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In addition, he was unhappy in his private life. Unlike Shakespeare, with whom his career offers many analogies, he never lived to reap the quiet benefit of his work, for he died in the midst of it, at the age of fifty-one, after a performance in the title-rôle of his own Malade Imaginaire. What he had achieved was, in the first place, the creation of French Comedy.
On the boards he always took the principal character himself, and he was a comedian in every look and gesture. The "Malade Imaginaire" was the last of his works. When it was produced upon the stage, the poet himself was really ill, but repressing the voice of natural suffering, to affect that of the hypochondriac for public amusement, he was seized with a convulsive cough, and carried home dying.
Amongst these were the scholars, who pronounced the dramas of Gottsched far superior to those of Corneille and Racine; there were the German patriots, who would not grant a smile to the best representation of "Le Malade Imaginaire," but declared "The Hypochondriac," by Guistorp, the wittiest drama in the world.
"That liqueur, my dear lord," replied Mr. Graeme, "is good old cowslip mead, with a flask of Maraschino di Zara infused in it. For the rest, the dinner has been almost as imaginaire as the omelet. The greater part of the recipes are in an old English volume in my library, or perhaps some owe their origin to the fertile invention of my housekeeper. Let us style them a la Dorothee." "Capital!
Moliere had just composed Le Malade Imaginaire, the last of that succession of blows which he had so often dealt the doctors; he was more ailing than ever; his friends, even his actors themselves pressed him not to have any play. "What would you have me do?" he replied; "there are fifty poor workmen who have but their day's pay to live upon; what will they do if we have no play?
He shuffled away, once more the perfect prototype of the malade imaginaire. Jocelyn Thew watched him in silence until he had disappeared. Then he turned and seated himself by the girl's side. "I find myself," he remarked ruminatively, "still a little troubled as to the precise amount of intelligence which our friend Mr. Crawshay might be said to possess.
As the day wore on, he was several times conscious of a wish to quicken the passing of its moments, and when Sir Henry Grebe, the penultimate patient, proved to be an elderly malade imaginaire of dilatory habit, involved speech, and determined misery, he was obliged firmly to check a rising desire to write a hasty bread-pill prescription and fling him in the direction of Marlborough House.
Thus the Sisters applauded Le Malade Imaginaire without any suspicion that the author was one whose works, for them, were placed under a ban, and whose very name they held in devout abhorrence. She inherited from her father a taste for acting, which she transmitted to her children.
I never for one moment classed your mother as a malade imaginaire!" exclaimed the lady. Her companion raised his eyebrows. "I fancy no one did who knew her." "You believe it, then?" "I should be an idiot if I didn't." "Do you mean to say she is out of her wheeled chair?" "No chairs for her now. When she wishes to walk she walks." "Then she always could!" declared Mrs. Evringham.
The greatest masterpiece of dramatic literature whether it be Romeo and Juliet, Antigone, La Malade Imaginaire or The Doll's House becomes nonsense if the thought divisions indicated by the verbal phrases are not carefully determined and expressed. "Great actors spend hours and hours seeking for the best method of expressing the author's meaning.
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