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"Stop a moment!" interrupted my uncle, who wished to pursue his argument. "I, whom you see here, have also had the honour of being made a cuckold, as they say in Molière. You are acquainted with Molière, I dare say?" "I am; go on!" said the lieutenant, who had made up his mind to restrain himself while my uncle was developing his explanations.
"Well, what will happen if you do not burn them?" "They will remain in my mind, and I shall never forget them!" "The deuce!" cried Loret; "what a dangerous thing! One would go mad with it!" "The deuce! the deuce!" repeated La Fontaine; "what can I do?" "I have discovered the way," said Moliere, who had entered just at this point of the conversation. "What way?"
"Write them first and burn them afterwards." "How simple! Well, I should never have discovered that. What a mind that devil of a Moliere has!" said La Fontaine. Then, striking his forehead, "Oh, thou wilt never be aught but an ass, Jean La Fontaine!" he added. "What are you saying there, my friend?" broke in Moliere, approaching the poet, whose aside he had heard.
And I 've got a whole bagful of books, to read in the train Anatole France, and Shakespeare, and Gyp, and Pierre Loti, and Molière, and Max Beerbohm, and everybody: all the books the Baronessa would have died a thousand deaths rather than let me look at.
"They cannot, indeed, claim the merit of being the first in France who opened the eyes of the nation; for Fenelon had taught even to Louis XIV., in his immortal 'Telemaque, the duties of a king; Racine, in his 'Germanicus, had shown the accursed nature of irresponsible despotism; Moliere, in his 'Tartuffe, had exposed the vices of priestly hypocrisy; Pascal, in his 'Provincial Letters, had revealed the wretched sophistries of the Jesuits; Bayle even, in his 'Critical Dictionary, had furnished materials for future sceptics."
I make an exception for music; but not for the visible theatrical accompaniments thereof. Well given on the stage, Don Giovanni, for instance, remains but the rather bourgeois play of Molière; leave me and the music together, and I promise you that all the romance and terror and wonder of ten thousand Spains are distilled into my fancy!
The reader must not, however, be hurried away from the subject of the convict population without the pleasure of an introduction to a delightful rascal, under sentence for forgery, with whom Peron had an interview. The ironical humour of the passage will lighten a page; and the plausible character revealed in it might have escaped from a comedy of Moliere.
The French have a school of stately comedy to which they can fly for renovation whenever they have fallen away from it; and their having such a school is mainly the reason why, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, they know men and women more accurately than we do. Moliere followed the Horatian precept, to observe the manners of his age and give his characters the colour befitting them at the time.
Fuller did not consider it important that a child should have juvenile books and Margaret's light reading consisted of Shakspere, Cervantes, and Molière. She gives an interesting account of her discovery of Shakspere at the age of eight.
The Précieuses Ridicules was acted in the presence of the assembled Hôtel de Rambouillet with immense applause. A central voice from the pit, anticipating the host of enemies and the fame of the reformer of comedy, exclaimed, "Take courage, Molière, this is true comedy."
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