The Man Behind the Iron Mask (15 page)

For a proper appreciation of the theory, some knowledge of Molière's life is necessary, but this can be quickly given. He was born in Paris in 1622, the eldest son of a wealthy merchant-upholsterer, was educated by the Jesuits at the college of Clermont, the best secondary school of the day, and went on to study law, it being his father's intention that he would one day succeed him in the family business. At the age of twenty-one, however, he abandoned his studies for the theatre, took the stage name Molière, and with an actress-friend called Madeleine Béjart formed an acting troupe. For two years the young couple struggled to establish their troupe in Paris, but unsuccessfully, and when Molière had been imprisoned for debt and obliged to beg help from his father, they gave up and moved to the provinces. There they lived as itinerant players, performing in market-towns and country mansions mainly in the south, and did not return to Paris until thirteen years later. By that time their repertory included plays of their own, farces and sketches written by Molière, and these won them the attention and protection of Monsieur, the King's brother, who had them perform for the King.

Royal approbation paved the way for success and largely because of the popularity of Molière's own pieces the troupe was soon well established. In 1661, Fouquet commissioned Molière to produce a spectacular entertainment as part of his grandiose house warming party at Vaux-le-Vicomte and for that he turned his hand to something new, the first of his highly successful comedy-ballets. In 1662, he went on to sound another new note in his comedy
School for Wives
, which proved highly controversial and a great success at the box-office. With
Tartuffe
in 1664 he took this new comedy form even further, ‘to castigate vice and folly' in an attack upon religious hypocrisy, but the play was banned and his next play
Dom Juan
, though showing to full houses, was stopped after only fifteen performances. In that same year, however, his troupe was granted the title of ‘The King's Troupe' and he continued undeterred to write and produce his plays for the court and the town until his death in 1673: comedies like
The
Misanthropist
in 1666 and
The Miser
in 1668, comedy-ballets like
The Would-Be Gentleman
in 1670 and
The Imaginary Invalid
in 1673. In 1667, a revised version of
Tartuffe
was banned again, but in 1669 a third version was authorized and became an immediate and immense success. It was at the age of fifty and the height of his career that he died, a victim of the consumption from which he had suffered for several years.

In the view of Anatole Loquin, this death was a pretence and Molière lived on for another thirty years, a secret prisoner, masked to hide his identity. For all of ten years, and particularly for the last three years before his supposed death, powerful enemies had conspired to destroy him. A smear campaign had been mounted to convince the King that he was a criminal degenerate who if brought to trial for the monstrous crime he had committed would certainly be sent to the stake. Eventually in 1672 the King had come to realize that whether Molière was guilty or not, the case against him was too strong to be ignored. The pretended death was therefore arranged at the King's command, with or without Molière's collusion, or the connivance of his wife, or the realization of his enemies, and the horror of public trial and execution was thus avoided.

Hostility to Molière first manifested itself at the beginning of 1663 in the controversy over his comedy
School for Wives
. Rival playwrights and acting troupes objected to it on artistic grounds, but an important section of the public was scandalized by what was seen to be a lack of proper reverence and respect for things holy and established. Among these critics were members of a secret organization called the Company of the Holy Sacrament, the avowed aim of which, since its foundation more than thirty years before, was to guard the religious orthodoxy and moral probity of French society. Made up, as it was, of leading figures from the Church, the nobility and the magistrature, with cells in all the provincial capitals of France, it had enormous influence. Louis XIII had granted the organization legal status, and Anne of Austria gave continual support until her death in 1666. Vincent de Paul had been closely associated with its members in his work for orphans and the sick, galley-slaves and the victims of war, but more typical of the Company as a whole was its crusade ‘to stop all scandals and profanities', by which was understood the theatre in general and artists like Molière in particular, along with a whole range of activities and attitudes thought depraved, from immodesty in dress to Protestantism.

To what extent Molière knew of the Company's existence, the identity of its members and their animosity towards him, one cannot say. In 1663 he might not have known that the parish priest of Saint-Sulpice, who had made life difficult for him and his newly-formed troupe in 1643, was a member of the Company of the Holy Sacrament or that the reason his patron in the Languedoc, the Prince de Conti, withdrew his protection in 1655 was because he had been persuaded to join the same organization. No doubt he had heard that in Normandy and Bordeaux in 1658 and in Paris in 1660 a number of cases had come to light of apparently devout and saintly men making themselves rich by the appropriation and sequestration of other people's property, but he might not have known that these were also members of the Company. Presumably he realized that the religious bigots who disapproved so strongly of his plays disapproved also of the King's private life; but he might not have known that Mazarin and, after him, Colbert, alarmed by the political ambitions of these people, had tried to suppress the secret organization to which they belonged, and for all their ministerial powers had failed.

Though it is impossible to say whether Molière deliberately wrote his
Tartuffe
as an attack upon the Company, his subject was without question drawn from those scandals involving the Company men which first entered the news in 1658, and that being so, the Company certainly saw it as an attack. In April 1664, when word got out concerning the kind of play he was preparing, the Company called a secret meeting to discuss a means of having it banned. The play was performed in spite of their opposition on 12 May, but only for the court, and though the King liked it he gave way to Company pressure and declared it unsuitable for public performance. While Molière appealed for support to friends in high places and even persuaded the papal legate to speak favourably of his play, the Company went to work on the public with a pamphlet written by the parish priest of Saint-Barthélemy. According to this, Molière was ‘a demon rigged out in flesh and the clothes of a man, the most notorious free-thinker and blasphemer who ever was,' and his play was ‘a profane and sacriligious act' for which he deserved ‘to be publicly executed, and given a foretaste of the fires of hell by being burned to death.' In a petition to the King, Molière pleaded that his play had been ‘judged diabolical without even being seen', but apart from private performances for Monsieur and the Prince de Condé, he was unable to show it again. The play was banned because his picture of false religious devotion presented too close a resemblance to the Company-man and so was falsified by the Company into an attack upon religious devotion itself. When for his next play he chose as a subject the impious reprobate Don Juan, it was only too easy for the Company to denounce that as further evidence of his irreligion and to have that banned as well.

Twice in less than a year the Company had forced Moliére from the stage, but privately the King was sympathetic and publicly he gave his support by granting Molière's troupe his name. Encouraged by this evidence of royal approval, Molière set to work on a revised version of his
Tartuffe
, changing the title to
Panulfe
, and on 5 August 1667, while the King was absent from capital, went ahead and staged it. The first night sold out and the play seemed set for a successful run, but the next day the following notice reached Molière from the President of the Parlement: ‘I know that you are not only an excellent actor, but also a very able man who does honour to his profession and to France. Nevertheless with all the good will that I have for you, I cannot allow you to perform your comedy. In my opinion it is very fine and instructive; but it is not the job of actors to instruct men on matters of Christian morality and religion.' Molière closed his theatre and on 8 August prepared a petition to be delivered to the King. Just three days after that, however, before the King had time to intervene, the Archbishop of Paris issued a proscription on the play, forbidding anyone in his diocese to perform, watch, print or read it in public or private ‘under pain of excommunication'. The President of the Parlement, Guillaume de Lamoignon, and the Archbishop of Paris, Hardouin de Péréfixe, were both members of the Company.

The doors of Molière's theatre stayed closed for more than seven weeks, as though finally in the face of such powerful opposition he had been demoralized, but eighteen months later he came back with a third version of the play. This time he was armed in advance with a written authorization from the King to perform it in public. It was first shown on 5 February 1669, and was presented fifty-five times before the end of that year. In March it appeared in print and by June had reached a second edition. The Company had after all failed to silence him, and the play they had contrived to ban for almost five years proved so popular that of all his plays it was, as it still is, the most frequently performed. Neither the first nor the second version of the play survives, but so far as one can gather the differences from one version to another were minor and served only to diminish those ambiguities which had allowed the Company to get away with their original condemnation of the play. In the person of Tartuffe, religious fraud was pilloried and with him, in so far as he resembled him, the Company-man was exposed as a cheat and made to look ridiculous.

From the first scene of the play, Tartuffe is presented as a sanctimonious bigot and a self-righteous prude who with an ingratiating show of moral rectitude and spiritual devotion has wheedled his way into the confidence and home of a man called Orgon. Thereafter he is proved to be a hypocrite and a crook whose display of virtue and piety is as false as it is excessive, designed to win from Orgon the material and social advantages he pretends to reject. That Tartuffe is an imposter is evident to everyone in Orgon's family, but their combined efforts to undeceive Orgon only push him further into Tartuffe's control; eventually he even decides to break off his daughter's engagement to the man she loves in order to give her in marriage to Tartuffe. Orgon's wife speaks to Tartuffe on his own, hoping to persuade him against the plan, but he takes advantage of the occasion to try to seduce her. He yearns to possess the beauty of God, he tells her, and that divine loveliness he sees manifest in her. She need not fear for her honour, he tells her, because he is a man of discretion and will keep her favours a secret. Orgon's son, having overheard these declarations, denounces him to his father, who refuses to believe the accusation. When his son persists in it, Orgon drives him from the house, disowned and cursed. Tartuffe, he decides, will be his sole heir and will marry his daughter that very evening. In proof of his trust he wants to go even further and make a deed of gift to Tartuffe of all his property. Tartuffe accepts but only, as he says, to ensure that Orgon's wealth will be used for the glory of God and not given to someone who might employ it for evil purposes.

In a last desperate bid to open Orgon's eyes, his wife has him hide under the table while she talks to Tartuffe again, deliberately leading the scoundrel on to repeat his earlier attempt at seduction. This time he makes the additional assertions that a sin kept secret is no sin at all and that Orgon is fool enough to believe anything Tartuffe wants him to believe. Orgon, at last disabused, orders Tartuffe from his house, but the deed of gift has already been made and, soon after Tartuffe's departure, a bailiff arrives to expel the family; legally Orgon's house and all his possessions now belong to Tartuffe. There is worse in store. Orgon had in his keeping a box of letters belonging to a friend in disgrace. Tartuffe has taken these letters to the King and, before Organ can flee, an officer arrives with a warrant for arrest. For a moment it seems that Tartuffe has perverted the judgement of the King just as he has perverted the teachings of God, but the officer's warrant turns out to be for the arrest of Tartuffe, not Orgon. The King, who can read the hearts of men and knows the false man from the true, has not been deceived by the imposter. Tartuffe is taken off to prison. Orgon's daughter is married to the man she loves, and everyone lives happily ever after.

For his victory over the Company of the Holy Sacrament, Moliére was to pay dearly; at least, that was the belief of Anatole Loquin. According to his theory, the success of
Tartuffe
only made the Company more determined to stifle Molière, and this time permanently, by destroying him in the eyes of his friends and especially in the good opinion of the King. The ground had already been prepared by scandalmongers and little was needed to set their work of character assassination in motion. The matter in question was Molière's marriage in 1662 to Armande Béjart, the younger sister of Madeleine. There had been gossip at the time because of sympathy for Madeleine. She had shared so much of her life with Molière, had been his mistress once, his partner always, and had raised Armande as if she were her own daughter. Among Molière's enemies the tittle-tattle had taken on an offensive tone and, in November 1663, during the slanging match which followed his play
School for Wives
, Racine reported to a friend that an actor from a rival company, Zacharie de Montfleury, had been using the story to make trouble for him: ‘Montfleury has made a suit against Molière and has given it to the King. He accuses him of marrying the daughter after sleeping with the mother. But Montfleury is not listened to at court'. In 1663, the King had no time for such back-biting and in 1664, when Molière's first child was born, he was pleased to be the godfather.