The Man Behind the Iron Mask (16 page)

In January 1670, however, just less than a year after Molière won the right to perform his
Tartuffe
, the gossip turned openly vicious as the result of a verse-comedy called
Elomire
which was published in pamphlet form. The play was obviously satirical and, since the title was an evident anagram of ‘Molière', no one had any doubt about the author's true meaning. Who the author was is not known, but in Loquin's view the play was written to order for the Company. Everyone knew that Molière was old enough to be his wife's father and that she was young enough to be the daughter of his one-time mistress; the allegation made in the play went just one step further. In Act I Scene iii, Elomire is made to declare that his wife is his own daughter. No doubt the slander was not in itself new, but until then it had never been made public. The accusation was serious. If Molière's marriage was incestuous, the penalty demanded by law was death at the stake.

One may be sure that Molière's friends, including the King, were eager to dismiss the charge as absurd, but presumably the facts of Armande's birth were as uncertain then as they are today. No birth certificate exists and what documents remain are imprecise and contradictory. According to her contract of marriage she was ‘about twenty years of age' in 1662, which would place her birth in about 1642, but according to her burial certificate she was fifty-five years old in 1700, which would fix her birth in 1645. This doubt about the year of her birth is enough to raise the possibility that she was indeed the daughter of Madeleine, and not her sister, because it is known that Joseph Béjart, the father of Madeleine, died in 1642. Nothing can be proved either way of course, but if Molière's wife was the daughter of Madeleine and was born after 1643, when Madeleine had become Molière's mistress, then Molière might very well have been the father of his own wife. It has been suggested that Armande's own uncertainty about the situation, when exposed to whispered accusations of incest, was the chief reason for her infidelity to Molière and the breakdown of their marriage in 1664, but whatever her own feelings and beliefs, the allegation of incest followed her throughout her life. In 1676 she was openly traduced in a court of law as ‘the daughter of her husband, the wife of her father' and in 1688 was slandered in the same way in a pamphlet called
La Fameuse Comédienne
.

As Loquin sees it,
Elomire
was the beginning of the end for Moliére. The seeds of doubt were sown and, with careful tending, grew to fruit. For a year or so he continued to enjoy popularity and patronage, but all the time his reputation was gradually being eroded by his inability to check the rumours about his marriage. In February 1672 Madeleine Béjart died, and it was in the course of the following months that Molière lost favour at court. Lully, the Master of the King's Music, refused to work with him any more and so he was obliged to find someone else to write the music for his new play,
The Imaginary Invalid
. Lully made difficulties for him even then, demanding that the score be reworked repeatedly, and finally, when the play with its music was ready, the King did not wish to see it. According to Loquin, Lully's hostility was not, as is often claimed, the cause of Molière's fall from grace, but only an effect. Lully, feeling the King grow cool towards Molière, abandoned him in order to keep his own favoured position.

The King's change of attitude towards Molière was, in Loquin's opinion, directly related to Madeleine Béjart's death. Since she was buried in Saint-Paul's cemetery, it is certain that on her death-bed she renounced the acting profession and received the last sacraments because, without that, actors and actresses were denied burial in holy ground. Loquin speculates that the Company managed to convince the King that in her final confession she had acknowledged herself to be the mother, and Moliére to be the father, of the girl who had become Moliére's wife, denouncing him as the guilty architect and the girl as the blameless victim of that heinous relationship. The King then determined to separate the incestuous couple and punish Molière but, to avoid any possible slur upon himself, he chose to do so without public scandal. The day chosen for Molière's pretended death was one year to the day that Madeleine Béjart had died, a coincidence too striking in Loquin's view to be the work of chance, though why the King should have wished that anniversary to be observed, he does not say.

The only contemporary description of the circumstances of Molière's death was made by a fellow-actor and member of the troupe called Charles Varlet de La Grange. He kept a diary of the troupe's activities, and for Friday 17 February 1673 he made the following entry: ‘This same day after the comedy, at ten o'clock at night, M. de Molière died in his house in the rue de Richelieu, having played the rôle of the Imaginary Invalid, greatly discomforted by a cold and inflammation of the chest which caused him to cough, and that so badly that in the strenuous efforts he made to clear his lungs he ruptured a vein.' His death though sudden should not have been a surprise if it is true that he had been suffering from consumption for seven or eight years; but, in the preface to the collected works of Molière published nine years after his death, La Grange maintained that though for some years Molière had some chronic lung problem which caused him to cough, ‘his constitution was otherwise excellent and had it not been for the unhappy chance that his sickness was not treated, he would have had the strength to overcome it.' La Grange considered that the ruptured vein was an accident, due to the violence of the coughing fit, and claimed that it ‘shortened his life by more than twenty years'. This point of view is of central importance to Loquin's theory, for he would have us recognize that La Grange had seen and worked with Molière almost every day for ten years, had been with him at the theatre just a few hours before his death and yet, though fully aware of how ill he had been that day, was surprised to learn of his death. La Grange was not a doctor, it is true, but he was not a fool either. The seriousness of Molière's illness, Loquin concludes, was an invention put about later to make his sudden death seem plausible.

It was not until 1704 that a biography of Molière appeared. Thirty-one years had elapsed since his supposed death and by that time most of the people who had known him intimately, including his wife and La Grange, were dead. Loquin finds some dark significance in this, as he does in the fact that only one year had elapsed since the death of the Iron Mask. The biography was written by Jean Léonor de Grimarest who had not known Molière but had got most of his information, including the circumstances of his death, from someone who had: the actor Michel Baron. Molière had adopted Baron at the age of twelve, taking him into his troupe and making him one of his own family. At the time of Molière's death Baron was twenty and their relationship was closer than it had ever been. According to Baron, on the morning of that fateful day Molière confided to him that he knew he was going to die and, after the evening performance, sought him out in his dressing-room. Baron, realizing how ill he was, called a sedan-chair and had him carried home. There he got him into bed and stayed with him until he saw that he had begun to spit blood. At that he went to Molière's wife, but by the time he returned with her to the bedroom Molière was dead. Later that same night he personally went to the palace to inform the King.

Baron's account of Molière's death, as recorded by Grimarest, is today the generally accepted version. It includes the kind of inconsequential detail that makes for credibility: Molière in bed not wanting to eat a bowl of his wife's broth and asking for a piece of parmesan cheese instead. ‘I thought I should go into detail about Molière's death,' Grimarest declared, ‘in order to disabuse the public on the various stories that have been invented about it.' What these stories were, he did not say, but one such story current at the time was that Molière had died on the stage, his real sickness not realized because he was acting the part of a man who imagined himself to be sick. That story, providing as it did a theatre full of imaginary witnesses, was in Loquin's opinion deliberately concocted as part of the official cover-up for the imaginary corpse, though as Loquin saw it, Grimarest's own account of Molière's death was just as much a fabrication: Baron, fully aware that he was the sole survivor of Molière's troupe and so could not be contradicted, took advantage of the situation to embroider the original story and give himself a star rôle in history. Loquin argues that for thirty-one years, until Grimarest gave Baron's version of what happened, there was uncertainty about the circumstances of Molière's death and the only good reason for this was that there were in fact no witnesses at all.

When it came to the circumstances of Molière's burial, Grimarest did such a sketchy job that his book was sharply criticized by the writer of an anonymous letter published in 1706. If he had given all the information he should and could have given, his critic said, ‘he would have had enough material to fill a volume as big again as the book he wrote and it would have been packed with the very strangest things.' Grimarest wrote a letter of his own in reply, acknowledging the truth of this assertion, and in the next printing of his book included both letters as an annex. ‘I found the material of that subject so delicate and difficult to deal with,' he explained in his letter, ‘that I frankly admit I did not dare to undertake it.' Fear of the authorities had stopped him publishing the full story of Molière's burial, but as a responsible writer he considered the omission too important to pass over it in silence. If the claim is true, and it is a claim which his own son is supposed to have made, that he himself was the writer of the anonymous letter criticizing the book, then that importance was considerable in his eyes. What little he does say about the burial is peculiar enough. That day ‘an incredible mass of people' gathered in the street outside Molière's house. What kind of people they were and why they were there is not clear, but Molière's wife was terrified by them, and they only dispersed after she had thrown them money. The burial itself took place at night by the light of ‘nearly a hundred torches'.

Some details are known of those ‘delicate and difficult' matters which Grimarest was afraid to mention and Loquin produces them as further support for his theory. Molière's body was refused burial in holy ground because, it was said, he had died without renouncing his profession of actor. When his widow appealed to the King, the burial was allowed, but only at night and without requiem mass. The body was taken directly from the house to the cemetery of Saint-Joseph and, since it was normal procedure for witnesses to sign the burial certificate in the church register while they were at the church, the entry certifying Molière's burial remained unsigned. The widow had a monument erected on the grave, but a story circulated that the grave was empty. Soon after the burial, it was said, the body had been secretly moved to a common grave in unconsecrated ground ‘close to the chaplain's house'. Such irregularities and uncertainties, Loquin argues, are perfectly consistent with the ‘delicate and difficult' business of burying an empty coffin. Today Molière's supposed remains are honoured in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise where they were placed in 1817. They were removed from Saint-Joseph in 1792 during the Revolution, not from Molière's grave but from the common grave ‘close to the chaplain's house'. Since under such circumstances no proper identification would have been possible, there is no good reason to believe that they are in fact the remains of Molière. That aside, however, the point for consideration is that presumably the remains were first looked for and not found under the tombstone erected by Molière's widow.

Loquin's investigation of the suspicious circumstances surrounding Molière's death and burial does not end there. It was not just the body which disappeared. Apparently all Molière's original manuscripts, his rough drafts, notes and fragments, his personal memos and private letters, vanished too. How is it possible, Loquin asks, that a writer, who wrote so much, left nothing in his own handwriting except ‘a couple of receipts and a few signatures?' For Loquin there is only one possible explanation: his collected papers were deliberately destroyed by the organization which had destroyed him, the Company of the Holy Sacrament. To eliminate Molière and to restrict to
Tartuffe
the damage he had done was after all a minor achievement when compared to the full-scale anti-Protestant campaign undertaken by the Company which led eventually to the suppression of Jansenism
⁷
and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
⁸

However preposterous Loquin's theory may seem, the most commonly voiced arguments against it are invalid. If Molière was the Iron Mask, it is said, then he lived for thirty years in prison from the age of fifty to the age of eighty, and that would have been impossible for a man suffering from consumption. According to Loquin, however, the seriousness of Molière's illness was invented as part of the cover-up: he was not consumptive at all. Molière's wife remarried in 1677 and if Molière had still been alive, it is said, then the authorities would not have allowed her to do so. According to Loquin, however, Molière was believed to be the father of his wife and so their marriage was null and void.

Perhaps the most delightful feature of Loquin's theory is the fact that the descriptions of the Iron Mask given by Voltaire and Palteau add up to what might very well be a portrait of Molière as an old man: white-haired, tall and well-built with a dark complexion and the voice of an actor which ‘held one's attention by the mere sound'. But the most interesting feature is the fact that it answers a central question which most other theories evade or ignore: the reason for the mask. Molière's face was not only known to the general public but familiar to them; and he would have been recognized in the South of France, where he had led his troupe for thirteen years, as well as in Paris.