by Molière
To let these two keep faith with one another?
ARISTE
Surely.
SGANARELLE
Then sign, and I shall do the same.
ARISTE
Very well; but I’m baffled.
SGANARELLE
I’ll soon explain the game.
MAGISTRATE
We shall return, sirs.
(The Magistrate and Notary exit into Valère’s house.)
SGANARELLE
Now then, I’ll reveal
Some secrets to you.
(They retire to the back of the stage.)
Scene 8
Léonor, Sganarelle, Ariste, Lisette.
LÉONOR
Oh, what a grim ordeal!
I find those young men tiresome, one and all.
On their account, I slipped away from the ball.
LISETTE
They all try hard to please you, and be engaging.
LÉONOR
Nevertheless, I find their talk enraging;
I’d rather hear the simplest common sense
Than all that empty prattle they dispense.
They think their blond wigs dazzle every eye,
And that they’re fearfully witty when they try
To tease one, in a bright, malicious fashion,
About the limits of an old man’s passion.
But I prefer an old man’s kindly zeal
To the giddy transports young men claim to feel.
Ah! Don’t I see—?
SGANARELLE
(To Ariste:)
Well, Brother, now you know. (Perceiving Léonor)
But look! She’s coming, with her maid in tow.
ARISTE
Léonor, I am not angry, but I’m pained:
You know your freedom’s never been constrained,
And that you’ve long been promised, on my part,
Full liberty in matters of the heart.
Yet, as if doubtful that I would approve,
You’ve gone behind my back to pledge your love.
I don’t regret my leniency, but such
Mistrustful conduct hurts me very much,
And what you’ve done is not a fair return
For my affection and my warm concern.
LÉONOR
I cannot guess to what your words refer;
My feelings, though, are what they always were,
And my regard for you is firm and strong.
I could not love another, and do you wrong.
If you would see my chief wish satisfied,
Say that tomorrow I may be your bride.
ARISTE
Then, Brother, on what foundation did you base—?
SGANARELLE
What! Didn’t you come, just now, from Valère’s place?
Didn’t you tell your sister, just today,
That, a year ago, he stole your heart away?
LÉONOR
Tell me, who took the trouble to devise
Such tales about me, and spin such pretty lies?
Scene 9
Isabelle, Valère, the Magistrate, the Notary, Ergaste, Lisette, Léonor, Sganarelle, Ariste.
ISABELLE
Sister, I fear I’ve taken liberties
With your good name; will you forgive me, please?
Under the pressure of a sudden crisis
I’ve stooped, today, to certain low devices:
By your example I am put to shame;
But fortune did not treat us both the same.
(To Sganarelle:)
Sir, I shall offer no apologies tò you;
It is a service, not a wrong, I do you.
The heavens did not design us to be wed:
I felt unworthy of you, and instead
Of making you an undeserving wife,
I chose another man to share my life.
VALÈRE
(To Sganarelle:)
I count it, sir, my greatest joy and pride
That from your hands I have received my bride.
ARISTE
Best take this quietly, Brother; your own extreme
Behavior forced these two to plot and scheme,
And it will be your sad lot, I foresee,
To be a dupe who gets no sympathy.
LISETTE
Well, I’m delighted. This clever trick’s a just
Reward for his suspicion and mistrust.
LÉONOR
I’m not sure that their trick deserves applause,
But I can’t blame them, for they had good cause.
ERGASTE
He’s a born cuckold, and lucky to get out
Of marriage before his horns began to sprout.
SGANARELLE
(Emerging from his stupefaction:)
No, I can’t fathom it; I’m overcome;
Such treachery is too deep for me to plumb;
I can’t believe that Satan himself could be
As wicked as this jade has been to me.
I would have sworn she could not do amiss;
Let no man trust a woman, after this!
The best of them are guileful and perverse;
Their breed was made to be creation’s curse.
The Devil take them all! I hereby sever
Relations with their faithless sex forever.
ERGASTE
Good.
ARISTE
Come to my house, friends. Tomorrow we’ll assuage, As best we can, my brother’s pain and rage.
LISETTE
(To the audience:)
D’you know any churlish husbands? If you do,
Send them to us: We’ll teach them a thing or two.
END OF PLAY
The Imaginary Cuckold, or Sganarelle
Introduction
This little comedy was first presented by Molière’s troupe on May 28, 1660. It was at once a hit, and during the “dead season” of summer, despite the absence of the court and the exodus of the rich and fashionable, it played to full houses. By the end of the year, it had been done a remarkable thirty-four times at the Petit-Bourbon, and privately performed a half dozen times for Cardinal Mazarin or the delighted king. One enthusiast, a man named Neufvillenaine, saw it often enough to memorize the dialogue and to publish, in Molière’s honor, a pirated edition of the play. During Molière’s lifetime, Sganarelle was offered by his company every year, and in all had more performances than any other of his works, with second honors going to The School for Husbands.
The Imaginary Cuckold, or Sganarelle has many qualities that may be seen as deriving from the tradition—then two centuries old—of the one-act French farce. Farce is concerned with standard comic types at the mercy of absurd situations, and surely such figures as the young lovers Célie and Lélie, or the earthy and insolent servant Gros-René, are as simple and generic as possible. The plot is a fast-developing imbroglio that, having built to a peak of confusion, concludes with a brisk and convenient dénouement. It is loaded with coincidences and ludicrous misunderstandings. There is a certain amount of vulgar language in Sganarelle, and though it is scarcely a knockabout piece, it contains a fair bit of physical comedy: The parallel swoons of Célie and Lélie, Sganarelle’s examination of Célie’s bosom, his avoidances of Lélie in Scene 9, his bold advances and craven retreats in Scene Twenty-One.
In all these ways, Sganarelle partakes of the flavor, rhythm and general makeup of farce. Yet, having said that, one must begin at once to qualify. The rudimentary persons of farce are commonly subordinate to a hectic plot, and seem to be manipulated by it; but that is not quite the case here. Lélie, Célie, Sganarelle and his wife are all in some degree mistrustful of their mates or beloveds before they encounter “proof ” of inconstancy; and in Scene Twenty-Two, when all has been explained away, we see Sganarelle and his wife still clinging to their doubts of one another. It is the characters, then, who spin the plot of Sganarelle with their want of faith; and though the play is far from philosophical, it rests upon thou
ghts about suspicion, evidence and trust which will surface more importantly in Tartuffe.
Above all, it is the title character (originally played by Molière himself) who cannot be seen as a mere cog in the plot machinery. Rather, it is the business of much of the plot to reveal the comic riches of his nature. In his most appealing aspect, Sganarelle is a Falstaffian figure who loves life and does not think much of death, heroic or otherwise. But he is also a prodigy of self-absorption. As one commentator observes, he is “hard on others, soft on himself,” and he continually oscillates between blustering self-assertion and timid recoil. So insulated is he that, in these repeated waverings, he seems like a shadow boxer afraid of his shadow. The play variously shows us the extent of his egoism : he is blithely callous when Célie is thought to be dying; he often thinks himself alone when he is not; and when Célie berates the absent Lélie, he believes that she is uttering his grievance. He expresses his complex nature in three distinct voices. One voice is that of a crudely voluble bourgeois who, when addressing his wife, is consistently brutal. The second voice is clownishly ironic, and is especially heard in Scene Six where, unable to make a plain statement of his suspicions, he resorts to a buffoonery that has the effect of simultaneous accusation and retraction. The third voice belongs to Sganarelle the fantasist, who dramatizes his supposed disgrace (Scene 9) and his temporary courage (Scene Twenty-One) in stilted soliloquies suggestive of tragic theater. Sganarelle, in short, is a character diversely revealed, who anticipates all those later Molière heroes (Arnolphe, Alceste) who are self-centered, self-assertive, ill-adjusted and victimized by their own obsessive notions.
“One would call it a farce,” a French critic writes of Sganarelle, “if it were not written inverse.” Certainly it is true that Molière’s third verse comedy, by wedding broad effects to a now polished poetic technique, makes it hard to speak confidently of low comedy or high; it is somewhat as if a comic strip had been rendered in oils. Much of what might have been expressed by physical violence—Gorgibus’s recurrent urge to thrash his daughter, the Punch-and-Judy relationship of Sganarelle and his wife—is realized instead on the verbal plane, a plane on which Célie’s maid has leisure to sketch a delectable self-portrait (Scene Two), and Sganarelle to display his mood swings in a lengthy monologue. The sixty-eight-line speech in which he does so constitutes the whole of Scene Seventeen, which was called “la belle scène” in Molière’s day. It is not hard to see why mid-eighteenth-century editors of Molière, associating well-turned and sustained alexandrines with high comedy, divided Sganarelle into three acts, cutting into the play at the two scene endings (Scenes Six and Seventeen) that leave the stage empty.
It was a mistake, of course, to dignify Sganarelle with such stately movement; the piece should be done continuously and at a good clip, as Molière intended and as La Grange’s edition (1682) makes plain. And M. Neufvillenaine’s descriptions of Molière in the title role, which he played without a mask, make it clear that a certain amount of broad clowning is authorized. “No one,” says Neufvillenaine, “was ever better at making and unmaking his face, and it is safe to say that in the course of this play he transforms his features more than twenty times . . . his pantomime gives rise to endless bursts of applause.” But if some present-day director of Sganarelle honors Molière’s precedent as to pace and acting style, let him also honor the artful spoken-ness of this comedy, and make sure that the verse dialogue is nowhere sacrificed to irrelevant horseplay and hubbub. Unless the lines are well said and clearly heard, there will be a loss of wit and timing, of character portrayal, and even of plot. This is particularly true toward the end of the play, where the four principals converge, each speaking out of a different—or differently weighted—misunderstanding of the situation. Sganarelle thinks that he is a cuckold and that his wife is in love with Lélie; Lélie thinks that Célie, his betrothed, has jilted him and married Sganarelle; Célie thinks that her fiancé, Lélie, has betrayed her with Sganarelle’s wife; and Sganarelle’s wife thinks that her husband is enamored of Célie. Such interplay of strong delusions can challenge the imaginative agility of an audience, and so give pleasure; or if badly performed, it can be merely chaotic, which does not amuse for long.
Gorgibus, in the fourth speech of the play, makes mention of a number of books that were very well known in Molière’s century. Clélie (1654–1660) was a wildly popular sentimental novel by Madeleine de Scudéry. The Quatrains of the magistrate Guy du Faur de Pibrac (d. 1584) and the Tablettes de la vie et de la mort of the historian Pierre Matthieu (d. 1621), were edifying texts deemed essential to the education of the young. The Guide des pêcheurs was an ascetic devotional book by a Spanish Dominican, Luis of Granada (d. 1588). I have made a few trivial changes in the text, for ease of speaking or of understanding. For example, Célie’s maid says in Scene Two, “God rest my poor Martin,” but I thought that “God rest my dear dead Jacques” would be easier for an American actress to say. And in the same character’s last speech (Scene Twenty-Two), I have substituted “a little pill / Of common sense” for the original’s “peu d’ellébore,” because folk medicine no longer speaks, as it did in the Middle Ages, of hellebore as a cure for madness.
—RW
Cummington, Massachusetts, 1993
CHARACTERS
GORGIBUS (gor-gee-BOOSE), a middle-class Parisian
CÉLIE (say-LEE), his daughter
LÉLIE (lay-LEE), a young man in love with Célie
GROS-RENÉ (grow-ra-NAY), Lélie’s valet
SGANARELLE (skan-a-RELL), a Parisian bourgeois and an
imaginary cuckold
SGANARELLE’S WIFE
VILLEBREQUIN (veal-breck-KAN), father of Valère, to
whom Célie is promised
CÉLIE’S MAID
A MALE RELATIVE OF SGANARELLE’S WIFE
THE SCENE
A residential square in Paris.
Scene 1
Gorgibus, Célie, Célie’s Maid.
CÉLIE
(Entering in tears, followed by her father.)
No, no! My heart will never consent to this.
GORGIBUS
What do I hear you say, my saucy miss?
Dare you oppose my wishes, and dispute
A parent’s power, which is absolute?
D’you hope to sway, by foolish arguments,
Your father’s judgment and mature good sense?
Which of us, in our household, has dominion?
And is it you or I, in your opinion,
Who knows what’s best for you, you silly child?
By Heaven, be careful not to get me riled,
Or you’ll have cause to know, this very minute,
Whether my arm still has some muscle in it.
You’d better cease your grumbling, Miss Contrary,
And accept the man I’ve picked for you to marry.
You tell me that I know too little of him,
And should have asked you first if you could love him:
Well, knowing his fortune, which is large indeed,
What other information do I need?
And as for love, does not a husband who
Has twenty thousand ducats appeal to you?
Whatever he’s like, a man as rich as he
Is a perfect gentleman, I’ll guarantee.
CÉLIE
Alas!
GORGIBUS
Well, well. “Alas,” you tell me, eh?
What a very fine “alas” this girl can say!
Take care, now; if you make me hit the ceiling,
I’ll give you cause to say “alas”—with feeling!
This is what comes, young lady, of your addiction
To all these volumes of romantic fiction;
Your head is full of amorous rigmarole,
And you care more for Clélie than for your soul.
Such trashy books, I tell you, should be flung
In the fire, because they much corrupt the young.
Instead of suc
h insidious poppycock,
Go read Matthieu, or the Quatrains of Pibrac—
Instructive literature that’s sound and wise
And full of maxims you should memorize.
Read, too, the Sinner’s Guide; no book can give
A young girl better advice on how to live.
Had such books been your only reading, you’d
Have learned a more obedient attitude.
CÉLIE
But, Father! Can you mean for me to be
False to the love I’ve promised to Lélie?
A girl can’t wed, I know, at her own whim;
But you yourself, sir, pledged my hand to him.
GORGIBUS
What if I did? I now transfer my pledge
To another man, whose wealth gives him the edge.
Lélie’s a handsome fellow, but do learn
That a suitor’s purse should be your first concern,
That gold can make the ugliest mate seem fair,
And that, without it, life’s a sad affair.
You don’t much like Valère, I know; but still,
Though the lover may not please you, the husband will.
That sweet word spouse can cause the heart to soften,