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Under that same date the Moniteur also puts it on record that the Theatre National was filled to its utmost capacity for the revival of the late citoyen Moliere's comedy. The Assembly of the Convention having voted the new law which placed the lives of thousands at the mercy of a few human bloodhounds, adjourned its sitting and proceeded to the Rue de Richelieu.
"He adores his wife and dares not find fault with her," pursued Oscar, rejoicing to have found a topic to which they listened. "He plays scenes with her which would make you die of laughing, exactly like Arnolphe in Moliere's comedy." The count, horror-stricken, looked at Pierrotin, who, finding that the count said nothing, concluded that Madame Clapart's son was telling falsehoods.
Consider the firstlings of Shakspere's art and of Molière's; and observe how they reveal these prentice playwrights at work, each seeking to display his cleverness and each satisfied when he had done this.
Man is only a machine, nothing more." "La Mettrie, I will give you to-morrow nothing but grouse and truffles to eat: woe to you, then, if the day after you do not write me just such a comedy as Moliere's!
There is no act so trivial, or to all appearance so unworthy of a rational being, that the magic of vanity cannot throw a halo of dignity over it, and persuade the agent that it is mainly by his exertions that society is kept together, as Molière's dancing-master reasoned that the secret of good government is the secret of good dancing namely, how to avoid false steps.
We can well believe that a play, set in this flattering key, was calculated to please the King, who was praised all through at the expense of his courtiers, who were les fâcheux, the bores. After this rare bit of adulation Molière's fortune was made. For the host, Fouquet, who had gathered so much here to give the King pleasure, a far different fate was reserved.
For the moment, seeing him surrounded by these female worshippers, hanging upon his lips as he discoursed to us about new readings of old truths, one was irresistibly reminded of certain scenes in Molière's "Femmes Savantes."
Plays, as well as novels, have been constructed in this inorganic way, for example, Molière's "L'Etourdi" and "Les Facheux." If the actors, in performing either of these plays, should omit one or two units of the sausage-string of incidents, the audience would not become aware of any gap in structure.
The circumstance which has been so much admired in Moliere's School of Women, that a jealous individual should be made the constant confidant of his rival's progress, had previously been introduced into this play, and certainly with much more probability.
Tartufe, the hypocrite, the swindler, the seducer of his benefactor's wife, looms out on us with the kind of horrible greatness that Milton's Satan might have had if he had come to live with a bourgeois family in seventeenth-century France. Molière's genius was many-sided; he was a master not only of the smile, but of the laugh.
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