph, in determin- 
 ing Marie Herve's age, than to her burial certificate. 2 
 
 Another objection to the belief that Marie Herve was 
 Armande Bdjart's mother, is that in Armande's marriage 
 settlement Marie Herve promised to give Armande 10,000 
 livres ; and in fact five months later Moliere gave an 
 acknowledgment that he had received 10,000 livres from 
 Marie Herve. 3 In March 1643 Marie Herve had represented 
 herself as a poor woman, and it is difficult to imagine how 
 she could have had so much money of her own to give away 
 in 1662. Her daughter Madeleine, however, is believed to 
 have been rich, and if she gave 10,000 livres in her mother's 
 name to Armande, that would not make Armande her child. 
 I think it is safer to make that supposition for no one can 
 tell now what were the intimate relations between the persons 
 concerned than to deny the truth of the legal documents in 
 
 1 Rtcherches sur Moliere, 32. It will be seen that reference is made here 
 to the end of the preceding paragraph. 
 
 2 There were two other instances in Moliere's family in which doubt is 
 thrown on the validity of the burial certificates. Marie Cresse", Moliere's 
 mother, the parish register says, was buried on the llth of May, but the 
 lawyer's inventory taken after her death says that she died on the 15th of 
 May. (See ante, chap. i. p. 52 note 1.) Both of these authorities cannot be 
 right. And in the case of Moliere's widow, afterwards Mile. Guerin, the 
 parish register says that she died "agee de cinquante-cinq ans." Soulie" 
 held firmly that Mile. Guerin must have been fifty-seven or fifty-eight at 
 the time of her death (Recherches sur Moliere, 105). 
 
 3 Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere, 204, 205. 
 
CHAPTEE XII 303 
 
 stating that Armande Be*jart was Marie Herve^s child, because 
 Marie Herve could not have given Armande so large a dowry. 
 It has also been urged that when Genevieve Bejart married, 
 in 1664, her marriage portion was only 4000 livres. Of 
 this 500 livres was paid in money and 3500 livres was 
 reckoned in "habits, linges et meubles." 1 But the husband 
 of Genevieve was not in a position to expect that his wife 
 should have such a large dowry as was the husband of 
 Armande. 
 
 Because I did not wish to enter into too many details, I 
 purposely refrained in speaking of Marie Herve's deed of 
 renunciation on the 10th of March 1643, from saying that 
 she there described all her children as minors. 2 Twenty-five 
 was then the age of majority, and' Madeleine was certainly 
 twenty-five ; and her brother Joseph was probably older than 
 she was. It is not easy to see why Marie Herve was advised 
 by her friends to make this false declaration. French writers 
 have thought that if all her children were minors legal 
 matters would be simplified and money saved, but they have 
 not been able to prove any other effect. M. Mesnard con- 
 demns the false declaration, as it might have given rise to 
 many frauds, 3 though he gives no instance of a fraud resulting 
 from it. Because Marie Herve made a false declaration as to 
 the ages of her children it does not follow that the rest of 
 the deed of renunciation was untrue. Those who believe that 
 both the marriage settlement between Moliere and Armande 
 Bejart and the certificate of their marriage ceremony were 
 founded more or less fraudulently upon Marie Herve's deed of 
 renunciation, should give stronger evidence for their belief in 
 the frauds which they think are contained in those two docu- 
 ments, than the assertion that Armande was Madeleine's child. 
 
 M. Jules Loiseleur, who holds that Armande was Madeleine's 
 child, says that if Marie Herve' made a false declaration as to 
 the ages of her children she would not have scrupled to say 
 that Armande was her child when she knew that she was not. 
 M. Loiseleur thinks that Armande was Madeleine's child, but 
 that the Comte de Modene was not her father. He begins by 
 assuming, as far as I can see gratuitously, that at the end of 
 
 1 Soulie, RecJierches sur Moliere, 213. 2 Ibid. 31 ; 172. 
 
 3 Notice biographique sur Moliere, 254. 
 
304 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 1642 or early in 1643 Madeleine was going to give birth to 
 a child, and from that assumption he declares that Marie 
 Herv^'s deed of renunciation was a fraud as regards the 
 parentage of Armande, 1 and that other documents framed 
 upon it doubtless Armande's marriage settlement and the 
 certificate of her marriage when investigated will be found 
 to be. untrue. 2 M. Loiseleur's theory is that Madeleine was 
 anxious not to lose her influence with her old lover the 
 Cornte de Modene, and to conceal her maternity persuaded 
 her mother to declare herself the mother of her child. He 
 thinks that if Armande's baptismal certificate were found it 
 would be worthless, because it was based on Marie Herve's 
 declaration on the 10th of March 1643, false in his opinion 
 in saying that Armande was her daughter; and that this and 
 subsequent frauds emanated from the deed of guardianship to 
 the children in itself a fraud which the deed of renuncia- 
 tion implied as having been signed. 3 But as the deed of 
 guardianship has not been found it is hardly fair to condemn 
 it as being false. 
 
 Besides the documents already mentioned, there are many 
 others in Soulie"s volume which state that Madeleine and 
 Armande Bdjart were sisters. To one of these I should like 
 to call attention. On the 9th of February 1672 Madeleine 
 Be'jart made her will. 4 Her mind was sound, but she thought 
 that the hand of death was upon her ; in fact she died a week 
 later, aged fifty-four years. Would she have very fervently 
 implored the mercy of her God and have prepared to die with 
 a lie upon her soul, saying that Armande was her sister, if 
 Armande had been her child ? She was either right or 
 grievously wrong. Madeleine Bejart's life when she was 
 young had not been pure, but she was a keen and intelligent 
 woman of the world ; and to think without proofs that on 
 her deathbed she refused to acknowledge her own child is to 
 pass a hard judgment on her. 
 
 It may not be amiss to ask, how did the tradition arise 
 which said that Armande was Madeleine's daughter ? If it 
 was founded on solid fact nothing more can be said, but 
 
 1 Points obscurs de la Vie de Moliere, 239 ; 242. 
 
 2 Ibid. 247. 3 2bid. 238 
 4 Soulte, Recherches sur Moliere, 243. 
 
CHAPTER XII 305 
 
 most Frenchmen who have taken an interest in the matter 
 hold now that Armande was Madeleine's sister. It would 
 not be wonderful if the tradition were founded on spite, and 
 accepted by some out of ill-will, and by others from natural 
 thoughtlessness caring no more about Armande's parentage 
 than about that of the wife of their grocer. There can be 
 no certainty in answer to the proposed question, but I will 
 try to state fairly what appears to me a probable conjecture. 
 
 In a letter to a friend, written in November or December 
 1663, Racine, then quite a young man, said that he had been 
 to court, that he had seen Moliere there, and that Montfleury 
 (an actor at the Hotel de Bourgogne) had presented a petition 
 to the king saying that Moliere had married the daughter 
 of a woman who had been his mistress. Racine's only remark 
 was : " Mais Montfleury n'est pas ecoute a la cour." l If 
 Montfleury did present this petition, it is extremely unlikely 
 that the other members of his troop did not know that he 
 had done so. The actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne were very 
 bitter against Moliere, because they found that his plays took 
 the public away from their theatre, and because they believed 
 that their plays were superior to those acted at the Palais 
 Royal. We all know how spite can warp men's minds when 
 interests of various kinds are concerned; it need not be 
 surprising, therefore, if the actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne 
 tried to spread about a report intended to injure a rival who 
 was doing his best, though fairly, to take the bread out of 
 their mouths. Something has been said already about this 
 hostility towards Moliere, and we shall see in the next chapter 
 how open war broke out between him and the men at the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne. Happily, however, we do not read that 
 the name of Mile. Moliere for she was then married was 
 dragged into this quarrel. Small attention seems to have 
 been given to Montfleury's petition ; for in the year after it 
 was presented the Due de Crequi, in the king's name, and 
 the Mare'chale du Plessis, in the name of the Duchess of 
 Orleans, were sponsors to Moliere's first-born child. If the 
 report as to Armande's birth had no better foundation than 
 
 1 (Euvres de J. Racine, by M. Paul Mesnard, in the "Collection des 
 Grands Ecrivains de la France," vol. vi. 506 ; also M. Mesnard's Notice 
 biographique sur Moliere, 265, 360. 
 
 U 
 
306 
 
 LIFE OF MOLlftEE 
 
 Montfleury's petition and, more especially, the talk among 
 the actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne, I can understand very 
 well that Moliere did not choose to contradict the charge; 
 and no contradiction of it by him is now known to have 
 been made. 
 
 The accusation was taken up after the poet's death, and 
 in the way of printed evidence the tradition that Armande 
 was Madeleine's daughter rests now upon three heads. Firstly, 
 what was said by the anonymous author of La Fameuse 
 Comedienne [Mile. Moliere], a book printed in 1688, and in 
 which one reads: "Elle est fille de la defunte Bejart," etc.; 1 
 secondly, upon some words spoken by Boileau to Brossette 
 in 1702 : "M. Despreaux [Boileau was often called Despreaux] 
 m'a dit que Moliere avait etc amoureux premierement de la 
 comedienne Bejart dont il avait epouse la fille " ; 2 and thirdly, 
 upon Grimarest's Vic de Moliere, published in 1705, where the 
 author takes for granted that Madeleine was Armande's 
 mother. 3 Whatever truth there may be in the pages of 
 La Fameuse Comedienne, it is a book cleverly written in some 
 parts but composed in spite to throw scandal on Moliere's 
 widow, then another man's wife. A word from La Grange 
 in his preface in 1682 might, perhaps, have prevented the 
 above mentioned assertion; but if Moliere had not denied 
 the charge, La Grange, who was certainly not garrulous when 
 his pen was in his hand, thought well to say nothing about it. 
 His business in this preface was to speak of Moliere and his 
 plays, not of his wife, and he made no allusion to her name. 
 In his Eegister, too, though he mentioned Moliere's marriage 
 and gave the name of his wife, he said nothing about her 
 parentage; and that also was a book where, with very rare 
 exceptions, he spoke only of the details of the theatre. As 
 to Boileau, he was an upright man, and would not willingly 
 have wronged the memory of one who had been his friend 
 but his words have a strong air of everyday gossip. He 
 was not one to inquire into the private affairs of other people, 
 and he, like others, may have been misinformed. He was 
 intimate with Eacine, who, from his own fault, had ceased 
 
 1 Edited by M. Jules Bonnassies, p. 6. 
 
 2 Correspondance entre Boileau et Brossette, par A. Laverdet, 517 and 
 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 255. 
 
 3 See pp. 35 and 36. 
 
CHAPTEE XII 307 
 
 to be Moliere's friend, and Eacine may without ill-will have 
 told him what he had heard from the actors at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne, where nearly all of his plays were performed. 
 And as to Grimarest, he had, as he says himself, been largely 
 supplied with information by Baron, who, when he was a lad, 
 had quarrelled with Mile. Moliere after he had tried to make 
 love to her. Baron was one of those who seceded from the 
 Palais Eoyal to the Hotel de Bourgogne after Moliere's death, 
 and he may have told Grimarest what he had heard, as, 
 perhaps, Boileau had told Brossette. Now, if it be a fair 
 conjecture that these three authorities the book La Fameuse 
 Comedienne, Boileau and Grimarest derived their informa- 
 tion as to the parentage of Armande Bejart from one source, 
 that is from the talk among the actors at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne, the value of their testimony becomes weakened 
 very considerably. 
 
 The whole of this matter is unpleasant. The alleged past 
 relations between Moliere and Madeleine Bejart have indeed 
 not been proved, but it would be futile to deny them ; and the 
 fact of his marriage with Armande, even supposing that she 
 was the daughter of Marie Herve, causes a disagreeable feeling. 
 Moliere loved little Armande when she was a child, and the 
 charm grew upon him until he found it to be irresistible. 
 The story of his life shows that he was a straight-thinking 
 man, and his satire shows that he was guided by good sense 
 and delicacy of taste; but no one can think that, under similar 
 circumstances, he would have approved of such a marriage 
 between other persons. 
 
CHAPTEE XIII 
 
 Till: KCOLE DES FEMMES AND THE WARFARE THAT FOLLOWED 
 THE MARIAGE FORCE THE PR1NCESSE D' ELIDE 
 
 THE ficole dcs Femmes, first acted on the 26th of December 1662, 
 was the eighth play that Moliere put on the stage. It would 
 seem that, conscious of his own desires and aspirations, he 
 had hitherto proceeded cautiously in his endeavours to show 
 dramatically the humours of the persons he wished to describe. 
 One of his early plays, however, Don Garde de Navarre, was 
 a failure ; his heroic comedy was a poor attempt at a play of 
 a bad kind. Otherwise, Moliere appears to have kept his ambi- 
 tion well in hand, and to have recognised that the lesson he 
 had to learn was not an easy one. A little later he wrote : " C'est 
 une (Strange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnetes gens." 
 Making the crowd laugh was not sufficient. Moliere did not 
 disdain popular laughter, but he wished also to enliven and 
 amuse the better educated part of his audience by showing 
 them the faults and follies of their neighbours in a spirit of 
 good comedy. He knew that the task was difficult, and, 
 perhaps because it had not been accomplished in plays before 
 his time, he spoke of it as " a strange undertaking." 
 
 More than a year elapsed after his arrival in Paris from the 
 provinces before he brought out a new play of his own. And, 
 modest in his ideas of his own powers, he thought he would 
 be more likely to attain his object by writing short light plays 
 before he felt his hand strong enough to fill a seriously meant 
 five-act comedy in a manner satisfactory to himself and to 
 his audience. Speaking broadly, Moliere's early plays show 
 a gradual improvement in the tone and spirit of comedy. It 
 was felt in Paris that a comic dramatist had arisen with new 
 and bright ideas, and that he showed them in a way that was 
 more sparkling, truer, and with greater vitality than had been 
 seen hitherto. Dramatists before his time, too, often looked 
 
CHAPTEE XIII 309 
 
 upon the stage as a platform for mental exercises. Moliere soon 
 grasped the truth that if comedy does not amuse audiences 
 will not be really interested in it, and that unless their feelings 
 are stirred no other kind of eloquence will be effectual. 
 
 Despois began his Notice to the ficole des Femmes 1 by 
 saying that this comedy " was not only Moliere's greatest 
 dramatic success in the whole course of his career, but that 
 after its appearance rival actors and jealous authors began to 
 write against him a series of pamphlets assailing his private 
 character as well as his reputation as an author and as an 
 actor." No comedy in France before the ficole des Femmes had 
 excited so much interest. It was both loudly abused and 
 loudly praised. Though it is far from being Moliere's greatest 
 play, it is in point of characterisation the best comedy that he 
 had written up to that time. Before its appearance playgoers 
 had not seen on the stage a picture of a bright, fresh-minded 
 girl shown in an easy and natural way. This was to them a 
 new thing and was the chief source of their delight. But 
 there were many critics who immediately found fault with 
 the construction of the comedy. The complaint was not 
 quite ill-grounded, for the greater part of the story is told 
 in narrative, much of the dialogue relates to what has 
 happened, showing indirectly what has been done or said. 
 The play was attacked by some because of its supposed 
 impiptiip,s, and jeered at by others for what they thought were 
 trivialities. If the comedy had not given pleasure to very 
 many it would not have continued to fill the theatre for so 
 long a time. It will be convenient to look at the idea shown 
 in the comedy before speaking of the quarrel which arose from 
 the success of the play. 
 
 The 6coU des Femmes was the complement to the iZcole des 
 Maris, and might have been so called if the other play had 
 not been written. In the first the dramatist showed that 
 bringing up girls under lock and key was likely to defeat its 
 object ; in the second, that enforced ignorance will not prevent 
 an intelligent girl from knowing her own mind, that like 
 should mate with like, and that a man should not say to the 
 woman he wants to marry 
 
 " Du cot de la barbe est la toute puissance." 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 107. 
 
310 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 In both comedies, especially in the latter one, there is some 
 satire on the selfishness of husbands ; but the gist of the 
 censure did not lie there. Moliere wished in both comedies 
 to put forward a plea for more humanity towards girls who 
 were treated as chattels, having no property in themselves, 
 but were owned by those who had authority over them, and 
 made to marry not that they might be happy, but that 
 parents or guardians should reap an advantage. 
 
 The plot in the jficole des Femmes was taken from some 
 stories in the middle ages that had long been popular, and also 
 from a romance of Scarron's La Precaution Inutile. 1 
 
 Arnolphe has taken charge of Agnes, no relation of his, since 
 she was a baby ; he is truly in love with her, but he is selfish, 
 and though some have said that he is " un homme d'esprit," 
 he has extremely silly ideas. Agnes is perhaps the favourite 
 among Moliere.'s young heroines. She is regarded as the type 
 of the " ingdnue " in French fiction a simple-minded girl who 
 believes what is said to her and thinks no harm of any one. 
 Her disposition is bright, she is charmingly portrayed, and 
 she has a coquetry of her own which is both piquant and 
 amusing; but Arnolphe wished to bring her up so that she 
 should learn nothing and know nothing 
 
 " Pour la faire idiote autant qu'il se pourroit." 
 
 Horace, a well-meaning, giddy youth, has fallen in love with 
 her, and she is captivated by his addresses. Moliere himself 
 said that the keynote to his comedy was the thoughtless con- 
 fidence with which Horace relates his adventures to Arnolphe, 
 who was his rival, and the open way in which Agnes tells 
 Arnolphe what has passed between herself and Horace, and 
 yet that Arnolphe should not be able to prevent the cata- 
 strophe. Arnolphe is severe on the frailties of women, and 
 talking to himself on their worthlessness, he says : 
 
 " et malgre tout cela, 
 )ans le monde on fait tout pour ces animaux-la." 
 
 These words gave great offence to the pretenses. Because 
 
 te does not believe in women's good intentions Arnolphe has 
 
 ermmed that he will mould a wife for himself. He is 
 
 1 xi - 126; also M - Louis 
 
CHAPTEK XIII 311 
 
 in love with the idea of marrying a fool, and he dreads the 
 presence of a clever woman. In spite of the ridicule seen 
 against him, there is a pathos, often shown with poetry, in his 
 love for the girl he has fostered since she was a child, and 
 whom he had cherished with the hope of making his own. 
 His jealousy of Horace will be understood and forgiven, but 
 his tyranny, his egotism, and his folly, all condemn him. 
 
 It is amusing to see how Arnolphe struggles hard under his 
 ungovernable selfishness to keep his temper while he is being 
 played upon by Horace quite innocently, and to notice how 
 Agnes seconds her lover, not knowing in the least what he 
 has done. Moliere saw the comic side of the picture, and in 
 planning his play he directed his thoughts to that purpose. 
 Eidicule thus shown is a keen weapon, and taking the comedy 
 as it was intended Moliere did his work excellently well. In 
 fiction it is generally safer criticism to accept ,an author's ideas 
 as he meant them, to see what use he has made of them and 
 how he worked them out, than to find fault with his story 
 because it does not accord with our own tastes. Tastes alter. 
 There are long speeches in the play which the audiences of 
 two hundred and fifty years ago listened to gladly, but which 
 would now be thought wearisome. It would now be thought 
 strange that Horace and Agnes should not be brought together 
 on the stage until the third scene of the fifth act ; and we 
 should certainly think now that Arnolphe sermonises Agnes 
 at too great length in Act ill. sc. 2. When he told her that if 
 she did not obey his lessons she would go as one of the devil's 
 own 
 
 " Bouillir dans les enfers a toute ternit," 
 
 his lines caused some scandal on the score of impiety, and 
 this was the first time that Moliere was censured for profaning 
 the doctrines of the Church. But Moliere was not thinking 
 of the doctrines of the Church. He wished to satirise an 
 egoist who made himself ridiculous, and he threw all his 
 earnestness into his satire. And one is tempted to think 
 that, though Horace is not without good sentiments, if the 
 dramatist had given him a finer nature instead of making him 
 appear to be a heedless young beau, he would have enhanced 
 the value of the character and have given to the lover a 
 stronger interest on his own account. But it was the 
 
312 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 Arnolphes of the world, as common as house-tops in every 
 street, that Moliere meant to censure. Such men were 
 fathers, or uncles, or guardians, who wished to make their 
 girls marry rich, elderly bachelors whom in many cases the 
 girls hardly knew ; or they might be elderly bachelors who 
 wanted to marry young girls who had no wish to have them 
 for husbands. It was the self-interestedness of those in 
 power that Moliere strove to denounce, and he did not trouble 
 himself much to sing the praises of his hero who was to rescue 
 Agnes from her keeper. Agnes was not the simpleton that 
 Arnolphe had tried to make her, and perhaps he had a lucky 
 escape from what he dreaded most. 
 
 Even hostile critics said that the play was well acted. 
 
 Moliere was his own Arnolphe, Mile, de Brie was Agnes, 
 
 La Grange was Horace. The other actors had smaller parts! 
 
 L'Espy is said to have been Chrysalde ; Brecourt and Mile. 
 
 Marotte (a gagiste in the troop) were Alain and Georgette,' 
 
 Arnolphe's two servants. Some of the scenes in which they 
 
 appeared had a capital effect. It was after a performance of 
 
 the Ecole des Femmes that Louis xiv. said of Brecourt, " That 
 
 man would make a stone laugh." De Brie is supposed to have 
 
 een the notary who has an amusing scene with Arnolphe in 
 
 the fourth act ; and perhaps Moliere spoke what he thought 
 
 )f de Brie when Arnolphe says of the notary: 
 
 " La peste soit fait Miomme et sa chienne de face." 
 (Devil take the man and his beastly mug.) 
 
 So far as is known.Mlle.de Brie was quite forty when she 
 
 : Played Agnes, and she kept the part for more than 
 
 twenty years. At the end of the 17th century M. de Tralage 
 
 wrote of her : -A few years before she left the stage hfr 
 
 comrades advised her to give up the part to Mile, du 
 
 Croisy [du Croisy's daughter, Angfliqne, then Mile. Poissonl 
 
 .en this actress came forward, the whole of the pit cried 
 
 so loudly for Mile, de Brie that she was fetched from L house 
 
 d made to play the part without changing her dress. One 
 
 may imagine the applause she received. She appeared as 
 
 tlsTl "a I' ^ fr m ^ Stage '" [ThiS WaS at Caster 
 ie played it even when she was sixty-five years old."' 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 149. 
 
CHAPTEE XIII 313 
 
 Mile, de Brie was a pretty, thin, graceful woman, and must 
 have been very popular. 
 
 Moliere could console himself for the hard things that were 
 said against his play, from the fact that while it was new his 
 theatre was better filled than it had ever been before. But 
 the censure began at the first performance. It would seem 
 that Boileau was then present. He was twenty-six years old 
 and did not know Moliere. He was delighted with the new 
 comedy, and wrote at once a short poem whieh he sent to the 
 dramatist as a complimentary new year's gift. As this poem 
 has some pointed and graceful lines I will quote the 1st, 3rd, 
 and 5th stanzas : 
 
 STANCES A M. MOLIERE, SUR SA COM^DIE DE L'ECOLE DES 
 FEMMES QUE PLUSIEURS GENS FRONDAIENT 
 
 " En vain mille jaloux esprits, 
 Moliere, osent avec mepris 
 Censurer ton plus bel ouvrage : 
 Sa charmante naivete 
 S'en va pour jamais, d'age en age, 
 Divertir la poste"rite\ 
 
 " Ta muse avec utilite 
 Dit plaisamment la ve"rite. 
 Chacun profite a ton ecole : 
 Tout en est beau, tout en est bon ; 
 Et ta plus burlesque parole 
 Est souvent un docte sermon. 
 
 " Laisse gronder tes envieux : 
 Us ont beau crier en tous lieux 
 Qu'en vain tu charmes le vulgaire ; 
 Que tes vers n'ont rien de plaisant : 
 Si tu savais un peu moins plaire 
 Tu ne leur deplairais pas tant." 
 
 The first edition of the ficole des Femmes was printed on the 
 17th of March 1663. It bore a frontispiece showing Arnolphe 
 sitting in a chair with a book in one hand and pointing to his 
 forehead with the other. Agnes is standing in front of him. 
 He is going to lecture her, and he says (at the beginning of 
 Act in. sc. 2) : 
 
 " La, regardez-moi la durant cet entretien." 
 La Grange says in his Kegister that at Easter 1663 L'Espy 
 
314 LIFE OF MOLIEEE 
 
 retired from the troop, thus reducing the number of shares 
 from fifteen to fourteen. Then he adds : 
 
 " At the same time M. de Moliere received a pension from the king 
 as a bel esprit, "and his name was inscribed on the state list for the 
 sum of 1000 livTes. Thereupon he wrote an acknowledgment in verse 
 to his Majesty." 
 
 Despois printed Moliere's Remerdment au Eoi immediately 
 after the Ecole des Femmes, thinking that La Grange was correct 
 as to when the pension was first given; but M. Mesnard 
 says that Moliere's name was not put on the list of pensions 
 until some six or seven months later. 1 The small difference 
 in date was of no consequence, and it was not in Moliere's 
 nature to trouble himself because the sum allowed to him was 
 less than that granted to many others. He must, however, 
 have had a sense of pride that his work had been recognised 
 and esteemed by the king and by those who had placed his 
 name upon the list of gratifications awarded to men of letters. 
 This was a mark of distinction, and Moliere had good reason 
 to feel honoured at having received it. Looking back at a 
 past time, it is curious to read : 
 
 "Au sieur Chapelain, le plus grand poete franc/ns qui ait jamais 
 e"te" et du plus solide jugement . . . 3000 livres. 
 
 " Au sieur Pierre Corneille, premier poete dramatique du monde 
 . . . 2000 livres. 
 
 "Au sieur Moliere, excellent poete comique . . . 1000 livres." 
 
 Moliere's Remerdment au Roi, printed some time in 1663, is 
 a satirical picture showing how eager were noblemen to be 
 admitted to the king's levee ; and in a tone of banter the poet 
 describes how a courtier who wishes to pay his respects should 
 dress, how he should enter the chamber, and when he has 
 reached the chair how he should make his compliment: 
 
 " Mais les grands princes n'aiment gueres 
 Que les compliments qui sont courts." 
 
 As soon as the courtier has opened his mouth the king will 
 smile softly, knowing all that his subject has to say : with 
 that the subject should rest satisfied. 
 
 For a sterner picture of the self-interest of noblemen who 
 left no stone unturned to get themselves in place, one may 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 284 ; Notice biographique sur Moliere, 286. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 315 
 
 look at the chapter " De la Cour " in La Bruyere's Caracteres 
 ou les Mceurs de ce Siecle. This book was first published in 
 1687, and it reached a ninth edition, very much enlarged, in 
 1695, the year of its author's death. In France La Bruyere is 
 ranked high among the prose classics, but in England he is 
 little known. Yet he is worth knowing both as a thinker and 
 as an author ; though it may seem to us now that he wrote in 
 riddles, and his style is that of a mannerist. His CaracUres is 
 a good complement to Moliere's comedies; it is a faithful 
 chronicle of the feelings of men and women of the time. But 
 it was intended for careful readers, not for the larger public 
 who enjoyed the effects of stage representation. La Bruyere 
 as well as Moliere had opportunities of watching the carriage 
 of men who pushed themselves at court. They were both of 
 bourgeois birth, yet they satirised men and women of the 
 world with so much good taste that they have always had the 
 laughter on their side. Skill in writing will not alone account 
 for this; their hearts were true and their minds were free 
 from vulgarity. 
 
 The quarrel occasioned by the success of the ficole des 
 Femmes was much talked about in Paris, and, from a bio- 
 graphical point of view, it is important. I dwell upon it 
 because it throws light on Moliere's character in showing 
 how he thought and what he said when the storm was raised 
 against him by the rival troop at the Hotel de Bourgogne 
 theatre; and it shows the brightness of one man's mind 
 against the dulness of those of his opponents. In his Critique 
 de I'&ole des Femmes and in his Impromptu de Versailles, 
 Moliere told honestly and in a spirit of comedy what were the 
 matters in dispute ; he put his adversaries' case so well that 
 they could not contradict what he said, nor could they urge 
 anything more on their own behalf. He had something to 
 say that is still worth reading; and though some of their 
 censures against the construction of the plot of the ficole des 
 Femmes were valid they gave way to angry jealousy, they had 
 little wit for attack or for self-defence, and what they wrote 
 was certainly very poor comedy. 
 
 De Visa's name has been mentioned already. He was 
 young, clever, industrious and pushing; he recognised 
 Moliere's great abilities, and when he saw that there was a 
 
316 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 quarrel between the poet and his rivals, the troop at the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne, he took their side because he thought 
 it would be most advantageous to him. He was perhaps the 
 first who began this battle with pen and ink, though tongues 
 had been at work some time before. About seven weeks after 
 the appearance of the cole des Femmes he published a three- 
 volume novel, Les Nouvelles Nouvelles, and there he both 
 extolled and blamed Moliere's play. It was most probably de 
 Vise' who later wrote two comedies against Moliere Zdinde 
 and La Vengeance des Marquis though as to the authorship 
 of these plays there has been some confusion. De Vise did 
 not put his name to his work, but it is hard to suppose that 
 his friends did not know what he had done ; and Moliere, if 
 his eyes were open, must have known it also. In 1665, when 
 all this quarrel had passed, Moliere put one of de Vise's 
 comedies on the stage at the Palais Eoyal; and in 1666 de 
 Vise' wrote a Lettre sur le Misanthrope, praising the comedy 
 very highly, though Moliere knew nothing of the letter till it 
 was printed, and was not glad to see it. Later three or four 
 comedies appeared at the Palais Royal, written by this man 
 who had been the adversary of the head of the troop at that 
 theatre. De Vise* wished to make his way in the world ; and 
 at a time when ideas of honesty in literary matters were often 
 lax he might well have extolled Moliere at one moment, 
 abused him afterwards, and later again have praised him, if 
 his inclinations or his interest ran that way. Moliere knew 
 what it all meant, he was good-natured and forgiving towards 
 one who was struggling with the battle of life and who did 
 not really mean mischief; and it is not likely that the 
 dramatist bothered himself about what de Vise' had written in 
 a novel against a play which the town had applauded very 
 loudly. In 1672 de Vise* established Le Mercure Galant, a 
 poor periodical which was intended to give exalted social 
 news ; and after Moliere's death this paper brought him the 
 kind of notoriety that he wanted. 1 
 
 Boursault was another of Moliere's opponents. He had 
 already written two or three plays, and one of these, Le 
 Me'decin Volant, was called by the same name as one of 
 
 M ' Fournel ifl his Contemporains 
 
CHAPTEE XIII 317 
 
 Moliere's early farces. Both authors drew their sketch from 
 the same groundwork. As an adversary Boursault was hardly 
 more formidable than de Vise, but he was more honestly 
 ambitious, for he had the courage to write under his own 
 name. He was pushed into the fray and made the mouth- 
 piece of others, and it has been said that he was punished too 
 severely. He was only twenty-five, but he need not have been 
 such a simpleton. His vanity brought him more than he 
 bargained for, and he did not meddle with Moliere again. I 
 should add that Boursault's head seems to have been more to 
 blame in this matter than his heart. He is spoken of as a 
 man who had the esteem of his contemporaries. Boileau once 
 satirised his verses ; Boursault forgave him and afterwards lent 
 him money. Late in the century two of Boursault's comedies 
 were successful on the stage. 1 
 
 I will quote what de Vise said in his Nouvelles Nouvelles 
 about the &ole des Femmes, as his opinions represented a fair 
 section of contemporary thought. 
 
 " This comedy produced effects that were quite new. Everybody 
 thought it was bad, and everybody rushed to see it. Ladies spoke 
 ill of it, and they also went to see it. The play was successful but it 
 did not please, and it pleased many who did not think it good. But 
 to tell you my opinion, no plot was ever so badly managed, and I am 
 ready to maintain that there is not a scene without numberless faults. 
 Nevertheless, I am bound to confess, to be just to the author's merits, 
 that this comedy is a monster with fine points, and that no one ever 
 saw so many good and bad things put side by side. There are some 
 so natural that it would seem they were nature's own work ; there 
 are passages which are inimitable, and which are so well expressed 
 that I cannot find language strong or pointed enough to give you a 
 true idea of them. . . . They are nature's portraits, which might pass 
 for being original. It seems as if she were speaking herself. These 
 passages occur not only when Agnes is on the stage, but they are to 
 be found in every character. Never was a comedy better performed 
 or with so much ability. Each actor knows how many steps he 
 ought to take, and every wink of the eye is counted." 2 
 
 From his preface to the jScole des Femmes, printed 17th 
 March 1663, it may be seen that Moliere had soon conceived 
 the idea of answering his detractors by writing a little comedy. 
 A certain abbe* du Buisson, whom the poet alludes to in this 
 
 1 V. Fournel, Les Contemporains de Moliere, i. 93-102. 
 
 2 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 467. 
 
318 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 preface as " a person of quality whose wit is well known in the 
 world, and who does me the honour to love me," pressed him 
 to carry out his idea. The abbe* even wrote such a comedy, or 
 sketch of a comedy, himself, and showed it to Moliere. But 
 Moliere dissuaded him from publishing it. 1 I have little 
 doubt that Moliere thought that if any play of his required a 
 public answer, he himself ought to make it. For a while he 
 was uncertain what to do ; then his answer came. 
 
 The ficole des Femmes had been acted as a new play from 
 Christmas 1662 up to the Easter holidays in 1663. Easter 
 fell early in 1663, for the Palais Royal theatre was opened 
 after the holidays on the 6th of April. On the 1st of June 
 the ficole dcs Femmes was revived, and with it, as an after- 
 piece, Moliere put on the stage the Critique upon his own play 
 that had created so much stir. The Critique de I'jZcole des 
 Femmes is a one-act comedy in prose, in which the dramatist 
 gives an amusing picture of the hard things that were said of 
 his former play which he pretends to criticise. He shows 
 here his own views of comedies and of the manner of writing 
 them much more than in any other play that came from his pen. 
 At the same time, it is well to notice his irony and to recollect 
 that it was his humour to mix satire and earnestness together. 
 His Critique must not be looked upon merely as a defence. 
 Unless he had more than a defence to offer he had better have 
 been silent ; unless he could throw his shells into the enemies' 
 tents and do some damage there, he was dooming himself to 
 defeat. Moliere thought far less of answering the objections 
 made against his late play than of laughing at his opponents 
 and showing that they were on a wrong tack. His enemies 
 were to be found in various camps. There were the actors at 
 the Hotel de Bourgogne; authors who had written or who 
 hoped to write for that theatre, and those men who set them- 
 selves up as good judges of a play and who liked the old style 
 of comedy better than his ; fine gentlemen and men of good 
 position in the world who thought that their dignity would be 
 compromised if they were known to take Moliere 's part; 
 prudish women and those who were proud of the title of 
 
 1 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 468. What Moliere says 
 in his preface, printed l?th March 1663, seems to agree tolerably well on 
 this point with what de Vise had written in his Nouvelles Nouvelle*, printed 
 9th February in the same year. 
 
CHAPTEE XIII 319 
 
 " precieuse " ; and many who said they were shocked at 
 Arnolphe's sermon to Agnes and at the " maximes du 
 mariage." I may say here that if Moliere mentioned this 
 objection he did not dwell upon it. To the nonsense of his 
 critics who did not like "tarte a la creme," "les enfants par 
 1'oreille," and " la scene du potage," he replied by nonsense of 
 his own in which there is some fun ; he showed what prudery 
 was, and he answered the trivialities of the precieuses who 
 were disgusted because he had made Arnolphe call women 
 animals. The scene known as " la scene du potage " is short, 
 and its fun will be understood by those who read it. But 
 explanation of the words " tarte a la creme " and " les enfants 
 par 1'oreille " would be long, and no one would thank me for 
 giving it. 1 In both cases a harmless jest was used to satirise 
 Arnolphe's folly and to make him talk in a ridiculous manner. 
 The expressions disgusted many who were delicate ; they 
 thought the words showed very bad taste. To talk in such a 
 way in a farce might be allowed, for those who found their 
 amusement in farces were not discriminating ; but in a five- 
 act comedy in verse it was deplorable. Moliere, happily, was 
 not so dainty. 
 
 All through his Critique Moliere throws off his banter 
 admirably. But he was in earnest when he said that comedies 
 written according to rule were not likely to be better than 
 those dictated by common-sense ; he was also in earnest when 
 he spoke of authors' jealousies and of their "trafficking for 
 reputation." His allusion to the court should not be taken 
 too literally. By that term he meant to include good society, 
 of which the court was then the natural head. He meant, 
 too, that joining in the society of one's fellows, taking one's 
 part in it, and noticing the play of life seen there, gave better 
 opportunities for judging a comedy than reading disquisitions 
 on the drama. Moliere, I take it, did not like to find himself 
 blamed for not showing the dull-headedness that he had 
 observed to be general in other comedies. The crowd saw 
 that he was right, but those who ought to have known better 
 abused him. His objects in the Critique were to uphold the 
 
 1 For the first see Despois' note, (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 165 note 4; and 
 for the other an article by M. Martin-Dairvault in the Molidriste for March 
 1888 (vol. ix. 359). 
 
320 LIFE OF MOLIEUE 
 
 judgment of the crowd and to satirise those who had found 
 fault with him wrongly. He brings forward by degrees three 
 ladies and three gentlemen, arid by the quickness of their 
 dispute he tells, as it seems with perfect fairness, what were 
 the objections raised against the fkole des Femmes. The new 
 play may be enjoyed thoroughly without any knowledge of 
 the other, for it is managed with much pleasantry and dramatic 
 skill, and it shows all the babble that the excitement of a 
 quarrel produces. The action lies in the rapid exchange of 
 opinions on a subject which a few months earlier had been 
 the gossip of every playgoer in Paris. To that extent all 
 the personages show themselves for what they are ; men and 
 women are talking about one thing, and they say very plainly 
 what they think. As a picture of an animated conversational 
 scene the dramatisation in the little comedy is excellent. 
 The satire is frank and good-humoured, and this will usually 
 carry further and be better remembered than ill-natured wit, 
 however clever it may be. There is some quasi-argument 
 towards the end of the comedy, and there Moliere says what 
 he thinks of plays intended to be regular and of the kind of 
 satisfaction they gave to those who applauded them. But the 
 preciseness and the doctrinaire opinions are all on one side, 
 for they certainly formed no part of Moliere' s creed ; he speaks 
 of them in order to show that in a stage play they are entirely 
 out of place. 
 
 Much of the satire was directed against those persons, 
 authors and others, who considered short and amusing plays 
 as farces good enough perhaps to satisfy the multitude 
 but that men of taste demanded tragedy, or at least comedy 
 that showed nobility of style. Lysidas, a jealous poet, is 
 made to say: "On voit une solitude effroyable aux grands 
 ouvrages, lorsque des sottises ont tout Paris." It has been 
 said that these words were a hit at Pierre Corneille, whose 
 tragedies at this time were far less popular than his earlier 
 ones had been; his Sophonisbe had fallen nearly flat a few 
 months before at the Hotel de Bourgogne. If, however, 
 Moliere meant anything personal in his satire, he was perhaps 
 thinking rather of Thomas Corneille and of a letter which he 
 had written a few years before to the abbe de Pure the gist 
 of which had most probably been made known to Moliere 
 
CHAPTEE XIII 321 
 
 saying that though the troop at the Petit Bourbon could act 
 a trifle like the Prdcieuses Ridicules, a serious play was beyond 
 their power. 1 In any case, Moliere could say with pardonable 
 pride that his own plays, whether " sottises " or not, filled his 
 theatre. In battling against ideas which for the most part 
 he believed to be absurd, but which were prevalent among a 
 large class of persons, Moliere says that "comedy is perhaps 
 more difficult to write than tragedy." We must remember 
 here that he spoke only of such tragedy as he had seen, and 
 that he wrote in a vein of satire. 
 
 " When you draw heroes you may do what you like. They are 
 fancy portraits, in which no one looks for a resemblance. You have 
 only to let your imagination soar at will, though it leaves aside what 
 is true in its attempt to seize upon what is wonderful. But when 
 you draw men you must draw them naturally. In these portraits 
 there should be a likeness, and your picture is worthless unless you 
 show the people of your own age." 2 
 
 Besides pointing to the want of naturalness in the charac- 
 terisation, this passage tells also that Moliere felt that most of 
 the tragedies of the time were dramatic poems rather than 
 dramas. Whatever his appreciation of tragedy may have 
 been, he knew that the interest in the plays should lie less 
 in exciting incidents or in magniloquent speeches from 
 " heroes " than in the truthful way in which the personages 
 in the play show themselves when their strong or dark 
 passions are aroused, and that it is in the conflict of passions 
 between the personages that the drama in the story is seen. 
 Among those who liked to be considered good judges of plays, 
 tragedy was still more popular in Paris than comedy. These 
 critics held that tragedy was more ennobling than comedy, 
 they believed it was a higher art, and they sided with the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne against Moliere because they considered 
 that tragedy was acted best at the old theatre. They had a 
 full right to think as they pleased, though their opinions were 
 not always sound. Moliere had not yet written any of his 
 best plays, but he had already shown that comedy has a life 
 and truth of her own, and that she should have a place beside 
 her more ambitious and perhaps too self-satisfied sister. This 
 
 1 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 219, 220. 
 
 2 Critique de VEcole des Femmes, sc. 6. The quotation is taken from the 
 middle of a speech by Dorante. 
 
 X 
 
302 LIFE OF MOLI&EE 
 
 was a reform that Moliere was gradually accomplishing, and 
 it will be understood that the exponents of tragedy did not 
 look upon his efforts with favourable eyes when they found 
 that his lessons were easily learned and that his teaching was 
 welcomed by an intelligent public. 
 
 At the end of the first scene in the Impromptu de Versailles 
 Moliere says that his wife had played the part of lise in the 
 Critique, Mile, du Pare that of Climene, and Bre'court that of 
 Dorante. For the other parts it is probable that du Croisy 
 was Lysidas, and that Mile, de Brie was Uranie. Some 
 editors have assigned to La Grange the part of the Marquis, 
 but Despois thought it was Moliere himself who jeered at 
 his own " tarte a la creme." It is believed that Mile. Moliere 
 did not go on the stage before she played the part of Elise in 
 the Critique de I'Ecole des Femmes. 
 
 The first edition of the comedy was printed on the 7th of 
 August 1663. 
 
 The Critique de I'ficole des Femmes was played thirty-two 
 times as a new play, and for a one-act comedy its success 
 was very great indeed. Strong partisan feeling had doubtless 
 much to do with the rush of people to the doors of the Palais 
 Royal, and as this went on Moliere's rivals at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne became furious. They could not sit still with 
 folded hands and say nothing. 
 
 A still-born answer caine in the shape of de Vise's Ze'linde, 
 ou la Writable Critique de I'ficole des Femmes et la Critique de 
 la Critique, a one-act comedy in prose, printed on the 4th of 
 August but never acted, at least in public. 1 It is probable 
 enough that de Vise" had read his play to the actors at the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne, and that they declined it as too poor for repre- 
 sentation. The purport of Ze'linde is to show how Moliere's 
 
 1 It seems to be decided now that de Vise", not de Villiers, was the author 
 of this play. See (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 112 note, where Despois corrects 
 his former opinion in favour of de Villiers, given in vol. ii. 339 of the same 
 work. In any case, Despois agreed with M. Fournel that Les Nouvelles 
 Nouvelles (printed 9th February 1663), Zelinde (printed 4th August 1663), 
 La Vengeance des Marquis (acted at the Hotel de Bourgogne in November 
 or December 1663), and the Lettre sur les affaires du theatre (printed 7th 
 December 1663) were all by the same author. Both M. Mesnard in his 
 Notice biographique sur Moliere, pp. 220, 277, 298, 300, and M. Desfeuilles 
 m his Notice bibliographique to the (Euvres de Moliere, vol. xi. pp. 120, 128, 
 130, concur with Despois in attributing these productions to de Vise. In 
 some of them he may have received assistance from de Villiers. 
 
CHAPTEK XIII 323 
 
 enemies decried his two last comedies. We read that too much 
 of the ficole des Femmes was told in narrative; but for the 
 rest, the criticisms are idle and some of them are uttered in an 
 exceedingly silly manner. Whatever industry or cleverness 
 de Vis^ may have had, he could not write a tolerable acting 
 comedy, and in his double capacity of playwright and critic 
 he made a clumsy mess of what he had better have left alone. 
 He was the first, I think, who made an anagram of Moliere's 
 name, and called him " filomire." The following extract, taken 
 from scene 8 in the comedy, will show how Moliere was looked 
 upon by many who went to see his plays. It may be said 
 that noblemen were then common characters in comedies; 
 Moliere had laughed at their inanities, and he continued to 
 do so. Zelinde is a learned woman ; Oriane, a lady, is a 
 nonentity ; Aristide is a poet : 
 
 " Zelinde. 
 
 " I have just had a happy thought. I should like to have him 
 [Ellomire] tossed in a blanket, and four marquises ought to hold the 
 corners. 
 
 " Aristide. 
 
 " The marquises are too fond of him, and would perhaps put them- 
 selves in his place to be well laughed at all round. To make fun of 
 their good friend is the last thing I shall do. I should be torn in 
 pieces if I were to attempt it. There would be less danger in laugh- 
 ing at the marquises themselves. Those whom he takes off best do 
 all they can to patronise him, for fear somebody else should not show 
 their absurdities so well. They like to look at themselves in lomire's 
 clear mirror better than in their own, and they find the sharpness of 
 his satire useful to them. 
 
 " Oriane. 
 
 " It is useful to those who profit by it, but not many do so, I think. 
 " Zelinde. 
 
 " They would be very sorry to profit by it. Elomire laughs at 
 that air of quality which distinguishes them from the bourgeois, and 
 they would not like to have their glory taken from them. 
 
 " Oriane. 
 
 " If so, why do they smile upon Elomire, and why do those whom 
 he ridicules most embrace him when they meet ? 
 
 " Zelinde. 
 
 " Because he makes them laugh at one another and call each other 
 turlupin [punster] as they do at court since the Critique was acted. 
 
324 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 " Oriane. 
 
 That should be an encouragement for Monsieur Aristide to set to 
 
 I 
 
 work. 
 
 " Aristide. 
 
 " ^lomire's reputation is too well established, and I am not going 
 to strengthen it ; for the more people laugh at him the more he will 
 succeed. . . . Why should I destroy my own reputation by attacking 
 a man who, every turlupin in France vows, can never be equalled ? 
 And though they talk in that way without knowing how another may 
 be able to write, one is bound to believe them because they are the 
 persons most interested in it. 
 
 " Zelinde. 
 
 "Do you still hold to this idea? You should make the world 
 laugh as he does, and you will succeed. They only take his side 
 because he amuses them. Make your satire better, go with the taste 
 of the age, and you will see if every one does not say you are as 
 clever as filomire. 
 
 "Aristide. 
 "But . . . 
 
 "Zelinde. 
 "What, but ... 
 
 " Aristide. 
 "But fortune smiles upon him." 
 
 In his other writings de Vise* had spoken of Moliere's good 
 luck ; and here, in spite of himself, he was praising Moliere 
 while he wished to belittle his fun. 
 
 The actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne had to wait some 
 time before they could bring out an answer to Moliere's 
 Critique. About the middle of October (1663) appeared Bour- 
 sault's comedy Le Portrait du Peintre. The peintre was of 
 course Moliere. Boursault pretended that Moliere had meant 
 to show him up as Lysidas in the Critique. It is not likely 
 that Moliere had any such intention. Boursault was one of the 
 hostile critics to the cole des Femmes', but there were many 
 others. He had written three comedies, none of which could 
 be classed as serious plays, and Moliere's Lysidas was repre- 
 sented as a jealous author who is wedded to the tedious regu- 
 larity of plays in which the laws were observed. Boursault 
 too, at this time was only twenty-five years old, but Lysidas 
 gives one the idea of a man whose age was nearly fifty He 
 was a pedant who liked it to be known that he could read 
 Greek and Latin, but Boursault could read neither Moliere's 
 enemies had to look about for some one who could reply to 
 
CHAPTEE XIII 325 
 
 his Critique de I'ficole des Femmes; they hit upon Boursault, 
 and they flattered him into the belief that he was Lysidas. At 
 the end of scene 7 in Zelinde Oriane asks : " Who is the Lysidas 
 in the Critique ? " Aristide answers : " He is a great man, for 
 he represents all the authors who write for the stage." I 
 think this is the first hint given that Boursault was assisted 
 in the composition of his play Le Portrait du Peintre. Moliere 
 said so very plainly in his Impromptu de Versailles. In one 
 sense Boursault's play is better than de Vise's : it does not 
 read so much like a string of monologues, and it had the 
 advantage of being acted. Moliere went to one of its first 
 performances and took a seat on the stage where he could 
 be plainly seen. He had satirised actors, authors, pedants, 
 fashionable gentlemen and affected ladies ; now his turn was 
 come to be laughed at if his adversaries had any show of wit 
 in them. If they could amuse the audience with fair raillery, 
 I believe that Moliere would have enjoyed the pleasantry ; if 
 there had been good fun he would have laughed at it. He 
 knew what "chaff" was, and could take it as well as give it. 
 But after the satire in his Critique there was too much sore 
 feeling among the party at the Hotel de Bourgogne to allow 
 of friendly fencing. 
 
 One is naturally inclined to ask, How did this quarrel begin ? 
 As far as printed evidence goes, it would seem that Moliere 
 first threw down the challenge. When in his Prtcieuses Ridi- 
 cules he pretended to laugh at his own troop because they 
 spoke their words simply, his rivals did not like his irony. 
 The satire was meant for them, and they knew it. If there 
 had been provocation for this satire the cause is not known 
 now, though we may suppose that it came from emulation 
 between the two companies. Personally, I am not inclined 
 to think that Moliere was much in the wrong ; but taking the 
 world as we find it, I imagine that sharp words had been 
 spoken by the actors at the- Hotel de Bourgogne when they 
 saw that Moliere and his troop were making great advances 
 in the popular favour, and that he answered the sharpness 
 by irony. As Moliere's comedies drew the public to his 
 theatre, jealousies became stronger; his rivals tried to dis- 
 parage his plays and looked for any handle that would serve 
 for abuse. He answered them in his Critique, and had the 
 
326 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 laughter of the town on his side. Boursault in sc. 4 of his play 
 alluded to what was known as the " le " in Act n. sc. 5 of the 
 Bcole dcs Femmcs, because it was said that the word " le " had 
 an improper signification. As far as I can see, there was 
 nothing in the play of the actors on the stage to warrant such 
 a charge. One is surprised now that so much spite should 
 have been shown about a piece of trumpery. The word " le " 
 either meant, only that Agnes did not want Arnolphe to know 
 that Horace had stolen the knot of ribbon or tie that he had 
 given her, or it had a wrong meaning ; and Moliere's adver- 
 saries construed it to his disadvantage. It is tolerably certain, 
 too, that those who affected to be scandalised were the most 
 pleased at what they attacked. A huge pother was made about 
 a trifle because people liked talking : the guilt lay there. When 
 men fight they must expect hard knocks. Moliere in his 
 Critique had hit straight out from the shoulder, but he found 
 himself in front of an adversary who tried to wound him by 
 underhand thrusts. Also in sc. 4, Boursault makes one of his 
 personages affirm that he has seen a printed key to Moliere's 
 Critique. 1 The key turns out to be the key of a door ! He 
 called his comedy Le Portrait du Peintre ou la Centre Critique 
 de I'ficole des Femmes. He called Moliere " notre singe," yet 
 he took his Critique to pieces and fashioned his own play upon 
 it in an inverse sense as had been suggested in de Vise's 
 Zdlinde. He tried to satirise people as Moliere had done and 
 to satirise Moliere at the same time ; he ends only by imitat- 
 ing him. The joke of the town amuses people for a time, but 
 when it is repeated with falsifying intent it becomes nauseous. 
 One writer said that when Moliere went to see Boursault's 
 comedy he was disconcerted at what he heard about himself. 
 It is far more likely that he was annoyed at having to listen 
 to rubbish, and that he expressed impatience at the thin wit 
 shown. Poor Boursault ! He was young ; vanity had laid her 
 hand upon him, and he was led into a trap. He was made to 
 write the Portrait du Peintre, and he suffered in consequence. 
 Moliere's next comedy, the Impromptu de Versailles so 
 called because it was written quickly and was first acted at 
 Versailles would probably not have been written but for 
 Boursault's Portrait du Peintre. Unfortunately the day of the 
 
 1 See V. Fournel, Les CotUtmporains de Moliere, i. 144 note 2. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 327 
 
 first performance of either play cannot be determined. One 
 would like to know which play Moliere's or Boursault's was 
 acted first, for there are circumstances connected with them 
 both that have not been recorded. A German eye-witness 
 wrote that he saw Boursault's " new " comedy at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne on the 19th of October 1663. M. Mesnard sup- 
 poses that was the first performance ; l but does it follow 
 necessarily ? As the theatres were open only three times a 
 week, the first performance may have taken place some days 
 earlier. 2 The first performance of Moliere's Impromptu was 
 given before the king at Versailles, possibly on the 16th of 
 October 1663, but more probably on the 18th or 19th. 3 It 
 was, at all events, between the first and last of those dates. 
 The play appeared for the first time in public on the 4th of 
 November. Internal evidence seems to show that Boursault's 
 comedy had the priority. 4 It is clear, however, that if the 
 words now read in the Impromptu are the same as those 
 spoken at the representation at Versailles, Moliere must have 
 known a good deal about Boursault's comedy, even though it 
 had not been acted. 
 
 All the actors in the Impromptu play under their own 
 names. The scene of the comedy is the stage of the theatre in 
 the palace at Versailles. 5 The comedy opens by Moliere, as 
 head of his troop, calling his actors together for the rehearsal 
 of a play which, we are to suppose, is to be acted before the 
 king in an antechamber in the palace. There is, however, an 
 illusion : the supposed performance before the king does not 
 take place, and the pretended rehearsal is a counterfeit which 
 the dramatist used as a means of showing his satire. Moliere 
 is terribly anxious as to the fate of the representation before 
 the king, and all his troop annoy him further by declaring that 
 they do not know their parts. Mile. Bejart says to him : 
 " You should have been better advised, and not have under- 
 taken to do what you have promised in a week's time." Then 
 
 1 Notice biograpliique sur Moliere, 282, 283. 
 - (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 132 ; xi. 128, 129. 
 
 3 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 283, 284; (Euvres de 
 Moliere, xi. 14, and note 1. 
 
 4 V. Fournel, Les Contemporains de Motiere, i. 99 ; 241 note 3 ; (Euvres 
 de Moliere, iii. 131, 132 ; 420 note 1. 
 
 5 The scenic indication is so given in the (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 386 ; and 
 see note 1 to that page. 
 
328 LIFE OF MOLIEKE 
 
 Moliere answers : " How could I help myself, when^ a king- 
 gave me his orders ? " Three times in this play Moliere says 
 that the king told him to write the comedy. 1 It seems strange 
 now that Louis should have intervened in the quarrel between 
 Moliere and his rivals, and have told him to write a comedy 
 against them. But the dramatist would not have three times 
 alleged the king's order to write the play unless the order had 
 in fact been given. 
 
 For our purposes here the satire in the Impromptu may be 
 divided under two heads : Moliere's ridicule of the inflated 
 declamation at the Hotel de Bourgogne, and his attack upon 
 Boursault and those who had assisted him in the composition 
 of Le Portrait du Peintre. 
 
 The actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne had jeered at Moliere 
 for his performance in his own heroic-comedy Don Garde de 
 Navarre, and now Moliere tried to turn the tables upon them. 
 Most of his troop are with him on the stage, and in giving 
 them the idea of a comedy he had thought of writing he 
 supposes that he is a poet, proud of his own work, who brings 
 his play to a company of actors just arrived from the provinces. 
 At the supposed poet's request one of the Palais Royal actors 
 recites, " in the most natural way possible," a line and a half 
 from one of Corneille's tragedies. The would-be poet (Moliere) 
 is not at all satisfied at the elocution shown, and recites 
 himself the same passage and various others, also from 
 tragedies of Corneille, imitating with admiration different 
 actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne, in the pompous and inflated 
 manner common at that theatre. After the imaginary poet 
 had recited the first passage, the Palais Eoyal actor, who was 
 doubtless expressing Moliere's personal conviction, says : " But 
 it seems to me that a king, alone with the captain of his 
 guard, would speak in a more humane tone and would not 
 rant like a maniac." The would-be poet (Moliere) answers : 
 " You do not know anything about it. You go and recite as 
 you have done, and you will see if you hear a single bravo." 
 
 These two contrary opinions contain the gist of the matter, 
 and Despois has a good note upon them. He says : " From 
 this it is clear that there were not only two rival troops who 
 
 1 " Deux fois dans la premiere scene (pp. 391-92 et p. 393), une fois dans la 
 scene n. (p. 406)," (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 133 note 3. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 329 
 
 tried to disparage each other, but two different systems of 
 elocution one trying to be natural and simple, the other not 
 afraid of extravagance but looking on it as a sure means of 
 producing effect." 1 Moliere's banter in his Prtcieuses Ridicules 
 against " les grands comediens " was pleasantly covered, but 
 the sting in it was felt. He said there that his own troop 
 were " ignoramuses who recite just as one talks. They do not 
 know how to declaim their lines, nor how to halt at the grand 
 moment. How can one distinguish a fine verse if the actor 
 does not pause and if he does not tell you that there you 
 should sound your bravos ? " In the Impromptu his satire 
 touches the same points, but it is stronger. Moliere's ideas of 
 acting in tragedy were much at variance with those that pre- 
 vailed among the actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne. Theirs 
 were in favour of bombastic utterance, his were for smooth 
 and simple speech. I have said already that according to 
 public opinion at the time tragedy was much better performed 
 at the Hotel de Bourgogne than at either of the other two Paris 
 theatres. None of Moliere's actors were welcomed in tragedy, 
 and after they went from the Petit Bourbon to the Palais Eoyal 
 tragedy was seen less and less often on their stage. In comedy 
 Moliere's acting was always popular, as his rivals found out to 
 their cost, but in tragedy they thought him ridiculous. In the 
 same parts he thought they were absurd. The public were 
 the judges, and they decided against him. 
 
 It must be understood that in the Impromptu de Versailles 
 Moliere and his troop were playing imaginary parts. We are 
 to believe that the dramatist is a poet giving his instructions 
 to a company, of actors newly arrived from the provinces for 
 the play they are to perform before the king. The supposed 
 poet's instructions to the different members of the troop are 
 interesting, as they come from the real Moliere in the form of 
 satire ; but I will give only what he says to du Croisy, who, it 
 is believed, acted Lysidas in the Critique : 
 
 " You represent the poet " [that is the poet in the play, not the 
 author], "and you must identify yourself with the character. You 
 should show that pedantic air which is observed in the best society, 
 that sententious tone of voice and that precise pronunciation which 
 emphasises every syllable and does not omit a single letter from the 
 strictest mode of spelling." 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 398 note 5. 
 
330 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 The rehearsal is about to commence when it is interrupted 
 by an unwelcome intruder. It does begin in scene 3 with 
 Moliere's satire against those who thought he had wished to 
 represent them personally on the stage. At the commence- 
 ment of scene 5 (according to Despois' edition), Mile, de Brie, 
 continuing the rehearsal, says : 
 
 " Would you like, ladies, to hear some fine news 1 Monsieur 
 Lysidas says that a play has been written against Moliere, and that 
 the grands comediens are going to act it. 
 
 "Moliere. 
 
 " Yes ; somebody wanted to read it to me. It is written by one 
 Br Brou Brossaut. 
 
 " Du Croisy. 
 
 " Sir, it is published under the name of Boursault ; but to tell you 
 the secret, many persons have put their hand to this work, and great 
 things are expected from it. As every author and every actor looks 
 upon Moliere as his greatest enemy, we have all set our heads together 
 to put a spoke in his wheel. We all gave a touch to his portrait, but 
 we were careful not to add our names. It would have been too fine 
 a thing for him to sink before the world under the efforts of all 
 Parnassus; and to make his downfall more ignominious we have 
 purposely chosen an author of no reputation. 
 
 " Mile, du Pare. 
 " I confess I am delighted. 
 
 " Moliere. 
 
 " Gad, so am I ! The railer will be paid back in his own coin. 
 He will get something to make his fingers smart." 
 
 The five actresses in the troop show their satisfaction that 
 Moliere is to be well trounced for his impertinent remarks 
 upon women. 
 
 "Du Croisy. 
 
 " This comedy, madam, should be well backed up, and the actors 
 at the Hotel . . . 
 
 "Mile. duParc. 
 
 " Make your mind easy ; they need fear nothing. I will warrant 
 the success of their play, every line of it. 
 
 "Mile. Moliere. 
 
 "You are right, madam. Too many people have an interest in 
 thinking well of it. Can you imagine that all those who think they 
 have been satirised by Moliere will not be ready to revenge themselves 
 by clapping their hands at this play 1 
 
CHAPTEE XIII 331 
 
 " Moliere. 
 
 " Gad ! I am told they are going to crush both him and his 
 comedies, and that actors and authors, from the cedar to the hyssop, 1 
 are devilishly bitter against him. 
 
 "Mile. Moliere. 
 
 "He will get what he deserves. Why does he write paltry 
 comedies that all Paris goes to see, and in which he paints people so 
 well that everybody recognises himself? Why does he not write 
 plays like those of Monsieur Lysidas 1 He would not make an enemy, 
 and all the authors would speak well of him. It is true that such 
 plays do not always draw large audiences j but on the other hand they 
 are always well written, nobody writes against them, and every one 
 who sees them is dying of envy to think them good. 
 
 " Du Croisy. 
 
 " It is true that I have the advantage not to make enemies, and all 
 my works are approved of by the savants. 
 
 "Mile. Moliere. 
 
 " You are right to be satisfied with yourself. That satisfaction is 
 better worth having than all the public applause and all the money 
 gained by Moliere's comedies. What does it matter to you if people 
 go to see your plays, so long as your fellow-authors think well of 
 them ? " 
 
 By the device of the imaginary rehearsal Moliere made all 
 the actors of his troop, who were his friends, repeat what his 
 enemies were saying against him, and he made them say also 
 what he thought of Boursault and his comedy. Later Mile. 
 Bejart interrupts the rehearsal it is in fact now finished 
 and says to Moliere, as author : 
 
 "HI were you I would have taken a different line. Everybody 
 looks for a strong answer from you, and from the way you were 
 spoken of in this play [Le Portrait du Peintre] you have a right to 
 say what you please .against the actors, and you should not spare 
 one of them. 
 
 "Moliere. 
 
 " You madden me to hear you talk like that ; it is the way with all 
 you women. You want me to fly into a passion against them and 
 break out into opprobrious language arid abuse as they do. What 
 should I gain by it, and how much would it annoy them ? Did they 
 not set about all this with a good will? And when they were 
 hesitating whether they should play the Par i rait du Peintre, fearing 
 
 1 Moliere probably meant from the highest to the lowest. Among authors 
 the greatest was, no doubt, Pierre Corneille. (Euvres de Moliere, iii. 420 
 note 3. 
 
332 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 a retort, did not one of them say : ' Let him abuse us as much as he 
 pleases so long as we make our money ' 1 Dees that show a mind 
 very sensitive to reproach? How can I revenge myself upon them 
 by doing what they want me to do 1 
 
 " Mile, de Brie. 
 
 " At the same time, they were very angry at three or four words 
 you said about them in the Critique and in your Prfaieuses. 
 
 " Moliere. 
 
 " Yes, those three or four words gave great offence, and they have 
 good reason to quote them. But that is not it. The worst harm I 
 have done them is that I have had the good fortune to please the 
 public a little more than they like. All their behaviour since we 
 came to Paris shows plainly where the shoe pinches them. But let 
 them do what they will, all their attempts need not make me 
 uneasy. They fall foul of my plays, so much the better ; and God 
 save me from ever writing anything that could please them. It would 
 be a bad look-out for me. 
 
 " Mile, de Brie. 
 "It is not pleasant to see one's work reviled. 
 
 "Moliere. 
 
 "Does that hurt me? Did not my comedy give me all that I 
 expected from it, for it had the good fortune to be acceptable to the 
 august personages whom I am particularly anxious to please. Have 
 I not reason to be satisfied with its fate, and does not their condem- 
 nation come too late ? Does this concern me now ? And when a 
 successful play is censured, does not the criticism censure those who 
 approved of it rather than the skill of him who wrote it ? 
 
 "Mile, de Brie. 
 
 " I would have given something to this little gentleman, the author, 
 who tries to write against people who are not thinking about him. 
 
 " Moliere. 
 
 " You are talking nonsense. Monsieur Boursault would be a nice 
 subject to bring before the court ! It would be making too much of 
 him to ridicule him before an august assembly. He would ask for 
 nothing better. He attacks me with a light heart so that he may 
 make himself known, no matter in what kind of way. He is a man 
 who has nothing to lose, and the actors only set him on at me to 
 entice me into a foolish squabble, and by this means to prevent me 
 from doing other work. And you are all simple enough to fall into 
 the trap ! But now I say publicly, that I do not mean to answer any 
 of their criticisms or counter criticisms. They may say all the harm 
 they please of my plays; I don't care a button. They may take 
 them after we have done with them, they may turn them as one does 
 a coat and put them on their stage, and make any profit they can 
 
CHAPTEE XIII 333 
 
 out of the good things they may find and out of any good fortune I 
 have had. I agree to this, for they have need of it, and I should be 
 glad to help them to get a living provided they will be satisfied with 
 what I can allow them with self-respect. Courtesy must have its 
 limits, and there are things which do not amuse either spectators or 
 him who is spoken about. I will gladly give them my work, my 
 acting, my gestures, my words, the intonation of my voice, and my 
 manner of speaking, to do what they like with them if these things can 
 be of any advantage to them. I say nothing against all this, and I 
 shall be delighted if it will amuse people. But in conceding so 
 much they should do me the favour to let other things alone, and not 
 touch on matters about which I am told they have attacked me in their 
 comedies. I will civilly beg so much of the polite gentleman who 
 interests himself in writing for them, and that is all the answer they 
 will get from me." 
 
 To my mind these last four speeches of Moliere's do not 
 show much self-sufficiency, but they show undeniably that he 
 was very angry. When he found that the actors at the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne, from motives of jealousy against himself, had 
 instigated Boursault to write his play, each of them more or 
 less giving him assistance, he did not scruple to say so and to 
 show his anger before the royal audience at Versailles. He 
 insinuated pretty plainly what is as clear as daylight that 
 the Portrait du Peintre was taken so closely from his Critique 
 de I'lZcole des Femmes that it was like a coat that had been 
 turned ; and Boursault could not repel the charge. More- 
 over, from the latter part of Moliere's last speech it would 
 seem that there were lines in the Portrait du Peintre referring 
 to his own private family affairs. If this be so, Boursault 
 omitted the allusion when he printed his comedy. 1 Boursault 
 may have pleased his friends by what he wrote against 
 Moliere, but one looks in vain now for any strength or wit in 
 his comedy. Moliere, with right on his side, was better armed, 
 and he brought down his whip so that it should sting. To 
 most of his satire no fair objection can be taken, and he was 
 quite justified in what be said against the actors at the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne. But when he made du Croisy say of Boursault : 
 " To make his downfall more ignominious we have purposely 
 chosen an author of no reputation"; when he himself said 
 of Boursault: "Monsieur Boursault would be a nice subject 
 
 1 V. Fournel, Les Contemporains de Moliere, i. 144, middle of note 2 ; 
 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 285. 
 
334 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 to bring before the court ! It would be making too much of 
 him to ridicule him before an august assembly. . . He is a 
 man who has nothing to lose " ; one feels surprised to see such 
 sarcasm coming from a writer who in his ridicule and in his 
 satire always took a high-bred tone which gave no offence and 
 which amused his audience pleasantly. Had Moliere said to 
 Boursault in actual words : " Get away, you wind-bag, you are 
 a cheat," the open charge would have been less objectionable 
 than his cutting personal sarcasm. This is a feature very rare 
 with Moliere ; but here, in his disgust at being treated unfairly, 
 it escaped him. Grimarest says somewhere: " Moliere ^tait 
 vif quand on 1'attaquait," and here we have the clearest in- 
 stance of it in all his comedies. 
 
 Perhaps because the Impromptu de Versailles was the issue 
 of a hot personal wrangle Moliere did not print this comedy. 
 It was printed for the first time by La Grange in 1682. 
 
 Of the plays and other writings that followed Moliere's 
 Impromptu de Versailles? I will only mention one. Antoine 
 Montneury, a son of Zacharie Montfleury, whose acting 
 Moliere had ridiculed, wrote a comedy, L' Impromptu de V Hotel 
 de Condt, which was acted at the Hotel de Bourgogne in 
 November or December 1663. He there satirised Moliere's 
 acting in tragedy, and gave a picture of it which was probably 
 like enough in spite of its hostile caricature. The following 
 extract relates to comedy, and the praise awarded to Moliere 
 in the form of censure shows the animosity against him. Alis, 
 a bookseller, offers to the Marquis plays by different authors. 
 The Marquis refuses Corneille; he disdains Quinault, Bour- 
 sault, Poisson, and Boyer : 
 
 Dites-moi done, Monsieur, afin que je vous vende, 
 De qui vous les voulez. 
 
 " Le Marquis. 
 
 De qui ! Belle demande. 
 De Moliere, morbleu ! de Moliere, de lui, 
 De lui, de cet auteur burlesque d'aujourd'hui, 
 De ce daubeur de moeurs, qui, sans aucun scrupule, 
 Fait un portrait naif de chaque ridicule ; 
 De ce fleau des cocus, de ce bouffon du temps, 
 De ce he>os de farce acharne sur les gens, 
 
 1 Their titles are given by M. Louis Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 1st ed. 
 vn. 470-72 ; see also the bibliography to the (Euvres de Moliere (compiled 
 by M. Desfeuilles), xi. 129, 130. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 335 
 
 Dont pour peindre les moeurs la veine est si savante 
 Qu'il parait tout semblable a ceux qu'il represente. 
 
 ... II faut que tout cede au bouffon d'aujourd'hui ; 
 Sur mon ame a present on ne rit que chez lui, 
 Car pour le serieux a quoi 1' Hotel l s'applique 
 II fait, quand on y va, qu'on ne rit qu'au comique. 
 Mais au Palais Royal, quand Moliere est des deux, 
 On rit dans le comique et dans le serieux." 2 
 
 In the rest of the play the satire is in the same tone. 
 Nevertheless, Montfleury's comedy is the most readable of all 
 those written at this time against Moliere. 
 
 It is impossible in reading the plays in this dispute not to 
 see that Moliere's line of thought was higher, more manly and 
 more honest than that of his opponents. In the way of 
 argument his two plays show some comedy and some wit, 
 though in the last one there is some unpleasant temper ; his 
 adversaries could only laugh at his acting in tragedy as he 
 had laughed at theirs, and the absolute flatness of their comedy, 
 relieved only by anger, shows that they were fighting a losing 
 battle. One other remark may be made. The asperity with 
 which Moliere was pursued, because of the success of the 
 j&cole des Femmes, was not unlike the angry fuss made by 
 Eichelieu, nearly thirty years before, when Corneille's Cid 
 created an enthusiasm such as had never been seen before on 
 the French stage, and which was never surpassed in the 17th 
 century. Richelieu was annoyed at Corneille's great triumph, 
 and unwisely told the members of the French Academy to 
 write a criticism on the play. Against their better judgment 
 they had to do as they were bidden. In 1667 Boileau said in 
 his ninth Satire : 
 
 " En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue ; 
 Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Eodrigue. 
 L' Academic en corps a beau le censurer, 
 Le public reVolte s'obstine a 1'admirer." 
 
 Rival authors were jealous of Corneille, and Richelieu took 
 their part ; wiseacres abused Moliere, and rival actors upheld 
 them : in both cases the public sided with the dramatists, and 
 still continue to do so. 
 
 1 L'Hotel de Bourgogne. 
 
 2 g c 3 t M. Fournel has given this comedy in vol. i. 239-60 of his 
 Contemporains de Moliere ; and his notes are worth reading, especially those 
 to sc. 4. 
 
336 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 The Mariage Ford was acted for the first time at the Louvre 
 on the 29th of January 1664 ; it was given at the Palais Eoyal 
 theatre on the 15th of February. This was the second of the 
 comedies-ballets that Moliere wrote to please the king and his 
 royal guests ; and before the performance the king declared his 
 intention of taking a part in the ballet. Louis xiv. danced as 
 an Egyptian in the second entree. The short play was at first 
 divided into three acts, and at the end of each there was music 
 and dancing. Lulli composed the music ; Beauchamps devised 
 the ballet, and he may have written some of the airs. 1 
 
 As Moliere was told to write a play, to be acted before the 
 court, he was bound to be amusing ; but the seriousness of his 
 nature made him try to show a purpose in his amusement. 
 The Mariage Forct is an instance which shows how well in 
 his smaller plays Moliere formed his lightly drawn characters, 
 how he sketched their main features in broad outline, giving a 
 few peculiar and distinctive touches to each ; and the cunning 
 way in which he mixed farce .and comedy together, dove- 
 tailing one into the other with wonderful instinct. The play 
 was written after a short notice, it was intended as a piece of 
 drollery ; and Moliere did not fear to put before the king an 
 example of the light comedy or farce improved, no doubt, and 
 free from coarseness that had been common on the stage in 
 France in his own boyish days. Some of his editors have 
 shown that he was indebted to Eabelais, and it has been said 
 here already that the Italian troops of 'actors in Paris had 
 taught him that in light plays quick movement of thought 
 and open and easy action should be prominent features. Two 
 hundred and fifty and three hundred years ago, audiences in 
 theatres were more amused than they are now with thin 
 conceits drawn out at great length, or with verbal disputations 
 showing puns or quibbles. There are instances of this in 
 Shakespeare, and in Moliere's shorter plays in prose there are 
 examples of antiquated wit given with much verbiage. At 
 the same time, a plea may be put forward for the farce in the 
 Mariage Forct, for underlying it there is the sense and meaning 
 of laughable comedy; and the farce was intended to amuse 
 an audience not disposed to be critical. The chief personages 
 are Sganarelle, a stupid rich man, cowardly and selfish, but 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 12 and note 2 ; 74 note 4. 
 
CHAPTEE XIII 337 
 
 otherwise without much harm in him ; and Pancrace and 
 Marphurius, two would-be philosophers. The play is chiefly 
 remembered because of the scenes in which these three men 
 appear. Moliere wished to show the silliness of a well-to-do 
 dunderhead, and the nonsense spoken by two pseudo-philoso- 
 phers, so he brought them together and let thein talk in their 
 own way. 
 
 Pancrace, a follower of Aristotle, is beside himself with rage 
 because an ignorant fellow, who did not know that form refers 
 to bodies that have life and shape to bodies that have no life, 
 spoke in public of the form of a hat instead of the shape of a hat ! 
 Sganarelle stands aghast with his eyes and his mouth open ; 
 his bewilderment at seeing a man, reputed for his learning, 
 wild with fury because somebody had said the form of a hat 
 instead of the shape of a hat, is really amusing. A good deal 
 of the actor's art depends upon knowing how to listen. 
 Whether Sganarelle or Pancrace is the bigger fool may be 
 doubted, but each is full of his own thoughts, and the folly of 
 one is used as a set-off against that of the other. Later, 
 Marphurius, a disciple of Pyrrho, who doubts of everything, 
 corrects Sganarelle for saying "I have come to see you" instead 
 of "it seems that I have come to see you." Sganarelle had 
 wished to ask Marphurius whether he would do well to marry ; 
 he is very patient, but can get nothing out of the philosopher 
 except uncertainties. At last he takes a stick and gives him 
 a good drubbing, and says : " Correct, if you please, this 
 manner of talking. We ought to doubt of everything; and 
 you should not say ' I have beaten you/ but ' it seems that I 
 have beaten you.' " 
 
 In ridiculing Pancrace and Marphurius, Moliere had no in- 
 tention of bringing philosophical questions before his audience. 
 That was not his province. But it was quite open to him to 
 satirise pedants who wished to have the reputation of men of 
 learning men who when they had acquired some philoso- 
 phical terms were proud of using them, though they did not 
 know that philosophy is only a word to express the habit of 
 thinking and acting wisely and well. Moliere's object was to 
 show that the science of his Pancrace and Marphurius lay in 
 verbal disputes, and that they were ignorant of the aim or end 
 of philosophy. Such men were more common then than now. 
 
 Y 
 
338 
 
 LIFE OF MOLlftEE 
 
 The dramatist wanted to ridicule them, and to do so he 
 allowed himself to take some bad instances of the effects of 
 scholastic jargon. And his scenes are not so exaggerated as to be 
 beyond a fair comic caricature of what such men were. Moliere 
 did not laugh at philosophy, but at the pretentiousness of 
 those who wished to ape its teaching and who wanted to make 
 a show of small knowledge while the better and larger part 
 was lacking. A very large part of the meaning in Moliere's 
 comedies is satire against the world's humbug. Taking the 
 Mariage Forct in connection with his other plays and concili- 
 ating their meaning generally, it does not appear that he made 
 light of learning or that he wished to belittle its professors. 
 He knew too well what learning meant, and his mind was too 
 reverential. When Pascal said, " Se moquer de la philosophic 
 c'est vraiment philosopher," he meant that there was a vast 
 deal more bad philosophy written and spoken in the world 
 than good. Moliere thought so too ; and in bringing before us 
 in this little play a foolish disciple of Aristotle and another of 
 Pyrrho he had no wish to pit one master or one creed against 
 the other. He did want to show that each ignorant champion 
 of his cause, by vaunting the little that he had learned, talks 
 rubbish. It would have been beyond Moliere's function as a 
 comic dramatist to do more. 1 
 
 I shall say nothing of the other personages in the comedy, 
 though the way in which the forced marriage was accom- 
 plished is amusing. When the play first appeared in public 
 it was given " avec le ballet et les ornements " which had been 
 seen at court, but the daily expenses of the little comedy were 
 so great that after twelve performances it was withdrawn. 
 The play was not acted again until February 1668, when it 
 was given with Amphitryon, as an after-piece ; but then " sans 
 le ballet et ses ornements." A few days before its revival 
 Moliere printed his comedy, and the play which had been 
 divided into three acts was reduced into one. The ballet was 
 omitted and a little alteration was made in the text. Because 
 of these alterations and of some changes in the members of the 
 troop at the Palais Eoyal it would be tedious to mention the 
 
 ie dans les commies de Moliere, read by 
 
 the ReZp.rrn n f^ d ^ Fra e u ^ ItWaS P rinted ^ the Institut al * in 
 ie Kevu ire, 26th October 1872 (2* serie, 2 annee No 17) 
 
CHAPTER XIII 339 
 
 names of the actors who took the different parts in the Mariage 
 Force. Moliere, however, played the part of his own Sganarelle. 
 At Easter 1664 Brecourt, who had played so well the parts 
 of Alain in the Ecole des Femmes and of Dorante in the Critique, 
 left his theatre and went to the Hotel de Bourgogne. He was 
 an excellent actor, but his nature was quarrelsome, and ap- 
 parently he had a dispute with Moliere. His place was filled 
 by Hubert, who came from the Theatre du Marais. The new 
 recruit was a good actor ; some of his roles were those that 
 should have been played by women, but he did not at first, as 
 has been often thought, play the part of Madame Pernelle in 
 the Tartuffe. In the autumn of this year the troop lost one of 
 their oldest friends, du Pare, who had very likely joined 
 Moliere's company at AIM in 1647. Jal says that du Pare 
 died on the 28th of October, and quotes some words from the 
 register of a church in Paris showing that he was buried on 
 the 29th. 1 But La Grange wrote: "Mardi 4 Novembre on ne 
 joua point a cause de la mort de M. du Pare " ; and he placed 
 a diamond-shaped black lozenge in his diary as a mark of 
 sorrow for the event. 
 
 In the early part of 1664 Moliere was at work upon the 
 Tartuffe, but he had to lay this aside for a while because he 
 received an order from the king to write a play for another 
 court rejoicing ; and on the 8th of May La Princesse d' Elide, 
 "comedie galante melee de musique et d'entrees de ballet," 
 was performed for the first time at Versailles. The notice 
 given to Moliere was a short one, and he had not time nor 
 inclination ^afterwards to finish his play as apparently he had 
 at first intended. One act and one scene only are in verse, 
 and what remains in prose of the five acts shows that he was 
 much hurried in his work. This court fete was known as 
 " Les Plaisirs de 1'Ile Enchantee." It lasted nominally for 
 three days, but the festivities were continued for four days 
 longer altogether from the 7th of May to the 13th. The 
 four additional days were called " Les fetes de Versailles." 
 Moliere's new play was mixed up with the general amusement 
 and made part of it. 2 On the second day of the fete, the 8th 
 of May, the Princesse d Elide was performed ; 3 on the fifth day, 
 
 1 Dictionnaire, 936 col. 2. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 107. See the two last lines of the note on this 
 page and the continuation of the note on p. 108. 3 Ibid. iv. 127. 
 
340 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 the llth of May, the Fdcheux; on the sixth day, the 12th, the 
 first three acts of the Tartu/e ; and on the seventh, the Manage 
 Forc<P So that the members of the troop at the Palais Royal 
 theatre were called upon to take a large part in the work for the 
 royal entertainment. La Grange records that they left Paris for 
 Versailles on the last day in April and that they remained 
 there until the 22nd of May. 2 They received from the king a 
 gratification of 4000 livres. This was to be divided among the 
 troop in equal shares ; but Moliere, as author of the new play, 
 received an additional present of 2000 livres. 3 
 
 For any meaning to be gathered from the Princesse d" Elide 
 the comedy was intended to show very lightly how a beautiful 
 princess disdained all her suitors, though of three princes there 
 was one she was fond of; and how this prince, in his turn, 
 though he loves his haughty charmer, announced that he was 
 going to marry one of her cousins. The "genre noble" in 
 comedy was turned into a kind of masquerade. With this idea, 
 if Moliere had been given more time, he might by his ridicule 
 have shown some good fun ; but the only amusing personage 
 in the play is Moron, a sort of Sganarelle turned into a court 
 jester. Most of the plays that Moliere wrote for the court 
 festivities are amusing or interesting in the satire shown, but 
 the Princesse d'filide does not appear to be one of them. Yet 
 when it was put on the stage at the Palais Eoyal on the 9th of 
 November following it was acted twenty-five times with good 
 receipts. The music and dancing that accompanied the play 
 were no doubt the reasons for its success. The list of the 
 actors who played in the various parts is to be found in most 
 good editions of Moliere. This was taken from the livret of 
 the comedie-ballet which was given to the spectators of the 
 performance at Versailles. 
 
 The first edition of the Princesse d' Elide was printed with 
 the official narrative of "Les Plaisirs de rile Enchantee," in 
 1664, but without further date. Three other editions of the 
 play, published in Moliere's lifetime, were printed in the same 
 way. 4 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 228-232. 
 
 ' 2 Jtegistre, 65. A small mistake of La Grange's here should be noticed. 
 He said that the Princesse d' Elide was performed on the 6th of May, but the 
 date was the 8th (P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 305 note). 
 Emile Campardon, Nouvelles Pieces sur Moliere. 41 
 
 4 (Auvres de Moliere, iv. 98 ; xi. 16, 17. 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 
 
 LE TARTUFFE 
 
 LE TARTUFFE aroused very strong animosities, and some- 
 thing should be said of the difficulties Moliere had to un- 
 dergo before Louis xiv. gave him permission to put his play 
 on the stage. An explanation should also be given of the 
 principal personage in the comedy, for though most of us 
 know that Tartuffe was a hypocrite, he belonged to a class of 
 men which we are not familiar with in England. 
 
 As was said at the end of the last chapter, the first three 
 acts of the Tartuffe were played before the king at Versailles 
 on the 12th of May 1664. On the 29th of November in the 
 same year the whole play was performed for the first time at 
 Eaincy, near Paris, by the invitation of the Prince de Conde*. 
 The first time the play was acted in public was at the Palais 
 Eoyal theatre on the 5th of August 1667 ; but the next day 
 future performances of the comedy were forbidden. At last, 
 the comedy was put on the stage at the Palais Eoyal on the 
 5th of February 1669, and it was played afterwards without 
 further hindrance. 1 Thus, some editors of Moliere have 
 given the year 1669 as the date of the Tartuffe, others 1667, 
 and M. Mesnard says that 1664 was its real date. 2 
 
 For biographical purposes I have thought it best to consider 
 the play as written in 1664, though the dramatist meant it for 
 the public and it was not acted in public till 1667 ; then only 
 one performance was given, and the ban against it was not 
 taken off until 1669. In_speaking si the Fm'tuffe-ss 'though 
 it belonged to the yearJ664, the author's ideas will be best 
 understood. There are chronological objections to this course, 
 and doubtless alterations were made in the comedy before it 
 was finally given to the public, but I do not think these were 
 of a radical kind. Moliere had great tenacity of purpose, and 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 270. 2 Ibid. 272. 
 
 341 
 
342 LIFE OF 
 
 when he had once made up his mind about a thing he did not 
 change his opinions easily. When Louis xiv. saw the first 
 three acts of the Tartufe at Versailles in May 1664, he re- 
 fused to allow the play to be acted in public; nine months 
 later in February 1665, Moliere brought out his Don Juan at 
 the Palais Eoyal theatre. When Moliere found that his 
 picture of a hypocrite was forbidden, he set to work to give a 
 picture of an atheist. ThgJ|gqgg_was written in verse, it 
 belongs essentially to high comeHy"; 'Don Juan, its counter- 
 part, was written in prose, and chougn tne comedy in the 
 latter play had a very serious meaning, it is funnier than in 
 the other and shown in a more popular manner. Don Juan, 
 too, is less open to misconstruction if it is considered as 
 written after the Tartufe. 
 
 The king's prohibition of the Tartu/e was probably given 
 on the day or day but one after the performance of the first 
 three acts of the comedy at Versailles. 1 The prohibition was 
 printed some time later in the same year, in the official 
 description of Les Plaisirs de rile EnchanUe in the narrative 
 of what took place on the 12th of May, the sixth day of the 
 fetes at Versailles : 
 
 " In the evening was played before his Majesty a comedy called 
 Tartuffe, which le sieur de Moliere had written against hypocrites. 
 But although the play was thought to be very entertaining, the king 
 knew there was so much conformity between those whom a sincere 
 devotion puts on the road to heaven and those whom a hollow show 
 of good works does not prevent from committing bad actions, that his 
 extreme delicacy in matters of religion would not allow this resem- 
 blance between vice and virtue, which might be taken one for the 
 other; and although the good intentions of the author were not 
 questioned, he [the king] nevertheless forbade the play to be given 
 in public and deprived himself of this pleasure so that others might 
 not be deceived who were less capable of good discernment." 2 
 
 This is carefully chosen language, and M. Mesnard thinks 
 that Moliere may have had a hand in it, even though it was 
 subjected afterwards to examination. 3 But the Gazette, a 
 semi-official, semi-court newspaper, never friendly to Moliere, 
 
 * (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 280 ; L. Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 1st ed. iv. 384. 
 ' 2 The prohibition is given in many editions of Moliere. M. Mesnard has 
 
 given it in vol. iv. 231, 232; Taschereau, 5th ed. iii. 108; M. Moland, 1st 
 ed. iii. 331. 
 
 * (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 92 and note 1. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 343 
 
 wrote of the performance of the Tartufe at Versailles in a 
 different tone; and in its number of the 17th of May 1664 
 said that Louis xiv., as eldest son of the Church, forbade the 
 representation of " a stage play called L' Hypocrite, which his 
 Majesty, fully enlightened in everything, considered to be 
 absolutely injurious to religion and capable of producing very 
 dangerous consequences." l 
 
 In his first petition to the king, Moliere, alluding to the pro- 
 hibition to play the comedy in public, says : "Your Majesty 
 found no fault in this comedy." Now, I do not believe that 
 in addressing the king Moliere would have used these words 
 unless he had thought they were true. And Boileau's opinion, 
 as given by Brossette, seems to have been that Louis xiv. 
 thought there was no great harm in the play. Brossette was 
 not born till 1671; but in 1702, nine years before Boileau's 
 death, he wrote some notes of what he had heard from Boileau 
 or Despreaux, as he was often called by his contemporaries. 
 What Brossette says in these notes is worth reading : 
 
 "... M. Despreaux spoke to me at length about Moliere's 
 Tartufe. When Moliere wrote his Tartufe, he recited to the king 
 the first three acts." [Brossette used here the word " recita," but 
 there is little doubt that he alluded to the performance at Versailles.] 
 " This pleased his Majesty, who spoke of it too highly not to irritate 
 the party of devots. M. de Perefixe, Archbishop of Paris, put him- 
 self at their head and spoke to the king against this comedy. The 
 king, pressed several times on the matter, said to Moliere, that he 
 must not irritate the devots who were an implacable people, and 
 therefore he could not be allowed to play his Tartufe in public. . . ." 2 
 
 Unless Moliere knew that Louis had been personally 
 favourable to his comedy he would not, on the 5th of February 
 1669, have addressed a third petition to his Majesty asking a 
 favour for the son of a friend in a tone of gracious banter ; 
 nor would he have told a piquant story at the end of his 
 preface to the first edition of his comedy, printed in the 
 following month : 
 
 "A week after it [the Tartufe] was forbidden a play called 
 Scaramoucke Ermite was acted at court, and the king as he left the 
 theatre said to the great prince I have just alluded to [Conde] : 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 232, end of note 2 ; Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 
 5th ed. 101. 
 
 2 A. Laverdet, Correspondence entre Boileau et Brossette, 563, 564. 
 
344 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 'I should like to know why people who are so greatly scandalised at 
 Moliere's comedy say nothing about Scaramouche. The prince 
 answered : 'The reason is that Scaramouche laughs at heaven and at 
 religion about which these gentlemen care nothing, and that Mo here s 
 confedy laughs at the men themselves, and that they will not 
 tolerate.' " 
 
 Scaramouche Ermite, a small imprinted comedy, is saidjo 
 have been licentious,but can we besure that those who 
 "enjoyed its iinirioraTTty"were also those who were violent 
 against the Tartuffel Nevertheless, the Prince de Conde 
 expressed broadly the secret opinions of many who were 
 hostile to Moliere's comedy. There is reason to think that 
 the king would have allowed Moliere to bring out his play if, 
 as head of the State, he had not been surrounded by men 
 whom the poet, in addressing his Majesty, boldly called " les 
 Tartuffes." This he did as early as August 1664 in his first 
 petition, and again later in his second petition in August 
 1667. Louis in his own mind thought that Moliere, as one 
 who knew the world, would be able to form a pretty good 
 opinion as to the honesty or dishonesty of religious guides ; 
 and the king, from what he had seen of Moliere's comedies, 
 was prepared to believe that the poet had not drawn an 
 unjust picture. In a word, I imagine thatJLouis xiv^fcrusted 
 more in Moliere's judgment than in that of his counsellors. 
 And from the tone of Moliere's three petitions to the king, in 
 whidTHe was bold but never disrespectful, onelsTeoVtothink 
 that he knew what was passing in the king's mind. Moliere 
 felt that Louis, if he had been allowed to have his own way, 
 would have sanctioned the performance of his comedy, but 
 that the king had to listen to objections made against the 
 play, and that he could not do quite as he liked. 
 
 While strong feeling was growing among the church party 
 against the performance of the comedy, one Pierre Eoulle,' a 
 doctor of the Sorbonne and a cure* of St. Barthelemy, a church 
 in Paris, wrote and published a pamphlet Le Eoi Glorieux au 
 Monde. After referring to the king's prohibition, he says : 
 
 " A man, or rather a demon clothed in the flesh and dressed as a 
 man, and the most notorious profaner and libertine the world has 
 seen, has been so impious as to send forth from his diabolical brain 
 a play now ready to be shown in public on the stage, scoffing at the 
 whole Church. He jeers at its most sacred character and its most 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 345 
 
 divine function . . . the leading and directing of souls and families 
 by wise guides and holy conductors." l 
 
 The cure' of St. Barthelemy, like many others, misjudged 
 Moliere's meaning and the purport of his comedy. He 
 imagined that churchmen generally were vilified, and he wrote 
 wildly as his inclinations prompted him. But he was right in 
 understanding that the comedy was an attack on the spiritual 
 directors of conscience. Of these men I shall say something 
 later. M. Mesnard thinks that Koulle wrote his pamphlet at 
 the end of July or in the first half of August 1664 ; 2 and that 
 it was in the same month of August that Moliere presented to 
 the king his first petition in favour of his comedy. 3 
 
 Moliere, in this petition, after alluding to " all the studied 
 grimaces of those outrageously good persons, all the underhand 
 tricks of those false coiners of devotion, who wish to ensnare 
 men by counterfeit zeal and sophistical charity," says that he 
 intended to draw a thorough-paced hypocrite so that there 
 should be no mistake about the man's evil designs. He tells 
 the king " the Tartuffes have secretly been artful enough to 
 find favour with your Majesty, and the models have caused 
 the copy to be suppressed " ; he says that his misfortune was 
 softened by the manner in which the king had refused to 
 allow the play to be acted, adding that his Majesty had the 
 goodness to say that "he found no fault in the comedy." 
 Moliere alludes to a reading he had given of the Tartuffe 
 before the papal legate and Eoman bishops, and says that they 
 had approved of his work. 4 And he speaks of Eoulle's pam- 
 phlet as though he had read it, for he says in evident allusion 
 to it : " My comedy, though it has not been seen, is diabolical, 
 and my brains are diabolical. I am a demon clothed in the 
 flesh dressed as a man, a libertine, an impious personage who 
 deserves exemplary punishment. It is not enough that flames 
 should publicly atone for my offence, for I should be let off 
 too easily. The charitable zeal of this gallant man does not 
 stop there ; he will not allow that I may find mercy before 
 God ; he is determined that I must be damned, and there is an 
 end of the matter." 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 283 ; Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 5th ed. 161 ; 
 Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 1st ed. iv. 388. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 285. 3 Ibid. 385, 386, in the footnote. 
 4 But see M. Mesnard's note here : (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 388 note 6. 
 
346 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 Louis xiv. may or may not have been a good judge as to 
 whether the Tartuffe should be acted on the public stage, but 
 it is clear from the tone of the petition that the poet believed 
 that the king was personally favourable to him. In his 
 pamphlet Eoulld said that Louis had ordered Moliere's comedy 
 to be burned, but it is not likely that Louis gave such an 
 order. It is more probable that the king said that the cure 
 should be told to keep his temper cool. And there is some 
 reason to think that at Moliere's request Roulle's pamphlet 
 was suppressed. 1 The cure of Si. Barthelemy died in 1666, 
 before the Tartu/e appeared on the stage in Paris. 
 
 Though performances of the Tartufe were forbidden in 
 public there were a few representations of the play before 
 royal or semi-royal audiences. 2 Therefore, among the nobility, 
 a good many must have seen Moliere's comedy acted on a 
 private stage. And the poet was permitted to read his play 
 at some private houses. Boileau in his third satire, written 
 in 1665, relates how a coxcomb, in inviting a friend to dine 
 with him, promised a reading of the Tartuffe : 
 
 " Et Moliere avec Tartuffe y doit jouer son role." 
 
 It has been said that Moliere gave several readings of his 
 play ; but very few have been recorded, and to those of 
 which mention has been made no exact date can be fixed. 
 M. Mesnard would put the reading at the house of Mile. 
 Ninon de Lenclos either a few days before the performance 
 of the comedy at the Palais Koyal in August 1667, or else 
 early in 1669; but he says that Sainte-Beuve thought this 
 reading was the first of all. 3 
 
 At the single performance of the Tartuffe at the Palais 
 Eoyal theatre on the 5th of August 1667, the comedy was 
 played under the title of L'Imposteur, and Tartuffe himself 
 was called Panulphe. La Grange recorded the single repre- 
 sentation, 4 and called the play by the name its author had 
 first given to it. The king was then with his army in 
 Flanders, and in his absence M. de Lamoignon, the first 
 president of the Parliament of Paris, which was the highest 
 law court in France, forbade future performances of the play 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 285, 286. 2 Ibid. iv. 270, 293. 
 
 3 Ibid. iv. 288, 289. 4 Registre ^ 89- 
 
CHAPTER XIV 347 
 
 until the king should order otherwise. After chronicling the 
 representation of the comedy, La Grange added that on the 
 8th of the month he and La Thorilliere (both members of the 
 troop) went to Flanders to see the king on the matter of the 
 prohibition. The king sent them word " that on his return 
 he would have the play of the Tartuffe examined and that we 
 should act it." The two emissaries took with them Moliere's 
 second petition to the king ; and in the second paragraph of 
 this petition there are passages that have been much 
 noticed : 
 
 "My comedy, Sire, has not been allowed to enjoy the advantages 
 that your Majesty was willing to show to it. I gained nothing by 
 bringing it out under the title of L'Imposteur and by disguising the 
 personage in the dress of a man of the world. It was to no purpose 
 that I gave him a small hat, long hair, a wide collar, a sword, and that 
 lace was put all over his coat " [this refers of course to changes of 
 costume on the stage] ; " that I softened the play in several places, and 
 that I carefully cut out everything I thought might furnish a shadow 
 of a pretext to the celebrated models of the character I wished to draw. 
 All this availed nothing. . . . My comedy had no sooner appeared 
 than it was struck as with a thunderbolt by a power that should com- 
 mand respect ; and all that I could do to save myself from the fury of 
 the storm was to say that your Majesty had the goodness to allow me 
 to have the play acted, and that I did not think it necessary to ask for 
 this permission from others since it was only your Majesty who had 
 forbidden it." 
 
 When Moliere told the king in this petition that M. de 
 Lamoignon's prohibition of his play scandalised all Paris, he 
 chose to ignore the opinions of men in authority and of those 
 who thought that authority must be right. He knew that 
 officialism in Paris was all-powerful, but he felt with the 
 people who frequently found it vexatious. In advocating his 
 own cause he thought he was speaking truly ; he was en- 
 deavouring to persuade the king that the order against him 
 
 was unjust, and he begged his Majesty to revoke it Mpj^re /V^ 
 
 wrote his comedy to show that religious lying is the worst-- .."- 
 form of intellectual poisoning; and he believed that "the y 
 most scrupulous minded " and " persons of well-known right- 
 eousness " thought that he had done no wrong, and that they 
 were "scandalised" at the animosity shown against the 
 performance of his play. 
 
 Moliere's word is the only authority which tells that the 
 
348 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 king had the goodness to allow him to have the Tartuffe acted 
 in public ; but it has been supposed that the permission was 
 given verbally before the king went to Flanders in the month 
 of May, and that the leave was granted on the condition that 
 changes were made in the comedy. 1 M. Mesnard thinks that 
 the permission was not so complete as Moliere imagined it to 
 be. That may be so ; yet I do not believe that in addressing 
 the king Molicre, who has never been accused of shiftiness, 
 would have urged his Majesty's permission unless it had been 
 granted. It may be asked why, if- the king had said as early 
 as the month of May (1677) that the Tartuffe might be acted, 
 the representation of the comedy should have been delayed 
 until August ? In the spring of that year Moliere was very 
 ill, and in April there was a report that he was going to die. 2 
 Two months later he was able to reappear on the stage, but 
 he was probably still weak, and the rehearsals of the comedy 
 had to be completed before the play could be given to the 
 public. 
 
 Nobody can tell what were the changes in the text of the 
 play before the one public representation in August 1667. 
 But at that representation Tartuffe's costume had been 
 changed ; and if it could be shown plainly what this had 
 been at the three court performances prior to the single per- 
 formance at the Palais Royal, more than idle curiosity would 
 be satisfied. Moliere, in his second petition to the king, said 
 that he had " disguised his personage as a man of the world." 
 It may be assumed, therefore, that Tartuffe was not repre- 
 sented as "a man of the world " before August 1667. There 
 are various lines in the comedy, as we have it now, showing 
 that Tartuffe, before Orgon relieved him from his distress 
 that is, before he appears on the stage was very poorly clad ; 
 and his dress at the court performances may, likely enough, 
 as M. Mesnard supposes, 3 have been not at all that of " a man 
 of the world," but rather that of humble poverty, and it may 
 also have indicated that he was connected with the Church in 
 a humble capacity. I take this idea gladly, but I am inclined 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 311, 312; x. 376-8; Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 
 3rd eel. 120, 121 ; 5th ed. 163 ; ouis Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 1st ed. 
 iv. 391. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 311 ; L. Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 1st ed. vol. i. 
 p. cci. 
 
 3 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 325. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 349 
 
 to think that the alteration in Tartuffe's costume was more 
 nominal than real. There is no evidence to show that his 
 dress was, at any performance, changed during the repre- 
 sentation of the play. Before the representation on the 
 5th of August 1667 he bore signs of poverty; on that day, 
 1 and afterwards, of affluence. But in spite of his sword, his 
 small hat, his long hair, and his lace, those persons who knew 
 how well-to-do men connected with the Church were dressed 
 would not be altogether deceived by his costume. I do 
 not think that from first -to last Moliere made any radical 
 difference in the character of his personage. There are strong 
 indications in the play that Tartuffe was meant to show a 
 director of conscience, and it is not to be supposed that he 
 was dressed in gaudy colours even though Moliere had " dis- x 
 guised his personage as a man of the world." The idea that 
 Tartuffe was ever meant to show a man in priest's orders may 
 be set aside as impossible. 
 
 It must have gone across the grain with Moliere to alter 
 the title of his play and the name of its chief personage. The 
 word " Tartuffe " had a significance in the public mind, and 
 the dramatist could not have made the change willingly. 
 Taschereau tells us that in those days men still said " truffer " 
 for " tromper " ; and he adds that in a book printed in Paris 
 in 1505 a certain chapter was headed "Des Truffes ou Tar- 
 tuffes." Etymologically, and in a popular sense, " un tartuffe " 
 meant " un trompeur." l Moliere, therefore, did not coin the 
 word, he did better : he took an old French word with a well- 
 accepted meaning. The word " Tartuffe " is sometimes printed 
 with only one /. But, according to M. Mesnard, on the title- 
 page and in the preface to the first edition of the play there 
 are two f's ; also in the second edition, which followed some 
 seven weeks later, and which contains the author's three 
 petitions to the king, the letter / is always doubled, as : 
 " Tartuffe." 
 
 For the remainder of Boileau's account of M. de Lamoignon's 
 interdiction of the Tartuffe I must refer the reader to the 
 continuation of Brossette's notes, 2 from which a quotation was 
 made a few pages back. We read in these notes that Moliere 
 
 1 Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 126 ; 5th ed. 168 ; (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 312 
 note 2 ; and M. Moland's (Euvres de Moliere, 1st ed. iv. 383. 
 
 J A. Laverdet, Correspondance entre Boileau et Brossette, 564. 565. 
 
350 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 went with Boileau to see the first president, who said to the 
 dramatist : 
 
 " With all the good will I have towards you I cannot allow you to 
 play your comedy. I am persuaded that it is very good and very 
 edifying, but it does not become comedians to instruct men on matters 
 of Christian morals and on religion ; the stage is not the place to 
 preach the Gospel." 
 
 At the end of these notes Boileau is made to say that " all 
 Moliere's anger fell upon the Archbishop (de Perefixfi), whom 
 he considered as the head of the faction of the devots who 
 were hostile to him." It may be guessed that this last 
 opinion of Boileau's came from Moliere himself. 
 
 At the performance of the Tartuffe on the 5th of August 
 1667 there was some one present who wrote a detailed account 
 of the play as he saw it then. This account, in the form of a 
 Lettre sur la Come'die de I'lmposteur, bears at the end the date 
 of 20th of August 1667. It was printed in that year, though 
 nobody knows where; and certainly once more, in 1668, 
 before the interdiction was taken off the comedy. Nobody 
 knows, too, who wrote this Letter. It has been attributed to 
 Moliere himself, but it is more generally thought that the 
 style is not such as might have been expected from him. And 
 it is exceedingly unlikely that Moliere would have published 
 an anonymous dissertation upon his own comedy. For myself, 
 I am inclined to suspect de Vise to be the author, as I sus- 
 pected him of having written the arguments to Sganarelle ou 
 le Cocu Imaginaire. Unless I am mistaken, the arguments at 
 the head of each scene of Sganarelle, La Lettre sur la Come'die 
 de I'lmposteur, and La Lettre sur la Come'die du Misanthrope 
 this last was known to be by de Vise* bear a likeness in the 
 lines of thought which shows that the three bits of criticism 
 probably came from the same hand. It is known too that 
 de Vise* criticised the ficole des Femmes just after it appeared 
 on the stage. It was not common in those days for a man to 
 rush into print, saying what he thought of a new play and 
 give the reasons for his opinions. De Vise had done so in at 
 least two instances. However all this may be, the Lettre sur 
 la Comedie de I'lmposteur gives an idea of the comedy when it 
 was first acted at the Palais Eoyal theatre ; and, if one chooses 
 to take the trouble to make comparisons, it seems to show 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 351 
 
 some at least of the alterations made in the text of the 
 play between August 1667 and February 1669. Nothing 
 material to the character of the play was changed. The most 
 important alterations were in the first act; and in the last 
 scene there Moliere made an alteration in his text, or probably 
 an addition to it. 1 It would seem very likely that he wished 
 to refute the condemnation of his play by the Archbishop of 
 Paris this will be mentioned immediately; and that when 
 he spoke, as plainly as words can speak, of the difference 
 between real and sham devotion he made Cleante the mouth- 
 piece of his own feelings. 
 
 M. de Lamoignon's prohibition gave Moliere a severe blow, 
 but a worse one was to follow. A few days after the dramatist 
 had sent his second petition to the king there came an ecclesi- 
 astioal mandate that seemed to crush his last hope of being 
 allowed to bring out his play. On the llth of August 
 Hardouin de Perefixe, Archbishop of Paris, published a decree 
 setting forth that a comedy under the new name of Llm- 
 posteur had been acted at one of the theatres in Paris " a 
 very dangerous comedy, and which is all the more likely to 
 be prejudicial to religion because, under the pretext of con- 
 demning hypocrisy or false devotion, it tends to accuse 
 indifferently of these faults all those who profess the most 
 earnest piety, and thus it exposes them to the railleries and 
 continual calumnies of libertines."^ ^Whether well foirndprl ' 
 or not, this was the real cause for hostility against the play. 
 It was not Tartuffe's villainy that was condemned ; but his \ 
 
 seeming righteousness was thought to be a satire on truly ' 
 righteous people, and his seeming righteousness made dupes 
 of good men and they were ridiculed because of their goodness. 
 The Archbishop felt so strongly on the matter that he forbade 
 any acting or reading of the comedy in his diocese either 
 publicly or privately under pain of excommunication, and his 
 mandate was to be read aloud in two churches in Paris. Such 
 an order would carry weight, and by it Moliere was con- 
 demned as having written an impious play in the eyes of 
 persons who previously had thought no ill of him. 
 
 But was this censure just ? The Archbishop thought that 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere , iv. 420 note 1. 
 
 2 Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 123; 5th ed. 165; (Euvre* de 
 Moliere, iv. 322. 
 
v 
 
 y 
 
 ( 352 LIFE OF MOLT^EE 
 
 by his satire Moliere was sneering at those who were in 
 earnest in their religious duties. Surely we may say now 
 that this was a misconception of the comedy ; surely we may 
 say now that the satire on Tartuffe was directed against frauds 
 conceived and carried out under the pretext of religion, and 
 that the satire or irony on Orgon and his mother was directed 
 against those who in religious matters were totally bereft of 
 common-sense. If the impiety in the play consisted in showing 
 that a man in Tartuffe's position could be a hypocrite, then 
 lay criticism ridiculing false religious guides was stricken 
 dumb; if his hypocrisy existed, only rebuke in a scriptural 
 sense might be written against it. Moliere did not trust the 
 divines ; he thought there were too many " Tartuffes " among 
 them. He said in his second petition to the king : " the 
 Tartuffes have secretly been artful enough to find favour with 
 your Majesty, and the models have caused the copy to be 
 suppressed " ; he believed that these men would work together 
 in order to maintain the influence of their order, and that 
 hypocrisy would be protected. On the other hand, every one 
 should have seen that if libertines laughed at Orgon and 
 Madame Pernelle for their folly, so might others who were 
 not libertines; for there could have been no calumny in 
 laughing at those whose egregious nonsense was as patent 
 as daylight. Moliere ridiculed Orgon and his mother, 
 Madame Pernelle, for being inordinately credulous, for being 
 gulled by a palpable knave whom everybody else dis- 
 trusted. Had there been no religious hypocrites, no too 
 simple-minded dupes, the comedy need not have been written. 
 Then there were those who thought it wrong to write a 
 comedy attacking the interests of religion and its ministers. 
 But Moliere did not attack religion, nor speak of it con- 
 temptuously. His whole comedy told very plainly that 
 earnest piety should be respected; it never for a moment 
 cast a suspicion of ridicule on true religion, or true devotion ; 
 the invective fell only on hypocrites, and laughter only on 
 those who from mental weakness were deceived by them. Nor 
 was the comedy a satire on the teaching of the Church, or on 
 the righteous practices of its ministers. There is nothing 
 in the play to show that Moliere intended disrespect to the 
 ministration of holy services in conformity with the rules of 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 353 
 
 the Church ; but he certainly wished to denounce those who 
 carried on the ministration of false service that was meant 
 to deceive others as being in conformity with the rules of 
 the Church. The only member of the Church alluded to 
 was the director ; it was his hypocrisy in the abuse of his 
 office that Moliere satirised. The dramatist portrayed a 
 vicious example of a director, because he thought that many 
 of his class were fit subjects for condemnation, even on the 
 stage. The incidents in the comedy are shown in Tartuffe's 
 bad conduct, and in the effects his evil teaching had on those 
 who foolishly allowed themselves to be gulled by it. Honest 
 satire may surely speak on such a matter as this. And if one 
 looks at the style and at the tone of the comedy and its 
 characterisation, and sees what is meant by its satire or irony, 
 it will not be possible to find irreverent mockery. What 
 Moliere did attack was the abuses that had grown from the 
 interests of religion, abuses which dishonest men had fostered 
 because they made their profit by them. 
 
 In the llth Lettre Provinciate, Pascal wrote: 
 
 "There is a great difference between laughing at religion and 
 laughing at those who profane it by their extravagant opinions. It 
 is wicked not to feel respect for the truths which the Spirit of God 
 has revealed, and it is wickedness of another kind not to feel con- 
 tempt for the falsehoods which the mind of man has opposed to them." 
 
 And later in the same Letter : 
 
 " When there is need to employ a little raillery the spirit of piety 
 demands that it be used against error only, and not against things 
 that are holy ; whereas the spirit of buffoonery, impiety and heresy 
 mocks at everything that is most sacred." 
 
 Whatever may be thought of these sayings of Pascal, 
 Moliere's comedy may be judged by them on the score of 
 reverence. Pascal is not accused nowadays of being irreverent, 
 and if Moliere's words and their meaning are understood, it 
 will be difficult to show a charge of irreverence against him. 
 Pascal's anger was so much roused by the deceitful practices 
 of the Jesuit fathers that he took the readiest means he could 
 find to denounce them. He appealed to the reading public, 
 and by his satire and his ridicule he did much to effect his 
 purpose. Moliere's means of addressing the world was the 
 stage, where every one could go to hear and see what was said 
 
 z 
 
354 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 and done, and all could laugh together at his picture. He 
 showed what was flagrantly dishonest ; and because he wrote 
 in a tone of pleasantry his satire has often been misunder- 
 stood, as it was condemned by those whom it attacked. In 
 his 7th Provincial Letter Pascal had satirised the Jesuit 
 doctrine of " directing the intention," and Moliere in Act IV. 
 sc. 5 of his comedy makes Tartuffe try to inculcate this belief 
 into Orgon's wife; 1 also in his 9th Letter Pascal had ridi- 
 culed the doctrine of "mental restrictions," and Moliere in 
 Act v. sc. 1 of his comedy shows that Tartuffe had actually 
 taught this creed to Orgon. 2 
 
 As the Lettres Provinciates, which appeared at intervals 
 between January 1656 and March 1657, were an event in the 
 literary world, so was the Tartuffe an event in the annals of 
 the stage. Like Pascal's Letters, Moliere's comedy was an 
 actuality. It spoke of matters that were of daily occurrence in 
 well-to-do households, and was therefore likely to create strong 
 interest. People thought very differently about it. The public, 
 on the whole, enjoyed the comedy, and as far as they really 
 thought about it perhaps they considered the satire well 
 deserved. But men in authority decried it as being scur- 
 rilous. The play was regarded by the Church and by the 
 Bench as an impious lampoon, holding up to scorn and 
 ridicule devout people who were to be reprobated and 
 laughed at by any one who wished to see them travestied. 
 We who live now can see more clearly than those who were 
 alive at the time that Moliere's morality was sounder than 
 that of his opponents. We can see now that he was bold 
 enough to tell the world, with all earnestness and reverence, 
 how a wicked man can scoff at religion and invoke heaven 
 for his own bad ends. We can see now that Moliere's 
 intentions may have been misunderstood at the time, and 
 that moderate-minded people regarded his play as dangerous. 
 Yet Tartuffe's villainy is perfectly transparent. It is utterly 
 impossible to confound him with a true-speaking or a God- 
 fearing man. No ingenuity, no special pleading, can palliate 
 his baseness. When he is first seen he talks with unctuous 
 piety ; and in a few minutes, in the same tone, he makes a 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 496 and note 3 
 a Ibid. iv. 504 and note 1. 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 355 
 
 strong declaration of love to the wife of his protector. When 
 Moliere spoke to the king about "the Tartuffes," he knew 
 what he was saying. He knew that the type of man he had 
 portrayed existed, and that there were such men belonging 
 to the Church, or connected with it a disgrace to themselves 
 and a stigma on the profession they pretended to serve. 
 
 The province of comedy has always been to laugh at the 
 follies and attack the vices of the age, and Moliere felt himself 
 justified in exposing to derision and contempt the double- 
 facedness of some members of a class of men who were 
 increasing in numbers, and whose influence was gaining 
 strength in the households of good families. Moliere knew 
 that the charge he was making was very severe, and I cannot 
 quite agree with those who hold that he bravely threw down 
 his gauntlet into the arena as the champion reformer of a 
 bad abuse. He was not a reformer by nature, nor was he an 
 enthusiast. But his sensitive and sympathetic nature was 
 pained to see men in places of grave responsibility gaining 
 power, comfort, and pecuniary profit from their office, while 
 they walked through the world with a lie continually in their 
 faces and on their tongues. I interpret in the same way, 
 though in a lesser degree, his attacks on the doctors ; against 
 " the Tartuffes " the accusation was terribly serious. In both 
 cases his object was to teach by satire and by laughter. 
 Whenever true comedy is shown, the tone and spirit of the 
 mirth or laughter it creates will generally indicate the 
 intentions of the writer. 
 
 I must now try to explain what Tartuffe was, and to what 
 order of men he belonged. To do this something should be said 
 about the " directeurs de conscience " and about the " devots," 
 and how each were considered in France about that time by 
 men whose opinions should carry weight. Most ,, English 
 readers know that Tartuffe was a hypocrite, but it is not so 
 generally known what his calling was, nor how self-seeking men 
 of his class drew their profit from it. There have been hypo- 
 crites at every time and in every country, but the forms of society 
 under which they have lived have not always been the same. 
 Other people, other manners. The wiles of hypocrisy will 
 vary according to the conditions favourable to their existence. 
 Tartuffe is not a rascal of English growth, nor could he be 
 
356 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 transplanted easily on to our soil. We have had our hypocrites 
 in fiction, drawn more or less from actual life, but our 
 imaginative literature does not supply us with a Tartuffe. 
 For us he must remain a foreigner. It is not the enormity of 
 his offence that differentiates him from our native-born villains, 
 but its kind. The circumstances under which we live, our 
 customs and our habits of thought, do not leave an easy open- 
 ing for his schemes. Our lives, morally speaking, may be no 
 whit better than those of the French people ; but that is not 
 the question. Our form of Protestantism and our national 
 sturdy independence of character almost debars the entrance 
 of a Tartuffe into our households. But in France in the 17th 
 century everything lay ready to his hands ; the will only on 
 his part was wanting. If a man in his position did not scruple 
 to become a villain he could easily find scope for his talents. 
 
 Early in the 17th century the Catholic Church in France 
 had regained much of its supremacy over the free- thinking 
 tendency which the Wars of Eeligion had fostered in the 
 century previous. The latter half of the 16th century in 
 France has been likened to the 18th, inasmuch as the foremost 
 men in each age were known for their incredulity, their love 
 of free thought, and their habit of laughing at religious 
 matters. Under Louis xiv. the people were usually more 
 devout than the nobles. It would be too much to say that 
 this was an age of faith, but many among the upper middle 
 classes were actuated by a wish to believe. Many of those 
 whose grandfathers had piqued themselves on unbelief and 
 had enjoyed what they thought was the fun of irreverence tried 
 to think religiously; they considered that forms of worship 
 were necessary for them ; and when the country was at rest 
 from the Civil War of the Fronde (1648-1652) conformity to 
 the rules of the Church was looked upon by the spiritually 
 minded as needful for the salvation of their souls. Among 
 these persons were many who were bent upon practising some 
 visible marks of devotion, and if they were but honest to 
 themselves they were certainly to be commended. 1 
 
 Besides their confessor, persons who could afford it engaged 
 the services of a director. He was known as the " directeur 
 
 1 Ch. Revillout, titudes litteraires et morales sur le \1 e siede. Deuxteme 
 partie, Louis xiv., Moliere et Tartuffe, pp. 7-9. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 357 
 
 do conscience," and was chosen as a guide to direct the 
 
 conduct. The most distinguishing mark of the office of the 
 
 director was in the social and domestic nature of his functions. 
 
 The confessor was always a man who had taken orders, and his 
 
 duties were prescribed to him definitely by the Church ; it 
 
 was not necessary that the director should be in orders, though 
 
 such was usually the case. There were lay directors connected 
 
 with the Church, though not absolutely belonging to it. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve says : " A director is different from a counsellor, 
 
 he is more obliged to look closely into things and to give 
 
 his opinions decisively." 1 On the next page Sainte-Beuve 
 
 adds, speaking of Saint-Cyran in his quality of director of the 
 
 solitaries at Port-Eoyal: "He never forgot to be upon his 
 
 guard against the secret ambition which insensibly tends to 
 
 wish to get the mastery over souls and take possession of 
 
 them." This was certainly an important and a difficult 
 
 matter. The office of the director was thus peculiar and 
 
 special, and it held out strong_jtenip tat ions to men who were 
 
 not possessed of more than an ordinary share of moral courage. 
 
 When chosen, the director should T)e acquainted with the style 
 
 of living of the family under his care, and with what went on 
 
 in the household. He was to instruct the members of the 
 
 family how to regulate their daily actions, he was allowed to 
 
 offer his opinion on the most intimate family affairs. When 
 
 a woman put herself under his guidance he was ever at her 
 
 hand to guide her in all her projects, in all her difficulties ; he 
 
 was to prescribe her pleasures, and nothing could be done 
 
 without his sanction. This sounds to us, in England, like 
 
 tyrannical supervision, and we wonder how a sensible woman 
 
 could submit to it. Very much would depend on the choice 
 
 of a director and what manner of man he was. The lady made 
 
 inquiries about him, and questioned him before engaging his 
 
 services if he was rigid or lax in his precepts. If she had a 
 
 director she would have one to her taste, and when she got 
 
 tired of him it was open to her to dismiss him and take 
 
 another. Bourdaloue spoke of the way in which people went 
 
 from one director to another, and said they wished to be 
 
 directed in the way they would like to go. 2 When we 
 
 recollect how rare are the qualities of sound discernment and 
 
 1 Port-Royal, 3rd ed. i. 355. 2 (Euvres (Paris, 1826), xiv. 420, 421. 
 
358 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 nice discretion, it is easy to imagine the errors into which a 
 director might be led whose conscience and common sense did 
 not tell him that the path between right and wrong where 
 men and women are concerned is both intricate and slippery. 
 Doubtless there were directors who performed their duties 
 honourably and well, but that there were many others quite 
 unfit for their position is undeniable. Priests, monks, spiritual 
 and lay directors, were sought after by those who wished to 
 ease their consciences by religious practices. If directors were 
 wanted directors could be found -when they knew that their 
 services would be remunerated. Consequently there arose a 
 set of men whom Moliere called " devots de place " : 
 
 " Ces gens, qui par une ame a 1'interet soumise, 
 Font de devotion me" tier et marchandise." 
 
 The demand for directors regulated the supply. In the latter 
 part of the 17th century these men were in vogue, in the 
 middle of the 18th they were not so much in request; but 
 while the mode lasted many ladies of fashion thought their 
 director was as necessary to them as their cook. Those who 
 were less well off did not receive so much attention. But once 
 in his position in the families of the well-to-do the director 
 reigned supreme. He learned to direct consciences so well 
 that women under his influence became tools in his hands. 
 Boileau gave a portrait of a director in his tenth satire (v. 559 
 et seq.), published in 1693 : 
 
 " Mais de tous les mortels, grace aux devotes ames, 
 Nul n'est si bien soigne" qu'un directeur de femmes." 
 
 Just about the same time, La Bruyere, whose judgment may 
 be trusted, wrote with mordant satire against the directors and 
 against the women who allowed themselves to be governed by 
 them. The two following quotations are taken from his 
 Caractkres, about the middle of the chapter "Des Femmes": 
 
 "A woman is easy to govern if a man will give himself the 
 trouble to do it. One man alone governs several. He educates 
 their mind and their memory, he tells them what their religion 
 should be, and he even undertakes to regulate their hearts. They do 
 not approve nor disapprove, they offer neither praise nor censure, 
 until they have watched his eyes and his face. They confide to him 
 their joys and their griefs, their hopes and their jealousies, their 
 hatreds and their loves. He makes them quarrel with and he reconciles 
 
CHAPTER XIV 359 
 
 them to their husbands, and he takes advantage of the intervals. 
 He busies himself in their affairs, interests himself in their lawsuits 
 and visits their judges. 1 He gives them his own doctor, his trades- 
 men and his workmen. He takes upon himself to find their apart- 
 ments, to furnish them, and he gives orders for their attendants. 
 He is seen with them in their carriages in the streets of a town and 
 on the promenades ; he is seated beside them in church and at the 
 theatre. He goes visiting with them, he accompanies them to the 
 baths, to the watering-places, when they are travelling, and he has 
 the best apartment at their country seat. He grows old but his 
 influence does not wane ; a little intelligence and much time wasted 
 are sufficient to maintain it. Children, heirs, daughter-in-law, niece, 
 servants, are all dependent on his will. At first he made himself 
 respected, he ends by being dreaded. This old and needful friend 
 dies without a tear shed for him, and ten women over whom he had 
 tyrannised gain their freedom by his death." 2 
 
 Think also for a moment of the meaning in this short 
 sentence : 
 
 " I wish I might be allowed to cry with all my strength to those 
 holy men who have been formerly hurt by women : ' Fly from 
 women, do not direct them, leave the care of their salvation to 
 others.' " 3 
 
 That a churchman with honest purpose should undertake 
 the care of souls La Bruyere believed to be right and good, 
 but that a divine or a layman in accepting such functions 
 should allow himself to become a petted darling of society 
 was to him abominable. He speaks of " the inexhaustible 
 nursery garden of directors " ; and from the difficult nature 
 of their duties, the faults into which the men were led, and 
 the folly of the women who submitted' themselves to their 
 guidance, he seems to have thought that the directors did 
 more harm than good, and that women at least would have 
 been better without them. Moliere may have thought so too, 
 but when he alluded to the directors of conscience he did not 
 attack the office itself ; his satire was against the abuse that 
 Tartuffe made of his position in the office. La Bruyere wrote 
 very strongly against the directors and against the " deVots," 
 
 1 It was the custom then for suitors to visit the judges of their case and 
 offer them bribes. Moliere alludes to it in the first scene of his Misan- 
 thrope ; so does Racine in Act I. sc. 1 of his comedy, Les Plaideurs. 
 
 2 (Euvres de La Bruy&re, par M. G. Servois (in the Collection des Grands 
 Ecrivains de la France), i. 184, 185. 
 
 3 Ibid. i. 181, 182. 
 
360 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 for at the time of his death in 1696 the number of men in both 
 of these classes was greater than it had been a generation earlier. 
 Moliere composed his comedy mainly against those who 
 make a false profession of religion : 
 
 " Ces deVots de place, 
 De qui la sacrilege et trompeuse grimace 
 Abuse impun^ment et se joue a leur gre 
 De ce qu'ont les mortels de plus saint et sacre." 
 
 The word " deVot " was then and for some years later 
 generally used in an ironical sense. Among men and women 
 who knew the ways of the world " un devot " was recognised 
 as the opposite of a devout man. When writers spoke of a 
 de*vot, unless the meaning of true devotion was gathered 
 plainly from the context, it was nearly always synonymous 
 with a hypocrite. There are several instances of this in the 
 Caracteres of La Bruyere. He says in the chapter " De la 
 Mode " : "A deVot is one who under a king who is an atheist 
 would be an atheist himself." 1 And in the chapter " Des 
 Femmes," while speaking of the directors, there is a witty bit 
 of satire: " It is too long odds against a husband for a woman 
 to be both a coquette and a devote; she should make her 
 choice." 2 And Flechier, the Bishop of Nimes, who died in 
 1710, said: 
 
 " There is a great difference between a good man and a devot. 
 The former has virtuous principles in his heart, he always seeks to 
 acquire them, and in a quiet way he does many good actions ; the 
 latter aims only at the appearances of virtue, he does not like things 
 which do not show, and if he can pass for a devot he is happy." 3 
 
 On page 279 of the same volume Fiddlier says : 
 
 " The first thing that a devot or a devote does is to look for a 
 director who is not too severe and who will accommodate himself a 
 little to his or her infirmities. A devot thinks himself a public 
 personage who deserves marks of respect that are not shown to 
 others. He is very proud of the services he gives to the poor arid to 
 the Church, and he urges this belief on the director, who carefully 
 makes use of him on every occasion. ... It is with the devot as 
 with the wit : both are taken for what they are worth. But one 
 cannot pass for a witty man or for an honest man without having a 
 good measure of either quality. When a man wishes to be thought 
 
 1 (Eu-ores de La Bruyere, par M. G. Servois (in the Collection des Grands 
 kcnvams de la France), ii. 152. 
 
 2 Ibid. i. 182. 3 (Euvres de Flechier (Nimes, 1782), ix. 276. 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 361 
 
 a devot he is at once known to be otherwise. ... If I speak of 
 the devots in a way not to wish to increase their number, the fault 
 does not lie in devotion but in the characters and in the minds of 
 the false devots." 
 
 What Flechier wrote against the professional devots bears 
 out Moliere in his delineation of the character of a hypocrite. 
 Had Moliere and Flechier exchanged their views on the 
 devots and on hypocrisy, neither knowing to whom he was 
 talking, they would probably have parted friends. 
 .C" No one will suppose that Moliere wrote his play from a 
 directly spiritual point of view. As a comic dramatist that 
 was not his function. He intended his comedy for men and 
 women in Paris who lived ordinary lives and enjoyed ordinary 
 pleasures in a rational way, and he gave a picture of a false 
 religious guide whose daily conduct was contrary to every 
 principle of morality. About religious guides who were 
 honest men he said nothing. There are many bad sides to 
 Tartuffe's character. Besides his hypocrisy we see in him 
 selfishness, ingratitude, want of charity, fraudulent covetous- 
 ness, gluttony, and lust. All these bad qualities are mixed 
 together, exposing the whole character of the man and showing 
 a personage of an exceptionally odious kind. Moliere wished, 
 no doubt, to provoke a laugh against those who allowed them- 
 selves to be duped by the hollow speciousness of men who 
 professed to live saintly lives, and whose exterior proclaimed 
 them to be what they were to any one who could look about 
 him with open eyes ; but his hot anger was shot against the 
 false guides who deceived others for their own profit. With- 
 out making the dupes appear ridiculous he could not, in the 
 spirit of comedy, have made the knave's villainy apparent. 
 Though we may accept Tartuffe as a " devot de profession," 
 the play which bears his name shows with abundant clearness 
 that he belonged to the particular class of men known as the 
 directors of conscience. Dorine calls him a director in the 
 second scene of the first act, when she is speaking of him and 
 of Orgon to Cleante : 
 
 " C'est de tous ses secrets 1'unique confident, 
 Et de ses actions le directeur prudent." 
 
 In itself this is not conclusive, but throughout the first act of 
 the play Tartuffe is often indirectly mentioned as a director. 
 
362 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 And just after he has made his declaration of love to Elmire 
 in Act in. sc. 3, he speaks some remarkable lines, in which the 
 word " nous " is repeated three times and " notre " twice, 
 thus showing that he belonged to a body of men who were 
 supposed to act with a common object : 
 
 " Mais les gens comme nous brulent d'un feu discret, 
 Avec qui pour toujours on est stir du secret : 
 Le soin que nous prenons de notre renommee 
 Re"pond de toutes choses a la personne aimee, 
 Et c'est en nous qu'on trouve, acceptant notre coeur, 
 De 1'amour sans scandale et du. plaisir sans peur." 
 
 It was not Moliere's practice to model a personage for the 
 stage on the character of any one individual, and he did not 
 draw his hypocrite from any one of his contemporaries, 
 though at the time the abb^ Roquette, afterwards bishop of 
 Autun, was very generally spoken of as the object of his 
 satire. Two other names have been given as models of Tar- 
 tuffe : the abbe' de Pons and one Charpy, who later became 
 a prior. 1 If there were two or three churchmen whose 
 likeness to Tartuffe was remarked, there were presumably 
 others who offered points of resemblance that were noticeable. 
 It is in this way that characters in fiction are formed. An 
 author has observed various traits in different persons. He 
 assimilates these together with others of his own imagining, 
 and so creates a character that makes a more or less lasting 
 impression according to the way it is shown. There is a 
 difference between drawing the portrait of a certain man or 
 woman and describing a personage of a certain type, and in 
 his character of Tartuffe Moliere did not draw a picture of any 
 one individual ; he conceived an ideal character of a particular 
 stamp, and from that conception he framed his personage. 
 There can be no doubt that the dramatist wished to show the 
 wiles of some dishonest men connected with the Church, and 
 worldly prudence did not deter him from inflicting a blow 
 where he thought it was deserved. 
 
 It is not known with any certainty to what means Moliere 
 owed the king's permission to place the Tartuffe on the public 
 stage. Bazin says 2 that there had been a long quarrel between 
 some of the French clergy and the pontifical authority in 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 303-308. 
 
 2 Notes historiques sur la vie de Moliere, 156, 157. 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 363 
 
 Eome, that this was terminated, at any rate for a while, by 
 a papal brief dated 19th of January 1669, and that the re- 
 conciliation may have been favourable to Moliere. In M. 
 Mesnard's opinion this explanation is not unlikely. 1 Perhaps 
 my readers may be more fortunate than I am in understand- 
 ing it. Nothing, however, is known of any first-hand record 
 showing the king's permission to play the Tartuffe in public. 
 The earliest authority is that of La Grange and Vivot, the 
 editors of the first complete edition of Moliere's plays, published^ 
 in 1682, who say : " La permission de representer cette comedie \ 
 en public sans interruption a ete accordee le 5 Fevrier 1669, et I 
 des ce meme jour la piece fut represented par la troupe du / 
 Eoi.' 2 These words were written some thirteen years after J 
 the event they refer to, and though they do not mention the 
 king's name there can be no doubt that it was his Majesty 
 who had granted the permission. The leave to play the 
 Tartuffe was given on the 5th of February 1669, and in the 
 afternoon of that day the comedy appeared on the public 
 stage and was played thenceforward without hindrance. At 
 all the court performances of the play before 1669 the last 
 of which was at Chantilly on the 20th of September 1668 
 and at the single performance at the Palais Eoyal on the 5th 
 of August 1667, the principal parts were probably taken by 
 the same actors, so that most of the work to be gone through 
 in the way of rehearsals had been done when leave to act the 
 comedy in public had been given. But it would seem that the 
 appearance of the comedy caused surprise. 3 Some kind of 
 notice to this effect must, one would say, have been given to 
 the public if it was only by advertisements at the corners of 
 the streets for the receipts taken at the first performance of 
 the Tartuffe on the 5th of February 1669 were by far the 
 highest ever known at the Palais Eoyal theatre. , . 
 
 Instead of speaking of the incidents in the play I shall say 
 something by way of interpretation of its principal person- 
 ages. From what has been told, an idea may be gathered of 
 Tartuffe's position in Orgon's household; and unless this is 
 kept in view much of the meaning of the comedy is lost. 
 Orgon, the husband of Elmire and the father of Damis and 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, iv. 332. 2 Ibid. iv. 270 ; 332. 
 
 3 Ibid. iv. 333. 
 
364 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 Mariane, was by nature a good man, affectionate to his wife 
 and children, and loved and respected by them. Nothing is 
 said about his religious creed, and he is not represented as 
 being sanctimonious. Earlier in life he had served the State 
 at the time of the Fronde, but he has since become infatuated 
 with Tartuffe, and through weakness has grown besotted in 
 his admiration for one who was unworthy of his trust. 
 Those who find fault with Arnolphe in the Ecole des Femmes 
 as being too ridiculous will perhaps bring the same charge 
 against Orgon in the Tartuffe. But neither personage was 
 meant to be an ordinary character. In both cases the 
 dramatist wanted to show by ridicule how a man acting 
 under strong emotion, unless he has a good foundation of 
 common sense, may lose his reason and behave in a very 
 foolish manner. Moliere knew well what he was doing, and 
 as a sort of half-apology for Orgon's folly he makes the sage 
 Cleante speak some prosaic and rather didactic lines which, 
 in a comedy showing clear characterisation, could only have 
 come from a man of his stamp : 
 
 "Les homines la plupart sont etrangement faits ! 
 Dans la juste nature on ne les voit jamais ; 
 La raison a pour eux des bornes trop petites ; 
 En chaque caractere ils passent des limites ; 
 Et la plus noble chose ils la gatent souvent 
 Pour la vouloir outrer et passer trop avant." 
 
 Cleaiite is really a most estimable person, and we should all 
 feel honoured at having such a man for our friend. He is 
 loyal, upright, and not dull-minded, though unimaginative; 
 and if there were many more like him the world might be 
 a better place. We have, however, in judging men to take 
 them as they are as well as what we may think they ought to 
 be. Comedy, too, should be mirthful, it should not show the 
 events of daily life just as they pass. The comic dramatist 
 turns a Cleante to account, but if he can show humour and 
 the lessons that honest satire may teach he will make more 
 and better use of an Arnolphe or an Orgon. 
 
 For reasons of his own Moliere chose that a man, not a 
 woman, should be the victim of the schemes of his hypocrite. 
 Perhaps he saw this was necessary to give a more comic 
 effect to his play. If Orgon had kept his senses, and his wife 
 had been cajoled and deceived, he would have turned Tartuffe 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 365 
 
 out of his house. The play would then have been different, 
 and no one can judge of Moliere's work by what he did not 
 write. 
 
 The comedy in the play is seen in various ways, but almost 
 always tending either to proclaim Tartuffe's hypocrisy and 
 unmask his villainy, or to show how he has duped others and 
 to laugh at them for their folly. With the exception of a 
 lovers' quarrel, drawn better and more amusingly than the 
 well-known scene in the Dlpit Amoureux, every incident in 
 the play is made to bear upon Tartuffe's character. His 
 personality pervades everything. He is not seen in the first 
 two acts. The dramatist used them to define and establish 
 the character of his hypocrite before presenting him to his 
 audience. 'As soon as Tartuffe appears every one has an idea 
 of what he is like ; the man reveals his whole nature later. 
 The scene is laid in Orgon's house in Paris, and the play 
 opens by showing the annoyance the dishonest director has 
 caused in Orgon's household. The family would be happy 
 but for him. They used to live comfortably, enjoying the 
 pleasures of life in a rational way ; they have no vices and 
 are not given to self-indulgence. But Tartuffe criticises their 
 innocent amusements, all their daily actions, and makes his 
 tyranny felt. In the first scene nearly all the personages 
 except Tartuffe and Orgon are on the stage. Madame 
 Pernelle, Orgon's mother, a querulous woman, has, like her 
 son, been deceived by Tartuffe; and because all the other 
 inmates of the house strongly distrust Tartuffe's pretended 
 piety and hate him for his interference and his reprimands, 
 she resents this dislike, and believing Tartuffe to be a good 
 man she imitates his impertinence and tells them all what she 
 thinks are home truths. Damis, Orgon's son, always hot- 
 headed, answers his grandmother: 
 
 " Quoi 1 Je souffrirai, moi, qu'un cagot de critique 
 Vienne usurper ceans un pouvoir tyrannique, 
 Et que nous ne puissions a rien nous divertir, 
 Si ce beau Monsieur-la n'y daigne consentir ? " 
 
 The word " ceans" used here in the second line is found six 
 times in the first act of the comedy. The word is now obsolete 
 or little used, and meant inside this house. It was more 
 precise in its meaning than id ; and considering the domestic 
 
366 LIFE OF 
 
 nature of the director's functions it seems to have been 
 specially applicable. 
 
 In his character of JElmire, Moliere thought less of enlisting 
 strong sympathies on her behalf than of portraying a good 
 woman and a good wife, in no way coquettish, handsome or 
 pretty and pleasing if you like, of a temperate disposition and 
 with sound common sense, who would stand her ground against 
 her intended seducer. Except for the very important scene 
 in the fourth act where Elmire, acting on her husband's 
 behalf, pretends to accept Tartufife's declaration of love, hers 
 is, I imagine, a rather ungracious part to have to play. Except 
 in this scene she cannot assert herself, but rather should show 
 discretion under disagreeable or unhappy circumstances. 
 Tartuffe doubtless admired her, but there is nothing to show 
 that she ever had a kind thought about him. She is used 
 mainly as a means to make Tartuffe disclose himself and show 
 what manner of man he is. And she must do this quietly 
 rather than by force of will. There is almost no satire or irony 
 in Elmire's nature, and ridicule cannot lay its hand upon her. 
 She has a strong sense of amour propre, she is cool-minded but 
 not cold-hearted. It should be remembered that she was 
 Orgon's second wife, and was not the mother of Damis nor of 
 Mariane; perhaps therefore the dramatist gave no familiar 
 or home scene between either of these two and their step- 
 mother. 
 
 Of Damis and Mariane little need be said here, nor of 
 Mariane's lover Valere. But I must say a word about Dorine. 
 Though nominally a subordinate character she is, at least on 
 the stage, the brightest figure in the play, and her irony and 
 her banter come as a pleasant relief by the side of Tartuffe's 
 self-seeking and perpetual falsehood. In the list of the 
 dramatis personse Dorine is spoken of as the " suivante de 
 Mariane," and in the comedy she appears in the position of 
 a well-trusted upper servant. She is very outspoken and 
 talks in a satirical and familiar manner, giving her opinion 
 sometimes as a clever woman of the world, at other times as 
 a dependant to whom very friendly liberties were allowed. 
 The suivante, or waiting-woman, had been a common per- 
 sonage in old French comedy, always more or less inanimate ; 
 and in this play Moliere transformed the character by putting 
 
CHAPTER XIV 367 
 
 life into it, and he showed his Dorine as an upper servant, 
 perhaps of middle age, who mixed with her betters and who 
 was permitted to say what she thought. She may, too, have 
 been nurse to Orgon's children when they were young. Her 
 sharp raillery is certainly amusing; and, in my opinion, the 
 healthy tone of her satire against her master see Act I. sc. 2 
 and Act n. sc. 2 is a strong sign that in his own mind the 
 dramatist did not sneer or scoff at religious practices, and 
 that he was very far from wishing that others should do so. 
 Dorine's wholesome ridicule of nonsense and disgust at false- 
 hood is as sure a sign that Moliere did not mean irreverence 
 in his comedy as all the wise words spoken by Cldante. 
 There are not many marks of character which, taken alone, 
 afford a truer test than laughter. Occasionally it lies with 
 bad intention; then have as little to do with the laugher as 
 you can. 
 
 The Tartuffe is certainly a serious comedy, condemning 
 
 religious imposture very strongly, and yet showing .bath-satire 
 and ridicule. There are scenes of mirth in it, but only one, 
 where Dorine reconciles Valere and Marian e after they have 
 quarrelled, that creates hearty enjoyment. It has seemed to 
 me more than once that on the stage this play is heavy, that 
 it is more stiff from its seriousness or solemnity than comedy 
 should be; and that in the representation the humour of 
 comedy, especially in the personage of Tartuffe, is not seen 
 so plainly as in reading Moliere's own words. There are 
 dramatic characters, more often found in tragedy than in 
 comedy, written by a master-hand and giving all the fulness 
 of meaning that language can portray, which hardly any actor 
 can personate thoroughly. It is not so much that the reader 
 trusts to his own imagination, or that during the representa- 
 tion he likes his own fancy better than the simulated rendering 
 of the part, as that the author had a bigger mind than the 
 actor, and that the written words bring home a stronger 
 picture of the personage intended than is within the power 
 of an actor to show. Tartuffe is one of these personages, 
 though he belongs to comedy and has the ridicule of comedy 
 of a grim kind thrown upon him causing more disgust than 
 amusement ; but he has also a tragic element in his character 
 in the feeling of horror that his evil influence inspires. I am 
 
368 LIFE OF 
 
 only giving ray own impressions ; others may judge better. 
 I think ithas been said that no male character in French 
 comedy is so difficult to play well as Tartuffe ; but the actor 
 who undertakes it will not give pleasure unless he animates 
 or enlivens the audience, and so interests them in his interpre- 
 tation. Moliere's lines show that Tartuffe is a wretch both 
 proud and mean ; his hypocrisy is so great that he is thoroughly 
 immoral and irreligious. He is bold and daring because he 
 can gain his objects best in that way; yet he fawns as a 
 parasite upon Orgon, he cringes before Elmire as he makes 
 love to her, and he is contemptuous to every one else. This 
 contradictory baseness is plainly in his character and is 
 exceedingly difficult to render on the stage in a spirit of 
 comedy ; but I doubt if the traditions of the Come'die Franchise 
 do not make him appear to be more burdened with his own 
 meanness, with his abject pride, than Moliere intended. He 
 is so solemn, too, that he rarely provokes a smile. He is not, 
 and cannot show himself to be, a frank villain until close 
 upon the end of the fourth act, and when he is seen after- 
 wards in the last scene of the play he is again brave ; but I 
 think that before he rises to bay against Orgon he might, in 
 spite of his dependence and snake-like conduct, act his part 
 with more assumed nobleness of manner, exhibit a little more 
 lightness and less appearance of servility towards his bene- 
 factor. His general demeanour, as seen on the stage, shows 
 that he has the strength of a really bad man, but not that 
 he comes of a noble family of which we are told that he 
 boasted. 
 
 The denouement to the Tartuffe has been blamed because 
 of the king's interference in the events of a comedy meant to 
 portray actual life. In a tale for children a romantic ending 
 is thought to be quite proper, but grown-up people, some 
 critics say, should not be asked to accept improbabilities. 
 Children are not altogether wrong in their liking for romance, 
 and their elders need not condemn it unnecessarily. It 
 may be admitted that the action of the sovereign to rescue 
 Orgon and his family from Tartuffe's cruel clutches has the 
 appearance of a Deus ex machina; yet looking at the facts 
 of the case the events in the comedy and the knowledge 
 that but for the king's interference the play would not have 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 369 
 
 been allowed to appear it is difficult to see how the de- 
 nouement, or the unravelling of the knot, could have been 
 solved in a better way. For the purposes of characterisation 
 Moliere made Orgon not only give his own property to Tar- 
 tuffe, but also place in his hands a casket belonging to a third 
 person. In the latter case the law might perhaps have inter- 
 vened and restored to Orgon that which was not his own to 
 give; but in the other, if the gift of his own property was 
 valid, the law could not rightly annul it. No other power, 
 therefore, remained but that of the king to render moral 
 justice. Who is to define between moral and legal justice 
 in the events of a stage play ? It is moral justice, or, if you 
 will, poetical or romantic justice, that the spectator in the 
 theatre wants. He does not go there to reason ; he judges of 
 what he sees and hears by effects. If his sympathies are 
 moved by the events or the characterisation in a play, emotional 
 feelings will have their place. If he cannot rely upon his 
 natural thoughts to determine the merits of a play, what he 
 thinks is pure reason may easily lead him upon a false track. 
 Intelligence rather than intellect is wanted in the matter, and 
 the striving or searching after intellect has before now blunted 
 the understanding of critics as to what should be the aim 
 of comedy. 
 
 Considering all the abuse that had been heaped upon 
 Moliere and the animosity shown against his comedy, remem- 
 bering the king's personal willingness to allow the Tartuffe 
 to be acted, though he had at first forbidden its representation, 
 and that it was the king who finally gave permission for the 
 play to appear on the stage considering all these circum- 
 stances and recognising that the dramatist was writing for 
 Parisians of his day, we may say that the long speech in the 
 last scene of the comedy addressed to Orgon by the " exempt," 
 or police officer, beginning : 
 
 " Eemettez-vous, Monsieur, d'une alarme si chaude. 
 Nous vivons sous un prince ennemi de la fraude," 
 
 contains a fair eulogy on Louis xiv. for his clearness of 
 judgment and sense of justice. Moliere's purpose here was 
 not to flatter the kihg,"~but to proclaim publicly that he owed 
 his sovereign a debt of gratitude. 
 
 2 A 
 
370 LIFE OF MOLIEEE 
 
 M Louis Moland, 1 M. Paul Mesnard, 2 and other writers, 
 while fully believing in the originality of Moliere's creation 
 l...th of the Tartuffe as a comedy and of the character of its 
 chief personage, have indicated some of the sources from 
 which the dramatist drew his picture of a hypocrite. Moliere 
 certainly did not invent his Tartuffe solely out of his own 
 brain, but he had ears to hear and eyes to see what was 
 passing around him. Before he wrote his play his thoughts 
 were full of the subject; he wanted to put a hypocrite on 
 the stage and show the wiles and evil qualities of the man's 
 nature. Moliere was the author of the characterisation in 
 the comedy, just as much as he was of the verses in which 
 the play is written. He owed something in the way of 
 groundwork to others before him, as has been the case with 
 every writer of fiction; but from his own observation and 
 imagination he formed the characters, planned the scenes, 
 and worked out the execution of the comedy. He did not 
 absolutely invent the story told in the play, but he dramatised 
 in a poetic form what he had seen or heard, or may be read, 
 and left the world to judge of his picture as it pleased. 
 
 Towards the end of his Notice to the Tartuffe, M. Mesnard, 
 following the contemporary authority of Eobinet's Muse. 
 historique, gave the names of the actors who played the 
 different parts in the comedy in February 1669. 3 The order 
 observed is that of the names of the personages at the head 
 of the play : Bejart as Madame Pernelle, Moliere as Orgon, 
 Mile. Moliere as Elmire, Hubert as Damis, Mile, de Brie as 
 Mariane, La Grange as Valere, La Thorilliere as Cleante, du 
 Croisy as Tartuffe, Mile. Bejart as Dorine. Kobinet did not 
 'say who played the minor parts of M. Loyal nor of 1'Exempt ; 
 it has been thought likely that de Brie filled them both. In 
 his Notice liographique sur Molikre* published eleven years 
 later than the volume which contains the Notice to the 
 Tartufe, M. Mesnard expresses a doubt whether, when the 
 first three acts of the comedy were performed at Versailles in 
 1664, Mile. Moliere then played the part of Elmire, on the 
 ground that she was young and inexperienced ; and he thinks 
 
 1 T.wesde Moliere, 1st ed. iv. 369-76 
 
 t iKurrts de Moliere, iv. 348-55 ; x. 311. 
 
 '/6W.iv.S84,S85. ' JW& x. 313. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 371 
 
 that at that time the role was more suitable to Mile, du Pare. 
 However that may be, Mile, du Pare left the troop at the 
 Palais Eoyal theatre at Easter 1667, and she died eighteen 
 months later. In May 1664 Mile. Moliere was twenty-one 
 years of age ; but, it may be asked, if she played the part of 
 Ce'limene in the Misanthrope in 1666, as appears to be certain, 
 might she not have been entrusted with that of Elmire two 
 years previously? For myself, I should say that Celimene's part 
 is the more difficult of the two. I have 1 seen both Madame 
 Arnould Plessy and Madame Madeleine Brohan in the two 
 parts, and I think that Celimene's requires higher imaginative 
 and stronger imitative qualities from an actress, and should 
 say that to be well rendered it demands more art and more 
 consummate skill. 
 
 The first edition of the play, with the author's preface, was 
 printed on the 23rd of March 1669, and on the title-page were 
 the words : " Le Tartvffe, ov L'Impostevr, Comedie. Par I. B. P. 
 de Moliere," etc. The second edition, printed on the 6th of 
 June following, besides the preface, contained the author's 
 three petitions to the king, then published for the first time. 1 
 Moliere parted with the rights of selling the printed copies 
 of the Tartuffe to the bookseller, Jean Eibou, for 200 pistoles, 
 or 2200 francs. Kibou pretended to think that he had given 
 too much money for the play, but Taschereau says there is 
 ground for not believing in the supposed regrets of Eibou 
 for having given so high a price. 2 
 
 For biographical reasons, already explained, I thought it 
 well to speak of the Tartuffe before Don Juan ; but in doing so 
 have had to depart from the chronological course of events. 
 
 Don Juan ou le Festin de Pierre was first seen at the Palais 
 Eoyal theatre on the 15th of February 1665; no other 
 previous performance of the comedy elsewhere has been 
 recorded. It was acted fifteen times before Easter, but 
 when the theatre re-opened after the three or four weeks'* 
 holiday it was withdrawn. Probably the authorities inter- 
 vened, thinking that the play was an attack on religious 
 ideas. 3 It was never put on the stage again at the Theatre 
 
 1 (Eu*res de Moliere, iv. 365, 366 ; xi. 33, 34. 
 
 2 Viede Moliere, 5th ed. 191. 3 (Euvres de Moliere, v. 38, 39 ; x. 325. 
 
372 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 Franeais until the year 1847. Of Thomas Corneille's version 
 oi the Festin de Pierre I will say a word later. La Grange's 
 Register shows that at all the performances of Moliere's 
 comedy, except the last, the receipts were high, and that on 
 four days they exceeded 2000 livres. The Tartu/e was the 
 only other play of Moliere's that made so much money 
 at one performance. La Grange thus disproves the assertions 
 put forward in the 18th century that Don Juan had but 
 a poor success because it was written in prose. There had 
 long been a prejudice in France against seriously meant 
 comedies in prose. It was thought that prose was not worthy 
 of the occasion. Moliere, as a man of the world and chief 
 manager of a theatre, was not likely to go strongly against 
 popular prejudices, but he did something to break them down ; 
 and Don Juan was the first of his comedies in more than one 
 act that was written in prose. 
 
 The prime cause, probably, which led Moliere to write 
 his Don Juan was the refusal of Louis xiv. to allow the 
 Tartujffeto be acted on the stage. In May 1664 this latter 
 play had been forbidden. Doubtless the poet was much 
 annoyed, for he believed he had drawn a fair picture. Like 
 all earnest men he was intent on his work, and as he was 
 not allowed to put his play satirising hypocrisy on the stage 
 he determined to write a comedy satirising atheism. As his 
 first play was in verse he thought that the second should be 
 in prose and shown in a more popular manner. Pascal's 
 niece, Marguerite Perier, said that when her uncle was on 
 his deathbed he was asked if he was not sorry he had 
 written the Lettres Provinciates, and he answered: "Instead 
 of being sorry, if I had to write them now I would make 
 them still stronger." 1 It is often thus that men of deep 
 natures strive to vindicate their opinions in the face of 
 hostile criticism; and Moliere in his second play did not 
 overshoot the mark by exaggeration. There may be still 
 some persons who dislike the pictures he gave in these two 
 comedies ; and even some, intolerant against him, who think 
 that he was largely imbued with irreligious ideas, and who 
 say that the two plays were written in an anti-religious or 
 
 . Havet, 2nd ed. vol. i. pp. cxi, cxii ; Sainte- 
 Bcuve, Port-Royal, 3rd ed. iii. 142. 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 373 
 
 scoffing spirit, presenting opposite sides of mental depravity. 
 Every one will judge as he pleases. My own impressions lead 
 me to think that when a strong work of imagination has been 
 given to the world its author has not drawn his picture from 
 caprice though warm feeling may have had something to do 
 with it and if it has elicited disapproval, that time has gene- 
 rally shown he was much more just and true in his conceptions 
 than his adverse critics were willing to allow. Very likely 
 Moliere was anxious to produce his Don Juan as soon as 
 possible, and comparing it with his other five-act plays it 
 seems to show signs of hurried work. Many of the scenes 
 are nearly as episodical as those in the Fdcheux\ they 
 characterise very clearly the chief personage, but they are 
 .not in a general sense linked together as those in the Tartuffe 
 or those in the Avare. In this way Don Juan is not one of 
 the best of Molicre's comedies, though its principal character 
 is certainly nnp. nf thp. strongest he ever drew. There is some 
 reason for thinking that the dramatist was pressed by his 
 fellow-actors to write a play in which Don Juan should be 
 the hero. They may have suggested the subject to him as the 
 groundwork for a comedy, or he may have first spoken about 
 the matter to some of his friends in the troop ; but in either 
 case I do not believe he would have written the play unless 
 he thought he could make the satire attaching to the principal 
 personage serve his purpose. 
 
 The conception of a Don Juan was a very old one. If 
 Moliere's personage is still well known and the Don Juans 
 seen on the stage during his lifetime are forgotten, that is 
 because he was able to draw a firmer dramatic character than 
 were his predecessors or contemporaries, and thus invest it 
 with an air of greater reality. With Moliere's comedy in view 
 the following extract, taken from M. Moland's work, 1 is worth 
 reading : 
 
 " The first idea of the drama came from Spain. In the old Andalusian 
 chronicles there was a legend, of uncertain date, which both in char- 
 acter and in construction was very like some of our own tales of the 
 middle ages. A debauched nobleman, named Don Juan Tenorio, 
 a descendant of one of the Twenty-Four of Seville, was said to have 
 mortally wounded the Venerable Commander of Ulloa after he had 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moltere, 1st ed. iii. 338, 339. 
 
 \ 
 
374 LIFE OF MOLltKE 
 
 run away with his daughter. This illustrious seignior was buried in 
 tin- church of the Franciscans, where his family had a chapel ; and a 
 tomb and a statue were erected to him there in his honour. At first 
 the murderer, because of his high birth and family influence, braved 
 thr law and escaped the rigours of justice. Then there came a 
 rumour that Don Juan had challenged the father of his victim, even 
 in his tomb, and had railed at and insulted his statue ; that the statue 
 became inspired, and as the minister of justice it had hurled the 
 impious man through the open earth into the flames of hell. Those 
 who said that Don Juan was enticed into the church by the allure- 
 ments of a love-meeting and slain there were not listened to, for what- 
 ever is marvellous obtains an easy mastery over the minds of men." 
 
 From this old legend a Spanish dramatist, Tirso de Molina 
 (otherwise known as friar Gabriel Tellez) r wrote a play early 
 in the 17th century which he called El Burlador de Sevilla y 
 Combidado di Pietra ; and this was the father of at least five 
 other plays, one Italian and four French, on the same subject 
 which were acted in Paris in the third quarter of the 17th 
 century. Of these tbe only one, except Moliere's, that need 
 concern us here was the first in date. An Italian imitation of 
 Molina's play was made by Onofrio Giliberto under the title 
 of // Convitato di Pietra, and it was acted at Naples in 1652. 
 Possibly it was printed there in that year, though both M. 
 Mesnard and M. Desfeuilles say that no copy of it can be 
 found. 1 Giliberto's imitation of Molina's play was put on the 
 stage by an Italian troop at the Petit Bourbon theatre in 
 Paris in 1657. As was customary with the actors of the 
 commedia della bella arte, it was performed in a more or less 
 impromptu way, and it is probable that some changes were 
 made. M. Moland has, however, given an outline of the 
 comedy as it was played at the Petit Bourbon theatre. 2 The 
 subject then become popular on the stage in Paris, and it is 
 curious that all of the four French plays in which Don Juan 
 was the hero were written by actors. All of these French 
 plays were in substance taken from Molina's play, or from 
 Giliberto's, or from an Italian play by Andrea Cicognini called 
 // Convitato di Pietrd, of uncertain date, but acted and printed 
 
 fore April 1664.* This latter play, though popular in Italy, 
 
 1 'Kuvret de Moliere, v. 15 ; xi. 133. 
 
 v. 21-24; xi. 133. 
 
 ' " 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 375 
 
 does not appear to have been acted in Paris, but Moliere seems 
 to have borrowed from it. 1 In three of the French plays, 
 according to the printed editions, Le Festin de Pierre was the 
 main title. But when Moliere's play was printed for the 
 first time in 1682 by La Grange and Vivot, it was called Don 
 Juan ou le Festin de Pierre ; though La Grange, in chronicling 
 in his Eegister the daily performances of Moliere's comedy in 
 1665, called it Le Festin de Pierre. As "le -festin " means the 
 feast, not the guest at the feast, M. Mesnard does well to point 
 out that the words show an ellipse and were understood to 
 mean " Le festin de Vlwmme de pierre, de la statue" 2 
 
 The conception of Don Juan, therefore, was not Moliere's ; 
 but he made his principal character appear to be a real atheist, 
 instead of a pretended atheist or giddy-headed libertine, as was 
 the case with the Spanish and Italian authors. They thought 
 principally of the incidents in their plays, he thought chiefly 
 of the characterisation of his personage. Though in Don Juan 
 Moliere borrowed from Tirso de Molina, from Giliberto, from 
 Cicognini, he was nevertheless working out his own thoughts 
 with seriousness of purpose. " Un grand seigneur me'chant 
 homme est une terrible chose," is the keynote to his comedy. 
 Tirso de Molina wrote a drama in verse, its character was 
 mainly religious, its tone and style were noble, and his play 
 contains few or no comic scenes. The Spanish Don Juan is 
 not an atheist, though he is very wilful in his wickedness. 
 He affects atheism in a dignified manner, and he rails at 
 religion more from a love of raillery than from true disbelief. 
 He always says there is time to repent, and at the end he asks 
 for the services of a priest. 3 In Giliberto's play, from the 
 sketch given of it by M. Moland, there seems to be an absence 
 of any kind of religious thought. Such an idea would have 
 been contrary to the feelings of an Italian audience. They 
 wanted only to be interested and amused, and did not care for 
 serious thought on the stage. In the way of amusement/of 
 comedy, Moliere always preferred Italian ideas to Spanish. 
 
 1 For fuller information on the whole subject see M. Mesnard's Notice to 
 Don Juan in the (Euvres de Moliere, vol. v. ; vol. xi. of the same work, pp. 
 133, 134 ; M. Moland's Notice to Don Juan in vol. iii. in his first edition of 
 Moliere's plays ; M. Fournel's Contemporains de Moliere, iii. 316, 318 ; arid 
 the same author's Petites Comedies Hares et Curieuses du Yl e Siecle, i. 19, 20. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, v. 10, continuation of note 3 from p. 9. 
 
 3 Ibid. v. 7. 
 
370 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 There is excellent comedy in his Don Juan, some of which he 
 may have borrowed from Italian sources, though the setting of 
 it was his own; but the earnestness he showed was certainly 
 not Italian, and it was deeper than Spanish seriousness. 
 Moliere did not mean to write a religious comedy, but he 
 satirised some of the many aspects of immorality. He con- 
 demned irreligion, impiety, and want of all reverential thought ; 
 and because he used satire and jesting his words have some- 
 times been misconstrued. I have said before that he often 
 mixed earnestness and ridicule together. His Don Juan was 
 tfeally a counterpart to his Tartu/e. The two plays should be 
 considered together, the second in date complementing the first 
 Tartuffe pretended to live a holy life ; Don Juan would deny 
 the existence of all holiness, and when he denounces hypocrisy 
 ht; dnt'.s so in a scoffing and cynical manner. He thinks, or 
 tries to think, that there is no right, no wrong, in the world ; in 
 the future no heaven, no hell ; and as we see him he would 
 believe in no God, in no devil, and is to all appearance an 
 atheist. Here, as in the Tartu/e, Moliere does not speak in a 
 scriptural sense; but I gather from his comedy that he him- 
 thought it doubtful if the thorough atheist is not an 
 maginary personage, and that when a man who believes 
 umself to be an atheist is pressed hard on matters that touch 
 s senses strongly, he is forced to admit the presence of a God 
 who rules over him. At all events, Moliere's Don Juan is a 
 who wishes to live as an atheist, though he is also a 
 The character is very powerfully drawn ; and except 
 one moment, when he shows personal courage, he is always 
 represented as odious and despicable in his crimes 
 
 -t must be said that even good modern editions of Moliere 
 
 show some differences in the text of Don Juan. Words or 
 
 are occasionally placed between brackets, or in inverted 
 
 commas, or in footnotes; and though the sense runs clearly 
 
CHAPTER XIV 377 
 
 should be made in the text, that some pages, even some sheets, 
 
 should be cancelled and reprinted with alterations. The 
 
 newly printed pages or sheets were called " cartons." When 
 
 the volume was " cartonne"," or expurgated, according to order 
 
 that is, when certain pages and sheets had been cancelled 
 
 and reprinted with the alterations demanded its sale was 
 
 allowed. Only three copies that were not " cartonne's " are 
 
 known to exist now. They give the text that has been 
 
 followed by M. Mesnard. But an edition of Don Juan was 
 
 published at Amsterdam in 1683 which professed to be still 
 
 more original. For after the first performance of the play, in 
 
 1665, the dramatist altered a few passages and made some 
 
 excisions. His most notable alterations were in Act m. sc. 1, 
 
 where allusion was made to the " moine bourru " ; in Act in. 
 
 sc. 2, known as "la scene du pauvre"; and in Sganarelle's 
 
 monologue at the end of the play. And there is evidence to 
 
 show that these corrections and additions in the Amsterdam 
 
 edition of 1683, professing to restore Moliere's words as they 
 
 were spoken at the first performance of the comedy, were not 
 
 apocryphal. A reprint of the Amsterdam edition was issued at 
 
 Brussels in 1694, but this was virtually only a copy. Thus, as 
 
 M. Moland says, there are three texts to Don Juan : the first 
 
 printing of the Paris edition in 1682; the second printing of 
 
 that edition in the same year, generally spoken of as the 
 
 "Edition cartonne"e"; and the Amsterdam edition of 1683. 1 
 
 To the " edition cartonne'e," or expurgated edition, I shall make 
 
 no reference; but I shall refer occasionally to the edition 
 
 printed at Amsterdam. 
 
 The main features in Moliere's comedy are in the character 
 of Don Juan and in that of his valet Sganarelle, who is used 
 as a foil to exhibit his master. The other personages, too, 
 were designed with this end in view ; they were all intended 
 to show in their various ways the wickedness of the licentious 
 nobleman. And in what I have to say about the play I shall 
 try to show Moliere's meaning chiefly through the two prin- 
 cipal characters. They nearly always appear on the stage 
 together. 
 
 1 M. Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 1st ed. iii. 361 ; vii. 497 ; Taschereau, 
 (Euvres de Moliere, ed. 1863, iii. 113 note ; P. Mesnard, (Euvres de Moliere, 
 v. 46, 47 ; 70, 71 ; and xi. 19, 20; 70, 71. 
 
378 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 The Sganarelle in this play is unlike the Sganarelles in five 
 other comedies of Moliere's where the same name appears, 
 except that all were meant to show ignorant men and more or 
 less stupid. The nature of Sganarelle in Don Juan is better 
 than that of his namesakes, and whatever intelligence he has 
 got comes from his heart rather than from his head. He has 
 an understanding of his own, but he shows it sometimes by 
 buffoonery. He differs from the other Sganarelles in appear- 
 ing as a serving-man, not as a master. His position is to obey, 
 not to give orders. And perhaps . for that reason he possesses 
 some good qualities which he might not have had were he the 
 ruler in his own house. He is partly like the valets in old 
 French comedy, but he is not clever nor quick-witted as they 
 were ; instead he is dull-headed, at times he talks like a fool, 
 and physically he is a coward. Apparently he has had some 
 religious instruction and still believes in it ; he is meant to 
 show a man who has his own simple ideas of right and wrong 
 and the insight that simple, uneducated honesty often gives. 
 He knows his master to be a monster of iniquity whom he is 
 bound to serve, for he cannot escape from him. To show his 
 mental accomplishments Moliere makes him at the outset of 
 the comedy discourse on the virtues of snuff. He is talking 
 to Gusman, the squire to Done Elvire, Don Juan's wife, and 
 tells him that he fears she will be ill repaid for her trouble in 
 running after her husband. Gusman asks if a man of Don 
 Juan's rank could be so base as to insult the virtuous love of 
 Done Elvire ? 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " Oh, yes, his rank ! That is a good reason, and it is likely to 
 prevent him ! 
 
 " Gusman. 
 " But the holy ties of marriage hold him bound. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " Eh, my poor Gusman, my friend, believe me, you do not know 
 Don Juan. ... Let me tell you, between ourselves, that you see in 
 Don Juan, my master, the greatest scoundrel ever created, a fanatic, 
 a devil, a dog, a Turk, a heretic, who believes neither in heaven, hell, 
 nor goblin, who passes his life just as a brute beast. . . , You say 
 he has married your mistress. ... A marriage costs him nothing. 
 ' \i c le > lad y> tow swoman, peasant, nobody is too hot or too 
 :old for him ; and if I were to tell you the names of all the 
 
 women 
 
CHAPTEK XIV 379 
 
 he has married in different places, I shouldn't have done to-day. You 
 are surprised, and change colour at what I am saying. I have only 
 given you an outline of the man ; to finish the portrait a good many 
 more touches are wanted. ... I would sooner serve the devil than 
 him. . . . But a great lord who lives a wicked life is a terrible per- 
 son. I must be faithful to him in spite of myself. Fear alone makes 
 me zealous on his behalf, conceals my sentiments, and often compels 
 me to applaud what I hate from the bottom of my soul." 
 
 When Don Juan arrives he adds something himself to the 
 picture Sganarelle has given of him. He boasts of his love 
 for women. But his language is not that of a large or tender- 
 hearted man who has a chivalrous feeling of regard or of 
 affection for woman as a woman ; it is not that of a man who 
 likes honestly the soft companionship of a woman's society. 
 Due allowance made for the rhetoric and tinsel that an audience 
 in the theatre in the 17th century expected from a grandee 
 when he was talking familiarly to his valet about his love- 
 affairs, Don Juan's first long speech does not show the passion 
 of love ; it does show that of desire. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " But, sir, with the leave that you have given me, may I be per- 
 mitted to say that I am a little scandalised at the life you are leading ? 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 " What do you mean ? What sort of life do I lead 1 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " Very good. But, for instance, to see you get married once a 
 month . . . 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 " Can anything be nicer ? 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " Yes, that is very nice and very amusing, and I should like it too 
 if there was no harm in it. But, sir, to play in that way with a holy 
 mystery, and . . . 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 " Let me be. That is an affair between heaven and myself, and 
 we can settle it without your help. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " Faith, sir, I have always heard it said that it is a bad sort of fun 
 toJaugh at heaven, and that libertines never come to a good end. 
 
380 
 
 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 " Now then, master fool, you know that I have told you I don't 
 
 like moralising. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " But I am not speaking of you, God forbid. You know what you 
 are doing, and if you believe in nothing you have your reasons. But 
 there are certain little impertinent persons in the world who are 
 libertines without knowing why, who are free-thinkers from vanity. 
 And if I had such a master, I should say to him very plainly, looking 
 at him in the face : ' Do you dare to laugh at heaven in that way, 
 and are you not afraid to make fun as you do of the most holy things ? 
 Have you a right, little worm, little- shrimp, that you are' (I am 
 speaking to the master I just mentioned), * have you a right to turn 
 into ridicule that which all men revere ? Do you think that because 
 you are noble, because you have a fair wig nicely trimmed, feathers 
 in your hat, a coat covered with gold lace and flame-coloured ribbons ' 
 (I am not speaking to you, but to the other master), ' do you think, 
 I say, that you are a bigger man, that you may do what you like, 
 and that no one shall dare tell you of your faults 1 Let me, your 
 valet, tell you that heaven sooner or later punishes wicked men, and 
 that a bad life leads to a bad death.' ..." 
 
 Now such language is unusual in comedy, but it was used 
 with serious purpose. It is manifest that the dramatist meant 
 to show" two personages of opposite natures, and he wished 
 the contrast between them to be observed. It was of their 
 natures that he was thinking chiefly. Moliere did not wish 
 to portray in Don Juan a man with religious doubts; as a 
 comic dramatist, that was not his proper function. He chose 
 him as a strong example, and meant to satirise men of high 
 position in the world who lived bad lives, who affected atheism, 
 or at least free-thinking, and who from their rank or their 
 wealth set bad examples to others. He had already made 
 Sganarelle say of his master: " Un grand seigneur me'chant 
 homme est une terrible chose." The scene of the play was laid 
 in Sicily, but it was felt that the interest of the comedy lay 
 among theFrench people and about what passed in their country. 
 Like his fellows, Don Juan was a dandy, an exquisite ; and his 
 speech, though simple from the force of his character, shows 
 that he had the grand manner of men of distinction ; and 
 Moliere, in his comedy, took advantage of the familiarity that 
 existed on the stage before his day between master and valet 
 > make poor Sganarelle, who was certainly neither clever nor 
 ght-witted, reproach his lord for his evil mode of living 
 
CHAPTER XIV 381 
 
 The personage of Done Elvire is a secondary one. Don 
 Juan had but lately taken her out of a convent and married 
 her ; and when she upbraids him for deserting her a few weeks 
 after their marriage, he will not deceive her by fine excuses, 
 but he is callous to her sufferings, and he lies to her as only a 
 wicked and blasphemous man can lie. 
 
 I pass over quickly the scenes in Act n. between Don Juan 
 and the two pretty peasant girls, Charlotte and Mathurine. 
 He sees them one after the other, makes love to each of them, 
 and in succession promises- to marry them both. There is a 
 bit of good comedy in the way in which the two girls, rivals 
 for the hand of the great lord, dispute before him which shall 
 be his wife, and also in the amusing way in which the wretch 
 satisfies them both. And I shall only just mention now the 
 first part of the first scene in Act in. There is some droll 
 by-play here against the doctors of medicine ; but except that 
 it shows Don Juan to be an unbeliever in medicine, as in 
 everything else, the fun is purely episodical. 
 
 The latter part of this scene, however, should be given. 
 Sganarelle says to his master : 
 
 " I want to know what you really do believe. Is it possible that 
 you have no belief in heaven ? 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 " Drop that. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 " That means no. And in hell 1 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 "Eh! 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 " Just the same. And in the devil, if you please ? 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 "Yes, yes. 
 
 "Sganarelle. 
 
 " As little. Don't you believe in another life ? 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 "Ah! Ah! Ah! 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " Here is a man that I shall have trouble to convert. Tell me now 
 (for one must believe in something), what it is that you do believe 1 
 
382 LIFE OF MOLIEKE 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 ' What do I believe ? 
 
 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 "Yes. 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 "I believe, Sganarelle, that two and two are four, and that four 
 
 and four are eight. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 "That's a nice creed! Your religion, it seems, consists in 
 ;iritlimetic." 
 
 The rest of Sganarelle's speech means that he, an ignorant 
 man, who recognises that "one must believe in something," 
 believes in the Creator and his works. At last he gets be- 
 wildered and says : 
 
 " Oh, Lor' ! contradict me, if you please. I cannot dispute unless 
 I am contradicted, and you let me go on talking so that you may 
 laugh at me. 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 " I am waiting until you have finished your argument. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " My argument is that there is something wonderful in man that 
 all the learned people cannot explain. Is it not marvellous that I am 
 here, and that there is something in my head that thinks of a hundred 
 different things in a moment, and does with my body what it likes 1 
 I want to clap my hands, raise my arms, look up to heaven, bow my 
 head, move my feet, go from right to left, go forwards, backwards, 
 turn . . . [As he is turning he tumbles down.] 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 " Good ! You have broken your nose with your argument. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " Faith, I am a big fool to waste time in reasoning with you ! 
 Believe what you like ; I don't care a button whether you are damned 
 or not." 
 
 At the first performance of the comedy, according to the 
 Amsterdam edition, when Sganarelle is questioning his master 
 as to his beliefs, he asks him : " What do you believe about 
 the ' moine bourru ' ? " Don Juan answers him : " Plague take 
 the ass!" And Sganarelle replies: "Now that is what I 
 cannot stand. There is nothing more true than the moine 
 
CHAPTER XIV 383 
 
 bourru, and I would let myself be hanged for him." 1 The 
 " moine bourru " is said to have been a phantom spirit who 
 walked about at night and ill-treated the people out of doors. 
 It was a popular superstition and had, or perhaps has still, 
 much the same effect on the ignorant as the " bogey man " has 
 with us upon young children. Some of Moliere's enemies, 
 blinded by bigoted passion to the spirit of comedy, were 
 shocked at his impiety in claiming reverence for an imaginary 
 being. They would not see that the dramatist, in a spirit of 
 satire, made use of a very uneducated and simple-minded 
 servant to convict his master, who believed only in arithmetic, 
 of a total absence of any religious feeling. After the first 
 performance of the comedy le moine bourru was not mentioned, 
 and the lesson was lost. 
 
 I come now to the " scene du pauvre " in Act in. sc. 2. 
 In some editions the pauvre is spoken of as Francisque. He 
 meets Don Juan and Sganarelle in a forest, and asks the noble- 
 man for a little charity : 
 
 "I am a poor man, sir, living quite alone in this wood for ten 
 years, and I shall not forget to pray heaven to give you all kinds of 
 good things. 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 " Eh ! pray that it will give you a coat, and don't trouble yourself 
 about other people. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " You don't know this gentleman, old man. 2 He only believes 
 that two and two are four, and that four and four are eight. 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 " What is your occupation among these trees ? 
 
 " Le Pauvre. 
 
 " To pray to heaven all day for the prosperity of good people who 
 give me something. 
 
 ''Don Juan. 
 
 " Then you should be well off. 
 
 " Le Pauvre. 
 "Alas, sir ! I am in the greatest distress. 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, v. 139 note 2. 
 
 2 In the 17th century ' ' bon homme " meant simply old man (Sainte-Beuve, 
 Port- Royal, 3rd ed. ii. 537 note) ; and see the beginning of the second scene 
 in the Tartu/e, where Cleante speaks of Madame Pernelle as "cette bonne 
 femme," and Dorine's reply. 
 
384 
 
 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 " You are jesting. A man who prays to heaven all day cannot fail 
 to be in easy circumstances. 
 
 " Le Pauvre. 
 " I assure you, sir, that most often I have not a bit of bread to put 
 
 between my teeth. 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 11 1 will give you a gold louis, and I give it to you for the love of 
 humanity." 
 
 So runs the original edition, non-cartonnee, published in 
 Paris in 1682, which has been followed by M. Mesnard. But 
 there was a part of the dialogue in this scene spoken at the 
 first performance of the play in 1665, omitted by La Grange 
 and Vivot in 1682, which was not published until 1693 at 
 Amsterdam. After the poor man declared that he had not 
 often a bit of bread to put between his teeth, Don Juan offers 
 him a gold louis if he will curse. The offer of the coin, under 
 the same condition, is made and refused three times. Then 
 Don Juan says to him : " There, that 's enough. I will give it 
 to you for the love of humanity." l 
 
 Here again Moliere made use of Sganarelle, who repeated 
 his master's creed to the poor man, to tell the audience in the 
 theatre that the gay young nobleman, the hero in the comedy, 
 had no sort of religious faith or feeling. Don Juan further 
 condemns himself by his sneer against the efficacy of prayer. 
 And when he finds that the unfortunate fellow will not commit 
 a sin for the sake of a gold piece, he says with bragging and 
 bitter irony: "Va, va, je te le donne pour 1'amour de 
 I'humanite." Much has been written about these words. . I 
 have no doubt whatever that they were meant to show strong 
 satire. It seems to me that Moliere wanted his audience to 
 understand that Don Juan, who was impious in everything, 
 wished to say boastingly and blasphemously : " If God won't 
 give you assistance, man will I will do so for man's sake " ; 
 or almost, " If God won't help you, the devil will." 
 
 It must be remembered that besides being an atheist, Don 
 
 Juan was thoroughly wicked. He knew that humanity was con- 
 
 . sidered as a Christian virtue, therefore he railed at it. Of real 
 
 i (Euvres de Mpltire, v. 146 note ; see also Louis Moland, (Euvres de 
 , Ut ed. in. 423, 424 ; and Taschereau, (Euvres de Moliere, ed. 1863, 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 385 
 
 humanity, or, in a familiar and concrete sense, a fellow-feeling 
 for others, he thought nothing. But for the moment he was 
 counterfeiting humanity, and in his gift he made the idea of 
 humanity serve his purpose as a sneer against the charitable 
 feeling towards others that God has put into men's hearts. A 
 moment previous he had sneered against belief in God and 
 trust in Him. It was thus that Moliere by his satire showed 
 the man's wickedness and his cruelty. 1 
 
 Particular religious creeds have nothing to do with all this. 
 Probably enough Moliere ca'red little about them. Probably 
 enough, too, he thought that they interfered in the minds of 
 many men with morality in a large sense, about which he did 
 care a great deal, and which he held was inseparable from all 
 true religion of whatever creed. He has nowhere said what 
 his own religious belief was, but I think it may be gathered 
 from his plays generally that human charity had a large share 
 in it. I do believe that he was actuated by the spirit of re- 
 ligion, apart from morality, and that he respected and revered 
 religious-minded men, if they were but honest in their beliefs 
 and if their acts were good and were truly done. What their 
 beliefs were he thought was a less important matter. He 
 thought more of conduct than of creed. Moliere drew his 
 character of a licentious atheist because he saw that such men 
 were becoming too common among the well-to-do in his 
 own country ; he wished to satirise their shameless and bare- 
 faced wickedness because its immorality set bad examples and 
 demoralised others. As a comic dramatist he was debarred 
 from using severe argument ; instead he chose ridicule as a 
 means of causing horror and disgust. We can all enjoy the 
 ridicule against Harpagon in the Avare, but that against Don 
 
 1 I gather from M. Mesnard that the use of the word " humanite, " as under- 
 stood now, was rare among writers in France in the 17th century. (See 
 (Euvres de Moliere, v. 184, about the middle of the note.) But there is a 
 good instance of it, hidden as it were, in a fragment of a comedy of Moliere's 
 that is little read in Melicerte, Act I. sc. 4, v. 179. There Lycarsis says 
 that he has 
 
 "Pour les desirs d'autrui beaucoup d'humanite. " 
 
 The word is used here lightly, but its meaning is plainly defined. And in 
 the Fourberies de Scapin, Act i. sc. 3, there is another instance of the same 
 kind, but a little stronger. Scapin has been begged by Octave and by 
 Hyacinte to assist them in their love-affairs, and he answers: "II faut 
 se laisser vaincre et avoir de 1'humanite." In other places Moliere uses 
 " humain" in the same sense ; and it is certain that about "humanity," as 
 we understand the word now, he thought a great deal. 
 
 2B 
 
386 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 Juan has not always been understood so well. There are 
 such great difficulties in treating of holy and unholy 
 things in a comedy meant for the stage that many people will 
 say & that such matters are best avoided; yet, as I read 
 Moliere's Tartufle and his Don Juan, I do not think that the 
 charge of irreverence can be fairly laid against him. 
 
 When Don Juan draws his sword and runs to the rescue of 
 a man attacked by robbers, who turns out to be Don Carlos, 
 one of his wife's brothers, he performs the only praiseworthy 
 action that can be placed to his credit. Sganarelle, who is not 
 courageous, runs away frightened. 
 
 It will be remembered that in the old Andalusian legend 
 from which Tirso de Molina took his play, allusion was made 
 to the Commander of Ulloa, whom Don Juan is said to have 
 killed. In the Spanish play the Commander is first seen alive, 
 then after a considerable interval his statue, supposed to be 
 animated, appears on the stage. But the laws which governed 
 the French drama would not allow a long interval between 
 the acts. As all the incidents in a French play were supposed 
 to have happened within twenty -four hours, Moliere spoke in 
 the second scene of his comedy of the death of the Com- 
 mander whom his Don Juan had killed six months previously. 
 
 Don Juan and Sganarelle are still in the forest where they had 
 met the poor man, and they see the Commander's sepulchre. 
 The sepulchre opens, and a handsome mausoleum and a statue 
 of the Commander are seen. Sganarelle is frightened at its 
 lifelike appearance. Don Juan insists that his valet shall 
 ask the statue if it will come to supper with him. When the 
 statue bows its head Sganarelle is still more afraid. 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 " Come here, you knave, I will show you what a coward you are. 
 Listen now. Will the Seigneur Commandeur come to supper with 
 me ? (The Statue again bows its head.) 
 
 "Sganarelle. 
 
 " I would not have had this happen otherwise for ten pistoles. 1 
 Well, sir ? 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 " Now, then, let us go out. 
 
 Moliere's words here are : "Jene voudrois pas en tenir dix pistoles" 
 UBb meaning as understood b y M - Mesnard. See (Euvres de Moliere, 
 
CHAPTER XIV 387 
 
 ' * SganareUe. (A lone. ) 
 " That is one of my free-thinkers who believe in nothing." 
 
 The interview with Monsieur Dimanche, who tries to get 
 money owing to him from Don Juan and from SganareUe, is 
 a deliciously amusing instance of light comedy, but the scene 
 is almost purely episodical. Don Juan afterwards receives a 
 visit from his father, Don Louis, who has come to reprimand 
 him for his evil mode of living. Nearly at the end of the 
 father's speech his son says to him : " If you were seated, sir, 
 you would be able to talk better." And when the old man has 
 gone the reprobate says of him : " Oh ! die as soon as you can, 
 it is the best thing you can do. Every one must have his 
 day, and it maddens me to see fathers who live as long 
 as their sons." Done Elvire appears once more to warn 
 her husband of his bad life. She can be nothing more to 
 him, but she speaks affectionately. SganareUe is moved to 
 tears, but Don Juan remains heartless ; and when his wife has 
 left him he asks for his supper. Here SganareUe shows a 
 mixture of buffoonery and terror that must have strangely 
 disconcerted those critics of dramatic propriety who thought 
 that all the passions should be kept in their place. The statue, 
 who had been invited, takes his place at the table. Don Juan 
 is ever fearless, and accepts with full self-assurance a return 
 invitation to supper given by the statue. 
 
 At the beginning of the fifth act Don Louis pays a last visit 
 to his son. As a prelude to what follows, Don Juan feigns 
 hypocrisy and gladdens the heart of his father, who goes away 
 happy. 
 
 " SganareUe. 
 
 11 Oh, sir ! how glad I am to see you converted. I have been 
 waiting for that for a long time, and now, thanks be to heaven, my 
 wishes are fulfilled. 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 " Plague take the fool ! 
 
 " SganareUe. 
 " What do you mean by fool 1 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 " Do you believe what I have just said, and do you think I was in 
 earnest all the time 1 
 
388 
 
 LIFE OF 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 "What! It is not ... You don't ... You ... Oh ! what 
 a man ! What a man ! What a man ! 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 "No, no, I am not at all changed; my sentiments are just the 
 same. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " What ! you believe in nothing, and you wish to set yourself up as 
 a good man (' un homme de bien '). 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 " And why not 1 There are many others like myself who take up 
 the trade and who put on the same mask to deceive the world. 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " Oh ! what a man ! What a man ! 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 " There is no harm in that now. Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, 
 and every fashionable vice passes for a virtue. The personage of a 
 good man is the best that one can affect nowadays, and the profes- 
 sion of a hypocrite has wonderful advantages. The imposture of the 
 art is always respected, and although it be discovered no one dares 
 to say a word against it. All other human vices are open to censure, 
 and everybody is free to attack them as he pleases. But hypocrisy is 
 a privileged vice ; it closes everybody's mouth and quietly enjoys a 
 sovereign impunity. By dint of shams a close society is made up 
 from a party sect. If one of these persons is offended, all the others 
 rise up in his defence ; and those who are known to be really honest, 
 and those whom every one knows to be real believers, those, I say, 
 are always the dupes. They fall openly into the traps laid by the 
 hypocrites, and they blindly protect the imitators of their own 
 actions. How many do you think I know who, by this device, have 
 cleverly patched up the riots of their youth, who have made a shield 
 of the mantle of religion, and under this honoured cloak have leave 
 to be the wickedest men in the world? You may know their 
 intrigues and be sure of what these people are, they still maintain a 
 high reputation ; and by bowing their heads, by venting deep sighs 
 and rolling their eyes, they put a good appearance upon anything they 
 do. I shall screen myself under this shelter, and there I shall con- 
 duct my own affairs safely. I shall not give up my pleasant habits, 
 but I shall carefully hide myself and amuse myself secretly. If I am 
 discovered I shall, without stirring, lay my interests before all the 
 party, and they will defend me before and against everybody. In 
 that way I can do what I like with impunity. I shall set myself up 
 as a censor of other people's actions, judge harshly of every one, and 
 only have a good opinion of myself. If I am offended I will never 
 forgive, and will always quietly maintain an inplacable hatred. I 
 
CHAPTEK XIV 389 
 
 shall be the avenger of the interests of heaven, and under this con- 
 venient pretext I will provoke my enemies, accuse them of impiety, 
 exasperate them by those zealous, indiscreet persons who, not knowing 
 what they are saying, will talk against them in public and cover 
 them with reproaches, and from their own mouths will damn them 
 openly. That is the way to take advantage of men's weaknesses, and 
 he is wise who knows how to suit himself to the vices of the age." 
 
 Until now the character of Don Juan is not fully known ; 
 Moliere reserved the deepest traits in his personage for the 
 last act of his play. Therefore I have thought well to give 
 this long speech in full. Hitherto Don Juan has been cruel 
 and licentious, he has appeared as an atheist and a scoffer. 
 We see now that the wicked grandee who had gloried in his 
 crimes means to continue his bad life, and to add to his 
 wickedness by screening himself under the mantle of religion. 
 His speech may be divided into two parts. In the first the 
 dramatist spoke against hypocrites and their conduct: he 
 declared that hypocrisy was considered by many as a fashion- 
 able and a privileged vice ; and, though he did not mention 
 his play which was prohibited, he said, with some warmth, 
 what he thought of the devots who had combined together 
 prevent the Tartuffe from being acted. In the second part, 
 beginning, " I shall screen myself," which is connected wit! 
 the first, Don Juan spoke of himself, and declared with 
 abominable cynicism how he meant to make hypocrisy, serve 
 his purpose. Here Moliere had in his mind the class of 
 persons whom in his first petition to the king, in August 1664, 
 he had boldly called " les Tartuffes " ; and he showed how a 
 very evil- thinking and ill-conditioned man would attach him- 
 self to a clique of devots in order to be protected by them, 
 pretend to be honest but live in a slough of debauchery, play 
 the hypocrite blasphemously by making himself the avenger 
 of the interests of heaven, be harsh and uncharitable to others, 
 and yet reap all the advantages of high opinion which the 
 world is willing to give generously to those who do live a good 
 and holy life. Moliere did not suppose that all the Tartuffes 
 were as bad as his Don Juan, but he showed how a Don Juan 
 would take advantage of their protection for his own evil 
 ends. 
 
 Sganarelle, more horrified than ever, cries : 
 
 "Oh, heavens ! What do I hear now 1 You only wanted to be a 
 
390 LIFE OF MOLlfeRE 
 
 hypocrite to give you the finishing-stroke, and this is the climax of 
 abominations. What you have just said, sir, goes beyond everything, 
 and I cannot help speaking. Do with me what you please ; beat me, 
 knock me down, kill me if you like, I must open my heart, and as a 
 faithful servant say to you what I ought. Learn, sir, that if you go 
 on taking the pitcher to the well it will break at last ; and as that 
 author, whom I do not know, says very finely : Man in this world is 
 as the bird on the bough, the bough is attached to the tree, he who 
 attaches himself to the tree follows good precepts [then come a dozen 
 lines of like nonsense], necessity has no law, he who has no law lives 
 liko a brute beast, and consequently you will be damned for ever." 
 
 This is an instance of how Moliere mixed his reproof and 
 his ridicule together ; and I must repeat that Moliere meant 
 his audience to see that the ignorant but honest-hearted fool, 
 in spite of his buffoonery, was a much better man than the 
 atheist grandee. 
 
 Don Carlos, one of Done Elvire's brothers, comes to demand 
 satisfaction of Don Juan, or else that Don Juan should 
 acknowledge his wife publicly. The villain feigns hypocrisy ; 
 he invokes heaven seven times, and says that both he and his 
 wife have determined to retire from the world. Tartuffe, also, 
 used to call upon heaven, but he did so as a hypocrite feigning 
 piety ; when Don Juan invokes heaven, he does so as an atheist 
 feigning hypocrisy. Don Juan replies to Don Carlos : 
 
 " You will do as you please. You know that I don't lack courage, 
 and that at need I can use my sword. ... But I tell you, for my 
 part, that it is not I who mean to fight. Heaven forbids the thought. 
 If you attack me we shall see what happens." 
 
 This was a bit of Jesuitical casuistry, borrowed directly. 
 M. Mesnard says, from Pascal's Lettres Provinciates. If a man 
 walks in a field and another attacks him, he may defend him- ' 
 self without doing wrong. 1 Sganarelle is astounded : 
 
 " What devilish style, sir, do you take up now 1 That is far worse 
 the rest, and I liked you much better as you were before I was 
 ways hoping for your salvation, but now I despair of it, and I think 
 that heaven, which has borne with you so long, will not suffer this 
 
 l.t 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 ""* S ^^ as *" think > and if 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, v. 199 note 5. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 391 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " Ah, sir ! It is heaven that is speaking to you ; it is a warning 
 that it gives you. 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 11 If heaven means to give me warning, it should speak a little more 
 clearly if it wishes me to understand it." 
 
 A spectre now appears veiled as a woman. 
 " The Spectre. .... 
 
 " Don Juan has only a moment to avail himself of heaven's mercy, 
 and if he does not repent now his destruction is certain. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 "Do you hear, sir? 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 " Who dares to utter these words'? I think I know that voice. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 "Ah, sir ! it is a spectre. I recognise its step. 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 "Spectre, phantom, or devil. I will see what it is." (The spectre 
 changes its form and represents Time ivith its scythe in its hand.) 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " Oh, heavens ! Do you see, sir, this change of figure 1 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 " No, no, nothing can frighten me, and I will try with my sword 
 whether it is a body or a spirit." (As Don Juan is about to strike 
 the spectre vanishes.) 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 " Ah, sir, submit before all these proofs and repent at once. 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 
 " No, no, it shall not be said, whatever happens, that I can repent. 
 Now then, follow me." 
 
 , The statue reappears and says : 
 
 "Stay, Don Juan. You promised me yesterday to come to 
 supper with me. 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 " Yes. Where must I go 1 
 
 " The Statue. 
 " Give me your hand. 
 
 " Don Juan. 
 " Here it is. 
 
 " The Statue. 
 
 " Don Juan, the hardening into sin leads to a bad death, and the 
 rejection of heaven's goodwill is followed by its chastisement. 
 
392 
 
 LIFE OF MOLIKEE 
 
 "Don Juan. 
 
 " Oh heavens ! what do I feel ? An invisible fire is burning me. 
 I am quite spent and my whole body is afire. Ah ! " (Strong thunder 
 lightning descend upon Don Juan ; the earth opens and swallows 
 him up, and huge fires belch out from where he has fallen.) 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 " Now by his death every one is satisfied : angered heaven, laws trans- 
 gressed, girls wronged, families dishonoured, parents outraged, women 
 ruined, husbands driven to despair, everybody is glad. I only am 
 unfortunate, who after so many years of service have no other recom- 
 pense than to see before my eyes my master's impiety punished by 
 the moat awful chastisement in the world." 
 
 According to the Amsterdam edition, this last speech of 
 Sganarelle's began with a cry, " Ah, mes gages ! mes gages ! " 
 and it ended with a similar cry after "unfortunate" ("mal- 
 heureux"). These words were thought to be very scandalous, 
 and after the first performance of the play they were omitted. 
 Now, the exclamations can be looked at in a calmer spirit. 
 Moliere, I conceive, meant nothing more than to put into the 
 mouth of his Sganarelle at the end of the comedy a charac- 
 teristic but foolish cry that should have the appearance of 
 buffoonery, and that would make the audience laugh at the 
 nonsense. A servant who believed in the moine bourru, when 
 he saw his master suddenly disappear for ever, would not 
 unnaturally exclaim at the loss of his wages. Would not 
 Sancho Panza have done the same ? In the way of cowardice, 
 ignorance, and self-interest, there is a certain comic family 
 likeness between Sganarelle and Sancho Panza, though Don 
 Quixote and Don Juan are hardly more unlike each other 
 than a highly bred gentleman and an Australian savage. 
 
 It may be taken as certain that La Grange played the part 
 of Don Juan and Moliere that of Sganarelle; and in all 
 probability Mile. Moliere represented Charlotte ; Mile, de Brie, 
 Mathurine; Mile, du Pare, Done Elvire; Bejart, Don Louis ; 
 and perhaps du Croisy, M. Dimanche. 1 
 
 Something was said of the annoyances the poet had to bear 
 
 efore the Tartuffe was allowed to be put on the stage. After 
 
 e appearance of Don Juan the same kind of religious zeal 
 
 partly well-intentioned, partly ill-natured, was manifested' 
 
 gh not to the same extent. When this play was a few 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, v. 56, 57. 
 
CHAPTEE XTV 393 
 
 weeks old a pamphlet was published: Observations sur une 
 comddie de Moliere, intitulee Le Festin de Pi&rre. Par B. A. 
 Sieur de Eochemont, avocat en Parlement. This writer 
 vilified Moliere; and then there followed a Reponse aux 
 Observations, etc., and a Lettre sur les Observations, etc. both 
 endeavouring to defend the dramatist against the strictures 
 in the first pamphlet. 1 In all three cases the author's 
 anonymity has been preserved. What strikes one chiefly in 
 reading these pamphlets now, is that none of their writers 
 had any idea of what comedy is, and that they laboured with 
 their arguments as a horse drags at his plough when pulling 
 it through a heavy soil. And I do not think that reading 
 their arguments will enable any soul alive to understand 
 Moliere's meaning one bit the better. 
 
 Apparently Moliere paid less attention to the attacks made 
 on his Don Juan than to those against the Tartuffe. His last 
 written play was acted fifteen times, several thousands of 
 people had seen it, and so far as he personally was concerned 
 he was tolerably content ; and it is not known that he made 
 any complaint in writing when he was asked, or told, not to 
 print his comedy. The privilege, or leave, to print it, was 
 given on the llth of March 1665, less than four weeks after it 
 had appeared on the stage. This privilege was registered at the 
 booksellers' syndicate on the 24th of May, 2 but the play was 
 not printed until the year 1682. 
 
 It was perhaps owing to the popularity of the subject that 
 Moliere's Don Juan appeared in an altered form at the Theatre 
 Guenegaud in the year 1677. The poet had then been dead 
 four years. The reader will remember that a few weeks after 
 his death the troop of actors at the Palais Eoyal were joined 
 to those at the Theatre du. Marais, and that when this fusion 
 had taken place the new troop went to play at a theatre in the 
 Eue Guenegaud under the title of " la troupe du Eoi " a title 
 which the actors at the Palais Eoyal had borne since 1665. 
 As Moliere's Don Juan had not been printed, the dramatic 
 copyright in the play belonged to his widow, and she must 
 have given her consent that her late husband's comedy should 
 be put into verse by Thomas Corneille, the younger brother of 
 
 1 The three pamphlets have been printed by M. Mesnard, (Euvres de 
 Aloliere, v. 217-55. 2 Ibid. v. 39. 
 
394 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 the more famous Pierre Corneille. The arrangement was 
 profitable to her, for the troop tp which she belonged gave 
 2200 livres for the new version of the play. Corneille and 
 Mile. Moliere shared the money equally, and she gave the 
 troop a receipt for the sum in his name and in her own. 1 
 Corneille altered Moliere's comedy in some respects. He says : 
 "I reserved to myself the right to soften certain passages 
 which hurt those who were scrupulous. I followed his prose 
 closely enough, except in the scenes in the third and fifth acts 
 where I brought women on the stage." Thomas Corneille was 
 an agreeable and a facile writer in verse, and though most 
 Frenchmen naturally prefer Moliere's prose because of its 
 greater strength and because they are rightly proud of 
 Moliere's name, the altered version of his comedy has, con- 
 sidering all things, been thought to be good, When the new 
 version of the play was put on the stage on the 12th of 
 February 1677, it had at first a great success. There were six 
 performances before Easter, giving an average of 1319 livres 
 taken each day. After the Easter holidays, for some unex- 
 plained reasons, the fortune of the comedy suddenly changed : 
 it was acted only seven times with an average daily receipt 
 of 362 livres. 2 But it is much more strange that the rhymed 
 version of Don Juan should always have been acted in Paris 
 for some hundred and fifty years, and that Moliere's comedy 
 should not have been seen there until the anniversary of his 
 birth in 1847. With reference to this revival there is an in- 
 teresting article on Lc Don Juan de Moliere by Charles Magnin 
 in the Revue des deux Mondes for the 15th of February 1847. 
 
 In August 1665 the actors at the Palais Royal, who had 
 een known as "la troupe de Monsieur," received a new 
 They were called to Saint Germain, and the king 
 -old Moliere that he wished that the troop should hence- 
 forward belong to him, and he asked this permission of 
 The actors were promised a pension of 6000 livres 
 they took the title of "la troupe du Roi au Palais 
 The "grands com&liens" at the H6tel de Bour"o<me 
 "la troupe royale," and their pension was 12 000 
 
 'es, twice as much as that given to their younger rivals. ' 
 
 Moliere, v. 50, 51. * La Grange , g Register? ^^ 
 
- 
 
 I 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 L' AMOUR MEDECINLE MISANTHROPE 
 
 MOLIERE'S next new play, L' Amour M&lecin, was first acted at 
 Versailles before the king on the 14th or 15th of September 
 1665, and it was put on to the stage at the Palais Royal on 
 the 22nd of the same month. This was another of the 
 comedies-ballets that Moliere wrote for a court amusement, 
 and as a new play it was performed three times before the 
 royal audiences at Versailles. The little comedy was then 
 divided into three acts to allow music and dancing as inter- 
 ludes ; though when it was given in public these accompani- 
 ments were omitted, probably because of the expense, and also 
 probably enough the divisions between the acts were not 
 maintained. When the author printed his play he wrote a 
 short preface which he wished the reader to notice : 
 
 " This is only a simple sketch, a small impromptu, which the king 
 wished for an entertainment. It is the most hurried of all those his 
 Majesty has ordered of me ; and when I say that it was suggested, 
 written, learned, and acted in five days, I shall only say what is true. 
 It is not necessary to warn you that there are many things that de- 
 pend on the action. Everybody knows that comedies are only written 
 to be acted ; and I do not advise people to read this one unless, while 
 they are reading, they can imagine all the play of the scenes. What 
 I will tell you is that it is to be wished that these sort of works could 
 always be seen with the ornaments that accompany them in the king's 
 palace. You would then see them in a more tolerable condition 
 and the airs and the symphonies of the incomparable Monsieur Lulli, 
 mingled with the beauty of the singing and the skill of the dancers, 
 doubtless give them charms, and it is with the greatest difficulty in 
 the world that they can do without them." 
 
 Since Easter the receipts at the Palais Koyal had been 
 unusually low ; and a new play, La Coquette ou le Favori, by 
 Mile. Desjardins, first given on the 24th of April, did not help 
 to raise them. La Grange shows that in this year, 1665-66, 
 each actor in the troop got less money for his share than in 
 
 395 
 
. 
 
 396 LIFE OF 
 
 any other year either at the Petit Bourbon or at the Palais 
 Koyal theatre. 1 For a few days the Amour Medecin did very 
 well, then by degrees the receipts fell off; but unless the fun 
 in the comedy had amused the audiences, the play would not 
 have been acted as an after-piece twenty-seven times. 
 
 In the Mariage Force Moliere had ridiculed sham philoso- 
 phers or pretended doctors of learning. In the Amour Medecin 
 hu ridiculed doctors who practised the art of medicine, because 
 lie thought that too many of them were empirics blindly fol- 
 lowing routine, that they were more ignorant of their art than 
 they should have been, that through greed they pretended to be 
 learned ; and because he thought that their want of common 
 sense, want of knowledge, and their pretence caused much 
 trouble and often death unnecessarily to sick people under 
 their care. In both of these plays he showed the caricature 
 of comedy plainly enough, but not so far as to disfigure his 
 personages, to alter their natures, or to turn the comedy in his 
 plays into farce. 
 
 It may be fairly assumed from Moliere's comedies that he 
 had a poor opinion of the medical men of his day, and that he 
 was distrustful of the power of medical skill in fighting against 
 a bad illness. Had he been a doctor himself, he would have 
 been sceptical, doubting of real improvement, but still trying 
 to do something to effect it and hoping for gradual ameliora- 
 tion. As it was, he was incredulous. Two stories are told 
 about him by Grimarest, 2 which are at least characteristic. 
 The poet and one of his friends, a Dr. Mauvilain, were both 
 dining at Versailles at the king's table, and Louis xiv. said to 
 Moliere : " Here is your physician ; what does he do to you ? " 
 Moliere answered: "Sire, we talk together, he gives me pre- 
 scriptions; I do not take them, and I get well." The second 
 tory is that Moliere said that a doctor was a man paid to 
 r nonsense in the patient's bedroom until nature had 
 I him or the remedies had killed him. 
 
 One of Moliere's early farces, Le Medecin Volant, written 
 
 *hen he was strolling with his troop in the provinces, was a 
 
 *tire against the doctors of medicine. His next attack was 
 
 n Jan (Act m . sc . i). A S this scene is purely episodical 
 
 as regards the events in the play, I only alluded to it when 
 
 Regl8ter ' 143 2 Vie de Moliere, 42, 43. 
 
CHAPTEE XV 397 
 
 speaking of that comedy, but it will not be out of place if 
 given here. Sganarelle dresses himself up as a doctor, and he 
 prescribes to five or six peasants who have come to him for 
 advice. He says afterwards to his master : 
 
 "It would be a queer thing if those sick people get well and if 
 they come to thank me. 
 
 '''Don Juan. 
 
 " And why not 1 Why should you not have the same privileges as 
 all the other doctors ? They have no more to do than you have in 
 curing their patients, and all their art is pure sham. All that they 
 do is to take the credit when a case turns out well ; and you as well 
 as they may reap the advantage that comes from the good fortune of 
 a sick person and see attributed to your remedies everything that may 
 come from good luck and from the forces of nature. 
 
 "Sganarelle. 
 "What, sir ! Do you think profanely about medicine also? 
 
 "Don Juan. 
 "It is one of the greatest errors among mankind. 
 
 "Sganarelle. 
 " What ! Don't you believe in senna, in cassia, or in antimony ? 
 
 "Don Juan. 
 " Why should I believe in them ? 
 
 "Sganarelle. 
 
 " Your mind is villainously distrustful. You know that antimony 
 is now making a great stir in the world. Its wonders have converted 
 the most incredulous persons, and less than three weeks ago I saw it 
 produce a marvellous eifect. 
 
 "Don Juan. 
 
 "What was it? 
 
 "Sganarelle. 
 
 "For six days a man had been on the point of death; nobody 
 knew what to prescribe, no remedy did any good. At last antimony 
 was tried. 
 
 "Don Juan. 
 "He got well, then? 
 
 "Sganarelle. 
 "No, he died. 
 
 "Don Juan. 
 " The effect was marvellous indeed. 
 
398 
 
 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 "Of course it was. He had been dying for six days, and the 
 untimnny killed him at once. Could anything have done it better 1 " 
 
 The quarrel among the doctors in Paris in the 17th century 
 about antimony, or, as Moliere calls it, "le vin emetique," 
 is related by Maurice Raynaud, himself a doctor of medicine, 
 who published in 1862 a volume called Les Mtdecins au 
 temps de Molttre, of which a second edition appeared four 
 years later. This book is temperate in tone, neither prais- 
 ing nor condemning Moliere's satire strongly, but rather 
 acknowledging that the dramatist's purpose was to show 
 playfully some of the foibles of doctors; and the author is 
 not very technical in the accounts he gives of the institu- 
 tions and customs of the medical profession in France two 
 hundred and fifty years ago. In every country men have 
 their national idiosyncrasies; but probably the members of 
 the Faculty in France at that time were not as doctors either 
 more or less learned than in other countries, where equal 
 opportunities for studying the science of medicine were given 
 to aspiring practitioners. 
 
 In a paragraph in a preface to the Tartu/e, while stating 
 that at different epochs comedy, medicine, philosophy, and 
 religion have been turned to a bad account, Moliere says : 
 "Medicine is a profitable art, and everybody reveres it as 
 one of the most excellent things that we have ; nevertheless, 
 there have been times when it has been made to appear 
 hateful, and men have often made of it an art to poison 
 each other." Moliere, of course, wrote against the doctors 
 in a tone of satire ; but his sceptical mind told him that 
 not enough was known about the science of medicine, and 
 that more should not be expected from doctors than 'they 
 could give. Had they been fairly honest, endeavouring to do 
 the best with the knowledge they had got, he would have left 
 them alone ; it was their greed and their humbug that annoyed 
 him. He thought that too many of them took advantage of 
 the confiding innocence of their patients to fill their own 
 pockets, that they hid their ignorance under a vain show of 
 words intelligible only to themselves, and that in their ignor- 
 ance they fell back upon what somebody had said or done 
 fore them, either making wrong attempts at cure or pre- 
 
CHAPTEE XV 399 
 
 scribing severe remedies when they were not needed. Moliere 
 certainly attacked the spirit of routine in the medical profes- 
 sion. He wished to see in doctors sane-minded men, who had 
 a faculty of insight and of common sense, who thought for 
 themselves intelligently, instead of a body of formalists who 
 were not even good working machines. He wished to open 
 the eyes of the public to the blind practices of those who 
 persisted in frequent bleeding and purging because others had 
 done it before them, whereas softer remedies and the experi- 
 ence gained by watching how nature, if left alone, would do 
 her work, were often what was most wanted. This or that 
 young man had passed his medical examinations, he said he 
 was a doctor, and he was taken at his word. He was not 
 necessarily a Thomas Diafoirus ; but if in most cases he had 
 possessed a fair power of healing, and if he had not been pre- 
 sumptuous and ridiculous, I doubt if Moliere's comedies against 
 the doctors would have been written. 
 
 And there were in France, as in every country, men of a 
 very low grade, more common then than now, really quite 
 ignorant practitioners, who deceived their patients wilfully, 
 and who thought every day how much money they could make 
 out of their credulity. One sees plainly enough that it was 
 not only the ignorance of the doctors that Moliere attacked, 
 but their dishonesty and their pretence. He was an open- 
 minded man, and would have been one of the first to recognise 
 a pardonable want of knowledge in a difficult art, but when 
 he found that there were " tartuffes " in medicine, he threw his 
 ridicule upon them. It has been said already that tartuffe 
 was an old French word meaning an impostor; and when 
 Moliere saw that medical tartuffes made lies part of their 
 stock-in-trade, he got angry and showed his wrath in that form 
 of satire that suited his purpose best. Every physician was 
 not a dishonest quack, as every spiritual director of conscience 
 was not a self-seeking hypocrite ; but at that time, more than 
 now, there were in both professions inducements to trickery, if 
 a man chose to avail himself of them. People were more 
 confiding then than now, because the general level of intelli- 
 gence was lower; they paid more respect to authority; and 
 perhaps, then more than now, they did what they were told 
 through fear of being found out if they were disobedient. 
 
400 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 Perhaps it is hardly likely that Moliere's raillery against the 
 doctors so far made itself felt as to do much real good, at 
 least in his day. Clever charlatans would not cry out that 
 they were hurt; doctors in good position would belittle 
 Moliere's plays, call them farces, or say that he did not know 
 what he was talking about ; while the world generally would 
 be credulous as before ; and if people became distrustful of 
 their doctors, they would in most cases have suffered from their 
 want of belief. 
 
 Moliere did not wish to "talk medicine" on the stage, 
 though perhaps he might have made part of his audience 
 think that he knew something about it. What he did want 
 to do was to expose some bad faults of the doctors in a strong 
 light, in the spirit of amusing comedy, and to make his audi- 
 ence laugh at his pictures of their presumption, their love of 
 formality, their ignorance, and their greed. From Eaynaud's 
 volume it may be seen that there was then much in the per- 
 sonal appearance and manners of these men that made them 
 ridiculous. Even in Paris many doctors going to see their 
 patients used to ride upon a mule, they wore a long robe or 
 gown, their hats were high and pointed ; and worse still, both 
 in consultation and in the sick-room, they interlarded their 
 speech with Latin, partly to hide their ignorance of what they 
 should have said in their own language, and partly to impose 
 on the unfortunate creatures under their charge Before 
 Moliere's day writers had satirised the doctors, and both 
 Taschereau and M. Moland, in speaking of the Amour Mtdecin 
 have given the following 17th century epigram as painting the 
 physicians of the time : 
 
 " Affecter un air pedantesque, 
 Cracher du Grec et du Latin, 
 Longue perruque, habit grotesque, 
 De la fourrure et du satin, 
 Tout cela re"uni fait presque 
 Ce qu'on appelle un medecin.' ; 
 
 All this might be fairly set forth in a satirical comedy that 
 n ended mamly to amuse, and it may be said safely that 
 .thout some oancatnre the satire would lose its salt and be 
 wanting m strength. The question then arises Is the carica 
 ure so great as to destroy the comedy in the' ^LyLT^n 
 the play mto a farce ? In the play now under consideration 
 
CHAPTEE XV 401 
 
 I think on the whole it is not, and that the general character- 
 isation is so fair that the notes or marks of laughable comedy 
 are greatly predominant. It is difficult to define how far 
 caricature in comedy can go without descending into farce ; 
 but every one will acknowledge that in high comedy it should 
 be kept well in hand, while in comedy meant to be openly 
 popular and to create laughter easily, greater latitude may 
 be given to it. We should, at any rate, ask ourselves : Is the 
 intended likeness fairly recognisable ? Does the character- 
 isation of the personages show them to be types of more or less 
 ludicrous men and women, or is it so distorted that they 
 appear to be only absurd figure-heads ? It seems to me 
 that these questions may be answered in Moliere's favour. 
 Even in those of his plays that come under the designation of 
 high comedy, he wrote in a tone of playful satire. As a comic 
 dramatist it was his aim to do so, and he succeeded most 
 admirably in giving true pictures of the types of men and 
 women he meant to represent, though he threw keen ridicule on 
 their follies. None of the plays that he wrote against the 
 doctors can be classed as high comedy and it may be that 
 there is some farce in the M6decin Malgre Lui and in Monsieur 
 de Pourceaugnac ; still I imagine that these plays also give true 
 satirical pictures of the objects intended to be represented. 
 Moliere often meant what he said; he tried to think truly, 
 though he conveyed his thoughts under the guise of raillery 
 and ridicule. And as comedy, even in its highest flights, should 
 be mirthful and give amusement, surely it is permissible in 
 lighter plays to use caricature so long as the satire or ridicule 
 shown does not descend into merer absurdity. In comedy, 
 ridicule and absurdity are not synonymous. Fair caricature is 
 the lawful province of a humorist indeed he can hardly do his 
 work well without it ; and if in a ludicrous picture of a person 
 or thing an easily recognisable likeness is shown of the object 
 represented, the picture is more or less true, almost however 
 great is the ridicule thrown upon it. The question of taste in 
 satire underlies all this, but it may be judged apart. Some 
 sin against taste because they wish to do so. If they have the 
 power of raillery, the piquancy of their wit is telling, but their 
 heads may score a triumph at the expense of their hearts. 
 The pleasantry in the Amour Mtfdecin must have startled 
 
 2c 
 
402 LIFE OF MOLIEKE 
 
 those who saw the play when it was acted at Versailles. Moliere 
 appears to have ridiculed the personal and the professional 
 eccentricities of the court physicians before the king and his 
 guests, and to have amused the royal audience very thoroughly. 
 Iii the Fdcheux, also first acted before the king, he had laughed 
 at some of the foibles of the courtiers ; but there the banter, 
 though it was personal, for the most part touched the oddities 
 of men who thought themselves above the condition of the 
 bourgeois, and they were flattered at being noticed and rallied 
 good-humouredly among their friends. The courtiers all knew 
 each other, the public did not know them, and they enjoyed 
 the fun among themselves, each one pleased to think that he 
 had been chosen for distinction. But in the Amour Mtdecin 
 the raillery was of a different kind, and though it was not ill- 
 natured, it bore strongly against the professional duties of the 
 doctors, and it was meant to show that in their daily practice 
 they were both ridiculous and inept. Still I do not think that 
 in his satire Moliere went so far as to show coarseness or 
 licentiousness. There is greater liberty of thought now than 
 there was in his day, and on the whole men are more delicate 
 in questions of good feeling and of manners. If artists and 
 authors may be censured for work badly done, why not doctors ? 
 And, if discretion be used, why not churchmen ? In those 
 countries where free thought is allowed in the public press, 
 political ministers are often ridiculed severely ; yet the people 
 there are better and more happily governed than in those 
 countries where free thought is stifled. In Moliere's day men 
 did not like being laughed at any more than they do now ; 
 but the doctors knew their own failings well enough, they 
 knew that they were fair game for chaff, they were accustomed 
 to it and they made the best of it. Speaking of the court 
 physicians, M. Mesnard says : " It has been related, but 
 without proof, that the king had himself indicated to Moliere 
 three great celebrities as subjects for merry-making." * And 
 in 1802 Cailhava said: It is very likely that before writing 
 his play Moliere communicated the subject of it to the king 
 otherwise would he have run the risk of displeasing his 
 Majesty by putting his first four physicians on the stage and 
 covering them with the finest but most cutting raillery ? " 2 I 
 
 1 Notice biographique sur Moliere, 332. a & tudes sur MMre 13 o 
 
CHAPTEE XV 403 
 
 do not suppose that these statements are purely fictitious. It 
 is not unlikely that Louis xiv. felt that he could trust in the 
 good sense of Moliere's satire, but that he had not the same 
 belief in the skill of his own medical advisers. 
 
 There is some anecdote about the travesty of the court 
 doctors in the Amour Mtdecin, and from this an idea may 
 be gathered. Gui Patin, a member of the Faculty well 
 known in his day for his satirical humour and his disputes 
 among his colleagues, wrote to a friend on the 22nd of 
 September 1665: 
 
 " A few days ago a comedy against the court doctors was acted at 
 Versailles. They were made to appear ridiculous before the king, 
 and he was highly amused. The first five doctors were singled out, 
 and, in addition, our master, Elie Breda, otherwise the Sieur des 
 Fougerais, who is a great man of probity and very worthy of praise, 
 if one believes what he would like to be thought of himself." 
 
 Three days later Patin wrote : 
 
 " L 1 Amour Malade [sic] is now being played at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne ; all Paris rushes to see the court doctors on the stage, 
 and especially Esprit and Guenaut, with masks expressly made for 
 the purpose. Des Fougerais has been added, etc. So every one is 
 laughing at those people who kill others with impunity." 
 
 I take these details mainly from M. Mesnard's Notice to the 
 Amour MMecin, 1 and he thinks that Patin spoke of Moliere's 
 comedy from hearsay ; and it is generally believed now that 
 Patin was wrong as to the doctors appearing in masks. In 
 this, however, a doubt is possible. Did Patin use the word 
 " mask " in its primary sense as applying to the face only, or 
 did he mean a general disguise that should be more or less 
 apparent? In any case, Moliere's play was not called the 
 Amour Malade, and it was not acted at the Hotel de Bour- 
 gogne. Patin's first letter contained another small error : he 
 spoke of six doctors in the comedy, but only five are named. 
 Another writer, Cizeron-Eival, published a book in 1765, 
 R6cr6ations Litt&raires, in which he spoke of Moliere's comedy. 
 He wrote from papers left by Brossette, who had got his infor- 
 mation from Boileau. The passage relating to Moliere in 
 the Recreations Litt6raires runs : 
 
 " The comedy of the Amour Mddecin is the first in which Moliere 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, v. 266-71. And see M. Moland's (Euvres de 
 Moliere, 1st ed. hi. 516, 517. 
 
404 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 Implied at the doctors and at the art of medicine; and to make the 
 pleasantry more agreeable to the king, before whom the play was 
 acted at Versailles, he travestied the chief court physicians with 
 masks made expressly for the purpose. These physicians were 
 MM. des Fougerais, Esprit, Gudnaud, and d'Aquin ; and as Moliere 
 wished to disguise their names he asked M. Despreaux [Boileau] to 
 give him some that would be suitable. He chose some names that 
 were taken from the Greek, and which showed the character of each 
 of these doctors. He gave to M. des Fougerais the name of 
 Desfonandres, which means man-killer ; to M. Esprit, who stammered, 
 that of Bahis, which means yelping, barking ; Macroton was the 
 name he gave to M. Guenaut because he spoke very slowly; and 
 that of Tomes, which means a bleeder, to M. d'Aquin, who was very 
 fond of blood-letting." 1 
 
 Here Cizeron-Eival mentions masks in the same words 
 that Patin had done. M. Mesnard thinks that Cizeron-Kival 
 had merely copied Patin, whose letters had been published in 
 1692. 
 
 There still remains another doctor, M. Filerin. He appears 
 only in the first scene of the third act ; what he says shall be 
 given later. 
 
 The object of the doctors' services must be mentioned. 
 Sganarelle, not unlike his namesake in the Mariage Forcd, bas 
 a daughter Lucinde who is in love, and who feigns to be ill. 
 Like her father she is obstinate ; she will not say wbat is the 
 matter with her. Lisette, her waiting-woman, divines the 
 cause of her illness, and tells Sganarelle that his daughter 
 wants a husband. She dins tbis into his ears with constant 
 repetition : " C'est un mari qu'elle veut. . . . Un mari, un mari, 
 un inari." Sganarelle says to himself : 
 
 " It is wise sometimes not to seem to hear things that one under- 
 stands only too plainly, and I did well to ward off the declaration of 
 a wish that I do not mean to satisfy. Can anything be more 
 tyrannical than this custom which fathers are bound to obey ? Any- 
 thing more impertinent and ridiculous than heaping up money one 
 has worked hard to get, and bringing up a girl carefully and affec- 
 tionately, to throw one and the other in the hands of a man for 
 whom we don't care a button 1 No, no, the custom may go to the 
 devil. I will keep my money and my daughter for myself." 
 
 Lisette has hit upon a plan for curing Lucinde. She rushes 
 to Sganarelle and tells him that his daughter is dangerously 
 ill and may not recover. The father, who, in spite of his 
 
 1 Quoted by M. Mesnard, CEuvret de Moliere, v. 270. 
 
CHAPTER XV 405 
 
 selfishness, does love his child, is horrified. He calls to his 
 valet and tells him to go at once to fetch some doctors, and 
 plenty of them. Lisette has not much faith in doctors, and 
 she offers some pleasantry against them. As four physicians 
 are about to appear she says to her master : " Now pay atten- 
 tion, you will be highly instructed ; they will tell you in 
 Latin that your daughter is ill." The character of Lisette is 
 meant to show that she. a woman of the people, has her own 
 rough common sense, and that she will speak energetically 
 against what she believes to be absurdities. 
 
 The four doctors who have seen Lucinde are in no hurry to 
 begin their consultation. Tomes relates the distances that his 
 mule has taken him from one part of Paris to another, and 
 des Fonandres boasts of the excellence of his horse. Then 
 there is a discussion (in Act II. sc. 3) between these two men 
 which should be given here; for however ridiculous it may 
 appear to us now, if as a picture it had not been a fair satire 
 on the spirit of routine and formality then prevalent among 
 the doctors, I do not think Moliere would have shown it so 
 pointedly in his comedy : 
 
 "M. Tomes. 
 
 " But which side do you take in the quarrel between the two 
 doctors Theophraste and Artemius 1 For it is a matter that divides 
 all our body. 
 
 " M. des Fonandres. 
 " I am for Artemius. 
 
 " M. Tomes. 
 
 " And so am I. It is not that his opinion, as we have seen, did 
 not kill the patient, and that that of Theophraste was not certainly 
 much better; but he was w r rong under the circumstances, and he 
 ought not to have held an opinion against that of his elder. What 
 do you say *? 
 
 " M. des Fonandres. 
 
 " Of course. One should always observe the rules, whatever may 
 happen. 
 
 " M. Tomes. 
 
 " For my part I am devilish strict, unless it be among friends ; 
 and three of our number were brought together the other day, with 
 an outside doctor ' un medecin de dehors ' l for a consultation in 
 
 1 " Un medecin de dehors was a doctor belonging to another Faculty 
 than that of Paris. The doctors of Montpellier, for instance, were spoken 
 of in that way." Note by M. Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 1st ed. iii. 546. 
 
406 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 which I settled the whole business, and I would not allow that any 
 one should give an opinion unless things were done according to 
 rule. The people of the house did what they could and the illness 
 \\.is pressing, but I would not give way and the patient died bravely 
 during the dispute. 
 
 " M. des Fonandres. 
 
 "You did quite right to teach people good manners and show 
 them their ignorance. 
 
 " M. Tomes. 
 
 "A dead man is only a dead man and is a matter of no conse- 
 quence, but a formality neglected does significant injury to the whole 
 body of physicians." 
 
 Sganarelle comes in to the four doctors to say that his 
 daughter is getting worse, and he asks them to say quickly 
 what they mean to do. After some by-play, Tomes and des 
 Fonandr6s disagree in their opinions, and they wrangle. 
 Tomes says : " If you do not instantly bleed your daughter 
 she is a dead person," and he leaves the stage ; des Fonandres 
 says : " If you do bleed her she will not be alive in a quarter 
 of an hour," and he also goes out. Then the other two doctors 
 give their opinions. Macroton talks very slowly, stopping 
 between each word and halting between each syllable. Bahis 
 speaks very quickly, but he stammers. They both agree in 
 their remedies. Macroton says: "Your child may die, but 
 you will have the consolation to know that it will be according 
 to the rules " ; Bahis says : " It is better to die according to 
 the rules than to get well irregularly." Sganarelle thanks 
 them both separately, drawling out his words when he speaks 
 to Macroton, and stuttering hurriedly when he talks to Bahis. 
 All this may be made very amusing on the stage, and we see 
 that if there are lines of demarcation between light comedy 
 and farce, they run into each other here very closely. The fact 
 that the play was intended as a piece of ridiculous fun will not 
 prevent it from giving a true picture in the spirit of comedy ; 
 and there may be some who say that even with the increase 
 of medical learning human nature has not altered much. 
 
 At the beginning of the third act, M. Filerin, the fifth 
 doctor, admonishes MM. Tomes and des Fonandres for quar- 
 relling among themselves and showing to the world the quackery 
 of medical art : 
 
CHAPTEE XV 407 
 
 " For my part, I do not understand this bad policy of some of our 
 people ; and it must be admitted that all these bickerings have lately 
 brought us into ill repute in a singular manner, and that if we are not 
 careful we shall bring ruin upon ourselves. I do not speak for my 
 own interest, for, thank God, I have settled my own affairs. Whether 
 it blows, or rains, or hails, those who are dead are dead, and I have 
 enough to live upon without thinking of those who are alive ; but all 
 these squabbles do not do medical men any good. Since Providence 
 has been so kind to us for ages past as to make the world infatuated 
 in our favour, we should not disabuse men with our senseless disputes, 
 and we should take advantage of their innocence as gently as we can. 
 . . . The greatest weakness in men is their love of life, and we avail 
 ourselves of this by our pompous nonsense ; and we know how to 
 make the most of the veneration that the fear of death gives them for 
 those in our profession. Let us therefore maintain for ourselves that 
 degree of esteem which their weakness has given to us, and be united 
 in our opinions towards our patients, so that we can attribute to our- 
 selves the fortunate issues in an illness, and accuse nature of all the 
 blunders we make in our art. ..." 
 
 Lisette indulges in another sally against the doctors, and we 
 do not see them again. 
 
 The hot disputes among the doctors themselves offered fair 
 ground for satire. To that part of M. Filerin's speech, near 
 the beginning, where he says " that all these bickerings have 
 brought us into ill repute," M. Mesnard has a footnote which I 
 will copy: "This was doubtless an allusion to the violent 
 quarrels about the circulation of the blood, the use of bleeding 
 and of antimony among the members of the Faculty of Paris ; 
 and to the long battle between them and those belonging to 
 other Faculties, especially against the doctors of the Faculty 
 of Montpellier." 1 And commentators have pointed out that 
 many of the ideas in M. Filerin's speech are found in Mon- 
 taigne's Essays, Book ii. chap. 37. Moliere, however, need 
 not have gone back nearly a hundred years to learn from 
 Montaigne what he saw for himself plainly enough. 
 
 Besides the satire against the doctors in the Amour Mtdecin, 
 which was the main purpose of the comedy, there is some by- 
 play against Sganarelle's selfishness, and his keeping resolutely 
 to his own opinion in opposition to advice which he has 
 solicited. Lucinde's father has the sort of cunning which 
 comes from distrust. He says to his friends : " All these 
 counsels are certainly admirable, but I find that they are 
 
 1 CEuirres de Moliere, v. 337 note 3. 
 
408 
 
 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 rather interested; and I think you advise me very well for 
 yourselves" To one who wants him to buy jewellery he 
 says- "Vousetes orfevre, Monsieur Josse." The humour in 
 these words has made them proverbial. It had long been 
 common in light French comedies, that old men should 
 duped and made ridiculous. Moliere's Sganarelles were 
 mainly creatures of light comedy, but they were not pure 
 caricatures. For fathers were very often selfish in the way 
 they wanted to marry their daughters, and one object of these 
 small plays was to punish them for their churlishness and 
 their self-interestedness, and to make the audience laugh at 
 their discomfiture. Moliere here, as in his other light 
 comedies, denounced their bad qualities and made them an 
 object of derision, and his love-scenes were written to further 
 that purpose. ' He knew very well that as love-scenes they 
 were hollow, but he tried to make them amusing, and to 
 show that there was an object in his satire. The last scenes 
 in the Amour MMecin bear out the title given to the play. 
 Clitandre, Lucinde's lover, dresses himself up as a doctor, and 
 with the aid of Lisette hoaxes Sganarelle in a most extra- 
 vagant manner. The old man is bamboozled in a fashion 
 almost beyond belief. After the strong ridicule thrown upon 
 the doctors, there would have been inconsistency in not 
 showing in the later scenes the same spirit of jesting satire. 
 The play should be considered in the way it was intended, 
 and, as Moliere says in his preface, the reader of the comedy 
 would do well to try to imagine all the play of the scenes. 
 
 It is tolerably certain that Be'jart played originally the part 
 of des Fonandres, but which actors took the other parts is not 
 known, except that Moliere was probably his own Sganarelle. 
 La Grange may have been seen as Clitandre, and Mile. Bejart 
 as Lisette. 
 
 The printing of the first edition of the Amour Mtdedn was 
 completed on the 15th of January 1666. 
 
 An unhappy incident must now be related. Racine, whose 
 first tragedy, La Theba/ide, had been brought out at the Palais 
 Royal theatre in June 1664, entrusted to Moliere and his 
 comrades his second tragedy, Alexandre le Grand. It was 
 played by them altogether nine times, in December 1665. On 
 the first four days the receipts were very good ; on the fifth 
 
CHAPTER XV 409 
 
 and sixth they were poor. Then it would seem that Eacine 
 submitted to be guided by his friends, who thought that the 
 tragedy was badly acted at the Palais Royal ; l and without 
 saying a word to Moliere or to his fellow-actors, Racine author- 
 ised the rival troop at the Hotel de Bourgogne to perform his 
 play. On the 18th of December it appeared simultaneously at 
 the two theatres. After chronicling the performance for that 
 day at the Palais Royal, La Grange wrote : 
 
 "The same day the troop was surprised that the said play Alex- 
 andre was acted at the Hotel de Bourgogne theatre. As Mr. Racine 
 was one of the plotters in the affair, the troop thought that they were 
 under no obligation to pay the author's shares to the said Mr. Racine, 
 who behaved so shabbily as to have taken the play to the other actors 
 and told them to perform it. The said author's shares were re-divided, 
 and each actor got for his share 47 livres." 
 
 Racine received his two shares, as author of the play, for 
 each of the first five performances of his tragedy, but not for 
 the sixth. The troop at the Palais Royal acted his play three 
 times more; it was not seen afterwards at that theatre. 
 Racine must have known at the time that he was doing 
 wrong. He must have known, too, of the old custom pre- 
 vailing at the different theatres, that when one troop had 
 put a play on to their stage no other troop should act it 
 until the play had been printed. 2 This custom had had 
 the force of law for many years, and though Racine was an 
 offender against it the actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne 
 sinned perhaps more deeply than he did. We may be sorry 
 now that Racine should have allowed his natural petulance 
 to get the better of his judgment. Apart from the theatre 
 he and Moliere had been friends, and connected with the 
 theatre Moliere had behaved well to him ; and though Racine 
 was young he was, in fact, close upon his twenty-seventh 
 birthday he was old enough to have known that his conduct 
 was not loyal. The incident prevented a friendship which 
 one would now like to think might have been maintained 
 between two of the keenest minds of the time. Most likely 
 Racine would before long have given his tragedies to the 
 
 1 Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 99-101 ; P. Mesnard, Notice bio- 
 r/raphique sur Moliere, 364-67. 
 
 2 P. Mesnard, Notice biographique sur Moliere, 367. 
 
410 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 troop at the Hotel de Bourgogne, as they were thought to 
 play tragedy best; but if the unfortunate breach between 
 him and Moliere had not happened, his single comedy, Les 
 Plaideurs, would in all probability have been seen and 
 applauded at the Palais Eoyal. That theatre was the natural 
 home of comedy, and Racine must have known that comedy 
 was acted best there. There are two tales, more or less true, 
 dating after this rupture, to the effect that each poet expressed 
 a generous judgment, differing from the opinion of the town, 
 about comedies that the other had written Racine defending 
 the Misanthrope, and Moliere ridiculing those who 'had found 
 fault with the Plaideurs. 1 Even if the stories were true, 
 the good opinion that each dramatist had of the other's work 
 did not bring the two men closer together. How far their 
 quarrel extended into their private lives is not known, but 
 it was probably deepened a few years later by other incidents 
 which will be related in their place. 
 
 We have now to consider a comedy of a very different kind 
 from the last. The Misanthrope was acted for the first time 
 at the Palais Royal theatre on the 4th of June 1666; there 
 is no record of the play being performed at court until some 
 years after its author's death. 
 
 From a large point of view the Misanthrope is generally 
 thought to be the finest of Moliere's comedies. Other plays of 
 his have a stronger plot, or are more openly amusing, or may 
 /have a better acting effect certainly three important elements 
 in the making of a good play. None of his comedies, how- 
 ever, show a deeper insight into the human heart, or a wider, 
 firmer, and more natural characterisation of the different 
 personages. [There is in this play an ideal picture of comedy 
 which will remain true until human nature changes. Some 
 ichmen hold the Tartu/e to be the greatest of Moliere's 
 The plot there is stronger than in the Misanthrope 
 the hypocrite is drawn with rare firmness of touch and 
 ramatic skill. But though there will always be false 
 :gious guides, the personage of Tartuffe has not the same 
 :ence now that he had formerly, and there is much in 
 
 ed - 
 
CHAPTEB XV 411 
 
 his character that will not be readily understood in every 
 country. On the other hand, the type of man shown in 
 Alceste will always exist everywhere. With all his faults 
 Alceste's character is noble and touching ; he may create 
 anger, he never creates disgust. Tartuffe is a coarse-minded 
 wretch ; Alceste is of much finer clay. In his strength you 
 see generous and delicate instincts ; the strength of the other 
 proceeds only from villainy. The pictured, too, of amour- 
 propre, of self-love or self-conceit, portrayed in the Misanthrope, 
 are not peculiar to any country or any people. They may be 
 found most strongly wherever society is hollow, or artful, 
 or specious, and the meaning of the comedy should be seen 
 by any fairly sensitive or fairly well educated man or woman 
 who can read its lines. There are no exciting incidents in 
 the play ; the interest lies in what is said rather than in what 
 is done. The conduct or the action of the comedy consists 
 in showing the thoughts and manners of the people concerned, 
 and when the types of the different personages are under- 
 stood, the dramatic characterisation becomes at once apparent. 
 Perhaps in no comedy of manners aiming at clear and distinct 
 portraiture has the characterisation of men's humours been 
 more strongly shown. It may be objected that no one of 
 the personages commands a full sympathy. Many readers 
 have had the same sort of feeling about Thackeray's Vanity 
 Fair, yet that is believed to be one of the finest novels in 
 the English language. 
 
 Several of Moliere's editors have pointed out that in de- 
 scribing some of the features of jealousy the poet repeated in 
 Act IV. scenes 2 and 3 of the Misanthrope a good many lines 
 from his luckless heroic-comedy Don Garde de Navarre, 
 which had been acted only a few times five years earlier, 
 and which was not printed until after his death. Under 
 these circumstances the repetition of verses or of the same 
 lines of thought is of very small consequence. Le Prince 
 Jaloux was added as a second title to Don Garde de Navarre, 
 and there is clear evidence to show that Moliere at one time 
 intended to qualify his Misanthrope with a second title, 
 L' Atrabilaire Amoureux; 1 but he abandoned the idea. It 
 may be noticed, however, that there is a partial likeness 
 
 1 CEuvres de Moliere, v. 384 and note 2. 
 
412 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 between the abortive attempt to show Don Garcie to be a 
 real personage, and the truthful picture given of Alceste in 
 the later play, though as comedies Don Garde de Navarre 
 and the Misanthrope are very widely different. In the 
 interval between them more than five years had elapsed. 
 In that time Moliere had written many comedies; he had 
 seen the world; he had learned from his own failure that 
 heroic-comedy, once popular in France, was at best a bastard 
 kind of play with much rhodomontade, and that he was 
 unfitted to write one that would satisfy even an uncritical 
 audience. Nevertheless, I believe that the main ideas seen 
 in the personage ef Alceste had long been floating in Moliere's 
 brain, that he had worried and amused himself about them, 
 and that allowing for the ridicule of comic characterisation, 
 which means a great deal, some of them almost formed part of 
 his nature. Then in the middle of his career, still constant 
 in a measure to his first thoughts, he gave effect to them 
 in true comedy, altering them, adding to them, and colouring 
 them, as he .found necessary for the characterisation of his 
 personage. 
 
 The scene of the Misanthrope is laid in the best society 
 in Paris ; and the dramatist placed his hero, Alceste the 
 misanthrope, among men and women who, with one exception, 
 care for others only as they touch themselves, and are flatterers 
 or are disloyal to those they call their friends. They cannot 
 understand Alceste's generosity and noble-heartedness, and 
 they exasperate him, laugh at him, and make him show much 
 asm, contradictoriness, and ill-humour. Their raillery is 
 tified, but it is not this that annoys him, for he is so proud 
 he can hear it unmoved; it is their insincerity that 
 enrages and embitters him. His extravagance often provokes 
 a smile even laughter, and thus the ridicule of comedy is 
 airly thrown upon him; and by his faults the dramatist 
 lows faults of other kinds in people who have not his high 
 .oral sense his delicate instincts, nor his steadfast honesty 
 a matter of fact, comedy has its own characters and its 
 
CHAPTEE XV 413 
 
 these ideals to his audience as personations of human beings 
 with their good points and their failings, and he tried to 
 dramatise their thoughts and their actions so that they should 
 illustrate the humours of life and show the mirth of comedy. 
 He thought the function of comedy was to reprove by satire, 
 and he dwelt more strongly on men's foibles than on their 
 virtues, and by satire he endeavoured to show their faults 
 and the foolish sides of their humours. All the characters 
 in the Misanthrope, are creatures of comedy; they are ideal 
 personifications dramatised with a view to showing them on 
 the stage in a spirit of comedy. And although we cannot, 
 and need not, put aside the feeling that we like one character 
 better than another; yet I take it that so far as they are 
 concerned we should try to see what type of personage each 
 one was meant to represent, how far the ideal has been 
 carried out, what is his or her part in the play, with what 
 purpose they were brought together, how they all act upon 
 one another, in apposition or in concord, and if in the combined 
 action they give a true and mirthful picture of the humours 
 of life with dramatic effect. No one of them was meant to 
 stand alone ; each was meant to be seen with the others, so 
 that their different and generally opposite natures might be 
 plainly distinguished. 
 
 The two chief characters in this comedy are the misanthrope, 
 Alceste, and Celimene, a young imperious woman of the world, 
 who is also a coquette. By the side of Alceste the poet placed 
 Philinte, an affable man of society, who wishes to be every- 
 body's friend ; and by the side of Celimene he portrayed in 
 filiante an even-minded girl, not unlike Philinte, though her 
 nature is higher than his. The other characters are Oronte, 
 a silly sonnetteer, Alceste's rival for the hand of Celimene ; 
 Arsinoe, an ill-natured prude ; and two foolish marquises, 
 Acaste and Clitandre. By looking at the principal scenes in 
 the comedy we shall see how the minor personages were 
 intended to accentuate the features of the misanthrope and of 
 the coquette. And I cannot help thinking that there is a 
 likeness of idea between the position of filiante by the side of 
 Celimene and that of Amelia by the side of Becky Sharp. 
 They were all meant to be considered from the point of view 
 of Vanity Fair. Celimene and Becky were creatures of Vanity 
 
. m LIFE OF MOLIT5KE 
 
 Fair, its atmosphere was the breath of their lives, and they 
 had prominent places in it. filiante and Amelia had no heart 
 for the fair, they did not belong to it though they were seen 
 there, and had friends in it whose sentiments they did not 
 
 share consequently they were thrown more or less into the 
 
 background. If the cleverness of cunning has its attractions, 
 those who show their conduct in a better way deserve also 
 their meed of praise. 
 
 The first scene in the play is well known for a long dis- 
 cussion between Alceste and Philinte, and as their characters 
 have been variously interpreted, I should like to say how I 
 understand them. Which of the two was morally most right 
 or wrong may easily lead us on a false track. It is only 
 indirectly that this question concerns us. We have to look at 
 the comedy in the play from a comic point of view. Moliere 
 meant to give a picture of two men whose humours are dia- 
 metrically opposite. He showed Alceste's over-rough energy 
 against the deceits of the world with strong satire, and he 
 painted Philinte's nerveless complacency with subtle irony. 
 If we contrast the way the dramatist has thrown his satire on 
 the misanthrope, and his irony on the man who wishes to be 
 the friend of everybody, that will, I think, give a fair idea of 
 the comedy in the characters of the two personages, and will 
 tell how each had his different views of the conduct of life. 
 Moliere meant the ethical problem to be kept in the back- 
 ground, but he attached much importance to the way he 
 showed it. He had his own philosophy, but as a dramatist 
 his object was to exhibit the manners of others. 
 
 It is dangerous to compare a character in comedy with one 
 in tragedy, for apart from the incidents related, the spirit of 
 comedy and of tragedy are very different. Still, Alceste is 
 ike Coriolanus in his obstinate determination to maintain his 
 pride and do what he believes is right in spite of what others 
 may say. What Shakespeare makes Menenius say of Coriolanus 
 (Act in. sc. 1) will apply to Alceste : 
 
 "His nature is too noble for the world 
 He would not flatter Neptune for his trident 
 
 ^t tosh >S P ,T r t0 th u Under - His heart ' his mouth 
 What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent ; 
 
 nd ' b emg angry, does forget that ever 
 He heard the name of death." 
 
CHAPTEE XV 415 
 
 And those who know Alceste will feel that he, as well as 
 Coriolanus, might have said of himself (v. 3) : 
 
 " I '11 never 
 
 Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand, 
 As if a man were author of himself 
 And knew no other kin." 
 
 It may be doubted if the word " misanthrope " describes 
 Alceste exactly, though it would be hard 'to find a more 
 fitting epithet. The term " misanthrope " may be applied to 
 men of different natures. Swift, Byron, Jean Jacques 
 Kousseau, were misanthropes, unlike one another ; and not one 
 of them offers a close resemblance to Moliere's imaginary 
 personage. There is, however, a strong likeness between him 
 and Thomas Carlyle in their perverseness, in their contra- 
 dictoriness ; and, in spite of their high qualities, in their not 
 being able to prevent themselves from thinking about them- 
 selves with persistent obstinacy. Like other men, Alceste's 
 character cannot be defined by a single qualification. He has 
 solid virtues and great social faults. He so tortures himself 
 with absurdly exaggerated ideas of honesty that from his 
 excessive fineness of feeling and strong passions he becomes 
 ill-mannered and egotistical, and makes himself unbearable 
 and ridiculous. The prime cause of his unhappiness is that 
 he cannot get away from himself and his own thoughts. And 
 his melancholy is greatly increased by his bottomless love for 
 a woman who has no love in her. All this has so excited him 
 that he is mentally ill. Like Hamlet, his brain is suffering. 
 He wants nothing for himself except the love of a woman who 
 can love nobody ; and it is his nature to be kind and courteous, 
 but his masterful temper overcomes his gentler instincts, and 
 leads him into trouble at every step. Hence is seen the 
 comedy in his character and the satire and the ridicule thrown 
 upon him. In spite of his rough temper he speaks with a 
 true tenderness and nobility of feeling that go straight to the 
 heart. His high qualities plead eloquently in his favour; 
 they show that he hates dishonesty and despises meanness, 
 and that he longs for a better and larger humanity among his 
 fellow- creatures. Moliere nowhere jeers at him, but laughs at 
 him compassionately, loving him really, though regretting his 
 intemperance. Alceste is an ideal personage drawn with 
 
416 LIFE OF MOLliCKE 
 
 absolute realism, and I do not know of one male character 
 that stands more boldly and more firmly on his feet in all the 
 plays that comedy can show. 
 
 Pliilinte is, or would be, a friend to Alceste, and is his 
 antithesis in almost every respect save in that of good birth. 
 His chief features, as seen in the comedy, are those of a man 
 who takes his colour from his friends and from surrounding 
 circumstances. He relies much upon tact. Tact generally 
 implies politeness, but with Philinte it comes more from good 
 policy than from innate good feeling. He has worldly pru- 
 dence, arid he always maintains a show of nice manners ; but 
 he has also a varnished selfishness and an insensibility as to 
 what happens to others. Cynicism need not be rough and 
 brutal ; it may be quiet and plausibly polite. So it is with 
 Philinte. He does not bark or bite ; he is neither satirical 
 nor ill-natured. He is not dishonest in deed, but it does not 
 annoy him to see fraud in others. He cannot change the ways 
 of the world, and he looks upon them with easy indifference. 
 It is not that he is tolerant of men's opinions and their 
 doings; he is listless or callous. Philinte's placid cynicism, 
 deep in his nature, is opposed to the turbulent cynicism of 
 Alceste. There is a strong contrast between the disdain and 
 the distrust in each. These are points of difference in the two 
 personages that should be noticed. The dramatist has shown 
 with the emphasis of comedy opposite types of men that will 
 always exist. Every right-feeling person has at times some- 
 thing of Alceste's anger when he sees calm acquiescence in 
 wrong-doing; and most of us, in whatever society we live, 
 have in various degrees something of the moral obliquity of 
 Philinte. Of the two the latter character is the most common, 
 but as the type has many variations, it is well, in reading the 
 comedy, to think of him only as he is described by Moliere. 
 Philinte has his good points. He would soothe Alceste in his 
 passion, his counsels are generally admirable ; but a toy terrier 
 might as well try to lure a bloodhound off the scent of his 
 quarry. 
 
 It was with the intention of portraying the workings of the 
 mind of his misanthrope and of an affable man of the world, 
 and of showing how such men would talk and act together' 
 that Moliere planned the first scene of this comedy. He has 
 
CHAPTEE XV 417 
 
 nowhere given a finer exposition of male characterisation. 
 The wilful egotism of the one, full of virile passions, and the 
 pliancy of the other, disliking and half afraid to think for 
 himself, are brought into very full relief. Philinte asks 
 Alceste the cause of his angry temper, and is willing to be his 
 friend. . . . Alceste interrupts him characteristically : 
 
 " Moi, votre ami ? Rayez cela de vos papiers." 
 
 Alceste is furious with Philinte because he has rapturously 
 embraced and expressed great willingness to serve a man 
 whose name he does not know, and for speaking of him 
 indifferently the moment his back was turned : 
 
 " Puisque vous y donnez dans ces vices du temps, 
 Morbleu ! vous n'etes pas pour etre de mes gens ; 
 Je refuse d'un coeur la vaste complaisance 
 Qui ne fait de merite aucune difference ; 
 Je veux qu'on me distingue ; et pour le trancher net, 
 L'ami du genre humain n'est point du tout mon fait." 
 
 His turbulent humour creates a smile, but his misanthropy is 
 less amusing. He is made very angry at the way men live 
 together, each one trying to make a profit out of his neighbour. 
 Philinte laughs at him, and says : 
 
 " Le monde par vos soins ne se changera pas ; 
 Et puisque la franchise a pour vous tant d'appas, 
 Je vous dirai tout franc que cette maladie, 
 Partout oil vous allez, donne la comedie, 
 Et qu'un si grand courroux contre les mreurs du temps 
 Vous tourne en ridicule aupres de bien des gens." 
 
 Alceste replies : 
 
 " Tant mieux, morbleu ! tant mieux, c'est ce que je demande ; 
 Ce m'est un fort bon signe et ma joie en est grande : 
 Tous les homines me sont a tel point odieux, 
 Que je serais faclie" d'etre sage a leurs yeux." 
 
 Instead of combating Alceste's opinions Philinte draws 
 him out and asks if he will spare no one in his hatred. 
 Alceste then lets his anger have full play, and his answer is 
 one of the finest passages to be found in Moliere's comedies : 
 
 " Non, elle est gene"rale, et je hais tous les hommes ; 
 Les uns parce qu'ils sont mechants et malfaisants, 
 Et les autres pour etre aux mechants complaisants, 
 Et n'avoir pas pour eux ces haines vigoureuses 
 Que doit donner le vice aux ames vertueuses." 
 
 These and the following are wonderful lines, in which there is 
 
 2D 
 
418 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 much nicety of language, and which, in spite of the violence 
 shown, especially at the end of the speech, I can never read 
 afresh without a feeling of the great reality expressed in the 
 words and of compassion for the unhappy man who uttered 
 them. His temper is very high ; how far it is misguided will 
 be judged according to personal tastes. There is no one so 
 likely to put himself out of court among his fellows as the man 
 who says he hates everybody and wants to hide himself ; his 
 friends will not listen to him, and those who are not his friends 
 jeer at him. Yet the honesty of Alceste's thoughts compels 
 admiration, and it is only from a generous and noble nature 
 that one can expect to find such an outburst. He is very 
 fierce against a thorough villain who has an action at law 
 against him. Everybody knows this adversary to be a crin- 
 ging, pushing, unscrupulous knave (a "pied-plat"); yet he 
 has by his dirty practices wriggled his way into society, . . . 
 and if by interest a place is given away he will gain it against 
 the most upright man. It is not from jealousy that Alceste is 
 bitter against the rogue's success, for he would spurn the 
 wretch as an unclean thing, but it hurts him that clever 
 meanness and dishonest cunning have prospered, and that 
 people should give a welcome to a villain who they know 
 should be shunned. 
 
 " Tt'tebleu ! ce me sont de mortelles blessures, 
 De voir qu'avec le vice on garde des mesures ; 
 Et parfois il me prend des mouvements soudains 
 De fuir dans un desert 1'approche des humains." 
 
 Philiute's reply charms for a moment by the softness of its 
 tone after the violence used by Alceste. He is, as always, 
 moderate, and much of what he says is fair common sense ; yet 
 his words show that the questions of right and wrong do not 
 touch him. He accepts good and evil as he finds them, with- 
 out thinking of their causes and not caring to know their 
 effects. While things go well with him he is apparently an 
 optimist; but he has no convictions, no strong desires. He 
 wishes lazily to let the world go its own way and take care of 
 itself. When you are really angry and believe that you have 
 just cause for wrath, your temper is not improved if your 
 friend says to you : 
 
 " La parfaite raison fuit toute extremite, 
 Et veut que Ton soit sage avec sobriete," 
 
CHAPTEE XV 419 
 
 Philinte's last words in this speech are : 
 
 " Et je crois qu'a la cour, de meme qu'a la ville, 
 Mon phlegme est philosophe autant que votre bile." 
 
 Alceste shows his stiff-necked honesty in the way he refuses 
 to bow to the common custom of soliciting the judge who is to 
 try a suit brought against him. Morally he is right, but as 
 the judges were often determined in their sentences by bribes, 1 
 Philinte though he recognises that Alceste's case is un- 
 deniably just urges his friend to make a stand against the 
 canvassing on the other side. Come what may, Alceste will 
 not stoop to what he conceives to be baseness : 
 
 " Je voudrois, m'en coutat-il grand'chose, 
 Pour la beaute du fait avoir perdu ma cause." 
 
 " Philinte. 
 
 " On se riroit de vous, Alceste, tout de bon, 
 Si Pon vous entendoit parler de la fagon. 
 
 " Alceste. 
 " Tant pis pour qui riroit." 
 
 I can only refer now to the last part of this scene where 
 Alceste speaks of his love for Celimene in a manner that leaves 
 no doubt of the strength of his passion. 
 
 But I will speak of the amusing "scene du sonnet" which 
 follows. Alceste's different conditions of mind are shown 
 here admirably. At first he tells Oronte politely that he has 
 no wish to be made a judge of his sonnet, but when forced to 
 give his opinion he shows that the verses are the veriest 
 rubbish ; then the two men quarrel. Unless it were well acted 
 this scene would be insufferable on the stage. I have seen it 
 played very gracefully and very amusingly at the Comedie 
 Franchise, showing, necessarily with some caricature in Oronte 
 and in Philinte, the nice elegance of the best form of dandyism 
 in Moliere's day. The dramatist was laughing at the self- 
 sufficiency of a coxcomb who wished an over-honest man to 
 advise him whether he should publish his verses, and in 
 describing the scene he was bound to do so with the ridicule 
 of comedy. Imagine an attempt to show the ridicule of 
 
 1 See M. Mesnard's note here, (Euvres de Moliere, v. 454 note 2 ; also the 
 long speech by Dandin, the judge, in Racine's comedy, Les Plaideurs, 
 Act i. sc. 4. 
 
420 LIFE OF 
 
 comedy in such a scene on the stage with no emphasis or no 
 caricature. The thing would manifestly be a failure. In 
 painting Alceste's disgust Moliere had in his mind an idea of 
 the annoyance that Boileau, or a man of his stamp, would feel 
 while an author whom he did not know insisted on reading to 
 him his bad verses. Apparently Boileau acknowledged the 
 truth of the picture as applied to himself, and it would 
 seem that he was proud of it. 1 He thought very highly 
 of Moliere's comedies, especially of the Misanthrope, and 
 with generous sentiments and some self-esteem he did not 
 suppose that Moliere, who had been his friend, would have 
 laughed at him publicly on the stage in a way that was 
 at all offensive. Moliere's business was in the first place 
 to think of his comedy, and Alceste is a dramatised picture 
 of a man who abhors all kinds of flummery. Boileau also 
 hated false taste in literature. Under similar circumstances 
 he would, probably enough, like Alceste, have denounced a 
 bad sonnet and shown that it was silly trumpery ; though I 
 doubt if he would have brought forward the old song, " Si le 
 Roi m'avoit donne," as an instance of simple but heartfelt 
 poetry, and I doubt also if he would have allowed his anger 
 to rise as Alceste did in his quarrel with Oronte. 
 
 This quarrel has put Alceste into a thoroughly bad temper. 
 He had meant to declare his love to Celimene, but instead he 
 tells her roughly in his high pride that everything between 
 them must be broken off, for he cannot endure the thought 
 that she should be always surrounded by so many admirers. 
 The coquette answers him : 
 
 " C'est ce qui doit rasseoir'votre ame effarouchee, 
 Puisque ma complaisance est sur tous epanchee, 
 Et vous auriez plus lieu de vous en offenser, 
 Si vous me la voyiez sur un seul ramasser." 
 
 And when she tells him that he has the happiness of knowing 
 that he is loved, he asks : " Who can assure me that you do 
 not say as much to the others ? " C&imene knows her lover's 
 peculiarities, but she cannot let such a speech pass unnoticed. 
 Then follows a passage in which Alceste proclaims his passion 
 in language too energetic to please the ear of his imperious 
 mistress. 
 
 vol 
 
 "' 228) continu ation of note 2 from p. 227; and 
 
CHAPTER XV 421 
 
 Celimene, though nominally not the most important, is the 
 most central figure in the Misanthrope ; she is the pivot on 
 whom the action in the play depends. She is a young widow, 
 only twenty years of age, but as cunning as a serpent. Her 
 manner of talking is hard and contemptuous ; she uses words 
 and phrases which show a strong nature, but none that show 
 softness or tenderness ; and she is one of those women who 
 do not like other women. She has told Alceste that she loves 
 him ; she allows another suitor for her hand, and she plays 
 with two noble admirers. She cannot break with any of them, 
 for the love of power and flattery are what come nearest to 
 her heart ; next is her love of slander. She is a woman of the 
 world, who thinks only of herself and of what she can give to 
 society by her presence and her wit. The scene of the comedy 
 is laid in her house, and as its mistress she expects that 
 homage shall be paid to her. What makes Celimene interest- 
 ing is the manner in which her character is shown. There is 
 excellent comedy in the clever way in which, in her disputes 
 with Alceste, though she is much to blame, she makes him 
 proclaim his faults and contrives to throw the wrong on his 
 side and to maintain her command over him. The scenes in 
 which she has her part are portrayed very vividly, and they 
 seem to be given in a fresh light as though they were enacted 
 here for the first time. 
 
 Eliante is on the whole the most sympathetic personage in 
 the comedy, and some readers may think they would like to 
 see more of her. She is intended as a contrast to her cousin 
 Celimene, by whom she is thrown into the background. Like 
 Philinte, she is a middle or temperate character, but her nature 
 is higher than his. Some satire is directed upon the want of 
 warmth of feeling in them both, and the dramatist makes it 
 evident that their even-mindedness is little heeded when 
 opposed by faults in persons of more vigorous dispositions, 
 filiante admires Alceste for his honesty of purpose, though she 
 smiles at his excesses. In a quiet way she is as truthful as he 
 is, and she does not flatter. She shows her calm common 
 sense frankly and pleasantly, reminding one of La Rochefou- 
 cauld's saying, " C'est une espece de coquetterie que de faire 
 remarquer qu'on n'en fait jamais." In this way even liante 
 shows her self-love. 
 
42 o LIFE OF 
 
 In the backbiting scene in the secoiid act Alceste, Celimene, 
 Philinte, filiante, the two silly marquises, Acaste and Clit- 
 andre, are present. Like all of Moliere's marquises, these two 
 show their supercilious fatuity. They ask Celimene what she 
 thinks of certain of their friends, and she, not mincing her 
 words, roundly abuses them all. The scene passes in her 
 drawing-room, and as hostess she has the best right to speak. 
 There Ts a somewhat similar scene in the School for Scandal, 
 and as regards the one scene in each comedy Sheridan's, 
 though less 3 strong, appears to have an advantage. He makes 
 the invective come from several persons, whereas Moliere 
 throws almost all the responsibility of slandering her neigh- 
 bours upon Celimene. He must have had his own reasons for 
 not making Arsinoe", an ill-natured prude, whom we shall see 
 presently, take part in the conversation. Hearing this flow 
 of abuse of their friends has been as gall to Alceste. He had 
 placed himself as far from the others as possible, but he 
 suddenly breaks his silence : 
 
 " Allons, ferme, poussez, mes bons amis de cour." 
 
 He charges them all with traducing people into whose arms 
 they would rush with signs of affection and oaths of friend- 
 ship. Clitandre replies : " Are you speaking to us ? If you 
 are displeased at what has been said, it is upon Madame that 
 your reproaches must fall." Alceste will defend his mistress 
 at all costs, and he feels himself insulted at being spoken to 
 by an empty-headed fop. " No, by heaven ! It is to you I 
 speak. It is because of your complacent smiles that she 
 throws her calumny upon others. Her satire is provoked by 
 your base flattery. She would take less pleasure in jeering if 
 she saw that no one applauded her wit." True or not, this 
 speech was unnecessarily rude ; and Alceste injures himself 
 in the eyes of everybody by his love of finding fault and by 
 his contradictoriness. 
 
 As Cleante is the sage in the Tarlufe, so is filiante, in a 
 gentler manner, the soft voice in the Misanthrope ; and it is 
 amusing to notice how completely Moliere instinctively shows 
 that all their evenness of temper and their attempts at pacifi- 
 cation are of no avail against natures that are stronger than 
 their own. In putting into the mouth of filiante an imitation 
 
CHAPTER XV 423 
 
 of some twenty lines of Lucretius (probably taken from the 
 translation he had made when he was a lad), the dramatist 
 gave the keynote of the character he wished to portray. Her 
 speech (Act n. sc. 4) begins : 
 
 " L'amour pour I'ordinaire est peu fait a ces lois, 
 Et 1'on voit les amants vanter tonjours leur choix." 
 
 Elian te meant perhaps to make an attempt at reconciliation ; 
 but Moliere also wished to show that the passion of love may 
 arise without reason, and that, though singular, there was 
 nothing unnatural in the love of a misanthrope for a coquette. 
 The speech of filiante seems also to be a sort of answer to four 
 lines of Corneille's on the nature of love in Act I. sc. 5 of his 
 tragedy Rodoymie : 
 
 " II est des noeuds secrets, il est des sympathies, 
 I_)ont par le doux rapport les ames assorties 
 S'attachent Tune a 1'autre et se laissent piquer 
 Par ces je ne sais quoi qu'on ne peut expliquer." l 
 
 These lines were first spoken in 1644, and they were well 
 remembered in Paris. When Moliere wrote his Misanthrope, 
 some twenty years later, he did not mean to contradict 
 Corneille, but he thought that love might spring from other 
 causes, and he wished to say so. And again, later in the 
 comedy, when filiante is talking to Philinte about Alceste's 
 love for Celimene, she says to him : 
 
 " L'amour dans les cneurs 
 
 N'est pas toujours produit par un rapport d'humeurs ; 
 Et toutes ces raisons de douces sympathies 
 Dans cette exemple-ci se trouvent dementies." 
 
 A guard of the court of marshals appears to demand Alceste's 
 presence. They had heard of the quarrel between him and 
 Oronte about the sonnet, and it was their office to prevent 
 duelling and to effect a reconciliation between the adversaries. 
 They therefore required Alceste to go before them. He seems 
 to think that he is to be asked to say that the verses he had 
 condemned are good, and that he will never do. " Kuat ccelum 
 fiat justitia," should be his motto. Philinte, however, per- 
 suades him to obey the marshals' order. To that he consents, 
 
 1 M. Mesnard, (Euvres de Moliere, v. 516 note, quotes other passages from 
 two of Corneille's comedies to the same effect. 
 
,, M LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 but he will not go back on his judgment about the sonnet. He 
 
 says : 
 
 "Hors qu'un commandement expres du Roi me vienne 
 De trouver bons les vers dont on se met en peine, 
 Je soutiendrai toujours, morbleu ! qu'ils sont mauvais,' 
 Et qu'un houmie est pendable apres les avoir faits." 
 
 The two marquises laugh at this sally, and Alceste causes 
 more amusement when he cries aloud : 
 
 " Par la sangbleu ! Messieurs, je ne croyais pas etre 
 Si plaisant que je suis." 
 
 Here we see a ludicrous side of the unhappy condition of 
 the misanthrope, and as Moliere was acting the part of his 
 own Alceste he showed the bitter smile of cynicism coming 
 from scornful anger as he pronounced these last words. 
 More than thirty years later Boileau remembered Moliere's 
 play at the end of this scene, and having a talent for mimicry 
 lie amused his friends one day by reciting the short passage as 
 Moliere had done. 1 
 
 Cdlimene had just given a very unflattering portrait of 
 Arsinoe, the prude, when she receives a visit from her. 
 Arsinoe has come from "heartfelt friendship" to remind 
 Cdlimene of her faults, and to tell her how the world is saying 
 hard things of her. Naturally the young widow, in her turn, 
 cannot be behindhand in showing to her friend similar offices 
 of good nature ; and to excuse her own faults Celimene says 
 with strong satire : 
 
 " Madame, on pent, je crois, louer et blamer tout, 
 Et chacun a raison suivant 1'age ou le gout. 
 II est une saison pour la galanterie ; 
 II en est une aussi propre a la pruderie. 
 On pent, par politique, en prendre le parti, 
 Quand de nos jeunes ans 1'eclat est amorti : 
 Cela sert a couvrir de facheuses disgraces. 
 Je^ne dis pas qu'un jour je ne suive vos traces : 
 L'age amenera tout, et ce n'est pas le temps, 
 Madame, comme on sait, d'etre prude a vingt 
 
 ans.' 
 
 I well recollect the terrible irony that Madame Arnould- 
 Plessy put into these words on one occasion (about the year 
 
 50) when she was acting the part of the young coquette. It 
 seemed to me so great that I felt pity for the actress who was 
 playing with her, and I wished that the poet himself could 
 
 1 M. Mesnard, (Euvres de Moliere, v. 494 note 2. 
 
CHAPTEE XV 
 
 have heard his words spoken by so perfect an elocutionist. 
 The ladies' battle in this scene is wonderfully graphic. If 
 Moliere were writing it now he would not give so many long 
 speeches; at the same time, shorter ones would not bring 
 before us more clearly the action of the two women trying to 
 wound each other by all the malice that polite invective can 
 show. One is glad to take Celimene's part and sympathise 
 with her for a moment. She was not the first assailant, and at 
 the end the advantage lies certainly on her side. 
 
 There is a scene between Philinte and liante in which we 
 see the accommodating spirit of them both. The poet satirises 
 their want of warm affections, and he probably meant this 
 scene as a prelude to the next. 
 
 Arsinoe had poisoned Alceste's mind against Celimene ; and 
 while Philinte and filiante are still together Alceste, wild with 
 passion, rushes to filiante and tells her that he holds in his 
 pocket a letter that Celimene has written to Oronte. Alceste's 
 rage here so far masters him that he suddenly makes an offer of 
 love to filiante, which she laughs at delicately, and her sensible 
 answer does not improve his position. It is to be presumed 
 that Moliere wished to portray his misanthrope's furious anger 
 and jealousy with the satire of comedy. For this two dis- 
 tinct different efforts are needed. When describing strong 
 feeling in other plays, I think he has nearly always thrown 
 the satire of comedy on his personages, and so invested them 
 with comic interest. But here, as far as Alceste is concerned, 
 I doubt if he has been successful in either effort both when 
 Alceste makes his offer to filiante and in the first forty lines 
 of the next scene when he is alone with Celimene. In speak- 
 ing of Don Garde de Navarre, I tried to say that Moliere 
 intended to give a picture of a man so infuriated by unwarrant- 
 able jealousy that he is hardly accountable for his speech, that 
 the poet attempted a flight of thought beyond his strength 
 and for which he was not fitted. And it would seem that in 
 part of the fourth act of the Misanthrope Moliere was making 
 another attempt, under altered circumstances, to carry out an 
 idea which had unfortunately beset him five years earlier. 
 The failure is not so great in the second as in the first play, 
 for Alceste is not absurd as was Don Garcie. Nevertheless 
 much of what he says to Eliante, and to Celimene at the 
 
426 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 beginning of his interview with her, falls flat and is in- 
 effective; his words do not carry with them the strength of 
 persuasion. They do tell heavily what he felt, but they do 
 not make others feel with him ; and the situation is not shown 
 in an amusing manner. 
 
 But the remainder and the longer part of the scene between 
 Alceste and Ce'limene (Act iv. sc. 3) is full of the highest 
 comic interest. The misanthrope manages to think less about 
 himself and to throw aside his savage humour; he shows 
 instead a real and loving affection. He is still very unhappy, 
 and with a letter in his hand he charges Celimene with having 
 written to Oronte. There is some fencing, and she tries to 
 make him believe that the letter was written to a woman. 
 With a mixture of satire and contempt, which Celimene 
 rebuffs, Alceste offers to read her letter to prove that the words 
 could not have been intended for a woman's eye. Celimene 
 will not allow her letter to be read ; he may think about it as 
 he pleases. He answers : 
 
 " De grace, inontrez-moi, je serai satisfait, 
 Qu'on peut pour une femme expliquer ce billet." 
 
 But she is driven to confess : 
 
 " Non, il est pour Oronte, et je veux qu'on le croie ; 
 Je regois tous ses soins avec beaucoup de joie ; 
 J'admire ce qu'il dit, j'estime ce qu'il est, 
 Et je tombe d'accord de tout ce qu'il vous plait. 
 Faites, prenez parti, que rien ne vous arrete, 
 Et ne me rompez pas davantage la tete." 
 
 Ce'limeiie's attitude here is very wonderful. She is beaten 
 down on all sides ; all means of argument are cut off from her, 
 and she is left without a weapon to defend herself. Then, 
 desperate as a beast at bay, she turns round upon her adversary 
 with strong mock disdain, which he believes to be real anger, 
 and, tiger-like, she tears him so as to leave him helpless. And 
 the quick rattle of her words gives an appearance of truth to 
 what she says. She has disabled her lover by exciting his 
 jealousy, and has gained her point. Alceste, who has hitherto 
 ield his head high in all his disputes, is now brought upon 
 3 knees before the woman he loves. He says to himself : 
 
 " Q U01 ? d '. un juste courroux je suis e"mu centre elle 
 
 01 qui me viens plaindre, et c'est moi qu'on querelle ! 
 >n pousse ma douleur et mes soupgons a bout 
 n me laisse tout croire, on fait gloire de tout " 
 
CHAPTER XV 427 
 
 He knows her falseness, but he cannot rid himself of his love, 
 and he despises himself for his weakness. He prays her to 
 disarm the suspicion she has cast upon herself : 
 
 " Defendez-vous au moins d'un crime qui m'accable, 
 Et cessez d'affecter d'etre envers moi coupable ; 
 Rendez-moi s'il se peut ce billet innocent : 
 A vous preter les mains ma tendresse consent ; 
 Efforcez-vous ici de paroitre fidele, 
 Et je m'efforcerai, moi, de vous croire telle." 
 
 There is pathos in what Alceste says, and Celimene laughs at 
 it as she had laughed at his wildness when he upbraided her 
 so fiercely. She says : 
 
 " Allez, vous etes fou dans vos transports jaloux, 
 Et ne meritez pas 1'amour qu'on a pour vous. 
 Je voudrois bien savoir qui pourroit me contraindre 
 A descendre pour vous aux bassesses de feindre, 
 Et pourquoi, si mon coaur penchoit d'autre cote, 
 Je ne le dirois pas avec sincerite. 
 
 Allez, de tels soupgons meritent ma colere, 
 Et vous ne valez pas que 1'on vous considere : 
 Je suis sotte, et veux mal a ma simplicite 
 De conserver encor pour vous quelque bont ; 
 Je devrois autre part attacher mon estime, 
 Et vous faire un sujet de plainte legitime." 
 
 Alceste again tells her she is false, and again shows his 
 weakness for her. She replies : 
 
 " Non, vous ne m'aimez pas comme il faut que 1'on aime." 
 
 Her artifice is excellent, but there is no sign of love in it. 
 She is so self-centred and has such a clear hardness of dis- 
 position, such a dazzling false honesty, that she can love no 
 one. She knows what she is doing, and she plays her game 
 very cleverly. Her object is to gain a triumph over her 
 opponent by making him show his love for her, and then to 
 take full advantage of his weakness. 
 
 I have said elsewhere, that in depicting Alceste's love for 
 Celimene it was rather the man's conduct in his passion than 
 the passion of love itself that the dramatist was anxious 
 to portray. Alceste again displays his egotism in a peculiar 
 manner. He says to Celimene, speaking of his love : 
 
 " Et dans 1'ardeur qu'il a de se montrer a tous 
 II va jusqu'a former des souhaits contre vous." 
 
 He wishes that no one cared for her, that she was wretched, 
 
12 6 LIFE OF 
 
 poor and of low birth, so that he, by making a noble sacrifice, 
 mi"ht repair the injustice of fortune and through his deep 
 love should have both the joy and the glory of claiming her 
 for his own. This speech must of course be read in the light 
 of comedy. Moliere wished to accentuate Alceste's passion, 
 and then not to jeer at him but to show in the vein of comedy 
 the excesses of an overflowing heart. He showed also in 
 Celimene the behaviour of a woman without heart, and 
 therefore without generosity. Her reply, which she does not 
 finish, is equally characteristic of her : 
 
 " C'est ine vouloir du bien d'une Strange maniere ! 
 Me preserve le Ciel que vous ayez matiere ..." 
 
 Besides his strong love, Alceste has in him a feeling of 
 poetry, but the distinctive feature of the scene is the address 
 of Celimene in her quarrel with Alceste. He knows her to be 
 guilty ; yet she forces him to beg of her to vindicate herself, 
 and she answers- his almost childishly affectionate prayer with 
 cutting raillery. She leads him to make new protestations of 
 love while she stands cold and firm, giving no explanation of 
 her conduct but enjoying the pleasure of conquering him and 
 of scoring a victory. It is the triumph of a coquette, who 
 does not know what truth means ; but she has won the battle. 
 
 It was open to Moliere to draw a noble but intemperate 
 character, for such men exist ; it is for us in reading his play 
 to see how the virtues and the faults of his hero are mixed 
 together, and how in the general environment and in the play 
 of the scenes they serve to make a picture of comedy. 
 
 At the beginning of the fifth act Alceste is crying over the 
 wicked injustice done to him. Through the perjury of his 
 adversary he has lost his lawsuit, but he will not appeal 
 against the judge's sentence. He has his grievance, and he 
 means to enjoy it : 
 
 " Ce sont vingt mille francs qu'il in'en pourra coiiter ; 
 Mais pour vingt mille francs j'aurai droit de pester 
 Centre Piniquit^ de la nature humaine 
 Et de nourrir pour elle une immortelle haine." 
 
 Philinte looks upon his friend's misfortune very placidly. 
 He says to him : 
 
 . . . Si de probite tout etoit revetu, 
 
 Si tous les coeurs etoient francs, justes et dociles, 
 
 La plupart de nos vertus nous seroient inutiles." 
 
CHAPTEK XV 429 
 
 He is a man without much feeling for others ; but if he were 
 tortured with sciatica, or had his house robbed, he would find 
 that " life gave him means of exercising his philosophy " more 
 fully than he had imagined. 
 
 Oronte, the sonnetteer, is a suitor for the young widow's 
 hand. He entreats her to accept him and to banish his rival, 
 or at least to say whom she means to favour. Alceste had 
 hidden himself in a "dark corner"; he suddenly rises up 
 from it, and he too calls upon Celimene to make her choice 
 and decide between them. She naturally tries to defend her- 
 self. But her proud position of queen of her own society is 
 not fated to last much longer. Letters that she had written 
 to Acaste and to Clitandre, saying to each spiteful things of 
 the other, are read aloud. All the men present come in for 
 their share of her ridicule, except Philinte. Such a woman 
 would think that he was not worthy of it. Indeed, in the 
 whole of the comedy Ce'limene addresses only six words 
 directly to Philinte. Acaste, Clitandre, and Oronte leave her, 
 declaring their wish to see her no more. Arsinoe' comments 
 in her own way on what has happened, and pretends to pity 
 Alceste, who did not deserve such treatment. Come what may, 
 Alceste will not suffer Arsinoe to reproach his mistress. He 
 says : " Let me, madam, I beg of you, settle my own interests 
 in this matter, and do not give yourself unnecessary trouble. 
 I do not wish that you should take up my quarrel, for I am 
 not in a mood to be thankful for so much zeal." And he adds, 
 with unjustifiable rudeness : " Nor is it of you that I should 
 think if I sought to make another choice." The prude is 
 stung to the quick. I will give only three lines of her 
 reply : 
 
 " H ! croyez-vous, Monsieur, qu'on ait cette pense"e ? 
 
 Le rebut de Madame est une marchandise 
 Dont on auroit grand tort d'etre si fort eprise." 
 
 Arsinoe' finds that she is not welcomed, and she is not seen 
 again. 
 
 Alceste would speak to Celimene, when she interrupts him 
 with a confession of her faults. Her words seem to bear an 
 air of truth, but he cannot believe them. For this woman he 
 would make any sacrifice, but he has no faith in what she 
 
430 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 says. He knows that he is very infirm of purpose. Turning 
 to filiante and Philinte, but speaking of Celimene, he shows 
 his humanity with its strength and its weakness : 
 
 " Vous voyez ce que peut une indigne tendresse, 
 Et je vous fais tous deux temoins de ina foiblesse. 
 Mais a vous dire vrai, ce n'est pas encor tout, 
 Et vous allez me voir la pousser jusqu'au bout, 
 Montrer que c'est a tort que sages on nous nomine, 
 Et que dans tous les canirs il est toujours de 1'homme." 
 
 Alceste will forgive Ce'limene everything if she will accede 
 to his last prayer to follow him into his desert where he has 
 resolved to live away from mankind. She may thus repair 
 her wrongs, and he can become fond of her once more. Ce'li- 
 mene scoffs at the idea of going to bury herself in a desert. 
 " La solitude effraye une arne de vingt ans," she says ; and she 
 adds: "If the gift of my hand would satisfy your wishes 
 and marriage . . ." Alceste suddenly stops her : 
 
 " Non : mon coour a present vous deteste, 
 it ce refus lui seul fait plus que tout le reste 
 Puisque vous n'Stes point, en des liens si dou'x, 
 .Four trouver tout en moi, comme moi tout en vous 
 Allez, je vous refuse, et ce sensible outrage 
 De vos mdignes fers pour jamais me degage." 
 
 Ce'limene cannot reply to Alceste's last words to her She 
 
 isappears, shorn of repute, lonely and unwept. She has 
 
 Khaps deserved her fate, but it is fearful. Terror and pity 
 
 make themselves felt, because the picture is painted in true 
 
 colour, it 1S one that we can all understand and believe to 
 
 to wholTn a fit o fX ^^^T^^ to ^ 
 and learns from her that she and PHr ? ' f ^ f IoVe ' 
 says to them both:- ^mte are betrothed. He 
 
CHAPTEK XV 431 
 
 Trahi de toutes parts, accable d'injustices, 
 
 Je vais sortir d'un gouffre ou triomphent les vices, 
 
 Et chercher sur la terre un endroit ecarte 
 
 Oil d'etre homme d'honneur on ait la liberte." 
 
 The denouement to the comedy, as far as it relates to its 
 two principal personages, is brusque, but Alceste was following 
 his nature. He seems to have awakened suddenly out of a 
 trance, and to have seen all at once that the woman whom he 
 had loved so deeply and so unwisely had no love in her, but 
 that her vanity and her ambition had led her to play with 
 him, caring nothing whether he suffered or not. With these 
 thoughts in our minds we may remember how Thackeray 
 described Henry Esmond's love for his cousin Beatrix, and 
 her conduct to him. Beatrix had some softness in her heart, 
 though not much ; Celimene had none, and she knew it. The 
 thoughts of both authors in dealing with the subject of the 
 spider and the fly offer many points of similarity. 
 
 If there be any who have not a large sympathy both with 
 and for Alceste, who have not felt with him in his anger and 
 for him in his sorrow, I think that they have missed much of 
 the comedy in the play and also of Moliere's personality ; 
 that they do not see how the poet, in the Misanthrope, has 
 shown some of the highest qualities of his sensitive nature. 
 In 1840 Alfred de Musset wrote a short poem, Une Soirte 
 Perdue ; and after saying that he went one evening to see the 
 Misanthrope at the Theatre Francois and found the house but 
 half full (for in those days it was not the mode to admire 
 Moliere), he exclaimed : 
 
 i" notre maitre a tous ! si ta tombe est ferme'e, 
 Laisse-moi, dans ta cendre un instant ranimee, 
 Trouver un etincelle, et je vais t'imiter ! 
 J'en aurai fait assez si je puis le tenter. 
 Apprends-moi de quel ton, dans ta bouche bardie, 
 Parlait la ve"rite, ta seule passion, 
 Et pour me faire entendre, a defaut du genie, 
 J'en aurai le courage et 1'indignation ! " 
 
 It has often been said that in drawing Alceste and Celimene 
 Moliere portrayed some characteristics of himself and of his 
 wife. This idea is commonly accepted, and it is impossible 
 to refute it. But it may be pushed too far. From the comedy 
 we see that the dramatist meant to characterise a very 
 irrational type of man; and in order to show how contra- 
 
(32 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 dictory men's humours often are he made his wildly honest 
 and too sensitive Alceste, already melancholy from the deceits 
 of the world, fall very ardently in love with a heartless woman 
 who does not know what love is, arid whose aims in life are to 
 appear in society, to fascinate, and to rule. Then he brought 
 them together as half affianced, and showed how incompatible 
 are their tempers. They have two faults in common, with 
 certain differences: a desire to command and an excessive 
 amour propre. Alceste would hide his self-love or self-con- 
 ceit, but he is so proud that he cannot do so ; while Ce'limene 
 is so vain that she makes no secret of hers, she even parades 
 it. Alceste decries men because he thinks they are liars, 
 Ce'limene abuses people because she thinks them silly. And, 
 as might be expected, their common failings do not tend to 
 reconcile them. Now, it is beside the point to consider 
 whether Moliere was thinking of himself and his wife as he 
 drew his two characters. The question to be determined is 
 rather: Do the personages of Alceste and Celimene show 
 dramatically the attributes of good comedy ? Very possibly 
 there was a likeness between the so-called models and the copies, 
 but there is only an idle curiosity in trying to see how far the 
 poet was describing his own domestic troubles when he wrote 
 his play. His lines may be read now everywhere, but what 
 happened in his own household, even if that were also known, 
 does not in the least alter the value of his scenes. It may well 
 be that because he showed the humours of comedy so plainly 
 many persons have been deceived, and that because the 
 imaginary picture is so graphic they have supposed it was 
 more or less a copy of what they have been told, and in some 
 cases half wished to believe, really took place. It is, how- 
 ever, very easy to perceive in certain lines an autobiographical 
 tendency. Towards the end of the first scene Philinte asks 
 Alceste how he can suffer Cdlimene's coquettish humour and 
 her backbiting, whether they cease to be faults in such a 
 charming woman, if he does not see them or if he excuses 
 them. Alceste answers in a speech beginning 
 " Non 1'amour que je sens pour cette jeune veuve 
 
 ie point mes yeux aux defauts qu'on lui treuve." 
 and ending by 
 
 1 Trtnv* for tronre was used occasionally by authors before Moliere's day. 
 
CHAPTEE XV 433 
 
 " Sa grace est la plus forte, et sans doute ma flanime 
 De ces vices du temps pourra purger son ame." 
 
 Is there a man alive who has never felt the meaning of the 
 words " sa grace est la plus forte " ? Here they are said in an 
 unfortunate or unhappy sense, but when said happily, what 
 a delight there is in them, and how joyfully true they will 
 always remain ! I am glad, however, to be able to say that 
 there is no fair reason to suppose that Mile. Moliere had the 
 backbiting propensities that were characteristic of Celimene. 
 
 If there is in some of the scenes in the Misanthrope a 
 likeness to the disputes that took place between Moliere 
 and his wife, I believe that the dramatist showed it uncon- 
 sciously far more than with determined purpose. He cared little 
 whether he showed it or not. With such knowledge, or misknow- 
 ledge, as we have got about Mile. Moliere her fits of caprice, 
 her coquetry, her love of display, her ambitious, her disdain, 
 and her want of affection for her husband it would be useless 
 to say that she and Celimene were not more or less alike ; and 
 it may be thought strange that the poet should have portrayed 
 such a character on the stage. Moliere did not allow his self- 
 consciousness to interfere with the design of his comedy, and 
 he did not trouble himself as to what the world said about the 
 resemblances. The greater number of people who saw his play 
 when it was new did not care about them. Why should we, 
 therefore, trouble ourselves impertinently about them ? Their 
 truth, or want of truth, will not make the comedy in the play 
 better or worse. I can understand that as Moliere was at 
 work depicting the character of Celimene, he should have said 
 to himself more than once : " That is like Armande " such 
 was his wife's name and in the next breath : " Well, if the 
 cap fits her she must wear it." But I think also that Celimene 
 was not the personage that interested him most. It was to 
 describe an Alceste and give a picture of his different humours 
 that made Moliere write the Misanthrope. That such an idea 
 had long been in his thoughts may be seen from his previous 
 abortive portrait of Don Garcie de Navarre. He recognised 
 that Don Garcie did not show his wild passion in a spirit of 
 true comedy, that the character was false ; and when he drew 
 his Alceste he chose as his principal female personage in the 
 new comedy a woman of a very different nature from the 
 
 2E 
 
434 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 heroine of his tragi-comedy written five years earlier. The 
 idea of Ce'limene's cap fitting Armande does not mean that a 
 personal likeness was intended. Moliere did not mean to 
 think of his wife ; he was not, in fact, thinking more of her as 
 Ce'limene than he was of himself as Alceste. He did not 
 intend to draw either her portrait or his own. But he had in 
 his own miiid the types of men and women he wished to 
 describe ; he, the creator, was whirled along passively by the 
 strength of his own work; he had his ideas of comedy, to 
 show people's faults by means of satire, and he felt bound to 
 carry them out to the best of his ability. 
 
 Moliere's sadness clung to him closely ; but, as I read his 
 character, he was not a misanthrope. He did not hate men 
 nor like to think of them badly. On the contrary, his large 
 sympathies with his fellow-creatures made him look into the 
 causes of their troubles. He wanted to see among them more 
 fair give and take, more confidence, less self-seeking. Mere 
 pretence he could laugh at ; a pre'cieuse or a femme savante 
 he thought was a disagreeable woman, and a man who con- 
 stantly tried to show himself to be bigger than he was he 
 thought was a bore, or that he made himself ridiculous. But 
 in neither case was any great harm done. When, however, 
 Moliere found that unjust troubles were put upon the younger 
 by their elders ; that men were hard with those under them ; 
 that those who had influence over others were dishonest in 
 their dealings then he got angry. Distrust and disdain, 
 which he did not like, were forced upon him ; he brooded over 
 the wrongs done to those who could not help themselves, and 
 he became cynical and unhappy. That, I take it, was in a 
 large measure the cause of Moliere's melancholy, and so far he 
 was in some lines of characterisation like his own Alceste. 
 As a comic dramatist, however, he was bound to emphasise 
 Alceste's features and show him to be a comic personage, that 
 s a personage whose humours are emphasised and satirised 
 by the fair ridicule of comedy. But I do not think that 
 Moliere was a misanthrope, in a fair acceptation of the word ; 
 his human sympathies were too strong to allow him to 
 have, in a marked way, the disdain of others felt by the cynic. 
 
 * had some cynicism, it is true, but less than he showed in 
 Alceste, or of a different kind in Philinte. 
 
CHAPTER XV 435 
 
 As to the actors who played originally in the Misanthrope, 
 M. Mesnard has copied the list given by Aime'-Martin, and a 
 more accurate list cannot be made now. Airne-Martin dis- 
 tributed the parts as follows: Moliere as Alceste, La 
 Thorilliere as Philinte, du Croisy as Oronte, Mile. Moliere as 
 Celimene, Mile, de Brie as filiante, Mile, du Pare as Arsinoe", 
 La Grange as Acaste, de Brie as un garde de la marechaussee, 
 Bejart as Dubois. Perhaps Hubert was Clitandre. 1 It has been 
 accepted as certain that Mile. Moliere was Celimene in the 
 comedy and that her husband was Alceste. About this latter 
 part something may be said. In his Notice to Don Garde de 
 Navarre 2 Despois wrote : " If there is a strong stage tradition 
 ... it is that which upholds the excellence of Moliere's acting 
 in the part of Alceste in the Misanthrope. Now, the part of 
 Don Garcie is in a measure reproduced in that of Alceste. 
 Can it be supposed that if Moliere had been so weak in the 
 first he should have shown himself so excellent in the second ? " 
 The seaming contradiction will be understood by any one who 
 may have followed me in what I said about Moliere's heroic- 
 comedy Don Garcie de Navarre, about the different ideas of 
 acting at the Hotel de Bourgogne and the Palais Royal 
 theatres, about Moliere's quarrel with his rivals, and about his 
 own acting generally. Also, Don Garcie was a false personage, 
 and no interpretation of it by any one could have given much 
 pleasure; Alceste's character was truly conceived, and the 
 actor who performs it stands on firm ground. Moliere, too, 
 must have learned something in the art of acting in the 
 interval of five years between the two plays ; and when he 
 played in the Misanthrope he was better known to the public 
 than at the time of his earlier play. And one may easily 
 imagine that Moliere would have shown with clear, strong, 
 and delicate cynicism his misanthrope's pride when the 
 ridicule of comedy was cast upon him, and also have shown 
 admirably the turbulence of an unhappy passionate man when 
 his Alceste was railing at the faults of the world, or when he 
 was being cheated by his mistress. In all this Alceste was a 
 true personage, and Moliere, unhappily for himself, understood 
 the characteristics only too plainly. 
 
 It was on the 4th of June 1666 that the Misanthrope first 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, v. 394 et seq. 2 Ibid. ii. 227. 
 
436 LIFE OF MOLI&RE 
 
 appeared on the stage. Leave was given to print the comedy 
 on the 24th of that month, but the printing was not completed 
 until the 24th of December following, and the first edition of 
 the play bears the date 1667 on the title-page. The text of 
 the comedy was preceded by a Lettre e'crite sur la comtdie du 
 Misanthrope, by Jean Donneau de Vise. Of him I have 
 spoken already. He wrote four or five comedies which were 
 played at the Palais Koyal theatre, but none of them appear 
 to have had much success. De Vise seems to have been 
 clever, except as a writer of plays, though he was not very 
 scrupulous when he was trying to make his way in the world. 
 His Letter on the Misanthrope may^ still be read; it contains 
 some good criticism, showing that he understood the meaning 
 of the comedy. According to Grimarest, 1 Moliere knew 
 nothing about the Letter until he was disagreeably surprised 
 by seeing it printed at the head of his play. Brossette, 
 repeating what he had heard from Boileau, says that de Vise 
 obtained official leave to print his Letter, and meant to do so 
 without Moliere's permission, and that when Moliere heard 
 what his critic had done, he consented to the Letter being 
 published rather than have a lawsuit, 2 Moliere at any rate 
 was annoyed at de Vise's officious interference, and I can quite 
 believe Grimarest when he adds that the poet made his critic 
 understand that he should not have attempted to defend his 
 play. It has been said or hinted that de Vise repeated in 
 his Letter some of Moliere's ideas on his comedy ; but there is 
 no evidence to lead one to suppose that Moliere, consciously, 
 had anything to do with the criticism contained in the 
 Letter. And except its author's audacious self-advertisement, 
 what purpose could have been gained by writing anything 
 about a play that had been acted twenty-one times, and had 
 been withdrawn from the stage nearly four months pre- 
 viously ? La Grange's Register shows that the comedy was 
 only moderately successful on the stage; but it shows also 
 that Grimarest cannot be trusted when he says that Moliere 
 wrote the Medecin Malgrt Lui, his next comedy, to assist his 
 Misanthrope. The dates of representation of both of these 
 comedies, when they were new, prove conclusively that 
 Grimarest was in error when he made this assertion. 
 1 Vie de Moliere, 99, 100. 
 
CHAPTER XV 437 
 
 After what has been said lately of the relations between 
 Moliere and his wife, this is perhaps the best place to speak 
 of the interview between Moliere and Chapelle at Auteuil. 
 In August 1667 Moliere was in possession of an apartment he 
 had rented at Auteuil, then outside Paris. The inventory 
 taken after his death states that in the autumn of 1672 he 
 had paid 200 livres for half a year's rent for the apartment ; 
 also 10 ecus for another room in the same h6use. There were 
 probably four rooms in all, and a garden, or at least a right to 
 walk and sit in the garden. It has been supposed that Mile. 
 Moliere did not live at Auteuil with her husband, that he 
 went there partly to be away from her, and also to free him- 
 self to some extent from the daily worries connected with his 
 theatre inside Paris. Moliere's old school friend Chapelle, 
 however, was a co-tenant with him in the house at Auteuil. 1 
 Chapelle was undoubtedly a clever man ; unhappily he could 
 fix his thoughts only on his love of society and his bottle. 
 Moliere had an affection for him, but he reproached him 
 for 'his overfondness for wine and for making enemies by a 
 bon mot. According to Grimarest, 2 Moliere said to Baron: 
 " Chapelle is my friend, but his unfortunate love of wine 
 destroys all the pleasure of his friendship. I cannot confide 
 anything to him without fear of exposing myself to every- 
 body." The story now to be related is found for the first time 
 in La Fameuse Comedienne? of which I spoke in chapter v. ; 
 but this anonymous book is far from being a trustworthy 
 authority. No one can say with any certainty what was the 
 origin of the story, fidouard Fournier thought it was founded 
 on a fragment of a letter written by Chapelle to the author of 
 the Fameuse Comedienne, giving an account of what took place 
 between him and Moliere, and this surmise has been thought 
 to be not improbable. 4 The' tale has been often repeated, 
 more or less. Saint e-Beuve gave it at length in his very 
 excellent article on Moliere in his Portraits Litttraires, and 
 spoke of it as fair material for biography. The tale runs : 
 
 " He [Moliere] was thinking to himself one day in his garden at 
 
 1 Soulie, Recherches sur Moliere, 289 ; P. Mesnard, Notice biographique 
 sur Moliere, 379, 380. 
 
 2 Vie de Moliere, 93, 120, 121. 3 Ed. by Jules Bonnassies, 16-21. 
 
 4 Ed. Fournier, Le Roman de Moliere, 20 ; and the same author's volume, 
 La Valise de Moliere, pp. xxxii, xxxiii. 
 
438 LIFE OF MOLlftRE 
 
 Auteuil, when one of his friends, Chapelle, happened to be in the 
 garden at the same time. Chapelle spoke to him and found him 
 more uneasy in his mind than usual. He asked him several times 
 what was troubling him. Moliere felt ashamed at not being able to 
 mako a better stand against a very common misfortune, and tried 
 to avoid the question ; but as his heart was full of his love he opened 
 it to his friend, and told him that the manner in which he was obliged 
 to live with his wife was the cause of his unhappiness. 
 
 "Clia|M-ll(>, who thought himself above that kind of thing, rallied 
 him, that he, who had painted so well the foibles of other men, 
 should find himself in a condition which he had so often reproved ; 
 and told him that no weakness was more foolish than love for a 
 woman who did not show affection in return. 
 
 " For my part, he [Chapelle] said, I confess that if I was unfor- 
 tunate enough to find myself in such a plight, and if I had good 
 reason to believe that the woman I loved showed her favours to others, 
 I should have so much contempt for her, that it would cure me for 
 ever of my passion. And you have a satisfaction that you would not 
 have if she were your mistress. Revenge usually takes the place of 
 love in the heart of a man who has been insulted, and you can 
 recompense yourself for the sorrow that your wife has caused you. 
 You can place her in confinement. That would be a sure way of 
 setting your mind at rest. 
 
 " Moliere, who had listened to his friend calmly enough, inter- 
 rupted him to ask if he had ever been in love. 
 
 "Yes, Chapelle answered, I have been in love as a man with 
 common sense should be, but I should not have worried myself so 
 much about a thing which my feeling of honour told me I ought to 
 do, and I blush for you to see you so undecided. 
 
 "Moliere replied, I see clearly that you have never loved any 
 woman, and that you have taken the image of love for love itself. I 
 will not speak of the numberless instances which would prove the 
 strength of this passion, but I will tell you truly how hopeless my 
 condition is, to show you how little one is master of oneself, when 
 love has gained the upper hand and when it uses its power. In 
 answer to your argument of the perfect knowledge you say I have 
 of men's hearts by the pictures that I give - to the public, I allow 
 that I have done my best to learn their weaknesses ; but if reason 
 has taught me that one may escape the danger, experience has shown 
 me only too plainly that it is impossible to avoid it. I see proofs of 
 this every day in myself. Nature gave me an affectionate disposi- 
 tion, and as all the efforts I have made have not conquered my 
 instincts, I have tried to make myself happy, that is to say as happy 
 as a man can be who has a sensitive heart. I felt that there were very 
 few women who were worth loving truly ; that interest, ambition, and 
 vanity were at the bottom of all. their schemes. I endeavoured to 
 choose a woman whose innocence of heart should form my happiness. 
 [ took my wife, so to say, from the cradle. I brought her up with 
 every mark of affection, and this has given rise to the rumours which 
 
CHAPTEE XV 439 
 
 you have heard. I believed that I could, by teaching, implant in her 
 sentiments that time would not destroy, and I used every effort to 
 that end. As she was very young when I married her, I did not see 
 the bad sides of her character, and I thought myself a little less 
 unfortunate than most husbands. Marriage did not cool my ardour ; 
 but I found as time went on so much indifference, that I began to 
 perceive that all my precautions had been useless, and that her feel- 
 ings for me were quite other than those which I had hoped for. I 
 reproached myself on a matter of delicacy which seemed to me to be 
 ridiculous in a husband, and I attributed to her natural disposition 
 what was really a want of affection for myself. I was only too 
 plainly convinced of my mistake, and the extravagant passion which 
 she showed soon afterwards for the Comte de Quiche made too much 
 noise to allow me to continue in this state of seeming tranquillity. 
 When I first heard of it I tried every means in my power to conquer 
 my own feelings, knowing that I could not change hers. I set all my 
 mind to work to gain my purpose ; I thought of everything that 
 might help to give me comfort. I considered her as a woman who 
 had once possessed the single virtue of innocence, but who had lost it 
 when she became unfaithful. For some time I resolved to live with 
 her as a well-bred man does who knows that his wife is fake, though 
 it may be said that her bad conduct should not injure his reputation. 
 But I discovered to my sorrow that a woman who is not really 
 beautiful, and who owes whatever intelligence she has to the educa- 
 tion that I gave her, very quickly upset all my reasoning. Whenever 
 she came beside me I forgot my resolutions, and the first words that 
 she spoke in her own defence convinced me so fully that my suspicions 
 were ill-founded, that I asked her pardon for being so credulous. 
 My kindness did not change her conduct. I have therefore deter- 
 mined to live with her as though she were not my wife. But if you 
 knew what I suffer you would pity me. My love for her is so strong 
 that I find myself taking her part ; and when I reflect how impos- 
 sible it is for me to conquer my feelings, I tell myself at the same 
 time that perhaps she has the same difficulty in overcoming her 
 coquetry, and I think more of sympathising with her than of blaming 
 her. You will tell me that I must be a poet to love anybody in that 
 manner. I think that there is only one kind of love, and that men 
 who have never had these compassionate feelings have never loved 
 truly. I think of her in connection with everything that happens. 
 She fills my heart so entirely, that when she is not with me my 
 thoughts are always with her. Whenever I see her I feel an inde- 
 scribable affection and tenderness that deprives me of my senses. I 
 have no eyes for her faults ; I only know that I love her. Is not 
 this the last stage of madness ? And do you wonder, if I have still any 
 power of reason, that it should only tell me of my weakness, but leave 
 me helpless to overcome it 1 ' 
 
 There is another account, given by Grimarest, 1 of an inter- 
 
 1 Vie de Moliere, pp. 79-81. 
 
440 LIFE OF MOLIEBE 
 
 view between Moliere and his friend Kohault, a natural 
 philosopher, according to which the poet spoke of the unhappy 
 relations between himself and his wife. There are points of 
 similarity in the two accounts as to Mile. Moliere's indiffer- 
 ence to her husband; the main difference between them is 
 that the author of the Fameuse Comedienne says that she was 
 unfaithful to him; in what Grimarest says, she is reported as 
 being true but cold-hearted. Both descriptions were written 
 after the date of the Misanthrope ; both were probably more 
 or less made up, though in both there is an air of truth which 
 it is difficult to dispel. 
 
 Moliere, like many other large-hearted and large-minded 
 men, had more than one side to his nature. He was both 
 affectionate and melancholy. It would seem from his plays, 
 even considering the spirit of comedy in which they were 
 written, that he had not a high opinion of women generally ; 
 and it may be gathered also that this want of a good opinion 
 of women helped to make him unhappy. It may be accepted, 
 at all events, that he was fascinated by Armande Be'jart when 
 she was a child, and that her charms grew upon him. When 
 he was just turned forty he married her, she being then 
 seventeen or eighteen, hoping and half believing that with 
 his strong love for her he could mould her, and that she would 
 adapt herself to his ways. In both of these expectations he 
 was disappointed. She naturally had her own thoughts, her 
 own aspirations, and they differed from his. Unfortunately she 
 was less yielding than he was. It is safest to concur in the 
 general impression that Moliere's married life was not a happy 
 one, and that he did not find in his wife the sweet disposi- 
 tion he had fondly anticipated. He was a man who looked 
 for kindliness, for sympathy, but she had none to give him. 
 His thoughts did not agree with hers ; neither could make a 
 close companion or friend of the other, and it would have been 
 better for them both if he had been able to resist her fascina- 
 tions. It may be true that in spite of himself Moliere always 
 continued to be fond of his wife, and that he reproached him- 
 self for speaking to her harshly. We read that for a time 
 they were separated, but that through the mediation of friends 
 they came together again a few years before the husband's 
 death. 
 
CHAPTEE XVI 
 
 LE MEDECIN MALGRE LUILE BALLET DES MUSES OTHER 
 EVENTS-AMPHITRYON L'A VARE-GEORGE DAN DIN 
 
 MOLIERE'S Mtdecin Malgr6 Lui was first acted at the Palais 
 Eoyal theatre on the 6th of August 1666, four days after the 
 Misanthrope, had been withdrawn from the stage as a new 
 play. After the seriousness of the five-act comedy in verse, 
 which had been played twenty-one times, and at its later 
 performances with low receipts, the poet, as manager of his 
 theatre and leader of the troop for which he virtually had to 
 provide, wished to give the public a lighter form of entertain- 
 ment. When the Mtdecin Malgrt Lui had been acted eleven 
 times, the Misanthrope was again brought forward, and these 
 two plays were given together on five consecutive days. 1 
 Grimarest's statement that Moliere had written the Mtdecin 
 Malgre Lui to assist the Misanthrope should therefore be 
 dismissed. 
 
 Very few dramatists have been so successful as Moliere in 
 both high, and in what may, perhaps, best be called popular 
 comedy. The link between them is in the desire and the 
 capability to show naturally and in an open comic manner 
 somewhat different sides of human nature. In the 17th century 
 society in France, more than was the case in England, was 
 divided roughly into two classes the quality and the people. 
 And Moliere, as he revealed in high comedy the thoughts and 
 the manners of the better educated, and in popular comedy 
 those in a lower or less cultivated rank of life, did not in 
 his own mind divide men into classes, either mentally or 
 morally. The wish with him to look upon all men as belong- 
 ing to the large human family, was father to the thought. He 
 was no theorist. If what are now understood as socialistic 
 principles had then been known in France, he would have 
 been averse to them ; but in marking in his own way, in a 
 
 1 La Grange's Register, pp. 82, 83. 
 
 441 
 
442 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 comic manner, the different ideas he saw around him, it may 
 be seen that his thoughts were often with the people, that he 
 recognised their hopes and their fears as well as those of their 
 loftier brethren, and that he would gladly have seen more 
 communication between them. Louis Racine, in his Mttmoires 
 of his father, tells a piquant anecdote, dating in all probability 
 from after Moliere's death, about Boileau's admiration for 
 Moliere : " He always looked upon Moliere as unique in his 
 genius ; and one day when the king asked him who was the 
 most uncommon (' le plus rare ') of the great writers who had 
 honoured France during his reign, he named Moliere. ' I did 
 not think so,' the king answered, 'but you know more about 
 the matter than I do.' " l 
 
 There is some excellent farce in the Medecin Malgrt Lui, and 
 the satire against the doctors is the most farcical part of the 
 play. But allowing that the incidents told are meant chiefly 
 to arouse laughter, the individual characterisation of the 
 various personages is very well shown ; and when different 
 traits in human characterisation are painted truly in a 
 farcical manner, then farce rises nearly to the level of comedy. 
 One of Moliere's rare qualities is that he knits comedy and 
 farce so well and so closely together. The Mddecin Malgre 
 Lid has always been popular on the stage. Up to the year 
 1870 it had been acted at the Come'die Franchise oftener 
 than any other play of Moliere's except the Tartuffe? 
 
 I need not repeat what was said early in the last chapter as 
 to how Moliere regarded the medical doctors of his day. 
 The fun in the Me'decin Malgre Lui is readily seen, but to give 
 it at second-hand is not an easy matter. It is fine and 
 delicate ; you enjoy the freshness of its wit, but you cannot 
 analyse it beyond feeling that it is shown with all the "go " of 
 comedy and that the enthusiasm it creates is infectious. The 
 play is hardly more than an amusing sketch composed in a 
 popular manner, and two of the personages speak the language 
 of the people. In all probability it was transformed from a 
 farce known as Le Fagotier or Le Fagoteux, which Moliere 
 himself had written in earlier days and which had been acted 
 a few times at the Palais Royal theatre. Some verbal in- 
 
 1 wres de J. Racine, by Paul Mesnard, vol. i. 1st ed. p. 263 ; 2nd. ed. 
 >?., chap. xi. p. 282. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 443 
 
 stances of what is now looked upon as coarseness are notice- 
 able. They strike one because Moliere, even in his popular 
 comedies, wrote very little indeed that any sensible man or 
 woman would wish to see bowdlerised. 
 
 This is the last of Moliere's comedies in which a Sganarelle 
 appears. The dramatist made frequent use of this character 
 and has shown him under various aspects. He is hard, or 
 contemptible, or vicious, or foolish, or cowardly, or boastful, or 
 self-interested ; and in exposing the same type of personage 
 under various guises Moliere showed how well he knew his 
 thoughts. One would have liked to have seen a different 
 name given to poor Sganarelle in Don Juan, for though 
 cowardly he hardly answers to his family name, and by the 
 side of his master he shines as a good man. The Sganarelle in 
 the present comedy is by occupation a wood-cutter, by nature 
 a selfish curmudgeon, and by habit a tippler. He has a wife 
 who is a shrew. They quarrel, and he beats her, and it 
 is owing to her revenge that he is made a doctor against his 
 will. 
 
 I shall refer to only one small incident in the M6decin 
 Malgrt Lui. It is in Act n. sc. 4, and in the well-known 
 words : " Nous avons chang^ tout cela." Sganarelle, the sham 
 doctor, has been talking furious nonsense to Ge'ronte, the 
 father of his patient : 
 
 " Gtronte. 
 
 " I have no doubt your reasoning is most excellent. There is only 
 one thing that puzzles me : the side [in the human body] of the 
 liver and of the heart. It seems to me that you place them wrongly, 
 that the heart is on the left side and the liver on the right. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 II Yes, formerly it was so ; but we have changed all that, and now 
 we construct medical science upon quite a new plan. 
 
 " Gfoonte. 
 " I did not know that ; pray forgive my ignorance. 
 
 " Sganarelle. 
 
 "It is of no consequence ; you are not obliged to be as clever as 
 we are." 
 
 It is ungracious to say so, but the source of the fun here was 
 not originally Moliere's. After the words in the text, "Nous 
 
444 LIFE OF 
 
 avons change* tout cela," M. Mesnard gives in a footnote l an 
 extract from La Gazette (the official newspaper in Paris) of the 
 17th of December 1650 : 
 
 " And because you ought to be not less informed of the wonderful 
 changes that take place in the human body as well as in that of the 
 States, it was discovered here this week, in a dissection made in 
 public by a doctor of medicine of this Faculty of a body of a man 
 who had been executed, that the liver which contains the spleen was 
 on the left side, and the spleen on the right side where the liver should 
 be, the heart inclining to the right side, and the majority of the 
 organs placed otherwise than is ordinarily the case." 
 
 This discovery caused some laughter at the time, and six- 
 teen years later Moliere gave it a setting of his own when he 
 satirised his quack doctor. In reading the poet's light plays 
 we pass over his good things almost carelessly ; they amuse, 
 and we take them easily as they were intended. The truth 
 of the comedy in his ludicrous characters depends largely on 
 the way it is shown. 
 
 It is certain that Moliere played the part of Sganarelle in 
 the Mtdecin Malgrt Lui, and his wife that of Lucinde, the 
 young lady who feigns to be ill. La Grange was probably the 
 lover, Ldandre ; and du Croisy, Ge'ronte. M. Mesnard thinks 
 that Mile, de Brie was Martine, Sganarelle's wife. 2 
 
 The comedy was printed at the end of 1666 ; the title-page 
 bears the date 1667. 3 
 
 On the 1st of December 1666 the troop at the Palais Koyal 
 were commanded by the king to go to Saint Germain. They 
 remained there until the 20th of February 1667, and took part 
 in a long fete known as Le Ballet des Muses* For this fete 
 Moliere wrote two acts of a comedy in verse, Mdicerte, 
 " comedie-pastorale-he'roique." The two acts were played in 
 an entrde of the ballet; and the king having expressed 
 his satisfaction with them, Moliere did not finish the play. 5 
 He never completed it. The two acts were not put upon 
 the stage at the Palais Eoyal theatre, and they were not 
 printed until the year 1682. There are some pretty verses 
 in the comedy, if it can be so called, at the beginning of the 
 
 1 (Envres de Moliere, vi. 88 note 3. 2 Ibid. vi. 22, 23. 
 
 3 Ibid. vi. 30, 31. 4 La Grange's Register, 85, 86. 
 
 (Euvres de Moliere, vi. 185. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 445 
 
 fifth scene of the first act, where Myrtil, a young boy, is 
 talking to a bird that he means as a present for his 
 heroine Melicerte ; and again later when he gives her the bird 
 at the beginning of the third scene of the second act. 
 
 Moliere made another sketch for the Ballet des Muses under 
 the title of La Pastorale Comique. Only a fragment of it has been 
 preserved, and this is so slight that it is hardly worth noticing. 
 It seems to have replaced Melicerte in the third entree of the 
 ballet. In his Register La Grange spoke of La Pastorale 
 Comique as Coridon, because the part he took in it was that of 
 Coridon, a young shepherd. 
 
 Later, and in the last week of the royal fete, on the 14th of 
 February 1667, 1 another small play of Moliere's was per- 
 formed. This was Le Sicilien ou L' Amour Peintre. It was in 
 one act and in prose, but there was music and dancing between 
 the scenes. Given as part of a revelry or masquerade, the 
 Sicilien is a pretty little comedy. It shows in a jesting way 
 the lesson that its author had wished to teach more seriously 
 in his former play, the ficole des Maris : that keeping young 
 women jealously under lock and key is not the way to make 
 them either loving or trustful to those in authority over them. 
 Perhaps because Moliere was seriously ill in the spring of this 
 year the Sicilien was not put on the stage at the Palais Royal 
 until the 10th of June. 2 For a few weeks it was given as an 
 after-piece, following other plays ; but judging now by the 
 receipts, it does not seem to have much attracted the public. 
 The names of the actors who took the various parts are given 
 by M. Mesnard; 3 the title-page of the comedy bears the date 
 1668. 
 
 After the very short mention made by La Grange on page 86 
 of his Register of the journey of the troop to Saint Germain, 
 he says that the king gave them 12,000 livres as pension for 
 two years. In August 1665 the king had promised the troop 
 a pension of 6000 livres, but at Easter 1666, the end of the 
 financial year at the theatre, no payment had been made ; so 
 that in February 1667 the pension for two years was given in 
 one payment. 4 
 
 On the 4th of March in this year, when the veteran Pierre 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, vi. 205. 2 Ibid. vi. 209, 210. 
 
 3 Ibid. vi. 294. 
 
 4 Conf. La Grange's Register, p. 76 and p. 86. 
 
446 LIFE OF MOLI]ERE 
 
 Corneille was sixty years old, the troop at the Palais Royal 
 bought from him his tragedy Attila, and gave him 2000 livres 
 for it, "prix fait" ready money. This was the first time 
 that Moliere bought a play from his older rival, a dramatist 
 whom he must have admired in bygone days. The tragedy 
 was acted twenty times, but the receipts show that the 
 pecuniary success of the play was far from satisfactory. 
 
 When speaking of the Tartu/e I mentioned the single 
 performance of that comedy on the 5th of August 1667, and 
 related how future performances of the play were forbidden. 
 
 At Easter 1667, the end of the theatrical year, La Grange 
 says in a note : " Mile, du Pare a quitte la troupe et a passe a 
 1'Hotel de Bourgogne, ou elle a joue Andromaque de M. 
 Racine." Perhaps Mile, du Pare thought that she was fol- 
 lowing her own interest in going to the rival theatre. She 
 had first joined Moliere's troop at Lyons after her marriage in 
 February 1653, and she remained in it till Easter 1659. Then 
 she and her husband went to the Theatre du Marais for twelve 
 months, but at the following Easter they rejoined their old 
 comrades. It has been thought that bickering among the 
 actresses of the troop at the Palais Royal was the cause of the 
 temporary secession. Du Pare died in October 1664, and his 
 share in the profits of the theatre were given to his widow 
 until the following Easter. Two years and a half later Mile. 
 du Pare went, as we have just seen, to the Hotel de Bourgogne 
 to play an important, though not the principal, part in Racine's 
 tragedy Andromaque, which was then new. If the year 1633 
 can be taken as the date of her birth, she was still a young 
 woman. It is not unlikely that after Mile. Moliere had joined 
 the troop at the Palais Royal, Mile, du Pare found that her 
 services were not so much needed. But her desertion from 
 her old friends has been attributed to persuasion from Racine. 
 And this last supposition is strengthened by the knowledge 
 that Racine had behaved badly to the actors at the Palais 
 Royal when he suddenly withdrew from them his Alexandre le 
 Grand in December 1665; and also by the fact that in May 
 1668 Moliere put on to his stage a parody on Racine's last 
 play in the form of a comedy, La Folk Querelk ou la Critique 
 
 Andromaque, by one Subligny. This comedy was acted a 
 fair number of times, but apparently did not create much 
 
CHAPTEE XVI 447 
 
 interest. 1 The parody, however, probably prevented any 
 future friendly intercourse between the two poets. Mile, du 
 Pare did not remain long at the Hotel de Bourgogne, for she 
 died in December 1668. 
 
 We have seen already that in the spring of the year 1667 
 Moliere was very seriously ill ; and M. Moland says that in 
 the latter part of that year he did not appear on the stage. 2 
 Indeed for seven weeks his theatre was closed in the absence 
 of two of the best actors, La Grange and Thorilliere, who had 
 gone to Flanders to present to the king the poet's second 
 petition on the matter of the prohibition of the Tartuffe. And 
 after their return the plays that were acted at the Palais 
 Eoyal theatre did not absolutely need the presence of the 
 leader of the troop. He was the author of only one of them La 
 Pastorale Comique, the little sketch that he had written for 
 the last royal fete at Saint Germain, and in which his small part 
 might easily have been taken by another actor. And when 
 the troop went to Versailles for a few days in November 1667, 
 among the plays acted there the Pastorale Comique was the only 
 one that could have been written by Moliere. But early in 
 January 1668 La Grange records three performances of Les 
 Me'decins, by which title he often used to designate the Amour 
 Me'decin, as five doctors are brought forward in the comedy ; 
 and in that play Moliere, ever constant to the daily work of 
 his life, doubtless reappeared in his part of Sganarelle. 
 
 On the 13th of January 1668 Moliere's Amphitryon was 
 first acted at the Palais Eoyal theatre. This was a mytho- 
 logical comedy, borrowed from the Amphitruo of Plautus and 
 from an old French comedy by Eotrou called Les deux Sosies, 
 acted at the Theatre du Marais in 1636, which had also 
 been taken from Plautus. Moliere did not care whether he 
 borrowed much from Plautus and from Eotrou or not; he 
 wanted to show the humours of a mythological comedy in 
 a playful manner. His Amphitryon is thoroughly French in 
 treatment and in the way the wit is shown. It is written 
 
 1 Sec La Grange's Register, 96. M. V. Fournel has printed La Critique 
 d'Andromaque in vol. iii. of his Contemporains de Moliere ; and he and other 
 French writers have said that La Grange did not state when it was first 
 acted, and that he omitted to record its first performances one to tour in 
 number. 
 
 2 L. Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 1st ed. vol. i. p. 201. 
 
148 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 with originality of style, not in the conventional Alexandrine 
 verse oftwelve syllables ; but in " vers libres," where the lines 
 are of various lengths, and where the rhymes do not follow 
 each other consecutively. It is the only one of Moliere's 
 comedies, except Psyche, written later in collaboration with 
 Pierre Corneille, in which he adopted this measure. 
 
 After it had been played twice in public there was a per- 
 formance of Amphitryon before the court at the Tuileries on 
 the 16th of January, and two months later, when the troop 
 at the Palais Royal went to Versailles, Amphitryon was one of 
 the plays then acted before the king. 1 
 
 I do not see the strong flattery of Louis xiv. that apparently 
 some French writers have found in the verses of this comedy. 
 Sosie's lament on the ungrateful labour of men who work for 
 princes, in the first scene of the play, certainly cannot have 
 had the appearance of flattery. It seems to me that satire is 
 more evident in the comedy, not of a personal kind against 
 the king, but against current habits of thought. Flattery 
 in a bad sense was not in Moliere's nature; his disposition 
 was too sceptical, too unhappy, and too honest to allow him to 
 use it. But the ridicule coming from good satire was always 
 congenial to him. He thought a great deal of comic irony, 
 but it is next to impossible to suppose that he meant his lines 
 in this comedy to have a literal signification. When, for 
 instance, Jupiter is made to take upon himself a human form 
 and is disguised as Amphitryon so that he may supplant him 
 in the couch of his wife Alcmene, one cannot really believe 
 that the poet meant to satirise the immoralities of Louis xiv. 
 in the lines : 
 
 " Un partage avec Jupiter 
 N'a rien qui deshonore." 
 
 No one can suppose that Moliere meant here to insult his 
 sovereign. M. Mesnard has shown from dates that the 
 lines cannot contain an allusion to the love-makings of 
 Louis xiv. and Madame de Montespan ; and that Rotrou, who 
 had borrowed from Plautus as well as Moliere, but who wrote 
 fifty years earlier, might also have been accused on the same 
 charge. 2 But there is a simpler and a stronger argument 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, vi. 323-25 ; also x. 383, and note 1. 
 
 2 Ibid. vi. 316, etc. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 449 
 
 than that of dates. It is not likely that within a few months 
 after Moliere had presented his petition to the king to be 
 allowed to put the Tartuffe on the stage, he should have 
 rebuked his Majesty in an insolent manner. And there is 
 no evidence to show that the king imagined that an indirect 
 insult was intended. Moliere loved the fun coming from 
 amusing, piquant, and not ill-natured satire ; and he made his 
 mythological comedy, which he took largely from Plautus and 
 from Rotrou, the vehicle for satirical allusions against general 
 habits of thought. To say that he looked upon Louis xiv. as 
 a divinity above the reach of allusion, and that the satire in 
 his play was meant only for the courtiers, would be absurd. It 
 would be more just to say that the playfulness of his wit and 
 the sparkling cynicism in his banter were enjoyed by the king, 
 who was both good-natured and sensible enough to take the 
 fun as it was meant; and that the courtiers laughed among 
 themselves at certain lines which had a general application in 
 their tartness. 
 
 In the prologue to the comedy we read : 
 
 " Lorsque dans un haut rang on a 1'heur 1 de paroitre, 
 Tout ce qu'on fait est toujours bel et bon, 
 Et suivant ce qu'on peut etre 
 Les choses changent de nom." 
 
 M. Mesnard quotes these lines and says admirably: 
 "L'ironie ne manquait pas de clarte. Si quelqu'un la juge 
 d'un meprisable flatteur il n'entend pas le frangais. On 
 1'entendait certainement mieux a Versailles." 2 Another 
 reason for thinking that Louis xiv. did not feel that Moliere 
 had been disrespectful to him is that this comedy was played 
 at court eight times between 1680 and 1700, and five times 
 between 1700 and 1715. 3 
 
 Amphitryon shows certain defects in Moliere's mind. He 
 did not feel strongly the beauties of poetry, consequently 
 he had not the power of language to show them strongly. 
 In satirical or ironical comedy he has been surpassed by 
 no one, and he wrote in excellent dramatic verse, but he 
 could not reach the higher nights of imaginative poetry. To 
 take the play we are now considering which was meant as 
 
 1 Heur is, of course, the equivalent here of bonheur. 
 
 2 Notice biographique sur Moliere, 384, 385. 
 (Euvres de Moliere, vi. 325. 
 
 2F 
 
450 LIFE OF M 
 
 a mythological comedy-in the scenes between Jupiter and 
 Alcinene, in those between Amphitryon and Alcmene, and m 
 the scene where Amphitryon delivers a long monologue show- 
 ing his bewilderment, one looks for poetical imagination and 
 poetical expression, and the reader is disappointed when he 
 finds instead cleverly turned verses which do not really 
 interest him because they do not arouse his sympathies. 
 
 The best drawn character in the comedy is that of Sosie, 
 Amphitryon's servant ; and the chief amusement in the play 
 is in the comedy of errors when Mercure is disguised as Sosie 
 and when Jupiter is disguised as Amphitryon. Some of the 
 scenes seem to be fresh and bright, and as we read them 
 they are full of wit. There are verses in Amphitryon so 
 frequently quoted that they have become commonplaces. 
 A few instances may be given : 
 
 " J'aime mieux un vice commode 
 Qu'une fatigante vertu." 
 
 And: 
 
 " Le veritable Amphitryon 
 Est 1' Amphitryon oil 1'on dine." 
 
 And: 
 
 " Le Seigneur Jupiter sait dorer la pilule." 
 
 And in daily life we often find there is good counsel in the 
 words : 
 
 " Sur telles affaires, toujours 
 Le meilleur est de ne rien dire." 
 
 There is a tradition that Moliere played the part of Sosie 
 in Amphitryon, but for the other roles there is much un- 
 certainty, and contradictory guesses have been made. 1 
 
 Moliere dedicated this comedy to the Prince de Conde ; 
 the printing of the play was completed on the 5th of March 
 1688. 2 
 
 It matters little whether the Avare or George Dandin be 
 first spoken of here. M. Mesnard in his edition of Moliere has 
 printed George Dandin first because that comedy was performed 
 at court before the other comedy was seen on any stage. It 
 may be better, however, in a biography of Moliere, to take 
 the two plays in the order of their appearance in public. 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, vi. 327-30. 2 lbid> vi 351 
 
CHAPTER XVI 451 
 
 There are no connecting ideas between them, and it is 
 tolerably certain that the Avare was written first. Other 
 instances of similar inversion if it can be so called will 
 be found among Moliere's later comedies. In all cases the 
 inversion is of no consequence. 
 
 La Grange says in his Register that the Avare was played 
 for the first time on the 9th of September 1668 at the Palais 
 Royal theatre. No authority can prevail on such a point 
 against that of La Grange. He was an actor in Moliere's 
 troop; he, as orateur in the troop, had to announce to the 
 public in the theatre each time a new play was to be given, 
 and he noted daily in his diary the names of the plays in 
 which he and his fellow-actors took their parts. But 
 Grimarest says that the Avare was first played in January 
 1668, and Voltaire in the year 1667. Both add that when first 
 given the play was a failure because it was written in prose, 
 but that at its revival some months later the public judged 
 the comedy more soundly and that it was successful. 1 The 
 reader may remember that in chapter xi. the figures in 
 La Grange's Register were used to tell what were the fortunes 
 of Moliere's comedies while they were new. La Grange was 
 a first-hand authority, and on such a subject the only one 
 really trustworthy. And his pages prove beyond dispute that 
 the Avare, one of the chief of Moliere's comedies in prose, met 
 with very poor success when it first appeared. It was acted 
 only nine times, and judging by the receipts it attracted 
 comparatively few spectators. And later, during its author's 
 lifetime, the receipts taken for its performances were seldom 
 good. On the other hand, it seems to have been very popular 
 in after years. Despois has shown that from 1659 to 1870 
 only three plays of Moliere's were acted at the Comedie 
 Franchise oftener than the Avare. 2 
 
 It is well known that in Moliere's day playgoers preferred 
 that seriously meant comedies in five acts should be in verse. 
 In spite of the success of Don Juan, a five-act comedy in 
 prose, it is quite possible that the fact that the Avare was 
 also in prose may have contributed to its failure. But had 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, vii. 3, 4 ; 47. M. Mesnard's references to Grimarest 's 
 Vie de Moliere apply to the first edition, published in 1705. In the modern 
 edition, printed in 1875, see pp. 58 and 104. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, i. 548, 549. 
 
452 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 Moliere written it in verse he would have planned the scenes 
 differently, and the laughter against Harpagon would have 
 been shown in a less popular manner. The comedy would 
 then have been other than it is. The noble duke referred to 
 by Grimarest was perhaps only expressing general opinion 
 rather energetically and in a ludicrous way when he objected 
 to the Avare because it was written in prose. " What is the 
 
 meaning of this ? " exclaimed M. le due de . " Is Moliere 
 
 daft, and does he take us for simpletons to make us sit through 
 five acts of prose ? Did anybody ever see such nonsense ? 
 Is it possible that anybody can like prose ? " Voltaire said 
 later that when the public appreciated the merits of the Avarc 
 " they understood that very good comedies might be written 
 in prose, and that it was perhaps more difficult to succeed in 
 this common style, in which the author relies only upon his 
 intelligence, than in verse; for in verse the rhymes, the 
 cadence, and the rhythm lend ornaments to simple ideas 
 which cannot be given easily in prose with a graceful 
 appearance." This remark of Voltaire's is of greater im- 
 portance than his error about the date of the play. The 
 desire to give a graceful appearance and graceful sound to 
 words in a comedy in the 17th century did much to hinder 
 the spirit of comedy in plays. Moliere showed clearly that 
 comedies may very well be written in prose, and he made it 
 evident that a comedy is best written in the form of language 
 that its author can handle the most easily with comic effect. 
 
 As a comedy the Avare presents' two ideas which should be 
 considered- together. It may be thought that the dramatist 
 meant to give a comic picture of a miser and of his griping 
 niggardliness; or that he wished to show the unhappy con- 
 dition of a son and a daughter, the children of a father who 
 had very little affection for them and no sense of his fatherly 
 duties. Perhaps the latter view was strongest in the author's 
 mind as the basis of his comedy, and hence his choice of avarice 
 as the crime best suited to illustrate his thoughts. In any 
 case the two ideas fit into one another, they work together and 
 they cannot he considered separately. We have seen already 
 in the Ecole des Maris and in the Ecole des Femmes how girls 
 had lost both father and mother were brought up badly, 
 through great selfishness in both cases, and with great brutality 
 
CHAPTEK XVI 453 
 
 in one instance and egregious folly in the other ; and here in 
 a later play the dramatist was reverting to the same idea, and 
 he made extreme stinginess the vice of the parent who was 
 the sole guardian of his two grown-up children. As the 
 father showed his son and daughter no affection, inspired 
 them with no respect, it is impossible that they could have 
 felt real love for him or have had a warm sense of filial duties. 
 Moliere took his Avare from the Aulularia of Plautus ; he 
 had been reading Plautus before he wrote his Amphitryon, 
 and a few months later he turned again to the Latin author 
 for assistance. 
 
 Of all Moliere's characters few are better known than the 
 miser Harpagon. He and Tartuffe may stand beside one 
 another. The conduct of Harpagon, however, is shown in a 
 more amusing way. Still, the comedy in the Avare is grim, 
 and there is a note of sadness in the picture of dislike and 
 distrust felt by the son and daughter for their sordid father 
 and in the hatred of him among all his dependants. 
 
 When Harpagon first comes on to the^tage with La Fleche, 
 his son's valet, he says to him : 
 
 " Get out of this at once, and don't answer me. Pack yourself out 
 of my house, arrant thief and true jail-bird, as you are." 
 
 La Fleche, who is a good fellow enough, says to himself: 
 
 " I 've never seen anything so wicked as this cursed old man, and I 
 think, under correction, that the devil is in him." 
 
 The old man is on the point of dismissing the servant 
 brutally; instead, he stops him and begins the following 
 dialogue : 
 
 " Stay : aren't you taking anything away 1 " " What could I take 
 from you 1 " " Come here and let me see. Show me your hands. "- 
 "There they are" "The others." " The others?" "Yes. "- 
 " There they are." 
 
 We have seen that the first words spoken by Harpagon give 
 an instance of his surly and suspicious nature ; and his de- 
 mand, just made, to La Fleche to show him his " other hands" 
 after the valet had shown the only two he has got, has 
 been blamed by some critics, needlessly, I think, on the score 
 of exaggeration. A mistake has been made in trying to judge 
 a bit of jeering satire by the light of dry reason. Looked at 
 
,:,l LIFE OF 
 
 in that way the demand is nonsensical ; but as comedy tries 
 to show men by their humours and to condemn or laugh at 
 their faults or their foibles, Harpagon's demand describes and 
 paints his crabbedness and distrust, and is therefore quite 
 fair as a mark of human characterisation. In all plays, as 
 more or less in all art, there is some exaggeration or height- 
 ening of the effect ; and comedy should be looked at from the 
 point of view of stage representation. Before finding fault 
 here with Moliere for caricature it would be well to consider 
 the bad qualities of the man he was endeavouring to describe, 
 and to recollect that these must be shown with humour. 
 
 Harpagon then points to La Fleche's hauts-de-chausses, or 
 breeches, and the dialogue goes on : 
 
 " Harpagon. 
 
 " Haven't you put anything in there 1 
 
 " La Fleche. 
 " See for yourself. 
 
 " Harpagon. 
 
 " Those large hauts-de-chausses are made to conceal stolen property, 
 and I wish that somebody was hanged for wearing them. 
 
 La Fleche (aside). 
 
 " Oh ! A man like that just deserves to get what he is afraid of 
 and I should take a delight in robbing him." 
 
 As La Fleche said these last words he did not know that 
 Harpagon had hidden 10,000 efcus in a box in his garden, 
 and that he was nervously anxious about his treasure. 
 There is more quarrelling between these two, and when 
 Harpagon is left alone at the end of the scene, he says to 
 "There is a rogue of a valet who bothers me a good 
 I don't like the sight of the lame dog." Be>rt, Moliere's 
 ther-in-law, who played the part of La Fleche, was lame, 
 the dramatist was here indulging in a little bit of good- 
 humoured drollery at his expense. And Bejart is said to 
 been a favourite actor with those who went into the 
 parterre of the theatre. 
 
 To judge the miser properly he should be seen with his 
 
 ren He wishes to marry his daughter filise to Anselme, 
 
 twice her age or more but who is willing to take her 
 
CHAPTEE XVI 455 
 
 without any dowry. IClise is outwardly respectful to her 
 father, but she is mutinous. Valere, her lover and her father's 
 steward " domestique " l appears in the middle of their dis- 
 pute, and for the purpose of the comedy in the play he 
 pretends to take Harpagon's side in their difference. Here 
 occurs the frequent repetition of the words " sans dot," used 
 by Harpagon. Valere, who means to be true to filise, but is 
 working on the weak side of the miser, says, at the last 
 mention of " sans dot " : " That determines everything. No- 
 body can go against the argument of sans dot." And later : 
 " When a man offers to take a girl sans dot, further inquiries 
 should not be made. Everything is included in that; and 
 sans dot takes the place of beauty, youth, birth, wisdom, and 
 honesty." Harpagon's son, Cleante, was extravagant, but this 
 was his worst fault. He is in love with Mariane, who is very 
 poor ; and to assist her and her mother he is driven to borrow 
 money at ruinous interest. And when he and his father find 
 themselves face to face, one as the borrower, the other as the 
 usurer, there is a quarrel between them. The father abuses 
 his son for prodigality, the son condemns his father for en- 
 riching himself in an infamous manner. The idea of such 
 a scene in a comedy is a good one, but it was not in the first 
 instance Moliere's. He may have taken it either from Bois- 
 robert's comedy, La Belle Plaideuse, acted fourteen years earlier, 
 or from a similar incident that had actually happened in Paris 
 before Boisrobert wrote his play. 2 
 
 The Avare affords an instance of how Moliere made use of 
 the minor characters in his comedies, and how he worked up 
 the incidents in his plays, in order to bring the main features 
 of his chief personages into full relief. Harpagon feels no 
 sorrow that his son Cleante was trying to borrow money ; he 
 has no sense of shame that he, as a father, was discovered in 
 trying to exact usury from his own son. He is a skin-flint 
 who thinks only of how he can grind others to scrape money 
 
 1 The word "domestique" occurs frequently in the social history of 
 France in the 17th century. It meant in the first instance, attached to the 
 household of a master. There was nothing menial in the office. Young 
 men of good family often made their apprenticeship in the world as domes- 
 tique in the house of some person of consequence, and older men of ability 
 were often so employed as steward or as secretary. Valere's position was 
 therefore quite consistent with that of a gentleman. (CKnvres de Moliere, 
 vi. 33 note 3 ; vii. 56 note 1.) 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, vii. 96 ; 102. 
 
456 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 together, and how to save it. When he meets Frosine, de- 
 scribed as " a woman of intrigue," he is eager to know how she 
 has prospered in furthering his suit with Mariane, whom he 
 says he loves and hopes to marry. Father and son are there- 
 fore rivals for the hand of the same young lady. Frosine is 
 an unpleasant creature ; not much is seen of her, but she must 
 just be mentioned. She hopes for some pecuniary assistance 
 from Harpagon, and flatters him absurdly. She might as well 
 pour oil on the sand to stay the raging of the sea, The miser, 
 who is anxious to get his daughter married "sans dot," is 
 equally anxious that his intended bride should bring him 
 money. He thinks that her mother " should exert herself a 
 little, make an effort, part with some of her property, for such 
 an occasion. For no man marries a girl unless she brings 
 him something." And he is ill-satisfied when he hears that 
 Mariane's dowry, though large, consists only in her economical 
 habits. 
 
 But for his niggardliness Harpagon would have a good 
 position in the world. He keeps a steward, at least four 
 servants, horses and a carriage ; and he feels himself obliged 
 to give a supper-party in his house in honour of Anselme, at 
 which he hopes that Mariane may be present. The amusina 
 scene (Act m. sc. 1) in which he gives his instructions to 
 his servants for his party is one of the best in the comedy 
 He speaks to them all and chooses that Maitre Jacques his 
 coachman and cook, shall take his orders last. This man 
 appears dressed as a coachman, but when told he is to 
 be spoken to as cook he quickly changes his clothes. It 
 
 seem from many early editions of Moliere that the 
 enumeration of the various dishes to be put on the table was 
 
 the actor who played the part of Maitre Jacques In 
 the edition of 1682, published by La Grange, who one* can 
 hardly think, added to the text words that its author did not 
 give the list is ridiculously long.* Maitre Jacques knew his 
 
 s proclivities, and, with the fair caricature of comedy 
 
 playing upon them. No wonder, therefore, that Harpagon 
 
 1 scream : Devil take it all ! That is enough to LI a 
 
CHAPTEE XVI 457 
 
 whole town." The cook, however, had not yet finished, and 
 before he had done Harpagon puts his hand over his mouth 
 and cries : " You wretch ! you want to eat up all my property." 
 But Valere, Harpagon's steward, will not allow profligate ex- 
 penditure. He says, " II faut manger pour vivre, et non pas 
 vivre pour manger." The miser takes heart at this good 
 counsel, and thinks he is repeating the ancient adage when he 
 cries joyfully : "-I1 faut vivre pour manger, et non pas manger 
 pour vi . . ." As might be expected, Harpagon starves his horses, 
 and Maitre Jacques, who when addressed as coachman again 
 changes his clothes, is glad to hear at last that he is not to 
 drive the poor beasts to the fair. "All the better," he says ; 
 " I would sooner they die under anybody else's hands than 
 under mine." 
 
 Mariane is very unhappy when told by Frosine that she 
 must marry Harpagon, and when she first sees him she is 
 nearly sick with disgust. She respects Cleante and is willing 
 to give herself to him, but she does not know that he is 
 Harpagon's son. The scenes in which Mariane has her part 
 betray, to our thinking, a weak point in the play. She is said 
 to be a good and charming girl, but not much is really known 
 about her. The interest felt in her is passive ; it is that she 
 may not be bound to Harpagon. Also on behalf of lise, the 
 miser's daughter, the interest felt is rather compassionate than 
 active. They are both good girls, but they would create more 
 sympathy if they had been portrayed more fully, and if the 
 good sides of their characters had been shown at greater length. 
 In this, as in other comedies, Moliere's purpose seems to have 
 been to show the tyranny of parents or elderly people who 
 exercised authority viciously over their juniors, and he thought 
 more of his satire against their harsh conduct than of dwelling 
 upon the brighter sides of younger natures. He showed these 
 qualities more fully in the ficole des Maris and the tlcole des 
 Femmes ; but while recognising that his purpose in the Avare 
 was thoroughly sane and good, and that he exhibited it very 
 strongly, one cannot help feeling that there is a want of lively 
 and pleasurable interest in the two girls naturally looked for 
 in a comedy. Moliere felt with them keenly enough, and he 
 wrote his comedy very largely on their behalf. But as in the 
 ficole des Femmes, where he thought less of bringing the lovers 
 
458 LIFE OF MOLl 
 
 together than of pointing to the folly and the selfishness of 
 Arnolphe, so here, in the Avare, he thought less of the love- 
 scenes between the young people than of exhibiting in all its 
 force the bad qualities of the father of a family. And he 
 believed he would best show his meaning in satire against 
 the beastly avarice and the selfishness of the old curmudgeon. 
 His grim hatred of Harpagon is unquestionable, though with 
 it he often creates laughter. A miser who saw the Avare on 
 the stage said of it : " One may learn a good deal from 
 Moliere's play ; it gives some excellent lessons in economy." 
 
 There is a scene between Harpagon and his son Cleante, 
 rivals for Mariane, concerning her, in which there is a display 
 of cunning against cunning ; and the father, as having authority, 
 gets the best of the dispute. Maitre Jacques intervenes and 
 pretends to calm them both ; but this leads to a further and 
 very violent quarrel. What they say to each other at the end 
 of it must be quoted. The father cries : 
 
 "I forbid you to see me again." "All the better," the son 
 
 answers. "I'll drive you out of the house." " Drive away." "I 
 
 renounce you for my son."" So be it."" I disinherit you."" Any- 
 thing you like." "And I give you my malediction." " I'll have 
 nothing to do with your gifts." 
 
 Ethical criticisms on this quarrel between the father and 
 the son, I believe, are for the most part out of place. Moliere's 
 concern as a comic dramatist was not to tell people what they 
 ought to do, but to show what their conduct was, what their 
 manners were, in a spirit of comedy. In that way he might, 
 perhaps, teach a lesson indirectly, by his satire. The use of 
 satire in comedy is not merely to amuse. Part of its higher 
 purpose may be seen here when we recollect that if the miser 
 had not brought up his son with criminal harshness and 
 neglect his son would at least have answered him respect- 
 fully. 
 
 When Harpagon finds that his box with 10,000 ^cus in it 
 
 been stolen, he is beside himself with anger and with fury 
 
 But his passion is that of a man whose mind is crazed at the 
 
 is of gam over which he had gloated with stupid and hideous 
 
 iabneea as the pile grew larger. He feels his pain acutely, 
 
 he cries over it like a child. His grief has unmanned him, 
 
 he vents it in spluttering rage. Perhaps this is a true 
 
CHAPTEE XVI 459 
 
 insight into the miser's heart. His greed for money has 
 mastered his nature ; for money he has sacrificed reputation in 
 the world, loss of friends, the esteem of his servants, and the 
 love and respect of his children. His long monologue, which 
 should be read as it was spoken, was not meant to have a 
 pleasant effect. It was meant, I think, to show weakness. It 
 gives no indication of the force of will in a villain who has 
 become what he is partly by strength of character. Under 
 great misfortune, Tartuffe and Don Juan would have spoken 
 differently. The monologue shows the howling and the snivel- 
 ling of a wretch temporarily distracted by the loss of hoarded 
 treasure. It is very difficult to say if his wild condition has 
 been painted too strongly. 
 
 Later, Harpagon accuses his steward, Valere, of the theft, 
 and there is a dispute between them in which, for comic pur- 
 poses, Moliere uses words ambiguously. The equivoque con- 
 sists in Harpagon's passion for his money, and in Valere's love 
 for filise, the old man's daughter ; and it is aided by the fact 
 that " elle " may apply to filise or to the cassette, the stolen 
 money-box. Hence has come the proverbial expression, " les 
 beaux yeux de la cassette." 
 
 The denouement to the Avare is somewhat romantic, and it 
 is not the best part of the play. Anselme appears, and it is 
 discovered that he is the father of Valere and of Mariane. 
 Valere had nothing to do with Harpagon's money-box; La 
 Fleche, who had a grudge against the old man, had taken it. 
 But it is intact. The miser is so rejoiced to get back all his 
 treasure, that he consents to do what is asked of him, so long 
 as he gives no money. In the course of the comedy he spoke 
 about the gallows; many men in the 18th century, when the 
 Avare was popular, would have gone gladly to see him hanging 
 there. 
 
 The want of success of the Avare as a new play is certainly 
 curious, and the more so if we accept Eobinet's evidence that 
 everybody at the time thought the comedy was well acted. 1 
 Perhaps the grimness and the sordidness of the principal 
 character in the play may have made people who like to see 
 brightness in a comedy decline to go to see what was mean 
 and repiilsive. This reason is more likely to have operated 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, vii. 7. 
 
460 LIFE OF MOLT^RE 
 
 against a new play than against one that had been on the 
 stage for many years, and in which the characterisation of its 
 chief personage had long been recognised as a masterpiece. 
 When you know that a man has such an aversion to the word 
 " give " that he cannot bring himself to say " I give you good 
 day," but only "I lend you a good day," 1 you may smile 
 at his currishness, but at first sight his appearance is dis- 
 agreeable. 
 
 Moliere acted the part of Harpagon ; and though the article 
 in the Mercure de France, in the year 1740, quoted in a previous 
 chapter, was founded on tradition, there is no reason to doubt 
 its truth when it said that this was one of the roles in high 
 comedy that the poet played excellently on the stage. It has 
 been assumed that because of his lameness Bejart played the 
 part of La Fleche. There is no certainty as to the names of 
 the actors who performed the other parts. Aime-Martin made 
 out a supposed list, which M. Mesnard has reprinted, but he 
 gives another distribution of the roles in some cases as more 
 probable. 2 
 
 The Avare was printed in February 1669, rather more than 
 five months after it was first seen on the stage; and M. 
 Mesnard has given a curious little bit of contemporary evi- 
 dence showing that this comedy, and George Dandin, Moliere's 
 next play in the order of public representation, were, when 
 printed, each sold for a franc and a half. 3 
 
 Dandin was acted for the first time at a fete given 
 e king at Versailles in the middle of July 1668. 4 The 
 comedy has three acts, and at the end of each there was sing- 
 ing and dancing. The words of the songs were written by 
 Moliere, and the music was composed by Lulli. In the 
 appendix to the comedy M. Mesnard has reprinted two con- 
 temporary official accounts of the royal fete at Versailles. On 
 the 2nd of November following, the troop at the Palais Eoyal 
 were ordered to go to Saint Germain, and there they played 
 the same comedy three times before the court. 5 
 
 A week later, on the 9th of November, George Dandin was 
 
 2 ^ Ct "' 8 j' t> ,? cene betw een La Fleche and Frosine. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, vii. 37 
 
 3 Ibid. vii. 45 and note 
 
 4 Ibid. vi. 473. 5 Register, 99. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 461 
 
 acted for the first time in public; but La Grange generally 
 called the play by its second title, Le Mari Confondu. 1 In 
 chronicling the first public appearance of every other play by 
 Moliere, La Grange added a marginal note in his Register, say- 
 ing : " Piece Nouvelle de M. de Moliere," but with this comedy 
 he did not do so; though when the play was first seen at 
 Versailles he gave as a marginal note: " George Dandin 
 premiere fois." 2 
 
 In writing a play to be performed before the king and his 
 guests at Versailles, Moliere had to think of some subject that 
 would lend itself easily to amusement. He fell back upon an 
 old farce that he had written in years gone by and which had 
 been acted by his troop in the provinces. He transformed his 
 own La Jalousie du Barbouille into George Dandin ou Le 
 Mari Confondu, and perhaps he took something from Boc- 
 caccio. 3 It seems strange that the success of the new comedy 
 at the Palais Royal theatre was not more marked ; as a matter 
 of fact the play fared indifferently. Probably enough the 
 singing and dancing, given at the end of each of the acts when 
 the play was performed before the court, were omitted at the 
 public representations. 4 
 
 I find myself in disagreement with some French critics who 
 have spoken more or less severely on the moral aspect of 
 George Dandin. The satire in the comedy has a double mean- 
 ing. It is, firstly, to laugh at George Dandin, a rich peasant -- 
 and a singularly stupid man, for having married a woman 
 of noble birth ; and secondly, a more serious matter, to 
 show the pain a woman can give her husband by her con- 
 tempt for him, by her flagrant coquetry, and by her constant 
 falsehood. Angelique, Dandin's wife, may be young and 
 pretty, she may have certain outward fascinations; if she has 
 other good qualities they are not seen, and she is not painted 
 so as to create sympathy. George Dandin does not pretend to 
 be high comedy in any of its scenes ; its second title shows 
 that it was meant to provoke laughter. Still, the play is not 
 a farce, for though the incidents and the characterisation are 
 ludicrous they are not absurd, and the events follow each 
 
 1 Register, 99. 2 Ibid. 97. 
 
 3 See M. Mesnard's Notice to George Dandin in the CEuvres de Moliere, 
 vol. vi. 
 
 4 CEuvres de Moliere, xi. 30. 
 
462 LIFE OF MOLltKE 
 
 other with a natural sequence of ideas. The comedy creates 
 most merriment on the stage, but when read one notices more 
 easily that it has its sorrowful side. To my mind, the Avare 
 Georg,- Dandin show stronger signs of sadness of heart on 
 
 c part of the author than any plays that Moliere wrote. 
 ,., amusing in the latter comedy to see the clever way in which 
 the wife outwits her husband who is a dunderhead, but it is 
 also painful because she deceives him with bad intentions. 
 As regards the moral in the play, the crux lies there. 
 
 Both Don Juan and George Dandin afford strong instances 
 of Moliere's practice of mixing together censure and jesting, 
 earnestness and laughter. Few writers have shown his great 
 capacity for uniting these opposite characteristics and making 
 each of them work into the other. His nature was deep and 
 thoughtful, it was quite sincere ; and as he threw his mockery 
 at George Dandin and his invective at Angelique he told 
 plainly that though he wrote his comedy in a light manner its 
 subject was very serious, and that it had engaged much of his 
 thoughts. As becomes a comic dramatist, he showed his pur- 
 pose through satire, but because his fun and his earnestness 
 were so closely dovetailed, his meaning has been sometimes 
 misunderstood. As to the charge of adultery, even in project, 
 brought by some writers against Angelique, I think it is critic- 
 ally a mistake to say anything about it. She does meet her 
 gallant clandestinely, but as to the more serious charge I doubt 
 very much if it entered Moliere's head. The first words 
 spoken by one of the chief personages in any of Moliere's 
 comedies may often be taken as an indication of the character 
 he wished to portray ; and in Angelique's first speech l too 
 long to be quoted now she shows under the veil of irony what 
 sort of woman she is and how her role in the comedy should 
 be considered. It should be remembered that she is speak- 
 ing before her father and her mother, and that her husband, 
 who has brought a grave accusation against her, is also present. 
 Translate her words literally and she seems to be a paragon 
 of virtue ; take them for what they are worth, and you see 
 the machinations of a shameless coquette. George Dandin 
 was meant to show in the style of amusing comedy the bare- 
 faced wantonness of a married woman, how she lied to her 
 
 1 Act I. sc. 6 in M. Mesnard's edition. 
 
CHAPTEE XVI 463 
 
 husband, jeered at him and abused him ; and also to show in 
 a lucticrous manner the egregious stupidity of the husband in 
 the blundering way he tried to stop his wife's misconduct. 
 You may laugh at George Dandin as much as you please, and 
 say that he should not have been such an ass ; and if Moliere, 
 who was not a purist, had been at your side he would have 
 agreed. But if your thoughts went no further he might have 
 been disappointed. In the double satire, surely the condemna- 
 tion of the wife has a stronger meaning than the ridicule of 
 the husband. Which is the most criminal, her falseness or 
 his ineptitude ? 
 
 The funniest part of the comedy is in the scenes between 
 George Dandin and his wife's father and mother, Monsieur 
 and Madame de Sotenville, and especially in their first inter- 
 view. Le baron de Sotenville is described as a "gentilhomme 
 campagnard" a gentleman with country manners. He 
 boasts of his long descent from an illustrious family ; and his 
 wife is equally haughty on account of her noble ancestry. 
 They are both ridiculous examples of persons extremely proud 
 of their blue blood ; and the way they receive their son-in-law, 
 the rich peasant, and listen to his complaints against their 
 daughter, is shown with much drollery. So far the fun is 
 pleasant, and you laugh merrily enough at George Daiidin 
 when he is driven to make excuses before M. and Mme. de 
 Sotenville to Clitandre, the gallant, because he said that 
 Clitandre had made love to his wife. Dandin's impotency to 
 prove the truth of his complaint before his noble connections, 
 who have cowed him, is shown in such an amusing manner 
 that hearty laughter is irresistible. His monologue at the 
 beginning of the play tells that he knows he has made a 
 fool of himself in marrying into a noble family; and you 
 recognise the truth of what he says to himself at the end of 
 the first act: "Tu 1'as voulu, George Dandin, tu Tas voulu." 
 He has brought his punishment on his own head, and he must 
 bear it. 
 
 But later the tone of the fun changes, when Dandin finds 
 more and more certainly that his wife has been keeping com- 
 pany with Clitandre. Everybody and everything conspires 
 against the baffled husband to show him to be in error, when 
 in reality the wrong is not on his side. He twice brings his 
 
464 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 father-in-law and mother-in-law to witness the presence 
 together of his wife and her gallant, but his wife by her 
 address and her falsehood always manages to throw the blame 
 upon him and to escape scot-free from the charge laid against 
 her. Aided by her suivante, she insults her husband while, in 
 apparently equivocal language, of which, however, the meaning 
 is perfectly clear, she makes love to Clitandre, her father and 
 mother standing by and applauding her virtue. They all jeer 
 at the unfortunate husband, and he is so thoroughly trounced 
 that he is made to feel and look like a beaten dog. Poor 
 Dandin's worst fault is that he is a fool. The acme of his 
 misery is seen in the last act. He is shamefully maltreated, 
 reviled and made an object of derision in order to show what 
 sort of creature is his wife. His last words are : " I give in 
 now, for there is no help for it. When a man has married a 
 bad woman, as I have done, the best thing he can do is to 
 throw himself into the water, head foremost." In all of this 
 there is certainly pathos. 
 
 To my mind this comedy was written with a strong feeling 
 of sadness at the cruel mockery of the baffled husband, 
 which all the laughter against him cannot efface. Compare 
 the tone of the Mtdetin Malgre Lui with that of George 
 Dandin. The former is bright and gay with sparkling wit; 
 the humour seen in the latter exhibits anxiety and sorrow. 
 Both plays are admirable acting comedies. Both the sham 
 physician and the rich peasant create great amusement on 
 the stage, but as you read, the laughter that each comedy pro- 
 :/okes strikes different chords and arouses different feelings. 
 n one respect George Dandin is a counterpart of the Misan- 
 thrope. There the dramatist showed in high comedy how a 
 clever, heartless woman, by her cunning, caused great pain to a 
 man to whom she was half-affianced ; in the other play he 
 showed the same thought in a more popular manner, but as 
 the target for the woman's reproaches was her husband, the 
 poisoned arrows penetrated more deeply. 
 
 It would seem, too, that there are other comedies of 
 Mohere's which were written to complement the idea seen in 
 a former play or to present it in another light. The plot and 
 the personages are different, and the subject matter, also more 
 2ss different, is treated from another point of view, larger 
 
 or 
 
465 
 
 or smaller, as the case may be ; j and if the first play was 
 written in verse the second was i:q prose, and generally in a 
 more popular style, or vice-versa.; Large-hearted and large- 
 minded men reveal themselves iri various ways, and if we 
 wish to understand how Moliere expressed his thoughts in 
 these comedies, we should read the plays together and con- 
 ciliate their meaning. For example : the Femmes Savantes 
 after the Pr&ieuses Ridicules] Don \Juan after the Tartuffe in 
 these two comedies the subject npatter is changed from one 
 extreme to another, the personage of Don Juan is in some 
 respects the opposite to that of Tartuffe ; the Avare after the 
 Ecole des Maris and the Ecole des Ifcmmes ; and, as to the point 
 already referred to, George Da ndin after the Misanthrope. 
 
 Moliere played the part of George Dandin, his wife that of 
 Angelique, and La Thorilliere that, of Lubin. Aime-Martin's 
 surmises as to the distribution of the other roles are probably 
 accurate : du Croisy as M. de Sotenville, Hubert as Mme. de 
 Sotenville, La Grange as Clitandre, Mile, de Brie as Claudine. 1 
 
 The original edition of George Dandin bears the date 1669. 2 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, vi. 496-98. 
 
 2 Ibid. 502, 503. 
 
 2c 
 
CHAITEK XVII 
 
 MONSIEUR DE POURCEAUGNAC LES AM ANTS MAGNIFIQUES 
 CHANGES IN THE TROP LE BOURGEOIS GENT1LHOMME 
 LES FOVRBERIES DE SO API N PSYCHE. 
 
 A MONTH after the last p<rformance of George Dandin as a 
 new play the king gave Miere permission to put the Tar- 
 tuffe on to the stage at tie Palais Koyal theatre. Of that 
 comedy I spoke in a prev.ous chapter, and said that as the 
 five acts of the play had ben written and were acted before 
 the Prince de Condd in November 1664, it would be well for 
 biographical reasons to consider the comedy as written in 
 that year. When the ban was finally taken off the Tartuffe, 
 and when the comedy was illowed to appear in public, in the 
 year 1669, it was played f<rty- three times the performances 
 lasting from the 5th of Febuary to the 25th of June following. 
 The troop at the Palais foyal went to Saint Germain twice 
 in the month of August 1*69 ; and on the 17th of September 
 they were ordered to go to Jhambord, another royal residence, 
 where they stayed until th 20th of October. In chronicling 
 this visit La Grange says m page 107 of his Eegister: "On 
 y a joud, entre plusieurs ome'dies, le Pourceaugnac pour la 
 premiere fois." Monsieur l e Pourceaugnac was written pur- 
 posely for the entertainment of the king and his guests, and 
 was first played at Chanbord. According to two contem- 
 porary accounts the first representation took place on the 
 6th of October 1669 ; but wenty-three years later La Grange 
 and Vivot, in the preface t, the edition of Moliere published 
 in 1682, lead one to supp> se that it was acted for the first 
 time in the month of September. The discrepancy in the 
 dates may be accounted f, r by accepting a fair supposition 
 thrown out by M. Mesi ir d : that the play was written 
 hurriedly at Chambord i the month of September. 1 La 
 
 1 (Euvres a Moltere, vii. 211-13. 
 466 
 
CHAPTEE XVII 467 
 
 Grange had gone to Chambord with his comrades ; and if 
 Moliere did not write his comedy until he got to Chambord, 
 La Grange knew such to be the fact, though after twenty- 
 three years he had forgotten the date of the first representation 
 of the play. There is no doubt that this comedy was first 
 acted in public on the 15th of November following. 
 
 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac was clearly intended as a piece 
 of wild buffoonery. The play is full of practical jokes against 
 a rich gentleman of Limoges, whose intelligence is " of the 
 thickest kind that is made." He has come to Paris with a 
 full idea of his own importance, equipped most absurdly, but, 
 as he thinks, like a courtier in a country dress, in order to 
 marry a girl about whom he knows nothing and whose father 
 he has never seen. The unlucky provincial has his good 
 points, but these do not prevent him from being trounced 
 with all the ridicule of farce in every possible manner. The 
 mockery seems to be cruel in spite of the open laughter it creates, 
 and the dramatist has been accused of personal motives of 
 revenge. Anecdotes to this effect are not wanting. It has 
 been said that Moliere wished to retaliate upon the people of 
 Limoges because they had, twelve or more years previously, 
 hissed his acting in a tragedy; but it is not known that 
 Moliere and his troop had ever gone to Limoges. It is said, 
 too, that not long before the date of the comedy a gentilhomme 
 limousin had a quarrel on the stage with the actors at the 
 Palais Royal theatre, and that in consequence Moliere made 
 a gentilhomme limousin bear the brunt of his satire. We 
 read also that the play was directed against a newly made 
 marquis who was in Paris at the time. But newly made 
 nobles were then common in France. Many of them had 
 gained their titles to nobility because they were clever, un- 
 scrupulous, and wealthy. M. de Pourceaugnac was hardly 
 like them. He was certainly not clever, and though his name 
 does not sound refined he had more idea of showing considera- 
 tion to others than had many of the newly fledged nobles. 
 Though he has come to Paris imagining that because he is 
 rich and because he is a person of importance in Limoges he 
 can marry a Parisian girl as he would buy a house, he is a 
 man with some delicacy of feeling. His chief characteristic 
 is that he is a simpleton. His foible is that he wants to 
 
468 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 be thought distinguished; and he does distinguish himself 
 effectually by his folly and by his credulity. The inhabitants 
 of the Limousin were not thought then to be the most wide- 
 awake people in France. Moliere had been among them and 
 knew what they were like. And one may easily imagine that 
 with his strong love of ridicule he should have pitched upon 
 a silly gentleman from Limoges as the object of his raillery 
 when he wanted to amuse the king and the royal party at 
 Chambord. M. de Pourceaugnac is kindly by nature, he has 
 no bad faults, and in reading his luckless adventures on his 
 arrival in Paris you feel a compassion for him. You almost 
 pity him in his misfortunes, though you cannot help laughing 
 at the preposterous way he is treated. Trick after trick is 
 played upon him, until the poor man does not know whether 
 he is standing on his head or his heels. The doctors of 
 medicine also come in for their share in the satire. You 
 enjoy the ridicule in the play, in spite of its wildness and its 
 buffoonery; and you feel unconsciously that the style is so 
 well adapted to the incidents and to the personages that the 
 farce seems to be shown in a manner almost worthy of comedy. 
 There are, however, two scenes (Act II. scs. 7 and 8) written in 
 strong patois which is difficult for a foreigner to understand ; 
 some editors of Moliere have translated them into French. 
 Taschereau l reports a saying of Diderot's : " Si Ton croit qu'il 
 y a beaucoup plus d'hommes capables de faire Pourceaugnac 
 que le Misanthrope, on se trompe." 
 
 In Act n. sc. 10 of the comedy Moliere made use of very 
 technical legal terms known only to professional lawyers, and 
 French writers have been surprised that he should have em- 
 ployed them with strict accuracy. 2 The fact may perhaps afford 
 a kind of evidence that the poet had not forgotten his own 
 reading of law-books more than twenty-five years previously. 
 It is more probable, however, that he did not depend altogether 
 upon his own recollections. We have seen in Act n. sc. 2 of 
 the FdcJieux that Moliere had been able to assimilate to his 
 own use, after some assistance given, the highly technical 
 terms used m his long description of a stag-hunt; therefore 
 it need not be surprising, if some assistance were again given, 
 
 1 Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed 149 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, vii. 314 note 1 ; 315 note 1. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 469 
 
 that he should have been able to assimilate equally well a few 
 lines of the technical language of lawyers. However that 
 may be, in the first scene of the comedy M. de Pourceaugnac 
 is spoken of as an " avocat de Limoges." And in the third 
 scene of the first act he says boastingly that he had read law. 
 But in Act ii, sc. 10 he wishes to be thought a fine gentle- 
 man and not a lawyer; and though he then quotes fluently 
 and accurately the technical terms of penal jurisprudence, he 
 denies that he has learned the practice of the courts, and says 
 that he " recollected the words from reading them in novels." 
 If that were the case, his intelligence must have developed 
 suddenly to a marvellous extent. 
 
 In spite of the farce in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, the 
 absurdities in the play are shown in the spirit of laughable 
 comedy. But it may be well to repeat here a few words 
 of Moliere's "Avis au lecteur" when he printed his Amour 
 Mtdecin. "It is not necessary to warn you that there are 
 things that depend upon the action. Everybody knows that 
 comedies are only written to be acted; and I do not advise 
 people to read this one unless, while they are reading, they 
 can imagine all the play of the scenes." The dancing at the 
 end of each act of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, and the songs 
 which had been set to music by Lulli, 1 must have added to 
 the pleasure of the entertainment. When the comedy was 
 put on the stage at the Palais Eoyal it was heartily welcomed. 
 It was played twenty times, on the whole with good receipts ; 
 and except at the first performance, when the Sicilien was given 
 on the same day, the new 'comedy was always played alone. 
 
 I have said nothing of the various personages in this 
 comedy, but will give here, as I have done generally with 
 Moliere's other comedies, the names of the actors who played 
 their parts in it for the first time. Moliere himself took the 
 role of M. de Pourceaugnac. For the other parts the distribu- 
 tion made by Aime'-Martin is the most accurate that can be 
 depended upon now : Bejart as Oronte, Mile. Moliere as 
 Julie, La Grange as firaste, Madeleine Bejart as Ne'rine, 
 Hubert as Lucette, du Croisy as Sbrigani. 2 This last is, after 
 the title role, the most important part in the play. 
 
 The original edition of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac bears the 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, xi. 35. - Ibid. vii. 228. 
 
470 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 date 1670; the printing of the comedy was completed on the 
 3rd of March in that year. 1 
 
 From a comic point of view there is little to be said about 
 Moliere's next play, Les Amants Magnifiques. It formed the 
 chief attraction of a fete known as " Le Divertissement Eoyal," 
 given by Louis xiv. at Saint Germain during the carnival 
 of 1670. Moliere wrote for this fete a semi-mythological 
 comedy in five acts in prose, in which there is some small 
 satire on judicial astrology. But the principal features of the 
 entertainment were in the interludes between the acts in 
 which there was music, dancing, and a display of bright and 
 pretty costumes. The play was seen for the first time at Saint 
 Germain on the 4th of February 1670, and four more per- 
 formances were given at court in the course of the next few 
 weeks. 2 But as the comedy in the play was very slight, and 
 as its representation in public with the costumes worn in the 
 interludes would have entailed considerable expense, Moliere 
 never put this play on to the stage at the Palais Eoyal. It 
 was not printed until after his death, in 1682. It was, how- 
 ever, given in public in the year 1688 at the theatre known 
 afterwards as the Come'die Franchise for many years the only 
 regular theatre in Paris. Before the death of Louis xiv. in 
 1715, it had been acted there altogether forty-one times, though 
 whether with or without the interludes is not known. 3 
 
 At Easter 1670 there were some changes in the troop at the 
 Palais Eoyal theatre that were of importance to the actors 
 there. Bejart retired from the stage. He was still just under 
 forty years of age, and he had given eleven years' service 
 in Paris; as his retirement was due to a wound he had 
 received in the performance of his daily duties, his comrades 
 granted him a pension of 1000 livres a year. Bejart then left 
 the troop. In chronicling the fact, La Grange says : This 
 pension was the first one created [at the Palais Eoyal theatre] 
 lowing the practice of pensions given to actors at the Hotel 
 Bourgogne." 4 Baron's name has been mentioned already. 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, vii. 231 : xi. 35 
 Ibid. vii. 360. 
 
 pp' 2\ e o g 31. er ' 1U ' F r the SyStem f retirin S Pensions,' le^ante^]*. 
 
CHAPTEE XVII 471 
 
 At Easter 1670 he was with a strolling company of actors in 
 Burgundy, but a lettre de cachet was sent to him ordering his 
 presence in Paris. Michel Baron was born in October 1653, 
 so that at the time which concerns us now he was only sixteen 
 years old. His father and mother had been actors, and he 
 had been brought up, so to say, on the stage. Moliere had 
 seen him when he was a small boy acting in a troop composed 
 of children, and perceived at once that the lad had strong 
 histrionic talents. The poet was kind to him, took him into 
 his own house to live with him, and gave him lessons in the 
 art of acting. Young Baron had taken the part of Myrtil in 
 Moliere's pastoral comedy Mllicerte, acted at Saint Germain in 
 December 1666, and Mile. Moliere played the title role in the 
 comedy. On some occasion in connection with the play, 
 whether because the boy was impertinent to Mile. Moliere, or 
 from haughtiness on her part, or from both reasons, she gave 
 him a box on the ear. Young Baron's pride and anger were 
 roused ; he ran away from his benefactor and re-entered the 
 small and poor troop in which he had been when Moliere first 
 saw him. There he remained for some three years or more 
 until the same kindly hand again delivered him. The lad 
 seems to have recognised that he had been foolish, for he 
 spoke of his former protector with marks of gratitude ; and 
 when he received a lettre de cachet ordering him to go to 
 Paris, he got at the same time an affectionate letter from 
 Moliere, who went to meet him on his arrival. Though Baron 
 was very young, he became at Easter 1670 a member of the 
 troop at the Palais Royal theatre, and one share in its con- 
 cerns was allotted to him. He died in 1729, but had retired 
 from the stage some years previously. He is said to have 
 been a great actor, especially in tragedy. He was the author 
 of several comedies, of which the best known is L'Homme CL 
 Bonnes Fortunes. In writing this play he probably drew a good 
 deal from his own experiences among women. 
 
 There were two other accessions to the Palais Eoyal theatre 
 at Easter 1670. La Grange says that two months after 
 Moliere had sent for Baron he sent for Beauval and his wife, 
 both of whom had been in the same provincial company with 
 Baron. Mile. Beauval was a very intelligent actress, and to 
 her was given a whole share in the profits of the theatre in 
 
(7-2 LIFE OF MOLlfiKE 
 
 Paris ; but her husband, who was little better than a ninny, 
 got only half a share. Out of his half share, for the first two 
 years, Beauval had to pay half of the pension allowed to 
 Bejart, and three livres each day the theatre was open to 
 Chateauneuf, a hired servant hitherto paid by the troop ; 
 while for the last year he was at the Palais Eoyal he had to 
 pay the whole of Bejart's pension. 1 It has been said that Mile. 
 Beauval was haughty and imperious, far from pretty, and that 
 she married her husband because he was a fool. The follow- 
 ing story seems to show, however, that Beauval had a sort of 
 unreasoning sense seen sometimes in a very simple-minded 
 person. In the Malade Imaginaire he took the part of 
 Thomas Diafoirus, a newly fledged doctor of medicine and a 
 greenhorn. Moliere was one day directing the rehearsal of 
 his comedy, and he found fault generally with the acting of 
 the members of the troop. Mile. Beauval answered her 
 teacher with some warmth : "You are scolding us all round, 
 but you do not say a word to my husband." Moliere replied :' 
 " I should be very sorry to do so, for I should spoil his play. 
 Nature has given him much better lessons than I can do for 
 the part he has to perform." 
 
 At the king's command the troop at the Palais Ptoyal left 
 
 Paris on the 3rd of November 1670 for Chambord, where the 
 
 court then was, and they stayed there until the 28th of the 
 
 month. On the Hth they acted the Bourgeois Gentilhomme 
 
 first time. Before they left Chambord three more 
 
 lormances of the comedy were demanded : on the 16th the 
 
 mh, and the 2 1st." Some days later the actors were called 
 
 >amt Germain, and there three more performances of the 
 
 iame comedy were given before the court: on the 9th, the llth 
 
 and the 13th of November.' La Grange's Begister ' sa ys that 
 
 ?ov P l thT , r the firSt time in P ublic at the Palais 
 Koyal theatre on the 23rd of November in the same year 
 
 We have seen that during Moliere's lifetime his ' best 
 
 ri r s> a r r ri ! y ^> ** p^med at C0 ur t 
 
 less often than his light plays that were written chiefly 
 ' cause laughter or to give an occasion for spectacula/ 
 
 ' 
 
CHAPTEK XVII 473 
 
 play. Moliere worked very hard to please Louis xiv., and the 
 Bourgeois Gentilhomme was another of the comedies-ballets 
 written to order for the amusement of the king and the royal 
 guests. In all of these plays the poet devised a light comedy 
 that would lend itself to a show of gaiety in the interludes 
 between the acts, and to a splendour in the costumes of 
 the personages who took their parts in the interludes. He 
 accepted the splendour as a necessary part of the entertain- 
 ment, but amusement coming from the mirth of comedy was 
 more natural to him ; and in most of the plays that he wrote 
 at the royal command he strove to make his satire serve some 
 purpose. The Bourgeois Gentilhomme should be taken as it 
 was meant, as a very ludicrous comedy composed for a court 
 festivity. The follies of M. Jourdain are shown with strong 
 caricature; yet the characterisation in the caricature in the 
 first four acts of the comedy is so lifelike that the picture 
 appears to be true in spite of its exaggerations. If that be 
 the case, the imaginary portrait is not farcical. But it should 
 be remembered that the character of M. Jourdain, as seen in 
 the first four acts of the comedy, was meant to lead up to 
 and fit in with the grotesque extravaganza which follows. 
 The interludes between the acts were meant as complementary 
 humorous illustrations of what had taken place in the comedy, 
 and as spectacular shows they were no doubt pretty and 
 graceful. Lulli composed the airs for the songs, and his music 
 was much admired. The grotesque extravaganza at the end 
 of the fourth act was really the kernel of the Bourgeois 
 Gentilhomme, and I cannot speak of it out of its place ; but 
 as far as the comedy in the play is concerned, the idea in 
 drawing the character of M. Jourdain was to ridicule in a 
 preposterous manner the crazes of a childish and most ignorant 
 man, haunted by self-love and by egregious vanity, who 
 wished to imitate the habits of people in a rank of life above 
 his own. Such foibles were not new in Moliere's day, and 
 he did not suppose that he could cure them any more than 
 he could prevent thunderstorms. It was, however, open to 
 him to portray in the spirit of laughable comedy the vagaries 
 of a man whose ambition led him to dress himself in peacock's 
 feathers. If that be frivolity, it is also a fair subject for comic 
 satire. Everything depends on the execution. The plot in 
 
474 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 the play is so slight that no one takes thought of it. What 
 interests is the comic manner in which the satire is shown. 
 
 It is to be remarked that the raillery against M. Jourdain is 
 nowhere ill-natured. He is laughed at by his masters, mocked 
 by his servant and bamboozled by others; but the ridicule 
 against him is not unkind. The strongest sarcasm he has to 
 bear is from his wife, and it must be admitted that she has 
 ground for complaint. She is wronged, though not seriously, 
 and if she did not get angry or showed no temper she would 
 be an abettor in his faults. Pretentiousness is one of the 
 marks of vulgarity. And we all feel, with as little unkind- 
 ness as possible, that with his crazy ambitions M. Jourdain 
 could not help being a vulgar man, and that he showed his 
 vulgarity most strongly when he should have least desired 
 to do so. But his pretentiousness is so ludicrous and is 
 exhibited in such a frank and childish way that instead of 
 causing disgust it creates hearty laughter. We take it as we 
 find it and really enjoy the comedy seen. Though his speech 
 was meant to betray an ignorance of good breeding, it would 
 be a mistake to criticise it closely. The dramatist thought 
 of the fun in his play, and he wished to show the satire in his 
 comedy in a healthy and amusing manner. M. Jourdain is not 
 a bad-thinking or a nasty-mingled man ; nobody really dislikes 
 him. Moliere speaks no evil of him, calls him by no hard 
 names ; he shows his foolish crazes in a strong light, so that 
 everybody may be amused at them. As regards silly vanities 
 that injured nobody, that was the way in this and other 
 comedies, that Moliere chose to moralise over them. No other 
 course was fairly open to him. The comic dramatist may laugh 
 at nonsense so that others shall see its folly, he may show bad 
 faults through the satire of comedy so that others shall regret 
 them or condemn them; but he must not preach to his 
 audience. To give a comic exhibition is his function, and 
 any lesson that he wishes to teach must be by comic presenta- 
 tion. Without some lesson, without some moral shown, no 
 comedy will attain a high rank ; but the teaching should be 
 done by laughter. And genial laughter that raises one's 
 spirits and makes one rejoice is more likely to be effectual 
 on the stage and to be better remembered than wit that 
 pleases only by its cleverness or by its pungency. A critic in 
 
CHAPTER XVII 475 
 
 his arm-chair, or many a youug man talking to his friends, 
 thinks he likes wit that sparkles and that titillates his brain 
 by brilliant dashes. But the audience in a theatre are emo- 
 tional in another and more natural way ; they look rather to 
 have their affections aroused, either by love or by hatred, and 
 to have their sympathies gratified by what they see and hear. 
 
 Monsieur Jourdain is certainly forty years old ; yet he has 
 engaged the services of a music-master, a dancing-master, a 
 fencing-master, and of a teacher of philosophy. " Visions of 
 nobility and of gallantry" have got into his head, and he 
 wishes to appear like a person of quality. When first seen, 
 his music and his dancing-masters are with him. He is 
 gorgeously clothed, and he wears a new-fashioned dressing- 
 gown called an " Indienne." This was an expensive piece 
 of luxury, and no child was ever prouder of a new frock than 
 M. Jourdain is of his Indienne. He has taken it off; but 
 when a song is being sung he puts it on again, then takes it 
 off, and again puts it on " in order to hear better." Though 
 he has a daughter of a marriageable age his visions of nobility 
 and of gallantry make him think he has fallen in love with 
 a certain marchioness, Dorimene ; and he wishes to be taught 
 how to make a bow to her. His dancing-master says: "If 
 you desire to present yourself very respectfully, you should 
 first make a bow backwards, then walk towards her, making 
 three bows, and the last one should be as low as her knees." 
 
 M. Jourdain's music-master and his dancing-master had 
 both extolled their arts as being useful to the government of 
 mankind. They had done so quietly and with moderation. 
 But the fencing-master is an authoritative person. He is 
 very noisy as he gives his instructions to M. Jourdain how 
 to hold himself when the foil is in his hand. 
 
 " Maitre d'Armes. 
 
 " I have told you already that the whole secret of fencing consists 
 in two things : to hit and not to be hit. And as I showed you the 
 other day by demonstrative reasoning, it is impossible that you 
 should be hit if you know how to parry your enemy's sword from 
 the line of your body ; and this depends only on a slight inward or 
 outward movement of the wrist. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 
 " So that a man, though he have no courage, is sure to kill his 
 adversary and not to be killed by him. 
 
I7U LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 "Maitre d'Armes. 
 " Of course. Did you not see the demonstration 1 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 "Yes. 
 
 "Maitre d'Armes. 
 
 " And it is in this that one perceives the consideration that should 
 be shown in a State to us professors, and how vastly superior is the 
 science of arms to all other useless sciences, like dancing, music, etc." 
 
 Such arrogance cannot be borne by the other two teachers. 
 At first the three masters wrangle together, then they come 
 to blows. While the scrimmage is going on the master of 
 philosophy arrives. He tries to calm them, but is soon drawn 
 into the quarrel. Then all the four professors get to fisticuffs 
 and call each other by the ugliest names they can find. 
 M. Jourdain for one moment is wise. He says : "Fight now 
 3 much as you like. I can't prevent it, and I am not going 
 lave my clothes torn in trying to separate you." 
 'f all the lessons given to M. Jourdain by his numerous 
 masters that by the master of philosophy is the most amusing. 
 middle-aged pupil is ridiculously ignorant, but the childish 
 > which he shows his ignorance is remarkable. He can 
 understand that there are five vowels; and when he is told 
 
 P T UnCed he 1S ln eCStas ? at fche ^autiful 
 ayed. But he is angry with himself at not 
 
 before ' and " 
 
 nf 
 
 and mother for not having taught him. He wants to write 
 
 he h th^TT^ great qUa% ' aDd is astonished wh ^ 
 that his letter must be in verse or in prose And 
 
 at hearing that when 
 
 different ways. All of T nonsensi % in five 
 
 *. - 
 
CHAPTEE XVII 477 
 
 but I said that the first go off ! " Those of us who are old 
 enough to remember the absurdities of Lord Dundreary and 
 how we laughed and laughed at Sothern's acting in the 
 part may have an idea of Moliere counterfeiting his own 
 M. Jourdain. 
 
 After his lesson M. Jourdain is waited upon by a tailor and 
 his assistant. They bring him a coat which the chief pro- 
 nounces to be a masterpiece. M. Jourdain is disconcerted for 
 a moment because he discovers that the flowers on the coat 
 are set with the stalks upwards. Even were this a workman's 
 blunder, he is appeased when the tailor tells him that all 
 persons of quality have the flowers on their coats placed in 
 that way. As he is going to put on his coat, the tailor stops 
 him : 
 
 " Stay, you must not do it like that. I have brought my men 
 to dress you with the accompaniment of music. These sort of coats 
 are put on ceremoniously. Now then, men, come in. Put on Mon- 
 sieur's coat in the way that you do with persons of quality." 
 
 ["Four tailor's workmen appear; two strip M. Jourdain of the 
 haut-de-chausses that he had worn during bis lessons, and two others 
 take off his shirt (camisole). Then they all put on his new coat, and 
 he walks about between them to show it off, and to let tbem see that 
 it fits well. During this performance a full orchestra is playing."] 
 
 There follows another bit of drollery in which the nonsense 
 rises higher and higher. M. Jourdain is asked to give the 
 workmen something to drink, and he is addressed as "Mon 
 Gentilhomme." The title tickles his vanity, and he gives 
 money; then he is thanked as " Monseigneur " ; he is more 
 delighted, and he gives more money; then he is thanked as 
 "Votre Grandeur." He can hardly hold himself. He 
 exclaims : 
 
 "'Votre Grandeur!' Oh! oh! oh! Wait, don't go away. To 
 me, ' Votre Grandeur ! ' My word, if he goes up to Altesse he '11 get 
 the whole of my purse.' " 
 
 At the end of the second act there is an interlude in which 
 the four tailor's workmen dance about in a sportive manner 
 to show their joy at the handsome liberalities of the rich 
 bourgeois. 
 
 The scene of the comedy is laid in Paris; and when 
 M. Jourdain is next seen he tells two lackeys to follow him 
 
478 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 as he walks through the town to show his coat, adding that they 
 must walk close behind him so that people can see they belong 
 to him. Before he goes out, Nicole, the family servant, comes 
 to him; and when she sees her master she bursts out into 
 incontrollable laughter. It is his get-up, and especially his 
 new coat, that moves her hilarity. " Hi, hi, hi. Comme vous 
 voila bati! Hi, hi, hi." Perhaps others have felt with me 
 that Nicole's laughter here is very infectious. She says little, 
 indeed she can hardly speak; but her few words, joined to 
 her master's astonishment and his annoyance at finding him- 
 self an object of ridicule, produce a singularly comical effect. 
 When she finds that she cannot stop herself she says : " Well, 
 sir, beat me if you like, but let me laugh my fill. That 
 will do me more good." And off she goes again. But when 
 M. Jourdain tells her that she is to get the house ready for 
 company her laughter stops instantly. She does not like her 
 master's company, and tells him so plainly. 
 
 When Madame Jourdain sees her husband she shows 
 her surprise at his folly by anger and disgust. She rallies 
 him, and Nicole joins in the banter against her master. 
 M. Jourdain tries to turn the raillery against himself by 
 showing his wife that she does not know that she is talkin<* 
 prose she, poor woman, being as ignorant of prose and verse 
 as her husband had been-and by telling Nicole how to pro- 
 nounce the letter U. He then tries to instruct Nicole in the 
 ; of fencing by "demonstrative reasoning"; but when she 
 given him several thrusts he is indignant because she has 
 not followed the rules. 
 
 Madame Jourdain is a plain-thinking woman, and she 
 speaks her mind freely. Visions of nobility and of gallantry " 
 lave no meaning for her, and she condemns her husband for 
 his infatuation for the count Dorante. 
 
 " Madame Jourdain. 
 
 your money 6 * '* ** ^^ and CareSSes ?> but ^ borrows 
 . " M. Jourdain. 
 
 he knows her. As soon as she perceives 1 },!^ sh 
 
CHAPTEE XVII 479 
 
 says : " He is coming again, perhaps for another loan. I feel 
 that I have dined when I see him." In other words, " I hate 
 the sight of him." Dorante, or the count, is exceedingly 
 amused at M. Jourdain's appearance. 
 
 " Dorante. 
 
 " That coat gives you a most splendid air, and we have few young 
 men at court better dressed than you. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 "He! he! 
 
 " Madame Jourdain (aside). 
 " He scratches him where he itches. 
 
 " Dorante. 
 " Turn round a bit. Prodigiously smart, indeed ! 
 
 "Madame Jourdain (aside). 
 " Yes ; as big a fool behind as in front." 
 
 Dorante is very plausibly polite in his manners ; he would 
 pay his respects to Madame Jourdain, but she will not accept 
 his soft words. Of course he has come to borrow more money. 
 Childish and ignorant as M. Jourdain is, he enumerates seven 
 instances of his lending money to Dorante, and he tells the 
 amount lent on each occasion. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 "Total sum, 15,800 livres. 
 
 "Dorante. 
 
 "The total sum is accurate : 15,800 livres. And add to that the 
 two hundred pistoles [2200 1.] that you are going to lend me now ; 
 that will make exactly 18,000 francs, which I will pay you on the 
 first opportunity." 
 
 The nincompoop goes out to fetch the two hundred pistoles, 
 and Dorante is left with Madame Jourdain. He tries his 
 courtier-like manners on her, and she answers him as he 
 deserves. 
 
 The reader may recollect that Moliere had introduced lovers' 
 quarrels into two of his earlier comedies, the Dtpit Amoureux 
 and the Tartuffe. In the Bourgeois Gentilhomme he reverted 
 to the same idea. But the lovers' tiff in the last play is not 
 so interesting as the scene preceding it, in which there is a 
 supposed portrait of the poet's wife in Act in. and sc. 9 in 
 
480 
 
 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 M. Mesnard's edition. 1 The portrait is found in a dialogue 
 between Cle'onte, a personage in the comedy, and his valet 
 Covielle. Cle'onte is in love with Lucile, M. Jourdain's 
 daughter, and though he has quarrelled with his mistress, he 
 gives a description of her charms such as could have been 
 traced only by a lover's hand. Nevertheless, French writers 
 on Moliere have generally accepted the idea that in the 
 description of Lucile the poet was drawing a likeness, perhaps 
 with some of the licence allowed in comedy, of his own wife, 
 whom he always continued to love in spite of her failings. 
 The portrait begins at the end of a speech by Covielle : 
 
 " In the first place, her eyes are small. 
 
 " CUonte. 
 
 11 That is true, her eyes are small ; but they are full of fire, and 
 they are the most brilliant, the most piercing, eyes in the world, the 
 most touching that ever were seen. 
 
 " Covielle. 
 " Her mouth is large. 
 
 " CUonte. 
 
 " Yes, but there are charms in it that one does not see in other 
 mouths. When you look at it you are filled with longing. No other 
 mouth was ever so inviting, so winsome. 
 
 " Covielle. 
 " She is not very tall. 
 
 " Cleonte. 
 " No, but her form is easy and very graceful. 
 
 " Covielle. 
 1 She affects a want of animation in her speech and in her actions. 
 
 " CUonte. 
 
 " That is true, but with it she shows a grace of her own ; and her 
 indefinable charm in *e way they creep 
 
 " Covielle. 
 " As to her wit . . 
 
 " CUonte. 
 Oh ! she has that, Covielle, of the finest and most delicate kind. 
 
 
CHAPTEE XVII 481 
 
 " Covielle. 
 " Her conversation . . . 
 
 " CUonte. 
 " Her conversation is charming. 
 
 " Covielle. 
 " She is always serious. 
 
 " CUonte. 
 
 " Must you have full-blown gaiety, joy fulness that is always 
 brimming over ? And can there be anything more insufferable than 
 those women who laugh at every word that is spoken ? 
 
 " Covielle. 
 " At any rate, no one can be more capricious than she is. 
 
 " Clfonte. 
 
 " Yes, she is capricious, I allow, but everything becomes a beauty ; 
 one tolerates everything from a beauty. 
 
 (( Covielle. 
 
 " If that is to be the way of it, I think that you will always be in 
 love with her." 
 
 The quarrel between Cle'onte and Lucile is given in the 
 next scene ; and, in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, as in the Dtpit 
 Amoureux, because the master and mistress choose to fall out, 
 their servants, Covielle and Nicole, think they will have their 
 wrangle also. I need only give the last words spoken by each 
 of the male personages, after peace has been made : 
 
 " Clfonte. 
 
 " Ah Lucile ! with one word from your mouth you know how to 
 pacify my heart. How easily we allow ourselves to be persuaded by 
 those whom we love ! 
 
 " Covielle. 
 " How quickly one is wheedled by those devilish animals ! " 
 
 Madame Jourdain is glad to welcome Cleonte as a future 
 son-in-law, but when the young man makes his demand 
 formally to Lucile's father, M. Jourdain replies : " Sir, before 
 giving you an answer, I must beg of you to tell me if you are a 
 gentilhomme." Cleonte refuses to give himself the title of 
 gentilhomme because he does not think he has a right to bear 
 
 2H 
 
482 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 it. M. Jourdain replies: "Shake hands, sir; my daughter 
 is not for you." This is an amusing trait, showing how M. 
 Jourdain was governed by his infatuation. His wife rebukes 
 him, and he replies hotly : " Those are just the sentiments of 
 a small mind, to wish to remain always among the people. 
 Don't answer me now. My daughter shall be a marchioness 
 in spite of everybody, and if you make me angry she shall be 
 a duchess." 
 
 Hitherto the follies of M. Jourdain have been ludicrous, 
 but he was more at fault in what he meant as love for 
 Dorimene. No doubt he was in earnest in what he said to 
 her, but one looks upon this piece of infatuation less as a fault 
 than as a craze because the lady was a marchioness. If she 
 thought of him at all it was only with amusement. The satire 
 against Dorante was more serious. Though a count and a 
 courtier, he was thoroughly dishonest. He is a type of a rogue 
 who goes through the world smiling. He makes Dorimene be- 
 lieve that the diamond M. Jourdain had sent her was a present 
 to her from himself ; and he takes advantage of M. Jourdain's 
 foible for Dorimene to allow her to think that the supper 
 given to her by M. Jourdain, and in his house, was given by 
 him (Dorante). M. Jourdain was a fool and may be laughed 
 at, though his wife had cause for other feelings than laughter 
 when she comes into her own dining-room, and finds that 
 while she had been sent to dine with her sister her husband 
 was entertaining another lady most sumptuously. For she 
 did not believe one word of Dorante's excuses. But if M. 
 Jourdain was a fool, Dorante was a knave. The courtier 
 borrows the rich tradesman's money, makes dishonest use of 
 his over-credulity for his own profit, and jeers at him because 
 he has very bourgeois manners. Dorante's knavery is shown 
 lightly, for in a play where the essence of the comedy lies 
 in the laughter coming from the satire of ridicule it would 
 have been scarcely possible to condemn trickeries except by 
 laughter. This Moliere knew how to do excellently, and he 
 showed the knave and the fool side by side. The Bourgeois 
 Gentilhomme was written to order, to be played before the king 
 and his court, and few authors would have had Moliere's 
 courage in thus attacking a courtier who, in the play, boasts 
 of his near approach to the king's person. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 483 
 
 In Moliere's previous comedies-ballets the dancing, with 
 the costumes of the personages and the music, had been sub- 
 servient to the comedy in the plays, though made to har- 
 monise with it ; whereas in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme the 
 comedy was planned to harmonise with the spectacular 
 exhibition seen in the interlude at the end of the fourth act, 
 and known as " La Ceremonie Turque." It is well to bear 
 this last fact in mind, in view of the characterisation of the 
 principal personage in the comedy. For it was the idea of 
 the masquerade that gave rise to the conception of M. Jour- 
 dain ; and Moliere had to create a personage that would fall 
 in with the masquerade of the Turkish ceremony. The vain 
 bourgeois knew nothing about his coming honours until they 
 were pressed upon him. 
 
 In relating here shortly how the Turkish ceremony came to 
 be planned I am naturally altogether under obligations to 
 French writers on Moliere. In December 1669 the chevalier 
 Laurent d'Arvieux, who had long lived in the East, was 
 called to Saint Germain to give the king a description of his 
 travels and of Turkish manners. He says in his MJmoires 
 that " the king and Madame de la Valliere laughed moderately 
 at his account, but that the laughter of Monsieur (the king's 
 brother) might have been heard two hundred yards away." 
 From his description arose the conception of the Bourgeois 
 G-entillwmme. Louis xiv. asked Moliere to write a play in 
 which a Turkish ceremony, shown in a burlesque manner, 
 should appear in the interludes. The chevalier d'Arvieux, 
 and Lulli, who had written the music for most of Moliere's 
 earlier comedies - ballets, were called upon to give the 
 dramatist their assistance. M. Mesnard quotes from the 
 chevalier's Mdmoires : 
 
 " His Majesty commanded me to co-operate with MM. Moliere and 
 de Lulli in composing a stage play which should show something of 
 Turkish dress and of Turkish manners. I therefore went to the village 
 of Auteuil, where M. de Moliere had a very pretty house, and there we 
 set to work at the play known in the CEuvres de Moliere under the title 
 of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who becomes a Turk jn order to marry 
 the daughter of the Grand Seigneur. I was to be responsible for the 
 Turkish dresses and for the description of Turkish manners. When 
 the play was finished it was shown to the king, who was pleased with 
 it, and I remained eight days with Baraillon, a master tailor, giving 
 instructions about Turkish clothes and turbans. Everything was 
 
484 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 taken off to Chambord; the play was performed in the month of 
 September, and it amused the king and the whole of the court." 1 
 
 D'Arvieux's memory deceived him when he said that M. 
 Jourdain became a Turk in order to marry the daughter of 
 the Grand Seigneur; it was the son of the Grand Turk who 
 married M. Jourdain's daughter. Baraillon was the tailor 
 employed habitually by the actors at the Palais Eoyal theatre. 
 
 M. Jourdain is left alone, unhappy, after his wife had dis- 
 turbed his small supper-party. He is startled by the appear- 
 ance of Covielle (Cle'onte's valet) disguised as a traveller, who 
 tells him that he had known him as a child, and that he had 
 been intimate with his father, who was a very well-bred 
 gentleman. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 " What do you say 1- 
 
 11 Covielle. 
 " I say that he was a very well-bred gentleman. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 "My father? 
 
 " Covielle, 
 "Yes. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 " There are foolish people who tell me that he was a merchant. 
 
 " Covielle. 
 
 " He a merchant ! That is pure slander. He never was one. All 
 that he did was to be very obliging and show kind services to 
 others. And as he was an excellent judge of stuffs, he went every- 
 where to choose them, had them sent to his house, and gave them to 
 ms friends in exchange for money." 
 
 M. Jourdain's vanity and his childishness have been shown, 
 and here he was nattered in his tenderest point. Covielle 
 goes on to say that he has been a great traveller and that he 
 has to announce grand news. 
 
 " Covielle. 
 
 "You know that the son of the Grand Turk is here. . . And 
 >naoraM he is iiUove with your daughter. 
 
 Moland > 
 
CHAPTER XVII 485 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 " The son of the Grand Turk ? 
 
 " Covielle. 
 " Yes ; and he wants to be your son-in-law. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 " The son of the Grand Turk my son-in-law ! 
 
 " Covielle. 
 
 " The son of the Grand Turk your son-in-law. When I went to 
 see him ... he said to me : 'Acciam croc soler ouch alia moustaph 
 gidelum amanakem varahini oussere carbulath ' ; in other words : 
 ' Haven't you seen a pretty young girl, the daughter of Monsieur 
 Jourdain, gentilhomme parisien 1 ' 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 " The son of the Grand Turk said that of me 1 
 
 " Covielle. 
 
 " Yes. When I told him that I knew you intimately and that I 
 had seen your daughter, he said to me, ' marababa sahem,' or ' Ah ! 
 how deeply I am in love with her.' 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 
 "' Marababa sahem' means 'Ah! how deeply I am in love with 
 her ' ? . . . Faith, you do well to tell me so. For I should never 
 have thought that ' marababa sahem ' means ' Ah ! how deeply I am 
 in love with her.' What a fine language Turkish is ! 
 
 " Covielle. 
 
 " Well, to finish my embassy, he desires your daughter in marriage ; 
 and that he may have a father-in-law worthy of himself he means to 
 make you Mamamouchi, which is a certain great dignity in his 
 country. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 " Mamamouchi ? 
 
 " Covielle. 
 
 "Yes, Mamamouchi'., or in our language Paladin. . . . There is 
 nothing higher than that in the world, and you will be on an equality 
 with the greatest lords of the earth." 
 
 This nonsense is so good that no one is surprised that 
 M. Jourdain should take it for sense. His enchantment has 
 begun and he is in fairyland. Cleonte (Covielle's master) 
 appears dressed as a Turk followed by three pages bearing his 
 
486 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 long train; and he and Covielle begin to talk pretended 
 Turkish. Except a few words everything they say is pure 
 gibberish. 1 
 
 " Covielle. 
 " Ossa binamen sadoc babally oracaf ouram. 
 
 " Cleonte. 
 " Bel-nun. 
 
 " Covielle. 
 
 " He says you must go with him immediately to prepare for the 
 ceremony, so that you may see your daughter and conclude the 
 marriage. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 
 " So many things in two words ? 
 
 " Covielle. 
 
 "Yes, the Turkish language is like that; it says much in a few 
 words. Go with him wherever he wishes." 
 
 We come now to the Turkish ceremony, which takes place 
 in the interlude between the fourth and the fifth act. As the 
 play was devised with a view to showing the Turkish cere- 
 mony in a burlesque manner, and as it would be difficult to 
 summarise the description satisfactorily, I give it as printed 
 by M. Mesnard from the original edition of the play. After 
 Moliere's death La Grange published in 1682 a longer version 
 of the ceremony ; and M. Mesnard has printed this other 
 reading also, believing that it was either written by Moliere or 
 accepted by him, and may be taken as authentic 2 : 
 
 " The Mufty, four Dervishes, six Turks dancing, six Turks playing, 
 and others playing on instruments in a Turkish fashion, are the actors 
 in this ceremony. 
 
 " The Mufty invokes Mahomet with the twelve Turks and the four 
 Dervishes; then the Bourgeois is brought before him dressed as a 
 Turk, without turban and without sabre, and the Mufty sings these 
 words to him : 
 
 " Se ti salir, 3 
 Ti respondir ; 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, viii. 171 note 2. 
 
 Ibid. viii. 183, first par. ; xi. 37. 
 
 J In a note after this line on p. 185, M. Mesnard quotes the opinion of a 
 
 .odern traveller who says that this patois of Moliere's is like the language 
 
 I spoken by the people on the Mediterranean between Algiers and 
 
 Marseilles. It is a mixture of Arab, Turkish, Maltese, French, Italian, and 
 
 Spanish a kind of pigeon French 
 
CHAPTEE XVII 487 
 
 Se non sabir, 
 Tazir, tazir. 
 Mi star Mufti : 
 Ti, qui star ti ? 
 Non intendir, 
 Tazir, tazir. 1 
 
 " In the same language the Mufty asks the Turks who are assisting 
 of what religion is the Bourgeois, and they assure him he is 
 Mahometan. The Mufty invokes Mahomet in lingua franca, and sings 
 the following words : 
 
 " Mahametta per Giourdina 
 Mi pregar sera 6 mattina : 
 Voler far un Paladina 
 D6 Giourdina, d6 Giourdina. 
 Dar turbanta, e dar scarcina, 
 Con galera 6 brigantina, 
 Per defender Palestina. 2 
 Mahametta, etc. 
 
 " The Mufty asks the Turks if the Bourgeois will be firm in the 
 Mahometan religion, and he sings these words : 
 
 " Star bon Turca Giourdina ? 3 
 
 " THE TURKS. 
 
 " Hi valla* 
 
 " THE MUFTY dances, and sings these words : 
 
 " Hu la ba ba la chou ba la ba ba la da. b 
 
 The Turks answer in the same words. The Mufty proposes to give 
 the turban to the Bourgeois, and sings the following words : 
 
 " Ti non star furba ? 
 
 " THE TURKS. 
 
 " No, no, no. 
 
 1 I give English translations of Moliere's patois taken from M. Mesnard's 
 literal French translation of the lines. " If you know, you answer ; if you 
 do not know, be silent, be silent. I am Mufty : you, who are you ? You 
 do not understand : be silent, be silent." 
 
 2 " Mahomet, for Jourdain, I will pray night and morning. Will make a 
 Paladin of Jourdain, of Jourdain. Give turban and give scimitar, with 
 galley and brigantine, to defend Palestine. " 
 
 3 "Be a good Turk, Jourdain?" 
 
 1 "Yes, certainly" ; literally, "I affirm it by God." 
 
 5 M. Mesnard thinks that this line of twelve syllables was meant only as 
 nonsense. But Auger (who published a valuable critical edition of Moliere 
 in 1819) thought that by altering the syllables a little three real Turkish 
 words could be seen: Allah, baba, hou; which mean "God, my father, 
 Him (God)." (Euvres de Moliere, viii. 181 note 3. Auger's idea seems to be 
 prodigiously ingenious. 
 
488 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 " THE MUFTY. 
 " Non star furfanta ? 
 
 "THE TURKS. 
 
 " No, no, no. 
 
 " THE MUFTY. 
 "Donar turbanta, donar turbanta. 1 
 
 The Turks repeat all that the Mufty has said when giving the turban 
 to the Bourgeois. The Mufty and the Dervishes put on their turbans 
 used at the ceremony, and the Koran is given to the Mufty, who 
 makes a second invocation, in which he is joined by all the assisting 
 Turks. After the invocation he gives the Bourgeois the sword, and 
 sings these words : 
 
 "THE MUFTY. 
 
 " Ti star nobile, e non star fabbola. 
 " Pigliar schiabbola. 2 
 
 " The Turks repeat the same lines, each holding his sabre in his 
 hand ; and six of them dance round about the Bourgeois and pretend 
 to hit him with the backs of their sabres. 
 
 "The Mufty orders the Turks to beat the Bourgeois, and he sings 
 the following words : 
 
 " Dara, Dam, 
 
 " Bastonnara, bastonnara. 3 
 
 "The Turks repeat the same lines, and beat him with sticks to a 
 musical accompaniment. 
 
 "After he has been beaten the Mufty sings to him : 
 " Non tener honta : 
 " Questa sta ultima affronta* 
 The Turks repeat the same lines. 
 
 The Mufty begins another invocation, and retires after the cere- 
 
 and singing with many instruments 
 
 It is to be remembered that this Turkish ceremony was 
 
 fl ? a l burles( l ue ' an <* seen with all the glitter of gold 
 
 the brightness of the new and handsome costumes it 
 
 have been a pretty sight. As the play was composed 
 
 and unde rtaken t the king , g ^ ^ ^ * P 
 
 ies; or perhaps it would be more just to say that they 
 
 NO ' n ' n - Not a knave ? -No, no, BO.- 
 
 "Do not be ashamed"* this is the last affront." 
 
CHAPTEE XVII 489 
 
 fell upon the taxpayers of the country. Taken together with 
 an uncertain sum of money allowed to the actors at the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne theatre, who were summoned to Versailles in the 
 following month, the total charges amounted to 49,404 livres. 
 Of this large sum, it would seem that much the greatest part 
 was due to the performances of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme. 
 M. Moland has given a detailed account of this expenditure. 1 
 In a footnote at the end he estimates that the king had 
 altogether not less than ten dramatic performances, and that 
 as each performance cost, one with another, a little less than 
 5000 livres, "the voluptuary expenses were controlled with 
 some strictness." I have said on a former page that, accord- 
 ing to French writers, if we wish to get now the equivalent 
 of the spending value of money in Moliere's day we should 
 multiply by five. 
 
 Though M. Jourdain has been bamboozled and beaten he 
 is completely happy, for he believes that he is a great lord 
 and that his daughter is going to marry the son of the Grand 
 Turk. His wife, however, cannot understand what has taken 
 place. He is so triumphant in his new honours that, instead 
 of telling her how he has received them, he can only say that 
 he has been made Mamamouchi and repeat the words he has 
 heard. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 
 " Hou la ba ba la chou ba la ba ba la da. 
 
 " Madame Jourdain. 
 " Oh, deary me ! My husband has gone mad. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 
 " Silence, impertinent woman ; bear proper respect to Monsieur le 
 Mamamouchi." 
 
 When Cleonte arrives, dressed as a Turk, M. Jourdain 
 horrifies his daughter, Lucile, by telling her that she sees 
 before her her future husband. Lucile shows disobedience, 
 but when she recognises her lover she instantly becomes 
 touched with her filial duties. Madame Jourdain is also 
 horrified at hearing that the son of the Grand Turk is to be 
 her son-in-law, and it is difficult to persuade her to see the 
 advantages of such a marriage. 
 
 1 L. Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 2nd ed. x. 417-26. 
 
490 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 " Covielle (aside to her). 
 
 "For the last hour, madame, we have been making signs to you. 
 Don't you see that all this is only to complete your husband's visionary 
 ideas ; that we have disguised ourselves in order to laugh at him, and 
 that Cleonte is the son of the Grand Turk ? 
 
 " Madame Jourdain. 
 " Oh ! if that is it, I agree. ... I consent to the marriage. 
 
 " M. Jourdain. 
 
 "Now, everybody has come to his senses. (Then to his wife.) 
 You wouldn't listen to me. I knew well enough that he would 
 show you what it is to be the son of the Grand Turk. 
 
 " Madame Jourdain. 
 
 " He has shown me perfectly, and I am satisfied. Let us send for 
 a lawyer." 
 
 The last words in the comedy are spoken by Covielle. 
 Alluding to M. Jourdain, he says : " If a man can be madder 
 than he is, I will go and tell it in Eome." 
 
 The fact that the Bourgeois Gentilhomme was played so often 
 at court is a proof that the performances gave great pleasure. 
 Doubtless the Turkish ceremony, the music, and the spec- 
 tacular exhibition were among the reasons for its good fortune. 
 But Grimarest, a generation later, wrote : " No play was ever 
 so badly welcomed, and no play of Moliere's gave him so 
 much uneasiness. At supper the king said no word to him 
 about it, and all the courtiers abused it." Grimarest's account 
 of the reception of the play is in itself a little bit of comedy. 1 
 As Louis xiv. made no remark about the play after its first 
 performance, said nothing to show whether he liked it or not, 
 the courtiers imagined that their master did not think well 
 of it. Thereupon a noble duke expressed his sentiments to 
 his friends : " Moliere must take us for simpletons if he thinks 
 he can amuse us by such rubbish. What does he mean by 
 Ha la ba, la la chou ? The poor fellow is talking nonsense, 
 he is worn out. If no other author takes his place he will 
 descend into Italian farce." According to Grimarest, when 
 Moliere saw how his play was pulled to pieces by the courtiers 
 he shut himself up in his room for five days, because the 
 
 1 Vie de Moliere, 141-43. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 491 
 
 comedy he had written under the king's orders and with 
 special desire to please his Majesty had been a failure. After 
 the second performance [Grimarest had evidently not been told 
 how often the play had been acted] the king lifted the cloud. 
 He said to Moliere : " I did not speak to you about your play 
 after its first performance because I thought I had been 
 deceived by the way it was acted ; but indeed, Moliere, you 
 have never amused me more, and your comedy is excellent." 
 On hearing this the courtiers looked at one another discon- 
 certed. But they chose to get out of the difficulty in the 
 easiest way. One of the poet's former hostile critics said of 
 him : " That man is inimitable ; he has a vis comica in every- 
 thing that he does that is never seen in the ancient writers." 
 Taschereau, who relates all this from Grimarest, adds himself : 
 " Et voila les bons amis de cour." l 
 
 Hitherto the public performances of Moliere's comedies 
 when they were new had succeeded each other regularly ; but 
 La Grange's Register shows that after the Bourgeois G-entilhomme 
 had been acted twice the troop at the Palais Royal theatre 
 put on to their stage Tite et B6r6nice, a new tragedy by Pierre 
 Corneille. Corneille's tragedy was acted three times before 
 Moliere's comedy again appeared, then there were three con- 
 secutive performances of Moliere's comedy ; and the two plays 
 were so given three consecutive performances of the tragedy 
 and three consecutive performances of the comedy following 
 each other alternately until the end of the theatrical year at 
 Easter 1671. I have said already that Tite et Berenice was 
 the only new play, not written by Moliere, that had a sub- 
 stantial success at the Palais Royal theatre. This success 
 was, however, eclipsed by that of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme. 
 Corneille's tragedy was acted twenty-one times and gave an 
 average daily receipt of 732 livres; Moliere's comedy was 
 acted twenty-four times and gave an average daily receipt 
 of 1004 livres. 
 
 The Bourgeois Gentilhomme was given to the public in Paris 
 just as it had been played at Charnbord and at Saint Germain. 2 
 If the courtiers had been delighted chiefly with the spectacle, 
 we may suppose that the townsfolk were charmed in the 
 
 1 Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 158, 159 ; (Euvres de Moliere, viii. 
 6, 7. 
 ' 2 (Euvres de Moliert, viii. 19. 
 
4.92 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 same way. In any case, this play appears, from a pecuniary 
 point of view, to have been one of the most successful that 
 Moliere put on to his stage. 
 
 The names of most of the actors who played originally in 
 the Bourgeois Gentilhomme are known. Moliere was naturally 
 his own M. Jourdain, his wife appeared as Lucile, Hubert, 
 who often acted women's parts, as Madame Jourdain, Mile. 
 Beauval as Nicole, du Croisy as the maitre de Philosophic ; 
 and in all probability La Grange as Cleonte, La Thorilliere as 
 Dorante, Mile, de Brie as Dorimene, and her husband as the 
 maitre d'armes. The roles of Covielle, and of the music-master 
 and of the dancing-master, appear not to have been assigned. 
 In the Ce'remonie Turque, Lulli, the musician, appeared as 
 Le Mufti when the play was acted before the court ; M. Mesnard 
 says that he did not go on to the stage in Paris. 1 
 
 The printing of the first edition of the Bourgeois Gentil- 
 homme was completed on the 18th of March 167 1. 2 
 
 Les Fourleries de Scapin, first acted on the 24th of May 1671, 
 
 was the next play of Moliere's seen at the Palais Royal 
 
 theatre. From the point of view of comedy this is one of the 
 
 weakest of Moliere's plays that he put upon his stage. It 
 
 may give amusement when well acted, but it shows little real 
 
 comedy. It was borrowed partly from the Phormio of Terence, 
 
 "with some reminiscences of Plautus"; Paul Lacroix thought 
 
 it was a transformation of an old play, Joguenet ou les Vieillards 
 
 its, written by Moliere some time between 1640 and 1655 ; 
 
 s scenes was probably taken from an old farce called 
 
 is dans le Sac, which may have been written by Moliere 
 
 J was in the provinces; and another scene, of which 
 
 aw d will be said later, was or was not taken from Le Pedant 
 
 i a I ^ yran0 de Ber S era <> w ^ten Probably in the 
 *5, but not printed until 1654 3 
 
 As we read the Fourleries de Scapin now we are reminded of 
 
 e s first two comedies, the titourdi and the Dtpit Amon- 
 
 em : where the incidents were directly borrowed from the 
 
 tage; we are carried back to the old comedy of 
 
 ' vii W?&. ? - vi". 36, 37; xi. 36-38. 
 
 PaulMesnard; andvoLxi 167 ' Fourberies de Sca P by M. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 493 
 
 intrigue in which the burden of the play lay chiefly in cheat- 
 ing. A man who can cheat cleverly doubtless shows ingenuity, 
 and Scapin is a clever rascal. But though comedy of a certain 
 kind is seen in the way he bamboozles two fathers out of their 
 money for the benefit of their sons, he is not so well known as 
 Mascarille, the honest rogue in the Etourdi, who seems to be 
 alive now after two hundred and fifty years. 
 
 It would, I think, be unwise and ungenerous to Moliere to 
 reproach him for having fallen back from good comedy, even 
 from ludicrous caricature which had a true comic meaning, to 
 a farce intending to show how a cunning thief can lie and 
 steal and make people laugh at his boldness. An author who 
 writes much cannot be always at high-water mark. Moliere 
 was bound to fill his theatre, and La Grange's Register proves 
 that only he could do so ; he was obliged to think of his fellow- 
 actors, who were dependent upon his exertions that they might 
 live. The wonder is that he provided for them so well. One 
 cannot say definitely when he wrote Les Fourberies de Scapin, 
 but it may be supposed that he was at work upon it when the 
 freshness of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme as a new play had 
 diminished. And his mind at that time must have been full 
 of Psyche to be spoken of presently a play that he was 
 writing in collaboration with Pierre Corneille, and of the 
 necessary preparations before it could be put on the stage. 
 
 Boileau had a very high opinion of Moliere's work, and 
 thought that his comedy generally gave excellent lessons. 
 In speaking of comedy in his Art Poetique, Canto in. v. 393- 
 400, Boileau wrote : 
 
 " Etudiez la cour et connaissez la ville : 
 L'une et Pautre est toujours en modeles fertile. 
 C'est par la que Moliere, illustrant ses ecrits, 
 Peut-etre de son art eut remporte le prix, 
 Si, moins ami du peuple en ses doctes peintures, 
 II n'eut point fait souvent grimacer ses figures, 
 Quitte pour le bouffon Pagreable et le fin, 
 Et sans honte a Terence allie Tabarin. 1 
 Dans ce sac ridicule oil Scapin s'enveloppe 
 Je ne reconnais plus Pauteur du Misanthrope" 
 
 The pronoun se (of course abbreviated) in the penultimate 
 verse has given rise to discussion ; for Scapin does not go into 
 
 1 Tabarin was the name of a clownish actor and juggler who, many years 
 earlier, used to play before the crowd on the Pont Neuf and in the Place 
 Dauphine. His jests and his quibbles were long remembered. 
 
494 LIFE OF MOLI&KE 
 
 the sack himself, he puts Ge'ronte into it. Boileau probably 
 wished to convey the idea in a figurative sense of a personage 
 exhibiting nonsensical buffoonery ; and when he published a 
 carefully prepared edition of his works thirty years later the 
 verse remained unaltered. Unless his lines are read too 
 literally, they do not mean that in the play he was condemn- 
 ing Moliere had brought a Tabarin on the stage which in 
 fact was not the case but rather that Moliere had fallen from 
 good comedy to tabarinesque farce. Such censure was perhaps 
 excessive. Boileau was pained that Moliere, in making use of 
 a comedy by Terence, should have written a play that exhibited, 
 as he thought, mountebank triviality. The critic, occasionally 
 too severe in his interpretations, was disgusted ; and when he 
 spoke in the same breath of the comedy in the Fourberies de 
 Scapin and of the comedy in the Misanthrope, by way of 
 contrast, it is difficult not to feel that his teaching was at 
 fault. I partly share his opinion in thinking poorly of the 
 Fourberies de Scapin, because of the want of good comic 
 characterisation in the play; but I imagine, taking the 
 general sense of his lines quoted above, that he was writing of 
 comedy too academically when he composed his Art Potiique. 
 From the lofty height on which he was engaged perhaps he 
 did not consider sufficiently the effects of comedy and how 
 they should be shown on the stage before an audience who do 
 not, and should not, look at a play from an academical point 
 f view. Then what are we to understand by Boileau's words 
 "gnmacer ses figures"? Moliere certainly often made his 
 personages appear ridiculous, but he did not alter their 
 natures. With few exceptions they are not absurd, for they 
 showed a comic meaning of their own as they provoked 
 There is generally a signification nT ESS 
 laughter lt is rarely an empty giggle. Moliere was by 
 nature a friend of the people " ; so also was Shakespeare. If 
 
 ^ 
 
 ualitvh ' as o 
 
 ality much of their comic force had not been born With- 
 
 out familiarity with the ways of thinking of those who are 
 
 SSSSSsaSS 
 
CHAPTEE XVII 495 
 
 sympathy with the humours of the persons portrayed, true 
 comedy will not be seen. Imagination not based on sym- 
 pathy will give hollow results. 
 
 In most of Moliere's light comedies, even in those that are 
 thought to be the most ridiculous, a fair idea can be formed of 
 the principal personages and of what they are like. This is 
 hardly the case with the Fourberies de Scapin; one thinks 
 there of the machinery employed and how it is used, but little 
 of the personal characterisation. A contrast between this 
 play and the fitourdi, also a comedy of intrigue, will show the 
 difference. Scapin was, nevertheless, acted eighteen times as 
 a new play, and with three exceptions alone ; and since 
 Moliere's death it has been generally considered to be a good 
 acting comedy. 
 
 Cyrano de Bergerac's comedy, Le Pedant Jou6, is re- 
 membered because Moliere in his Fourberies de Scapin is said 
 to have borrowed two scenes from it. In both plays a schem- 
 ing valet persuades an old man that his son has been taken a 
 prisoner on board a Turkish galley. The exclamation in 
 Moliere's comedy, " Que diable allait-il faire dans cette 
 galere ? " is nearly the same as in Cyrano's, but from the 
 setting it is more dramatically comic. The idea of the 
 galley scene in Moliere's comedy may have been taken from 
 Bergerac or from an Italian play acted before either author 
 was born. When they were lads Moliere and Cyrano had 
 read philosophy together under Gassendi, both were bright 
 and clever, and Moliere is said to have been fond of his 
 friend in spite of his impudence and his lawless conduct. In 
 those days there was more or less close companionship 
 between them; and, according to Grimarest, when Moliere 
 was reproached that he had borrowed his fun in Scapin from 
 Bergerac's play, he answered : " Je reprends mon bien ou je le 
 trouve ? " ! 
 
 There is contemporary evidence to show that Moliere 
 played the part of Scapin, La Thorilliere of Sylvestre, and 
 Mile. Beauval that of Zerbinette. 2 
 
 The printing of the Fourberies de Scapin was completed on 
 the 18th of August 167 1. 3 
 
 1 Vie de Moliere, 8. 
 
 2 CEuvres de Moliere, viii. 400, 401. 3 Ibid. viii. 405 ; xi. 39. 
 
4 9 6 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 We come now to PsyM, a play to be found among the works 
 both of Pierre Corneille and of Moliere. In the best days of the 
 drama in England plays were very often written by more than 
 one author, but in France this practice was the exception 
 rather than the rule. PsyM is the only play in which, apart 
 from the composition of a ballet, Moliere shared the authorship 
 with anybody. During the three or four years before its pro- 
 duction Moliere had worked very hard to provide dramatic 
 entertainment for his sovereign, and at the end of 1670 he 
 was told to compose " une piece a grand spectacle " for the 
 carnival festivities in 1671 just as an upholsterer might be 
 told to furnish a palace handsomely on the spur of the 
 moment. The time given to the poet was short, as was 
 usually the case when he received royal orders. He therefore 
 sought assistance. He chose as his chief collaborator Pierre 
 Corneille, then sixty-four years of age ; and with some small 
 help from others the two great dramatists wrote between 
 them Psycht, a play in five acts and in verse, qualified as a 
 " trage*die-ballet," which was first performed at the Tuileries 
 Palace, probably on the 17th of January 167 1. 1 It was put 
 upon the stage at the Palais Royal theatre six months later, 
 on the 24th of July. 
 
 In the original edition of PsyM there is, as a sort of pre- 
 face, a notice from the bookseller to the reader, probably from 
 Moliere's pen, explaining the different shares in the author- 
 ship of the tragedy-ballet. Moliere devised all the plans for 
 the composition of the play, thinking more of the beauty of 
 the spectacle than of exactness. He wrote the greater part of 
 the prologue the first fifty-six verses of it were probably by 
 Quinault 2 he wrote the whole of the first act, and the first 
 scene in the second and in the third acts. But the versifica- 
 tion of the greater part of the play devolved upon Corneille, 
 and fifteen days were allowed to him for his work. There 
 still remained the verses in the interludes and the music. All 
 of the former were by Quinault, except the first, " la plainte 
 
 (Euvres de Pierre Corneille, in the Collection des Grands Ecrivains de la 
 France, by M. Marty Laveaux, vii. 283 ; (Euvres de Moliere, viii. 248 ; 
 (Ewrres de Moliere by M. L. Moland, 2nd ed. xi. 13 
 
 3 (Euvres de Molttre, viii. 274 note 2 ; and M. Moland's 2nd ed. of the 
 (Euvrea de Moliere, xi. 26 note 2. 
 
CHAPTEK XVII 497 
 
 Italienne " ; this was by Lulli. Lulli also composed all the 
 music for the play. 
 
 Even now guesses can only be made why the legend of 
 Cupid and Psyche was selected for the piece a grand spectacle 
 to amuse the king and his guests. If the choice of the subject 
 was suggested by either of the authors of the play, it may be 
 that it came from him who undertook the planning of the 
 incidents and the arrangement of the scenes. A Ballet Royal 
 de Psyche had been danced at court in 1656, and La Fontaine 
 in 1669 had published a novel, Les Amours de Psych6 et de 
 Cupidon. Either or both of these events may have had some 
 influence on the choice of a subject selected for the carnival 
 festivities in 1671. But another reason has been alleged 
 which seems to be rather more circumstantial, in spite of its 
 grotesqueness. In the garde-meuble belonging to his Majesty 
 there was a piece of scene- pain ting representing hell, and it 
 was thought to be a pity that this should be left there lying 
 idle any longer. M. Mesnard indulges in a little fair raillery at 
 the idea of two men of genius being brought to work together 
 in order to utilise a bit of painted canvas. The subject of the 
 picture painted on the canvas would hardly accord with the 
 style of thought seen usually in Moliere's comedies. But the 
 dramatist had lately, in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac and in the 
 Bourgeois Gentilhomme, exhibited human foibles with strong 
 caricature ; perhaps therefore he was glad in his next court 
 play to turn his mind in another direction and take for his 
 subject a semi-mythological fable and describe it in irregular 
 verses, as he had done in Amphitryon, also borrowed in part 
 from mythology. 
 
 Much trouble was taken to make the mise-en-scene of 
 Psyche appear glorious. An idea of what it was like may be 
 formed from the livret or programme of the interludes in the 
 play. The splendour of scenic display was doubtless the 
 chief source of delight to very many of the spectators both 
 at the court and in the town. The stage effects of those days 
 would appear simple to us now ; but Moliere learned, not for 
 the first time, when he brought out Psyche at the Palais Eoyal 
 theatre and gave it to the public as nearly as possible with 
 the same brilliancy as it had been seen by the courtiers at the 
 
 2i 
 
498 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 Tuileries, that a handsome spectacular show will make people 
 spend their money to see it. 
 
 Just before the Easter holidays in 1671 the troop at the 
 Palais Royal determined to have the inside of their theatre 
 renovated. La Grange records what was done. 1 The total cost 
 came to close upon 2000 livres, and the Italian actors in Paris 
 who used to play in the Palais Royal theatre on the off-days of 
 the week " les jours extraordinaires " shared the expense 
 with Moliere's troop. La Grange goes on to say that, on the 
 15th of April, the troop, after deliberation, determined to put 
 Psycht on to their stage. This proved a costly matter, for the 
 preparatory expenses rose to 4359 livres. 2 On the 24th of 
 July the mythological tragedy-ballet was played for the 
 first time in public. La Grange writes that the daily expenses 
 rose to 351 livres; "and that while the play was running, 
 Mons. Beauchamps received 1100 livres as recompense for 
 having planned the ballets and for managing the music, not 
 including the 11 livres that the troop gave him every day 
 for beating the measure to the music, and for directing the 
 ballets." Whatever PsycM may have cost to put on the 
 stage, it was pecuniarily very successful. As a new play it 
 was performed thirty-eight times a number not exceeded by 
 any other comedy of Moliere's except the Tartuffe. And it 
 had two revivals in Moliere's lifetime. During the first it 
 was acted thirteen times, during the second thirty-one times. 
 
 In planning the composition of PsycU Moliere's chief desire 
 was to give the old legend a semblance of dramatic form ; he 
 wished to interest his audience in the fate of the beautiful 
 young girl and of her handsome lover. Nine-tenths of the 
 courtiers who saw the play knew nothing about gods and 
 goddesses, but they would be pleased if their senses were 
 charmed agreeably. Perhaps that is the best way to look 
 at the play now. Those who have read the allegory of 
 Cupid and Venus in Apuleius will not receive additional 
 pleasure from Corneille's and Moliere's lines on that account. 
 The verses will probably please more as a lyric than as a 
 drama. Psychd is a play to be read, book in hand. When 
 the imagination is left alone it can soar at will, and fancy 
 a picture to itself a dramatic action which on the stage 
 
 , 122, 123. 2 mdf 124 
 
CHAPTER XVII 499 
 
 may unfortunately not appear to be so evident. There is a 
 note of comedy in the two first scenes, in the way that 
 Moliere makes Psyche's two sisters show their jealousy 
 because she is sought after by suitors while they are left 
 unnoticed. Elsewhere, too, Moliere is gently amusing. But 
 the subject of the play would not allow of frank, comic 
 raillery ; hearty, open laughter would have been thought out 
 of place. And in Corneille's verses there is often a note of 
 poetry in the scenes. Psyche' has bravely submitted to her 
 fate that for a husband she should have a foul serpent spread- 
 ing his venom everywhere. But when Cupid (1'Amour) 
 appears before her, saying he is the serpent, her fears are 
 disarmed. She thinks he is a god. 
 
 " Qu'un monstre tel que vous inspire pen de crainte ! " 
 
 She does not know what is the fire that is in her. Formerly 
 she had respect, sympathy, compassion, but now : 
 
 " Je ne sais ce que c'est, mais je sais qu'il me charme, 
 
 Que je n'en congois point d'alarme ; 
 Plus j'ai les yeux sur vous, plus je m'en sens charmer : 
 Tout ce que j 'ai senti n'agissoit point de meme, 
 
 Et je dirois que je vous aime, 
 Seigneur, si je savois ce que c'est d'aimer." 
 
 These lines might have been spoken by Agnes in the JEcole 
 des Femmes. Psyche's couplet concludes : 
 
 "Par quel ordre du Ciel,*que je ne puis comprendre, 
 
 Vous dis-je plus que je ne doi, 
 Moi de qui la pudeur devroit du moms attendre 
 Que vous m'expliquassiez le trouble oil je vous voi ? 
 Vous soupirez, Seigneur, ainsi que je soupire ; 
 Vos sens connne les miens paroissent interdits ; 
 C'est a moi de m'en taire, a vous de me le dire. 
 
 Et cependant c'est moi qui vous le dis." 1 
 
 Among other pieces of scandal, the author of the Fameuse 
 Comedienne wrote that the appearance of Psyclit was the cause 
 for the renewal of a liaison between Baron and Mile. Moliere. 
 But this anonymous writer is the only authority for the story. * 
 The tale gives rise to a dispute which might go on for ever, 
 because there is so little evidence either way that can be 
 accepted as true. As a young boy Baron had quarrelled with 
 Mile. Moliere, and had left Paris in a huff in consequence ; 
 
 1 Act in. so. 3. 
 
500 LIFE OF 
 
 some three years later he is supposed to be making love to 
 her. When PsyM appeared at the Tuileries Palace in the 
 carnival of 1671, Baron was seventeen and a few months 
 old; Mile. Moliere's twenty-eighth birthday fell about that 
 time. There was therefore a wide difference in their ages. 
 It may be almost admitted that both were haughty, vain, and 
 absolutely selfish. Still, with it all, one should hesitate before 
 attaching importance to a tale from the pen of an anony- 
 mous and scurrilous gossipmonger. 
 
 There is a healthier kind of interest in learning that Baron's 
 great reputation as an actor began with his role of Cupid 
 (I'Amour) in PsyM. In 1667, when he was very young, he 
 had played the part of Myrtil in Moliere's Melicerte\ and 
 later, at the end of 1670, he appeared as Domitian in 
 Corneille's Tite et Btrtnice. But his acting in these two 
 last-named parts was not well remembered ; his personation 
 of Cupid remained long in the minds or in the hearts of 
 those who saw it. It was, however, in tragedy that Baron 
 excelled chiefly. He was one of the four actors who, six 
 weeks after Moliere's death, left the Palais Eoyal theatre 
 and joined the rival troop at the Hotel de Bourgogne. It 
 is probable that there he found a better scope for his talents 
 than he would have found at the Palais Eoyal, had Moliere 
 lived and continued to direct that theatre. 
 
 The names of the actors who appeared in the various 
 roles in Psyche when the play was new may be found in M. 
 Mesnard's edition of the (Euvres de Moliere, viii. 367; and in 
 M. Marty Laveaux's edition of the (Euvres de P. Corneille, 
 vii. 290. 
 
 On the 31st of December 1670 leave was given to Moliere 
 to print Psychf, but the printing of the play was not completed 
 until the 6th of October 1671. Moliere's was the only author's 
 name seen on the title-page. During Corneille's lifetime 
 Psych^ was never printed among his works. 
 
CHAPTEK XVIII 
 
 LES FEMMES SAVANTESLA COMTESSE D'JESGARBAGNAS 
 LE MALADE IMAGINAIRE POESIES DI VERSES 
 
 IN the Femmes Savantes, acted for the first time on the llth of 
 March 1672 at the Palais Eoyal theatre, the gist of the satire 
 is not very different at bottom from that in the Prtcieuses 
 Ridicules, the first play that Moliere wrote after his return 
 to Paris from the provinces. In the earlier comedy the 
 dramatist laughed at the manners of women whose heads 
 were so much turned by romantic and pretentious ideas that 
 they acquired a love of preciosity, or over-niceness, over- 
 refinement of thought; and consequently their affectations 
 became ridiculous. In the two middle quarters of the 17th 
 century, people in good society in Paris used to meet on 
 certain days of the week at each other's houses, and there 
 ladies were glad to hear from gentlemen expressions of 
 Platonic love and friendship shown with gallantry and 
 courteous respect. Playful satire* was given and taken in 
 good part and was enjoyed. For some years these and similar 
 amusements went on gaily ; the compliments and the small 
 railleries were understood in the spirit of pleasantry; they 
 were laughed at, and nobody was the worse for them. There 
 was doubtless an affectation with it all, but heartiness, socia- 
 bility, and intelligent frivolity were the leading characteristics. 
 As might be expected, the affectations increased ; the play- 
 fulness of intention remained, but an intellectual flavour was 
 demanded with it. Then ladies contrived to invent a diction 
 or language of their own, so romantic, so far-fetched, or so 
 high-flown, that it became a jargon, and few except themselves 
 could understand its technicalities ; they liked it to be known 
 that they stood well with the authors of the day ; they in- 
 dulged in verse-making in various forms enigmas, ballads, 
 madrigals, sonnets, impromptus and some held what were 
 
 501 
 
502 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 called " acaddmies," or "bureaux de bel esprit." Naturally 
 enough these ladies, in their attempts to be distinguished 
 from others who did not belong to their set, rather overshot 
 the mark by their absurdities ; at the same time they amused 
 themselves and enjoyed their follies in their own way. All 
 this Molicre showed with strong caricature that had also many 
 of the features of good comedy. 
 
 Nearly a year before his death the poet showed his satire a 
 second time against the same kind of foibles, but in a rather 
 different manner. The Prfoieuses Ridicules is in one act and in 
 prose, the Femmes Savantes is in five acts and in verse. It was 
 proper that a comedy in five acts and in verse should be 
 couched in a somewhat higher style than a one-act comedy in 
 prose. And the personages in the later written comedy belong 
 to a better rank of society than do those in the earlier one. 
 The manners of the femmes savantes, though disagreeably 
 haughty, give an air of better breeding than the open good- 
 nature of the precieuses ridicules. Philaminte, Belise, and 
 Armande mistook the nonsense in Trissotin's verses for 
 beauties, but they would have seen the vulgarities of the 
 Marquis de Mascarille, though they might have been willing 
 to overlook them. There are other differences between the 
 two comedies. In the longer one the satire takes a wider 
 form. The three ladies are ridiculed together for their love of 
 a display of preciosity and of learning, but each one has to 
 bear in addition other satire personal to herself. The carica- 
 ture here is not so strong as in the shorter play ; and in one 
 instance where it may seem to be very absurd there was in 
 reality no caricature, no exaggeration, but merely a simple 
 reproduction. 
 
 In the first part of chapter vii. I tried to give shortly an 
 idea of some of the drawing-room amusements of people in 
 Paris in the middle of the 17th century, and I mentioned the 
 names of a good many ladies and gentlemen who are known to 
 have been guests at the Hotel de Eambouillet. There were 
 also, a few years later, other houses in Paris where people used 
 to meet to see each other and talk over what was uppermost in 
 their minds, and that of Mile, de Scudery is the best known ; 
 but none of these receptions enjoyed the same prestige as 
 those in Madame de Rambouillet's salon bleu in the Rue 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 503 
 
 Saint-Thomas du Louvre. Cousin says that this lady opened 
 her house to her friends between the years 1617 and 1620. 
 Her receptions, broken off perhaps only temporarily in 1645, 
 because of the death of her son, may have lasted until the 
 outbreak of the Civil War in Paris known as La Fronde, in 
 1648. From different reasons, it is hardly likely that they 
 continued longer. They lasted, therefore, for thirty years. It 
 seems to be admitted that in the later years of the Hotel de 
 Eambouillet affectation among the guests grew stronger, that 
 intellectual amusements, which had been taken up as play- 
 things, as pleasant frivolities, became more or less a serious 
 occupation. In 1652, after the Fronde, the number of after- 
 noon parties in Paris increased. Preciosity, which arose among 
 Madame de Eambouillet's friends during the last ten or twelve 
 years of their meetings, grew to be the fashion. It was imi- 
 tated, and the usual results of imitation followed : it was shown 
 more extravagantly and with less good taste. People used to 
 talk then of the " vraies precieuses " and of the " fausses 
 precieuses," and of the former as being of older date. The 
 later type had certainly been in existence for some years when 
 Moliere showed what they were like under the names of Cathos 
 and Madelon. Had all these societies with their vagaries 
 not come into vogue, Moliere need not have given his Precieuses 
 Ridicules in 1659, nor his Femmes Savant es in 1672. 
 
 Moliere's power of teaching by laughter was one of his 
 characteristics, and perhaps in no play has he shown from first 
 to last more or better comic raillery than in the Femmes 
 Savantes. Sometimes it is tempered with irony, sometimes it 
 is so strong that it should rather be called satire, and in one 
 well-known scene there is angry invective; but throughout 
 the comedy generally raillery and banter are the prevailing 
 notes. The plot in the play is slight, but one thinks little 
 about it; one thinks of the comedy shown. What engages 
 the attention is the comic manner in which the humours or 
 the caprices of the personages are truly portrayed. These 
 oddities are seen with the fair caricature belonging to comedy, 
 and they are described in a racy comic style that shows both 
 delicacy of touch and strength of instinct. In speaking of a 
 great man who has laboured much, it is generally unwise to 
 pronounce affirmatively that this or that is his best piece of 
 
504 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 work, for in the various efforts he has made excellences of 
 different kinds will be found. Nevertheless, perhaps, I should 
 not be far wrong if I were to say that the Femmes Savantes is 
 the best acting play among Moliere's high-class comedies, nor 
 if I were to add, that in the way of amusement, no play of his 
 affords better reading. 
 
 The first lines in the comedy are full of raillery. They are 
 spoken by Armande to her younger sister Henriette : 
 
 ** Quoi ? le beau noin de fille est un litre, ma soeur, 
 Dont vous voulez quitter la charmante douceur, 
 Et de vous marier vous osez faire fete ? 
 Ce vulgaire dessein peut vous monter en tete ? " 
 
 Armande had refused to give herself to Clitandre ; after an 
 interval he became smitten with the softer charms of Henriette, 
 and she has accepted his love. The two sisters are very un- 
 like, and they show their different characters by their speech. 
 Armande is jealous and angry, she is a precieuse, and she has 
 her mother's love of pedantry. Henriette is a girl we should 
 all like to know ; she is pleasant, and has quite wit enough to 
 take her own part against her strong-minded sister. When 
 she expresses her delight at the hope that one day she may 
 be united to Clitandre, her sister answers her : 
 
 " Mon Dieu ! que votre esprit est d'un e"tage has ! 
 Que vous jouez au monde un petit personnage 
 Que de vous claquemurer aux choses du menage, 
 Et de n'entrevoir point de plaisirs plus touchants 
 Qu'un idole d'epoux et des marmots d'enfants ! 
 Laissez aux gens grossiers, aux personnes vulgaires, 
 Les bas amusements de ces sortes d'affaires. 
 
 Loin d'etre aux lois d'un homme en esclave asservie, 
 
 Mariez-vous, ma sreur, a la philosophic, 
 
 Qui nous monte au-dessus de tout le genre humain, 
 
 Et donne a la raison 1'empire souverain, 
 
 Soumettant a ses lois la partie animale 
 
 Dont Pappetit grossier aux betes nous ravale." 
 
 Henriette is willing to acknowledge her own inferiority, but 
 she must use the faculties that have been given to her. She 
 replies to her sister : 
 
 " Ne troublons point du Ciel les justes reglements, 
 b de nos deux instincts suivons les mouvements 
 Habitez par 1'essor d'un grand et beau genie 
 Les hautes regions de la philosophic 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 505 
 
 Tandis que mon esprit, se tenant ici-bas, 
 Goutera de 1'hymen les terrestres appas. 
 Ainsi, dans nos desseins 1'une a 1'autre contraire, 
 Nous saurons toutes deux imiter notre mere : 
 Vous, du cote de Tame et des nobles desirs, 
 Moi, du cote des sens et des grossiers plaisirs ; 
 Vous, aux productions d'esprit et de lumiere, 
 Moi, dans celles, ma soeur, qui sont de la rnatiere." 
 
 And in her next speech : 
 
 " De grace, souffrez-moi, par un peu de bonte, 
 Des bassesses a qui vous devez la clarte ; 
 Et ne supprimez point, voulant qu'on vous seconde, 
 Quelque petit savant qui veut venir au monde." 
 
 The elevated raillery in the whole of the first scene is un- 
 deniable, and it shows how naturally Moliere expressed his 
 thoughts in a comic manner. 
 
 The author of the Fameuse Comedienne wrote, in 1678, that 
 when Moliere was at Lyons (say in 1653) he was in love with 
 Mile, du Pare, but that she rejected his addresses, and that 
 he consoled himself with Mile, de Brie. The statement may 
 be true or not. Many French writers have adopted it more 
 or less, and have asserted that when the dramatist made 
 Clitandre transfer his affections from Armande to Henriette in 
 the Femmes Savantes, he was alluding to his own former posi- 
 tion at Lyons between two actresses in his troop. Even were 
 this assertion true, it would not alter the comedy in the play 
 for better or worse. Speaking generally, one may say that 
 unless some fault against taste or conduct can be shown, it is 
 of little consequence what was the source of the incidents 
 dramatised, nor when, or where, or how they took place. 
 What a reader or a playgoer demands is that the comedy in a 
 play should be well and amusingly given and shown with 
 pleasant comic vitality. 
 
 There is no love-scene worthy of the name between 
 Clitandre and Henriette, but their engagement has proceeded 
 from mutual respect or admiration. The consent of Henriette's 
 father Chrysale, or of her mother Philaminte, has not, however, 
 been obtained. Clitand e would go to Chrysale. But Henriette 
 
 knows her father to 
 that it is more importa 
 for it is she who gove 
 that it shall be obeyed. 
 
 e weak of purpose, and tells her lover 
 
 it to gain the goodwill of her mother ; 
 
 ns ; she lays down the law and means 
 
 Clitandre's answer is rather blunt, but 
 
50G 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 there are in it some often quoted lines which suit the satire 
 in the comedy admirably. He declares that pretentiously 
 learned women are not to his taste ; and then he goes on : 
 
 " Je consens qu'une femme ait des clartes de tout ; 
 Mais je ne lui veux point la passion choquante 
 De se rendre savante aim d'etre savante ^; 
 Et j'aime que souvent, aux questions qu'on fait, 
 Elle sache ignorer les choses qu'elle sait ; 
 De son etude enfin je veux qu'elle se cache, 
 Et qu'elle ait du savoir sans vouloir qu'on le sache. 
 Sans citer les auteurs, sans dire de grand mots, 
 Et clouer de Pesprit a ses moindres propos." 
 
 All this had been said more at length by Mile, de Scude'ry 
 in her novel, Le Grand Cyrus, written at intervals twenty 
 years or more before the date of the Femmes Savantes. Both 
 Mile, de Scude'ry and Moliere meant : let a woman learn and 
 know what she likes and be well instructed, but let her be 
 careful not to show her knowledge where it is not wanted. 
 It is worth noting that the term " femmes savantes " was used 
 by Mile, de Scude'ry. She drew a distinction between a well- 
 informed woman and a femme savante, and spoke of the 
 latter as though she did not like her : " Ce n'est pas que celle 
 qu'on n'appellera point savante ne puisse savoir autant et 
 plus de choses que celles a qui on donnera ce terrible nom, 
 mais c'est qu'elle se sait mieux servir de son esprit, et qu'elle 
 sait cacher adroitement ce que 1'autre montre mal a propos." 1 
 Both Mile, de Scude'ry and Moliere thought that a well- 
 informed or a well-instructed woman might, happily, be a very 
 different person from a femme savante. Mile, de Scudery's 
 novels seem to show her to be an apostle of affectation, but 
 in reality she was playing with the spirit of the time. She 
 lived with others, and she drew her fun out of them in a lady- 
 like manner. 
 
 One other thing may be noticed. In this as in other 
 comedies, if Moliere gives, as it often seems likely, his own 
 personal opinions, he does so in a manner perfectly consistent 
 with the play of the comedy he was writing. Like Mile, de 
 Scude'ry, he was far from admiring the femmes savantes, or, as 
 he calls them, " femmes docteurs." But throughout his plays 
 
 1 ? 6e ?1? long i ex * ract f rom Le Grand Cyrus, quoted by Victor Cousin 
 , C n n ^ ot , chapter xii ' of his Soci ^ Franchise au XVII e Siecle 
 (vol. 11. pp. 180-82, ed. 1858). Also (Euvrets de Moliere, ix. 72 note 3 
 
CHAPTEK XVIII 507 
 
 generally his own feelings are never thrust forward. They are 
 never shown to be personal to himself or to anybody else. 
 He presents his satire openly and in a true comic spirit. He 
 makes no exhortation, expounds no thesis. In the play we 
 are now to consider he shows fairly what are the attributes of 
 the femmes savantes, how they make themselves ridiculous 
 and often disagreeable. Henriette, though a young girl, 
 appears to be well educated, but her mind is very different 
 from that of her mother or of her aunt, and she is in every 
 way opposed to her elder sister. 
 
 Clitandre goes on to tell Henriette that much as he respects 
 her mother he cannot agree with her in her praises of the man 
 she takes to be a great wit. 
 
 " Son Monsieur Trissotin me chagrine, m'assomme, 
 Et j'enrage de voir qu'elle estime un tel homme ; 
 Qn'elle nous mette au rang des grands et beaux esprits 
 Un benet dont par tout on siffle les ecrits, 
 Un pedant dont on voit la plume liberal e 
 D'officieux 1 papiers fournir toute la halle." 
 
 It would be useless to pretend that in the personage of 
 Trissotin Moliere did not mean to draw a comic picture of the 
 abbe* Cotin, who was then alive, and to ridicule his foolishness. 
 But Cotin was one of a class, he was typical of others ; and if 
 he was chosen as the scapegoat, it is very likely that he 
 deserved punishment the most. Two days before the Femmes 
 Savantes appeared on the stage. Madame de Sevigne, in a letter 
 to her daughter, spoke of the comedy by the name of Trissotin, 
 and it is so chronicled in La Grange's Kegister on and after 
 its twelfth performance. In the Mdnagiana, first published in 
 1693, it is said: "Moliere at first took off Cotin under the 
 name of Tricotin ; then, with greater piquancy, under the 
 pretext of a better disguise, he changed it afterwards into 
 Trissotin, or trois fois sot." 2 
 
 There have often been poor wits, honoured by some and 
 
 ' belittled by others, whose names are known to posterity only 
 
 because their nonsense and their more or less false position in 
 
 society have brought down upon them well-deserved ridicule 
 
 from contemporary authors who saw through their hollowness. 
 
 1 M. Mesnard has a note here : ' ' Officieux, doing a service, goes well with 
 liberale. The papers do a service to the vendors in the market, for they 
 serve to wrap around the articles that are purchased." (Euvres de Moliere, 
 ix. 73 note 3. 2 Ibid. ix. 9. 
 
508 LIFE OF 
 
 The abb<$ Cotin was a poor wit who, in an age when preciosity 
 was fashionable, gained for himself a position of consequence 
 among ladies who belonged to the best families in France, and 
 who thought his verses were ravishingly beautiful. He was 
 considered as one of the oracles, and because he had a facility 
 for writing he was placed above others who could not compose 
 rubbish so easily. Cotin was a man, he went to afternoon 
 parties and talked to the ladies there, and his church prefer- 
 ments did not prevent him from writing trashy a la mode 
 verses which were now and then in doubtful taste. Though 
 there was no freshness of thought in what he wrote and 
 published, perhaps when he was talking he showed to better 
 advantage. Even then, he must have guarded himself against 
 his natural self-sufficiency. If he would talk and say nothing 
 quietly, there were people who would listen to him. In days 
 gone by he had been one of the guests at the Hotel de 
 Rambouillet, and later he was received kindly at other houses 
 which were not open to every one who wished for admittance. 
 One of these was the Luxembourg Palace, where an apartment 
 was given to Mademoiselle, the daughter of Gaston, Duke of 
 Orleans, brother to Louis xm. At the Luxembourg Cotin 
 became a favourite. He did his best to please the ladies who 
 went there when Mademoiselle had her receptions, and he 
 worked harder at his madrigals and his enigmas than at his 
 sermons. Thus the abb6 Cotin became a petted darling of 
 society. He was made much of and was spoilt, until Moliere 
 gave him a blow from which he never recovered. As a con- 
 versationalist perhaps Cotin enjoyed at the Luxembourg the 
 same sort of reputation, in a lesser degree, that was allowed 
 to Voiture at the Hotel de Rambouillet. Voiture could talk 
 easily, which is one of the first necessities for pleasant conver- 
 sation, and it may be that Cotin was partially endowed with 
 the same gift. As to writing, Voiture's letters do not give one 
 the idea of a man of much brightness, and his printed portrait 
 looks like that of a ninny. Cotin knew how to put words 
 together on paper, though he said little in them ; and when 
 he wrote on serious subjects it is to be hoped his inanities were 
 not so glaring as in his drawing-room verses. When he was 
 a young man he showed stupidly that he had learned Latin, 
 and he was made a member of the French Academy. 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 509 
 
 His vanity gave him a good opinion of himself and of his 
 powers of preaching. Boileau naturally disliked his flummery, 
 and wrote in his third Satire, published in 1663, that Cotin 
 preached to empty benches. Moliere and Boileau would 
 dislike Cotin on the same grounds. They thought him a 
 trifler and a windbag. And because they both waged war 
 against false taste and bantered those who took pleasure in 
 listening to nonsense, Cotin, on his side, naturally considered 
 them as his enemy. He wrote a satire against Boileau, and 
 Moliere was not spared in the attack. And Cotin, with 
 Menage, we are told, had tried to persuade the Due de Montau- 
 sier that Moliere meant to satirise him in the personage of 
 Alceste in the Misanthrope. However this may be, the day 
 after the Femmes Savantes appeared on the stage, a laudatory 
 short account was given of the comedy in a new weekly peri- 
 odical called Le Mercure Galant l : 
 
 "Bien des gens font des applications de cette comedie; et une 
 querelle de 1'auteur il y a environ huit ans avec un homme de lettres, 
 qu'on pretend etre represente par Monsieur Trissotin, a donne lieu a 
 ce qui s'en est publie. Mais Monsieur de Moliere s'est suffisamment 
 Justine de cela par une harangue qu'il fit au public deux jours avant 
 la premiere representation de sa piece. Et puis ce pretendu original 
 de cette agreable comedie ne doit pas s'en mettre en peine s'il est aussi 
 sage et aussi habile homme que Ton dit, et cela ne servira qu'a faire 
 eclater davantage son merite en faisant naitre 1'envie de le connoitre, 
 de lire ses ecrits, et d'aller a des sermons." 
 
 Cotin is pointed at here clearly as the original of Trissotin. 
 The harangue mentioned in the Mercure Galant was the 
 " annonce " customarily spoken by the orateur of the troop to 
 the audience in the theatre. It would be interesting to know 
 what Moliere said in announcing the coming performances of 
 his new comedy. He had good reason to be angry with Cotin, 
 for the abbe had twice written against him and had tried to 
 conceal the authorship of his attacks as far as he was able. 
 One would say now that Moliere might have left such an 
 adversary alone, and have disregarded his lampoons. Moliere 
 had to bear harder contumely than any taunts Cotin could in- 
 flict. But he disliked the man's pedantry, his self-sufficiency, 
 and his meanness. Cotin did not think much for himself ; he 
 borrowed where he could from Latin authors, and from any 
 1 Vol. i. pp. 64, 65. 
 
510 LIFE OF MOLltRE 
 
 modern writer whose lines might be of. service to him. And 
 he displayed his vanity in a curious manner. Before the date 
 of the Femmes Savantes he wrote of himself : " My cypher 
 is composed of two C's " alluding to the two initial letters of 
 his name (Charles Cotin) " and these, in a mysterious sense, 
 indicate the circle of the globe which my works may be said 
 to fill." Whether the dramatist knew of this hyperbolical 
 foolery or not, he satirised very aptly the man who could 
 
 publish it. 
 
 "... mais Monsieur Trissotin 
 M'inspire ati fond de Fame un dominant chagrin. 
 La constants hauteur de sa presomption, 
 Cette mtre"pidite de bonne opinion," etc. 1 
 
 There are those who will say that Moliere's satire against 
 Cotin was cruel ; others will say that Cotin deserved what he 
 got, because he was such an arrant fool. But was Moliere 
 unjust in his treatment of one who in his semi-public life 
 exposed himself to open raillery ? Had Cotin not been a vain- 
 glorious humbug, Moliere would have left him alone ; Cotin 
 lived by foppishness, and Moliere bantered him for his inane 
 verses, as Alceste had rebuked Oronte : 
 
 " Quel besoin si pressant avez-vous de rimer ? 
 Et qui, diantre, vous pousse a vous faire impriiner ? " 
 
 But after Alceste's criticism Oronte did not publish his 
 sonnet. 
 
 In Act in. sc. 2 Moliere makes Trissotin read aloud before the 
 three femmes savantes a poem of his composition : Sonnet a la 
 Princesse Uranie sur sa fievre. Unless this sonnet had been 
 ridiculous it need not have been given in the comedy ; it was, 
 in fact, a textual reproduction of a poem entitled Sonnet a Mile. 
 de Longueville, a present duchesse de Nemours, sur sa fievre, 
 written by Cotin and published for the first time in the first 
 edition of his CEuvres Galantes, in 1663. Later in the same 
 scene, Moliere makes Trissotin read aloud an epigram that 
 he had composed; and this also was taken textually from 
 Cotin's CEuvres Galantes. The title only is changed a little. 2 
 
 Moliere's satire here was straightforward. He showed 
 Cotin's imbecility by quoting his own words. Authors in the 
 
 1 Femmes Savantes , Act i. sc. 3. 
 
 " I30; also M - Louis Mola " d ' s 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 511 
 
 17th century often spoke of their fellow-authors whom they 
 wished to disparage in terms that would now be thought 
 beyond the bounds of fair reproof. We have nowadays our 
 abusive criticism, and it is sometimes calumnious; that of 
 two hundred years ago was expressed in a more downright 
 manner. Perhaps the sledgehammer fashion is the least 
 injurious. The works of Boileau and of La Bruyere were 
 reprinted during their lifetime oftener than those of any of 
 their contemporaries in their own country if an exception 
 may be made in the Lettres Provinciales of Pascal, who died 
 in 1662 because of the hard-hitting in the personalities and 
 of the curiosity of readers to see what writers whose names 
 were respected said of men whom they wished to ridicule or 
 denounce. The personalities shown by Boileau refer only to 
 what an author had written and published ; those alluded to 
 by La Bruyere, to which exception might be taken, refer very 
 largely to men who were well known and whose daily con- 
 duct, more or less public, was either ridiculous or worse. La 
 Bruyere may seem to us now to be more open to blame than 
 Boileau, yet those who know his written portraits in his 
 Caract&res will not be disposed to find fault with him for 
 bad taste or for ill nature. Neither of these authors has 
 been condemned by posterity, and I do not see that Moliere 
 in his strong satire against the abbe Cotin was more to blame 
 than they were. He was much more amusing, and if that 
 was a crime it was heightened by his having a greater number 
 of listeners and spectators than either Boileau or La Bruyere 
 had of readers. 
 
 Cotin had gained the reputation of a bel esprit, and Moliere 
 gave two samples of his wit. They were both flowery trash. 
 In previous comedies the dramatist had satirised the kind of 
 society verses that were then common, and each time he showed 
 nonsense of different kinds. Mascarille's impromptu in the 
 Prtcieuses Ridicules is so frankly droll in its absurdity that it 
 causes joyous laughter ; Oronte's sonnet in the Misanthrope is 
 absurd because in many of the lines the words, when fairly 
 construed, bear no meaning ; Cotin's sonnet and his epigram in 
 the Femmes Savantes disgust, for besides being silly they are 
 full of embellishments out of place shown with the self-conceit 
 of a pedant. In the Prtcieuses and in the Femmes Savantes 
 
512 LIFE OF MOLIliKE 
 
 we find a man reading trash to admiring ladies; but Cotin 
 was stupid and had neither the imagination nor the wit of 
 the Marquis de Mascarille. The sham marquis, as we know, 
 is acting his part, and though his manners are not refined, 
 he counterfeits with admirable caricature the character he is 
 playing and is most amusing. Cotin was never other than 
 himself; he had no cleverness in him, nor even the sense 
 of judgment often found in a dull man. Verses like all those 
 just mentioned were read aloud in many salons in Paris during 
 Moliere's lifetime, and in bantering their authors the dramatist 
 was bound to laugh at those who expressed their delight as 
 they listened to the reading. In the comedy that now con- 
 cerns us the scene passes in the house of Chrysale, a well-to- 
 do bourgeois. Whatever may be his foibles, he is free from 
 affectations and from pedantry. But his wife Philaminte, 
 his sister Belise, and his eldest daughter Armande, wish to 
 have aesthetic ideas above those of plain-thinking people. 
 They want to be distinguished, and they intend to create a 
 school or following of their own. Moliere called them femmes 
 savantes; he meant them to be also precieuses ridicules. 
 Apparently they are honest in their glorification of Trissotin ; 
 at all events they show most amusingly that they are crack- 
 brained in their ecstasies over his inflated balderdash, which 
 they think is clever wit prettily expressed. 
 
 Of course there is exaggeration in the way the ladies show 
 how they are enraptured. Unless they had extolled Trissotin's 
 nonsense extravagantly, believing it to be poetry sparkling 
 with beautiful images, there would have been little satire 
 against them. Without some caricature the c'omic significa- 
 tion of the scene would have been lost; without some 
 heightening effect the representation of the scene would fall 
 flat on the stage. I have already spoken of MolierVs use of 
 caricature. In most cases he did not push it beyond fair 
 limits ; with few exceptions he did not allow the/ comedy in 
 his plays to degenerate into farce. I do not see kow a comic 
 dramatist can show open humour, in the characterisation either 
 of the incidents in his play or of his personages, without a 
 mixture of caricature. For good caricature hks a truth, a 
 delicacy and a strength of its own, which {loe/not disfigure 
 or materially alter. Its humour heighten^ ybr accentuates 
 
CHAPTEK XVIII 513 
 
 personal features or events, making them ludicrous, but without 
 showing them to be absurd or without giving an unfair picture 
 of the person or thing intended to be represented. 
 
 The three ladies have exalted ideas of making themselves 
 known in the world. Philaminte is determined that women 
 shall be no longer considered as inferior creatures ; she thinks 
 that they as well as men may learn the truths of science, of 
 nature, and of art. Trissotin's position is to flatter the ladies ; 
 he knows as much about science as they do, but he must 
 interest himself in their occupations. 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 " Je m'attache pour 1'ordre au peripate"tisme. 
 
 " Philaminte. 
 " Pour les abstractions, j'aime le platonisme. 
 
 " Amande. 
 " Epicure me plait, et ses dogmes sont forts. 
 
 "Belise. 
 
 " Je m'accommode assez pour moi des petits corps ; 
 Mais le vide a souffrir me semble difficile, 
 Et je goute bien mieux la matiere subtile. 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 " Descartes pour Paimant donne fort dans mon sens. 
 
 " Armande. 
 " J'aime ses tourbillons. 
 
 " Philaminte. 
 
 " Moi, ses mondes tombants." 
 
 Then, when Armande says she hoped that their society would 
 soon be formed, and that she, with her mother and her aunt, 
 would gain renown by some discovery, the dialogue goes on : 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 
 " On en attend beaucoup de vos vives clart^s, 
 Et pour vous la nature a peu d'obscurite"s. 
 
 " Philaminte. 
 
 " Pour moi, sans me flatter, j'en ai deja fait une, 
 Et j'ai vu clairement des hommes dans la lune. 
 
 "Belise. 
 
 " Je n'ai point encor vu d'hommes, comme je croi ; 
 Mais j'ai vu des clochers tout comme je vous voi. 
 
 " Armande. 
 
 " Nous approfondirons, ainsi que la physique, 
 Grammaire, histoire, vers, morale et politique." 
 
 Here again the satire is given with caricature. It was 
 
 2K 
 
514 LIFE OF M 
 
 directed against certain ladies who displayed fussy pedantry 
 in things they could not understand. Moliere had said in the 
 third scene of his comedy that it was right that women should 
 be well informed, but that they should use modesty in the way 
 they showed their knowledge. In his satire against vain dis- 
 plays of learning he gave examples of women who talked of 
 science when they did not know what it meant, and he laughed 
 at them for their foolishness as he had laughed at his two 
 sham philosophers in the Mariage Force; and in literary 
 matters, which were less abstruse, he ridiculed their preten- 
 sions and hollow ideas. After the French Academy had been 
 founded in 1635, a good number of its first members thought 
 it was their duty to make reforms in the language of their 
 country ; they determined to publish treatises or disquisitions 
 laying down grammatical and other laws for writers to follow, 
 and they were to be the sole judges of the value of their own 
 enactments. One member disliked the word car, and he pro- 
 posed that it should be abolished. The learned ladies in the 
 comedy before us were trying to emulate the aspirations of 
 the early members of the French Academy, and the dramatist 
 laughed at them for their folly, as the Academy had been 
 laughed at many years before his comedy was written. 1 But 
 Moliere meant more than mere laughter. His mockery of the 
 femmes savantes was in one respect like his banter against 
 Climene, the pre'cieuse and the prude in his Critique de FJScoU des 
 Femmes and against the affectations of all women of her stamp. 
 Moliere disliked the whole class heartily, and he thought a 
 pretentious woman was a more disagreeable person than a pre- 
 tentious man. From the man there may be escape, but the 
 woman who sickens with her affectations urges them with 
 painful obstinacy. Climene in the Critique was disgusted at 
 imaginary indecencies where no indecency was intended and 
 where none existed; and Philaminte's greatest hope is that 
 when she and her friends shall have established their academy 
 they may effect 
 
 " . . . le retranchement de ces syllabes sales, 
 Qui dans les plus beaux mots produisent des scandales, 
 
 Ces sources d'un amas d'equivoques infames, 
 
 Dont on vient faire insulte a la pudeur des femmes." 
 
 See (Euvre* de Molitore, ix. 138 notes 1 and 2, by M. Mesnard, 
 
CHAPTEK XVIII 515 
 
 The next few lines must be given : 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 " Voila certaineinent d'admirables projets 1 
 
 "Belise. 
 " Vous verrez nos statuts quand ils seront tous faits. 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 " Ils ne sauroient manquer d'etre tous beaux et sages. 
 
 " Armande. 
 
 " Nous serons par nos lois les juges des ouvrages ; 
 Par nos lois, prose et vers tout nous sera soumis ; 
 Nul n'aura de 1'esprit hors nous et nos amis." 
 
 The wit in this last line has made the words proverbial. 
 Henriette, against her will, had been present while Trissotin 
 was reading his verses, and she is present in the next scene 
 (m. 3), when his friend Vadius makes his appearance. Tris- 
 sotin introduces him to the ladies, and is anxious to recom- 
 mend him properly : 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 
 " II a des vieux auteurs la pleine intelligence, 
 Et sait du grec, Madame, autant qu'homme de France. 
 
 " Philaminte (to Belise). 
 " Du grec, 6 Ciel ! du grec ! II sait du grec, ma sceur ! 
 
 "Belise (to Armande). 
 " Ah, ma niece, du grec ! 
 
 "Armande. 
 
 " Du grec, quelle douceur ! 
 
 " Philaminte. 
 
 " Quoi ? Monsieur sait du grec ? Ah ! permettez, de grace, 
 Que pour 1'amour du grec, Monsieur, on vous embrasse. 
 
 (Vadius kisses them all except Henriette, who refuses.) 
 
 " Henriette. 
 " Excusez-moi, Monsieur, je n'entends pas le grec." 
 
 After a speech by Vadius, in which he says that it is a 
 common fault with authors to annoy people by reading aloud 
 their own compositions in society, and become 
 
 " De leurs vers fatigants lecteurs infatigables," 
 
516 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 he and Trissotin extol each other's productions with most 
 friendly generosity : 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 " Vos vers ont des beaute"s que n'ont point tous les autres. 
 
 " Vadius. 
 " Les Graces et les Ve"nus regnent tous dans les votres. 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 " Vous avez le tour libre, et le beau choix des mots. 
 
 " Vadius. 
 " On voit partout chez vous Yithos et le pathos. 1 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 
 " Nous avons vu de vous des Eclogues d'un style 
 Qui passe en doux attraits Theocrite et Virgile." 
 
 And so the mutual admiration goes on, until Yadius falls 
 foul of a sonnet that he did not know Trissotin had written. 
 At first the two men disagree, then they quarrel, and finally 
 they pour upon each other all the vituperative words and 
 phrases they can find : 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 " Vous donnez sottement vos qualites aux autres. 
 
 " Vadius. 
 " Fort impertinemment vous me jetez les votres. 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 " Allez, petit grimaud, barbouilleur de papier. 
 
 " Vadius. 
 "Allez, rimeur de balle, opprobre du metier. 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 " Allez, fripier d'ecrits, impudent plagiaire. 
 
 " Vadius. 
 "AUei, cuistre ... . 
 
 " Philaminte. 
 
 " Eh ! Messieurs, que pretendez-vous faire ? 
 " Trissotin. 
 
 " Va, va restituer tous les honteux larcins 
 Que re'clament sur toi les Grecs et les Latins. 
 
 1 In his compliment Vadius meant to say, that Trissotin's writings 
 showed pictures both of manners and of passions. 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 517 
 
 " Vadius. 
 
 " Va, va-t'en faire amende honorable au Parnasse 
 D'avoir fait a tes vers estropier Horace. 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 " Souviens-toi de ton livre et de son peu de bruit. 
 
 " Vadius. 
 " Et toi, de ton libraire a 1'hopital reduit.' 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 " Ma gloire est etablie ; en vain tu la dechires. 
 
 " Vadius. 
 " Oui, oui, je te renvoie a 1'auteur des Satires." 
 
 Each disputant tries to palliate the rebuke he had received 
 from Boileau, the author of the Satires, and tries also to 
 heighten the force of the invective that Boileau had cast upon 
 his adversary. Boileau's mockery of Cotin had been constant, 
 and Cotin knew perfectly that Moliere's personage of Trissotin 
 was meant to apply to him. It has always been believed that 
 in the personage of Vadius, Moliere meant to characterise 
 Manage, though that writer, perhaps from motives of policy, 
 denied that the dramatist had any such intention ; Menage also 
 declared that the characteristics shown were not his. Boileau 
 had rallied Menage in his second Satire, but soon afterwards 
 substituted another writer's name ; the only other instance was 
 in his fourth Satire where, in dealing some heavy blows to 
 Chapelain, the author of the terrible poem La Pucelle, he 
 quizzed at the same time Menage and his scribbling friends. 
 
 Our concern is with the comedy in the play that was acted 
 on the stage ; but literary gossip or anecdotes are so closely 
 connected with a general view of the Femmes Savantes, that 
 something should be said of the two men who undoubtedly 
 served more or less as the models of Trissotin and of Vadius. 
 
 Menage was intellectually a bigger man than Cotin, though 
 perhaps more of a pedant. He was a type of a savant who 
 could not turn his learning to any purpose useful to himself 
 or to others. He is said to have been spiteful and sharp- 
 tongued. His plagiarisms, which were well known, were due 
 in a great part to his very retentive memory and to his lack of 
 imagination. Still, Menage showed that he had thoughts of 
 his own in his Requete des Dictionnaires, a squib in doggerel 
 
518 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 verse on the labours of the early members of the French 
 Academy. It would be too much to say that the poem was 
 good, though there was truth and a little wit in the lines ; but 
 the satire provoked the anger of the forty immortals, and 
 consequently Menage's name was never added to their number. 
 Menage and Cotin had been friends, but they fell out; and 
 Cotin alludes to their quarrel in a short poem of his, now 
 scarce, called La Mtnagerie, published in 1666. Had Menage, 
 like Cotin, shown himself to be a ladies' man ; had he even 
 been able to compose light frivolities that were meant to give 
 pleasure and to amuse, his poem against the indolence and 
 the incapacity of the Academicians might have been forgiven. 
 Instead, he made enemies by his caustic tongue ; he gave 
 offence to ladies as well as to gentlemen. His satirical poem 
 against the Academy was not in itself ill-natured, but it 
 contained truths which were not forgotten because their 
 author showed personal ill-nature in other ways. 
 
 The most effective scenes on the stage in the Femmes 
 Savantes are those where Trissotin and Vadius make their 
 appearance in the third act. In looking at the comedy in the 
 play it matters little to have passed over for the moment 
 Philaminte's husband Chrysale, and Belise his chimerical 
 sister. Belise is a woman of very uncertain age ; those who 
 are charitable might say she was forty. Moliere makes her 
 think that every man who has seen her is smitten with her 
 charms. Clitandre wishes her to give him some assistance 
 in his love-affair with Henriette ; but at the mention of the 
 words "amant" and "sincere flamme" she takes fire and 
 pretends to think that Clitandre had applied them to her. He 
 assures her four times that he had not thought of her in that 
 way, but still she rides her hobby. Clitandre is obliged at 
 length to say openly : 
 
 " Je veux etre pendu si je vous aime . . ." 
 
 Commentators have pointed out that the dramatist borrowed 
 the character of Belise from that of Hesperie in Les Vision- 
 naires, by Desmarets, acted at the Hotel de Bourgogne in 1637. 
 When it was new the Visionnaires was very highly praised, it 
 was spoken of as "1'inimitable comedie"; and some years later 
 Moliere often put it on to his own stage at the Petit Bourbon, 
 before his troop left that theatre for the Palais Koyal. Very 
 
CHAPTEK XVIII 519 
 
 likely Moliere saw that under Desmarets' caricature there 
 was the spirit of comedy, not shown lightly perhaps nor with 
 much vitality, but still with purposed intention and sensible 
 effect. It may be also that the whimsical ideas of Hespe*rie 
 in the Visionnaires made Moliere think that similar ideas 
 would be suitable to a middle-aged femme savante, and that they 
 would assist in ridiculing her before an audience. In writing 
 his comedies Moliere thought very much of their representa- 
 tion; and to a woman in Belise's position he was bound to 
 give force of character. Philaminte and Armande have each 
 their individual peculiarities, and they are both sufficiently 
 disagreeable ; Belise is ludicrous or even grotesque, but she is 
 a woman whose oddities are naturally shown. The laughter 
 that she provokes is pleasant, almost joyous; the laughter felt 
 against her sister-in-law and her niece has a sneer in it, and 
 one enjoys its vindictiveness. It would be unfair to think of 
 comparing Desmarets' work with Moliere's ; the probability is 
 that the audiences in the theatre received as much pleasure in 
 1637 from the Visionnaires as those of a generation later did 
 from the Femmes Savantes. 
 
 Chrysale, in Moliere's comedy, is one of those men who do 
 not stand by himself; he is his wife's husband. Philaminte 
 is domineering in everything ; she is determined to send away 
 Martine, a good servant girl respected by her master, not 
 because the girl has broken anything, nor even stolen, but 
 because she has, her mistress says : 
 
 " Apres trente legons insulte mon oreille 
 Par 1'impropriete (Tun mot sauvage et bas, 
 Qu'en termes decisifs condamne Vaugelas." 
 
 Vaugelas was an excellent commentator on the language of his 
 country. 1 His main standpoint was that good usage should 
 be the guide for correct writing and- correct speaking; and in 
 his Remarques sur la langue frangaise, published in 1647, he 
 was less dictatorial than some other writers who had neither 
 his knowledge nor his good sense. Though Moliere mentions 
 him several times in the Femmes Savantes, the satire in the 
 comedy does not fall upon hini ; it is directed against the 
 ignorance of pedantry. Martine knew how to cook her 
 
 1 See Sainte-Beuve's first article on Vaugelas in the Nouveaux Lundis, 
 vi. 340. 
 
520 
 
 LIFE OF MQLIEEE 
 
 dinners well, which was what her master wanted; and 
 Chrysale spoke from his heart when he said to his wife : 
 
 " Je vis de bonne soupe, et non de beau langage, 
 Vaugelas n'apprend point a faire un potage ; 
 Et Malherbe et Balzac, si savants en beaux mots, 
 En cuisine peut-etre auroient e"te" des sots." 
 
 Chrysale has been lectured until he cannot stand it any 
 longer. He is afraid to speak directly to his wife; he ad- 
 dresses himself to his sister, though they had both maintained 
 the same arguments against him : 
 
 " Le moindre solecisme en parlant vous irrite ; 
 Mais vous en faites, vous, d'6tranges en conduite," etc. 
 
 His long speech, towards the end of the second act, is well 
 known; it affords an instance of admirable comic raillery. 
 Chrysale goes on to discharge his bile. He is angry with 
 the ladies of his household because, instead of attending 
 to their domestic duties, they are eternally thinking of books 
 and of science. And he looks back upon the olden days when 
 women were modest in their aspirations. But 
 
 "Les femmes d'a present sont bien loin de ces mceurs : 
 Elles veulent ecrire et devenir auteurs. 
 Nulle science n'est pour elles trop profonde, 
 Et ceans beaucoup plus qu'en aucun lieu du monde : 
 Les secrets les plus hauts s'y laissent concevoir, 
 Et 1'on sait tout chez moi, hors ce qu'il faut savoir. 
 
 Mes gens a la science aspirent pour vous plaire, 
 Et tous ne font rien moins que ce qu'ils ont a faire ; 
 Raisonner est Pemploi de toute ma maison, 
 Et le raisonnement en bannit la raison. 
 
 Je n'aime point ceans tous vos gens a latin, 
 Et principalement ce Monsieur Trissotin : 
 C'est lui qui dans des vers vous a tympanises ; 
 Tous les propos qu'il tient sont des billeves^es l ; 
 On cherche ce qu'il dit apres qu'il a parle, 
 Et je lui crois, pour uioi, le timbre un peu feleV' 
 
 There is some irony against Chrysale, who is fond of his 
 creature comforts. His invective is partly caused because 
 those who should have looked after his dinner were intent 
 
 call "^miT'rot J i li6re meant here what we should now > less elegantly, 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 521 
 
 upon some theory or upon a volume of verses. And he 
 speaks feelingly when he bewails the loss of his servant who 
 was to be sent away because she had not learned to talk like 
 Vaugelas. His wife and sister are nearly scarified at what 
 they have heard. 
 
 " Philaminte. 
 " Quelle bassesse, 6 Ciel, et d'ame et de langage ! 
 
 "Belise. 
 
 " Est-il de petits corps un plus lourd assemblage ! 
 Un esprit compose d'atomes plus bourgeois ! 
 Et de ce meme sang se peut-il que je sois ? 
 Je me veux mal de mort d'etre de votre race, 
 Et de confusion j'abandonne la place." 
 
 When Chrysale gives his brother, Ariste, to understand that 
 he had not dared to speak to his wife in favour of Henrietta's 
 marriage with Clitandre, Ariste rallies him on his want of 
 courage. Chrysale's answer is very near his heart : 
 
 " Mon Dieu ! vous en parlez, mon frere, bien a Paise, 
 Et vous ne savez pas comine le bruit me pese. 
 J'aime fort le repos, la paix et la douceur, 
 Et ma femme est terrible avecque son humeur. 
 
 Elle me fait trembler des qu'elle prend son ton ; 
 Je ne sais oil me mettre, et c'est un vrai dragon ; 
 Et cependant, avec toute sa diablerie, 
 II faut que je 1'appelle 'mon cceur 3 et 'ma mie. 3 " 
 
 We may see, therefore, that Philaminte means to give 
 Henriette to her hero Trissotin. Armande compliments her 
 sister upon her future husband ; then both she and her 
 mother abuse Clitandre most uncharitably. He hears how he 
 is being unfairly treated, and asks what he has done to deserve 
 such punishment. A wrangle between him and Armande 
 follows. She says that she was his first choice ; he retorts 
 that she had declined his offers. She who had told her sister 
 that philosophy should be her husband now reproaches her 
 former admirer with vulgar desires : 
 
 " Vous ne sauriez pour moi tenir votre pense 
 Du commerce des sens nette et debarrasse"e 1 
 Et vous ne goutez point, dans ses plus doux appas, 
 Cette union des cceurs oil les corps n'entrent pas ? 
 Vous ne pouvez m'aimer que d'une amour grossiere ? 
 Qu' avec tout 1'attirail des noeuds de la matiere ? " 
 
522 
 
 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 Clitandre answers her : 
 
 " Pour moi, par un malheur, je m'apergois, Madame, 
 Que j'ai, ne vous deplaise, un corps tout comme une ame : 
 Je sens qu'il y tient trop, pour le laisser a part ; 
 De ces detachements je ne connois point 1'art : 
 Le Ciel m'a de'nie cette philosophic, 
 Et mon ame et mon corps marchent de compagnie." 
 
 Armande is beaten in the dispute. The manner in which 
 she tries to recapture her former admirer is amusing: 
 
 " He bien, Monsieur, he* bien, puisque sans m'ecouter, 
 Vos sentiments brutaux veulent se contenter," etc. 
 
 But Clitandre tells her that it is too late, for another has 
 taken her place. 
 
 During the discussion Trissotin makes his appearance. He 
 and Clitandre know that they are rivals for the hand of 
 Henriette, and there is a lively duel between the man of 
 the world and the pedant. This quarrel is not waged so 
 fiercely as that between Trissotin and Vadius. It is too long 
 to quote at length, but a few lines may be given : 
 
 " Trissotin. 
 
 " J'ai era jusques ici que c'etoit 1'ignorance 
 Qui faisoit les grands sots, et non pas la science. 
 
 " Clitandre. 
 
 " Vous avez cru fort mal, et je vous suis garant 
 Qu'un sot savant est sot plus qu'un sot ignorant." 
 
 After a few more passages, Philaminte intervenes to stop 
 their thinly veiled personal allusions. Clitandre answers 
 her: 
 
 " Eh, mon Dieu ! tout cela n'a rien dont il s'offense : 
 II entend raillerie autant qu'homme de France." 
 
 Clitandre did not mean that Trissotin's love of good raillery 
 was keen, but that he had to put up with sharper blows than 
 he would be likely to get in that instance. With the two 
 ladies present, who are his friends, Trissotin cannot remain 
 prudently silent when he is beaten. He sneers at Clitandre 
 because he is familiar with what goes on at court, and adds : 
 "La cour, comme Ton sait, ne tient pas pour Pesprit." 
 
 Clitandre is not a man to boast of his relations with the 
 )urt; he is also not a man to say nothing when he hears the 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 523 
 
 court abused by an imbecile. It has been thought that in 
 Clitandre's answer Moliere was giving expression to his own 
 sentiments. It is clear, at all events, as M. Mesnard points 
 out in a footnote, 1 that the dramatist was repeating here, in 
 other words, what he had said in his Critique de I'ficole des 
 Femmes. He now makes Clitandre say : 
 
 " Permettez-moi, Monsieur Trissotin, de vous dire, 
 Avec tout le respect que votre nom m'inspire, 
 Que vous feriez fort bien, vos confreres et vous, 
 De parler de la cour d'un ton un peu plus doux. 
 
 Qu'elle a du sens commun pour se connoitre a tout ; 
 Que chez elle on se pent former quelque bon gout ; 
 Et que 1'esprit du monde y vaut, sans flatterie, 
 Tout le savoir obscur de la pedanterie." 
 
 On a former page I made a small quotation from the authors 
 of the Lexique belonging to the (Euvres de Moli&re, to the effect 
 that Moliere kept something of the oratorical tone of his age, that 
 his sentences are very rhythmical, and are so full and sonorous 
 that if some small matter were not understood, his meaning 
 would still be easily gathered in any part of the theatre. The 
 words spoken by Clitandre in the Femmes Savantes afford an 
 example of this. Perhaps this role is one that is understood 
 better after it has been seen well acted on the stage. On first 
 thoughts the character of Clitandre may appear commonplace. 
 It is far otherwise. He is a man of the world, of good birth 
 and frank address. He is very outspoken, and is not wanting 
 in self-assurance. And he hates with all his blood the fawn- 
 ing disposition of Trissotin, his pretentious but inane rubbish 
 written in quantities sufficient to paper the walls of a score of 
 houses, his affected admiration of men simply because they 
 have learned Greek and Latin, and his useless pedantry which 
 he exhibits with all the vanity of a peacock and with all the 
 ineptitude of a blockhead. Moliere's open style proclaims 
 this distinctly. Clitandre's robust self-assurance is very 
 different from Trissotin's self-conceit. Clitandre hardly loses 
 his temper ; he shows his anger against his rival with honest- 
 hearted enthusiasm. Trissotin smirks and flatters in order to 
 maintain his miserable credit with three women, each more 
 foolish than himself. 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, ix. 173. 
 
524 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 It has been explained that a good part of the satire against 
 Trissotin was understood by contemporaries to apply to the 
 abbd Cotin, who was then alive; and more than once in 
 this book I have said that Moliere was never ill-natured in 
 his satire. There are some who, when they read how Cotin 
 was treated in the Femmes Savanles, will not agree with this 
 last statement. Moliere's ridicule against M. Jourdain was 
 jovial and kindly, that against Cotin was almost ruthless ; it 
 was like the felling of a tree, and in fact it morally killed the 
 poor abbe*. Does that show ill-nature ? Against a Tartuffe, 
 or a Don Juan, or a Harpagon, few will complain how severe 
 were the blows. Cotin, it is true, was not criminal as they 
 were; but if he was in effect a pompous nincompoop who 
 enjoyed semi-publicly a silly life by means of pretentious 
 false wit, I doubt very much if it was not a good and a wise 
 thing to knock him on the head, morally, and thus slay him. 
 
 Headers who have been patient enough to get as far as 
 this in my book will have made up their minds if Moliere's 
 satire against humbug was generally justified. In this par- 
 ticular case it must be remembered that Trissotin was not 
 playing a part like the Marquis de Mascarille in the Prtcieuses ; 
 he was not quizzing others so that he might laugh at their 
 folly. He tried to show humour or wit and elegance of style ; 
 instead he wrote nonsense because he could do no better. 
 And he read his rubbish aloud in fashionable drawing-rooms, 
 accepted the praises that were showered upon it, prided him- 
 self on the good opinions of his listeners, and published his 
 verses, thinking them worthy of being read and enjoyed. If, 
 as there is fair reason to believe, Trissotin was really like 
 Cotin in all this, Moliere's satire on the abbe* was justified. 
 For Cotin led a semi-public life, and anybody would think of 
 
 as he pleased. But there were attacks on Trissotin's 
 personality which may seem now to be unfair when directed 
 against a man then alive. Trissotin's manner was pretentious ; 
 under a humble guise he was puffed with self-conceit. Was 
 Cohere therefore warranted in proclaiming to all Paris these 
 :aults m Cotin, because he showed them in society? Did 
 Moliere here exceed the limits of fair comic satire when he 
 bus took off Cotin on the stage ? The question can hardly 
 be answered by a direct Yes or No. Yet, if it be not 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 525 
 
 allowed to try to kill hollow pretence by ridicule, the fault 
 will grow and become intolerable. Taking Moliere's satire 
 against the abbe Cotin as we find it, comparing it with other 
 personal satire at the time, I believe that on the whole it was 
 healthy, not ill-intentioned, and that the culprit deserved it. 
 
 Henriette is of course married before the termination of the 
 comedy, but the arrangements for her marriage do not go off 
 smoothly. The difficulty is not so much to find a husband for 
 her, as to say who shall be the favoured suitor. When the 
 notary arrives to draw up the contract Henriette's father says 
 he wishes for Clitandre, her mother for Trissotin. The man 
 of law is bewildered, and exclaims : 
 
 " Deux epoux ! 
 C'est trop pour la coutume." 
 
 Neither Chrysale nor Philaminte will give way in their 
 choice of a son-in-law, so Martine, the condemned cook, 
 intervenes in the argument and altogether on the side of 
 Clitandre. She does not like Trissotin ; and she thinks that 
 women have no right to dictate to their husbands : 
 " La poule ne doit point chanter devant le coq." 
 
 Martine continues to talk with the sound common sense, 
 bluntly expressed, that Moliere was so fond of putting into 
 the mouths of the women of the people. The dramatist's 
 object here was, of course, to contrast Mar tine's ignorance and 
 mother wit with the preciosity and the pedantry of the femmes 
 savantes. We are told that Martine was in fact Moliere's 
 domestic servant, and that she played her part in the comedy 
 under her own name. Also that the dramatist used to read his 
 plays to this woman in order to learn from her laughter or from 
 her frowns whether his intended fun was good or not, whether 
 or not his comedy was really amusing. Doubtless there is 
 romance in the tradition; but we may take it that Moliere 
 liked Martine's ideas better than those of her three mistresses. 
 
 Moliere had to find a denouement to his play, and the 
 denouement to the Femmes Savantes is hardly a good one. To 
 the exposition of his characters he gave all his thoughts ; and 
 the comic ridicule attaching to his personages is worked out 
 charmingly and in a most amusing manner. Nobody likes 
 either Philaminte or Armande, but everybody likes to see how 
 they are made to talk and express their foolish thoughts. The 
 
526 LIFE OF 
 
 ridicule, too, thrown upon Be"lise is delightful because of its 
 perfectly natural caricature. But when the climax of the 
 incidents related arrived and Moliere had to unravel his own 
 knot, he cut it by a contrivance that was commonplace and 
 not amusing. 
 
 The list of the names of the actors who originally played 
 the various parts in this comedy is believed to be fairly ac- 
 curate. Moliere played the part of Ghrysale ; Baron, Ariste ; 
 La Grange, Clitandre ; La Thorilliere, Trissotin ; du Croisy, 
 Vadius ; Hubert, who had previously taken women's parts, was 
 Philaminte; Mile. Villeaubrun(GenevieveBejart),Belise; Mile, 
 de Brie, Armande; Mile. Moliere, Henriette ; and Martine, 
 probably Martine La Foret, was the Martine in the comedy. 
 About this last role there seems to be more uncertainty than 
 about any of the others. M. Mesnard is sceptical of the 
 romantic and traditionary legend ; and he suggests, with very 
 fair reason, that this part was played by Mile. Beauval. 1 
 
 The printing of the Femmes Savantes was completed on the 
 10th December 1672, just ten months after the play was first 
 acted on the stage. 2 
 
 There are a good many often quoted lines, now more or less 
 proverbial, that are to be found in the Femmes Savantes. Con- 
 sidering the people who speak them, or those to whom they 
 were addressed, they are not more than fairly satirical ; and 
 they show, what most moderately attentive readers of Moliere 
 have already seen for themselves, that he did not try to invent 
 witty lines for the sake of saying something smart. He was a 
 rare craftsman in the easy way he used his words to show the 
 mirth of comedy, and he loved the fun of satire when it arose 
 and showed itself naturally ; but he disliked the idea of think- 
 ing of witty sayings in order to produce an effect. Both Pascal 
 and La Bruyere, two of the best thinkers that France has pro- 
 duced, wrote : " Faiseur de bons mots, mauvais caractere." I 
 took a few instances of well-known quotations, characteristic 
 of Moliere, from his Amphitryon; these from the Femmes 
 Savantes serve the same purpose. Perhaps their chief merit is 
 that they are all suitable in their place. 
 
 " Mariez-vous, ma sceur, a la philosophic." i. 1 ; v. 44. 
 
 1 OSuvre* de Molttre, ix. 47-52. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 527 
 
 " Cette intre'pidite de bonne opinion." i. 3 ; v. 254. 
 
 " Raisonner est Pemploi de toute ma maison, 
 Et le raisonnement en bannit la raison." u. 7 ; v. 597, 598. 
 
 " Nul n'aura de Pesprit hors nous et nos amis." in. 2 ; v. 924. 
 
 " Excusez-moi, Monsieur, je n'entends pas le grec." 
 
 in. 3 ; v. 947. 
 
 " De leurs vers fatigants lecteurs infatigables. 3 ' in. 3 ; v. 958. 
 " On voit partout chez vous I'ithos et le pathos." in. 3 ; v. 972. 
 
 " Vous donnez sottement vos qualites aux autres." 
 
 in. 3 ; v. 1013. 
 
 " Un sot savant est plus sot qu'un sot ignorant." 
 
 iv. 3 ; v. 1296. 
 
 It would seem that La Comtesse d'JZscarbagnas was the last of 
 the comedies-ballets that Moliere wrote for the royal pleasure. 
 In November 1671 Monsieur married for the second time, and 
 Louis xiv. wished to give a complimentary fete to his brother and 
 to his new sister-in-law, the Princess Palatine, Charlotte Eliza- 
 beth of Bavaria, in honour of their marriage. To lend a grace 
 to the event Moliere was told to compose a play which should 
 admit of music and dancing, and to select for the interludes the 
 most admired portions of the ballets that had been previously 
 danced at court. On the 2nd of December 1671 the new 
 comedy was performed for the first time at Saint Germain. 
 The play was written to show off the interludes, and these 
 were taken from former plays written by Moliere. The 
 Comtesse d } Escarbagnas has only one act, and it is clear that 
 both the author and the king's guests thought more of the 
 magnificence of the spectacle than of the comedy in the play. 
 The troop at the Palais Eoyal theatre had been called away 
 from Paris to Saint Germain on the 27th of November ; they 
 remained there until the 7th of December. In the meanwhile 
 at Saint Germain there was a constant round of festivities. 1 
 
 La Comtesse d'Escarlagnas was first acted at the Palais Eoyal 
 theatre on the 8th of July 1672. The scene of the play is laid 
 at Angouleme. The little comedy is no more than a light 
 sketch showing how an ignorant-minded and ill-tempered 
 woman, countess though she be, has, after a visit of three 
 months to Paris, become opinionated in her ideas about persons 
 
 1 (Entires de Moliere, vol. viii., Notice to the Comtesse d' Escarbagnas, by 
 M. Paul Mesnard ; and M. Louis Moland's (Euvres de Moliere, 2d. ed. vol. 
 xi. ? Notice to the same play. 
 
528 LIFE OF MOLI&EE 
 
 of quality, and how she scolds her provincial servants because 
 they are raw and clumsy. The Comtesse d'Escarbagnas might 
 almost be the sister of Monsieur de Pourceangnac. She is as 
 great a simpleton as he is, though in a different way, and her 
 natural instincts are not so good. If both were put together 
 into society the gentleman would make fewer enemies than 
 the lady. Country people were more behind-hand in their 
 manners, compared with Parisians, two hundred and fifty years 
 ago than they are now ; but Moliere knew the type of woman 
 he was sketching, what were her vanities, her heavy stupidities, 
 and how she could not prevent her fits of ill-humour. Two 
 hundred and fifty years hence such a creature will be much 
 the same. 
 
 La Grange shows that the Comtesse d'Escarbagnas was acted 
 at the Palais Eoyal fourteen times, and that each day it was 
 followed by a performance of the Manage Force} But the 
 pomp and the spectacle of the ballet, which had been the 
 principal features in the play at Saint Germain, were found to 
 be too costly to be given in public as an accompaniment to a 
 very light comedy. 2 This was the only play written by 
 Moliere in which he took no part on the stage. The names of 
 the original actors are given by M. Mesnard. 3 The play was 
 never printed until nine years after its author's death. 
 
 The last of Moliere's comedies, Le Malade Imaginaire, was 
 acted for the first time on the 10th of February 1673, at the 
 Palais Koyal theatre. We are told that the author intended 
 this comedy to be played before the court during the festivities 
 of the carnival in 1673, 4 though not that he had received 
 the king's command to write the play. MM. Mesnard and 
 Moland both seem to think that the dramatist determined to 
 have his play acted in public at the Palais Eoyal theatre, and 
 not at court, because of a quarrel between himself and Lulli. 
 The latter, it will be remembered, had composed the music 
 for many of the comedies-ballets written by Moliere. The 
 reason of their quarrel was that Lulli, in his desire to establish 
 
 opera-house in Paris, had obtained a privilege or monopoly 
 
 iii - 539 - 3 Md- viii. 546. 
 ed. x i 4 ' 1X> 21 ; X " 428 ; L " Moland > a" ^ Moliere, 2d. 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 529 
 
 for an Academic royale de musique, forbidding dancing in all 
 other theatres in Paris, and limiting the number of singers to 
 six, and of musical instruments to twelve. Moliere may have 
 been right to quarrel with Lulli. This man had gained his 
 monopoly, which was generally very unpopular ; but by some 
 mark of favour, not specified, all the restrictions set forth in 
 the privilege were not put in force when the Malade Imaginaire 
 appeared on the stage at the Palais Eoyal theatre. Still, no 
 proof has been given to show that Moliere was asked to write 
 this play for performance at court ; and even supposing that 
 he had been so asked, no word has been said telling how he 
 could have withdrawn his play from the court programme 
 without royal sanction. I am inclined to agree with Auger, 
 who says in his edition of Moliere's plays, published in 1819 
 (vol. ix. p. 477), that it seems that the poet did not receive 
 any command from the king to write this play. It is clear, 
 however, that the Malade Tmaginaire, styled " comedie mele'e 
 de musique et de danses," was planned, like Moliere's other 
 comedies-ballets, with the idea of giving music and dancing 
 as interludes between the acts. It is well to bear this in mind, 
 for though many readers pass over the interludes they should 
 remember that the comedy was planned largely on their 
 behalf. The music for this play, as for the Comtesse d'Escar- 
 ~bagnas, was composed by Charpentier. 
 
 Moliere's last comedy contains perhaps his most severe 
 attack on the doctors of medicine. As he had ridiculed them 
 in at least four of his previous comedies, it cannot be thought 
 that he meant no more than playfulness or light banter. 
 Putting aside the Mddecin Volant, one of his farces, written 
 when he was in the provinces, his first attack on the medical 
 Faculty was in Don Juan, acted in February 1665. Because 
 this short piece of strong satire was purely episodical as 
 regards the events in the play, I only alluded to it when 
 speaking of that comedy, but I quoted it at length in what I 
 had to say about the Amour Mddecin, acted six months after Don 
 Juan had been withrawn from the stage. It is indisputable 
 that Moliere meant much of what he said against the doctors 
 of medicine; but he wrote in a vein of comedy, and he 
 covered his censure with strong ridicule. This was his constant 
 practice. Because of his easy laughter his meaning has often 
 
 2L 
 
530 LIFE OF MOLltiBE 
 
 been unheeded ; because of his grotesqueness his earnestness 
 has sometimes been rejected derisively. In other matters he 
 used reproof in the same way. His object was to make people 
 laugh at foolish habits, and to show by amusing satire, that 
 should be reverent, how the evil conduct of men one to 
 another was hurtful to all and morally wrong. If there 
 were any who would learn a lesson from his comedy, they 
 might do so. Moliere was no doctrinaire, but he thought that 
 many of the physicians in his day took money out of people's 
 pockets by feigning knowledge they did not possess, that nearly 
 all of them were too much given to following routine, and that 
 they used the knowledge they had in a pompous and absurd 
 manner; and of the value of the skill employed by well- 
 intentioned practitioners he was sceptical in more or less of a 
 good sense. 
 
 An idea of the comedy in the Malade Imaginaire will be 
 gathered by looking at the personages in the play. We see an 
 empty-headed doctor of medicine, Monsieur Diafoirus ; his son 
 Thomas, also a doctor, but newly fledged, and both a pedant 
 and an ignoramus ; Monsieur Purgon, whose name speaks for 
 itself, the medical attendant of the malade imaginaire ; Argan, 
 a semi-imbecile, a selfish, angry do-nothing, besotted with the 
 idea that he is ill, and that unless he swallows every month as 
 much physic as would float a small boat, he will get rapidly 
 worse ; Beline, his second wife, a creature more greedy of gain 
 and more heartless than Frosine in the Avare ; Angelique, 
 Argan's daughter, who does love her father; Beralde, who, 
 because he is Argan's brother, sermonises him and tries to 
 bring him to reason ; and Toinette, a domestic servant who 
 rallies her master on his hypochondriacal foolery, as Lisette 
 in the Amour Mtdecin had rallied her master on his faith in 
 quacks, and as Dorine in the Tartu/e had also rallied her 
 master on his belief in imposture of a more serious kind. For 
 the form of the thing, Angelique has a lover, Cleante ; and 
 there is a pretty scene between Argan and his second daughter, 
 Louison, a child of six or eight years. 
 
 The plots in Moliere's comedies are not the strongest part of 
 his work. The Misanthrope and the Femmes Savantes, usually 
 considered as among his best plays, seem to have almost no 
 plot. But if there be any man who does not enjoy the comic 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 531 
 
 characterisation in either of those two plays also in the 
 Critique de I'JEcole des Femmes, in George Dandin, and in the 
 Bourgeois Gentilhomme it would not be intolerant to say of 
 him that he does not understand Moliere. It is very easy to 
 see that Moliere was far more interested in showing the play 
 of life by good-humoured comic satire, and by true comic 
 characterisation of his personages, than he was in contriving 
 an elaborate plot and in unravelling it so as to create or pro- 
 duce wonder or delight. Love of true comedy was in his 
 nature, as singing is in that of a blackbird, and he wished to 
 portray his characters and the events in his plays with all the 
 natural comic humour he could throw into them. In his last, 
 as in nearly all of his previous comedies, his personages are 
 interesting because they have a vitality of their own ; and one 
 sees from the open and easy way they talk that they give an 
 amusing and lifelike character to the incidents they help to 
 beget and to accomplish. About the events themselves in his 
 plays Moliere did not care much except as a means of showing 
 the natures of his personages. 
 
 At the outset of the Malade Imaginaire Argan is adding 
 up the items in his apothecary's bill for the last month. As 
 the bill is long, and as Argan is garrulous, he is made to begin 
 on the 24th day of the month. From the 24th to the 28th 
 inclusive, he enumerates the various prescriptions supplied 
 by his apothecary, M. Fleurant, and he regulates the various 
 charges as he thinks fit. It was customary at that time to 
 reduce apothecaries' bills by one-half ; and according to two 
 recent editors of Moliere, it would seem that the dramatist 
 was exaggerating very little the accusations he brought against 
 M. Fleurant and others in his trade. 1 The total amount of the 
 bill comes to 63 livres, 4 sous, 6 deniers. 
 
 "So that," Argan says to himself, "I have taken this month one, 
 two . . . seven, eight doses of physic; and one, two . . . eleven, 
 twelve clysters. Last month it was twelve doses of physic and 
 twenty clysters. I don't wonder that I am not so well this month 
 as I was last month." 
 
 Argan shows one good feature in his character. He recog- 
 nises that his daughter Angelique is following natural instincts 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, ix. 284 note 1 ; L. Moland, (Euvres de Moliere, 2nd 
 ed. xii. 40, continuation of note 4 from p. 39. 
 
532 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 in being glad when she is told that a proposal has been made 
 for her hand. But she and her father are thinking of different 
 suitors. She is harping upon Cle'ante, he insists upon Thomas 
 Diafoirus. The invalid wishes to have a doctor in his house, 
 and this young man will have money. Toinette begins her 
 raillery and makes her master very angry. His wife comes to 
 him and cossets him with the affection that conies from the 
 thoughts of his money-bags. 
 
 It has been shown l that a comedy by Bre'court, Le grand 
 bcntt defils aussi sot que son p&re, had some sort of success at the 
 Palais Koyal theatre in January 1664. Not much is known 
 about the play, as it was never printed ; but the title seems to 
 have tickled Moliere, for in it both Monsieur Diafoirus and his 
 son are aptly characterised. A "benet" is a greenhorn, a 
 nincompoop, and when this father and son make a formal call 
 upon Argan for the purpose of asking for the hand of his 
 daughter Angelique, Thomas Diafoirus is described as " a great 
 greenhorn fresh from the schools, who does everything clumsily 
 and at the wrong time." 
 
 " M. Diafoirus. 
 
 "... Now then, Thomas, come forward. Make your compli- 
 ments. 
 
 " Thomas Diafoirus. 
 " Should I not begin with the father ? 
 
 "M. Diafoirus. 
 "Yes. 
 
 " Thomas Diafoirus (to Argan). 
 
 " Sir, I come to greet respectfully, to acknowledge, to love and to 
 revere in you a second father ; but a second father to whom I must 
 say that I am more bounden than to the first. The first generated 
 
 me, but you have chosen me. He received me from necessity, but 
 you have accepted me by grace. What I receive from him is a work 
 
 f his body but what I receive from you is a work of your good will : 
 and so much as the spiritual faculties are above the corporeal faculties 
 
 >o much the more do I owe to you, and so much the more do I esteem 
 
 )recious that future filiation for which I tender now by anticipation 
 my most humble and respectful homage. 
 
 " Toinette. 
 "Long live the colleges which made such a clever man ! 
 
 1 Ante, p. 281. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 533 
 
 " Thomas Diafoirus (to M. Diafoirus), 
 " Was that well done, father 1 
 
 " M. Diafoirus. 
 " Optime: 
 
 " Argan (to Angelique). 
 " Now then, make your curtsy to Monsieur. 
 
 " Thomas Diafoirus (to M. Diafoirus). 
 Shall I kiss ? i 
 
 " M. Diafoirus. 
 " Yes, yes. 
 
 " Thomas Diafoirus (to Angelique). 
 
 " Madame, it is with justice that heaven has allowed to you the 
 name of belle mere, 2 for since . . . 
 
 " Argan (to Thomas Diafoirus). 
 " That is not my wife ; you are talking to my daughter." 
 
 M. Diafoirus tells his son to make his compliment to the 
 young lady. The imbecile -rolls it out of his mouth as he 
 would pull string out of a bag : 
 
 " Thomas Diafoirus. 
 
 " Mademoiselle, neither more nor less than the statue of Memnon 
 uttered a harmonious sound when it was lighted by the rays of the sun, 
 so do I just in the same way feel myself animated by a soft inspiration 
 at the apparition of the sun of your beauties. And as the natur- 
 alists remark that the flower called heliotrope always turns towards 
 this day-star, so will my heart henceforward always turn towards the 
 resplendent stars of your adorable eyes, as it would towards its only 
 pole. Suffer then, Mademoiselle, that to-day I lay on the altar of 
 your charms the offering of this heart which lives for and aspires to 
 no other glory than to be, through all its life, Mademoiselle, your 
 most humble, most obedient, and most faithful servant and husband. 
 
 " Toinette. 
 
 " See what it is to have studied ! One learns how to make pretty 
 speeches. 
 
 " Argan (to Clednte). 
 
 " Well ! what do you say to that ? 
 
 1 The ridicule of the situation here is obvious ; but in a note, (Euvres de 
 Moliere, ix. 350 note 4, M. Mesnard explains that this old custom was not 
 extinct in France at the time of the Malade Imaginaire. 
 
 2 The French word " belle mere " must be repeated here. Thomas Dia- 
 foirus was probably going to make a pun upon "belle" for the sake of a 
 compliment. 
 
534 LIFE OF MOLIEEE 
 
 " Cleante. 
 
 " That Monsieur does wonders, and that if he be as good a physi- 
 cian as he is a good orator, it will be a pleasure to be one of his 
 patients." 
 
 M. Diafoirus' praise of his son need not be given at length. 
 He says that if his boy was slow to learn at first he flowered 
 late, and that now his child rejoices his heart ; for the lad is 
 firm in his belief of the ancients, and he would never under- 
 stand or listen to the modern imaginary discoveries about the 
 circulation of the blood and such like rubbish. 
 
 When Thomas Diafoirus is next seen he begins his compli- 
 ment to Bdline, Argan's wife. Happily, however, he is inter- 
 rupted in the middle of his period and his fine ideas vanish. 
 He is rather pleased that his courtship of Angdlique should 
 take place in public, and he goes through with it as might be 
 expected. Later he shows his learning and his intelligence 
 when Argan asks him to diagnose his case. At the end of 
 scene 6, in M. Mesnard's edition, M. Diafoirus intervenes : 
 
 " M. Diafoirus. 
 
 ... He [M. Purgon, Argan's own doctor] tells you to eat a 
 good deal of roast meat 1 
 
 " Argan. 
 " No, only boiled meat. 
 
 " M. Diafoirus. 
 
 "Well, yes; roast, boiled, all the same. He prescribes for you 
 very wisely, and you could not be in better hands. 
 
 " Argan. 
 " Sir, how many grains of salt should one put into an egg 1 
 
 " M. Diafoirus. 
 
 " Six, eight, ten even numbers ; as in medicine, we go bv uneven 
 numbers. 
 
 This reads now like pure nonsense; it was not, however, 
 
 there's invention, for doctors of medicine in his day or earlier 
 
 to reason in that way .1 And a short speech made by Argan 
 
 * m the comedy, and which highly amused Madame de 
 
 gne, may also be mentioned here: "M. Purgon told me 
 
 i my room in the morning, twelve times forwards and 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, ix. 377 and note 1. 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 535 
 
 twelve times backwards, but he did not say whether it was to 
 be along the room or across it." 
 
 The Malade Imaginaire has but three acts, and in Act ill. 
 sc. 3 there is a long and well-known discussion between 
 Argan and his brother Beralde about the value of the art of 
 medicine and of the power of doctors to stay or cure disease. 
 Argan is of course strong in his belief of the need of medical 
 advice ; Beralde, on the other hand, is as firm that the so-called 
 skill of doctors is worthless. And Beralde urges his argument, 
 not- with scepticism or doubt as to the power of healing given 
 to or acquired by doctors, but disbelieving altogether that 
 doctors have such power. As to Moliere's own opinion about 
 all this, judging from his character generally, I should be 
 inclined to say that it was mainly sceptical, but that it hardly 
 went so far as disbelieving altogether or denying. He could not 
 believe, he doubted ; and probably enough he hoped that as 
 time went on more accurate knowledge about medicine would 
 be obtained. His satire against the dishonest greed of doctors 
 is another question. It is easy to have decided ideas as to 
 whether, -in this scene between the two brothers, Moliere 
 meant or did not mean to express his own opinions on the 
 matter under dispute. The more absolute our ideas are, 
 perhaps the more likely are they to be wrong. But I think 
 we may be tolerably certain that Moliere meant in the first 
 place that his scene should be looked at in the light of comedy. 
 There are abundant instances in his plays showing how admir- 
 ably he gave comic pictures of arguments which, in less skil- 
 ful hands, might have been hardly more than disquisitions 
 with much talk and but little comedy. It is of small conse- 
 quence whether Moliere expressed his own opinions in these 
 disputes or not. His desire was to give the opinions of others, 
 and he felt it to be of great consequence in telling the dispute 
 that the mirth of comedy should be shown. Moliere wrote 
 so frequently against the doctors of medicine, and always in a 
 tone of satire, that it is difficult to suppose that he did not 
 believe much of what he put into the mouth of Be'ralde, though 
 perhaps he himself would not have gone so far. And it is 
 difficult also not to feel that there were personal reasons, 
 caused by his own bad health, affecting him when he wrote 
 
 1 CEuvres de Moliere, ix. 339 and note 5. 
 
536 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 his Malade Imaginaire. We are now a bit behind the scenes, 
 and are tempted to think, without sentimentalism, that Moliere 
 had an idea that his end was not far off, and that he wished 
 in perhaps his last comedy against the doctors to treat the 
 medical tartuffes, more clever in hiding their own ineptitude 
 and their imbecility than in anything else, as they deserved. 
 L^^ Argan should 
 
 make himself ridiculous ; but it may be asked did he not also 
 mean to throw counter-satire on Beralde ? 
 
 The likeness, strong enough, noticed by M. Mesnard, 1 be- 
 tween some words spoken by Beralde and words spoken by 
 Don Juan, which I quoted in what I had to say on the Amour 
 Mtdecin, seems to point that way. A good part of the discus- 
 sion between the two brothers should be given : 
 
 " Argan. 
 " Let us argue the matter. You have no belief in medicine ? 
 
 "Beralde. 
 " No, and I do not see what good I should get by believing in it. 
 
 " Argan. 
 
 " What ! you dismiss as untrue a thing universally established, and 
 which for centuries past has been revered ? 
 
 " Beralde. 
 
 "Instead of believing it to be true, I think, between ourselves, 
 that it is one of the greatest follies ot^niankind ; and, in looking at 
 things wisely, I say that there is no more idle mummery, .nothing 
 more ridiculous, than one man bothering himself by trying* to cure 
 another. 
 
 " Argan. 
 " Why cannot you think that one man may cure another ? 
 
 " Beralde. 
 
 " Because _the_active forces of our body are mysteries of which 
 .en so far, have been able to tell nothing, and that nature has put 
 thick veils over our eyes that we are still in the dark. 
 
 " Argan. 
 "Doctors, therefore, according to you, know nothing at all ? 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moltere, ix. 396 note 1. 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 537 
 
 " Beralde. 
 
 " Yes, they do. Most of them are excellent humanists, they know \ 
 how to talk fine Latin, they can call all maladies by Greek names, 
 define them and distinguish them; but as for healing, they know 
 nothing about it. * - 
 
 " Argan. 
 
 " But you must admit that doctors know more about the matter 
 than other people 1 
 
 " Beralde. 
 
 " They know what I have told you, which does not go far in the 
 art of curing; and all the excellence of their skill consists in 
 pompous gibberish, in specious babble, which gives you words for 
 reasons and promises for effects. 
 
 " Argan. 
 
 " But still, there are people as wise and as clever as you are ; and 
 we see that in case of illness they do ask the advice of doctors. 
 
 " Beralde. 
 
 "That is a sign of human weakness, and not of the truth of 
 their art. 
 
 " Argan. 
 "... What should one do, then, when one is ill ? 
 
 " Bdralde. 
 " Nothing. 
 
 " Argan. 
 "Nothing? 
 
 " Beralde. 
 
 "Nothing, except lie quiet. Nature, if left alone, pulls herself 
 out of the hole into which she has fallen. It is our uneasiness, our 
 restlessness, that destroys everything, and nearly every man dies of 
 the remedies given to him, not of his illness. 
 
 " Argan. 
 
 " Ho ! Ho ! It seems that you are a great doctor, and I wish we 
 had here one of those gentlemen to stop your jaw and take your talk 
 down a peg. 
 
 " Beralde. 
 
 " I am not trying to fight against the doctor's art ; everybody may 
 think about it as he pleases at his own risks. I am only talking 
 between ourselves ; and to make you open your eyes and to make 
 
)53 8 LIFE OF 
 
 you laugh at all this, I should like to take you to see one of 
 Unlit-re's comedies. 1 
 
 r 
 
 " Argan. 
 
 "Your Moliere is an ignorant fellow with his comedies, and I 
 consider him most impertinent to make fun of honest people like 
 doctors. 
 
 " Beralde. 
 
 "It is not the doctors he makes fun of, but the nonsense of 
 medicine. 2 
 
 " Argan. 
 
 " What business has he to think about finding fault with medical 
 practices? He is a big fool, an impertinent ass, to laugh at con- 
 sultations and prescriptions, to censure the whole body of medical 
 men, and to put on to his stage such venerable persons as these 
 gentlemen ! 
 
 " Beralde. 
 
 " Whom should he put there but men of different callings ? You 
 may see there any day kings and princes, and they have as good 
 blood in their veins as the doctors. 
 
 " Argan. 
 
 "S'death! But no; in the devil's name, if I was a doctor I 
 would pay him back in his own coin. I 'd let him have it for his 
 impudence. If he were ill, I 'd let him die without help. He might 
 talk and howl as he liked. I would not give him the smallest 
 cupping and not one clyster. I 'd say to him : ' Die, die ; that will 
 teach you another time how to laugh at the Faculty.' 
 
 " Beralde. 
 " You are very angry with him. 
 
 " Argan. 
 
 "Yes, he's a loon, and if all the doctors were wise they would 
 do as I say. 
 
 " Beralde. 
 
 "He will be wiser than your doctors, for he won't ask for their 
 help. 
 
 " Argan. 
 "So much the worse for him if he goes without it. 
 
 themselves !? F^? ^^ dramatists u sed occasionally to allude to 
 Lt m ^ V e e s 8 be n fo?e^ e s iL^^ ** f "^ Mo1 ^ & S ^ 
 
 M S' ix " 401 note 4 ' Here > as i annotating some 
 
 a likeness of tLught 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 539 
 
 " Beralde. 
 
 " He has reasons of his own for not wanting it. He maintains 
 that only strong and robust people, those who have a good constitu- 
 tion, can fight against both the remedies and the malady ; but for 
 himself, he has only just strength enough to bear up against his 
 illness. " ' 
 
 From the point of view of lecturing and of credulous belief 
 shown in comedy this scene in the Malade Imaginaire between 
 Beralde and Argan offers a certain likeness to the last scene 
 in the first act of the Tartuffe, where Cle'ante endeavours to 
 show Orgon how he has been deceived by imposture. The 
 characters of Cle'ante and of Beralde are virtually the same, 
 the same kind of acting would personate them both ; between 
 Orgon and Argan there seems to be a greater difference, but 
 it is only in the direction of their semi-imbecility. 
 
 It would be wrong to say nothing of Argan's medical 
 adviser, M. Purgon. This learned pundit had sent M. 
 Fleurant, the apothecary, with a clyster very specially pre- 
 pared for Argan's use. But Beralde, in his wisdom, had 
 persuaded his brother to leave drugs alone for one day. The 
 apothecary thereupon goes to his chief and reports how the 
 clyster had been neglected and scorned. M. Purgon enters 
 furious against his patient for his contempt and for his miscon- 
 duct. He says that Argan's action is a heinous insult against 
 the science of medicine and a crime of high treason against 
 the Faculty, that all intercourse between Argan and him must 
 cease ; and then M. Purgon tears in pieces a deed of gift in /^v 
 favour of his nephew, Thomas Diafoirus, which was to have been 
 given to his nephew at the time of his marriage with Argan's \/ 
 daughter, Angelique. But that is not all. Because the/Kl 
 invalid had declared himself rebellious against the prescrip- 
 tions, M. Purgon threatens him with half a dozen frightful 
 diseases, each one worse than the last, and with death at 
 the end as a final extinguisher. Even the buffoonery of the /\ 
 doctors against the unfortunate M. de Pourceaugnac was ' 
 not more grotesque than the end of this scene in the Malade 
 Imaginaire. 
 
 The poor fool believes what has been said to him, and feels 
 that he is being punished for his fault. But he is ready to 
 listen to the advice of another doctor. Toinette has told 
 
540 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 Bdralde that she has prepared a scheme, and she appears 
 dressed as a doctor of medicine aged ninety years. 
 
 " Toinette (to Argan). 
 
 "Give me your pulse. Now then, beat properly. I Tl make you 
 move as you ought. Ho! That pulse is insolent; I see that you 
 don't know me yet. Who is your doctor ? 
 
 " Argan. 
 
 "M. Purgon. 
 
 " Toinette. 
 
 " That man is not on my books among the great doctors. What 
 does he say is the matter with you ? 
 
 "Argan. 
 " He says it 's the liver, others say it 's the spleen. 
 
 " Toinette. 
 " They are all ignorant creatures. It 's your lung that is ill." 
 
 After every word that Argan speaks, giving as he thinks a 
 sign of illness, his new doctor ejaculates, "The lung, the 
 lung ! " after every article of food Argan says he has been told 
 to eat, his new doctor ejaculates, " Ignorant fellow ! " And he 
 prescribes a regimen of food that might be suitable for young 
 men on a knapsack expedition. 
 
 Again the simpleton believes what is said to him, but he 
 does not like being told that he must have one arm cut off, 
 because it deprives the other of its natural subsistence ; nor is 
 he happy when told that he must have one eye taken out for 
 the same reason. Perhaps the meaning of these scenes, where 
 Toinette is disguised as a doctor, is to show once more how 
 inordinately credulous and stupid were many people who put 
 themselves under the care of ignorant practitioners and let 
 themselves be guided by worthless advice. 
 
 What more there is to be said about the comedy in the 
 Malade Imaginaire is soon told. Argan consents to feign that 
 he has died in his chair. When Byline, his wife, is told of her 
 husband's death, she exclaims : " Heaven be praised ! " She 
 congratulates herself on being freed from a man whose habits 
 are disgusting, and she thinks only of clutching the money 
 he has left in his house. She is going out to get the keys, 
 when he cries out to stop her. Angelique, Argan's daughter, 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 541 
 
 has to go through the same trial of affection. The result is 
 very different ; and when she implores her father, if he will 
 not let her marry Cleante, that she should not be forced to 
 marry another, he consents to their marriage on the condition 
 that Cleante will prepare himself to be a doctor. The young 
 man naturally consents gladly enough. 
 
 Then as a preparation for the third and last interlude, 
 Beralde says to his brother : 
 
 " An idea has just struck me. Become a doctor yourself. It will 
 be more convenient, and you will have in yourself all that you 
 want." 
 
 After some persuasion Argan consents to be made a doctor, 
 and his admission into the Faculty forms the subject of the 
 burlesque scene, complementary to the Malade Imaginaire, 
 known as La, Certfmonie. This is a satirical picture, written 
 in amusing Macaronic Latin, of the manner in which young 
 men in Moliere's day were received as bachelors into the 
 medical Faculty. A very small knowledge of Latin and of 
 French words will enable anyone to see its meaning and 
 to enjoy its humour. 
 
 As might be expected, there is some satire against the course 
 of instruction given to the young men during their term of 
 pupilage. The first question the bachelor is asked is : " Why 
 does opium induce sleep ? " He answers : " Because it has a 
 dormitive quality." The chorus of the Faculty replies : 
 
 " Bene, bene, bene, bene respondere, 
 Dignus, dignus est intrare 
 In nostro docto corpore, 
 Bene, bene respondere." 
 
 Then the bachelor is asked what remedy he would apply in 
 half a dozen different cases of illness. To all the questions 
 he makes the same answer : 
 
 " Clysterium donare, 
 Postea seignare, 
 Ensuita purgare." 
 
 He is asked to swear to keep the written statutes of the 
 Faculty with sense and good judgment ; he complies, of course. 
 Then, that in all consultations he will be of the same opinion 
 
542 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 as his elder, whether his advice be good or bad ; and to that 
 he swears. Also that he will never use any remedy but those 
 prescribed by the learned Faculty, even though the patient 
 were to die of his malady. The president then confers the 
 doctor's cap upon the bachelor, and endows him with various 
 medical powers ; the last mentioned is that of killing every- 
 body with impunity. The bachelor has to return thanks for 
 the honour done him. He says : 
 
 " Grandes doctores doctrinse 
 
 De la rhubarbe et du sene, 
 Ce seroit sans douta a moi chosa folia, 
 
 Inepta et ridicula, 
 
 Si j'alloibam m'engageare 
 
 Vobis louangeas donare, 
 Et entreprenoibam adjoutare 
 
 Des lumieras au soleillo, 
 
 Et des etoilas au cielo, 
 
 Des ondas a 1'Oceano, 
 
 Et des rosas au printanno. 
 Agreate qu' avec uno moto, 
 
 Pro toto remercimento, 
 Rendam gratiam corpori tarn docto. 
 
 Vobis, vobis debeo 
 Bien plus qu' a naturae et qu' a patri meo : 
 
 Natura et pater meus 
 
 Hominem me habent factuni ; 
 
 Mais vos me, ce qui est bien plus, 
 
 Avetis factum medicum, 
 
 Honor, favor, et gratia 
 
 Qui, in hoc corde que voila, 
 
 Imprimant ressentimenta 
 Qui dureront in secula." 
 
 Then the chorus sings : 
 
 " Vivat, vivat, vivat, vivat, cent fois vivat 
 Novus doctor, qui tarn bene parlat ! 
 Mille, inille annis et manget et bibet, 
 Et seignet et tuat." 
 
 As Moliere died almost on the stage, this is perhaps the 
 place to record the circumstances of his death. Many strong 
 men have wished to die m harness, in the midst of their 
 labours. Moliere certainly did so; and this fact lends an 
 additional lustre to the halo of glory which we should all 
 B glad to see spread around the last hours of one whose 
 work has ever been, and will always be, admired and respected 
 by open-minded and generous-thinking men and women, 
 (jrrnnarest says : 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 543 
 
 " The day on which the Malade Imaginaire was to be acted for 
 the third time " [Grimarest should have said the fourth time] 
 " Moliere's chest annoyed him more than usual. He sent for his wife, 
 and said to her in Baron's presence : 'So long as-pain and pleasure 
 have been equally mixed in my life, I have thought myself happy ; 
 but now I am worn out with trouble, and have no minute of enjoy- 
 ment or of rest. I see clearly that I must give up the game. I 
 cannot hold out against the pain and worry, which do not give me a 
 moment's peace.' Then thinking to himself, he added : * How much 
 a man suffers before hejiies ! ' Mile. Moliere and Baron were greatly 
 touched at Moliere's speech, which they did not expect from him, 
 however great his suffering might be. They implored him, with 
 tears in their eyes, not to play that day, but to take a little rest. He 
 said to them : 'What can I do ? There are fifty poor workpeople 
 who live on their day's pay , what would they do if there were no per- 
 formance "? I should reproach myself if I were to keep their bread 
 from them for one day, being actually able to give it to them.' He 
 sent for the actors and told them that as he was worse than usual he 
 would not play that day, unless everything were ready at four o'clock 
 punctually. ' Otherwise,' he said to them, ' I shall not be there and 
 you may give back the money.' The candles were lighted, and the 
 curtain was drawn exactly at four o'clock. Moliere went through his 
 part with difficulty, and half of the audience perceived that in pro- 
 nouncing the word Juro in the Clrimonie a convulsion came upon 
 him. When he saw that this was remarked he made an effort, and 
 by a forced smile he hid what had happened." x 
 
 When he had chronicled the fourth performance of the 
 Malade Imaginaire, La Grange wrote in his Eegister : 
 
 " This same day, after the play was over, about ten o'clock in the 
 evening, M. de Moliere died in his house in the Rue de Richelieu, 
 having acted the part of the said Malade Imaginaire, very much 
 troubled by a cold and inflammation of the lungs, which caused him to 
 cough a great deal, so that in the strong efforts he made to spit he 
 burst a vein in his body and did not live half an hour or three- 
 quarters of an hour after the said vein had burst. His body is buried 
 at Saint Joseph's chapel of ease belonging to the parish of Saint 
 Eustache." 
 
 Nine years later La Grange wrote in the preface to the first 
 complete edition of Moliere's plays, of which he was one of 
 the editors : 
 
 " On the 17th day of February [1673], the day of the fourth per- 
 formance of the Malade Imaginaire, he [Moliere] was so much 
 troubled by the inflammation in his chest that he had difficulty in 
 acting his part. He got through it, though he suffered much, and 
 
 1 Vie de Moliere, pp. 284-87, ed. 1705. 
 
544 LIFE OF MOLIERE 
 
 the audience saw easily that his performance was far from what he 
 wished it to be. Immediately the play was over he went home, and 
 no sooner had he got into bed than the cough which troubled him 
 perpetually became very violent. The efforts he made were so great 
 that he burst a vein in his lungs. Finding himself in that condition, 
 he turned all his thoughts to heaven. A moment later he became 
 speechless, and in half an hour he was suffocated by the quantity of 
 blood that came up through his mouth." x 
 
 Two sisters of charity, to whom Moliere had given hospi- 
 tality, were with him at his death. The cure of Saint Eustache 
 refused to bury Moliere. Thereupon his widow addressed a 
 petition to the Archbishop of Paris, Harlay de Champvalon, 
 setting forth that the deceased had asked for a priest to 
 receive from him the last sacrament, that he had sent his valet 
 and a woman servant to two priests belonging to the church 
 of Saint Eustache, that they had refused to obey the call of 
 the dying man; that then Moliere's brother-in-law, Jean 
 Aubry, went to fetch another priest from the same church, 
 but that he arrived too late. The petition goes on to say that 
 as the deceased had asked for the services of a priest before 
 his death, that as he had died as a good Christian, and had 
 received the sacrament at the previous Easter, grace might be 
 accorded that he should be buried in the church of Saint 
 Eustache. Finally the demand was granted, and probably 
 owing to the king's interference, but with restrictions. 
 Ecclesiastical burial was allowed in the cemetery of the 
 parish, but on the condition that there should be no display, 
 there should be only two priests, it should not take place in 
 the day-time, and there should be no solemn service for the 
 dead man said in the parish of Saint Eustache or elsewhere. 
 The funeral was postponed until the 21st of February, at 
 about nine o'clock in the evening. It is comforting to think 
 chat the wicked severity of the archbishop's order was not 
 carried out. From a letter, apparently anonymous, addressed 
 to Monsieur Boy vin, pretre, docteur en the'ologie," an account 
 may be read of the ceremony showing that it was conducted 
 with all proper reverence, and in a manner very different from 
 the wishes of the archbishop. Harlay de Champvalon was far 
 from being a good man ; but Bossuet, whom everybody should 
 espect, showed himself in another way equally intolerant. 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, i. pp. 17, 18. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 545 
 
 Twenty years after Moliere's death the prelate wrote: 
 "Posterity will know the end of this poet and actor who, 
 while he was playing his Malade Imaginaire or his Medecin 
 par force, received the last attack of the malady from which 
 he died a few hours later, and went from the laughter of the 
 stage, where he uttered almost his last sigh, to the tribunal of 
 Him who said : ' Woe unto you that laugh now ! for ye shall 
 mourn and weep.' " l Had these words come from a lay writer 
 of ordinary intelligence, they would not have been noticed ; 
 but coming as they did from a prelate and from one of the 
 greatest minds that France has produced, their foolishness and 
 their uncharitableness are astonishing. 
 
 Both M. Mesnard 2 and M. Moland 3 have written at length 
 about the obsequies of Moliere. It is said that in 1792 what 
 were thought to be Moliere's remains were, with those of 
 La Fontaine, dug up from the cemetery of Saint Joseph, but 
 what was done with them is not told ; that in 1799 they were 
 placed by Alexandre Lenoir in a mausoleum in the Muse'e des 
 Monuments Frangais, and that in 1817 they were transported 
 to Pere La Chaise. But M. Mesnard thinks that these mauso- 
 leums were cenotaphs. 4 In 1875 the two mausoleums were 
 restored. Among the different epitaphs written on Moliere, 
 that by his friend and admirer La Fontaine has been thought 
 by Frenchmen to be the best : 
 
 " Sous ce tombeau gisent Plaute et Terence, 
 Et cependant le seul Moliere y git. 
 Leurs trois talents ne formoient qu'un esprit, 
 Dont le bel art rejouissoit la France. 
 Us sont partis ! et j'ai peu d'espe"rance 
 De les revoir. Malgre tous nos efforts, 
 Pour un longtemps, selon toute apparence, 
 Terence et Plaute et Moliere sont morts." 
 
 Among great French writers who have not been members of 
 the French Academy, Moliere is the chief. Yet if we think 
 for a moment what was his position as an actor who delighted 
 the crowd in the pit of his theatre with his performances of 
 ridiculous characters ; when we think of him as the author of 
 the Tartuffe which had brought down upon him the censure 
 
 1 Quoted by M. Mesnard, (Euvres de Moliere, x. 432. 
 
 2 Ibid. x. 430-48. 3 (Euvres de Moliere, 2nd ed. i. 307-35. 
 4 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 447. 
 
 2M 
 
546 LIFE OF MOLlfeKE 
 
 of nearly all churchmen and of many men who by their 
 abilities had risen in the world, as the author of George 
 Dandin where it was believed he had extolled the shameless 
 effrontery of an impudent woman in order to jeer at the 
 misfortunes she caused to her husband; when we recollect 
 that the poet, about whose verses many of the Academicians 
 cared nothing and whose wit they derided, was the leader of 
 a troop of actors and lived much in their society ; when we 
 recollect also how many churchmen there were among the 
 actual members of the Academy in Moliere's day, and the 
 unwillingness that men have very commonly and everywhere 
 shown to admit into their choice society another of very 
 opposite opinions to their own; when we think of all this 
 for a moment, we shall feel that the surprise would indeed 
 have been great if Moliere had been allowed to sit as one of 
 the forty immortals. A little more than a hundred years 
 after the poet's death the members of the Academy wished to 
 grant him a posthumous honour. In the room where they 
 held their sittings a bust of Moliere was placed, and on it 
 was engraved the following inscription : 
 
 " Rien ne manque a sa gloire, il manquait a la notre." 
 
 At the end of vol. ix. of the CEuvres de Moliere M. Mesnard 
 has printed some Potsies Diverses, never intended to be 
 spoken on the stage, that Moliere wrote or may be fairly 
 supposed to have written. The chief is a poem, entitled La 
 Gloire du Val de Grace, addressed by Moliere in 1669 to the 
 painter Mignard on his fresco in the dome of the church Le 
 Val de Grace in Paris, on the south side of the river. To 
 this poem M. Mesnard has prefixed a substantial Notice. 
 Apart from the province of comedy Moliere's verses do not 
 give much pleasure. The lines may be regular and correct, 
 but they have little of the charm that true poetry inspires. 
 There are, however, some lines in La Gloire du Val de Grace 
 which have an interest outside the mere skill of verse-making 
 or of painting. One characteristic of Moliere's work, which 
 everybody must have noticed, is that it shows a free hand. 
 When he had got his thoughts into the shape suitable for his 
 purpose at the moment, the rest came to him fairly easily. 
 The labour of composition which has hampered so many 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 547 
 
 authors did not, we may imagine, give him great trouble. 
 He evidently wished to see the effect of freshness in all work. 
 When the house was built he did not like to see marks left 
 by the scaffolding. And regularity or correctness was to him 
 a smaller matter than true naturalness. These thoughts made 
 him allude in his poem to the difference between frescoes and 
 oil-painting. He preferred the fresco with its "brusques 
 fierteX" which must be seized quickly to picture the passing 
 thought and which cannot be erased, to the slower work 
 which may be retouched and manipulated at pleasure. The 
 following lines give some conception of Moliere's ideas about 
 the effect his and other work should produce : 
 
 " La fresque, dont la grace, a Pautre pre"feree, 
 Se conserve un eclat d'eternelle duree, 
 Mais dont la promptitude et les brusques fierte"s 
 Veulent un grand genie a toucher ses beautes ! 
 De 1'autre, qu'on connoit, la traitable me"thode 
 Aux foiblesses d'un peintre aisement s'accommode ; 
 La paresse de 1'huile, allant avec lenteur, 
 Du plus tardif gnie attend la pesanteur : 
 Elle sait secourir, par le temps qu'elle donne, 
 Les faux pas que peut faire un pinceau qui tatonne ; 
 Et sur cette peinture on peut, pour faire mieux, 
 Eevenir, quand on veut, avec de nouveaux yeux. 
 Cette commodite de retoucher 1'ouvrage 
 Aux peintres chancelants est un grand avantage ; 
 Et ce qu'on ne fait pas en vingt fois qu'on reprend, 
 On le peut faire en trente, on le peut faire en cent. 
 Mais la fresque est pressante, et veut, sans complaisance, 
 Qu'un peintre s'accommode a son impatience, 
 La traite a sa maniere, et d'un travail soudain 
 Saississe le moment qu'elle donne a sa main : 
 La severe rigueur de ce moment qui passe 
 Aux erreurs d'un pinceau ne fait aucune grace ; 
 Avec elle il n'est point de retour a tenter, 
 Et tout au premier coup se doit executer ; 
 Elle veut un esprit oil se rencontre unie 
 La pleine connoissance avec le grand ge"nie, 
 Secouru d'une main propre a le seconder 
 Et maitresse de 1'art jusqu'a le gourmander, 
 Une main prompte & suivre un beau feu qui la guide, 
 Et dont comnie un eclair, la justesse rapide 
 Expand dans ses fonds, a grands traits non tate"s, 
 De ses expressions les touchantes beautes." 
 
 What is chiefly noticeable here is that Moliere liked 
 to see large-mindedness, originality, and a show of ease and 
 of quickness in all good work. Sainte-Beuve, in rallying 
 Vauvenargues because he preferred La Bruyere as a painter 
 
548 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 of men's actions to Moliere, says of him : " Vous etes peintre 
 a 1'huile, M. de Vauvenargues." 
 
 By far the best, in my opinion, of Moliere's poems, is the 
 Remerdment au Eoi, written in 1663, which was noticed in a 
 previous chapter. There is there distinctly a comic interest, 
 and the author shows his satire playfully and pleasantly. 
 But Moliere's ambition did not make him attempt to write 
 pretty verses. The spirit of poetry was not sufficiently strong 
 in him, and his hands were already so full with writing of 
 another kind that he had small wish to manufacture tender 
 lines which he knew beforehand would be worth very little. 
 It is not likely that those printed by M. Mesnard are 
 either widely read or admired. I must say here for the last 
 time that the purpose of Moliere's work was to portray the 
 humours of men and women and their characterisation by 
 amusing and satirical comedy, laughing at their foibles and 
 condemning their faults. He certainly had keen imagination; 
 and it led him to show with comic effect what people are like 
 as they go through their parts in the play of life, and how for 
 good and for ill they act and react upon one another. He 
 would not preach, but he strove to teach honest lessons by 
 playful and not ill-natured satire. His thoughts were bent 
 towards mirthful comedy, and his style or manner of writing 
 naturally followed his thoughts and took its colour from them. 
 But though Moliere often showed poetical feeling in his verses, 
 he had not the higher or deeper feelings of poetry, nor had he 
 the power of strong poetical expression. If an author has a 
 high and rare faculty largely developed, it is better to see 
 what use he has made of that force than to belittle his 
 intellectual capabilities because he has not another faculty 
 in a more or less opposite direction. When it has been 
 proved that Shakespeare and Bacon were but one man, then 
 it will be time for a new and a logical method of inter- 
 preting human thoughts to arise. 
 
CHAPTEE XIX 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND CONCLUSION 
 
 WE have finished considering Moliere's comedies, but there 
 are still a few biographical matters to be mentioned which could 
 not have been spoken about earlier without awkward inter- 
 ruption in the narrative. 
 
 If facts could only be adduced, an extremely interesting 
 chapter might be written about Moliere and his friends. But 
 unless imagination is to run riot, the facts are wanting which 
 would enable me to deal here much more than has been hinted 
 at already with the social side of Moliere's character. Taken 
 fairly and kept in its place, a good deal may be said in favour 
 of the saying I think an Irish one " There never was a good 
 story yet without a lie in it." But what is a lie ? If all fiction 
 is a lie because the tale told is not as true as cold logic, the 
 world must be in a bad state. The man who can deck a purely 
 fictitious tale with real and fitting attributes gives a true life 
 to it, for he shows that his imagination was sound and that it 
 did not lie to him there. My reader will have seen already 
 that I have not got that imagination. I have tried to say 
 what were Moliere's ideas about the actual work of his life ; 
 but I have no wish at the end of a book that is already long, 
 to enter into aesthetic-speculative, or speculative-aesthetic, 
 literary theories on work that did not concern him directly. 
 
 Moliere, doubtless, had his friends, but it is not certain that 
 he had the time or always the inclination to enjoy much of 
 their society. La Fontaine in his novel, Les Amours de 
 PsyM et de Cupidon, published in 1669, described the meetings 
 of four companions whom he called Poliphile, Ariste, Gelaste, 
 and Acante ; and it has been said that in his tale the author 
 told how he and Moliere and Eacine and Boileau met together 
 and discussed all things in loving friendship. On this romantic 
 idea castles in the air have been built, but the structures were 
 
 549 
 
550 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 so slight that no one could live in them. We read that 
 Ariste was meant to be Boileau. Sceptical commentators 
 who doubted that any actual meaning was to be found in 
 La Fontaine's fable have admitted so much. But later criti- 
 cism has muddled the other imaginary names with the real 
 ones, and now nobody knows quite who was who, except that 
 the proud title of Ariste has always been given to Boileau. 
 Even then, nothing can be gathered from the conversation 
 related that describes the thoughts of any one of the friends. 
 There is a short discussion among them as to the differences 
 between tragedy and comedy, but the opinions are given in a 
 purely formal manner; they show nothing characteristic of 
 the speakers, and not much that is characteristic of either 
 tragedy or comedy. The probability may be that when La 
 Fontaine began his story he had some half romantic idea 
 which he did not carry out, and that names have been prefixed 
 to his personages mainly for the pleasure of doing so. This 
 has certainly been the case with regard to some novels written 
 both in England and in France within the last sixty or seventy 
 years. In December 1665 Eacine and Moliere had quarrelled. 
 It is not likely that they became friends after that date, and 
 there is nothing to show that before that date they and La 
 Fontaine and Boileau used to meet, even now and then, with 
 set purpose to enjoy each other's society and to listen while 
 each in turn was propounding his opinions. 
 
 The following anecdote is amusing, and is not perhaps so 
 wild as it may appear to be. When, the dramatist was living 
 at Auteuil, some of his friends, Boileau, Chapelle, Lulli, and 
 two others, went one day to see him. Moliere was far from 
 well, and he begged Chapelle to do the honours of his house. 
 Chapelle acted the host so well that before the party broke 
 up not one of them knew clearly what he was saying. But 
 instead of being merry they talked rank pessimism. They all 
 said that the best thing that could have happened to any one 
 was not to have been born ; as it was, the best thing was to die. 
 And they agreed, with a singular unanimity of opinion, to go 
 down at once to the Seine, which was close by, and drown them- 
 selves. Their noise disturbed Moliere, and when he heard of 
 their determination he exclaimed: "How now, gentlemen! 
 what have I done that you should carry out such a grand idea 
 
CHAPTER XIX 551 
 
 without telling me about it ? " Chapelle was forced to admit 
 that Moliere had not been fairly treated. Then addressing 
 him directly he said: "But come along now with us and 
 drown yourself." " Wait a moment/' the poet objected. " This 
 is not a thing to be done clumsily. It will be the last action 
 in our lives, and it requires care. If we drown ourselves at 
 this time of day, people will talk nastily of us say perhaps 
 that we were tipsy. The thing should be done properly so 
 that we may get some glory from it. Let us go to-morrow 
 morning about eight or nine o'clock, and when everybody is 
 afoot we will drown ourselves in the river." " Yes, that 's what 
 we '11 do," Chapelle answered. ".We can drown ourselves 
 to-morrow morning. In the meanwhile, let us go back and 
 finish our wine." When the next day came they found that 
 life still had its charms. 1 On one or two occasions in his plays 
 Moliere seemed to think that people did not commit suicide 
 so often as they talked about doing it. 
 
 Though the French dramatists in the seventeenth century 
 did not join together in writing their plays, as the English 
 dramatists had done two or three generations earlier, few of 
 them probably declined all offers of verbal assistance from their 
 friends. The man who gave most assistance to Moliere was, 
 of course, Boileau. He was " Le legislateur du Parnasse," and 
 at times acted the critic among his friends. He gave Moliere 
 Greek-sounding names for the doctors in the Amour Mtdecin ; 
 and we are told that he gave him the idea of the scene between 
 Trissotin and Vadius in the Femmes Savantes\ also of the 
 Latin ceremony at the end of the Malade Imaginaire. Boileau 
 thus showed that he had a sense of humour. And in the first 
 scene of the Femmes Savantes he suggested an alteration 
 which, with the exception of one word, Moliere allowed. 2 
 
 The main thoughts of Boileau and of Moliere were much 
 alike on many subjects, but the two men expressed themselves 
 differently. Their satire against affectation and pretence was 
 shown in different ways. When affectations and pretence meant 
 no more than idle vanities that did no one any harm, Moliere 
 generally laughed at them. Boileau tried to make his satire 
 laughable, but it was not given to him to do so. His honesty 
 
 1 Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 93, 94. 
 
 2 (Euvres de Moliere, ix. 63 note 3. 
 
552 LIFE OF MOLIliKE 
 
 of purpose is to be respected, his comic seriousness is some- 
 times amusing, but light raillery that should carry weight was 
 beyond his power. There are four verses in Act I. sc. ii. of 
 the Misanthrope, spoken by Alceste when he is showing 
 Oronte that his sonnet is worthless, which, in the thought 
 that inspired them, might have come straight from Boileau or 
 from Pascal as well as from Moliere. All three disliked false 
 taste in literature, and all three in their different ways would 
 have said : 
 
 " Ce style figure", dont on fait vanite, 
 Sont du bon caractere et de la verite ; 
 Ce n'est que jeu de mots, qu'affectation pure, 
 Et ce n'est point ainsi que parle la nature." 
 
 We have seen how Moliere laughed at false literary tastes. 
 Pascal's laughter was tersely expressed, as when he said that 
 people call a king " an august monarch " ; when he wrote " la 
 vraie eloquence se moque de 1'eloquence," and again : " se 
 moquer de la philosophic c'est vraiment philosopher." But 
 Boileau's anger got the better of him, and he felt inclined to 
 roar. There was a mania in France in the second quarter of 
 the seventeenth century and a little later for burlesque and 
 trivial writing. This Boileau hated, and he showed his dis- 
 gust at it in the first canto of his Art Pottique. 
 
 " Cette contagion infecta les provinces, 
 Du clerc et du bourgeois passa jusques aux princes ; 
 Le plus mauvais plaisant eut ses approbateurs ; 
 Et jusqu'a d'Assouci, tout trouva des lecteurs." 
 
 Boileau was probably right, and the way he expressed himself 
 in the last quoted line seems to have given amusement to the 
 man he wanted to censure. 
 
 At one time, at least, Louis xiv. was a good friend to 
 Moliere, for without the protection afforded by the sovereign 
 to the poet it is doubtful whether the Tartuffe would have 
 appeared on the stage during its author's lifetime. Moliere 
 recognised his Majesty's mark of favour and his sense of 
 justice; and he proclaimed his gratitude loudly in the speech 
 spoken by 1'exempt, or police officer, nearly at the end of the 
 comedy. Conde also was on the poet's side against the bigots 
 who wished to crush the immortal picture of hypocrisy and 
 concurrent vices. Taschereau speaks of Conde's esteem for 
 Moliere, and tells the following story, which, if true, was 
 
CHAPTEE XIX 553 
 
 more witty than polite. The prince was so much upset 
 by the news of Moliere's death, that when an abbe pre- 
 sented to him an epitaph for the poet, Conde replied : " I wish 
 he was alive to make yours." 1 Neither Louis xiv. nor his 
 courtiers generally had much real knowledge of Moliere's 
 power. As an actor, he amused them. They considered him 
 an excellent mimic who could imitate admirably on the stage 
 the ridiculous qualities of a man who was everywhere a laugh- 
 ing-stock. But for Moliere as author they knew and cared 
 little. A proof of this may be seen from a comparison of the 
 number of times his more serious comedies and his come'dies- 
 ballets were played at court during his lifetime. 2 Moliere 
 tickled the vanity of the noblemen when he drew their por- 
 traits in the Fdcheux ; but as to the comedies he wrote later, 
 not many of the courtiers paid him the compliment to try to 
 understand their meaning. The humour or the wit was appreci- 
 ated by the men in the parterre of the theatre ; it was too frank, 
 too open, for the great dandies, and they jeered at it. This 
 fatuous superciliousness annoyed Moliere, and he gave pictures 
 of two brainless noblemen, Acaste and Clitandre, in the Misan- 
 thrope. They are seen chiefly in the first scene of the third 
 act, and in the fourth scene of the fifth act. 
 
 To come now to things more definite. There may be a 
 natural curiosity, not altogether idle, to know how much money 
 Moliere earned in Paris from 1658 to 1673. But could the 
 amount be stated accurately, it would not tell much unless its 
 value could be compared with other values ; and all that is 
 a large matter. Of the various classes of writers in France in 
 the seventeenth century, the dramatists were the best paid. 
 A few of them might have lived more or less well, while their 
 plays were new, upon what they got from the theatres ; but 
 even Boileau and La Bruyere, who wrote no plays, and whose 
 works were reprinted oftener than those of any other author, 
 would have starved unless they had other sources of income 
 than from the sale of their books. As it happened, they both 
 declined to receive what was owing to them in that way. 
 Though the amounts paid to Moliere for his many plays are 
 known approximately, they cannot be compared with the sums 
 
 1 Taschereau, Vie de Moliere, 3rd ed. 97. 
 
 2 (Euvrea de Moliere, i. 557, col. 1. 
 
554 LIFE OF 
 
 received by either of the two Corneilles, nor with those received 
 by Kacine, for these are not known at all. 
 
 There is in the Magasin Pittoresque for September 1860 
 (pp. 278-280) an article by Eegnier on the fitat de la Fortune 
 de Moliere. As soci^taire of the Comedie Franqaise Eegnier 
 had access to its archives. He estimated that for the repre- 
 sentation of his comedies Moliere got, as author, 49,500 livres. 
 Other estimates, a little larger or smaller, may be formed; 
 because, in taking the plays separately, every one will not 
 agree as to the amount received from each. Eegnier's reckoning 
 is, nevertheless, I imagine, tolerably accurate. As to the sale 
 of the plays when printed, little is known, but probably it was 
 not large. A popular play, while new, has rarely found a com- 
 paratively large number of readers. Moliere, too, did not 
 think much about the reading public; his anxiety was to 
 please those who went to his theatre to see and to hear. Like 
 Shakespeare, he wrote for his audience, not for the few who 
 read at home ; and the thoughts of neither author went so far 
 ahead as to trouble him with the attentive opinions of posterity. 
 The amount that Moliere received as an actor can be stated, 
 for La Grange, on p. 143 of his Eegister, reckoned that he had 
 received 51,670 livres as his share at the Palais Eoyal theatre 
 during the fourteen years he played in Paris ; and Moliere's 
 earnings as an actor were of course the same as those of La 
 Grange. Eegnier, in estimating Moliere's earnings as an actor, 
 counted his wife's share as belonging to her husband. I think 
 that is hardly kind ; because, for money fairly earned in this 
 world, everybody should have his own purse. Moliere was not 
 a curmudgeon, to grab his wife's dues ; and Mile. Moliere, we 
 may feel tolerably sure, knew very well how to keep what she 
 had got. If she spent no more than what she had gained 
 lawfully from the theatre, her husband had so far no reason to 
 be dissatisfied with her. We have seen already that in 1663 
 Moliere received a pension of 1000 livres from the king as 
 " homme de lettres " ; therefore after ten years that mounted 
 to 10,000 livres. And as tapissier valet de chambre du Eoi, 
 Eegnier reckoned that at the time of his death Moliere 
 received 4337 livres. Eegnier's total estimate is that since 
 La Grange began to keep his Eegister at Easter 1659 Moliere 
 made 152,021 livres, 19 sous. If we multiply this sum by five, 
 
CHAPTEE XIX 555 
 
 as French writers would do to get the equivalent in spend- 
 ing money in our day, Moliere made altogether 30,404 
 sterling. 
 
 For the details in the inventory taken after Moliere's death, 
 telling the different articles of property that belonged to 
 him and to his wife, and their debts, I must refer to Soulie's 
 volume. 1 Soulie estimates that according to the values given 
 in this inventory for linen, furniture, clothes, books, silver, 
 ready-money, etc., Moliere left behind him 18,000 livres 
 worth of goods of various kinds, and that the total value of 
 his estate should be put down at 40,000 livres or 200,000 
 francs at the present day, and, if one considers depreciation, 
 that this sum might be 300,000 francs. 2 Among Moliere's 
 books there were some Greek and Latin classics; and some 
 French authors, of whom Montaigne, Balzac, and Pierre 
 Corneille are the best known. But it seems strange that there 
 was no Eabelais ; for in largeness of view in their outlook 
 upon human nature, and upon the way that men show them- 
 selves to be what they are, there was much likeness between 
 Eabelais and Moliere, and probably also much sympathy. And 
 it is curious that among Moliere's books, though there were 
 some two hundred and forty volumes of French, Spanish, and 
 Italian comedies, no copy of his own plays was mentioned in 
 his inventory. Soulie says that altogether Moliere had about 
 three hundred volumes in Paris and about forty at Auteuil. 3 
 What Moliere read it would be as impossible to tell as to say 
 what the weather was like as he drove from Auteuil to the 
 Palais Eoyal theatre. Some men as busily employed as he 
 was have been voracious readers. Byron is an instance. 
 Judging generally, and from the titles of the books owned by 
 Moliere, I should not fancy that Moliere was a great reader ; 
 though other persons may very well think differently. One 
 does find among the effects mentioned in his inventory de- 
 scriptions of about twenty of the costumes worn by him in 
 the different parts he played in his comedies. These descrip- 
 tions are given collectively by M. Moland, 4 and to some people 
 they may be interesting. I did not speak of them in saying 
 which part Moliere had acted in this or that comedy, for to 
 
 1 Recherches sur Moliere, 81-97 ; 262-92. 2 Ibid. 97. 
 
 3 Ibid. 93. 4 Moliere, sa vie et ses ouvrages, 310, 311. 
 
556 LIFE OF MOLI^RE 
 
 have done so would have been tedious, and many of the French 
 terms describing the costumes are untranslatable. 
 
 Mile. Moliere remained a widow for four years after her 
 husband's death. On the 29th of May 1677 she signed a 
 contract of marriage between Isaac FranQois Guerin and 
 herself, and two days later the marriage ceremony was per- 
 formed. 1 Gue'rin had been an actor at the Theatre du Marais ; 
 and after Moliere's death, when the actors at that theatre 
 joined themselves with those who had belonged to the Palais 
 Royal, Gue'rin was one of the new troop who went to play 
 at the Hotel Gudnegaud ; 2 and seven years later he became 
 a member of the only regular company of actors in Paris, 3 
 a company which was known afterwards as the Comedie 
 FranQaise. In this last list of actors' names, given by La 
 Grange, the name of Mile. Moliere may also be seen. 
 
 Moliere had three children, two boys and a girl. The girl 
 only survived him. Their surname has generally been given 
 as Poquelin. His eldest boy, Louis, born on the 19th of 
 January 1664, was baptized on the 18th or on the 28th of 
 the following month. 4 The due de Cre'qui, in the king's name, 
 was his godfather, and la mare'chale du Plessis, in the name 
 of the duchesse d'Orleans, was his godmother. M. Mesnard 
 thinks that this royal honour was accorded to Moliere because 
 he was a valet de chambre du roi, not because of his writings. 
 But little Louis died on the 10th of November in the year of 
 his birth. 5 And Moliere lost his other boy less than a month 
 after his birth. Pierre Jean-Bap tiste Arm and, bom on the 
 15th of September 1672, was christened on the 1st of October 
 following. 6 On page 136 of his Register, La Grange, while 
 chronicling the theatrical representations for that month of 
 October, says in a marginal note : "Mardy 11, neant, a cause 
 de la mort du petit Moliere." 
 
 Moliere's second child, Esprit Madeleine, was christened on 
 the 4th of August 1665. 7 Her father took her to live with 
 
 1 Soulie", Recherches sur Moliere, 100 
 
 2 Segistre de la Grange, 146. 3 Ibidt 2 38. 
 
 Jal Dictiomwire : p. 875, col. 1, says on the 18th ; M. Mesnard, Notice 
 biographique sur Moliere, 472 (Document ix.), says the 28th. 
 J Jal, Dictionnaire, p. 875, col. 1. 
 
 357 7 423 P ' 875> 01 ' * 5 P ' Mesnard Notice ^ographique .sur Moliere, 
 7 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 474, Document xn. 
 
CHAPTEE XIX 557 
 
 him in his apartment at Auteuil, and when he died she was 
 not eight years old. Little is known about her in her young 
 days except that she once showed her wit in a piquant 
 manner. About the year 1680 or 1681 Chapelle, with whom 
 she was perhaps pretty intimate, asked her how old she was. 
 She answered: "Fifteen and a half; but don't say anything 
 about that to my mother." 1 Her late father could hardly 
 have imagined a more graphic reply. There is a romantic 
 story to the effect that when she was twenty years of age 
 she eloped with Claude de Rachel de Montalant, but that as 
 he could not obtain her mother's consent to their marriage 
 the two lovers had to wait for her death. Mile. Moliere 
 for La Grange calls her by the name of her first husband, 
 though she was in fact Mile. Guerin lived until the year 
 1700, 2 and her daughter did not marry M. de Montalant until 
 five years later. The bridegroom was a widower of sixty 
 years of age, or close upon it, and the bride had just passed 
 her fortieth birthday. 3 He was a man of good family, but 
 was poor. The marriage settlement between him and his 
 future wife shows some curious clauses, for which I must refer 
 to Soulie's volume. And there is much else, also to be found 
 in Soulie's volume, referring to money matters consequent 
 upon Moliere's death, which not many readers would thank 
 me to give here. A few circumstances, however, may be told 
 very shortly. 
 
 When de Montalant married Mile. Poquelin his income 
 appears to have been stated at 500 livres a year, but adding 
 up the few figures I cannot make them amount to more than 
 440 livres a year. 4 Madeleine Poquelin was more richly 
 endowed, for she inherited money from her father, from her 
 aunt Madeleine Bejart, and from her mother ; and her fortune 
 amounted to nearly 66,000 livres. 5 She died in 1723; her 
 husband in 1738. There was no issue from their marriage. 
 
 The dates of the deaths of the Be'jarts, Moliere's oldest 
 comrades on the stage, may be mentioned. Joseph, known 
 until his death as Bejart aine, died in 1659; Louis, known 
 until his elder brother's death as Bejart cadet, died in 1678 ; 
 
 1 (Euvres de Moliere, x. 457. 
 
 2 Semite, Recherches sur Moliere, 105. 3 Ibid. 107. 
 
 4 Ibid. 108-9 ; 331. 5 Ibid. 109 ; 337. 
 
558 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 Madeleine, their eldest sister, died unmarried in 1672 ; Gene- 
 vieve, who had married twice, died in 1675; and Armande, 
 who became Moliere's wife, in 1 700. 
 
 According to the inventory taken after his death in February 
 1669, Jean Poquelin, Moliere's father, died worth only 937 
 livres, and Souli^ remarks that this sum was much less than 
 the 2200 livres that Poquelin had contributed to his marriage 
 settlement with Marie Cresse" in 1621. 1 The probability is that 
 his life was not a happy one. Widowed for the second time when 
 he was just over forty years of age, he lived thirty -three years 
 longer and saw his business, which had once been prosperous, 
 slowly lessening. What comfort he may have got from his 
 children is not known, but there can be little doubt that the fact 
 that his eldest son chose the stage as his profession gave him 
 great pain. And perhaps it would not be wrong to suppose 
 that his sorrow clung to him. If you can get to the bottom 
 of a man's money dealings, large and small, and see with 
 what spirit he parts with his money generally an impossible 
 task you will learn much of his character. The world takes 
 what knowledge it has gpt in this matter and estimates 
 accordingly. And this test has not been favourable to Jean 
 Poquelin. Perhaps he has been wrongly judged upon what is 
 known of his money transactions with his children. 2 Soulie' 
 says that Voltaire's assertion that Jean Poquelin was an old- 
 clothes merchant seems, from his inventory, to be nearly 
 justified, at least during the last years of his life. He did 
 not die a poor man, and though his disposition may have 
 been morose, we should be wrong to look for his qualities 
 in the character of Harpagon. Indeed, the fact that Moliere 
 drew the character of Harpagon may be taken fairly as a sign 
 that Jean Poquelin was not a miser. Moliere's sense of 
 honourable feeling would have prevented him from wishing 
 to portray the features of his father in such a character. 
 
 In this account of Moliere's life and of his comedy there are, 
 I fear, things omitted that should have been said; on the 
 other hand, there are some details which might perhaps have 
 been eliminated. But every one should try to tell his story 
 in his own way, and while doing so work with his own brains. 
 
 1 Recherches sur Moltere, 66. 2 7^ 50 _ 53 . 63 , 68 
 
CHAPTEE XIX 559 
 
 As Moliere wrote many comedies, perhaps there are some 
 persons who would like to have an idea as to which of his 
 plays they should read. I cannot pretend to any royal road 
 to such knowledge ; and as Moliere did not divide men into 
 classes, perhaps no one should make that attempt with 
 his plays. Possibly an English reader will choose at first 
 the comedies in prose as more easy to understand. Moliere 
 wrote twenty-eight comedies of different lengths, and the 
 amount of his prose and of his verse is pretty equally 
 balanced. Of the comedies in prose shown in his lighter 
 manner, the Pre'cieuses Ridicules, the Amour Mtdecin, the 
 M6decin Malgrt Lui, George Dandin and the Bourgeois Gentil- 
 homme are well known to be amusing ; while his humour is 
 shown in a more serious way in the Critique de I'lScole des 
 Femmes, in Don Juan and in the Avare. Among the plays in 
 verse the Tartufe, the Misanthrope, the Femmes Savantes, 
 stand in the first rank ; below them, but each with its own 
 characteristics, are the ^Jtourdi, the Fdcheux, the ficole des 
 Femmes, Amphitryon. These indications are only meant to be 
 taken generally. After speaking of George Dandin, I said that 
 Moliere made some of his comedies complementary to others 
 that he had written previously, and that in such cases it 
 would be well to read the later written comedy after the first 
 and then try to conciliate their meaning. That plan will 
 tell how he made use of his thoughts in different ways. In 
 prose and in verse Moliere showed his purpose by laughter 
 more openly and in a more popular manner in prose; 
 more delicately, with irony as well as with satire, in verse 
 Thus in the Tartuffe, Dorine rallies her master thoroughly, 
 but with refinement of language; in Don Juan, the satire 
 strikes like the blow from a club. So also in the two plays 
 against the affectations of women. The wit in the Pre'cieuses 
 Ridicules is rough, familiar, jovial; in the Femmes Savantes 
 both silly and stupid pedantry are exposed with elegance and 
 grace of manner, and in the disputes we enjoy the tartness 
 shown by the combatants. In the Misanthrope, Celirnene 
 speaks like a hard woman of the world who had been bred up 
 in an artificial school of cold politeness; in George Dandin, 
 Angelique is a woman of the same stamp though of a 
 worse nature, and we see in her the same thoughts pushed 
 
560 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 farther and shown with open effrontery and barefaced shame- 
 lessness. There is sadness in the satire in George Dandin, but 
 at the same time the comedy in the play is most amusing. 
 
 One word in conclusion. I have often thought that those 
 who wish to learn to read French would do well to take 
 Moliere as their instructor. If they have a liking for comedy 
 he will interest them, and that is a great point gained. When 
 young people are trying to educate themselves they are far more 
 likely to do so with the aid of a book they enjoy than if they 
 force themselves to read one that gives them little pleasure. 
 Moliere's irregularities of construction are those natural to 
 comedy, and they are not so faulty as to count much against 
 the large reasons which have always made him popular with 
 those who know his plays; and the very few instances of 
 what may now be called coarseness cannot be fairly urged 
 with common sense or without uncharitableness. I think that 
 as a teacher of language Moliere would educate an intelligent 
 young man or girl better and more thoroughly than an author 
 who sat down to write with didactic intentions. Which 
 would interest the most, which would confer, educationally, 
 the greatest benefit the Avare or TdfawLquel Moliere's 
 mind was always clear and his views of life were remarkably 
 broad and sound, and he was so human in his thoughts that 
 except in some matters of form most of his scenes might have 
 been written yesterday. If that be so, people two hundred 
 and fifty years hence will think of them nearly as we do now. 
 Frenchmen are rightly proud of their favourite author, and we 
 English who enjoy his comedies feel that their cause for pride 
 is both just and true. 
 
INDEX 
 
 ABSURDITY and ridicule in fable and in 
 comedy are not synonymous, 170 ; 194 ; 401. 
 
 ACADEMY, French (The), Origin of, 151. 
 Ridicule thrown upon its early members, 
 514. The femmes savantes wished to 
 imitate their labours, 514. Menage wrote 
 a squib against the Academicians, 517, 
 618. Why Moliere was not a member of 
 the Academy, 545, 546. 
 
 ACTING, Moliere's ideas of, different from 
 those at the Hotel de Bourgogne, 261-265. 
 
 ACTORS' shares, how divided, 229, 230. 
 
 " AFFICHE " (The), 238-240. 
 
 "AFFICHE (Une) de Comediens en, 1662," 
 122, 123. 
 
 A GEN, Moliere played at, 104. 
 
 AIME-MARTIN gave for the first time the 
 names of the original actors in Moliere's 
 plays, 140. 
 
 ALBI, Moliere played at, 101. 
 
 ALEXANDRINE metre used by Moliere in 
 nearly all of his plays in verse, 208. 
 
 "ALLER a la comedie" meant going to the 
 play, 96. 
 
 Amants Magnifiqiies (Les), comedy by 
 Moliere ; not acted at the Palais Royal 
 theatre, 470. 
 
 Amour Medecin (Z/), comedy by Moliere, 
 395-408. The satire against the doctors in 
 this comedy was not coarse, 402 ; names 
 of all the original actors in the play not 
 known, 408. Its success on the stage, 
 278 ; 283. 
 
 Amphitryon, comedy by Moliere, 447-450. 
 Written in " vers libres," 447, 448. Moliere 
 did not mean to flatter or to insult the 
 king, 448, 449. The play shows that 
 Moliere had not a high sense of the feeling 
 of poetry, 449, 450. Proverbial quotations 
 from this comedy, 450. Uncertainty as to 
 the original actors in, 450. Its success on 
 the stage, 278 ; 283. 
 
 ANALYSIS of yearly receipts taken by 
 Moliere's troop, 275, 276. 
 
 Androtfiede, tragedy by P. Corneille, played 
 by Moliere's troop at Lyons, 110, 111. 
 
 " ANIMAUX," term of banter against actors 
 used by Moliere, 100 ; and against women, 
 310. 
 
 " ANNONCE" (The), 237, 238. 
 
 ARCHBISHOP of Paris (The), condemns the 
 Tartuffe, and was his censure just? 351- 
 353. 
 
 ARISTOTLE and Horace ; wrong consideration 
 given to them by the authors of plays, 260- 
 261. 
 
 ARVIEUX, Laurent d', assists Moliere with 
 the Turkish ceremony in the Bourgeois 
 Gentilhomme, 483, 484. 
 
 ASPECTS, Different, of, the Hotel de Bour- 
 gogne and Palais Royal theatres, 254-265. 
 
 Assouci, d', met Moliere at Lyons, 116, 117. 
 Satirised by Boileau, 552. 
 
 ATHEIST, Moliere wished to draw a picture 
 of an, 342 ; 372. He made his Don Juan 
 appear to be an atheist, 375, 376 ; but per- 
 haps the poet did not believe in absolute 
 atheism, 376. 
 
 AUTEUIL, Moliere rented an apartment at, 
 437. Interview between Chapelle and 
 Moliere at Auteuil, 437-440. Anecdote 
 about Moliere and his friends drowning 
 themselves at Auteuil, 550, 551. 
 
 AUTHORITY, Compulsory obedience to, ham- 
 pered the early French comic writers, 37, 38. 
 
 AUTHORS' bench on the stage, 245. 
 
 AUTHORS of plays, how they were paid, 233- 
 235. 
 
 AUTHORS read their plays to the troop, 236. 
 
 AUTHORS' shares, 235. 
 
 AUTOGRAPH receipts by Moliere, 105, 106 ; 
 
 117. 
 
 Avar* ('), comedy by Moliere, 450-460. 
 Wrong dates given to the first appeniviucc, 
 of the play, 451 . At first a failure on the 
 
 stage, later very popular, 278, 282 ,'451. 
 
 
 N 
 
562 
 
 LIFE OF MOLIEEE 
 
 nl.ji-ctions to the play because it was in 
 
 prose, 451, 452. Supposed list of the 
 
 original actors in, 460. 
 AVERAGE of receipts, see RECEIPTS. 
 AVIGNON, Moliore played at, 124. He there 
 
 first met Mignard, 124. 
 
 Ballet des Incampatibles (Le}, 114, 115. 
 
 Ballet des Muses (Le), 444, 445. 
 
 BARON as a lad was Moliere's pupil ; he gave 
 Grimarest many details for his Vie de 
 Molttre, 54. He joined Moliere's troop in 
 Paris in 1670, 470, 471. Author of 
 L'Homme d Bonnes Fortunes ; a great 
 tragic actor ; died in 1729, 471. Reported 
 liaison between him and Mile. Moliere, 
 
 499, 500. His reputation as an actor began 
 with his role of 1'Amour in PsychZ, 500. 
 He was one of the actors who went to the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne after Moliere's death, 
 
 500. Was with Moliere at the time of his 
 death, 543. 
 
 BEAUVAL and his wife join Moliere's troop. 
 471, 472. Beauval had not a whole share 
 in the theatre, 230. 
 
 BEJART, Armande, most probably daughter of 
 Joseph Bejart, 81. Date of her birth, 81 ; 
 299. As a young girl was probably known 
 as Mile. Menou, 111, 300. Moliere took 
 charge of her early education, 300. Ques- 
 tion as to her parentage, 298-307. Her 
 marriage with Moliere, 300, 301. Her 
 marriage settlement, 302. And see Mile. 
 MOLIERE. 
 
 Genevieve, daughter of Joseph 
 Bejart, 81. Was one of the members of 
 the Illustre Theatre, 82. Went with 
 Moliere into the provinces, 98. Was one 
 of Moliere's troop in Paris ; known on the 
 stage as Mile, lierve, 133. Her marriage 
 portion in 1664, 303. 
 
 Joseph, the father of Moliere's 
 future comrades Joseph, Madeleine, 
 Louis, Genevieve, and most probably of 
 Armande, 76 ; 80-82. 
 
 (aine), Joseph, son of Joseph Bejart ; 
 81 . Was one of the members of the Illustre 
 Tli.-iitre, 82. Went to Angers to be cured 
 of his stammering, 88. Sixteen months 
 later he was with the troop, 90. Went with 
 Moliire into the provinces, 98. Dedicated 
 a book on heraldry to the Prince de Conti, 
 115. Wrote a second book on heraldry, 122. 
 Was one of Moliere's troop in Paris, 133. 
 His uejith, 133, 134. Evidence that he was 
 
 a good actor, 134. Story that he left at his 
 death 24,000 ecus is a fable, 134. 
 
 BEJART (cadet), Louis, son of Joseph Bejart, 
 81. Went with Moliere into the provinces, 
 98. Was one of Moliere's troop in Paris, 
 133. Moliere alludes to his lameness in 
 the Avare, 454. He retired from the stage 
 in 1670 with a pension, 470. Died in 1678, 
 557. 
 
 Madeleine, daughter of Joseph Bejart, 
 first accounts of, 76, 77. Moliere's 
 love for her did not make him go on the 
 stage, 77 ; 98. She was allowed to choose 
 her parts at the Illustre Theatre, 83. She 
 went with Moliere into the provinces, and 
 at first shared with him the leadership of 
 the troop, 98, 99. Said to have had 
 authority over Moliere, 109. She signed 
 an agreement to rent the Theatre du 
 Marais in Paris, 127. Was one of Moliere's 
 troop in Paris, 133. In her will she said 
 that Moliere's wife was her sister, 304. 
 She died in 1672, 558. 
 
 BEJARTS, deaths of the, 557, 558. 
 
 BELIEFS, religious, An idea of Moliere's, 385. 
 
 BERGERAC, Cyrano de, read philosophy with 
 Moliere and others under Gassendi ; his 
 wild behaviour, 64. His comedy Le 
 Pedant Jmie, 495. 
 
 BERNIER, Fra^ois, schoolfellow of Moliere's ; 
 traveller and philosopher, 63-65. 
 
 BEZIERS, Moliere played at, 119 ; 121. 
 
 BLANK verse, No French comedy in, 12 ; 208. 
 
 BOILEA.U said there was no good comedy 
 in France before Moliere, 33. His harsh 
 judgment on Grimarest's Vie de Moliere, 
 54. Boileau respected Moliere and ad- 
 mired his work, 54, 55. His satire on 
 bigotry, 55. How he advised Chapelle 
 not to drink so much wine, 64. He re- 
 gretted the loss of Moliere's early farce, 
 Le Docteur Ammireux, 137. His opinion 
 of Moliere's caricature, 196. Shortly be- 
 fore Moliere's death he advised him to give 
 up acting, 257. His lines to Moliere on 
 the Ecole des Femmes, 313. He relates 
 what was Louis xiv.'s opinion of the Tar- 
 tu/e, 343. Alludes to a private reading 
 of the Tartu/e, 346. Went with Moliere 
 to M. de Lamoignon, 349, 350. His portrait 
 of a director of conscience, 358. He gave 
 Moliere Greek names for the doctors in 
 the Amour Medecin, 403, 404. Boileau was 
 not unlike Alceste in the "scene du son- 
 net" in the Misanthrope, 420. His praise 
 of Moliere to Louis xiv., 442. His criti- 
 
INDEX 
 
 563 
 
 cism on the Fourberies de Scapin partly 
 true, partly mistaken, 493, 494. His dis- 
 like to the abbe Cotin, 509. Personalities 
 in his satires, 511. He ridiculed Cotin 
 and Menage, 517. Story telling how he 
 and others wished to drown themselves at 
 Auteuil, 550, 551. He gave Moliere some 
 small assistance with his comedies, 551. 
 Similarity between Boileau, Moliere, and 
 Pascal in their dislike to false taste in 
 literature, 551, 552. 
 
 BOISROBERT, his comedies, 31, 32. 
 
 BON horn me in the 17th century meant an 
 old man, 383 note 2. 
 
 BORDEAUX, Doubtful if Moliere played at, 100. 
 
 BORROWINGS, Why Moliere's, in comedy, 
 were better than those of his predecessors, 
 143, 144. 
 
 BOSSUET spoke too harshly of Moliere after 
 his death, 544, 545. 
 
 BOULANQER de Chalussay, Le, his comedy 
 Elomire Hypocondre, 67. He thought 
 Moliere had been called to the bar, 68. 
 
 Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Le), comedy by 
 Moliere, 472-492. Lulli composed the 
 music for this comedy, 473. The charac- 
 ter of M. Jourdain was drawn to fit in 
 with the grotesque extravaganza at the 
 end of the play, 473 ; 483. How the 
 Turkish ceremony arose, 483. What 
 Louis xiv. and his courtiers thought of 
 the comedy, 490, 491. The original actors 
 in the play, 492. Its success on the stage, 
 277-279 ; 283. 
 
 BOURSAULT, his part in the quarrel after the 
 Ecole des Femmes, 316, 317 ; 324-334. 
 
 BOX-OFFICE, Evidence of the, taken as the 
 sole test of the fortunes of Moliere's plays 
 when new, 280, 281. 
 
 BRECOURT joins Moliere's troop, 298. He 
 leaves Moliere, 339. His two comedies, 
 281 ; 298 ; 532. 
 
 BRIE, de, an actor in Moliere's troop in the 
 provinces, 111. Belonged to it in Paris ; 
 not a good actor, 133. 
 Mile, de, joined Moliere's troop in the 
 provinces, 103, 104. Moliere said to have 
 been fond of her, 108, 109. Took three 
 parts in one play, 111. Belonged to 
 Moliere's troop in Paris, 133. Record of 
 her success in the Ecole des Femmes ; she 
 must have been popular, 312, 313. 
 
 BROSSETTE, Notes taken by, of what Boileau 
 thought about Moliere, 343 ; 349; 403; 436. 
 
 BRUYERE, La, said "Les enfants des dieux 
 naissent instruits," 60. He laughed at 
 
 the precieuses ridicules, 158, 159. He 
 and Fenelon criticised Moliere's style, 
 206. La Bruyere and his one book Les 
 Caraderes, 314, 315. He satirised the 
 "directeurs" and the "devots," 358-360. 
 Personalities in his Caracteres, 511. He 
 and Boileau reprinted oftener than any con- 
 temporary author, 511, 553. La Bruyere 
 said : " Faiseur de bons mots, mauvais 
 caractere," 526. 
 
 BUFFOONS and mountebank actors, see Chap, 
 iii. 
 
 BURLESQUE writers, Scarron the chief of in 
 his day, 30. This style censured by 
 Boileau, 552. 
 
 C 
 
 CALVIMONT, Madame de, Moliere's troop 
 play before her, 113. 
 
 CARCASSONNE, Moliere played at, 101 ; 108. 
 
 CARICATURE, necessary in comedy, 47 ; 193, ^ 
 194 ; 400, 401 ; 512, 513. Without truth 
 caricature shows only absurdity, 192. 
 How Moliere used caricature in comedy, 
 193-196. Good caricature has its truth 
 and its naturalness ; it does not destroy 
 the comedy in a play if truly shown, 194- 
 196 ; 400, 401 ; 512, 513. 
 
 CARICATURIST, Moliere was not a, 194, 195. \/ 
 
 CARTE de Tendre (The), 160 note. 
 
 " CASTIGAT ridendo mores" applies to 
 Moliere, 181. 
 
 CEREMONIE (La), in the Mcdade Imaginaire, 
 541, 542. 
 
 Turque (La), in the Bourgeois Gentil- 
 homme, 486-488. How it arose, 483, 484. 
 
 CHALUSSAY, see BOULANGER. 
 
 CHAPELLE, Moliere's schoolfellow and life- 
 long friend, 63-65. Unlikely that he was 
 the author of the Fameuse Comedienne, 
 109, 110. Allusion to a letter from him to 
 Moliere about bickerings in the troop at 
 the Palais Royal theatre, 132. Allusion 
 to another letter from him to Moliere 
 about young Armande Bejart, 300. He 
 was co-tenant with Moliere in a house at 
 Auteuil, 437. Moliere regrets Chapelle's 
 over- fondness for wine, 437. Interview 
 between Chapelle and Moliere in the 
 garden at Auteuil, 437-439. Chapelle 
 may perhaps have furnished the substance 
 of the story, 110; 437. How Chapelle 
 and others wished to drown themselves at 
 Auteuil, 550, 551. 
 
 CHAPPUZEAU, Samuel : his book Le Thedtre 
 
564 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 Francois, 227. Quotations from it, Chap. 
 ix. passim. Two comedies by him, 289, 290. 
 
 CHARACTERISATION in an animate sense al- 
 most unknown in French, comedy before 
 Moliere's day, 36. Characterisation in 
 Moliere's comedies, 187-197. Moliere 
 thought more of characterisation than of 
 plot, 187-189 ; 530, 531. There is charac- 
 terisation of incident as well as of the 
 personages, 187-189. Moliere's personal 
 characterisation was intellectually his 
 strongest point, and how he strove to 
 show it, 188, 189. Personal characterisa- 
 tion stands above plot, 189. How Moliere 
 drew his personal characterisation, 188- 
 191. True characterisation is not pro- 
 duced by modelling ; to be natural it must 
 be partly creative, 191. Moliere's faculties 
 for showing it, 191. Moliere did not mean 
 to draw the characteristics of his wife or 
 his own in the Misanthrope, 431-434. 
 
 CHARACTER-MONGER, Moliere was not a, 218. 
 
 CHARACTER- PAINTING : P. Corneille was per- 
 haps the first French comic dramatist who 
 attempted it, 20, 21. Moliere's subtle 
 use of language helped him to show it, 
 206. See CHARACTERISATION. 
 
 CHARACTERS, Middle or temperate, in comedy, 
 and how Moliere showed them, 191-193. 
 
 Cocue Imaginaire (La), comedy by F. Do- 
 neau, 172. 
 
 Cocu Imaginaire (Le), see Sganarelle. 
 
 COLLEGE de Clermont (Le), 59-61. 
 
 ' ' COMEDIE ( La), " meant a play of any kind, 96. 
 
 COMEDIE Francaise (La), dates from 1680; 
 how it was formed, 225, 226. 
 
 COMEDIES were generally played in the 
 summer, tragedies in the winter, 240, 241. 
 
 COMEDIES-BALLETS, Moliere wrote twelve for 
 court fetes, 252. What they were, 296. 
 
 COMEDY, Adoption of the word in France, 
 5. It was brighter before the renaissance 
 of the drama than for a century after- 
 wards, 5. Idea of French comedies in the 
 latter half of the 16th century, 10, 11. 
 Before 1629 comedies were very much less 
 numerous than tragedies, 11. Comedy in 
 France was injured by the laws of the 
 unities, 15-17; 198. What comedy is, 
 what it means, 33 ; 176 ; 189. Is of slow 
 birth, 34 ; 42. Was hindered by pedantry, 
 35. Early French comedy was inanimate, 
 36-38. Before 1640 French comedy was 
 too formal, 40. Foundation of comedy 
 difficult to determine, 42. Moliere's ideas 
 of comedy, Chap. viii. passim. Useless 
 
 to speak of comedy absolutely ; it should 
 be looked at from a large point of view, 
 
 175, 176. Comedy should have a moral, 
 
 176. The office of comedy, 176, 177. 
 Moliere thought that comedy should re- 
 prove by satire, 176-181 ; 413. Comedy 
 must amuse, 176; 178; 309. High and 
 low comedy have been confounded, 178, 
 179. Moliere's plays perhaps best desig- 
 nated as high and popular comedy, 179 ; 
 441. The 'comedy in a play lies in the 
 characterisation, 188. Moliere mixed 
 comedy and farce together, 196. The 
 language of comedy has its own uses, 206, 
 207. Moliere would sacrifice regularity of 
 language to get a true picture of comedy, 
 222. Moliere's two first one-act comedies 
 were said to be farces, 254. Moliere said : 
 "comedy is perhaps more difficult to write 
 than tragedy," 321. Moliere battled for 
 the truth of comedy, 321, 322. Some of 
 Moliere's comedies were written to com- 
 plement ideas seen in a former play, 464, 
 465 ; 559. Love of true comedy was in 
 Moliere's nature, 531. To show comedy 
 was the purpose of Moliere's work, 548. 
 
 COMIC, Meaning of the word, 176. Comic 
 characterisation was Moliere's study, 197. 
 The comic dramatist tries to show comic 
 ideals of types of men and women, 412, 413. 
 Comic raillery in the Femm,es Savantes, 503. 
 
 " COMMEDIA dell' arte" (La), 72-74 ; 146. 
 
 COMPOSITION, Moliere's facility of, 204, 205. 
 
 Comtesse d' Escarbagnas (La), comedy by 
 Moliere, 527, 528. Success of the play 
 on the stage, 278, 283. 
 
 CONDE, Prince de, The Tartu/e was played 
 before him at Raincy in November 1664, 
 341. His witty answer to the king about 
 the Tartu/e and Scaramouche, 343, 344. 
 His esteem for Moliere, 552, 553. 
 
 CONFRERES (Les) de la Passion played the 
 mysteries in Paris, 1, 2. They hired a 
 theatrical company, 2, 3. Were jealous of 
 their privilege, 2, 3. They let the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne theatre to a troop of actors, 
 3 ; 56. The Corporation suppressed, 3. 
 
 CONTI, Prince de, Moliere's schoolfellow, 60. 
 Moliere's troop play before him in the 
 provinces and he becomes their protector, 
 112-119. The prince wished to make 
 Moliere his secretary, 115, 116. Conti 
 wrongly orders moneys to be given to 
 Moliere's troop, 118. After Conti's con- 
 version in 1656 he censed to be the pro- 
 tector of Moliere's troop, 119 ; 122. 
 
INDEX 
 
 565 
 
 COPYRIGHT, Dramatic, in Moliere's day, 
 customs of, 166 ; 233. 
 
 CORNEILLE, Pierre, his comedies, 17-27. 
 Melite, a comedy, his first play, 18. He 
 explains some of his ideas of comedy, 19. 
 He improved the tone of comedy, 19, 20. 
 Was perhaps the first comic dramatist 
 who attempted character-painting, 20, 21. 
 Partly an originator, 21 ; but his scenes 
 want strength and playfulness, 21, 22. 
 He wished to show the "honnete homme," 
 23. In the " suivante " he made a woman 
 represent a woman, 23. Was once one of 
 Richelieu's five authors, 24. His Illusion 
 Comique, 24, 25. Le Menteur, his best 
 comedy, 26, 27. His plays acted by 
 Moliere's troop in the provinces, 98. 
 Performance of his Andromede at Lyons, 
 110, 111. Little known of the meetings 
 between him and Moliere at Rouen in 
 1658, 125, 126. Read his Polyeucte at the 
 Hotel de Rambouillet, 152. Most of his 
 tragedies acted at the Hotel de Bourgogne, 
 258. His Attila fared badly at the Palais 
 Royal, 277 ; 281 ; 446. His Tite et Berenice 
 fared well there, 277 ; 281, 282 ; 491. He 
 and Moliere wrote Psychg together, 496-500. 
 
 CORNEILLE, Thomas (Pierre's younger 
 brother), his comedies, 32, 33. Some of 
 his plays were very successful on the stage, 
 274. Letter of his abusing Moliere's 
 troop, 320, 321. Perhaps Moliere answered 
 this by satire in the Critique de VEcole des 
 Femmes, 320, 321. He versified Moliere's 
 Don Juan, 393, 394. 
 
 CORRECTNESS of language and comic expres- 
 sion, collision between, 222. 
 
 Corrivaux (Les), comedy by Jean de la 
 Taille, 8, 9. 
 
 COSNAC, Daniel de, relates how Moliere's 
 troop first played before the Prince de 
 Conti, 113, 114. 
 
 COSTUMES, Stage, 247, 248. Those worn by 
 Moliere, 555. 
 
 COTIN, The abbe, taken off as Trissotin in 
 the Femmes Savantes, 507-512 ; 517, 518 ; 
 524, 5'25. 
 
 COURT (The), in his allusion to in the 
 Critique Moliere meant to include good 
 society, 319. Moliere upholds the court 
 against silly abuse, 523. 
 
 COURTIERS (The), how Moliere laughed at 
 them in the FAcheux, 294, 295. They 
 were amused by Moliere's comedies, but 
 did not understand them, 553. 
 
 CRESSE, Louis, Moliere's uncle, 48. 
 
 CRESSE, Louis de, Moliere's grandfather, 48. 
 Took young Poquelin to the theatre, 55. 
 
 Marie, Moliere's mother : her marriage 
 
 with Jean Poquelin, 48. Generally spoken 
 of by her maiden name, 50. Her early 
 death, and her children, 52. 
 
 Critique de VEcole des Femmes (La), comedy 
 by Moliere, 317-322. Original actors in 
 the play. 322. Success of the comedy on 
 the stage, 278, 279 ; 283. 
 
 CROISY, du, joined Moliere's troop ; re- 
 mained long on the stage, 133. 
 
 Mile, du (wife of the actor) : her share 
 
 taken from her, 229, 230. 
 
 Mile. Angelique du (daughter of the 
 
 actor), not allowed to play Mile, de Erie's 
 part in the Ecole des Femmes, 312. See 
 Mile. POISSON. 
 
 CUSTOMS of dramatic copyright in Moliere's 
 day, 233. 
 
 Stage, were the same in all French 
 
 theatres, 99 ; 227, 228. 
 
 CYRANO, see BERGERAC. 
 
 D 
 
 " DECLAMATION " at the Hotel de Bourgogne, 
 262-264. 
 
 DENOUEMENT (The) to a play with Moliere was 
 sometimes a weak point, 188. In the Tar- 
 tuff e it could hardly have been better, 368, 
 369. In the Misanthrope it is brusque, 431 ; 
 in the Femmes Savantes, not good, 525. 
 
 Depit Amoureux (Le), comedy by Moliere, 
 first played at Beziers, 121. Success of in 
 Paris, 132. The comedy in the play, 141, 
 142. What is known of the original actors 
 in the play, 142. Success of the comedy 
 on the stage after Easter 1659, 283. 
 
 DESMARETS, his comedy Les Visionnaires, 
 27, 28. Moliere may have partly taken 
 the idea of it in his Fdcheux, 294. Per- 
 haps Moliere borrowed the character of 
 Belise in the Femmes Savantes from that 
 of Hespe"rie in the Visionnaires, 518, 519. 
 
 " DEVOTS " (les), 360, 361. 
 
 DICKENS and Moliere both created laughter 
 in order to show their purpose, 195, 196. 
 
 DIJON, Moliere's troop at, 122. 
 
 "DIRECTEUR de conscience" (le), 356-362. 
 
 DISORDERS in the theatre, 248, 249. 
 
 DISTRIBUTION of the parts in a play, 236. 
 
 Docteur Amoureux (Le), early farce of 
 Moliere's played before the king in Paris, 
 131. Boileau regretted its loss, 137. 
 
 DOCTORS, Moliere had a poor opinion of 
 those of his day, 396 ; 398-400 ; 402 ; 529, 
 
566 
 
 LIFE OF 
 
 530 ; 535, 536. A 17th century epigram 
 against them, 400. 
 
 "DoMESTiQUE," Meaning of, in the seven- 
 teenth century, 455 note 1. 
 
 DONEAU, F., author of the comedy La Cocue 
 Imaginaire, 172. 
 
 Don Garde de Navarre, heroic-comedy by 
 Moliere, a failure, and reasons why,286-289. 
 Partial likeness between Don Garcie and 
 Alceste in the Misanthrope, 288, 289 ; 411, 
 412. Don Garcie acted only nine times, 
 283 ; 287, 288. 
 
 Don Japhet d'Armtnie, comedy by Scarron, 
 29,30. 
 
 Don Juan, comedy by Moliere, 371-392. 
 Was written after the Tartu/e, and was its 
 counterpart, 342; 372. Why Moliere 
 wrote it, 372. Many of its scenes are 
 episodical, 373. The first conception of 
 a Don Juan came from Spain, 373, 374. 
 Many plays were written with Don Juan 
 for a hero, 374, 375. Differences in 
 personal characterisation between Spanish 
 and Italian Don Juans and Moliere's, 375, 
 376. Textual differences in Moliere's play, 
 
 376, 377. The main features in the play, 
 
 377. The comedy tells how Moliere 
 showed strong reproof by jesting satire, 
 377-392. The Sganarelle in this play 
 unlike his namesakes, 378. The " moine 
 bourru,"382, 383. The "scene du panvre," 
 383, 384. Don Juan was meant to be 
 thoroughly wicked, 384-386. A word 
 about Moliere's religious belief, 385. Don 
 Juan's speech against and in favour of 
 hypocrisy, 388, 389. Original actors in 
 the comedy, 392. Pamphlets for and 
 against the play, 392, 393. Don Juan 
 not printed in Moliere's lifetime, 393. 
 Moliere's prose play rendered into verse by 
 Thomas Corneille, 393, 394. Success of 
 Moliere's play on the stage, 276, 278, 279 ; 
 and note 1 to 283. 
 
 Don Quixote, The French translation of, 
 increased the taste for romantic plots on 
 the French stage, 145. The novel shows 
 caricature and true comedy, 196. 
 
 'DOUBLE, Jouer au," 243, 244. 
 
 DRAMA, Separation of the profane from the 
 sacred element in, and struggle between 
 the scholars and the popular writers for 
 the first formation of, 35. A drama should 
 show how people of different natures act 
 d react upon one another, 176. Moliere 
 satirised the rules for the drama 198 260 
 and note. 
 
 "DROITS d'auteur," Early and later plan of 
 
 the, 234, 235. 
 
 "DROIT des pauvres (le)," 249. 
 DUFEESNE, at first leader of Moliere's troop 
 
 in the provinces, later he gave up the lead 
 
 to Moliere, 99-101 ; 104. Left the stage, 
 
 132. 
 
 E 
 
 EARNESTNESS and ridicule, Moliere mixed 
 them together, 180, 181 ; 462-464. 
 
 EASTER, the end and the beginning of the 
 f theatrical year, 228, 229. 
 
 Ecole des Femmes (L'), comedy by Moliere, 
 
 ^308-312. Its brightness, 309. f Written 
 
 with the same purpose as the Ecole des 
 
 Maris, 309, 310. Original actors in, 312. 
 
 Its success on the stage, 278, 279; 283. 
 
 f Warfare that followed the comedy, 315-325. 
 
 Ecole des Maris (Z'), comedy by Moliere, 
 290-292. A satire against the bad bring- 
 ing up of young girls, 290, 291. Original 
 actors in, 291. Its success on the stage, 
 278 ; 282. 
 
 EFFECT, Moliere thought how his verses 
 would sound on the stage ; he tried to show 
 comic effects, 203-205 ; 220, 221. Dramatic 
 effects more necessary in a comedy than 
 literary flavour, 220, 221. 
 
 ELOCUTION, Moliere wished for simple 
 manner of speaking on the stage, 261-264. 
 
 ^ELOMIRE," anagram of Moliere, 323. 
 
 Elomire Hypocondre, comedy by Le Bou- 
 langer de Chalussay, 67, 68. 
 
 ^'ENFANTS (Les) par 1'oreille," 319. 
 
 EPERNON, Due de, becomes protector of 
 Moliere's troop, 99 ; this protection ceased, 
 104. 
 
 "^ ESPRIT gaulois" in Sganarelle, 169, 170. 
 
 Etourdi (L'), Moliere's first comedy, first 
 played at Lyons, 111, 112. Its success in 
 Paris, 132. What it was like, 137-140. 
 Original actors in, 140, 141. Its success 
 on the stage after Easter 1659, 283. 
 
 Eugene, the earliest French comedy, by 
 Jodelle, 8. 
 
 EXAGGERATION in comedy, see CARICATURE. 
 Some exaggeration in acting allowed by 
 Preville, 270. 
 
 " EXTRAORDINAIRE, Jouer a 1'," 243, 244. 
 
 Facheux (Les}, comedy by Moliere, 292-298. 
 La Fontaine's praise of the comedy, 293. 
 In it Moliere laughed at the grandees, 294. 
 The first of his comedies-ballets, 296 
 
INDEX 
 
 567 
 
 Original actors in the play, 297. Its suc- 
 cess on the stage, 278, 279 ; 283. 
 
 FADS, Moliere revealed men's, 195, 196. 
 
 FAIRS, When strolling Moliere's troop pro- 
 bably played at the, 97. 
 
 FALSTAFF, Partial likeness between and 
 Sganarelle in the comedy of that name, 
 169, 170. 
 
 Fameuse Comedienne (La), an anonymous 
 book to be read with caution ; doubts as to 
 its authorship ; speaks of Moliere's rela- 
 tions with the actresses in his troop at 
 Lyons, 109, 110; 505. Speaks of young 
 Armande Bejart, 299, 300. Says that 
 Armande was Madeleine Bejart' s daughter ; 
 the book was written spitefully, 306. 
 Eelates the interview between Moliere and 
 Chapelle at Auteuil, 437-439. Tells of a 
 liaison between Baron and Mile. Moliere, 
 499. 
 
 FAMILIARITY and sympathy necessary for 
 real comedy, 45 ; 494, 495. 
 
 FARCE, the mother of comedy, 5 ; 4(j). Farce 
 was the old word for comedy in France, 5. 
 It was banished from the Hotel de Bour- 
 gogne, 5; 40; 261. Early French farces, 
 were popular, and were printed oftener 
 before the renaissance of the drama than 
 after it, 12 ; 35. Unfairly treated on the 
 early French stage, 38 ; 40. Moliere began 
 his authorship by writing farces, 41. Farce- 
 acting in Paris when Moliere was a boy, 
 70, 71. Moliere's early farces, 134-137. 
 . Farce is the nonsense of comedy ; Moliere 
 mixed comedy and farce together, but in 
 his light plays comedy largely predomi- 
 nates, 196. The Precieuses and Sganarelle 
 were said to be farces, 254. A difference 
 between comedy and farce, 400, 401. There 
 is farce in the Medecin Malgre Lui, 442 ; 
 and in M. de Pourceaugnac, 468, 469. The 
 Precieuses Ridicules is not a farce, 165 ; 
 nor is George Daudi/i, 4(51, 462. 
 
 FAUTEUIL de Moliere at Pezenas,' 120, 121. 
 
 Femmes Savantes (Les), Comedy by Moliere, 
 501-527. The satire in this comedy not 
 very different from that in the Precieuses 
 Ridicules, 501 ; but there are differences 
 between the two comedies, 502. Platonic 
 love in the salons in Paris ; affectations 
 increased, 501-503. Preciosity increased 
 and was shown with less good taste, 
 503. The plot in the Femmes Sa- 
 vantes is slight, but the comic raillery 
 in the play is admirable, 503. Excellence 
 of this comedy both as a reading and as an 
 
 acting play, 504. The abbe Cotin and 
 Menage were taken off in this play, see 
 COTIN and MANAGE. Moliere's opinion of 
 a femme savante was the same as that of 
 Mile, de Scudery, 506. In previous plays 
 Moliere had satirised foolish society verses, 
 511, 512. He disliked the affectations of 
 the precieuses, 514. He stands up for the 
 court, 523. The denouement to the 
 Femmes Savccntes is not good, 525. Ori- 
 ginal actors in the play, 526. Some often 
 quoted lines from it, 526, 527. Success of 
 the comedy on the stage, 278, 279 ; 283. 
 
 FENELON and La Bruyere criticised Moliere's 
 style, 206. 
 
 FiVE-act plays by Moliere gave generally 
 best results, but there were exceptions, 280. 
 
 FIVE authors, Corneille was once one of 
 Eichelieu's, 24. 
 
 FLECHIER extolled the society at the Hotel 
 de Kambouillet, 154. He wrote against 
 the "devots,"360, 361. 
 
 FOIRE de Saint Germain (La), 69, 70. 
 
 FONTAINE, La, and Moliere, the most popular 
 writers of the " Sieclede Louis xiv.," 45. He 
 did not like imitation in authorship, 17. He 
 was the greatest master of "Verslibres," 
 208. His praise of Moliere's Fdcheux, 293. 
 His epitaph on Moliere, 545. In his novel, 
 Psyche, he is said to have depicted the 
 meetings of Moliere, Boileau, Racine, and 
 himself, 549, 550. 
 
 FONTENAY le Comte, Moliere played at, 101. 
 
 FODQUET asked the actors at the Palais Royal 
 to play at Vaux, 292. 
 
 "FOUR" (a), 276. 
 
 Fourberies de Scapin (Les), comedy by 
 Moliere. The comedy in is poor, 492-495 ; 
 but a good acting play, 495. Boileau's 
 criticism on partly true, partly mistaken, 
 493, 494. Some of the original actors in, 
 495. Success of, on the stage, 278 ; 283. 
 
 FREE air in all that Moliere wrote, 204. 
 
 FRIVOLITY may be a fair subject for comic 
 satire, 473, 474. 
 
 FRONDE (La), hard to say what effect it had 
 on Moliere's troop in the provinces, 102. 
 Time of, may be taken as a dividing-line 
 between the "vraies" and the "fausses 
 precieuses," 155 ; 159. 
 
 " GAGISTE," a hired actor, 229. 
 Galanteries du due d'Ossonne (Les), comedy 
 by Mairet, 17. 
 
568 
 
 LIFE OF 
 
 GASSENDI teaches Moliere philosophy, 64, 65 
 GAULTIER, Garguille and his companions 
 
 57 ; 70, 71. 
 Gazette, (La), hostile to Moliere, 256 ; 342, 
 
 343. 
 
 "GENRE noble" introduced into French 
 comedy, 12. Much was thought of it, 37 
 38. At the H6tel de Bourgogne, 261. 
 George Dandin, comedy by Moliere, 460-465. 
 It shows Molii-re's sadness, and how he 
 mixed together 'his earnestness and his 
 jesting, 462-464. In one point a counter- 
 part of the Misanthrope, 464, 559, 560. 
 Original actors in, 465. Success of, on 
 the stage, 278 ; 283. 
 GIGNAC, Two inscriptions on a drinking- 
 
 fountain at, 119, 120. 
 GILBERT'S comedy, La Vraie et la Fausse 
 
 Prtcieuse, 168 ; 173, 174 ; 281, 282. 
 Gloire du Val de Grace (La), a poem by 
 
 Moliere, 125 ; 546, 547. 
 GORLA, Marquise Therese de, her marriage 
 with du Pare, 1 08. And see PARC, Mile. du. 
 GRANDEES (The), how Moliere laughed at 
 
 them in the FAcheux, 294, 295. 
 "GRANDS Comediens (Les)," The actors at 
 the HQtel de Bourgogne were called, 163 ; 
 254 ; 261. 
 
 "GRAND seigneur, Un, mediant homme est 
 une terrible chose," is the keynote to Don 
 Juan, 375. 
 
 GRANGE, La, one of the editors of the first 
 complete edition of Moliere's works ; and 
 author of a Register of the affairs of Mol- 
 iere's troop in Paris, 128-130. (Quoted 
 afterwards very frequently.) He joined 
 Moliere's troop, 133. "Orateur" at the 
 Palais Royal theatre, 238. 
 GRATIFICATIONS given to Moliere's troop by 
 
 Louis xiv., 230 ; 250-252. 
 GRENOBLE, Moliere's troop at, 125. 
 GRIMAREST, his Vie de Moliere, 54. 
 
 HARDY, Alexandre, perhaps the founder of 
 the Theatre du Marais, 4. A very fertile 
 dramatist, 12-14. Corneille alludes to 
 him, 18. 
 
 HARPAGON and Shylock, a likeness between 
 223, -224. 
 
 " HEROES," Moliere satirised the painting of, 
 
 HERVE, Marie, widow of Joseph Bejart 80 
 She was nearly certainly the mother 
 
 of Armande Bejart, Moliere's wife, 81 ; 
 298-307. 
 
 HESNACT, Jean, 63. 
 " HONNTE homme/' the, in Corneille's day, 
 
 23. 
 
 HORACE and Aristotle, wrong consideration 
 given to them by the authors of comedies, 
 260, 261. 
 
 HOSPITAL money, 101. 
 
 HOTEL de Bourgogne, The, was considered the 
 chief theatre in Paris, 1 ; 254. Its founda- 
 tion, 2, 3. Moliere's first satire on the 
 actors at, 163; 325. The actors at the 
 Hotel tried to separate Moliere's troop, 
 173. The Hotel de Bourgogne was one of 
 the ancestors of theComedie Frai^aise, 225, 
 226. The Hotel was the first theatre to 
 establish a system of retiring pensions for 
 its actors, 230-232. The actors there tell 
 the queen-mother that they wish to serve 
 the king, 253. Different aspects of the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne and the Palais Royal 
 theatres, 254-261. More new plays acted 
 at the Hotel than at the Palais Royal, 257- 
 259. Most of Corneille's and Racine's 
 plays first acted there, 258. Style of act- 
 ing at the Hotel, 261-263. No record of 
 events kept there, 273. Montfleury, one of 
 the actors there, presents a petition to the 
 king against Moliere, 305. Possibly the 
 talk among the actors at the Hotel may 
 have been the source of the tradition of 
 the birth of Moliere's wife, 304-307. The 
 troop at the Hotel were very hostile to 
 Moliere after the success of the Ecole des 
 Femmes ; warfare between him and them, 
 315-335. Racine took his Alexandre le 
 Grand from the Palais Royal to the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne, 408-410. 
 
 de Rambouillet, sketch of the society 
 there, 147-155. Affectation at the Hotel 
 not very great at first, 150-154. In later 
 salons it grew stronger, 155-160 ; 165 ; 501- 
 503. Unlikely that Moliere's Precieuses 
 Ridicules annoyed Mme. de Rambouillet, 
 164, 165. 
 
 du Petit Bourbon, Moliere's troop 
 allowed to play there ; site of, 131. They 
 were expelled from it, 172, 173. Summary 
 of the fortunes of Moliere's troop there, 
 173, 174 ; 275. 276. 
 
 rlouRS of performance, 241. 
 HUBERT joined Moliere's troop, 339. 
 H UMANITY, Moliere's strongest characteristic, 
 45. Shown in his style, 210 and 385 note, 
 o n Juan railed at humanity, 384, 385. 
 
INDEX 
 
 569 
 
 HUMOURS of men should be shown in 
 comedy, 33, 34; 176, 177; 548. They 
 play a large part in the comedy of life, 
 192. Moliere blended them together, 194, 
 195. 
 
 I 
 
 IDEAS, Moliere's, of comedy, see Chap. viii. 
 
 IGNORAMUSES, Moliere spoke of the members 
 of his troop, in irony, as, 163 ; 329. 
 
 Illusion Comique (L'), comedy by P.Corneille, 
 24, 25. 
 
 "ILLUSTRE," Meaning of, in the second 
 quarter of the 17th century, 82 ; 155. 
 Theatre (L 1 ), 82-91. Why that name 
 was chosen, 82. The members of, open 
 their theatre in Paris and fail, 84, 85. 
 They leave one tennis-court and go to 
 another, 88, 89. Again unlucky, so their 
 troop was broken up, 89-91. The name 
 lllustre Theatre not used by Moliere in 
 the provinces, 99. 
 
 IMAGINATIVENESS and realism, Moliere 
 brought them together, 195. 
 
 IMITATION on the French stage began with 
 the renaissance of the drama, 8. Imita- 
 tion and routine were drawbacks to early 
 French comedy, 16, 17 ; 36. And in Italy, 
 72. 
 
 Jmposteur (L'), the altered name of the 
 Tar tuff e at the single performance of the 
 play, 5th August 1667, 346 ; 350. 
 
 Impromptu de V Hotel de Conde (L'), comedy 
 by A. Montfleury against Moliere, 334, 
 335. 
 
 Impromptu de Versailles (L'), comedy by 
 Moliere, a satire against the actors at the 
 H6tel de Bourgogne and against Bour- 
 sault, 326-335. All the actors in the 
 comedy play under their own names, 327. 
 In this comedy Moliere showed some 
 temper, 333, 334. Success of the comedy 
 on the stage, 278 ; 283. 
 
 Incompatibles, Le Ballet des, 114, 115. 
 
 "INTERRUPTIONS" at the Palais Royal 
 theatre, 276. 
 
 INVENTION, purely creative, is impossible, 
 191. 
 
 IRONY, Good, demands a mastery of lan- 
 guage, 210. Irony against Arnolphe, 195 ; 
 against Philinte, 414. 
 
 IRREVERENCE, charge of, cannot be fairly 
 laid against Moliere, 353 ; 385, 386. 
 
 ITALIAN comedy in Paris, 71-74. 
 
 JEALOUSY shown by the actors at the Hotel 
 
 de Bourgogne, of Moliere's troop, 253 ; 
 
 255, 256 ; 322-335. 
 JODELET joined Moliere's troop, 133. 
 Jodelet ou le MaUre Valet, comedy "by 
 
 Scarron, 30, 31. 
 JODELLE wrote Eugene, the first French 
 
 comedy, 8, 9. 
 
 LAMOIGNON, M. de, forbade the appearance 
 of the Tartuffe, 346, 347. Moliere sees 
 him about the prohibition, 349, 350. 
 
 LANGUAGE of comedy, The, has its own uses, 
 206, 207. Some licence of language 
 allowed in a comedy intended for the 
 stage. 207, 208. In the language of 
 comedy in verse Shakespeare and Moliere 
 stand supreme, 222. Language and style 
 help characterisation in comedy, 206 ; 208- 
 210. Moliere would sacrifice regularity of 
 language to get the right expression, 207 ; 
 or to get a true picture of comedy, 222 ; 
 220-223. 
 
 LARIVEY, his comedies, 9, 10. 
 
 LAUGHTER is essential in comedy, 178, 179. 
 The tone of laughter in a comedy helps to 
 characterise it, 179 ; 355. Moliere taught 
 by laughter, 181, 182; 195, 196; 355. 
 And see CARICATURE. Laughter an indi- 
 cation of character, 367. Genial laughter 
 is more effectual on the stage than clever 
 wit, 474, 475. 
 
 LAW terms used by Moliere, 68 ; 468, 469. 
 
 ' ' LE, " The word, in the Ecole des Femmes,32G. 
 
 L'EsFY joined Moliere's troop, 133. 
 
 LEWES, G. H., quotation from, on the first 
 formation of the drama, 35. 
 
 LHOSTE, F^tienne, 51. 
 
 LIGHTNESS, seeming, of Moliere's comedies, 
 196, 197. 
 
 LITERARY drama, Both Shakespeare and 
 Moliere would have rejected the theory of 
 a, 220-222. Impossible to give a literary 
 flavour to words spoken on the stage, 220, 
 221. Literary effects and stage effects, 
 differences between, in the theatre, 221. 
 Literary merits in a play have only a 
 secondary value on the stage, 287. 
 
 Louis xiv. allowed Moliere's troop to play 
 at the Petit Bourbon, 131 ; later at the 
 Palais Royal, 173. He suggests to Moliere 
 a scene for the Fdcheux, 295. Moliere 
 said that the king told him to write the 
 
570 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 Impromptu de Versailles, 327, 328. 
 Louis xiv. gave pensions to the Italian 
 companies when in Paris, to the actors 
 at the Hotel de Bourgogne, and to 
 Mnlu-re's troop, 230. He often com- 
 manded the presence of a troop of actors, 
 250. Various sums of money given 
 by the king to Moliere's troop, 250-252. 
 Louis xiv. liked Moliere's lighter comedies, 
 252, 253 ; but had little real knowledge of 
 his power, 553. Louis thought there was 
 no great harm in the Tartu/e, and if left 
 alone would have at first allowed the 
 comedy to appear, 343, 344. The king 
 allows the comedy to appear, 362, 363. 
 Louis xiv. becomes the protector of the 
 troop at the Palais Royal theatre, 394. 
 Louis xiv. was a good friend to Moliere, 
 369 ; 552. 
 
 LOVE, Moliere thought the passion of, may 
 arise without reason, 423. 
 
 LovE-scenes, Moliere's, and why as such they 
 do not generally give much pleasure, 1 98- 
 202. He thought more of his satire, 201, 
 202. 
 
 LUCRETIUS, translation of, by Moliere, 66, 67. 
 
 LULLI established the Opera in the Palais 
 Royal theatre after Moliere's death, 240. 
 He composed the airs for many of 
 Moliere's comedies-ballets, 483. Quarrel 
 between him and Moliere, 528, 529. 
 
 LYONS, Moliere's troop at, 108 ; 110, 111 ; 
 114; 116; 122. 
 
 M 
 
 MAIRET and his plays, 16, 17. 
 
 MAISON des Singes (La), Moliere's supposed 
 birthplace, 49. Interior of, 50, 51. 
 
 Afalade Jmaginaire (Le), comedy by Moliere, 
 528-542. Doubtful if Moliere had the 
 king's order to write this play, 528, 529. 
 It was planned as a comedie-ballet, 529. 
 Contains a severe attack on the doctors of 
 medicine, and the censure was shown 
 with strong ridicule, 529, 530. How far 
 did Moliere mean to express his own 
 opinions against the doctors? 535. La 
 CSrSmonie, 541, 542. Success of the 
 comedy on the stage, 278, 279 ; 283. 
 
 MARAIS, Le Theatre du, 1. Origin of, and 
 early status uncertain, 3-5. The actors 
 at, tried to separate Moliere's troop, 173. 
 Was the least fortunate of the three 
 theatres in Paris, 227. No record of 
 events kept there, 273. 
 
 Mariage Forct (Le), comedy by Moliere, 
 336-339. Success of the play on the stage, 
 278 ; 283. 
 Marquis Ridicule (Le), comedy by Scarron, 
 
 29. 
 
 MASCARILLE, the name of, 141. 
 MATAMORE (Le), 24, 25. 
 Medecin Malgre Lui (Le), comedy by Moli- 
 ere, 441-444. The words "nous avons 
 change tout cela," 443, 444. Original 
 actors in the comedy, 444. Success of 
 the play on the stage, 278; 282. This 
 comedy was not written to assist the 
 Misanthrope, 280, 441. 
 Melicerte, fragment of a comedy by Moliere, 
 
 444, 445. 
 
 Melite, a comedy by P. Corneille, 18. 
 MENAGE taken off as Va'dius in the Femines 
 
 Savantes, 509 ; 517, 518. 
 MENOU, Mile., a pet name given to Ar- 
 
 mande Bejart, 111 ; 300. 
 Menteur (Le), comedy by P. Corneille, 26, 
 
 27 ; 43. 
 Mercure de France (Le), article in, about 
 
 Moliere's acting, 268, 269 ; 271. 
 Mercure Galant (Le), praises Moliere's acting, 
 267. Established by de Vise, 316. It speaks 
 of Trissotin in the Femmes Savantes, 509. 
 MIDDLE or temperate characters in comedy, 
 
 191-193. 
 
 MIGNARD probably painted a portrait of 
 Moliere at Avignon in 1657, 124. And 
 see Preface, p. viii. Friendship between 
 him and Moliere, 125. Moliere addressed 
 a poem to him, 125 ; 546, 547. 
 Misanthrope (Le), 410-436. Perhaps the 
 finest of Moliere's comedies, 410, 411 
 Partial likeness between Alceste and Don 
 Garcie de Navarre, 288, 289 ; 411, 412 ; 
 425, 426. Vanity Fair shown in the 
 comedy, 413, 414. The moral position 
 between Alceste and Philiste should be 
 looked at from the point of view of 
 comedy, 414. Doubtful if the word 
 "misanthrope" describes Alceste exactly, 
 415 ; or if the word would be fairly applic- 
 able to Moliere, 434. A. de Musset's 
 verses on Moliere, 431. Moliere did not 
 mean to show himself as Alceste, nor his 
 wife as Celimene, 431-434. Original actors 
 in the play, 435. Success of the play on 
 the stage, 278, 283. The first edition of 
 the comedy and de Vise's letter, 435, 436. 
 MISE en scene (La), 245-247. 
 MOLIERE, Fra^ois de, a writer of novels, 87. 
 MOLIERE, Jean Baptists Poquelin, the earliest 
 
INDEX 
 
 571 
 
 true French comic dramatist, 42, 43. He 
 and La Fontaine are the most popular 
 writers of the "siecle de Louis xiv.," 45. 
 Moliere's christening, 47. He was de- 
 scended on both sides from a line of uphol- 
 sterers, 47, 48. Born in the Maison des 
 Singes, 49. The eldest of Marie Cresse's 
 children, 52. A sign that he felt the early 
 loss of his mother, 53. Taken to the 
 theatre by his grandfather, 56. What he 
 felt as a boy inside the theatre, 57. He 
 asked to be sent to school ; went to the 
 College de Clermont, 59. His schooling, 
 60-62. Moliere becomes tapissier valet de 
 chambre du roi, 62, 63. His schoolfellows, 
 63. Gassendi taught Moliere philosophy, 
 and his influence, 64, 65. Moliere trans- 
 lated Lucretius, -66, 67. Called to the bar, 
 67, 68. When young he learned much 
 from the Italian actors, 74. He did not 
 go on the stage because of his love for 
 Madeleine Bejart ; was urged by his own 
 love of acting and of comedy, 76-78. He 
 took lessons in acting from charlatans, 80. 
 He was one of the founders of the Illustre 
 Theatre, 82, 83. Uncertainty why he chose 
 the name Moliere, 86, 87. He borrowed 
 money for his own needs, 89. He was put 
 into priosn for money owing to the troop, 
 90. His father did not give him all the 
 money due to him, 94. In after years he 
 lent his father 10,000 livres, 94. Moliere 
 and his comrades left Paris to go strolling 
 in the provinces, 95 ; 97, 98. By degrees 
 he came to be leader of the troop, 100 ; 
 
 106, 107. His troop often played before 
 the Provincial States ; see PROVINCIAL 
 STATES. Moliere' s two autographs and 
 signatures, 105, 106 ; 117, 118. He was in 
 Paris in 1651, probably without his troop, 
 
 107. Moliere said to be in love with some 
 of the actresses in his troop, 108, 109. 
 His first comedy, 111 ; 137-40. Moliere 
 declined to be Secretary to the Prince de 
 Conti, 115, 116. He loses his wallet while 
 travelling, 119. First met Mignard, 124, 
 125. His troop go to Rouen, 125, 126. 
 They wish to return to Paris, 126. Mon- 
 sieur promises them his " protection," 127 ; 
 and 300 livres a year to each actor, 130, 131. 
 They arrive in Paris from the provinces, 
 127. They play before the king, October 
 1658, 131. Composition of Moliere's troop 
 at Easter 1659, 133. Moliere's early farces, 
 133-137. How Moliere's borrowings in 
 his first two comedies differed fromj;those 
 
 of his predecessors, 143-146. His Pr$- 
 cieuses Ridicules, 160-167. Sganarelle, 
 168-172. His troop were turned out of 
 the Petit Bourbon theatre, 172, 173. 
 Moliere's comedies were almost the only 
 plays profitable to his troop at the Petit 
 Bourbon, 173, 174. 
 
 Moliere's ideas of comedy, see Chapter 
 viii. Moliere did not offer his moral as a 
 precept, 176. His ridicule and his satire 
 were governed by charitable intentions, 
 177, 178. His teaching : he was not a 
 reformer, 179-183; 355. Moliere mixed 
 together censure and jesting, earnestness 
 and laughter, and drew his lessons from 
 them, 46; 180-182; 390; 462-464. His 
 ridicule was not intended merely to create 
 laughter, 180, 181. Moliere's ridicule, like 
 Pascal's, was reverential, 180, 181 ; 353- 
 354. " Moliere, c'est la morale des hon- 
 netes gens," 182. A likeness between 
 Moliere and Thackeray, 183, 184. Moliere's 
 sadness, 183-186 ; 434. His mind was 
 naturally sceptical, 66; 200; 398; 535. 
 Futility of Rousseau's criticisms on 
 Moliere, 186. Personalities in his plays, 
 see PERSONALITIES. How Moliere grouped 
 together his personages, 186, 187. He 
 thought more of characterisation than of 
 plot, 187-189. How he used middle 
 characters in comedy, 191-193. His 
 caricature was generally justified, and 
 showed much more comedy than farce, 
 193-196; and see CARICATURE. Both 
 Moliere and Dickens created laughter in 
 order to show their purpose, 195, 196. The 
 seeming lightness of his comedy, 196, 197. 
 Moliere and the laws of the imities, 197, 
 198. His love-scenes, 198-202. Moliere 
 was not romantic, 200, 201; 217. His 
 style, 202-210. Moliere and Shakespeare, 
 210-224. 
 
 Moliere "orateur" at the Palais Royal 
 theatre, 238. Strong social prejudices 
 against Moliere and his troop, 254-256. 
 Moliere's large outlook, 260. He was the 
 father of good comedy in France, 260, 261. 
 He disliked the style of acting at the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne, 261-263. Moliere as an actor, 
 263-271. His portrait by Mile. Poisson, 
 271. Moliere reading his plays to children 
 and to his maidservant, 271 , 272. The for- 
 tunes of his comedies when new, see 
 Chapter xi. Moliere's were almost the only 
 plays profitable to his troop, 275, 276 ; com- 
 pare Tables 278 and 281 ; 281, 282 ; and see 
 
572 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 RECEIPTS. Moliere's power of rapid work, 
 204 205; 296, 297. Moliere's marriage 
 and'his wife's parentage, 298-307. Moliere's 
 early plays show a gradual improvement 
 in comedy, 308. Boileau's complimentary 
 verses to Moliere on his Ecole des Femmes, 
 313. Moliere's Remerdment au Roi, 314. 
 His quarrel with the actors at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne began with the success of the 
 ficole des Femmes, 315. Moliere pretends 
 to criticise his own play, 318. His satire 
 on "heroes," 321. Unlikely that in his 
 Critique Moliere meant to satirise Bour- 
 sault, 324. Did Moliere begin this 
 quarrel ? 325. Louis xiv. told Moliere to 
 write his Impromptu de Versailles, 327, 
 328. Heads of the satire in that comedy, 
 328. The satire against the actors at the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne was justified, but 
 against Boursault it was too sarcastic, 
 333, 334. Moliere's attitude in this 
 quarrel was better than that of his 
 enemies, 335. His Manage Force, 336- 
 339. He had to interrupt his work on 
 the Tartu/e in order to write a court 
 play, 339. 
 
 Reasons for choosing 1664 as the date of 
 the Tartu/e, 341, 342. Moliere did not 
 believe that Louis xiv. personally thought 
 there was much harm in the Tartu/e, 343, 
 344. In writing to the king Moliere twice 
 called his Majesty's religious counsellors 
 " les Tartuffes," 344, 345. Moliere's first 
 petition to the king, 345. Moliere gives 
 some readings of the Tartu/e, 346. One 
 public performance of the play, 346. His 
 second petition to the king, 347. Moliere 
 thought the king had given him leave to 
 have his play acted, 347, 348. Meaning of 
 the word^ljiEtufiV'-^iaL Moliere sees M. 
 de Lamoignon, 349, 350. Moliere did not 
 attack religion or honest work done by the 
 priests ; he did attack falsehood, 352, 353. 
 Moliere was like Pascal in his ridicule, 
 353, 354. Moliere knew that in the 
 Tartu/e he was making a very serious 
 charge, but he was not a reformer, 355. 
 He did not write the play from a spiritual 
 point of view, 361. He did not draw his 
 Tartuffe from any one individual, 362. 
 The king allows Moliere to have the Tar- 
 tu/e acted, 362, 363. Moliere's words give 
 perhaps a better idea of the comedy in the 
 Tartu/e than any stage representation, 367, 
 368. Moliere proclaims his gratitude to 
 Louis xiv., 369. He wrote his Don Juan 
 
 because the king forbade the Tartu/e, 372. 
 His conception of Don Juan different from 
 the Spanish or the Italian ideal, 375, 376. 
 In Don Juan Moliere reproved by jesting 
 satire, 379-384; 390. His purpose in 
 Don Juan, 380. An idea of Moliere's 
 religious beliefs, 385. In Don Juan and in 
 the Tartu/e he was actuated by the spirit 
 of religion, 66. Moliere again attacks " les 
 Tartuffes," 388, 389. His Don Juan put 
 into verse by Thomas Corneille, 393, 394. 
 
 Moliere had a poor opinion of the doctors 
 in his day, 396-400 ; 529, 530 ; 535, 536. 
 His quarrel with Eacine, 408-410 ; 446, 447. 
 Moliere did not mean to portray himself as 
 Alceste nor his wife as Celimene in the 
 Misanthrope, 431-434. He cannot be 
 fairly called a misanthrope, 185, 186 ; 434. 
 Moliere and Chapelle, interview between, 
 at Auteuil, 437-440. Moliere and his wife 
 were not suited for one another, 440. 
 Moliere was successful in both high and 
 popular comedy, 441, 442. During the 
 latter part of 1667 Moliere did not appear 
 on the stage, 447. In a high sense Moliere 
 was not a poet, 200 ; 449, 450 ; 548. Mol- 
 iere's purpose in the Avare, 452, 453 ; 457. 
 Some of Moliere's comedies were written 
 to complement the idea shown in a former 
 play, 464, 465; 559, 560. Moliere put 
 Baron into the troop at the Palais Royal 
 theatre, 470, 471. How Moliere showed 
 the craziness of M. Jourdain, 474. Mol- 
 iere chose Corneille as his collaborator in 
 Psyche', 496. On the whole Moliere was 
 justified in his satire against Cotin, 509- 
 511 ; 524, 525. Moliere wished more to 
 show the satire of comedy than to express 
 his own opinion against the doctors, 529, 
 530 ; 535. But he did not think well of 
 them, see DOCTORS La Certmonie in the 
 Malade Imaginaire, 541, 542. Moliere's 
 death, 542-544. Shameful trouble about 
 his funeral, 544. La Fontaine's epitaph on 
 Moliere, 545. Why Moliere was not a 
 member of the French Academy, 545, 
 546. Moliere's Poesies Diverses, 546-548. 
 The purpose of his work was to show 
 comedy, 548. Not very much is known 
 about Moliere with his friends, 549. 
 Anecdote about Moliere and his friends 
 drowning themselves at Auteuil, 550, 551. 
 Moliere, Boileau, and Pascal disliked false 
 taste in literature, 551, 552. Moliere not 
 really understood by the king or his 
 courtiers, 553. Money earned by Moliere, 
 
INDEX 
 
 573 
 
 554, 555. Details told by his inventory, 
 
 555. His three children ; his daughter only 
 survived him, 556, 557. She married, but 
 left no issue, 557. Hints as to the best 
 plays of Moliere to read, 559. Moliere as 
 a teacher of French, 560. 
 
 MOLIERE, Mile, (and see ARMANDE BEJART), 
 question of her parentage, 298-307. Her 
 marriage with the poet, 300, 301. Her 
 name was not dragged into the quarrel be- 
 tween her husband and the actors at the 
 Hotel de Bourgogne, 305. Her first part 
 on the stage was probably in the Critique 
 de I'Ecole- des JFemmes, 322. Moliere did 
 not mean to draw her portrait as Celimene 
 in the Misanthrope, 431-434. According 
 to the author of the Fameuse Comedienne 
 she was unfaithful to her husband, 437-439 ; 
 according to Grimarest she showed her 
 indifference to him, 439, 440. She and 
 Moliere were ill matched, 440. Stories of 
 a quarrel and of a liaison between her and 
 Baron, 471 ; 499, 500. Supposed portrait 
 of, written by her husband, 479-481. Mile. 
 Moliere marries a second time, 556. 
 MOLLIER, Louis de, a musician and dancer, 
 
 87. 
 
 MONEY, Value of in Moliere's day compared 
 with ours, 232, 233. Money made by 
 Moliere, 553-555. 
 
 MONSIKUR becomes the protector of Moliere's 
 troop in Paris, 127. He promises 300 
 livres a year to each actor, but the money 
 was never paid, 130, 131. Monsieur asks 
 the king to allow Moliere's troop to play 
 at the Palais Royal theatre, 172, 173. In 
 1665 "la troupe de Monsieur" becomes 
 "la troupe du Roi," 394. 
 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, comedy by 
 Moliere, 466-470. Its wildness, 467, 468. 
 Original actors in, 469. Its success on the 
 stage, 278 ; 283. 
 
 MOKTFLEURY, Antoine, his comedy L'lm- 
 promptu de V Hotel de Conde, 334, 335. 
 - (Zacharie), presents a petition to the 
 king against Moliere, 305, 306. 
 MONTPELLIER, Moliere's troop played at, 114. 
 MORAL, There should be a, in comedy ; 
 
 Moliere disguised it, 176. 
 "MORALE (La) des homiOtes gens," what it 
 
 means, 182. 
 
 MORALITY, Code of, in Moliere's plays, 182. 
 Music in the theatres, 240. 
 MUSSET, A. de, his tribute to Moliere, 431. 
 MYSTERES (Les), played in Paris ; forbidden 
 later, 1, 2. 
 
 N 
 
 NANTES, Moliere's troop at, 101. 
 
 NARBONNE, Moliere's troop at, 103 ; 118. 
 
 NEUFVILLENAINE printed Sganarelle fraudu- 
 lently, 171, 172. 
 
 NEW and old plays, Dividing lines between, 
 174. 
 
 NINON de Lenclos, a reading of the Tartu/e 
 at her house, 346. 
 
 " Nous avons change tout cela," 443, 444. 
 
 
 
 OBSERVATION, Sympathetic and accurate, is 
 at the bottom of good work, 296, 297. 
 
 ORATEUR (L') of the troop, 237, 238. 
 
 ORATORICAL tone in Moliere's style, 204; 
 523. 
 
 ORIGINALITY, Moliere showed his in his per- 
 sonal characterisation and in his style, 197. 
 
 ORLEANS, Duke of, becomes protector to the 
 members of the Illustre Theatre. 85, 86. 
 He withdraws his protection, 90, 91. 
 
 PALAIS Royal theatre and interior of, 241- 
 243. Its size, 244. Different aspects of 
 this theatre and the H6tel de Bourgogne, 
 254-265. Moliere's troop began to play there 
 in January 1661, 286. Theatre renovated 
 and enlarged, 498. After Moliere's death 
 it was given to Lulli for the Opera, 225. 
 
 PARC, du (Rene Berthelot), joined Moliere's 
 troop at Albi, 101. His marriage with 
 Marquise Therese de Gorla, 108. He and 
 his wife leave Moliere's troop but return a 
 year later, 132, 133. His death, 339. 
 
 Mile, du (wife of the above, nee Mar- 
 quise Therese de Gorla), joined Moliere's 
 troop at Lyons, 108. Moliere said to have 
 been fond of her, 109. She was perhaps 
 the cause of Moliere's troop playing before 
 the Prince de Conti, 113, 114. She won 
 compliments from the two Corneilles at 
 Rouen, 125. In 1667 she left Moliere's 
 troop finally ; died next year, 446, 447. 
 
 PARTERRE (Le), or pit, the popular and the 
 cheapest part in the theatre, 242, 243. 
 Moliere trusted in the judgment of the 
 parterre, 245. 
 
 PARTS (in a new play), how distributed, 236. 
 
 PASCAL gives a happy idea showing freshness 
 of thought, 143, 144. Both he and Mol- 
 iere used ridicule as a weapon of attack 
 against frauds, 180, 181 ; 353, 354. Pascal 
 
574 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^KE 
 
 said he was not sorry he had written the 
 Lettres Provinciales, 372. He said : " Fai- 
 seur de bons mots, mauvais caractere, 
 526. Similarity between him and Molu-re 
 in their dislike to false taste in literature, 
 
 Pastorale Comique (La), sketch by Moliere, 
 
 445. 
 " PAUVRE, La scene du," in Don Juan, 383 
 
 385. 
 
 PEDANTRY hindered early comedy in France, 
 35. Moliire ridiculed pedantry in the 
 GrUiqiie de VEcole des Femmes, in the 
 Mariage Force, in the Femmes Savantes, 
 and in his plays against the doctors, 
 
 PENSIONS given to actors by the king, 230. 
 Retiring pensions established by the actors 
 amongst themselves, 230-232. Pension 
 and other moneys given by Louis xiv. to 
 Moliere's troop, 250-252. Pension accorded 
 to Moliere as bel esprit, 314. 
 
 PKRKFIXE, Hardouinde, Archbishop of Paris, 
 gave a mandate against the Tartu/e, 
 351. 
 
 PERFORMANCES, number of, together with 
 the receipts, the best means of testing the 
 success of an old play, 273, 274. And see 
 RECEIPTS and REPRESENTATIONS. 
 
 PERSONALITIES in Moliere's plays were mostly 
 unintentional or half-conscious, 190, 191 ; 
 294, 295 ; 362 ; 402 ; 433, 434. But see 
 BOURSAULT andCoTiN, whom the dramatist 
 marked more particularly. Personalities 
 in Boileau and in La Bruyt-re, 510, 511. 
 
 PERSONAL opinions, Moliere never thrust his 
 forward, 506, 507. 
 
 PEZENAS, Moliere's troop at, 105, 106 ; 113, 
 114 ; 117, 118 ; 124. Moliere's arm-chair 
 at Pezenas, 120, 121. 
 
 Philosophic (La) dans les Comedies de Mol- 
 iire, 338 note. 
 
 PiJAKDifcRE, M. de la, discovered two auto- 
 graph signatures of Moliere's, 105, 106 ; 
 117. He thought that the Prince de Conti 
 wrongly ordered the States to give money 
 to Moliere's troop, 118. 
 
 I'lxixirs (Les) de rile enchantee, 339, 340. 
 
 PLATONIC love at the Hotel de Rambouillet, 
 154, 
 
 I'I.AYS, new and old, dividing-lines between, 
 171. 
 
 PLEIADE (The), writers of, were not distinc- 
 liv.lv i.l.-iy wrists, 7,8. 
 
 M"!MVS. were not the strongest part 
 of his work, 5oO, 5U1. And see CHARAC- 
 TERISATION. 
 
 POET, Moliere was not fully a, 209 ; 449, 450 ; 
 
 548. But he showed poetical feeling in the 
 
 Ecole des Femmes and in the Misanthrope, 
 POISSON, Mile., her portrait of Moliere, 271. 
 PONT-NEUF (The), was in a popular sense the 
 
 centre of Paris, 70. 
 POQUELIN, Esprit Madeleine, Moliere's 
 
 daughter, survived him, 556, 557. 
 
 (Jean), Moliere's father, an upholsterer 
 in Paris, married Marie Cresse, 47, 48. 
 Became tapissier du roi, 51. A sign of 
 his success in business, 51. He educated 
 his children at home, 51. He married a 
 second time, 53. He did not wish to keep 
 Moliere ignorant, 61, 62. He secured his 
 court appointment for his son, 62. His 
 disgust when his son wished to be an actor ; 
 still he gave him 630 livres, 78, 79. Money 
 transactions between him and his children, 
 91-95. The year before his death Moliere 
 lent him 10,000 livres, 94. His business 
 probably declined, 95 ; 558. Very unlikely 
 that Moliere portrayed his father as Har- 
 pagon, 558. 
 
 Moliere's grandfather, an uphol- 
 sterer in Paris, 47. 
 
 Jean Baptiste, see MOLIERE. 
 
 (Jean), called "1'autre Jean," and later 
 
 "Jean le jeune," Moliere's brother, 52; 
 92, 93. 
 
 Louis and Pierre, two sons of Moliere's 
 
 who died in infancy, 556. 
 
 Princesse d 1 Elide (La), comedy by Molu-re, 
 
 339, 340. 
 
 PROSE : Moliere's satire perhaps shown more 
 popularly in his prose than in his verse, 
 and in his prose his vis comica is strongest, 
 210. Moliere's comedies in prose made a 
 little more money than those in verse, 280. 
 Prejudice against serious comedies in prose, 
 372 ; 451, 452. 
 
 PROVINCES, Strolling in the, Chapter v. 
 
 PROVINCIAL States (The), what they were, 
 104, 105. Moliere's troop often played 
 before them, 105, 106; 114, 115; 117, 
 118 ; 121 ; 124. 
 
 theatre, Sketch of a, 102, 103. 
 Psyche, tragedie-ballet, written by Moliere 
 
 and P. Corneille, 496-500. Reference to 
 the actors who played in it, 500. Its 
 success on the stage, 278, 279 ; 283 ; 498. 
 
 " QUE diable allait-il faire dans cette galere ? " 
 495. 
 
INDEX 
 
 575 
 
 QUINAULT wrote a very small part of Psyche, 
 
 496, 497. 
 QUOTATIONS from Amphitryon, 450 ; and 
 
 from the Femmes Savantes, 526, 527. 
 
 R 
 
 RACINE, most of his plays acted at the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne, 258. His two first tragedies 
 were acted at the Palais Koyal, 277. Ra- 
 cine said that Montfleury had presented a 
 petition to the king against Moliere, 305. 
 Racine's unhappy quarrel with Moliere, 
 408-410. Further cause for quarrel between 
 the two poets, 446, 447. 
 
 RAILLERY, against M. Jourdain, 474 ; in the 
 Femmes Savantes, 503. Difference be- 
 tween Moliere's raillery in prose and in 
 verse, 210. 
 
 RANTING at the Hotel de Bourgogne theatre, 
 261-262. 
 
 REALISM and imaginativeness, Moliere 
 brought them together, 195. 
 
 RECEIPTS (The), made by an old play, together 
 with the number of its performances, the 
 best way of testing its success, 273, 274. 
 Daily average of the receipts at Moliere's 
 two theatres, 275, 276. They varied con- 
 siderably, 276, 277. Average of daily 
 receipts made by Moliere's comedies when 
 new, 274, 275 ; 277-279. Average of daily 
 receipts made by new plays not written by 
 Moliere, 281, 282. 
 
 REDUIT, 162 note. 
 
 REGISTER at Moliere's theatre, see GRANGE, 
 La. No register kept at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne nor at the Theatre du Marais, 
 273, 274. 
 
 Remerdment au Roi, poem by Moliere, 314 ; 
 548. 
 
 RENAISSANCE of the drama in France injured 
 comedy temporarily, 5. It took place 
 about 1550, and introduced imitations, 
 7,8. 
 
 REPRESENTATIONS, Number of, each of 
 Moliere's plays had from 1659 to 1870, 
 282-284. 
 
 REPUBLICANISM common among French 
 actors in the 17th century, 99 ; 227, 228. 
 
 RICHELIEU employed live authors to write 
 plays for him, 24. He made an angry fuss 
 when Corneille's Cid was very successful, 
 335. 
 
 RIDICULE and absurdity in fable and in 
 comedy are not synonymous, 170 ; 194 ; 
 
 401. Ridicule with Moliere was not in- 
 tended merely to create laughter, 180, 181. 
 Both Pascal and Moliere used ridicule as a 
 weapon of attack against frauds, 180, 181 ; 
 353, 354. In three plays Moliere used 
 ridicule as a means of causing horror and 
 disgust, 385, 386. And see SATIRE. 
 
 Roman Comique (Le), novel by Scarron, 96, 
 97. 
 
 ROTROU, a popular dramatist before Moliere, 
 28. Poet of the troop at the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne, 233, 234. 
 
 ROUEN, strolling actors commonly began 
 their performances there, 84. Moliere's 
 troop at, 125, 126. 
 
 ROULLE, Pierre, and his pamphlet Le Roi 
 Glorieux au Monde, 344, 345. 
 
 ROUSSEAU, J. B., owned a manuscript of 
 two of Moliere's early farces ; his criticism 
 upon them, 134, 135. 
 
 J. J., his criticisms on Moliere's A vare 
 
 and the Misanthrope are futile, 186. 
 
 ROUTINE a fault in early French comedy, 
 36. 
 
 RUELLE, 162 note. 
 
 S 
 
 SADNESS in Moliere, 183-186; 434. He 
 shows it strongly in the A vare and in George 
 Dandin, 462. 
 
 SAINTE-BEUVE said : ' ' Moliere, c'est la morale 
 des honnetes gens," 182. 
 
 SALON, the word not in use at the time of 
 the Hotel de Rambouillet, 151 note. 
 
 SARRASIN, how he introduced Moliere to the 
 Prince de Conti, 113. 
 
 SATIRE, Moliere's, was not ill-natured, 46, 
 47 ; 177, 178. Shown more delicately in 
 verse than in prose, more popularly in 
 prose than in verse, 210. Jesting satire 
 mixed with strong reproof in Don Juan 
 and in George Dandin, 379-384 ; 390 ; 462- 
 464. Moliere showed comedy by good 
 humoured satire, 531. And see RIDICULE. 
 
 Scaramouche Ermite, an imprinted comedy, 
 343, 344. 
 
 SCARRON and his comedies, 29-31. His 
 Roman Comique, 96, 97. 
 
 SCENERY, Stage, 245-247. 
 
 SCEPTICISM not synonymous with disbelief, 
 66 ; 535. 
 
 SCUDERY, Mile, de, her salon, 155-157. Her 
 novels, 156, 157 ; 160 note. They were not 
 so affected as they seem to be, 506. She 
 
576 
 
 LIFE OF MOLlilKE 
 
 used the term "femmes savantes" long 
 before Moliere did, and she did not like 
 the women, 506. 
 
 SGANARELLE, meaning of the name, 168. 
 Moliere gave this name to six characters 
 more or less alike, 168, 169. 
 
 Sganardle ou le Cocu Imaginaire, comedy 
 by Moliere, 168-171. Partial likeness 
 between the Sganarelle in this comedy and 
 Falstaff, 169, 170. Original actors in the 
 play, 171. How the comedy was printed, 
 171, 172. 
 
 SHAKESPEARE and Moliere considered, 210- 
 224. 
 
 SHARES, Actors', in the theatre: surmise 
 how the idea of partnership arose, 228. 
 How the shares were divided, 229, 230. 
 Fractions of shares, 230. Value of one 
 share at the Palais Royal theatre, 232, 233. 
 
 Authors', in a play, 234, 235. 
 SHYLOCK and Harpagon, a likeness between, 
 
 223, 224. 
 
 Sicilien (Le), comedy by Moliere, 445. 
 SINGE, Moliere called "notre singe," 326. 
 SINGES, Maison des, Moliere's birthplace, 
 
 49. 
 SOCIALISM among the actors was not merely 
 
 theoretical, 229. 
 SOTIES (The), 6. 
 SOURCE of the incidents of a play, not 
 
 material to know it, 144, 145 ; 505. 
 SPANISH actors fared poorly in Paris, 74, 
 
 75. 
 "Captains," 24, 25. 
 
 plays and novels adapted to the French 
 stage, 28, 29; 32. Moliere did not use 
 them much, 145. 
 
 SPEECH, Moliere's characters showed them- 
 selves by their, 203. Both Shakespeare 
 and Moliere gave to their words the flavour 
 of actual speech, 221. 
 
 STAGE customs, see chapter ix. 
 
 Seats on the, 245. 
 
 STATES, Provincial. See PROVINCIAL STATES. 
 
 STROLLING in the provinces, Chapter v. 
 Strolling companies had the same customs 
 as the actors in Paris, 99. They put them- 
 selves under the "protection" of a noble- 
 man, 99. The engagements of their actors 
 were not generally lasting, 100. There 
 were probably a dozen or more of these 
 troops, 107. 
 
 STYLE, Moliere's, 202-210; 219-223. See 
 LANGUAGE. 
 
 "SUIVANTB, La," 23, 24. 
 
 SYMONDS, J. A., said that the poverty of the 
 
 Italian drama was due to imitation, 
 72. 
 
 SYMPATHY and humanity, the strongest char- 
 acteristics of Moliere and of La Fontaine, 
 45. Sympathy necessary for showing 
 good comedy, 45 ; 494, 495. See OBSERVA- 
 TION. 
 
 TABARIN, a clownish actor on the Pont Neuf, 
 493 note. 
 
 TAPISSIER ordinaire du Eoi, Moliere's father 
 bought the office of, 51. Office of tapissier 
 et valet de chambre du Koi held by 
 Moliere, 62, 63. Taken from Moliere 
 temporarily and given to his younger 
 brother, 92. 
 
 "TARTE a la creme," a harmless jest satiris- 
 ing Arnolphe's folly, 319. 
 
 Tartu/e (Le), comedy by Moliere, 339-371. 
 Question as to the date of the comedy, 341. 
 Don Juan was written after the Tartuffe, 
 342; 372. The Tartuffe was prohibited 
 by Louis xiv., 342. Moliere's first petition 
 to the king about his comedy, 343-345. 
 Louis thought there was no great harm in 
 the play, but was governed by others, 343, 
 344. Pierre Koulle and his pamphlet Le 
 Roi Glorieux au Monde, 344-346. Private 
 readings of the play, 346. Single perform- 
 ance of the comedy under the title of 
 L'Imposteur, in August 1667, 346. Further 
 performances forbidden by M. de Lamoi- 
 gnon, 346, 347. Moliere's second petition 
 to the king, 347. Moliere thought the king 
 had allowed him to have his play acted, 347, 
 348. Alterations in the play before August 
 1667, 347-349; 350-351. "Un tartuffe" 
 was an old French word meaning "un 
 trompeur " ; good evidence that Moliere 
 wrote th e word with two / 's, 349. Moliere 
 sees M. de Lamoignon, 349, 350. Printed 
 account of the Tartu/e by one who saw 
 the performance in August 1667, 350, 351. 
 The Archbishop of Paris condemned the 
 play, 351. Was his censure just ? 351-353. 
 The objects of Moliere's satire, 352, 353. 
 Likeness in his satire to Pascal's, 353, 354. 
 Le Tartu/e was an actuality, 354. Severity 
 of the charge made, 355. To what order 
 of men Tartuffe belonged, ,355-362. See 
 DIRECTEUR and DIVOTS. He was not 
 drawn from one individual, 362. Louis 
 xiv. allowed the play to appear on 
 the stage, 362, 363. Some marks of the 
 
INDEX 
 
 577 
 
 comedy in the play, 363-368. The denoue- 
 ment to the Tartuffe has been wrongly 
 blamed, 368, 369. Moliere proclaims his 
 gratitude to the king, 369. The play was 
 an original comedy, 370. Actors in the 
 different parts, 370, 371. Its great success 
 on the stage, 276 ; 278, 279 ; 282. 
 
 " TARTUFFES " (The), Moliere in writing to 
 the king called dishonest churchmen by 
 this name, 344, 345. "Tartuffes" in 
 medicine, 399, 536. 
 
 TEACHING, Moliere's, 179-183. 
 
 TENNIS-COURTS often used as theatres, 83 ; 
 97 ; 241. 
 
 THACKERAY, likeness between him and 
 Moliere, 183, 184. 
 
 THEATRE (The), belonged virtually to the 
 troop of actors who rented it, 4. The 
 three French theatres in Paris after 
 October 1658, 225, 226. How they 
 became the ancestors of the Comedie 
 Fransaise, 225, 226. Paris theatres were 
 republican institutions, 227, 228. All 
 French theatres were governed by the 
 same customs, 227, 228. Theatrical year 
 ended with and began at Easter, 228, 229. 
 Paris theatres open three days a week, 237. 
 "Le theatre" in one sense synonymous 
 with the stage, 243. 
 
 THEATRES, minor, Chapter iii. 
 
 THORILLIERE, La, joined Moliere's troop, 
 298. 
 
 Tite et Berenice, tragedy by P. Corneille, the 
 only play not written by Moliere that had 
 a substantial success at the Palais Royal 
 theatre, 258 ; 281, 282. 
 
 TOULOUSE, Moliere played at, 101, 102. 
 
 TRADESMEN in Paris fond of the theatre, 56. 
 
 TRAGEDIES generally played in the winter, 
 comedies in the summer, 240, 241. 
 
 TRAGEDY more highly esteemed in Paris than 
 comedy, 260, 261 ; 321. Tragedy thought 
 to be badly acted at the Palais Royal, 264- 
 266. Moliere was a poor actor in tragedy, 
 265-267. Moliere's ideas of tragedy were 
 different from those then common, 261- 
 266. 
 
 TRALAGE, M. de, 67 and note 1. Quoted, 
 312. 
 
 TROUPE de Moliere (La), first known in the 
 provinces as " la troupe du due d'Epernon, " 
 99-104 ; later as "les comediens du Prince 
 de Conti," 114-119. In Paris at first they 
 belonged to Monsieur, 127 ; 130, 131. 
 From 1665 they were known as "la troupe 
 du Roi," 394. 
 
 TRUTH in fiction does not exclude what is 
 ludicrous or grotesque, 170. Truth a 
 fundamental basis in all arts, 175, 176. 
 Without truth caricature shows only ab- 
 surdity, but true caricature shows good 
 comedy, 192-196. 
 
 TURKISH ceremony (the), in the Bourgeois 
 Gfentilhomme, 482-490. Turkish language, 
 in, 486, and notes 1 and 3. 
 
 U 
 
 UNITIES of the drama, 14, 15. Inaugurated 
 by Mairet, 16. Moliere accepted the laws ; 
 nonsense talked about them ; English and 
 Spanish dramatists not governed by them, 
 197, 198 ; 260 and note. 
 
 VALETS (The) in old French comedy, 30, 31 ; 
 138. 
 
 VANITY FAIR, Celimene and Becky Sharp, 
 both creatures of, 413, 414. 
 
 VARLET, Madame, gave La Grange's Register 
 to the Comedie Franaise, 129. 
 
 VAUDEVILLE (The), what it was originally, 
 38. 
 
 VAUGELAS, a good commentator on the 
 French language, 519. 
 
 VERSE-making at the Hotel de Rambouillet, 
 153. Moliere satirised the fashion for silly 
 verse-making in society, 511, 512. 
 
 "VERS libres," seen in only two plays of 
 Moliere's, 208. 
 
 Veuve (La), comedy by P. Corneille ; his 
 preface to, 19. 
 
 VIENNE, Moliere played at, 107. 
 
 VILLIERS, de, wrote against Moliere, 322 note. 
 
 Vis COMICA, What it is, 210 ; 224. 
 
 VISE, de, his testimony of Moliere's early 
 inclination for the stage, 77. Perhaps it 
 was he who printed Moliere's Sganarelle, 
 172. Five poor plays of his were acted at 
 the Palais Royal, 258, 259. He was one 
 of Moliere's enemies after the success of 
 the Ecole des Femmes, 315-317 ; his comedy 
 Z'elinde, 322-326. Other writings by him, 
 322 note. Suspicion that he wrote La 
 Lettre sur la Gome"die de I'Imposteur, 
 350. His Lettre sur la Come'die du Mis- 
 anthrope, 436. In 1672 he established Le 
 Mercure Galant, 316. 
 
 Visionnaires (Les), comedy by Desmarets, 
 27, 28. Moliere may have borrowed from 
 
 20 
 
578 
 
 LIFE OF MOLI^EE 
 
 it in his Fdcheux, 294 ; and in his Femmes 
 
 Savantes, 518, 519. 
 "VisiTE, En," A troop went sometimes, 249, 
 
 250. 
 VIVOT, co-editor with La Grange in the first 
 
 complete edition of Moliere's plays in 1682, 
 
 130. 
 VOITUBB. His death was felt at the HStel 
 
 de Rambouillet, 148. 
 Voyage (Le) de Chapelle et de Bachaumont, 
 
 W 
 
 WARFARE caused by the success of the Ecole 
 
 des Femmes, 315-335. 
 WOMEN. Perhaps Moliere did not think of 
 
 them very highly, 200. 
 
 ZELINDE, comedy by de Vise against Moliere, 
 322-326. 
 
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