The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  Still amid the battle over Tartuffe, Molière presented, on June 4, 1666, another satire hardly calculated to please either the public or the court. If action is the soul of drama, Le Misanthrope is rather a philosophical dialogue than a play. One sentence can tell the story: Alceste, who demands a strict morality and complete honesty from himself and all, loves Célimène, who favors him but relishes a multiplicity of suitors and compliments. To Molière this is but a scaffolding for a study of morality. Should we always speak the truth, or should we substitute courtesy for truth in order to get along in the world? Alceste resents the compromises that society makes with the truth; he condemns the hypocrisy of the court, where everyone pretends to the loftiest sentiments and the “warmest regards,” while at heart each one is scheming for himself, is critical of all the rest, and uses flattery as a lever to position or power. Alceste scorns all this, and proposes to be honest even to the point of suicide. Orontes, a scribbling courtier, insists on reading his verses to Alceste and asks for sincere criticism; he gets it, and vows revenge. Célimène flirts; Alceste reproves her; she calls him a prig; we almost hear Molière rebuking his gay wife, and indeed it was he who played Alceste, and she Célimène.

  ALCESTE. Madame, will you have me be plain with you? I am very much dissatisfied with your ways of behavior. . . . I don’t quarrel with you, but your disposition, madame, opens to the first comer too ready an access to your heart. You have too many lovers whom we see besieging you; and my soul cannot reconcile itself to this.

  CÉLIMÈNE. Do you blame me for attracting lovers? Can I help it if people find me lovable? And when they make delectable efforts to see me should I take a stick and drive them out?

  ALCESTE. No, it is not a stick that you must use, but a spirit less yielding and melting before their vows. I know that your beauty follows you everywhere, but your welcome holds further those whom your eyes attract; and your sweetness to all who surrender to you completes in their hearts the work of your charms. 36

  The philosophical foil to Alceste is his friend Philinte, who advises him to adjust himself amiably to the natural defects of mankind, and to recognize politeness as the lubrication of life. The zest of the play lies in Molière’s division of his sentiments between Alceste and Philinte. Alceste is Molière the husband who fears that he is a cuckold, and the valet tapissier du roi who, to make the King’s bed, has to run the gantlet of a hundred nobles as proud of their pedigree as he of his genius. Philinte is Molière the philosopher, bidding himself be reasonable and lenient in judging humanity. Says Philinte-Molière to Molière-Alceste, in a passage which we may take as a sample of Molière the poet:

  Mon Dieu, des moeurs du temps mettons-nous moins en peine,

  Et faisons un peu grâce à la nature humaine;

  Ne l’examinons point dans la grande rigueur,

  Et voyons ses défauts avec quelque douceur.

  Il faut, parmi le monde, une vertu traitable;

  A force de sagesse on peut être blâmable;

  La parfaite raison fuit toute extrémité

  Et veut que l’on soit sage avec sobriété.

  Cette grande raideur des vertus des vieux âges

  Heurte trop notre siècle et les communs usages;

  Elle veut aux mortels trop de perfection:

  Il faut fléchir au temps sans obstination,

  Et c’est une folie à nulle autre seconde

  De vouloir se mêler de corriger le monde.

  J’observe, comme vous, cent choses tous les jours,

  Qui pourraient mieux aller, prenant un autre cours;

  Mais quoi qu’à chaque pas je puisse voir paraître,

  En courroux, comme vous, on ne me voit point être;

  Je prends tout doucement les hommes comme ils sont,

  J’accoutume mon âme à souffrir ce qu’ils font,

  Et je crois qu’à la cour, de même qu’à la ville,

  Mon flegme est philosophe autant que votre bile.* 37

  Napoleon thought that Philinte had the better of the argument; Jean Jacques Rousseau thought Philinte a liar, and approved Alceste’s rigorous morality. 38 In the end Alceste, like Jean Jacques, renounces the world and retires to a sterilized solitude.

  The play had only a moderate success. The courtiers did not relish the satire of their fine manners, and the pit could hardly enthuse over an Alceste who frankly despised everybody but himself. The critics, however, being neither of the pit nor of the court, applauded the play as a brave attempt to write a drama of ideas; and later pundits judge it the most perfect of Molière’s works. In the course of time, when its pilloried generation was dead, it won public acceptance; between 1680 and 1954 it had 1,571 performances at the Comédie-Française—only less than Tartuffe and L’Avare.

  Unable to live in peace with a young wife to whom monogamy and beauty seemed a contradiction in terms, Molière left her (August, 1667), and went to live with his friend Chapelain at Auteuil, in the western end of Paris. Chapelain gently derided him for taking love so seriously; but Molière was more poet than philosopher, and (if we may believe one poet reporting another) confessed:

  “I have determined to live with her as if she were not my wife; but if you knew what I suffer you would pity me. My passion has reached such a point that it even enters with compassion into all her interests. When I consider how impossible it is for me to conquer what I feel for her, I tell myself that she may have the same difficulty in conquering her inclination to be coquettish, and I find myself more disposed to pity her than to blame her. You will tell me, no doubt, that a man must be a poet to feel this; but for my part I feel that there is but one kind of love, and that those who have not felt these delicacies of sentiment have never truly loved. All things in the world are connected with her in my heart . . . When I see her, an emotion, transports that may be felt but not described, take from me all power of reflection; I have no longer any eyes for her defects; I can see only all that she has that is lovable. Is not that the last degree of madness?” 39

  He tried to forget her by losing himself in his work. In 1667 he busied himself arranging entertainment for the King at St.-Germain. His comedy Amphitryon (January 13, 1668) celebrated again the amours of Jupiter, who seduces Amphitryon’s wife Alcmène. When Jupiter explains to her that

  Un partage avec Jupiter

  N’a rien du tout qui déshonore

  —i.e., for a lady to share her bed with Jove is not at all dishonorable—the lines were interpreted by many auditors as condoning the royal liaison with Mme. de Montespan; if so, it was a very generous sycophancy, for Molière was in no mood to sympathize with seducers. Like everybody else he buttered the King with flattery, as at the end of Tartuffe. In another comedy, produced before the court on July 15, George Dandin, ou le Mari confondu, we have again the story of the husband confounded, suspecting his wife of adultery, unable to prove it, and eating his heart out with suspicion and jealousy; Molière was pouring salt into his wounds.

  It was a busy year, for only a few months later (September 9) he produced one of his most famous plays. L’Avare (The Miser) took its theme, and part of its plot, from Plautus’ Aulularia; but Plautus had taken that from the New Comedy of the Greeks; the miser, and satire of him, are probably as old as money. No one has ever handled the subject with more vivacity and power than Molière. Harpagon so loves his hoard that he lets his horses starve and go without hoofs; he has such an aversion to giving that he does not “give you good day,” but prête le bonjour—“lends you good day.” Seeing two candles lit for dinner, he blows one out. He refuses a dowry to his daughter, and trusts that his children will predecease him. 40 The satire, as usual in Molière, verges on caricature. The audience found the picture distasteful, and after eight performances the play was withdrawn. But Boileau’s praise helped to revive it; it was shown forty-seven times in its first four years, and is second only to Tartuffe in frequency of presentation.

  Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme had less merit and more success. In December, 1669,
a Turkish ambassador came to France. The court put on all its splendor to impress him; he responded with haughty stolidity; after his departure Louis invited Molière and Lully to compose a comedy-ballet in which the ambassador would be parodied in a turquerie. Molière enlarged the scheme into a satire on the increasing number of middle-class Frenchmen who were struggling to dress and speak like born aristocrats. The comedy had its première before King and court at Chambord, October 14, 1670. When presented at the Palais-Royal in November it atoned financially for the losses of L’Avare. Molière played M. Jourdain; Lully played the Mufti. To invest himself with nobility, M. Jourdain hires a music master, a dancing master, a fencing master, a philosophy master. They come to blows over the relative importance of their arts—whether it is more vital to achieve harmony, to be in step, to be able to kill neatly, or to speak elegant French. In the claims of the music master we suspect a sly dig at pompous, climbing Lully. Half the world knows the scene in which M. Jourdain learns that all language is either prose or verse.

  M. JOURDAIN. What? When I say, “Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give me my night bonnet”—this is prose?

  PHILOSOPHY MASTER. Yes, Monsieur.

  M. JOURDAIN. By my faith! for over forty years I’ve been speaking prose without knowing anything about it. I am for all the world most obliged to you for informing me of this. 41

  Some courtiers, who had not long since graduated from commerce into lace, felt that the satire was aimed at them, and they pooh-poohed the play as nonsense; but the King assured Molière, “You have never written anything yet which has amused me so much.” Hearing this, says Guizot, “the court was at once seized with a fit of admiration.” 42

  Molière and Lully collaborated again to produce before the court (January, 1671), a tragedy-ballet, Psyché, to which Pierre Corneille and Quinault contributed most of the verse. Lully was winning the battle against Molière: comedy was giving way to opera, dialogue to machinery; gods and goddesses had to be lowered from heaven or hoisted from hell. The stage at the Palais-Royal had to be rebuilt for Psyché, at a cost of 1,980 livres. But the production was a financial success.

  Romance, however, was not Molière’s forte; he was more at home when roasting the absurdities of the age on the point of his wit. It seemed to him that a learned woman was an uncomfortable anomaly and an impediment to marriage. He had heard such women pruning vocabularies, debating niceties of grammar, quoting the classics, and talking philosophy; this, to Molière’s ears, sounded like a sexual perversion. Moreover two men, the Abbé Cotin and the poet Ménage, had been inveighing against Molière’s plays; here was a chance to prick them. So, on March 11, 1672, he offered Les Femmes savantes. Philaminte discharges a maid for using a word condemned by the Academy; her daughter Armande rejects matrimony as a disgusting contact of bodies rather than a fusion of minds; Trissotin reads his awful poetry to these admiring prudes; Vadius riddles the poetry and presents more of his own and the same. Against all these Molière defends Henriette, who abominates alexandrines and wants a husband who can give her children instead of epigrams. Had Armande Béjart become a précieuse? Or was Molière showing his age?

  VII. CURTAIN

  He was only fifty, but his hectic life, his tuberculosis, his marriage, and his bereavements had drained his vitality. The portrait by Mignard caught him at his prime: large nose, sensual lips, and comically elevatable eyebrows, but already a wrinkled forehead and wistful eyes. Moving in the vortex of the theater from town to town and from day to day, dealing with high-strung prima donnas, a lively wife, and a sensitive King, seeing two of his three children die—this was no primrose path to optimism, but an open road to bad digestion and early death. Understandably he became “a self-devouring volcano,” 43 melancholy, sharp-tempered, frankly critical but sympathetically generous. His troupe understood him and was devoted to him, knowing that he used himself up to give it sustenance and success. His friends were always ready to do battle for him—above all, Boileau and La Fontaine, who, sometimes with Racine, made with Molière les Quatre Amis, the famous “Four Friends.” They found him well educated and informed, witty but seldom merry, a Grimaldi on the stage, but in private sadder than Shakespeare’s Jaques.

  After four and a half years of separation he returned to his wife (1671). The child that resulted from this reconciliation died after a month of life. At Auteuil he had lived on a milk diet prescribed by his doctor; now he resumed his usual consumption of wine, and attended late suppers to please Armande. Despite his increasing cough he decided to play the leading role, Argan, in his final play, Le Malade imaginaire (February 10, 1673).

  Argan imagines himself afflicted with a dozen diseases, and spends half his fortune on doctors and drugs. His brother Béralde derides him:

  ARGAN. What must we do, then, when we are sick?

  BÉRALDE. Nothing, brother. . . . We must only keep ourselves quiet. Nature herself, when we let her alone, will gently deliver herself from the disorder she’s fallen into. ‘Tis our ingratitude, ‘tis our impatience, that spoils all; and almost all men die of their medicines, not of their diseases. 44

  To further ridicule the profession, Argan is told that he himself can become a doctor in short order, and can easily pass the examination for a medical license. There follows the famous mock examination:

  FIRST DOCTOR. Demandabo causam and rationem quare opium facit dormiré. . . .

  ARGAN. Quia est in eo

  Virtus dormitiva.

  Cujus est natura

  Sensus stupifire. . . .

  SECOND DOCTOR. Quae sunt remedia

  Quae in maladia

  Called hydropsia

  Convenit facere?

  ARGAN. Clisterium donare,

  Postea bleedare,

  Afterwards purgare.

  CHORUS. Bene, bene, bene respondere,

  Dignus, dignus est intrare

  In nostro docto corpore.

  Molière’s death was almost a part of this play. On February 17, 1673, Armande and others, perceiving his fatigue, begged him to close the theater for a few days while he regained strength. But “How can I do that?” he asked. “There are fifty poor workmen here who are paid by the day; what will they do if we don’t play? I should reproach myself for having neglected to give them their bread for a single day so long as I was able to act.” 45 In the final act, as Molière, in the part of Argan (who had twice pretended death), uttered the word Juro, “I swear,” in taking the oath as a physician, he was seized with a convulsive cough. He covered it with a false laugh, and finished the play. He was hurried to his home by his wife and the young actor Michel Baron. He asked for a priest, but none came. His cough became more violent; he burst a blood vessel, choked with the blood in his throat, and died.

  Harlay de Champvallon, Archbishop of Paris, ruled that since Molière had not made his final penitence and received absolution, he could not be buried in Christian ground. Armande, who had always loved him even while deceiving him, went to Versailles, threw herself at the feet of the King, and said, not wisely but boldly and truly, “If my husband was a criminal, his crimes were sanctioned by your Majesty in person.” 46 Louis sent some secret word to the Archbishop. Harlay compromised: the body must not be taken into a church for Christian rites, but it was allowed a quiet burial, after sunset, in a remote corner of the Cemetery of St.-Joseph in the Rue Montmartre.

  Molière remains by common consent one of the greatest figures in the literature of France. Not by perfection of dramatic technique, nor by any splendor of poetry. Almost all his plots are borrowed, almost all their denouements are artificial and absurd; almost all his characters are personified qualities, several, like Harpagon, are exaggerated to the point of caricature; and too often his comedies fall into farce. We are told that the court, as well as the general public, liked him best when he was most farcical, and did not relish his mordant satires on failings widely shared. Probably he would have omitted the farce if he had not felt compelled to keep his company solvent.


  Like Shakespeare mourning that he must make himself a motley to the view, he wrote: “I think it a very grievous punishment, in the liberal arts, to display oneself to fools, and to expose our compositions to the barbarous judgment of the stupid.” 47 It irked him to be always required to make people laugh; this, he has one of his characters say, “is a queer enterprise.” 48 He aspired to write tragedies, and, though he fell short of his aim, he managed to give to his greatest comedies a tragic significance and depth.

  So it is the philosophy in his plays, as well as their humor and pungent satire, that makes almost every literate Frenchman read Molière. 49 It was essentially a rationalistic philosophy, which gladdened the hearts of the eighteenth-century philosophes. “There is in Molière not a trace of supernatural Christianity,” and “the religion expounded by his mouthpiece Cléante” in Tartuffe “might be endorsed by Voltaire.” 50 He never attacked the Christian creed, he acknowledged the beneficence of religion in innumerable lives, he respected sincere devotion; but he scorned the surface piety that put a weekly face on daily selfishness.

  His moral philosophy was pagan in the sense that it legitimized pleasure, and had no sense of sin. It savored of Epicurus and Seneca rather than of St. Paul or Augustine; harmonized better with the laxity of the King than with the austerities of Port-Royal. He deprecated excess even in virtue. He admired l’honnéte homme, the sensible man of the world who threaded his way with sane moderation among competing absurdities, and adjusted himself without fuss to the shortcomings of mankind.