[In the following essay, Kenny explores Molière's struggles in creating the new genre of musical-comedy.]

Much modern criticism has positively re-evaluated Molière's comédies-ballets in the context of the argument for a ‘third manner’ Molière who turns away from high comedy of language towards an irrational world of fantasy and illusion. Gérard Defaux and Claude Abraham make this case eloquently in spite of the somewhat embarrassing presence of Les Femmes savantes, while more recently Patrick Dandrey has disagreed radically with this thesis, particularly with reference to the musical coherence of the comédie-ballet.¹ The tripartite division of Molière's thought and work, though it contains many useful insights, is largely the result of neat academic hindsight and the deification of Molière the classical genius. It is perhaps worth noting that this critical view in a more benign form is already present in Sainte-Beuve's notice for his edition of the Oeuvres; ‘De la farce franche et un peu grosse du début, on se sera élevé, en passant par le naïf, le sérieux, le profondément observé, jusqu'à la fantaisie du rire dans toute sa pompe et au gai sabbat le plus délirant.’ Sainte-Beuve clearly recognised and celebrated the late comédies-ballets as ‘ces fusées[…] d'éblouissante gaieté’ and places them on a level with A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.² Late nineteenth-century criticism took a more solemn turn and for far too long a more just evaluation of the comédies-ballets has been hindered by the fact that the music, singing and dancing have been truncated or simply excised from performances which reduce the plays to abridged and aesthetically unsatisfying approximations of spoken comedy. More recently, critics have remembered, as Alain pointed out many years ago, ‘Shakespeare acteur, Molière acteur, ce ne sont point des hasards’ and have reexamined the works as blueprints for performance rather than judging them merely as printed literary texts.

In doing this they are belatedly complying with Molière's express wishes. In the preface to L'Amour médecin he admits that his new genre was the hybrid but happy result of an urgent royal command. As such it had no corpus of pre-existing conventions to govern its structure and Molière, Lully and Beauchamp, as seasoned men of the theatre, were engaged in a new art of improvisation. Nevertheless, as Sainte-Beuve remarked, ‘Le génie se fait de chaque nécessité une inspiration’ and Molière saw at once the potential for this new form of music theatre. The prologue is sung by ‘La Comédie, La Musique, Le Ballet’ personified, and they agree on a new form of theatrical harmony; ‘Quittons, quittons notre vaine querelle, / Ne nous disputons point nos talents tour à tour; / Et d'une gloire plus belle / Piquons-nous en ce jour. / Unissons-nous tous trois d'une ardeur sans seconde, / Pour donner du plaisir au plus grand roi du monde’ Donneau de Visé was among the first to note the originality of Molière's trouvaille; ‘Il a, le premier, inventé la manière de mêler des scènes de musique et des ballets dans ses comédies et trouvé par là un nouveau secret de plaire qui avait été jusqu'alors inconnu.’ In his preface Molière presciently warns future readers of the comédies-ballets that they must become metteurs en scène if they are to appreciate the genre; ‘Il n'est pas nécessaire de vous avertir qu'il y a beaucoup de choses qui dépendent de l'action. On sait bien que les comédies ne sont faites que pour être jouées, et je ne conseille de lire celle-ci [L'Amour médecin] qu'aux personnes qui ont des yeux pour découvrir, dans la lecture, tout le jeu du théâtre.’ In such conditions ‘Vous les verriez dans un état beaucoup plus supportable; et les airs et les symphonies de l'incomparable M. Lully, mêlés à la beauté des voix et à l'adresse des danseurs, leur donnent, sans doute, des grâces dont ils ont toutes les peines du monde à se passer.’

As early as 1661 in his Avertissement to Les Fâcheux, Molière had bemoaned the lack of rehearsal time which obliged him to invent a new genre in which the ballets were hastily stitched into the course of the action, with the result that ‘certains endroits du ballet n'entrent pas dans la comédie aussi naturellement que d'autres.’ Nevertheless he goes on to reveal that he is genuinely intrigued by the theatrical potential of this mingling of genres; ‘Quoi qu'il en soit, c'est un mélange qui est nouveau pour nos théâtres […] et, comme tout le monde l'a trouvé agréable, il peut servir d'idée à d'autres choses qui pourraient être méditées avec plus de loisir’ Molière was to meditate on this ‘mélange’ throughout the remainder of his career, often putting what are surely his own thoughts into the mouths of his characters on the stage. In La Princesse d'Élide in 1664, he makes a decisive addition to his ‘mélange’ by a massive introduction of vocal music. Molière himself, in the role of Moron, celebrates the extension of his talents to include singing, not without an ironic dig at the fanciful conventions of pastoral lyricism; ‘Jusqu'au revoir. Pour moi, je reste ici, et j'ai une petite conversation à faire avec ces arbres et ces rochers.’ In the third intermède, as Philis resists his advances, Moron clearly voices Molière's own feelings on the current vogue for vocal music; ‘… si je savais chanter, j'en ferais bien mieux mes affaires. La plupart des femmes aujourd'hui se laissent prendre par les oreilles; elles sont cause que tout le monde se mêle de musique, et l'on ne réussit auprès d'elles que par les petites chansons […] Il faut que j'apprenne à chanter pour faire comme les autres …’ A satyr arrives and Moron begs ‘mon ami, tu sais bien ce que tu m'as promis il y a longtemps: apprends-moi à chanter, je te prie.’ The lesson gets nowhere and in a later scene Molière-Moron laments his relative lack of musicianship, surely in an implied contrast with his great collaborator-rival, Lully; ‘Morbleu! que n'ai-je de la voix! Ah! nature marâtre, pourquoi ne m'as-tu pas donné de quoi chanter comme à un autre? […] Mais pourquoi est-ce je ne puis pas chanter? N'ai-je pas un estomac, un gosier et une langue comme un autre? Oui, oui, allons: je veux chanter aussi …' One further speech in La Princesse d'Élide contains a tribute to the power of song. At the end of Act IV, in the remarkably poignant monologue which prefigures exactly the tone of Marivaux's ‘surprise de l'amour’, the Princess calls on the singers in these words; ‘O vous, admirables personnes, qui par la douceur de vos chants avez l'art d'adoucir les plus fâcheuses inquiétudes, approchez-vous d'ici, de grâce, et tâchez de charmer avec votre musique le chagrin où je suis.’

In these years of experiment and collaboration (on stage as well as off) between Les deux Baptiste, as Mme de Sévigné called them, Lully learned much from Molière; as Philippe Beaussant points out in his introduction to Mark Minkowski's recording of scenes from the comédies-ballets, ‘nous comprenons que, bien avant Cadmus et Hermione, son premier opéra, Lully ait pu concevoir le récitatif à la française. Il existe des exemples achevés de récitatif “lulliste” dans les scènes pastorales de George Dandin ou dans Les Amants magnifiques, mais l'ébauche s'y trouve déjà dans La Princesse d'Élide.’ But it is also in that work that one of the keys may be found to the quarrel between the two men, namely the presence in Molière, alongside grace and elegance, of ‘le comique le plus endiablé […] que la Tragédie lyrique au ton soutenu bannira peu à peu.’³ In the last great comédies-ballets Molière-Moron continues to mock the excessively wilting and affected aspects of pastoral convention. Much as he admired the delicate minor-key laments of Lully's lovelorn nymphs and shepherds, his own artistic temperament inclined him to exploit singing and dancing for more comic effects. In Le Sicilien, Adraste orders a serenade which must be ‘tendre et passionnée, quelque chose qui m'entretienne dans une douce rêverie’. The slave Hali counsels him against ‘le bémol’. ‘Monsieur je tiens pour le bécarre. Vous savez que je m'y connais. Le bécarre me charme; hors du bécarre, plus de salut en harmonie.’⁴ In the end Hali offers a trio in which two lovesick shepherds lament ‘tout remplis de langueur […] sur bémol. […] Là-dessus vient un berger joyeux avec un bécarre admirable, qui se moque de leur faiblesse.’ One cannot help reading into this amusing exchange and Moron's earlier complaint an aspect of the temperamental tension between Molière and Lully, a tension which released remarkable creative energy before reaching breaking-point in 1670-71.

Critics have dealt extensively with the last two comédies-ballets, insisting on the dramatic and psychological relevance of the musical scenes to the comedy as a whole. The most fervent admirers of the genre have insisted on the richly satisfying homogeneity of the constituent elements. Philippe Beaussant, for instance, admires ‘l'imbrication du chant de la danse et de la comédie. Elle est exemplaire dès leur première oeuvre commune, elle éclate dans La Princesse d'Élide. L'action parlée et l'action chantée s'enchaînent sans rupture et se marient, de même que l'action jouée et l'action dansée.’⁵ Well, up to a point. Many of the entrées de ballet have no justification other than as pure choreographic spectacle but, as in present-day musicals, they are none the worse for that. Jacques Copeau maintained that ‘George Dandin me paraissait fermé aux attractions du divertissement.’⁶Le Bourgeois gentilhomme contains ninety minutes of music and is rarely seen with Le Ballet des Nations. The intervention of Polichinelle in Le Malade imaginaire is barely comprehensible for a non-specialist audience, unaware that it continues in parodic form Molière's long reflection on the relative merits of words and music. Most recently, Patrick Dandrey has been utterly, and surely most unfairly, dismissive of the value of the musical scenes; ‘le divertissement […] ne fait que se surajouter assez artificiellement à l'intrigue et à son dénouement. […] Et puis […] quel rôle jouent les ritournelles et trémoussements de Lully dans l'action dramatique des autres comédies-ballets?’⁷ ‘Trémoussements’ indeed. A word most memorably uttered by Monsieur Jourdain.

One returns again to Molière's own reminder that ‘les comédies ne sont faites que pour être jouées’. Diderot perceived this more clearly than Dandrey when he remarked ‘Si l'on croit qu'il y ait beaucoup d'hommes plus capables de faire Pourceaugnac que Le Misanthrope, on se trompe.’ Of all the comédies-ballets, and I include the last two, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac is perhaps the most formally coherent, a perfect fusion of singing, dancing and acting in the service of pure entertainment. It may be appreciated in the theatre at one and the same time as a gloriously gratuitous comic spectacle and as a further contribution to Molière's conscious inner dialogue on the nature and function of comic theatre. Music is essential to both the performance and understanding of Pourceaugnac. Without it, the piece is amputated, unbalanced, unsatisfying. Not that Molière's comic writing lacks wit, grace and verve, far from it. But the spoken scenes are paced and structured to lead into and out of the musical scenes in a way which makes both integral parts of the intrigue. Lully's music frames the entire piece; Molière obviously does not resent this but gives the last word to music for reasons which will shortly become clear.

Pourceaugnac is an excellent example of the overall internal coherence of Molière's output, of what one might call the dialectical, rather than monolinear, growth of his work. The purified essence of La Jalousie du Barbouillé and Le Médecin volant is present alongside clear pre-echoes of the world of M. Jourdain and Argan. As one attempts to unravel the apparently simple texture of the work the threads of a surprisingly rich thematic tapestry are revealed and each deserves separate consideration.

Molière never forgot his early years as a wandering farceur, nor his debt to the traditions and techniques of the commedia dell'arte. In Pourceaugnac he both openly acknowledges his debt and transforms and revivifies common material. The opening musical invocation ‘Répands charmante nuit’ has its obvious parallel in the dark openings and night scenes of the commedia (cf. Le Sicilien, scene 1; ‘Il fait noir comme dans un four: le ciel s'est habillé ce soir en Scaramouche.’) Gustave Attinger, in the course of his classic account of Molière's links with the commedia, points out that the action of the whole of Act I and the first two scenes of Act II are based in precise detail on an Italian canevas, Policinello pazzo per forza, and that later scenes including the debts alleged by the ‘marchand flamand’ and the arrival of an abandoned wife and her children are to be found in the canevas, Policinello burlato.⁸ In other words, the bare bones of most of the action are borrowed but brilliantly improved by Molière. In the canevas, every trick played on Policinello is revealed by a speaker in advance, thus destroying the element of surprise for the audience. Molière, on the other hand, never allows Sbrigani to reveal the next twist of his wicked imagination. It is surely with this in mind that he makes Eraste say to Julie (and the audience) ‘Ne vous demandez pas tous les ressorts que nous ferons jouer; vous en aurez le divertissement; et comme aux comédies; il est bon de vous laisser le plaisir de la surprise, et de ne vous avertir point de tout ce qu'on vous fera voir.’ Molière drives the point home in the last act where Sbrigani's final tricks are announced to Eraste in inaudible whispered exchanges. Molière gives us two abandoned wives instead of one and a whole ‘volée d'enfants’. We may also see an acknowledgement of commedia sources in the fact that médecins grotesques and the matassins with their clystères sing their entire scene in Italian, transforming an earthy old commonplace into a brightly paced comic interlude of music and dancing. Another Italian device which Molière exploited repeatedly is the use of pattern dialogue and rapid-fire, symmetrical exchanges. Such exchanges are found throughout Pourceaugnac, often in situations which suggest that they may have been accompanied by refined versions of Italian lazzi. Let us conclude this far from exhaustive list with a reminder that Molière also borrowed from the Italians (as well as from French farce) that procession of pedantic professionals (and professional pedants) whose utterances, far from throwing light on any situation, serve only to obfuscate meaning and confuse the actors and the action. Such obfuscation and confusion are a central aspect of Pourceaugnac's comic action and also of its more serious sub-text.

Jacques Copeau saw the essential action of the play as a ‘poursuite’ and this is surely one of the keys to its success in the theatre. Much of the vitality of the spoken action comes from the relentless forward drive of the chase. No sooner is the theme established with great economy in the opening scenes, culminating in Sbrigani's ‘Ma foi! voici notre homme: songeons à nous’ than the hunt is on for this ‘gibier’ who is ‘homme enfin à donner dans tous les panneaux qu'on lui présentera.’ The rhythm of the entire play could be marked accelerando, with only occasional brief pauses to allow the audience to draw breath, to emphasise the rhythm by comic contrast or to allow Sbrigani to prepare his next trick. Sbrigani's ‘gibier’ is not merely M. de Pourceaugnac but also Oronte who falls just as readily into the trap for ‘le beau-père est aussi dupe que le gendre.’ Molière has divided between the two older men a number of character types; the pretentious provincial in Paris, the lascivious older suitor, the irascible authoritarian father-figure. Neither is a match for the protean transformations or the rapid footwork of Sbrigani and his friends in an intrigue which moves to the rhythm of dance, a pas de deux, de trois, de quatre, punctuated and crowned by the entries of the entire corps de ballet. Attinger, quoting Copeau, noted that ‘tout se déroule dans une cadence qui postule la choréographie’ and that ‘la musique et la danse communiquent à toute la pièce un rythme de ballet’.⁹ To this observation should be added Robert McBride's very pertinent assertion that ‘Le théâtre de Molière fourmille de scènes qui sont autant de petits ballets parfaitement orchestrés et cohérents à l'intérieur de ce grand ballet des incompatibles qu'est une de ses comédies.’¹⁰ Thanks to Sbrigani, Julie's incompatibility with Pourceaugnac is ironically inverted into feigned desire and at the end of the play Eraste joins Julie in a pas de deux of feigned incompatibility. By the time Sbrigani allows Pourceaugnac and Oronte to meet, he has ensured that they are in the first stages of an incompatibility which grows more pronounced as the play proceeds. A possibly shameful medical complaint, two wives and a host of children are incompatible with ‘ce fâcheux mariage que mon père s'est mis en tête.’ Finally Pourceaugnac is utterly incompatible with all those around him. According to Copeau ‘C'est un mannequin en butte à toutes les avanies qui ont été délibérément concertées contre lui […] On pourrait dire qu'il ne se mêle pas à la comédie, mais se borne à lui faire tête. C'est le jeu adverse qui se développe en dehors de lui, autour de lui et contre lui …’.¹¹

The verbal and visual choreography of the entire play is based largely around two types of movement, both of which contribute to the ‘poursuite’. The first is a double movement which is alternately centrifugal and centripetal. A whole series of characters, real and disguised, come from the furthest-flung and most ‘ex-centric’ corners of France and beyond, all drawn to Paris, the metropolitan centre of cultural and social refinement and, within Paris, to that classic setting for comic intrigue, the ‘place publique’. The two young couples run in to set the plot in motion then scatter in all directions, only meeting again in the finale. Pourceaugnac comes up from Limoges to play the gentleman and is chased onto the stage by the mocking crowd which met him at the coach-stop, just as he will at the very end be chased off by the entire company. Along the way we meet a bewildering cavalcade of characters and caricatures who claim to have come from afar. Sbrigani, first from Naples, then as the merchant from Flanders, no mean linguistic jump for an actor; Lucette from Pézénas in the deep South and Nérine from St-Quentin up in Picardy; grotesque doctors who sing in Italian and ‘lawyers’ who while singing in French quote legal precedents from almost every nation in Western Europe; drunken Swiss guards with their guttural Germanic drivel. In the finale we meet gypsies from … heaven alone knows where. The bemused Oronte is left spinning in the midst of these linguistically and geographically bewildering entrances and exits, hardly even recognising the ‘language’ spoken by his own daughter. The other important movement is circular. The balletic chase sends Pourceaugnac, and at times Oronte, round in ever-decreasing and ever more frenzied circles until the atmosphere is one of demented vertigo. As Pourceaugnac is finally expelled from the whirligig Eraste brings Julie back from her supposed ‘fuite’ and Oronte is brought back from his flight of paternal excentricity. The three high points of the circular chase are the dance of the matassins with their clystères, the swarm of ‘wives’ and children around Pourceaugnac who cries ‘Au secours! Où fuirai-je? Je n'en puis plus’, and the ballet of ‘Avocats, Procureurs et Sergents’ who whirl around the would-be ‘gentilhomme limousin’ at his last appearance in male attire…. The comic chase is present from Molière's very earliest works and in its crudest form it is simply another of the things he borrowed from the commedia; but in Pourceaugnac it is so refined by music and choreography that it acquires a grace and symmetry which might almost be described as elegant.

Monsieur de Pourceaugnac is perhaps the most self-consciously theatrical of all Molière's comédies-ballets, perhaps even of all his plays. With the exception of Oronte and the two speaking doctors, every actor on stage is playing a character who is playing another character. Within the play another play is being performed with Pourceaugnac and Oronte as its spectators and victims. Eraste announces this structure ‘comme aux comédies’ in the first scene and Nérine puns ‘nous lui jouerons tant de pièces’. Sbrigani, the genial stage-manager, says to his co-plotters ‘vous nous tiendrez prêts au besoin les autres acteurs de la comédie’ and Eraste reinforces the theme when he urges Julie ‘Au moins, Madame, souvenez-vous bien de votre rôle […] pour mieux couvrir notre jeu …’. Pourceaugnac is playing a role which he finds increasingly difficult to sustain and his pathetically repeated bleating ‘Je suis gentilhomme limousin’ rings ever more hollow until in the third act he too is obliged to take on an even more spurious and comic identity, a travesty of a travesty!

Much of the delight of the intrigue comes from dramatic irony, the sustained disparity between what various characters wrongly believe to be taking place among themselves onstage, what others know to be true, and the further irony of the presence of the audience. It is surely as another deliberate irony that Molière gives Pourceaugnac the line ‘Est-ce une comédie que nous jouons ici?’ at the only moment in the play when the true answer, delivered in good faith by the doctors, is ‘Non.’ For the doctors, who are real doctors, are themselves victims of the plot and their diagnoses, perfectly sound and sensible in the medicine of the day, only become ridiculous in that they are addressed to a man who is not a melancholy hypochondriac but a hearty bumpkin in search of a good dinner. In scene after scene, language, far from contributing to rational communication, serves only to cloud the issue, to misinform and to disinform. The wariness of academic pedantry which Molière originally borrows from the commedia becomes in his work a sustained reflection on the dangers and limitations of language. The theme is already present in La Jalousie du Barbouillé where all the supposed wisdom of ‘le docteur’ is irrelevant jargon and incomprehensible Latin. When this garrulous pedant attempts to bring harmony to the quarrelling family the result is that everyone ends up speaking at once and understanding nothing. This is the very first appearance of what might be called the theme of Babel and it is underlined by the fact that it results in the doctor's fall to the ground. Learned language impedes all communication in Dépit amoureux II,6, leaving the pedant Métaphraste to muse ironically on a ‘world turned upside down’ from which language and therefore meaning are absent. A similar theme is further elaborated in Le Mariage forcé, where the two pedants are far less capable of telling Sganarelle what he needs to know than a couple of flighty gypsies, whose singing and dancing perhaps reveal a glimmer of truth.

Every speech in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac contributes to the décalage between appearance and reality. Language at its most plausible is also at its most mendacious and leads ultimately to the total absurdity of a man stripped of his identity and of his clothes, mimicking the voice of a ‘femme du bel air’. In the third act Pourceaugnac literally loses his own voice and becomes one more caricature among the cackling voices of Babel. This confusion of tongues is one of the most powerful effects created by Molière in the play. Sbrigani has kept his Neapolitan accent; Pourceaugnac's French is richly spiced with ‘l'accent du Midi’; the doctors' Parisian French is incomprehensible thanks to their subject matter and their Latin interpolations; the matassins sing in Italian; the ‘marchand flamand’ speaks double-Dutch; Nérine chews her words ‘à la Picarde’. But the climax of this proliferation of competing voices comes with the arrival from Pézenas of Lucette who, abandoning completely any semblance of Cartesian or Gallic clarity, takes flight into a torrent of Gascon from which virtually all meaning has fled. It is surely no coincidence that at such a comic high point of the action Molière decided to replace French with the most extended pieces of babble in his entire work. Nor is it an accident that the structure of Lucette's speech is a parody of a form which demanded an intense purity and clarity of diction, namely, Racinian tragedy. In the last long speech of her first scene, Lucette becomes a burlesque Ariadne, ‘abandounado à las mourtéles doulous que yeu ressenti de sas perfidos acciûs’. The following scene is another Ballet des Incompatibles in which a pair of fishwives, one (the actor Hubert) in drag, outdo each other in incomprehensibility, and the entire scene is crowned by the meaningless prattle of children, enfant=infans=speechless. It is from this high point of absurdity onwards that Pourceaugnac is persuaded to divest himself of his own intended role, his legal jargon, his precious clothes and his voice, so that in the scene with the two suisses (in reality friends of Sbrigani) all three voices on stage are counterfeit. And all this was engineered by Sbrigani who Pourceaugnac believed to the last to be ‘le seul honnête homme que j'aie trouvé dans cette ville.’ When, moments later, an exhausted Oronte concludes the betrothal of the young lovers with the conventional ‘Ah! que de bruit! […] Ah, ah, ah!’ there is, in performance, a far more than conventional sigh of relief that the babble of tongues is about to be stilled.

If the performance were to end at this point with a perfunctory ‘allons quérir un notaire!’ Pourceaugnac could be seen as a wilfully perverse tale of heartless mockery and deception, a cruel Parisian confidence trick played on an elderly gentleman (Oronte was the last role played by the one-eyed and lame Béjart) and a harmless and gullible booby up from the sticks (Molière losing his Armande-Julie). But this is not a black comedy or theatre of cruelty; it is, as Eraste told Julie, a ‘divertissement’ from the moments of noirceur in the real world of Molière's moral comedy. Respecting as it does the unity of time, the action is a perfect example of the ‘folle journée’, a day of pure and harmless madness on which all proprieties and conventions may, without negative moral implications, be thrown to the winds. In other words, as in the other late comédies-ballets, it is Shrove Tuesday, ‘Carnaval’, when a temporary inversion of order into disorder is a salutary, cathartic and curative process. As we are warned in La Comtesse d' Escarbagnas, ‘C'est sans vous offenser Madame, et les comédies veulent ces sortes de choses’; in Mme Jourdain's words we are in a world of ‘carême(s)-prenant(s)’ and it is ‘temps d'aller en masque’. In Le Malade imaginaire Béralde further reassures us that ‘le Carnaval autorise cela’ and at the end of Pourceaugnac, Eraste says ‘nous pouvons jouir du divertissement de la saison.’ Molière played Pourceaugnac, Jourdain and Argan, and, as Covielle points out ‘Tout cela sent un peu sa comédie […] et il est homme à y jouer son rôle à merveille.’ The reiterated references to ‘theatre in the theatre’ remind us that we are in a privileged space of fantasy, as Plautus said ‘in festivo loco’,¹² a place in which the insoluble moral ambiguities of the real world and the linguistic ambiguities of apparently logical discourse are momentarily vanquished in favour of a new language of harmonious reconciliation. For Molière the dramatist, the confusion of tongues when all speak at once leads to Babel; for the Molière of the comédies-ballets, music transforms and elevates the babble into vocal harmony.

Music enfolds and informs the entire structure of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac. The time of spoken dialogue and the tempo of music are carefully balanced throughout, creating, in the theatre, a measured and aesthetically satisfying experience which is difficult to glean from the printed page. A grandiose overture boldly asserts the importance of music in the ensuing action, and its rapid second section with breathless overlapping entries seems to prefigure the relentless ‘poursuite’. The Sérénade which follows has an integral role in the dramatic structure. Eraste says to the musicians and singers, ‘Suivez les ordres que je vous ai donnés pour la sérénade. Pour moi, je me retire, et ne veux point paraître ici.’ The solos and the trio serve as an exposition, telling in brief of the predicament of Julie and Eraste whose love is crossed by tyrannical parents. This is a clever and economical way of establishing the love theme, for there is little time for wooing once the chase has begun. Although promising a happy outcome, the music remains wistful and elegiac and even the trio ‘Aimons-nous donc’, with its plaintive falling phrases, seems more a hopeful prayer than a bold assertion. An energetic ballet then enacts a brief quarrel and reconciliation, preparing the audience for the role of dance in the action. The endless verbiage of the doctors is a perfect example of what Béralde calls ‘le roman de la médecine’ and bears little relation to reality. The doctors only succeed in making a perfectly healthy man feel confused and irritable and before administering their own dubious remedies they call on the ‘douceur exhilarante de la musique’ to calm his spirits. Thus the doctors are part of the malady not the cure. The cure, for the audience, if not yet for Pourceaugnac, lies in the conjunction of comedy, ballet and music. All three personified in L'Amour médecin declared that ‘Sans nous tous les hommes / Deviendraient mal sains, / Et c'est nous qui sommes / Leurs grands médecins.’ As soon as the doctors' pompous and dotty music begins we leave the real world for the first flight into comic fantasy in what Copeau called the ‘espaces béants de la musique’. The music begins in a mock-doleful minor mode (which Molière had called ‘le bémol’) then moves on to an elegant dance rhythm in which the singers urge us to banish melancholy with singing, dancing, laughter, wine and snuff! The ‘clystère’ scene is purified by music and dance (‘un beau bécarre’) and becomes a stylised ballet of whirling dervishes which concludes the first act. The second act similarly moves towards a fantastic musical climax of grotesque lawyers, in which the lugubrious music of the slow lawyer and the rapid patter of the stuttering lawyer eventually overlap and become incomprehensible, except as an exhilaratingly rhythmic musical and balletic pattern.

The presence of these structurally coherent and dramatically relevant musical scenes at the outset, and at the end of the first two acts, sets up a powerful aesthetic expectation of music, song and dance at the close of the last act. This is of course realised but the function of the finale is different from the earlier intermèdes. One simply cannot agree with Patrick Dandrey that the musical finale of Pourceaugnac is merely ‘un prolongement redondant’. True, it is not exactly a part of the action but it is a crucial part of the structures we have tried to examine. For Molière, ‘la fin d'une vraie et pure comédie’ now demands the absolution of all conflict into musical harmony. Language and plot dissolve as all the ‘acteurs de la comédie’ return to be reconciled with each other and the audience in a celebration of harmless folly and laughter, what Sainte-Beuve called Molière's ‘Purs ébats, son rire étincelant, redoublé, presque sans cause en se prolongeant, désintéressé du réel, comme une flamme folâtre qui voltige de plus belle après que la combustion grossière a cessé, un rire des dieux, suprême, inextinguible.’¹³ The stage directions remind us that the whole company ‘[cherche] à se donner des plaisirs innocents’ at the end of what might, as in L'École des maris, be called ‘le stratagème adroit d'un innocent amour.’ The text of the final chorus makes it clear that Pourceaugnac, who has played Policinello for our delight, is included in the rejoicing; ‘Lorsque pour rire on s'assemble / Les plus sages ce me semble / sont ceux qui sont les plus fous.’ What had been impossible in speech has been realised in the conjunction of words and music. The triumphant chords of C and G major remind us that ‘Hors du bécarre plus de salut en harmonie.’ The solos of the finale are delivered by a couple of ‘Égyptiens’. Paradoxically this is one last echo of the theme of excentricity of which we spoke earlier. These picturesque nomads now take the centre of the stage to wish good fortune to the entire company, and their exquisitely delicate duet (‘les biens, la gloire’, a brief moment of relative bémol) is a surprisingly poignant reminder of the vanity of human wishes. In the final curtain call, the voices of reason and erudition, ‘le divin Hippocrate’, Aristotle and his ‘trois opérations de l'esprit’, the babble of Neapolitan, Gascon, Picard, Limousin, Dutch, Italian, German and Latin, all are silenced to receive a Gypsy's blessing in music, and to respond in an impressively grandiose four-voiced harmony which triumphs over Babel. In Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Molière-Moron who longed to learn to sing, finally realised his dream and created a prototypically coherent musical-comedy.

Notes

1. Gérard Defaux, Molière ou les métamorphoses du comique (Lexington: French Forum, 1980); Claude Abraham, On the structure of Molière's comédies-ballets, Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1984; Patrick Dandrey, Molière ou l'esthétique du ridicule (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992), p.270.

2. Sainte-Beuve ed., Molière, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Lecou, 1853), p.24.

3. Philippe Beaussant, sleeve-notes to Lully-Molière, Comédies-Ballets, Erato CD 2292-45286-2.

4. Molière is here using the words bémol and bécarre to signify minor and major keys, not sharps and naturals.

5. Philippe Beaussant, loc. cit..

6. Jacques Copeau, Registres II, Molière (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p.265.

7. Patrick Dandrey, loc. cit..

8. Gustave Attinger, L'Esprit de la commedia dell'arte dans le théâtre français (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1950), pp. 137-8.

9. Ibid., p.159.

10. Robert McBride, ‘Molière, le Languedoc et le Ballet des Incompatibles’, in La Vie théâtrale dans les provinces du Midi (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980), p.135. In this ballet Molière made one of his earliest appearances travesti en femme. Pourceaugnac was his last such appearance, although it could be said that at the end of both Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire Molière is equally ‘cross-dressed’ in garments which mark him out as a creature from a fantasy world.

11. Jacques Copeau, op.cit., p.269.

12. Plautus, Miles gloriosus, vv.83-85.

13. Sainte-Beuve, loc. cit.