Life and death-moliere 

Page from La Grange’s Register, dated 17 February 1673

“Is there not some danger in counterfeiting death?”

“By the devil himself! If I were a doctor, I would take revenge for his impertinence, and I would let him die as he is. Whatever he might do and say, I would not prescribe the slightest bleeding, the smallest purging of the bowels, and I would tell him: die! die! That will teach you to make fun of doctors.” (The Imaginary Invalid, Act III, sc. 3)

In the famous Register he kept when hired to Molière’s troupe, Charles La Grange, the faithful companion, wrote on 17 February 1673:

“That same day, after the performance at ten in the evening, Monsieur de Molière died in his house in the Rue de Richelieu, having played the role of the Imaginary Invalid much indisposed with a cold and an inflammation of the chest that caused him a great cough so that in the great efforts he made to spit he burst a vein in his body and did not live more than half an hour or three quarters from when the vein burst. His body is buried at St. Joseph’s, in the parish of Saint-Eustache. There is a gravestone raised one foot above ground.”

In La Grange’s sober narrative one can sense the underlying feeling of humiliation inflicted on actors excluded by the Gallican church; no matter how well-known, celebrated or well protected by those power they may be. La Grange is writing after the fact, and every word seems to weigh heavily with the pain of the actor-poet, with the blood he vomits from the mouth, with everything that he would still have to denounce in the faults of his century and of ours.

Let us come back to the facts. In this month of February 1673, Molière is sick, weak and tired, wounded by the growing disaffection of the King, now infatuated with Lully, who, after eight years of fruitful collaboration is now at war with Molière. He is rehearsing a new comedy-ballet and has asked Marc-Antoine Charpentier to write the score. The Imaginary Invalid, a comedy-ballet in 3 acts, on the known theme of the self-centred father who goes against his daughter’s feelings in order to satisfy his own mania. With burlesque interventions by bumbling doctors and crooked apothecaries, with its loud-mouthed servant as the voice of reason and a treacherous wife to boot, the play is in itself a condensed version of Molière works and a succinct depiction of his personal problems.

The Imaginary Invalid play was presented to the public at the Palais Royal on 10 February 1673, then on 12 and 14 February. On Friday 17, the day of the fourth performance, if we are to believe Grimarest, Molière’s first biographer (1), Molière was on the verge of not performing. While he was exhausted, he refused to deny “fifty workers” a day’s pay. His only demand was that the curtain be raised at exactly four o’clock. The show was long and the Prince de Condé, a loyal supporter of Molière, was in the audience. La Grange, in his preface to the Complete Works of Molière in 1682, said he had difficulty performing his role and “could finish it only with much suffering.” In the feverish closing ceremony, while doctors and apothecaries were dashing about, Molière had a fit of coughing that left him spitting blood. He grimaced. Fortunately the play was finished and the curtain was quickly dropped, without the public noticing the tragedy that was unfolding on the comic stage. Wrapped in his gown, Molière was immediately transported in a sedan chair to his home, a few hundred yards from the theatre on the Rue de Richelieu. La Grange, Baron and Armande accompanied him. Molière refused the broth made for him by his wife because it was too strong and nibbled on a piece of parmesan with a little bread. He went to bed, with his head resting on a pillow filled with soporific drugs. But a fresh stream of blood gushed from his mouth. It was impossible to stop the hemoptysis that was suffocating him. By chance, the house was lodging, as was customary, two itinerant nuns from the order of the Poor Clares of Annecy, who had come to Paris for Lent. They rushed to Molière’s side. Aubry, Molière’s brother-in-law, sent for a priest at St. Eustache. The priests Lenfant and Lechat refused to come for an actor. The angry Aubry himself ran to the parish and managed to find a third priest by the name of Paysant. When he brought him back to Rue de Richelieu, it was too late. Molière had died, suffocated, with the nuns at his bedside. He probably died of pulmonary congestion (tuberculosis?) complicated by a stomach ulcer (cancer?). But most importantly, he died without confession, died without being able to renounce the profession of actor, actions required by the Church. While he may seem to us today as a free spirit, having created Tartuffe, fought for its performance, written Don Juan, and had himself treated by Pierre Roullé, the parish priest of Saint-Barthélemy, as the “devil clothed in flesh and dressed as man”, and as the “most outrageously impious libertine there lived in these past centuries”, Molière was a good Christian, at least in appearance, for it was difficult to be anything else while in the immediate entourage of the king. The Tralage compendium, which gave approvals of good morals to contemporary actors, counted Molière, as did La Grange, among those who attended mass regularly (unlike Madame Molière, his wife). Molière’s confessor was Père Bernard, and he was a friend of Père Francois Loiseau, the parish priest of Auteuil, where he had his country house. Molière had celebrated Easter in 1672. Faced with the obstinate refusal of the priests of St. Eustache to provide the actor with a Christian burial, on 18 February Armande Béjart sent a petition to the Archbishop of Paris, Harlay de Champvalon who would not hear it, even though Molière was valet to the king. She then rushed to throw herself at the feet of the king at Saint-Germain. To avoid a scandal, she was granted a short ceremony at the entrance of Saint-Eustache, without pomp, at night, and in private.

What was the reason for the Church’s paradoxical attitude to actors in France? The King himself, Louis XIII, took pains to specify, in 1641, after duly forbidding “the depiction of any dishonest actions etc.”, that “their profession, which may innocently divert our peoples from various bad occupations, may not be held in blame against them, nor damage their reputation in public commerce”.

The Church fathers, and Tertullian, shocked by the vulgarity of the pantomimes and Atellan farces [short buffoonish comedies] inherited from Rome, had cast an anathema down on theatre, as something incompatible with Christian life. During the Council of Elvira in 305, the rule was set down that actors are allowed into the Christian community only if they renounce their art. In 397, the excommunication extended to spectators who attended a show on a Sunday or feast day. Saint Augustine, aware of the enjoyment they procure, all the more severely condemned those who practiced theatre or attended it. A kind of tolerance came to be established among the clergy in the Middle Ages with the emergence of edifying or semi-liturgical performances. Thomas Aquinas stated that “acting [is] a necessity for human nature, actors do are not in sin as long as they perform with moderation, that is to say only employing licit words or actions, and as long as they do no act in forbidden circumstances and times” (IIa IIae, qu. 168, s. 3). The Council of Trent in the sixteenth century remained prudently reserved and considered comedy as “indifferent”; the Jesuits used theatre for teaching purposes and the Cardinal Richelieu’s policy encouraged and protected the theatrical art. Yet the entire second half of the seventeenth century was to be shaken by violent controversy around this subject, reflecting the religious disputes that were causing turmoil in the country. Richelieu favoured the reform of the theatre, banning all violence from the stage and the application of the famous rules, inciting Louis XIII to sign the edict of 16 April 1641 which seemed to lift the stigma imposed on actors; he encouraged the Abbé d’Aubignac in his theoretical writings (Practice of Theatre, 1657, followed by the Project for the Restoration of French Theatre); he applauded the widespread use of biblical and religious subjects. But the Gallican clergy did not see things the same way, and the Illustre Théâtre had barely taken up residence at the Jeu de Paume des Métayers in 1643 when the parish priest of St. Sulpice, Jean-Jacques Olier, famous for his intransigence toward the Huguenots, the Jansenists and the libertines, denounced actors. Anne of Austria was scolded by her confessors for her fondness for theatre. Various prelates published decrees against actors. And yet, in this same period, no doubt in the wake of the Louis XIII’s edict and the tolerant statements of Francois de Sales, actors were getting married in churches, baptising their children and being buried religiously. Ecclesiastics did not refuse to sit on “the bishops’ bench” when comedies were performed at court... The quarrels between Jesuits and Jansenists, Jansenists and Mazarin, Mazarin and the princes, and Huguenots and Papists further interfered in this profusion of works condemning or defending theatre published in the second half of the century, especially after the publication of the French translation of St. Charles Borromeo’s treatise against balls, immediately extended by the French clergy to comedy (1664). Also looming behind this persecution was the omnipotent and occult Company of the Blessed Sacrament founded in 1629, and whose influence weighed heavily on the successive bans of Tartuffe. The dispute culminated in the affair of Father Caffaro, this unfortunate Theatine overwhelmed by the wrath of Bossuet and the Archbishop of Paris for having indulgently prefaced the works of Edme Boursault, and forced to admit the errors of his ways to his superiors.

In the short work published in the year of the Molière’s death (2), the honest Samuel Chappuzeau, gave a measured account of his own “reflections on the feelings of the Fathers and Councils”: “[theatre] is not dirty, as long as the poet does not transgress the bounds of propriety, and in fact it is only shows that are bloody or dishonest that the charity and purity of Christianity opposes, and that the Councils and Fathers have spoken out against.”

La Bruyère’s common sense would manage to make all parties agree, if common sense were more commonly shared: “What idea could be more bizarre than to imagine a crowd of Christians of either sex gathered on certain days in a room to applaud a band of excommunicated individuals, who are excommunicated only because of the pleasure they give, and for which they are already paid? I think it would be better to either close the theatres or to be less severe in pronouncements about the state of actors.” (3) But at a time when his Characters was published, such wisdom was still far distant. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the Church dropped its ban on actors and the twentieth that this was officially recognised.

Jacqueline Razgonnikoff, former librarian at the Comédie-Française library-museum.

That same day, after the performance at ten in the evening, Monsieur de Molière died in his house in the Rue de Richelieu, having played the role of the Imaginary Invalid much indisposed with a cold and an inflammation of the chest that caused him a great cough so that in the great efforts he made to spit he burst a vein in his body and did not live more than half an hour or three quarters from when the vein burst. His body is buried at St. Joseph’s, in the parish of Saint-Eustache. There is a gravestone raised one foot above ground.

Death had only ever entered his theatre with a playful pirouette. The death of Pandolfe in The Scatterbrain is merely a ruse to wrest some money from his friend Anselm, and the “ghost” exclaims: “What! Have I passed away without noticing!” The dying Scapin has himself carried to the head of the table but it is only a trick to be forgiven for his double-dealing. Argan forges his death to test his family, and the death of Don Juan, a traditional death at that, is all about sleight of hand, a stage climax.

On this 17 February 1673, death, the real death came. And there was no silence before this death.

Epitaphs immediately appeared, mostly of an unbelievable nastiness, in this time when people rhymed as we now switch television channels. Some examples:

For fear that by imitating Molière’s ways in life

On 2 March 1673, Philippe de la Brosse wrote to Madame de Sablé, “He who loves the truth also loves the discipline of the Church. And that is what the parish priest of Saint-Eustache shows by his conduct in refusing to give consecrated ground to a wretched jester who only ever thought of making people laugh all his life, not thinking that God would laugh at the death of sinners who wait until their final hour to call out to him.”

Hurt and sickened, Chapelle replied to this jumble of prose and verse in an epigram:

And it was a Jesuit writer and grammarian, Père Bouhours (who died in 1702), who wrote the most lucid and also the cruellest epitaph:

Examining the writings of the time gives one a strong feeling of unease. All the contemporaries speak of a sudden death.

Starting with Robinet who wrote his usual chronicle in verse as soon as he heard the news. He alluded to the last work that is “currently attracting all of Paris” and states that the Faculty of Medicine is annoyed when it is interrupted:

He declaimed against them (doctors) almost all his life

What actor, at such a price, would wish follow his example?

“Monsieur de Molière has died, as you already know, but so suddenly he had almost no time to be sick.”

D’Assoucy wrote Ombre de Molière in which he cites Molière’s enemies: the Marais, the Hôtel de Bourgogne (rival theatres), Lully, the University, Cotin and the hypocrites...

“Had he had the time to be sick, he would not have died without a doctor...”

Assoucy ended up being thrown in jail, and Le Mercure galant was temporarily banned. However, it was well informed because

is Jean Donneau de Visé, someone who was present in Molière’s battles... as an adversary. But he changed sides. After

he was in Molière’s camp. Was it because, having taken on clerical garb, as was appropriate in the best families, he was defrocked for marrying the daughter of a painter? Was it that by approaching Molière he had been drawn to the man’s generosity? Was it because Molière the director staged five of the plays he had written, and specifically the last, The Unfaithful Husbands on 24 January, 1673?

I mourned this man who was incomparable in his art, snatched by a sudden death...”

“I do not know what men, seditious rather than pious, hated him.”

La Grange, in its register, is both laconic and precise... Molière died quickly.

“He was indisposed with a cold and an inflammation of the chest.”

and he recalls that it caused him to put the following lines into the mouth of Harpagon (The Miser, 1668): “

I have no great indispositions, thank you God, there’s is only my inflammation that troubles me from time to time.”

“Moreover, he had a very good constitution, and without the accident which left his illness with no remedy, he would not have lacked the strength to overcome it.”

“...His death, which has been referred to in various ways...”

According to rumour, a silence heavy with hatred came down. Three months after Molière’s death, Mme Lhermitte wrote from Paris to the Count of Modena:

“I assure you that people no longer speak of the poor Molière, as if he had never existed, and his theatre that so recently had caused so much talk is completely abolished. I think I wrote to tell you that all the actors have dispersed...”