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NOEL LE BRETON DE HÀUTEROCHE: SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY COMIC PLAYWRIGHT AND ACTOR
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By Edwin Lewis Isley, M.A. *****
The Ohio State University 1997
Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Charles G.S. Williams, Adviser
Professor Karlis Racevskis Adviser Professor John Rule French and Italian Graduate Program UMI Number: 9813280
Copyright 1997 by Isley, Edwin Lewis
AH rights reserved.
UMI Microform 9813280 Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.
This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Copyright by Edwin Lewis Isley 1997 ABSTRACT
Noël Le Breton, known as Hauteroche, had an illustrious career in the theatre as an actor, administrator, and a playwright. It was he who provided, along with Poisson,
Brécourt, and Champmeslé, the greatest number of new plays for the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the theatre that was to become the chief rival of Molière and his company.
Hauteroche may also be viewed as an innovator, in his use of one-act plays and in his development of the emerging comedy of manners. Few playwrights have had such contemporary admiration and such a loyal following as Hauteroche.
This dissertation, based on primary and secondary bibliographies more comprehensive than any compiled previously, offers a complete synthetic view of Hauteroche's career taking full advantage of the contributions to
"Hauterochean” studies made over the last half-century. Attempts to situtate Hauteroche's texts within the total theatrical spectacle in which contemporary audiences of his plays participated is fundamental, the more so as
Hauteroche was at one level a pragmatic provider of comédies that would please the specific audiences of the Hôtel de
11 Bourgogne theatre, France's first popular playhouse.
Without adopting the technical language of semiotics of the
theatre, I have tried to keep present in my presentation of the theatrical situation the spirit of semiotics, which examines theatrical spectacle as a system incorporating multiple encodings. Although by necessity limited for a period now as remote as the 1660s-1690s, and for which only partial documentation remains, I have grounded my analyses when possible in the material circumstances of stage settings, music, lighting, the actors' gestures and props, as well as the audience's distance— physically and mentally from the play of comic types and the ideas they bear as seen
in the frame of the stage and in what contemporaries of Molière called "la beauté de la chandelle," that is, the special if not unique experience of theatre.
Ill For Kimberly
IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my adviser. Professor Charles G.S.
Williams, for his support, encouragement, and enthusiasm which made this dissertation possible, and for his patience in correcting my stylistic and factual errors. I thank Professors John C. Rule (The Department of
History), Karlis Racevskis (The Department of French and Italian), and Lois A. Rosow (The School of Music) for their careful and discriminating reading of my dissertation. I should also like to thank Dean James Siddens, Ph.D. for his encouragement and understanding. I thank Professor Antonio Scuderi for attempting to locate an article by Georges Mongrédien printed in the 15
September-1 October 1927 journal Chantecler.
I am also very grateful to the State University of New York (Stony Brook) for loaning me the three volume 1736 edition of Les OEuvres de Monsieur de Hauteroche. I am pleased that they entrusted me with the actual volumes of such old and rare books.
I should also like thank Mr. Thomas P. Ford of The Houghton Library (Harvard University) for providing an accurate transcription of the rare "Au lecteur" to Les Nobles de province.
I also wish to thank the Interlibrary Loans Offices at both The Ohio State University and Ohio Dominican College for their efforts in locating obscure texts. I also thank all of the colleges and universities that loaned me secondary sources on Hauteroche. There are so many schools that aided me it is impossible to list them all. I thank Donald W. Gilman, Professor of French at Ball
State University, for his encouragement. I should also like to thank Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth R. Jones of Chicago, Illinois for aiding me in my research and providing much needed moral support.
Miss Maria Y. Stilson deserves my thanks and gratitude.
Her singular charm and enthusiam have helped me to persevere.
VI VITA
February 18, 1962...... Born - Richmond, Indiana
1988 ...... M.A. French, Ball State University 1989 - 1995...... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, and Lecturer, The Ohio State University
199 5 - present...... Lecturer, Ohio Dominican College
PUBLICATION
Edwin L. Isley and Richard Duda, “Semi-autonomy at L'École des Mines." Mélanges pédagogiques. C.R.A.P.E.L.: Nancy, France, March 1986.
FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: French and Italian
Vll TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page Abstract i i
D e d i c a t i o n ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... v
V i t a ...... vii
Introduction ...... 1 A Man of the Theatre ...... 1 Hauterochean Scholarship ...... 58 Notes to Introduction ...... 69
Part I— Beginning Plays (1668-1671)...... 75
Chapter 1— Amant qui ne flatte point ou "l'aveuglement comique" ...... 75 Notes to Chapter 1 ...... 117
Chapter 2— One Act and Three Acts: Le Souper mal- apprété and Les Apparences trompeuses . 119
2.1 Le Souper mal-apprêté ou "le festin d ' a i r " ...... 119 2.2 Les Apparences trompeuses ou "un festin de p i e r r e " ...... 136 Notes to Chapter 2 ...... 178 Part II— The Crispin Sequence (1670-1675) 181 Notes to The Crispin Sequence (1670-1675) .... 185
Chapter 3— Three Acts and One Act: Crispin médecin and Le D e u i l ...... 186 3.1 Crispin médecin ou "un nouveau médecin malgré l u i " ...... 186 3.2 Le D e u i l ...... 205 Notes to Chapter 3 ...... 223
Chapter 4— Crispin musicien ou "le musicien malgré l u i " ...... 224 Notes to Chapter 4 ...... 251
Vlll Chapter 5— Les Nobles de province ou "le scélérat imaginaire"...... 252 Notes to Chapter 5 ...... 298
Part III— The Final Plays (1684-1690) ...... 301 Chapter 6— Five Acts and One Act: L'Esprit folet ou la Dame invisible and Le C o c h e r ...... 301
6.1 L'Esprit folet ou la dameinvisible 307 6.2 Le Cocher ou "Sans-Soucy vengé" . 3 29 Notes to Chapter 6 ...... 344
Chapter 7— Le Feint Polonois ou la veuve impertinente...... 347 Notes to Chapter 7 ...... 378 Chapter 8— Les Bourgeoises de qualité ...... 380 Notes to Chapter 8 ...... 430
Appendix: Chronology ofHauteroche's Life ...... 43 2
Bibliography ...... 441 1. Hauteroche's Dramatic Writings ...... 441 2. On Hauteroche ...... 445 3. General W o r k s ...... 452
IX INTRODUCTION
À MAN OF THE THEATRE
Noël Le Breton, known as Hauteroche, had an illustrious
career in the theatre as an actor, administrator, and a playwright. It was he who provided, from the company of four actor-playwrights— including Poisson, Brécourt, and
Champmeslé— the greatest number of new plays for the theatre
of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the theatre that was to become
the chief rival of Molière and his company. And Hauteroche
may also be viewed as an innovator, in his use of one-act plays and in his development of the emerging comedy of
manners. Few playwrights have had such contemporary
admiration and such a loyal following as Hauteroche. Unfortunately, information about Hauteroche's life is sketchy, due to the lack of documents.^ In my chronology of his life, I have collected everything that Hauterochean scholarship has identified in the documentation of his life and career. The chronology should therefore accompany the reading of this introductory biographical portrait. We know very little as established fact for the first forty years of Hauteroche's long life (he may have lived to ninety). His date of birth has been set in 1617, although no baptismal or other records have been found to confirm the date.^ What we do know now is the constitution of his family. Hauteroche's father, who was also named Noël Le Breton, was a button-maker. "Tous les historiens font de lui un huissier au parlement mais... s'il était huissier, ce qui est peu probable n'étant pas de famille noble, il fallait que ce soit une charge honorifique, autrement il n'aurait pas pu remplir ces deux fonctions en même temps"
(Karch, p. 43). The father lived to be at least eighty.
When Hauteroche was around sixty-one (1678), he made his father "légataire universel," a clause that was revoked several months later. Only a few months afterward his father died. His mother, whose name is not known, despite
"de laborieuses recherches" (Karch, p. 43) died before 164 3 (the date of Hauteroche's half-brother's birth). If what is attributed to her activity in the stories told about
Hauteroche is true, then one can speculate that she was a well-connected person in legal circles and was enterprising in her activities on behalf of her family. Noël I Le Breton remarried after his wife's death. His second wife,
Pasquette Gaillard, gave birth to Pierre Le Breton (1643-13 August-1680), Hauteroche's half brother, who became an
"enlumineur et tailleur de pierre" (Karch, p. 42). Hauteroche also had an older sister, Marie, with whom he remained on good terms. She is mentioned as a beneficiary in his will of 1704, as are her two daughters. Marie and Marguerite (Karch, pp. 42-43). She was the widow of Claude Rocher. Marguerite married the procureur. Pierre de la Motte, thus moving the family back to the milieu from which Hauteroche's mother had most likely come.
Traditional biographical narrations, what Karch calls the "légende,” furnish the following undocumented account of
Hauteroche's early life and formation. The story has it that Le Breton loved adventure and hoped to become a soldier. His mother, fearing for her son's safety, tried in vain to deter his interests in such a hazardous profession. She purchased for him the office of "conseiller au Châtelet" and arranged a marriage to the daughter of one of the family's friends. She neglected, however, to inform him about the plans until after the fact.
According to the "légende," between the ages of eighteen and twenty. Le Breton, who was obviously quite troubled by his mother's arrangements, absconded with enough family money to make his way to Valencia, Spain, where he hoped to realize his dream of great military exploits. However, after unsuccessful attempts to gain glory and honor, he abandoned the idea of life in the military. In a state of disillusionment, he took up gambling and lost all his money and most of his belongings. The imprudent young man now found himself in a state of privation and need. In order to earn money, he joined a group of French actors in Valladolid. After two and a half years, he went to Germany to direct another company. Unfortunately, there are no details in the "légende," about his sojourn in Germany; nor does the story tell when he left to return to France and
Paris.
It seems most probable that Hauteroche returned to
France in the late 1640s. Sophie Wilma Deierkauf-Holsboer, in her Le Théâtre du Marais (1958), published a long-known act (See Lancaster, 1936, III^, p. 769) of 29 September
1649 attesting to Hauteroche's standing as godfather to the son of the actors Claude Jannequin and Madeleine Desurlis
(p. 81). She clarifies the context of this act in such manner to allow more precision to the "about 1650" that has stood as designation of the date of Hauteroche's entry into the Marais company of actors (See Lancaster, ibid). The theatre company assembled to celebrate the occasion, she points out, is in fact one directed by Hauteroche, who had been entrusted by Catherine Desurlis's father with the theatrical apprenticeship of his three daughters— later to illustrate their name as a theatrical dynasty and Hauteroche's direction of them. Catherine joined as early as 1650 (or earlier), Madeleine in 1652, finally Estiennette in 1653, with Catherine having the charge of her younger sisters. The signers of the act therefore give us the constitution of Hauteroche's company, formed for a year according to an act of association also published by
Deierkauf-Holsboer (p. 82). It included Jannequin ("Rochefort"), François de la Court, Jehan Loseu
("Beauchaisne"), Drouyn, François Serdin, and Estiennette Desurlis. It was Hauteroche's sometime collaborator Pierre-
Regnault Petit Jehan, called Laroque, now director of the
Marais company, who recruited Hauteroche and part of his
troupe, at the beginning of April 1655. The company in the
perspective of peace and prosperity following the civil war
of the Fronde had been newly rejuvenated. The new company at the Marais, in the rue Vieille-du-
Temple, numbered fourteen including in addition to Laroque,
Hauteroche and the three Desurlis sisters, Madeleine Lemoine
(called La Beaupré), Julien Bedeau (well-known as "Jodelet"), François Bedeau (known as I'Espy), François
Juvenon ("La Fleur"), Jean Simonin (called Chevalier),
Claude Jannequin, sieur de Rochefort (husband of Madeleine
Desurlis), François Sardin and his wife Catherine Bourgeois, and Jehan Loseu. Under his stage name (for the first time?), Hauteroche takes a first star turn on the Marais stage in Act I of Quinault's La Comédie sans comédie. which contained similar spots for Laroque, Jodelet, and La Fleur.
Je suis né, grâce au ciel, d'assez nobles parents: J'ai reçu, dans la cour, mille honneurs différents: La France à m'admirer souvent s'est occupée; Le favori du roi m'a donné cette épée: J'ai reçu des faveurs des gens du plus haut rang; Ce diamant de prix vient d'un prince du sang; J'ai l'heur d'être connu du plus grand des monarques; Et j'ai, de son estime, eu d'éclantes marques; Il m'écoute, parfois, mieux que ses courtisans. Et l'habit que je porte est un de ses présents (I, v, p. 67).: Less often quoted, but important as an expression of
Hauteroche's own conception of the theatre, is his character's "défense et illustration" of the actor's art and its power.
Depuis qu'en nos jours de merveilleux esprits Ont épuré cet Art par leurs doctes écrits. Ses défauts sont changez en graces immortelles. Dont le charme est sensible aux ames les plus belles. La Scene est une école où l'on enseigne plus Que l'horreur des forfaits et l'amour des vertus (I, V, p. 68).
The first season went well for the new troupe of seasoned actors. Boxoffice receipts were good for a series of plays by playwrights in vogue. Thomas Corneille's comedy Les Illustres ennemis in April gave the Hôtel de Bourgogne
(Paris's first company, the "troupe du roi") good competition. A revival of Boisrobert's C o u p s d'amour et de fortune played polemically against another play by the same name Quinault had given to the Hôtel (and which Boisrobert accused of being plagiarized). Finally Quinault's Comédie sans comédie played in repertory with Thomas Corneille's new comedy. Le Geôlier de soy-mesme. The year 1656 started out with Gillet de la Tessonerie's Le Compaanard. also a new play.
Despite successes, a new lease for the 1656-57 season was refused the company in March 1656. Hauteroche's old group opted for the provinces again, a more lucrative prospect than costly reestablishment in Paris, and set off again in 1657, adding another stint to the twenty-odd years (Karch, p. 41) of apprenticeship in the provinces before the return to Paris for the Marais experience, which had
lasted just a year.* The theatre closed, for a third time,
between April 1657 and 31 March 1659. However brief, the
time in the rue Vieille-du-Temple had been valuable for
Hauteroche. He had been part of a superb acting ensemble,
and he had had his Parisian showcase in it. He had also the chance to work directly with Jodelet, circumstances of some
significance in the development of his own career. When the
Marais reopened in April 1659, it had the nucleus of players
to take it, with new direction, to new heights: René
Bertelot (Gros-René) and his wife Marquise Thérèse de Gorla— before both went elsewhere— ; Chevalier; Brécourt
and his wife Estiennette Desurlis— until his departure for
Molière's company in 1662— ; La Thorillière; Jodelet for a
last season, before his move to Molière's stage and his final appearance there as the vicomte de Jodelet in Les
Précieuses ridicules. And star vehicles were not wanting:
La Feinte mort de Jodelet was created. Corneille returned to the Marais for the first time since his emergence from
retirement, giving it La Toison d'or to continue its former trademark specialty of spectaculars, possible again with the
newly fitted stage machinery of Denis Buffequin. Whatever
the temptations, Hauteroche did not return to the Marais ; there were greater temptations, and opportunities, elsewhere. Hauteroche's new peregrinations did not last long.
Before the year was out, he had returned to Paris, and
became a part of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Being for the time
the only show in town, the Hôtel under the direction of the great Floridor, was undergoing a veritable renaissance. It
flirted with the "machine plays" that were the Marais's
hallmark but concentrated more on building up the comic repertory (proactively wise, as it turned out, in view of
Molière's coming successes). Floridor, who always knew a good thing, and was a genius at recruitment, took on
Hauteroche, as replacement for Pierre Lazard at his death.
Although Hauteroche's act of association has not been found,
A. Ross Curtis has published a rental agreement ("bail") of 1660 that includes Hauteroche's signature along with those of the full company (Curtis, 1972, p. 15). It is highly probable then that Hauteroche was well ensconced there by the time Molière had returned to Paris and began his meteoric rise.®
When Molière performed Corneille's Nicomède in his first Paris season, the long-established Hôtel had no special cause for alarm. It was on Molière's shoulders to prove himself against the reigning masters of tragic acting, the Montfleurys and Floridors. The prestige and the pay, since royal subsidies allowed an actor-pensionnaire to make twice what he would at the Marais, of the Hôtel acted like magnets for aspiring actors. To replenish the cast it did
8 not take the royal commands to transfer from another theatre
that sometimes did occur (and brought a new crisis to the Marais in 1662). Hauteroche was one of those actors who moved willingly to a larger stage, in every sense of the word, and he entered into the life of the rue Mauconseil fully committed to the company for what would turn out to be twenty-two years. It was a tribute to his professionalism, at every level, that after the withdraw of a dying Floridor in August 1671 he became director of the troupe. In addition to managing the cast and their programmes, and keeping an eye on finances, the direction brought with it the function of orator (that Hauteroche had filled unofficially on occasion even before Floridor died). This
"public relations" function entailed the traditionally regular exhortations to audiences to spread the good news about the productions they have seen, allocutions on behalf of the company on the occasion of special performances at court or in other aristocratic residences, and finally the responsibility for designing the company's posters. But Hauteroche gained more than administrative responsibilities.
Entering into another superb ensemble of players,® in which he found or would shortly recover old friends as colleagues (especially Brécourt and La Fleur, with whom he frequently played) and would make new ones— like Mademoiselle D'Ennebault, who played the female lead in his first play.
Mademoiselle des OEillets, or the Champmeslés, his acting talents diversified. In the years of what may be considered the first period of his activity at the Hôtel, ending in the season 1670-71, he played, as will become clear, at least
four principal types of rôles and had through starring creations imposed two of them as signature rôles. Finally, the four plays that may be considered "beginnings" and which come at the end of this period are encouraged by and shaped for the cast he knew thoroughly after a decade's performing together.
Corneille also wanted "d'avoir quelquefois mon tour à l'Hôtel," as he wrote in 1662, at the moment of deciding to move his Sertorius there, from the Marais,^ and thus following up the placement of his L'OEdipe. which in 1659 had marked his emergence from retirement. Madame des OEillets, who had transferred there, after Easter of 1662, continued to play Viriate, and Hauteroche now played Pompey,
"the true hero" of the play according to d'Aubignac (cited by Lancaster, 1936, III^, p. 476). Molière paid Hauteroche a backhanded compliment by parodying his performance in his L'Impromptu de Versailles, along with those of Montfleury,
Mademoiselle de Beauchâteau, and Villiers in other rôles.
"MOLIÈRE: Et celui-ci, le reconnoîtrez-vous bien dans
Pompée de Sertorius? (Imitant Hauteroche, aussi comédien): L'inimitié qui regne entre les deux partis,/N'y rend pas de l'honneur..., etc. MADEMOISELLE DE BRIE: Je le reconnois un peu, je pense" (scene 1, Jouanny éd., I, p. 523).
10 Hauteroche, fully master of the Bourgogne tragic diction and style, has been recognized. And Molière could have recognized even more in him in the rôles Hauteroche played during the 1662 season.® Molière had used at least one sonorous line from
Sertorius in the comic rhetoric of the would-be master,
Arnolphe in L'École des femmes, notably in the "Je suis maître, je parle: allez, obéissez," that ends Act II. It is Pompey's line in Sertorius. Hauteroche the actor may well have learned from Arnolphe and Molière in the rôle, from the comedy of discrepancy between the heroic diction and the lowly speaker, and used it playing his second leading rôle of 1662, the creation of the title rôle in
Raymond Poisson's Baron de la Crasse. According to Madame Poisson, Hauteroche "jouait parfaitement" this rôle,’ which launched the vogue "des campagnards ridicules, notamment des barons" (Curtis, 1972, p. 142). The character bears resemblance to Arnolphe, though Molière himself created a closer descendant in Monsieur de Sotenville (Georae Dandin), a rôle that Hauteroche later played when the play became available for performance at the Comédie-Française. And finally, Hauteroche will create his own analogue, especially in the rôle of Monsieur de Fatencour in his play Les Nobles de province (published, 1678).
The Baron de la Crasse also contains some benign revenge for Molière's attacks on the Hotel's declamatory
11 style. Playing off the fact that there was not much new in Molière's 1662 season, the Baron remarks that Molière "se
croit fort habile homme, et fort grand Orateur;/Les premiers
de son art, les plus inimitables,/il ne les trouve pas
seulement supportables (scene 1, cited by Curtis, p. 138).
Hauteroche did not actively participate in the Hotel's
collective revenge for L 'Impromptu deployed in Montfleury's L'Impromptu de 1'Hostel de Condé. which opened on 13
December and in which Hauteroche is not known to have had a rôle. It seems likely that he was only amused, if not
flattered, by his part in Molière's comedy (in which his friend Brécourt played a part). All Hauteroche's playcraft
will demonstrate admiration for Molière's genius, from the
start of Les Précieuses ridicules to the end with Les Femmes
savantes and Les Fourberies de Scapin. an epic of comic
creation of which he was a privileged spectator. Hauteroche's admiration, professional and artistic, for the actor and craftsman, inspired emulation rather than
instilling envy. In concluding a review of the comedies, mounted by the Hôtel from 1662 at the rate of at least one
new one per season, as a tactic in response to the growing triumphs of the Palais-Royal, Raymond Picard judged (1961, p. 143) that "les Brécourt, Poisson, Hauteroche et
Montfleury réunis ne faisaient pas un Molière." One might quarrel. The Poisson-Hauteroche creation of 1662 was worthy of Molière, at least, and he would have thought so. If
12 Hauteroche himself had heard Picard's remark, with the modesty and the admiration that go together as characteristic of his attitude toward the master, he might simply have agreed.
In December 1665, the wily Floridor opened negotiations with the ambitious young Racine that convinced him that it was time for him also to have a turn at the Hôtel. Persuaded by the prestige of the troupe in tragedy, and the excellence of its actors, Racine created a scandal that has not been forgotten. Despite agreements to the contrary,
Racine withdrew his play Alexandre le grand from the Palais- Royal by allowing it to be played simultaneously at the
Hôtel de Bourgogne. It played simultaneously in the two theatres for a week (See Lancaster, 1936, III', pp. 492- 95). Floridor's gain was also Hauteroche's. He began a long history of collaboration in the creation of Racine's plays with the rôle of Ephestion. Robinet, in his review of
3 January 1666 gives his performance as much praise as this modest rôle calls for in the economy of his review: "Bref,
EPHESTION & TAXILE/S'expriment en assez bon stile/Par HAUTE-
ROCHE & par BRÉCOURT" (Rothschild, 1881, I, p. 574). The following year he created the rôle of Phénix, Pyrrhus's confidant in Andromague. And in 1670, he continued the rôle as Paulin, confidant of the Emperor Titus in Bérénice. In the meanwhile he had created the rôle of Narcisse in Britannicus (1669) in a particularly memorable performance,
13 seemingly with the kind of melodramatic menacing that Edouard de Max gave to the rôle of Néron's nemesis.
Boursault recalled that Hauteroche "joue si finement ce qu'il représente qu'il attraperoit un plus habile homme que
Britannicus.
The rôle of Paulin must have taken an added intensity, remembered against Hauteroche's performance of Narcisse.
But the most significant aspect of repetition in these rôles is the cumulative effect that identifies the actor with the confidant, even during his first period at the Hôtel.
Madame Poisson, who recalled that Hauteroche "jouait parfaitement les confidants," and gives us the only physical description now known of Hauteroche (who seems to have had no portrait painted), recalls that he was "d'une taille avantageuse, mais fort maigre et décharné," suggesting that he was well cast in these nobly sober, and if sometimes sinister, parts. But Madame Poisson signals other rôles
"comme Phénix dans 1'Andromague de Racine; Arbate dans
Mithridate; Narcisse dans Britannicus. et plusieurs rôles comiques de la plus grande originalité, tels que le Baron de la Crasse, M. de Sotenville dans Georae Dandin. Chicaneau dans Les Plaideurs" (Campardon, vol. 1, p. 1058). In making something of his physical features in comedy, the lessons learned from Molière could well have added another from Jodelet, who was also tall and slender and using it to advantage, played against a shorter man (as Hauteroche may
14 have with Brécourt) with a variety of devices from "pince- sans-rire" facial gestures to farcically disjointed body language (on the order of Seinfeld's Cosmo Kramer (Michael
Richards)). When playing with Poisson, the comic duo could have sparked memories of Jodelet and Gros-René. And Hauteroche possessed other rôles, as we shall see, that were at his disposal for intertextual play. The years 1664-1666 brought Hauteroche increasingly into high society. In 1664, there is a quite unexpected début. Fifteen short lyrics by the poet Hauteroche were included in the publisher Ribou's fashionable collection Les Delices de la Poésie galante des plus célèbres Auteurs du
Temps..., dedicated to the duc de Coislin. A variety of forms of galanterie appear (one eclogue, two sonnets, five madrigaux, three épigrammes, two billets, one avertissement, and one bouts-rimés) in the stylish company of masters in the art of "galanterie poétique"— Benserade, Mesdames de la Suze and de Brégy, Linières and Montreuil. Among the thirty-two contributors only Du Pelletier with thirty-seven poems is more represented than he (See Lachèvre, 1904, pp.
55-56, 59, and 360). The irony, of course, is that Hauteroche was included among "des plus célèbres Auteurs" when in fact he had published nothing at all. Being recognized, and recognizable as the Baron de la Crasse perhaps stood in for proven poetic prowess, the art of the actor being "illustre" enough. Inclusion in this symbolic
15 high society, meant for the diversion of the "beau monde" was the gift of the publisher Ribou, later publisher of
Hauteroche's plays (perhaps a personal friend). The poet's
gift to those of us who would understand the man and his
career is the revelation that Hauteroche was an aspiring man of letters, the image that will later be fashioned by the
successive prefaces to his plays.
In January of 1666, he enjoyed the hospitality of the
due de Créquy, with the troupe, when the due, enthusiast and
patron of the theatre (Hauteroche's friends Poisson and
Raisin were among the beneficiaries), entertained the King,
who was absenting himself from the court's mourning for his mother for a moment of diversion. The Hôtel offered a performance of Thomas Corneille's Antiochus. and Lully
followed it up with his ballet Le Triomphe de Bacchus
(Christout, 1967, p. 113). Hauteroche appropriately enough
for the contributor to the Ribou anthology played the part of the Tygrane in Corneille's play opposite Mademoiselle
D'Ennebault as Stratonice. "D'autre part aussi, HAUTE- ROCHE/Pourrait toucher un coeur de roche," Robinet reported in letter of 29 May 1666 (Rothschild, 1881, I, p. 924).
And we know, from a context that I shall discuss later, that in the early 1670s Hauteroche gained a special entrée into the Orléans household. At the end of 1666 and the beginning of 1667, Louis cleared away the air of mourning with a lavish
16 entertainment, Le Ballet des muses, that involved Molière and the Palais-Royal company as well as the Hôtel. In December, Molière and his troupe offered for the sixth entrée featuring the muse of theatre, Mélicerte. (later replaced by La Pastorale comique. still later by Le
Sicilien). When the Hôtel had their turn, in January, they played for the same entrée a masquerade that brought Poisson in as a "marquis singulier" and Mademoiselle Des OEillets as a "comtesse vieille et galante." There then followed a farce. Les Poètes (anonymous). "Lira, poète de la Cour
(Hauteroche) remet des sonnets à Silvandre 'pour la petite comédie qu'il doit faire', reads the livret for the entree
(Deierkauf-Holsboer, 1970, II, p. 134). Shortly after the presentation of sonnets in the Ribou anthology, Hauteroche as "poète de cour," makes the same symbolic gesture to the court, which included the King, who in other entrées danced a shepherd's gavotte with other "bergers" and Cyrus (partnered by Raynal "en travesti" as Mandane)."^ Playing for the court, as he did often enough with the troupe to be familiar— he was back in November of the same year for the court opening of Andromague— Hauteroche was now also of the court in its play. In 1669, Hauteroche played the rôle of Lope in the very popular La Femme iuae et partie by Montfleury, given in special performance for the duchesse de Bouillon (Lancaster, III^, p. 816). The dues de Coislin and Créqui, the
17 duchesses de Bouillon and d'Orléans, the King and any number of grands seigneurs in attendance for the Ballet des muses
were so many connections that offered themselves to the budding playwright seeking patronage and prestige through dedications. Unlike his friend Poisson or Dancourt, among
so many others, Hauteroche at no time indulged in this privileged flattery. The two dedications of plays that he
made, as we shall see, were to be aimed with different
pitches in other directions. In this abstention, Hauteroche
showed himself, as he would later be remembered, as a
"seigneur" in the République des Lettres, more keen to be a part of the "beau monde" in the entertainments at its edges
than to sing for his supper from the street, even or especially when it was the rue Mauconseil. In a world
celebrated for its gossip, and perpetuated by the gossip of others about it and its "morals," Hauteroche offered and
kept an image of unblemished dignity, which well served that
of the actors' profession. As Madame Poisson remembered:
"C'était un homme d'honneur et estimable, non-seulement par
ses talents, mais encore par sa probité et sa droiture" (Molière, ed. R. Bray, vol. l, p. 1058).
Hauteroche's first play, performed on 12 July 1668, and published by Guillain and de Sercy the following year, was a
five-act "grande comédie," in verse. In the "Avis au
lecteur," he explains that his colleagues had urged him to write for the theatre and to produce his plays. The
18 encouragement by Hauteroche's colleagues begins a practice that would continue throughout his career. If his first play, L'Amant oui ne flatte point, could be construed tactically as a counterweight to Molière's success with
L'Amphitryon. as Raymond Picard suggests (1961, p. 143), it more surely and significantly was produced to bolster the flagging success of Thomas Corneille's Laodice. reine de
Cappadoce. mounted in February, in which Hauteroche played. At the same time. Poisson's Le Poète basoue. produced in early June, with its references to Corneille's play, had served the same end. In that play, which included a fine part for Hauteroche, a Basque poet invades the theatre, loaded with originally odd plays for the company to consider and full of scorn for its repertory, which he runs down in a dialectally mangled French calculated for easy laughs from the audience. A long-suffering but dignified Floridor introduces him to selected members of the cast: after
Floridor, Mademoiselle de Beauchâteau, dressed for the play as one of the princesses in which she specialized at the age of fifty-four; then Hauteroche (at this point forty-nine); after him, comes Mademoiselle de Brécourt, new that year at thirty-eight. To Hauteroche is given a defense of the actors that focuses their complaints about publishers: Et qui, s'il vous plaist, fait éclater leurs ouvrages Que ceux qui donnent l'ame à ces grands personnages? Que ne doivent-ils point aux excellens Auteurs Que l'on peut bien nommer d'aymables Enchanteurs? Puisqu'ils charment l'esprit, enchantent les oreilles? Que dans leur bouche un rien passe pour des merveilles?
19 Qu'un galimatias dit par ces grands Acteurs? Tire tout le brouhaha de tous les spectateurs? Mais si-tost que l'on voit cette piece imprimée On rougit mille fois de l'avoir estimée. Les endroits qu'au théâtre on avoit admirés Si-tost qu'on les peut lire ils sont comme enterrés. L'Autheur les méconnoit, et luy mesme confesse Qu'il voit tous ses enfans étouffés sous la presse. Pourquoy les élever, et nous abbaisser tous? Nous avons besoin d'eux, ils ont besoin de nous (scene viii, cited from Curtis, p. 185).
Curtis remarks that this tirade was doubtless the most personal that Poisson ever put on the stage. If the tone of
Hauteroche's prefaces on critics is considered, the two actors shared opinions expressed here, as more generally on the actor's function as entertainer: to be "aimables enchanteurs," charming the mind and delighting the ear, and finally animating by the remembered tone of their voices the texts of the plays they have performed. Le Poète basque. and this speech given to Hauteroche, shows the collaboration of the two actors continuing and growing. Beyond being a tribute to the fine voice Hauteroche evidently had. Poisson acknowledges his friend's dignity that would serve to pull off this tirade, and excellent "public relations man" that he was, served the image of that dignity that increasingly characterized the actor Hauteroche beyond the theatre. "Nous ignorons si cette comédie a eu du succès," Madame
Deierkauf-Holsboer concludes (1970, II, p. 136). Robinet does give L'Amant qui ne flatte point a good review in his letter of 14 July, praising the actors— especially the distinguished tragic actress. Mademoiselle D'Ennebault— who
20 played the female lead— , its moral tone, and the quality of its writing ("bien écrite”), which indicates that reception was not a major disappointment. But critics were not unanimous about its construction. Whatever the degree of satisfaction, there is no doubt that 1668 proved to be a splendid year, at the time and for the future. In addition to the two rôles already noted, the boost from Poisson, and his own play, Hauteroche ended the year with a personal triumph, creation of the rôle of Chicanneau in Racine's sole comedy. Les Plaideurs. In its beginnings the play was slow to take on in the city; but it was an immediate success at court, where the king laughed loudly. Chicanneau and the comtesse de Pimbêche were recognized as comic gems, which had reanimated their setting by the time Hauteroche was repeating the rôle at the Comédie-Française. The rôle, and
Hauteroche's visibility in it, doubtless bolstered the immediate afterlife of L'Amant qui ne flatte point, complementary as it is to the play's comic thematics, generally similar to Molière's in Le Misanthrope. Hauteroche's principal inspiration in his first play.
In addition to a good recommendation as future director, the year 1668 served the future in another, unsuspected way. In August, Poisson's Les Faux Moscovites (in which Hauteroche did not play) was produced. That month, two Russian ambassadors paid a much touted official visit and were taken to the theatre. They went to Molière's
21 to see L 'Amphitryon. and to the Marais where they were entertained by Quinault's Les C o u p s de l'amour et de la fortune (Deierkauf-Holsboer, II, p. 137), but they cut their visit to the Hôtel. Poisson's play was the company's revenge. It is more than possible that Poisson's farce with its pseudo-Russian gibberish (doubled with the Basque baragouinage of the same year) was remembered and served Hauteroche as inspiration when, almost two decades later, he composed his Le Feint Polonais. If Molière was also engaged by the language, for Le Bourgeois gentilhomme's "tromperie turque" (See Lancaster, 1936, III=, p. 735), the comic tastes of the two playwrights met again, in this common source.
In July 1669, Le Souper mal-apprêté. a one-act farce in prose by Hauteroche opened. It was one of the kind of productions inventoried in the repertory of the theatre as "petites pièces" or what, according to Poisson— who long confined himself to the form— made writers for the theatre one-fifth a playwright. It is one of three, produced at different stages in Hauteroche's career, that together have served most to keep the playwright alive, in the repertory of the theatre and in print. Its anecdotal subject would seem simple— a young man tries not to give a dinner for his loved one because he has no money for it— were it not for the complications the playwright provides. Robinet bids his readers to partake of this supper in a performance running
22 yet on 18 August (Letter of 17 August, Rothschild, 1899, III, p. 847).
Le Souper in 1669 functioned for the Hôtel as L Amant had the previous year. The year began with Boyer's Le Jeune
Marius. with Hauteroche in the rôle of Pompée," playing opposite La Fleur as Sylla. The tragedy fared badly. It began playing in repertory with an outstanding success, Montfleury's La Femme iuae et partie (in which Hauteroche had a rôle) that seemingly began its run the year before, caused something of a scandal and filled the house, offering some considerable competition to the end of a scandal threatening to monopolize the audience in 1669— the end of the ban on Le Tartuffe that came with its staging at the
Palais-Royal. By summer, however, the play that is considered Montfleury's finest (Deierkauf-Holsboer, 1970,
II, p. 138) was also faltering. Montfleury again tried a
Moliéresque tactic and staged a "Critique": Le Procès de la femme iuaée. which did not catch on. It was at this pass that Hauteroche's one-acter came to the boards and held them. It was in fact Hauteroche's first big hit. And it continued to be an audience pleaser as long as the Hôtel existed. Madame Chevalley, in the list of the plays acted on the last ten playing days of the company, 25 July-18 August, 1680, which she first published,has allowed us to see that Le Souper mal-apprêté played on two days, with
Racine's Mithridate. It entered immediately into the
23 repertory of the Comédie-Française, where it played one
hundred sixty-nine times between 1680 and 1728. The year 1669 is worthy of its predecessor, even goes
it one better, with the success of his second play. Hauteroche's rôle in Le Jeune Marius had after all not been hissed, and it was followed by the outstanding performance of Racine's lago, the part of Narcisse played with
Floridor's Néron at the end of the year. On 22 March 1670, Hauteroche returned to Paris early, from a "visite” to court in Britannicus to sign an act on
behalf of the troupe, an act of association that was Floridor's last great coup in recruitment. The act brought
to the Hôtel, from the Marais, Charles Chevillet, called
Champmeslé and his wife, Marie Desmares. "La Champmeslé," of course, doubtless the most celebrated tragédienne of the
century, created the rôles of the great Racinian heroines of
the 1670s beginning with the rôle of Bérénice in Racine's new tragedy that opened in November (with Floridor playing Titus, and Le Champmeslé as Antiochus— and Hauteroche as
Paulin). She was all the more welcome as Mademoiselle Des OEillets had died in October. In the actor-playwright
Champmeslé, Hauteroche gained another interlocutor, as well as colleague, who like him was dedicated to playcraft and
its theory (and into the bargain was a keen businessman). The Champmeslés brought so much to the Hôtel that their departure for the Théâtre du Guénégaud in 1679 was taken by
24 later commentators as the premonitory sign of its imminent demise.
The troupe of 1670, with the exception of Mademoiselle
Des OEillets, constituted the company for which and by whom Hauteroche's first plays were written and performed, and would remain that until 1675. It numbered twelve. In addition to Floridor and his wife. Marguerite de Baloré,
Hauteroche and the Champmeslés, it included Raymond Poisson
(sieur de Belleroche) and Victorine Guerin, his wife;
Guillaume Marcoureau (sieur de Brécourt) and his wife
Estienne de Surlis; Madeleine du Pouget (called "la
Beauchâteau"), Françoise Jacob (called "la D'Ennebault"), and François Juvenon ("La Fleur").
Besides Racine's new tragedy, and four new comedies, nothing more is known about the Hotel's 1670 repertory
(including Hauteroche's other rôles). Nor is the order of performance of the comedies certain. One might speculate that Poisson's new one-acter. Les Coquettes (in which he played the valet Crispin) and Hauteroche's new play, the three-act Crispin médecin were placed together in early or mid-summer to give a boost in boxoffice, as had been the pattern established by the last two seasons. According to Robinet (Letter of 10 May 1670 in Brooks, 1993, p. 37)
Crispin médecin opened on 10 May. And Robinet gives it good publicity: "On joùe un Crispin Médecin./Oui peut guérir le plus mal-sain,/Par ses buffonner ignorances/Et ses
25 plaisantes ordonnances./De Haute-Roche, habile Acteur/Et, par omnes casus. Acteur." And boost the season— and year— they did. The two plays in the new collaboration, linked by the Crispin character, were enormously successful; added to
Thomas Corneille's La Comtesse d'Oroueil. and Montfleury's
Le Gentilhomme de la Beauce. the Hôtel had a stellar year of comedy before Bérénice added powerfully to its glory. And with Crispin médecin, published by the prestigious high- society publisher Barbin before the year was out,^^
Hauteroche had his second smash hit in succession. The success of Crispin médecin really opens a new period in Hauteroche's career that with much the regretted final withdrawal of Floridor from the theatre in August of
1671, will also be the period of his directorship of the
Hôtel— which seemingly ended, or changed complexion with the arrival of La Thorillière— and lasts through the decade of the '70s, ending with the merge by royal order (22 August,
1680) of the Hôtel de Bourgogne company with the Théâtre du Guénégaud— (formed by royal order after the merger of the
Marais and Molière's following his death in 1673) that constituted the unique Paris theatre in the Comédie-
Française. The major part of Hauteroche's production for the Hôtel in this new period is linked by the character Crispin, and behind him the collaboration of Hauteroche and
Poisson. For that reason, I will treat Crispin médecin in
Part II of this dissertation. On the other hand,
26 Hauteroche's fourth play Les Apparences trompeuses. ou les maris infidèles (1672), for reasons that seem stronger than sheer chronology, belongs to the period of apprenticeship that I have supposed to end in 1670, whose dramaturgy I will consider in Part I.
Les Apparences trompeuses. the title under which
Hauteroche's play was first published in Paris by Promé in
1673 and in subsequent collective editions, was first announced for 6 August 1672, thus resuming the pattern of production established in the late '60s. The title under which it was announced was "Les Maris infidèles," half of the full title whose two parts more fully reflect the play's origins, Molière's phenomenally successful Saanarelle. ou le cocu imaginaire (1660). In Hauteroche's play, an older, married man grumbles about women's coquettery and infidelity, yet by comic paradox it is he who seeks other women. As Lancaster puts it, the "quite simple plot consists in little more than a wife's efforts to rouse her husband's jealousy" (1936, III^, p. 779). Sometime before the August date, Hauteroche's colleagues persuaded the playwright not to produce the play, which never reached the stage,and remains thereby the unique example is
Hauteroche's collective works of a play published to be read.
Some external factors have been suggested for the suppression of Les Apparences trompeuses. It contains
27 satire of an "abbé galant," that develops into a boldly anticlerical attack on the custom of relegating young women to convents for economic reasons, which in the spirit of
Molière's L'École des femmes will be a recurrent theme in
Hauteroche's plays (but nowhere so rhetorically obtrusive as it is here). "On en fait des abbés sans beaucoup de façons,/Qui sous ce titre-là demeurans dans le monde,/En content, s'il leur plaît, à la brune et la blonde;/Ils font des damarets, sont de tous les plaisirs,/Et pensent rarement
à régler leurs désirs./On devroit, sans nous mettre au rang des Soeurs Professes,/Comme on fait des Abbés, faire aussi des Abesses" (I, iii). It is also possible that pressure was exerted to avoid competition with de Visé's new play.
Les Maris infidèles ou I'Amy de tout le monde, which Molière was preparing at the time to produce.
Whatever the reasons for the suppression (and both of the external causes suggested seem weak), and whatever the weakness of the play, which I will analyze in Part I, the most significant inferences that may be drawn from the fact have to do with the nature of Hauteroche's relation to the
Hôtel and what it meant to him. In the first full season of directorship, as he was, Hauteroche could, theoretically, have forced a play into production, if vanity had predominated. That he may have listened to his colleagues' advice and heeded it, despite a certain pride in the play that led to justificatory publication, suggests that his
28 first and controlling emotion was humility, the suspicion that he had indeed not come up to Molière's golden standard, or his own set by the last two plays, or the Hotel's. In the end concern for solidarity and the reputation of the Hôtel precede vain pride in authorship or embarrassment.
Finally, whatever the interest of the "failure" of Les
Apparences trompeuses may be in examining the development of Hauteroche's playcraft, it makes no difference to his career. He entered the 1671-72 season sailing on the success of Crispin médecin and finished the year 1672 with a comparable one.
* * * *
Eight months after Crispin médecin first appeared, a performance in January 1671 was still being enthusiastically advertised by Robinet. "Un médecin des plus joyeux,/Voire des plus facétieux,/... Et son nom vaut bien d'estre appris" (10 January, Brooks, p. 55). In May Hauteroche for a second time played a leading lover's rôle, Hydas in
Boyer's Atalante. this time opposite la Champmeslé as Climène. Robinet puffed, in a lengthy review, that "Certain
Hydas, est son Amant,/représenté, pareillement,/De trés-bon, par Haute-Roche :/Et pour n'avoir aucun reproche,/J'ajoûte que chacun d'iceux,/Est, de pied-en-cap, mis des mieux./Id est, de façon fort brillante,/Tout de même, que fort galante" (9 May, Brooks, p. 76). But ail was not so happy at the Hôtel. Between the first production of Poisson's Les
29 Femmes cocmette and its transportation to Versailles, Floridor left permanently, and before his death the
following year, would give all the world as fine a show in dying as he had in living on the stage.
Brought to the Hôtel by Floridor, directed by him, and
playing opposite in some of the greatest rôles, Hauteroche could not have felt other than great loss. And if he had been an unequaled professional mentor and constant friend, he had certainly also been an object of admiration. He was for half of Paris after all, or for that percentage of it that went to the theatre. Story had it (Boileau's) that receipts for the first run of Britannicus were low because Floridor's public did not want to see their hero in the character of Néron. Tributes to his manner of acting
(détachée") were outnumbered by those to the "honnête homme. And it was in his favor, as recently as 1668, that the Conseil du roi has issued an arrêt (10 September) decreeing that a nobleman could also be an actor "sans déroger."^® Hauteroche, who already stood for the actor's dignity, and had stood up for it on stage, had had, and continued to have as director of the troupe, a model to emulate.
The year 1672 seems to have returned to normal for the players' schedule, and the new director's fortunes took another upward swing. His creation of the rôle of Osmin, confidant of the vizir Acomat (played by La Fleur) in
30 Racine's Baiazet on 5 January merited him special recognition from Robinet for mature acting. "Hauteroche. en son personnage/De favory, prudent, et sage,/Parût, et c'est la vérité,/Un acteur expérimenté (Letter of 30 January,
Brooks, p. 111). And the year brought also the creation of the title rôle of Théodat in Thomas Corneille's latest tragedy, once more opposite La Champmeslé, "Dont l'Esprit est si bien stilé,/Pour les grands rôles de la scène," commented Robinet, who is no less flattering to Hauteroche's sustaining of the royal rôle. The specific quality praised, of diction, seems almost a decade after L 'Impromptu a vindication of the actor from Molière's parody. "De
Hauteroche. comme il faut,/D'un ton, ni trop bas, ni trop haut,/(Je le di, sans que je le flate)/Y représente
Théodat,/Que le sort porte, en noble arroy,/Jusques au bon heur d'être Roy,/Et, par dessus le Diadème,/D'obtenir la
Beauté qu'il aime" (Letter of 26 November, Brooks, p. 120). Despite this and other praise, Corneille's tragedy did not come up to the successes of his L 'Ariane that had held the boards earlier in the year even playing in competition with Molière's Les Femmes savantes. Hauteroche's Le Deuil opened at the Hôtel on 24
November,“ the day before Corneille's Pulchérie at the Marais— and playing in repertory with his brother's
Théodat— drained the audience from the one Corneille to support the other. Publication by Promé, as early as the
31 first week in February, would be indication enough of the
one-act prose play's popularity, but Robinet's advertisement
for it makes it quite clear: "... un Remède sans
reproche,/Que, depuis peu, de Hauteroche./Prépare si bien, à
Hôtel/Ou'il fit rire tout Mortel./C'est sa petite
Comédie,/S'il faut qu'ici, je vous le die,/Qu'il plût à tant de Spectateurs,/Qui peuvent s'en rendre Lecteurs (Letter of
11 February 1673, Brooks, p. 133). It was the most popular of the three one-acters produced in 1672, the other two being Poisson's La Hollande malade and Champmeslé's L'Heure du berger. It passed immediately into the repertory of the
Comédie-Française, without having ever been long out of performance in the intervening seven years, and played four hundred ninety times between 1680 and 1781 (Lancaster, 1936, III^, p. 778). Its fortune continues, as the only
Hauterochean play to have been given a twentieth-century critical edition (Truchet, 1986), which anthologizes it as the "best of Hauteroche." The anecdote of the play is drawn from Noël Dufail's Contes d'Eutraoel and, as will later be seen, by way of
Molière once again. The "Avis," in the spirit of a continuing "campaign" for the recognition of "honnêteté" in the theatre foregrounds the propriety of the play's language, which includes a new rôle for Crispin. The rôle in which he was cast in Crispin médecin of the "médecin malgré lui' or "médecin imaginaire," who serves his master
32 against his father's unknowing pursuit of the woman his son
loves, has changed, provocatively, as a new personality for Crispin emerges.
Crispin médecin appears in a new setting on 2 August 1673. A special performance was arranged for the pleasure of Monsieur frère du roi and Madame on a visit from
Vincennes to the house of Monsieur de Boisfranc at Saint- Ouen. The "troupe royal" was invited to play Mithridate. and it closed the evening with Hauteroche's farce, "Qui ne fâcha pas Hauteroche," Robinet coyly ends a review of several of Monsieur's entertainments (Letter of 5 August
1673, Brooks, p. 146). Hauteroche was there to see his play performed, since it was he who had in January created the rôle of Arbate, Mithridate's confidant. De Visé informs his readers that Monsieur had specifically requested Crispin médecin "parce qu'il 1'avoit déjà vue. Monsieur doubtless complimented the author. It was not the first time that Hauteroche had entertained him and Madame. The Robinet review of 30 January, with its flattering remarks on
Hauteroche's performance as Osmin did not refer to the play's opening, covering rather the special performance the troupe did on that date as a part of the marriage festivities of Philippe d'Orléans and the second Madame, Charlotte Elisabeth de Bavière (la Palatine). And the performance of Crispin médecin was not Hauteroche's last time there. Madame surely (and perhaps Monsieur) was
33 charmed and knew well Hauteroche's next smash hit— his fourth in succession— a new, third "Crispin" play, Crispin musicien. And she relayed some information about the play, years later, when she remembered it: "Je connais la pièce Crispin musicien. Elle a été faite spécialement pour Baron l'ancien. Poisson et La Thorillière le père.
From "Crispin médecin imaginaire" to "Crispin musicien imaginaire," who appeared on stage at the Hôtel, on 5 July
1674, there seems only a step. The plots are similar, and the Crispin character is closer to the earlier play than to its last Hauterochean incarnation in Les Nobles de province. But the step is a giant one. The new play is expanded to five acts and in effect is, as will be shown, structured by the music that it puts on stage. Poisson, as part of the music, will have a surprise for the audience and appears in a newly grotesque costume, visually closer to some of the fantastic shapes of the royal ballets, it might seem, than to the usual Hôtel costumes." Hauteroche's aspirations, inferable first in the five-act form, seem to be moving toward comedy of manners. But the right combination of different kinds of entertainment was struck: an immediate hit, Crispin musicien was proclaimed that again in 1676, when Colletet's Journal de Paris referred yet to it, "avec tous les ornements de M. Hauteroche fut représentée à l'Hôtel de Bourgogne," and again in 1678, when the Mercure galant reports its "gros succès" with theatregoers. During
34 the last ten performing days of the Hôtel, in 1680, it played by itself on two separate days (August 6 and 10).
Hauteroche reaches the high point in his career, it could be concluded, in 1674, on a wave of hits, starring rôles, and reprises both at the Hôtel and court (as well as elsewhere in prestigious special performances). In 1674, he lost his colleagues and friends La Fleur, who died, and
Brécourt, who left the company and Paris for the provinces.
But the troupe gained new life with the arrival after
Molière's death of his protégé Baron, another actor playwright (with whom Hauteroche remained on excellent terms^*) , and the distinguished actor François Lenoir de La Thorillière, the actors— with Poisson for whom Hauteroche wrote Crispin musicien. La Thorillière, at his death, 27
July 1680, was mourned by the entire company as their
"chef,” Madame Chevally has written (1970, p. 209), and he may well have come to the troupe as that, lessening
Hauteroche's activities, and freeing some of his time for a project that was sorely needed in 1675, a new play. By the same token, Hauteroche seems to need in 1675, a new play. He seems to have taken on no new rôles between 1674 (when he breaks a pattern by not playing a part in Racine's
Iphigénie) and 1677, when we will see that he did so for a special reason, and in fact to have acted only in the reprises of plays with rôles that were already closely associated with him.
35 The new project, perhaps in view in 1674, was the last
"Crispin play" by Hauteroche that was produced, the five-act Les Nobles de province. This play is one of three of which
Madame Deierkauf-Holsboer declared that "nous n'avons aucune indication qui permette de déterminer la date d[es]... premières." After noting that it was first published in
Lyons in 1678, she adds: "Et l'on peut admettre qu'elle a
été jouée pour la première fois à l'Hôtel de Bourgogne avant cette date, mais nous n'en avons aucune preuve." It is in her chronicle of the year 1675 that these remarks are placed, and Lancaster (IV\, p. 462), also at a loss for dates of first performance and composition also favors 1675 for the performance. Madame Deierkauf-Holsboer asks the questions about that year, in view of the pattern of
Hauteroche's past moments of offering a play to the company, that might well make the 1675 performance date for Les Nobles de province more probable. In 1675-76, she contends, the Hôtel did not succeed in drawing the Parisian public by successful new plays. "II semble même qu'aucune nouvelle pièce ne fut montée sur la scène de la rue Mauconseil." It is possible that Hauteroche's was, but that it was not successful, since no press reviews were forthcoming and publication, when it did take place, was in Lyons. "Comment expliquer ce fait?" she asks, and then proposes a moment when the usual older suppliers have moved on (Thomas
Corneille and Antoine Montfleury to the Guénégaud, Brécourt
36 to adventures in the provinces, Corneille into silence after
Suréna1, and a younger generation has not yet moved onto the scene- The result is a new dependence on "reprises" and the importation for the first of some of Molière's plays into the repertory. Of the older generation, it is precisely Hauteroche and Champmeslé, who are yet there, and
Champmeslé's two-act Fragments de Molière constitutes another of the three undatable plays. It seems reasonable to suppose that both playwrights felt the dearth, described by Madame Deierkauf-Holsboer, and moved to do something about it (and for Champmeslé the moment may also have been the sounding of a first alarm that in the near future made him seek an exit— to the Guénégaud). Since Crispin is in the new play, it also seems that it may have been the success of Crispin musicien that shaped the project.
The "musicien imaginaire" moves this time to the "fou imaginaire" or "malgré lui"— an entirely different character uneasily placed among the quarrels of the "nobles" Fatencour and Fontnid situated in a village in the Vivarais, which looks toward Lyons rather than Paris. Crispin, into the bargain, is leader of a band of toughs who terrorize an innocent man. Hauteroche had created a full comedy of manners and for the second time in his career misjudges his audience.
In 1677, Hauteroche created the rôle of Théramène, confidant of Hyppolite, who has the famous long Act V
37 "récit" of his death in Racine's Phèdre. And he would play the rôle again, in newly significant circumstances at the Comédie-Française. In 1677 there was also a new play in the works. Les Nouvellistes, a three-act play in prose, which the Mercure galant announced on 6 January 1678, the year in which the audience success of Crispin musicien was still being repeated in the same journal, as was a special performance of Le Deuil at Fontainebleau (No. VIII, p. 201). Opening in February (Mélèse, p. 167), Hauteroche's comedy would have been played in repertory with Thomas Corneille's highly successful Le Comte d'Essex (which had opened in January) and entered into it at about the same time as another tragedy, Lyncée. by the newcomer Abeille. Eighteenth-century commentators do little more than list the play. Leris, whose Dictionnaire portatif des théâtres (1754) contains for the first complete and fairly accurate bibliography of Hauteroche's plays, for the first also links Les Nouvellistes to another play with the same title but listed as anonymous produced at the Hotel in 1686
(p. 242). Mélèse (ibid), on the other hand, links Hauteroche's play with fragments of a play with the same title published in the Mercure galant in May, June, and July of 1672, then leaped to the hypothesis of de Visé's collaboration on the play that would be produced in 1678 (continued in 1686). Lancaster (IV^, pp. 464-66) rightly contests the linking of Hauteroche's comedy either to the
38 anonymous play that opened on 16 October 1686 and ran for
five performances (which the Parfaict brothers in 1745 list
as anonymous) or the de Visé fragment published in 1672. "The comic possibilities of 'nouvellistes' had already been
suggested by Molière in La Comtesse d'Escarbagnas, as probable a source for Hauteroche as the Mercure galant."
Given Hauteroche's demonstrated habit of beginning with Molière, one might conclude that it is more probable that he began there for Les Nouvellistes and that a new foray into comedy of manners, picking up the current craze would be treated along the lines of the craze for titles— or music— that were the comic possibilities exploited in a Molieresque focus in his last two plays. Such a play would be well calculated for a season whose hits were La Chapelle's Les Carosses d'Orléans and Poisson's Les Fous divertissants. And this use of Molière could have constituted in Hauteroche's own manner a contribution to the new presence of Molière at the Hôtel, first in the tributes his colleagues Brécourt and Champmeslé had put on the stage, with L'Ombre de Molière (1673) and Les Fragments de Molière
(1675) respectively, and in Molière's plays' new entrance into the repertory. Hauteroche doubtless supported both developments. At an impasse then, on Les Nouvellistes.
Madame Deierkauf-Holsboer returns to the practice of simply listing the play in the 1678 repertory.
39 Even less is known about La Bassette. which would continue the same line of comedy focusing again on the contemporary, this time the craze for gaming, a rich theme heavily mined by the plays to come, from Regnard and
Dancourt among many others, and perhaps early enough to have been influential on them, as Lancaster suggests Les
Nouvellistes may have been on Dancourt's Les Nouvellistes de
Lille. La Bassette played at the Hôtel in May 1680, the
Parfaicts inform us (XII, 1680, p. 188), concurrently with another play by the same title, at the Guénégaud, and
Lancaster provides the information that the "rival" play was by Champmeslé. Neither Mélèse nor Madame Deierkauf-Holsboer mentions either of these plays. Joseph LaPorte, who links the two unpublished plays in the first critical article devoted exclusively to Hauteroche (1760, pp. 226-27), characterizes both with a belittling comment entirely in keeping with the narrow late neoclassical aesthetic already present to some extent in the Parfaicts' presentations and in full-blown prejudice in La Harpe (An VII de la République). And it is worthwhile to continue out quotation of his critical judgment, since it will (usually without acknowledgement) be quoted or paraphrased in the majority of nineteenth-century biographical dictionaries until Jal
(1872) restored scholarship to the genre. "On attribue au même Auteur deux... Comédies, la Bassette & les Nouvellistes. mais elles n'ont pas été imprimées, & sans
40 doute qu'elles ne méritent peu de l'être. La plupart de celles qui le sont, ont eu du succès dans le tems; plusieurs même sont restées au Théâtre. On y remarque, dans ces dernières sur tout, un grand fond de plaisanteries, & une connoissance réfléchie des règles dramatiques. Le grand comique des unes, l'heureuse ordonnace des autres, est ce qui caractérisé principalement le génie de Hauteroche." There may be some truth in this evaluation of the two unpublished plays, which would explain what remains a mystery, i.e., why Hauteroche himself did not put these plays into print in the first collective edition of his plays, published in The Hague by Moetjens, as he in fact had for Les Apparences trompeuses' first independent printing.
Given the maverick nature of the publisher, who often printed pirated or clandestine books and manuscripts, it is highly probable that Hauteroche did have a hand in the publication (though not in subsequent collective publication because of his blindness). The playwright may have heard the voices of past colleagues dissuading him, as he declared they had done for the production of Les Apparences trompeuses. Or there may have been other reasons, with little or nothing to do with self-criticism, for the suppression. Friendship for Champmeslé, which given
Hauteroche's character as we have seen it, was little likely to have ceased with his move to the Guénégaud, may have tipped the decision. The collaborator of 1675 and the
41 colleague, who first signed Champmeslé's act of association, may have been loathe— non-competitive as he seems to have been temperamentally— even to give the appearance of competition in print. In some circles, even in 1680, an "honnête homme" did not do that sort of thing. Perhaps the most compelling, and inclusive hypothesis can be derived from the nature of his plays after La Bassette in the 1680s. When two new plays by Hauteroche appear in 1684 (thus changing the two-year rhythm in place since 1670), they have taken quite new directions, as I shall show in Part III, which amounts to a reaffirmation and renewal of the kind of inspiration that had animated and characterized the playwright up to Les Nobles de province. In the reflection of the time out, whether in preparation of the collective edition or not, it may have seemed already to Hauteroche that the nature and direction of his three plays fLes Nobles de province. Les Nouvellistes. La Bassette1 could be summed up and represented in the first of the series that was the fullest expression of them.
There is a quite simple, less hypothetical reason for the abandonment at least of La Bassette. In March 1680, when it was performed, the Hôtel was much occupied by the rumors of a merger that happened officially at the end of the summer, thus occupying them physically with moving and other planning for the last quarter of the year. Bereft of La Thorillière and Champmeslé, Hauteroche may as much as
42 anyone have worked to shepherd the troupe through the potentially rending and divisive period of transition.
Madame Chevalley has emphasized the curious fact that there is less extant documentation concerning feelings and processes of the merger of 1680 than there is for that of the Marais and Molière's troupe seven years earlier. It may well be that the absence of dissenting voices had to do with
Hauteroche's sense of tact and caution and that, contrary to what may have been believed when the narrative of the Parisian theatres was told almost exclusively in terms of rivalry, that the actors wished for the merger and welcomed its implementation. Rivalry, in its wasteful managerial aspects, would be a thing of the past. And there were many bridging friendships in the small world of actors of the two theatres. Then, too, both royal presence and financial support had been shaky since Molière's death. That promised to be regularized and secure, according to the brevet of April 24, which accorded the new theatre 12,000 livres (the traditional amount since the days of Richelieu), signed by all the actors, including Hauteroche (facsimile page in Chevalley, 1970, p. 220). The lettre de cachet signed by the King and Colbert on 21 October, then seems to follow no serious opposition, and the unified new theatre had opened in the Guénégaud buildings, where they were now to play daily (rather than three times a week). The opening had been on Saint Louis's day, 25 August, and the King's fond
43 wish for the merger was answered by this new addition to the
festivities marking that feast day of the monarchy. For its first performance the Comédie-Française gave Phèdre and La
Chapelle's Les Carosses d'Orléans. Hauteroche was a part of the festivity, in the rôle of Théramène, the final and culminating rôle in the long line of Racinian confidants he had played.
The merger obviously brought fears of losing positions and wages, or reduction in parts, that the King moved to minimize. The Hôtel fared well. One member, Mademoiselle
La Thuillerie, retired; all the others took their places in the new company of twenty-seven, which shared financially 2Ii/« parts in the new theatre's proceeds. No actor from the
Hôtel suffered a reduction in shares. The Hotel's troupe, in which Hauteroche and Poisson were the senior members, had undergone considerable change since their entrances into it twenty-odd years earlier, to the extent in fact that the two seniors and Mademoiselle D'Ennebault were the sole remaining members of that first troupe they had known. The rest of the transfers from the Hôtel were Baron, Mademoiselle Baron,
Beauval, Mademoiselle Beauval, La Thuillerie, Mademoiselle Bellonde, Raisin, Mademoiselle Raisin, de Villiers fils. At twelve, they were outnumbered by the Guénégaud transfers, who had taken the cuts in shares: Champmeslé, Mademoiselle Champmeslé, La Grange, Mademoiselle de La Grange, de Villiers, Mademoiselle Molière, Guérin d'Estriche,
44 Mademoiselle de Brie, Mademoiselle Dupin, Rosimont, Hubert,
Mademoiselle Guyot, Mademoiselle du Croisy, Verneuil, and Du
Croisy.^
Hauteroche personally fared well in the merger. He was much in evidence in the new theatre, from the opening performance onward. As I have noted, five of his previously performed plays went immediately into the first season's repertory. In addition to the Racinian confidant rôles, he also maintained his starring rôles of Baron de la Grasse and
Chicanneau, and added to them that of Sotenville from Molière's Georae Dandin. He also escaped the bureaucratic downside of the royal merger, the managing by royal agents (who differed over the years of the first decade) who now controlled the schedule of court appearances, and the selection of new plays, and the distribution of rôles (the latter two activities were done semi-autonomously in the more democratic practice of regular meetings of the full cast-"sessions" begun at the close of the 1682 year). From December communications from the King's representatives in charge were directed to the admirably efficient keeper of the invaluable Registre. Charles Varlet de La Grange. But Hauteroche kept an active part in concerns effecting the troupe. One of the few letters known is the frequently published one to La Grange, addressed playfully as "Mon cousin," a fellow stage king, and addressing the problem of staffing the theatre with actors in view of the demand for
45 "visites" that made a large part of the new theatre in fact a traveling company. The letter is dated from Paris, 12
September [1681].
Mon cousin, Vous ne pouvez pas douter que nous n'ayons esté obligé de cesser le théâtre aujourdhuy. Vous sçavez que de représenter une pièce sérieuse, sans une petite pièce, c'est absolument chasser le peuple. Vous n'ignorez pas aussi que nous ne pouvons donner aucune comédie, tous les comiques estant à Fontainebleau. Si vous voulez que nous remontions au théâtre au plus tôt, envoyez-nous les secours nécessaires, c'est- à-dire Raisin et Poisson; autrement nous serons contraints d'aller faire trés- humblement remontrance à Sa Majesté, qui ne veut pas que la Comédie cesse à Paris. Je laisse à votre prudence à envisager les choses avec l'avis de tous nos camarades. Je suis de tout mon coeur, mon cousin. Votre obéissant serviteur, signé De Haute Roche, suivi par onze de ses collègues
* * * *
Ât the end of the fouth season of the Comédie-
Française, La Grange recorded (20 March 1684, Young éd., p. 331), "M^ Hauteroche est Sorty de la Trouppe et a cédé sa part savoir demye part a M. Raisin l'aisné et l'autre demye part a Mile Raisin qui luy donnent par forme de desdomagement trois cent louis d'or. ainsi par ordre de M. de Crequi. M. Raisin L'aisné aura demye part en payant 571 livres: 12 par an a la trouppe qui est la pension que payoit Hauteroche. Mlle Raisin payera 1,000 livres de pension a la trouppe et aura sa part entiere. M. Hauteroche ne sera plus de la troupe et aura 1000 livres de pension."
46 A month before his retirement, at sixty-seven,
Hauteroche had given a new play to the company. On 22
February L'Esprit folet ou la Dame invisible opened. And if
"il est sorti du théâtre," as actor, a second new play followed retirement. Le Cocher supposé opened on 9 June and
was the same kind of hit as Hauteroche's earlier one-acters.
Le Souper mal-apprêté and Le Deuil. which continued to be
played regularly in 1684 and 1685. Le Cocher. whose
anecdote involves a straying lover angling with a disguised
coachman for a Parisian conquest and his surprise when his
fiancée from Limoges appears in the city, is a new
collaboration of Hauteroche and Poisson. Poisson gave a
vintage performance and was busy repeating it. The new one- acter played ten times in the summer, regularly in repertory
in the autumn before going to Versailles on 21 November (and into print the same month). It played twice in January
1685, then in regular repertory again throughout the year,
which included a performance at Marly on 7 August (the
penultimate entry in La Grange's register). La Dame invisible (as La Grange's register regularly
lists the title) has the marks of a finale, to be followed by the coda of Le Cocher. thus ending the year of retirement
in a triumph. Hauteroche returns, as we will see in the analysis of the play in Part III, to the pleasures of plotting, and for the first time since Crispin musicien experiments with stage space, notably lighting effects.
47 Disguise is also once again at the knot of the plot, this time by a clever young woman in search of and testing her lover (Pontignan) and in the process terrifying his valet
(Scapin) with the notion that she is of the spirit world.
Poisson plays Scapin, and this time, his master Pontignan is played by Hauteroche himself,^' a last turn on stage for the comic duo that had for so long worked together privately. The part of Scapin is built up in the play to be clearly a starring rôle, a kind of comic apotheosis worthy of a friend named for the transcendent Scapin of Molière's Les
Fourberies de Scapin. And a special star of pleasure is also followed by the playwright into the rôle he played himself. At long last he is the soldier that as an adolescent he allegedly desired to be.
The notice in the Mercure galant is dithyrambic, and the play has a string of successive performances to 7 March, all with impressive grosses (La Grange, I, pp. 329-30).
One performance follows, at some distance (19 May) with about one-guarter of the proceeds of the first-run performances, then disappears from the repertory in 1684-85. This performance history suggests that the triumph, after four years without a new play, was indeed a personal one for the playwright— a "new Hauteroche" and "with Hauteroche in it" had evidently passed through a loyal audience that had continued to keep Crispin médecin and Crispin musicien. Le
Souper mal-apprêté, and Le Deuil in the theatre, and
48 returned to them after seeing La Dame invisible once. Le
Cocher went to Versailles and Marly, whereas La Dame invisible stayed in Paris, apparently never staged at court in Hauteroche's lifetime.
Hauteroche was unusual among his colleagues for remaining celibate during a long professional life, husbands and wives— both married to the theatre— having been the more usual practice. In his new life of retirement, at sixty- eight, he married quite soon. The marriage contract, long ago published,^® is dated 25 June 1685. The bride was
Jacqueline Le Sueur, widow, whom Hauteroche had known and lent money when she was still Madame Jean-Baptiste Arnauld.
She was younger, by how much is not known, since Hauteroche had known (and also lent to) her mother, Radegonde Regnard, widow of Pierre Le Sueur (Karch, p. 44). She had been qualified, in Hauteroche's will of 1678, as "amie,” and named executrix. And the friendship went back at least to
1671, when both signed the marriage contract of the actors
Claude Deschamps, sieur de Villiers, and Jeanne Guillemant
(Karch, p. 43). Despite this context, neither mother nor daughter appears ever to have been an actress. On 14 April
1685, Jacqueline Le Sueur appeared before notaries and made her prospective husband procureur of all of her possessions. One is tempted to suppose that a quite familiar comic scenario is being set up. But nothing is known, except devotion in domestic life, of either wife or husband in
49 their twenty-two years of married life. A note on a
"quittance" for Hauteroche's pension, signed by his wife in
1694 reads "par sa femme Jacqueline Le Sueur a cause de l'infirmité & perte de veûe du Sieur dautroche mon éspoux"
(Karch, p. 42). Thirteen years at least of picking up the pension disbursements only begins to describe the care, devotion, and business acumen needed to manage a blind husband,^" whose business affairs had become complex.
In the will of 1678, Hauteroche's fortune amounts to
25.000 livres, not including real estate and personal effects. In 1685, at the time of marriage, it had grown to
80.000 livres. Evidently the years between Les Nobles de province and La Dame invisible have been spent in other pursuits in addition to meditation on playcraft. The financial arrangements at retirement, noted by La Grange, were of course welcome but not absolutely necessary. Hauteroche had more annual income from two of his lending transactions, detailed by Karch (p. 46), than he received from his pension. After his marriage, 6,000 livres were lent to Jean Le Roy, "greffier de la quatrième chambre des enquêtes de la cour du Parlement de Paris," and Geneviève
Hérault son épouse"; another 20,000 livres went to Louis
Gislain, sieur de Belcourt, "conseiller du Roy, trésorier receveur général et payeur de rentes." The annual dividend, of 1,300 livres on these loans does not qualify Hauteroche literally as a usurer,^' but it is handsome. Belcourt,
50 "ami,” was named as Hauteroche's final executor in December
1704, with a legacy of 3,000 livres.
Added to the lending was speculation in real estate. From 1685 to 1689, the couple resided in a house Hauteroche owned, rue Saint-Sauveur; at the time of his death, they occupied another in the rue de la Marche, always in the Saint-Sauveur parish, the "actors' parish," where he lived and died like so many other actors of his time. But at least two other houses were owned: one located at 6, rue de
Beaune, rented twice in 1695 (at 300 livres a year), and another in Aubervilliers, sold in 1696 to the Filles-de-
Notre-Dame-des-Vertus. One wonders whether this property had served as a country residence where the playwright retreated and the married couple spent time during the first decade of their marriage and Hauteroche's retirement.
Financial dealing lasted up to at least two years before Hauteroche's death. In 1705, through his wife, he lent 48,000 livres to Marie Bonneau^^, widow of Charles
Fortier, sieur de la Hoguette, which yielded another annual dividend of 2,400 livres. At the time of his death, then,
Hauteroche possessed 30,000 livres in liquid assets and
68,000 on loan, which yielded an annual 3,400 livres. In all this author's shares in performances and publisher's purchases of rights played no part. That already comfortable living for an actor of Hauteroche's stature was already accounted for in the nest egg counted up in 1685.
51 Totaled up, Hauteroche's fortune takes on the air of
relative wealth (relative, though, when one remembers that
the daughter of a due, or of a "fermier général," might expect an equivalent 100,000 livres as a dowry).”
The question of great interest, deriving from Kerch's invaluable detailing of Hauteroche's life as a businessman, and from her point of another— fourth— career along with those of the actor, theatre director, and playwright, is— when did the speculation begin? This question leads to others that are important for the biography that we know so little about of a truly personal nature, as well as for the attitudes toward the arts to which Hauteroche devoted his long professional life. The titles of the persons listed above to whom money was lent in the '80s, who were also friends, are exclusively in the legal world into which his niece married (and from which I have supposed his mother to have come). Added to these is a particularly interesting transaction concerning Anne Bellinzani, wife of Michel Ferrand, Président in the Grand Chambre, whom she divorced, and author of the scandalous epistolary novel Lettres de la jeune Bélise à Cléante (1696), which is a Balzacian episode that has not been known to her biographers.” Karch records that "le 17 janvier 1687, Anne Bellinzani, épouse de Michel Ferrand... lui céda pour 1,600 livres une agrafe de 24 diamants fins avec deux boucles d'oreilles composées chacune de 17 diamants" (p. 45). It is also revealing, given
52 Hauteroche's alleged early aspirations for the soldier's life— and the frequency of needy soldiers in his plays— that in December 1685 he lent 3,650 livres to Jean-Baptiste du
Defant, colonel d'un régiment de dragons.”
Speculation, and connections with financial speculators in the legal world, may go as far back as the early '70s.
The only dedication of a play by Hauteroche, to Le Deuil
(1672), is to André Girard Le Camus, chevalier, conseiller ordinaire du roi. Le Camus, from a distinguished family, has ties to financial circles,’* and it may well be gratitude for these connections that motivates the lengthy dedication to him and his wife. The attitude of "seigneur" in the République des Lettres, that I have used to characterize Hauteroche's dignity, established through the '70s, may lie, more than any literary attitude or "crisis," behind the lessening of activity around 1675, just as it may in general shape his attitude toward production for the stage, before and after retirement. The solid security sought beyond the theatre made these things possible, just as they did a style of life that is, if not seigniorial, at least allows for the detached attitude and setting of the "honnête homme."
The most interesting feature of the somewhat disappointing 1685 inventory of the house in the rue Saint-
Sauveur is its fleshing out of the space first in that house, then in the one in the rue de la Marche, in which
53 Hauteroche wrote— a library equipped with a substantial (though not vast) collection of books and a similar
collection of paintings that ornamented the room (Karch, pp. 47, and 53 n. 13, and n. 17). We know from Hauteroche's
various "Avis," and the sources of his plays, that his collection of books included a Horace and the Latin
playwrights, most probably a Calderon, and surely Molière's
plays; but unfortunately the inventory does not itemize the library (suggesting that it contained modest "working"
editions rather than rare and/or expensive items), and we
can go no further with identification of its contents. But it is some consolation to be able to picture the scene of
writing, removed from the business of the theatre and the
business of speculation, in which Hauteroche wrote his two
last plays and from which the fourth career of finance may provide some new biographical perspectives.
Hauteroche's tenth play, Le Feint Polonais ou la veuve
impertinente. three acts in prose, is very playable, but no
conclusive evidence has been found to prove that it was ever acted in Paris. There are no contemporary reviews. And
like Les Nobles de province. the play is directed toward
Lyons, where it was first published, suggesting an intermediary connection for whom the play may have been destined.
Disguise is again central to the play. Both Des Valons and his valet La Franchise are disguised as Poles (and
54 comically mistaken for Turks in the Paris streets) in aid of courting Des Valons' loved one and her family. The obstacles that beset the family, as well as the adventuring couple, are Des Valons' father's bankruptcy and his loved one's aunt, the widow of the title who has so embroiled her own affairs that they spill over into her niece's. Like Pontignan in La Dame invisible. La Franchise will have another name before the play is over. In Act V he is exposed as a frank escroc (though a loveable one). Des
Valons, too, will be exposed, and become anomalously Géronte, but his virtue will remain unblemished The particular form that this virtue takes, and wins the day with the family and the prize of the loved one, is the repayment of the father's debts. The father is named but never appears on stage. If we think back to the young Hauteroche's absconding with family money, and also to the bestowal— and then retraction— of the provision of "légataire universel" for his father in the 1678 will, the dénouement of the Feint
Polonais may be invested with autobiographical signification. Des Valons— Géronte, father and son linked again, with the son, now secure, symbolically enacting an atonement? Hauteroche's last play. Les Bourgeoises de qualité, in five acts and verse, has a better fortune than Le Feint Polonais. It did play at the Comédie-Française in its new
55 theatre in the rue des Fossés-Saint-GeriQain, for a very
creditable run of seven performances between 26 July and 7 August, 1690. Curiosity about the playwright and his new play, now that a new production has not been seen in six years, contributed measurably to this success. But the
"revenant" returned in fine form, a playcraft that fully embodies the aesthetic that had animated it since the days of his speech on the theatre from the Marais's stage in
Quinault's La Comédie sans comédie.
Les Bourgeoises de qualité, clearly Hauteroche's most complicated play, displays its play by making its lovers the writers and directors of the play and their servants producer and actor (the latter given the name L'Espérance).
The play is a recasting of Molière's Les Femmes savantes. which as Lancaster judged (IV^, 1940, p. 8 22) is far from a slavish imitation of Molière. It is on the contrary a final creative tribute to Molière, in which some personal reminiscences may also be embedded, in the manner of those of Le Feint Polonais. The Olimpe, that has taken the place of Molière's Philaminte, seems cast with her "ugly" daughter
Angélique in a kind of variant of the Cinderella story, frozen in pride and snobbishness, and irredeemably a spectacle of comic blindness; the Anselme, into which Molière's Crysalde has evolved is a frankly materialistic character, but a kindly spouse and a loving father to the second daughter, the Cinderella figure Mariane. The Mariane
56 name for this ingénue figure links the play with Le Feint
Polonais. in which the comparable figure is given the same name. This figure is the focal point of both plays, the
gaze in which the jeunes premiers read their own naturalness. That gaze, projected toward the spectators of
the play, may also be the inner gaze of the playwright
focused on a recalled scene of early life that is reanimated
in the imaginative act of writing.
Jacques Truchet has emphasized in his commentary on Le
Deuil (1986, pp. 1584-85), Hauteroche's "heureuse alliance de la fantasie et du réalisme." The country setting of the play, near Sens, with Truchet's examples of referential
realism mark the play in such a way as to look forward to
developments in the theatre emerging still in and for the
quite different theatre-going public of 1690, the largely amoral world of Dancourt's comedies. But the play of 1690
also has a dated feel, of the moral comedy and its high aspirations that animated Molière's grandes comédies. With the perspectives of creative imitation of Molière, and those of the "businessman" that open onto the personal, which I have focused in this last section of my introduction and which inform my dissertation, I hope to show in it through dramaturgical and thematic analyses the broader sense and fuller truth of that "heureuse alliance."
57 HÀDTEROCHEAN SCHOLARSHIP
In my remarks on Les Nouvellistes and La Bassette. I
pointed to factors that illy served Hauterochean criticism in its beginnings. The narrowly conceived late neoclassical
schema, and its moralizing accompaniment, too often
presupposed Hauteroche as an inferior Molière, scorned his accomplishments in farce, and equally paradoxically, was blind to the living and creative classical aesthetic that does animate the shaping of Hauteroche's playcraft, in directions learned from Molière. The same critical prejudices compromise much of the criticism of the Restoration and early Romantic writers, represented by Geoffroy (1825). His writing gestures toward a broader understanding but is compromised by unexamined presuppositions about the "beau," the "noble," and especially the "vraisemblable," which will still dampen the movement of Hauterochean studies at the turn of the century.
The modern critical tradition of Hauterochean scholarship begins with Victor Fournel and several of his contemporaries, Castel-Blaze (1876), Jal (1872), and Rhode (1877). Fournel's Molière et ses contemporains... (1866) for the first anthologizes Hauteroche's texts with those of his colleagues in playcraft, thus allowing for comparative
58 study, and facilitating it by good biographical narrative and bibliography (such as it was), although his selections
are restricted to Crispin médecin and Crispin musicien.
Fournel's own synthesis, stunted by the unexamined
retrograde critical vocabulary outlined above, comes late in
his career (1892). One can only ask the question "and where
are we?" when faced with the following conclusion on
Hauteroche's plays: "Elies vont du mauvais à l'excellent,
en passant par tous les degrés du médiocre... . Hauteroche n'aborda point la grande comédie, et ses meilleurs ouvrages
ne sont guère que des farces de bon aloi. Son imagination
n'est pas très riche de son propre fonds et ses intentions comiques manquent de profondeurs" (p. 253).
H. Castil-Blaze's Molière musicien (1876), which
extends its study to fifteen other playwrights including
Hauteroche in Crispin musicien, merits distinction as the first technical study of a play by Hauteroche, still of
interest, especially in its analysis of the "gavotte."
Unfortunately the rich concentration of musicological studies of Molière's use of music in recent times has not been extended, in Castil-Blaze's manner, to his contemporaries outside the world of early opera and court ballet. Jal's documentary probity, which set a standard in his Dictionnaire critique (1872), has unfortunately also not been followed in subsequent entries on Hauteroche in biographical dictionaries.^'
59 Karolus Rhode's brief Gryphiswald dissertation (1877) is the first real attempt at a synthetic treatment of
Hauteroche's career. Constrained by the dissertation conventions that made it an academic exercise, it offers little more than an informed biographical notice and plot summaries, that open up the questions of Hauteroche's relationship to Poisson, the significance of his playing in Quinault's La Comédie sans comédie, and the importance of
Spanish sources. Rhode's book is entirely superseded by the longer dissertation presented at the University of Cologne in 1927 by Wilhelm Voss. Voss goes beyond Rhode's plot outlines, into dramaturgical analysis, examination of the
Spanish influence, and exploration of historical and cultural contexts that include the worlds of physicians, judges, and the landed gentry. Voss's work remains, as the only book-length study of Hauteroche's career, the ground work of Hauterochean studies. But inevitably, the extraordinary quantity and quality, of general studies and monographs on seventeenth-century French theatre in the last half-century have severely limited the value of Voss's study, both as synthesis and in detail. Without going so far as to describe the study as superseded, as Karch does,^® it seems reasonable to say that it needed to be redone a decade after its publication. The historical scholarship that in the 1930s provide the materials for a new synthesis were first of all Mélèse's
60 Répertoire analytique (1934) and Parts III (19 36) and IV
(1940) of H. Carrington Lancaster's monumental French
Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century (1929-42).
Mélèse presented a catalogue of contemporary references to actors and plays produced, which consolidated the means of evaluating the impact of Hauteroche's acting rôles and plays on their first audiences. Lancaster's Parts III and IV deal chronologically with Hauteroche's career, in two parts, with a synopsis for each of his eleven plays ; information on reviews, casting, and stagings; and critical evaluations in historically determined standards of dramaturgy. To these henceforth essential reference works should be added B.E. and G.P. Young's edition of the Registre of La Grange
(1947), which in facsimile (vol. I) and rich commentary
(vol. II), allows us to see precisely the place Hauteroche held in the first five seasons of the Comédie-Française, of which he became a member at the end of his career. Georges
Mongrédien's scholarly work on seventeenth-century actors must also be included: first published in his Les Grands comédiens du XVII" siècle (19 29), which complemented the then standard reference work in the field by Lyonnet (1911), then expanded and corrected it was published by the CNRS in
1961. For the first time there is in this work a systematic listing for actors of the resources of the Minutier central.
61 The elements of a new synthesis came, in condensed
form, in volumes III and V of Antoine Adam's Histoire de la
littérature française au XVII'' siècle (1948-56). With his
sure sense of the life of groups and their intersections
with historical traditions and literary genres, Adam situates the actor in the theatrical life of the time,
outlines importantly his "orthodox" post-Moliéresque aesthetics of comedy (V, p. 277), and sketches out the
interplay of the kinds of comic plays that Hauteroche drew
upon in the creation of his own comedies for his own
audiences. Absent from this broad historical context, by
necessity of course, is the continuous narrative that would
link these centers of interest and integrate attention to the five-act form that is the principal embodiment of
Hauteroche's aesthetics.
Another fundamental historical work of scholarship appeared in the late 1950's, which brought new focus to
Hauteroche's career. Sophie Wilma Deierkauf-Holsboer's
Histoire du théâtre du Marais... (1958) presents new documents and interpretation of them, and reconstruction of the chronology of the theatre's repertory, which allow for a newly precise description of Hauteroche's tenure and activities at the Marais.
The 1970s for Hauterochean studies open with further historical studies of integral importance in the exact reconstruction of Hauteroche's theatrical career and
62 continue with a number of monographic studies that address questions central to his playcraft. Deierkauf-Holsboer's
Histoire de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne (1970) is a major work chronologically reconstructing the theatre's repertory season by season and rectifying prejudiced and popular views of its strengths and its interplay with other Parisian theatres. It could no longer be held, except in caricature, simply as the "enemies of Molière." Hauteroche's plays, as well as the rôles that he played, are given new relief, as is the outline of the temperament that made him the man of the theatre that he was. The invaluable archival contribution of Mariel O'Neill Karch (1972) has been detailed above (note 1).
Monographic treatment of the actor Poisson by A. Ross Curtis (1972) has in thoroughness, documentation, and interpretative acumen, increased our understanding of this longest and most fruitful collaboration that Hauteroche enjoyed with a colleague. André Blanc's comprehensive studies of Dancourt (1977, 1984) have described the territory that lies, for Hauteroche, in the trends of the future of the French theatre and help to circumscribe the place, definition, and limits of Hauteroche's specific domain and his career and achievements within it. Jean
Emelina's history of the rôles of servants in the theatre, from 1610 to 1700 (1975) throws new light on their function
63 in Hauteroche's plays, disparagingly referred to by one
eighteenth-century commentator as "un théâtre de valets."
Synthetic treatments of Hauteroche's career from late 1960s through the 1970s tend to be short parts in general histories, intended for a broad audience. Mongrédien (1966, English translation, 1969) places Hauteroche and his first
plays in the life of the theatre. "Bellerose, Montfleury,
Floridor, and Hauteroche were the 'great actors' of the
seventeenth century," he concludes (1969, p. 67)— a far cry from Manzius's casual: "Hauteroche was probably a bad actor, but was a clever dramatic author..." (1905, p. 134). And Geoffrey Brereton (1977) treats representative plays
illuminatingly under the headings "The Shadow of Molière," and "The Cynical Generation."
Monographical and specialist treatments continue to make contributions in the 1980s. Georges Forestier's study of the aesthetics of the play within the play (1981),
including several in which Hauteroche acted, offers suggestive contexts for identifying the reflexive elements that are a part of Hauteroche's aesthetics of comedy. Gerard Gouvernet (1985) offers a complementary focus to Emelina's study, tracing the evolution of the type of the valet in the theatre of the last quarter of the century and including Hauteroche within the movement of that development. Colette Hélard-Cosnier (1987) makes a new contribution of importance for the study of Hauteroche's
64 Spanish sources for the first since Voss's recapitulation of
the principal nineteenth-century studies (Martineche, 1900;
A. Puibusque, 1843) and Lancaster's application of them to
Hauteroche (1940). But the publishing event in Hauterochean studies of the
1980s was the appearance of the first modern critical
edition of one of Hauteroche's plays. Le Deui1 . by Jacques
Truchet (1986). With its well-informed notice on Hauteroche, careful editing and annotation, and its specific
placement in the period 1650-1671, the editors of the second
anthology volume of the Pléiade's Théâtre du XVII* siècle.
Jacques Scherer and Truchet, have once more placed
Hauteroche among his contemporaries, in a broader and more
nuanced context than that provided by Fournel. Hauteroche is situated in an "éventail de formules diverses" existing
in the years 1650-71 according to which a "Thomas Corneille, un Quinault, un Donneau de Visé, un Montfleury, un
Hauteroche, chacun de son côté, [est] tout autre chose que
Molière... (p. xxi). This same kind of variety is represented within Hauteroche's "comédie autonome," which nourished by the romanesque, also becomes part of the "défense et illustration" of "la petite comédie" that "se charge volontiers, sans abdiquer sa drôlerie, de significations sociales qui... font... l'esquisse d'une comédie de moeurs" (p. xxiii). It is this variety that
65 constitutes "une heureuse alliance de la fantasie et du réalisme" (p. 1584).
* * * *
It is my hope that this dissertation, based on primary and secondary bibliographies more complete than any compiled previously, will also offer a more complete synthetic view of Hauteroche's career, in all its aspects, and of its development according to the periodization outlined above in this introduction, taking full advantage of the contributions to Hauterochean studies made over the last half-century. In the dramaturgical and thematic analyses that I have done I have been guided by Jacques Scherer's La Dramaturgie classique.
Scherer's study is valuable in several ways. When
Hauteroche began to write his plays, the heroic period of the elaboration of dramaturgical theory in seventeenth- century France was over, one generation in the past. But as his prefaces will show, he believed that playcraft involved the study of poetics. As such it involved him then in an historically highly coded activity. La Dramaturgie classique gives us a handbook to what may be called "neoclassical aesthetics," and with its discussions of the various elements of that aesthetics, the co-ordinates of the kind of dramaturgical analyses pursued for Molière's plays by Jacques Guicharnaud (1963) and Andrew Calder (1993) or for Racine by Bernard Weinberg (1963) and David Haskell
66 (1991). This kind of patient processing of the practice of playcraft embodied in Hauteroche's texts, which has never systematically been done for them, seems the more desirable when it can still be provocatively asserted, à propos of a recent work on Molière and farce, that "La dramaturgie de
Molière, sa technique de composition des pièces, sont encore mal connues" (Claude Bourqui, 1997). Scherer's study offers finally another important set of co-ordinates in its historical panorama of the evolution of "genres," the curve of popularity decade by decade of the kinds of theatrical representation audiences sought for their pleasures.
Attempts to situtate Hauteroche's texts within the total theatrical spectacle in which contemporary audiences of his plays participated has seemed to me fundamental, the more so as Hauteroche was at one level a pragmatic provider of comedies that would please the specific audiences of the
Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre, which has been called by Charles
Niemeyer (1947), "France's first popular playhouse."
Without adopting the technical language of semiotics of the theatre, I have tried to keep present in my presentation of the theatrical situation the spirit of studies like that of Keir Elam (1980), which examines theatrical spectacle as a system incorporating multiple encodings. Although by necessity limited for a period now as remote as the 1660s-
1690s, and for which only partial documentation remains, I have grounded my analyses when possible in the material
67 circumstances of stage settings, music, lighting, the actors' gestures and props, as well as the audience's distance— physically and mentally from the play of comic types and the ideas they bear as seen in the frame of the stage and in what contemporaries of Molière called "la beauté de la chandelle," that is, the special if not unique experience of theatre.
68 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
Karch (1972) gives a systematic review of what has been discovered. She has been the first researcher on Hauteroche to examine systematically the Comédie-Française dossier concerning him and the Minutier central. The eighty-eight items in the Comédie-Française archives contain the often published letter to La Grange of 1681, first published by Jal (1872; see below, p. 59) and "quittances" for his pension in retirement (1684-1707). The Minutier contains "une vingtaine d'actes" (p. 42), among which Hauteroche's last will of 13 December 1704 (CXI, 21), family affairs (CXI, 33, 59; Cl, 20, 33, 37, 44, 49) and finances (Cl, 22, 33, 51, 55, 61, 75, 77, 80). She published with a commentary the inventory of Hauteroche's possessions at the time of his marriage (1685).
Lancaster (1936, III^, p. 768 and n. 1) speculates "probably born about 1630," but gives no hard evidence for this acknowledged conjecture. It has been followed without commentary by some current biographical dictionaries (e.g. Calame, 1972, p. 523) and commentators depending on them (e.g. Brereton, 1977, p. 154). I have generally not tried here to note errors like these systematically, since to do so would seem to offer no real service, and have confined myself to correcting them only when they have special relevance. The pure theatrical bravado of these lines has not deterred some adders to the Hauteroche "légende" from taking the first assertion (of noble birth) at face value. That he was raised as a "gentleman" by an ambitious mother is, however, possible. The spirit of the development on "favor," if not the letter concerning the king, is prophetic of Hauteroche's success at court. On the form of this play within a play, see G. Forestier (1981), pp. 205-6. *■ Jacques Truchet (1986, p. 1582) writes that "Hauteroche ne resta au Marais que quelques années," which is a mistake. Precision of the amount of time before 1660 depends on the date of Pierre Lazard's death. Mongrédien (1961) does not give an entry to Hazard. Deierkauf-Holsboer (1970, II, pp. 94-95) places it in a chronology in 1657.
69 Deierkauf-Holsboer (1970, II, p. 96) has focused historically the company's distinction: "Dans 1'histoire du théâtre français au XVII® siècle, il n'y a jamais eu de troupe avant ou après l'établissement de Molière à Paris qui comptât parmi ses membres tant d'éminents comédiens et comédiennes que celle de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne." Sertorius played in all three Paris theatres. See Lancaster, 1936, III=, pp. 475-76. Since the registers of the Hôtel de Bourgogne are not extant and one must consequently for the identification of Hauteroche's (and his colleagues') rôles depend on a very ephemeral periodical press (Robinet, particularly, many of whose "lettres" are extremely rare or lost) or the occasional fugitive piece (private letters like Madame d 'Orléans's or polemical writing as in the case of Boursault), a full accounting of Hauteroche's rôles is impossible. Nonetheless, I have attempted to pull together, more systematically than has been done, the identifications that are possible. Mélèse's repertory of contemporary references (1934) has been invaluable, as has the work on Robinet by William Brooks (1993), supplementing the Rothschild-Picot inventory of Robinet (1881-1899).
® For Madame Poisson's memories, see Molière, OEuvres. ed. René Bray (1954), I, p. 1058. Curtis (p. 139) insists that Poisson wrote the leading part for himself but credits Madame Poisson's testimony. There is no known explanation for the transfer to Hauteroche (though one might speculate that Poisson wanted to keep the audience's eye on him in the rôle of Crispin).
In Artémise et Poliante (1670), p. 13, cited by Mélèse (1934), p. 87. On the ballet generally see Christout (1967), pp. 113-14 and especially the reconstruction by Fournel (1866), II, pp. 573-82. Mélèse (1934), p. 135; Rothschild (1899), III, p. 196, and on publication in letter of 2 March 1669, p. 58. Robinet, letter of 2 February 1669, cited by Mélèse (1934); Rothschild (1899), p. 467. Silvie Chevalley, Revue de l'histoire du théâtre (1965). See for a facsimile of the page, her Album Théâtre classique (1970), p. 208.
70 Lancaster (1936, III', p. 774, n. 12) attests to this very rare printing, from the Soleine Bibliographie dramatique (no. 1428). Like Lancaster, Deierkauf-Holsboer (1970, II, p. 142) maintains the 1670 performance date, which cannot be made more precise than summer. Lancaster fibid. . p. 778), with identification of the Parfaicts' error affirms of Hauteroche's own statement in the "Avis" that the play was "never played," "there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the statement." Deierkauf- Holsboer makes no reference to the play.
For a collection of obituary notices, see Mélèse (1934), p. 86.
A facsimile of the arrêt is reproduced in Silvie Chevalley (1970), p. 138. Jacques Truchet notes that the play was created at the Hôtel de Bourgogne "en 1672 (on ne peut préciser davantage)" (1986, p. 1583), but Mélèse clearly gives the November 14 (1934, p. 154) that there is no apparent reason to question. The circumstances are noted by Mélèse (1934), p. 142. Mercure galant VI, p. 50, cited by Lancaster III' (1936), p. 774. "• Letter of 19 July 1711, cited by Mélèse (1934), p. 159). Contrast the image of the character presented in the illustration given by Chevalley (1970, p. 183) with the more familiar earlier ones given by Curtis (1972, p. 86). Hauteroche was a signer of Baron's marriage contract on 13 September 1675 (Mongrédien, 1961, p. 91). Baron also put the actors of the Hôtel onto the stage, in the Prologue to his Le Rendez-vous des Thuilleries ou le Coquet trompé (the hit play of March 1685), but they do not include Hauteroche, who had retired in 1684. Information on the constitution of troupes and their distribution is taken from Mongrédien (1953), p. 174. '®- Quoted from B.E. and G.P. Young, eds.. La Grange's Le Réaistre (1947), p. 37; see also, Chevalley (1970), p. 223 for a facsimile.
71 Mercure galant. February 1684, p. 380. This is the only documented performance of Hauteroche's acting in any of his own plays. I have resisted the temptation to cast him in others, particularly in the first, since he would be following Molière's in playing his own misanthrope, and he had just recently played opposite Mademoiselle D'Ennebault, who played the lead Hauteroche's play. But if he had played the lead rôle, given his stature, contemporary reviews would surely have recorded the fact.
The marriage contract was first published by E. Campardon (1879) without commentary (pp. 143-45). Listed for the groom are sieur Matieu d'Ennebault, husband of the actrice, "bourgeois de Paris, ami," and sieur Quillet de Saint-Georges, aussi ami"; for the bride, Jean-Baptiste Dedenois, bourgeois de la ville d'Amiens, beau-frère à cause d'Anne-Marie Lesueur, sa femme," and Jean de Lapierre, prêtre habitué à Saint-Eustache, ami..." (p. 143). The Comédie-Française document's date for Hauteroche's blindness in 1694 is valuable. I have followed the tradition whereby Hauteroche's vision became impaired as early as 1687. The Church defined usury as any lending of money at interest, as well as the unlimited accumulation of wealth (and this definition was reaffirmed by the 1700 Assemblée du clergé). Hauteroche in this narrow sense could be termed a usurer, as Karch does. Obviously general government practice also falls within this letter, whose liberal spirit Mousnier points out increasingly since mid-seventeenth century (1979, I, pp. 246-7, 300, 3 39). Within the limit of 5% there was no question. "Lois XIV fixa le denier 20 (5p. 100) en décembre 1665" (Marion, 1979, p. 300). Hauteroche's investments (all cited at 5%) thus escape the definition of usury. James Gaines points out (1984, p. 21) that Harpagon, Molière's avare calculates at the denier 12, thus at 8%. Jean Lemoine, who points out that rates were 1% higher in Brittany, shows how the actress Des OEillets placed money at this rate with the duchesse de Brissac (1938, p. 16). Hauteroche may be doing similarly with Marie Bonneau and Belfort, the largest of his alleged "loans."
This is yet another link to a wealthy family, long and well established in the financial world. See on Thomas Bonneau, Daniel Dessert (1984), p. 543. Her husband would seem to have been one of the children for whom Philippe Fortin de La Hoguette wrote the well-known Testament on Conseils fidèles d'un bon père à ses enfants (1648).
72 I refer to the "Tariffe ou Evaluation des partis sortables pour faire facilement des mariages," in Furetière's Le Roman bourgeois (1958), pp. 919-20. Fortunes of over 100,000 livres usually marked ascension into the noblity (those of Louis XIV's ministers were in the 800.000 range). Gaines remarks that "above the level of 10.000 fortunes tended to escalate rapidly" (1984, p. 22) See Charles G.S. Williams's "Doubling and Omission in the Text of Anne Ferrand/Bélise." Convergences : Rhetoric and Poetic in Seventeenth-Centurv France. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 1989. pp. 123-43.
André-Gérard Le Camus (?— 15 September 1698), nicknamed "Gambade," was the fifth of six sons of Nicolas Le Camus, popularly known as "le riche." He became "procureur général" in the Cour des aides in 1643 and subsequently "conseiller du roi" in the council of finances and "conseiller au grand Conseil." His wife, who occupies the better part of Hauteroche's dedication, was Charlotte Melson, "femme d'esprit" and society hostess at Anthony as elsewhere. She was also a "femme savante," member of the Lincei, "la divine Coralte" in La Forge's Le Cercle des femmes savantes. "l'illustre Le Camus" in Vertron's La Nouvelle Pandore. She figures in Mademoiselle's La Galerie des portraits as a prose writer and also wrote verse. Poems were addressed to her by Boisrobert and Pinchesne, who frequented her salon, along with the Perraults, Nanteuil, Chapelain. The familiar tone of Hauteroche's dedicatory epistle suggests that he also was an habitué of this society, in which and through which most likely lay the origins of the poems anthologized by Ribou. See Antoine Adam, ed., Tallemant des Réaux (1961, II, p. 1298, n. 8, p. 1556, n. 3 and passim). See also Sévigné, Lettres (1978), vols. I, III passim; Daniel Dessert (1984) and Françoise Bayard (1988), passim. André-Gérard's brother Jean was lieutenant civil at the Châtelet, which suggests that Hauteroche's mother's connections lay in part through the Le Camus dynasty. Truchet (1986) provides no information on Le Camus. The entry in the Dictionnaire de biographie française. where one might expect the highest degree of accuracy and pertinence, equal to the DNB's; Blémont (1933) is a noteworthy example. It teems with errors in dates (the majority) and does not distinguish fact from fiction. Linking Voss and Rhode, she writes (1972, p. 41): "Disposant d'une documentation insuffisante et se fiant entièrement à ce qui avait déjà imprimé, ces deux hommes ne firent qu'une synthèse de ce que l'on savait déjà."
73 Despite repeated efforts through interlibrary loan, and the visit of Professor Antonio Scuderi to the University of Catania library in search of it, I have been unable to locate the early article of Georges Mongrédien printed in the 15 September-1 October 1927 of the journal Chantecler published in Catania. I wish to thank Dr. Scuderi for his efforts on by behalf.
74 PART I
BEGINNING PLAYS (1668-1671)
CHAPTER 1
L^AMANT OPT NE FLATTE POINT OU "L'AVEUGLEMENT COMIQUE"
Hauteroche's stage in L'Amant qui ne flatte point derived ultimately from the commedia and was that used by Molière up to and including L'École des femmes. A bourgeois house on the back flat, with a street space in front of it, where characters meet and talk is its simple composition.^
The house has windows and a door where people are seen and enter. But there is no reverse flat of interior space. The door on which a knock is heard in the exposition is an important symbolic part of the scene, since one or more characters are set upon passing through the door and entering into the family.
ACT I
The exposition of L'Amant qui ne flatte point shows us the temperament of Géraste, the suitor of the title, as he meets his prospective father-in-law, Anselme (scene ii), en
75 route to Anselme's house, where he will meet for the first time his intended, Lucrèce. When they arrive, Lucrèce and the family servant, Florence, are questioned by Géraste, and respond— with the help of Anselme (scene iii). We are thus shown Géraste in private conversation, and in public interview, social intercourse that translates the self-image into public image. These two central scenes are framed by
"letter-scenes."
Sbroct, Anselme's old friend (and a wealthy one), being childless, has recommended his nephew, whom he promises to make his heir, to Anselme as a son-in-law. Anselme reads the letter (scene iv) privately on stage; Florence, we learn (scene i) has read the letter, before her master, and gives a first disclosure of it to Philipin, Ariste's valet, whose knock on the door of Anselme's house opens the play.
Philipin is so distracted by the present state of his master (who has become a "loup-garou" and beats him uncharacteristically) that he forgets to flirt with Florence. She pouts only to keep him there and reveals the fact that she does not know the cause of Ariste's transformation (suspected by Philipin already as having something to do with frustration over his courtship of Lucrèce). There are in fact three obstacles: the friendship, of Anselme and Sbroct, and money, in a powerful combination. "FLORENCE: Apprend qu'un nommé Sbroct, riche bourgeois de Nante,/Qui possédé de moins sept mille écus de
76 rente,/Fut de tout tems d'Anselme un des meilleurs amis" (p,
11)^. The third obstacle has to do with Géraste himself,
which emerges in a series of pertinent questions from Philipin: "A-t-il quelque mérite? est-ce un homme
d'esprit?" setting up Géraste's first entrance, as does Florence's reply: "On ne sçait quel il est: mais quelques-
uns m'ont dit/que la façon d'agir est assez singulière;/Que bien souvent aux gens il vient rompre en visère;/Qu'il leur
dit brusquement tous les défauts qu'ils ont,/Sans trop s'inquiéter de ce qu'ils diront" (p. 13).
What is "singularity" (eccentricity, character flaw)
for some may be others' quality ("mérite," "esprit"): for
the bourgeois Anselme plain-speaking may be both. But that depends on how true to type Anselme is, and it is this
question asked by Philipin that glides us into the first
appearance of both characters, once a fourth potential
obstacle is eliminated— Lucrèce herself. She does still have a "tendresse extrême" for Ariste (but not quite
eliminated— since it is said that "elle craint son Père").
Philipin's final leading question is "Et d'un Gendre pareil ton vieillard s'accommode?" (p. 14).
The twelve exchanges en route between Géraste and
Anselme typecast both characters clearly. They begin with Géraste's brusk complaint to Anselme's that he is walking too fast and that Anselme's pace has winded him. But he
immediately shows the contrary, that he has plenty of wind,
77 in the event opinions on oldsters in general (and Anselme certainly is one since it is revealed that he is seventy- five— but feels as good as he did at fifteen). Anselme shrugs off the rudeness: "Ne raillons point, Monsieur, & laissons-la mon âge;/Je suis ce que je suis, & je me porte bien" (p. 16). This self-confidence triggers a tirade (37 w . ) on "les vieillards," after which Anselme gets the space for only one line (and that interrupted): "Mais, Monsieur, quelquefois un peu de complaisance oblige plus..." before
Géraste is off again (moving from criticism of the "folie" of others to their "pure extravagance") with another eleven lines around correction— "nous corrigeons comme de frère à frère."
Anselme agrees, in principle— "Oui, j'approuverai fort cette belle maxime./Si tous pour la vertu nous avions même estime"— as Philinte does in Act I of Le Misanthrope. which
Hauteroche recreates, starting with the rhythm of Alceste's one-sided conversation that tends to giving speeches on his idées géniales and with the same progression toward explosion on the felt outrage of false friendship: Géraste again clarifies (another similarity to Alceste's "je ne dis pas cela"). He is not concerned with correcting just anyone's "folie"; it is real friendship that requires his plain-speech, rather than the derisive laughter he gives to fools: "Mais à tous mes amis je dis ce que je pense,/Je n'ai pour leur folie aucune complaisance" (p. 21). And he
78 ends the scene with an ironic gesture of politeness, whose irony it is not clear that he sees: "Mais quittons ce discours, peut-être il vous chagrine," since Anselme, as revealed by his speech, has shown no signs of real annoyance.
The scene of Géraste and Lucrèce's first meeting is, tellingly, more a continuation of the conversation with Anselme than the expected "tête-à-tête" of fiancés. When he first catches sight of her, Géraste has two spontaneous questions for Anselme, which for all of being asides are visibly well within Lucrèce's hearing. Both are insults, where compliments are to be expected. "Où diable a-t-elle pris/Ces yeux doux & brillans qui d'abord m'ont surpris?"
Anselme's proud answer: "En elle vous voyez le portrait de sa mère"— is only a further goad for Géraste's response: she can't be yours, are you sure that your wife... a mystery... couched in generalizing language ("la thèse est générale"), with the comic assurance "ce que je dis là ne fait rien contre vous" (the irony here surely not seen). Anselme agreeably responds: "Je ne me fâche point," sure again of his own story, as the father of twenty-two over eighteen years, a fruitful multiplication on a scale that shocks Géraste, unwilling as he professes himself to be of a future responsibility and disruption to his life that this progeny would entail. The second compliment, that goes astray, is drawn by the "éclat" of Lucrèce's complexion— "ce
79 n'est que lys & roses," the beginning of many gallant
portraits. Surely she is "fardée,” Géraste complains, but
is assured by Anselme, significantly; "Elle est sans aucun
fard" (p. 24). Géraste's first questions to Lucrèce are as insulting,
embarrassing her visibly to the point that the father has to
answer for her: as with Anselme, Géraste is merciless on
age. Informed that she is twenty-three (a concession to the actress playing the part. Mademoiselle D'Ennebault, who was
twenty-six,3 as is the name, Lucrèce, emblematic of mature virtue), Géraste answers "elle n'est pas printanière." The insult is all the more ridiculous as the Venus-like "beauté
épanouie" of Lucrèce is before the spectators' eyes.
Géraste has warned Lucrèce that he will not sweet-talk her like any old suitor. This she finds "admirable," in terms of frankness; and that seemingly admiring approval is all that Géraste needs to be off again in a speech on his
frankness, in which there are twelve instances of an assertive "je" and its possessive pronoun in eight lines
(pp. 24-25). Like an old man (Gorgibus), the subject of make-up generally moves Géraste along to the inevitable denunciation of vicious flirtation in society and hateful young charmers— "Ces muguets à peruque," ("aiguillons de coquettes,"). Lost in verbiage, Géraste must be asked the pertinent question point-blank by Anselme: "Mais, Monsieur, dites-raoi, ma fille vous plait-elle?"
80 Géraste is comically uncertain: "Oui, mais... .” He thinks that he may detect in Lucrèce's expression an "esprit brouillon." What he does is to misread the "rêve" and the
"air chagrin" appearing on her face, that in the manner of the Agnès of L'École des femmes appear there as expressions of the distress over what is heard from an unlikely fiancé that bodes ill for the "promise" of the joys of matrimony. Géraste leaves no doubt of what motivates him, his insecurity, and Hauteroche goes further in an explicit reading of Alceste than Molière does. Géraste the insecure is fearful of cuckoldry, and has a jealous nature. Another long speech (19 lines) ends with "Je craindrois d'avoir lieu de doubter de sa foi, et que tous mes enfans ne fussent pas de moi" (pp. 29-30). Hauteroche thus makes the nature of the obsession the more striking by leading us back, in conversation, to Géraste's first verbal reaction to Lucrèce.
Anselme reassures him, he would suppose once for all, that Lucrèce is innocent in the ways of love and "fort sage." It should have been enough for him to hear Lucrèce say that as far as "Messieurs les blondins" are concerned, "Mais ces sortes de gens ne sont pas tant à craindre," just as it should have been enough assurance for Alceste to hear Célimène say, "Le bonheur de savoir que vous êtes aimée." But Géraste like Alceste is tone-deaf. And, tellingly, the gentle Lucrèce does not treat him with Célimène's sarcastic comment on the scene— "la fleurette est mignonne."
81 Hauteroche tops off the character of Géraste with one final, significant trait that he has read in Moliere's of
Alceste, where he has also read the literalness, the long- windedness, and the tin ear, all co-ordinating a portrait of comic blindness. Géraste has no sense of humor. The device of exposure is cleverly put into action, according to another Moliéresque device of the response of a character to laughter. As Géraste rises to another speech on cuckoldry,
Florame, the "soubrette à grand rire," as we may call the type, breaks out in a peel of laughter. Géraste turns on her, and denounces her as the "minois fin," potential go- between for intrigues (which we have seen her in fact to be), and browbeats her into embarrassed silence; "si je ris...," she stammers. It is a repetition of what Géraste has more subtly done for Lucrèce, moving her from the expression of faint distaste to a grimace of distress. All this off his chest, Géraste is impatient for the marriage to take place the next day, as Anselme has promised; at the end of the interview with Lucrèce, he precedes Anselme into the house. Lucrèce and Florame are for their parts already set to find and invention to prevent it. The exposition begins to shows us an aspect of L 'Amant qui ne flatte point that will particularize its comedy and
Hauterochean comedy more generally. Sententiousness, the use of pat maximes and ungainly "thèses" is a character trait for other types as surely as is the quotation of a
82 lowly proverbe by a valet or “soubrette." The sententious
Géraste shows himself to be the type of a misreader of La
Rochefoucauld's recently published Maximes : "Les faux honnêtes gens sont ceux qui déguisent leurs défauts aux autres et à eux-mêmes- Les vrais honnêtes gens sont ceux qui les connaissent parfaitement et les confessent” (no.
202). Ultimately the less than perfect expression of his faults may derive from Géraste's ignorance or misapplication of another maxime: "La simplicité affectée est une imposture délicate" (no. 289). But I am getting ahead of the story, which should return to the portrait of Anselme that we are given at the end of exposition. Typically of Molière's comic debates, neither Géraste nor Anselme is fully right or wrong in his initial conversation on "correction" in conversation nor in the subsequent enactment of their opinions in the actions of the scene of Géraste's first meeting with Lucrèce. Anselme has held, as a supposed man of the world, that no correction of the sort that Géraste describes is safe from an arousal, sooner or later, of resentment that will turn the friend into an adversary waiting for his chance to return the "compliment" and get even by a rejoicing in the fault finder's own faults and their exposure. We have here the set-up of a classical debate of the effects of satire in the theatre, along the lines of the traditional castiaat ridendo
83 mores that stood as Molière's first definition of comic laughter in the Préface to Les Précieuses ridicules.*
Anselme will be as vulnerable as Géraste is, for
reasons that are set at the end of the expository scene with Lucrèce and Florence ranged on his side against the
"outsider" Géraste. First, an instinctive kindness or
sentimentality (depending on the angle of comic focus),
makes Anselme come to Florence's defense. He swears for Florence's character on the record of ten years' service,
and he is, as we have seen, wrong. This blindness casts
another shadow as Géraste responds again insultingly to
Anselme's defense of Florence. "Si j'en sçai bien juger, entre vous deux, je gage/Que vous la mitonnez depuis votre veuvage." Anselme's response is first of all, as indicated by Hauteroche's stage direction a smile ("en souriant"). We may want to take this glint in the eye sympathetically and consider it "esprit," but in fact it is the kind of leer of complicity (in which Poisson specialized in other
Hauterochean plays) which can be read "what a good idea, but no I haven't." This is "style goguenard," as Robinet happily termed the traditional seasoning of farce that comes along for certain comic types of old men in other comedies.®
And as Hauteroche makes clears in his later "Avis," as well as later in the play, it is vulgarity, most incriminating for Géraste but drawing in Anselme. Anselme is a man of the
84 body and its intuitions, "common sense" for him, and would have no time to read La Rochefoucauld.*
A last, but essential trait, comes into focus, as a danger signal, after Anselme has (in scene iv) read Sbroct's letter. In a self-satisfied speech, he drifts off with revery on how much Sbroct makes Géraste worth. "Cinq mille ecus par an," is impressive, and we see now the full comic value of Florence's certification of Géraste's "mérite"— she had in her impressed memory of his worth upped the income to "de moins sept." Florence will have some difficulty, but no real one, in finding this charm irresistible. For the moment, the commercial arrangement seems to take full possession of Anselme, as be-all and end-all. "Si dans ce
Gendre on voit quelque défaut bizarre,/Un revenu si bon aisément le répare./Le bien fait excuser quantité de défauts,/Et nous fait distinguer toujours d'avec les sots"
(p. 34). With Anselme in this frame of mind, permanently if true to type, Ariste has no hope. We remember from I, i what now is invincible obstacle— that he has no money. (But we remember, too, that his father is awaiting the resolution of a litigation that will make him and his heir of a "qualité" to satisfy Anselme.
85 ACT II-IV
The action of the play begins in Act II with a cluster of four scenes bringing the ieune premier. Ariste, into the plot, a clever ruse invented by Lucrèce and Florence, who brings Ariste a letter (scene II). Ariste immediately and enthusiastically agrees to impersonate Géraste, to gain time, if nothing else, and leaves to copy Sbroct's letter
(which Florence has brought him along with Lucrèce's). The master and the valet, having been reconciled by their dilemma (scene i), Philipin and Florence are left alone together for a scene of shy flirtation (scene iii), in which
Philipin's attention wanders between confidence in and fear of failure in the ruse. Ariste returns confident of himself. A second group of four scene takes use back to Anselme and Géraste, whom the old man is accompanying back to his inn. Scene v, the second conversation, repeats the first: the occasion calling for compliments becomes a further pretext for Géraste to develop his idée fixe on frankness and to generalize it— let the fools go their own way, but friends should be told the full truth, for their own good. Anselme repeats his caution on the animosity that is raised, inevitably according to him, by doing this. So much the better, Géraste like Alceste again, repeats, true to his own logic (and in contradiction to society's common sense).
86 Their conversation is interrupted by Licaste (scene vi),
Géraste's valet, who just like a Breton has had six pints at the inn and garbles the message he has come to deliver— a man unknown to him, awaits Géraste at the inn.'’ Anselme, bonhomme. likes the look of Licaste ("son visage me plait") and proposes a drink that Licaste's duties make him regretfully decline.
Made sympathetic again, Anselme continues to act in that manner: he consults Lucrèce on her opinion of Géraste and invites Florence to add her own (scene viii). But his consultation of both is as much a testing of the waters of the depth of his judgment as a real confirmation. In a monologue (scene vii) we as spectators have already seen his cogitations. Géraste has reminded him of Sbroct as a youth, and from this he judges that he has "esprit" of a certain sort and charts his course of action accordingly. Notice that in taking to himself Anselme already makes Géraste "mon gendre," as though his mind is made up, once and for all.
"Mon gendre a de l'esprit; mais il est trop critique" (p.
58)— "A le combattre aussi je dois peu m'arrêter." Lucrèce (scene viii) responds, as she should, to
Anselme's questions: "Moi, je n'ai rien à dire. Il vous plaît, il me plaît" (p. 61). And pushed by a "L'aimez- vous?" she delivers herself with prudent common sense as Anselme would expect: "Je ne l'aime, ni l'haï." Finally, as Anselme presses on: "Mais vous pourrez l'aimer," she
87 satisfies his desire to find her a dutiful daughter: "Je
ferai mon devoir." It is then the consultant's— Florence's
turn, and she too answers as she is expected to do (getting
Géraste's income right this time), in confirmation of
Anselme's own opinion. "Ma foi. Monsieur, Géraste est un homme d 'esprit;/Quand il parle, pour moi j'admire ce qu'il
dit./Je ne hai pas en lui cette grande franchise;/Mais encore à l'aimer, ce qui plus autorise,/C'est ce grand
revenu de quinze mille francs./Dont Lucrèce sera maîtresse
tous les ans" (p. 62). Satisfied, Anselme gives a speech
(12 w . ). Sounding like Géraste, he contrasts the
unfortunate destiny of Lucrèce, should she fall for some
wastrel "blondin" rather than the thrifty Géraste. Florence
answers again as she is supposed to, but the rhyme undermines her agreement ("heureuse/geuse") with Anselme on
what the future with Géraste's thrift (read stinginess) means— in fact not his income but what little of it he
chooses to share with his wife. "Avec un tel époux, que vous serez heureuse !/Vous pourrez bien juger de n'être jamais geuse."
Hauteroche's clever exposure of bourgeois self- satisfaction and its limitations is the more effective as he
begins scene iii with a focus on planned role-playing, Anselme himself playing the rôle of the astute "conaisseur d'hommes"/man-of-the-world: "Combattre son humeur, c'est mal prendre son tems/Outre sa critique est assez de bon
88 sens,/En province ils ont tous cette maudite mode;/Mais chacun à Paris veut suivre sa méthode” (p. 61). The last
scene (ix) of the Act sets this portrait off. As we
suspected, and are now directly informed, both Lucrèce and
Florence have also been playing rôles, which Anselme has not
seen, thus enhancing the nature of his comic blindness: Anselme does not see that he is being dealt with according
to the exact way his strategy would deal with Géraste.
Scene II, ix, which closes the first installment of the
action, before the "suspension agréable," of Act III, makes several things clear. First of all it is the women, Lucrèce
and Florence, who direct the action, in conception of the
scheme or ruse and in its first enactment. The men are
under the illusion of being actors, which they ironically
are according to the scenario. Géraste has his ruse, too,
since as much as the wily Anselme he enters into an economic
pact, according to which his uncle's largesse— and his own income— depend on the marriage. The women's ruse, or more
precisely, their counter ruse will be more likely than not to succeed, given the limited lights of their opponents. The appearance, or illusion at least, of tension is thus accomplished before it is played on in Act III. And tensions already present in Act II's action are refocused.
There is first the tension of the generations that sets ruse and counter ruse: Ariste-Lucrèce-Florence versus the
"barbon" Anselme and his "partner" Géraste (with Lisidan
89 thrown in, for what that may be worth). Giving the spectators' focus on Lucrèce even more sympathy, she is made to feel guilty about "playing," i.e., deceiving her father;
"Mais j'aime mon devoir, & j'honore mon Père/A les trahir, rien ne peut m'émouvoir" (p. 64). Virtue, a part of beauty, for Hauteroche, is seemingly the character that draws all eyes, as Florence (the "temptress," at least according to Géraste) answers her qualms: "Je ne prétends en rien choquer votre devoir/Quand je parle d'efforts, ce sont efforts d'adresse/où le devoir s'accorde avec quelque finesse./Il est plusieurs moyens, sans blesser la raison/D'éviter un hymen plus dur qu'une prison." Convincing, Florence clarifies the counter ruse as a good game pitted against an insidious economic transaction, which equals economic enslavement. She makes her case, for reality, even more vivid by a new portrait of Géraste (already called an ape), contrasting strikingly with the flattering "official" portrait gotten up for Anselme. A comic gradation, moving from the worst to even more so, ends with the concrete identification of the metaphoric prison— it is life in the country, setting now in right perspective the opposition Paris/province that Anselme had used to ornament his rhetoric. "Epouser un Fantasque, un jaloux, un Satyre/Un critique, un Fâcheux, enfin un Campagnard,/Près de qui vos beaux jours courent bien du hazard/Il vous enfermera dans quelque chaumière;/Car de ces Campagnards c'est assez
90 la maniéré./Surtout quand ils ont pris une Femme de Paris (pp. 64-65).
Florence has verbalized Célimène's worst nightmare, as an "âme de vingt ans," about the would-be dropout from society that Alceste threatens to be in his disillusioned retreat to the country. It is made explicit, as are the added traits Géraste does not share with Alceste.
The confusion that defers the action fills nine scenes in Act III. The first grouping of three sets into motion a second passing disorder caused by Licaste, and the unknown man at the inn, whom Géraste has not found in the interval between acts whom Licaste is sent off to find, after needing elaborate directions.
The central sequence (iv-vi) adds, at the center of the play, Ariste's masquerade. When he presents himself first to Anselme, the old man is nonplused, but one thing remains clear in his mind throughout the series of futile gestures and questions to get to the real identity: one of the two is an impostor and a crook. The second scene of unfolding turmoil (v) brings in Géraste for the confrontation by his double. It is this scene surely that prompted Raymond Picard to characterize Amant qui ne flatte point as a "piètre réponse à L'Amphitryon."* In fact, its difference from the already celebrated scene in which a malicious
Mercure confronts Amphitryon (III, ii) is apparently intended: "AMPHITRYON: Comment Amphitryon est là dedans?
91 MERCURE: Fort bien," leading to an anguished foreboding,
"Ah! quel étrange coup m'a-t-il porté dans l'âme!"— a frustration for which Sosie entering at that moment pays.
In Hauteroche's scene, Géraste has no metaphysical moment; he is so sure that he is what he is, that he rounds on the
"bonhomme," answering questions with high indignation but not with impatience, and joins into the chorus of duplicate answers Ariste enacts without the violence that Anselme twice cautions him against. Calling in Lucrèce and Florence (scene vi), as Anselme does, cannot help. Lucrèce's laughter is all that is gained. But Hauteroche has escalated the confusion to the full cast assembled on stage
(except for Licaste, still in search of the man from the inn). As they disperse, and Anselme ridiculously ushers the two Cérastes back to his house, in order not to offend the true one, the best that they can do is to trust to time— "time will tell," they agree (and the playwright whets the audience's appetite for what is to come).
But time does not immediately tell and plays a trick on the seekers after truth in the last series of scenes:
Licaste appears (scene vii) with the man from the inn, one
Breton appropriately named Kerlonte, a character more traditionally familiar, it turns out, from dénouements. Kerlonte's story is that after twenty years at sea he has come home to find that Géraste has acted the blackguard with his sister, seducing and abandoning her. He has hastened to
92 Paris, in pursuit of him, seemingly informed by Sbroct about
his whereabouts. Both Cerastes are struck dumb by the unexpected turn of events, though Anselme is not, since one
phrase in Sbroct's letter alluding to an unfortunate affairs from which marriage would extricate Géraste makes Kerlonte's story seem "vraisemblable." The comic trick, Hauteroche's
turn springs on them follows on Anselme's call for the true
Géraste to answer the accusation, answered only by a new
chorus or protested innocence. Having sep up the
traditional identification (of dénouements), it is denied by
the playwright: Kerlonte, away at sea and away from Nantes
quickly in search of Géraste, has never laid eyes on him and neglected to equip himself with other means of identifying his culprit. He exits echoing Anselme's vow to get to the bottom of things.
The last scene (ix), with the valets left alone on the stage, would seem to cast Licaste as Sosie, but like his master cast as Amphitryon, he falls short of the rôle.
Licaste and Philipin in fact ape their masters, and the act ends in pure farce (in the spirit of Act IV of Le Misanthrope if not in its already used letter). Licaste, slow to catch on that if there is a second Géraste, there must be a second Licaste, recoups quickly and launches into an aggressive sputtering of persons who can certify he is who he is, in Nantes, but without naming them, since he wants their names but doesn't want to give himself away,
93 thus mining Géraste' indignant, and inconclusive splutterings. Taunting Licaste aggressively, Philipin in turn mimes the effrontery of Ariste's challenges in disguise, and delivers a kick to the hapless Licaste, reduced to a last empty threat— "if I just had you in
Brittany... ." For the moment, the end of Act III, Hauteroche keeps him in a confused and frustrated corner of Paris. The continued action of Act IV focuses on Anselme's search for truth. After bidding adieu to Ariste and Philipin (scene i), he has a long monologue (scene ii); then he seeks the counsel of his brother-in-law, Florame
(scene iii), whom he knows to be an esprit turbulant"; finally, it is Lucrèce's turn (scene iv) to face a new interrogation. For the second seguence of four scenes we move to the other side, or ruse, for the reconnoitering of the lovers and their valets, whose actions must also be continued and, like Anselme's become more difficult, if not desperate. The "supplement" (i.e., the number of additional scenes beyond an exact parallel with Act II and which the nub of the trouble may be contained) is the return of Géraste, at what is the dramatic high point of the play—
Géraste's desperate actions (the third set) threaten to break off the bond of sympathy that would link him to
Anselme and therefore to isolate him. That isolation would seem a worthy situation, and thematically so, for this point
94 in the play, where at a comparable moment in Le Misanthrope
Alceste has his second, culminating interview with Célimène.
"Efforcez-vous de paraître... et je vous croirai..., the champion of sincerity utters there in full contradiction.
For Géraste it will also be a question of "feint," and he is given a second interview with Lucrèce, presided over as the last one was by Anselme (I, iii).
In the long monologue (36 w , pp. 102-4) given
Anselme, Hauteroche imports into the comedy a device of tragic playcraft, and does so differently from Molière's comparable use of monologue in L'École des femmes (which as seen plays a part in L 'Amant qui ne flatte point by a rapprochement through "goguenardise" of Anselme and
Arnolphe). Unlike Arnolphe, whose repeated monologues constitute him a "personnage à monologues," self-isolating and self-marginalizing, the garrulous Anselme uses the monologue unusually and with his typical garrulity. In tragedies this is a doubly effective moment of a résumé of the previous action for the audience, intensifying it as well as refreshing the memory of it; for the character, a moment of introspection in which the way forward, toward the truth, at least glimmers. This glimmer for Anselme— that his daughter may be tricking him— is obscured in prolixity and the self-assurance that such a rôle is not Lucrèce.
The ignored first warning in introspection, is followed by a second, from Florame, when he has been stopped in his
95 purposeful business long enough to hold a conversation with
Anselme. Apprized of the situation of the two Cerastes,
Florame has no trouble supposing that Lucrèce has a hand in the trick— "Qu'elle n'eût point de part à cette fourberie?" he asks an Anselme immediately predisposed to believe the contrary (just as he is to be skeptical of Florame's "esprit turbulant"). Pushed by the allegation that Lucrèce has an "esprit malin," Anselme is determined to read the signs of her lively mind otherwise: "Ma fille assurément n'est pas stupide;/Mais dans son procédé je la trouve candide,/Et jamais son esprit n'a panché vers le mal" (p. 106). Conversation, or dialogue as Hauteroche sets it up, has little more hope than introspection in changing Anselme's mind. Florame pushes the wrong button when he pursues with a remark of child rearing— "pour gâter un enfant, vous n'avez point d'égal." For his second debate scene in the play involving
Anselme (IV, iii), Hauteroche unmistakably uses a fourth Moliéresgue source, Molière's first "école" play, L'École des maris. played in 1661 (and dedicated in print to the due d'Orléans), and he has studied the play well. Florame is cast in the Sganarelle rôle, the younger and the more severe of the two brothers, who begin and end arguing about women's education; Anselme, like Molière's Ariste, the elder, is more flexible and liberal. And for both couples never the twain shall meet: one of Molière's typical "dialogues des
96 sourds," the conversation turned argument comes to an impasse, or is suspended, with neither side being entirely right or entirely wrong, thereby neither surely as each flatters himself by thinking in possession of the whole truth. Both sides, in L'Amant oui ne flatte point, are heated to anger. On the one hand, the scene as repetition serves to set his limitations at this new moment when
Anselme is disinclined and unlikely as ever by his temperament to discover the truth on his own. There is, on the other hand, a considerable opening out of the comic type of the old man (as in Molière's Ariste), since he holds, however mistakenly, what an audience (and not one wholly constituted by women) may like to think of as enlightened views, though perhaps unorthodox. He reverences nature and blood, he concedes to Florame, "mais j'en ai plus encore pour l'éducation" (p. 111). Having this heartfelt conviction, reduced to "un proverbe au besoin," by Florame, Anselme moves in in an angry attack of Florame's avarice, which denies his son "de faire dans le monde une honnête dépense" (p. 111), and drives him to wish for his father's death in order to gain it finally in his inheritance. Florame, angry too, and disinclined to rethink his position, evokes prudence and nature, and presents nothing that will alter Anselme's position a whit. In the mechanical nature of the repetition, comic blindness re-emerges; for a second time Anselme fails in heat to act on the counsel his mind
97 has shaped for action, his self-advice not to contradict those persons who cannot be changed, in their temperaments, and the generalization that contradiction of such persons always brings resentful retaliation. Counterbalancing the satirical reduction, or escaping from it, however, is a quality of heart, or of real principles located there, that guarantee the character, and open him up (at least to ambiguity). And IV, iii is not the last time in Act IV that
Hauteroche shows Anselme the "good father." Two more episodes, or "épreuves," follow before the Act closes with the comic spectacle of Anselme's limitations. After reflecting briefly in a monologue on the self- fulfilling prophecy of Florame's "humeur étrange," Anselme's path is crossed by Lucrèce (IV, iv), on her way, she informs him, to visit her uncle. Anselme, dissuading her, tells her
Florame's opinion of her. Lucrèce shows embarrassment, which the audience reads simply as fear of exposure, and Anselme interprets as offended virtue and personal hurt.
Melting to the spectacle, instead of interrogating her, he does everything in his power to comfort her by the expression of his confidence and love. This scene too has been made ambiguous by the playwright who has prepared the character of Lucrèce, for that part of the spectators who wish to think about it, on a "both... and" formula, rather than an "either... or." Ruse and guilt over it; trickery and honesty have been built into the beauty of the
98 character. It is left to Florence to do the elaborately negative portrait of Florame (p. 115), to which Anselme and
Lucrèce both react fully in character, Anselme finding the skinflint "bourru" a good likeness, and Lucrèce objecting that he is her uncle after all and "Tu sçavais qu'à tort souvent l'on blâme l'innocence" (p. 116).
Transferring the point of view, Florence and Lucrèce quickly exchange worries and hopes, on Anselme, once he should discover the truth, and Philipin announces that
Ariste is at hand. He scarcely has time for more than the expression of his transport of happiness to be alone again with his loved one (IV, vii), when Géraste and Licaste arrive for the Act's "supplement," and Florence shoos Ariste away, leaving the stage open for a more intimate view of
Géraste than the audience has yet had (scene ix). Licaste (who could be played in this scene as tipsy, though there is no such stage direction) has in any event been shown to be hardly the interlocutor to lead one to clear thinking. His nostalgia for the familiar ways (and drinking partners who may be princes) of Brittany lead him to exaggerate the dangers of Paris, on "franches coquettes," that lead to Géraste's "marotte"— cuckoldry. Géraste tries to be both philosophical and practical: "Chacun court ce hazard dedans le mariage;/Paysan, grand Seigneur, Campagnard, citoyen:/Mais un homme d'honneur ne doit tremper en rien;/Il faut qu'il fasse tout, pour s'empêcher de
99 l'être,/Ou qu'il feigne du moins de ne le pas connaître" (p.
125). We have scarcely registered this Alceste-like illogic
when we are faced with a more elaborate exposure of Géraste
drawn out of him by Licaste's response to his "philosophizing." Licaste cuts to the reality: Géraste's
real obstacles to returning home are first of all the
promise of money in Paris— "II vaut mieux toujours l'être
avec beaucoup d'argent/Que de l'être à crédit, & se voir
indigent"— and the real danger in Paris is Kerlonte, since his accusation of Géraste has been true. The fact leads to
the identification of the second real reason for not returning home: the mess with Kerlonte's sister (now given
the ironic name Irénée); evoking it, Licaste hovers between circumlocution and a winking "style goguenard" (in which he
later frankly indulges): "D'ailleurs, il a raison; car sa
Soeur Irénée,/Qui par vous a souffert les trois quarts d'une
année,/C'est-à-dire neuf mois, & vous m'entendez?" Géraste is sure of his means out of the fix: "L'argent à de tels
maux est puissant remède" (p. 126). Vulgar Licaste rises to an enthusiastic speech on the subject of "money the cure of all ills," works up a thirst, and leaves to drink— "Je
vais me rafraîchir un peu la gargamelle," leaving Géraste to
his confrontation with Anselme with the final advice to make a clean breast of it all: "Monsieur, contez-lui tout."
But Géraste has his own plan (scene x). He moves to
insure his own position by casting Lucrèce into the rôle of
100 intriguer. He reports to Anselme that he has seen Lucrèce
and the impostor in an "intelligence" ("la chose est sans
réplique"), thus incriminating her as his accomplice.
Warned one last time, Anselme, to Géraste's frustration, again refuses to believe even an eye-witness, until Lucrèce
has spoken for herself. She, of course, denies it ("A me
traiter ainsi; je ne sçai qui le porte"), and after a short outburst of anger on Anselme's part is believed by him once
again: "Si la chose était ainsi, la faute n'est pas grave." Géraste, in full exasperation, acts exactly as he should if
he wants to lose his case: "Ah, Beaupere, avouez qu'on vous
trompe aisément." But Anselme is not at all prepared to confess this. "Moi?", he replies with a shortness that
should be a warning signal to the loquacious Géraste, who
ignores it. Géraste concedes, what is important to the audience— "Vous êtes bon, humain, facile, & débonnaire"— but pursues his point, and indeed loses his case. Letting
Lucrèce go, without having gotten anything except tied in a knot of language, Géraste asks for a final private moment with Anselme (scene xii).
Restating briefly this time his credentials in "franchise," and "sincérité," he confesses his fault with
Irénée, alleging no attenuating circumstances other than Sbroct's intractability on the match, and asking for
Anselme's help throws himself on his mercy. What has been prompted by frustration ends in anger, as the worst thing
101 that can happen to a confessor of truth happens to Géraste.
Anselme, after arching an eyebrow, does not believe him. The false-Géraste will have to confess also, Anselme patiently tells the distraught Géraste. He calms down enough, with Anselme's aid, to think of his universal cure and to suggest to his once and future father-in-law:
"L'argent puisse servir de remède... ."
ACT V
Just before the beginning of the end, the dénouement of
Act V, spectators have had of Anselme and his actions a carefully prepared culminating scene of ambiguity. On the one hand is a comic spectacle of blindness, in his failure to recognize the truth when it is staring at him, due to his bourgeois cautiousness; on the other, an act of generosity and fairness to his daughter, which refuses the flaw of many a tragic (and comic) father who fails to give his children their day in court. And posed for the dénouement is Géraste's proposal for all closures, not far from Anselme's mind either: money will do the trick. In one sense, it does in Act V. In V, i Florame, the turbulent brother-in-law runs into Lisidan, an old friend newly arrived in Paris as the final victor in a fourteen-year litigation that has taken him through sovereign courts from Grenoble to Rennes. The two
102 veterans of legal chicanery, agreeing that recent reforms have improved the courts,’ indulge in mutual grumbling about
the still rampant abuses of litigation. It is established
that Lisidan has won big. Equally fortunate, for the
Anselme household, it is revealed that Lisidan is from
Nantes; knows Sbroct, who has aided him in his court-room
tasks in Brittany; and can finally identify the real
Géraste. It has already dawned on that part of the audience that is half-awake, and can still remember the exposition of I, i, that Lisidan is Ariste's father, now equipped with the means to raise the first obstacle of all— his lack of money
suitable in Anselme's view of the world for a son-in-law,
provided that Ariste has not in the meanwhile by his
intriguing made the eventuality hopeless.
Bending the rule of liaison of scenes, Ariste and
Philipin are made to enter (scene ii), as Florame and Lisidan exit, Philipin is precisely in the process of cautioning Ariste about making matters worse by a headstrong visit to Lucrèce before learning what has transpired in Géraste's visit to Anselme. We are treated to a repeated, final scene of farce between master and man, and to comic blindness in a minor variant. Philipin complains (it is in his character) that his good advice is never listened to at the same time that Ariste is in fact agreeing with him. It takes only some kind words, rather than a stick, to bring about this first harmonization in the play's closure.
103 Florence arrives (scene iii) with the go-ahead for Ariste,
who hastens off to Lucrèce, leaving Philipin and Florence alone together (scene iv). In good spirits, Philipin proposes to kiss her. right there in the street, and is turned down, but with a smile that promises another harmonious resolution in the near future of the end of the play.
Anselme, catching the last of the scene between
Philipin and Florence, as he leaves the house proposes to
himself another interview in the pursuit of getting to the bottom of things (scene v). Starting with small talk about
Sbroct and how he is now, and how it was with their youthful exploits some twenty years ago, Anselme hopes to draw out
Philipin and to catch the real Géraste through information or indiscretion. Philipin is reduced to stuttering
improvisation and heaves a sigh of relief when Florence (scene vi) rescues him from the "maudit entretien" with a relayed order to join his master. The scene of repeated failure on Anselme's part adds to our knowledge of him the fact of a youth of "libertin" wild-oat-sowing. Left alone briefly to cogitate on further steps, which will take the form of renewed interviews of the valets (scene vii), Anselme is interrupted by the arrival of Florame and Lisidan for the big scene of identification (viii) , a gift that will relieve Anselme of the toil of thought, and the wrap-up that takes place in the last sequence of four scenes.
104 After showing his touchiness even at the sight of Florame, Anselme welcomes his brother-in-law and the stranger. While they are talking, and agree that the imposter deserves a punishment, a "rigoureux supplice," in
Florame's extreme formulation, Géraste appears upstage. He and Lisidan immediately fall to a warm greeting, with
Géraste inquiring after his lawsuit, indirectly a formal identification followed by its formalization. Anselme moves to his door to summon the impostor, and the last unknown— his punishment hangs in the air. In scene x, Lisidan immediately identifies Ariste as his son (and Philipin delivers the called-for aside, "Tout est perdu"). All eyes move to Ariste at center stage for his confession.
Without artifice, Ariste confesses faults (p. 159), beginning with the reciprocal love for/by Lucrèce. He justifies their ruse as only one to gain time in the matter of Lucrèce's fulfillment of her filial duty that amounts to self-sacrifice, given the nature of Géraste, about whom he is to his face equally frank: "Contre ses sentiments elle prend un époux/Qu'elle ne sçauroit voir sans se mettre en courroux." Lisidan asks the first question; reserving his own judgment of his son's actions and his own present disposition toward him, he properly looks toward Anselme
(who is obviously pensive): "Qu'espérer, si son Père à tes désirs s'oppose?" The second question, predictably focused on its asker, is Géraste's: "Si bien, à vous ouir, que
105 Lucrèce me hait?" Ariste's answer has the same devastatingly self-evident simplicity, and the same substance as Agnes's to Arnolphe's proposal of himself as her husband: "Vous ne lui plaisez pas," Ariste tells him
(p. 160). The reaction of Géraste's déoit is an entirely egoist vow of vengeance: "D'un mépris si grand je sçaurai me venger,/Je la veux épouser pour la faire enrager." After snapping Anselme out of his revery— "Hé, vous ne dites rien?
Quel grand soin vous occupe?" Florame has his own moment of egoist satisfaction— an "I told you so" charge leveled at
Anselme: "Avouez maintenant que vous êtes bien dupe." Anselme, as might be expected, cedes his place in this "trial scene," to Lucrèce, to whom all eyes move (scene xi).
Anselme plays the prosecutor but appears more simply the injured party, rather than the outraged father: "Ma fille,/Quel déordre aujourd'huy vois-je dans ma Famille/... vous me laissez tromper?" Automatically a protest cornes to her lips— "Moi, mon Père," but it is cut short by a no- nonsense call to order from Anselme: "Osez-vous encore soutenir le contraire?", and swept away by Ariste's "Madame, il n'est plus temps de rien dissimuler." It is finally bolstered by Anselme's confident "reading" of her heart (expressed with the "tu," rather than the previously accusatorial "vous")— "Là, répond, ton coeur en soupire."
"J'aime Ariste," she begins candidly, before an "hélas" at the prospect of Géraste, and a simple commendation to her
106 father in as candid an expression of filial duty (which was not a fiction)— "C'est à vous là-dessus à disposer de moi."
One last time Géraste pushes in before Anselme, with an accusation and a course of action that injured vanity has changed since the vow of vengeance of the preceding scene. "Vous me haïssez donc, Madame la coquette,/Je ne veux point de vous c'est une affaire faite" (p. 162). Alceste's final renunciation of Célimène is played here in another key and with different dynamics. Prodded to explain himself by a startled "Quoi donc, vous...," from Anselme, Géraste doesn't hesitate to reveal his obsessive fear of cuckoldry as his motivation, well grounded in his determination that his spouse will— body and soul— be his possession. "En un mot, c'est un point résolu,/Je vois trop qu'en idée on me feroit cocu:/Que ferois-je du corps, quand Monsieur auroit l'âme." His only condition is another matter of self-interest, that his uncle Sbroct should be informed of the true proceedings. Lisidan moves to center stage to resolve the matter. And his wedding gift to his son, of 80,000 livres, a sum large enough to transfix Anselme (though the rente it would yield, of 4,000 livres, is not quite what Géraste would have had^°). It elicits a "Je vous pardonne," scarcely before Ariste can get out of his mouth a request for Lucrèce's hand. Ariste properly acknowledges this "grâce," which Anselme sets for the next day, and Lucrèce drops to her knees, only to be raised up by her father, "de bon coeur."
107 Only the loose end of Kerlonte remains in the last scene to
be dealt with. He is immediately disarmed by Anselme's
generous fulfillment of Géraste's earlier request for his
help. "Voilà le vrai Géraste, il consent de bon coeur/De
retourner à Nante épouser votre soeur." Géraste hastens to
agree. And both join in the pre-wedding celebration.
Money makes the world go round, and a happy dénouement
is well within the 80,000 livres range. But Hauteroche's
play through its "both— and" construction demonstrates that it also takes "de bons coeurs" to make it go around— and
come around— the right way.
Hauteroche's eclectic use of Molière, centered around Le Misanthrope, could be studied, as I have in part, under
the heading "how to read Molière." The combination of comic
elements— farce, satire, and debates of ideas, are
reminiscent of "comédie Moliéresgue." Farce centers around
the play of valets. Satire, of the courts' procedures, and of mis-education arises from circumstances and character.
When conversation becomes debate, the method of using conversation becomes an added subject to those explicitly
the matter of the exchanges. This mixture, the title suggests inevitably, is to be put to the use of a comedy of character; and here Hauteroche gets into trouble, some of which he sees himself in his quite relaxed "Avis," some of which he appears not to detect (or perhaps prefers not to take up in the public space of a preface).
108 In the "Avis," Hauteroche first lists his initial
reservations, which prompted him to keep the play to himself
and only for the amusement of friends; he then explains
what was cut for performance, but restored to the printed
text because of "its beauties"; finally, he considers one,
quite essential criticism that followed the performance and
answers it.
The three reservations take their place in a passing
definition of the playwright's activity, composing a dramatic poem (which means more than writing the play's alexandrins!. What is does mean, composing with attention to poetics, is made more clear by a quotation from Horace's
Ars poetica. which may be identified as w . 319-22: "At times a play marked by attractive passages and characters
fitly sketched, though lacking charm, though without force and art, gives the people more delight and holds them better than verses void of thought, and sonorous trifles.This passage is cited as aesthetic justification for restoring to the printed text "cent vers de satyre & de morale, qui n'ont point été récités, à cause qu'ils y sont un peu hors d'oeuvre mais que j'ai jugé assez beaux pour ne pas déplaire
à la lecture. Il y en a a pour le moins soixante dans la scene des Beaux-freres, au quatrième Acte, & les autre sont dispersés en divers endroits. J'aurois pû les faire paraître sur le Théâtre aussi-bien que dans l'impression;
109 mais je n'ai pas voulu m'y bazarder, quoique Horace nous dise..." (p. 4).
In addition to indicating his aspirations to be recognized as a man of letters, Hauteroche's quotation from Horace and his commentary on it together tell us a good deal about his personal tastes in plays. And both may suggest what has been left out— or suggested— thought and substance first of all, as opposed to "verses void of thought" and
"sonorous trifles." The two expressions, as well as
"lacking in charm," may allude to galanterie. the precious love language in a long Petrarchan tradition that dominated lyric poetry well into the 1660s and was being recast in a more forceful direction at the moment Hauteroche was writing. His young lovers ironize that kind of language, and speak more simply and naturally ("characters fitly sketched"). The expressions may also catch a certain kind of sententiousness for its own sake, or similarly, flashy word play.
That something should be cut because it is even "a little bit" an hors-d'oeuvre takes us to the central criticism of organic form, or unity, read as prerequisite for aesthetic accomplishment of any artistic form with claims to beauty according to all arts of poetry based on
Aristotle's. And if it is just suggested here, rather than spelled out, other criticisms (and Hauteroche's final defense) converge to suggest it as the reason for cutting
110 the major part of the debate adapted from L'École des maris
(IV, iii). As Lancaster has pointed out, the brother-in-
law, Florame, seems to have been invented only for this debate and has no real place in the action (and neither does his neglected son, who, of course doesn't appear in the play)This is a first indication that unity of action, in terms of character, Aristotle's first concern and prerequisite in form, has been Hauteroche's main problem. Hauteroche's initial reservations about the playability of L'Amant oui ne flatte point are three: 1) "Je ne la trouvois pas assez divertissante"; 2) "Je n'y trouverois pas ces agrémens qui d'ordinaire attirent l'approbation de ceux qui aiment les Ouvrages de Théâtre"; 3) "J'ajouterois encore qu'il y avoit quelque Acte où je ne voyois pas quelque chaleur, & que l'action y languissoit, par la nécessité d'instruire le Spectateur de quelque circonstance." The allusiveness of the first two points makes their exact meaning hard to pin down, and if one accepts (which I think few readers will) the brothers
Parfaict's judgment that the play is "froide d'un bout à l'autre" (1745, X, p. 291), so is the third point. But the third point alludes, it seems most probable, to Act V; the need for disclosure being the circumstances and exact nature of Lisidan's absence and his business. Hauteroche had not yet mastered, as he would later, the means of lessening the intrinsic difficulties of the dénouement's stasis, either by
111 keeping the action going into it or by heightening the final
transcendent celebration to the level of fantasy. Despite
its capable construction, for the Parfaicts Act V is simply
"ridicule." This identification of the problem takes us back also to the episodic character Florame and his second appearance, for the detailed conversation with the newly arrived Lisidan with its passing satire on the lawcourts, which Hauteroche numbered among his "beauties" (V, i). The first point, that the play is simply not entertaining enough, may simply refer to the stage spectacle and its pacing (or these may be the "agréments" alluded to in the second, although the term extending its technical musical sense— graces— more generally is applied to matters of diction and versification). If one takes the first point, in this sense, what is certain is that Acts II-IV are not so quickly paced as they might be, and later are, nor is the disguise at which Lucrèce and Ariste play given the theatricality that such ruses later are in Hauteroche's playing with them himself. Additionally, neither Lubin's complaints, nor especially Florence's angry denunciations have yet been given the sparkling spin of the sauciest "soubrettes" or sassy valets. Licaste's type-casting, which will be picked up in the only bit of farce of Les Apparences trompeuses. is brighter promise for what will indeed be a brighter future. As Adam has remarked, perhaps a bit too
112 categorically but true of his play, Hauteroche keeps a tight rein on fantasy (III, p. 277).
One could go even further, working around the second of
Hauteroche's points). Both the choice of more natural speech that Hauteroche made (which contrasts ironically with the kind of diction the actor needed in tragedy according to
Molière's caricature of it) and characterization by ambiguity, both of which have seemed especially distinguishing features of Amant qui ne flatte point, tend toward a comedy that plays to a "rire dans l'âme," thereby tending to dampen the flash of the single idea or formula brilliantly repeated. Hauteroche has not yet learned how to manage through his playcraft to have things both ways.
Hauteroche's tone in the "Avis" becomes more defensively testy when he deals with one criticism made after the play, bringing us back to the problem of unity, which in one form or another has been accepted by later critical readers, from the Brothers Parfaict to Antoine
Adam. After Acts I-II, Géraste's character is changed, and the remaining part of the play does not demonstrate with the same forcefulness— or do so at all, according to the Parfaicts— the fate of the character according to the title's single attribute. "Au contraire, on y voit toujours son humeur paroître brusque & franche; & quoiqu'il agisse suivant les occasions qui se présente, c'est toujours dans
113 le même esprit, c'est-à-dire en Amant libre, & qui ne flatte point," Hauteroche contradicts such perception.
My analysis, I believe, has shown how one may agree with Hauteroche's defense. Yet there are two causes for the objection that need to be weighed and which do attenuate the forcefulness of the unity that Hauteroche claims. The first has to do with that he terms "suivant les occasions."
Successively, Géraste's past as seducer of Irénée, his obesession with cuckoldry, and his actions as fortune- hunter— all of which are additions to Le Misanthrope of
Hauteroche's own contriving— blur the rôle of the frank plain-speaker, associating him with various forms of hypocrisy, if the analysis does not determinedly follow up the changing contexts incriminating the materialist and the egoist in the given schema of plain speaking. Hauteroche may have thought that his exposition was massive enough (and it can be seen to have condensed Le Misanthrope into Act I ) , to leave Céraste the reduced part he has, until reintroducing him in different circumstances in Act IV, but in this he seems to critics then and since to have misjudged the compositional potential exposition gives to character. It is perhaps with a perception of this particular fault in unity that Hauteroche proceeds differently, but reinforces the integration of his exposition in Les Apparences trompeuses.
114 "Comédie de caractère gâchée,” Adam remarks (V, p. 418), and Lancaster would have agreed, since he, like Adam, sees the plotting that begins in Act II as a threat to the kind of comedy announced by the title and begun in Act I.
Lancaster suggests (III^, p. 770) that Hauteroche becomes more interested in Ariste than in Géraste, and comes back too late to him. It seems to me, on the basis of my analysis, that Géraste has a different rival, and that it is Anselme that captures the playwright's greater interest, as he developed the character, and sustained it finally into a starring rôle. Géraste may finally be seen as a part of Anselme's day, one that has the time for a lot of other things (even a nap in his study after writing a sonnet). On the other hand, Géraste may display something like Alceste's determination to remove himself from that day— and place— but he is not allowed the strength of character to effect that action, which would in turn affirm that character." After an entirely negative review of L'Amant gui ne flatte point, explicable finally only in the focus of taste, the Parfaicts quote Robinet's good review of the play, perhaps as a counterweight suggesting that the play gave more pleasure in the theatre than they found in their reading. It is a good idea, I believe, to repeat my quotation of a part of Robinet's review, for a similar reason, with the qualification that Robinet is no fat and that his credit as a journalist depended on his accurate
115 reading and predictions of audience's pleasures. The elaborate consideration of the play's shortcomings in achieving "perfect form" does not constitute it a failure nor spoil all pleasures both audience and playwright found in this début of a new and "promising" comic author: "C'est un sujet très bien écrit,/Rempli de morale & d'esprit,/Où d'ailleurs l'intrigue est plaisante,/Et tout-à-fait divertissante.
116 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
See Roger W. Herzel (1978), p. 928.
Unless otherwise indicated, the texts of Hauteroche's plays are quoted from the three-volume edition published in Paris by Ribou in 1736.
Born in 1642, she played Junie fBritannicusl at twenty-seven; Aricie (Phèdre) at thirty-five. Meanwhile, she played Vénus in Les Amours déguisés (1664). Recently she has also been seen in de Visé's La Mère coquette (1665), in which being one's age is the principal theme. See Roman d'Amat (1954). *■ Jouanny edition. I, pp. 193-94. The expression, which is a coinage of the inscription writer Jean-Baptiste Santeul, rather than a classical citation, was on the curtain of Dominique Biancolleli's Théâtre italien (Petit Larousse). Gérard Defaux uses it similarly, as epigraph to his section on the first "moral comedy" as Molière conceived it (1983, p. 39). It is the spirit rather than the expression of Molière's first manner, I follow Defaux, "Molière et la comédie classique" (1983, pp. 71-96).
Quoted by Lancaster (1936), III^, p. 753, n. 1. It is formulated by Robinet in 1667. This is a noticeable part of the wit of Molière's Arnolphe in L'École des femmes, in his collection of famous cases of cuckoldry. On sexual innuendo see Virginia Scott (1990), p. 147; Defaux (1983), p. 65. That Anselme's "marotte" is writing sonnets, as we are rather curiously informed (Florence to Ariste, V, iii, p. 146) is probably another indicator of his generally sentimental character, but it is difficult to interpret, especially placed where it is, except as some sort of distraction. His conversational sparring partner Florame, by contrast, is like Molière's Arnolphe a reader of Pibrac (V, i, p. 138).
117 The scene looks like a reproduction of Act IV, v, of Le Misanthrope in which Dubois has hurried to convey a paper from an unknown man so quickly that he forgets the paper. It functions in the same manner of drawing out Géraste's character.
“• Picard (1961), p. 143. The quotation from L 'Amphitryon is Jouanny ed., II.
Louis XIV's reform of court procedures, and in intention at least, all private law, dates from 1661. In March of 1667, Colbert and Pussorts final synthesis was to become the "Ordonnance de procédure civil" of April 1667, to which the interlocutors here most probably allude. See Bluche (1986), pp. 205-6).
The interest rate in Paris was "le denier vingt" 5%. See Introduction, n. 30.
Translation by H. Rushton-Fairclough (1966), p. 476.
Lancaster's judgment (III=, p. 771, n. 7) that "as the neglected youth has no connection with the plot, the passage violates the unity of action" may seem an excessively purist interpretation of the rules. How a passage may violate action is not immediately clear. However, if it is a violation the determined inclusion of the exemplum, it may be felt to be evidence of capital interest to the problem of Hauteroche's relationship with his father that I have sketched in my introduction.
"Brutal," the Parfaicts term Géraste; Lancaster judges that he "lacks the courage, honesty, and manliness of Alceste" (111% p. 770). For full quotation of Robinet on the play, see my introduction (p. 116). On Robinet as a critic, William Brooks (1993), p. 12: "Qu'il s'est cru chroniquer plutôt que critique, soit; mais Robinet se livre malgré tout de temps en temps à des réflexions plus ou moins judicieuses qui démontrent qu'il est prêt à exprimer ses opinions et à en esquisser la justification."
118 CHAPTER 2
ONE ACT AND THREE ACTS: LE SODPER MAL-APPRÊTÉ AND T.RS APPARENCES TROMPEUSES
2-1 LE SOUPER MAL-APPRÊTÉ OU "LE FESTIN D'AIR"
The writer of a one-act play, in 1669, was not encumbered by formal rules. By the same token, he was thrown on the resources of his own talent to provide the pleasures the audience expected— including cleverness that would pass as original invention. One was expected to be inventive in a one-acter. It is basically an anecdote, given dramatic form, or a situation told as a good story.^ The principal condition for this is a single unbroken and uncluttered line of development, in which the initial situation worsens in well-marked stages to desperate— an initial "embarras" becomes a "fort grand embarras"— before one seems to realize it, since pace is the essence of success. Action and reaction must follow guickly on one another. And the time of the play should be nearly as can be its playing time. The problems of exposition and dénouement, difficult keys to the success and illusion of "formal perfection" in
119 the five-act form, are magnified in a one-acter: exposition must be done more quickly in one scene, but not so quickly as to be ill-defined; similarly, the dénouement (in a traditionally designated "scène dernière") must arrive in a flash— a variant of the surprise ending— that will leave spectators blinking— and then with a smile. Everything in plotting, then, depends on a lively wit and a light touch, and this is no less true of characterizations. Character- types are what are needed, quickly identifiable in terms of actions that define them. There is little, or no time, for more than the suggestion of character development or complexity, though a single particularizing variant trait may serve to demonstrate cleverness and/or originality (how many types of coquettes, of valets and "soubrettes," can one think of, to illustrate this point?).
Given the lightness of touch and wit, and the speed, that define successful one-acters, like Hauteroche's Le
Souper mal-apprêté, analysis may seem as belabored as the proverbial replay-anatomization of a joke. But it can serve nonetheless to show how Hauteroche's first hit became just that and in conclusion what development from the mixed reception of L'Amant oui ne flatte point has taken place in the playwright's craft and art.
The stage for Le Souper mal-apprêté is slightly more complex than that on which L 'Amant qui ne flatte point is set, though basically the same. Two houses are represented.
120 One, on a downstage flat is Célide's house, the woman that young Valère is courting, where she is living with her brother. It is in front of this house that he and his valet Philipin have come to rest at the beginning of the play, after a zig-zag trip across Paris about which Philipin complains at length. He has been led without explanation from the rue Saint-Martin to the faubourg Saint-Germain, across bridges twice and through assorted construction sites elsewhere! The second house, center rear stage, we learn at the end of scene i is the inn where Valère and Philipin are staying. The space between the houses— of a narrow square or a large street— where the characters meet, is given comic value visually against the ridiculous lengths of the circuitous route described by Philipin, literally to cross the street. Both houses must be open to a single room, Célide's representing any room in which she may talk confidentially with her maid, Dorise; Valère's, an antechamber beyond which there is a door visible, which opens onto a reception room where the supper of the title would take place. "Your place or mine" is the symbolic value posed by the two interior spaces, more temporary and makeshift than the solid bourgeois house figured by
Anselme's dwelling in L'Amant qui ne flatte point.= Valère reveals, on questioning (scene i) the reason for so many detours : he is dodging creditors, that seem to be everywhere. He shivers at the thought of confronting their
121 dunning, since he is flat broke. "La tricherie enfin va toujours à son maistre" (p. 176), Philipin answers with the
kind of candor the young Valère cultivates for himself and
tolerates in his servant. Indeed Philipin scolds him for
gambling away what was left of his money, and Valère takes
it, agreeing with a certain nonchalance: "J'aurois mieux
fait, sans doute; il le faut avoüer;/Mais c'en est fait"
(p. 177). Philipin reminds Valère that his father and his
welcome purse will be back shortly; in ten days, Valère finishes the sentence. But in the meanwhile, the situation
is that Valère has promised Célide supper that evening. Philipin treats him to sarcasm and the truth. "Pourquoi!
Morbleu, nous n'avons pas la maille/Ni plus de crédit." Valère laughs, pushing Philipin to a list of creditors that
fills two alexandrins. and an opinion that the creditors are
right. The owner and staff of the inn where they are
staying are also right in having stopped their credit. Lisimon appears (scene ii), and Philipin spying a
potential lender frankly hangs around to prompt Valère. After a comic bit on useless compliments, ending in a giggle, the young friends exchange easy confidences. Célide has invited him to Valère's supper, and told him to bring
his mistress, Cidalise. Out of politeness, accompanied by
Philipin's grumbling, Valère bids him welcome. But worse is to come. Lisimon is looking forward to being cheered up, he
reveals, since he has lost his last sou at gambling. No
122 loan from him, then, and two more mouths to feed; Philipin
throws up his hands: "Serviteur au festin!"
Left alone, Valère asks Philipin (who is shaking his head at this pass) to help him. Surely not, he first
responds (scene iii), since the world is inflexible on
wanting to be paid and he is at his wits' end. Still the
censor, he taunts Valère, but gives some half-hearted suggestions when Valère reminds him how Célide ("esprit
emporté") will be affronted and not soon let him forget it,
should there be no supper as promised: you can pretend to
be ill or to have been called out to a duel, he suggests.
The young man of honor— "II y va de ma gloire," the debtor amusingly says— dislikes both "feints," indeed, he
confesses, he does not give very good performances
pretending to be what he is not. Philipin doesn't hold back on the reality punch, voiced in a rhyme that will recur ("paroles/pistoles," p. 187). You can't afford pretty words: "Ne m'embarassez point par vos raisonnements./Allez,
laissez-moi faire." Won over by sympathy, despite himself, Philipin literally chases Valère off the stage and talks himself up to the rôle of fourbum imoerator in a monologue
(scene iv), cogitating modestly on what will effect an
"honnête défaite," getting Valère off the hook. "Ah! gu'un valet d'esprit est une belle chose," (p. 190), he exults as an idea dawns, "Quelgue jour, à mon tour, je prétends être maître."^ And to boot, he continues in comic irony for the
123 spectators, the valet costs less than a horse (the more so
since he is certainly at present without wages, though
significantly he is not made to mention the fact). And in a
blink, Philipin is ready to go "on stage," knocking at Célide's door. The first sequence, of four scenes, giving
us the situation and its first worsening escalation, is
followed up by a second sequence of four, from Célide's
side, which makes things considerably worse. Célide's temporary absence gives Philipin time to flirt
with Dorise, her servant, and spectators time to see that
she will be in all ways his equal. While he wants to kiss, she wants to know the menu for the supper: "Silence sur
l'amour, & parlons du festin." "Si bien que ton amour est un amour gourmand" (p. 193). "Tu vas te chagriner pour un
mot de gogaille?" she taunts him, as Célide arrives (scene vi). Dorise evidently has a good appetite. Philipin again wags his head as he is first questioned, and looks "sombre
et noir" (p. 195). His bright idea is a warning that
Valère's neighbors have been maliciously gossiping about her visits to him and that in order to avoid embarrassment herself and for Valère, she should refrain from appearing for the supper. Transfer it here, then, is Dorise's almost
immediate reply, since how to cancel the event tactfully— without offending Valère— has now become Célide's predicament ("Encore doit-on trouver une honnête défaite,"
Dorise echoes Philipin, p. 199). The fuss involved in the
124 change, and Célide's desire to go out, undo the threat posed by Dorise. Appeal to Célide's "honor" seems to have done
the trick, and with her agreement to keep Philipin's visit a
secret, Philipin goes off contented. "Après avoir un peu rêvé," according to Hauteroche's
stage direction, Dorise follows her mistress in almost
immediately seeing through Philipin's invention and supposes
that Valère is the author, or at least in on, his strategy. Seconded by Dorise, Célide immediately jumps to the mistaken
conclusion that she is being got rid of so that Valère can
be alone with Cidalise, the vain and mindless coquette, that
satisfies expectations and enough so as to place her in the
setting of fashionable Parisian women that Poisson will
later in the season do in his Femmes coquettes.* Lisette,
who likes Valère, is thus unknowingly enlisted as a prosecution witness against him. Cidalise is so in love with herself that it is hard to believe there is any room for anyone else in her affections. And her beauty has
persuaded her that she deserves an "illustre conquête." That leaves Valère out, it would seem, but who knows, since
Cidalise— like a hundred other women that Lisette could name— is susceptible to being tricked. Even now she is seeing a certain "fou" passing for a gentleman but in fact a "fourbe," who takes her repeatedly to secret sessions of chiromancy (and "pedimancy," Lisette comically throws in), to Lisette's scandal, becoming ventures in nipple-reading
125 that are plainly seductions (p. 208). There ought to be a law for such “fiefés coquins" (that put Valère, despite his
misdemeanors, in a very innocent perspective®), Lisette and Dorise agree at parting.
Philipin's first trick has failed, since Célide is more
determined than ever not to miss the supper, in order to
catch Valère and Cidalise in the act of a secret
assignation. The comic comparison of the genius valet,
cheaper than a horse, in fact goes down a degree— to a good
piece of furniture. "Un valet de bon sens est un meuble
imparable" (p. 210). Indeed in the sequence of four scenes that it triggers off, it has made things worse by the time
(scene x) he exultantly reports on his successful "invention" to Valère. We are at the center of the play and
fully prepared for the worst of Valère's fears to happen.
To the surprise of both master and servant, first Célide and Dorise (scene xi), then Lisimon and Cidalise (scene xii) arrive, for the "si léger repas" of a non-existent supper,
Philipin remarks sardonically in the framing monologue (scene xiii) of this central sequence. He gives up: "II a fait la folie; hé morbleu! qu'il s'en tire." Valère has been invaded and occupied, seemingly now without a strategy for resistance and/or liberation. His desired duet with
Célide has become a dramatic quartet. The guests' aggressive appetites and their brusk politeness— including a "Je veux souper ici" from an
126 imperious Célide and an all-round "one course will do, don't fuss"— blind them to Valère's embarrassment, fully enjoyable for the audience before it is crystallized in renewed, and more desperate pleas for assistance from Philipin (scene xiv) to get some food. Impossible, he at first assures
Valère, reminding him of the inflexible creditors, then again softening him under the double influence of Valère's distress and his own new bright idea. "Mettant le doigt au front," Hauteroche ironically notes in his stage direction that we now may read as a cartoon-like signifier, and is off again on his own for a second try at successful performance. His abrupt exit leaves Valère alone (scene xv) for a short monologue of puzzlement and foreboding— "Je crains qu'il ne me rende un fort mauvais office." At least Philipin has even less far to go this time— through the door leading to the adjoining room where the guests are playing cards while waiting for their supper— and both Valère and the audience will not have to wait so long for the outcome, since time is running out in all ways (we entering into the last sequence of four scenes before the "wrap up" of dénouement).
Célide re-enters (scene xvi), alarmed by the news (Philipin's invention) of her brother's grievous wound in a street aggression, which Philipin has just heard about at the corner, he clarifies for her. As wished for, she is ready to rush away to attend him when the brother himself enters (scene xvii) to give the lie to the gossip and to
127 embody the failure to Philipin's second invention. Philipin
is reduced to a stammering number on the undependability of
street gossip (including such comic bromides as the proverb
"Plus d'un âne au Marché, qui se nomme Martin," p. 221, the irony of which the brother is of course oblivious to) . But worse is to come, the second stratagem's reversal bringing with it the same result as the first's: "J'y viens souper aussi," the brother announces, swelling the quartet (now doubled with the added presence of Philipin, Dorise, and
Lisette), to a small chamber orchestra, and Valère to near panic, translated first (scene xviii), a stage direction indicates (p. 222), into a frantic dumb-show of gestures pointing to the door of the reception room, through which the brother has just passed to join the guests waiting for their supper (with an additional "one course will do, no fuss, please"). Philipin, once again depressed by his failure, is silent, then stirred slightly tosses out some patently unsatisfactory suggestions for recouping, beginning with a burn down the place, which often in contemporary comedy signals the final triumph of unreason, then continuing with the crass story of a stolen purse. He gets no further before Valère is besieged from the other side— the street. A caterer ("traiteur") first (scene xix), then an officer of the law with summonses from three other creditors (scene xx), are announced, embodying Valère's first expressed nightmare about such confrontations. But
128 circumstances, by this time, have considerably increased the nightmare, which has become the young man-about-town's fear of exposure in front of his friends. Stage direction and business play this up, as they indicate on the one hand
Valère's fearful glances toward the closed door and on the other its repeated opening for a head to emerge with the inquiry whether the supper will be forthcoming and worse yet for the brother to emerge and himself treat with the caterer
(p. 226), creating for Valère an agonizing imbroglio. The situation, for Valère, at the close of scene xx has indeed become intolerable, a "fort grand embarras." In the first of the scenes of Valère's confrontations, the caterer's, Hauteroche has inverted, and plays in a minor key, Dom Juan's famous masterful disarming of his creditor.
Monsieur Dimanche, in Dom Juan ou le festin de pierre (IV, iii), the more appropriately for this "festin d'air." Unlike Dom Juan, the experienced mature aristocrat, master of his performances, who ties Dimanche in a knot, by his unexpected show of deference and politeness, Valère faces him stripped to the body of the vulnerable young man (as
Philipin the censor had first reduced his show as a man of honor). As Valère himself first admitted, he is not (in part because he does not want to be) good at pretending he is something he is not, and he believes sincerity to be the best policy. Accordingly, he throws himself in his dilemma on the merchant's sympathetic mercy. The first sounds of
129 the merchant's call to the order of business, the reduction of the son's sure reality— his father's credit— to a
"detour" of bad faith— A d'autres. Monsieur; ce sont là vos détours :/Votre valet cent fois a donné de ces bourdes;/C'est nous prendre en un mot pour franches hapelourdes" (p.
225)®— should be enough to bring home Philipin's lesson on the reality of arithmetic in the world of business (= the
"real world"). After a personal plea fails, a promise on the oath of the "foi d'honnête homme" in turn fails, when the guarantee is mercilessly reduced by the merchant according to the record of the past ("comme de l'autre somme...") that has not proved the credit of the guarantor. Valère, "regardant de tous côtés" (p. 227), the stage direction notes, is left with the shakes, newly vulnerable, for the worst— embarrassment beyond that he may suffer with his friends— that is, the appearance of the law.
The destiny of Tartuffe, the exposure of the "fiefé coquin" (as Cidalise's seducer in Le Souper mal-apprêté has been labeled) and his removal from society, is quite enough to conjure up an idea of Valère's fears as he faces the
Sergent. Delinquency, in his inn and away from his father, loss of the sure credit and favor with his father, even being sent off to the "petites maisons" and the Lazarist fathers' reforming whips, constitutes the final, most vivid nightmare of Valère's risky business. And it is no wonder that the nonchalant and tolerant master, once the scene of
130 ritual humiliation has ended in only a warning from the law, thanks to Valère's composed performance— "just doing your duty, officer"— contemplates using the stick on the absent Philipin (scene xxi).
Philipin bursts in on this monologue (scene xxii), with the triumphant news that the third shot of his invention has hit home ("Ah! par bleu! Pour ce coup, la Dame I'a dans
I'aile," p. 230). He has no time to explain before ("la scène dernière") the ruée of dénouement begins: the women rush out into the anteroom on their hurried way to the street, accompanied by the men unsuccessfully attempting to stop the stampede. The explanation, delivered by Philipin, once they have passed, is forthcoming. To lance the swelling, as it were, he has administered the story of the death on the inn of a beautiful woman from smallpox. The arrow, or the lancet, surely aimed, has indeed hit home in another swelling— women's vanity. The spectators knew, without explanation, that smallpox was indeed a beautiful woman's worst nightmare; worse than death, it could leave in life the broken promise of happiness that is a visible spectacle of ravaging scars (and to the superstitious or blind believer furthermore the external marks of an ugly soul).
Le Souper mal-apprêté's last comic turn is the decision, prompted by relief over the passing of the situation's treat, to beat it, to get away from the
131 compromising place while the going is good; indeed, Philipin remarks fresh from the experience— "Ces deux
Messieurs pourraient revenir sur leurs pas." Philipin gets to crown this gesture by an envoy, in the nature of the troupe's orateur's last bidding to the audience
(unforgettably enacted in Molière's to the audience of
L'École des maris^l . Home is best, and for a special reason; the entertainment is over, and after this "festin d'air," real supper awaits. "PHILIPIN; Je conseille à chacun d'aller à sa demeure;/Il y soupera mieux qu'il ne seroit ici./Et moi, de mon côté, je vais souper aussi" (p. 234). In his review of the play. Robinet, joins in this play, miming the audience's smiling reception of it. "HAUTE-ROCHE y donne un souper/Qui, sans l'estomach occuper,/N'étant fait que pour les Oreilles,/Vous y fera rire à merveilles,/Et vous reviendrez à la fin/Aveque grand'joie & grand faim" (Rothschild, III, p. 847). One hopes that the suppers might be accompanied by
Lully's chamber "Musique pour les soupers du roi," to supplement the pleasures. I have purposely sustained metaphors from music in my analysis, since on the one hand they point to the pleasures of music that Hauteroche will in time himself put on stage and on the other to the kind of pleasures to which Robinet's "pour les oreilles" alludes, more difficult to analyze and to evoke than are Lully's harmonies read from the scores. The pleasures of "music"
132 have to do with the right sound to the turnings of the good story being told, for that matter the assent drawn to the charm of the basic, particularizing disguise that is the play's premise, finally to the stage and movement of lines of verse, which sound in themselves as they should (catching a character's speech inflections and with them a bit of character, then developing similarly, as they should, in conversation). A good ear, as well as a good eye, is rewarded in Le Souper mal-apprêté. In a very relaxed "Avis,” in which Hauteroche frankly basks in the pleasures his audience has shown in its appreciation, he first inventories them: "Quantité... ont trouvé l'invention particulière, la conduite assez raisonnable, la versification naturelle, & sur-tout purgée de ces basses expressions..." (p. 169). I have suggested above how each of these elements may be heard as "music to the ears";
Hauteroche develops one, "versification naturelle," by the apologetic and slightly defensive development that follows his retrospective replay of pleasures. Verses that "faire naître et débrouiller les quelques incidents," especially for the reader "hors de vûë," he reasons, are no less difficult than are those grand lines shaped by passion (the pedal tones of rhetorical ornament, let us say), which can find little or no place in a play other than a five-act one.® Others demand the "toutes simples..., très peu de discours, & beaucoup de naïveté" (p. 171). The
133 representation of "naïveté" with much art, let us be clear, of this real key to the pleasures of sight and sound that predominantly contributed to making Le Souper mal-apprêté a hit for its first audience.
For the avid youth culture that is his audience in 1669
Hauteroche has broken his young characters away from oldsters, and set them on their own in a manner fit to engage all the beauty and nostalgia inherent in La
Rochefoucauld's evocation of youth as "une ivresse continuelle, la fièvre de la raison" (no. 271). Maie and female characters alike exult in defining and liberating performances, at which they are not yet masters: the soldier's noble profession of honor and aristocratic nonchalance, beyond money of course or any other form of prudent calculating, or the woman's display on her own of her beauty, in a style that transcends vulgar coquettery.
For the weary courtier, man or woman, or the weary businessman or wife in the first audience what is refreshing
"festin d'air" is the spectacle of careless youth who get away with it all, with only a warning that constitutes no
"rabat-joie" for anyone participating in the pleasures, on either side of the stage. Suspending the world of L'Amant oui ne flatte point, the dominance of money, of which Le Souper mal-apprêté is very much of a piece, there is a recaptured youth for the time of performance and a smile to save it afterwards.
134 Hauteroche, as I have indicated, has learned how to shape some of the combined pleasures of "comédie hauterochienne" from meditation on Molière's plays. Antoine
Adam has suggested that he also learned from the anonymously produced one-act comedy. Les Coteaux, ou les marquis friands
(published 1665), which he places among the first examples of the new form of comedy of manners offered by one-act plays in the 1660s (III, p. 278; V, p. 416). That play stages the situation of a secret society of gourmets, imagined at an embarrassing if typical session besieged by uninvited guests.’ If Hauteroche's Le Souper mal-apprêté offers the same aroma, the combination of comic dishes is definitely his own "cuisine comique."
135 2.2 T.Kfi APPARENCES TROMPEUSES Oü "UN FESTIN DE PIERRE"
The single-page "Au lecteur" to Les Apparences trompeuses expresses its author's satisfaction with its plot
and characters in an understated way: "Le sujet de cette comedie est fort simple, & n'est chargé que de très-peu
d'incidens; Elle a des caractères assez passables, & dont
les Originaux se rencontrent fréquemment dans le monde" (p. 347). After noting that the play had not been performed for
"la raison qu'on ne l'a trouvée jouable," Hauteroche leaves the final verdict on the matter to his readers. There is
one concession, again understated, which gives us the clue to the probable cause of convincing dissuasion from
production, and an affirmative compensatory quality that is a significant complementary bit of information on
Hauteroche's attitude toward playcraft as writing. First, the concession is that this play "n'est pas si plaisante que celles qu'on a vues de ma façon." Les Apparences trompeuses is indeed different from Le Souper mal-apprêté or Crispin médecin (the last play by Hauteroche seen on stage before Les Apparences trompeuses), in fact as different as night
from day. It is very probable that the substance of the advice not to produce had nothing to do with the accomplishment of form (the plot being admirably sustained)
136 but had everything to do with the general tone of the comedy— which is what Anouilh called in his own plays
"comédie rosse," as opposed to his "comédies roses." It is
only slightly an exaggeration to say that, with certain
adjustments. Les Apparences trompeuses would be at home on the naturalistic stage.
Like his retrospective defense of L'Amant qui ne flatte
point. Hauteroche's compensatory reason for offering Les Apparences trompeuses to readers and their judgement shows
his personal attachment to the play for a reason that does
not exclude pure pride of authorship but qualifies that pride as something else. As in the "avis" to this first play, it is pleasures of the mind, of thought, that shape that pride, as they shaped the play— "mais je crois qu'il y a des choses qui peut-être pourront donner quelque satisfaction à l'esprit" (p. 347). It is the man of letters, the humanist, and his own pleasure of thought, which are offered here.
The first stage of thought about Les Apparences trompeuses may be represented by the suppression of the title under which the play was first announced. Les Maris infidèles. The result of this is the generalization of the illusion/delusion focused by the title to other characters in the play, and an expansion of its thematic import. At the same time the main protagonist, Sturgon, is no longer made to bear the burden of full unification of action. In
137 other words, Hauteroche does not suggest that he has written a comedy of character. The comedy is thus also separated from Molière's one-act farce, Saanarelle ou le cocu imaginaire^ certainly an intertext, but a very different play from Les Apparences trompeuses. Molière's play and the
"comédie Moliéresque" it represents seems more likely to have been part of a general meditation on comic blindness, operating in dialogue on the one hand with criticism of Amant qui ne flatte point and on the other Molière's use of farce, which Hauteroche rejects in his rewriting in Sturgon of the rôle of Géraste. There is no doubt that
Sturgon is a "cocu imaginaire" from the moment of his opening scene-long monologue, so different from Sganarelle's monologue that the Parisian audience found to be "la belle scène" (scene xvii).^° The expression "apparences trompeuses," as the deceptive veil of this world, "rempli de chimères," as
Sturgon describes it in the play (I, ii, p. 355), also takes on a religious connotation. It belongs to the kind of language with which Pascal, for example, evoked a different kind of comedy, the frantic divertissement of "la comédie humaine" playing out "la misère de l'homme sans Dieu." For man "dans l'ordre des corps" the human comedy is a sobering one: "quelque belle que soit la comédie en tout le reste, le dernier acte est sanglant. On jette enfin de la terre sur la tête et en voilà pour jamais" (Lafuma, no. 165).
138 sturgon the old man (of fifty) is in Act III of Les
Apparences trompeuses well and truly buried.
The actors' objection, "but it's not you, Hauteroche," pointing up the difference of the play from Hauteroche's first three, may also have detected in Les Apparences
trompeuses a perceptible limit where the genre itself is
threatened and something else is suggested— a play that stages religion. It is quite possible to read Les
Apparences trompeuses as a passage from the staging of the
transforming grace of the art of the theatre to the art of the theatre used to stage the action of grace. The apparent joylessness of Les Apparences trompeuses
results from cutting away— or seriously attenuating— three main sources of representation of joyous good spirits: the
farcical interplay of valets and "soubrettes," the careless natural attraction and beauty of the young lovers, and the final canavalesque festivity of the denouement's closure. Replacing the buoyant Philipin, the valet named here Sans-Soucy (surely by ironic antiphrasis) is the whipping- boy for almost the entire cast. The slaps he receives and his whimperings echo through the dénouement, from which he is significantly excluded. The "soubrette" rôle has been written out; Lise, whom we first see dogging Sturgon, would in staging first be seen as she is later described, not young, "une vieille fille" of thirty. Judging from her actions, she is destined to remain a spinster. It is she,
139 still a "rabat-joie" in the dénouement that replaces
Molière's joyful Lisette, who offers the envoy to L'École
des maris, in a decidedly scratchy tone, which puts into
question the pertinence of what she says as a full
description of the play. As the young lovers, Nerine and Damis seem at first
scarcely to fare any better, seemingly in Act I and II far
from that focal center of the spectacle of beauty and its symbolic meaning that Hauterochean comedy gives to their
representation elsewhere. Nerine, who is twenty and
beautiful to the eye of the spectator, frankly admits that
she has married Sturgon for his money, brazenly blackmails
her brother, and is a sore and vengeful loser in the
marriage game. Damis is hardly more than a feature in her
scenario, playing a dubious game of his own. Luckily for him, and for all concerned, as it happens, he will be part
of a new couple in Act III. Hauteroche, in leaving the play to his readers, has
imposed on them its stage setting, beyond the printed
notation "L'Action est à Paris." One may begin with the staging for Le Souper mal-apprêté, with two dwellings and a street/square. The house downstage, center, is Sturgon's,
his bourgeois paradise of secure solidity, now turned to a hell on earth. It is open to a reception room, from which one sees a stairway that leads to Nérine's apartment. The
second structure, replacing the inn, and symbolically so, we
140 are directed to see ini, i as the convent where Sturgon's
sister lives. It is set at some distance, stage rear. Visually then exposition begins with the two spaces of a
civitas dei and a civitas terenna. Our first view of
Sturgon adds initially to this symbolic reading by a
beginning gesture, now familiar from three plays in which
Hauteroche has used it (rather than an entry into the comic
world through the traditional quarrel). Sturgon pauses, to
give his monologue, while the second character catches up, then complains in the first exchange of dialogue about the
pace set. This beginning serves, here and earlier, as a kind of time-signature, setting the rapid pace for the
comedy to come, and also a fundamental trait for the protagonist— here Sturgon is a man in a hurry, frantically
harried.
ACT I
Pausing at his door, not yet ready to enter his own domain, until he has set his mind to meeting what he will find there, Sturgon is also freed momentarily from Lise, whom he has unexpectedly met at the convent where he has
just visited his sister. The opening monologue (28 w . ) is more than Anselme's Amant qui ne flatte point. IV, ii) the monologue of tragic heroes, and without the caricature of heroic language that makes for Arnolphe's failures at
141 introspection or Sganarelle's paradoxical success at it in
comic terms (scene xvii), Sturgon is obsessed by an idea
and angry with himself for not being able to rid himself of
the visions it evokes in him. The first two rhymes set the human dilemma: reason has been poisoned by jealousy whose
fantasies have taken its place: "Qu'une Femme coquette est
un mortel poison/a quiconque a pour but l'honneur & la raison!/Combien de fois par jour la noire jalousie/vient-
elle avec fureur troubler sa fantaisie? (p. 349). This could be the Dom Garcie of Molière's "comédie héroique."
From this beginning a familiar scenario opens and closes—
"femme coquette" + "jouvenceau avec" = "la perte d'honneur"
= "être cocu." Honor and reason require absolute rejection
of one kind of resolution, and peace of mind, being a
complaisant and silent husband, since it abdicates the responsibility that allows for mastery and indeed moral agency. Those who can resolve the dilemma in this way may
be envied, as Sturgon does, but not emulated by those who
have self-respect. The monologue breaks off with suspicion.
Wishing for Lise, to find out why she was at the convent but
also as a confidante in his wretchedness, Sturgon
nonetheless mistrusts her— "il n'est pas sûr qu'elle soit
fidèle." When Lise appears out-of-breath, she offers Sturgon (I, ii) anything but comfort. From the first she assails him in a shaming manner ("en branlant la tête," reads the stage
142 direction), reminding him of the public image that he himself projects, momentarily obscured from his mind. He is doubly a hypocrite, she charges. "And Lucrèce," is her first charge, to Sturgon's immediate discomfort, one may imagine, since this naming of names comes in the street. "Avec votre Femme avoir une Maîtresse! Et... ." A "tai- toi" interrupts her, followed by a series of similar cautions— "encore tai-toi," "Paix," "Suffit," "silence" but cannot stop the relentless directness of Lise's commentary— "Ce n'est pas agir de bonne foi,/Qu'en peut dire le monde?... Cette Lucrèce...", and ending with a warning precisely in terms of a part of Sturgon's obsessive fantasy: "A Paris, comme ailleurs, on découvre les choses;/Pour s'en s'instruire, on fait plusieurs metamorposes./Et... ." The sibilant sounds of this hissed warning strike all the more forcibly Sturgon's nerves, triggering an "éclat" of anger
(noted by the stage direction). It shuts down Lise, who makes an unwilling show of deference: "Monsieur, je n'en parlerai plus." Sturgon, as he may suspect has won the argument; but also, as he may not, lost an ally. Calmed for the moment, Sturgon opens the matter of the convent, and Lise's presence there, a development that goes, paradoxically, better. Asked why she has visited Jacinte, Lise's first response is "Madame," an answer of itself enough to raise
Sturgon's suspicions on motive— meddling, if not spying,
143 being his ready explanation. To his next question, seeking clarification— "Est-ce par piété," an answering rhyme
("civilité"), sets the opposition holy/worldly (or unholy), refocusing the terms of opposition of Sturgon's first monologue, which is acted out in the first half of I, ii.
"Non, mais pour faire une civilité." They agree on one thing— Jacinte— whom Sturgon characterizes as "bonne fille" (read obedient) and Lise would canonize: "Elle deviendra
Sainte,/De l'air qu'elle s'y prend, il n'en faut point douter" (p. 354). But doubt, Sturgon does, as his questions indicate. He has been frustrated in his information gathering in the convent by Jacinte's reticence
("A un Frere une soeur s'explique rarement.") as well as frustrated by Lise's presence in the parlor, hence his mistrust of that part of the convent that is still an opening onto the world— "Cependant au parloir elle aime à caqueter." His leading question is yet ambiguous, since it could express only a brotherly concern (which one would be ill advised to read out of it despite its more obvious primary meaning): "Crois-tu qu'en ce Couvent elle soit satisfaite,/Qu'elle y prenne du goût, que rien de 1'inquiété?" Lise's first response, that he must have seen for himself, being unsatisfactory, Sturgon's inquiry becomes more tellingly direct— What did she say to you? "Rien," is the infuriating answer. And scenting danger, Lise is on the offensive again.
144 Lise raises the opposition holy/unholy again by questioning Sturgon on the appropriateness of the spectacle he made in the convent. Why was it necessary, she asks, to sermonize his sister, and the good sisters, on the seven deadly sins and to evoke for them a world "n'étant rempli que de chimères," well given up for the convent's "solides plaisirs." Sturgon abstains from a posturing claim that he believes this vision of the world (which he well may). Lise has obviously been in service since she was a girl and knows him well enough, one can judge from the amount of frankness assumed and tolerated with Sturgon, to see quickly that such a profession is not the whole truth. More practical,
Sturgon admits a part of the truth, which Lise will fill out. If he sermonized as he did, "C'étoit pour l'obliger à ne pas les quitter" (p. 355). Lise moves in directly, with the second instance of hypocrisy (and a further torment for the Sturgon of the opening monologue). "Bon. Vous m'apprenez que dans cette visite/Vous jouissez finement le rolle d'hypocrite... Mais quoi, si votre Soeur, nonobstant votre adresse,/Aimoit quelque Tarquin, quand vous aimez
Lucrèce,/Et que pour lui l'amour la tourmentât un peu,/Ça, l'empêcheriez-vous de sortir de ce lieu?" Lise can hardly believe her ears when Sturgon's immediate response is "Non." "Tout de bon," she asks, only to receive immediate confirmation that she has not misheard: "Croi-moi," which draws her spontaneously admiring approval. "C'est être
145 raisonable,/Et sur cette mattiere un Frere fort traitable./Ma foi j'en sçai beaucoup qui sans aucun remords,/Pour l'y faire cloîtrer feroient tous leurs efforts./C'est pourtant grande pitié, qu'on oblige une fille/D'épouser un Couvent par raison de famille" (p. 356).
Lise, pleased with her audience and herself, rambles on, developing an outrage on this subject that has lost its pertinence; interrupted at the word "mode” (any fashion being an alarm to Sturgon), she goes on to deliver herself of the set-piece on abbesses and abbés, who should in their galanterie set the standard for them both, supposed as dangerous in my introduction.^' It is dangerous at least to Lise's case, since Sturgon has heard enough now to think that he knows his suspicions to be true, that Lise is his wife's "agent" and no ally for him. Silencing her tactfully and tactically, he sends her off to fetch Sans-Soucy, a sure ally, he thinks, and strides into his house.
Lise obviously has not seen Racine's recent Britannicus. or has not learned from it what a big lie can be and does for Néron— give him time and a free mind to implement his hypocrisy in the "étouffement" of his rival.
She does not see that the pattern of the scene she has just played is that of Néron, through anger and disarray to the
"feint" in cold calculation, just as she does not see the full enormity of the calculations she absolves Sturgon from making (the diabolical bookkeeping, on Lise's reckoning
146 followed through, that money saved on Jacinte = money available for Lucrèce), since the scenario of commitment to an "honnête prison," or the convent used as an inn, is exactly what Sturgon is following with his sister. A first
"épreuve" successfully undergone, Sturgon faces a new one when he has entered his domain.
That Nerine is not home is a first annoyance, which Sans-Soucy afflicts on his master. That he does not know where she has gone is a second. Annoyance grows to anger, again, ending with Sans-Soucy's receiving a sound slap.
Sturgon relieves himself on his man with this traditionally significant violence (the pun is intended). The valet's fault is that he turns into the same sort of tease Sturgon's wife is. He in fact wants to talk and does, about Damis and
Nerine, but since he hasn't finally seen anything he can only Sturgon-like give voice to his suspicions. In point of fact he has been gotten rid of, he alleges, by the couple, which is already a danger signal (if it is true), but what they then do together he can only guess (and does)— "Honi soit qui mal y pense," for the man— and for the master. But there is a difference; Sans-Soucy is only a lowly valet, vulgar and not too bright (characteristics the master, too, is in danger of being given). So when he does give voice to suspicions it is from his mouth an insult meriting a slap of punishment.^
147 Curt dismissal, ironically of a last faithful ally, is
followed by grumbling to Lise, when she again (I, iv) joins
Sturgon (and not to leave him until the center of the play):
"autant d'espions," and treating his wife the way he does,
in "1'esprit d'un Valet passer pour une infame." The rhyme,
femme/infame is still ringing in Sturgon's ears, and the audience's when his first view of Nérine, in the play, draws from him a characterization that shows us just how close he himself is to vulgarity and presumptuousness condemned in
Sans-Soucy. "La voici, la coquine," he says to himself (and to Lise) once again at even the sight of her in the grips of his obsession. Hauteroche makes much of this short scene of transition, since it is also the chance for Lise, Narcisse- like, to turn Sturgon's exasperation over Sans-Soucy to her own advantage (or her mistress's). She reinforces his mistrust, hence separating even further the potential allies; he is good for service, she concedes, "mais enfin pour sa langue il est pernicieux." Yes and no, we may already feel, and will again be led to ask of Sans-Soucy's supposed fault. If I, iii is a first dress rehearsal for the confrontation with Nérine Sturgon began planning in I, i's monologue, he is frustratingly denied that scene by her first appearance with Damis (scene v), which scarcely does more than give bodies to his overheated imaginings— first from the confirmation that they have been out together, then
148 even worse, that they are now in together as he ironically drives them out of the room. When Nérine takes Damis by the hand and directs them both toward her apartment on the first floor she is literally obeying Sturgon's last instruction to her in the scene: "Laissez-moi." He is equally dismissive at first, in returning Damis's compliment, and in answer to
Nérine's attempts to calm him to the point that civil discourse is possible. With an imperious affirmation of his wish for mastery, this "homme qui ne flatte point," returns insult for compliment: Damis's "Je me compte au rang de vos amis" and accompanying bow is returned with a stiff-necked "Je ne m'y compte pas, & ne veux point être,/Et qui plus est, chez moi, je veux être le maître." To Nérine's intervening beginning of a defense, comes an even curter
"taisez-vous," then "votre vue augmente ma colère," culminating with the "laissez-moi." Hauteroche sets a pattern in this short scene of the "homme qui ne flatte point"'s destruction of the very thing that he wishes for.
In this last scene of the exposition of Sturgon's character, we are angled to glimpse the future in the short run and in the longer view of a man who will be satisfied of his mastery only when he has made himself solitary. But we also see that when he will be that master, he will yet have his Lise, there after this scene has been played, the eternal self-interested confidante and witness, as here, to that other company Sturgon will always have, the tormenting demon
149 of jealousy, at this moment ready to flood his mind with the brillant after-image of Nérine and Damis— "En user de la
sorte, & même en ma présence/Àhl c'est pousser à bout ma trop de patience" (p. 365).
Sturgon's third passage into anger is literally "à bout." Scene I, vi enacts a fully pathological state of
madness. If Philipin in comic desperation in Le Soupe could suggest the ultimate act of unreason, torching the house to
save the occupants, Sturgon's demand from Lise for "du feu" is in deadly earnest. It is repeated insistently as she
attempts to reason with him— "Morbleu, du feu, du feu." He
would turn his wife's boudoir into a pyre. The violent
choleric temperament in shown in x-ray, before Sturgon
rushes in alienation out of his house, where he pauses for
some air— "unique moyen d'éviter ma colère" (scene vii, p.
367). Lise, first startled, has by this time rushed upstairs to warn Nérine and Damis.
Arnolphe's hyperventilation and sweatings are brought to mind in the enactment of Sturgon's disabling passionate
anger. So is a famous image from Pascal's Pensées : "Quand
je suis mis quelquefois à considération les divers agitations des hommes..., j'ai dit souvent que tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chamber" (Lafuma, no. 136). Sturgon will be able to do this, and to accomplish the desire for fixity he expresses and first misses with I,
150 vi only in the last scene of dénouement. In the meanwhile he is the victim of his own fantasy and its rhythms, an oscillation from the "grandeur" of illusion of mastery, to its loss in consciousness of humiliating subjection, resolvable only in his mind by escape from the claustrophobic site of the fantasy's staging.
Lise is there, once again to set the immediate stage
(I, viii), in a report of the "lovers' reaction to the threat of immolation. "Ils ont ri...," she reports with cruel bluntness, and giving Sturgon's demon one more prod.
Can laughter teach lessons? Only, if one presupposes sanity in the potential learner. Sturgon is sane, it has been suggested and will be shown repeatedly over the three acts, only in good moments. It is not apparently clear that the confrontation (I, x-xii), so ardently wished for, ends well.
It starts well, with Sturgon's masterful dismissal of Damis, who leaves with a silent bow acknowledging the legitimacy of
Sturgon's authority, but it ends with the would-be master running once more into the street.
From the first moment (scene x) Nerine shows herself in terse and tough directness Sturgon's equal, "Ça, que me voulez-vous?/Sçachons-en le sujet, faites-le moi connoître" (p. 370). As she informs him, answering his last charge— of being the "rieuse" made two scenes later— "Vous m'accusez
à tort, je ne suis pas railleuse" (scene xxi, p. 377).
Nérine does not let herself be turned in argument into
151 Célimène, the coquette of Sturgon's imaginings, nor just any ’’femme de Sganarelle.” She recognizes neither, nor herself
in the accusations of misdoings with assorted "godelureaux”
in general and Damis in particular, Sturgon's charges, after
his call to order in the repeated "Je veux être le maître." Having stonewalled Sturgon perfectly, the would-be
successful prosecutor at all costs inadvisedly calls Sans- Soucy as witness (I , xi).
Having learned his lesson well, from Sturgon, about the perils of speaking ill of the mistress, despite two coercive threats of added blows, Sans-Soucy professes to have no testimony to give and walks out, leaving Sturgon frustrated with a vow "Je me tairai toujours" (p. 375). Sturgon has been reproached with his own illogic, of doing himself what he chides in Sans-Soucy; he has, in fact, in his first charges of Nérine cited Sans-Soucy as witness repeatedly. And Nérine has not allowed this comic blindness to logic to remain implicit. In the exchange with Nérine all is said in blunt denunciation on both sides, as anger drives both husband and wife to brisk insults: "NERINE: Vous ne méritez pas une femme d'honneur. STURGON: Aussi vous travaillez à n'avoir plus ce titre... Vous ne méritez pas de m'avoir pour Epoux. NERINE: Sans-doute, & l'on connoit fort mal votre mérite" (p. 376). Filled once again with anger, and in the grip of delusion, Sturgon rushes from the house, with Nérine's "go ahead" called after him, there to
152 pursue his own chimera of finding a witness, in the event
Nérine's brother Cloestan, for the final setting of the justice he fantasizes.
In two series of six scenes, Hauteroche, it is clear, is experimenting with a different kind of plot. It is the sustained plot that he has chosen, as evidenced by scene v- vi, from which there is nowhere to "go up" on a curve of ascending action and intensity. Sturgon will therefore live in his folly and its rhythms for the rest of the play until its dénouement. Act II, which is Nérine's act, will clarify that the plot experiment is linked to the intertext of Molière's Saanarelle. the one-act form— farce— that, as seen depends on sustained plotting for its effectiveness. The last two scene of Act I turn ustoward Nérine (and Lise) for a preview of what is to come.
Lise, who has warned Nerine at the beginning of her "trial" that Sans-Soucy had "jazé," left alone with her
(scene xiii, p. 379), warns her again: "II a la langue, & ne peut la tenir." Nérine calls him in (scene xiv) and forgetting gratitude owed him administers a therapeutic slap of her own, for the malice to come, one might say. She is cheered on by Lise who clamoring to hit him herself would, in effect, stone him for slander (which he really has not committed). "Tu pourras un jour contenter ton désir," Nérine promises in the act's last line, thereby closing it with a pact that promises to be dangerous for Sturgon in the
153 successful pursuit of his prosecution, and is an embodiment of his fears. But paradoxically, it also sets, along with Nérine's slap to Sans-Soucy, a first bit of evidence in his final defense.
ACT II
The heart of Act II is Nérine's confession to Lise (scene v), dividing its eight scenes into two halves, that she has been feigning with Damis in order to make Sturgon jealous. This confession, which brings with it the information that Damis has been acting according to his own scheme, of being near Jacinte, with whom he has fallen in love, acts as a veritable "coup de théâtre," for those spectators who have been caught up in the development through Act I of Sturgon's clinical delusion, spilling over into Act II (scenes i-ii) with his feverish solicitation of
Cloëstan's aid, replaying of the dumbshow of Sans-Soucy's testimony yet again (with the sole gain of warranting the valet another slap from Cloestan, scene iii). Nérine's confession refocuses Sturgon's affliction, in an unexpected way, when one listens carefully to Nérine in her actions before and after it and considers the way in which the farcical intertext of Saanarelle has been brought to bear on her character in action, according to Hauteroche's adaptation of it.
154 Sturgon's enlistment of Cloestan to the cause goes so far as to imagine Nérine's consignment to the Madelonettes, the convent where wayward women were led to penitence.
Cloestan at first dismisses Sturgon's case, given his distraught appearance, as imaginings (scene i, p. 386).
Sans-Soucy's stuttering, about "un blondin qui lui fait les yeux doux" (scene iii, p. 389), despite the slap administered to him (or indeed the sign of it), creates a doubt in Cloëstan's mind. He is, however, totally disarmed by Nérine, when he confronts her directly— "votre procédé... déplaît & l'irrite" (scene iv, p. 391). Confident of her power over him, and of herself— "Tout franc sur mon honneur je fais ce qu'il me plaît/Je m'en trouve fort bien, & n'en veux point démordre" (p. 393)— she threatens to expose her brother's laison with the same Lucrèce to his imperious wife, herself inclined to jealousy. Along with Nérine's tough stubbornness ("Je n'en veux pas démordre."), special attention should be paid to her response to Cloëstan's defense of Lucrèce. More articulate than the nervous
Sturgon in the same situation (I, ii), Cloëstan gives her qualities: "Ah, ma Soeur, cette Dame est Dame de mérite,/Et sur sa probité vous êtes mal instruite./Qui vous dit cela" (p. 394). Nérine refuses to name her sources, when asked after a first "Gens qui le savent bien," but adds the name of Dame Clémence, who has been serving as entremetteuse. Lise, to Nérine's surprise, jumps into the conversation with
155 the name Damis. She obviously intends to spare Nerine the embarrassment of disclosure she does not wish to make (and perhaps herself from exposure as the source). The two women then play a brillant improvisation, with Nérine's denials countered in a way to point up their fiction by Lise's inventions of a new Damis, "savant & grand magicien," reason enough for Nérine's private conversations with him. The spiel is kept going long enough that Cloëstan is brought round, as they want: "Ma soeur, ne craignez rien, je suis un homme discret" (p. 396). The last word in the scene is his "parole" on this self-interested agreement.
After clarification that Lise's "folie" has been invented to protect and cover Nérine's "honneur choqué,"
Nérine opens up to confidentiality with the "suivante" she had at first mistrusted (since she had come from Sturgon's service to hers). Her tone is jarring, to say the least. "Cinquante ans avec vingt ne conviennent pas fort," she begins (p. 401), and claims that she could have lived with the fact, given the advantages economically, had it not been compounded by the "commerce secret" with Lucrèce. Lise pretends to be given this news for the first time (which "clears" her as Nérine's original informant). And even in this new-found intimacy Nérine refuses to divulge the name of source; "c'est une confidence," is all she will say.
Lucrèce is at least thirty, therefore not young, Nérine comments (ironically to the confidante who is the same age),
156 and has duped with Dame Clémence's help both men into
ignorance of the other's existence in Lucrèce's society.
What Nérine does know, the insult added to an injured vanity, is that this commerce is costing money (but unlike
Madame Joudain she has no specific instance or precise amount to cite, it would seem): "Mais je sais pour certain qu'il en coûte à tous deux." This certainly is the goad to
Nérine's "Je veux me venger," and the details of her ruse, which goes beyond the ploy of jealousy as a means of regaining her husband, just as her very real honnêteté has kept her short of real adultery. It is vengeance that she is seeking, to make Sturgon suffer is the goal that she confides: "Tous mon dessein ne va qu'à le rendre jaloux,/Et faire, s'il se peut, qu'il connoisse en lui-même/Que l'infidélité cause une peine extrême,/Qu'il me blâme en secret, & que par ce moyen,/En m'imputant un crime, il ressente le sien" (pp. 403-4). We have seen in Act l-Act II, i-ii how efficiently Nérine's ruse has worked, and its success works against her, since it has driven Sturgon beyond the point of being able to learn any lesson at all.
It may take a miracle, we may well by now feel, to bring
Sturgon back, or the simple touch of human kindness that at this point doesn't seem within Nérine's character. The Saanarelle intertext clarifies what is dramatically evident at the moment of Nérine's confession. The cascade of imbroglios in Molière's farce involves Sganarelle and his
157 wife, and the couple Célie-Lélie, of whom they are both jealous, involving husband and wife equally in "apparences trompeuses," blindly deluding them to the point that a third party (the kindly widow who is the "suivante") is needed to issue and effect a call to order. What Nérine does not see in her anger is that she is exactly repeating in her overriding desire for vengeance the exact fault that she blames in her husband. She will not allow him his Lucrèce, without suspicion based on circumstantial evidence, any more than he will her Damis, and she, too, must speak her virtue, expose thereby her antagonist, impose her justice and her punishment. And she, too, is finally driven by money, the diabolical bookkeeping to which she and Lise return in the second part of II, v. The substitution of Lise, by
Hauteroche, for the kindly figure Molière chose as agent of order, is also revealing. Lise, like Nérine, will finally be too compromised by the plot to fulfill this function in Les Apparences trompeuses. At this point it is clear that
Lise and Sans-Soucy, as confidants are analogous figures, whose dramatic function would seem to owe something to the Racinian use of them as double-agents.^* Lise, wittingly, and Sans-Soucy witlessly and by necessity are this. Nérine, then, suffers in our eyes in her use— and misuse of Lise, as we have felt Sturgon to do in the rapprochement made between his actions and motives and his valet's. The specialist in confidants that Hauteroche becomes has led him to some
158 special understanding of the relationship master-man on both sides.
What is clear is that Sturgon's supposed paranoia has some basis in fact, we see, by the end of Act II. Damis, seemingly compromised, although he to this point has done nothing but act the perfect gentleman in public, is in fact included in Nérine's scenario. But it is unclear how much he has been let into its design and goal. He may be ignorant of both. What Nérine does inform Lise is that he has known better than to pursue any "fleurettes" with her.
In private, too, then, it would seem he has remained the perfect gentleman. This has been assured, Nerine assures, in her turn, by Damis's true love for Jacinte, and Jacinte's
"intelligence." Nérine is clear too about Sturgon's opposition, for economic reasons, that would keep Jacinte in the convent. "Mais mon Epoux, je crois, n'en a pas grande envie./Il tâche à la cloistrer, afin d'avoir son bien" (p. 406). With this established, both turn back to Damis. Lise now feels uneasy about her invention of a "Damis mage," since in some way it might provide an obstacle to his happy union with Jacinte, and Nérine promises to explain it all to her brother. It is more kindness than she shows her husband, since it seems not to have occurred to her that a simple explanation of what she has revealed to him, might be a recourse. And in the clarification with Cloëstan, which will take place between Act II and Act III, she will become
159 a party to a newly cruel humiliation of Sturgon inflicted by her brother.
Before that culminating humiliation, however, Sturgon reappears (scene vi) for a replay of I, vi, with Lise, whom we see smiling ("en souriant,” p. 410) after humoring him a bit (”en faisant un peu la doucereuse”). ”0ù va-t-elle? où va-t-elle, où va-t-elle?” he assails her frantically on entering, and pursues with the same manic urgency through the long tease of the scene. The vital question is "De quoi parliez-vous?" The frustrating answers are the same (I, ii)— ”de rien,” so many slaps, echoing those Sturgon has administered himself to Sans-Soucy and for Lise substituting for those she has been promised for him. It is definitely, doubly so, a Sturgon— Sans-Soucy that we see center stage at the end of Act II. Sturgon has no more than a few moment's monologue, in the street where he once again has fled for air, when he sees an unknown man approaching. This turns out to be Blesois ("Suis-je du bois,” we recall Sturgon's pathetic question was to Nerine), a kind of "masked avenger” that Nérine could not have contrived in her scheme and that Damis ironically has. Blesois is a drunken servant who replays the part of Licaste in L'Amant. He is delivering a note for Nérine, with the specific instructions not to give it to the husband. In his fog he sees Sturgon, as the audience has been brought to do, as a servant rather than the husband, and chatters on impertinently while Sturgon
160 reads the "poulet" (which really is scarcely that since
Damis only pledges his obedience to Nérine's wishes).^ But it does give him to read the characterization of him that doubles with Blesois' impertinent one of the "the husband":
"Je m'inquiète fort peu de la bizarrerie de Monsieur votre Epoux" (p. 417). Pushed beyond endurance by this written proof of his case, Sturgon glows with the rôle of
"fantasque, fou" Blesois gives him in a final long tirade (17 w . ), broken only by the sight of a returning Sans-
Soucy. "Je le veux adoucir," Sturgon says to himself. "Feignons: sur mon chagrin il faut que je me dompte," as he crumples up Damis's letter for future use. "S'abêtir,"
Pascal advises, in another context of "chagrin," and make as though you believe, in the ritual motions of belief.
After turning the only bit of farce in the play,
Blesois's mistake, to sinister effect, Hauteroche ends (scene viii) with a fine moment, whatever its delusion on the promise that Sturgon makes finally to Sans-Soucy that he will aid the valet to avenge himself for Lise's slap, which Sans-Soucy regrets and yet feels more than any other.
Underneath Sturgon's ruse, and the exact parallel of his promise to Sans-Soucy with that Nerine made to Lise, we see in Sturgon newly humiliated a common humanity with Sans- Soucy, felt in the need imposed by alienation. The moment comes in an exchange of lies, in response to Cloëstan's slapping of Sans-Soucy. "STURGON: Ah! c'est mal en user,
161 il a tort, je l'avoue. SANS-SOUCY: C'est pour vous trop aimer, que je suis souffleté;/Mais, motus, je sçaurai
chercher la vérité. STURGON: Il faut un peu souffrir pour un Maître qu'on aime." In the Paris street. King Sturgon has found his fool. And in Act III he will be forunate enough to find his way beyond.
ACT III
Act III really belongs to Damis and Jacinte. It is their union and reintegration into society that offers the context for the dénouement's expanded sense and its focus in Sturgon's final transformation from the alienation focused at the ends of Acts I and II to the intergrated human being obeying "raison et honneur" we see before us in the last scene of Act III (viii). Like other playwrights before him, Hauteroche has to deal with the problem of the convincingness ("vraisemblance") of a rapid conversion in dénouement— Sturgon's action and his crowning of it with symbolic language: "Puis qu'en bonne amitié la raison nous rassemble,/Pour finir la journée, il faut souper ensemble." Hauteroche prepares it in two ways. First, while repeating the pattern of Sturgon's slides into the misère of delusion, especially in III, vii, another series of events occur that change the height of the "grandeur" from which he falls. Chief among these, and the second preparation for the
162 dénouement, is the restoration of Jacinte to the world and the new order that she gives to it.
Sans-Soucy links Acts II and III. Encouraged by his moment of shared confidence with Sturgon, he takes the matter of Lise into his own hands (III, i), and sets to declaring his love for her. Lise replays (III, ii) Nérine's
I, xii scene with Sturgon, less successfully with this particular partner who confronts her differently— "Pourquoi dissimuler & me faire la fine?"— when she has done her best at impersonating her mistress. "Parle-moi d'autre chose, ou, me laisse en repos" (p. 425) is her answer and tack for changing the subject to Damis and Nérine. But she only succeeds in whetting Sans-Soucy's appetite, as does the thought of what they do together, when he gives voice to his imaginings. "Je t'aime," he lunges from fantasy to speech, imagining Lise as mother of "un petit Sans-Soucy." Her side-stepping brings a second accusation of acting: "Tu fais bien la sucrée/Hé, je ne te crois pas Fille si resserée..." that topples him over into frank "goguenardise": "Que fait-on, quand on veut rendre une fille mère," he inquires with a leer, to which the "fille" of thirty to his amusement professes total ignorance. Sans-
Soucy, who says he has seen up her skirt, offers to teach her, and the scene ends in blows. Sans-Soucy, irretrievably in the "ordre des corps" with its "misère," can find no place in a new order, despite one
163 more— and better moment. Otherwise, it might seem that the entire scene serves only as a foil for Damis, who happens onto the end of it, and warns Sans-Soucy away from returning
Lise's blows with a mini-sermon on chivalry and what it means to suffer the unrequited love of one's lady. Damis is there, then, downstage, to witness the "coup de théâtre" of
III, iv: the arrival upstage of Sturgon with Jacinte, liberated from her convent during the interval between the acts and the time it has taken Sans-Soucy to play his big scene. In the spring-like éclat of beauty that her name suggests, she is the cynosure of all eyes, spectators' as well as characters', beginning with Damis, transfixed by his vision incarnate, and continuing with each of the others who repeat and renforce the surprise with their immediate comments and inquiries about her story. If Damis's chivalry would seem to have earned him this gift, freely given to him in the "ordre des esprits," it may at first seem to spectators that Sturgon's action takes him even further from
Sans-Soucy into the "ordre de la charité." But this placement is quickly revised by the first exchanges of brother and sister, yet out of Damis' hearing. "Voilà, ma chère soeur,/Ce que je veux de vous,"
Sturgon begins, obviously repeating what he has already told Jacinte en route from the convent. Significantly, before she hears the repetition (and the audience hears Sturgon's reasons for the first time) she is heard to answer him:
164 "Volontiers, de grand coeur," attesting to her generosity. Sturgon has fetched her from the convent to be his new, sure spy on his wife, and her trysts with Damis, and promises her a husband if she is successful in purveying sure evidence.
One misuse of her has followed another, we may conclude, and with that conclusion withdraw any doubt that Sturgon's big lie to Lise in Act I was just that (technically, though with some casuistry, he is doing what he said he would). We have no doubt either that Sturgon is still now possessed by his demon. His first responses to Damis, who turns to the pair, that have passed him on their majestic progress downstage, once he has found his tongue, confirm the point. For the first, Damis speaks for himself, rather than as an exemplary rôle, to inquire directly about the nature of his fault in
Sturgon's eyes— "J'obéis à Madame," he ventures according to his principles of chivalry, and is answered by the possessor of Sturgon— "Et vous n'obéissez que trop bien à ma Femme," at the beginning of an insulting and dismissive speech ending only with the new awareness that Nérine is once again missing. Lise is dispatched to fetch her from Cloëstan's. While she does so, Sturgon dismisses Damis, only to be surprised by the appearance of Cloëstan in place of his wife. This time before, during, and after Cloëstan's appearance, Jacinte takes a hand in directing Sturgon. Initially (scene vi) she silences him— "Voici votre
Beaufrere,/Quittez tous vos discours, cessez votre
165 entretien" (p. 433). But Sturgon is also protected by his fool, Sans-Soucy, who enters (scene vi) for the last time, into a place ritually reserved for Sturgon. On catching sight of Sans-Soucy, Cloëstan moves immediately to give him a last, gratuitous slap. Sturgon, who has gone through the ritual of "s'abêtir" with Sans-
Soucy reacts differently to his brutalization and evident tears. He is not one with Cloëstan any longer. "Quel diable vous transporte?" he asks his brother-in-law pointedly, "Pourquoi battre les gens qui ne vous disent mot"
(pp. 434-35). Cloëstan makes no answer, taking his privilege as self-evident, and menaces Sans-Soucy with another blow when he provides Sturgon with the answer to the question asked. Acting as a kind of exorcist, or "operateur" with the latest prescription of a cure for an illness, thus aiding the passage already seen of Sturgon's projection of his own demon onto Cloëstan, Sans-Soucy offers the only explanation he is capable of giving from sheer experience in the "ordre des corps": "C'est sans doute l'effet de quelque vertigo./Monsieur, fuyez de lui, si vous m'en voulez croire;/Dans sa fougue il pourroit vous briser la mâchoire;/Les gens à vertigots sont par-fois furieux."
These words, that accompany Jacinte's wise advice not to speak (Anselme's unheeded advice to himself for characters like Cloëstan in L'Amant), bring Sturgon to a new but still obscure consciousness of what it means to be mad. He does
166 not yet recognize himself fully in Cloëstan's mirror, but he senses the wrongness, and the danger of the image— moving
warily around his brother-in-law, looking at him from the distance of real appraisal. Sans-Soucy exits, as though a martyr to the principle voiced in Act II's conclusion: "II
faut souffrir un peu pour un maître qu'on aime." Jacinte,
from what we have heard, is willing to be another martyr,
and her consoling presence remains for Sturgon throughout the new épreuve culminating them all in a remarkable scene
(III, vii), from which she will guide Sturgon away.
Cloëstan's brutal humiliation of Sturgon, obviously a line worked out with Nérine between the acts, has the value of shock treatment used in desperation (and exasperation).
The scene begins with a tone of sweet reason, to Cloëstan's ears, the attempt to talk Sturgon around to the same kind of accommodation with the truth that he himself has made when confronted by Nérine. One last time, to Cloëstan's face as
Sturgon's idea of honor demands, he refuses even under this direct pressure to compromise by assuming the rôle of camplaisant husband. The "homme qui ne flatte point," approaching to Molière's Alceste nearer than Hauteroche's Géraste ever did, denounces this rôle in Cloëstan, "cocu volontaire"— "Si vous n'êtes cocu, vous méritez de l'être," he counters, and into the bargain would appoint him "syndic des cocus." And he is clearer on Nérine; it is simple, to him, as it was initially to Cloëstan. "J'en demeure
167 d'accord, mais elle doit sçavoir/Que je prétends aussi qu'on fasse son devoir."
It is at this point that Cloëstan delivers his "coup de grâce," the very opposite of the kind of grace that will triumph a scene later. It comes in two installments tactically deployed. First he does Sturgon's portrait to his face.
Être laid & gouteux, avoir cinquante années. De plus avoir des dens à demi surannées. Méchant air, l'abord brusque, & aspect rebutant: Un Époux tel que vous n'est pas fort ragoûtant (p. 439) Not a grimace ruffles the face of the man looking at this portrait with a steady gaze and answering to the prosecutor's discomfort only "Après." (not even a question; one hears Anselme's stolid "Je suis ce que je suis, passons" from Act I of L 'Amant1. Going one step farther, Cloëstan plays his trump: "... Je n'ignore pas/Que certaine Lucrèce a pour vous des appas,/Qu'elle aime votre argent, et non votre personne/Qu'elle sert à plusieurs, ... (p. 442). Only silence responds to this last stone cast. Sturgon's gaze has been caught elsewhere than in this rectifying mirror. Cloëstan is abruptly tuned out, and turned away from, to his final frustration. Throughout the rest of the scene he makes aggressive and futile attempts to finish his
"conversation/réquisitoire" by regaining Sturgon's attention.
168 Sturgon's end of the scene, which began with an immediately recognizable profile of honor, according to his lights, ends in ambiguity. His eye has been caught by Damis and Jacinte, who have come naturally together and are talking to each other at one side of the centrally staged interrogation by Cloëstan. Catching sight of them, it seems from his angry accusatory words that Cloëstan's "coup de grâce" may have worked in the same manner as Marine's ruse did, that Sturgon has been cast into a new episode of his madness. As his gaze has settled on the happy couple, he sees Nérine and Damis, denounced now as "la peste des familles," and hears Nérine in the few words Jacinte utters- -"J'ignore..."— displacing onto the mistaken image his
"chère soeur" casts in the mirror of his fantasy the kind of brutal verbal response he has made to Nérine: "Quant à vous, je vois bien/Qu'en sortant du Couvent vous n'ignorez rien." Struck first by Cloëstan's inclusion of him precisely as the key term in his alleged diabolical bookkeeping and and declaration of its failure (that he has not gotten the proper return on his investment), then struck again by the obscure consciousness of another failure in calculations— that he has been the go-between for Damis and Jacinte, there is a case for a breakdown. Visually, on stage, Sturgon is assailed on both sides, by his demons in the transposition of the young lovers standing before him and by Cloëstan, who grasps his arm on the other side,
169 finally to call him to attention. He curses Cloëstan, "Les
démons te confondent" (p. 444); Cloëstan recoils,
loosening his grip; and Jacinte moving to Sturgon's side
replaces it with her touch and the reassuring "... n'apprehenez rien." This time projecting his demon has been
assisted by the exorcist, and it is with Jacinte that
Sturgon would remain, at the close of the scene. But he is not allowed this pause, another flight to the street, before
the dénouement is upon him. He responds yet in character
when he first sees Cloëstan's wife (now given the promising
name of Floride, suggestive of an appropriate setting for
flowers to grow in), since her imperious reputation precedes
her; she threatens to be another installment of what has just been heard from her husband; and finally, she swells
the court before which he must answer for his faults to
three judges (or the full complement of the sovereign courts of the time). It is perhaps with more reason than unreason that he wishes the scene to the devil: "C'est le diable qui vient augmenter mon souci," he mutters with a final bit of
intensification before the ordeal to come of this final call to order.
The passage into madness, and the being led in halluciation away from it, may equally well be read and seen as the mysterious passage of grace. Thoroughly humbled, Sturgon is in a state of grace, in which he remains steadfastly attentive to the best he can see, reason and
170 honor. Since grace comes as a free gift, not earned as payment for good works done, and since it is only God that sees into men's hearts, the love Sturgon expresses for Jacinte— and that she feels in return of her own— overrides his misuse of the convent and of her. Jacinte is the vessel of God's grace, again mysteriously not there for the Old Man
Sans-Soucy, who remains with the bitter memory of his Lise, despite the acts of self-sacrifice shown to Sturgon."* Lise remains the emblem of the ‘'chimères” of this world, and it is in that way that her envoy, falling far short of what may be represented by III, vii, is a last "rire jaune”— instance of "les apparences trompeuses.” Sturgon can then face his judicial panel blessed by the presence of a fourth figure for whom all three judges have at one time or another declare their own love in the person of Jacinte.
The dénouement which could threaten to be anticlimatic and an "invraisemblable” final chorus of sweet reason transcends the problems by being a representation of the "ordre of charity,” begun unexpectedly, at least in presupposed character, by Floride, who is the agent of order, from the moment that she turns the key that will keep
Sturgon "dans sa chambre.” At first she addresses a compliment to Sturgon, on what kind of husband he is; "Moi?,” he says with a start, and receiving a "oui,” that is free from irony and sarcasm. Sturgon responds, as the stage direction with tantalizing imprecision notes: "après avoir
171 un peu rêvé" (p. 447). His immediate response, still
fearful of what is to come, is "Serviteur, car il faut que
je sorte." It is with a smile that Floride holds up the key that keeps him in this "chambre," for his "salut" but where he is indeed not alone. And when he turns to face the entire cast, the first thing that he hears is the derisive laughter of "ridicule" coming from Cloëstan and Damis, exactly what he most fears. It is again Floride, who cuts through the men's explanations of this useless laughter with a direction that will indicate the immediate gestures and tone of her conversation with Sturgon, an example to the others in attendance, especially Nérine, who can see a different but similar temperament in the process of managing as she at heart has wanted to and the means to be used.
Floride begins with "il faut cesser de rire, & parler tout de bon" (p. 448). This sweet sound draws an immediate sigh of relief and accommodation from Sturgon, who settles in in earnest: "Ah, de vous écouter j'aurai la patience." For the first time in the play, the word "patience" has its real meaning and not its opposite in Sturgon's use of it.
Floride does indeed replay Cloëstan's case, but she does so with kindness that he does not know. "C'est à vous d'y songer, je parle franchement," she pauses to qualify (p. 449). And there is a new pause from Sturgon, which Floride takes advantage of once again, to lead him to the matter of Lucrèce, where she must stop with Sturgon's: "Oh, je ne
172 suis plus d'âge à prendre des leçons/J'y vais quand il plaît" (p. 451), the meaning of which is far from simple, although simplicity may be its import— along the line of "at my age she can't teach me anything I care to learn; I just call in for some 'divertissement'."
It is time for Nérine to speak for herself, as she begins to do, and as Sturgon began the scene doing, in an angry tone she has become accustomed to use. "II faut que je m'explique,/... Sans perdre un seul moment me séparer de lui. " It is a false start or one that will need modulation in its continuation, and Floride speaks that guidance to Nérine, who tones down, repeating the facts she had given to
Lise in Act II. That she "chérit l'honneur," therefore nothing really has happened with Damis, she affirms, then gives the second part of her proof— that Damis and Jacinte are in love. Eyes turn once more to Jacinte, first of all Sturgon's, who asks the surprised question: "Quoi, vous aimez ma Soeur," without adding anything the old Sturgon would to it. And Damis's response is heard, really, on its own terms: "Je soupire pour elle,/Et je brûle. Monsieur, de me voir son Époux." Jacinte has been promised her reward, in the old bargain by Sturgon, and will receive it now for herself if Sturgon may be supposed to show in his gaze the conviction of a new truth (he is blessedly never made to face the old one that Arnolphe must face).
173 Encouraged by his gaze at Jacinte perhaps, if we may at
Hauteroche's invitation "produce" the play, Nérine confesses that vengeance was her plan, and putting this in a simple narrative of her distress, for the first time tells Sturgon the simple truth— met by another pause, while Sturgon stands transfixed "regardant sa femme," and another proding from Floride: "A ces discours que pouvez-vous répondre?" She might well ask, since the sounds coming from Sturgon, wrapt in his wife, are noted as "Houf, houf," suspiciously similar to the traditionally played "Ouf," that humiliatingly lets the final wind out of Arnolphe in the dénouement of L'École des femmes. But Sturgon is spared humiliation by a transcendent speech, denied to Arnolphe, ending in a bear- hug of an embrace for Nérine that she accepts and is moved by (according to Cloëstan). We owe Sturgon a hearing of his full response to Nérine, through Floride's able direction: Chercher à m'excuser c'est vouloir me confondre. J'ai tort, je le confesse. Ah, Mignonne, pardon Bon, devois-je trahir cet aimable Bouchon, Non, dans mon procédé Je ne suis qu'un infâme. Je ne mérite pas une si belle femme... . Il la rebaisse. (p. 452)
Nérine accepts his promise not to see Lucrèce again— there is now no need or reason not to. And Sturgon gives Jacinte to Damis, with whom she belongs. Beyond his proclamation of the victory of "amitié et raison," (p. 454) which I quoted earlier as the symbolic accomplishment of the order of dénouement, and prior to the first invitation to a new life begun on this "jour avec joie" (to which even Lise is
174 invited), the real triumph is proclaimed in Sturgon's regard directed toward Jacinte and Damis— "Le Couvent & le monde ont grand intelligence" (p. 453).
* * * *
À "sujet simple," Hauteroche remarked in his "Avis." Grace may be that, if it is taken out of the hands of disputatious theologians. It may be as simple as a human touch, or a voice, conveying tenderness and concern, and however difficult it may seem, to be found simply in the embrace of a sister, or a spouse. Staging grace, and the thought on religion and the stage that preceded it, and which the playwright invites his readers to continue after it, derives from a humanist's optimism, all of a piece with the three earlier plays of Hauteroche's "beginnings" with their exploratory questions of comic blindness and the degree to which comic art can be said to offer instruction as an "école du rire." Hauteroche surely had no Jansenist sympathies. Acting in Britannicus. and most probably reading Pascal's
Pensées that also appeared in the first, Port-Royal edition in the period that separates Les Apparences trompeuses from Le Souper mal-apprêté, were factors in the genesis of Hauteroche's fourth play, which modified but complemented his study of Saanarelle. The playwright's use of that play, reflects a refusal to dramatize in a full "comédie humaine" the restrictive vision of man's potency in the world through
175 the aesthetics of farce. By the same token, however moving
it may have been to have discovered Racine's "misère de
l'homme sans Dieu" in acting in Britannicus. or in reading
Pascal's powerful eloquence, these two complementary "visions du monde" may well have seemed incomplete to
Hauteroche, and certainly not his.
In thinking about the relationship of religion and the stage, and what the problems are, Hauteroche may have been guided by the most special event in the same period within
the history of the theatre— the final triumphant staging of
Le Tartuffe. And thinking his way through the polemics that
had kept it from the stage (and its unfortunate "libertin"
sibling, Pom Juan, still not available in printed form, but
surely known to Hauteroche), he may have recalled a very
striking formulation of the nature of religion in the "Lettre sur l'Imposteur," less well known and remembered
than the letter's formulation of "ridicule." Religion there, with Molière's blessing, is taken to be the
"perfectionnement de la raison."^° This definition, to the orthodox believer tending to a legitimate doubt on
fanaticism and hypocrisy that Hauteroche seems to have been, would seem a good beginning but once again incomplete, needing precisely the positioning of a crowning grace. The bleak year of plays that was 1668 in Molière's career— George Dandin. L'Avare. L'Amphitryon may have offered
176 Hauteroche some corroboration in his thought about the limits of satire and farce.
As a playwright, Hauteroche once more is seen to have begun with and then departed from the model of Molière, in playcraft as well as in thought. In the rewriting of L'Amant oui ne flatte point that was done, as I have shown in running commentary on it, Hauteroche may well have learned from Saanarelle the experimental line that he takes, the sustained plot and in short the enlargement of the one- act aesthetics he had mastered to three-act expansion of the same model. Added confidence in his own art, from the success of Crispin médecin, may alone have sufficed to point the way.
At the very least. Les Apparences trompeuses. as rewriting of L^Amant qui ne flatte point, shows as a part of
Hauteroche's apprenticeship as playwright the humanist's attachment to revision and the playwright's to renewal through experimentation, founding and grounding experimentation— within limits of the aesthetics to which he remained committed— at later periods of his career as a dramatist— quite separately, as he may have wanted to prove to himself at first in his fourth play, from the production of the supplier of crowd-pleasing comedies for the Hotel de Bourgogne.
177 MOTES TO CHAPTER 2
The Parfaicts (X, p. 407) describe Le Souper mal apprêté as "sans intrigue." It is difficult to understand how that could be.
The Mémoire de Mahelot lists the only stage requirements needed as being "une escritoire et des papiers," these belonging to the Sergent (p. 138).
Lancaster quite rightly remarked (III=, p. 773) that this comic posturing, reminiscent of Molière's Mascarille hardly makes Philipin "an opponent of the ancien régime" or an "ancestor of Figaro."
On the play see Lancaster (III', p. 762 ff), Curtis (1971), pp. 204-31.
It may have been the details of this portrait that triggered insistence on the play's lack of "expressions basses," defensively in the "Avis." There is no known objection to this first instance of the "underground" of adventurers/criminals in Hauteroche's theatre.
The Traiteur's expression, and the rhyme, are shared by Anselme in his big monologue in L'Amant qui ne flatte point. The co-incidence should signal the quality of Anselme's introspection as a kind of mental bookkeeping.
"LISETTE: Vous, si vous connoissez des maris loups-garous,/Envoyez-les au moins à l'école chez nous."
®- With nothing to react against in critical reception of Le souper mal-apprêté. Hauteroche returns to defense of his five-act L'Amant qui ne flatte point, which he insists contains "d'assez beaux vers."
® For Les Coteaux, see Lancaster (III', pp. 668-70). Adam (IV, p. 416) alludes to a "rapport précis," which would seem to refer to the brother's intervention in scene xix.
Jouhanny ed. (I, p. 1750, note 352).
178 The problems are set by Act V of Corneille's Polyeucte. The possibility is explored dramatically by Rotrou in the "actor's saint": Saint-Genest. comédien païen (1648) .
See "Introduction," p. 27. On Hauteroche's acting the rôle of Narcisse, see Introduction, pp. 23-24. The lie, referred to, occurs at the end of Act IV.
The character of Sans-Soucy is adapted with fine comic effect in the rôle of the Cocher who gives the title to Hauteroche's Le Cocher (1684).
The informant's name is never revealed. One may wonder whether it could be the Dame Clémence Nérine names to fortify her case with Cloëstan. In that "louche" connection there is even more of a case against her. On the other hand her refusal to divulge, justifying the confidence, may simply be another indicator of her fundamental honnêteté.
Besides the obvious sense of word here I mean to evoke also the ambiguity that their understanding and encouragement may have for the hero/heroine in Racine's world as a source potentially either for good or evil, for or against the hearer of the echoing advice. The archetype is OEnone (Phèdre).
The servant Blesois here accomplishes what the jeune premier/blondin forces Arnolphe to do in the series of imbroglios in which he constitutes him— and with his knowledge the truchement in his own "cuckoldry."
On the other hand, the circumstances of Sans- Soucy's disappearance from the play, after III, vi, unusal in an aesthetics that must account for everything, may suggest that he too may be touched by grace, to the extent that he has at least gotten away from the particular "lions' den" he is in.
The question of Hauteroche's religion has not been even raised by previous commentators. My statement takes into account, in addition to the comic vision that unites the first four plays, and Hauteroche's professional ensconcement in this world (of actors), the dedication to business that I have supposed to have begun also precisely during this period, ca. 1670 (See Introduction, p. 51).
179 For the context, and commentary of it, see W.G. Moore (1966), p. 138: "II est certain que la religion n'est que la perfection de la raison, du moins pour la morale... enfin que la religion n'est qu'une raison plus parfaite," is the text.
The couple Angélique-Dandin is another intertext of interest for Nérine-Sturgon, although the misalliance that is central to the former plays no part in the latter's relationship. L'Avare. on the other hand, may have set Hauteroche's fixation with money that predominates in his first two plays, but seems less obtruding thereafter in their world.
180 PART II
THE CRISPIN SEQUENCE (1670-1675)
The stock character Crispin had a rich stage life of sixty years as one of the most popular and important figures
of dramatic comedy from the mid-seventeenth century to the
early eighteenth century. In 1654, Paul Scarron (1610?-
1660) wrote L'Ecolier de Salamanque ou les généreux ennemis.
tragédie-comédie. five acts in verse, in which he introduced
the famous character. He drew the subject matter of his play from the Spanish playwright Francisco de Rojas
Zorrilla's Obliaados v ofendidos (1641). The valet's name
was Crispinillo; Scarron "... gallicise le nom du valet,
mais laisse intacts let traits de son caractère" (Curtis, p. 80). This play would open the door for a man soon to become a legend.
Although he did not perform in Scarron's play, Raymond Poisson (1633-1690) "... en tant qu'acteur, a réussi à faire de Crispin un personnage populaire reconnaissable, doué de certains traits qui le différencient des autres valets, et qu'en tant qu'auteur il a contribué à populariser un personnage capable de subir tous les procédés de transformisme. Le fait que les auteurs comiques
181 contemporains de Poisson [comme Hauteroche] se sont hâtés
d'exploiter la vogue de Crispin est dû en grande mesure à
l'image forgée par 1'acteur-auteur" (ibid, p. 83).
There is no doubt, as Curtis maintains and
demonstrates, that Poisson truly popularized the character Crispin. In fact, he was better known to his audience as
Crispin than under his own name. Poisson, who apparently had eyes that resembled those of the late famous twentieth-
century comic actor Marty Feldman, was "... [un] excellent acteur comique, à qui même l'on attribue l'invention du costume de ce personnage..." (Geoffroy, p. 205).
... Il est certain que c'est à ses soins qu'il fut redevable du costume dont la tradition nous le montre encore affublé de nos jours. ... Notre opinion est Poisson n'eut en vue que de se composer un costume de fantaisie, mais original, résutat qu'il atteignit si bien, que la tradition de ce costume s'est maintenue jusqu'à nos jours [Nouvelle biographie générale, p. 572).
Of the forty-five known Crispin plays that were written between 1654 and 1712,^ Hauteroche, with his Crispin médecin (1670), Le Deuil (1672), Crispin musicien (1674), and Les
Nobles de province (1675),^ composed more Crispin plays than any other author. They were written with Poisson in mind, utilizing his physical attributes, and his general comic talents. Only Montfleury with his three plays: Le Comédien-poète (1673), Crispin gentilhomme (1675), and La
Dame médecin (1678), and Poisson himself with Le Zia-zaa (the farce contained in his Baron de Crasse (1662), Le Fou
182 raisonable (1664), and Les Femmes coquettes (1670) come close to matching Hauteroche's production of Crispin plays. Even the renown late seventeenth-yearly eighteenth- century comic writers Regnard and Lesage, capitalized on
"Crispinmania." "... Renard, dans son Légataire universel et ses Folies amoureuses. et Lesage, dans son Crispin rival rde son maître)^ tout en marquant de leur génie le rôle du valet, n'ont fait que reprendre un personnage déjà solidement campé dans leurs prédécesseurs" (Curtis, p.
83)." Although Poisson had died in 1690, Crispin surprisingly continued to live on for another twenty-two years. I say "surprisingly" because Poisson was the embodiment of Crispin, but his son Paul continued the rôle as a family tradition depicting and defining a character so well liked that, despite his creator's death, Crispin refused to die. Curtis, as a dix-seotiemeiste. somewhat bitterly, remarks on the paradox that "... les historiens du théâtre... agissent comme si la vie littéraire de Crispin [a] commencé au début du XVIII® siècle" (ibid). Poisson and Hauteroche maintained "les relations les plus amicales" (ibid, p. 273). Hauteroche provided Poisson with a variety of Crispin rôles in his four plays. In Crispin médecin, the witty valet is the central figure who contributes much to the development and conclusion of the play. Although he is far from brave, he literally risks life and limbs for the union of the lovers. In Le Deuil.
183 Crispin is a subordinate valet, who plays on the superstitions of a gullible household. In this comedy, he follows in the footsteps of his master, acts mostly in a supporting rôle. In Crispin musicien. Crispin, along with the clever maid, is able to resolve the lovers' problems with the cruel father who wants to place his daughters in a convent. In the final play in the sequence. Les Nobles de province. Crispin is given a relatively frightful and violent rôle, which at one point includes belief in his own madness, in grips of which he was responsible for the beating of an innocent man. Despite the variety of personality traits that Crispin rôles takes on, there is a common focus that makes him easily recognizable on the stage— the renown Raymond Poisson himself, who provided the image that the audience had come to expect.
184 HOTES TO THE CRISPIN SEQUENCE (1670-1675)
Gérard Gouvernât (1985, pp. 134-135) provides a comprehensive and chronological listing of Crispin plays starting with Scarron's Écolier de Salamanque (1654) and ending with Marivaux's Le Père prudent et équitable (1712), and Legrand's Les Métamorphoses amoureuses (1712).
See "Introduction: A Man of the Theatre," (p. 36).
See A. Ross Curtis (1972) for the most comprehensive study of the above nine plays. *• Le Légataire universel was first produced in 1708; Les Folies amoureuses was first produced in 1704; Crispin rival de son maître was first produced in 1707. Curtis neglects to mention Lesage's other Crispin work. La Tontine, first produced in 1708. It is evidently the prestige of Lesage that has mistakenly led historians of the theatre to treat the character as an early eighteenth-century type.
185 CHAPTER 3
THREE ACTS AND ONE ACT: CRISPIN MÉDECIN AND T.F. DEUTT.
3.1 CRISPIN MÉDECIN CD "UN NOUVEAU MÉDECIN MALGRÉ LDI"
The Crispin, the new valet in Hauteroche's Crispin médecin came to his plays from a double circumstance of the troupe's composition. De Villiers, who specialized in Philipins and had doubtless played the part in Hauteroche's first two plays, retired in 1670.^ Crispin médecin. a three-acter written in prose, appeared in 1670. This is by far Hauteroche's most popular play with well over eight- hundred performances at the Comédie-Française.= "... Hauteroche, the most notable of the Hôtel de Bourgogne group, ... wrote ... Crispin médecin.... which contains a comic doctor and a valet whose well-meant efforts land him in serious trouble. This innocuous play, in which most of the characters are 'nice people,' was... constantly performed well into the nineteenth century" (Brereton, p.
154). Despite the play's popularity. The Bothers Parfaict are evidently dissatisfied with it: "Quoique cette pièce ait eu beaucoup de succès dans sa nouveauté et se soit conservée au Théâtre, cependant il faut convenir que le
186 comique en est assez bas, l'intrigue extrêmement folle et
que les caractères sont ridicules" (1674, vol. 11, p. 397). One must question this assessment; the plot and characters
are certainly no less ridiculous than those depicted in
other doctor plays. Moreover, it is a comedy: one should expect a bit of craziness and ridiculousness.
Crispin médecin is a tour-de-force rôle for Poisson.
Crispin appears in over half of the scenes, and especially
when dressed as a doctor, he is in command of the stage. The part makes heavy demands on Poisson's verbal and
physical agility and unusual appearance, short though the play may be. Most critics, including myself, believe that
the huge success of the play is due in great part to the so- called "dissection scene" (II, iii). "Ce Crispin étendu sur
une table, prêt à être disséqué, & mourant de peur... a fait toujours rire (LaPorte, pp. 222-223). It is easy to
imagine Poisson, "mourant de peur," eyes bulging, and body
trembling, as the doctor prepares to make the first incision. Moreover, Crispin's "... Araca, lostovi, baritonoval..." rivals the false Latinisms found in Molière's finest doctor comedies.
One of the most rewarding and profitable schemes to which the comic doctor resorted was his display of a medical
187 hocus-pocus of Greek, Latin, Arabic and other "unknown" languages for the purpose of confusing the naive patient.
The custom of using Latin was very common, not only the educated doctor, but even the "physician despite himself" could spout enough Latin to conceal his faults and to extricate himself from difficult situations. Hauteroche attacks doctors as fakes and ignorant men, who disguise their lack of knowledge under a veneer of learned words.
While Crispin is obviously meant to parody the poor preparation of doctors, his situation is not so extreme. An ignorant man pretending to be a physician is not really any more dangerous than the fraudulent doctor with antiquated knowledge trying to cheat people, who are ill, out of their money. Molière, of course, repeatedly made excellent use of the subject matter in his derisive and often bitter attacks on the profession. His broad satire of medicine appears in the comédies : Le Médecin volant (1659), in which Sganarelle poses as his own twin brother, who is a doctor, in order to deceive an overly protective and elderly man jealously guarding his daughter from suitors; L'Amour médecin (1665), in which the ieune-premier Clitandre pretends to be a doctor which affords his mistress and himself the opportunity to communicate under the nose of the watchful father; Dorn Juan ou le festin de pierre (1665), in which Sganarelle dresses as a physician in order to escape his persecutors; Le
188 Médecin malgré lui (1666), in which Sganarelle, a brute and drunken husband, outwitted by his clever wife and forced to take on the rôle of doctor, deceives the old possessive
Géronte and spirits away the young lovers; and Le Malade imaginaire (1673), in which the old hypocondriac Argan puts his health as risk by receiving unnecessary medical treatment by doctors who only look for profit.
There exists a common intrigue to most of Molière's plays that mock the medical profession. A witty and scheming servant plots to help his master win his true love's hand, despite the opposition of an elderly and oppressing father. Sganarelle is usually the stock character that Molière employs. Molière generally incorporates a "real" doctor and a servant, who out of necessity, takes on the rôle of doctor. Hauteroche, it must be admitted, more or less, follows Molière's established technique.
Hauteroche provides little information about the setting of the play; "La scène est à Paris." "The place includes a street before a house and two apartments within it, as shown by the requirements indicated in the Mémoire de Mahelot (p. 137): 'II faut abattre le rideau pour le premier acte. Deux cabinets a costé. Une table, un tapis et un oreiller dessus. Des lestres, des jettons'" (Lancaster, French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Centurv. vol. III=, p. 774). The first apartment,
189 belonging to old Lisidor, I conclude from my reading, must be luxuriously decorated, indicating the wealth accumulated from a long and prosperous life. The other house shows Doctor Mirobolan's surgery, which has an entrance from the outside and a second door leading to the cave. We must also conclude from our reading that there are several tools of the medical professions present, including nails, ropes, a saw, and viols of pills.
ACT I
Lisidor, in his seventies, explains to his valet,
Marin, that he has sent his young son Géralde to Bourges, "... sous prétexte d'étudier encore quelque terns la
Jurisprudence" (i). The old widower is interested in marrying the beautiful Alcine, Doctor Mirobolan's eighteen- year-old daughter. Marin points out that there is over a fifty-year disparity in age between the two, and rightly asks that he reconsider marrying a lady whom he should considered only a child. Moreover, Féliante, Alcine's mother, will surely disapprove of the union. However,
Doctor Mirobolan has already promised Alcine's hand to him. Although we do not meet the elderly Doctor Mirobolan in the opening scene, we realize that he must be a fool for having promised his youthful daughter to an equally old fool, Lisidor. The wisdom of such a doctor is immediately in question. Mirobolan, echoing the Anselme of L'Amant qui
190 ne flatte point and the Sturgon of Les Apparences trompeuses in their confidence of being the head of the household, believes in his unsurpassed control over all situations, indeed in his own infallibility. He unquestioningly thinks that he is the head of the household: "Je suis le maître"
(ii). Whereas, he is actually quite subservient.
Exaggeration, blind to the facts, define in comic discrepancy the doctor. It is clear that Féliante controls what happens under the roof of the Doctor's house. Showing her power and authority, she tells Lisidor: "je vous refuse mon consentement," and adds "... mettez-vous en tête que vous n'aurez jamais ma fille (iii). Of course the reason for which Féliante rejects the relationship is his age, even though he is wealthy and of a high social status. Despite his wife's refutation. Doctor Mirobolan reaffirms, in
Féliante's absence, his promise of Alcine to Lisidor: "Je vous tiendrai parole... laissez-moi faire" (iv). Géralde has given a letter to Crispin and asked him to deliver it to his father. Crispin has, however, lost the letter, which is nothing more than a request for money and clothes. When Crispin first appears, the spectator, who knows that he will eventually appear as a doctor, wonders whether this simpleton can possibly impersonate a doctor.
Lisidor, who is concerned by the letter presented by Crispin, tells him "Ce n'est pas là le stile ni l'écriture
191 de mon Fils" (vi). Crispin, who is illiterate, explains that he had lost the letter and has dictated a new letter to a "Paisan," who transcribed it. He adds that he feared a beating from his master for having lost it. Nonetheless, the message is the same. The stingy Lisidor cannot believe that his son has already spent the money that he had given Géralde some time back.
In a monologue, Crispin reaffirms that he must not explain to Géralde that he lost the letter (vii), but it is necessary to attain money since Géralde is on a spending spree (vii). Although the monologue is quite short, ten lines, it is important. There is only one more monologue in the play, and it belongs to Dorine (II, ii). The fact that two monologues, usually reserved for lovers or tyrannical parents in a tyrade, are given to the valet and the servant demonstrates their ultimate significance to the the development of the noeud and dénouement of the play.
Moreover, the monologue allows Hauteroche to retain the unity of scenes by affording Lisidor and Marin an opportunity to exit, and allowing Crispin and Géralde, in logical transition, to meet and discuss the situation at hand.
Géralde has secretly returned to Paris to continue his suit of Alcine, with whom he has a rendez-vous. Alcine, who is obviously quite upset, explains to him that his father wants to marry her (ix). She adds that her mother, who
192 knows of their love affair, will intervene and not allow the marriage to take place. Like Babet of Le Deuil. who will only appear only two scenes (ii and iii) as a courtesy to the audience,: this is Alcine's only appearance in the play, thus providing a face for the name. This scene also affords the opportunity for Crispin and Alcine's servant Lise to flirt on the side.
ACT II
The second act opens with Doctor Mirobolan eagerly waiting for the cadaver of a hanged man to dissect. He looks forward to the dissection for the sheer pleasure of doing it and for the heightened social prestige it will give him as an outstanding doctor. He asks Dorine to prepare the surgery for the corpse soon to arrive. Dorine, the witty and outspoken servant, seizes the moment to attack the medical profession: "votre science est bien incertaine, & vous y êtes les premiers trompés" (i). Mirobolan daims that medicine is not the problem. Dorine counters: "II faut donc que ce soit la faute des Médecins, puisque ce n'est pas celle de la médecine" (i). To which the Doctor Mirobolan has no reply. Thus, the doctor demonstrates that he is not only incapable of a legitimate practice of medicine but is also unable to carry on an intelligent debate— even with someone of a lower social status.
193 Mirobolan, as he prepares to leave, takes the opportunity to make lusty advances to Dorine: "Si Dorine vouloit faire tout ce que je lui dirois, elle auroit un peu de tendresse pour moi, & certainement elle n'en seroit point fâchée." The doctor eventually leaves the obstinate Dorine, who rejects the advances, alone for the short monologue alluded to earlier. In the scene she professes that men can never be happy with women: "... ces chiens d'hommes ne sçauroient se contenter de leurs femmes" (ii).
Crispin arrives to deliver a letter from Géralde to
Dorine for Alcine (iii). While Crispin and Dorine are talking, Mirobolan appears; this sets up the most famous moment of all of Hauteroche's plays, the so-called
"dissection scene." Crispin, still in his own clothes, gets onto the dissection table in order to hide his presence from
Mirobolan. Doctor Mirobolan approaches the dissection coldly and methodically: [à Dorine] "Va seulement, & m'apporte un paquet de cordes, & des doux que tu trouveras tout proches les Bistouris. Pendant qu'il a ce reste de chaleur, je trouverai plus facilement les vaines lactées, & les reservoirs qui conduisent le chyle au coeur pour la sanguification" (iv). He is so excited fay the prospect of this dissection that he confesses: "Ah! quel plaisir je vais prendre à faire sur son corps une incision cruciale, & à lui ouvrir le ventre depuis le cartilage Xiphoïde jusqu'aux os pubis..." (iv). Although he realizes that "Le
194 coeur lui bat encore," Mirobolan, in extreme ignorance and the delight of having a would-be corpse on which he can perform an autopsy, does not recognize that Crispin is indeed still alive. Crispin is rightly frightened to no end. Dorine desperately tries to find an excuse for Doctor Mirobolan to leave in order to save Crispin from this situation. First of all, Dorine claims that there is a sick and dying man in need of his immediate assistance. Mirobolan coldly replies that "ce ne sera pas ma faute; car s'il doit mourir dans si peu de tems, ma visite ne lui serviroit pas de grande chose" (iv). Dorine then daims, because of the redecoration and rearrangement of Mirobolan's house and surgery that it is necessary to "ôter la liberté d'approprier ce lieu, comme je le voudrois; attendez à demain..." (iv).
À surgeon appears at Mirobolan's; there is, indeed, an actual emergency and the doctor's assistance is needed. At first he refuses: "...saignez-le toujours, je le verrai dans deux heures" (v). The surgeon refuses to bleed the patient because he is sure that he will die if he is bled.
Here Hauteroche is clearly attacking doctors who knowingly betray their patients' trust. Doctor Mirobolan, echoing traditional professional prejudice,* touts his own social status and superiority over surgeons: "Mais je veux qu'il soit saigné. C'est bien à faire aux Chirurgiens à raisonner avec les Médecins." He also refuses to attend to the sick
195 man. The surgeon, honorably, holds his ground and once again refuses to bleed the patient. Mirobolan replies:
"... je le ferai saigner par au autre." The surgeon
implies that he does not want the patient's blood, literally or symbolically, on his hands, and exits. "The medicine Molière [and Hauteroche] knew throughout their life was more authoritarian than empirical; ... it could be formalistic, even ritualistic, to the detriment of a patient's health; and... its orientation was rhetorical rather clinical..."
(Hall, pp. 102-104).
Dorine, having heard the conversation, claims that
Mirobolan's wife has informed her that he would be going to
"Monsieur Le Baron"'s due to the emergency. She also says that, because of the redecoration of the house, she was unable to find all of the tools that he needs to perform the dissection (vi). The doctor, therefore, unable to do dissection, realizes the potential financial and social benefit of helping a baron, and departs immediately, sparing the terrified Crispin.
Crispin has not yet recovered from his trauma when someone else knocks on the door and demands entry. Crispin, who refuses to lie down on the dissecting table ever again, becomes a doctor out of necessity. Dorine simply throws a doctor's robe over him and the transformation is instant. Crispin, who does not want to play the rôle of doctor, certainly prefers it to that of a corpse. Thus, as in many
196 of Molière's medical satires, the servant becomes a doctor by necessity.
A young lady by the name of Lise claims that her
mistress has lost her puppy and has sent her to the doctor's for a remedy. Crispin, in the new rôle of doctor,
prescribes a laxative for the lady's problem: "Prenez des
pillules... les premières venues de chez l'Apothiquaire"
(vii). Crispin, although well paid (un Ecu blanc), is not at all happy in his rôle of doctor and wants to quit. However, Lise is not only the patient that "Doctor
Crispin" has. As soon as she leaves, an elderly man by the name of Grand-Simon, who wants to win the hand of a young and beautiful woman, arrives: "Vous sçaurez que j'aime une fille dans notre Village, or comme il y a un certain drôle qui va quelquefois chez elle, je voudrois bien sçavoir de voir si elle m'aime comme elle dit, & si je l'épouserai; car, à vous dire la vérité; je m'en défie" (viii). Crispin uses the same remedy with the aged lover and once again prescribes pills.
While Lise completely accepts the notion that the pills will help her mistress find the little dog, Grand-Simon is a little more skeptical: "Mais il me semble que les pillules ne sont bonnes que purger les gens, & non pas pour... ." Crispin tells Grand-Simon that: "C'est une science qui vous est inconnue" (viii). Grand-Simon, despite the bizarre prescription, reluctantly takes the pills with him; he is
197 desperate enough to at least try it. He also pays "un Ecu d/or."
It is easy to establish a parallel between these scenes (vii and viii) and the third act, second scene of Le Médecin malgré lui in which Thibaut and his son, Perrin, approach
Sganarelle about Parette's illness. The woman, Thibaut's wife and Perrin's mother, is extremely ill. Sganarelle médecin. unlike Crispin, refuses to help until he is handsomely paid by the son. His prescription will obviously have no more effect than that which Crispin offers to Lise or Grand-Simon.
SGANARELLE Un Remede pour la guerir... Tenez, voila un morceau de fromage, qu'il faut que vous luy fassiez prendre.
PERRIN Du Fromage, Monsieur?
SGANARELLE Ouy, c'est un Fromage préparé, où il entre de l'Or, du Coral, et des Perles, et quantité d'autres choses precieuses.
PERRIN Monsieur, je vous sommes bien obligez: et j'alons ly faire prendre ça tout à l'heure.
SGANARELLE Allez. Si elle meurt, ne manquez pas de la faire enterrer du mieux que vous pourrez (III, ii).
Neither Crispin or Sganarelle believes in the effectiveness of his own prescription and openly admits it to those seeking his assistance. Nevertheless, Lise, Grand-Simon,
Thibaut and Perrin are so desperate that they are willing to
198 try virtually anything that might have even the remotest chance of helping. Clearly the situation is much more precarious in Molière's play; it is a life or death situation. Yet, both scenes demonstrate high levels of comedy.
Hauteroche, although critical of doctors, is equally critical of patients who resort to a physician for situations that do not require the medical assistant.
Frankly, Lise needs a dog-catcher and Grand-Simon needs a psychic. Crispin's fitting prescription of pills, the equalavent of ExLax™, is Hauteroche's not so subtle way of saying that Lise and Grand-Simon are full of shit, and they need to eliminate it. With his impressive costume and supposed erudition, Crispin easily deceived his patients. In a word, more skepticism is needed on the part of the patients; they should use reason and moderation in judging the advice of physicians.
The witty Dorine, who sees the lavish profit that
Crispin has made, demands her share: "Un Ecu d'or, & un Ecu blanc en si peu de tems! Moi qui t'ai fait Médecin, tu devrois m'en donner la moitié" (viii). After all, without her help, he would have never made so much profit.
Unfortunately for Crispin, Doctor Mirobolan returns (ix). Crispin, who does not perform well in the presence of an actual physician, stutters throughout the entire scene:
"La reputation de Monsieur Mirobolan est une reputation
199 qui... dans les choses... fait enfin... que... je n'y manquerai pas" (ix). Mirobolan discusses at length the case of a man with a severe fever, and insists on "Doctor
Crispin"'s opinion. As soon as he begin to speak in Latin, Crispin is at a total loss. Crispin, though awkwardly, tries his best: "Vous n'avez pas besoin de conseil, vous êtes un homme qui. ... oui... car... enfin je ne dis rien" (ix). He continues: "Monsieur, dans ces sortes de maladies, je ne sçai pas si... quand... là-dessus... on... la... des pillules..." (ix). Mirobolan claims that such a prescription would seriously injure the patient, as if he cared. Crispin comes up with the quick and clever reply: "Oh, je ne dis pas cela; je dis... que des pillules que j'ai prises ce matin m'obligent à vous quitter au plutôt" (ix). Thus Crispin makes the narrow escape from which he probably indeed needs to relieve himself.
ACT III
The third act, which "... has various comic situations that are largely episodic..." (Lancaster, ibid. p. 775), quickly advances the intrigue. The main trickster, Crispin, has to continue his rôle as love's messenger. He does not want to return to Doctor Mirobolan's, lest he be recognized and be subjected to physical abuse. Nonetheless, the valet must serve his master. Géralde reads aloud love letter sent to him by Alcine. She is determined to have him for a
200 husband: "... Soyez certain que je n'aurai jamais d'autre mari que vous" (i), and asks him to reply to the letter. Since Crispin is obliged to return to Mirobolan's to deliver the reply, he may as well go in the disguise of a doctor.
He asks Géralde to teach him some Latin. Géralde teaches him to say "Medicus sum." Crispin now believes that he knows how to speak Latin and remarks "C'est une belle chose de sçavoir le Latin" (i ). Crispin, who is not yet in his medical garb, is seen by
Lisidor and Marin, who want to know where Géralde is (ii).
Crispin claims not to know. Lisidor says that people in town have seen him and he does not believe him. He tries to strike Crispin with his cane but misses. In the attempt he falls down and hurts his shoulder. Because he is so old, he has to rely on Marin to help him to get to his feet.
"Crispin, [qui] a été assez aggressif..., (Curtis, p. 108)" gets into a fight with Marin. Crispin, in a rage, boxes
Marin in the ear. This violent side foreshadows the Crispin to appear in Les Nobles de province^ in which he is a truly violent and belligerent individual. At least in this scene, one might argue self-defense. The old man and his valet go to speak to the Doctor. However, before their arrival, Marin asks Lisidor to abandon his desire to marry Alcine (iii). However, the silly vieillard turns a deaf ear. Dorine, who answers the door, explains that Mirobolan is not there (iv). However, she
201 would go get Féliante, if he would like. Lisidor, wanting
to avoid the domineering woman, naturally refuses. Dorine also puts in her two cents' worth by telling him that he is
being a fool for seeking the young girl's hand. Once again
he refuses to capitulate. After Lisidor and Marin exit, Crispin, in the disguise
of a doctor, arrives and tells Dorine about two medical students, who asked for his opinion about blood transfusion, which he calls "la Transconfusion du Sang" (v). Crispin
admits : "Que diable sçai-je, moi? une bête sur une
autre... . L'artere... le sang littéral... arterial... .
Un tuyau par où entre le sang... une bête morte, l'autre qui ne vaut guere mieux... . Enfin, le diable les emporte
avec tout leur raisonnement" (v).
Lisidor, along with Marin, returns to Mirobolan's house
to offer an engagement ring to Alcine. At the entrance of the house, the old man recognizes Crispin and immediately
threatens him with his cane. However, "Doctor Crispin," by
use of his new knowledge of Latin, is able at least
temporarily to convince him that he is a doctor. "LISIDOR:
Toi, Medecin? CRISPIN: Ouy, médecin, et vous êtes un impertinent Araca, lostovi, baritonovaï, forlutom, transconfusiona... Si vous étiez raisonnable, je vous parlerois de la transconfusion, mais je vois bien que vous en tenez. Allez, prenez des pillules" (vi). Hauteroche's humorous use of false Latinism, which sounds more like a
202 witch's spell, clearly stems from Molière's genius. In Le
Médecin malgré lui Sganarelle utters: "Cabricias arci thuran, catalamus, singulariter, nominative haec Musa la Muse. Bonus, Bona, Bonum, Deus sanctus, estne oration latinas? etiam, ouy, quare, pourquoy, quia substantive, et adjectivum, con cordât in generi, numerum, et casus" (II, iv).
Dorine promptly and wisely asks "Doctor Crispin" to enter the apartment and wait for Doctor Mirobolan in the cave. Mirobolan arrives and speaks with Lisidor, Marin, and
Dorine, unaware that the médecin malgré lui. Crispin, is in the other room (vii). Only a few moments later, Lise comes to complain about the ineffectiveness of the prescription of pills (viii). She mistakes Mirobolan for Crispin médecin and tells him: "Je voudrois que vous fussiez pendu... ,"
Mirobolan rightly claims: "... je ne vous ai jamais vûë," and thinks that she is crazy. Then an angry Grand-Simon shows up (ix). He, too, misidentifies Mirobolan as Crispin médecin and wishes to beat him with a stick. Crispin and Féliante exit the cave (x), and Crispin is is forced to admit the truth— he is a médecin malgré lui and Géralde is Alcine's lover. Lisidor, finally realizing that he has little chance to win Alcine's hand, consents to the union of his son and Alcine. This time, the physician's wife gives her consent. Géralde comes to the house to plead
203 on his hands and knees for his father's forgiveness for all of the deception (xi). All is forgiven.
204 3.2 LE DEÜIL^
"The most interesting development from the 1660s on,
attributable particularly to Hauteroche and his companion
playwrights, was the rise of the one-act comedy. It was usually performed as a sweetener after a full-length tragedy
or tragicomedy to send the audience home in a cheerful mood" (Brereton, p. 155). Le Deuil, the second play in the
Crispin sequence, is such a one-act comedy, performed as a
"sweetener" to Corneille's tragedy Théodat. Les Frères Parfaict correctly state that Le Deuil's "... sujet est
heureux, simple et neuf, l'exposition très-claire et l'intrigue conduite avec art, est terminée par un dénouement
tiré du fond du sujet" (1672, vol. 11, p. 250). In a word. Le Deuil served its purpose and delighted its
audience. In his "Au Lecteur," Hauteroche felt the need to
justify his reasons for writing a one-act play rather than writing a three-act or five-act play. He wanted to create a fast paced comedy which would net be interrupted before its dénouement. ... II ne m'en auroit pas coûté cinquante vers, mais j'ai mieux aimé presser un peu les incidens, & donner de la chaleur à l'action, que de la
205 rallentir par le temps qu'il auroit fallu pour les entres-Actes.
As I have indicated in Part I, it is a genuine challenge to write a one-act play, especially in its requirements of a very skillful exposition that introduces the plot, but does not reveal the dénouement in advance to the audience.
Hauteroche emphasises his belief that it takes in fact just as much talent and artfulness to write a short play as it does to write a lengthier one: ... Je tiens que l'art n'est pas moins nécessaire pour une petite Pièce que pour une grande. Les Pièces d'un Acte ou de trois Actes un peu bien faites doivent avoir, celle de cinq, l'exposition, le noeud, le dénouement, la vrai-semblance, l'unité de lieu, de temps, St d'action; la liaison des Scenes, les sentimens suivant la condition des personnages, les expressions qui leur soient convenables, les bienséances & les caractères naturels: enfin toutes les Parties utiles à la perfection de ces sortes d'ouvrages. Hauteroche admits also in the "Au Lecteur" that he was inspired by the tale "D'un fils qui trompa l'avarice de son père" by Noël Du Fail.’ However, he daims to have taken
"fort peu de chose" from it "et qu'il y a beaucoup de [son] invention." Despite this declaration the principal motive remains essentially the same in both works. In the short story by Du Fail, a miserly father attempts to tighten the reins on his spendthrift son who has accumulated many debts. The son wishes that his father would die. This desire inspires the ruse that ultimately directs the plot. The
206 son, along with his servant, arrives in mourning attire at his father's tenant's house; the tenant is prepared to pay the year's lease. The lessee, who believes the son's story about his father's death, hands over the rent to him and asks him to renew the lease. Together the lessee and the son draw up a new lease. For his support the servant receives a generous reward. Not long after the young man and his servant's departure, the father's notary appears at the tenant's home to collect the year's rent. The father, in grief over the loss of his precious money and in anger directed towards his son, dies. Thus, "le conte est tout prêt pour la scène, et Hauteroche n'eut guère qu'à le versifier" (Philipot, pp. 441-42). Of course, since
Hauteroche was writing a comedy he could certainly not incorporate Du Fail's ending into the play. He had to soften it and remove anything from the tale which did not conform to the rules or codes of comedy.
The theme of avarice, as my notes on usury and on money in the world of Dancourt's plays indicates, was prominent at the time Hauteroche first produced Le Deuil. In fact,
Molière's play L'Avare (1668) was presented only four years earlier. In Hauteroche's work, like Molière's, healthy love and youth conquer selfish possessiveness and aged sterility and bitterness. Although Molière paints a much darker picture of the corruption of the human spirit by gold and wealth than Hauteroche, Hauteroche hopes that his audience
207 will get the message: stinginess and self-interest serve only to destroy family ties. It was a message that he had already sent in the Act IV debate of Anselme and Florame of
L^Amant cmi ne flatte point (see above, p 97) Florame's son, not seen in that play, comes center stage in Timante of
Le Deuil. Recognition of one's avarice affords the opportunity for one to change for the better. "... Sans prendre ouvertement parti pour un jeune homme aussi ingénieux, l'auteur jette la responsabilité de la faute sur un père avare et sur la théorie professée dans certaines familles et d'après laquelle un jeune homme doit se débrouiller tout seul..."; this becomes a good lesson for parents (Philipot, p. 442). Further, it is evident that Hauteroche borrowed many comic elements and even some of the story line from the second act of Molière's L'Étourdi ou les Contre-temps
(1653). First of all, there is a clear parallel among the characters. Lélie CL'Étourdi) and Timante fLe Deuil) are the "jeunes premiers," who need their fathers' money. Mascarille and Crispin are the sons' valets who faithfully assist their masters. Pandolfe CL'Étourdi) and Pirante (Le
Deuil are the old miserly fathers who do little to provide financial security for their sons, let alone the means "de faire dans le monde une honnête dépense" fL'Amant qui ne flatte point, p. 111) Anselme fL'Étourdi) and Jaquemin (Le
Deuil) are debtors who owe money to the fathers. In both
208 plays rumors spread that the old fathers have died of a stroke. This is, of course, the ruse that the sons use to procure money which they spend either to win the love of or to support financially the women of their desires. Lélie and Crispin must feign their mourning and do so to such an extreme that it is comical. Anselme and Jaquemin, the men duped for their money, react in a similar manner. Initially, they are frightened by the appearance of the man whom they thought to be dead. Once they realize that they have been duped, they are determined to see the culprit hanged. The parallel ends here. Ultimately Anselme gets his money back by a ruse of his own aesign. Jaquemin never gets his money back directly, but does welcome a new son-in- law of a much higher social level into his family. During the seventeenth century in France, dramatic works involving the supernatural were very popular; the success of Le Deuil was due in part to this intense fascination with the unfathomable. Acceptance of supernatural was wide spread; not only did many of the common people accept it, but so did several members of the wealthy and educated class. Some seven years before Hauteroche first produced Le Deuil. Molière's company had performed Dorn Juan. ou le Festin de pierre (1665) in which man remains purely nontranscendent. "Rather than extend the action or implications toward man's spiritual existence as a creature connected somehow to supernatural forces, comedy
209 delimits its scope to man as a social being, finite and temporal. Man moves in a physical world... . [Nonetheless] the world continues its customary rotation" (Walker, p.
32). Hauteroche took advantage of the audience's belief in preternaturalness, but also played into its sense of logic.
Although the play is not expository, Hauteroche ultimately attacks the belief in the supernatural (as he will later do in La Dame invisible1. He contributes to the enlightenment of the public by means of a satirical treatment of the subject matter; his examination of superstition becomes a keynote and gains a striking importance on the stage. Unlike most plays by Hauteroche which take place in
Paris, Le Deuil, like "D'un fils qui trompa l'avarice de son père," takes place in the countryside eight kilometers from
Sens. From my reading of the text, the stage includes Jaquemin's farm house and various agricultural props, including a pitchfork, a dog, and pigeons. Despite Adam's claim that the play takes place during "un accouchement en pleine nuit," (III, p. 416) I envision that the play begins sometime at mid-morning. Nonetheless, given its November opening, one might assume that the stage was indeed sombre. but it is it is unlikely that the play was set during the witching hours; there are certainly no stage directions to that effect.
In the opening scene, the young newlywed Timante, dressed in mourning attire, pretends to mourn the death of
210 his miserly father, Pirante. Timante, who is in great financial need, explains to his valet Crispin that he is feigning his father's death for money (2,000 ecus). He then asks Crispin to inform his father's tenant, Pirante, of his father's sudden death. Timante has an important letter written by Pirante to Jaquemin that explains the financial arrangement between the two old closefisted men. Because of the letter, Timante has special insight as to how much money he can demand from Jaquemin. Jaquemin has already paid a minor amount of the rent due (800 ecus) and has not yet received a receipt for it; he still owes Pirante 6600 livres. From the letter we also find out three very important facts. First of all, Pirante has asked Jaquemin not to respond to the letter. Pirante, not expecting a response, has no knowledge that his son has intercepted the letter. Second, Pirante is supposed to be away for two to three weeks. This information make Timante realize that his financial situation will only worsen during this time.
Although his father is miserly, he did at least provide minimal financial assistance to his son. Moreover, since
Timante is in possession of the letter, nobody is aware that the father has taken leave; this adds great credence to Timante's story about his father's death. Finally, despite their different social status, Pirante has signed the letter
"Votre meilleur Ami," establishing the strong friendship
211 between them. This will allow Timante to play on Jaquemin's sympathies.
Crispin admires Timante's cunning: "mais quoiqu'en ce dessein. Monsieur, je vous admire" (i). Timante asks
Crispin to join him in the deception. CRISPIN Pour toucher cet argent ça que faut-il donc faire? TIMANTE Pleurer. Sçais-tu pleurer? CRISPIN Moi? Non, mais je sçais braire. Cela suffira-t-il? TIMANTE Tu feras de ton mieux...
As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, all of Hauteroche's Crispin plays were essentially written for the famous comic actor Raymond Poisson; Le Deuil is, of course, no exception. "Pour la grandeur de sa bouche, et pour sa façon de rouler les yeux, personne ne surpassait Poisson. Dans Le Deuil, de Hauteroche, l'auteur qui tirait les meilleurs effets de la physionomie de son collègue..." (Curtis, p. 91). Crispin affirms : "J'ai de terribles yeux. Commencez seulement,pour venir à la charge/Je vous réponds. Monsieur, d'une bouche assez large (i). Unlike most comic plays of the time in which the valets and maid servants direct and control the action on stage by their ruse, wit and reason, it is refreshing to have the master take control of his own destiny. In this regard. Le Deuil deserves special attention. Timante, who has invented
212 the prank himself, is in no way dependent on his servant, as
Lélie is on Mascarille in L'Étourdi ou les Contre-temps or
Valère is on Phillipin in Le Souper mal-apprêté. Crispin represents the common type of servant despite the considerable loss of importance usually given to the valet.
"Timante n'est point de ces amoureux qui n'agissent que par le conseil de leurs Valets: il est au contraire l'ame de la Pièce, c'est lui qui conduit toute l'intrigue, qui est
Auteur de la fourberie, & Crispin ne fait que la féconder adroitement" (Frères Parfaict, 1672, vol. 11, p. 252).
Babet, the miserly Jaquemin's daughter and Timante's secret wife, and her servant Perrette arrive on the scene
(ii) to discover Timante weeping profoundly and Crispin braying like a donkey. The two women are informed about the death of Pirante, whom we discover is the godfather (and the new father-in-law) of Babet. Babet is deeply touched by the loss of Pirante; "Je I'aimois comme mon propre Pere, Soutiens-moi." While she is crying, Crispin offers his somewhat cynical and ironic ideas about death (which he will continue to do throughout the play): "Les morts ne vivent plus, les pleurer c'est folie" (ii). After Perrette exits,
Timante reveals his ruse to Babet— a plot which will dupe both avaricious fathers; "Je n'imagine rien de plus propre à duper & ton Père et le mien" (iii). Understanding their financial needs, Babet offers little resistance to this plan. This is Babet's only appearance in the play; Wilhelm
213 Voos correctly explains (p. 36) that her appearance is nothing more than a courtesy to the audience; in other words, her appearance provides a face for the name.
Timante comments on the importance of having money: "S'il n'a de l'argent on n'est pas honnête-homme,/Il en faut pour paroître" (iv). He feels that his father has not given him an adequate opportunity to advance socially. So, he has decided to take the bull by the horns and to acquire money by means of his clever ruse.
Timante and Crispin perceive Jaquemin and Perette coming onto the scene (iv) and immediately renew their grieving. Jaquemin has been informed that Pirante has supposedly died (v).
TIMANTE pleurant Ahl Monsieur Jaquemin... . JAQUEMIN pleurant Mon pauvre Maître, ahl ah! TIMANTE pi murant Ah!
CRISPIN pleurant Hon, hon PERRETTE pi murant Hin, hin, hin.
All of this loud, exaggerated and graphically inarticulate fake grief, enhanced by Crispin's donkey-like sounds for a man, who is not dead, only adds to the comedy of the situation and allows the audience to play along with the ruse. Jaquemin, whose wife died six years earlier, is taken
214 in and begins to cry himself. His grief encourages Crispin to offer his sardonically humorous notions about death.
JAQUEMIN Pleurant Quand je perdis ma Femme, il m'en souvient encor...
CRISPIN Hé, Monsieur Jaquemin, Laissez-là votre Femme, elle est bien morte (v).
Crispin inadvertently acknowledges that Pirante is not dead by stating that Jaquemin's wife is really dead, but no one seems to notice this "slip-up," save the audience.
Jaquemin, reiterating what the letter has already made clear, refers to Pirante as a true and devoted friend. This opens up the opportunity for Timante to profess falsely to be Jaquemin's friend. "[Mon père] étoit votre ami, je ne le suis pas moins" (v). Essentially, Timante is buttering up Jaquemin for the money soon to be attained.
Timante is not the only one to introduce a ruse into the play. Although Crispin seemingly supports Jaquemin, he always acts in his master's behalf. He claims that the ghost of Pirante has appeared. Crispin begins to convince the unsophisticated man of the truth of his declaration;
"II nous a lutines six jours comme le Diable; tantôt en
Pigeon blanc, tantôt en Chien Barbet..." (v). Crispin explains to Jaquemin: "Je prenois les Esprits pour un conte, mais je suis détrompé, car pour vos intérêts le pauve
Mort [Pirante] nous [à Crispin et à Timante] est apparu tout exprès" (v). This claim will have a serious impact on the
215 play, as we will see. The logical tenant farmer, Jaquemin, astonished by Crispin's remarkable story, initially doubts the claim. Utilizing the information provided in the letter, Timante explains that the ghost of his father has informed him about Jaquemin's partial payments and his remaining debts to Pirante. Jaquemin, who is unaware of the letter, begins to swallow the story.
Jaquemin falsely professes to be completely ruined financially because of the death: "Me voilà ruiné" (v). He is a laborer, a farmer, and a merchant who admittedly uses every chance to profit; even the death of his master affords him the opportunity for practical financial gain.
Paralleling the nouveau riche of his time, he is, of course, better off than he is willing to admit. He gives Timante the money that he so desperately needs, but is smart enough to agree upon a new lease which is more to his advantageous than the one Pirante established with him. Timante concurs wholeheartedly; after all, it is not his money. Thus each man delights in having outsmarted the other one. Jaquemin exits to procure the money.
In Jaquemin's absence, Timante plans his escape (vi).
Crispin wants his "pot de vin"* from Jaquemin immediately because he realizes that if he leaves with Timante, he may never receive it. Perrette enters with paper and an inkwell with which Timante will write a receipt for the money that he will have received from Jaquemin. This provides Perrette
216 with the opportunity to discuss her superstitious fears
about death with Timante. She saw a large water spaniel in
the kitchen that she believes contains Pirante's soul. This
drove her almost to sheer panic; "le sang m'a remué
jusqu'au fin bout des doigts" (vi). She asks if Timante has seen the animal. He feeds her belief by saying that he has
seen it five or six times. In order to find out whether Perrette and Timante have seen the same dog, he asks
Perrette: "A-t'il le nez camus?" Hauteroche pokes fun at
the naive and superstitious household who believe Pirante to
be reincarnated into relatively benign animals that act just like any other animals of their species would.
It is important, however, to mention that Perrette is
not a simpleton purely directed by an irrational fear of the unknown. She is a clever maid with a strong perception or insight into Timante and Babet's love relationship. Although she does not know that Timante and Babet are married, she does suspect that a strong romantic rapport exists between them. Jaquemin enters with his money purse in hand and gives
700 louis to Timante. While Timante prepares the receipt
for the money, Perrette explains to Jaquemin that she sincerely believes that Pirante will return because of the dog that she saw earlier in the kitchen. Before she can continue, Timante interrupts her as he dates the document "1673." Jaquemin reads the letter out loud:
217 J'ay soussigné confesse avoir reçu de Monsieur Jaquemin, la somme de six mille six cens livres, qui joints à deux mille cens livres qu'il avoit payés à feu mon Pere sans quittance, l'acquitent de l'année échûë à Pâques dernier. Plus, j'ai reçu cent Louis d'or pour le Pot de Vin du nouveau Bail que je m'oblige de lui passer devant les Notaires toutefois & quantes, aux mêmes clauses & conditions de celui-ci, à huit mille ciqn cens livres. Fait ce mil sept cents soixante & treize. TIMANTE
Jaquemin is pleased by the document and confesses his admiration for Timante, stating that he sees his father's spirit in him. He ironically adds: "J'ai peine à croire encore qu'il soit mort" (viii). He asks that Crispin return for his "pot de vin" "... car enfin il est bon que chacun soit content" (viii). As mentioned above Perrette is no fool. She recognizes that she has the opportunity to get a wage increase now that
Jaquemin is prepared to open his purse. She demands to be paid by Jaquemin, whom she finds incredibly stingy (ix).
She attacks his avarice and informs him that if he does not pay her, she has a better offer from an old widower, who lives near by. Moreover, she tells him that Babet should get married; after all, she is twenty years old. Jaquemin, demonstrating his narrowmindedness and possessiveness, claims that she is too young to marry; "elle n'a que vingt ans, c'est un enfant" (ix).
When Pirante returns prematurely from his travels.(x), his presence naturally causes wide spread terror. Perrette,
218 believing him to be a specter, takes one look at him and runs away screaming. Pirante, for reasons not mentioned in the play, decided not to stay away for the full three months as he had planned. Because of Crispin's ghost tale, Pirante is shunned and regarded as an apparition by all involved.
He goes up to Jaquemin and taps him on the shoulder to get his attention. Jaquemin, upon seeing the supposed ghost, panics and runs for his life. Naturally, Pirante is confused by such a reception by people in whom he places much confidence and considers to be friends. Pirante stumbles upon Nicodème, Jaquemin's farmhand, who unlike Perette and Jaquemin, does not run away in fear
(xii). This is the case only because Nicodème is unaware that Pirante is supposed to be dead. Pirante discusses with him the bizarre reception by Perrette and Jaquemin. Neither men understand why. Ironically, Pirante believes them to be possessed, which demonstrates his own superstitious mind. He leads Pirante to Jaquemin's house, but Perrette refuses to open up. Perrette, hiding behind the door of Jaquemin's house, informs Nicodème that "Monsieur Pirante est mort, on en a la nouvelle, ce n'est que son Esprit qui revient"
(xii). Despite the fact that he was conversing with him only a few minutes earlier, Nicodème, in his simplicity, swallows Perrette's tale hook, line and sinker. Nicodème, who is extremely gullible, believes every word that she says. He, then, defends himself with a pitchfork:
219 "N'approchez pas; palsangué voyez-vous, je vous enfoucherions par le chignon du cou, adieu" (xii). Perrette reassures him that he is doing the right thing: "Ce n'est que son fantôme à present que tu vois..." (xii). An extremely humorous moment occurs when Pirante tries to rationalize with Nicodème by declaring that he is not dead:
"Je n'ai rien de changé, tu le vois, Nicodème. Je parle, marche, agis. Les morts font-ils de meme? Jamais... ."
Nicodème replies: "Oh palsangué vous m'en contez bien là.
Avons-je été morts, nous, pour sçavoir tout cela c'est bien philosophé" (xii). These words are humorous coming from an unworldly servant such as Nicodème. While Pirante attempts to be rational and logical with him, Nicodème explains that he should listen to logic, logic being that he is, indeed, dead and merely a ghost. Pirante tries to get Nicodème to touch him to prove that he is not a spirit but of flesh and blood. Of course, he refuses. Jaquemin, Perrette and Nicodème were completely duped by Timante's story of Pirante's death and Crispin's ghostly tale. Admittedly, the three belong to the lower social class. However, it is important to reiterate that even Pirante thought that they were possessed by demons which made them believe that he was a specter. Hauteroche shows that superstition knows no social status. Ultimately, he makes a mockery of those who are so easily fooled by such ideas. In concurrence with the philosophical thoughts of
220 seventeenth-century Europe; and despite popular belief in the occult, one must, first of all, depend upon empirical
evidence and confront the miraculous with skepticism. After much dialogue, doubt sets in. The characters realize that Pirante is, in fact, not a ghost and that they are all victims of a prank. Jaquemin figures out that
Timante has been plotting against Pirante and himself and reveals the scheme to Pirante. Despite Nicodème's revelation that Pirante is not dead, he still has a strong belief in the supernatural: "Morgue, j'appellerois vingt
Sorciers à mon aide, plutôt que de mourir" (xiv).
Hauteroche seems to be conveying the notion that, despite logic and evidence, superstition and belief in the occult will continue.
Jaquemin explains that Crispin is due to return to collect his "pot de vin." In the final scene (xiv), Nicodème confronts Crispin, who appears in a mourning costume. Nicodème mentions the death of Pirante, stating that he would have cured himself. To which Crispin offers the sardonic reply, "la mort il n'est point de remède." Crispin, upon seeing Pirante, pretends to be frightened by him, as if he were a ghost. Pirante asks him, "Tu me crains, je suis donc mort?" He attacks Crispin and blames him completely for everything, instead of his son. Although it is true that Crispin is an accessory to the crime, he is clearly not the mastermind behind the conspiracy. Pirante
221 realizes this but is simply unable to control his rage.
Eventually, Crispin admits the ruse and explains that
Timante has married. Pirante is outraged and appalled. He wants to know "qu'a-t-il done épousé... ? ...quelque gueuse l'aura fait prendre sur le faitl... Qui?" (xiv). Crispin, then, discloses that Babet is his son's wife. Both fathers, who are best of friends, have enough insight to realize that, despite their social differences, this could be a good marriage. Pirante and Jaquemin decide to forgive their children's deception. "Timante et Babet disparoissent longtemps avant le dénouement. Ces deux personnes n'auroient pu paroitre qu'avec excuses: il étoit de l'adresse du Poète de leur
éviter cette situation peu agréable, et d'avoir terminé leurs affaires à l'aimable, et en leur absence" (Frères
Parfaict, 1672, vol. 11, pp. 251-252). It is true that
Timante and Babet's further appearance would not have resulted in a comical situation but in a painful and embarrassing one. The fathers' forgiveness has a much better effect in their absence. Youth has once again cast its spell, and its skapegrace gotten away with a warning.
The lesson for oldsters proposed by Le Deuil, and symbolically accpeted in the fathers' forgiveness of its dénouement is an instruire well mixed in plaire.
222 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
Claude Deschamps, called de Villiers, born in 1601, oined the Hôtel in 1642— He was thus an elderly presence on stage in Hauteroche's first two plays. He had acted in Paris first at the Marais, from 1634, and was known then to Hauteroche. On his specialty of the Philipin rôle, Deierkauf-Holsboer (1970), pp. 85, 96; and on his career, Mazouer (1987), p. 61, n. 6.
See Sophie Wilma Deierkauf-Holsboer's Le Théâtre de Bourgogne (1970), p. 142. See below, on Le Deuil.
*• Mirobolan echoes Guy Patin's recurrent denunciation of surgeons's ignorance and pride. The opposition of physicians to surgeons lasted throughout the century, despite the real scientific gains achieved by the college of surgeons. On the controversy, see Howard M. Solomon, Public Welfare. Science, and Propaganda in Seventeenth Century France: The Innovations of Theoohraste Renandot. Princeton, 1972.
See Chapter 5 on Les Nobles de province.
All quotations for this chapter have been taken from the text of Le Deuil established by Jacques Truchet (1986). Noël Du Fail (15207-1591), Lord of the Hérissaye, was a story-teller. His most famous collection Contes et discours d'Eutrapel was published in 1588. On Hauteroche's use of this source, see also Truchet (1986, p. 1583). "Le pot-de-vin était une somme donnée en supplément lors de la conclusion d'un contrat. Il ne s'agissait pas, contrairement à l'acception actuelle, d'une malhonnête; d'ailleurs, à la scène viii, Timante mentionnera le pot-de- vin dans un papier officiel." Truchet, (1986, p. 1587)
223 CHAPTER 4
CRISPIN MDSICIEN OU "LE MUSICIEN MALGRÉ LUI"
Crispin musicien (1674), the third play in the Crispin sequence, is a five-acter written in verse. Sophie Wilma
Deierkauf-Holsboer explains that "Le succès [que Hauteroche] a obtenu quelques années plus tôt avec sa comédie Crispin médecin [1670], lui a donné l'idée de composer une nouvelle pièce dans laquelle Crispin tient le rôle principal. La popularité de la musique qui ne cesse de croître depuis la
fondation de l'Opéra à Paris, a conduit Hauteroche à produire... Crispin musicien, [une] pièce dans laquelle le chant et la musique tiennent donc une place importante.
L'auteur obtint un succès considérable..." (1970, II, p.
154) . Only four years before the first presentation of Crispin musicien. Molière's company performed what might be the most famous comédie-ballet ever. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670). The interval between each act is regularly marked by an entr'acte. Act I ends with a performance by four dance students. At the end of Act II, four of Monsieur Jourdain's tailors dance in delight because of the lavish sum of money that the would-be gentleman has
224 given them. Between Acts III and IV, six dancing chefs with
platters inundated with fine foods entertain the object of
Jourdain's desires, Dorimène. Act IV ends with the six
Turks dancing in the ceremony to glorify and ennoble
Monsieur Jourdain as a mamamouchi; the play ends, of
course, with the famous "Ballet des Nations." Clearly the idea of a comédie-ba11et appealed to
Hauteroche. He wished to compose a play that was similar and yet distinguished; he knew that such a work would be
popular. After a brainstorm, he realized that a comédie- opéra could have universal appeal. Similarly to Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, the play opens with an overture.^ In the opening to Crispin musicien, we see Crispin, who will masquerade as a musician. In Molière's work, the curtain rises to a reveal a genuine music student. Hauteroche, much like Molière, provides entertainment between acts; the musical lackeys appear at the play's opening and at every break. They provide music and perform the important stage alterations for the following acts.=
Admittedly the play is rather long, even for a five- acter. It is, nonetheless, amusing and engaging and represents a concerted effort on Hauteroche's behalf to create a new work of art. Ultimately, he succeeded in his efforts; "... [La pièce] a des scènes amusantes, et pourrait même passer pour une espèce de chef-d'oeuvre..." (Fournel, Les Contemporains de Molière, p. 94). Critics,
225 however, attack the subject matter of the play, claiming that there is duplicity in the plot and that the play is faulty despite its success. They state that there are number of useless and pointless characters. Hauteroche defends all of his characters because they add humor and play an important rôle in the development of the comedy's plot and its dénouement (Préface). In his preface Hauteroche admits that "on ne peut jamais déplaire avec l'Art" and that it is dangerous to
"s'écarter de ses regies," but that since pleasure is "le but de ce grand Art," it is allowable to violate rules if by so doing, one pleases. This independence of rule is especially interesting on the part of Hauteroche, the experienced actor, author, and dramatic theorist. Although many critics claim that there is a lack of structure, I believe, on the other hand, that Crispin musicien is a highly structured play and its music is the thread that ties it together. The music not only pleases and entertains the audience, but it serves to control the tempo and the mood of the comedy. Several songs are sung in the course of the performance. The play opens, as mentioned above, with violin practice and Phélonte's lackeys play at the end of each act except the last. Hauteroche has thus incorporated the music of the intermissions with the play, as Molière had done with the dancing of the ballet. The comedy eventually acquired the designation "l'Opéra de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne"
226 when it appeared in a provincial repertory of January, 1675
(Lancaster, French Dramatic Literature of the Seventeenth
Century. IV\, p. 459). Hauteroche confesses that the critics of the theatre
complained about the play. They complain about the fact
that there are two different houses in which action takes
place (Phélonte's house and Dorame's). However, Hauteroche
chooses to consider the complaint to be insignificant. The
important thing is that the play was successful in public. He professes that cette Pièce s'est d'elle-même attirée
1'estime de tout Paris."
ACT I
Hauteroche, in his opening stage directions, states:
"La scène est à Paris dans la Maison de Phélonte, & de dans celle de Dorame"; the houses alternate from act to act.
Crispin musicien opens with what is essentially an "intermission," implying a continuation of action that has occurred before the play's first scene.
The play opens in Phélonte's antechamber, set for a concert with a harpsicord down stage. La Ronce, le laquais de Phélonte. tells his six fiddlers, "habillés en Laquais," that they need to concentrate more, since Phélonte has been angry over their casualness. They play the overture, then exit briefly to allow, Crispin, Phélonte's valet, to make his début. While the seven lackeys exit, Crispin appears
227 upon stage, according to Hauteroche's directions, in a dream
like state; he is desperately in love with Toinon, Daphnis'
attractive and witty servant. La Ronce and his comrades,
each with a violin in hand, reenter, offering Crispin unwanted distraction from his musing on his unrequited love
for Toinon. La Ronce is only interested in perfecting his music and wants nothing to do with Crispin's amorous desires. They exchange harsh words (I, iii).
In scene iv we get our first glimpse at Phélonte, who has been disturbed by all of the noise in the antechamber. Phélonte is a talented harpsichordist; his greatest pleasure is the musical arts. He has no interest in the squabble, and merely wants his musicians to practice and to pay no attention to Crispin's "folles bontades." After
Phélonte's departure. La Ronce and Crispin quarrel and threaten each other. Crispin refuses to abandon his lovelorn daydream, even though the house is "accablée de musique" and cluttered by practicing musicians. He is futher interrupted by another one of these— "la parleuse" Fanchon.
Fanchon, Phélonte's servant, is a talented singer. She is angry about her current singing rôle and expresses this to Crispin, who becomes even more irritated than ever by music (vii). He is frustrated and simply wants to be left alone. In a fit of anger, they poke each other in the
228 forehead. They immediately separate upon the master's arrival (viii).
Fanchon tells Phélonte that his young brother, Mêlante, along with his tutor Boniface, stopped by the previous day. We discover that Phélonte is cross with the "incorrigible petit mignon," who has annoyed him, and wants him to spend more time with his tutor in "college" (viii). For distraction, Phélonte asks Fanchon if she knows a new minuet (which he hums). They move to the harsichord and they tune up. "Seulement donnez-moi votre 'ton,'" she says significantly. She sings an light song, celebrating wine, as antidote to the pains of love; one is better off free from its chains. Phélonte, who seems to find love to be pure folly, is extremely pleased by Fanchon's little number.
All the songs of the play, except for two— "Tu viens peindre nos prés vives couleurs..." (V, ix), and "Pour
Crispin & Toinon...," (V, x,)— express similar notions: love is a source of pain. Drink is the only comfort or escape from its shackles: "Un Buveur en homme habile,/Conserve sa liberté;/Car l'Amant le plus tranquile
Est toujours inquiété" (viii). The songs that the characters sing are thus light songs, on wine, whose lyricism was infectuously simple for the parterre. Fanchon and Phélonte both enjoy such happy songs that symbolise music itself as joyful consolation and distraction from its trials and pains. And such will be the unified message of
229 the plays, expressed in the first song: "On pense en
douceur la vie, Quand on aime le bon vin; Mais quand on
chérit Silvie, On a souvent du chagrin."
Throughout most of Act I, Phélonte, who has the
reputation of a veteran in galanterie. refuses to admit to
himself or to anyone that he is in love with Daphnis and
constantly chides Crispin because his love for Toinon has rendered him ineffectual. He would rather play music, it seems, Fanchon, similarly, more explicitly subscribes to the song's message. She is genuinely not interested in romantic
relationships, and finds the food and drink of love
exclusively in music.
Phélonte, in his despair, wants to perform another song: La Ronce and two of his musicians, Jolicoeur and La
Fluste, join Phélonte to perform a chaconne.^ Phélonte,
alluding to the opening scene in which La Ronce speaks of his dissatisfaction with the lackeys' performance, is
apparently unhappy with it: "Qu'on range ce Clavessin.
Sortez" (X). Phélonte asks the love sick Crispin to fetch his hat;
Crispin brings him his coat. Phélonte, who threatens to
beat him, states: "je vois (que) ta folie augmente... chaque jour" (xi). Crispin feels the pain of love getting worse everyday; Phélonte says that he will beat the very notion of love out of him, if he does not perform his chores better. Crispin explains to him that the "lutin" love
230 conquers all and that there is little one can do to avoid "ce chien." Phélonte is, in fact, pretending to resist
love; we discover that for some time now he has pursued an unknown masked lady (Daphnis) whose spirit enchants him.
Nonetheless, he confesses to Crispin he worries that, because she wears a mask, she might be incredibly ugly.
This clearly foreshadows the relationship between Pontignan and Angélique of Esprit folet ou la Dame invisible.* In the course of my reading, I am lead to believe that Daphnis wears a mask to hide her romantic interests from her father who wants to place her in a convent. It was not unusual for modest women to wear masks when they had business outside (ordi vers ions) in society.
Crispin, however, knows about whom his master speaks and assures him; "Sa Suivante m'a dit qu'elle est belle, archi-belle" (xi). Her mistress is Toinon, who so bewitches
Crispin. However, Crispin claims not to know the masked lady's name and continues to speak about his own romantic desires; this once again arouses Phélonte's annoyance. Mêlante enters and wants to know why Phélonte is arguing with Crispin. Phélonte tells him about Crispin's love bug and his poor service: "Si je demande à boire, il m'apporte à manger L'Amour lui renverse l'esprit"
(xii). Mêlante claims to be in love too, although he does not yet know her name (Lise). Phélonte finds this laughable. Even though he is in the same situation, he is
231 unwilling to admit it. In fact, their situation is even more similar than he realizes; the two brothers are
unknowingly in love with two women, who happen to be
sisters, Daphnis and Lise.
Phélonte confronts Crispin, whom he sarcastically calls
"Monsieur 1'Amant." He believes that Crispin is in love
with Fanchon; "Elle ne te plait pas? ... Tu lui fais
affront; elle est aimable" (xiii). Crispin denies any interest in Fanchon and admits that it is the masked woman's servant who so captivates his heart.
Toinon, wearing a mask, appears at Phélonte's house on
Daphnis' behalf. Daphnis has written a letter to him in which she tells him that he should no longer look for her in
the park of the Tuilleries. His apparent lack of interest
in her gives her no reason to pursue any relationship with him. She then offers him: "Un Adieu pour toujours" (xiv). Phélonte never knew what he had and now he feels a profound sense of loss: "Je sens pour [la] Maîtresse [de Toinon] une sincère flame" (xiv). Phélonte pleads for Toinon to put in a good word for him: "Agi, parle pour moi". She says that she will do her best. Phélonte then asks Crispin to follow her. Crispin sarcastically replies: "Puisque l'amour est fadaise pour vous, À quoi bon? ... Les Amants sont fous..." (xv) and Crispin, the ever devoted valet, takes off after Toinon.
232 At the end of the first act, the six lackeys enter the stage, three from each side, and perform an air.^ After the song, they push the two flats for scenery which form
Dorame's antechamber.
ACT II
Dorame, Lise and Daphnis' contemptible father, makes his first appearance in the play (i). "While the comedy is primarily one of intrigue, it approaches a comédie de moeurs... in its discussion of the convent as a place for girls of whom their father wishes to dispose" (Lancaster,
IV^, p. 459). Dorame remarks piously to Lise, "Te voir dans un Couvent feroit toute ma joie," and Toinon retorts, in a long tirade: "Vous n'avez plus. Monsieur, que le Couvent en tête,/Vous voulez tout cloîtrer; et qui vous en croiroit,/ Avant qu'il fût dix ans, le monde périroit./Hé- bien, mettez-vous y, s'il vous en prend envie,/Et laissez à chacun mener son train de vie./Pour moi, j'aime le monde, et sans tant discourir,/Je ne suis pas d'humeur à le laisser périr. D'avoir un bon mari, j'ai tentation grande;/Et, tout- franc, du Couvent je ne suis point friande (i)." Lise remarks that "La contrainte en ces lieux enfante le désordre." Toinon accuses Dorame of sacrificing his daughters' interests to those of his son. Dorame, however, insists that he is sending his daughters to the convent only to save them from the disturbances of worldly existence. As
233 the sympathy of the audience is with the girls rather than
with their hypocritical father, who objects even to Toinon's
saying "ma foy." Toinon believes that Dorame should allow
his daughters to marry. To which Dorame says: "... ce
n'est pas ton affaire" (ii). Toinon insists that Mêlante
and Lise are in love. Dorame denies it and simply walks away, leaving Toinon shouting: "... Hé quoi! point de
réponse" (ii). Hauteroche is obviously continuing an attack on social misuse of the convent system he began in les
Apparences trompeuses. Daphnis is a new type of woman in Hauteroche's plays;
she directs her own fate and knows how to conquer the object of her love.® Since her love is not returned by Phélonte,
she must fight for it. Toinon explains to her that her
father is only interested in the well-being of his son (who never makes an appearance in the play). It is clear that the father views his daughters as an inconvenience; the son
is the heir to the family name and its traditions.’ However, Daphnis is more interested in knowing what came to pass at Phélonte's. She asks Toinon: "Penses-tu que Phélonte ait pour moi de l'estime?" (iv). She confesses to Toinon her affection for him. Crispin sneaks into Dorame's house to transmit a message to Daphnis from
Phélonte and to receive one in return from her. However, he is taken by surprise by Dorame who grabs him by the collar and demands to know what he is doing in his house: "...
234 Tes yeux me font voir les regards d'un voleur: ... tu seras pendu (vi). Here again Hauteroche continues to capitalize on Poisson's unique appearance, especially his bugged-eyes. Toinon saves the day by claiming that Crispin is the music teacher sent by a Madame Angélique for his daughters. Crispin, indignantly confronts Dorame: "Est-ce ainsi qu'on en use? Me traiter de voleurl..." (vii). Dorame offers a very curt apology to Crispin and explains to
Toinon that most musicians do not look like Crispin: "A voir cette figure, & même son habit” (vii).® Despite all of this, Dorame takes time to reflect. He reflects, too, unknowingly, the play's message, in his belief that musical training will comfort his daughters, who are destined to the convent. His thoughts are interrupted when the real music teacher shows up, speaking with a strong Gascon accent. True to the reputation of the natives of Gascony, the musician is a braggart, in a word, ”un véritable gasconade."
Dorame is confused by the appearance of the second musician.
After a long winded and arrogant discourse about his success and the importance of his art, the ambitions musician invites Dorame to a private performance of a recently composed opera in the hopes of securing his influence. Dorame, who thinks that the Gascon is crazy, sends him to Crispin to discuss their art. Upon his first view of
Crispin, he says to Dorame: "Ah! Monsieur a tout I'air d'un Chantre de Lutrin;/Il est propre à quelque Tabarin,/Ou
235 bien à l'Orviétan, je le vois à sa mine./J'admire son habit, et sa taille poupine" (II, x).
Soon enough, the two men begin to discuss the craft of music and to debate their individual talents. Crispin gets entangled in the conversation. When the musician sarcastically consults him about a difficult point in a musical composition, he replies, with the nonsensical eloquence of Sganarelle in le Médecin malgré lui: "C'est que cet E mi la qui vous met en souci,/Et que ce mi B fa que vous traittez ainsi,/Sortant de la De mode, en fait la raisonnance,/Qui rentrant en B mol. forme la conséquence./Il faut considérer, qu'ut re mi fa sol la./Font des accords aigus... s'il faut que je m'explique,/Qui fait que dans les sons... on voit de la Musique.../Comprenez-vous-bien?" (v).
The musician daims that Crispin is an impostor and attempts to pull out his sword to attack him; Dorame stops him (v). The musician agrees to not draw the sword against
Crispin, but only because Crispin is swordless. However, the two adversaries continue to exchange threats and insults and attempt to assault each other with chairs. Dorame, who is caught in the middle, is almost struck by both chairs.
He quickly reacts though and runs to his halberd with which he manages to get the two foes to stop fighting. Toinon explains to Dorame that Madame Angélique must have decided to send two maîtres de musique, so that he would have a choice. The second act ends with Crispin and the music
236 teacher going out to the streets to continue their fight.
Toinon is worried for Crispin but he reassures her: ”... je m'en tirerai bien” (xii). Although there are no actual musical performances in Act II, this is the act in which the musician appears and confronts "Crispin musicien” in his exaggerated and hyperbolical conversation regarding music. As soon as the act draws to a close the set-piece is pulled open and the six lackeys appear. Once again, they perform and then disappear, three on either side.
ACT III
As third act opens at Phélonte's house, we find that
Crispin has explained all that went on at Dorame's house. Phélonte is particularly impressed by Crispin's handling of the music teacher and by his ability to deal with musical jargon. But, Phélonte is most interested in what is going on with Daphnis. He desires to see her and to talk to her; he asks Crispin to take him to her. The main problem is, of course, Dorame ”[qui] est d'une humeur gui n'est pas fort tranquille” (i). Despite the aggressive father Dorame, Phélonte, desperately in love with Daphnis, is ready to go to his house to meet with her. Just as they are ready to leave. La
Ronce announces the arrival of a man who wants to speak to Phélonte; it is none other than the music teacher. Crispin
237 immediately tries to conceal himself. The musician has heard that Phélonte is an amateur of music and has come to
invite him to the opera that he has composed. He suddenly sees Crispin and reacts very strongly; he asks Phélonte:
"Quoi 1 pouvez-vous souffrir cet ignorant chez vous?" (iii).
The musician challenges Crispin to a musical contest and
asks Phélonte to be the judge.
The musician proposes a contest to Crispin in which each would demonstrate his musical prowess. Singing in his
strong Gascon accent, the musician performs an air on the
"belle dédaigneuse," which Phélonte with some irony deems perfectly à la mode." Beauté, qui captivez mes sens, Ma voix, par ses tristes accens. Vous peint l'excès de mon martyre. Mais, Dieux! quelle haine avez-vous: Quand mon coeur ose vous le dire. Soudain vous entrez en courroux (iii).
Crispin, who struggles for a reason to withdraw promptly from the competition, claims it is unfair.: "Moi? je n'en
ferai rien. Votre accent est Gascon, le mien est Parisien. Apprenez mon accent, & j'apprendrai le vôtre. Puis on pourra juger, & de l'un, & de l'autre" (iii). Although he never actually enters into direct competition with the
Gascon, we will find out towards the end of the play that Crispin is a little more talented and gifted than the pompous Gascon. The man from Gascony flies into a rage and orders Crispin to "[se munir] d'une épée; avec armes pareilles, seul à seul, de pied ferme, on ... peut
238 divertir" (iii). The musician departs, nonetheless, leaving his threat unfulfilled. Phélonte and Crispin joke that the valet has now earned his degree in music. "Ma maîtrise le pique," Crispin brags; "Je te vois Gradué... en musique,"
Phélonte laughingly absents (iv). Boniface, Mêlante's tutor, arrives on his behalf and asks Phélonte for clemency (vi). He is quite ready to develop on Senaca, but is brushed off. Phélonte and Crispin then exit, leaving the old tutor with the pretty Fanchon
(vii).
We find that the elderly Boniface is an extremely lusty and flirtatious creature who is very attracted to the witty and intelligent singer. The seduction is a comic failure. Fanchon is not interested and requests that they "Ne
[parlent] point d'aimer, & [changent] de propos" (vii). The tutor, realizing the futility of his efforts, takes leave of Fanchon. His, "Adieu belle Fanchon," is answered by the humorous reply, "Adieu, beau Boniface" (viii).
Le Breton, Mêlante's valet, then arrives, apparently on his master's behalf, to ask also for Phélonte's assistance.
The valet, who is described by Hauteroche as "un peu yvre," is actually completely inebriated. His main desire is wine, women, and song; although he claims not to be drunk. La Ronce ironically explains to Fanchon: "II n'a pas bû, c'est d'amour qu'il soupire" (xii). Le Breton flirts unrelentingly and in vain with the frigid Fanchon. He
239 expresses his desires for her in relatively crude terms: "Fanchon, mon âme... te convoite, je t'aime" (xii). He implores Fanchon to sing a minuet; she pretends to not know any. Le Breton, frustrated, begins to sing his own minuet and grabs La Ronce by the hand and starts to dance, but due to excessive intoxication falls flat on the floor, much to the delight of Fanchon, (and the parterre. one might imagine). Mêlante arrives and is surprised to discover his valet there (xiii). Le Breton and La Ronce quickly exit to "[aller] boire à [sa] santé" (xiii). Fanchon explains to
Mêlante that she knows why he has come to Phélonte's house.
She claims that Phélonte has explained his brother's love for Lise and his brother has brought her to his house so that they could have the opportunity to speak. Fanchon is pleased to have a rôle in what she hopes will be their union. In the final scene of Act III, we catch the troublesome Mêlante blatantly lying to his mistress Lise: "... n'appréhendez rien; je suis ici le maître, & ce logis est mien" (xv). Nevertheless, their love seems sincere. Fanchon tells Lise: "Sur l'espoir de l'hymen tout mon bonheur se fonde" (xv).
As the third act comes to a conclusion, the six lackeys appear once again, playing a drinking song. At the conclusion of their song, the set piece is push together and
240 the group of musicians disappears behind it and Dorame's study reappears.
ACT IV
Daphnis tells Toinon that she is very much in love with
Phélonte, but much to her shame and embarrassment he appears to show no romantic interest in her. Toinon explains to her
that "sa manière d'aimer est un peu libertine," but that she is sure that he is in love with her (i). He is a proud man;
his love burns for her.
Crispin comes to tell them that Phélonte is nearby and
wishes to enter and speak to Daphnis. However, she does not want him to come in for fear that her father will arrive and
ruin everything. It becomes very clear that she is terrified by Dorame and his frightful nature. Toinon convinces her to let Phélonte enter, albeit with much hesitation; Daphnis must take advantage of the opportunity.
Phélonte enters and immediately professes his profound love
for her: "... de voir tant de beauté, ne laisse à ma raison aucune liberté" (iv). Nevertheless, Daphnis appeals to his logic; after all, they do not know each other very well. Phélonte presses and insists upon his sincerity. He believes that it is their destiny to marry and confesses: "L'Hymen est le seul but où tendent mes désirs" (iv).
241 Phélonte intends to go to Daphnis' father to ask for her hand. After all, he does come from a good family. Daphnis implores that he not do it for fear that her father will react negatively and ruin all prospects of marriage.
She asks that he leave because her father may show up at any moment. However, before he can leave, there is a knock upon the door. Daphnis panics, believing that it is her father.
Phélonte and Crispin are quickly ushered to Dorame's study and locked in by Toinon. Much to Daphnis' relief it is Anastase, Daphnis and
Lise's brother's tutor, who has come to deliver a letter to Dorame from his son. Toinon, who dislikes Anastase, tries in vain to get him to leave so that Phélonte and Crispin may depart without anyone having ever known that they were there. However, he insists on staying until Dorame comes home. Toinon and Daphnis almost succeed in getting him to leave; however, at the very moment that he prepares to depart who else but Dorame arrives and immediately inquires as to the well-being of his son. The teacher brings a message asking him to intercede for a friend. Mêlante, whose earlier attempt to elicit his brother's help, via Boniface, failed (III, vi). The old father, who appears to be willing to do virtually anything for his son, agrees to offer his help and wishes to send as a gift to his son an portable writing desk that is in the study where Phélonte and Crispin are hiding. Daphnis fears that all is lost.
242 However, Dorame cannot find his key and asks Dorine for hers. She naturally claims to be unable to find it. Dorame goes upstairs to look for his spare copy. While Dorame is gone, Toinon continues to harangue Anastase in hopes that he will leave. Dorame comes back with the key; Toinon attempts in vain to prevent her master from entering. Once Dorame opens the door, Phélonte and Crispin exit singing, dancing, and playing music. They pretend to be composing an important musical piece: "Suivez bien votre mode, allons, par E mi la. Le même Fa re mi fa. fa sol fa mi. fa re fa. sol fa re mi fa" (xii). Phélonte is passed off as one of Crispin's students and by chance they have stopped by Dorame's house to jot down important notes.
Toinon tells him not to worry; at his age who knows what may happen to him if his blood pressure were to become too high. Dorame is still confused by how they got locked up in his studio, since Toinon supposedly cannot find her key. This is a puzzle to which he will never receive an adequate answer. Although reluctant, Dorame has to content himself with what is going on. With the ruse, Crispin and Phélonte manage to deceive
Dorame and escape a difficult situation. Phélonte continues the deception by singing an air about the pains of love:
L'Amour cause trop de peine. Je ne veux plus m'engager; Un Amant souffre la gêne. Quand l'Objet vient à changer. L'Amour cause trop de peine. Je ne veux plus m'engager (IV, xi). 243 Dorame is still confused by how Crispin and Phélonte managed to get themselves locked up in his studio. However,
like Molière's Jourdain, who forgets all of his strife the instant that one refers to him as a nobleman, Dorame forgets all incongruities at the first few notes of a song. Once
again the little rondo deals with the theme of suffering in love. Crispin beats the time and sings "Fa re mi fa. fa sol
fa mi" over and over. Dorame begins to tire of the song. Phélonte and Crispin quickly retire from the scene before he
can figure out their little scheme. As the fourth act draws to a close, the set-piece is
pulled together, once again exposing the lackeys performing in Phélonte's antechamber. After their air, they withdraw
from the stage.
ACT V
Crispin enters still singing the same "fa re mi fa. fa sol fa mi much to the displeasure of Phélonte, who thinks that he is crazy. Love has made Crispin very happy; however, it only provides misery for Phélonte. Crispin ironically reminds Phélonte that he mistreated him and threatened him with a stick because of his lovesickness cause by Toinon. Now, Phélonte is reduced to his level. Phélonte admits: "II faut te l'avouer, ce changement est grand, ... l'Amour parle, il m'attire" (i).
244 Now that he understands love, Phélonte intends to write a note to Daphnis reaffirming his love for her and asks
Crispin to return to Dorame's house to deliver it. Crispin, however, does not want to go back there because of Dorame's excessively violent nature. Phélonte insists that he deliver the letter because if he were to deliver it himself and Dorame were to discover him, it would ruin the relationship that he has established with Daphnis. Crispin, the faithful valet, consents.
Fanchon tells Phélonte that his brother. Mêlante, along with some lady (Lise), has been waiting in the garden for over an hour to speak to him. However, Phélonte does not really care; he scorns his brother and is preoccupied with his own amorous pursuit. Fanchon is confused by his complete indifference about his brother's presence. Crispin explains to Fanchon, much to her surprise, that their master is in love. Fanchon, who is genuinely unmoved by love, believes that both Crispin and Phélonte are moonstruck. Daphnis and Toinon have successfully sneaked out from
Dorame's house to pay a visit to Phélonte. Daphnis asks Crispin what Phélonte is doing and if he is alone. Crispin teases her cruelly by claiming that Phélonte is in his study "... avec une belle... qu'il aime, & tendrement" (v).
Then, much to her relief, Crispin explains: "C'est avec vous qu'il est, il vous écrit." Crispin goes on to reaffirm Phélonte's sincere devotion to her and to declare his
245 genuine desire to spend the rest of his life with her. She
is quite pleased by all of this and states: "S'il m'épouse,
Toinon sera ta recompense... ." Both Phélonte and Daphnis
have promised Toinon to him. Toinon, although somewhat unenthusiastically, consents: "Ne sçais-tu pas qu'une
Servante suit sa Maîtresse à grand pas? Ainsi le tout
dépend de bien servir sa flame" (v).However, we are
inclined to believe that Toinon is more interested in Crispin than this statement implies. Phélonte comes in and
is surprised and delighted to see the woman that he loves so
much. He tells her that he has been in love with her ever
since he first laid eyes on her.
Dorame, under the pretext of telling Phélonte that his son has asked him to ask Phélonte to forgive Mêlante's
mutability, arrives at Phélonte's house and is virtually in
a state of shock to discover his daughter there. Crispin
claims that they are in his apartment and that Daphnis has come for music lessons. Dorame is furious: "... Ma fille apprendra, s'il vous plaît, à chanter toute seule, ou point" (vii).
To change the subject, Crispin daims to be preparing for an important upcoming concert. Dorame, who seems quite
interested in this concert, asks Crispin his name. In a most imaginative and fantastic story, Crispin relates how he was given the name La Verdure: "[Le nom] de ma Famille, est de la Garaniere,/Nom que j'avois d'abord assez mis en
246 lumière./Mais comme tous mes Airs, du premier au dernier,/Ont un je-ne-sçai-quoi de gai, de printannier,/Que
je les rends toujours fleuris outre-mesure./On m'a par
excellence appelle La Verdure" (vii). While Toinon and Daphnis plot their escape, Dorame
insists that the great "Verdure" perform for him. Crispin
tells him that his singers are upstairs and that he will go
fetch them. Dorame tells Phélonte that he knows his family and explains that Phélonte should forgive his brother.
Phélonte, seeing possible marital benefits of complying with
Dorame's wishes, immediately consents. Just as Phélonte is ready to bring up the subject of
Daphnis, Crispin arrives with the fiddlers and Fanchon.
The violinists perform the prelude; Phélonte plays the
harpsichord while Crispin keeps time. Living up to his alias La Verdure, Crispin and the others sing a happy song
about springtime: Tu viens peindre nos prés vives couleurs; Printemps, tu ramenés les Fleurs, Chacun en a l'ame ravie; Mais qu'ai-je affaire helas! de tout ce que je voi. Tu ne ramenés point Silvie, Ainsi tu ne fais rien pour moi (ix). This song has a different tone from the previous ones. In the other songs, the drinking man is happy in his intoxication. Thus, he has no need of Silvie; her love would only bring him pain. Now that it is spring and love
247 is in the air, Silvie is nowhere to be found. The drinker has lost his loved one and can only blame the season.
The mood shift of the song parallels that of Phélonte's from Act I to Act V. The only difference is that Phélonte will, of course, win the hand of his beloved Daphnis. The shift to which I allude is that there has always been a latent desire for love, but it has been ridiculed. What was once an apparent rejection of love has now become something to be missed or cherished. However, the musicial mood swing is only temporary. Dorame is very impressed by the little number and the confident "Crispin musicien" asks him if he would like to hear another one. Dorame gladly agrees; he greatly enjoyed the rondo to which Crispin amusingly refers as "... [des] éternûmens d'esprit" (ix). The singers give an encore performance that returns to the earlier theme of love causing pain: L'Amour cause trop de peine. Je ne veux plus m'engager; Un Amant souffre la gêne. Quand l'Objet vient à changer. L'Amour cause trop de peine. Je ne veux plus m'engager (V, ix). In this song the drinker, who has had second thoughts about the significance of love, returns to his strong drink because Bacchus, the god of grape-growing and of wine, "— est le seul remede qui peut guérir de l'Amour..." (ix). In the final scene(x). Mêlante enters with his arm around Lise and asks to take part in the concert. Dorame is
248 astonished to find his other daughter at Phélonte's home. Mêlante admits that he has been in love with Lise for over a year now and that he would like to marry her. Dorame, initially refuses. However, Lise, Daphnis, Toinon and
Crispin get on their hands and knees to plead for his acquiescence. Lise, with tears in her eyes, begs for his forgiveness. Dorame says: "Ses pleurs réveillent ma tendresse et... . C'est assez. Mêlante, elle est à vous"
(x). He also has enough insight to recognize that Phélonte is, in fact, in love with his other daughter. Thus, he consents to their union. Now it is Crispin's turn to win a bride: "Toinon m'aime, je l'aime, & je vous la demande"
(x). Crispin tells Dorame his real name and explains that he is Phélonte's valet. Dorame agrees to the marriage provided that Crispin will perform again. This time,
Crispin sings a love song in honor of Toinon and promises to give concerts three times a week. Now that Dorame has consented to the three up-coming weddings, Crispin sings a humorous little song about the child that he hopes to have with Toinon:
Pour Crispin & Toinon, Que dans neuf mois un beau Garçon Soit le fruit d'un hymen prospéré. Ah! que si ce petit Poupon Vient au jour beau comme son Pere, Ce doit être un joli Mignon (V, x).
This petit air surely evoked much laughter. Crispin, as portrayed by Raymond Poisson, with his bulging eyes and
249 bizarre appearance, should hope that his little "Poupon" will resemble Toinon.
The theme of music dominates the play from its beginning to its conclusion. An important element behind Hauteroche's stage directions and the use of music is that there is no need of a curtain, since it would never fall at anytime during the performance. Besides the lackeys' performances, Fanchon has a solo; Phélonte plays the harpsichord on more than one occasion; the Gascon sings a drinking song; Le Breton, although in a drunken stupor, sings and dances; Crispin and Phélonte sing together, and Crispin performs his own brief number. The music is spread out relatively evenly throughout the play and basically provides the true entertainment of the comedy. Certainly the audience was pleased, and to Hauteroche, that is what was this time most important.
250 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
The music for the play is not known to have survived and the composer, or composers, have not been identified. The Mémoire de Mahelot on staging is as follows (p. 117): "Theatre est deux chambre différante qui se change a tous les actes. Il faut un clavesin, une halbarde, deux tabourest, 3 chaisse, un manteau, deux billets, 2 clef, 2 battes, une escritoire." Transcription Lancaster IV^; p. 461. n. 7. À chaconne is the music performed for a slow and stately dance. Usually its musical form consists of variations based on a reiterated harmonic pattern with a 3/4 time.
4. See L'Esprit folet ou la Dame invisible Part III below.
An air is a short musical piece usually written for a solo vocalist, simpler than an opera aria. Hauteroche will continues to use this type of woman in the character of Julie of Le Cocherr See Le Cocher. Part III below. This is an idea that sets up the notions of noblesse to be explored by Hauteroche in the next play in the Crispin sequence. Les Nobles de province. “• See Silvie Chevalley, Album Théâtre classique (1970), for a drawing of "Raymond Poisson dans 'Crispin musicien'" (p. 183).
251 CHAPTER 5
T.RS WCIRT.RS PE PROVTNCE OU "LE SCÉLÉRAT IMAGINAIRE"^
The five-act play that Hauteroche wrote most probably for the 1675 season at the Hôtel de Bourgogne takes Crispin back to the country. The setting designated generally by the title, but unusually not particularized in the text after the list of characters, we learn from Act I is a village near Lyons, which looks to that city rather than to Paris administratively and culturally.= And it was in Lyons that the play was first published in 1678. The ingénue of the play, Angélique, and her maid Florine have spent a season in Lyons, in society that gives them a special vantage point on the village doings catalyzed by her father.
Monsieur de Fatencour, in his feud with the Fondnid family.
The omission of a particularizing place name may be seen to serve the generalization of the title. The setting could really be anywhere "en province" where one might encounter a country nobleman holding forth in front of his château. The peasants— farmers and farmworkers— that fill out as Crispin's band the generalized "comédie de moeurs," sound in their stylized ungrammatical French no different from there like elsewhere, for example Nicodème of Sens, in Le
252 Deuil. "Il y a tant de Robins, que c'est là ne rien dire,"
Florine says of one of Crispin's band.
Hauteroche wrote Les Nobles de province as a star vehicle for his colleague and collaborator Poisson, and it bears the marks of several stages of their earlier collaboration. Poisson could return to the traditional costume for this stay in the country after his musical outing to Paris. And the famous signature eye-rollings, as well as the "braire" of Le Deuil, are played up explicitly several times. With Fatencour, the master with whom Crispin is obliged to act a rôle, Crispin forms a comic duo Hauteroche and Poisson began in 1662 with Le Baron de La
Crasse and the tradition of "hobereaux" to which the rôle of
Fatencour belongs, by way of the figure of Sotenville of
Molière's George Dandin.^ Significantly, it is Crispin, in the dénouement of Les Nobles de province (V,i, pp. 382-83) who sets most clearly the "comédie de moeurs" Hauteroche wishes to represent and who both sees and sees through it in his intelligent résumé. The mastery achieved by Crispin (and Poisson) by the beginning of Act V, of which this recapitualation is one part, shows that it was indeed a new Crispin, "maître de lui comme de l'univers" that Hauteroche created in his last Crispin play, a significant contribution to the tradition effected by his changes to the rôle.
Stepping outside the tradition, Hauteroche creates a character who is no longer a valet at all; indeed, the new
253 Crispin prides himself on not being anyone's valet. He is the son of one of Fatencour's tenant farmers, and he has recently returned from a trip to Rome, where he had remained some six years. There, no one but himself was his master, he proudly informs the valet Fabrice, who is duly impressed by his display of Italian (and it is the real thing that
Crispin agrees to teach him). Fabrice has traveled, too, to court with his master, and is no fool. We are in fact a far cry from the illiterate Crispin of Crispin médecin and his rote "Medicus sum.” The addition of the trip to Rome continues Poisson's own invention of it in his five-actLes
Femmes coquettes (1671). In Poisson's play, Crispin once home professes to despise Italians and regrets his trip.* In Hauteroche's Les Nobles de province, the trip and stay in
Italy will become a theme of structural importance developing in terms of an on-going debate on the experience of travel as education, a debate with an illustrious past from the Renaissance humanists to the recent ironic rethinking of fables on travel in the first collectionof La
Fontaine's Fables (1668). Crispin's experience, as the farm boy returned home, dramatizes at the moment of reintegration into the domain of Fatencour, takes us paradoxically to the broadest and deepest context of a continuing and living humanist tradition, beyond the lessons of style learned at Lyons or at court (by the play's ieune premier D'llsmarets).
254 À second fundamental change, brought to bear in Acts I-
III of Hauteroche's new dramatic setting for Crispin, is the
violence of the character. Unlike earlier Crispins, from
the beginning with Scarron, who avoid rixes. the exposition of Act I centers on a character who has all the appearance of a "fier-à-bras,” as Curtis puts it (1972, p. 107), and
whose dominant trait of "emportement" will be tellingly well
suited to the environment of Fatencour's domain. The
focusing symbol here is no longer the initial knock on the door opening a journey inside a foyer. which was
characteristic of Hauteroche's early plays and recurs later,
but rather the aggressive bursting out of the house that is
seen in Crispin's first entrance on stage. The dominant trait of "emportement" will recede with the renewed action of Act IV, and a more traditional Crispin will exit after the last two acts than the new one that bursts in to play
Acts I-III. It is this first Crispin that proved to be an
influence on as well as reshaping of the tradition rôle.^
A third basic alteration of the rôle traditionally played by Crispin has to do with the function of disguise.
As central to the definition of the rôle, and with it Poisson's acting, disguise had by 1675 come to represent invention and virtuosity in it. The theatrical illusion of this, apart from a self-generated bright idea foregrounded by stage action and/or metacommentary, is the inventiveness with which Crispin warms to the rôles that are thrust upon
255 him, whether of soldier or pedagogue, bel-esprit or poet, in others' plays, or as mourner or music master in Hauteroche's
earlier creations.® In Les Nobles de province. Crispin never willingly plays the **fou,” and at the heart of the play he complains bitterly of having been made the "fou malgré lui" (III, viii, p. 334). Throughout he is indignant as he is cast into the rôle, by way of the medical establishment finally, and it is only under duress that he plays the rôle. By extension, it will be a significant element of preparation for the dénouement of the play, as well as the crowning of its action, that Crispin will publicly denounce all disguising.
Since Les Nobles de province is not known to have been staged in Paris, readers of the play must imagine its stage setting with the aid of the play's unfolding action. In Act I, i there is Fatencour's dwelling, either a château or manor house, most likely upstage to give it perspective and to allow for adjacent garden space with two gates that will figure for the young lovers' trysts. In Act V, we learn that the second house represented is Monsieur de Valereux's (rather than the rival Fondnid's). All the cast converges, in Act V, in the direction of this house, where the resolution must lie to the Fatencour-Fondnid war that the governor has ordered to be resolved. There is no indication of action within either house, all conversation seemingly taking place in the space between them, not here the street
256 or square of the city but rather adjoining lawns and gardens, thus taking advantage of the large Hôtel de
Bourgogne stage after minimizing it in Crispin musicien.^
ACT I
The eleven scenes of exposition of Act I are divided into three roughly equal sequences, constituted by three similarly patterned interruptions of stage action made by
Crispin's entrances.
The first installment of the prolonged conversation between the neighbors Valereux and Fatencour begins with a negative that bodes ill for the success of Valereux's repeated peace feelers at the request of the governor.
"Non, Monsieur de Valereux, il ne sera point dit/Que ma Maison le cède à celle de Fondnid./Vous m'accusez en vain d'humeur bouillante/Madame de Fondnid est une impertinente."
Half of the scene's exchanges are taken up with recitation of genealogical titles starting from 1492, despite
Valereux's efforts to stem the reiteration, and to the causa belli— Madame de Fondnid's willful failure to observe the precedence due to Madame de Fatencour by remaining in her armchair when she entered a room. Valereux finally fixes the loquatious nobleman's attention on the matter at hand— "Croyez-moi, faites mieux, choissez des arbitres,/Et ne commetez point, pour vos seul intérêts,/Les meilleures Maisons de tout le Vivarais;/Ou pour ou contre vous, la
257 Noblesse engagée,/Sur votre différend, se trouve
partagée;/!! peut coûter du sang, si..." (p. 241). Fired
by the example of crusading ancestors, Fatencour draws his
sword on hearing the word "sang" and waves it in the air with a determination that cuts through any discussion, diplomatic, ethical, or moral. The king's ordinances against dueling, and the governor's concern for peace, may have held him back thus far, he answer, as Valereux warns him with friendly advice against the consequences of breaking them, will be as nothing, he pledges, should the outrage to his honor continue. This is the posture he has assumed when Crispin makes his first entrance.
Valereux's last advice, unwanted, of course, and unheard, extends to the brusk and obviously angry Crispin, who enters talking to himself and scarcely acknowledging the presence of the persons whose conversation he interrupts, thus suggesting a paralleling of the two characters. "Tous les grands dégaineurs sont gens que l'on évite;/Et le solide honneur dont on doit faire cas,/Ne consiste jamais à faire du fracas./Il faut que la prudence au courage réponde" (pp.
243-44), Valereux advises, a lesson in a new model of courtesy historically too late for Fatencour and too early for Crispin. "Moi coquin?/Âpprenez qu'on me nomme Crispin," is his first complaint. Fatencour's quite natural question,
"qu'avez-vous," is met with an almost equally insulting "Morbleu! si vous étiez homme," followed by a profession of
258 honor in a different musical mode from Fatencour's
Picrocole-like sabre rattingly.® The simple facts are given a trumpet flourish (and Poisson's "braire"): "Je vous ferois bien voir que je reviens de Rome,/Que dans l'occasion je suis garçon de coeur, sans noblesse, il est vrai, mais tout rempli d'honneur." The cause of this outburst, once it is uncovered, is again a woman. Fatencour's strongwilled and outspoken niece, Arpalis, has administered a slap, with a "coquin," in answer to Crispin's too familiar and pushy request to borrow a violin. On his return from Rome, the
Fatencours have obviously taken an interest in Crispin and extended him some easy hospitality at the château, which he has overstepped as he has misjudged its limitations. The violin was needed, he explains, to accompany a bouquet, part of the "petits soins" he has learned by the book, properly due his lawfully intended fiancée, Florine. Having delivered himself of this explanation, Crispin exits as abruptly as he entered, with just an automatic by your leave ("Serviteur").
The first juxtaposition on stage of the two angry men, "hommes à fracas," sets an expository focus and perspective of satire. Master and man (by feudal right), each has his honor. Each is also a big frog in a little puddle, croaking out unpleasantly his complaints of slights to honor. Both characters will develop, in concert, as the noise broadens out and disturbs others' peace.
259 In the continuation of Fatencour and Valereux's conversation (I, iii), Fatencour would leave his interlocutor as abruptly as Crispin has left the stage— "Je vous quitte," he begins in response to a "Revenons à
Fondnid." He is kept in conversation only through a desire to find more faults. Fondnid has neglected to pay feudal dues, Fondnid has usurped a pew in the parish church, Fondnid has sounded a hunting horn too near. Discussion advances to an exposé of the social disorder implicit in
Fatencour's temperament and stand. He cynically sets aside any other form of justice than the sword. The courts are after all corrupt, concludes this supposed guardian of their justice. And worse, they are slow: "... Et qui, pour me piller, trouvera le moyen/De prolonger vingt ans une affaire de rien." The full scandai to the mind exposed is that the famous "point d'honneur" is in fact an "affaire de rien," logically precluding any further action, let alone Fatencour's violence— "Moi, d'un Procès vingt ans j'aurois l'ame occupée,/Quand je puis le finir par quatre coups d'épée?" (p. 249). Valereux is left alone and in a short monologue (I, iv) reflects on self-deception by "aveugle courroux" and "un fantôme d'honneur" (p. 250). The second sequence of expository scenes (I-, v-vii), introduces D'llsmarets, who happens on Valereux and receives the bad news that no reconciliation is in the making. One must just wait until Fatencour's "bile s'évapore" is
260 Valereux's judgement. In conversation with his valet,
Fabrice, we are informed that after ten years at court,
where love is obscured by "intrigues, artifices & mystère,"
D'llsmarets has fallen truly in love with Angélique. They are so far the first casualties— Romeo and Juliette-like— of
thier family's feud. Angélique remains "tendre" despite the
feud, and D'llsmarets strives toward maintaining optimism
concerning its resolution. He simply regrets, for the moment, that his legitimate love for Angélique and honorable
intentions of making her his wife should have to be kept a
secret and thereby a matter of scheming where none should be
necessary. For both the former courtier, and his valet, "accommodement" should rhyme, as it does (p. 254) with
"raisonnement," whereas for "Messieurs les Campagnards," as the audience has heard, it rhymes with an undermining "emportement." Both men too express confidence in
Valereux's skills as a negotiator. It seems that the
carefully particularized stage notation for D'llsmarets's costume, "en juste-au-corps de velours noir," is in its
simple elegance just another element, along with diction and manners, of the court civilization that the young man keeps green in this backwater; but before the end of the exposition we will discover another use for it.
When D'llsmarets is just beginning to profess his gratitude to Florine for arranging a garden tryst with
Angélique (I, vii) his good manners are interrupted by
261 Crispin's second entrance (I, viii). A second time he
brings disorder to an orderly conversation. Having caught
sight of Florine, Crispin makes his way toward her intent on accomplishing the ritual display of love. He seems
oblivious to the rank of the persons to whom she is speaking, and literally steps of D'llsmarets's feet in his
haste— expressed with a sententiousness of proverbial
"wisdom" that is a part of his character of experienced
traveler— "Le terns est cher, fol qui ne l'emploie," he says
to the man standing in his way, with his request to move aside. He glowers when told to move on; and Fabrice draws
attention to the new appearance of the famous Poisson eye- rolling ("Comme il ouvre les yeux!," p. 257). Insults are
exchanged, and finally Crispin gives Monsieur de Fondnid's son a good push. His manners are of an impertinence to make
even a courtier forget his, since D'llsmarets returns a good
slap for the push. Stung, since he evidently feels himself
no one's valet, any more than Arpalis's "coquin," Crispin puffs out his chest: "Un soufflet, sans rien dire! Ah! c'est frapper en traître./Ventre, j'ai de l'honneur" (p.
258). This disparate mixture of social registers, which triggers a new menace from D'llsmarets, is followed by a new misunderstanding that sends Crispin off stage half way through the scene with renewed anger and more mutterings to himself. Wanting to take advantage of D'llsmarets's professed gratitude, as a favor to her, Florine intervenes—
262 "Hé pour l'amour de moi, ne le maltraitez pas." With his shortsightedness for the marks of social standing, Crispin misunderstands and believes that he has in D'llsmarets a rival for Florins's love. His aside, before another willfully abrupt exit, amounts to a vow of vengeance: "Oui? pour 1'amour de toi? C'est bien dit: patience. Rira bien qui rira le dernier, va" (p. 259). The gentleman, who of course has obeyed the lady's request, expresses only mild surprise in deference to love, when Florins informs him that for all his oddity, Crispin loves her and wants to marry her— which is good enough for her, given who he really is, "le fils de Jean Rustaut, le fermier du logis." "Il faut l'entendre," she adds.
D'llsmarets, always the gentleman, offers to apologize to Crispin, and does not develop his first impression's judgment that Crispin "a 1'esprit perdu." Thanking him,
Florine admits that Crispin "méritoit ce qu'il a reçu," obviously including unexpressed yet in her "reading" of her fiancé an uppityness with quality that is an unfortunate result of the change wrought by his having been too long abroad. The scene is interrupted by the prospect of the arrival of Monsieur de Loisonnière, one of the band of relatives and other noblemen that have been assembling to counsel Fatencour on the progress of the feud. Florine cannot bear the sight of him, much less his presence, since she believes him to be an agitator, delaying the
263 reconciliation of Fatencour with his enemy, and knows that he is part of a gang of invaders of Fatencour's game reserve and garden and wine cellar who threaten to eat the master out of house and home with their interminable talk of guns and other weaponry. The major part of I, ix, is a cheeky confrontation of
Monsieur de Loisonnière with Florine's own truths on "tant de gentilshommes à nourrir, embarassent/Vous accurez ici, cinq ou six à la fois;/Deux mots sur la querelle, & quatre heures à table." Its expansive verve inspired Dancourt's comic rhythm of assaults on the owner of a pleasant country house, whose friends take advantage of him, in La Maison de
Campagne.^ Loisonnière agrees placidly to it all, infuriating Florine still more. Unfortunately for the peaceful self-satisfaction of the character, enjoying what he believes to be his due, Loisonnière is also dressed in a black "juste-au-corps." His final pronouncement: "Pour temperer les gens qui prennent trop d/essor/Il est bon..." is interrupted by a bitter dose of his own prescription. Crispin the avenger, entering the third time (I, x), along with four of his country mates— Nicolas, Robin, Gratian, and Grand-Jobe— mistakes one black costume for another, and confusing Fatencour's cousin (whose face he doesn't see) for D'llsmarets, sets his band on Loisonnière with their staffs. Loisonnière is given a good drubbing on all sides, despite Florine's attempts to call off the band
264 of "possédés." "Je pense qu'il est fou," she says to the
audience. At the height of his spirits, and sure of the
reason of his premeditation, Crispin affirms this "folie." "Si je suis fou, tant mieux/C'est mon plaisir." The
signature eye-rolling is now taken as a sign of madness. "FLORINE: Voyez comme il roule les yeux. CRISPIN: Je veux
les rouller, moi." Crispin ends by raising his hand to Florine, who exits hurriedly with the exact same judgment on
him that Valereux made on Fatencour: "L'accès te prend, il faut attendre qu'il passe." Loisonnière, of course, has
long since fled in fright, saving his limbs at the expense of embarrassment.
The gang disperses in the last scene of exposition, while the getting is good. The peasant Nicolas, set to wonder by Crispin's raising his hand to Florine, asks a final question that voices those formed earlier by others
(Arpalis, Florine) and opens one side of a debate— Did you learn to hit women from seeing it in Rome?— inclining us toward the negative interpretation of the fruits of travel.
Crispin is quick to answer that indeed he has. "Pour elles en ce lieu, point de miséricorde." Scandalized, the simple Nicolas spares his friend, but not the Italians— "ces gens venimeux."
265 ACT II-IV
In order to build up the starring rôle, Hauteroche in effect has written a three-act play, developing the action begun in Act I with Crispin's assault on Loisonnière through the two acts that follow during which every character involved becomes informed of and reacts to the event. Acts
II and III, constructed in almost exact parallel, continue to feature Crispin in a series of focal scenes, with which the lovers' trials and ruses are interlaced but kept dramatically subordinate. Both acts end with Doctor Chiros, a variant on Doctor Mirobolan, integrated into the action as a threat of the establishment to Crispin's progress of reaccommodation to the Fatencour's environment. Hovering near, and a flunkey of Madame de Fatencour, Chiros's stubborn, senile incompetence threatens to enact literally on Crispin the expression "fou-a-lier." Brief analysis of these focal scenes— scenes iii, and then the sequence iv-vi- , in Act II, then scenes v-vii in Act III, with their framing contexts, can demonstrate the formal unity of Acts I-III. A progressively more familiar poetics of youth, fully developed by the moment of the Crispin plays in Hauteroche's career, and debate on travel as a means of self re-fashioning through education are focused by this central unified action. The first focal scene of Crispin's trials (II, iii) is framed by responses to his "mad" action of attacking
266 Loisonnière, first, from Angélique and Florine (II, i), then by Fatencour and Loisonnière himself (II, ii). The act begins with the sound of Florine's frank laughter, after having recounted the story of the "déroute" that seems to her poetic justice. Angélique more discreetly smiles with her and admits that she would not like a husband who is a "campagnard" like her cousin. With her mind on
D'llsmarets's image she prefers the types she and Florine have seen in Lyons that captures the style and spirit of the court. Theses courtiers "Ont je ne sçai quoi de si noble en parlant,/Un certain air en tout aimable, doux, galant,/Un esprit libre, aisé, qui plait, qui s'insinue" (p. 273). Florine approves Angélique's taste and compliments them both on the progress they have made in discerning this style and becoming a part of it through reading novels. "La lecture sans doute aide fort à l'esprit... Elle ôte à la fin tout le matériel;/Mais il faut, pour cela, beaucoup de naturel," Angélique observes with an evident fittingness that makes the scene into a living apology for "la bonne lecture des romans,"^® possible for the 1675 audience in a way it wouldn't have been a decade earlier. Florine laughs that she is indeed natural (read: knows the difference between fact and fiction), as Angélique's language, modesty, and fine sensibility show her to be. In the provinces, novel- reading may offer, and continue, the advantages of travel; it is in the best sense an escape, from stifling enclosure.
267 Florine posts herself to listen in on the conversation of Fatencour and Loisonnière whom she sees approaching and rightly has assumed to be talking about the same subject of Crispin's aggression. She cannot resist joining in, to taunt Loisonnière a little on his version of the affront to his honor. The cousin cannot, of course, abide her smiles and even stifled mocking laughter, and waxes angry, but before Florine has gained the useful knowledge that
Loisonnière has not seen and therefore is unable to identify any of his assailants. And she teasingly eludes his efforts to elicit that information from her. Fatencour, rather surprisingly (but tellingly) comes to her aid; he has no more sense of humor than the cousin, but his old-fashioned honor moves him automatically to the aid of a maiden in distress. In Act II, iii, Crispin repeats his performances in Act
I. A brusk and angry entrance with scant attention paid to the station— or even the existence— of all the persons who surround him— demonstrates exclusive focus on the purpose of having his say. His say this time, in language more rigid even than Fatencour's, is a renunciation of Florine as his fiancée, since he has caught her out singing a different song in the park. "II a 1'esprit creux," is Florine's first reaction, goading Crispin from renunciation to denunciation of the hussey. Quick to realize that Crispin may indirectly in the clumsiness of anger expose the young lovers to
268 Fatencour, Florine vainly attempts to quiet him by signs. Failing that, she opens the gambit of his "folie" for the first, fastening on the first big word that comes to mind— "hipocondre," a diagnosis that someone may well have been shrewd enough to make, we will later discover, of Madame de
Fatencour.^* She cites as authority Doctor Chiros (whom she knows she can get to say anything that he believes he has said but forgotten). Fatencour, impatiently, swallows the diagnosis without thought on it, despite Crispin's indignant protestation of untruths. Loisonnière opines for a good purging, lest the Fatencour family should "catch" something. With heavy irony that shoots past him, Florine agrees: "J'ai toujours apprenendé les foux;/C'est une maladie aussi contagieuse..." "Sors, coquin," Fatencour commands, already contaminated by a foolish confusion of "fou" and "coquin." But Crispin is not the man now to be dismissed brutally in this manner, at least while the steam is still up, and he vents himself into self-exposure. Loisonnière is an equally unwitting partner, in this burlesque sanity hearing, in which the defendant who has chosen himself for counsel has certainly chosen a fool. "Chimère," Florine submits for the prosecution when the causa belli of the slap is reentered into evidence. True enough, the defense insists, since it was avenged. The "light bulb" goes on for Loisonnière, who disrupts the proceedings by springing to Crispin's throat, an action that causes a reflex action in Crispin; from
269 deeply remembered experience, he drops to his knees and
offers apology by reflex: "Je suis mort!/Pardon, pardon,
monsieur," which draws a second instance of generosity from
Fatencour: "Mon cousin, je vous prie,/Ne vous emportez point...," that only scarcely overrides Loisonnière's
continuing splutters of indignation.
Emboldened by Fatencour's support, Crispin returns to
an upright position, only to be figuratively knocked down again. His first question to the "court" indicates real
puzzlement: "Comment diable I/Parce que je dis vrai, je suis
fou?" This fundamental question opens up realms of diagnosis and knowledge unsuspected by anyone in this court, whose judges are either purposedly prejudiced (Florine) or unconsciously blinkered by ignorance and social stereotyping
(Fatencour, Loisonnière). "Misérable," Florine retorts in a show of exasperation, implying with her posturing an "I tried to spare you." And Crispin is again really surprised when she points out to him that it is fact Loisonnière that he has set upon. Loisonnière repeats his injured dignity number— "Vouloir encore nier"— and like his cousin
Fatencour, would seek final justice by the sword— this time in effect the executioner's, we may see. "Tu mourras de ma main" (p. 287). Crispin instinctually returns violence and taunts Loisonnière with the fact of his undistinguished drubbing. Florine, who knows what may accidentally happen in this angry confrontation, once again intervenes for
270 mercy, indirectly, by trying to sustain the image of the madman, whose malady should spare him real physical punishment. "Quand la sottise est faite, on la veut méconnaître," she begins with a keen insight into automatic memory repression, that however ambigious is enough to suggest to someone else a volontary act of forgetting.
Against Crispin's protests, Florine is again successful— first Fatencour, then Loisonnière, after a revealing "Mais il faut châtier les foux" (whose self-incriminating irony is again lost on him), pardons Crispin "fou malgré lui." But neither will pardon the "paysans"'s Crispin, in their view
(and the "paysans" as we will find out) has criminally led astray. They exit, still supposing that the whole incident is in fact a conspiracy mounted by the enemy Fondnid.
Act II, V, the first consultation with Doctor Chiros, as a "forensic expert," is the center piece in a sequence of three scenes that offer a superbly crafted development on the "fou malgré lui." In II, iv, there is a circling of both characters around each other, as both Crispin and Florine deal with uncertainty. Florine, who now has her ruse fully in mind, wants to convince Crispin that he is "fou," but at the same time she does not want him in fact to be mad, since she is still intent on him as a husband. Crispin, still truly perplexed by events he cannot understand, resists being labelled a "fou," when he can yet feel the slap D'llsmarets gave him. What he in fact needs
271 in a metaphysician to work thorough his problem. "Je ne me croyois pas la tête si mal saine," he says as he recounts stories fabricated by Florine to demonstrate his delusionary state, in which the slap would be a part. Quite naturally, he concludes, "II faut songer à me médiciner" (p. 292), and greets the opportune appearance of Doctor Chiros with an enthusiasm that obscures the total ineptness of the physician that appears in Act II, v. Harried in his calls and garrulous with senility, the doctor arrives talking. Florine has no difficulty whatsoever reminding him that he has diagnosed Crispin as "hipocondre," and forgotten it: if
I said it, it must be true, he concludes with his own special professional logic in response to Florine's prompting. He is able to flash up the Greek etymology, a Latin tag, and the pathology of the malady, all without the slightest indication that he knows what the thing is that he is talking about. And of course his only prescription is his invariable one— bleeding. Crispin, wanting to hear some pertinent sense in this fatras. fastens onto the phrase
"causé de chaleur" and applies it himself to his own particular case— too much sun in Italy. His conclusion is thus strengthened. "Je suis beaucoup plus mal que je ne l'avais crû/Je le vois bien...," he declares to Florine, after Chiros's exit, and repeats his first self-diagnosis as fact: "Les voyages m'ont trop échauffée les viscères;/Et depuis mon retour, ces inflammations/M'ont, par trop de
272 repos, fait des obstructions... . Florine encourages him:
"Qui t'en a tant appris? Tu parles comme un homme...," and despite the bad consequences of his travels Crispin holds onto the belief that they have indeed remade "un homme"— "Penses-tu que les gens aillent pour rien à Rome?" Florine for her part is touched by his real distress: "Console- toi," and "courage," she answer his plaints— "A mon âge être
foul quelle pitié!" (p. 299). But still, the sting of that slap...; doubt remains even with the growing sense of having fallen ill: "Mais puis-je être si mal, sans que j'en sente rien?" But Florine dismisses this as pure "marques d 'extravagance."
The second consultation with Chiros (II, x) is framed by a series of rapid events that puts Florine's ruse at risk by an unexpected happening. D'llsmarets surges through the garden door against which Florine and Crispin have been talking, fleeing from discovery at his assigned moment of trysting by Fatencour, who with Loisonnière has been making a stately progress— talking— from one garden to the other. He is gone again in a flash, at Florine's bidding, but not before Crispin recognizes his "donneur de soufflets" and moves toward him. In no mood to bear another obstacle patiently, D'llsmarets draws his sword to the "maraut," and Crispin shouts for help, "Au voleur, arrêtez." Florine, in a scene of three lines, manages by her quick wits to brazen out the situation and to quiet Crispin, whose cries may
273 alert Fatencour. "Adieu. Je hais les fous, mais je ne les crains guère" (p. 301). Exasperation over persistence in delusion, she would have Crispin believe, is her motivation for this abrupt exit. But the audience sees Crispin's different interpretation in his short monologue (II, ix) . He sees through the entire ruse immediately: his flash of intelligence, without real introspection, is followed by an automatic vow of vengeance, again rash since Act III will reveal that he has not gotten the full picture. Chiros returns, on his way back from a canceled consultation with Madame de Fatencour. Crispin, who now knows that he is not ill, responds curtly to the diagnostic examination the physician insists on inflicting on him.
With few words he leaves no doubt in his answers that no symptoms are present. But when Chiros repeats the word
"hipocondre," Crispin ruins the game and his victory by sending the doctor and his "bistouris" to the devil. Chiros, of course, sees only a display of anger that confirms his diagnosis. And in the monologue (ii, xi) following Crispin's exit concludes that the "fou" must be bound for his own good. Chiros with his thoughtless rigidity and old fashioned rituals is all of a piece with the village nobles he treats. His ugly menace ends Act II in stark contrast to the life-giving laughter and delight that began it with Angélique.
274 Crispin's final "épreuve" in gaining a true hearing of his sanity case, with Madame de Fatencour (III, vii), will prove to be the most difficult of all and the most violent.
The first half of Act III provides a portrait of Madame de Fatencour that prepares the audience for Crispin's ordeal in scenes v-vii. Madame de Fatencour begins the act with an inquiry about Crispin, since Loisonnière has told her about the attack. Florine, eager to defuse the curiosity, informs her that Crispin has been driven mad by his travels; but
Madame de Fatencour remains skeptical until she sees for herself. In the meanwhile she raises, conservative and humorless disciplinarian that she has been with her daughter, the question of two love letters found in the park (in fact dropped by the hapless D'llsmarets). Angélique and
Florine manage to explain them away as Arpalis's exchange with D'llsmarets, whose name is on one. That fact is sufficient to reveal Madame de Fatencour's implacable hatred for the entire family. Arpalis, arriving on the scene, true to her independent character, and uninformed of the rôle of conspirator into which she has been cast, further frustrates the suspicious mother's inquiry by a refusal to consider her correspondence any of her aunt's business. It is at this unfortunate moment of frustration that Crispin arrives to present his case. Seeing his approach, Florine hastens to re-present her case against the "hipocondre, fou," and to arouse fully Madame de Fatencour's predictable indignation
275 over Crispin's own part in the beating of cousin Loisonnière (III, iv, p. 322).
The first thing Crispin hears from Madame de Fatencour is an imperious call to order and the prejudging accusation
"coquin." "Connois-tu Monsieur de Loisonnière?/Dis, coquin1" Crispin's response shows that he has not yet accepted the fact that it was the Fatencour's cousin that he did in fact beat; this is the part of the picture his illumination on the true state of affairs in Act II, ix did not provide him. Florine is quick to take and to present the denial as further instance of madness. Madame de Fatencour cannot imagine, as Florine has argued, that
Loisonnière could have any reason to make up the tale— or to be mistaken about its circumstances, as Crispin claims.
Matters are considerably worsened for the plaintiff by the arrival (III, vi) of the peasant Nicolas, fresh from punishment by Fatencour and Loisonnière and bound upon denouncing Crispin for involving him in the escapade. He followed Crispin, Nicolas reveals, because of the bond of friendship for his father, and because he took Crispin at his word that an unknown man had roughed him up. But now that he knows Crispin lied (yet another witness testifying from a partial and limited picture of the truth), he hastens to reaffirm his own honor to Madame de Fatencour. And he is believed where Crispin is not.
276 To make things even worse, Loisonnière arrives to be a part of the scene of Madame de Fatencour's final judgment, which is a good deal shorter than it would need to be to dispell the "fort grand embarras" into which Crispin has by this point been thrust. Even more implacably than her husband, Madame insists "Je ne dois pas laisser cette offense impunie." Crispin's defense that Florine and Loisonnière are in conspiracy against him, once again in its heat is self-incriminating evidence of his madness. "Madame, il devient furieux," Florine points out, "comme il roule les yeux." Crispin is so exasperated by the judgment— "Tu n'as vû personne"— that the extravagant vow he makes to say no more comes dangerously near to a threat, and is close enough to it for Madame de Fatencour to call for the stick, taking punishment into her own hands as did the men. "Je verrois à présent mettre le feu chez vous,/Que je n'en dirois pas un seul mot." Ironically, even Loisonnière joins Angélique in calling for mercy from Madame de Fatencour's punishing stick. "Sors, mon ami, j'apprehends,/Qu'à la fin," Angélique sensitively advises him. But in the end, the new man stands firm (and talks again) refusing to give up or be beaten into being other than what he knows himself to be. It is in fact a fine moment, for the rôle and the play, when he refuses all disguise: "Si je sors je veux qu'on me pende,/Disant ce que j'ai vû rien ne doit m'alarmer,/Je demeurerai là, me dût-on
277 assommer,/Florine a bonne langue, & me fait hipocondre/Pour
m'ôter les moyens de la pouvoir confondre... ." But this
fine moment is cut short by a new arrival that swells out
the "court" to its full complement— "bien pis," Crispin
declares, as Doctor Chiros arrives to give his "expert"
evidence. Madame de Fatencour, who finds the arrival "fort
à propos," is, of course, easily swayed to believe as Chiros
does, and consigns Crispin to his punishment rather than her own, leaving with condemned man's profession of innocent
indignation— "Quoi! l'on me fera fou malgré moi? (p. 334)-
-the heart of the matter unsounded. But like the victims of
the maxim "Might makes right," in La Fontaine's first
fables, Crispin is "battu, mais non pas abattu." He can still walk away, sending the doctor to blazes along with the
whole proceedings, and in the event accepting full moral responsibility for his action.
After Chiros's exit (III, ix), things take an upswing in Crispin's favor, which prepares his changed fortunes in
Act IV, the one-act play Hauteroche adds to and links with
the three-acter he has written. Florine is convinced that
"enfin la victoire est gagnée" (III, x), and she is equally sure that given his performance she has made no mistake on
the man she has determined to be her husband. It is time,
she judges and proposes, to do something for Crispin, and especially to deliver him from the clutches of Chiros. Angélique, who in her display of sympathy has already lived
278 up to her name, agrees, doubly convinced by the accuracy of her prediction of her mother's impatient anger that has taken place. Coupled with their agreement to tell Crispin the truth, and to enlist him into their cause, is the arrival of an unknown man, who as the official "exempt" sent by the governor that he turns out to be will also make a contribution to the new order of Crispin's brave new world, which established in Act IV will develop with only some passing dissonances into the harmonious dénouement of Act V. In the interval between Acts III an IV, La Tour, the governor's man has made his wishes known to Fatencour. Act
IV begins with both men, hats in hand, issuing from the château in a stream of mutual deference. Fondnid joins them (IV, ii) prematurely, since the formal reconciliation stipulated in a formal plan drawn up by the governor is scheduled for later. Like La Fontaine's goats on a narrow bridge, the two enemies are paralyzed by ritual politeness until Fondnid finds the appropriate ritual expression that releases them all. Crispin, who wanders in (IV, iii) in contrast is greeted by Fatencour by an impatient "Qu'est- ce?", and in response to his "Je me promene" receives a curtly submissive "Hé bien, promene-toi," that turns his head after the exiting Fatencour with the comment to himself: "Belle réponse I oyez." Florine takes Fatencour's place (IV, v), and Crispin "faisant mine de s'en aller" (p.
344), prepares to do as he has been done unto. Then he is
279 stopped by the sound of the start of an old song: "Arrête, mon cher," and does as it bids him.
Crispin plays with Florine the madman she has turned him into, stubbornly and with full lucidity, only for a moment before being fully drawn into conversation by
Florine's remark "Quand on rit,/Il me semble qu'on doit entendre la raillerie," and by their mutual agreement that Doctor Chiros is worse than a fool in being a sot. Florine pulls out all the stops of seduction: "Tu voudrois me déplaire,/A moi, Crispin? à moi, que tu nommois toujours/Ton bec, ton toutou, tes amours" (p. 346).
Crispin melts before the old attraction, which he admits, and grasps at the new experience for a guide. "Avec le tems la paille, hom! les nefles meurissent,/Dit le proverbe à
Rome," and interrupts Florine's reservation about the effects of his trip with a frank confession. "Que veux-tu? c'est peut-être betise,/De croire ce qu'on voit, mais j'ai cette sottise." Feeling challenged by these words of wisdom, Florine makes the clean breast of the truth of the D'llsmarets incident, as she had determined to do, after making Crispin swear to secrecy and accepting his word, given by the appropriate oath "Ou la peste m'étouffe" (a fate surely worse than that to which "Hipocondrie" could have destined him). Following the lovers' ruse directed by Florine with interest, Crispin is entirely won over by the time she assures his of D'llsmarets's protection, since he
280 "sçait vivre, il est honnête” (p. 350). "Touche, cela vaut fait, tu n'as qu'à dire," he concludes their pact. On the matter of his first play on the team, delivering a letter to
Angélique, he has a passing misgiving. A memory from past life, and the other lives of older Crispins who lose letters”"' and get the stick for it, along with a premonition of things to come in the nature of the missteps from earlier Crispin plays, passes through his mind (and flicker in spectators' memories). But misgivings are wiped away by the return of the old love song, which also refocuses the fruits of travel: "j'ai de l'intelligence, & suis des raffinez,/Qu'il n'est pas fort aisé de mener par le nez./Quand on a comme moi passé six ans à Rome... M'aimes- tu? (pp. 350-51). Past, present, and future are made possible by Florine's immediate response— "Si je t'aime, oh!" But Crispin begins on the wrong foot (in his mouth):
"la femme est un terrible animal," he observes, only to be cut off by the old Florine, who needs not take any of this guff, as Crispin knows. "Tu vas moraliser?" she retorts before repeating his instruction on the letter. D'llsmarets is as good as Florine's word (IV, v)", and after a relatively civil "Va-t-en, mon ami," accepts him gladly as an ally and go-between. He even has the grace to listen without impatience to Crispin's repeated "when I was in Italy." A gift of ten louls brings Crispin to a willing
"Oh Monsieur, je suis votre valet" (p. 357) "& tres humble
281 serviteur." Underwitten by the identity restored by
Florine's love, Crispin now has the freedom to use the metaphor. And the new parallel, replacing that with
Fatencour, will now be with the "honnête homme" D'llsmarets.
In IV, vi-viii, Crispin continues to soar, in conversation with Fabrice, who admires him as indicated for his Italian experience and exchanges of keen portraits of Fondnids and Fatencours. Fondnid, who passes (IV, vii) and sends Fabrice after his son with impatient assertiveness appears to
Crispin, as he does on stage, as a "vilain Gentillâtre" eliciting the rhyme "mine accariâtre," and as for Monsieur aux oisons (as Fabrice dubs Loisonnière), he is no more than a fat who really believes that "II faut pour raisonner être de qualité."
The first setback in Crispin's new lease on life arrives at the and of Act IV (scene xi) just at the moment that he is contentedly counting his ten louls and talking to himself about love's blessings (IV, x). In a wickedly memorable scene of caricature, the "vache enragée," Madame de Fatencour heaves up on the horizon accompanied by Loisonnière armed with a long rifle. Unfortunately both had been hiding (visibly to the audience) at the edge of the garden and overheard Crispin and Fabrice's conversation (IV, ix) Madame, who has thus overheard Crispin's derogatory description of Doctor Chiros as a "chirurgien de village," shows herself not one to forgive or forget the extension of
282 the description of herself as the doctor's "vache à lait."
"Tu veux être hypocondre à present," Madame taunts, as
Loisonnière holds the gun aimed at Crispin and forces him to dance the pantomime of madness: "Je le suis,/ou je donne au diable" (p. 371). Madame does not believe a word of it, and couldn't care less, as long as she gets what she is really after— D'llsmarets's letter to Angélique. She rudely searches him herself, and into the bargain Loisonnière takes his ten louls. He will "keep them for" Crispin, he promises, covering this shabby action with a lie Crispin immediately and sharply sees through. "Je me ris de cela,/la mienne est aussi bonne," he objects, and begins to shout. To silence him, it is Madame de Fatencour, "le prenant au colet," the stage direction indicates, who threatens his life: "II faut que je l'étrangle" (p. 375), she snarls (it is a pity Poisson could not have played the rôle en travesti. as the rôle would ten years earlier most likely have been played, giving new setting for the play of eye-rolling). And she freezes him, above his strangulated
"Ah!" with a "scélérat!"— the unique instance of the exclusionary term for the criminal outlaws. She would turn him over to Loisonnière, and his itchy triggers finger, if she didn't have more pressing business elsewhere.
At this bad moment, Chiros reappears (IV, xii), only to have another appointment canceled. In compensation, she offers him the honor of disagreement on Crispin's malady.
283 Crispin, is indeed, she insists, a "fou imaginaire."
Decidedly, all is not yet for the best in Crispin's new world. With the multiple threats posed at the end of Act IV, we have been put on notice to buckle up for some bumpy going yet in the dénouement of Act V. As Florine will warn
Angélique, tempering optimism about lovers' special destinies for "d'heureuses journée," "... nous courions hazard d'un régal fort malsain,/Si sur nous votre Mere eut pû mettre la main/Elle a dans certain tems, la bile dangereuse" (V, ii, pp. 386-87).
ACT V
The dénouement, which in the first half of Act V, i-vi, celebrates the new Auguste-Crispin, "maître de l'univers comme de lui-même," moves toward a political resolution (V, vii-xi) in the general ideological frame of Act V of
Molière's Le Tartuffe, which never in effect takes place.
The circumstances of a series of unforeseen interruptions (V, xii-xiii), which in fact bring to bear the supplement of
Hauterochean poetic fantasy, by that spirit effects what the letter of the law cannot do— in the way of recognition of human natural rights. It is this last development that moves directly to the end of the Fatencour-Fondnid war and beyond it to its commemoration in the celebration of two marriages.
284 Walking onto the stage, unruffled by the ugly confrontation at the end of Act IV— from which he has once again seemingly just walked away— Crispin encounters La Tour entering from the other side, out of Valereux's house. We first hear a surprise, in striking contrast to Madame de Fatencour's abusive "scélérat," before its circumstances are explained, providing another piece of the puzzle of Crispin's stay in Rome and with it correction of the mistaken impression the enthusiastic terms of Crispin's pact with Florine might give that his Roman education had been gained with the "bas-fonds" of its society. La Tour calls out to the figure who has not yet seen him with the dignity of the title: "Monsieur Crispin," and reminds him of the times they had spent in conversation together in Rome. La
Tour's response to Crispin's inquiry as to his reasons for being in the village is an impatient allusion to the "sot demeslé" the governor and he have judged the Fatencour- Fondnid war to be. Continuing in the spirit of their earlier conversation, Crispin without undue rhetoric in contradiction, takes exception to this oversimplification of the village and its inhabitants. The nuanced mastery of his revision, to which I alluded early on, in identifying Hauteroche's modifications of the traditional Crispin rôle, is worth quotation in full for several reasons having to do with Hauteroche's playcraft. Recalling his stated preference for the well-made (five-act) play over easy
285 satire, Crispin's long description may be seen to perform a résumé of the play's past and a preparation for its future dénouement. As metacommentary it may also show us what lies behind the "comédie de moeurs."
Ces Messieurs, la plupart sont fort chargés de bile Le salpetre chez eux se rencontre à foison; Et d'abord ils ont peine à goûter la raison; Mais leur fougue passée, ils sont bien raisonnables... . Entre autres il en est qui sont très-campagnards, Gens aimant leurs foyers, & qu'on nomme cagnards, Qui n'ont que rarement sorti de la Province, Qui sur le point d'honneur souffrent peu qu'on les pince. Braves à toute outrance, & qu'on voit pour rien Mettre la brette à l'air & s'en excrimer bien. D'ailleurs grand discoureurs sur toutes les matières. Et des francs hobereaux conservant les maniérés: Quand ils sont une fois à vanter leurs combats. Leurs maison... la-dessus il ne finissent pas. Ils en fatiguent ceux qui veulent les entendre; Mais, du reste, assez bons à qui sçait bien les prendre. Pour Monsieur de Fondnid, & Monsieur Fatencour, Sont à peu prés tout comme & faits au même tour... (pp. 382-83).
Conversation between Florine and Angélique (V, ii), on their arrivai at Valereux's shows their movement there partially from flight from Madame Fatencour's menace, as seen in Florine's evocation of it quoted above, and also to enlist his help (through his daughter, who is Angélique's friend) with resolution of the Fatencour-Fondnid feud, which they hope will also end the obstacles to the lovers' happy union. Angélique with characteristic modesty regrets making a scene ("éclat") and fears that she may be judged harshly both for having seen D'llsmarets privately and for the forwardness of her present measures of leaving the house secretly to solicit herself Valereux's aid. The two women
286 also encounter Crispin who has remained in the vicinity after his exchanges with La Tour, and Florine shames him over the loss of D'llsmarets's incriminating letter; he should have laid down his life to defend it. Refusing this kind of sentimentally heroic dramatization of his particular function, and describing the facts of Loisonnière's long gun and Angélique's "diable de Mere," Crispin rises guiltlessly above the challenge to his competence, letting the facts speak for themselves along with a sincere apology for the outcome. Valereux comes to his door (V, iv) and after dismissing Crispin with thanks for having conducted the women there, ushers Angélique into the "sanctuary" she seeks in his house. Florine stays behind (V, v) to give Crispin his next assignment. He must return to the château, and with his life keep Madame Fatencour from knowing where her daughter now is. Left alone (V, vi), Crispin first questions Florine's readiness to sacrifice him for someone else's love. But once again be easily transcends a threatening moment, here of doubt. "Elle m'aime pourtant," he begins self-assuringly to reason, and then takes flight comically— and poetically— in a last transformative evocation of the famous Poisson features, seen now through the lens of love: "... aussi sans vanité/Je suis assez bien fait, droit, bien pris, bien planté,/L'oeil fin quoique petit, le nez de bonne sorte,/La bouche un peu trop grande, il est vrai, mais qu'importe,
287 ..." (p. 391). À more sobre affirmation of personal
identity, the co-ordinated and prerequisite "maîtrise" to that of the "univers" of Crispin's world visible in his description of it to La Tour, is a crowning repetition of the fine moment in Act III when Crispin has refused to dissemble or disguised himself (and won all over again
Florine's heart). It comes in Act V, vii, which opens the second sequence of scenes of dénouement that might be called the "procession of the nobles."
On their way also to Valereux's, Fatencour and
Loisonnière in their turn come upon Crispin. Fatencour replays a now familiar scene, first demanding Crispin's reasons for being where he is (obviously in Fatencour's suspicious mind he is lurking with intent), then yielding to his cousin, who as always seconds Fatencour's verbal aggressiveness with physical violence, "ce maraut." Without anger himself, Crispin answers for his "being there," once again, in a matter to turn Loisonnière's anger back on him and to expose the real "maraut." He is on the way to Valereux's, he says, leveling his gaze at Fatencour's cousin, to ask him "de mettre à raison Monsieur de
Loisonnière;/Il m'a pris vingt louis." The upping of the sum almost succeeds in an involuntary confession, correcting the amount to that of the theft. Loisonnière catches himself in time; but Crispin uses his tone of voice against him— "Pourquoi crier si fort"— and leads him to understand
288 that with just restitution he is getting off cheaply: "Rendez-moi la moitié, je vous quitte." But Fatencour's
defense of the man of honor, incapable of such a thing, and dismissal of Crispin "fou" as unworthy of credence, again
stop the action of the real justice of restitution. It is this shabby cover-up that is the real preface to the
fastidious planning of the assembly that is to follow and it is also the occasion for Crispin's dissociation by affirmation of his own identity. He will clear the way, he grants, but before they go he has a few words to say.
C'est Crispin qu'on me nomme. Monsieur, je ne suis point. Dieu mercy. Gentil-homme, Je suis tout simplement fils de votre Fermier; Mais je ne voudrois pas pour un bras tout entier. En faire autant que fait, sans nulle conscience Ce Noble à vingt Carrats (p. 394).
The sequence of scenes (V, ix-xi) playing out the stiff formality of the proper approach of the nobles to the assembly, their proper places in it, and the proper representation makes for painful reading. It could play better on stage as parodie farce. What is evident in its slow unfolding, behind its stately trees, is a forest of respect for order as embodied by the governor's legitimate power, once the testy individuals have been satisfied that the exquisite attention due to their honor is being properly observed. As Crispin's depiction directed us to see, and we have seen in enactment of Fatencour's old-fashioned courtesy, all is not hollow here, no matter how much observance of forms may at first make it seem to be. But
289 with all the ceremony, and approval by the Fatencour clan,
the success of the union is almost spoiled by Fondnid (V,
xi), whose hotheadedness several degrees higher than even Loisonnière's threatens to begin the war all over again.
But it is the last symmetrically constructed series of scenes (V, xii-xiv), which again begins from an
interruption, that will move toward a success that will make the suspension and the failure to reconvene the formal
conference of reconcilation irrelevant.
Crispin's last entrance (V, xii) is not as before the direct cause of disorder, but rather an alert to its threat,
in the person of Madame de Fatencour, who is on the warpath and headed in the direction of Valereux's with Arpalis. Whatever else Crispin has been able to master, she is a force of nature that he could not contain. Having arrived,
(V, xiii) to the surprise of Fatencour, Madame insists on her husband's withdrawing for a private conversation (in which she would present the documentation of the liaison of the children that she expects to disrail the proceedings).
Valereux, seconding Fatencour, attempts to convince Madame de Fatencour to wait until the conclusion of the proceedings to have her word with her husband. The moment is won by Arpalis, who steps forward and makes all the details public.
The wedding that is a "gage" of the family's peace may well serve as its charter, she reasons, and is seconded by Valereux. He also answers Fatencour's first shock in
290 discovering Angélique's liaison. She will speak for
herself, he counsels, and sends Crispin to fetch her.
Arpalis again promotes herself, independently, to mediator.
She addresses Fatencour first, asking him directly not to
offer opposition to the "heureuse union" that "finit pour
jamais votre division./Votre gloire par là ne sera point
blessée" (p. 410). Fatencour's immediate response, an expected no, despite the remark on "gloire" than he has
taken in surely, is firmly answered by Arpalis. No doubt your opinion is a no, she begins, then asserts "Mais il faut
aujourd'huy/Qu'en faveur de leur feux, vous nous disiez un oui" (p. 412). We will see the force of this "il faut," by
the end of the scene. D'llsmarets steps up next and offers a handsome apology for his behavior to Madame de Fatencour, whose silence indicates that she is touched by it. So do her eyes, according to Arpalis, who once again takes over, pronouncing silence as consent. Madame de Fatencour splutters but does not contradict. Everything has been set in place for the reconciliation in fact of the last scene, in which Fatencour gives his consent in front of the entire cast. Two marriages, Crispin and Florine's being the second, seal the peace and celebrate the new order.
What is needed to make the last scene work is the presence of Angélique to complete the beauty of the young couple, which commands natural responses to respect and grants its natural rights. Arpalis's action of making
291 everything public is the guarantee, however, that natural right will win cut. The "il faut" of her argument to
Fatencour presupposes the logic of persons like him once the
matter of honor is a public record. "Noblesse oblige," in that sphere, and Fatencour does give his consent. A part of the "lessons" of the dénouement, from which the participant
Crispin can learn, supplements that taught him by Florine on generalization about women. The woman who is identified one moment as the cause of war may in another be the agent of peace. Even Madame Fatencour may have such days. Or to put
it another way, if you have seen that Crispin may become
Auguste one day, despite what it seems others may do to prevent it, beware generalization and its doing unto others what you would not have done unto you. On a good day, even a Loisonnière may give the ten lours back, as he spontaneously does at close of the "heureuse jounée" of Les Nobles de province.
* * * *
In the very brief (one paragraph) "Au lecteur" published with the original edition of Les Nobles de province. Hauteroche makes two significant points, one concerning the form of the play and the other on the theme underlying his "comedy of manners." "J'advoueray seulement que je ne la croy pas indigne des autres que j'ay faites," he judges the play with an emphasis on playcraft. And on his subjects and their treatment, he wrote; "Ceux qui
292 liront cette Comedie y verront une image de ces
Gentilshommes de Campagne, qui souvent se piquent plus de
l'antiquité de leur Noblesse, que d'avoir de la raison. On
y verra aussi des caractères qui leur sont opposez, & qu'on peut dire raisonnables." The picture of "hobereaux" in
their social setting, which yields the "comedy of manners"
that has been the almost exclusive interest of literary
historians in the play, is in the playwright's remarks
subordinate to and focused by a play of ideas on the use of reason: an unreasonable attitude in one group of characters
is opposed to another's, which includes Crispin (along with Florine), the lovers, and Valereux and La Tour,
"raisonneurs" and representatives of the social order). Crispin's characterization of Loisonnière as a "fat," who
really believes that "II faut pour raisonner être de qualité" (IV, vi, p. 361) is then at the heart of the play's message in a perspective of ideas esthetically incorporated into Hauteroche's dramaturgy according to the
"Avis" to Les Apparences trompeuses. In my analysis of Les Nobles de province. I have attempted to show that revision of current characterization of the play by literary historians may, and needs, to be revised along the lines that Hauteroche suggests in his "Au lecteur." Traditionally, Les Nobles de province has been characterized as loosely structured, with a "double plot and portions of it that have no effect on the dénouement"
293 (Lancaster, IV^, p. 464). When the play's composition has been analyzed as a three-act play complemented by a linked one-act (iv), from which a second act, of dénouement develops, with the unifying theme of the re-integration of Crispin, re-fashioned through education in the experience of travel, into the old Fatencour environment (including the approved marriage to Florine and the ruse into which she is forced to protect Angélique and D'llsmarets to the detriment of her fiancé), both double plot and extraneous scenes fall away. Crispin's trials in proving his new identity (I-III) crowned by his victory (IV-V) are also the trials of the
"qualité"— the establishement that includes the physician
Chiros— that opposes him through pre-judgment and thoughtless stereotyping (which fate also extends to Angélique as daughter as well as the peasants).
More to the point, in judging the import of Hauteroche play of and with ideas, is Lancaster's remark that "the author was unable to dramatize his theme in a manner altogether worthy of his conception" (although conception here seems to be intended as "comedy of manners" and details of Crispin's story are seen to be at odds with it). Hauteroche's ambitious conception of providing a full-scale
"comedy of manners" as a new star vehicle for the master comic Poisson becomes an experimental play from the moment that Crispin is freed from the rôle of valet to anyone at all and provided with the proud personal past of seeing the
294 world beyond the Fatencour domain as a free man. It continues to be experiemental in the refusal of the dénouement of Molière's Georae Dandin as proper for this play and the conclusion to the on-going puzzles and debates on the nature of and effects on Crispin of the stay in Italy, a puzzle to which each character individually and by type must respond in terms of open closed responses, of granting a new identity or enclosing it in a social (mis)- applied prison of reason. The repeated pattern of established power to impose on the other/difference, in the character of Crispin, the marginalizing status of madman (= outlaw)— literally to bind him for treatment elsewhere— seems all of a piece with Michel Foucault's description, goals, and effects of the "grand enfermement."^® As an experimental play, Les Nobles de province occupies the position for Hauteroche's second and most successful period that Les Apparences trompeuses does in the period of his apprenticeship as a playwright. The two plays are also linked thematically and share the same fate of problematic productions and a delay for life in print. The evident thematic link is madness. Sturgon in the dénouement of Les Apparences trompeuses has been seen to be set free from it, and returned to himself, by grace that mainfests itself in a communication of the simple truth about its causes and the touch of human kindness of which that communication is one instance. Crispin receives the same
295 enabling gift in Act IV, which permits both self-knowledge and capable control of integration into a hostile environment. Hauteroche develops his thought in another area, from the problematics of an individual in marriage to that of an individual— and representative of a class or order— in society. The problematics of Les Nobles de province are political. If it has seemed an exaggeration to take certain isolated remarks by Hauteroche's valets in earlier plays as qualifications for enlisting them in the ranks of the precursors of Figaro, Crispin's judgment of Loisonnière, and Hauteroche's parody of the noble-'*Maraut” puts the son of the farmer Rustaut squarely within those ranks. Fear of censorship and its effects may have kept Les
Apparences trompeuses from production. The danger seems much greater for Les Nobles de province and as real in 1675.
There was perhaps prudence in waiting for 1678, when the peace of the treaty of Nymwegen was still being celebrated, for Hauteroche to push for the publication of the play.
But more than the company of writing judged in respect to the Dutch war (for which Poisson made undisguised propaganda use of the theatre)^\ Hauteroche's Les Nobles de province deserves other companions. The year 1675 was notable in the intellectual world of Paris for two arrêts of
Parlement forbidding the teaching of Cartesianism and the presecution of the Oratorians for including it in their curriculum.^® The real companions for Hauteroche's play may
296 well be works like Soileau's Arrêt burlesque written in response to those official decrees on the proper use of reason.
297 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
Except in one key instance, at the end of Act IV, Crispin is usually called "coquin" and "maraut," rather than "scélérat." I have chosen "scélérat" because of its stronger connotation of criminalizing and therefore its marginalizing force, which I take to be one of the principal themes of the play. "Scélérat" has the same applicability it does in Molière's stage direction designating Tartuffe— "C'est un scélérat qui parle."
À second play. Le Feint Polonais (1686), will use the same setting (See Part III, Chapter 7, note 1.) and was also published at Lyons. An acquaintance with the theatre and its world in Lyons may have been gained by playing there during Hauteroche's years with traveling companies. And contacts may have been kept up. His attention to Lyons was perhaps directed also by Samuel Chappuzeau, historian and sometime resident (and proofreader) of the city. His first play, Damon et Pythias (1657) was performed during Hauteroche's year at the Marais. Chappuzeau, who knew Hauteroche, refers to him in "Livre III" of his Le Théâtre français. when speaking of "orateurs": "... il s'acquiert dignement de cet emplois. Il a beaucoup d''étude et beaucoup d'esprit..." (Monval, éd., p. 163).
Use of the play and its repeated pattern of alienation for Dandin is an intertext especially for Acts I- III. The transfer of the name Angélique from Dandin's shrewish aristocratic wife to Fatencour's daughter, Hauteroche's model ingénue, is all of a piece with the optimism of Acts IV-V, that departs from Molière's dénouement of Dandin's mock suicide. His use of the Moliéresque intertext is then the same as his use of Soanarelle in writing Les Apparences trompeuses.
*• On the play and this aspect of it, see Lancaster, II', pp. 762-65, and Curtis (1972), pp. 108-9. Curtis (1972, p. 108) shows that La Thuillerie's Crispin bel-esprit (1681), scenes 12-14 were copied from Hauteroche's bellicose Crispin (I, viii).
298 The Crispin of Crispin médecin, who is already a little more combative than some earlier rôles, does momentarily resist disguise, though he too does warm to perfromance enabled by the "new man" it makes of him.
Valereux (I, v, p. 250) refers to the space between houses as "deux cens pas," an exaggeration to suggest spaciousness. Niemeyer (1947, pp. 74-75) calculates the stages as being 43' deep by 40'. The length of the theatre itself was 126' length by 36'.
Beyond Hauteroche's usual fun with onomastic punning, there seems to be a real Rabelaisian fantaisie verbale in the accumulation of names throughout the play of the military allies and family of Fatencour, e.g. Branchemort, Cochonaz, d'Artenroc, Tronc-Lourdait, Bois-Sec, Haute-crible... .
See André Blanc (1984), p. 41. The one-act Dancourt play dates from 1688.
By the mid-1670s, "des romans... jouaient le rôle des conseils de savoir-vivre qu'on cherche dans la presse féminine d'aujourd'hui," Micheline Guénin was written of fashionable society. See Introduction to Madame de Villedieu, Les Désordres de l'amour. Geneva: Droz, 1970, p. 41).
Hypochondria has a rich place and tradition in the seventeenth century from Rotrou to Molière's Le Malade imaginaire (1673). Certain lines of Hauteroche's Crispin play on Toinette's already famous "Vous êtes malade et plus malade que vous ne pensez." Madame de Fatencour's complaints of "aigreurs" and "rate" would seem to suit her and be more in the line of a temperamental disorder. The paradox of a doctor describing a non-disease as though it had a real physical pathology is at the heart of Hauteroche's comic use of it.
See, for example, the already "inside joke" of Crispin's fictionally lost letter in Crispin médecin. I, vi.
The scenes from V through XII are all misnumbered in the 173 2 edition.
Lancaster (IV\, p. 462, note 1) identifies Hauteroche's source for this device of the overhearing by a woman of her description as a "vache à lait," which is then repeated back to let the speaker know it has been heard in Jacques Pousset de Montauban's Panurge (1674), a considerable hit but left unpublished until 1933.
299 I have used the text of the "Avis" from the original edition owned by the Harvard Library. Lancaster (IV\, p. 461, note a, quotes from a note to the publisher Amaulry, dated 9 February, 1678 giving the publisher permission to print his comedy "de telle manière qu'il voudra." Rather than an indication of nonchalance, a desire not to be an obstacle in any way to the play's being printed may be the import of this note.
Reference here is to the central arguments of L'Histoire de la folie à l'âae classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
La Hollande malade (performed, 1672; published by Promé, 1673. See the section, "L'historique de la guerre" in the introduction to the recent edition of the play by Louisette Navailles (Exeter University Press, 1955), pp. xv-xxiii.
See François Bluche (1986), pp. 583-86.
300 PART III
THE FINAL PLAYS (1684-1690)
CHAPTER 6
FIVE ACTS AND ONE ACT: LA DAME INVISIBLE AND LE COCHER
When approaching the four plays that may constitute a last period in Hauteroche's career, the most significant questions become, for several reasons that have to do with the specific nature of the shape of the playwright's production and career, what is original about an
Hauterochean play? and what makes an Hauterochean play recognizable as such to a contemporary audience? It is these questions that I will examine through the third part of this dissertation, which will also serve through this focus on style as my conclusion.
The last four plays are chronologically extended over a period of less than a decade, ending in 1690, when there is a quite different theatrical public from that for which Hauteroche had written when he began to write for the theatre. Two of theses plays, first performed in 1684, were unqualified successes— L'Esorit folet ou la Dame invisible, a five-act comedy in verse, and Le Cocher, a one-act farce
301 in prose. It seems appropriate to treat them together, as I
do in Chapter Six, and to situate them as the natural development of the dramatic production that preceded them and at the same time the culmination of that dramaturgical art. The last two plays, Le Feint Polonais ou la Veuve
impertinente (1686), a three-act play in verse, and Les
Bourgeois de Qualité (1690), five acts in prose, were less than popular and critical success the plays of 1684 had
been. In Chapters Seven and Eight, I examine the ways Hauteroche re-adapts, extends, and experiments with the
dramaturgy of the earlier plays in an attempt to describe the nature of the dramatic entertainment Hauteroche sought
to provide and the reasons for the qualified popular and critical success they received.
All four of the plays considered here in Part 3 were produced after Hauteroche's official retirement from the theatre in 1682. It might seem that the failure of two plays, in 1678 and 1680, at least to reach even the state of first printing, was the proximate cause for the playwright's withdrawal and retirement from the theatre. But this seems not to have been the case. On the other hand, Hauteroche's attitude toward his playcraft, visible in his prefaces throughout his career, and in the continuing success of his plays both to remain in the active repertory of the unified company of the Comédie-Française in 1680 and to be reprinted
302 in collective editions, suggest that the relative failures of 1678 and 1680 may rather have been the occasion for some practical damage control than disillusion in the Romantic terms of a creative crisis. In this respect, the example of Hauteroche's attitude toward, and management of failure, just before the successes of 1684, seems particularly pertinent. The playwright who had been one of the principal furnishers of the Hôtel de Bourgogne's comic repertory, saw that a new Crispin play was rejected by that company. But rather than remove his own last idea, for a new Crispin play that was not what was wanted, the occasion served the playwright as a challenge, to renew his sources of inspiration, and to expand his comic form. The result was the highly successful L'Esorit folet ou la Dame invisible.^
In this spirit, it is egually possible that his official retirement in 1682 was at least in part determined by Hauteroche's decision to manage his career differently and to devote himself for the moment at least to the first collective edition of his plays, which appeared in The Hague in 1683.2 On the other hand, recently published docu mentation on Hauteroche's fortune* also serves to define the shape of his career and the nature of his involvement with the theatre and the art of playcrafting. It is now entirely clear that by 1680 at least Hauteroche had no pressing financial need to earn his wherewithal by his pen. The inside jokes that reached the
303 stage earlier on, about his hobnobbing with aristocrats and their favors, corresponded more and more to the reality of a growing network of financial connections and enterprises and the amassing of a not inconsiderable fortune. The last four plays and the career in which they are a part in view of this prosperous existence elsewhere, beyond the theatre, take on a new light. Money, or at least the possession of an income, significantly recurrent themes in Hauteroche's early plays, disappear from the dramatized comic adventures of the jeunes premiers in the last plays— remaining only in the preoccupations of valets like Morille of Le Cocher.
Most importantly the existence of these last plays at all bears witness to Hauteroche's professionalism as a man of the theatre, a "seigneur" in this artistic domain, there as a co-worker in it by choice and by the privileges of a talent triumphant at supplying a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure.
Manager, actor and orator, as well as playwright,
Hauteroche was eminently a man of the theatre. Even so, and with the variety of his plays— displayed in this last period as it was earlier, in the diversity of one-, three-, and five-act forms and equal share of verse and in prose— and the regular rhythm of his production— a substantial oeuvre but less so than more ambitious productions by his contemporaries (notably Dancourt), Hauteroche was not the same kind of man of the theatre that Molière was. Neither
304 his life nor his plays lend themselves to the kind of systematic, all-enveloping allegory of theatrical existence that has fascinated critics, novelists, and film makers interpreting Molière's career.* Nonetheless, Hauteroche's plays and dramaturgy especially in the last period are not without elements of self-reflexivity that richly serve to highlight the particular qualities of style recognizable to a certain audience of loyal followers. In the prefaces to his plays, already a distinctive practice in which a Poisson or a Baron, for example, did not indulge, Hauteroche continues to elaborate the composite image of a discriminating artist at work. He is tasteful but not fussy, learned but not pedantic, in this self- fashioning that puts him into good company. His preferences are clear, and clarified in defensive instances in his prefaces: above all he respects and strives to create the
"pièce bien faite," thus eschewing certain kinds of theatrical divertissement. certain high levels of diction, the sententious, for example (Hauteroche never seems to have shared Molière's temptation to the tragic), but accepting overall the essential givens of the classical traditions of aesthetics, as it is embodied and illustrated in Molière's oeuvre. Consequently, in good neo-aristotelian tradition, Hauteroche puts plot first aesthetically and in practice.
And it is with plotting, "1'intrigue," that the kind of examination I have proposed for Part 3 properly begins.
305 L'Esprit folet ou la Dame invisible, first performed on February 22, 1684, struck out in a new direction, precisely in the matter of plotting, by choice of its source. La Dama duende by Calderon® and secondarily the earlier French adaptation of that play by D'Ouville.® Hauteroche exhibits in this five-act play what will be true of his plays generally— a talent for the creation of a we11-contrived plot, from which character-types emerge and come to life through appropriate, verisimilar dialogue. And the audience's delight in this play is solicited by an element of mystery built into the stage set, with its secret passage through walls'', and heightened by an especially skillful use of lighting effects. The exposition of Act I, which begins the plotting, plays to maximum advantage on the seductive attractions of mystery and "diablerie."
306 6.1 L'ESPRIT FOLET OU lA DAME INVISIBLE
ACT I
In the first scene of exposition, the dialogue confrontation of master and servant sets the register for the comedy. Pontignan and Scapin have just arrived in the Place Royale from Limoges. Pontignan is impressed by the great buildings of Paris that he has seen. Scapin, on the other hand, thinks that the area is haunted. He asks
Pontignan about the veiled lady who has seemed to appeared no matter where they have gone. Pontignan admits that he has seen her repeatedly. He has found her incredibly charming and gracious. He wonders whether she is an "esprit divin." Scapin feels sure that she is a diabolical spirit.
She must be in league with the devil. He wonders how she always seems to know where they are. Some evil must lurk within her. Pontignan agrees that he is confused by her ability to appear suddenly no matter where they go. We discover that Pontignan has come to Paris because his father and Leonor's have arranged their marriage. The unknown and veiled lady has asked Pontignan not to go meet and talk with either his fiancée or prospective father-in- law. The invisible woman seems to know much about the
307 master and his valet. Scapin believes that she uses witchcraft to know all that happens. She can read the hearts of men. In fact, her maidservant has alluded to her amazing abilities. Pontignan thinks that all this is nonsense. Scapin reiterates all the events that have taken place since they arrived in Paris.
Pontignan is intrigued by the unknown lady. He seems to be falling in love with her. Scapin is confused by this. After all, Pontignan has never seen the veiled lady's face.
Furthermore, he has the chance to marry into a fine and wealthy family. He wonders why Pontignan is willing to jeopardize such a lucrative situation by pursuing an unknown lady. It is surely not prudent to go against his father's wishes. Pontignan is not moved by his valet's words. In fact, he is drawn to the new and bizarre circumstances creating an adventure. He is the happiest that he has ever been. Scapin warns him that the veiled lady may be no more than an old hag with evil intents. Pontignan wants Scapin to explain how he came up with such ideas. Scapin explains that she obviously would not hide a beautiful face. Thus, she must be an ugly monster— not only in appearance but in spirit. Furthermore, her maidservant is even darker and scarier than the so-called invisible lady. Pontignan says that he will wait and see whether this lady is the ugly witch Scapin believes her to be. Actually, Pontignan caught a glimpse of her face when her veil was blown by the wind.
308 Although he could not get a full look, he at least saw that
she had fine and delicate features. He was and is sure that
she must be a handsome woman. He hopes to go to her house that evening. Scapin wonders if the lady may simply be a
beggar looking to take advantage of young and wealthy
strangers to town. At this moment he catches sight of the veiled lady only a few steps away.
Lisette, wearing a veil, has come (I, ii) to Pontignan with her mistress. Pontignan exits rapidly to see his veiled lady friend, leaving Lisette to continue the dialogue with Scapin. She begins by asking him why he seems so pale.
He explains that he does not like the unknown and distrusts women who wear veils. He insists that the veiled lady show her face to his master or there will be no more rendez-vous.
Lisette, in her turn, warns that the veiled lady and her own magic powers are great. There are no walls that they cannot penetrate. All they have to do is to pronounce the magic words, "Bruks, Haurs, Gaft, Crink, mirf du," and the world is open to them. Scapin begs her to leave. He hates being surrounded by the unknown and by magic. But it is Pontignan's decision, and he is obviously attracted. Scapin reiterates his own view that the veiled woman is ugly.
Lisette contradicts him: the opposite is true, the veiled lady is beautiful beyond compare. Scapin remains skeptical. Lisette confesses that she herself is not so attractive as her mistress but, even so, Scapin may one day find her
309 attractive enough to wish to marry her. This revelation
frightens Scapin even more. And her promise to bring him
much happiness and glory only increases his fears. Playing
with him, and skirting a confession, she claims that the devil is not so evil as he might imagine. Then Lisette breaks off, noticing that Pontignan and her mistress are
arriving. Pontignan tells Angélique, in the first dialogue of the
lovers (I, iii), that he is confused by her refusal to show her face. She answers him that she knows he is there to
marry Léonor but that she hopes he will offer her his love.
She proclaims herself as rival to Léonor for his love.
Pontignan replies that he only wants to be with her and certainly not with Léonor, whom he has never met. He hopes
to break off his prearranged marriage to Léonor but worries about his father's reaction. Angélique reassures him that ”1'amour que j'ai pour vous ne craint que votre Père.” She instructs him not to allow his father to determine his
destiny. She should be his destiny, freely embraced. Pontignan is ready to admit all to Léonor. To his eager
inquiry about their next meeting, Angélique bids him to wait and promises a letter designating it soon. In the meanwhile
Pontignan pledges silence. Angélique and Lisette exit, leaving Pontignan and Scapin to a new dialogue on the situation (I, iv). But the dialogue is interrupted.
310 Fcnt-ignan repeats to Scapin that he wants to break off his engagement to Lécncr and asks for Scapin's opinion.
Scapin, noticing a Flemish man quickly approaching them, offers no reply; he recognizes that the man traveled from Limoges to Paris with them. The Fleming is La Forest, in reality a Frenchman and Angélique's spy, who ultimately keeps her informed of all Pontignan's and Soapin' movements. La Forest pretends to be Flemish by adopting a broken French
(neither Pontignan nor Scapin has any audible verbal traces of the Limousin in contrast). He pretends that his pocketbook has been stolen in order to warn Pontignan not to stay where is lodging. He too fears the veiled woman who may have been involved. So goes the ruse by which La Forest may gain confidence and access to Pontignan. Pontignan again promises silence. After La Forest's exit, Pontignan expresses surprise. The poor man was taken but only for twenty louis d'or.
Scapin fears that the invisible lady or her servant may be there at the moment, since, he explains, the magic words "Craks, Mir, Dauf” make them invisible. Pontignan is skeptical in the face of Scapin's conviction that these are words, provided by hell, give the women special powers. The comic impasse, the "dialogue des sourds," is set. Scapin clarifies his seriousness; Pontignan remains skeptical and laughs at what he takes to be his servant's wild imagination.
311 Alcidor, Angélique's brother, enter for the last scene of exposition. He is delighted to see his old army buddy, Celicourt (Pontignan) and inquires after his reasons for being in the city. Pontignan explains that business has brought him there. Alcidor reveals a debt of gratitude, from military days, when Pontignan had used the family title of Celicourt. Alcidor recognizes the name Pontignan from another context, that of the man engaged to the beautiful
Léonor. Surely Pontignan will be happy with such a beauty, he remarks. Alcidor explains to a newly puzzled Pontignan that he is a friend of Léonor's father and has come by the news in that way. To Alcidor's surprise Pontignan immediately enlists his aid in pursuit of the veiled woman, whom he loves, despite Léonor's qualities. Alcidor the friend begs him to consider carefully the course of action Pontignan has determined to take. Pontignan reaffirms his exclusive faith to his newly beloved. Quite naturally Alcidor offers his friend a comfortable lodging with him, orders the baggage attended to, and is followed out by his friend and a relieved Scapin.
The scenes between master and man that revolve around types of temperamental responses to the unknown, progressive and comically set at the intellectual level, leave some doubts in the spectators' minds and maintain suspense for the action that follows in Acts II-IV. For all his skepticism, and with information/evidence going beyond what
312 Scapin has “seen," Pontignan has been bewitched by a "coup de foudre" of passionate love. If this is not the devil's work, it is definitely Angélique's scheming, as the scene with La Forest makes clear. The extent and particular nature of this scheme remains open, creating dramatic suspense. The closing, transitional scene with Alcidor plays down the comic potential of the quid pro quo in subtle preparation for the ultimate success of the love action.
Pontignan, who has also been "veiled" (by another, legitimate name), is certified as honorable by the shared military past that Alcidor evokes. His recent determination to break a vow, which must make any soldier pause, will thus not be in the character an adventurer or simply a
"scélérat."
ACT II
The preliminary action of Act II begins with a scene change and two "coups de théâtre" that complete the données of the exposition. Alternating from the world of the street and its associations, we are now situated for action in the women's world, the domain of Angélique and Lisette. The particular stage setting, where Pontignan will play out his comedy, is Angélique's room, the erstwhile children's
"prison," where they were left by Angélique's mother (now dead) when she went out. Lisette recalls that they used to
313 move two boards into a secret passage, thus freeing themselves to leave and return later before Angélique's mother.
The "coups de théâtre” involve Angélique, who loses her masquerade as "dame invisible" in the course of the Act.
Angélique is Alcidor's sister. And he has already informed her that he hopes the unknown gentleman who is to lodge with them will eventually become her husband. In approaching
Pontignan and Scapin, we further learn, Angélique has been acting out of friendship, for Léonor and her lover Damis, who are as eager as Pontignan and Angélique (who has fallen
in love with Pontignan while serving her friend's ends) to be rid of an arranged spouse. Angélique's scheme, in the new setting, has been refocused as the continuation of children's games, the "poison" of scheming drained away potentially for a "good game." "L'intrigue est admirable, il le faut avouer" (II, i), Lisette guides us in appreciation.
The plot sets off with the reappearance of La Forest, who has gained the keys to Pontignan's and Scapin's luggage and reassures Angélique of Pontignan's continuing fascination and Scapin's continuing gullibility to their disguises as sorceresses (II, ii). La Forest will also be rewarded, of course, if the scheme succeeds. Alcidor, who is not yet in on it (and believes La Forest to be a jeweler), enters with the right news for Angélique: that of
314 Pontignan's identity: "Son nom vous surprendra." Angélique
is delighted; Alcidor, for his part, remains in the dark.
Concerned, as the audience was initially, about the motives
of the "dame invisible," he has drawn Pontignan into
agreement to unmask her the next day, if she persists. Angélique blushes, a sign that Alcidor cannot yet read, and
whose significance she hides under her agreement to the unmasking. Bother and sister part and exit at the news of
Pontignan's imminent arrival, but not before Lisette and
Angélique make the arrangements for the scheme that fills
out the Act (scenes v-ix). To Lisette's "A 1'hymen souhaité
je vous tiens parvenue" that opens scene five, Angélique adds the consequence: "Ce changement finit mon rôle d'inconnu" (p. 45). The scene, of adolescent doubt ("Il me
verra. Mon coeur est déjà plein d'alarmes" p. 46), on Angélique's part, answered by the sturdy sense of the "soubrette" Lisette ("fiez-vous à moi, j'ai certaines
lumières") is the first of two "curtain raisers" for the
orchestration of the first installment of the ruse, a light
and skillful "playlet" of the sort Hauteroche has at his
technical disposition. Scapin and La Ramée, charged with the luggage, make themselves comfortable in the second, and
assure themselves that the room is secure as well as comfortable. The comedy of the following two scenes is then set for Angélique and Lisette's secret entry and the
"diabolical" invasion of the luggage and the placement of a
315 letter of assignation. Comic business of the going through of the luggage: the clean and elegant contents of
Pontignan's, as contrasted with the malodorous items of Scapin's (with a letter from the "loved one" left at home, below stairs at the Château de Pourceaugnac, a portrait reveals, and gifts to be relayed to her brother, worker on the construction site at Versailles) is given a place, before Lisette leaves an incriminating mess ("Je prétens
être Esprit, ... il met tout au pillage") and takes the guests' purse into the bargain. The comic glory of the preliminary action of Act II, before its suspension by Act III, is the discovery by Scapin and Pontignan of their "lutinage." Scapin, terrorized by the supernatural invasion, is heard in disbelief by a master who first suspects him of a scam of his own and threatens him with punishment. Defending himself by simple logic of repetition, Scapin gets nowhere and indignantly questions the master, finally to no avail for his own defense: "Vous ne croyez donc point qu'il soit des sorciers?— PONTIGNAN: Non. SCAPIN: Comment non, prenez-vous le Diable pour un conte? PONTIGNAN: Rien moins" (p. 65). Hauteroche's
Pontignan and Scapin have taken over where Molière's Dom Juan and Sganarelle stopped. Pontignan knows, for his part, that there are different keys that may serve to open the same lock. And practical, he leaves the frightened Scapin on watch.
316 ACT III
The delaying tactics of the suspension of action of Act
III involve the introduction of Léonor (III, i-vi) and a working out of Alcidor's mission to her father to negotiate her cause of abandoning Pontignan for Damis; a second ruse, staged by Lisette, at Scapin's expense (II, vii-xi), and a repetition of Act II's crowning comic conclusion in a final clarifying scene between master and servant (x-xi). Léonor, Angélique's friend, appears; she is a variant, if not a near mirror copy of the friend— both ingénues who are clever without being offensively aggressive, naturally hesitant and uncertain without being coy. Waiting together for the outcome of Alcidor's negotiation, Léonor has time to satisfy her curiosity— and the spectators'— about their "intelligence" and to admire the cleverness of Angélique's letter and the ruse of introducing a scarf, as though by magic, into Pontignan's room, by which he may be identified at the approaching ball where the "dame invisible" will unmask herself. Pontignan has already promised that nothing will prevent his attending the ball and, perfect courtly lover, pledged secrecy and silence.
Alcidor's announcement of paternal agreement delights Léonor. Introducing a "fausse piste" of complication he warns her against falling in love herself with Pontignan. But, of course, Damis is proclaimed as the sole possessor of
317 her heart. All will be ready, shortly, Lisette having been sent to place the fairy's scarf, when Scapin reenters with news of Pontignan's activities. To his relief, there has been no new encounter with the "dame invisible." His relief is replaced by the spectacle of a new seizure of terror when
Pontignan orders him to light his room (III, v): "Elle a son Krasmurduf," he mutters before an astonished Alcidor, as convinced as Pontignan that Scapin has taken leave of his senses in this nonsensical utterance. Licorice seeds, left in place of the stolen money, Scapin argues, must signify a witch's passage. Pontignan dismisses his worry; but Scapin's terror remains. He is convinced that he is being sent to his death: "C'est fait, me voilà mort. Dieu veuille avoir mon âme" (p. 78). Scapin's exit, hastened by further threats of blows from his master, allows Pontignan and
Alcidor to exchange information (III, vi) and with it gain greater confidence that all will go well.
Scapin's second encounter with his demons, if it repeats Act II's scene, goes it one better. Lisette discovered in the dark, while planting the scarf (III, vii), and alarmed by possible full exposure from the approaching light, manages to extinguish it and at the same time to grab Scapin by the neck. The physical contact, and the directness of the threat she utters— "Si tu cries, je t'étrangle" (p. 84)— are new, intensifying elements that have their importance for the added intensity of the
318 repeated scene nine, in which even with the evidence of marks on his neck, Scapin cannot make himself believed.
Even after the scuffle involving Pontignan (III, ix), after which he ends up holding the basket of ribbons and its hidden note, Pontignan as before believes there is a simpler, material explanation of events. Not so for the erstwhile coward, who after addressing the supposed phantom with timorous courtesy:"AhI pardon, je vais crier tout bas— Misécorde!... de lui [Pontignan] peint les Esprits les plus honnêtes gens... (p. 84), waxes eloquent with indignation to Pontignan: "Voyons puisqu'il faut voir: ouf! Mais hélas: j'enrage. Quoi... Ah! Monsieur, nous n'avons qu'à nous tenir gaillards" (pp. 89-90). But once more, faced with Pontignan's practical measures, in the event a search of the room, Scapin's response is to crumble with fear. "Que cherchois-je moi? je ne veux rien trouver... Monsieur, mettez dessus la Table... Si vous aviez senti ses griffes comme moi..." (p. 91). The final dialogue, before Scapin is reluctantly pushed on in pursuit of a solution to the mystery that is all too real to him, shows us a Dandin figure, physically converted by an increasing barrage of evidence, unable to communicate its weight of conviction, because his interlocutors refuse to credit him with the authority to weigh his own experience. To his "Enfin sur les Esprits vous voilà convaincu," Pontignan responds bruskly: "Point du tout." A
319 frustrated charge, "l'hérétique" (p. 92) is Scapin's sole
response before he goes with fear and trembling into the
world he imagines, which at the moment is no farther than the same room where he is forced by Pontignan to wait with
him for the return of the "dame invisible."
ACT IV
The continued action of Act IV begins (IV, i) with a planning scene for the ball's high point of the unmasking of the "dame invisible." Léonor substitutes for Lisette, who has been sent on an errand, and assumes the lead with her partner Angélique, on furthering their enterprise. The parallelism with Act II is, however, cut short, with the reappearance (IV, ii) of Scapin and Pontignan, who are in their way also seeking an unmasking: they are hidden in order to surprise the accomplice of the "dame," who has yet to collect Pontignan's answering note left in the ribbon basket. Rather than alternate the two pairs of plotters and work towards the high point of the play's action in a scene of unmasking at the end of Act IV, Hauteroche elects to stay with his comic focus on Scapin, shortening the act and deferring the high point into the dénouement of Act V. This extended repetition of the comic focus, which suggests the elaboration of the three-act play, avoids the pitfalls of a
320 possibly largely anticliinactic Act V and that of an overlong Act IV, while at the same time it builds the virtuoso
resources of the rôle of Scapin into a truly starring rôle.
Pontignan and Scapin enter (IV, ii) in the dark,
pretext enough to set Scapin atremble: "N'avoir point de
lumière!" (p. 103). "As-tu peur," inquires Pontignan coyly,
focusing the reaction. The memory of things that go bump in the night has been vividly implanted from the fleshly encounter Scapin first recalls: "Je frisonne/Ce lutin qui
tantôt m'étouffoit/N'a besoin de voir pour me venir griffer." Pontignan's reassuring rejoinder— "N'en apprehende rien, le lutin est bon Diable," for ail of repeating Scapin's earlier hypocritical strategy of compliments when faced with the "lutin," does no good. Any hold by reason and common sense are useless, on or for
Scapin, who starts when Pontignan moves away from him and he himself is called to move away from easy access to the door.
The best he can do is to catch ahold of Pontignan's
"justacorps," and like a good child close his eyes and keep quiet: "En vous tenant serré, je consens à me taire,/Je tremble, mais enfin je ne dirai plus rien." Silence is too much to promise, however, and the valet's needed service becomes more burden than boon.
The sounds of whispering, by Angélique and Léonor in the other room, then the low glow of Léonor's lantern summon up the worst visions for Scapin: "J'entens de reste Deux
321 Diables, au lieu d'un nous en vont donner, peste! Me voilà presque mort." Like Molière's obsessive Harpagon, Scapin's obsession of fear brings the alienation felt as premature death. As the lantern's light approaches, making seeing possible, if one will simply open one's eyes as Pontignan does, Scapin cannot. "Vois-tu la clarté?" Pontignan inquires. Scapin's response shows the body still in play with a vengeance. "La peur est laxative,/Je suis perdu," he replies. At this comic high point of the play, Scapin the child holding on to the "adult," unable to keep his vow of silence, has quite literally shit his drawers. And the stench floats through the diarrhetic speech that illustrates the comic blindness focused triumphantly though the scene.
While Pontignan the soldier moves to clear-sighted and rapt reconnaissance, Scapin emits a series of responses, only in syntax less recognizable as mechanical speech than Harpagon's famous "Sans dot." To the discovery that it is a woman, he "clarifies"— "un diable femme... c'est pis cent fois que vingt Diables ensemble; and to the observation that she is beautiful, "Toute cette beauté n'est qu'un charme infernal... Tout en est faux" (p. 106). When
Pontignan speaks to the "spirit"— "Vous voulez vous cacher, mais pourquoi?/Le désir d'éclaircir ma trop longue avanture; ne me fait rien tenter qui passe la nature ;/Demandant à vous voir blesse-t-on vos appas?" (p. 108). Scapin makes a gesture toward escape and has to be held fast by Pontignan.
322 Pontignan and Scapin may agree that the "spirit"'s request should be obeyed, though it is courtesy attested in the last line of Pontignan's address to her that carries and wins the day. Were it left to Scapin, there would be no dénouement, only the disorder of flight. Freed to exit, as he has so heartfeltly wished to do, Scapin hesitates, once again— was, is, and ever will be— from fear. "Si vous vouliez.
Monsieur, me faire escorte..." (p. 112). is in effect his line, magnified by a resounding, and childlike, door slamming to keep the spirits in: "Fermons pour empêcher que le Diable ne sorte/Le vouloir retenir, il faut être enragé" (p. 113). To Pontignan's explicit comment on this behavior— "Fat"— the audience is brought by the conclusion of this masterfully crafted scene to echo Scapin's last word and add to the "fat" an "enragé." The symbolism of the doorway, with its open and closed doors, ultimately its nature as secret passage, in regard to Scapin is served by the repeated patterning, of scene iv, where Scapin and Pontignan replay reactions to the spirit's disappearance, then to Pontignan's putting on of the "scarf." The same mechanical responses to the unknown are triggered by Scapin's lingering and ineradicable fear, only slightly veiled by servility vis-à-vis the earthly power of his master: "Comme tout bon valet doit mourir pour son Maître,/Monsieur, dût le Lutin contre moi déchainé, A me rouler de coups se montre acharné,... (p. 118)... but "Ne
323 vous étonnez point si vous me trouvez mort..." (p. 120). À knock on the door suffices for the undoing of this mock- heroic valor (IV, v). Luckily it is Alcidor, with plans and schemes for the ball: "Nous verrons après si la Femme invisible/Vous trouverez pour elle également sensible." For Scapin, it is "le malheureux" off to his undoing.
The door is closed. For Pontignan, on the contrary, as for Angélique, Léonor, and Alcidor (and Damis, one supposes)— the quintet of young lovers— the door is open. Love, like any other adventure, demands risk, which is a part of its charm and ultimate glory. As Pontignan concludes, "Ainsi cette beauté brillante/Que vous me vantez tant, & que je crois charmante,/Risqueroit avec moi l'honneur de ses appas,... (p. 122). It is in fact Léonor's intuitive certainty about Pontignan (V, ii), the same "intelligence" that was the precondition for Angélique's falling in love with him in the first place, which can lead to the success of the continuing plans that are the beginning (V, i) of the
"end," the dénouement of Act V.
ACT V
The continued plans for the ball, and Pontignan's transport to and fro, are made possible by the return of Lisette as well as by Léonor's new knowledge and begin the act (V, i-iii) with the preordained closure of Angélique's
324 unmasking that takes place in scene iv. The play's action is theoretically concluded in this climatic scene.
Pontignan passes all the tests, posed first by Léonor and the supposed "magical" circumstances of her assigned "épreuves" for him, then by Angélique in her last performance as "dame invisible" on the exclusivity of his
love for her, his felt safety (well-being) with her, and his trust in her. Happiness is his reward (V, iv), even though it must remain a secret and Alcidor must be deprived of knowledge of it (V, v). Alcidor is reassured that his friend Pontignan has succeeded with the love he has desired for him and exits to find his prospective brother-in-law.
At this point, when the comedic happy ending is all but in place, and the young women are anxious to conclude, fearing that something may go amiss (V, vii), Scapin is reintroduced, and consequently Act V grows half again. The comic imbroglio played at speed in the concluding half of the act is for Pontignan as well as Scapin the kind of all-consuming, vertiginous game that Molière's comic ballets offer as externalized dramatic setting of an internal fixed state of delusion. As long as Scapin is
Pontignan's sole partner disorder reigns, in the delusion of darkness that obscures Pontignan's own room to him (V, viii- ix), in his mistaking of Lisette for a spirit, and his loss of Scapin supposedly disappearing in turn (but conducted through the secret panel in the wall). It takes the entry
325 of Alcidor to restore order and to provide the last pieces of the new order of the deferred dénouement. Yet even then
(V, xii), Alcidor is not entirely convinced by Pontignan's assurance that the "dame invisible" and his sister, who has won Pontignan' eternal love, are one and the same. Luckily for all involved, Lisette has Scapin firmly in hand and in place for his last sequence. Transfixed in his place by Lisette, who has realized her mistake in conveying
Scapin through the wall (V, xiii), and then frightened into a corner by a further knock on the door (V, xiv)— which in fact announces Alcidor and Pontignan, ready for their final knowledge and its crowning prize— Scapin's final enactment of the now ritual sequence drives him over the edge. But it is anger, rather than madness, that erupts: "Croyez moi, la
Maison, la Dame, vous l'Hôte, vous irez tous au Diable, & ce n'est pas ma faute" (V, xiv, p. 157).
The last pieces of the delayed closure fall into place quickly: Alcidor's revelation, to Pontignan, of Angélique as his sister assures his friend's happiness (V, xv), while
Lisette's to Scapin, that it was her "griffe" that had marked him leads him of a final gift of peace of mind (V, xvi). "Voilà comme souvent surpris à l'impourvû,/Tel qui pense avoir vû le Diable, n'a rien vu" (p. 162). Conversion to good sense, seemingly prepared by the prior explosion of Scapin's anger, that broke through, or blew away, the repeated constraints of his crippling prejudices
326 and paralyzing fear? The firmness and permanence of this harmoniously transcendent ending are questionable, doubtful as any rapid conversion is as a fully satisfying dramatic dénouement. Momentary sense and peace of mind, subject to future testing is more the conclusion that comes with the heritage of the expanded rôle of Scapin, who here plays into the ambiguous victory, brought about by circumstances in the turn of events beyond his control, in manner of his elder namesake, the Scapin of Molière's Les Fourberies de Scanin. In that play's dénouement Scapin declares his own comic apotheosis simply for having survived (and of course Molière the master of farce emblematically along with him).
What is not in doubt is the craftsmanship of Hauteroche in his final comic elaboration of the "fearful valet."
Falstaff, in a monomaniacal, fanatical mode, the Scapin of La Dame invisible is as much as— or perhaps more than— the Crispin of Les Nobles de province the final triumphant incarnation of the comic type he had made his trademark with Crispin. And here the story of Hauteroche's rewriting after the refusal of another Crispin play takes its full meaning. The reworking, from the Spanish and French sources, lead to quite different creation in Scapin's embodiment of comic blindness, gullibility before the opaqueness of language as well as the unknown, moral helplessness in charting his course, and new and memorable contexts for Hauteroche's devoted public. Objections to violation of the rule of
327 unity of place, created by the newly elaborate stage set,
are indeed, as the playwright comments in the "Avis,"
carping®; the "liberties" taken do not in fact go beyond
uses of the stage acceptable in tragedies since the 1640s. The stage setting, emblematic of the childlike games that
continue up to the marriages of the principal characters,
gives metaphoric representation to the problems of comic
blindness (as opposed to the passing through walls possible
for "true love"). One can imagine that Geoffrey's later moralizing strictures* would have elicited the same
annoyance in the playwright (similar to Corneille's in
dealing with like criticism of his character Chimène). There is nothing in the "good games" these representations of attractive and spirited youths play among themselves within their settings that even suggests the morally offensive. On the contrary, in Hauteroche's representation of them, their cleverness, their emancipation, and their
freedom from constraints of an older generation, celebrate their promise of the happiness of self-fashioning.
328 6.2 LE COCHER OU "SANS-SOUCY VENGÉ"
The considerable success in the theatre of La Dame invisible in February 1684 was followed up with another in the summer season. In early June (7 or 9?) Le Cocher was given its first performance and successful run of twelve consecutive performances, then played repeatedly in counterpoint with the summer's season's other outstanding dramatic success, Brécourt's T i m o n . It was performed before the court at Fontainebleau in September and reprised in the city in December. For the leading rôle of Morille, the coachman of the title. Poisson was again enlisted, further assurance of the popular success^ of the play evidently sought by the playwright in his choice of form and source.
Hauteroche drew again on a Spanish source, Mendoza's Los Riesoos gue tene un Coche and proceeded to adapt it to contemporary taste in the same manner he had used in his re writing of Calderon for his own La Dame invisible. H e frankly boasts, in his "Avis" to the first printing of Le Cocher. that his version is theatrically superior to his predecessor's, and critical opinion has ratified his claim. The Parfaict brothers struck the first laudatory note,
329 echoed by virtually all subsequent commentators. Clean lines of narrative development in plotting, as is in fact necessary for the successful rhythm and pace of the one-act play, comes first in praise, accompanied by an acknowledgement of novelty in conception of the subject— the coachman's disguise— as well as the characterization of
Hilaire, the potentially stock tyrannical father figure, that is the principal partner for Morille's performance.
While Hauteroche may have been inspired, consciously or not, by an episode from Molière Monsieur de Pourceaunac (thus leaving a little of Limoges in the new play), in the kind of carnavalesque scene that obviously attracted his attention and admiration^, that "source" in no way lessens the personal way in which Hauteroche dramatizes that one strand of Molière's tangled web set for his Limousin up from the country.
In its plotting. Le Cocher exists by the proper setting of its comic gem, scene xviii (of twenty-three), in which
Morille in disguise as a coachman is confronted by an unknown woman disguised as his wife. The resources of
Poisson's performance style are fully exploited, from the first eye rollings of alarmed surprise to leers and the gestures of lecherously roving hands, as the all-too-willing Hilaire directs the scene he himself sets in the privacy of a "cabinet" in his comfortably appointed house and Morille's reactions from physical alarm to concupiscent promise.
330 This comic high point as scene is the intersection of two schemes involving Hilaire and his household. The first, framing ruse, unfolds in the introductory sequence of six scenes and is the young lover Lisidor's scheme. Le Mans replaces Limoges, but the effect is the same: a provincial in the city, moving from the street and its life into a place he would make his own, encumbered by his country attachments. These do not include here, for Lisidor and
Morille, any more than they had for Pontignan and Scapin, the linguistic impediment of a provincial accent, which is left once and for all to the episodic, functional rôles of lower status servants, often designated by names suggesting their particular province and embodying a single popularly recognizable trait of that province (like Breton drunken ness). A fiancée, with a letter to prove her claim, to whom he has declared himself passionately attached, is Lisidor's principal encumbrance. It is she who sets herself on
Morille, disguising as his wife. After having decided that no news is bad news and that Lisidor has been away an alarmingly long time, she has unknown to him, come to Paris in pursuit. Once there she has set the younger brother of her maid, one Adrian, to spy on Lisidor. He confirms her worst suspicions that Lisidor has in fact strayed, in the amorous pursuit of the fair Dorothée, Hilaire's daughter, destined, she (by her father), for the less than fair Eutrope, a clumsy but smitten suitor, a man of a certain age
331 and of the law, with whom Hilaire might have a lawsuit, were
it not for the mollifying promised of the gift of his
daughter's hand.
Before the moment that Julie hatches her plot to gain entry into Hilaire's household, and sets in motion the
scheme for revenge if not the renewal of relations with
Lisidor, the second of the two schemes that intersect in Hilaire's "cabinet," Julie's action had already contributed
to the disorder besetting Hilaire's established life and
plans that will play itself on this day of comedy. With her
blessing, Adrian has sent an anonymous letter to Hilaire,
exposing Dorothée's trysts with an unknown gentleman while
driving in the park. And Eutrope has also come by this incriminating evidence, through Hilaire's own divulging of
it. This sticky situation, for all concerned, has not been
aided by Hilaire's mismanaged confrontation of Dorothée (scene v), who will admit to nothing and slips out of his
control by negative assent on the matter of a daughter's
doing her duty (of marrying Euthrope). Hilaire does the
heavy father badly, allowing himself to be manipulated into
a lie (that he himself has seen the trysts, when in fact he only has the second-hand, dubious authority of an anonymous
letter) and finally violence, in the act claustrating Dorothée until her marriage. Her coolness to this threat, further frustration for Hilaire, signifies that she considers it an empty one not to be taken seriously. Such
332 is the preliminary state of affairs in the Hilaire domain at the moment Julie imagines her scheme and we have reached a second stage in the farce: the physical penetration of
Lisidor into Hilaire's house. It is only after scene vi that the spectator is fully clear that Morille, seen to be in Lisidor's service from the opening scene, is in disguise as a coachman. Already in his first real scene, with Hilaire (iii), the coachman had performed a comedy of unfittingness, of discrepancy, which is just one aspect of the frustrating disorder sprung upon
Hilaire, who comes to the same communicational impasse with his servant that he will undergo with his daughter. Trying to elicit information on the trysts and the identity of the unknown gentleman from him, Hilaire meets the stonewall of a display of ’’professional pride” and knowing one's place; the argument is frustratingly unbeatable: "Monsieur, j'aime me taire, que de mal parler” (p. 209). Morille has learned the wisdom that Molière's Sosie is given by experience and reiterates it in his show of worthiness: "Monsieur, il ne faut jamais qu'un serviteur mette le nez dans les affaires de ceux dont il mange le pain, à moins qu'ils ne l'ordonnent." To this repeated plain speech (but a verbal
"mask" nonetheless), Hilaire can only respond with a mixed salad of expletives that at least signal his growing anger:
"Le diable t'emporte," "Que le ciel te confonde," "Que la
333 foudre t'écrase,” "Maraut,” "détesté,” "bourreau...” (pp.
204-205).
The revelation that Morille is not in fact a coachman
at all is a virtual coup de théâtre, realized more fully by the cutting of the "supposé” from the primitive title of the
play— Le Cocher supposé, and enhanced by the verbal comedy
of Morille's "confession" to Dorothée (scene vi). He has had no previous experience with horses, "moi qui n'avois en ma vie mené de carosse. Je vous tiens fort heureuse, que mon ignorance ne vous ait point fait casser le cou, ou quelque membre." Then he waxes eloquent, stripping himself down, once the process has begun, to a comic speech that parodies with its chosen ornaments, the plain speech offered
in turn to Lisidor, Hilaire, and here first to Dorothée:
"Quant à moi, je suis d'avis de demander mon congé, car le métier de Cocher, que je fais malgré moi pour servir vos amours, m'attirera sans doute quelque maligne influence.
Tout franc, je crains la destinée de Monsieur Phaëton; c'est-à-dire que la foudre de votre Oncle a déjà commencé par un soufflet, à faire le Jupiter sur mon Visage" (p. 213). His direct question to Dorothée— "Mais aujourd'huy puis-je joüer un autre rôle, sans que votre Oncle s'en appreçoive?"— is answered by Julie's scheme and its new rôle of husband. And he, like Hilaire, will be cast into the new scenario, "sans qu'il s'en apperçoive."
334 The inspired nature of Julie's cleverness, and with it the comic playwright's, is underscored by a scene of similar circumstances in Julie's retinue to that played by Morille and Dorothée in scene vi. She and her maid. Rosette, and Rosette's brother Adrian have also come to an impasse, now that the second sequence of scenes (vii-xiii) has led to the second, critical stage of Lisidor's progress (xiii). They have seen, in the traditional square of streets before two houses that constitutes Hauteroche's stage set, the entry themselves, through Morille's quarters. Sympathetic and indignant for her mistress. Rosette would avenge herself for a betrayal like Lisidor's by violence: "Tout franc, si j'aimois comme vous aimez, j'aurois déjà mis le feu à la maison." Getting even, not mad, is more Julie's way: her retort— "La violence est ici bien moins nécessaire que l'addresse;" Rosette continues to indulge her fantasies of getting in her licks: "Morguenne, il s'en souviendroit.
Mais que prétendez-vous faire? Quant à moi, j'enrage de battre. Ah! que je prendrois un grand plaisir à bourrer un infidèle, & à lui faire retourner dans le ventre sa perfidie
& son inconstance." During this tirade Julie drifts off in a revery that is the state of grace visited by comic inspiration and the trouvaille of the perfect scheme— the light bulb coming on in the bubble over the head of characters in illustrated cartoons— assured by Hauteroche's stage direction: "après avoir un peu rêvé." "Cesse tes
335 emportements, baisse ta coëffe,” she commands her troop as she swings actions into strategy and knocks decisively at
Hilaire's door.
The quid pro quo of the masquerade of Scene xviii is fleshed out with the kind of bawdiness that traditionally
spices farce. It is set up (scenes xv-xvi) through Hilaire, who has only to lay eyes on Julie, "wife of Morille," to be won over to her cause of abandoned wife and mother. To her clarification, "II est mon mari," he answers: "II n'est pas digne de ce nom là, & vous méritez une autre fortune.” And in response to Julie's modest acknowledgement of the compliment, he is moved to pledge his support: "Je veux prendre votre parti contre lui, & par là vous donner des marques sensibles de l'estime que j'ai pour vous" (p. 229).
Her profession of gratitude pushes him even farther, into at least the third instance of his extravagant and hair- triggered violence/passion. "Votre abord m'a touché d'une telle manière, que je l'étranglerois s'il refusoit à faire son devoir auprès de vous." After a rapid glance at Rosette, Julie's new "cousin," elicits only an "assez jolie" by comparison, Hilaire ushers Madame into the "cabinet" as though stepping in for the unworthy husband: "Elle est assez jolie, mais tout franc, vous l'êtes encore plus qu'elle. Je vais faire ouvrir mon appartement, pour vous y faire entrer & là nous expliquerons avec lui de bonne manière" (p. 230).
336 Rosette is quick to spy and to point out the extent to which Julie's seduction scene has succeeded, "Ma foi,
Madame, je crois que ce Monsieur Hilaire se sent remuer... dans lui... quelque chose pour vous" (p. 231). The time— thirty years— has long passed when the coyness of this kind of omissions and their sexual innuendo scandalized "bien pensant" spectators of Molière's L'École des femmes. The character of the figure of Adrian, characterized by his sister as in anybody's pay to supplement his winnings from gambling— "guère honnête"— is alone evidence enough that we have entered the world of the Paris street fairs and con games in which Dancourt's plays are set or their only lightly veiled transformation in the Naples of Molière's Les Fourberies de Scanin. that already resituates virtually within the farce a new audience for it. What is coyly understated in Rosette's identification is significantly shrugged off in response by Julie's "Qu'importe." That Julie plays at seduction for her own ends means less to the spectator, or is totally obscured for him, by the progress of her charms, "sensiblement" felt by two men— as Morille in his turn falls. The comic grace of performance effects an enactment of poetic justice to the point that Julie wins over spectators to her cause as rapidly as she does the conversions on stage. In scene xviii, Morille's lechery, which succeeds his first puzzled reactions, insulted as he is and even laid
337 hands on by Hilaire, is a fantasy invited by the ambiguous direction of the overzealous and clumsy Hilaire in his rôle of reconciler and marriage counsellor. "Te voilà tout interdit, coquin! Allons qu'on l'embrasse tout-à-1'heure devant moi; qu'on lui témoigne son repentir, & qu'on la prie de vouloir te pardonner (à Julie) Le voulez-vous pas bien," Hilaire initially invites them. To which Julie replies with equal ambiguity: "Tout ce qu'il vous plaira. Monsieur" (p. 236). Then, as they warm to their task,
Hilaire bids the couple to join hands: "Mais pour 1'amour de moi, touchez-vous dans la main," and Julie adds:
"J'obéis à vos ordres avec bien du plaisir" (p. 239). As for Morille, he admits that he still is in the dark:
"Parbleu, je n'y vois goutte." It takes Hilaire's added directions to wake him up: "Votre réunion ne sera pas bien faite que vous n'ayez couché ensemble." "Je voudrois voir cela," Morille rapidly replies, a response that is a line direction for Poisson's signature wide-eyed mugging. Julie plays for time— "rien ne presse. Monsieur," giving no hint in voice and demeanor that her scheme may in fact be undergoing some serious complications. The time serves Hilaire for some further fantasizing: J'en demeure d'accord; mais dans ces sortes de reconciliation, le particulier de l'homme & de la femme est un grand secours pour terminer bien des contestations. Vous pouvez, en attendant mieux, disposer de ce cabinet, vous y deshabillez,
338 Sc vous mettre au lit." Morille instantly starts to undo his buttons, while Hilaire approves his dispatch. Regretfully the willing voyeur must avert his eyes, in effect leave, as he makes ready to do and to take Rosette with him. "Sans façon je veux vous voir ensemble dans le lit," he begins, then adds: "& pour cela il faut vous laisser seule avec votre époux; l'occasion achèvera de cimenter ce que j'ai mis en beau chemin" (p. 241). Julie manages to keep
Rosette at her side while dismissing Hilaire, and it is in fact she who closes the door. With its slam she issues a
"faquin" at Morille that is the beginning of a new lesson on reality (scene xix), the first of the play's last sequence of scenes (fittingly rhythmed by being one scene less than the three preceding sequences).
Put on trial by the two women for his "fourberies," read into evidence by Julie, Morille cannot retreat to his former rôle of "cocher." His lies are instantly identified and punished by a slap from Rosette, to punctuate her mistress's "l'effronté menteur." Threatened with repeated punishment for further lies, and the demand to reveal
Lisidor's whereabouts. Morille struggles to escape. Julie, who preferred and supposedly still does brain to brawn, loses her composure— "Ah, maraut, il faut que je t'étrangle" and joins in the assault of blows on one side that Rosette has begun on the other. The noise of this all-enveloping farce draws Hilaire back (xix), and Morille is given a
339 second lesson in reality; he is no more believed by Hilaire than by the woman; he cannot win his case. It takes only the false accusation of the "battered wife," in explanation of the noise to Hilaire, to indict Morille, who in the event cannot lie skillfully enough to counteract the potentially as threatening exposure of the man hiding introduced by him into Hilaire's domicile. Hilaire simpers in gratitude to Julie, "la caressant," according to Hauteroche's stage direction: "Que ne vous dois-je point!" Julie has the last word: "Si vous voulez que je vous dise davantage, faites venir cet homme en ce lieu, & que devant eux vous soyez instruit de toute chose." The only thing that stands in the way of a rapid dénouement at this point is a bit of farce.
Morille pretends to have lost his key. It is of course only a matter of very little time before Hilaire can return with his spare. In preparation for the actual dénouement of the "scène dernière," Morille profits from the little bit of time given him to humble himself and to throw himself upon the mercy of the women, first of Rosette to whom his appeal takes the form of a renewed courtship, seemingly begun long ago in Le Mans. She shows that she does not have a heart of stone and in her turn so does Julie, who accedes to Rosette's plea for
Morille's forgiveness. Dorothée is heard approaching (xxii), and once apprised of the situation issues an equally human response: "O ciel, que je suis malheureuse!" (p.
340 253). The promise of happy resolution and the threat of its undoing combine to underscore the tension that remains up to the dénouement. It resides in the anticipation of Hilaire's response to the truth and his reactionary course of action in settling the disorder created by both schemes that have caused it— for the time it has taken to play them out on stage, since Hauteroche has given his farce the optimum time structure of full congruence of fictional chronology and playing time.
Exposure and forgiveness, or at least probation, unfold so quickly in scene xxiii that the formal dénouement passes by the spectator in a flash of actions. Hilaire's judgments, once the characters' true identities have been revealed to him, are mercifully terse and surprisingly effective, untroubled as might have been expected by wounded pride and vanity. Exposed as an intruder, and a "fourbe” in fact, Lisidor fails to stand up for himself (Morille has in fact cleared the way for this by refusing one last time to deliver himself of a judgment). Lisidor will say only "Que cela peut être vrai, & peut être faux." Hilaire, equally terse and understated, replies only that "La réponse est un peu normande," before turning the case over to Dorothée to judge. His "Et vous votre Niece, qu'en dites-vous?" is from every point of view unexpected. Perhaps his niece's is not unexpected to him, when with obvious disdain she denounces Lisidor with her judgment— "Que c'est un fourbe, un
341 scélérat, que je déteste" (p. 255).— and exits with the line. Lisidor is expelled (and Morille with him) by Hilaire with threats of the law if he does not go forthwith. Before going, he kneels to ask Julie's forgiveness, which comes, as prepared by her earlier pardoning of Morille, without resistance. Her heart is intact. Hilaire is untouched by the spectacle, and by Julie's apology for the inconvenience they have all cause him, and orders Julie and Rosette also from his house. At the same time he deals with his niece's future, and with Morille. "Allez au diable & sortez promptement de mon logis. Pour ma Niece, elle épousera dès demain Eutrope, ou un Couvent. (A Morille lui donnant un soufflet en sortant) & pour toi voilà ton salaire." The last words are Morille's, first a "Me voilà payé de mes gages," which inevitably resonates with the famously final words of Sganarelle in Molière's Pom Juan— "Et mes gages?" But significantly there is no question in Morille's remark concerning this fact in the settling up of his idea of the natural order of things. Finally, as the newly happy lovers prepare to exit. Rosette awaits Morille's arm, he echoes with renewed knowledge his own judgment, however askew its expression as voiced in scene vi: "Je vous suis; car il ne fait pas bon ici pour moi" (p. 256).
Physically absent from the dénouement is Eutrope, who is waiting in the wings (Dorothée's appartement) as
Dorothée's future. Like Lisidor, he has entered into the
342 house; unlike the young adventurer, he has been invited.
Eutrope who was last seen on stage wandering through (scenes x-xi) and voicing the play's only monologue is after all not so bad a fellow, lost as he was last seen in his calf-like love, not a fate worse than death or its equivalent in a life sentence to a convent. Accustomed as spectators have become to the parade of clever young women characters that Hauteroche sends across his stage in 1684, some of the spectators may have left Le Cocher with a smile accompanying the thought that well, after all she is not married yet... .
Such trailing, post-performance projections represent one proof, by "infection," as it were, of the triumphant imposition of a personal style, "la comédie hauterochienne."
343 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6
The play rejected is Les Frayeurs de Crispin. The story of its authorship is a complicated one. Lancaster attributes it to a little-known itinerant playwright named Crosnier (IV^, pp. 550-51) and suggests on the basis of a stage design by Mahelot that it was first accepted by the Comédie-Française after a reading, then rejected when it was discovered to be nothing more than an abrégé of the play L'Esprit follet by d'Ouville (See note 6 below) passed off as the author's own work. It seems too improbable that Hauteroche, near retirement, should have happened to be working on the same plot from the same source in the same intention of providing a new play. According to his "Avis," it was a "grande princesse" who made the request for him to re-do d'Ouville. The lady has not been identified. She was most probably Mademoiselle d'Ennbault, who was in a position to tell Hauteroche about the affair and even to suggest that he make a good thing out of what Crosnier had botched. His next play. Le Cocher, within the year is dedicated to Mademoiselle d'Ennebault's husband. The "esprit" that elevates her in the preface is the same that in 1681 had addressed La Grange as "mon cousin" because he was a fellow stage king.
Adrien Moetjens maintained regular literary agents in Paris. His 1700 catalogue included 3,510 books in French. See Henri-Jean Martin (1969), II, p. 724. By Karch, see "Introduction," n. 1.
I have in mind the frantic pace of creativity and production that is thematized and finally symbolized by the film Molière (1978) by Adriane Mnouchkine, already strikingly present in allegorical (of the theatre) form in Alfred Simon's Molière par lui-même (1967). Simon's references to this "superbe film" in his later biography of Molière (1988) bring out the kinship of interpretation: pp. 15, 90, 284, 353, 498, 515.
344 As Hauteroche points out in his “avis," he went back to the source in Calderon's La Dama duende and also used slightly another of his comedias El Escondido y la tapada. Lancaster identifies La Dama duende (III, iv-viii) as source for V, viii-xi, xiii (which was not used by d'Ouville). Lancaster's examination of the borrowing, more systematic than any other before or since, concludes that "In the main the play combined Calderon's ingenuity with French classical ideas in regards to structure, unity of tone, and style" (IV^, p. 515). Antoine Le Metel d'Ouville (Boisrobert's brother), dramatist, storyteller, and translator from the Spanish published his Esprit follet in 1642 (Hauteroche dates it fifty-four years earlier, giving it twelve additional years in age, the more to justify his assertion that its language, at least, was not current usage in the theatre) . Jean Rousset makes the play emblematic of baroque art (1954, p. 66), which already justifies Hauteroche's claim of datedness. Lancaster agrees (IV^, p. 514), citing d'Ouville's excesive use of tirades and rhetorical striving to make "belles phrases," both inimical to Hauteroche's general practices. Colette Hélard-Cosnier, the most recent examiner of d'Ouville's translation style (1987) also finds a rhetorical register that is not Calderon's, as well as a "libertinage" that is foreign to the Spanish dramaist (pp. 160-61). This too is out-of-date at the moment of Hauteroche's writing when Bayle (on the comet) has already set a different tone of rationalism. The odor of "libertinage" may in part account for Hauteroche's attack, in the "Avis," on the abuses of satire in comedy— it is more difficult, he affirms, to write a "pièce bien faite" than to indulge in lavish satire. All in all, Hauteroche's claim that his version is superior in structure and preparations, characterization, and prosody seems justified. Le Mémoire de Mahelot (1910, p. 134) records the following stage set: "Le théâtre est deux chambres différantes et un pirot au meillieu. 11 faut deux tables, des toilettes, 4 flambeaux, une malle dans laquelle il y a une valize, un abit d'este et des coussins de senteure et une gravatte et une chemise et manchette, du descrotoire, des cartes, des dès, des cornets, une bource, du charbon, une almanach, des mouchettes, du pain, du fromage." ®- Lancaster puts this into proper perspective as a "violation of liaison" (IV^, p. 515).
345 ’■ "Nous n'aimons point à voir de jeunes filles s'amuser à faire les sorcières, causer aux hommes d'autres tourmens que ceux de la jalousie et de l'amour, entrer dans leur chambre par une fausse porte, ouvrir leurs valises avec des fausses clefs, les lutiner par des moyens qui appartiennent à la magie plutôt qu'à la beauté; leur lot n'est pas de faire peur, et les inquiétudes de ce genre ne sont pas de leur compétence; leurs caprices et leurs charmes, voilà prestiges et leur diablerie" (1825, p. 206). Brécourt's play was the last before his death in 1685. As a comedy on Lucian's "Timon the Misanthrope," it should not be a surprise to Lancaster that the play "is surprisingly gloomy for a one-act comedy" (IV, p. 511). What is surprising, and perhaps due in part to Brécourt's flamboyant personality, is its strong success.
See Curtis (1972), p. 57. Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza, Los Riesoos que tiene un coche. Hauteroche writes, in the "Avis" that the "l'idée du sujet" came to him from Mendoza, but that he "I'a fort dépaïsée." Lancaster (IV^, p. 515).
Lucette (II, vii) assails Pourceaugnac with a case of abandonment and also of paternity, all in a heavy southern (Pezenas) accent.
346 CHAPTER 7
LE FEINT POLONAIS OU LA VEUVE IMPERTINENTE
Hauteroche's cheerful Parisian comedy Le Feint Polonais ou la Veuve impertiente. a three-act play in prose, appeared in 1686. It seems to have been destined for the provinces, more particularly for Lyons. It was there that the first printing took place, most probably after the opening's first run. It is not certain, on the other hand, that the play opened in Paris at all, despite Voos's assertion (p. 80, undocumented), that a single performance there did take place. Lyons, or at least its vicinity, does figure in the play: both of its soldier jeunes premiers have been stationed in the environs before returning to Paris.^ And the recurrent pattern of these types of characters' provincial roots and encumbrances there does not come into play here, as though the playwright "nouvelliste," as it were, wished to give a view of happenings in Paris to a society loosely linked to it that would find that city view an amusing "curiosité." Had the play not been performed at all, Hauteroche would surely have said as much, as he does elsewhere in his "Avis," and would scarcely have defended it in the manner that he does.
347 The "Avis" is unique in the amount of defensiveness it allows itself and striking in the contrasting tones of the defenses. First of all there is a matter-of-fact concession whose tone is set by the insistent use of the qualifying adverb "sincèrement." A parler sincèrement de cette comédie, elle n'est pas dans cette exacte régularité que l'art et ses préceptes demandent pour les ouvrages de théâtre. Il y a deux actions qui n'ont guère de rapport ensemble, et qui ne se mêlent presque point dans toute la pièce," he begins apologetically but significantly without going so far as to characterize the double action as having no connection. He ends with a telling description of what is to be seen: "On voit la pluspart des acteurs et des actrices se traverser l'un l'autre dans leurs desseins et c'est ce qui m'a fait donner deux différents titres." Drawing attention to the central flaw of a play's dramatic structure by focusing it in the play's title (and then pointing it out in the preface) is a curious procedure if the playwright were intent only on a validating success in the theatre. One element of explanation may be that Le Feint Polonais was written as a favor for a theatrical friend in Lyons and that its composition and appearance having satisfied that end the modest success of performance at all— and its printing— was either a bonus or beside the point. Another element may lie in experimentation within limits. Now married, and in very comfortable circumstances,
348 Hauteroche may in the retreat of his library have been writing for the pleasure of writing a new play. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine him as the author of
"armchair" plays. Master of the comic imbroglio, Hauteroche begins there, and as the concluding assertion of his first and most purposely general remarks on the structure perhaps indicates he takes the imbroglio farther into the "traversé" than he previously had. Other prefatory comments support this suggestion of limited experimentation. Overall, there can be no question of a full rediscovery or rehabilitation of the comedy of Le Feint Polonais. but Lancaster's "feeble"^ is an inadequate description that merits re examination.
The playwright does not rise to a very spirited defense of the "soubrette" rôle he has made to partner his ingénue, Marianne. "La servante Lucette a peu de part dans
1'intrigue, elle y agit selon que l'occasion se présente sans avancer ni reculer les affaires de la scène." Lucette does play her part in the dénouement, as will be seen, in concert with Marianne and especially with Ambroise, but it seems to be the case that Hauteroche did not want to argue the point, preferring to emphasize that for the most part the character goes its own way, not functioning as is more usual employment of this character type solely as an "utilité" and as resource in abetting the young lovers' schemes.
349 Hauteroche reserves his arguments and rhetorical resources for three more spirited defensive points. "Le dénouement arrive par un incident imprévu que le hazard fait naître, mais qui pourtant ne choque point la vrai semblance." The terseness of this comment, which seems to suggest disdain in the matter of taste that "vraisemblance" finally is, skirts a begging of the question. So too does his more extended discussion of the disguise that begins the play and provides the first term of its title. "On n'a pas fort approuvé le déguisement du premier amoureux, mais je n'en découvre point la cause, ce n'est pas une chose nouvelle qu'un amant se déguise pour l'intérêt de sa passion. Il lui tombe en esprit de se déguiser en Polonais, pour être moins reconnu dans le lieu da sa naissance. C'est une pensée qui n'est pas éloignée du bon sens, et d'ailleurs il en voit l'exécution facile, par la raison que dans Paris il y en a beaucoup habillés de cette manière." There is too much pleasure with this particular disguise, elaborately indulged in Act I and finally a comic turn in the dénouement, for the playwright to admit to a fault.
Question-begging here— Why Polish?— has been swept aside by the suggestion of a line of argument (i.e., lots of them in
Paris) that remains undeveloped, for reason that will be later clarified. As in the matter of the dénouement, the comic donnée of the basic disguise-scheme of the play is defended generally in terms of comic tradition. What is
350 acceptable is what has worked before in the theatre; and if that is not acceptable, then the game has not been rightly- understood.
The most lengthy rejoinder in the "Avis" is the defense of the character of Rufile, who fills out a major part of Act II, and with her her comic partner, the rich widower
Monsieur Ambroise, who seeks her hand in marriage. She is a new comic type in Hauteroche's theatre, though her particular comedy is familiar in it. The playwright, who rightly does not claim originality, even though he has not exploited this comic mask before, remembers a host of like widows before and after the Madame Pernelle of Molière's Le Tartuffe that trod the boards or drew the satirist's shafts in the manner of the often-recast anecdote of the matron of Ephesus.’ But the length and substance of her defense suggests that both the character and the distribution of the rôle across the play pleased the playwright who in fact in his remarks defends his Act II. "Quelques uns ont trouvé les carateres de Rufile et de Mr. Ambroise un peu trop chargés; mais ils n'y ont pas fait assez de réflexion,"
Hauteroche begins decisively. "Ils sont véritablement dans la nature, ils n'ont rien qui ne soit ordinaire, et ne sortent point des bornes que les regies nous préscrivent."
As I will later suggest, the main import of these remarks may be precisely what most damages the play's prospects in the theatre. For now, let's listen carefully to
351 Hauteroche's preparation for a reader's first encounter with these stock characters. "Rufile est une femme d'une humeur emportée, qui se pique de vertu, et qui croit sur cette vision être en droit de qlosser sur la conduite des autres. Elle dit brusquement aux gens ce qu'elle a dans la pensée sans se mettre en peine si elle les chagrine ou non. On sçait bien que ces sortes de tempéramens ne laissent pas souvent à ceux de cette complexion toute la modération nécessaire au commerce de la vie civile." The ridicule of the personnage. commented on by all the play's characters (except Ambroise, of course) on a scale running from a blunt
"folle" to a euphemistic "étrange," is centered on the kind of dance she leads her docile comic partner Ambroise. "Elle pousse inconsidérément Mr. Ambroise, sur ce qu'il la recherche en mariage, et lui dit les choses outrageantes pour se débarasser de ses poursuites. Ce procède lui attire quelques réponses fâcheuses, car quoique Mr. Ambroise, soit d'un naturel paisible, il se sent obligé de lui répliquer par des paroles désobligeantes. Il s'en repent quelques momens après, son amour l'emporte sur son ressentiment et il cherche avec soin ses moyens de pouvoir renouer avec elle." A last remark returns us to another defense, like that to which I drew attention above incriminating a theatrical defect in the theatre of 1686. "Ces caractères ne sont point extraordinaires puisqu'il est vrai que nous en voyons tous les jours de semblables dans le monde."
352 ACT I
The play is set in what can now be characterized as Hauteroche's standard stage setting. A Paris street is the
initial set with a comfortable house behind, seen into from a door, then with the change of a flat, revolving into a comfortably appointed room. As is most often the case, the movement of the jeunes premiers is calculated to gain access to the house.
Le Feint Polonais ou la Veuve impertinente begins with a series of stage directions on laughter that amounts to a modern laugh track. It is the first thing that we hear from the attractive ingénue that Mariane will prove to be: she ends as she begins the first scene with her easy laughter. Des Valons's laughter is added to the atmosphere of merriment filling the second scene as we learn, along with his companion. La Franchise, a soldier in his military company, the reasons why they are both turned out as
"Turks." Mariane and Lucette are first seen returning from mass. Lucette's initial question to Mariane about what she has made of the "Turks" seen in the church, and their "airs assez éloignés de l'inhumanité que l'on leur attribué ordinairement. Hem?" draws Mariane's first laughter and Lucette's comment on it: "Hé que veux-tu que j'en pense. LUCETTE: vous riez? Ma foi, ces deux Turcs ne sont pas mal tournés." Mariane frankly agrees and ask a question, which
353 shares in her laughter, about Lucette' identification of the strangers as Turks, a stereotyping from the signs of native dress that will occur in Act I repeatedly: "II est vrai. Mais pourquoi veux-tu que ces gens là soient Turcs...
LUCETTE: Je prens tous les gens habillés de cette manière pour des Turcs. Il est vrai que ceux-ci m'ont paru mieux
faits & plus agréables que la plupart de ceux qu'on
rencontre souvent dans la rue vêtus de la sorte." À second
laugh is drawn from Mariane when Lucette assures her that Mariane has caught one stranger's eye (Lucette has been
quick to notice that she herself caught the other's). "Quelles visions," replies Mariane dismissing the comment, only to be extravagantly complimented in a manner to underline the element of modesty that is a part of the youthful beauty of the actress playing the rôle. "Lucette:
Ce ne sont point des visions. Vous possédez un certain gratieux qui pourrait apprivoiser le coeur le plus farouche,
& je m'assure qu'il n'y a pas de Turc, quelque Barbare qu'il fût, qui n'adoucit volontiers auprès de vous" (p. 345). "Un certain gratieux" well describes the Hauteroche seeks for his young lovers, who shimmer with promise of happiness, and whose hearts center their lives with happy intuition. The Des Valons who explains himself in Act I, ii, is a dashing soldier, like Mariane, free from any pretense. As Des Valons explains his scheme of masquerading to La
Franchise, some new elements entre into the portrait of the
354 jeune premier. The scheme is his, of course, to meet Mariane's father Ergaste (a Parisian banker) as a Polish
heir to a large fortune, guaranteed by a common friend who
is a banker in Amsterdam. He has met Mariane and her aunt
while he was stationed in the vicinity of Lyons and they
were there visiting relatives. The opposition comes not from any objection to his person but from an unusual obstruction. His father has declared bankruptcy and Ergaste
is among his creditors, to the tune of 1,000 ecus. Thus,
Des Valons supposes, Ergaste and his sister would at present be little inclined to find him an attractive candidate for
son-in-law. Des Valons's plan is to show Ergaste and also
his sister who may also be an obstacle that contrary to
supposition his own "mérite" is solid. "Tu sçais aussi que je n'ai jamais fait mistere de ma naissance, & que j'ai
point imité ces gens qui lorsque la fortune les éleve à quelque rang travaillent à méconnaître leurs parents, & à se faire descendre de quelque race imaginaire." And La Franchise agrees, "Par exemple, vous. Monsieur, qui avouez franchement que vous n'êtes que le fils d'un Banquier de Paris, qui même n'a pas trop bien fait les affaires, voudriez-vous troquer votre gloire contre celle de ces
Nobles qui n'ont pour tout mérite, que le titre de Gentilhomme, & qui à l'ombre de cette qualité, s'imaginent follement que tout leur soit dû; quoique souvent sur le chapitre de la raison, ils soient plus sauvages que les
355 sauvages." We are not far from Les Nobles de province here, and it is significant that this "caractère" with its satiric thrust and rhetorical charge comes from La Franchise, who will turn out to be a quite different character from the friend and companion in arms that he willingly serves, after a beginning of grumbling at being made to wear the "Turkish" disguise without explanation (children follow and jeer at him in the street, he is forgetting how to use his own language, among other gripes). Just as Mariane is spared in her natural nobility the first mention of physical attraction, it is La Franchise who will play out for his friend the ruse of the first entrance into Ergaste's household, and the comedy of the doorway that he is forced to endure.
Before La Franchise may join Ergaste to the game and gain entrance marking a new stage in the scheme that ends Act I, he is forced to face the doorkeepers, Lucette first
(I, iv), then quite uselessly the servant Picard (I, vi).
There are thus two rehearsals with the pseudo-Polish language that he spouts before it must serve to win over Ergaste (I, vii). The stage is set, and held, by two framing scenes of monologue (I, ill, v), the first working up in a monologue to the fateful knock, the second reflecting on accomplishment— or reflecting the "rake's progress" after first success with Lucette. Hauteroche plays with the "fantaisie verbale" of nonsense speech in a
356 carnavalesque manner, taking his lead obviously from Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, but with irony and a line of satirical development that is his own: "Aragasqui, paralicou rostogateau, biscuit," the false Pole greets
Lucette (p. 355). And with the direction again "en riant," she answer frankly, addressing him by the only word she has understood: "Je ne vous entens point. Monsieur Biscuit." La Franchise, warming to the task (and especially to Lucette), immediately switches to the language of gestures—
"il veut l'embrasser," reads the stage direction— under the justification of foreign customs. He is good-naturedly—
"ces drôles sont plaisants"— but firmly rebuffed by Lucette.
She, who ultimately serves by fetching Ergaste, indulges in her own bit of "language masking," as though catching the virus she adds a big word from philosophy to make her point:
"On ne saurait rien me reprocher sur l'honnetêté, & qu'on doit avoir de la retenue pour celles qui sont de cette
Cathegorie." La Franchise banters on the word, finally losing Lucette, who with a blink declares a truce.
"Cathegorie, ma Belle? J'avois crû, ma Belle, que l'honnetêté n'empêche pas à la Cathegorie de faire son devoir, & je ne sçavois pas que par la Cathegorie je pusse avoir le malheur de vous déplaire. LUCETTE: Je pense.
Monsieur, que vous vous raillez de moi." After her exit. La Franchise goes on with the game, but changes tone and stakes, to the frank bawdiness of the soldier, an additional
357 indication of "l'âme moins haute" that prepares full
discovery of it that will occur in Act III. "Parbleu cette fille n'est pas impertinente; & ses yeux m'ont causé de certaines émotions... qui... enfin, si je la trouvois dans une Ville au pillage, je ne pourrois m'empêcher de passer malgré elle sur la Cathegorie. Mais quelqu'un vient. Pensons à notre affaire."
The interview with Picard (I, vi) is a different matter altogether. It is as antagonistic as the meeting with
Lucette was sympathetic. The lumbering servant dislikes the "Turk" on sight: "Morguenne comme ces gens sont bâtis I" (p.
259), he mutters to himself, and to La Franchise's first
"Forloneau rabric kanouic," issues a blunt: "Que demandez- vous?" The response, "je demande Maracou Ergasti," is immediately translated: "Monsieur Ergaste?" A hostile impasse is reached, when La Franchise refuses to divulge the nature of his business: "Je lui voulou cen que je lui voulou." Whereas Lucette entred into the game, with "Monsieur Biscuit," without requiring a translation, Picard is the man demanding exact translation; without it, there is no game, or it turns sour. "Monsieur," Picard answers, "je vous demandou pardou, je vais lui dire que vous le demandez, & que vous lui voulou cen que qu'on lui voulou. Je suis votre serviteur." This response, multiplying the grammatical deformations of the foreign accent, is parody in the service of mockery; and La Franchise hears it as such:
358 "Ce fat se raille de moi: à la fin quelqu'un se repentira" (p. 360).
The stage has been set and dramatic tension created for the meeting with Ergaste, which may go either of the two proceeding ways, after La Franchise's initial reverences:
"Aragasqui paralicon, rostogasteau, biscuit, Ergasti."
Ergaste's first response registers incomprehension, like Picard's: "Je ne vous entens point. Monsieur." La
Franchise tries an urbane compliment (somewhat clumsily), elevating Ergaste to a man-of-the-world who would quite naturally know Polish: "La Franchise: Quoi! vous n'entendez pas Polonais? Ergaste: Non, Monsieur" (p. 361). But the compliment falls flat when Ergaste answers it with unrelenting good sense: II me semble qu'il n'y a pas de quoi s'étonner; cette langue n'est pas si familière qu'on ne soit obligé de la savoir." La Franchise answers with a risky lesson on the beauty of Polish, to which Ergaste seems for a moment indifferent. Man of commmon sense, he will commit himself later, "on verra... ." "Mais il me semble que pour un Polonois vous parlez bien
François," he remarks, providing an opening for the first installment of La Franchise's story. It takes only the letter of credit for 10,000 écus, from his friend in
Amsterdam, really to open the door to Ergaste's offered hospitality: "... je suis tout a son service, et je ne souffrirai point qu'il loge d'autres logis que le mien...
359 tout ce qui vient de mon ami Feloque m'est toujours bien cher" (p. 363).
So far so good, with this high point, in Act I: Ergaste is not a brute, he honors friendship, and he know how to observe social forms of polite society. As a man-of- the-world, he immediately corrects Lucette's confusion of Turks and Poles once La Franchise has exited and she has bluntly asked him why he should want to clutter up his house with Turks (I, viii). She accepts his corrective in the right spirit ("Vous les estimez, & c'est assez.")
Everything here suggests that as "père de famille" Ergaste will prove to be enlightened as he is as a businessman. And such proves to be the case. Ergaste lives in harmony with his daughter, as with his servants, and has a number of loyal friends. He will accommodate into this harmony, once their identity is revealed in the dénouement of Act III, Des Valons and La Franchise. The real threat to this harmony, and therefore to the success of the young lovers' scheme, lies elsewhere, in the nature of Ergaste's sister Rufile and her place in the household.
The last three scenes of Act I (viii-x) introduce Rufile. In the first framing scene, Ergaste admits freely to Lucette that he would like to be rid of his sister: "Je voudrois de toute mon âme qu'elle fût remariée afin d'être débarassé" (p. 305). Lucette has led him on with a reminder that his sister may not be so pleased as he is to
360 play host to "Turks." "Qu'elle le soit ou qu'elle ne le soit pas, je ne m'en mets gueres en peine; mais je sçaurai lui en parler." After this confidence in his reason and verbal skills, he asks Lucette about the matter at hand— the proposal his friend Ambroise has made to Rufile— and Lucette provides enough information to set up the comedy of Rufile's reactions. Both Lucette and Mariane are as eager as Ergaste to be rid of her, since she comments on and seeks to control their every action. "C'est une étrange humeur; feu son mari avoit beaucoup à souffrir d'elle," Ergaste acknowledges. The type, Lucette clarifies in rejoinder, is the "dragon of virtue," the judgmental and censorious prude.
"Elle fatigue les gens des louanges qu'elle se donne, & prône à tous momens sa pruderie, comme si les autres ne l'étoient pas autant qu'elle." Significantly, Ergaste gives
Rufile her due, in qualification of the "type." "Il faut avouer qu'elle est vertueuse." Lucette wonders, however, given Rufile's past, before her marriage. "Je ne disconviens pas : mais quand on a été quatre ou cinq and fille Lingere, la chose peut être douteuse." Ergaste closes the conversation in character, one which will make him compatible with and sympathetic to Des Valons : "Cela ne conclut rien contre elle, & il se trouve dans toutes les professions des personnes honnêtes." But Ergaste is not Job and the living presence of this "dragon of virtue," as depicted in Lucette's closing speech, will be hard to bear.
361 "D'accord, mais je ne sçaurois souffrir sa médisance, ni son peu de charité pour le prochain. Elle est toujours inquiette sur la conduite des autres, & toujours fort tranquille sur la sienne. Si j'étois homme, j'aimerois mieux une demie honnête femme, avec de la douceur, que ces
Diablesses qui font sans cesse étalage de leur vertu. La voici" (p. 366).
Rufile's kind of rôle, which in earlier decades in Paris would have been played by a male actor "en travesti," invites her to bristle with authority untroubled by any qualifications or qualifiers. In response to her brother's questions and comments on Ambroise she delivers decided opinions. He is indeed "plaisant" to seek her hand given his first wife's reputation. It is fortunate that he has no children, since they certainly would not have been his.
Turning a deaf ear to Ergaste's warnings on "médisance," she also turns her back, exiting with an impatiently repeated "Je n'en veux pas," that was, is, and ever will be her last word. Ergaste is left in frustration and, like the spectator, in some doubt about his previous certainty that he will be able to talk Rufile around to good sense. This impatience grows when Lucette, returned for the second framing scene, asks him for his opinion. A still measured and detached opinion is managed— "C'est une femme," extravagant like all women in their differing ways. But a reiteration by Lucette of the possibility that Rufile will
362 not suffer Turks in the house gladly, raises enough annoyance in Ergaste to suggest a potential threat, hanging over into Act II, to Des Valons's scheme. When Ergaste explodes, he assumes, unnaturally, we suspect, the rôle of the heavy, tyrannical "père de famille": "Je suis le maître chez moi; & je me ris de ce gu'elle peut dire là dessus."
If Ergaste can keep this laughter, all will be right with the world.
ACT II
The twelve scenes of Act II almost exactly repeat and at the same time fittingly amplify the patterning of Act I. The comedy of the doorway is replayed, this time with Des
Valons who is introduced by La Franchise, as agreed. Picard repeats his questions with increased nastiness (II, ii) and Ergaste (II, iv) greets a new rush of pseudo-Polish with a renewed politeness that runs even to enchantment:
"Qu'importe, Je voudrois sçavoir le Polonois" (p. 378), which is met with a heavily ironic answer from La Franchise: "II n'en est pas besoin. Monsieur, puisqu'il entend le François." Mariane, who comes to greet her father's guests is introduced to and is willingly coopted into a rôle in Des Valons's scheme (II, v-vi). "Embarassée," at first according to Hauteroche's stage direction, the "belle
Mariane" retains all her fitting modesty through respect for
363 her family and frank admission of her gratitude and her love ("sincère") for Des Valons. All seems to be going swimmingly, enough so that La Franchise rises to the continued task with new enthusiasm (p. 392). The second half of the act amplifies the threat of the blocking character that Rufile has become as she in her turn enters to greet the guests.
Rufile, responding to the Polish test (II, vii) in her turn at first passes it, her politeness equally her brother's, and she takes no issue with his growing admiration of the marvels of the Polish tongue. Lucette responds to Des Valons's "Polish compliment" with an admirable modesty befitting her place: "Monsieur, je ne mérite pas les gracieusetés que vous me faites. Je ne suis que la servante du logis... (p. 383). As the actors all exit in order to usher Des Valons into occupancy of his rooms, Rufile arranges to be left with Lucette. Scene viii particularizes and opens out the comic type and the following scene sets it into action, in the event an interview with Ambroise that quickly becomes an unfriendly and noisy quarrel. Rufile confides in Lucette, obviously trusting her. She informs her of the exact amount that her first husband left her (40,000 livres), sufficient for her to be comfortable and to avoid the first concerns of most widows of her time concerning their material welfare, and like the Bélein of Molière's Le Malade imaginaire^ sometimes
364 avid in preserving them.* But she is not either the kind of widow who eagerly pursued a new sense of freedom and empowerment.® She admits that she is willing to remarry and reveals one absolute condition for that new contract. "Oh! Je ne remarierai jamais que je n'aye un Caresse" (p. 385).
Given the absence of a sense of humor that is part of her character, this revelation offered with poker-faced matter- of-factness would raise a spontaneous laugh. Lucette, too cagey to laugh at this moment, simply registers an incredulous echo: "Un Carosse, Madame!"
Hauteroche has skillfully set up a doubt on priorities accounting for the morally indignant denunciation of the candidate Ambroise launched by Rufile after this revelation. She scorns him for permitting the moral tawdriness of his first wife's several lovers and for the outrage of profiting from these "malversations" in his business. Now there is an
"avidité" that, in her eyes, belongs, we may well imagine, with the seven deadlies. And it must be recognized that
Rufile's desire for a carriage, by her own admission, does not derive from a pride that belongs in the same company.
She is not Dancourt's Madame Patin, who begins Le Chevalier
à la mode with an explosion of anger over the failure of some aristocrat to give precedence to her carriage, the emblazoned emblem of her "new money."® I shall return to Madame Patin later. In the case of Rufile, who is not in reality controlled by money or pride deriving from it,
365 whatever her comic blindness visible in the order of priorities, it is solely comfort that has been her motivation: "C'est une chose insupportable pour moi, que de marcher dans les rues duant l'Hyver parmi la fange, les neiges, & la pluye, & l'Ete pendant la brûlante ardeur du Soleil" (p. 385).
Before it is interrupted by Ambroise's entrance, into a heated scene, Lucette in this scene of confidence picksup especially on Rufile's denunciation of Ambroise's profiteering. If Lucette sounds, in her tone of realism verging on cynicism, like a raisonneur in Molière's dialogues with assorted monomaniacs, the generalization coming from Lucette is more interesting as reflections on public morality of 1685-86 in exactly that part of society that provided the main part of theatre audiences. "Ma foi, Madame, il n'est pas le seul de ce temperament. Nous en voyons quantité qui n'en font pas trop de scruple, & qui avancent leurs affaires par cet endroit." Rufile's response predictably is that such people should be banished from honorable society. "Une grande entreprise," Lucette rejoins with sarcasm, then fills out the picture: "Car franchement, Madame, il n'y a gueres de famille dans le monde, où il ne se trouve quelque femme ou fille dereglée, ou quelque fripon” (p. 387). Rufile half agrees. "Cela peut être vrai," but she is not resigned to the fact; "mais on doit prendre le soin de les corriger par des exemples & par les
366 paroles... .” Warming to the discussion, as Rufile has been, Lucette, throwing caution to the wind (in all senses) and makes a move toward applying to her interlocutor her own advice: "Ma figue, Madame, je crois que la véritable vertu est de ne se point vanter d'avoir la vertu.C'est un nom dont plusieurs se passent, qui souvent ne la connaissent pas trop." The direct application is deferred to the other framing scene for the quarrel with Ambroise. In the throes of comic blindness, Rufile might well not have an eyebrow raised here in anticipation of an application of Lucette's generalization to herself. But there is no doubt of fully visible evidence of impatience, which will shortly escalate to explosive anger with Ambroise, by the time Lucette is interrupted: "Par exemple, ... ." Ambroise, ironically declaring his good fortune, steps into this gap— or breech— and in turn opens another himself. The scene of the quarrel (ix), the comic high point of
Act II that also bids to be that— for better or worse— of the play as a whole, orchestrates another use of mechanized speech. Rufile's "Je n'en veux pas," from the beginning her signature, applied to Ambroise, is spat five times at him directly. His reasoning, that he can provide for Rufile and that he is a good prospect for that reason and also because he is an "honnête homme" only goads Rufile to anger and heightened insults, which to pass her for the truth. Arguing with him, and thus partially responsive rather than
367 totally deaf, she repeats her reasons for believing the contrary. Seeing red, Ambroise returns the "compliment**— that with the past of an apprentice laundress— and indeed the story of a liaison with a certain man of the law... .
Indignation at this level for Rufile can only lead to direct insult... "Vous en avez menti, & vous êtes un sot" (p.
391). As Lucette later reminds him, Ambroise gives her exact change, or at least in fact makes a rush at doing so:
"Ventrebleu, vous êtes une...," before catching himself and leaving the audience (and/or Lucette, witness on stage, turned away and registering on her fact the playwright tells us not what— wide-eyed alarm or a smirk) to fill in the blank. "Tu ne devois pas souffrir que cette infâme me parlât de la sorte, tu l'aurois dû le dévisager," Rufile points out to Lucette (II, x, pp. 392-93), after Ambroise has stormed out. She herself vows revenge, even with Lucette's warning of the consequences : "Hé ! Madame, croyez-moi, n'allez point donner à rire aux gens." In Rufile's response, from the immediately triggered "CommentI" through the enunciation of reasons as compelling as to be blinding to the evidence at hand— "donner à rire aux gens? je ne crains personne, j'ai de l'honneur & de la vertu," we realize how deeply we are in Molière's virtual audience for a "Riez donc, parterre..." or any number of Alceste's remarks preparing the disillusioned "J'ai pour moi la justice et je perds mon procès," rather than that of a new
368 audience suggested by Lucette's evocation of the decorative dissipation and decadence of 1685-86.
The supplement to Act II (scenes xi-xii) is Lucette's.
Left alone, she indulges in chortling: she wouldn't have not had this scene, obviously counting on it to determine Ergaste's resolve to be rid of his shrew of a sister, thus furthering her own scheme (with the tacit agreement of Mariane). Then, in dialogue, with a repentant Ambroise
(xii), she is enlisted, unknowingly, for the other scheme, which will intersect with her own. Ambroise offers her a gold watch if she is successful in furthering his matrimonial plans. Lucette gladly suppresses a monologue on love in the interest of working toward this prize. It is not literally true, we will see in Act III, that Lucette does not advance the plot. After all there is a gold watch at stake, and clever as she has been made to be, Lucette knows that she has the information that may be used to win it. She needs only to wait for, then correctly judge, the right timing of her moment.
ACT III
The entire cast is assembled as Des Valons and La Franchise take their leave, with proper ceremony (III, i) , exiting to collect their things at the inn and leaving the stage for Rufile and the overflow of Act II. She has her
369 third (and most sought) scene (III, ii) of indignation left to play: the report and, to her mind, exposure of the false
Ambroise to Ergaste. Interrupted, she is forced to witness a business arrangement (III, iii), before exiting angrily. Reactions on all parts to this new source of indignation fill out most of the act before the final supplement of the dénouement (scenes xiii-xiv). La Franchise enters with further proof of the "Polish gentleman's merit (ix) and Lucette plays her trump card (xi). A new situation at the last moment, and a reversal for La Franchise, takes place
(xii), which requires the additional scenes of dénouement.
In scene ii Rufile's frustration is the kind of dépit of a lover who has made the total gift of self and has been nonetheless rejected. Having unburdened herself to her brother, on the score of accusations made against the erstwhile apprentice laundress, she meets with a "Ce n'est pas là un grand mal" (p. 400). Sympathetically, Mariane sides with her aunt. "Assurément, ma Tante, & il [Ambroise] mériteroit cent coups de baton." Ergaste, delving for explanations for his friend's actions, elicits the truth about Rufile's provoking insults and faces her with a "vous avez tort" (p. 401). Rufile can only pity her brother's blindness. And Mariane now changes sides to support her father. The scene, before interruption, and Rufile's being pushed aside to pout, ends with a repeated judgment by
Ergaste that she is "extravagante" and indeed "folle."
370 The intruder, Des Ruisseaux, who has in fact come on business as usual and is only (as yet) a fâcheux for Rufile,
presents a letter of change for 800 ecus, guaranteed by Ambroise, who will be present shortly. The name alone is
enough to unhinge Rufile, who intervenes with a threat to paste Ambroise one if he so much as shows his face. Ergaste,
horrified by this disruption of the order of business, excuses his sister summarily to the stranger, repeating again in his annoyance his opinion of her actions—
"Monsieur, ne prenez point garde à ce qu'elle dit, elle est folle" (p. 404). Ail of a piece, Rufile insists on having the last word: a denial, and a threat, as she exits: "Cela est faux, & s'il y vient nous verrons."
Ergaste reassures Des Ruisseaux (III, iv) that their friend will receive no further insult, and turns to the family for advice with the frank admission, "Oh je ne sçais plus où j'en suis avec elle" (III, v ) . Mariane, in the spirit of freedom that the young desire for themselves, is quick to be generous: "Hé, mon père, ne vous inquiétez point, laissez-la faire à sa fantaisie." But Ergaste cannot abide the prospect of having his friends treated henceforth in the manner Rufile threatens to. Something must be done to dissuade her. Lucette plays her trump— if Ambroise will only buy her a carriage— but Ergaste is still unconvinced. The prospect seems ridiculous to him (and we learn, incidentally, why Rufile herself had not purchased a
371 carriage for her own use when she had the means to do so).
"C'est à ce coup qu'on peut juger qu'elle est folle,”
Ergaste opines, "A-t-elle de la qualité et du bien pour
souhaiter avoir un carosse? (p. 407). Lucette, fearful that she has played her card too soon (and she has), hastens
to suggest a compromise that in effect sets the proper context for Dancourt's Madame Patin's conscious as well as
unconscious assumptions: "Hé, Monsieur, laissons la qualité, quand on a du bien ça suffit." Ergaste disagrees,
quality must be there; "II faut de la qualité, ou quelque charge qui vous oblige à faire cette dépense, sans quoi l'on
s'attire avec justice l'indignation & le mépris de tout le
monde." He is not yet at the point of conviction that
"Paris vaut un carosse," but he is almost there. He agrees with Lucette when he admits: "Plût au Ciel qu'il [Ambroise] voulût faire la folie. Vous sçavez, ma Fille, qu'il doit
venir dans peu avec son ami, allez à la chambre, & faites- lui connoître que je suis fort en colère" (p. 408).
Left alone with Ergaste, Lucette (III, vi) inadvertently turns attention back to the perspective of Des Valons's scheme, with the remark "vous devriez marier votre
fille: songer qu'elle a beaucoup à souffrir des mauvais procédés de votre Soeur," and equally as inadvertently opens up for the spectator the fausse piste of another perspective— that Ergaste in his disarray may seek to marry his daughter, unsuitable, to his friend Ambroise. But we
372 are in for a further installment of Rufile, addressed to
Ambroise, translating to paper her angry threat of the
consequences of his reappearing. At wits' end, Ergaste would send the letter back to her, but he cannot persuade— or threaten— Picard into the service. Picard apologizes for
the fear he has mimed, as well as the disobedience, but
there is reason, he advances: "Vous sçavez bien. Monsieur,
qu'elle est plus méchante que..." (p. 412). Another
unspoken— and unspeakable— word, omitted but quickly filled
in by Ergaste among other spectators. He understands and
forgives the "maraut," Picard, with the relatively gentle
"tai toi." Lucette, braver than the blustery but craven Picard, volunteers to deliver the message.
La Franchise's return with a part of the baggage brings
us back to the lovers. He has the wherewithal, a casket of
jewels worth 30,000 livres, to take Ergaste's mind off Rufile and greatly to enhance Des Valons's "cause." Ergaste
sinks into a monologue of wonderment before this treasure
(p. 414). Lucette too bears good news (III, x): after cutting up something fierce, Rufile seems to have been persuaded, by her and Mariane together, that she has pushed
Ergaste unreasonably as far as she can without serious consequences, and that in fact Ambroise "I'aimoit, & avec lui elle seroit heureuse" (p. 415) . This hypothesis is immediately verified, on the one hand, by Ambroise himself, who reenters with Des Ruisseaux (III, xi) into a more
373 fortunate turn of events than he had in Act II. With business completed, Ergaste apologizes directly for his sister's rudeness, and receives a generous pardon of her from Ambroise: "Quand on a de la tendresse pour les gens, on excuse facilement leurs deffauts" (p. 416). Heartened,
Lucette plays her trump card again and wins: "S'il ne tenoit qu'à un Carosse, je lui donnerois de tout mon coeur."
Ail heave a sign of pleasure and Lucette exits to inform Rufile.
The new complication, supplementing Act III, arrives with the new entrance of La Franchise (III, xii), who is for the first time faced on stage with the newcomer. Des
Ruisseaux, who recognizes him and reveals an identity that is a surprise to all assembled, including the spectator.
Insulting him first, with soldierly bravado. Des Ruisseaux exposes La Franchise (and thereby gives to his name its full irony) as a deserter from his own company, three years earlier near Lyons. And it seems that he has decamped with a horse that was not his. "Drôle de fourbe," "coquin," "pendard," the insults stick, despite a sincere confession that La Franchise had not wanted to follow Des Ruisseaux's company to Catalognia and not wished to proceed on foot to
Flandres where he sought and found another company under Des
Valons. Des Valons also has been kept in the dark. With further generosity, however. Des Ruisseaux promises him a full pardon, in honor of Ergaste's hospitality, if La
374 Franchise will tell the true story behind his present disguise. This he does, willingly: "II [Des Valons] aime
éperdument la Fille de Monsieur Ergaste. Enfin ils s'aiment tous deux passionément" (p. 412). Ergaste is, of course, also fully informed, and is struck dumb. The final scenes, of dénouement, started off by Des
Valons's reappearance have been criticized without being given their due of invention, if not originality. Des
Valons is recognized also by Des Ruisseaux, as his cousin
Géronte. Ergaste is further overcome by the explanation.
If it is unusual to name a ieune premier Géronte, it is unheard of in contemporary comedy for such a character to make the gesture Des Valons-Géronte does to prove his merit, finally. The jewels left in Ergaste's keeping are worth exactly what Des Valons-Géronte's father owes him and are offered in payment of his father's debt. Géronte swears that Felouque's guarantee of his other assets is also genuine. The "invention" is unusual enough to suggest some obscure form of symbolic atonement for past misdemeanors on
Hauteroche's part, by the older man looking back at the young man who decades before had absconded with his father's money in order to seek the adventures of a military career.®
Mariane, exposed as soon as she makes her last entrance (III, xiv) begs her father's pardon, which is given, when Des Valons-Géronte has renewed his oath that he has spoken the truth about his credit/merit. The assembled cast exits
375 in order to assure Ambroise of an equal happiness with Rufile. "Vous ne dites rien de moi, Monsieur," says La
Franchise to Ergaste, who serves him up to poetic justice: "Pour toi, te voilà exempt de la pendaison" (p. 416). "C'est encore quelque chose," he agrees, and looking toward
Lucette continues: "En attendant mieux, ma Chere, si tu voulois joindre ta Cathegorie à la mienne, tu verrois... ." Smiling and moving toward him, Lucette picks up the game they had played on first meeting: "Oh!
Monsieur Zamirouski, balibalon, casteau, biscuit." La
Franchise's curtain line with a smile to the audience continues the game: "Tu me railles, mais Morbleu j'aime la Cathegorie."
Hauteroche's Polish joke for the provinces ends with the good humor its opening laughter first offered its spectators. Association of the game of pseudo-Polish speech and the banter of love language in the dénouement with magnified fairy tale ending of three marriages amounts to a variant of "Tout finit par des chansons." Des Valons- Géronte 's generous gesture may also fall under this magic, which is finally a celebration of "la beauté de la chandelle," that is, the power of theatrical spectacle.
Included in this celebration is the gift Molière has left, to the stage generally, and to the playwright Hauteroche.
There seems to be no "anxiety of influence," but rather a community of creative variation in a common game. The
376 variants, which go a long way toward responses to the questions of what an Hauterochean play is and how to recognize it, have something to do with "niceness," already with the Dancourt phenomenon beginning in 1685-1687 out of season in the theatre. In Le Feint Polonais this niceness takes on significance when it is realized that no character in the play is in bondage to any other; each seems free to go its own way. A younger generation is not bound to the tyranny of an older, whose exemplars are much too nice
(rather than simply incapable) to exert that tyranny; pairs of servants are not bound to repeat, in caricature, the love rituals of their young masters and mistresses, who are too decent to impose upon difference. All valets in
Hauterochean comedy do not receive blows and all stock characters that are figures of comic blindness do not end in pathology that negates the possibility of the noble comic theory castiaat ridendo mores.* Hauteroche seems to have kept his belief, along with the non-cynical view, expressed by Ergaste: "II se trouve dans toutes les professions des personnes honnêtes."
377 NOTES TO CHAPTER 7
Peronne is mentioned in I, ii (p. 353) and "pais Lionnois" in III, xii (p. 421).
Lancaster (IV^, p. 517): "Le Feint Polonois.. . is one of his least meritorious productions. The feeble plot... ." This critical tradition is begun by La Porte: "... une double action, foiblement conduite” (1760, p. 225) .
On the comic stage tradition, beginning with Corneille's Clarice, in La Veuve, and including Molière's Célimène and Béline (as well as the Dorimène of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme'I , Mirsis of de Vise's La Veuve à la mode, and Dancourt's Madame Patin, see Roger Duchêne (1978), pp. 228- 30 and passim. The hypocrisy of Mirsis, "merry widow" in private and theatrically tearful in public is the closest of the major instances of the rôle to the locus classicus of misogyny that Boccaccio's anecdote of the Matron of Ephesus became.
See on the social and economic status of widows, Duchêne (1978), p. 229.
Dancourt's Madame Patin is typical: "Je suis veuve. Dieu merci!" See also Duchêne (1978), pp. 230-32 and passim. ^ On the avidly speculative nature of the society of 1686, and generally, on its "decadence," see the vivid description of Robert H. Crashaw (1980), xv-xvii. See also on the place of money in Dancourt's play Blanc (1984), pp. 229-35.
This turn of phrase recalls inevitably La Rochefoucauld's "Le vrai honnête homme est celui qui ne se pique de rien" (no. 203), and Pascal's "La vraie éloquence se moque de l'éloquence" (Lafuma, no. 203).
Too little is known of Hauteroche's life, including the vercity of the of the theft, to be able to document this suggestion. I have outlined an hypothesis that incorporates it in my introduction.
378 I allude here to the evolution of Molière's comic aesthetics and practice developed by Gérard Defaux (1983), who sees 1668 as the watershed of the classical theory of "castigat ridendo mores," or theatre as "école," and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme as the first full embodiment of a new aesthetics in which it is abandoned in favor of a "therapy," as it were, that would simply stabilize the "folie."
379 CHAPTER 8
T.KS RnnRaEflT.SES PE OnAT.TTR
Hauteroche's last comedy, Les Bourgeoises de qualité, appeared in 1690, the year his old friend and interpreter
Poisson died, and was published the following year. It was first performed in the inauspicious summer season at the
Comédie-Française for seven performances, from the opening on 26 July to 7 August, and was picked up for two more performances in the winter season. Paris was much preoccupied with war, serious money shortages, and scarcities. Among the latter could be included authors to supply the theatre^ with its booming business (in part at least created by the desire for diversions from other less pleasant business at hand). Hauteroche, as he had before in the days of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, lent a hand, and it was his misfortune that the opening took place during summer campaigns with their inevitable alteration of the theatre audience.
For his last choice in dramatic structure, to some extent also potentially limiting the immediate good fortunes of the play in the theatre, Hauteroche returned to the five- act play in verse. He did so for reasons of his own, just
380 at the moment when it is being abandoned and the "Dancourt phenomenon" and its fellow travelers were creating with a thick succession of crowd-pleasers in its place the new vogue for one-act comedies of manners, often set in the environs of Paris, and in tone almost exclusively amoral.^
Hauteroche's aesthetics, which gave highest place and esteem to the grande comédie in five acts with primary focus on plot, remains resolutely in place, as does his Parisian setting, in this play the interior of the house of the bourgeois Anselme. And as will become amply evident, the moraliste shaped in the 1660s and '70s still projects those values in his play. Hauteroche could easily have followed Dancourt's lead, or Molière's with La Comtesse d'Escarbaonas. and moved the action to the provinces, as he once had done in Les Nobles de province. But for his new comedy of manners, which blindness may have played some part in the decision or the sense that it was to be his last play,^ he determined to remain consistently to the end with the kind of stage space and enclosure that he had made his own and within which he needed no other sight than his imagination. There is also consistency in another generally characteristic aspect of the theatricality of the comedy of manners, and always of intrigue, that Les Bourgeoises de qualité gives to its spectators. Although several other plays may have provided various details,* the principal
381 source without doubt and immediately evident is again
Moliéresque. Les Bourgeoises de qualité is a rewriting of
Molière's Les Femmes savantes, first performed in 1672 and continuing in the active repertory, with an especially memorable production as recently as 1687.® It may be no simple coincidence, if Hauteroche did have a special sense of closure, that his chosen source was Molière's last five- act comedy of manners in verse, which was already held to be his crowning achievement in that form of dramatic poetry (as it was long to be).*
Les Bourgeoises de qualité is also thematically a companion piece to Le Feint Polonais. If the earlier play foregrounds in its comedic vision an absence of pretensions, and the value of naturalness, the comedy of Les Bourgeoises de qualité is par excellence a comedy of pretentiousness, beginning with the title that offers an oxymoronic reminiscence of Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. There is a natural link between the new play's thematics and the discussion of "qualité," and money in the event, that develops between Lucette and Ergaste in Le Feint Polonais
(III, v ) . And the beauty, poetry, and positive values of naturalness are given the same theatrical focus in the two plays— the young lovers, with the ingénues of both plays sharing the same name Mariane (and one wonders whether the same actress in the rôles). The first spark struck by the title is quite different from that struck by Dancourt's
382 variant Les Bourgeois à la mode.^ as different as that which kindled the blaze of Mol1ère's provocative Les Femmes savantes (yet another oxymoron, at least to some ears).
Learning as context, with all its contemporary and humanist resonances of intellectual debate, has been given up by Hauteroche in his adaptation of Molière's play. No figures comparable to the parasitic impostors Trissotin and Vadius were sought for Les Bourgeoises de qualité. It is the court and its manners and prestige rather than the world of academies and learning that lies behind Hauteroche's comedy. The Olimpe that replaces Molière's Philaminte is first pictured (by the family servant Toinon) as "une bourgeoise révoltée,” while the Angélique replacing the
Armande of Les Femmes savantes is caught out in the exposition dreaming of herself as a duchess. Like mother like daughter. Along with the comic frauds in the République des Lettres, another great comic rôle has been left aside by Hauteroche. There is no place in his comedic vision, or the texture of this play, for the broad comedy of
Bélise, the "visionnaire" who is a magnified version of self-delusion and as aunt becomes a major obstacle (or "fâcheuse") in the young lovers' schemes. On the other hand, Angélique's suitors have been tripled in number. The jeune premier. Lisandre, a wealthy nobleman from the
Auvergne, is the rôle corresponding to the Clitandre of Les
Femmes savantes; his life is complicated by the presence of
383 a potential rival. Le Marquis, and by another literally of his own invention— the Comte created in his scheme to marry
Mariane, neglected daughter and hated sister, fay disguising his valet L'Espérance. The "Avis" that Hauteroche published with Les Bourgeoises de qualité is more acidic than usual in response to nitpicking critics; bent on making a reputation for cleverness and "envieux," these are "esprits critiques qui ont répandu leur venin sur quelques endroits de ma pièce."
He is particularly annoyed, it would seem on the evidence of the sole item of this kind of criticism to which he deigns to respond, by having the central disguise of his comedy criticized, as it happened for the second time in succession. It has been said, he reports, that a valet dressing up as his master is scarcely original; there are many to be found still on the stage. The playwright's distinction in response, making it clear to readers that they are not to expect a marquis de Mascarille or vicomte de Jodelet— or the spirit of Les Précieuses ridicules. should be carefully attended to. His valet, he maintains, will not be an "extravagant," but rather a fine actor giving a performance of the "homme de qualité" unbetrayed by his dress, gestures, or speech. As in the instance of La Franchise, in Le Feint Polonais. the investment of pleasure and invention in L'Espérance has been too great for the playwright to admit to a fault. To the contrary, the name
384 itself, like La Franchise in a different way, may play into the symbolic vision of the last plays generally— an opening by way of the imagination to creative self-fashioning and finally to happiness. There are good and bad disguises and performances of them. And this distinction may also pose for this last play an area of focusing limited experimentation. The Lettres sur 1^imposteur, of De Visé and Molière,® is insistent on the fact that all disguise is
"ridicule" (and detectable through visual discrepancy). For the Hauteroche of the last period, of "good games and bad games," as for the first Marivaux plays to come, the definition in the theatre of "ridicule" may be less absolute. As far as critics are concerned, some others have been worth listening to, probably the actors and others involved in the production of Les Bourgeoises de qualité. After meditation, the playwright admits that the play may have suffered because "Le sujet est trop simple, & trop peu rempli d'incidents." The second point especially most probably came into play. As we shall see, the exposition of Act I sets up a level of expectation for "happenings" that the play's action is hard put to satisfy fully. Dancourt was already a master at avoiding this, even if by illusion, balancing scenes of action against others in his successful reshaping of the comedy of manners.* Overall, however,
Hauteroche announces himself finally pleased by the
385 reception of his last play. The order he gives to those
aspects that have been praised is particularly revealing.
It provides a sense of the crowning triumph to a career of
play-writing set to achievement in just that neoclassical aesthetic order into which they naturally fall under the playwright's pen: "... ils ont trouvé la conduite assez
raisonnable, les caractères bien soutenus, les portraits
vifs & ressemblans, les situations agréables, les vers naturels"— in sum, a "Pièce generalement bien écrite."
ACT I
The first and last of the seven scenes of Act I, in
which Hauteroche recasts the four of Molière's exposition in
Les Femmes savantes stage worry over the success of the
lovers' scheme of passing L'Espérance off as a count, which will be the action of Act II. The opening scene represents the parting of L'Espérance and Toinon, before he is off to don his elaborate costume and gather his props (much admired by Toinon) of a coach with six lackeys. Spectators see
immediately what comes as assurance to a yet worried Mariane at the end of the act: the actor cast as L'Espérance looks the part. As Lisandre says to Mariane, "II a I'air d'un vrai Comte, & fera son devoir"; and Mariane agrees: "II est assez bien fait; mais quelque soin qu'il prenne/Poura- t-il soutenir... . Lisandre hurries to answer her doubt:
386 N'en soyez point en peine,/Sa figure pour plaire est un grand ornement,/Et quand il paroistra dans tout ajustement... (p. 22). Handsome as he is, of course L'Espérance has flirted with Toinon in I, i; looking admiringly up at him, she reassures him that he will charm his audience out of their trees: "Tu charmeras sans doute,
& la mere, & la fille./On te donne à la cour un mérite qui brille,/on t'y peint comme à toute heure attachée... Juge dans leur esprit jusques où va ta gloire."
Given the brilliant scenario— and casting— L'Espérance cheerfully concludes on his future success: "Je n'ay done qu'à parler...," and Toinon coaching a bit prompts him to "Parle-leur de grandeurs, le coeur les volera" (p. 2). If he is clear about himself and his charms, and obviously no stranger to women, L'Espérance is puzzled by the particular women who will be his audience: "Mais qui diable leur met cette grandeur en teste?/La mere sort d'un sang fécond en procureurs,/on le sçait... Toinon brings in response an x-ray of the play's other masquerade, lighting it with a telling rhyme for L'Espérance's "procureurs" ("erreurs"): "Chacun aime à nourrir ses erreurs./L'air de Cour est son foible: elle en est entestée,/Aussi la nomme-t-on Bourgeoise révoltée./Son mary, fort bon homme, est le fils d'un Marchand,/Sa noblesse est son bien." With a smile of complicity with the like-minded Toinon, L'Espérance concludes: "Le bien n'est pas méchant," a sentence on its
387 own that, in the shape of its truism has for the play the ring of an axiom.
The brilliant scene of the quarrel that characterizes the two sisters in conversational action beginning Les
Femmes savantes is deferred by Hauteroche to I, v, thereby promoting it to the comic high point of the act. The three
intervening scenes preparing the moment first focus (I, ii) on Mariane, who like her homonym in Le Feint Polonais is first given a portrait by her faithful servant and friend.
Attention is then pointed toward Angélique, who by the end of the act will more than have demonstrated the full irony of her name (which she shares with the truly aristocratic shrew Madame George Dandin). The scene of the sisters' quarrel is framed by her reception of two suitors, first Le
Marquis (I, iv) who keeps his— and our— eye also on Mariane, then Lisandre playing his prearranged rôle as suitor. The elaboration of the scheme that frames Act I runs also in the details of its implementation over into I, ii, and the conversation Mariane has with Toinon. Lisandre's bright idea is that with L'Espérance's success in courting
Angélique, with whom the "Comte" has been reported to be in love, he will set the jealous Marquis into action. At present he is at the point of counting himself out due to Angélique's coolness. To draw her in, Mariane will give signs of "intelligence" with the Marquis, thereby engaging Angélique's perverse jealousy of Mariane. Meanwhile,
388 Lisandre, who is scorned because he dresses simply and has no airs of the court, will be given to Mariane, achieving their goal. Somewhat incongruously in view of this elaboration, the portrait of Mariane is given— including qualities that would seem to be sorely on trial in this scenario calling for virtuoso performers. "Vous estes douce, honneste, engageante, & civile,/Grand attrait pour les coeurs, par là tout est facile./... Votre air fin, & modeste a fait cette conquête," Toinon reminds Mariane, à propos of her captivation of Lisandre (and in answer to the "fausse piste" of Mariane's last minute fear that he may in fact fall for Angélique while pretending to court her) .
Mariane is like the Julie of Le Cocher of a beauty that makes seduction scenes natural occurrences through which her qualities guide her unscathed.
If learning has been cut away as the principal context comedy, Hauteroche holds on to education as a theme, in the manner of Molière's L'École des femmes. There is another advantage for Mariane, on which Toinon minces no words in I, ii : if Angélique is perfectly beautiful, she is also "une sotte," in large part because of the "education" or rather the "finishing school" that her mother has lavishly, exclusively, and slavishly set her to, according to Olimpe's own lights and indeed incarnation of the finished product of
"courtliness." Angélique, in this pedagogy of mindless mimicry, had only to reflect her mother's image. Mariane,
389 who contemplates her own relative neglect with no apparent bitterness, generalizing brings a pleasant rhyme for "sotte"
("marotte") to the conversation: "Chacun a sa Marotte./Tous ces airs de grandeur que tu veux condamner. Ma mère qui les prend, a sçu les luy donner. From which Toinon draws the lesson that Mariane has been well and mercifully spared her mother's attention; on the other hand, it has been made clearer how Angélique's "sottise" can work to the advantage of the lovers' scheme. She has been so idolized, raised so high, that she cannot see the earth; in other words, she has lost all sense of human proportion and is subject to the comic blindness of self-delusion. She will in fact play the rôles assigned to her, provided she is coached with the right flattery. And Toinon will continually take charge of assuring that that happens. "Elle [Olimpe] a bien réussi d'en faire son Idole./Par ses leçons d'orgueil elle a fait une foie,/Qui se perdant veü à se trop élever,/s'est mise hors d'état de se plus retrouver." Mariane again generalizes, modestly as befits her character, drawing attention to an irony that brings along a last bit of exposition in the person of an aunt, to whom she has been sent regularly to be out of the way. The irony at one level, to Mariane, is that Angélique in the thick of attention with all strategies deployed for the victory of conquest of a loved one has not succeeded and she, put out of the way, has with Lisandre. At a second level, Mariane
390 also sees, the irony is that the aunt, by fortunate coincidence, is a friend of Lisandre and thus has been able to sound him on his intentions— and his credit. The further irony at the level of Hauteroche's aesthetics is that this convention of plotting of a character that does not appear replaces the comic masterpiece of the rôle of Bélise. But it is also significant in illuminating the comic vision that derives from Hauteroche's aesthetics. He stops short of pathology in his representation of comic self-blindness.
Olimpe and her daughter suffice to show it on an ordinary level that does not exclude them from the comedy of human society. The sequence I, iv-vi shows Hauteroche at the top of his craftsmanship. The Marquis enters with a troubled air. Asked why, he admits that he cannot live much longer with
Angélique's coldness: confiding to Mariane, and looking at her he is drawn, as predicted, into attraction to Angélique's opposite temperament. "Hélas que vôtre soeur ne vous ressemble-t-elle?" To Mariane's modest reply, "J'ay l'esprit uni, rien qui sente la Cour," he in effect sings an aria with a final Petrarchean turn: Que cet esprit uny me donneroit d'amour! L'Art ne peut rien avoir qui vaille la nature. Elle est en vous sans fard, simple, sincere, pure. Un air sage, modeste, & Rempli de douceur... Que n'en puis-je trouver autant dans vôtre soeur! Car enfin je sens bien qu'en dépit de moy-mesme. Toujours quoy qu'elle fasse, il faudra que je l'aime. Rien de ses dures loix ne me peut détacher. Je suis né pour les suivre. (pp. 11-12)
391 This "plainte," which opens up the thematic heart of the play also sets an element of tension. While it might encourage Mariane, obviously touched, she does not take advantage— making us wonder about her future as schemer/performer. Speaking in character she offers the
Marquis advice that is in fact against her own self- interest: if you were to go to court more often, since that is what has caused alarm to your disadvantage. The Marquis loses this advantage, however, since the allusion to the court sends his mind off, or shuts it down, with jealous speculation (also predicted) on the exact identity of this count who is to be his rival. On the other hand, Angélique's entrance works to Mariane's advantage, to the point of minimizing the danger of her indiscreet sympathy.
Hauteroche's stage direction marking Angélique's first entrance, with Toinon, sets a tone for all that will follow: "parlant toujours avec dédaigneux, & méprisant." In these tones, she immediately displays the perverse jealousy of
Mariane she has been scripted to play: "Quoi je suis dans ma chambre et vous estes icy," she accusingly addresses Le Marquis, then refuses his carriage and his arm. What a pity to take him away, she taunts sarcastically, since "Vous seriez obligé de quitter Mariane./Elle a tant de mérité...
Vous avez le goût bon, de la délicatesse." Le Marquis, first inclined not to believe his eyes and ears, remains puzzled, then is stunned as the truth sinks in; finally
392 after an interruption by Angélique caused by even the suggestion that there may be anybody with whom she could be compared sends her into a tirade, he accepts what he sees and hears with revulsion. Finally Angélique gives him his walking papers ("congé" would surely be euphemistic) with frank insults. The movement of Hauteroche's alexandrins as they unfold in short exchanges, stretch into the tirade, then retreat from the "victory" on the stilts of stychomythia masterfully sets into action the rhythms of the speech of these two quarreling temperaments. Toinon's intervention, egging both sides on, typically, is placed like the assurance of a dance coach's hand. LE MARQUIS J'admire, à dire vray, de voir que tout vous blesse
ANGÉLIQUE Vous me connaissez mal. LE MARQUIS Mais ce froid courroux...
ANGÉLIQUE J'approuve tout, o rien ne me blesse de vous.
LE MARQUIS Vous me méprisez bien. ANGÉLIQUE Je n'ay rien à vous dire. On doit murmurer des mépris qu'on attire. LE MARQUIS Pour vous plaire, je croy que vous avez raison Mais tout autre que vous...
393 ANGÉLIQUE Point de comparaison. Mons sentiment peut-estre est different du vôtre; Mais je ne regie point mes droits sur ceux d'un autre, Et s'il faut vous parler icy de bonne foy, Quand une fille aimable, & faite comme moy. Ne manquant point d'esprit, ayant de la naissance. Un éclat de beauté, digne de preference. Un mérite à souffrir, des Ducs à ses genous. Fait tant que d'écouter un homme tel que vous; Il luy doit une ardeur si pure, si fidelle. Qu'il faut qu'il n'ait plus d'yeux, plus de coeur que pour elle L'espoir d'en estre aimé, qu'on ne luy défend pas. Demande un sacrifice entier à ses appas. De sa seule beauté le culte est légitime. Il doit seul l'occuper, & tout le reste est crime.
TOINON au Marquis
L'admirable leçonI là, retenez-la bien. Dame, quand on est belle, on ne l'est pas pour rien. Vous estes effrayé de ce coup de tonnerre. Allons, pauvre serpent, mettez-vous ventre à terre. à Angélique Achevez. Craignez-vous de la rendre trop haut? Il vous vole un regard, bourrez-le comme il faut.
LE MARQUIS Tant de fierté m'étonne; & j'ay peine à comprendre...
ANGÉLIQUE Brisons là, je n'ay pas le tems de vous entendre. LE MARQUIS Mais une soeur, pour qui le sang & l'amitié Devroient vous inspirer... ANGÉLIQUE Vous me faites pitié. LE MARQUIS Je ne vois ce qui me nuit, & commence à connoitre Qu'un Rival trop vanté...
ANGÉLIQUE Cela pourrait bien estre.
LE MARQUIS On le dit d'un mérite à me rendre jaloux.
394 ANGELIQUE Il en aura bien peu, s'il n'en a plus que vous. LE MARQUIS Du moins en choisissant... ANGÉLIQUE Je sçay ce qu'il faut faire. Point de conseils. LE MARQUIS J'entens, c'est à moy de me taire. Afin qu'à ce grand choix vous pensiez à loisir Je m'en vay vous laisser. ANGÉLIQUE Vous me ferez plaisir.
The high point of Act I, the confrontation of the two sisters has indeed been eloquently set up.
Toinon in I, v continues to goad Angélique on by praise for her words and scorn for Mariane's. "Voilà ce qui appelle avoir soin de sa gloire" (p. 16). Mariane plays
"bad cop" to Toinon's "good cop" and in fact follows Angélique's lead in the preceding scene. The exact nature of her act is not clear until I, vii, when she explains to Lisandre what has transpired. In the earlier scene, everything suggests that Angélique has not looked once at Mariane, even when speaking about her in her presence sarcastically. Mariane's voice is the more prominent for having emerged from this silence with a calmness and relative brevity that if it suggests Angélique's rhythms also recalls Henrietta's plain speaking that works to expose Armande in the opening scene of Les Femmes savantes. On the other side, Angélique's answer are more cruelly dismissive
395 than Ârmande's. "MARIANE:... Je suis donc bien à craindre?/ANGÉLIQUE: À craindre, vous? j'admire, et que vous le pensez, & que vous l'osiez dire./MARIANE: ... Si vous ne craignez pas quoy q[ue vous puissiez faire,/De perdre le Marquis, pourquoy cette colère?... ANGÉLIQUE: Ce discours est si sot que je n'y répons pas./MARIANE: Vous vous abaisserez./ANGÉLIQUE: Beaucoup, je le confesse./ MARIANE: Cependant le Marquis ne croit pas qu'il s'abaisse, et peut-être.../ANGÉLIQUE: Voila comme souvent des termes obligeants,/Faute d'être entendus, gâtent l'esprit des gens... ." Mariane's response, "Vous n'en estes pas bien assurée, & peut-estre..." irks Angélique into a now unqualified generalization, whose syntax ironically includes her as speaker, blinded as she is by narcissistic self- regard: "Non personne jamais ne songe à se connoistre."
The sententious line is the kind of speech that manuals of honnetêté advised "honnêtes gens" to avoid, and the smug delivery of this philosophy reduced to a tag is made obvious by the level of what follows "Si vous vous connaissiez, pourriez-vous ignorer/Quels mépris vos défauts luy doivent inspirer?/Vos allures en tout fort rudes, sont grossières,/ Vous n'avez aucun goût pour les belles maniérés,/A l'air bas, qui jamais ne vous peut estre ôté,/Est-ce qu'on vous croiroit fille de qualité?/Trouve-t-on rien en vous qui touche, plaise, impose" (p. 17).
396 The beginning of Mariane's response to this hateful portrait is low-keyed— "Je suis ce qu'on m'a faite, & non
pas autre chose," but grows into a tirade of twenty lines—
almost exactly balancing Angélique's seizure of self
admiration in the preceding scene. It ia a satirist's denunciation that she works herself up to.
Mais cette qualité que vous élevez tant, Dites-moy je vous prie, en quoy consiste-t-elle? Est-ce à rouler les yeux pour se faire plus belle? À façonner sa bouche, & prendre un air de Cour? À se mettre en la teste un désir incommode, D'embellir son discours de termes à la mode? À placer sans raison, le mot gros par tout. Et cent autres encor qu'on soutient de bon goût, A hausser sa frontage en coquette éventée. Et renchérir d'abord sur la mode inventée? À vouloir affecter par un soin assidu. Pour ses Marchands, Le Gras, la Frainaye, & l'Egu, À se remplir l'esprit de la fausse chimere. D'une sotte grandeur, qui n'est qu'imaginaire, À se croire d'un rang d'éclat environné. Quoiqu'en pleine roture on soit quelquefois né. (p. 18) Shades of Alceste making a fool of himself? These lines
bristle with directives to an actress inclined to turn the
moment into the broad comedy of grotesque mime of "righteous
indignation" (à la Rufile in Le Feint PolonaisK But
Hauteroche's game here is more subtle than that. In I, vii, along with a further installment on L'Espérance's masquerade, Mariane clarifies to Lisandre that her performance with Angélique is worth applauding: "Elle n'est pas contente/Le Marquis m'a parlé, j'ay fait la suffisante,/Je m'en suis aplaudie, & c'est ce qui la tient" (p. 21). In assuming the rôle of "suffisante," or know-it-
397 all, and doing it well, Mariane acted exactly as Angélique
expected her to do according to her own comic blindness, in
fact— leading her by the nose to another self-exposure.
Immediately after the mock-tirade, and with a first encouragement by Toinon's "Écoutez-la jazer," Angélique
predictably adds: "II faut la laisser dire,/Rien n'est si pitoyable, & ce discours m'inspire... ." Equally predictably, the "suffisante" Mariane breaks in to expose the real pity: Angélique's inability to recognize the meaning of "roture," in the last line of the tirade, as it applies to herself. In continued plain speech: "J'ay peine
à vous comprendre avec votre grand air; Car enfin estes- vous fille d'un Duc & Pair?/Puisqu'il faut sa con noistre... . Angélique cannot hear the question or make any application because the sweet sound of the word "Duchesse" has triggered the dream or fiction she has come to live by automatically. She is after all, she believes, the stuff of which duchesses are made. "DuchesseI et n'est-on pas du bois dont on les fait?/Nul espoir n'est trop haut que la qualité fonde." Mariane turns full satirist in response. "Mon Dieu, la qualité se donne à tout le monde,/Et cent femmes de rien, sous un rang emprunté/Veulent estre aujourd'huy femmes de qualité./Chacun prend un nom de noblesse choisie,/Examinez le fond, c'est franche Bourgeoise." Responding to this, once again in character, Angélique spoils the redeeming shred of sympathy that one
398 retains for Molière's Armande, when she makes a similar plea for the uplifting life of the mind: "Quand on ne seroit rien, l'ardeur de s'élever/Marque un noble panchant que l'on doit approuver ;/Mais la gloire pour vous ne fut jamais de mise./je ne m'étonne point si chacun vous méprise,/Vous avez le coeur bas, de petits sentimens (p. 19; cf. Les Femme
Savantes. I, i, w . 39-43, in a tirade in which Armande begins where Angélique stops: "Mon Dieu, que votre esprit est d'un étage bas!/Que vous jouez au monde un petit personnage,", w . 26-27).
Angélique's dismissal of Lisandre (I, vi) is done in a short scene, closing the frame on the mock-quarrel. She is impatient with his presence, since as predicted she shows no interest in him, mistaking his standing because of his simple dress and unaffected speech. A repeated "Une autrefois" is all Lisandre gets in exchange for the compliments he ritually offers as a part of the disguise of courtship. And in I, vii Lisandre finds himself reassuring
Mariane that he is in fact a simple man: "Le faste n'a jamais esté mon caractère./J'ay toujours dédaigné de paroistre au dehors,/Les plaisirs de l'esprit semblent mes seuls trésors./Mon bien est en Auvergne... ." So far then, at the conclusion of Act I, all is well.
399 ACT Il-rv
The series of scenes of the Comte's successful
performances, so elaborately set up in Act I's anticipatory
remarks and preparations, begins at the high point of Act II
(scene iv), continues in a long arc over the whole intrigue,
and culminates in Act V. Two factors tend to dampen the dramatic sparks of these scenes. First, success is less
engaging and flashy in comic effect than failure. The second factor involves the on stage audience certifying the
success. On the other hand, consisting exclusively of the two women who give the play its title, Olimpe and her
daughter Angélique (and occasionally the more skeptical Marquis), this audience in the grips of favoring prejudice
concerning their expectations is not a very bright
contingent, no real match for the resourceful stage management of Toinon, the clever direction of Lisandre at a
certain distance, and the performing talents of L'Espérance
(and Mariane, when called upon). All of Act II before the high point of scene iv, prepares us to expect the gullibility of this audience that in the first installment
of action may also include a complaisant Anselme. Given a
good character reference, as "bon homme," by Toinon in the
exposition, he certainly is not the henpecked husband figure that Molière's Crysalde is shown to be from kindness and complaisance, making his agreement to the marriage of his
400 daughter Henriette to Clitandre far from the definitive act
he claims it to be in Act II of Les Femmes savantes.
Despite his apparent good sense and kindness, and his concern and love for Mariane, the Anselme of II, v-vi may yet fail his daughter during this crucial day of occupation of his domicile and the knotting up of its plot.
If the lights of the audience on stage are dim, rather than the laser beams they think them to be, their scheme and its threat, for all the intensity of wishing its success, are also fairly feeble. The possibility of consigning the embarrassing Mariane to a convent, for which Angélique campaigns at the beginning of the act for no better reason than fussing with Mariane is ruining her own complexion to an already converted Olimpe, is a dire enough fate, but there is little reason to suppose that Anselme's past veto will be withdrawn in the near future, whatever the befuddlement the unfolding day may bring. Mariane shows herself sure of this, when directly faced with the threat from her mother (II, ii), and frustrates her by simply playing the dutiful daughter and entrusting her fate to her father. She ornaments her performance of resistance with an unwelcome esprit that serves up to Olimpe a paradox incriminating the mother's misuse of religion. If she is indeed as unworthy as she has been made out to be, "Et pourquoy faire au Ciel un si vilain present?/Pour moy je l'avoueray je n'en suis capable,/Et ma soeur plus que moy
401 luy seroit agreable;/Elle est tout charmante... (p. 31). To an annoyed Olimpe, this esprit amounts to nothing more than further evidence of what she has already noticed in
Mariane, "certains airs de soubrette" (p. 29). And just as Angélique lost in Act I any of the sympathy we extend to
Molière's Armande, by her total support of Angélique, Olimpe loses the value of sympathy inherent in her response to
Mariane: "Done vostre pere est tout, moy je ne suis rien" (p. 31). Even supposing the threat to be real, it does not have the potential for intricate development of the counter schemes of the other successfully plotted plays of Hauteroche's last period.
In order to minimize some of these potential weaknesses, the playwright introduces variety and gradation to the series of scenes focused on L'Espérance's performances. Increasing in difficulty, different aspects of the rôle he plays become as many feats attesting to and enhancing the éclat of the actor's talent. The culminating
épreuve comes in Act V when he must under the eyes of his audience successfully rise to the impersonation of a nobleman's injured honor and sustain the challenge of an answering justificatory duel with a partner for the scene who is a true nobleman— Le Marquis. The stakes at this point have been upped, since in theory at least, a "contretemps" could mean loss of life rather than simply loss of face. It would also seem in the playwright's
402 interest of creating the illusion of tension that there should be some gradation on the other side as well, that the on stage audience's gullibility should also grow. This is trickier business, since a straightforward gradation would work in this sense only if the actor were a bad or doubtful performer (using one of the satirist's ordinary means of exposing bad taste through disproportionate response). The simple repetition of gullibility would seem to suffice, the repetition adding to the length of the continuing game, proof enough in itself of "growth." But Hauteroche will also pull off by other means at the end of Act II this illusion of a raise in the stakes of gullibility, when
Olimpe and Anselme are shown alone together for the first time. As predicted, L'Espérance's first performance (II, iv) is slickly easy. The actor's assurance, "je n'ai que parler" has been fittingly understood by him as "je n'ai que complimenter." To demonstrate his perfectly courtly air for
Olimpe, it is enough that he initially takes her for Angélique's sister (shades of Bélise, whose delusion of being universally courted presupposes that she is her niece's age). Difficulty already increases for the actor
L'Espérance with the entry of Anselme (II, v). The usual flattery, along the line that news of Anselme is the talk of the court, may please Olimpe, but for a man of Anselme's stripe being talked about by persons whom he does not know
403 may well be either a matter of indifference or a cause for alarm. Anselme tends toward the former, we find. He has had a bad business experience in dealing with the court, so the court is bad business— enough reason to stay away from it and to put it out of his mind. Scene five is beautifully
managed as a lesson for L'Espérance, demonstrating his talent for quick study. Trying to lessen the embarrassment
of Anselme, Olimpe takes every opportunity offered to
embroider on his links with the court, by amplification, up
to the boldface lie of a purely fictional great-grandfather who was a marshal of France. At this point the series of
muttered apartés. with which the disgruntled Anselme has been glossing the fiction, reaches a "La folle?" (p. 42). L'Espérance, who knows Olimpe's line already, consequently
listens to Anselme's mutterings and looks at the facial grimaces (and body gestures, most probably) accompanying them, a spectacle Olimpe is at pains to hide under the
stylized traits of the courtly portrait with which she would replace him. After all, she has already done this for her
own portrait. L'Espérance learns quickly to end the scene with a cessation of compliments to Anselme, who continues politely enough in his own way to play host. The closing ritual of politesse with which Hauteroche ends the scene is an ironic turn, involving three different interpretations of
the gestures: Anselme's satisfaction first, then Olimpe's, who finding a further evidence of courtliness exclaims to
404 Toinon with an in fact rhetorical question— "Qu'il est galant?" (p. 43). Toinon finishes the alexandrin and
clinches its irony with the certification of the performer's
success that is to be the audience's response: "II sçait
fort bien son monde." For the dénouement, the fact that Anselme does not
contradict his wife in public, thus publicly embarrassing
her, will be significant; for the audience, as for L'Espérance, in Act II he will yet remain ambiguous. Firm
in his own code of elementary courtesy— that one does not
discuss personal matters in front of strangers— Anselme is
nonetheless not master of his speech and gestures enough to
hide them in public. If one could be entirely certain that he would act one way or another, Mariane would obviously
have enlisted his participation in the scheme from the first and the whole elaborate masquerade of the comte could have been avoided. The scene between husband and wife that closes Act II (vi), a conversation that in fact is
confrontation and quarrel, presents as it should a
foreshadowing of the dénouement; but at the same time it stages a complexity of misunderstanding that will suggest that the way to that dénouement is far from direct or certain. Hauteroche the veteran plotter, despite the difficulties, provides at the proper moment the illusion that the plot is thickening, that things will get worse before they get better. Act II, vi closes the sequence of
405 three scenes with the playwright's seasoned talent, already abundantly recognized in his one-act plays, for creating a
"detachable playlet." Toinon, of course, remains in her multiple function of stage director, participant in the action and at the same time doubly witness to it, for the on stage audience and that in the theatre. Unlike Crysalde's characteristic affection for Martine, in the conclusion of Act II of Les Femmes savantes. Anselme here will have none of Toinon's "direction": "Tay-toi" simply puts a stop to it.
It is significantly Olimpe, with her complaining who starts the quarrel. All should be said in the first two exchanges; but the point is that it is not, the urgent need to say the last word having caught ahold of both characters as they are seen to gather steam. "OLIMPE: En vérité.
Monsieur, il faut que je vous gronde./Vous dites contre vous certaines pauvretez/Qui me faisant rougir.../ANSELME : Je dis des veritez,/Et ne vous comprens point avecque vos sots contes./OLIMPE: Il est bon ce me semble, estant avec des
Comtes.../ANSELME : Non, chaque chose doit paroistre ce qu'elle est,/Vos Comtes, vos Marquis, tout cela me déplaît./Angélique se perd vous prenant pour modelle/Vos leçons de grandeur lui tourne la cervelle; Mais une bonne fois, écoutez bien cela/Ma femme" (p. 44). Olimpe will not allow the real point to be pursued, since she changes the subject, to Anselme's growing frustration, on hearing the
406 term "femme." "OLIMPE: Le beau nom que vous me donnez là./ANSELME: Comment vous appeler? n'estes-vous pas ma femme?/OLIMPE: Je vous nomme Monsieur, appelez-moy Madame./Ma femme est si bourgeois./ANSELME: Que diable sommes-nous?/Voilà 1'entestement qui produit tant de foux./Chacun de qualité se pique, ose y prétendre./On soutient ce qu'on est, pourquoi vouloir descendre." Olimpe might draw sympathy here, as Angélique might have done earlier in her echo of her mother's plea for the finer things and way of life. And she might increase that sympathy, as the first stage in the quarrel brings Anselme to a denunciatorily violent threat: "Crains que je ne t'assomme,/Maraude, qui vas sottement applaudir/Sur la démangeaison qu'elle a de s'aggrandir" (p. 45). Olimpe's persistent and calm response to this threat: "Puisque pour
Gentilhomme on peut reconnoistre...," disarms it as a real alternative for Anselme, who shows himself equally "entêté":
"Non, je ne le suis point, & ne le veut pas estre." An exit would possibly be most effective here, but Anselme must persist: "Mais quand je le serois, comme beaucoup s'en faut,/Je vous prie, à quel droit le portez-vous si haut?/
Fille d'un procureur... ."
To Olimpe's ear, this reality is the worst slander, and a stage direction, "d'un ton colère," pitches her closing of the alexandrin: "D'un procureur I" At this point she will not either have any of Toinon's direction, and in her anger
407 she propels herself into full-blown comic blindness and its attendant willful alienation. "Comment? Monsieur Trigant n'estoit pas vostre pere?" Anselme pursues, only to receive a fully delusional response: "Non." Anselme changes tactics slightly, trying to jolt Olimpe back to reality with the challenge "Que me faites-vous penser de vôtre mère," and is no more successful in preventing the final outburst.
"Oh, vous en penserez tout ce qu'il vous plaira," Olimpe rejoins (showing us where Angélique has learned the techniques of insult we saw at length in Act I). Anselme's added "son honneur" is the last straw; the alexandrin is more quickly broken with the full force of anger: "Son honneur ira comme il pourra. Un pere Procureur me blesse, m'assassine,/Je ne puis avouer une telle origine./Envers et contre tous j'en maintiendrai l'erreur./Et je ne seray point fille d'un Procureur." The will to power, and to self-fashioning, at this level has enough strength to ennoble, to consecrate the speaker "une grande folle," as it were, tragically at the level of the rôle of Medea mother Olimpe has by this time shown herself to be vis-à-vis Angélique whose life she has consumed, by projection, as well as Mariane, eliminated by negation, or comically at the level of the all-consuming
"folie à lier" of a Bélise. The plotting of the last third of the scene denies Olimpe the stature of either, with the enactment of a "déroute des Précieuses" turn.^° If
408 L'Espérance is to be spared the rôle of marquis de Mascarille, nothing is to be spared, Olimpe, acting out on a grandiose scale the bad performance of distinction at which the adolescent Cathos plays in Les Précieuse ridicules.
L'Espérance's initial would-be compliment on Olimpe's age
reverses itself to an "at your age," bourgeoise révoltée!—
adolescent, indeed. Yet at this stage imaging yourself as a foundling? And it is this line that Anselme indirectly
takes, exposing the physical grimace of the choleric Olimpe ("l'emportée"), red-faced natural reality behind the stylized mask of distinction Olimpe shows herself not clever
enough to keep in place. Showing a resourcefulness of esprit he shares with his
daughter Mariane, and expanding the traditional comic type,
Anselme poses an analogy the equal of any parlor game of
wit: if you don't recognize yourself as your father's daughter, because you are unlike him, what am I to think about Angélique— that she is not my own daughter? And
where, then, is your honor? The word "honor" only sends Olimpe off to another automatic rhetorical defense, as the
word "s'encanailler," describing her association with the "Comte," does; and when she finally tumbles to the real charge Anselme's "énigme" has implied, he has already
exited, denying her the possibility of having the last word. Frustrated and angry, Olimpe rushes from the stage, in pursuit of her opportunity and demonstrating her truth as
409 the true femme bourgeoise, ready to deliver a verbal slap of
retaliation or, if needs be, the real thing to Anselme. To bring her to even the partial, but entirely needed
recognition of this entirely Moliéresque enactment of "ridicule," in the Hauterochean adaptation will take the dénouement of Act V.
The gradated repetition of L'Espérance's performances
over the center of the play, and its high point in Act IV, given a quick viewing, shows us its enactment of the traits
of the courtier satirized in Mariane's tirade of Act I and
then found morally questionable by the kindred spirit
Anselme in Act II. Anselme is kept out of the on stage
audience for the displays of Act III, as the women play out their delusional games of distinction. The sequence Act III, v-vii, at the heart of the play,
first frames L'Espérance's new success. As Toinon first catches sight of him, she exclaims: "L'Espérance est brilliant dans sa perruque blonde/On diroit d'un Seigneur tant il le porte beau" (p. 58). And the first order of scene five is praise from Mariane confirming his impression that his first. Act II, performance was correct: "Mon entrée a fait rage." "On m'en dit merveilles," she agrees, and concludes: "Tout va bien." Indeed it is for L'Espérance. Toinon adds her admiration, with a bit of bantering flirtation; and Lisandre promises friendship ever after. Before the conspirators disband, for fear of being
410 overheard, L'Espérance's crowing takes the shape of a speech in which pride, unlike that shown fay Olimpe and Angélique, is justified. It is not the pride ("fierté") that goeth faefore a fall that is to fae heard at this strategic moment in the play (its center, where central themes are traditionally aired)— in the celefaration of real self- fashioning that has faeen L'Espérance's fortune: "Vous voyez qu'un fils de paysan,/Peut tout comme un Marquis devenir courtisan,/Pourvu qu'on joue un peu 1'imaginitive,/Que l'on sçache à propos manier le qui vive.../Le métier n'est point sot quand il est faien connu,/Je m'acoutumerois (p. 59).
Ail indeed does go well faecause the "fils de paysan," unlike the "fille de procureur," has not forgotten his origins, keeping the distance of metaphor ("comme un marquis") in view. There is no mistaking the mask for the face and unconsciously make the move to "chevalier d'industrie"; accordingly, he can faanter on the attraction— and fay implication the corruption— of the métier."
The performance of III, vi is fueled again on compliments. The "Comte" opens with the magic word for
Angélique— "duchesse." Angélique's room, he declares, is more faeautiful than the duchesse's where he might have faeen in which "on n'y respire que l'ambre" (p. 61). But it is really propelled fay maliciousness, "la médisance," not absent from the performance of II, iv, in which the "Comte" had portrayed Lisandre as a "gueux" (and informed of this,
411 in III, iv, Lisandre is amused by the caricature) in his
Auvergnat genteel poverty. The other side, specifically
Angélique, has registered this "médisance" literally and
remembering it, as intended, made a new plan accordingly. In the first part of the act, Angélique re-adjusts her
scheme and acts herself, independently from her mother, to
implement it. If she cannot see how to get Mariane off to a
convent, given Anselme's opposition, the next best thing is
to get her off to a god-forsaken backwater (III, i) , which is what the Auvergne symbolized popularly for those who
believed that "hors de la cour, point de salut," a belief
that the "Comte" surely favors and fosters. Angélique's
first step has been to summon Lisandre and to attempt to
manipulate him into marrying Mariane (III, ii). She does
this by adopting a new straightforward tone, of which her mother would not have been capable, but for all of having the air of sincerity it is still the ploy, the mask of
sincerity. And the truth that she displays, in self-
knowledge, is still skin-deep. "Rendons-nous justice 1'un à
l'autre,/Vous n'estes pas mon fait, je ne suis pas le
vôtre./Je suis née en un rang que je veux soutenir,/J'aime l'éclat, il faut du bien pour y fournir" (p. 53). And she has no use, here and now, for "1'amour dans le roman." The "Corate," who just prior to his big scene characterizes himself as "L'homme à fracas,/Mon carosse a fait du bruit, mes laquais..." (Ill, iv, p. 60) is precisely her éclat.
412 Countering the in character objections of Lisandre, the ideal suitor, that he cannot reconcile himself to her loss,
Angélique responds with a play on Platonic love conceits— by losing her he will gain her eternally as sister-in-law and
friend, that goes astray and amounts to no more than a proposed contract for adultery. With the entrance of
Mariane (III, iii) to complete her rapidly gotten-up scheme,
Angélique is even less successful, in the quick change of becoming Mariane's kind benefactress. Nor can she overcome, at the speed she has set herself, the revulsion to Lisandre
that is Mariane's pose. Angélique literally throws up her hands, leaving Toinon to clean up the mess of her failure (p. 57), a failure that also sets up the success of the
"Comte" in III, vi.
The médisance that wins the day's admiration at this
point is the "Comte"'s number on Mariane. He plays out the
hateful portrait of Mariane that both Olimpe and Angélique have projected upon her and plays on Olimpe's embarrassment
he had observed over being Anselme's wife. The mother, he wagers, will be as embarrassed to be known as Mariane's mother. To his question who was that, purposely mistaking Mariane for a servant, he receives a very tentative and clearly embarrassed "Croiriez-vous... que ce seroit ma fille?" "Quoy cette laideron!— apparently spontaneous sincerity, covered over by a supposedly frank apology, is
just what Olimpe wants to hear. And Mariane plays up with
413 the sauciness of the "soubrette" (p. 63), for which Olimpe
feels obliged to apologize before having Mariane physically removed from the place (by Toinon). The framing scene, proclaiming success (V, vii) is not this time set in the co conspirator stock-taking. The success is measured rather by the acceptance by Olimpe and Angélique of the "Comte" as one of them and his enlistment into their scheme to marry Lisandre and Mariane. Toinon had had the bright idea— or so it seemed to Angélique (III, i, p. 50), for the "Comte" to endow Lisandre with enough money to make him attractive to
Anselme. And now the "Comte" accepts the proposition gracefully to the generous tune of 10,000 écus, to which a comically revealing reflex makes Olimpe respond "C'est trop..." before the graceful thanks of "AhI que cette bonté sensiblement me touche," and Angélique's echoing compliment. The "Comte" fittingly ends the scene with a bow to these curtsies and a compliment filled with irony: "Trop heureux si l'excès de mon amour ardente/A vostre tour pour moy, vous peut rendre obligeante."
The supplement of Act III, and its gradation of increased difficulty, comes in its last series of scenes
(viii-x) in which a more difficult judge than Anselme enters to test the performance. Le Marquis, with the ring of real courtly manners from the start: "... j'ay peur d'estre indiscret;/Chassez-moy, si je trouble un entretient secret./Du titre d'importun je me fais tant de honte." The
414 conversation turns at first on the "Comte'"s image for wit,
a diamond refracting the light of the court, and Le Marquis
applauds the "délicatesse" of his "esprit." But it quickly
degenerates into a quarrel, provoked by the "Comte," by a shift to the third person: "Quel est ce jouvenceau," he
asks, to his face, and receives his answer from Toinon in an
only slightly less insulting generalization: "C'est un marquis," to which he adds the further insult: "De ville?"
The Marquis stung by the word answers angrily ("au comte
brusquant"): "De Ville! vous pourriez..." But the "Comte"
high-handedly interrupts to make matters worse: "De quoy
vous fachez-vous?" he asks with pseudo-naïveté, then proceeds to offer Le Marquis a little lecture on the
composition of the court with its "étourdis" as opposed to the city's "sages" (among whom he obviously counts the
Marquis) and caps it all with the smugly superior
observation that "Chaque chose à la Cour doit estre dans son
point" (p. 70). Le Marquis's response alerts us to L'Espérance's game. Olimpe and Angélique know that Le
Marquis goes to court only occasionally, as he now reaffirms: "J'y vais de temps en temps, & ne vous y vois point," with the quite different intention of exposing the
"Comte." The intention of the second half of the alexandrin is verbalized by what Olimpe and Angélique's prejudice hear
in its first hemistich. The "Comte" has now and later covered himself from exposure by the Marquis, whose protests
415 will not be believed because he is thought to be a less than assiduous courtier and, into the bargain, a jealous rival to the "Comte." And the "Comte" adds one more article to seal the blindfolds of his audience into place. If you haven't seen me, perhaps that's due to your limited access to inner circles where I am; and Le Marquis is given no time to respond to this. With a skillful gesture of true aristocratic pride and insolence, which the "Comte" has only been aping, the Marquis remains silent and allows the "Comte" to take his leave of the ladies with a complicitous wink and a pejorative suffix: "Je vais cherchez nos Àuvergnacs."
When Le Marquis only agrees in a qualified manner that the "Comte"'s style is exemplary of the perfection of the court— "Elle sont singulières," he manages to say (III, ix), he becomes the second suitor in the space of an act to be given his congé by Angélique, who takes her leave, rudely, leaving her mother (III, x) the task of angrily transforming the daughter's bad manners into "qualité" in an imperious tone that leaves no room for the Marquis to answer before their exits. The Marquis has learned, through a repetition and supplement of Act I, and suspects more; Olimpe, to her loss, has learned nothing, acting mechanically as usual, and suspects nothing. And at this moment L'Espérance is in full glory.
416 The continued action of Act IV, which could be entitled "The Marriage Contract," unfolds in nine scenes, seven of
which (iii-ix) have the "Comte" on stage. The two sides'
schemes have now completely coincided into a single plot line, since however different their motives they are in fact
working toward the same thing, the marriage of Lisandre and
Mariane. At his entrance the "Comte" takes over the relay from Olimpe (and Toinon), who has been no more successful
than Angélique in Act III in bringing Mariane around to
agreement. Mariane again simply and obediently awaits her father's decision. And Anselme will not be long in
delivering it now since he is out investigating Lisandre's
circumstances with persons guaranteed to know (one supposes his sister). From the moment of his entrance the "Comte"
insinuates that his "machine" or "resort" of the endowment of the newly wealthy Lisandre has done the trick and that
the whole victory of the marriage contract will be his.
Thus Act IV in its entirety falls climatically, if somewhat by illusion, under the successful performance of L'Espérance's act. The main challenge of the two preceding
acts are redeployed and concentrated in this one; in short
order, L'Espérance will have to face and to convince both Anselme and Le Marquis. Anselme (IV, iv) turns out to be no real problem. He
enters from his investigation so satisfied with Lisandre as a prospective son-in-law, and thanking his wife for her good
417 judgment (for which she gladly takes credit) that he does not at first notice the "Comte”'s presence at all. After
excusing himself for the oversight, he is so filled with Lisandre and the happy legal affairs to come that he has no time and only half an ear for the "Comte", who slips in a brilliant idea in a low key. After fashioning a fictional portrait of Lisandre as a Dom Juan figure, who will regret the commitment of the marriage contract the morning after it
is signed (as he has others), the "Comte" suggests that a "dédit" be added to it, that is, a forfeiture clause contracting both parties to damages, of 20,000 ecus in the event, should either break the contract. Hearing the sum doubtless picks up Anselme's ears, but he is so sure of
Lisandre that he puts little stock in the clause, and so sure of his own opinion that he doesn't even apply a possible forfeiture to himself and Olimpe. He exits quickly and cheerfully when the notary arrives (p. 84), leaving behind him for this private business the "Comte" in Olimpe's company. The "Comte" takes advantage of this intimacy to prompt Olimpe to join the notary and her husband in order to insure the implementation of the "dédit." It is in fact this bright idea that does make the contract and the wedding legally, as it were, the triumph of L'Espérance's performance as the "Comte." Reminded of the sum at stake.
418 Olimpe hurries off importantly, eager and flattered to be of use (she can "share" in this credit too).
Left alone with Toinon (IV, vi), the "Comte" shares in a short exchange of mutual congratulations on how well things are going, but accompanied, as it is wont to be at this high point of an Hauterochean play's plotting of action, by a superstitious fear, expressed here by Toinon (p. 89), that some unknown factor may intervene to spoil things. And just at that moment, she spies the Marquis, who enters completing her alexandrin and continuing as though in embodiment of her fears: "Que m'a-t-on dit Toinon,/On donne
Mariane à Lisandre. Mais non/Cela n'est point (IV, vii).
The chivalrous Marquis has come to assure himself that Mariane is not being speedily forced into marriage against her will, sacrificed to her elder sister, as appearances do indeed suggest. Receiving no real satisfaction from Toinon, who confines her explanation to the logic of obedience on Mariane's part, the Marquis— who up to that time has given no indication that he sees the "Comte"— is no more satisfied by the explanation the "Comte" volunteers, which may describe no more than the success of an advantageous
"mariage de convenance": "L'affaire est merveilleuse, & par ce mariage/Elle va devenir Dame du haut étage." Annoyed, the Marquis returns the "Comte"'s earlier insult and challenge. "Lors que je luy souhaite un sort heureux & doux,/J'en voudrois un garant plus assuré que vous" (p. 91)
419 is parried in a manner only to receive a second provoking
insult. L'Espérance flaters and has to be prompted by
Toinon. Rising now to (pseudo-)Cornelian heights for the concluding part of the scene, the "Comte" might have gotten himself off the hook by the properly observed protocol that would spare both parties. But Angélique appears and adds her insult to the Marquis. Playing the real "fâcheuse" she backs him into a corner (viii, p. 95) from which his honor can regain its luster only by exposing the "Comte" as an impostor. Left alone with Angélique, at the end of the act
(ix), the "Comte" continues in character to illustrate and to celebrate the heroic code. He fears nothing from the Marquis's challenge: "Qu'il cherche, son chagrin n'a rien que je reboubte." Having boasted to Toinon in the course of the act that he is past master in the art of acting out
"minauderie," L'Espérance ends his performances where he began them, with fine-spun compliment, at the moment a Petrarchean conceit attributing all his valor to the inspiration of his lady, charming Angélique back into her imaginary family tree (p. 96).
ACT V
As in earlier five-act plays, Hauteroche is skillful in minimizing the inherent weaknesses of an act-long dénouement. The long arc of performances by L'Espérance
420 extends that line of unified action's plotting to an
ultimate culminating scene in Act V (iii, then iv). Sacrifice of an ending for Act IV that would parallel that
focused on Olimpe ending Act II, in the interest of giving clarity of line to L'Espérance's ascension, has also deferred the fate of Olimpe to the dénouement. Thus two keys scenes of "defeat," it would seem, are juxtaposed. The symbolic celebration of harmony that consecrates the rightness of the restored order, at the end of the act, both thematizes values generally prized in the unfolding of the play's fictive day and, as good classical dramaturgical theory directs, problematizes matters that exceed that day, in ethical context especially but also in the questions "closure" raises in psychological and aesthetic terms.
The last performance that L'Espérance is called upon to give repeats, significantly, that he accomplished at the end of Act IV in response to the Marquis's challenge. The Marquis, having moved from daughter to higher authority has warned Olimpe that a masquerading "Comte" could be a "gueux, un misérable, un faquin... Est possible un filou qui s'introduit chez vous./Il est tant de gens qui sous le nom de comte... ." His reasoning is supported, of course, by the evidence of the subjects of contemporary plays, as eloquent a witness as the spectacular cases of criminality that were exposed on a European stage. And the puzzlement that he expresses that Olimpe has let herself be "éblouie"
421 without verifying the "Comte"'s titles is also reasonable.
Unreasonably, he challenges the honor of the "Comte" in a manner that requires the "Comte" to call a field, to go to the extremity of a duel putting his life on the line.
Defending the "actor"'s reason the "Comte" answer fittingly, launching a "défi" with a mime of bravado that now includes
the Marquis in the canaille he himself has just evoked for
Olimpe: "II est cent faux Marquis, contre un faux comte." L'Espérance's talent, and its use are not inferior to those displayed in earlier performances, and the Marquis's
exasperation at his performance, as L'Espérance slides from a duel to the (legal) alternative of bringing a case before the court of the marshals of France would not seem to
incriminate a disqualifying cowardice on the part of the "Comte," thus a flaw in L'Espérance's performance. The Marquis withdraws from the provoked duel because he has new information that changes the game, and play-acting. In the interval between Act IV and V, he has discovered conclusively who the actor is— a valet— and he cannot without derogation, and/or ridicule, engage in a duel with him. And indeed he need not. Exposure of the hollowness of the acting, no matter how fine the players, is all that is needed; and this in fact is what Marquis does do when Lisandre appears (V, iv), and names are named. In V, iv the actor playing the Marquis has his crowning moment, as he changes function and rôle. Cast first in the
422 lovers' scenario as "le jaloux", he has acted out that rôle, which conflicted with his self-image as unrequited courtly lover condemned to suffer in silence ("Je suis obligé de me taire" is his motif) and not to become the "importun" of farce. In being the agent of L'Espérance's exposure, the deed that replaces the dream of being the savior of Mariane in distress, and in the "lessons" offered in its aftermath.
Le Marquis escapes earlier rôles to become the symbol of triumphant nobility, "qualité" in its natural order. If
L'Espérance sailed under the spirit of the maxim "Un vrai noble est toujours au-dessus de l'outrage" (p. 104), Le
Marquis literally embodies its truth, finally in the act of congé from Olimpe and Angélique. Newly consecrated, as it were, he offers them, one last time, a representation of their truth that should by now be fully self-evident.
Je sçay tout le respect qu'aux Dames on doit rendre, J'en ay beaucoup pour vous & sur la qualité. Je consens qu'aucun rang ne vous soit contesté: Mais vostre exemple a mis au coeur de vostre aînée. Un orgueil qui n'est point d'une bien née. Je renounce au bonheur de me voir son époux; Je n'ay plus rien à dire & prens congé de vous. Olimpe's last scene, in V, v, might seem to justify the title "La Déroute," continued from Act II. In Hauteroche's moralizing aesthetics it is simply pride having its fall, the exposure of the ugly human grimace, cruelty, and bad manners shown all too clearly, in alternation with the composed face and affected gestures meant to cover them over. The "étrange mère" is not really a monster, an
423 exception to human nature, she is a misguided woman of
limited intelligence who has made, and continues to make her
own mistakes— and to impose them thoughtlessly upon others,
her "marotte," especially on her vulnerable daughter. She
begins the dénouement with Angélique under the full illusion of control, promising her daughter that a fully satisfying
marriage to the "Comte" is imminent, and continues under
that illusion in her first final reckoning with Le Marquis
(V, ii); believing in the near victory of her own scheme, on the one hand, she awards Mariane to the Marquis, and on
the other she defends Angélique's territory for the "Comte”; "Je connois l'honnête homme, & je lis dans son âme" (p.
102), she proclaims proudly to the Marquis, and pridefully
instructs him consequently: "Cherchez à modérez vôtre
jalouse bile,/Des gens de qualité ma maison est l'azile" (p.
101) . Faced with the truth, first from Lisandre, Olimpe can
see nothing except the wound to her pride: "Je ne voy que
ma honte,/On me dupe, on m'ameine un faux Comte" (p. 110).
She scornfully refuses the pardon for the ruse offered humbly by Lisandre in the name of love and menaces L'Espérance with an angry "Tay toi." Still believing herself in control, of knowledge of the Marquis, she changes entirely the course of her actions decidedly in place at the beginning of the act: "Le Marquis a pour vous un coeur
fidelle & tendre...," she informs Angélique, who acts
424 swiftly as directed: "L'honneur, l'amour, tout veut que je
me donne à vous,/Ouy, Monsieur le Marquis, je vous prens
pour époux... ." This is mercifully Angélique's parting speech, as she exits open armed to embrace the void. She is
spared the refusal of her by the Marquis and the spectacle of her mother's humiliating crash after his exit speech. In
response to that speech, Olimpe can only call after him a short and angry threat, desperately inadequate in its
flagrant untruth as either satisfaction or face-saving:
"Cent amans à I'envy soupirent pour ma fille,/Vous ne
méritez pas d'estre dans ma famille." The irreality of the "hundred" here, when there is no one even on the distant
horizon, is something akin to Bélise's catalogues of phantom lovers in Les Femmes savantes. But Olimpe quickly realizes that she is no longer the arbitrix of merit she has set herself to be and just what her family is. In her own way
Olimpe admits defeat (where by contrast, we will see,
L'Espérance never has to): "Je ne le cache point, je n'en puis revenir./Vous me faites passer pour une ridicule./Quoy donc? on publiera que je suis si crédule."
But this is a limited self-knowledge, of a different dimension from that which Molière's Philaminte is given at the comparable moment in Les Femmes savantes. Faced with exposure and worse, the loss of her fortune, Philaminte shows remarkable power of adaptation and regeneration."
Olimpe reenters the bourgeoisie by reflex, as it were, by
425 bowing to Lisandre's marriage to Mariane, with ill grace,
because of the default clause in the marriage contract (just minutes before denounced in anger as foisted upon her by the duplicitous "Comte"); this is good sense, indeed. And she
reenters the natural order, of her angry temperament, with a
rush toward L'Espérance (p. 112)— "Elle va pour le
frapper," reads the stage direction. L'Espérance nimbly steps out of her way, leaving an angry "Non" and "Jamais" hanging in the air with the interrupted half-line of
Lisandre's second request: "Madame, pardonner... ." The all-enveloping reclamation by the true self has once again blocked out the graceful way to save face through a changed style. What Philaminte is made to know instinctually and what is offered to Olimpe by Lisandre: "... Eh moquez-vous de tout,/Aisément des sots bruits, on peut venir à bout.
Pour leur couper chemin concluons l'hymenée." Olimpe has one more lesson to bear (V, vi), as Anselme enters for his decisive rôle in the dénouement. His first words reveal, for the reader what spectators have plainly seen: her red-faced and contorting anger in frustration. "De quel chagrin estes-vous occupée?/Vous querellez déjà vostre gendre, du moins/Quand on s'emporte il faut que ce soit sans témoins./En vous abandonnant à vostre humeur trop prompte,/Vous oubliez que c'est devant Monsieur le Comte."
As if a lesson on etiquette from Anselme were not enough, Olimpe must witness the stage-play of L'Espérance's
426 automatic start— like a jack-in-the-box— to play this scene
of compliments with Anselme. But the final injury, after
the long series of insults suffered at the hands of the false count, comes with Anselme's interruption of her story
of the imposture Olimpe is now burning to tell him. Like Rufile, in Le Feint Polonais. hell-bent on exposing the
perfidious Ambroise to Ergaste, she is silenced by a
frustrating variant on "ce n'est gue ça". But there is a
surprising kindness, even tenderness, rather than vengeful exultation, in Anselme's words. "Vous voyez tant de gens du grand air, que peut-estre/Est-ce une honte à vous de vous y mal connoître./Pour moy Comtes, Marquis, qu'ils soient vrai, qu'ils sont faux,/Pour ce que j'en veux faire, ils me sont tous égaux:/Vous, qui de la grandeur un peu trop entestée. Croyez..." (p. 144).
One last time, Olimpe fails to hear the way. Distracted from Anselme's words of direction by the final entrance of Mariane— "Ah! vous voila Madame l'effrontée...," and interrupting Lisandre, she fashions her concession, upon which she will exit, in her old manner:
"... L'affaire est faite./Vous jouirez du bien que vostre amour souhaite,/Monsieur à vostre hymen je ne puis opposer./Mariane est à vous, vous pouvez l'épouser." This ill grace is accompanied by a parting threat, to spoil the harmony promised with the new dispensation of matrimony: "Mais tant que je vivray, j'auray gravé dans l'âme/Le
427 complot, outrageant qui la rend vostre femme./Adieu" (p. 144). Like Rufile, whose rôle of "dragon of virtue"
Olimpe's as arbitrix of merit amplifies with some
variations, Olimpe will be left alone in her room to pout. She is not, as Rufile is not, consigned to that room as to a
cell— a kind of "madwoman in the attic"— in the same way
that Angélique has not been put out, relegated to perpetual
exile. Mother and daughter have been given their freedom, released from the comic space and sent into different, if
not fresh air, to lick their wounds privately and to heal,
then to be reintegrated through the agency of the "good father" into the new harmonized order.
Anselme, the last of Hauteroche's "good fathers,"
promises his alarmed daughter that all will be right, that
Olimpe may be for now the spoilsport but is powerless to act
on her threat or to sustain its "rôle" for long. "Elle
s'apaisera, n'en soyons point en peine./Pour toy l'hymen te met à couvert de sa haine." In the spirit of his counsel to
Olimpe, Anselme finally shrugs off any recounting of the strategies (and it would indeed be a long "récit") offered to him that have led to the present happiness. The end justifies the means. And the end is then left to the two pairs of young lovers who come center stage: L'Espérance, the "trésor" and Toinon, the loyal and inventive friend (and the veteran of a hugely demanding rôle in the play) have well earned their bows at center stage, between the happy
428 couple Mariane and Lisandre, who then take their bows— under the watchful eye of Anselme to one side regarding them with apparent pleasure— in the new harmony thus staged with its double layer of security— Lisandre and Anselme, for
L'Espérance and Toinon. L'Espérance (still designated as "Le Comte") and still in full court dress is given a last comic turn, of celebration before admiring eyes, and commemorates the power of the good game just completed.
Turning to Lisandre in the character of the "Comte," he offers: "Monsieur, si vous vouliez Toinon seroit Comtesse."
429 NOTES TO CHAPTER 8
The Parisian suminmer of 1690, when all the "beaux chevaliers" are in Holland on exercises, and there remains in Paris only "maîtres à danser, riches hommes de robe, et abbés trop élégants," is evoked in Dancourt's L'Été des coquettes. Dancourt produced four plays in seven months in 1690 and was with three of these, like Hauteroche, a "fournisseur d'été." His one-act Merlin déserteur (written for Raisin, who specialized in Merlins) followed— and picked up— Hauteroche's play. See André Blanc (1984), pp. 42-44. The amoralism of Dancourt's plays has been a common-place of anthologies of plays and manuals of litterary history since the eighteenth-century. André Blanc, with the same orientation, speaks in his conclusion with more subtlety of a "style théâtral," ancestor of that of the "théâtre de boulevard," which is "plus sociologue que moraliste" and "se rattache aux modes plutôt qu'aux moeurs." Certain "louches" types, such as the "chevalier-escroc" and the "femme d'intrigues" appear to emblematic of this world. None of this can be applied to Hauteroche.
As explained in my "Introduction," Hauteroche's blindess is attested in 1694. My remarks here suppose, according to tradition, that an impairment existed as early as 1687.
*• The Parfaict brothers mention Les Précieuses ridicules. Hauteroche's Olimpe does have in common with the Madelon of Molière's play a refusal to believe herself the dauther of her father. They mention also Scarron's L'Héritier ridicule^ in which a valet disguises in order to win a girl's smile for his master. Lancaster (IV^, pp. 821-22) adds Montfleury's Le Dupe de soi-même, in which a mother would shut up in a convent one of her daughters for the other's profit. All these intertexts are episodic and without bearing to the overall structure of Hauteroche's play.
430 cited by H. Gaston Hall (1974), p. 58. It was performed within the first month of the existence of La Comédie-Française and seventeenth times over the five years during which La Grange's Registre lasted from that time. Not the most popular revival, it was nonetheless a staple in the repertory.
De Visé expressed contemporary opinion when he proclaimed the play to be "tout-a-fait achevée." Negative views of Les Femmes savantes begin with Antoine Adam's revisionism (III, 1962, pp. 388-95) and have been followed by historians whose concentration is development or evolution, in which this play represents for all its artistry a "regression."
’’ ’ Dancourt's Les Bourgeoises de qualité received its title in 1724 for a performance which wished to emphasize its social subject better than the original title of La Fête de village, under which it was first performed and printed in 1700. The relationship with Hauteroche's play is then purely accidental, and the two plays have nothing significant in common. His Les Bourgeoises à la mode (1692) dramatizes the comic tribulations of a bourgeois couple when they transform their residence into a gaming establishment, thus fundamentally different from Hauteroche's play.
Despite recent claims by Robert MTBride for La Mothe Le Vayer's authorship of the "Lettre," I continue to believe, as did W.G. Moore and Gérard Defaux, that the author is Donneau de Visé with Molière's collaboration and approval.
This balancing for the Chevalier à la mode is nicely represented in diagram form by Robert H. Crashaw rDancourt. 1980), p. xviii.
The title of an anonymous ballet given shortly after Molière's Précieuses ridicules in which Amour puts to rout those churls that scorn love (See René Bray, 1948), p. 133.
H. Gaston Hall (1974), p. 47, comments that "Like the capacity of women to learn conceded at the beginning of the play, the wisdom attained by Philaminte at the close— comparable to a tragic hero's discovery, or recognition— must symbolize optimism with regard to a still underprivileged sex." James Gaines points out the enormity of Philaminte's loss in her lawsuit, 120,000 livres (1984), p. 182.
431 APPENDIX
CHRONOLOGY OF HADTEROCHE'S LIFE
1617 (?)
Probable date of birth of Noël Le Breton, son of Noël I Le Breton (15987-1678), "boutonnier," and a mother not subsequently identified (?-ca. 1642). 1635-1637 (?)
Leaves Paris, with a view to a career in army, in Spain. Joins a French acting troupe in Valladolid. after 1637 (?)-(?)
Directs a troupe of French actors in Germany and travels with them there. Date of return cannot be surmised.
1650 Director of a provincial troupe that includes Catherine Desurlis, then her sisters Madeleine (1652) and Estiennette (1653). Hauteroche's friendship with their father Etienne Desurlis (Parisian) would predate their association with the troupe.
1654
April 1 Act of "Association d'une troupe de comédiens de campagne sous la direction de Noël Breton, sieur de Hauteroche" and "Promesse faite par la troupe de Noël Breton, sieur de Hauteroche, à Catherine de Surlis." The earliest act of constitution of a troupe, for one year, co-signed by Jannequin ("Rochefort"), François de la Court, Jehan Loseu ("Beauchaisne"), Drouyn, François Serdin, and Estiennette Desurlis.
September 29 Hauteroche is godfather at Fontenay-le-Comte to the son of Claude Jannequin and Madeleine Desurlis. His troupe entertains.
432 1654 (CONT.) Scarron creates the stock character Crispin in his comedy L'Écolier de Salamanque.
1655 April Hauteroche, now permanently with the stage name, becomes a regular member of the Théâtre du Marais. He remains only for the 1655-56 season, after which the company loses its lease and closes (April 1657 to March 31, 1659).
Summer Acts himself in Quinault's comedy La Comédie sans comédie.
1657 April Hauteroche and members of his former company leave Paris to act in the provinces. The exact date of his return is not known but may be within the year.
1658-59 Floridor, director of the Théâtre de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne takes on Hauteroche, as a replacement for Pierre Lazard (d. 1657). His first season corresponds exactly with Molière's on his return from the provinces.
1660 March Signature appears on the "bail" (rental agreement) of the Hôtel.
Molière creates Saanarelle ou le cocu imaginaire.
1662 Creates the rôle of Baron de la Crasse in Raymond Poisson's comedy Le Baron de la Crasse.
Plays Pompée in Pierre Corneille's Sertorius.
Molière create L'Ecole des femmes.
1663
March 3 Hauteroche signs with the other actors a four-year bail on the Hôtel de Bourgogne.
433 166 3 (CONT.)
Molière creates Impromptu de Versailles, which includes a caricature of Hauteroche's tragic diction in the rôle of Pompée.
Unofficially assumes on occasion Floridor's function as the troupe's orateur.
1664
Fifteen lyric poems by Hauteroche appear in Les Délices de la poésie galante des plus célèbres auteurs du temps. published by Ribou and dedicated to the duc de Coislin. Signature on letter-mémoire of the actors of the Hôtel concerning pensions.
1665
December 18 Performs the rôle of Ephestion in Jean Racine's Alexandre le grand.
1666
January Performs the rôle of Tygrane in Thomas Corneille's Antiochus. The opening is a special entertainment for the King given by the due de Créqui.
1667 Plays at court in the "Ballet des muses" in the rôle de Lira, "poète de la cour."
November 19 Creates the rôle of Phénix in Racine's Andromaque.
1668
February 18 Plays, with Brécourt, one of the rôles of prétendants in Thomas Corneille's Laodice. reine de Cappadoce.
June 9 First performance of Le Poète basque by Raymond Poisson, in which Hauteroche plays himself.
July 12 Hauteroche's first play is produced, L'Amant qui ne flatte point. inspired by Molière's Le Misanthrope (1666).
434 1668 (CONT.) November Creates the rôle of Chicanneau in Racine's comedy Les Plaideurs. 1669
February 2 Creates the rôle of Pompée in abbé Boyer's Le Jeune Marius.
February 21 Creates the rôle of Narcisse in Racine's Britannicus.
July Hauteroche's second play Le Souper mal-aoorêté opens.
L'Amant qui ne flatte point is first published in Paris by Guillain and de Sercy. Plays the rôle of the "Coadjuteur" in Montfleury's La Femme iuae et partie and in a special performance for the duchesse de Bouillon. 1670
March 22 Signs the act of association by which Champmeslé and his wife join the Hôtel de Bourgogne.
April 25 Signs a "mémoire" of ratification of the 1,000 livres pension of retired actors from the Hôtel.
May 10 Hauteroche's third play, Crispin médecin, opens.
Le Souper mal-apprêté is first published in Paris by Guillain and de Sercy.
Crispin médecin is first published by Barbin.
November 21 Creates the rôle of Paulin in Racine's Bérénice. 1671
May 9 Creates the rôle of the lover Hydas in Boyer's Atalante.
435 1671 (CONT.)
August After withdrawal from the theatre of the terminally ill Floridor, Hauteroche takes over directorship of the troupe and the function of orateur. Signature on the marriage contract of Claude Deschamps (de Villiers) and Jeanne Guillemain, signed also by his future wife Madame J,-B. Arnauld (Jacqueline Le Sueur) and her mother Radegonde Regnard (née Le Sueur).
1672
January 5 Creates the rôle of Osmin in Racine's Baiazet.
August 6 Announcement under the title Les Maris infidèles of Hauteroche's fourth play. Les Apparences trompeuses. which was not produced.
November 16 Creates the lead rôle of Théodat in Thomas Corneille's Théodat.
November 24 Hauteroche's fifth play. Le Deuil, is first performed.
1673 January 13 Creates the rôle of Arbate in Racine's Mithidate. January 30 Plays in a special performance of Mithridate staged as a part of the festivities of the marriage of the due d'Orléans and Charlotte Elisabeth de Bavière.
August 2 Crispin médecin is played for the due d'Orléans at his request in private performance given for him by Monsieur de Boisfranc at Saint-Ouen. Hauteroche is in attendance, playing in a production of Mithridate for the entertainment. Les Apparence trompeuses and Le Deuil are first published in Paris by Promé. Le Deuil is headed by a dedication to André Le Camus, chevalier, conseiller ordinaire du roi.
436 1674 July 5 Hauteroche's sixth play, Crispin musicien, opens.
September 21 Crispin musicien is first published in Paris by Promé. 1675
Summer Probable first production date of Hauteroche's seventh play Les Nobles de province.
September 13 Signature on the marriage contract of the actor Michel Baron. 1677
January 1
Creates the rôle of Téramène in Racine's Phèdre. 1678 January or February Les Nouvellistes. Hauteroche's eight play, first performed. It was not published and is not extant. August 28 Les Nobles de province first published in Lyons by Amaulry, including an "Au lecteur" not subsequently published. Hauteroche's first will and testament is drawn up, his father appearing as "légataire universel."
Noël I Le Breton dies.
Le Deuil is performed at Versailles. 1679
February 15 Signature on the marriage contract of Jean Bouillart. 1680 March Hauteroche's ninth play La Bassette. is first performed. It was not published and does not survive.
437 1680 (CONT.)
August 13 Pierre Le Breton, Hauteroche's half-brother, dies.
August 25 The merging of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Théâtre du Guénégaud takes place to form the single Parisian theatre in La Comédie-Française. Hauteroche performs in the opening performance of Phèdre. 1682 The first collective edition of Hauteroche's plays is published by Adrien Moetjens in The Hague, Les Pièces de théâtre du sieur de Hauteroche. containing in order of publication L'Amant qui ne flatte point. Le Souper mal apprêté . Crispin médecin. Le Deuil. Les Apparences trompeuses. Crispin musicien, and Les Nobles de province. Loan to Jacqueline Le Sueur of 2,200 livres for settlement of her mother's estate. 1684
February 22 L'Esprit folet ou la Dame invisible. Hauteroche's tenth play, is first produced. March 20 Hauteroche's retirement from the Hôtel de Bourgogne is officially noted by LaGrange, with "demye part à M. Raisin, l'aîné, demye à Mlle Raisin." April 17 Hauteroche receives power of attorney for all Jacqueline Le Sueur's financial affaires.
June 7 or 9 Le Cocher. Hauteroche's eleventh play, is first performed.
1685 June 25 Hauteroche marries Jacqueline Le Sueur. Inventory is drawn up of Jacqueline's house, rue de Beaurepaire, where the couple will reside. August 7 Le Cocher is given for the King at Marly.
438 1685 (CONT.) First publications of Esprit folet ou la dame invisible and of Le Cocher, in Paris by Ribou. Le Cocher has a preface not subsequently published.
December 10 Loan of 3,650 livres to J.-B. Defant, colonel de dragons. 1686
Hauteroche's eleventh play. Le Feint Polonois ou la veuve impertinente published for the first in Lyons by Plaignard, after a probable public performance in Lyons. The play was not produced in Paris. 1687
January 17 Loan of 1,600 livres to Anne Bellinzani, Madame Michel Ferrand. Probable date of Hauteroche's blindness, from unknown cause.
1688 March 1 Signature on marriage contract of the actor Duparc's son. 1689
March 22 Hauteroche and his wife rent a house, rue Saint-Sauveur at 720 livres yearly. 1690
July 26-August 7 Les Bourgeoises de qualité. Hauteroche's twelfth and last play, produced at La Comédie-Française. 1691
Les Bourgeoises de qualité published for the first in Paris by the Veuve Gontier, who also published a second collective edition of Hauteroche's plays.
1694
Jacqueline Le Sueur's signature on a quittance for Hauteroche's pension notes his blindness and generally bad health.
439 1695
The Hauteroches rent out a house owned at 16, rue de Beaune (at 300 livres).
1696
A third collective edition of Hauteroche's plays is published in Paris by Guillain. December 1 The Hauteroches sell a house owned in Aubervilliers (4,500 livres).
1697-1705
Loans of 6,000 livres to Jean Le Roy, greffier à la 4® Chambre des Enquêtes, and his wife Geneviève Hérault, and of 20,000 livres to Louis Gislain, sieur de Belcourt. 1703
A fourth collective edition of Hauteroche's plays published by Ribou, containing in ordre of publication Crispin musicien. Crispin médecin. Le Deuil. Les bourgeoises de qualité, and L'Esprit folet ou la dame invisible.
1704 December 13 Hauteroche's second and final will and testament is drawn up. His executor is Louis Gislain de Belcourt. His sister Marie is "légataire universelle."
1705 January 14 Loan of 48,000 livres to Marie Bonneau, widow of Charles Fortier, sieur de La Hoquette. 1707 July 14 Hauteroche dies in a house in the rue de la March and is buried in the parish chruch of Saint-Sauveur. 1713
Death of Jacqueline Le Sueur, paroisse Saint-Suplice. Her sister Anne-Marie Le Sueur, widow of Louis de Dours is "légataire universel."
440 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. HAUTEROCHE'S DRAMATIC WRITINGS
Hauteroche, Noël Le Breton. Les OEuvres de Monsieur de Hauteroche. La Haye: Moetjens, 1683. Les OEuvres de Monsieur de Hauteroche. Paris: Veuve de Gontier, 1691 Les OEuvres de Monsieur de Hauteroche. Paris : Guillain, 1696.
Les OEuvres de Monsieur de Hauteroche. Paris : Ribou, 1703 .
Les OEuvres de Monsieur de Hauteroche. 3 vols. Paris : Ribou, 1736. Les OEuvres de Monsieur de Hauteroche. 3 vols. Paris: Compagnie des libraires associciés, 1742. Théâtre de Noël le Breton, sieur de Hauteroche. Paris: Aux Dépens de la Compagnie, 1772. . Théâtre de Hauteroche. Paris: Touquet, 1821,
_ . Chefs-d'oeuvre dramatiques de Hauteroche. et Camoistron. Paris: J. Didot, 1824. _ . L'Amant qui ne flatte point. Paris: Guillain, and C. de Sercy, 1669. L'Amant qui ne flatte point. La Haye: Moetjens, 1682.
_____ . Le Soupé mal-apprété. Paris: Guillain, 1670. _____ . Le Soupé mal aoresté. Paris: Quinet, 1670.
_____ . Le Soupé. mal apresté. La Haye: Moetjens, 1682. Le Soupé mal aprêté. Paris: Didot, 1778.
441 Crispin médecin. Paris: Ribou, 1680. Crispin médecin. La Haye: Moetjens, 1682.
Crispin médecin. Amsterdam: P. Rotterdam, 1715.
Crispin médecin. Crispin médecin.
Crispin médecin. Crispin médecin.
Crispin médecin. Paris: Ribou, 1777. Crispin médecin.
Crispin médecin. Paris: Brunet, 1789 Crispin médecin.
Crispin médecin. 1796.
Crispin médecin. Paris: Pages, 1802.
Crisoin médecin. Paris : Petitot Répertoire du françois, 1804. Crisoin médecin. français, 1818.
Crispin médecin. Paris: Comédie-française, 1893.
Crispin médecin. 1894.
Crispin médecin.
Krispyn medicvn. Krispyn, medicvn 1715.
Krispyn^ medicvn I. Duim, 1738
442 Hauteroche. Crispin Lakei oa Doktor. Copenhagen: Skuespil til Brug for den danske Skueplads, 1787.
Crispin Lakei oa Doktor. Copenhagen : Trykt paa Gyldendals Forlag, 1787.
Crispin médecin. Copenhagen: Skuespiltekster fra Komediehuset i Lille Gronnegade, 1921.
_____ . Crispin médecin. Les Contemporains de Molière. Ed. Fournel. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1866.
Les Apparences trompeuses ou les maris infidèles. Paris: Promé, 1673.
Les Apparences trompeuses La Haye: Moetjens, 1682,
Les Apparences trompeuses. Paris: Duchesne, 1765.
Le Deuil. Paris: Promé, 1673 Le Deüil
Le Deuil Le Deuil
Le Deüil La Haye: Moetjens, 1682.
Le Deuil Paris: Duchesne, 1774.
Le Deuil Paris: Petitot Répertoire du théâtre françois
Le Deuil.Deuil Paris: Répertoire général du Théâtre français 818.
Le Deuil Théâtre du XVII” siècle. Ed. Jacques Truchet. Paris: Gaillimard, 1986. _____ . Crispin musicien. Paris: Promé, 1674. _____ . Crispin musicien. Paris: Ribou, 1680. _____ . Crispin musicien. Paris: Ribou, 1705.
______. Crispin musicien. Les Contemporains de Molière. Ed. Fournel. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1866.
443 Hauteroche. Krispin. muzikant. Amsterdam: A. Magnus, 1685.
. Krispyn, muzikant. Amsterdam: H. Bosch, 1727. . Krispvn, muzikant. Amsterdam: I. Duim, 1739.
______. Les Nobles de Province. Lyon: Amaulry, 1678.
Les Nobles de Province. La Haye: Moetjens, 1682,
La Dame invisible. Paris: Quay des Augustins, 1685. [pirated Ribou printing]
L'Esprit folet ou la Dame invisible. Paris: Ribou, 1685.
L'Esprit folet; ou La Dame invisible. Paris; Ribou, 1698.
L'Esprit follet, ou la Dame invisible. Paris: Gueffier, 1770.
_ . L'Esprit follet, ou. la Dame invisible. Paris: Fin du Répertoire du Théâtre français, 1824.
L'Esprit follet, ou la Dame invisible. Paris: Tous les libraires, 1878.
Le Cocher. Paris: Quay des Grands Augustins, 1685. [pirated Ribou printing]
_____ . Le Cocher. Paris: Ribou, 1685. _____ . Le Cocher. Paris: Guillain, 1685.
Le Cocher. Paris: Aux Dépens de la compagnie. 1752,
Le Cocher supposé. Avignon: Chambeau, 1774. Le Cocher supposé. Paris: Pages, 1802.
Le Cocher supposé. Paris: Rertoire général du Théâtre français, 1818.
. Le Cocher supposé. Paris: Veuve Dabo, 1823. Le Feint Polonais ou la veuve impertinente. Lyon: Plaignard, 1686.
444 Hauteroche. Les Bourgeoises de qualité. Paris: Veuve Gontier, 1691.
______. Les Bourgeoises de qualité. Berlin: Robert Roger, 1692.
2 . ON HAUTEROCHE
Adam, Antoine. Histoire de la littérature française au XVlIe siècle. 5 vols. Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1948-1956.
Anonymous. "Hauteroche." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of French Literature. Ed. Joyce M.H. Reid. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
Anonymous. "Hauteroche." Dictionnaire des lettres françaises— le dix-septième siècle. Ed. Cardinal Georges Grente. Paris: Fayard, 1951.
Anonymous. "Hauteroche." Dictionnaire des littératures françaises et étrangères. Ed. Jacques Demougin. Paris: Larousse, 1992. Anonymous. "Hauteroche." La Comédie-française ri6 80- 1980). Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1980.
Anonymous. "Hauteroche." Nouvelle biographie générale depuis les temps les plus reculés iusqu^à nos jours avec les renseionments bibliographiques et l'indication des sources à consulter, eds. M. Le Dr Hoefer and M. De Manne. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1877. Anonymous. "Hauteroche." The Oxford Companion to French Literature. eds. Paul Harvey and J.E. Heseltine. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.
Antoine, André. Le Théâtre. Paris: Les Éditions de France, 1932. Auger, Louis. "Hauteroche." Bibliographie universelle ancienne et moderne. Ed. M.M. Michaud. Paris: Louis Vivès, 1880. vol. 18. Babault, B. "Hauteroche." Annales dramatiques: ou. Dictionnaire général des théâtres par une société de gens de lettres. 9 vols. Paris: de Henée, 1808-1812.
445 Blanc, André. F.C. Dancourt (1661-17251: La Comédie fran çaise à l'heure du Soleil couchant. Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1984.
_____ . Le Théâtre de Dancourt. 2 vols. Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1977. Blémont, H. "Hauteroche." Dictionnaire de biographie française, eds. J. Balteau, M. Barroux and M. Prévost. Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1933. vol. 17.
Bonnassies, J. La Comédie-Française: Histoire administrative f1658-17571. Paris: Didier, 1874.
Brereton, Geoffrey. French Comic Drama from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centurv. London: Methuen, 1977.
Brooks, William, Ed. Le Théâtre et l'opéra vus par les aazetiers Robinet et Laurent f1670-16781. Tübingen: Biblio 17, 1993.
Brüggemann, Werner. Spanisches Theater und Deutsche Romantik. Münster Westfalen: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1964. vol. l. Calame, Alexandre. "Hauteroche." Dizionario critico délia 1etteratura francese. Ed. Franco Simone. Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1972. vol. l. Campardon, Emile. Les Comédiens du roi de la troupe française pendant les derniers siècles. Paris: Champion, 1879. Castil-Blaze, H. Molière musicien: notes sur les oeuvres Racine. Ouinault, Reonart. Montluc- Maillv. Hauteroche. Saint-Evremont. DuFresnv. Palaprat. Dancourt. Lesaae. Destouches. J.J. Rousseau. Beaumarchais, etc.; où se mêlent des considérations sur l'harmonie de la lanoue française. 2 vols. Paris: Castil-Blaze, 1876.
Chappuzeau, Samuel. Le Théâtre françois. Ed. Georges Monval. Paris: Bonnassies, 1875. Curtis, A. Ross. Crispin 1er: La vie et l'oeuvre de Raymond Poisson comédien-poète du XVIIe siècle. Toronto: University of Toronto Romance Serie 19, 1972 Deierkauf-Holsboer, S. Wilma. L/Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre français à Paris. Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1960.
446 Deierkauf-Holsboer. Le Théâtre de Bourgogne. Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1970. vol. 2.
. Le Théâtre du Marais. Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1958. vol. 2.
Despois, Eugène André. Le Théâtre français sous Louis XIV. 3e édition. Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1886. Emelina, Jean. Les Valets et les servantes dans le théâtre comique en France de 1610 à 1700. Grenoble: P.U.G., 1975. Forestier, Georges. Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du XVIIe siècle. Geneva: Droz, 1981. Fournel, Victor. Les Contemporains de Molière: recueil de comédie, rares ou peu connues louées de 1650 à 1680 avec l'histoire de chaque théâtre, des notes et notices biographiques, bibliographiques et critiques. 2 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1866.
______. Le Théâtre au XVIIe siècle: la comédie. Paris: Lecène, Oudin et Cie, 1892.
Geoffroy, Julien. "Hauteroche, Crispin médecin." Cours de littérature dramatique ou. recueil par ordre de matières des feuilletons. 2nd edition. Paris: P. Blanchard, 1825. vol. 2.
Gouvernet, Gérard. Le Tvpe du valet chez Molière et ses successeurs Reanard. DuFresny. Dancourt et Lesaqer caractères et évolution. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Gueullette, J.-E. Notes et souvenirs sur le théâtre italien au XVlIle siècle. Paris: E. Droz, 1938. Guichemerre, Roger. La Comédie avant Molière f1640-1660). Paris: Armand Colin, 1972. Hawkins, Frederick. Annals of the French Stage from its Origin to the Death of Racine. 2 vols. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1970. Hélard-Cosnier, Colette. "'La Scène est à Paris'... de Calderon à d'Ouville." Deux siècles de relations hispano-françaises de Commynes à Madame d'Aulnoy: Actes du colloque international du CRECIF. Ed. Daniel-Henri Pageaux. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1987.
447 Jal, Auguste. "Hauteroche." Dictionnaire critique de biographie et d'histoire: errata et supplément pour tous les dictionnaries historiques d/après des documents authentiques inédits. 2"^ ed. Paris: Pion, 1872. Jasinski, René. "Hauteroche." Histoire de la littérature française: Nouvelle édition revue et complétée par Robert Bossuet. René Fromilhaaue. René Pomeau et Jacques Robichez. Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1965. vol. 1.
Joannides, A. La Comédie-Française de 1680 à 1900. Dictionnaire général des pièces et des auteurs. Paris: Pion, 1901. La Comédie-Française de 1680 à 1920: Tableau des représentations. Paris: Pion, 1921.
Jurgens, Madeleine. Documents du Minutier Central des notaires de Paris. Paris: Archives nationales, 1982.
Karch, Mariel O'Neill. "État présent des études sur la vie de Noël Le Breton, sieur de Hauteroche (1617-1707), comédien dramaturge, suivi de l'inventaire de ses meubles en 1685." XVIIe siècle. 96 (1972), pp. 39-54. Lachèvre, Frédéric. "Hauteroche." Dictionnaire des recueils collectifs de poésies publiés de 1597 à 1700. Paris: H. Leclerc, vol. 3. 1904. La Grange, Charles Varlet. Le Régistre de La Grange 1659- 1685. eds. Bert Edward Young and Grace Philputt Young. Rpt. 2 vols. Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1947.
La Harpe, Jean-François. Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne. Paris: Dupont. 1818. vol. 6.
______. Lvcée ou Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne. Paris: H. Agasse, An VII de la République. Lancaster, Henry Carrington. French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Centurv. 9 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1929-1942. Ed. Five French Farces. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins Press. 1937 Sunset: A Historv of Parisian Drama in the Last Years of Louis XIV f1701-1715). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1945.
448 Lancaster. Actors' Roles at the Comédie-Française According to the Répertoire des Comédies francoises qui se peuvent ioûer en 1685. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1951.
The Comédie Française 1680-1701: Plavs. Actors. Spectators. Finances. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941. The Comédie Française 1701-1774: Plays, Actors Spectators. Finances. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1951.
La Porte, Joseph- "Théâtre de Hauteroche." Observateur littéraire. 1760.
La Vallière, Louis César de la Baume. Bibliothèaue du théâtre françois depuis son origine: contenant un extrait de tous les ouvrages composés pour ce théâtre; depuis les mystères jusqu'aux pièces de Pierre Corneille; une liste chronologigue de celles composées depuis cette dernière époque iuscfu'à présent; avec deux tables alphabétiques, l'une des auteurs et l'autre des pièces. Dresde: Michel Groell, 1768.
Lemazurier, Pierre David. Galerie historique des acteurs du théâtre français, depuis 1600 iusqu'à nos jours: ouvrage recueilli des mémoires du temps et de la tradition. Paris: J. Chaumerot, 1810.
Le Moyne, Nicolas-Toussaine. "Hauteroche." Les Siècles littéraires de la France. Rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1971. vol. 3. Léris, Antoine. "Hauteroche." Dictionnaire portatif des théâtres, contenant l'origine des différens théâtres de Paris. C.A. Jambert. 1754. Lintilhac, Eugène. Histoire générale du théâtre en France— La Comédie du dix-septième siècle. Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1904. Loliée, Frédéric. La Comédie-française: Histoire de la maison de Molière. Paris: Lucien LaVeur, 1907. Lough, John. Paris Theatre Audiences in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London: Oxford University Press, 1957.
449 Lyonnet, Henry. '’Hauteroche.” Dictionnaire des comédiens français: biographie, bibliographie, iconographie. Geneva: Bibliothèque de la Revue Universelle Internationale Illustrée, 1911. vol. 2.
Mahelot, Laurent. Le Mémoire de Mahelot. Laurent et d'autre déorateurs de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne et de la Comédie- Française au XVII* siècle. Ed. H.C. Lancaster. Paris: champion, 1910.
Mantzius, Karl. A History of Theatrical Art in Ancient and Modern Times. London: Duckworth, 1905. vol. 4.
Martin, Henri-Jean. Livre pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVII^ siècle r1598-17011. 2 vols. Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1969. Mazouer, Charles. Le Personnage du naïf dans le théâtre comique du moven âae à Marivaux. Paris: Klincksieck, 1979.
Mélèse, Pierre. Répertoire analytique des documents con temporains d'information et de critique concernant le théâtre à Paris sous Louis XIV— 1659-1715. Paris: Librairie E. Droz, 1934. Mercure galant, mai, juin, juillet, août, 1672; octobre, 1677; anvier, 1678; février, 1684. Molière. OEuvres. Eds. Eugène Despois, Paul Mesnard, and Arthur Desfeuillons. 9 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1873- 1900. vol. 3.
Mongrédien, Georges. "Chronologie des troupes qui ont joué à l'Hôtel de Bourgogne (1598-1680)." Revue d'histoire du théâtre. I-II, (1953), pp. 160-74. "Hauteroche." Dictionnaire biographique des comédiens français du dix-septième siècle. Paris; CNRS, 1961. _____ . Les Grands comédiens du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Emile Chamontin, 1927. Mouhy, Charles de Fieux. Tablettes dramatiques, contenant 1'abrégé de l'histoire du théâtre françois. l'établissement des théâtres à Paris, un dictionnaire des pièces, et l'abreaé de l'histoire des auteurs et des acteurs. Paris: S. Jorry, 1752.
450 Moureau, François. Dufresny— Auteur dramatique f1657-17241 : Ouvrage publié avec le councours du Ministère des Universités et de l'Université de Haute Alsace. Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1979.
Parfaict, François and Claude. Histoire du théâtre françois. Paris: P.G. Le Mercier Imprimeur-Libraire, 1745. vols. 10-13. Petit de Julleville, L. Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française des origines à 1900. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1912. vols. 4 and 5.
Philipot, Emmanuel. La Vie et l'oeuvre littéraire de Noël Du Fail: Gentilhomme Breton. Paris: Librairie An cienne Honoré Champion, 1914. Puibusque, Adolphe. Histoire comparée des littératures espagnole et française: ouvrage qui a remporté le prix proposé par l'académie française, au concours extraordinaire de 1842. Paris: G.-A. Dentu, 1843. vol. 2.
Quérard, Joseph-Marie. "Hauteroche." La France littéraire ou dictionnaire bibliographique des savants, historiens et gens de lettres de la France, ainsi que des littérateurs étrangers qui ont écrit en français. plus particulièrement pendant les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1830. vol. 4.
Ricord, Alexandre. Les Fastes de la comédie française et portraits des plus célèbres acteurs qui se sont illustrés, et ceux qui s'illustrent encore sur notre scène. Paris: Hocquet, 1822. vol. 2. Rohde, Karolus. Noël le Breton. Sieur de Hauteroche. Theil I.. Dissertatio Inauguralis Philogica. OUAM. Consensu et auctoritate. Amplissimi Philosophnrum Qrdinis in Aima Litterarum Universitate Gryphiswaldensi Ad Summos in Philosophia Honores Rite Capessendos Die XXVII. Kunike, Gryphiswaldiae: Typis Frid. 1877.
Rothchild, James de. Ed. Les Continuateurs de Loret: Lettres en vers de La Gravette de Mavolas. Robinet. Boursault. Perdou de Subligny. Laurent et autres ri665- 1689)■ Eds. Baron James de Rothchild and Émile Picot. 3 vols. Paris: Rahir et C^“. 1899. Royer, Alphonse. Histoire universelle du théâtre. Paris: A. Franck, 1870. vol. 3.
451 Seibt, Robert. Mrs. Centlivre und ihre Quelle Hauteroche. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1910.
Scherer, Jacques. La Dramaturgie française en France. Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1950. Stone, George Winchester, Jr. and George M. Kahrl. David Garrick: A Critical Biography. Southern Illinois University Press, 1979.
Voos, Wilhelm. Hauteroche fNoel Le Breton) 1617 f?1-1707. Schauspieler und Lustspieldichter, Inaugural: Dissertation zur Erlanouna des Doktormûrde einer Hohen Philosophischen Fakultat der Universitat Kôln. Ohligs: Buchdruckerei Carl Bieth, 1927. Wildenstein, Daniel. Inventaires après décès d/artistes et de collectionneurs français du xviii“. conservés au Minutier central des notaires de la Seine, aux archives nationales. Paris: Les Beaux-arts, 1967. Wright, C.H.C. A History of French Literature. New York: Haskell House, 1969. Yarrow, P.J. A Literary History of France. 1600-1715. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967.
3. GENERAL WORKS
Abraham, Claude. On the Structure of Molière^s Comédies- Ballets. Paris: Biblio 17, 1984. Adam, Antoine. L'Aae classique f1624-16601. Paris: Arthaud, 1968. Alvarez-Detrell, Tamara and Michael Paulson. The Gambling Mania on and off the Stage in Pre-Revolutionary France. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982. Attinger, Gustave. L^Esprit de la commedia dell'arte dans le théâtre français. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1950. Aubrun, Charles V. La Comedia Espanola f1600-1680 1. Trans. Julio Lago Alonso. Madrid: Taurus, 1968. Bayard, Françoise. Le Monde des financiers au XVII* siècle. Paris: Flammarion, 1988. Bédier, Joseph. Littérature française, rev. ed. Paris Hachette, 1948.
452 Bénichou, Paul. Morales du grand siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Blue, William R. The Development of Imagery in Calderon's Comedias. South Carolina: Spanish Literature Publications Company, 1983. Bluche, François. Louis XIV. Paris: Fayard, 1986. Boursier, Nicole and David Trott, eds. L'Aae du théâtre en France. Edmonton: Academic Publishers, 1988. Bray, René. La Préciosité et les précieux. Paris: Albin Michel, 1945. Briggs, Robin. Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Caihava d'Estendoux, Jean-François. De l'Art de la comédie. Rpt. 2 vols. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970.
Calder, Andrew. Molière: The Theory and Practice of Comedy. London: Athlone Press, 1993. Calderon de la Barca, Perdo. Primera Parte de Comedias de Don Pedro Claderon de la Barca. Ed. A. Valbuena Briones. Madrid: Clasicos Hispanicos, 1974. vol. 1. Calderon de la Barca, Pedro. Select Plavs of Calderon. Ed. Norman Maccoll. New York: Macmillan, 1888. Carmody, Jim. Rereading Molière: Mise en scène from Antoine to Vitez. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Chevalley, Silvie, Album Théâtre classique: la vie théâtrale sous Louis XIII et Louis XIV. Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1970. Christout, Marie-Françoise. Le Ballet de Cour de Louis XIV. 1643-1672. Paris: Éditions A. et J. Picard, 1967. Cohn, Norman. Europe's Inner Demons. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
Conesa, Gabriel. Le Dialogue moliéresque: étude stylistique et dramturaique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983. Corneille, Pierre. Théâtre complet. Ed. Alain Niderst. 3 vols. Rouen: L'Université de Rouen, 1985.
453 Cowles, William L., Ed. The Adelphoe of Terence. Boston: Leach, Shewell, and Sanborn, 1896. Curtis, A. Ross. "Le Valet Crispin et le premier grand interprète du rôle au XVIIe siècle." Romanisch Forschunaen. vol. 78. Ease 2/3. 1966.
D'Amat, Roman. "Dennebault." Dictionnaire de biographie française, eds. J. Balteau, M. Barroux et M. Pré vost. Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1933. vol. 10.
Dancourt, Florent Carton. La Comédie de Dancourt 1685-1714. Paris: G. Charpentier, 1882. ______. Le Chevalier à la mode. Ed. Robert H. Crawshaw. Exeter: University of Exeter, 1980.
. Comédies. Ed. André Blanc. 2 vols. Paris: Nizet, 1985. ______. Les Bourgeoises de qualité ou la fête de village. Paris: M. Lecouvreur, 1808. Defaux, Gérard. Molière ou les métamorphoses du comique: de la comédie morale au triomphe de la folie. 2 ’^ ed. Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1983.
Dessert, Daniel. Argent, pouvoir et société au Grand Siècle. Paris: Fayard, 1984. Devlin, Judith. The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the NineteenthCentury. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
Donneau de Visé, Jean. Trois comédies. Paris: Librairie E. Droz, 1940. Duchêne, Roger. "La Veuve au XVII® siècle." Onze études sur l'image de la femme dans la littérature française du dix-septième siècle. Ed. Wolfgang Leiner. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978. pp. 221-42. DuFail, Noël. Contes et discours d/Eutranel. 2 vols. Rpt. D. Jouaust. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1875. Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 1980. Fairclough, H. Rushton, trans. Horace: Satires. Epistles and Ars Poetica. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.
454 Forestier, Georges. Molière. Paris: Bordas, 1990.
Froldi, Rinaldo. Il Teatro valenzano e 1'origine délia commedia barocca. Pisa: Editrice Tecnico Scientifica, 1962.
Furetère, Antoine. Le Roman bourgeois: Romanciers du XVII" siècle. Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1958. Gaines, James F. Social Structures in Molière's Theatre. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 1984.
Garapon, Robert. La Fantaisie verbale et le comique dans le théâtre français du moven âae à la fin du XVIIe siècle. Paris. 1957.
Garrick, David. The Lvina Valet. Microprint. London: J. Dicks, 1864-1872. vol. 6.
Gros, Étienne. Philippe Ouinault: Sa vie et son oeuvre. Paris: Edouard Champion. 1926. Hall, H. Gaston. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme: Context and Stagecraft. Durham: University of Durham, 1990. . Comedy in Context: Essays on Molière. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1984.
Herzel, Roger W. "The Decor of Molière's Stage: The Testimony of Brissart and Chauveau." p m t .a . 93, (1978), pp. 925-54.
Hollier, Denis et al, eds. A New History of French Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Howarth, William Driver, Ed. Comic Drama: The European Heritage. London: Methuen, 1978. Molière: A Playwright and His Audience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. , Ed. Molière: Stage and Studv; Essays in Honour of W.G. Moore. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1973. Jasinski, René. Histoire de la littérature française. 2 vols. Paris: Boivin, 1947. Jouvet, Louis. Molière et la comédie classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1965-
455 Kennard, Joseph S. Masks and Marionettes. New York: Macmillan Company, 193 5. Knutson, Harold. Molière: An Archetypal Approach. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. ______. The Triumph of Wit: Molière and Restoration Comedy. Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, 1988.
Lanson, Gustave. "Molière et la farce." Revue de Paris. 1901. vol. 3., pp. 129-53.
La Rochefoucauld. Maximes. Ed. Jacques Truchets. Paris: Gamier, 1967.
Lawrenson, Thomas Edward. The French Stage in the 17th Century: A Study of the Advent of the Italian Order. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954. Léman, Michel. Les Valets et les servantes dans le théâtre comique en France de 1610 à 1700. Ed. Jean Emelina. Cannes: C.E.L., 1975. Lemoine, Jean. Des OEillets: une grande comédienne, une maîtresse de Louis XIV. Paris: Perrin, n.d. [1938].
Lough, John. Seventeenth-Centurv French Drama: The Back ground . Oxford: Clarendon, 1979.
Marion, Marcel. Dictionnaire des Institutions de la France aux XVII" et XVIII** siècles. Paris: Picard, 1979.
Martineche, Ernest. La Comedia espagnole en France de Hardv à Racine. Paris: Hachette, 1900. Mélèse, Pierre. Le Théâtre et son public à Paris sous Louis XIV. Geneva: Droz, 1934. Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. OEuvres complètes de Molière. Ed. René Bray. 3 vols. Paris: Club du meilleur livre, 1954. ______. OEuvres complètes. Ed. Robert Jouanny. 2 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1962. . Les Femmes savantes. Ed. H. Gaston Hall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Mongrédien, Georges. Dailv Life in the French Theatre at the Time of Molière. Trans. Claire E. Engel. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969.
456 Mongrédien. La Vie privée de Molière. Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1950.
La Vie quotidienne des comédiens au temps de Molière. Paris: Hachette, 1966.
Montfleury, Antoine Jacob. La Femme iuae et partie. Paris; Delalain, 1774.
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