Alceste’s beloved, Célimène, is just as upright and discerning as he, and has as sharp a tongue. But she is willing to make an accommodation with society. At the same time that she recognizes fools and makes fun of them, she also charms them out of their shoes. One of the great characters in the history of drama, she also represents a home truth. Plain speaking, no matter how correct, will always offend if it is not accompanied by a certain social grace, a certain courtesy. The insistence on the part of Alceste that all, or at least he, should always speak their minds, is finally seen as overweening pride. Célimène is vain and beautiful, but she has the humility that comes from being able to see other people as real and needful, like herself. Alceste can’t see this. He retreats into his dark corner, an almost tragic figure. Yet a comic one, too—the play is very funny, and Célimène is superb.
Molière wrote The Doctor in Spite of Himself the year after The Misanthrope. It was a time of distress for the company and for Molière personally, who was very ill, but none of his plays has a sunnier disposition than this foolish farce about a peasant who admits to being a doctor in order to avoid being beaten. He gets everything wrong; when he is taken to task for seeking the heart on the right side of the chest he explains, in the immortal phrase: “We have changed all that!” He also cures his patient with some down-home common sense. He knows when a girl is sick and when she is in love, and this one is in love; if so, he knows how to make her well. He rearranges things so that the lovers have each other and everyone else is happy, too, and there is thenceforth no more illness on this stage. Molière played the part of the doctor; he had been treated by many quacks and he knew all their tricks.
Six years after returning to Paris from his years of touring in the provinces, in 1664, Molière presented at Versailles, to a royal audience, the first version of his extraordinary play Tartuffe, or, The Imposter. This first version, in three acts, tells of a “holy” man who worms his way into the household of a good bourgeois and rewards his benefactor by attempting to seduce his wife. When he is caught in the act he reproaches himself with such aplomb that the bourgeois ends up not only forgiving him but insisting that he spend as much time with his wife as he can.
It was the custom during the seventeenth century in France for “directors of conscience,” who were usually pious laymen, not clergy, to be placed by the Church in families where they were supposed to reprove and reform conduct. Obviously this practice could lead to all kinds of hypocrisy. But it was a recognized religious procedure, and Molière’s attack on it in Tartuffe enraged the ecclesiastics of Paris. The play was banned and he was charged with several crimes.
Molière was acquitted of the charges but it was five years before he was able to free his play, which he liked very much, from the grip of the censors. He twice petitioned the king and published a “Letter on the Comedy of the Imposter” that reflected his deepest views of the essence of comedy. “The comic,” he wrote, “is the outward and visible form that nature’s bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that,” he went on, “we should see, and avoid, it.”
To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence, and we must see wherein the rational consists … Incongruity is the heart of the comic … It follows that all lying, disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different from the reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceed from a single source, all this is in essence comic.
These arguments apparently persuaded the king to allow Molière to present the play again. In the meantime he had doubled its length and added a depth of character seldom achieved in comedy. Orgon, the deceived bourgeois, has become a complex man, a fool for a while, but one who is eventually capable of seeing the light. His wife, Elmire, is a woman of much common sense. Their daughter, Mariane, and Mariane’s maid, Dorine, are a superb pair, and the lovers’ quarrel that Dorine first promotes between Mariane and Valère and then attempts to stop once it has gone on too long is one of the funniest scenes in theater.
Molière understood the power of hypocrisy and knew that common sense and reason are often helpless against it except in the imaginative world of the stage. Tartuffe, the imposter, wins everything in the final version of the play. Orgon and his wife and children are only saved by the miraculous intercession of His Majesty, who sees all and knows all in this good world of justice and truth. That was a very nice compliment to the King, but the audience departed from the theater realizing full well that kings do not in fact know all, and that evil is a real and present thing.
Molière won his battle for Tartuffe; it ended up being his greatest stage success. He did not win in the case of another of his best plays, Don Juan. At the end of this play, which influenced Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an atheist is consigned to hell in a spectacular outburst of words and fire, but before his punishment Juan has had the temerity to mock the priests and charm the audience. The Church found this intolerable. Don Juan was banned and never played again during Molière’s lifetime.
Many productions of Molière in English attempt to make an English playwright out of him. Such productions overemphasize the farcical elements, ignore the formalisms in his plays, run over the scene breaks, present the actors in modern dress, and the like. The best place to see him played—if you know a bit of French (it need not be a lot)—is at the Salle Molière of the Comédie Française, in Paris, where the plays of this greatest of French writers are presented with all due decorum, love, and respect. Short of that they should be read—for example, in the translations by the splendid American poet Richard Wilbur—slowly and with delectation of the comic situations.
BLAISE PASCAL
1623–1662
Pensées
Among the thinkers and writers of the seventeenth century in France, Blaise Pascal, the most modest and retiring of all, takes second place to none. Born in 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand, he was a youthful prodigy. He was from childhood fascinated by mathematics, but his father destined his brilliant son for the law and consequently forbade him to study mathematics and removed all mathematical books from his library. Pascal thereupon made up his own system of geometry, using different names: a circle was “a round.” The father, coming upon this work of original creative genius, gave the boy his intellectual liberty. Pascal went on to invent truly new things in mathematics—among others, he founded the modern science of probability. His later work on that distinctive curve, the cycloid, made him famous throughout Europe. His correspondence with another mathematician, Fermat, contains much that remains of interest today. And to help his tax-collector father with his computations, Blaise Pascal, at the age of twenty, constructed a calculating device that has been termed the first digital computer.