Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/654

Rh 626 M O L I E R E these early days of the war of the Fronde. We find Moliere at Nantes in 1648, at Fontenay-le-Compte, and in the spring of 1649 at Agen, Toulouse, and probably at Angouleme and Limoges. In January 1650 they played at Narbonne, and between 1650 and 1653 Lyons was the headquarters of the troupe. In January 1653, or perhaps 1655, Moliere gave L Utourdi at Lyons, the first of his finished pieces, as contrasted with the slight farces with which he generally diverted a country audience. It would be interesting to have the precise date of this piece, but La Grange (1682) says that &quot;in 1653 Moliere went to Lyons, where he gave his first comedy, L ^tourdi,&quot; while in his Registre La Grange enters the year as 1655. At Lyons De Brie and his wife, the famous Mile, de Brie, entered the troupe, and Du Pare married marquise de Gorla, better known as Mile, du Pare. The libellous author of La, Fameuse Comedienne reports that Moliere s heart was the shuttlecock of the beautiful Du Pare and De Brie, and the tradition has a persistent life. Moliere s own opinion of the ladies and men of his company may be read be tween the lines of his Impromptu de Versailles. In 1653 Prince de Conti, after many political adventures, was residing at La Grange, near Pezenas, in Languedoc, and chance brought him into relations with his old school fellow Moliere. Conti had for first gentleman of his bed chamber the abbe Daniel de Cosnac, whose memoirs now throw light for a moment on the fortunes of the wander ing troupe. Cosnac engaged the company &quot; of Moliere and of La Bejart;&quot; but another company, that of Cormier, nearly intercepted the favour of the prince. Thanks to the resolu tion of Cosnac, Moliere was given one chance of appearing on the private theatre of La Grange. The excellence of his acting, the splendour of the costumes, and the insist ence of Cosnac, and of Sarrasin, Conti s secretary, gained the day for Moliere, and a pension was assigned to his company (Cosnac, Memoires, i. 128, Paris, 1852). As Cosnac proposed to pay Moliere a thousand crowns of his own money to recompense him in case he was supplanted by Cormier, it is obvious that his profession had become sufficiently lucrative. In 1654, during the session of the estates of Languedoc, Moliere and his company played at Montpellier. Here Moliere danced in a ballet (Le Ballet des Incompatible^} in which a number of men of rank took part, according to the fashion of the time. Moliere s own roles were those of the Poet and the Fishwife. The sport of the little piece is to introduce opposite characters, dancing and singing together. Silence dances with six women, Truth with four courtiers, Money with a poet. and so forth. Whether the ballet, or any parts of it, are by Moliere, is still disputed (La Jeunesse de Moliere, suivie du Ballet des Incompatibles, P. L. Jacob, Paris, 1858). In April 1655 it is certain that the troupe was at Lyons, where they met and hospitably entertained a profligate buffoon, Charles d Assoucy, who informs the ages that Moliere kept open house, and &quot;une table bien garnie.&quot; November 1655 found Moliere at Pezenas, where the estates of Languedoc were convened, and where local tradition points out the barber s chair in which the poet used to sit and study character. The longest of Moliere s extant autographs is a receipt, dated at Pezenas, 4th Feb ruary 1656, for 6000 livres, granted by the estates of Languedoc. This year was notable for the earliest repre sentation, at Beziers, of Moliere s second finished comedy, the Depit Amoureux. Conti now withdrew to Paris, and began to &quot;make his soul,&quot; as the Irish say. Almost his first act of penitence was to discard Moliere s troupe (1657), which consequently found that the liberality of the estates of Languedoc was dried up for ever. Conti s relations with Moliere must have definitively closed long before 1666, when the now pious prince wrote a treatise against the stage, and especially charged his old schoolfellow with keeping a new school, a school of atheism (Traite de la Comedie, p. 24, Paris, 1666). Moliere was now (1657) independent of princes and their favour. He went on a new circuit to Nismes, Orange, and Avignon, where he met another old class-mate, Chapelle, and also encountered the friend of his later life, the painter Mignard. After a later stay at Lyons, ending with a piece given for the benefit of the poor on 27th February 1658, Moliere passed to Grenoble, returned to Lyons, and is next found in Rouen, where, we should have said, the Theatre Illustre had played in 1643 (F. Bouquet, La Troupe de Moliere a Rouen, p. 90, Paris, 1880). At Rouen Moliere must have made or renewed the acquaintance of Pierre and Thomas Cor- neille. His company had played pieces by Corneille at Lyons and elsewhere. The real business of the comedian in Rouen was to prepare his return to Paris. &quot;After several secret journeys thither he was fortunate enough to secure the patronage of Monsieur, the king s only brother, who granted him his protection, and permitted the company to take his name, presenting them as his servants to the king and the queen-mother &quot; (Preface to La Grange s edition of 1682). The troupe appeared for the first time before Louis XIV. in a theatre arranged in the old Louvre (24th October 1658). Moliere was now thirty-six years of age. He had gained all the experience that fifteen years of practice could give. He had seen men and cities, and noted all the humours of rural and civic France. He was at the head of a company which, as La Grange, his friend and comrade, says, &quot; sin cerely loved him.&quot; He had the unlucrative patronage of a great prince to back him, and the jealousy of all play wrights, and of the old theatres of the Hotel de Bourgogne and the Marais, to contend against. In this struggle we can follow him by aid of the Registre of La Grange (a brief diary of receipts and payments), and by the help of notices in the rhymed chronicles of Loret. The first appearance of Moliere before the king was all but a failure. Nicomede, by the elder Corneille, was the piece, and we may believe that the actors of the Hotel de Bourgogne, who were present, found much to criticize. When the play was over, Moliere came forward and asked the king s permission to act &quot; one of the little pieces with which he had been used to regale the provinces.&quot; The Docteur Amoureux, one of several slight comedies admitting of much &quot; gag,&quot; was then performed, and &quot; diverted as much as it surprised the audience.&quot; The king commanded that the troupe should establish itself in Paris (Preface, ed. 1682). The theatre assigned to the company was a salle in the Petit Bourbon, in a line with the present Rue du Louvre. Some Italian players already occupied the house on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays ; the company of Moliere played on the other days. The first piece played in the new house (3d Nov. 1658) was L JStourdi. La Grange says the comedy had a great success, producing seventy pistoles for each actor. The success is admitted even by the spiteful author of jZlomire Hypochondre (Paris, &quot;Jo jouai 1 Etourdi, qui fut line merveille.&quot; The success, however, is attributed to the farcical element in the play and the acting the cuckoo cry of Moliere s detractors. The original of L Jlltourdi is the Italian comedy (1629) L Inavvertito, by Nicolo Barbieri detto Beltrame ; Moliere pushed rather far his right to &quot;take his own wherever he found it.&quot; Had he written nothing more original, the contemporary critic of the Festin de Pierre might have said, not untruly, that he only excelled in stealing pieces from the Italians. The piece is conventional : the stock characters of the prodigal son, the impudent valet, the old father occupy the stage. But the dialogue