[In this essay, Maber traces the sexual humor throughout Molière's works, distinguishing playwright's use of bawdy, a broad, obvious form of comedy, from his use of subtle double entendre, which requires some complicity from the audience for the humor to be realized.]

Molière is one of the most accessible of all French writers, and arguably the most universal in his appeal; and yet at the same time he is one of the most elusive. From his own lifetime to the present day, he has been the subject of a great diversity of interpretations, of his own complex and multi-faceted personality as a man as much as his intentions as an author; and the same diversity of interpretation has of course always been brought to the performance of the plays.

The title of this paper is a deliberate echo of Eric Partridge's famous study of Shakespeare.¹ The parallel highlights the profound differences between the two dramatists rather than their similarity in this respect: compared with Shakespeare, one might feel that there is hardly enough in the French playwright to be worth investigating at all. However, the sense that one should look for something different in Molière can form a useful starting-point, and this paper offers some preliminary comments towards a fuller study of this aspect of his work.

In Molière's case the subject has never been free from controversy. Quite apart from the querelles occasioned by individual plays in his lifetime, it is clear that, before the end of the seventeenth century, judgments had polarized to a remarkable extent. On the one hand there are those who, led by Boileau, strongly emphasize the decency, honnêteté, and morality of his works, and regard any contrary details as unworthy exceptions to the true nature of his achievement. Thus Castaignet de Tanchoy could write in 1691:

C'est par lui …
Que l'acteur en joignant le geste à la parole
Du Théâtre Français nous a fait une école,
Banissant à jamais ces termes insolents
Qui blessaient la pudeur, l'oreille, le bon sens.

and Le Noble in 1700: ‘Ce sage correcteur de nos folies ne s'émancipait point à ces impertinentes équivoques qui ne font rire que des âmes basses: il entrait délicatement dans le naturel, sans chercher à désopiler la rate par ces fades mots à double entente’. The opposing point of view is of course expressed most memorably by Bossuet, in his Maximes et réflexions sur la Comédie and the Lettre au p. Caffaro of 9 May 1694:

Il faudra donc que nous passions pour honnêtes les impiétés et les infamies dont sont pleines les comédies de Molière … qui remplit encore à présent tous les théâtres des équivoques les plus grossières dont on ait jamais infecté les oreilles des chrétiens.²

At first sight it seems astonishing that such different reactions should have been aroused by the same works, but the diversity of response has persisted ever since. By and large, the Boileau view has tended to predominate, and even so perceptive a critic as W.G. Moore has been able to state that, ‘apart from the famous “le” in L'École des femmes, there is a (small) amount of “lavatory” humour in two plays, and some indecent gesture in Le Médecin malgré lui, but that is all—in the text’.³ On the other hand those who have resolutely sought out the ‘équivoques les plus grossières’ have not failed to find them.⁴

Molière's audiences would, of course, approach his plays from a position of familiarity with the existing and more obviously indecent tradition. The humour no longer needs to be so explicit to be effective; and, at the very least, audience expectations can supply the bawdy connotations of some plot elements that are mainstays of earlier and cruder treatments, and an alertness to pick up any nudges and winks in the text. Such a consideration can be important in evaluating the overall effect of a play.

In considering Molière's gauloiseries, one automatically thinks above all of L'École des femmes and some of the less substantial farces. These must indeed figure largely in any discussion, but the field can be extended much further. It is not practicable, in a brief overview such as this, to include anything resembling a full repertory of examples or to cover the whole of Molière's works. Most notably, perhaps, I have excluded Dom Juan and Amphitryon from this discussion. The relevance of the subject is obvious in both cases, but in their very different ways both are untypical in the role it plays. Indeed, this fact contributes importantly to their effect, and they need fuller treatment than is possible here. My intention is, rather, to suggest some generally valid lines of approach and illustrate them with a few characteristic examples.

In fact, a vigorous current of bawdy humour persists throughout Molière's oeuvre, from the earliest farces to Le Malade imaginaire. It goes without saying that it is not equally evident in all the plays, but one cannot trace any neat pattern of evolution in Molière's use of it, except perhaps for a greater subtlety after the earliest works. As so often, one must be very wary of any attempt to impose a preconceived pattern on Molière. One might perhaps have expected a steady diminution of this element as Molière's career progressed, but this is not so; alternatively, one might look for it to be increasingly confined to the short farces, and progressively eliminated from the major plays, but again this is not borne out by the texts themselves.

The public clearly never lost its taste for this type of humour, and it is equally clear that it always went down well at court; the vital proviso always being that it should not overstep the bounds of the constantly evolving principle of bienséance, which could be highly elastic, and always remained essentially a question of feeling rather than definition. It is interesting to note that the play in which this kind of humour is least evident of all, Le Misanthrope, was very slow to appeal to the public until Molière coupled it in a double bill with his next play, the hilarious medical farce of Le Médecin malgré lui, in which much more earthy humour plays a conspicuous part.

The bawdy is best seen as always forming one element in Molière's comic repertoire, which he draws on and uses as required throughout his career. Rather than approaching it chronologically or by the type of play in which it appears, it is most fruitful to study the different forms that it takes in the broad context of Molière's oeuvre as a whole.

Molière's use of bawdy humour can be divided into three broad categories. Firstly, as has been mentioned, some plays have plots which, by their very nature, revolve around themes which are staples of this type of humour. A second category covers shorter, but none the less explicit passages involving individual jokes, references, and obvious gestures. The third category, the least obvious but the most interesting, includes all the less explicit aspects of such humour, including much that could be considered optional, to be brought out or not in individual performances: a whole substratum of double entendres that might well pass unperceived, gestures that could be innocent or suggestive, opportunities for an actor to manufacture a laugh through facial expression or tone of voice, and so on. These three categories constantly overlap and interact and it is impossible to separate them out too rigidly, but they form a useful basis for discussion.

In the first category, inevitably, we are dealing with the two great comic themes of cuckoldry and doctors: neither of them automatically hilarious today, but both well-established and infallible triggers of earthy laughter for Molière's contemporaries. The joke of cuckoldry, of course, is at the expense of masculine inadequacy and the secret fears of the would-be dominant male, and this humour is timeless: although horns and foreheads have lost their suggestiveness, an easy laugh can still be raised by any reference to men's notorious sensitivity about little things.

Thus the joke in the name of Monsieur de la Souche resides not only in the double sense of ‘blockhead’ (as the audience takes it) and the evocation of a mighty dynasty (as Arnolphe intends); but also, following on from the generative associations of the latter, the phallic imagery is clearly intended to be appreciated by the audience: when Chryslade calls the ‘souche’ ‘un vieux tronc pourri’, the forty-two-year-old Arnolphe is not at all pleased.

The same problem is even more acute for the fifty-three-year-old Sganarelle in Le Mariage forcé. For all his lubricious anticipation of marital pleasure, he shows a comic need for reassurance in the first scene. He protests too much of his manly vigour: ‘Ne parlons point de l'âge que je puis avoir; mais regardons seulement les choses. Y a-t-il homme de trente ans qui paraisse plus frais et plus vigoureux que vous me voyez? N'ai-je pas tous les mouvements de mon corps aussi bons que jamais … ?’—a speech which is followed immediately by a less optimistic view of the hands-on approach that might be required of his wife: ‘Outre la joie que j'aurai de posséder une belle femme, qui me fera mille caresses, qui me dorlotera et me viendra frotter lorsque je serai las …’.

The theme extends even beyond the many plays revolving around ‘le cocuage’, potential or ‘imaginaire’: the mature man who has married or is pursuing a much younger woman is a constantly recurring character in Molière's plays, and includes not only Arnolphe and the Sganarelle of Le Mariage forcé, but also Orgon, George Dandin, Harpagon, Monsieur Jourdain, and Argan.⁵ This can be seen in many ways: as part of both the legacy of farce tradition and the heritage of literary comedy, as a reflection of the resources of Molière's troupe and his own age as leading actor, and also no doubt as an aspect of familiar contemporary reality; but there is always latent the comic frisson of inappropriate desires and sexual incompatibility.

The comic counterpart of male inadequacy is female sexuality, which, as we shall see, provides an equally fertile source of double entendres. One immediately thinks, of course, of characters such as Agnès and the ladies of Les Femmes savantes, and Lucinde of L'Amour médecin; but once again, the theme is persistently to be felt just below the surface in very many of the plays.⁶

When we turn to the doctors, they provide an irresistible source of laughter in their self-conceit, their ludicrous jargon, and the Galgenhumor of their mortality rate. Their presence is inevitably associated with bodily functions of all kinds: as Lisette says in L'Amour médecin, ‘Il faut s'éloigner. Un médecin a cent choses à demander qu'il n'est pas honnête qu'un homme entende’ (III, 6); but, invariably, underlying it all is the bedpan humour of the clystères and lavements, and the grotesque eroticism of the seringue. The farcical image of M. de Pourceaugnac running round the stage pursued by doctors brandishing seringues, while he attempts to shield his backside first with a hat, and then with a chair (I, 11) remains in the mind whenever doctors appear on Molière's stage.

This paper is not primarily concerned with the examples of direct medical satire, nor with the purely scatological humour, which in any case has a relatively limited range. However, such humour does very frequently overlap into the erotic. The world of the doctors stands in direct opposition to healthy normality in every way: and with this healthy normality commonly represented by a pair of young lovers, it is no surprise to find a strong sexual element in the ridicule of medical men.

The supreme example is the last, Le Malade imaginaire, where it is assimilated throughout to the comic theme of male inadequacy. For Argan, stimulation has been displaced from women to doctors, and there is an almost voluptuous dedication in his exhaustive programme of colonic irrigation (‘un petit clystère insinuatif, préparatif et remollient, pour amollir, humecter et rafraîchir les entrailles de monsieur’). There are constant oblique allusions to his sexual inadequacy. He is no longer able to contemplate fathering a child unless a doctor supports his efforts: ‘Tout le regret que j'aurai, si je meurs, mamie, c'est de n'avoir point un enfant de vous. Monsieur Purgon m'avait dit qu'il m'en ferait faire un’ (I, 7). Béline hints at this inadequacy in her ‘oraison funèbre’: ‘Quelle perte est-ce que la sienne? et de quoi servait-il sur la terre?’ (III, 12). Indeed, if one looks at how Béline addresses her husband throughout the play, the suggestion that he is a less than dynamic partner is more than clear in the transparent ambiguities of her hypocritical endearments: she habitually calls Argan ‘mon fils’ or ‘mon petit fils’, alternating this with ‘mon pauvre mari’ and ‘mon pauvre petit mari’.

These running themes are very often explicitly presented in the opening couple of scenes of the plays. For example, L'École des femmes and Le Mariage forcé begin with two middle-aged men talking about women, marriage, and sex, while Les Femmes savantes begins with two attractive young women talking about men, marriage, and sex. In the second scene of L'Amour médecin we are told what the languishing Lucinde really needs, as if we had not already guessed: Lisette shouts nine times the magic words ‘un mari’; while the opening monologue of Le Malade imaginaire establishes Argan's greatest source of pleasure firmly in his bowels, as he calculates the staggering number of médecines and lavements that he has had in the past two months. In this way Molière firmly establishes the comic tone for the audience.⁷ Even though, in some cases, more serious elements undoubtedly emerge later, they are prevented from unbalancing the overall comic effect.

When we turn to individual gauloiseries and obviously suggestive jokes or gestures the most notorious examples are in L'École des femmes, although in general they tend, as one would expect, to be found most frequently in the lighter pieces. Molière uses them with some prudence, enlivening a scene with an incidental laugh without allowing the cruder types of humour to become predominant. A typical example is the comic équivoque in Sganarelle's conversation with a doctor in L'Amour médecin:

M. Tomès: Nous avons vu suffisamment la malade, et sans doute qu'il y a beaucoup d'impuretés en elle.

Sganarelle: Ma fille est impure?

M. Tomès: Je veux dire qu'il y a beaucoup d'impuretés dans son corps, quantité d'humeurs corrompues.

Sganarelle: Ah! je vous entends.

(II, 2)

Equally typical is the incidental joke in La Comtesse d'Escarbagnas, when the Countess hears the syllable vit in the young Count's Latin, and cries ‘je vous prie de lui enseigner du latin plus honnête que celui-là’: and the comedy of ‘les syllabes sales’ is of course to figure much more largely in Les Femmes savantes.⁸

As regards physical gesture, there is a running joke in Le Médecin malgré lui of Sganarelle's attempts to get his hands on Jacqueline's breasts which is pursued at some length (II, 2, 3); but most commonly the possibilities for bawdy physical gestures are left open to the actors to exploit as they wish in different interpretations of the plays. For example, there could be great variation in how far the physical joke is taken in Scene 11 of Les Précieuses ridicules:

Jodelet: … j'y fus blessé à la jambe d'un coup de grenade, dont je porte encore les marques. Tâtez un peu, de grâce; vous sentirez quelque coup, c'était là.

Cathos: Il est vrai que la cicatrice est grande.

It all depends, of course, on where exactly on the leg Cathos places her hand to ‘tâter’, but the implication is clear (‘Is that a gun in your pocket …’); and it is followed up by Mascarille's startling threat to go even further, and Magdelon's hasty reply:

Mascarille, mettant la main sur le bouton de son haut-de-chausses: Je vais vous montrer une furieuse plaie.

Magdelon: Il n'est pas nécessaire: nous le croyons sans y regarder.

Mascarille: Ce sont des marques honorables, qui font voir ce qu'on est.

Similarly, in Le Malade imaginaire, the ludicrous inadequacy of Thomas Diafoirus as a prospective husband for Angélique could be neatly indicated if a stage direction were acted out in an appropriately suggestive way. The direction ‘Thomas Diafoirus, tirant de sa poche une grande thèse roulée, qu'il présente à Angélique’ prompts the young woman's reply: ‘Monsieur, c'est pour moi un meuble inutile …’; and when he then proceeds to discourse with pedantic explicitness on the excellences of his reproductive organs, his effect has been fatally undermined in advance (II, 5).

It is particularly interesting to see how, in more substantial plays, such elements are integrated into character portrayal. Harpagon's displaced eroticism for his cassette is never more clearly brought out than in the sustained quiproquo of his interrogation of Valère (‘Hé! dis-moi donc un peu; tu n'y as point touché? …’, V,3); and, while Tartuffe's verbal and physical advances to Elmire speak for themselves, the undertones and overtones of all the plot elements in Tartuffe have still not been fully explored.⁹

In L'École des femmes, in particular, the jokes are not gratuitous. The bawdy double meaning in the tarte à la crème, and Agnès's innocent words about her puces or her petit chat, reinforce the contrast between her innocence and Arnolphe's pose of worldly knowingness, while sounding warning notes as to the future course of the action in hinting at a latent sexuality in the girl that is about to emerge. It is taken a stage further in the sequel to Agnès's puces:

Arnolphe: Ah! vous aurez dans peu quelqu'un pour
          les chasser.
Agnès: Vous me ferez plaisir.
Arnolphe:                                                            Je le puis bien penser.

(I, 3, vv. 237-38)

Here, the audience is apparently in complicity with Arnolphe in perceiving the crude équivoque in Agnès's words, and directly mocking her innocence with the equally crude reply which, inevitably, she does not understand. Yet what is actually transmitted is the unhealthiness of Arnolphe's seedy obsession and, in spite of our complicity in the joke at Agnès's expense, it is Arnolphe who is diminished.

It is a typical aspect of Molière's technique—and useful when defending himself—that a joke can often work at several different levels at once. Thus les enfants par l'oreille (I, 1, vv.161-4; V, 4, v.1493) can be seen as an entirely innocent piece of naïveté; as a Rabelaisian echo (of the birth of Gargantua) maintaining an important theme running throughout the play; as irreligious satire on the Annunciation; or as a bawdy double-entendre at Agnès's expense, with Arnolphe and the audience sharing the knowledge that, in such a context, ‘oreille’ could stand for another part of the body entirely. The audience would certainly be familiar with this, since such an awareness is assumed in a far more explicit earlier use of the word in Dépit amoureux:

Marinette: … Quelque autre, sous espoir de
          matrimonion,
Aurait ouvert l'oreille à la tentation;
Mais moi, nescio vos.
Lucile:                                                            Que tu dis de folies,
Et choisis mal ton temps pour de telles saillies!

(II, 4, vv.625-28)

The same substitution is exploited again, in a more ambiguous form, in Les Femmes savantes, III, 1, v.717.¹⁰ Such an example brings us to the final category, where the bawdy humour is relatively less explicit, or may be brought out optionally if desired.

It is not at all surprising that Molière was capable, in performing his plays, of changing the emphasis according to the situation and responding to his audience: the most celebrated anecdote is of his acting Le Misanthrope in such a way as to make Montausier be delighted to have been thought the model for Alceste.¹¹ In another well-known anecdote Boursault claimed that, in Le Malade imaginaire, III, 4, Béralde originally said to the ‘apothicaire’ Monsieur Fleurant (‘une seringue à la main’): ‘Allez, Monsieur, allez, on voit bien que vous avez coûtume de ne parler qu'à des culs’; but the audience reacted with hostility until it was changed at the second performance to: ‘Allez, Monsieur, allez, on voit bien que vous n'avez pas coûtume de parler à des visages’.¹²

The anecdote may or may not be true—it certainly seems rather late in his career for Molière to have written Boursault's first version, unless it represents a variant improvised by the actor—but the final form of the joke is an excellent example of Molière's developed art of suggestion without crude explicitness, and his skill in playing on audience complicity.

It is particularly effective when the audience goes beyond complicity to active participation in completing the joke. One might call this the ‘dot dot dot’ technique. There is a distinctly unsubtle example in Le Mariage forcé, when Sganarelle becomes overexcited at the thought of the delights of marriage to Dorimène, immediately before the cold shower of realization that her ideas are rather different:

Vous allez être à moi depuis la tête jusqu'aux pieds, et je serai maître de tout: de vos petits yeux éveillés, de votre petit nez fripon, de vos lèvres appétissantes, de vos oreilles amoureuses, de votre petit menton joli, de vos petits têtons rondelets, de votre … ; enfin, toute votre personne sera à ma discretion, et je serai à même pour vous caresser comme je voudrai.

A later example in Les Femmes savantes is much less explicit. As Chrysale tries to find out what unforgivable offence Martine has committed, his guesses increase in seriousness: has she broken something expensive? allowed valuables to be stolen? been caught out ‘à n'être pas fidèle’? No, it is much worse than all of these; and then Chrysale suddenly has an idea: ‘Comment! diantre, friponne! Euh? a-t-elle commis …’, before being immediately interrupted by Philaminte (vv. 445-62). A sexually suggestive interpretation is not, of course, essential here, but depends on the actors and the audience. It is, though, at the very least a possibility, and fits very well with the theme of veiled erotic allusion that runs through the play.

It will have become clear from a number of examples quoted that there is, potentially, a wide range of innuendo in the plays that can be brought out with enough determination and ingenuity. We all know how the most apparently harmless remark can be given a suggestive double meaning by facial expression or tone of voice, or a hearer's response to it. A witty writer can go further, and cause a genuinely innocuous word to be laden with obscene suggestiveness—the ne plus ultra of this technique being probably the ‘china’ scene in Wycherley's The Country Wife (IV, 3).

In Molière the most widely discussed cases are in L'École des femmes, but these are far from being the only examples. If an obscene double meaning is so readily perceived in the idea of une tarte à la crème being inserted into a young woman's corbillon, it is easy to imagine the suggestiveness of an exchange such as Tartuffe's attempt to press a jus on Elmire in Act IV, Scene 5—particularly in a scene so full of sexual innuendo, linguistic ambiguities, and veiled meanings of all kinds (as in Elmire's third reply below). Elmire's cough has acted like a Geiger counter in registering the intimacy of Tartuffe's advances, and in lines 1495-1508 it reaches a climax:

Tartuffe: … Contentez mon désir, et n'ayez
          point d'effroi:
Je vous réponds de tout, et prends le mal sur moi.
Vous toussez fort, Madame
Elmire:                                                                      Oui, je suis au supplice.
Tartuffe: Vous plaît-il un morceau de ce jus de
          réglisse?
Elmire: C'est un rhume obstiné, sans doute; et je
          vois bien
Que tous les jus du monde ici ne feront rien.
Tartuffe: Cela certes est fâcheux.
Elmire:                                                            Oui, plus qu'on ne peut dire.

It is worth noting that it is Elmire's own comment ‘tous les jus du monde ici ne feront rien’ that particularly draws attention to the suggestiveness. Other such examples can readily be found, and reference has already been made to J.-H. Périvier's remarkable analysis of the erotically-charged language of the scene of Trissotin's sonnet in Les Femmes savantes.

One has to be aware, of course, of the danger of becoming like the marquise Araminte in the Critique (‘Celle-ci pousse l'affaire plus avant qu'aucune, et l'habileté de son scrupule découvre des saletés où jamais personne n'en avait vu’, Scene 5). But these very lines show that Molière was aware that people were responding to his play(s) in this way; and even if one takes his disingenuous defence completely at face value, it is interesting to consider what contemporary Aramintes might have found.

Indeed, one might well wonder why, if there was genuinely such a persistent element of verbal and visual bawdy in Molière's work, his enemies do not make more explicit reference to what would be such an obvious point of attack. Molière must have been protected to some extent by his skill in the Critique de l'École des femmes, where he cleverly combines defence and pre-emptive strike in Uranie's mock-innocent teasing of the scandalised Climène in Scene 3, and Uranie and Dorante in Scene 6: in assiduously hunting out obscene double-entendres, the critic runs a serious risk of appearing as a louche obsessive, finding obscenity where none was intended.

In fact, the techniques employed by Molière's contemporary critics are interesting and revealing. When churchmen such as Bourdaloue and above all Bossuet anathematize Molière as a corrupting influence it is in relatively general terms, the assumption clearly being that their hearers or readers will know precisely what is being alluded to, and understand just what these ‘sales équivoques’ are. The technique adopted by more worldly critics, on the other hand, is best displayed in the Querelle de l'École des femmes. They draw attention to the most controversial passages, but—with the exception of the ubiquitous le—they tend to do so in a coded way, finding some other, and relatively harmless, reasons for criticizing the phrases.¹³ Once again, the assumption is that the audience will already be well aware of the true objections to the words.

This discussion has been no more than a brief survey of a very rich field of enquiry, but the conclusions are evident. Despite Boileau's hopes, Molière never did devote himself solely to being ‘l'auteur du Misanthrope’. The element of bawdy humour in the plays reflects Molière's astute knowledge of his public, and unquestionably contributed to the success of his most popular works. Its role in individual plays is, with some notable exceptions, a relatively minor one; but equally, a distorted perception is gained of his work if it is disregarded entirely. The persistence and skilful exploitation of this most universal type of humour plays a not inconsiderable part in the broad humanity and, one might argue, the profound moral healthiness of Molière's work.

Notes

1. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy: a Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary, new edition, revised (London: Routledge and Paul, 1955). See also the comments of W.D. Howarth, Molière: a Playwright and his Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 61.

2. Castaignet de Tanchoy, Épître à M. de Beauchamp (Avignon: Michel Chastel, 1691), p. 5; Eustache Le Noble, L'École du monde (Paris: Martin Juvenel, 1700), III, 32-33; Bossuet, ‘Lettre au p. Caffaro’, Correspondance, edited by Urbain and Levesque, VI (Paris: Hachette, 1912), 259; all quoted in G. Mongrédien, Recueil des textes et des documents du XVIIe siècle relatifs à Molière (2 vols, Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1965), pp. 651, 741, 676 respectively.

3. W.G. Moore, Molière: a New Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 100.

4. A remarkable example is Jacques-Henri Périvier, ‘Equivoques moliéresques: le sonnet de Trissotin’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 38 (1973), 543-54, which elucidates ‘une longue équivoque érotique’ running throughout Act III, scenes 1-2 of Les Femmes savantes.

5. See Howarth, Molière, pp. 102-03.

6. Other examples from Le Médecin volant and Le Médecin malgré lui are noted in David Shaw, ‘Molière and the art of recycling’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 15 (1993), 165-80 (p. 168).

7. For a similar approach to the initial definition of individual characters see Noël Peacock, ‘Opening lines in Molière’, SCFS, 11 (1989), 94-105.

8. See the note in Molière, Œuvres complètes, edited by Georges Couton (2 vols, Paris: Gallimard, 1971), II, 1461-62, and the discussion by H. Gaston Hall in Comedy in Context: Essays on Molière (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), p. 79.

9. For example, see Couton's long notes on the erotic suggestiveness of the discipline, and on the suggestive side to relations between a confessor and his female penitent: Œuvres, I, 1353-54, 1365-66.

10. J.-H. Périvier comments here that ‘l'oreille, comme en d'autres pièces de Molière, est ici la métaphore du sexe’ (‘Équivoques’, p. 547). The same point is made in Clive Scott, The Riches of Rhyme (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 199.

11. The story is told in Dangeau's Journal and by Saint-Simon, both quoted in Mongrédien, Recueil, pp. 260-61.

12. Boursault, Lettres nouvelles (Paris: Vve Th. Girard, 1709), I, 119-20, quoted in Mongrédien, Recueil, p. 433; and see Howarth's commentary, Molière, pp. 60-61. The printed version differs slightly from Boursault's version of the revised line.

13. A good example is found in Scene 8 of Boursault's Le Portrait du peintre, in Molière, Œuvres, ed. Couton, I, 1061-67.