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Updated: May 26, 2025
"Philip Nolan" we often called the old man, who sometimes said to us, with yearning, pathetic voice, "I am an American; I am here only till I make my fortune. When I am rich enough I shall go Home. I shall die and be buried at Home, when I am rich enough." Temperament is Fate. Père S 's temperament of Harpagon fated him to die as he had lived, a man without a country.
A miser and a superannuated lover may both be present at the representation of Harpagon, and both return from the theatre satisfied with themselves, while the miser says to himself, "I am at least not in love;" and the lover, "Well, at all events I am not a miser."
The first word is 'fifty per cent'; he belongs to the race of Harpagon; he'll take canary birds at all seasons, fur tippets in summer, nankeens in winter. What securities are you going to offer him? Gobseck! Gobseck! in the name of virtuous folly, who told you to go to that commercial guillotine?" "Monsieur du Tillet." "Ah! the scoundrel, I recognize him! We used to be friends.
And as for that /petit monsieur/, do you think I could quietly contemplate my own tool's enjoyment of all I had lost myself? Nay, more, if that young Harpagon were Alphonso's son-inlaw, could the duke have a whisperer at his ear more fatal to my own interests? To be brief, I saw at a glance my best course. I have adopted it.
But a defect that is ridiculous, as soon as it feels itself to be so, endeavours to modify itself, or at least to appear as though it did. Were Harpagon to see us laugh at his miserliness, I do not say that he would get rid of it, but he would either show it less or show it differently. Indeed, it is in this sense only that laughter "corrects men's manners."
We avoid Harpagon as though he were a leper; but Falstaff, who, like Lady Ida, could "find no cure for this intolerable consumption of the purse," never lacked friends, and even Justice Shallow, it will be remembered, lent him a thousand crowns. There is no record of its having been repaid, though Falstaff was once surprised, in a moment of bitter humiliation, into admitting the debt.
She had about twelve thousand francs a year; but that modest income was partly made up of an annual stipend sent her by the old Duchesse de Navarreins, paternal aunt of the young duke, and another stipend given by her mother, the Duchesse d'Uxelles, who was living on her estate in the country, where she economized as old duchesses alone know how to economize; for Harpagon is a mere novice compared to them.
They have the large reality of general ideas, which is a truer thing than the actuality of facts. In France, instead of calling a man a miser, they call him an Harpagon. We know Rosalind as we know our sweetest summer love; Hamlet is our elder brother, and understands our own wavering and faltering.
A little privation will do them no kind of harm. They belong to that class of whom it has been said that 'they would borrow money from Harpagon, and find truffles on the raft of the Medusa. But hold! we are at the end of our breakfast. What say you? Shall we take our demi-tasse in the next room, among our fellow-students of physic and the fine arts?"
Characters he did not seek to draw, but he made a personage the medium of incarnating a quality. Harpagon is not a miser; he is Avarice speaking and doing. Alceste is not a person; he is Misanthropy personified. This fundamental exaggeration led to and facilitated the caricature of relations and juxtapositions.
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