by Will Durant
Molière himself did not reach that plane of moderation. His profession as a comic dramatist compelled him to satire, and often to hyperbole; he was too hard on learned women, too indiscriminate in attacking physicians; and he might have shown more respect for enemas. But overemphasis is in the blood of satire, and dramas seldom make their point without it. Molière would have been greater if he could have found a way to satirize the fundamental evil of the reign—the military greed and ruinous despotism of Louis XIV; but it was this gracious autocrat who protected him against his enemies and made possible his war against bigotry. How lucky he was to die before his master had become the most destructive bigot of them all!
France loves Molière, and still plays him, as England loves and plays Shakespeare. We cannot, as some fervent Gauls would do, equate him with England’s bard; he was only a part of Shakespeare, whose other parts were Racine and Montaigne. Nor can we, as many do, place him at the head of French literature. We are not even sure that Boileau was right when he told Louis XIV that Molière was the greatest poet of the reign; when Boileau said this, Racine had not yet written Phèdre or Athalie. But in Molière it is not only the writer who belongs to the history of France, it is the man: the harassed and faithful manager, the deceived and forgiving husband, the dramatist covering his griefs with laughter, the ailing actor carrying on to the hour of death his war against pedantry, bigotry, superstition, and sham.
CHAPTER V
The Classic Zenith in French Literature
1643–1715
I. MILIEU
THE zenith in French classical literature was not coterminous with the age of Louis XIV; it came, rather, under the ministry of Mazarin and in the halcyon youth of the reign (1661–67), before Mars had sent the Muses to the rear. The initial stimulus to the literary outburst was given by Richelieu’s encouragement of drama and poetry; the second spur came from the martial triumphs at Rocroi (1643) and Lens (1648); the third flowed from the diplomatic victories of France in the treaties of Westphalia (1648) and the Pyrenees (1659); the fourth, from the association of men of letters with men of breeding and women of culture in the salons; only the final impulse was the patronage of literature by the King and the court. Many of the literary masterpieces of the reign—Pascal’s Letters (1656) and Thoughts, Molière’s Tartuffe (1664), Le Festin de pierre (1665), and Le Misanthrope (1666), La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims (1665), Boileau’s Satires (1667), Racine’s Andromaque (1667)—were written before 1667 by men who had grown up under Richelieu and Mazarin.
It remains nevertheless that Louis was the most lavish patron of literature in all history. Hardly two years after taking over the government (1662–63)—consequently before all but two of the works just mentioned—he asked Colbert and others to have competent persons draw up a list of authors, scholars, and scientists, of whatever land, who merited aid. From these lists forty-five Frenchmen and fifteen foreigners received royal pensions. 1 The Dutch scholars Heinsius and Vossius, the Dutch physicist Christian Huygens, the Florentine mathematician Viviani, and many other foreigners were surprised to receive letters from Colbert apprising them that they had been voted pensions by the French King, subject to approval by their own governments. Some of these pensions ran as high as three thousand livres per year. Boileau, the unofficial president of poetry, lived on his pensions like a grand seigneur, and left 286,000 francs in cash; Racine received 145,000 francs over a period of ten years as royal historian. 2 Probably the international pensions were motived in part by the wish to have a favorable press abroad; and the domestic gifts aimed to bring thought, like industry and art, under governmental co-ordination and control. This aim was achieved: all publication was subjected to state censorship, and the French mind submitted, with only sporadic and negligible resistance, to royal supervision of its printed expression. Moreover, the King was persuaded that these pensioned pens would sing his praises in prose and verse and send a rosy picture of him down to history. They did their best.
Louis not only pensioned men of letters, he protected and respected them, raised their social status, and welcomed them at court. “Remember,” he said to Boileau, “that I shall always have a half hour to give you.” 3 His literary taste may have leaned too far toward classical order, dignity, and good form; but these virtues seemed to him not only to stabilize government but to ennoble France. In some ways he was ahead of the people and the court in his literary judgments. We have seen him protecting Molière against noble and ecclesiastical sniping; we shall see him encouraging the highest flights of Racine.
Again at the suggestion of Colbert, and again following in the steps of Richelieu, Louis declared himself the personal protector of the French Academy, raised it to the rank of a major state institution, provided it with ample funds, and gave it lodgings in the Louvre. Colbert himself became a member. When an Academician who was also a grand seigneur had an easy chair installed in the Academy for his own comfort, Colbert sent for thirty-nine more such seats to maintain an equality of dignity above distinctions of class; so “les quarante fauteuils” became a synonym for the Académie Française. In 1663 a subsidiary Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres was organized to record the events of the reign.
Colbert saw to it that the forty Immortals earned their keep by dutiful attendance, and by work on the Dictionary. This undertaking, begun in 1638, was progressing so slowly that Boisrobert could express alphabetically his longing for longevity:
Six months they’ve been engaged on F;
Oh, that my fate would guarantee
That I should keep alive till G. 4
The plan of the Dictionary was elaborate: it proposed to trace each permissible word through the history of its uses and spellings, with abundant illustrative quotations; so fifty-six years elapsed between its inception and its first publication (1694). It screened too strictly the language of the people, the professions, and the arts; it pruned Rabelais, Amyot, and Montaigne; it outlawed a thousand expressions that favored vivid speech. The same logic, precision, and clarity that made geometry the ideal of seventeenth-century science and philosophy, the same authority and discipline by which Colbert ruled the economy and Le Brun the arts, the same dignity and refinement that governed the court of the King, the same classic cleaving to rules that molded the style of Bossuet, Fénelon, La Rochefoucauld, Racine, and Boileau—these dictated the Dictionary of the Academy. Periodically it has been revised and reissued, struggling to maintain order in a living growth, its classical citadel repeatedly assaulted, and often conquered, by the errors of the people, the terminology of the sciences, the jargon of the trades, the argot of the streets; a dictionary, like history and government, is a composition of forces between the weight of the many and the power of the few. Something was lost to the language in vitality, much was gained in purity, precision, elegance, and prestige. It produced no turbulent and wanton Shakespeare, but it became the most respected language in Europe, the medium of diplomacy, the speech of aristocracies. For a century and more, Europe aspired to be French.
II. CORNEILLE POSTSCRIPT: 1643–84
The language reached its zenith in the flexible facility of Molière’s dialogue, in the sonorous rhetoric of Corneille, and in the melodious refinement of Racine.
Corneille was apparently in his prime—aged thirty-seven—when Louis became King. He began the reign with Le Menteur, which raised the tone of French comedy as Le Cid had raised that of tragedy. Thereafter he staged tragedies almost annually: Rodogune (1644), Théodore (1645), Heraclius (1646), Don Sancho d’Aragon (1649), Andromède (1650), Nicomède (1651), Pertharite (1652). A few were well received, but, as each trod on its predecessor’s heels, it became evident that Corneille was working too hastily, and that the sap of his genius was running thin. His flair for portraying nobility was lost in a river of argument; his eloquence defeated itself by continuance. “My friend Corneille,” said Molière, “has a familiar who inspires him with the finest verses in the world. But sometimes the familiar leaves him to shift fo
r himself, and then he fares very badly.” 5 Pertharite was so unfavorably received that Corneille for six years retired from the theater (1653–59). He dealt with his critics in a series of Examens, and in three Discours on dramatic poetry; these showed his critical faculty rising as his poetic talent fell; they became a fountainhead of modern literary criticism, and served as models when Dryden defended his middling poetry in excellent prose.
In 1659 a thoughtful gift from Fouquet called Corneille back to the boards. Oedipe won some acclaim in the wake of the young King’s praise; but the works that followed—Sertorius (1662), Sophonisbe (1663), Othon (1664), Agésilas (1666), Attila (1667)—were so mediocre that Fontenelle could hardly believe that they were by Corneille; and Boileau emitted a cruel epigram: “Après l’Agésilas, hélas! Mais après l’Attila, holà!—After Agésilas, alas! But after Attila, stop!” Madame Henrietta, usually the soul of kindness, made matters worse by inviting both Corneille and Racine, each with the knowledge of the other, to write a play on the same theme—Berenice, the Jewish princess with whom the future Emperor Titus fell in love. Racine’s Bérénice was played at the Hôtel de Bourgogne on November 21, 1670, almost five months after Henrietta’s death, and met with full success; Corneille’s Tite et Bérénice was performed a week later by Molière’s company, and was coldly received. The failure broke Corneille’s spirit. He tried again with Pulchérie (1672) and Suréna (1674); they too failed; and Corneille spent the remaining decade of his life in quiet and somber piety.
He was so careless of money that, despite a pension of two thousand livres and other gifts from Louis XIV, he ended his life in poverty. Through some oversight the pension was interrupted for four years; then Corneille appealed to Colbert, who had it restored; but after the death of Colbert it lapsed again. Boileau, hearing of it, informed Louis XIV, and offered to give up his own pension in favor of Corneille. The King immediately sent two hundred livres to the old poet, who soon thereafter died (1684), aged seventy-eight. A eulogy memorable for generosity and eloquence was pronounced upon him in the French Academy by the rival who had succeeded him, and who had already raised French drama and poetry to the peak of their history.
III. RACINE: 1639–99
Like Molière, he was of middle-class origin. His father was controller of the state’s salt monopoly at La Ferté-Milon, some fifty miles northeast of Paris; his mother was the daughter of an attorney at Villers-Cotterêts. She died in 1641, when Jean was not yet two; his father died a year later; and the boy was brought up by his paternal grandparents. There was a strong Jansenist bent in the family; a grandmother and an aunt joined the Port-Royal sisterhood, and Jean himself, at the age of sixteen, was sent to the petite école kept there by the Solitaries. He received from them an intensive training in religion and Greek—two influences that were to take turns in dominating his life. He was fascinated by the plays of Sophocles and Euripides, and translated some of them himself. At the Collège d’Harcourt in Paris he learned some philosophy and more classical lore, and discovered the mysterious charms of young womanhood, new and used. For two years he lived on the Quai des Grands-Augustins with his cousin Nicolas Vitart, who fluctuated between Port-Royal and the theater. Racine heard several plays, wrote one, and presented it to Molière. It was not good enough for production, but Molière gave him a hundred louis nevertheless, and encouraged him to try again. Racine decided upon a literary career.
Alarmed by this madness, and by reports of his amours, his relatives sent him to Uzès in south France (1659) as understudy to an uncle who, as canon of the cathedral, promised him an ecclesiastical benefice if he would study theology and be ordained. For a year the young poet, still simmering with Paris, covered his fire with a black robe, and read St. Thomas Aquinas—with a little Ariosto and Euripides on the side. Now he wrote to La Fontaine:
All the women are brilliant. . . corpus solidum et succi plenum [flesh firm and succulent]; but as the first thing that was said to me was to be on my guard, I do not wish to say more about them. Besides, it would be profaning the house of a beneficed priest, in which I live, to make a long discourse on the matter; domus mea domus orationis [my house is the house of prayer]. . . . I was told, “Be blind.” If I can’t be that entirely, I can at least be mute; for . . . one must be a monk with monks, just as I was a wolf with you and the other wolves of your pack. 6
The canon fell into difficulties, the promised benefice became uncertain, Racine discovered that he had no vocation to the priesthood. He changed his garb, closed the Summa, and returned to Paris (1663).
Arrived, he published an ode that drew a hundred louis from the royal purse. Molière suggested to him a theme which Racine turned into his second play, La Thébaïde. Molière produced it on June 20, 1664, but had to withdraw it after four performances. However, it made enough noise to be heard at Port-Royal-des-Champs. His nun aunt sent him thence a letter that deserves to be quoted as part of a drama as eloquent and touching as anything in Racine:
Having learned that you are planning to come here, I have asked of our Mother permission to see you. . . . But I have heard news, these last days, that has moved me deeply. I write to you in the bitterness of my heart, shedding tears that I should wish to lay in abundance before God to obtain from him your salvation, which is what I long for with more ardor than anything else in the world. I have learned with sorrow that you frequent, more than ever, people whose name is an abomination to all who have any measure of piety, and with reason, since they are forbidden entry to the church, or access to the Sacrament. . . . Judge, then, my dear nephew, in what state I must be, for you must know the tenderness I have always had for you, and that I have asked for nothing except that you should belong to God in some honorable employment. I beg you, then, my dear nephew, to have pity on your soul, to look into your heart and consider seriously into what an abyss you have cast yourself. I hope that what has been told me is not true; but if you are so unfortunate as to be continuing a commerce which dishonors you before God and men, you must not think of coming to see us, for you well understand that I could not speak with you, knowing you to be in a state so deplorable and so contrary to Christianity. Meanwhile I shall not cease to pray God to have mercy upon you and thereby upon me, since your salvation is so dear to me. 7
Here is quite another world than that which our pages usually record—a world of profound belief in the Christian creed, and of loving devotion to its moral code. We cannot but sympathize with a woman who could write with such sincerity of feeling, and not without excuse in her view of the French drama as it had been in her youth. Not quite so tender was a public statement by Nicole, who had taught Racine at Port-Royal:
Everyone knows that this gentlemen has written . . . stage plays. . . . In the eyes of right-minded people such an occupation is in itself not a very honorable one; but, viewed in the light of the Christian religion and the Gospel teaching, it becomes really a dreadful one. Novelists and dramatists are poison-mongers who destroy not men’s bodies but their souls. 8
Corneille, Molière, and Racine separately answered this indictment, Racine with an angry vigor that he keenly repented in later years.
His break with Port-Royal was soon followed by a break with Molière. On December 4, 1665, Molière’s company presented Racine’s third play, Alexandre. Molière was characteristically generous; he knew that Racine did not admire him as a tragic actor, and that the young author was in love with the most beautiful but not the most capable of his actresses; he kept himself and the Béjarts out of the cast, gave the leading female role to Thérèse du Parc, and spared no expense on the production. It met with a good reception, but Racine was dissatisfied with the acting. He arranged a private performance of his play by the Troupe Royale; he was so pleased that he withdrew it from Molière and gave it to this rival company. He persuaded Mlle, du Parc, who had become his mistress, to leave Molière’s company and join the older one. In its new home at the Hôtel de Bourgogne the play ran through thirty performances in little more than
two months. It was not one of Racine’s masterpieces, but it established him as the successor of Corneille, and won him the guiding friendship of the critic Boileau. When Racine boasted, “I have a surprising facility in writing my verses,” Boileau replied, “I want to teach you to write them with difficulty.” 9 Henceforth the great critic taught the poet the rules of classic art.
We do not know with what difficulty Racine wrote Andromaque; in any case he reached in it the full perfection of his dramatic power and poetic style. Its dedication to Madame Henrietta recalls that he read the play to her, and that she wept. Yet it is a drama of terror rather than of sentiment, with all the inevitable catastrophe that we expect in Aeschylus or Sophocles. The plot is a tangle of loves. Orestes loves Hermione, who loves Pyrrhus, who loves Andromache, who loves Hector, who is dead. Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, has been awarded three prizes for his share in the Greek victory over Troy: Epirus as his kingdom, Andromache (Hector’s widow) as his captive, and Hermione (daughter of Menelaus and Helen) as his wife. Andromache is still young and beautiful, though always in tears; she lives only to remember her noble husband, and to fear for their child Astyanax, whom Racine, by dramatic license, rescues from the death allotted him in Euripides to use him here as a hinge of fate. Orestes, son and slayer of Clytemnestra, comes to Epirus as envoy of the Greeks to demand of Pyrrhus the surrender and death of Astyanax as a possible future avenger of Troy. Pyrrhus rejects the proposal in a passage of untranslatable music:
On craint qu’avec Hector Troie un jour ne renaisse,