United States or United States Minor Outlying Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Throw Celimene into the current of genuine passion I do not mean the brutality of Alceste I will wager that coquetry will be swept away by love. I had such faith in mine that I thought to be able to fix the moment when I should call myself victorious and sure of being obeyed.
Later on, when he became more versatile as an actor, he wrote for himself a wider range of parts and individualised them in name as well as in nature. His growth in depicting the characters of young women is curiously coincident with the growth of his wife as an actress for whom to devise such characters. Molière's best woman Célimène, in Le Misanthrope was created for Mlle.
Thanks to the perfectly proper and becoming advances of the beautiful woman, whom her rival, Madame Colleville, called the Celimene of the rue Duphot, he had dined there every Friday for the last month, and returned of his own accord for a cup of tea on Wednesdays.
Yes! on the whole we might easily say that she was exquisite, even though we did not admit that she was beautiful. Painter David has made a sketch of her; we have all seen it at the Musee Carnavalet, and all wondered why that charming, if irregular, little face made such an impression of sadness. There are five acts in "Le Misanthrope," during which Celimene is almost constantly on the stage.
The spur applied by Lisbeth to Steinbock's vanity was intensified by the appearance of the dining-room, bright with handsome silver plate; the dinner was served with every refinement and extravagance of Parisian luxury. "I should have done better to take Celimene," thought he to himself.
And we are quite at a loss even to guess what the French playwright-psychologist, who has left us the unforgetable figure of Célimène would have thought of Hedda Gabler, that strangest creation of the end of the century, anatomically virtuous, but empty of heart and avid of sensation.
Their dramatic value lies in their piquancy of confrontation. The tug-of-war between Alceste and Celimene, between Rodrigue and Chimene in "Le Cid," is what we think of as dramatic; and it is this same element which is found as well in the complicated and overflowing English plays.
But the condition of honest women in his day did not permit of the freedom of action and fencing dialectic of a Celimene, and consequently it is below our mark of pure Comedy. Sainte-Beuve conjures up the ghost of Menander, saying: For the love of me love Terence. Of the six comedies of Terence, four are derived from Menander; two, the Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus.
To change our metaphor, adjustment to the middle way is here so easily credible and possible, that it is the very hunting-ground for the Comic Spirit. The reputed masterpiece of Moliere shows us Alceste and Celimene in the end still at odds. But light-heartedness and sincerity are not to common sense incompatible, and thus we are rightly led up to the impasse by paths of laughter.
The affectations of "L'Astrée" have been erected into a code of Love, and we have succeeded in establishing the French cavalier as the paragon of excellence in love matters, and the perfect type of gallantry. The saying "to die for one's lady-love" rises so naturally to our lips that the most insignificant cornet might warble it to his Célimène without causing her to smile.
Word Of The Day