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In his satire on learned ladies Les Femmes Savantes the ridicule is incessant, remorseless; the absurd, pedantic, self-complacent women are turned inside out before our eyes amid a cataract of laughter; and, if Molière had been merely the well-balanced moralist some critics suppose, that, no doubt, would have been enough. But for the true Molière it was not enough.
Voltaire had a hollow wooden voice, and his declamation had more pomp in it than nature; yet in the part of Trissotin, in the Femmes Savantes, he performed very well. From Lausanne, where he quarrelled with several persons, he went, in 1755, to St. Jean, close to Geneva, and gave to the house he occupied the name of Les Dèlices, which it retains to this day.
And though his order is not always our order, yet a certain exquisite orderliness is of the very essence of his thought and style. It is the characteristic which Molière hits upon in Les Femmes savantes, 'Je m'attache pour l'ordre au péripatétisme'.
The surest way to make a dupe is to let you victim suppose you are his Voila de l'erudition. Les Femmes Savantes. I found, on my return, covered with blood, and foaming with passion, my inestimable valet Bedos! "What's the matter?" said I.
Crisp, wiser for her than he had been for himself, read the manuscript in his lonely retreat, and manfully told her that she had failed, that to remove blemishes here and there would be useless, that the piece had abundance of wit but no interest, that it was bad as a whole, that it would remind every reader of the Femmes Savantes, which, strange to say, she had never read, and that she could not sustain so close a comparison with Molière.
Ladies that soar in the realms of Rose-Pink, whose language wears the nodding plumes of intellectual conceit, are traceable to Philaminte and Belise of the Femmes Savantes: and the mordant witty women have the tongue of Celimene.
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."
In the Femmes Savantes raillery has also the upper hand of mirth; the action is insignificant and not in the least degree attractive; and the catastrophe, after the manner of Moliere, is arbitrarily brought about by foreign means. Yet these technical imperfections might well be excused for the sake of its satirical merit.
With the Italian style of buildings and decorations, the Italian system of a Court adorned by ladies was first introduced here under Francois I., and soon became a necessity.... Under Francois I., his beautiful mistress, the Duchesse d'Etampes "la plus belle des savantes, et la plus savante des belles," directed all the fetes.
Mais qu'on approche de plus près et qu'on observe avec soin: mille nuances fines vont éclore sous le regard; mille intentions savantes vont sortir de ce tissu profond et serré; on ne peut plus en détacher ses yeux. Similarly when Mr.
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