SOURCE: “Two Comedy-Ballets of Salon Life,” in The Triumph of Ballet in Molière's Theatre, The Edwin Mellon Press, 1992, pp. 271-97.

[In this excerpt, McBride focuses on La Comtesse d'Escarbagnas and, particularly, on The Learned Ladies as grand aesthetic spectacles. McBride argues that the sheer theatricality of The Learned Ladies becomes more important than either its overt themes or its satire when the play is staged.]

(1)

La Comtesse d'Escarbagnas was composed as part of Le Ballet des ballets to celebrate the marriage of Monsieur, widower of Henriette d'Angleterre, with Elisabeth-Charlotte de Bavière, known as La Palatine. The ballet was performed on 2 December 1671 at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, with Charpentier in charge of the music and Beauchamps of the ballets. The ballet's livret informs us that ‘Sa Majesté a choisi tous les plus beaux endroits des divertissements qui se sont représentés devant Elle depuis plusieurs années, et ordonné à Molière de faire une comédie qui enchaînât tous ces beaux morceaux de musique et de danse, afin que ce pompeux et magnifique assemblage de tant de choses différentes puisse fournir le plus beau spectacle qui se soit encore vu pour la salle et le théâtre de Saint-Germain-en-Laye’.¹ The king also requested Molière to write a pastoral for the occasion, which is unfortunately not extant.

From the livret there is no precise indication of the respective places occupied by the comedy and the pastoral in the overall spectacle, but the general economy of Le Ballet is reasonably clear. The prologue comprises the opening intermezzo of Les Amants magnifiques with the addition of songs and dances from Psyché. Venus descends from heaven to pose ‘les fondements de toute la comédie et des divertissements’, and an overture is played by violins.² There follow the first seven scenes of La Comtesse, then the pastoral play in five Acts, which Le Vicomte announces before being interrupted peremptorily by La Comtesse: ‘… cette comédie n'a été faite que pour lier ensemble les différents morceaux de musique, et de danse, dont on a voulu composer ce divertissement …’ (Sc. 7). The characters and intermezzos of the pastoral are known from the livret. There were seven characters: a nymph, played by Mlle de Brie, a shepherdess disguised as a man (Mlle Molière), a second shepherdess (Mlle Molière), two shepherds (Baron and La Thorillière), and another shepherd and a Turk, both played by Molière.³ The intermezzos of the pastoral are as follows: I. La Plainte, the first intermezzo of Psyché; II. The ceremony in which the dancing and singing magicians from the second scene of the Pastorale comique implore Venus to create for them a miracle of grace and pulchritude, a scene which itself comprises the third entry of Le Ballet des Muses (1666); III. The fight between the retainers of Cupid and Bacchus, which makes up the fourth intermezzo of George Dandin; IV. A female Egyptian dances and sings and is followed by the entry of twelve dancers also costumed as Egyptians, from scene 15 of the Pastorale comique and the third entry of Le Ballet des Muses, together with the entry of Vulcan, Cyclops and fairies which comprised the second intermezzo of Psyché; V. The turquerie from Act IV of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme; VI. The dance of the Italians from the final ballet of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and the entry of the Spaniards from the same ballet. The last two scenes from La Comtesse are now inserted, with the heroine settling for the extremely roturier Tibaudier in consolation for the loss of the aristocratic Le Vicomte, who however solaces his disappointed admirer by providing the seventh and final intermezzo, the grandiose finale from Psyché. The troupes of Apollo, Bacchus, Mome and Mars enter singly, then join in a crescendo of singing and music to the accompaniment of dancing to celebrate the marriage of Cupid and Psyché.

La Comtesse takes its place within the composite spectacle of Le Ballet des ballets following the opening intermezzos from Les Amants magnifiques and the songs and dances from the prologue of Psyché. Set thus in its original context it would have appeared as a series of tableaux both succeeding, and preparatory to, elements of ballet and music. (After four performances at court it was given at the Palais-Royal in July 1672 in conjunction with Le Médecin malgré lui for which new intermezzos had been provided with music by Charpentier to replace the costly outlay for the ballet.)⁴ Like so many of Molière's scenes, the comedy is both sufficiently self-contained to be performed in its own right and fluid to merge into the overall entertainment. This dual feature is all the more interesting since the comedy presents no obvious connexion with the preceding entries or the pastoral play and ballet to which it gives way in scenes 7 and 9. Within the economy of Le Ballet des ballets comedy and ballet seem to be, if not interchangeable, at least complementary aspects of the same spectacle. At the outset of La Comtesse Julie announces the entertainment to be offered by Le Vicomte who explains its general connective function to the company before its insertion into the play at the end of scene seven. In the comedy, plot, character and dialogue are sufficiently supple to interact freely with elements of ballet and music and to merge with them into a larger spectacle. Indeed, the theme of comedy as part of the total spectacle is alluded to at the beginning by the aristocratic co-producers of La Comtesse, Julie and Le Vicomte. As a result of a familial feud, Le Vicomte is obliged to pursue his courtship of her in La Comtesse's salon where his attendance is legitimized by his pose (at Julie's request) as his hostess's ardent suitor. When he complains, not unreasonably, about the gratuitous charade he is obliged to sustain, Julie's explanation indicates the different levels at which comedy is to be played out: the reason for it is ‘Pour mieux cacher notre amour; et puis, à vous dire la vérité, cette feinte dont vous parlez m'est une comédie fort agréable, et je ne sais si celle que vous donnez aujourd'hui [that is the pastoral to be provided by Le Vicomte after scene seven] me divertira davantage’ (Sc.1). A higher layer of comedy is to be superimposed as Julie describes its aristocratic dupe: ‘Notre comtesse d'Escarbagnas, avec son perpétuel entêtement de qualité, est un aussi bon personnage qu'on en puisse mettre sur le théâtre’ (Sc.1). The subject of the countess's particular comedy is the same as that of the general spectacle which incorporates it, that is, escapism into a world of fantasy, but at a deeper level since she is at pains to substitute her own private world of illusion for the more shallow one of divertissement. Her obsession is with escape from the tedium of the provincial salon life into the heady atmosphere of the court at Paris and her consequent desire to transmute the former into the latter as Julie intimates: ‘Le petit voyage qu'elle a fait à Paris l'a ramenée dans Angoulême plus achevée qu'elle n'était. L'approche de l'air de la cour a donné à son ridicule de nouveaux agréments, et sa sottise tous les jours ne fait que croître et embellir’ (Sc.1).

The comedy-ballet to which La Comtesse gives rise offers no truer a picture of provincial life than does Le Bourgeois gentilhomme of the Parisian middle-class. The raison d'être of both characters is their mystical infatuation with ‘l'air de la cour’ where taste, fitness and form reign supreme in all things and reality and its blemishes are concealed by art. They aspire to that glittering world of appearances described by La Bruyère as ‘un pays où les joies sont visibles, mais fausses, et les chagrins cachés, mais réels’⁵. La Comtesse scarcely needs prompting from Julie to the effect that ‘On sait bien mieux vivre à Paris’ but rises ecstatically to the stimulus of the capital's aesthetic superiority over the provinces: ‘On y voit venir du beau monde, qui ne marchande point à vous rendre tous les respects qu'on saurait souhaiter. On ne s'en lève pas, si l'on veut, de dessus son siège; et lorsque l'on veut voir la revue, ou le grand ballet de Psyché, on est servie à point nommé’ (Sc.2). The court is the place where self-image is normally recognized and gratified and where the most insignificant detail acquires the elegance and symmetry of an art-form of which the quintessential expression is ballet. The countess's visit to Paris therefore fulfils the same function as the turquerie for Monsieur Jourdain. The rarer air of both court and ceremonial confirms the characters in their innate sense of superiority over their environments by purifying them from all the dross and materialism attaching to their respective provincial milieu and bourgeois origins, although it should be borne in mind that the cathartic effect is permanent in the case of Monsieur Jourdain and temporary in the countess's, since she marries Monsieur Tibaudier, conseiller, at the end. Just as Jourdain in his pre-mamamouchi state suffers the contumely of being reminded by forces hostile to his illusions of his social pedigree (‘Et votre père n'était-il pas marchand aussi bien que le mien?’ asks his wife inopportunely, III, 12), so too the countess at each moment is denied her rightful privileges and is treated with uncouth earthiness by provincial nobles, bourgeois and servants alike. Unaesthetic mediocrity materializes around her on all sides: servants are ignorant of the function of an antichamber, they gawp at her in provincial astonishment, their coarse provincial hands clutch at her delicate head-gear and she is aghast at the prospect of having to provide seats for the assembled company by herself. She seeks to escape from the rising tide of provincialism by clinging tenaciously to courtly ways in front of her servant as illustrated in her ceremonial ballet with Julie in which the latter mockingly keeps pace with each provincial step:

La Comtesse: Otez-vous de là, insolente; je vous renvoyerai chez vos parents. Apportez-moi un verre d'eau. (Faisant des cérémonies pour s'asseoir.) Madame.

Julie: Madame.

La Comtesse: Ah! Madame.

Julie: Ah! Madame.

La Comtesse: Mon Dieu! Madame.

Julie: Mon Dieu! Madame.

La Comtesse: Oh! Madame.

Julie: Oh! Madame.

La Comtesse: Eh! Madame.

Julie: Eh! Madame.

La Comtesse: Hé! allons donc, Madame.

Julie: Hé! allons donc, Madame.

La Comtesse: Je suis chez moi, Madame, nous sommes demeurées d'accord de cela. Me prenez-vous pour une provinciale, Madame?

Julie: Dieu m'en garde, Madame!

(Sc.2)

At court she seems to have been the cynosure—pace Mlle de Chartres—for that most aesthetic expression of courtly love, gallantry, as she claims to Julie:

Vous pouvez bien croire, Madame, que tout ce qui s'appelle les galants de la cour n'a pas manqué de venir à ma porte, et de m'en conter; et je garde dans ma cassette de leurs billets, qui peuvent faire voir quelles propositions j'ai refusées; il n'est pas nécessaire de vous dire leurs noms; on sait ce qu'on veut dire par les galants de la cour.

(Sc.2)

In Angoulême she is still the centre of court life as the presence of her two provincial courtiers, MM Tibaudier and Harpin attests, but it is a court shorn of Parisian lustre as Julie insinuates at each opportunity. The countess is invincibly attached to the ways of her court and her courtiers—their lowly social origins notwithstanding—since for her they ‘servent au moins à remplir les vuides de la galanterie, à faire nombre de soupirants’. (Sc.2). There is nothing courtly or balletic about Monsieur Tibaudier's declaration of his passion for her. His billet doux expresses it with an earthiness which no doubt would have been commendable to Alceste. The declaration is centred around his gift of pears to the countess and is larded with creaking puns as he warms to his theme, namely that ‘je suis aussi franc chrétien que les poires’ (which are ‘des poires de bon-chrétien’ i.e. large pears). The pears he gives to her are unlike the ‘poires d'angoisse’ (astringent pears) which her cruelty obliges him to swallow daily (Sc.4). His poem in the salon (Sc.5) is even more physical, as he enjoins her to strip away her tigress's skin ‘Qui couvre vos appas la nuit comme le jour’. On meeting her son he opines that ‘On ne peut aimer le tronc qu'on n'aime aussi les branches’ (Sc.7). (The countess's language is no more elevated in tone or substance and abounds in what R. Jouanny terms ‘la verdeur des mots fermiers’;⁶ her lack of any sense of the fitness of things is only equalled by her hyperaesthesia in matters of courtly convention, witness her reaction to Le Vicomte as he ventures to describe the form of the salon entertainment: ‘Mon Dieu! voyons l'affaire: on a assez d'esprit pour comprendre les choses’ (Sc.7).) Le Vicomte, although an aristocrat from the provinces, embodies all the taste and sense of decorum she lacks in common with her roturier suitor. His poem to Julie (Sc.1) complains, as do Monsieur Tibaudier's verses to the countess, of the cruel treatment he receives at the hands of his mistress. But unlike the conseiller, Le Vicomte observes poetic and social propriety by distancing himself from his passion for Julie, which is mediated through the conventional précieux imagery. She becomes the ‘Iris’ who imposes on her suitor her rigorous ‘lois’ thus occasioning his ‘tourments’. His ‘suffering’ for her charms and pleasure is no more that a précieux conceit as the final pointe intimates: ‘Je meurs et de la feinte et de la vérité’.⁷

The ballet of the provincial court is inopportunely interrupted by the apparition of Monsieur Harpin, the tax-collector who evinces, with Madame Jourdain and Alceste, a similar determination to disrupt the aristocratic spectacle (Sc.8). His intrusion onto the stage is even more functional and unaesthetic than that of Madame Jourdain. She merely interrupts her husband's preparations for the ballet whereas Harpin crashes onto the stage in the middle of a comedy-ballet within a comedy-ballet. To the countess's complaint that he demonstrates scant respect for the canons of art he ripostes tellingly by displacing the locus of the comedy from the stage to the audience and thus makes explicit the pleasure anticipated by Julie in the opening scene at the prospect of viewing the entire gamut of her comic excesses: ‘Eh têtebleu! la véritable comédie qui se fait ici, c'est celle que vous jouez’ (Sc.8). He is able to achieve his revenge on the salon hostess and her company in a way of which Alceste had dreamed but could never execute, by withdrawing from her the material basis on which the comedy-ballet of her pretensions is founded:⁸ ‘… et moi je ne suis point d'humeur à payer les violons pour faire danser les autres’, as well as by steadfastly resisting all blandishments to rejoin it: ‘Voilà ma scène faite, voilà mon rôle joué’. His intrusion and exit give a bitter-sweet edge to the remainder of Le Vicomte's divertissement. With Julie and himself finding that there is now no parental obstacle to their marriage, he can pair off Monsieur Tibaudier and La Comtesse in true balletic style while offering what remains of the entertainment to his hostess as an aesthetic palliative for marriage to the prosaic Monsieur Tibaudier.

(2)

It is perhaps true to state that no other ‘grande comédie’ by Molière has given rise to sharper critical division than has Les Femmes savantes. A great gulf is seemingly fixed between those critics who rank it among Molière's masterpieces and those who dismiss it as being arid and academic in subject-matter and style. Both critical traditions can claim a long history stretching as far back as the earliest audience reactions to the play. On one hand, Grimarest echoes a commonly held view among Molière's contemporaries when he reports that ‘ce divertissement, disait-on, était sec, peu intéressant, et ne convenait qu'à des gens de lecture’.⁹ The Préface of 1682 affirms on the other that Les Femmes savantes, together with Le Misanthrope and Le Tartuffe, are generally reckoned to be the greatest achievements of Molière, ‘des chefs-d'oeuvre qu'on ne saurait assez admirer’.¹⁰ The Longueruana (1754) reflects perfectly this deep-seated duality; having acknowledged that the play is, with Le Tartuffe, one of the playwright's masterpieces, a caveat is at once entered: ‘Mais les Femmes savantes ont trop d'endroits d'érudition pour plaire à une infinité de femmes et de gens du monde qui n'en ont point du tout’.¹¹ Voltaire repeats this double view of the comedy: ‘Plus on la vit, et plus on admira comment Molière avait pu jeter tant de comique sur un sujet qui paraissait fournir plus de pédanterie que d'agrément’.¹²

As the play's theme has lost much of its currency and relevance in the twentieth century, serious misgivings about its ranking in the Molière canon have been frequently expressed. For P. Brisson, it represents nothing more than a ‘grande toile académique, composition de maître, médaille d'honneur du salon'.¹³ A. Adam is even more peremptory: with Dom Garcie it is Molière's worst play, ‘cette oeuvre trop soignée est sans verve’.¹⁴ Likewise, M. Descotes finds the brio and instinctive comedy of previous plays absent, as does G. Couton, who avers that ‘le meilleur Molière se trouve dans des oeuvres plus lestement menées et plus spontanées’.¹⁵ W. D. Howarth writes of it as being a ‘distinctive literary comedy’ and goes so far as to ask whether Molière paid too high a price in terms of comedy for his wish to achieve aesthetic coherence.¹⁶ The defenders of the play's worth, if less numerous than its detractors, have fought a vigorous rear-guard action on its behalf. Despois and Mesnard describe the play as being a ‘vive peinture de moeurs, où la plupart des portraits sont autant de chefs-d'oeuvre, satire toute en action, qui, à aucun moment, ne s'égare hors des conditions du théâtre, perfection du style où jamais le poète n'avait mieux atteint’, before concluding that ‘il y faut tout admirer’.¹⁷ In similar vein, R. Fernandez characterizes it as an ‘oeuvre brillante, admirablement composée, … le testament comique de Molière’.¹⁸ More recently, R. Garapon affirms his view that it is ‘une authentique grande comédie’.¹⁹ Such would appear to have been the opinion of Donneau de Visé who, on seeing the first performance of the comedy at the Palais-Royal theatre, wrote that the author had fulfilled his own hopes expressed some four years previously of performing there ‘une pièce comique de sa façon qui fût tout à fait achevée’.²⁰ From its first performance on 12 March 1672 until the theatre's closure for Easter on 5 April, the play enjoyed considerable success, but after the resumption attendances fell rapidly. Today it occupies fifth place in the list of Molière's most frequently performed plays at the Comédie-Française, behind Le Médecin malgré lui and in front of Le Malade imaginaire, a fact which appears to give the lie to critics who complain about its overly literary and untheatrical qualities.²¹

It seems reasonable to infer from this that the inherent theatricality of the play has outlived both the necessarily dated subject of whether or not women should interest themselves in learning and the sciences and the original satirical intentions of its author. It is understandable but regrettable that both issues should loom so large in Molière criticism since they tend to obscure the essence of his comic art. Ideas and satire there are in abundance, but if the play lives on it is because both elements are subordinated to comic movement and vitality.²² A third factor which has undoubtedly contributed to the somewhat disenchanted views of the comedy adduced above is Molière's radical departure from the dramatic structure so characteristic of his bestknown plays. The action of Les Femmes savantes cannot be said to be dominated by a single overpowering imaginaire such as Arnolphe, Alceste, Harpagon, Monsieur Jourdain, Argan, etc. It is, as S. Chevalley has written, ‘une pièce de troupe’ rather than a ‘pièce d'auteur’.²³ Philaminte, Clitandre, Henriette, Chrysale and Armande each speak between two and three hundred lines of verse, Trissotin has just under two hundred and Bélise almost one hundred and fifty. Ariste speaks almost one hundred verses, and Vadius and Martine some fifty apiece. The most significant change however is to be found in the scope of the role played by Molière. In comparison with his other roles, such as those of Arnolphe, Alceste and Orgon, the first two are three times as long as that of Chrysale and the third some 50٪ longer. The father figure has indeed been reduced to the ranks in this play: he is absent from Act I and in Acts III-V his role comprises some sixty verses.²⁴ In addition, the part of the leading imaginaire, normally taken by Molière, is here played by the principal femme savante Philaminte. The change in the balance of the roles may be largely explained by the fact that traditional masculine domination in the home has been usurped by Philaminte et al accounting for the long absences of Chrysale from the stage. As Agrippine had already said in a somewhat different familial context ‘Ma place est occupée et je ne suis plus rien’.²⁵ The displacement of the father from the centre of power in the family is already the premise on which the comedy proceeds. Consequently, the essential comic action resolves itself into a struggle between the domineering wife who holds the reins of domestic power and the timid husband who is cajoled and pushed from behind into making momentary forays against her. All the other happenings in the play, such as the sacking of Martine by Philaminte, the salon meeting, the jealous clashes between Armande and Henriette, Chrysale's preference for Henriette and his wife's for Armande, Philaminte's infatuation with Trissotin and her wish to marry Henriette to him, Bélise's aberration, etc, all stem, directly or indirectly, from Chrysale's abdication of domestic authority to his wife. Ariste crystallizes gnomically this central issue in the play by saying to his brother

                                        Votre femme, entre nous,
Est par vos lâchetés souveraine sur vous.
Son pouvoir n'est fondé que sur votre faiblesse,
C'est de vous qu'elle prend le titre de maîtresse;
Vous-même à ses hauteurs vous vous abandonnez,
Et vous faites mener en bête par le nez.

(II, 9, ll.677-82)

The dispersal of dramatic resources away from one principal role onto a group of principal roles enhances the variety of comic effects to be obtained from the original clash between husband and wife. Although each of the roles is distinctive in individuality and motivation, they do not act purely as individuals, but rather marshall themselves behind their respective champions, Philaminte or Chrysale. (Only once does Trissotin allow his Tartuffian libidinousness to stray beyond self-imposed subordination to his group leader, Philaminte, that is in his scene with Henriette (V, 1), but, like Tartuffe, he can rest secure in the knowledge that his dupe will automatically disbelieve adverse reports of his conduct.)²⁶ Thus Bélise, Armande and Trissotin line up behind Philaminte, and Henriette, Clitandre, Ariste and Martine fall in behind Chrysale. The comic situation originates from the clash between husband and wife but is played out for the most part between the groups of their supporters within the household. One might say that it is not only a ‘pièce de troupe’ but pre-eminently a ‘pièce de troupes’. This is supported by R. Garapon's contention that it was the playwright's intention to produce a comedy of a more spectacular nature than previous ‘grandes comédies’ and one closer in structure to the genre of comedy-ballet. In support of this new view of the play, he adduces evidence that no fewer than twelve scenes have at least four actors on stage at once (excluding valets and servants), compared to eight scenes in Le Tartuffe, five in Le Misanthrope, thirteen in L'Avare and some fifteen or sixteen in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.²⁷ Elsewhere the same critic has calculated the play's coefficient of stage-occupation as 4.3, ranking Les Femmes savantes narrowly behind Le Bourgeois gentilhomme as Molière's second most spectacular play in terms of stage utilization.²⁸ In the light of this evidence, there appears to be a case for examining this ‘pièce comique tout à fait achevée’ not perhaps as his most classical and literary play but in order to ascertain whether it can be said to sustain the steady movement towards the structure of comedy-ballet most manifest in the productions belonging to the later part of his career.

(3)

‘The action of Les Femmes savantes is in confrontations between the characters’.²⁹ It was said above that the clashes of the rival groups of supporters originate from the conflict between husband and wife for domestic supremacy. One may add that each clash between the members of the groups anticipates ever more acute phases of the essential conflict between husband and wife. The series of individual and group confrontations crystallizes into two climactic points of the comedy at which Philaminte and Chrysale clash head-on. The first of these (II, 7), is preceded by the clash of the two groups, as represented by Philaminte and Bélise against Chrysale and Martine. The second takes place in V, 3, where the struggle reaches its crescendo, with the two champions flanked by all their respective supporters. Both scenes represent supreme points of tension in the evolution of the domestic conflict and it will be helpful to see how their dramatic impact is enhanced and prepared for by the preceding confrontations between the old and the new orders represented by Chrysale and Philaminte and their followers. The confrontations give rise to the following cycles of movement, each with its distinctive rhythm, making for an agreeably varied and symmetrically patterned action:

(a) I, 1-3: The consequences of the new order of things.

(b) II: The husband's advance and retreat in front of his wife.

(c) III: The salon scene or the power of words.

(d) IV: The power of matriarchy and the consort's contumacy.

(e) V: The final clash of the old and new orders.

The first cycle is in the nature of a prologue as the situation is explained through the fierce sororial confrontation between Henriette and Armande. Adopting a hortatory tone which derives, as the spectator will presently perceive, from her mother's example, Armande adjures Henriette to forsake humdrum domesticity in order to aspire to the life of the mind.³⁰ Henriette's reply, couched in conciliatory tones, stresses the diversity of temperament which should allow both sisters to follow individual bents while imitating an aspect of their progenitrix.

We recognize that familiar opposition between the tyranny of aberrant reason and the acceptance of natural desires which is the ultimate source of the comic movement in this and other plays. The movement here begins as andante in tempo and reflects the sisters' carefully developed argument and counter-argument. The didactic tone is reminiscent of the fastidiously conducted polemics between Gassendi and Descartes in which the former in his Disquisitio Metaphysica (1642-4) objected to the latter's metaphysical system, apostrophizing his opponent as ‘O mens’, to which Descartes rejoined in kind by addressing his critic as ‘O caro’.³¹ As L. Jouvet found, the scene is difficult to render in animated vein, but saw its dramatic clash at the point at which Armande advises her sister to desist from her attentions to her own former suitor, Clitandre.³²

With the latter's entrance in the second scene, the tension mounts as the vindictive Armande taunts Henriette by asking her whether she has received parental permission to encourage Clitandre's courtship (ll.162-8). On her withdrawal in a fit of jealous pique at the end of the scene, the tension falls as Henriette and Clitandre discuss the tactics most conducive to obtaining approval for their marriage (Sc.3). Clitandre's innate aversion to, and uncontrollable contempt for, the object of Philaminte's favour, Trissotin, is cited by Henriette as a great handicap to winning over the mother to their cause, a task rendered all the more urgent on account of the abject state of dependence on his wife in which their ally, Chrysale, languishes. Hence Henriette's advice to Clitandre:

                                        le plus sûr est de gagner ma mère:
Mon père est d'une humeur à consentir à tout,
Mais il met peu de poids aux choses qu'il résout;
Il a reçu du Ciel certaine bonté d'âme,
Qui le soumet d'abord à ce que veut sa femme;
C'est elle qui gouverne, et d'un ton absolu
Elle dicte pour loi ce qu'elle a résolu.

(ll.204-10)

Chrysale's inability to withstand his virago wife is here identified as the primary cause of the household instability, resulting in the ‘grande puissance’ which Trissotin exerts over her (l.239). The first cycle completes the exposition of the domestic situation and encloses the lovers in an impasse from which it is going to require ingenuity to extricate them. Just as the comedy could easily appear to lack pace and take on a sombre hue, the final scene of the Act, the entrance of Bélise (Sc.4), comes to raise the tempo and break the tension, with the introduction of her sustained flight of fantasy. It acts as a light-hearted intermezzo linking Acts I and II. That Molière made a practice of including scenes which fulfil the function of intermezzos while still remaining intrinsic to the plays has been recognized by J. Copeau: ‘Il y a dans l'action des intermèdes constants (comme entre les actes). Cette danse est dans le texte. Ce n'est pas de l'imagination’.³³ R. Garapon has also discerned the presence of such intra-textual intermezzos in this play which are entrusted to Bélise and Chrysale at the end of each Act with the exception of the final one where the intermezzo precedes the dénouement.³⁴ Bélise from within, and Chrysale from without the circle of the femmes savantes, offer release from the tedium of aberrant reason's tyranny into the joyful gratuitousness of fantasy, each acting in his and her own egregious manner as comedy's fifth columnists against l'esprit de système in the household.

Clitandre, by attempting to enlist Bélise's help in favour of his suit, gives the imaginaire what little stimulus she needs to generate her own ballet movement in which she is both principal dancer and choreographer.³⁵ (There is a parallel between this intermezzo and the final scene of Act I in Le Tartuffe in which Cléante, in order to extract confirmation from Orgon of the latter's promise to marry Mariane to Valère, unavailingly pursues his elusive quarry through the scene, see chapter 3.)

Each step of Bélise's ballet is likewise neatly executed to avoid contact with an unpalatable fact, that is, that Clitandre loves Henriette. As that fact becomes apparently ever more inescapable, so Bélise exhibits such prodigious agility that she emerges at the end of the scene with her fantasy gloriously intact. The sequence of her steps is as follows: 1. She side-steps his careful attempt to explain to her precisely why he needs her assistance by imposing silence on him in the most dramatic and romantic manner, ll.276ff. 2. When he endeavours to calm her ardour by pointing out that it is not her but rather her younger niece with whom he is in love, she escapes nimbly from fact into a romanesque gloss on his words, construed as ‘Ce subtil faux-fuyant’ (l.292), in a style worthy of Philis or Iris playing out their pastoral idyll. 3. When presented with his reiteration that he loves Henriette, she again eludes fact by escaping into the pretext that he is hiding behind a figure of speech in his declaration of love to her, ll.303ff. 4. The finale to her ballet is provided by a triple pirouette executed with a bravura which leaves Clitandre grasping vainly at this unlikeliest will-o'-the-wisp:

(a)
Clitandre: Mais …
Bélise:          Adieu, pour ce coup, ceci doit vous suffire,
Et je vous ai plus dit que je ne voulais dire.
(b)
Clitandre: Mais votre erreur …
Bélise:                                        Laissez, je rougis maintenant,
Et ma pudeur s'est fait un effort surprenant.
(c)
Clitandre: Je veux être pendu si je vous aime, et
          sage …
Bélise: Non, non, je ne veux rien entendre
          davantage.

(ll.319-24)

The last movement is all the more effective for being accomplished as she traverses the stage ultra-rapidly.³⁶

The intermezzo spills over into the second cycle of the action comprising Act II. In this Act, Chrysale speaks around one hundred and eighty of the some two hundred and fifty verses which make up the role. It could be termed the ballet of the vacillating husband in which he executes the three movements characteristic of his gyrations in response to the threat to his domestic status. They describe a circular pattern at the end of which he is no further advanced than at the beginning. In the true tradition of his imaginaire ancestor Arnolphe he is destined to move in his habitual grove throughout the play.³⁷ The movements are: his self-confident advance in front of Ariste and Martine (II, 2-5); his initial advance and subsequent hasty retreat when faced with the draconian Philaminte (II, 6-8); his re-emergence at the end of the Act (Sc.9) as the irrepressible comic force to be sent again and again into motion alternately by his corps de ballet and his wife.

His entry in scene two is in the allegro mode, marked by four sprightly steps inspired by his fanciful reminiscences of his friendship with Clitandre's father, and Ariste has to keep pace if only to bring him back to the subject of the moment:

(a)
Chrysale: Je connus feu son père en mon voyage
          à Rome.
Ariste: Fort bien.
(b)
Chrysale:                    C'était, mon frère, un fort bon
          gentilhomme.
Ariste: On le dit.
(c)
Chrysale:                    Nous n'avions alors que vingt-
          huit ans,
Et nous étions, ma foi! tous deux de verts galants.
Ariste: Je le crois.
(d)
Chrysale:                    Nous donnions chez les dames
          romaines,
Et tout le monde là parlait de nos fredaines:
Nous faisions des jaloux.
Ariste:                                                            Voilà qui va des mieux.
Mais venons au sujet qui m'amène en ces lieux.

(ll.343-50)³⁸

The sequence of steps in this spring-like flight of imagination is traversed by the more deeply rooted fantasy of Bélise's continued intermezzo (Sc.3). That Clitandre has given Ariste clear proof of his preference for Henriette, that Bélise's ‘suitors’ either pay not the slightest attention to her, or laugh at her behaviour, or have just married, is insufficient evidence to shake her confidence. Fantasy is so impregnable that it is for her fact, with any ostensible invalidation serving only to reinforce her visionary truth. Self-sufficient and consistent in its aberration, it rather glories in the absence of outer props, the contradiction of others being regarded as its firmest evidence. From the fantasy-world of one character we move into that of another, on the resumption of Chrysale's scene with Ariste (Sc.4). (The ability of one character to recognize the fantasy of another while remaining purblind to his own is endemic in Molière's world.) He assumes with great verbal redundancy his most masterful persona in response to the suggestion that he endeavour to win his wife over to the side of the lovers:

          Il suffit: je l'[Clitandre] accepte pour gendre.

(l.408)

          Vous moquez-vous? Il n'est pas nécessaire:
Je réponds de ma femme, et prends sur moi l'affaire.

(ll.411-12)

          Laissez faire, dis-je, et n'appréhendez pas:
Je la vais disposer aux choses de ce pas.

(ll.413-14)

                                        C'est une affaire faite,
Et je vais à ma femme en parler sans délai.

(ll.416-17)

In conformity with the long line of barbons from which he descends his illusions of authority are as great as the fact of his pusillanimity.³⁹ In his account of the play's first performance, Donneau de Visé provides a pithy characterisation of the titular head of the house ‘… qui veut faire croire qu'il est le maître de sa maison, qui se fait fort de tout quand il est seul et qui cède tout dès que sa femme paraît’.⁴⁰ Although obliged, literally, to dance to Philaminte's tune for most of the time, he has perfected in her presence a curious crab-like manner of manoeuvring by virtue of which he contrives to give the impression of a simultaneous advance and retreat. He thereby satisfies his own pretensions to authority while adhering to the golden axiom of the barbon to the effect that discretion is always the better part of valour.

The dismissal of Martine by Philaminte and her reappearance in the household (II, 6) initiates the second movement of his ballet and prepares the first climactic clash between husband and wife (II, 7). The movement obeys the following sequence of steps: 1. Chrysale advances to question his wife about the reason for the servant's dismissal and retreats at once into supine acceptance of her decision (ll.431-44). 2. He then appears to advance again in his five questions to Philaminte about the possible reasons for her dismissal (ll.447-8, 451, 453-4, 456-457), but in fact beats a tactical retreat to the recurrent rhythm of his wife's ever stronger assertions that the servant's crime is even more heinous than any of the increasingly serious offences proffered by him. 3. With the revelation that her crime is of a purely linguistic form and substance he subsides into temporary mutism and is ignored by Philaminte until the end of the Act, whereupon he will be summoned by his dragon to ratify her action, to which he lamely subscribes (ll.506-7). 4. The movement carries over into the following scene with the same characters present except the banished Martine. Chrysale advances again to defend the servant and accuses Philaminte and Bélise of neglecting their household duties (ll.525-34); when both women fasten onto his mundane outlook and solecisms and overlook his gravamen, he is goaded beyond endurance to mount a lumbering charge against his refined tormentors (ll.555-7), only to wilt once more under the imperious stare of his termagant wife and yet to succeed adeptly in recovering from his faux-pas by a feint at the very last moment: ‘C'est à vous que je parle, ma soeur’ (l.558). His revolt thus evaporates, and Philaminte's victory is consolidated by her intimation in the following scene that Trissotin has been selected as Henriette's husband.⁴¹ The cycle of the action has reached a point similar to the impasse at the end of Act I with domestic events having taken a more serious turn owing to the reimposition of the new order of things on the household.

This impression, however, is fully dissipated by the final movement of Chrysale's ballet provided by the intermezzo at the end of the Act in scene nine. It not only lightens the tone of the play, but also operates a change in Chrysale and ensures a still more dramatic confrontation with Philaminte in the final Act. It is Ariste who, by his rapid questions to the flaccid husband about the conjugal ‘discussion’ which has just elapsed, pulls him out of his customary torpor and dynamizes him once more. Chrysale's answers are broken up into five staccato steps (ll.647-57) and obey his usual rhythm of advance and retreat as he gradually admits that Henriette's husband is to be someone other than Clitandre and of whom he himself has by no means approved. With Ariste's furious attack on him for standing in craven terror of his wife (ll.677-96) he begins to galvanize himself progressively as the spirit of comic movement ebbs again into his petrified form over seven steps, so much so that he graduates to the point at which his burlesque flourish signifies his renewed readiness to lead his troupe into battle with the dreaded domestic tyrant:

(a)
Chrysale: Oui, vous avez raison, et je vois que j'ai
          tort.
Allons, il faut enfin montrer un coeur plus fort,
Mon frère.
Ariste:                                                            C'est bien dit.
(b)
Chrysale:                                                  C'est une chose infâme
Que d'être si soumis au pouvoir d'une femme.
Ariste: Fort bien.
(c)
Chrysale:          De ma douceur elle a trop profité.
Ariste: Il est vrai.
(d)
Chrysale:                              Trop joui de ma facilité.
Ariste: Sans doute.
(e)
Chrysale:          Et je lui veux faire aujourd'hui
          connaître
Que ma fille est ma fille, et que j'en suis le maître
Pour lui prendre un mari qui soit selon mes voeux.
Ariste: Vous voilà raisonnable, et comme je vous
          veux.
(f)
Chrysale: Vous êtes pour Clitandre, et savez sa
          demeure:
Faites-le-moi venir, mon frère, tout à l'heure.
Ariste: J'y cours tout de ce pas.
(g)
Chrysale:                                        C'est souffrir trop longtemps,
Et je m'en vais être homme à la barbe des gens.

(ll.697-710)

As Arnolphe is reinflated after each successive reversal against Horace, so too Chrysale is recharged after each deflation at the hands of his wife. But unlike the hero of L'Ecole des femmes Chrysale is not a self-charging phenomenon and will again require external stimulus in order to confront his wife in the final Act.

The third cycle comprising the events in the salon (Act III) is a microcosm of the comedy, as it provides a full representation of the two incompatible tendencies adumbrated in the opening scenes of the play between Armande and Henriette. On one hand we have the reduction of life to doctrinaire schema as evidenced in the sterile pursuit of perfectionism by the femmes savantes (Sc.1-2), and on the other the irrepressible surge of comic life and movement bursting through the artificial constraints of doctrine (Sc.3). In the first two scenes, the femmes savantes vie with each other to comment on Trissotin's poems, repeating snatches hypnotically as a priestess might intone a series of mantras. Words are invested with magical properties to become the sole reliable arbiters of good and evil in human relationships. (It was on account of her defective linguistic usage that Martine was dismissed, excellent cook that she was, ll.459-62.) They are to be sacralized in the temple of the Academy from which all impurities will be expunged as Armande assures us (ll.899-908). The sacred letter replaces life and movement in their vision of things. (Trissotin, in spite of his name, Trois fois sot, resembles Tartuffe in that he manipulates words wittingly: whenever he panders to the salon's taste for metaphorical conceit and exaggeration he never confuses his means with his ends. Like the hyperbolic religious language of Tartuffe, his words become actions to ingratiate himself into a rich bourgeois household.) When the femmes savantes use terms denoting physical need or objects in their description of poetry (for example ‘repas friands’ l.716, ‘pressants désirs’, l.717, ‘plaisirs’ l.718), they operate that conversion of movement into ideas which Saint-Evremond noted in the précieux attitude to love.⁴² (Trissotin, speaking of his poem as a child to whom he gives birth (ll.720-2), is less naïve, playing upon their repressed sexual instinct which, in Tartuffian fashion, he is ever ready to liberate.) Consequently, the movement is somewhat larghetto as their ponderous witticisms and creaking puns conglomerate rather than enliven. The extended repression of instinct and the apotheosis of sterility is the necessary pretext of, and prelude to, the devastating revenge of comic movement carried out in scene three, as the foundations of academe are exploded by the very elements which are to be their crowning glory—words.

This act of vengeance takes place in the meeting of the two salon poetasters Trissotin and Vadius. Words, so long imprisoned in the temple of reason and good taste, are here liberated by self-interest to generate a ballet of invective danced by two powerful and outraged egos. The carefully marked gradations through which the ballet proceeds enhances its dramatic impact:

1. Vadius advances the theory that an author ought not to read his poems in public, and then, with the endemic self-blindness of the pedant in Molière's comedies, advances his own with alacrity (ll.955-68).

2. He is adroitly deflected from his moment of self-glory by Trissotin, who, in order to share the limelight, initiates an ascending series of mutually congratulatory remarks about their poems (ll.969-88).

3. The dance of amour-propre is quickened as Trissotin goes even further by deflecting attention from Vadius' poem to his own sonnet, which the exacerbated pedantic ego promptly pronounces to be inept (ll.988-1005).

4. Trissotin counters his heavy advance by demolishing Vadius' unread poem as the worthless product of an outmoded genre, and like pugilists, they trade insult for insult in rapid sequence (ll.1006-16).

5. A new boundary in the ballet is crossed as Trissotin accuses his rival of plagiarizing the classics and his accusations are hurled back in parallel lines with all the vigour of the Molière pedant (ll.1017-27).

6. With the mention of Boileau at the end of the fifth step, both draw breath before taking up the struggle with renewed passion. His attacks on both poets are interpreted by each as self-vindication and indictment of the rival (ll.1027-40).

7. The verbal and gestural ballet reaches its crescendo in their furious stichomythic assault in which each invokes on the other the ultimate dread salon sanction—that of satirical vengeance (ll.1041-44). The comic ballet has here brought all the participants in the salon scene down to earth from the Olympian heights of academe, and the third cycle of the action ends with two consequences from this abrupt descent. Philaminte's promise to marry Henriette to Trissotin (Sc.4), and the acerbic exchange between Armande and Henriette (Sc.5), remind us that, in spite of the ludicrous excesses of the salon and the gratifying ballet of self-deflation which climaxes it, the matter of Henriette's marriage to Clitandre, far from being resolved, has been increasingly jeopardized. The intermezzo now given by Chrysale (Sc.6) is therefore all the more welcome and it is performed in the brusque tradition of a Gorgibus or a Sganarelle. As the father promises Henriette in marriage to Clitandre, he truncates peremptorily Armande's warning about Philaminte's decision in regard to marriage with Trissotin (‘Taisez-vous, péronnelle!’ (l.1109)). With the plaudits of Ariste ringing in his ears (‘Fort bien: vous faites des merveilles’ l.1114) he exits triumphantly for the second time at the head of his troupe, without however having yet outgrown his status as a cardboard figure of ballet by having confronted Philaminte decisively.

Of all the cycles of the action, the fourth (Act IV) is probably the weakest from a purely dramaturgical point of view, since it duplicates the binary rhythm of Acts II and III in the ponderous oscillation between doctrinaire forces inimical to comedy and comic movement. For the greater part the Act demonstrates yet again in maestoso manner the total authority exercised by Philaminte over her household in spite of all Chrysale's fantasizing in his rodomontades. Nevertheless this cycle, like preceding ones, ends with the return of the comic spirit in the ample shape of Chrysale. From the opening scene, the initiative is firmly grasped by Philaminte as she is apprised by Armande of the insurgent counter-movement to her plan for Henriette's marriage. Nor is her control in the slightest eroded but rather reinforced by the two exhilarating but entirely inconsequential acts of Trissotin's demolition carried out in front of her by Clitandre, the first of which occurs in the poet's absence (Sc.2), the second in his presence (Sc.3), or by Vadius' claim in his letter to her that his rival poet wishes to marry Henriette merely for her money (Sc.4). As in Act III, all attacks on her idol serve only to harden her in her wish to accelerate the marriage and culminate in her diktat: ‘Dès ce soir à Monsieur je marierai ma fille’ (l.1405).⁴³ This point of the action represents the nadir of the lovers' fortunes, but relief is at hand in the intermezzo which follows (Sc.5), in which the dauntless Chrysale, on hearing of his wife's decision, parallels it burlesquely in his supreme flight of fantasy:

                                                            Et dès ce soir je veux,
Pour la contrecarrer, vous marier vous deux.

(ll.1435-6)

Attention is further diverted from their plight by the spectacle of the corps de ballet, composed of Henriette, Clitandre and Ariste, which pushes the coryphaeus malgré lui forwards to ever greater feats of imaginary resistance before lining up behind him for the decisive phase of their counter-movement.

The final cycle (Act V), so long anticipated but so skilfully deferred, contains the climactic clash between coryphaeus, coryphée and their respective troupes. It is yet further retarded and intensified by two preceding movements. In the opening scene, Henriette and Trissotin meet directly for the first time to discuss the projected marriage. Each attempt by her to evade his pursuit is matched by the relentless feline advance of a surefooted dancer in the mould of Tartuffe who circumvents all obstacles placed in his path while keeping his sights firmly trained on the goal: ‘Pourvu que je vous aie, il n'importe comment’ (l.1536). The second movement is provided by yet another fantastic intermezzo from Chrysale in advance of the dénouement (Sc.2). It is initiated by the down-to-earth Henriette who, on hearing her father's recurrent fantasizing to the effect that he intends to withstand Philaminte face to face over the marriage issue, understandably professes herself less than sanguine about his ability to fulfil his intention. His touchiness gives a pretext for an entry in which his manifold gyrations, designed to sustain the fantasy of his domestic authority, merely reveal yet again in their self-indulgent extravagance and facility the fact of his native pusillanimity, while Henriette beats a tactful retreat. Once launched into his movement of wish-fulfilment, it is obvious that he is capable of sustaining its steps for ever, and it is only truncated by the sudden announcement by Clitandre of the arrival of Philaminte with her notary:

(a)
Chrysale: Comment? Me prenez-voux ici pour un
          benêt?
Henriette: M'en préserve le ciel!
(b)
Chrysale:                                        Suis-je un fat, s'il vous plaît?
Henriette: Je ne dis pas cela.
(c)
Chrysale:                                                  Me croit-on incapable
Des fermes sentiments d'un homme raisonnable?
Henriette: Non, mon père.
(d)
Chrysale:                                        Est-ce donc qu'à l'âge où je me
          vois,
Je n'aurais pas l'esprit d'être maître chez moi?
Henriette: Si fait.
(e)
Chrysale:          Et que j'aurais cette faiblesse d'âme,
De me laisser mener par le nez à ma femme?
Henriette: Eh! non, mon père.
(f)
Chrysale:                                        Ouais! qu'est-ce donc que ceci?
Je vous trouve plaisante à me parler ainsi.
Henriette: Si je vous ai choqué, ce n'est pas mon
          envie.
(g)
Chrysale: Ma volonté céans doit être en tout
          suivie.
Henriette: Fort bien, mon père.
(h)
Chrysale:                                        Aucun, hors moi, dans la maison,
N'a droit de commander.
Henriette:                                                  Oui, vous avez raison.
(i)
Chrysale: C'est moi qui tiens le rang de chef
          de la famille.
Henriette: D'accord.
(j)
Chrysale:                              C'est moi qui dois disposer
          de ma fille.
Henriette: Eh! oui.
(k)
Chrysale:                    Le Ciel me donne un plein pouvoir
          sur vous.
Henriette: Qui vous dit le contraire?
(l)
Chrysale:                                                  Et pour prendre un époux
Je vous ferai bien voir que c'est à votre père
Qu'il vous faut obéir, non pas à votre mère.
Henriette: Hélas! vous flattez là les plus doux de
          mes voeux,
Veuillez être obéi, c'est tout ce que je veux.
(m)
Chrysale:Nous verrons si ma femme à mes
          désirs rebelle …

(ll.1575-97)

This is the most sustained indulgence by Chrysale in his vision of masculine authority in the household, and gives the measure of his function in the play. That function is habitually underrated: it is not merely to provide light relief from the humourless obsessions of the femmes savantes, but to oppose at regular intervals the quixotic counter-culture of comic fantasy to the systematic culture at present prevailing in the household. That he purveys it in the purest and most insubstantial form of imagination we know not only from past experience of the collapse of this ballet figure when faced with his redoubtable spouse, but also from the fact that he knows Henriette to be an unresisting and compliant target for his vision of things. She agrees in any case with him before he begins! The superfluous nature of the development of his ideal scenario, in which all criticism, however small, of his imagined masterful management of household affairs becomes the object of his relentless forensic investigations, is the surest indicator of his self-fulfilment and re-creation through fantasy.

Thus heralded, the great moment arrives at last at which the final confrontation between the doctrinaire Philaminte and her chameleon-like husband takes place. Its dramatic quality is further emphasized by the symmetrical disposition of the two rival troupes headed by their respective leaders. Chrysale's troupe of Clitandre and Henriette is augmented by the arrival of Martine, and Armande, Bélise and Trissotin follow Philaminte. The rivalry of the spouses is compounded by the presence in each troupe of competing daughters and suitors. The return of Martine counterbalances the natural supremacy of Philaminte over her vacillating spouse and also provides the aesthetic counterpoint to Act II which saw her dismissal. This initial equipoise is maintained until the very end of the confrontation which unfolds as follows:

1. Both leaders take their first step in unision, agreeing on the choice of Henriette as the bride (ll.1618-20).

2. They both propose their own choice of bridegroom to the notary and their competing claims set up a pleasing aesthetic balance offsetting the total lack of harmony between respective leaders and troupes (ll.1621-39).

3. With the movement having come to a standstill, Martine steps forward to take the place of Chrysale, who now seconds her bold peasant utterances: ‘C'est bien dit’ (l.1643); ‘Sans doute’ (l.1644); ‘Il est vrai’ (l.1646); ‘C'est parler comme il faut’ (l.1653); ‘Oui’(l.1655); ‘Fort bien’ (l.1661); ‘Elle a dit vérité’ (l.1672). His retreat foreshadows his familiar lapse into supine acquiescence to his wife in step four.

4. With the troupes in a state of equipollence, Philaminte advances with a proposal designed to appeal to her husband as a compromise but in fact representing for her a double victory, to the effect that Henriette will marry Trissotin and Clitandre Armande, to which Chrysale signifies his consent (ll.1673-80). With an unpalatable ending now even more in prospect than at any of the preceding points of the action at which the lovers' hopes appeared forlorn (II, 8, III, 4, IV, 4), a deus ex machina is called for to ensure the triumph of art over the psychology of character.

The deus ex machina is the only expedient capable of terminating the familiar final perspective in Molière's theatre of the otherwise perpetual circular dance of obdurate egos in which his protagonists are destined to engage. Donneau de Visé, describing the immovability of Philaminte at this juncture of the play (and we may surely infer that here at least a strong point of resemblance between the matriarch and her younger daughter is to be found), draws a suggestive parallel with the ending of Le Tartuffe:

… cet entêtement, aussi fort que celui du père dans Tartuffe, durerait toujours si, par un artifice ingénieux d'un procès perdu et d'une banqueroute (qui n'est pas d'une moins belle invention que l'Exempt dans l'Imposteur), un frère qui, quoique bien jeune, paraît l'homme du monde du meilleur sens ne le venait faire cesser, en faisant le dénouement de la pièce.⁴⁴

This blatant overriding of psychological probability by the coincidental arrival of the two letters marks the sublime triumph of the inept and bungling animator of the intermezzos, Chrysale, over the forces of applied reason and dogma. It thus situates the play in the same fairy-tale world of facile endings so characteristic of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire. The instantaneous dissolution of elements inimical to the lovers' dreams, (the exit of Trissotin and the enthusiastic acceptance of Clitandre by the Stoic matriarch), and the unhesitating support of Clitandre for the impoverished family, relate the ending to the same world of fantasy in which Mme Jourdain's sound bourgeois common-sense is made to evaporate to facilitate her husband's creation as Mamamouchi and in which Toinette engineers parallel but different expressions of opinion from Argan's wife and the lovers about his feigned death to resolve the situation in Le Malade imaginaire. The ingenious eradication of difficulties in the latter comedy-ballets precedes of course the ballet which celebrates the victory of comic form over inert matter. There is no subsequent ballet to signal Chrysale's victory, malgré lui, over his wife—has he not already celebrated it in his mind's eye and articulated his vision to Henriette?—but the same mood of euphoria is generated at the end by the two characters who have sustained the spirit of fantasy in the intermezzos throughout the comedy. Bélise's warning to Clitandre that love for her is still indelibly engraved on his heart, (ll.1774-6) and Chrysale's final grandiose assertion in the last two lines of the play of a paternal authority which he has never possessed and never will possess save in his imagination, carry the ending of the comedy into that realm of facile self-indulgence and fantastic improbability peculiar to the world of comedy-ballet.

Notes

1. Despois & Mesnard, VIII, p. 599.

2. Ibid., p. 601.

3. Ibid., p. 600.

4. See Couton, I, pp. 1317-9, for the text of the Intermèdes nouveaux.

5. De la Cour, No.63, in Les Caractères, ed. cit., p. 242.

6. Molière Théâtre complet (Paris, 1960), II, p. 653.

7. See the allusive mode of address in Oronte's poem to Célimène and its pointe in Le Misanthrope, I, 2.

8. Cf. Alceste's wish that Célimène might be socially and materially dependent on him, Le Misanthrope, IV, 3, ll.1425-32.

9. Ed. cit., p. 115.

10. Couton, I, p. 1000.

11. G. Mongrédien, Recueil … II, p. 797.

12. Sommaire des Femmes savantes, in Despois & Mesnard, IX, p. 55.

13. Op. cit., pp. 273-4.

14. Op. cit., III, p. 392. But G. Reynier notes that if the play took longer to finish than most of the others ‘… là encore il (Molière) n'a pas renoncé à sa libre et large manière. Là non plus il n'a pas fait de très grands efforts pour atteindre la régularité, la pureté d'expression à laquelle étaient arrivés de moins beaux génies’, Les Femmes savantes de Molière (Paris, 1936), p. 213.

15. Op. cit., p. 227; Couton, II, p. 975.

16. ‘“Une pièce comique tout à fait achevée”: aesthetic coherence in Les Femmes savantes’ in Form and meaning … p. 145, pp. 153-4. M. Lagier views the play as contrasting strangely with the spectacles immediately preceding it, and with Le Malade imaginaire, in his edition of the play (Préface de Jean Piat, Paris, 1986), p. 118.

17. IX, p. 4.

18. Op. cit., p. 228.

19. Op. cit., p. 152. This view is endorsed in the perceptive study by N. A. Peacock, Les Femmes savantes (London, 1990), p. 86.

20. G. Mongrédien, Recueil … II, p. 408.

21. Inclusive of performances during Molière's lifetime and subsequently by the augmented ‘troupe du roi’ at the Hôtel Guénégaud.

22. On the personalities satirized, see Despois & Mesnard, IX, pp. 4-16.

23. ‘L'Interprétation des Femmes savantes’, L'Avant-Scène, 409-10 (septembre, 1968), p. 65.

24. See M. Descotes, op. cit., pp. 227-8, who points out the similarity in balance in the roles of this play and Le Tartuffe; also W. D. Howarth, art. cit., pp. 154-5, n.18.

25. Racine, Britannicus, l.882; as H. G. Hall points out, the balance in the roles is achieved by having three sorts of femmes savantes and by the restriction of the roles of the father and the parasite, Les Femmes savantes (Oxford, 1974), p. 32.

26. On the parallel with Tartuffe, see G. Reynier, op. cit., pp. 206ff, and H. C. Knutson, Molière, An Archetypal Approach (Toronto & Buffalo, 1976), pp. 84-5.

27. Op. cit., pp. 140-1.

28. ‘Sur l'occupation de la scène dans les comédies de Molière’, in Molière: Stage and Study … p. 15.

29. H. G. Hall, ed. cit., pp. 32-3. M. Lagier sees these confrontations taking place between characters in groups, duos and trios, ed. cit., p. 157.

30. The stress of the former on elevation (ll.31-51) is counter-balanced by the latter's speech centred around her own low ambition (ll.53-72).

31. Disquisitio Metaphysica, seu Dubitationes et Instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii Metaphysicam et Responsa, Texte établi, traduit et annoté par B. Rochot (Paris, 1959).

32. Molière et la comédie classique …, pp. 76-7.

33. Notes prises par L. Jouvet, in J. Copeau's edition of Les Fourberies de Scapin, p. 23.

34. Op. cit., p. 140.

35. According to W. D. Howarth, Bélise is ‘the only character to inhabit a private fantasy world in which she has lost touch with reality’, art.cit., p. 151. It might also be said that Armande, Philaminte and Chrysale inhabit their own fantasy worlds inasmuch as they indulge their own whims throughout the play: Armande sets her platonic course above her natural inclinations, her mother insulates herself from fact through intoxication with scientism and Stoic self-sufficiency which blind her to Trissotin's designs and the import of Ariste's concocted letters at the end, while Chrysale comes to believe in the authoritative persona he likes to assume in front of others.

36. The stage-direction at this point in the version of the play by Jean Meyer at the Comédie-Française reads thus: ‘Bélise se dirige vers la porte des appartements à droite. Suivie de Clitandre’, in L'Avant-Scène, 409-10, p. 14.

37. Cf. R. Garapon's description of him as ‘un simple personnage de ballet’, op. cit., p. 147.

38. On the different forms of repetition employed here by Ariste, see R. Garapon, La Fantaisie verbale … pp. 241-2.

39. For his theatrical lineage, see H. G. Hall, ed. cit., pp. 39ff.

40. G. Mongrédien, Recueil … II, p. 408.

41. On the evidence of this scene alone, we may agree with H. C. Knutson that ‘Philaminte is as much a Père as Agrippine’, op. cit., p. 89.

42. Le Cercle, Oeuvres mêlées (Paris, 1865), II, p. 535.

43. In her readiness to sacrifice Henriette to Trissotin Philaminte shares the same perverse delight in antagonising her family as does Orgon, which to my mind militates against the more sympathetic views of her advanced by W. D. Howarth, art. cit., pp. 150-1, and H. G. Hall, ed. cit., p. 45.

44. G. Mongrédien, Recueil … II, p. 408.

Bibliography

Editions of Molière's Plays

Oeuvres complètes. Edition Despois et Mesnard, Grands Ecrivains de la France, 13 vols (Paris, 1873-93).

Oeuvres complètes. Edition G. Couton, 2 vols (Paris, 1971).

Editions of Individual Plays

Les Fourberies de Scapin. Edition J. Copeau (Paris, 1951).

Les Femmes savantes. Edited by H. G. Hall (Oxford, 1974).

General Bibliography

Chevalley, S. ‘L'Interprétation des Femmes savantes, L'Avant-Scène’, 409-10 (septembre, 1968), pp. 65-7.

Garapon, R. ‘Sur l'occupation de la scène dans les comédies de Molière’, Molière: Stage and Study, Essays in Honour of W.G. Moore, edited by W. D. Howarth & Merlin Thomas (Oxford, 1973).

Hall, H. G. Comedy in Context: Essays on Molière (Mississippi, 1984).

Howarth, W. D. & Thomas, M. (editors) Molière: Stage and Study, Essays in Honour of W.G. Moore (Oxford, 1973).

Jouvet, L. Molière et la comédie classique (Paris, 1965).

Knutson, H. C. Molière an Archetypal Approach (Toronto & Buffalo, 1976).

La Bruyère, J. de. Les Caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle, Edition de Robert Garapon (Paris, 1962).

Mongrédien, G. Recueil des textes et des documents du XVIIe siècle relatifs à Molière, 2 vols (Paris, 1973).

Reynier, G. Les Femmes savantes de Molière (Paris, 1936).