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Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the rest our sympathy, somehow, is with them, after all; and M. de Pourceaugnac is a gentleman, despite his misadventures. Though triumphant Youth and malicious Love in your plays may batter and defeat Jealousy and Old Age, yet they have not all the victory, or you did not mean that they should win it.
This and several others of the same period, as Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, La Comtesse d'Escarbagnas, and even his last, the Malade Imaginaire, sufficiently prove that the maturity of his mind as an artist did not keep pace with the progress of years, otherwise he would have been disgusted with such loose productions.
We cannot ascertain the year in which this man died; he had been bred a templer, which he forsook as a dry unentertaining study, and much beneath the genius of a poet. His dramatic works are, The Careless Lovers, a Comedy, acted at the duke's theatre, 4to. 1673. The scene Covent-Garden, part of this play is borrowed from Moliere's Monsieur de Pourceaugnac.
However it may be, no other overtone could more perfectly have completed the fundamental note. When Moliere introduces to us the two ridiculous doctors, Bahis and Macroton, in L'Amour medecin, he makes one of them speak very slowly, as though scanning his words syllable by syllable, whilst the other stutters. We find the same contrast between the two lawyers in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac.
If I escape with my life, I shall be fortunate. Why, then, since you pin me to the very wall, I'll tell you what I should do. I should go back to the original and help myself more freely from it." "The original?" questioned M. Binet the author. "It is called, I believe, 'Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, and was written by Moliere." Somebody tittered, but that somebody was not M. Binet.
Monsieur de Pourceaugnac was played for the first time at Chambord, on the 6th of October, 1669; a year afterwards, on the same stage, appeared Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, with the interludes and music of Lulli.
The role, like that of Sbrigani in Pourceaugnac, required an intelligent actor, and it was played to perfection. Without making the child fearful and timid by inspiring excessive terror, he made him realise so thoroughly the folly of his exploit that in half an hour's time he brought him home to me, ashamed and humble, and afraid to look me in the face.
Such is probably the experience of the tippler when he feels himself pleasantly drifting into a state of blankness in which neither reason nor propriety has any meaning for him. Now, consider whether some of Moliere's plays would not produce the same sensation: for instance, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, which, after beginning almost reasonably, develops into a sequence of all sorts of absurdities.
The play was given in that great yellow saloon, opening off from the grand staircase, where Molière first gave Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and where Lulli jumped from the stage into the orchestra to amuse Louis le Grand when he was bored with Pourceaugnac. Monsieur Voltaire was, I am sure, much harder to please than Louis le Grand, and Madame du Châtelet was harder to please than Monsieur Voltaire.
The drama has but to take a step to break all the spider's webs with which the militia of Lilliput have attempted to fetter its sleep. Tartuffe is not handsome, Pourceaugnac is not noble, but Pourceaugnac and Tartuffe are admirable flashes of art.
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