Even today, or perhaps yesterday or tomorrow, the precise date is disputed, Molière celebrates the 400and anniversary of his birth. It is good that the greatest French-language playwright in history is immortal since, if I venerate him today, it took me a long time to love him.
At twenty, already in love with literature, I looked at Molière from afar, considering him, without knowing him, as a writer of the past, outdated, just good enough to serve as a flower in the buttonhole for pedants who accumulate cultural capital to found their social distinction. Like Monsieur Jourdain who writes prose without knowing it, I was writing Bourdieu for the poor in complete ignorance.
When, in CEGEP and university, in letters, they sang to me of the greatness of Molière—which didn’t happen so often, moreover, when I think about it—I saw nothing but snobbery in it. I refused to waste my time reading this dead old writer and his drama, in verse, my dear.
I no longer remember the click that changed my view of him. Is it my reading, in 1999, of the chapter that Jean d’Ormesson devotes to him in Another history of French literature ? May be. The plea of the academician, in any case, convinces. Molière, he wrote, revolutionized the theater by raising comedy to the dignity of tragedy, he established himself as “the greatest comic poet of all time” and “vivacity and movement, charm too, and life belong to him alone. It gives the taste.
Does my definitive conversion date back to the summer of 2006, when I was dazzled by a representation of the Amorous spite (1656), one of Molière’s first comedies, given in the open air, near Joliette, by the breathtaking troupe of the Advienne que peut? The first moment probably nourished the second since, in the review of the play that I was then signing in The duty, I was quoting d’Ormesson.
Still, Molière has since become one of my favorite writers. I know now that this author, whom I imagined mummified and buried forever with powder and a wig, embodies, even today, the eternal vigor of literary genius in the French language. Molière is 400 years old, and he is my friend.
“What I had thought until then superficial or farce, and that we often play as such, wrote André Comte-Sponville in 2000 about the Bourgeois gentleman (1670), took on its true depth, which is that of humanity, at the same time as its maximum humor, which is that of our ridiculousness. An entertainment ? It is one, but one that makes you smarter and happier. »
The comment applies to all of Molière’s work: it is always entertaining – after many readings, I continue to burst out laughing when Géronte, in Deceits of Scapin (1671), continues the “but what the hell was he going to do in this galley? — but, adds the philosopher, it is to make us “more lucid, freer, more cheerful.”
Molière, in fact, does not age. His critique of the presumption of the medical establishment hits the bull’s eye as if it were written yesterday. In The doctor despite Himself (1666), Sganarelle, forced to play the medic reluctantly, quickly takes a liking to imposture. After explaining vaguely to a father whose daughter is mute that this is attributable to “the impediment of the action of her tongue”, Sganarelle must justify having located, by mistake, the heart on the right and the liver on the left, contrary to custom.
Like a good know-it-all, it doesn’t come apart. “Yes,” he replies, “it used to be so; but we have changed all that, and we are now practicing medicine with an entirely new method. Faced with so much science, the father bows and asks forgiveness for his ignorance. The advantage with medicine, concludes Sganarelle, is that the fault always lies with the person who dies.
In the same room, the accent of the “salvists”, who speak of “paroquets”, “libarté” and “amiquié”, makes me feel at home.
If Molière is 400 years old, his learned women (1672), a piece created a year before his death, celebrate their 350and birthday. The perky genius is expressed in all the lines, versified with stunning elegance. Do not believe the rumor that sees misogyny in this room where precious people cover themselves with ridicule. The gentlemen, in this affair, do not come out any better, and it is snobbery and cunning, which have neither age nor precise sex, that Molière ridicules. Clitandre, the young and wise lover, sums up the essentials: science and the mind, he explains, “are things of themselves which are beautiful and good”, but the farts of brew misuse them.
I had the folly to believe that Molière was on the side of the pedants. Impudent, he has nevertheless unmasked them for 400 years.