l'École, now Quai du Louvre, in a house that was torn away in 1854 for
the widening of present Rue du Louvre. Many of the buildings left on
the quay are of the date and appearance of this, his last bachelor
home.
Driven from the Petit-Bourbon by its hurried demolition in 1660,
Molière was granted the use and the privileges of the _Salle_ of the
former Palais-Cardinal, partly gone to ruin and needing large
expenditure to make it good. It had been arranged by Richelieu, just
before his death, for the presentation of his "Mirame." For the great
cardinal and great minister thought that he was a great dramatist too,
and in his vanity saw himself the centre of the mimic stage, as he
really was of the world-stage he managed. He is made by Bulwer to say,
with historic truth: "Of my ministry I am not vain; but of my muse, I
own it." His theatre in his residence--willed at his death to the
King, and thenceforward known as the Palais-Royal--was therefore the
only structure in Paris designed especially and solely for playhouse
purposes. It stood on the western corner of Rues Saint-Honoré and de
Valois, as a tablet there tells us. During the repairs Molière took
his troupe to various _châteaux_ about Paris, returning to open this
theatre on January 20, 1661. This removal was the last he made, and
this house was the scene of his most striking successes.
It is not out of place here to follow his troupe for a while after his
death, and so complete our record of those early theatres. His widow,
succeeding to the control of the company, was, within three months,
compelled to give up the Cardinal's house to Lulli, the most popular
musician of that day, and a scheming fellow withal. The unscrupulous
Florentine induced the King to grant him this Salle des Spectacles for
the production of his music. The opera held the house until fire
destroyed it in 1763, when a new "Academy of Music" was constructed on
the eastern corner of the same streets; this, also, was burned in
1781. Above the tablet recording these dates on this eastern-corner
wall is a fine old sun-dial, such as is rarely seen in Paris, and
seldom noticed now.
The widow Molière, being dispossessed, found a theatre in Rue
Mazarine, just beyond her husband's first theatre, "in the
Tennis-Court where hangs a Bottle for a Sign." For it had been the
_Jeu de Paume de la Bouteille_, and now became the Théâtre Guénégaud,
being exactly opposite the end of that street. Within the structure at
No. 42 Rue Mazarine may be seen the heavy beams of the front portion
of its fabric, where was the entrance for the public. The space
behind, now used for a workshop, with huge pillars around its four
sides, served for the audience, and the stage was built farther
beyond. On the court of this house, and on the contiguous court of No.
43 Rue de Seine, stood a large building, whose first floor was taken
by Madame Molière, and in its rear wall she cut a door to give access
to her stage. The entrance for the performers was in the little
Passage du Pont-Neuf, and under it there are remains of the
foundations of the theatre. Here, in May, 1677, the widow took the
name of Madame Guérin on her marriage with a comedian of her company.
And we feel as little regret as she seems to have felt for her loss of
an illustrious name. In the words of a derisive verse of the time:
"_Elle avoit un mari d'esprit, qu'elle aimoit peu;
Elle prend un de chair, qu'elle aime davantage._"
[Illustration: COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE 1680]
This was the first theatre to present to the general public "lyric
dramas set to music," brought first to France by Mazarin for his
private stage in the small hall of the Palais-Royal, where they were
presented as "_Comédies en Musique, avec machines à la mode
d'Italie_." They bored everybody, the fashion for opera not yet being
set. On October 21, 1680, by letters-patent from royalty, the troupe
of the Théâtre Guénégaud was united to that of the Hôtel de
Bourgogne, and to the combined companies was granted the name of
Comédie Française, the first assumption of that now time-honored
title. The theatre became so successful that the Jansenists in the
Collége Mazarin--the present Institute--made an uproar because they
were annoyed by the traffic and the turmoil in the narrow street, and
succeeded in driving away the playhouse in 1688. After a long search,
the Comédie Française found new quarters in the _Jeu de Paume de
l'Étoile_, built along the outer edge of the street made over the
ditch of the wall, named Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, now Rue de
l'Ancienne-Comédie. At its present No. 14, set in the original front
wall of the theatre, between the second and third stories, a tablet
marks the site; above it is a bas-relief, showing a Minerva reclining
on a slab. She traces on paper, with her right hand, that which is
reflected in the mirror of Truth, held in her left hand. At the rear
of the court stands the old fabric that held the stage. Since those
boards were removed to other walls--the story shall be told in a later
chapter--the building has had various usages. It now serves as a
storehouse for wall-paper. During the Empire it was taken for his
studio by the artist Antoine-Jean Gros, the successor of David and the
forerunner of Géricault; so standing for the transition from the
Classic to the Romantic school. It is not true that he killed himself
in this studio. He went out from it, when maddened by the art critics,
and drowned himself in the Seine in the summer of 1835.
It was a great bill with which the Comédie Française opened this house
on the night of April 18, 1689, for it was made up of two
masterpieces, Racine's "Phèdre" and Molière's "Le Médecin Malgré Lui."
A vast and enthusiastic audience thronged, with joyous clatter,
through narrow Rues Mazarine and Dauphine, coming from the river. The
Café Procope, recently opened just opposite the theatre, was crowded
after the performance, the drinkers of coffee not quite sure that they
liked the new beverage. And so, at the top of their triumphs, we leave
the players with whom we have vagabondized so long and so
sympathetically.
Molière, at the height of his career, had married Armande Béjart, he
being forty years of age, she "aged twenty years or thereabout," in
the words of the marriage contract, signed January 23, 1662. No one
knows now, very few knew then, whether the bride was the sister or the
daughter of Madeleine Béjart, Molière's friend and comrade for many
years, who doubled her rôle of versatile actress with that of
provident cashier of the company. She was devoted to Armande, whom she
had taken to her home from the girl's early schooling in Languedoc,
and over whom she watched in the _coulisses_. She fought against the
marriage, which she saw was a mistake, finally accepted it, and at
her own death in 1672 left all her handsome savings to the wife of
Molière.
In the cast of the "École des Maris," first produced in 1661, appears
the name of Armande Béjart, and, three months after the marriage,
"Mlle. Molière"--so were known the wives of the _bourgeoisie_,
"Madame" being reserved for _grandes-dames_--played the small part of
Élise put for her by the author into his "Critique de l'École des
Femmes." Henceforward she was registered as one of the troupe, the
manager receiving two portions of the receipts for his and her united
shares. She was a pleasing actress, never more than mediocre, except
in those parts, in his own plays, fitted to her and drilled into her
by her husband. She had an attractive presence on the boards, without
much beauty, without any brains. Her voice was exquisite, opulent in
tones that seemed to suggest the heart she did not own. For she was
born with an endowment of adroit coquetry, and she developed her gift.
She was flighty and frivolous, evasive and obstinate, fond of
pleasures not always innocent. Her spendthrift ways hurt Molière's
thrifty spirit, her coquetry hurt his love, her caprices hurt his
honor. His infatuation, a madness closely allied to his genius,
brought to him a fleeting happiness, followed by almost unbroken
torments of love, jealousy, forgiveness. In his home he found none of
the rest nor comfort nor sympathy so much needed, after his prodigious
work in composing, drill-work in rehearsing, and public work in
performing at his theatre, and at Versailles and Fontainebleau. He
got no consolation from his wife for the sneers of venomous rivals,
enraged by his supremacy, and for the stabs of the great world, eager
to avenge his keen puncturing of its pretence and its priggishness.
And while he writhed in private, he made fun in public of his
immitigable grief, and portrayed on the stage the betrayed and
bamboozled husband--at once tragic and absurd--that he believed
himself to be. These eleven years of home-sorrows shortened his life.
On the very day of his fatal attack, he said to the flippant minx,
Armande: "I could believe myself happy when pleasure and pain equally
filled my life; but, to-day, broken with grief, unable to count on one
moment of brightness or of ease, I must give up the game. I can hold
out no longer against the distress and despair that leave me not one
instant of respite."
The church ceremony of their marriage had taken place on February 20,
1662, at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, as its register testifies. He had
already left his bachelor quarters on Quai de l'École, and had taken
an apartment in a large house situated on the small open space opposite
the entrance of the Palais-Royal, the germ of the present _place_
of that name. His windows looked out toward his theatre, and on the two
streets at whose junction the house stood--Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre
and Saint-Honoré. The first-named street, near its end on Quai du
Louvre, held the Hôtel de Rambouillet, which was a reconstruction of
the old Hôtel de Pisani, made in 1618, after the plan and under the
eye of the Marquise de Rambouillet. She is known in history, as she
was known in the _salons_ of her day, by her sobriquet of
"Arthénice"--an anagram coined by Malherbe from her name Catherine.
Hither came all that was brilliant in Paris, and much that pretended
to be brilliant; and from here went out the grotesque affectations of
the _Précieuses Ridicules_. The mansion--one of the grandest of that
period--having passed into other hands, was used as a Vauxhall d'Hiver
in 1784, as a theatre in 1792, and was partly burned in 1836. The
remaining portion, which served as stables for Louis-Philippe, was
wiped away, along with all that end of the old street, by the Second
Empire, to make space for the alignment of the wings of the Louvre.
The buildings of the Ministry of Finance cover a portion of the
street, and the site of Molière's residence, in the middle of the
present Place du Palais-Royal, is trodden, almost every day of the
year, by the feet of American women, hurrying to and from the Museum
of the Louvre or the great shop of the same name.
After a short stay in their first home, Molière and his wife set up
housekeeping in Rue de Richelieu. It is not known if it was in the
house of his later domicile and death. Their cook here was the famous
La Forêt, to whom, it is said, Molière read his new plays, trying
their effect on the ordinary auditor, such as made up the bulk of the
audiences of that time. Servants were commonly called La Forêt then,
and the real name of this cook was Renée Vannier. Within a year,
domestic dissensions came to abide in the household, and it was moved
back to its first home, where Madeleine had remained, and now made one
of the _ménage_. To it came a new inmate in February, 1664, a boy,
baptized at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, having the great monarch for a
godfather, and for a godmother Henrietta of England, wife of the
King's brother, Philippe d'Orléans, and poisoned by him or his
creatures a few years later, it is believed. These royal sponsors were
represented at the christening by distinguished State servants, the
whole affair giving ample proof of this player's position at the time.
A little later, we have hints that the small family was living farther
east in Rue Saint-Honoré, at the corner of Rue d'Orléans, still near
his theatre, in a house swept away when that street was widened into
Rue du Louvre. From this house was buried, in November, 1664, the
child Louis, the burial-service being held at Saint-Eustache, their
parish church, Molière's baptismal church, his mother's burial church.
Here, too, in the following year, August, 1665, he brought to the font
his newly born daughter, Esprit-Madeleine. In October of this same
year he took a long lease of an apartment in their former house on the
corner of Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, and there they stayed for seven
years, removing once more, and for the last time, in October, 1672, to
Rue de Richelieu.
Where now stands No. 40 of that street, René Baudelet, Tailor to the
Queen by title, had taken a house only recently builded, and from him
Molière rented nearly every floor. His lease was for a term of six
years, and he lived only four and a half months after coming here. The
first floor was set apart for his wife, whose ostentatious furnishing,
including a bed fit for a queen, is itemized in the inventory made
after her husband's death. He took for his apartment the whole second
floor, spaciously planned and sumptuously furnished; for he, too, was
lavish in his expenditure and loved costly surroundings. His plate was
superb, his wardrobe rich, his collection of dramatic books and
manuscripts complete and precious. His bedroom, wherein he died, was
on the rear of the house, and its windows looked over the garden of
the Palais-Royal, to which he had access from his terrace below, and
thence by steps down to a gate in the garden wall. Thus he could get
to his theatre by way of those trim paths of Richelieu's planning, as
well as by going along the street and around the corner. You must bear
in mind that the galleries of the Palais-Royal, with their shops, were
not constructed until 1784, and that Rues de Valois and Montpensier
were not yet cut; so that the garden reached, on either side, to the
backs of the houses that fronted on Rues de Richelieu and des
Bons-Enfants. Many of the occupants had, like Molière, their private
doors in the garden wall, with access by stone steps. One of these
staircases is still left, and may be seen in Rue de Valois, descending
from the rear of the Hôtel de la Chancellerie d'Orléans, whose Doric
entrance-court is at No. 19 Rue des Bons-Enfants.
The house now numbered 40 Rue de Richelieu and 37 Rue Montpensier was
erected soon after 1767, when the walls that had harbored Molière were
torn down to prevent them from tumbling down. The present building has
an admirable circular staircase climbing to an open lantern in the
roof. The houses on either side, numbered 37 _bis_ and 35 Rue
Montpensier, retain their original features of a central body with
projecting wings, and so serve to show us a likeness of Molière's
dwelling. Their front windows look out now on the grand fountain of
the younger Visconti's design, erected to Molière's memory in 1844, at
the junction of Rue de Richelieu and old Rue Traversière, now named
Rue Molière. This fountain, flowing full and free always, as flowed
the inspiration of his Muse, is surmounted by an admirable seated
statue of the player-poet by Seurre, the figures of Serious and of
Light Comedy, standing at his feet on either side, being of Pradier's
design. And in Rue de Richelieu, a little farther south, at the
present Nos. 23 and 23 _bis_--once one grand mansion, still intact,
though divided--lived his friend Mignard, and here he died in 1795.
The painter and the player had met at Avignon in 1657-8, and grew to
be life-long friends, with equal admiration of the other's art.
Indeed, Molière considered that he honored Raphael and Michael Angelo,
when he named them "_ces Mignards de leur âge_." Certainly no such
vivid portrait of Molière has come down to us as that on the canvas of
this artist, now in the gallery at Chantilly. It shows us not the
comedian, but the man in the maturity of his strength and beauty.
His blond _perruque_, such as was worn then by all gallants, such as
made his Alceste sneer, softens the features marked strongly even so
early in life, but having none of the hard lines cut deeper by worry
and weariness. The mouth is large and frank, the eyes glow with a
humorous melancholy, the expression is eloquent of his wistful
tenderness.
[Illustration: The Molière Fountain.]
Early in 1667 we find Molière leasing a little cottage, or part of a
cottage, at Auteuil, for a retreat at times. He needed its pure air
for his failing health, its quiet for his work, and its distance from
the disquiet of his home with Armande and Madeleine. He had laid by
money; and his earnings, with his pension from the King--who had
permitted to the troupe the title of "His Majesty's Comedians"--gave
him a handsome income. He was not without shrewdness as a man of
affairs, and not without tact as a courtier. Success, in its worst
worldly sense, could come only through royal favor in that day, and no
man, whatever his manliness, seemed ashamed to stoop to flatter.
Racine, La Fontaine, the sterling Boileau, the antiquely upright
Corneille, were tarred, thickly or thinly, with the same brush.
Auteuil was then a tranquil village, far away from the town's turmoil,
and brought near enough for its dwellers by the silent and swift
river. Now it is a bustling suburb of the city, and the site of
Molière's cottage and grounds is covered by a block of commonplace
modern dwellings on the corner of Rue Théophile Gautier and Rue
d'Auteuil, and is marked by a tablet in the front wall of No. 2 of
the latter street. It has been claimed that this is a mistaken
localization, and that it is nearly opposite this spot that we must
look for his garden and a fragment of his villa, still saved. The
conscientious pilgrim may not fail to take that look, and will ring at
the iron gate of No. 57 Rue Théophile Gautier. It is the gate of the
ancient _hôtel_ of Choiseul-Praslin, a name of unhappy memory in the
annals of swell assassins. The ducal wearer of the title, during the
reign of Louis-Philippe, stabbed his wife to death in their town-house
in the Champs Élysées, and poisoned himself in his cell to save his
condemnation by his fellow-peers of France. The ancient family mansion
has been taken by "_Les Dominicaines_," who have devoted themselves
for centuries to the education of young girls, and have placed here
the Institution of Saint Thomas of Aquinas.
A white-robed sister graciously gives permission to enter, and leads
the visitor across the spacious court, through the stately rooms and
halls--all intact in their old-fashioned harmony of proportion and
decoration--into the garden that stretches far along Rue de Rémusat,
and that once spread away down the slope to the Seine. Here, amid the
magnificent cedar trees, centuries old, stands a mutilated pavilion of
red brick and white stone or stucco, showing only its unbroken porch
with pillars and a fragment of the fabric, cut raggedly away a few
feet behind, to make room for a new structure. Over the central door
are small figures in bas-relief, and in the pediment above one reads,
"_Ici fut la Maison de Molière._" It would be a comfort to be able to
accept this legend; the fact that prevents is that the pavilion was
erected only in 1855 by the owner of the garden, to keep alive the
associations of Molière with this quarter!
It is in his garden, behind the wall that holds the tablet, that we
may see the player-poet as he rests in the frequent free hours, and
days withal, that came in the actor's busy life then. Here he walks,
alone or with his chosen cronies: Rohault, his sympathetic physician;
Boileau, a frequent visitor; Chapelle, who had a room in the cottage,
the quondam schoolfellow and the man of rare gifts; a pleasing
minor-poet, fond of fun, fonder of wine, friendly even to rudeness,
but beloved by all the others, whom he teased and ridiculed, and yet
counselled shrewdly. He sympathized with, albeit his sceptic spirit
could not quite fraternize with, the sensitive vibrating nature of
Molière, that brought, along with acutest enjoyment, the keenest
suffering. In this day-and-night companionship, craving consolation
for his betossed soul, Molière gave voice to his sorrows, bewailing
his wife's frailties and the torments they brought to him--to him,
"born to tenderness," as he truly put it, but unable to plant any root
of tenderness in her shallow nature--loving her in spite of reason,
living with her, but not as her husband, suffering ceaselessly.
This garden often saw gayer scenes of good-fellowship and feasting,
and once a historic frolic, when the _convives_, flushed with wine,
ran down the slope to the river, bent on plunging in to cool their
blood, and were kept dry and undrowned by Molière's steadier head and
hand. His _ménage_ was modest, and his wife seldom came out from their
town apartment, but his daughter was brought often for a visit from
her boarding-school near by in Auteuil. He was beloved by all his
neighbors, to whom he was known less by his public repute than by his
constant kindly acts among them. It was not the actor-manager, but the
"_tapissier valet-de-chambre du Roi_," then residing in Auteuil, who
signed the register of the parish church, as god-father of a village
boy on March 20, 1671; just as he had signed, in the same capacity,
the register of Saint-Roch on September 10, 1669, at the christening
of a friend's daughter, Jeanne Catherine Toutbel. These signatures
were destroyed when all the ancient church registers, then stored in
the Hôtel de Ville, were burned by the Commune.
On the night of Friday, February 16, 1673, while personating his
_Malade Imaginaire_--its fourth performance--Molière was struck down
by a genuine malady. He pulled through the play, and, as the curtain
went down at last, he was nearly strangled by a spasm of coughing that
broke a blood-vessel. Careful hands carried him around to his bedroom
on the second floor of No. 40, where in a few days--too few, his years
being a little more than fifty--death set him free from suffering.
This fatal crisis was the culmination of a long series of recurrent
paroxysms, coming from his fevered life and his fiery soul, that "o'er
informed the tenement of clay," in Dryden's phrase. And his heart had
been crushed by the death of his second boy, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste-Armand,
in October of the previous year. Then, on the physical side, he had
been subjected throughout long years to constant exposure to draughts
on the stage, and to sudden changes within and without the theatre,
most trying to so delicate a frame. His watchful friend, Boileau, had
often urged him to leave the stage before he should break down.
Moreover, it distressed Boileau that the greatest genius of his time,
as he considered Molière, should have to paint his face, put on a
false mustache, get into a bag and be beaten with sticks, in his
ludicrous rôle of comic valet. But all pleading was thrown away. The
invalid maintained that nothing but his own management, his own plays,
and his own playing, kept his theatre alive and his company from
starvation; and so he held on to the end, dying literally in harness.
His wife appeared too late on the last scene, the priest who was
summoned could not come in time, and the dying eyes were closed by two
stranger nuns, lodging for the time in the house.