United States or Slovenia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Compare them in this respect with the people schooled in La Bruyere, La Fontaine, Moliere; with the people who have the figures of a Trissotin and a Vadius before them for a comic warning of the personal vanities of the caressed professor. It is more than difference of race. It is the difference of traditions, temper, and style, which comes of schooling.
All is a sort of involuntary parody, and the more repulsive because a word ends in a blow, because a sentimental, declamatory Trissotin poses as statesman, because the studied elegance of the closet become pistol shots aimed at living breasts, because an epithet skillfully directed sends a man to the guillotine. The contrast is too great between his talent and the part he plays.
To this species of comic element, the way in which Oronte introduces his sonnet, Orgon listens to the accounts respecting Tartuffe and his wife, and Vadius and Trissotin fall by the ears, undoubtedly belongs; but the endless disquisitions of Alceste and Philinte as to the manner in which we ought to behave amid the falsity and corruption of the world do not in the slightest respect belong to it.
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.
Though not a poet, in any high sense of the word, he wrote neat and polished lines with great facility, and was fond of exercising this talent. Indeed, if we must speak out, he seems to have been more of a Trissotin than was to be expected from the powers of his mind and from the great part which he had played in life.
The poor, the workers, the people, they are on both sides, equally miserable, equally exploited. Thinkers have a common field, and as for their rivalries and their vanities, they are as ridiculous in the East as in the West; the world does not go to war over the quarrels of a Vadius or a Trissotin. The State? But the State and the Country are not the same thing.
He had a good deal of learning, but much pretension, and Moliere has given him an undesirable immortality as Vadius in "Les Femmes Savantes," in company with his deadly enemy, the Abbe Cotin, who figures as "Trissotin." It appears that the susceptible savant lost his heart to his lively pupil, and sighed not only in secret but quite openly.
That, at the end, Trissotin should be ignominiously made to commit an act of low selfishness is odious; for we know that a learned man then alive was satirized under this character, and that his name was very slightly disguised.
The memorable scene between Trissotin and Vadius, their mutual compliments terminating in their mutual contempt, had been rehearsed by their respective authors the Abbé Cottin and Ménage. The stultified booby of Limoges, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, and the mystified millionaire, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, were copied after life, as was Sganarelle, in Le Médecin malgré lui.
We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking, and so grotesque, as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.
Word Of The Day