The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

Molière's company called themselves "Comédiens de Monsieur"; and after Torelli had left them full possession of the Petit Bourbon, their greatest rivals in public favor were the company at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, who played Corneille, Scudéry, Scarron, and other authors of less note. In 1659 Molière took the town by storm with his Précieuses Ridicules, a satire in one act on the exaggerations of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. This was followed in the succeeding year by Sganarelle ou le Cocu Imaginaire; in the beginning of 1661 appeared Don Garcie de Navarre, a heroic piece in five acts, intended to delineate the evils of passionate jealousy; and in the same year were produced L'École des Maris, a satire on unreasonable jealousy, and Les Fâcheux, a court sketch of several kinds of bores; in 1662 L'École des Femmes—an attempt to show the danger of bringing girls up in too strict a manner—with its sequel, the Critique de l'École des Femmes, in the year after.

Boursault, an amiable man but a mediocre playwright, envious of Molière's growing fame, wrote for the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which eagerly accepted, if it did not bespeak, his piece, Le Portrait du Peintre ou la Contrecritique de l'École des Femmes, in which he attempted to bring his brother-author into ridicule; but Molière took ample revenge in his Impromptu de Versailles, in which he soundly lashed his rivals, though it may be mentioned to his honor that it was never printed during his lifetime. In 1664 he wrote the Mariage Forcé, a one-act piece with eight entrées de ballet, specially designed for court representation, in which the King himself was pleased to dance, and, a month or two later, the Princesse d'Elide, a cumbrous and comparatively inferior production, done in great haste at the command of Louis XIV, who had determined upon an eight-days' festival in honor of Louise de la Vallière.

It was during these festivities that for the first time was represented the first three acts of Molière's masterpiece, Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur, a play well worthy of the best and most legitimate subject which satire can have to deal with. Nothing can be fairer or more appropriate than that the art which consists in feigning a representation of real life on the stage should take, as the butt of its ridicule and the object of its skill, the man whose whole life and character are engaged in feigning the possession of virtue and seeming to be that which he is not. The earliest satirists and dramatists have seized on the topic with avidity; and to go no further out of our way than Molière's predecessors in France, we may mention the authors of the romance of Reynard the Fox, Rutebœuf; Jean de Meung, the author of the Farce des Brus, Regnier, Scarron, even Pascal.

Very various, no doubt, are the hypocritical types encountered in the works of these and other satirists; but all must necessarily have a certain amount of family likeness, and many a hereditary trait is recognized as common to at least two, if not to all, of the race. "Molière gives us the hypocrite by nature, the man who would be a canting scoundrel even if it did not 'pay'; who cannot help being so; who is a human being, and therefore not perfect; who is a man, and thus sensually inclined; who employs certain means to subdue his passions and to become a 'whited sepulchre,' but who gives way all the more to them when he imagines that he can do so with impunity." Tartuffe, who ought to be bound to Orgon by the strongest ties of gratitude, allows the son to be turned out of the house by his father, because the latter will not believe the accusations brought against the hypocrite—tries to seduce his benefactor's wife, to marry his daughter by a first marriage; and finally, after having obtained all his dupe's property, betrays him to the king as a criminal against the state. The dénouement of the play is that Tartuffe himself is led to prison, and that vice is for the nonce punished on the stage as it deserves to be.

Tartuffe made many enemies for Molière, especially among the clergy, who were not afraid of being twitted with their too ready application to themselves of the moral of the play. It was prohibited in 1664; and some zealous clergymen even went so far as to write treatises which they hoped would counteract the effects of the dramatist's works. For their own sakes we may hope that they did not succeed. The King was not strong enough to withstand the influence of the clergy, and did not venture at once to remove the interdict. The relaxation did not take place until five years later. But it was at this time that Louis XIV bestowed on Molière's company the name of "Comédiens du Roi"; and the troop was subsidied by a yearly pension of seven thousand livres.