Post about Jean Baptiste Moliere. Brief biography of Moliere the most important thing

MAIN DATES OF LIFE AND WORK 1856, August 27 - In the village of Naguevichi, Drohobych district, Ivan Yakovlevich Franko was born in the family of a rural blacksmith. 1864–1867 - Study (from the second grade) at a normal four-year school of the Basilian Order in the city of Drohobych. 1865, in the spring - Died

short biography outlined in this article.

Moliere short biography

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin- French comedian of the 17th century, creator of classical comedy, actor and director of the theater, better known as the Molière troupe.

Born in Paris January 16, 1622. His father was the royal upholsterer and valet, and the family lived very prosperously. Since 1636, Jean Baptiste received his education at a prestigious educational institution - the Jesuit Clermont College; in 1639, upon graduation, he became a licentiate of rights, but he preferred the theater to the work of an artisan or lawyer.

In June 1643, when he was already 21 years old, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin left his family and opened the “Brilliant Theater” in Paris. This, as we would say today, project lasted only two years and suffered financial failure. All that remained were debts that Jean-Baptiste had nothing to pay. For this reason, he even had to spend some time in prison.

After this story, the father cursed his son and forbade him to disgrace his family name. At that time, the acting profession was considered the lowest and was called nothing more than a contemptuous “comedian”. This is precisely what is associated with the appearance of the pseudonym Moliere. Jean-Baptiste chose to renounce his family name, because he could not imagine his life without the theater.

Moliere took up what he loved, organizing a traveling troupe with which he traveled from one city to another. The repertoire was small, so he took up the pen himself. He started by writing one-act plays. This is how “The Flying Doctor”, “Vetrenik”, “Barbuye’s Jealousy” appeared (these are the ones that have come down to us, but there were others).

Gradually, the popularity of Moliere's troupe grew and they began to perform in large cities. One day, in Languedoc, Moliere met with a school friend, the Prince of Conti, who recommended him to the king's brother. And so Jean-Baptiste Moliere, together with his actors, got the opportunity to play in the theater at court, in the Louvre.

The last decade and a half of Moliere's life (1658 - 1673) were the most productive times in terms of drama. At this time, such masterpieces as “Funny Fashionistas”, “The Imaginary Cuckold”, “The Bourgeois in the Nobility”, “Don Juan, or the Stone Guest”, “Tartuffe”, “The Misanthrope”, “The Imaginary Invalid” were created. His plays mercilessly ridicule the vices of people: greed, hypocrisy, hypocrisy.

The production of the comedy Tartuffe at court dealt a serious blow to the Catholic Church. In the play, Moliere showed the criminality of church authorities and the falsity of its morality. Of course, the play was banned, and in order to save it, Moliere “removed” the main character from his clergy, making him an ordinary saint and a hypocrite.

Other plays were also prohibited from being staged—this was how the playwright’s criticism acted. Once his theater was even closed, and for three whole months the actors waited for the opportunity to play again, although all this time they did not even receive money.

Moliere himself was far from a poor man; he received an annual pension of 1,500 livres from the king. But he treated money lightly and spent it with pleasure. He spent not only on himself, but helped those in need, and not one of those who turned to him with a request was offended. Contemporaries spoke of him as a kind, generous, helpful person.

The personal life of Jean-Baptiste Moliere was not very happy. He married at the age of forty, his young wife Armande Bejart deceived him. His friendship with Jean Racine did not work out either. After the premiere of Racine’s play “Alexander the Great” at the Moliere Theater, it was transferred to another troupe for production. Moliere took this as a betrayal

Moliere died 17 February 1673. He was playing the main role in his play “The Imaginary Invalid” and felt unwell on stage. A few hours later, the great playwright died. The Archbishop of Paris prohibited the body of a “comedian” and an “unrepentant sinner” from being buried according to Christian rites.

He was buried secretly, at night, in the Saint-Joseph cemetery.

born in Paris on January 15, 1622. His father, a bourgeois, a court upholsterer, did not at all think about giving his son any great education, and by the age of fourteen the future playwright had barely learned to read and write. The parents ensured that their court position passed to their son, but the boy discovered extraordinary abilities and a persistent desire to learn; his father’s craft did not attract him. At the insistence of his grandfather, Poquelin the father reluctantly enrolled his son in a Jesuit college. Here, for five years, Moliere successfully studied the course of science. He was fortunate to have as one of his teachers the famous philosopher Gassendi, who introduced him to the teachings of Epicurus. They say that Moliere translated Lucretius’s poem “On the Nature of Things” into French (this translation has not survived, and there is no evidence of the authenticity of this legend; evidence can only serve as a sound materialist philosophy, which runs through all of Moliere’s works).
Since childhood, Moliere was passionate about theater. The theater was his dearest dream. After graduating from Clermont College, having completed all the duties of formally completing his education and receiving a law degree in Orleans, Moliere hastened to form a troupe of actors from several friends and like-minded people and open the “Brilliant Theater” in Paris.
Moliere had not yet thought about independent dramatic creativity. He wanted to be an actor, and an actor of a tragic role, and then he took a pseudonym for himself - Moliere. One of the actors already had this name before him.
It was an early time in the history of French theater. Only recently a permanent troupe of actors appeared in Paris, inspired by the dramatic genius of Corneille, as well as the patronage of Cardinal Richelieu, who himself was not averse to tragedies.
The undertakings of Molière and his comrades, their young enthusiasm, were not crowned with success. The theater had to be closed. Moliere joined a troupe of traveling comedians, which had been traveling around the cities of France since 1646. It could be seen in Nantes, Limoges, Bordeaux, Toulouse. In 1650, Moliere and his comrades performed in Narbonne.
Wanderings around the country enrich Moliere with life observations. He studies the customs of various classes, hears the living speech of the people. In 1653, in Lyon, he staged one of his first plays, “Madcap.”
The talent of a playwright was discovered in him unexpectedly. He never dreamed of independent literary creativity and took up the pen, forced by the poverty of his troupe’s repertoire. At first, he only remade Italian farces, adapting them to French conditions, then he began to move further and further away from Italian models, more boldly introduced an original element into them, and, finally, completely discarded them for the sake of independent creativity.
Thus was born the best comedian in France. He was a little over thirty years old. “Before this age it is difficult to achieve anything in the dramatic genre, which requires knowledge of both the world and the human heart,” wrote Voltaire.
In 1658, Moliere was again in Paris; he is already an experienced actor, playwright, a person who has known the world in all its reality. The performance of Moliere's troupe in Versailles in front of the royal court was a success. The troupe was left in the capital. The Molière Theater initially settled in the Petit-Bourbon premises, performing three times a week (on other days the stage was occupied by the Italian Theater).
In 1660, Moliere received a stage in the hall of the Palais Royal, built under Richelieu for one of the tragedies, part of which was written by the cardinal himself. The premises did not at all meet all the requirements of the theater - however, France did not have the best at that time. Even a century later, Voltaire complained: “We do not have a single tolerable theater - truly Gothic barbarism, of which the Italians rightly accuse us. There are good plays in France, and good theater halls in Italy.”
During the fourteen years of his creative life in Paris, Moliere created everything that was included in his rich literary heritage (more than thirty plays). His talent unfolded in all its splendor. He was patronized by the king, who was, however, far from understanding what a treasure France possessed in the person of Moliere. Once, in a conversation with Boileau, the king asked who would glorify his reign, and was quite surprised by the strict critic’s answer that this would be achieved by a playwright who called himself Moliere.
The playwright had to fight off numerous enemies who were not at all occupied with literary issues. Behind them were hidden more powerful opponents, touched by the satirical arrows of Moliere's comedies; enemies invented and spread the most incredible rumors about the man who was the pride of the people.
Moliere died suddenly, at the fifty-second year of his life. Once, during the performance of his play “The Imaginary Invalid,” in which a seriously ill playwright played the main role, he felt ill and died a few hours after the end of the performance (February 17, 1673). Archbishop of Paris Harley de Chanvallon forbade the body of the “comedian” and “unrepentant sinner” to be buried in Christian rites (Molière was not given unction, as required by the church charter). A crowd of fanatics gathered near the house of the deceased playwright, trying to prevent the burial. The playwright's widow threw money out the window to get rid of the offensive interference of the crowd excited by the clergy. Moliere was buried at night in the Saint-Joseph cemetery. Boileau responded to the death of the great playwright in poetry, telling in them about the atmosphere of hostility and persecution in which Moliere lived and worked.
In the preface to his comedy “Tartuffe,” Moliere, defending the right of a playwright, in particular a comedian, to intervene in public life, the right to depict vices in the name of educational purposes, wrote: “The theater has great corrective power.” “The best examples of serious morality are usually less powerful than satire... We deal vices a heavy blow by exposing them to public ridicule.”
Here Moliere defines the meaning of the purpose of comedy: “It is nothing more than a witty poem that exposes human shortcomings with entertaining teachings.”
So, according to Moliere, comedy faces two tasks. The first and main thing is to teach people, the second and secondary thing is to entertain them. If comedy is deprived of its edifying element, it will turn into empty ridicule; if you take away its entertainment functions, it will cease to be a comedy and its moralizing goals will also not be achieved. In short, “the duty of comedy is to correct people by amusing them.”
The playwright perfectly understood the social significance of his satirical art. Everyone should serve people to the best of their talents. Everyone should contribute to the public welfare, but each does this depending on his personal inclinations and talents. In the comedy "Funny Primroses" Moliere very transparently hinted at what kind of theater he liked.
Moliere considers naturalness and simplicity to be the main advantages of an actor’s performance. Let us give the reasoning of the negative character in Mascarille's play. “Only the comedians of the Burgundy Hotel are able to show the product face to face,” argues Mascarille. The Burgundy Hotel troupe was the royal troupe of Paris and, therefore, recognized as the first. But Moliere did not accept her theatrical system, condemning the “stage effects” of the actors at the Burgundy Hotel, who could only “recite loudly.”
“Everyone else is ignorant, reading poetry as they say,” Mascarille develops his theory. These “rest” include the Moliere Theater. The playwright put into the mouth of Mascarille the opinions of Parisian theater conservatives, who were shocked by the simplicity and ordinariness of the stage embodiment of the author's text in the Molière theater. However, according to the deep conviction of the playwright, one must read poetry exactly “as they say”: simply, naturally; and the dramatic material itself, according to Moliere, must be truthful, in modern language - realistic.
Moliere's thought was correct, but he failed to convince his contemporaries. Racine did not want to stage his tragedies at Moliere's theater precisely because the method of stage disclosure by actors of the author's text was too natural.
In the 18th century, Voltaire, and after him Diderot, Mercier, Seden, and Beaumarchais stubbornly fought against the pomposity and unnaturalness of classicist theater. But the enlighteners of the 18th century also failed to achieve success. Classicist theater still adhered to old forms. In the 19th century, romantics and realists opposed these forms.
Moliere's attraction to stage truth in its realistic interpretation is very obvious, and only time, tastes and concepts of the century did not allow him to develop his talent with Shakespearean breadth.
Moliere expresses interesting opinions about the essence of theatrical art in “Criticism of “A Lesson for Wives.” Theater “is a mirror of society,” he says. The playwright compares comedy with tragedy. Obviously, already in his time, the stilted classical tragedy began to bore the audience. One of the characters in the aforementioned play by Moliere declares: “at the presentation of great works there is a terrifying emptiness, at the nonsense (meaning Moliere’s comedies) - all of Paris.”
Moliere criticizes classic tragedy for its isolation from modernity, for the schematic nature of its stage images, for the far-fetched nature of its situations. In his days, no attention was paid to this criticism of the tragedy, meanwhile, in the embryo there was hidden the future anti-classicist program, which was put forward by French enlighteners in the second half of the 18th century (Diderot, Beaumarchais) and the French romantics of the first half of the 19th century.
Before us are realistic principles, as they could have been conceived in the time of Moliere. True, the playwright believed that “working from life,” “resemblance” to life, are necessary mainly in the comedy genre and do not go beyond it: “When portraying people, you write from life. Their portraits should be similar, and you have achieved nothing if they are not recognized as people of your century.”
Moliere also expresses guesses about the legitimacy of a peculiar mixture of serious and comic elements in the theater, which, in the opinion of his contemporaries and even subsequent generations, right up to the war between the romantics and the classicists in the 19th century, was considered unacceptable.
In short, Moliere is paving the way for future literary battles; but we would be sinning against the truth if we declared him the herald of theatrical reform. Moliere's ideas about the tasks of comedy do not fall outside the circle of classicist aesthetics. The task of comedy, as he imagined it, was “to give on stage a pleasant portrayal of common shortcomings.” He shows here a characteristic tendency among classicists towards the rationalistic abstraction of types.
Moliere does not at all object to the classicist rules, seeing in them a manifestation of “common sense”, “casual observations of sensible people on how not to spoil their pleasure from this kind of plays.” It was not the ancient Greeks who suggested to modern peoples the unity of time, place and action, but sound human logic, argues Moliere.
In a small theatrical joke “Impromptu Versailles” (1663), Moliere showed his troupe preparing the next performance. The actors talk about the principles of the game. We are talking about the theater of the Burgundy Hotel.
The purpose of comedy is to “portray accurately human flaws,” he says, but comedic characters are not portraits. It is impossible to create a character that does not resemble someone around him, but “you have to be crazy to look for your doubles in comedy,” says Moliere. The playwright clearly hints at the collective nature of the artistic image, saying that the features of a comedic character “can be noticed in hundreds of different faces.”
All these true thoughts, thrown in passing, will subsequently find their place in the system of realistic aesthetics.
Moliere was born for realistic theater. The sober materialistic philosophy of Lucretius, which he studied in his youth, and rich life observations during the years of his wandering life prepared him for a realistic type of creativity. The dramaturgical school of his time left its mark on him, but Moliere continually broke the shackles of the classicist canons.
The main difference between the classical system and Shakespeare's realistic methods is manifested in the method of character construction. The stage character of the classicists is predominantly one-sided, static, without contradictions or development. This is a character-idea, it is as broad as the idea embedded in it requires. The author's bias manifests itself completely straightforwardly and nakedly. Talented playwrights - Corneille, Racine, Moliere - were able to be truthful within the limits and narrow tendentiousness of the image, but the normativity of the aesthetics of classicism still limited their creative possibilities. They did not reach the heights of Shakespeare, and not because they lacked talent, but because their talents often conflicted with established aesthetic norms and retreated before them. Moliere, who worked on the comedy “Don Juan” hastily, not intending it for a long stage life, allowed himself to violate this basic law of classicism (static and unilinearity of the image); he wrote in accordance not with theory, but with life and his author’s understanding, and created a masterpiece, a highly realistic drama.

Early years. The beginning of an acting career

Moliere came from an old bourgeois family, which for several centuries was engaged in the craft of upholsterers and drapers. Molière's father, Jean Poquelin (1595-1669), was court upholsterer and valet to Louis XIII. Moliere was brought up at a prestigious Jesuit school - Clermont College, where he thoroughly studied Latin, so he freely read Roman authors in the original and even, according to legend, translated Lucretius’ philosophical poem “On the Nature of Things” into French (the translation is lost). After graduating from college in 1639, Moliere passed the exam in Orleans for the title of licentiate of rights. But the legal career attracted him no more than his father’s craft, and Moliere chose the profession of an actor. In 1643, Moliere became the head of the “Brilliant Theater” ( Illustre Theater). When the group broke up, Moliere decided to seek his fortune in the provinces, joining a troupe of traveling comedians led by Dufresne.

Moliere's troupe in the provinces. First plays

Moliere's youthful wanderings throughout the French province (-) during the years of the civil war (Fronde) enriched him with everyday and theatrical experience. Since 1645, Moliere joined Dufresne, and in 1650 he headed the troupe. The repertoire hunger of Molière's troupe was the impetus for the beginning of his dramatic activity. Thus, the years of Moliere’s theatrical studies became the years of his author’s studies. Many of the farcical scenarios he composed in the provinces have disappeared. Only the plays “Barboulier’s Jealousy” have survived ( La jalousie du Barbouillé) and "The Flying Doctor" ( Le medécin volant), whose affiliation with Molière is not entirely reliable. The titles of a number of similar plays played by Molière in Paris after his return from the provinces are also known (“Gros-Rene the Schoolboy”, “The Pedant Doctor”, “Gorgibus in the Bag”, “Plan-Plan”, “Three Doctors”, “Cossack”) , “The Feigned Lump”, “The Twig Knitter”), and these titles echo the situations of Moliere’s later farces (for example, “Gorgibus in the Sack” and “The Tricks of Scapin”, d. III, sc. II). These plays indicate that the tradition of ancient farce nourished Moliere's dramaturgy and became an organic component in the main comedies of his mature age.

The farcical repertoire, excellently performed by Moliere's troupe under his direction (Moliere himself found himself as an actor in farce), helped strengthen its reputation. It increased even more after Moliere composed two great comedies in verse - “Naughty, or Everything Is Out of Place” ( L'Étourdi ou les Contretemps, ) and "Love's Annoyance" ( Le dépit amoureux,), written in the manner of Italian literary comedy. The main plot, which represents a free imitation of Italian authors, is layered here with borrowings from various old and new comedies, in accordance with Moliere’s favorite principle of “taking his goodness wherever he finds it.” The interest of both plays lies in the development of comic situations and intrigue; the characters in them are still developed very superficially.

Parisian period

Later plays

The overly deep and serious comedy “The Misanthrope” was coldly received by the audience, who were looking primarily for entertainment in the theater. To save the play, Moliere added to it the brilliant farce “The Reluctant Doctor” (fr. Le medécin malgré lui, ). This trinket, which was a huge success and is still preserved in the repertoire, developed Moliere’s favorite theme of quack doctors and ignoramuses. It is curious that just in the most mature period of his work, when Moliere rose to the heights of socio-psychological comedy, he increasingly returned to a farce splashing with fun, devoid of serious satirical tasks. It was during these years that Moliere wrote such masterpieces of entertaining comedy-intrigue as “Monsieur de Poursonnac” and “The Tricks of Scapin” (fr. Les fourberies de Scapin, ). Moliere returned here to the primary source of his inspiration - to the ancient farce.

In literary circles, there has long been a somewhat disdainful attitude toward these crude, but sparkling, genuine “internal” comic plays. This prejudice goes back to the very legislator of classicism Boileau, the ideologist of bourgeois-aristocratic art, who condemned Moliere for buffoonery and indulging the coarse tastes of the crowd. However, it was precisely in this lower genre, uncanonized and rejected by classical poetics, that Moliere, more than in his “high” comedies, dissociated himself from alien class influences and exploded feudal-aristocratic values. This was facilitated by the “plebeian” form of farce, which has long served the young bourgeoisie as a well-aimed weapon in its struggle against the privileged classes of the feudal era. Suffice it to say that it was in farces that Moliere developed that type of intelligent and dexterous commoner, dressed in a lackey's livery, who would become, half a century later, the main exponent of the aggressive sentiments of the rising bourgeoisie. Scapin and Sbrigani are in this sense the direct predecessors of the servants of Lesage, Marivaux and others up to and including the famous Figaro.

Standing apart among the comedies of this period is “Amphitryon” (fr. Amphitryon, ). Despite the independence of Moliere's judgments manifested here, it would be a mistake to see the comedy as a satire on the king himself and his court. Moliere retained his faith in the alliance of the bourgeoisie with royal power until the end of his life, expressing the point of view of his class, which had not yet matured before the idea of ​​political revolution.

In addition to the bourgeoisie’s craving for the nobility, Moliere also ridicules its specific vices, of which the first place belongs to stinginess. In the famous comedy “The Miser” (L’avare,), written under the influence of “Kubyshka” (fr. Aulularia) Plautus, Moliere masterfully draws the repulsive image of the miser Harpagon (his name has become a household name in France), whose passion for accumulation, specific to the bourgeoisie as a class of moneyed people, has taken on a pathological character and drowned out all human feelings. Demonstrating the harm of usury for bourgeois morality, showing the corrupting effect of stinginess on the bourgeois family, Moliere at the same time considers stinginess as a moral vice, without revealing the social causes that give rise to it. Such an abstract interpretation of the theme of stinginess weakens the social significance of the comedy, which nevertheless is - with all its advantages and disadvantages - the purest and most typical (along with The Misanthrope) example of a classic comedy of characters.

Moliere also poses the problem of family and marriage in his penultimate comedy “Learned Women” (fr. Les femmes savantes, 1672), in which he returns to the theme of “Pretentious Women”, but develops it much wider and deeper. The object of his satire here are female pedants who are fond of science and neglect family responsibilities. Mocking in the person of Armande a bourgeois girl who has a condescending attitude toward marriage and prefers to “take philosophy as a husband,” Moliere contrasts her with Henriette, a healthy and normal girl who shuns “high matters,” but who has a clear and practical mind, homely and economical. This is the ideal of a woman for Moliere, who here again approaches the patriarchal-philistine point of view. Moliere, like his class as a whole, was still far from the idea of ​​women's equality.

The question of the disintegration of the bourgeois family was also raised in Moliere’s last comedy “The Imaginary Invalid” (fr. Le malade imaginaire, 1673). This time, the reason for the breakdown of the family is the mania of the head of the house, Argan, who imagines himself sick and is a toy in the hands of unscrupulous and ignorant doctors. Moliere's contempt for doctors, which runs through all of his drama, is quite understandable historically, if we remember that medical science in his time was based not on experience and observation, but on scholastic reasoning. Moliere attacked charlatan doctors in the same way as he attacked other pseudoscientific pedants and sophists who raped “nature.”

Although written by a terminally ill Moliere, the comedy “The Imaginary Invalid” is one of his most fun and cheerful comedies. At its 4th performance on February 17, Moliere, who played the role of Argan, felt ill and did not finish the performance. He was carried home and died a few hours later. The Archbishop of Paris forbade the burial of an unrepentant sinner (actors had to repent on their deathbed) and lifted the ban only on the instructions of the king. The greatest playwright of France was buried at night, without rites, behind the fence of the cemetery where suicides were buried. Following his coffin were several thousand people of the “common people” who had gathered to pay their last respects to their beloved poet and actor. Representatives of high society were absent from the funeral. Class enmity haunted Moliere after his death, as well as during his lifetime, when the “despicable” craft of an actor prevented Moliere from being elected to the French Academy. But his name went down in the history of the theater as the name of the founder of French stage realism. It is not for nothing that the French academic theater “Comédie Française” still unofficially calls itself the “House of Molière”.

Characteristic

When assessing Moliere as an artist, one cannot proceed from individual aspects of his artistic technique: language, style, composition, versification, etc. This is important only for understanding the extent to which they help him figuratively express his understanding of reality and attitude towards it. Moliere was an artist of the era of primitive capitalist accumulation rising in the feudal environment of the French bourgeoisie. He was a representative of the most advanced class of his era, whose interests included maximum knowledge of reality in order to strengthen his existence and dominance in it. That is why Moliere was a materialist. He recognized the objective existence of material reality, nature, independent of human consciousness (la nature), which determines and shapes a person’s consciousness, is for him the only source of truth and good. With all the power of his comic genius, Moliere attacks those who think differently, who try to rape nature, imposing their subjective conjectures on it. All the images drawn by Moliere of pedants, bookish scientists, charlatan doctors, affectations, marquises, saints, etc. are funny, first of all, for their subjectivism, their pretension to impose their own ideas on nature, not to take into account its objective laws.

Moliere's materialistic worldview makes him an artist who bases his creative method on experience, observation, and the study of people and life. An artist of the advanced rising class, Moliere has relatively great opportunities for understanding the existence of all other classes. In his comedies he reflected almost all aspects of French life in the 17th century. Moreover, all phenomena and people are depicted by him from the point of view of the interests of his class. These interests determine the direction of his satire, irony and buffoonery, which for Moliere are means of influencing reality, remaking it in the interests of the bourgeoisie. Thus, Moliere’s comedic art is permeated with a certain class attitude.

But the French bourgeoisie of the 17th century. was not yet, as noted above, “a class for itself.” It was not yet the hegemon of the historical process and therefore did not have a sufficiently mature class consciousness, did not have an organization that united it into a single cohesive force, did not think about a decisive break with the feudal nobility and about a violent change in the existing socio-political system. Hence the specific limitations of Moliere's class knowledge of reality, his inconsistency and hesitation, his concessions to feudal-aristocratic tastes (comedies and ballets), and noble culture (the image of Don Juan). Hence Moliere’s assimilation of the ridiculous portrayal of people of low rank (servants, peasants), which is canonical for the noble theater, and in general his partial subordination to the canon of classicism. Hence further - the insufficiently clear dissociation of the nobles from the bourgeoisie and the dissolution of both in the vague social category of “gens de bien”, that is, enlightened secular people, to whom most of the positive heroes-reasoners of his comedies belong (up to and including Alceste). Criticizing certain shortcomings of the modern noble-monarchical system, Moliere did not understand that the specific culprits of the evil to which he directed the sting of his satire should be sought in the socio-political system of France, in the alignment of its class forces, and not at all in the distortions of the all-good “nature” , that is, in explicit abstraction. The limited knowledge of reality, specific to Moliere as an artist of an unconstituted class, is expressed in the fact that his materialism is inconsistent, and therefore not alien to the influence of idealism. Not knowing that it is the social existence of people that determines their consciousness, Moliere transfers the issue of social justice from the socio-political sphere to the moral sphere, dreaming of resolving it within the existing system through preaching and denunciation.

This was naturally reflected in Moliere’s artistic method. It is characterized by:

• a sharp distinction between positive and negative characters, the opposition of virtue and vice;
• schematization of images, Moliere’s tendency to use masks instead of living people, inherited from commedia dell’arte;
• the mechanical unfolding of action as a collision of forces external to each other and internally almost motionless.

True, Moliere's plays are characterized by great dynamism of comedic action; but this dynamics is external, it is alien to the characters, which are basically static in their psychological content. This was already noticed by Pushkin, who wrote, contrasting Molière with Shakespeare: “The faces created by Shakespeare are not, as in Molière, types of such and such a passion, such and such a vice, but living beings, filled with many passions, many vices... In Moliere, the stingy stingy and that’s all.”

If in his best comedies (Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, Don Juan) Moliere tries to overcome the monosyllabus of his images, the mechanistic nature of his method, then basically his images and the entire structure of his comedies still bear a strong imprint of mechanistic materialism , characteristic of the worldview of the French bourgeoisie of the 17th century. and her artistic style - classicism.

The question of Moliere's attitude to classicism is much more complex than it seems to school literary history, which unconditionally labels him a classic. There is no doubt that Moliere was the creator and best representative of the classical comedy of characters, and in a number of his “high” comedies, Moliere’s artistic practice is quite consistent with the classical doctrine. But at the same time, Moliere's other plays (mainly farces) sharply contradict this doctrine. This means that in his worldview Moliere differs from the main representatives of the classical school.

As is known, French classicism is the style of the upper bourgeoisie and the most sensitive to economic development strata of the feudal nobility, which was closely associated with the aristocracy, on which the former had a certain influence with the rationalism of its thinking, being in turn influenced by feudal-noble skills, traditions and prejudices. The artistic and political line of Boileau, Racine and others is a line of compromise and class cooperation between the bourgeoisie and the nobility on the basis of serving the tastes of the court and nobility. Any bourgeois-democratic, “popular”, “plebeian” tendencies are absolutely alien to classicism. This is literature aimed at the “select” and contemptuous of the “rabble” (cf. Boileau’s “The Poetics”).

That is why for Moliere, who was the ideologist of the most advanced strata of the bourgeoisie and waged a fierce struggle with the privileged classes for the emancipation of bourgeois culture, the classical canon should have turned out to be too narrow. Moliere approaches classicism only in its most general stylistic principles, expressing the main tendencies of the bourgeois psyche of the era of primitive accumulation. This includes such features as rationalism, typification and generalization of images, their abstract-logical systematization, strict clarity of composition, transparent clarity of thought and style. But even standing mainly on the classical platform, Moliere at the same time rejects a number of core principles of classical doctrine, such as the regulation of poetic creativity, the fetishization of “unities”, which he sometimes treats quite freely (“Don Juan”, for example, by construction - a typical baroque tragicomedy of the pre-classical era), the narrowness and limitations of canonized genres, from which he deviates either towards “low” farce or towards court comedy-ballet. Developing these non-canonized genres, he introduces into them a number of features that contradict the prescriptions of the classical canon: he prefers the external comedy of situations, theatrical buffoonery, and the dynamic unfolding of farcical intrigue to the restrained and noble comedy of conversational comedy; polished salon-aristocratic language. - living folk speech, dotted with provincialisms, dialectisms, vernacular and slang words, sometimes even words of gibberish, macaroonisms, etc. All this gives Moliere’s comedies a democratic grassroots imprint, for which Boileau reproached him, who spoke of his “excessive love for the people " But this is not Moliere in all of his plays. In general, despite his partial subordination to the classical canon, despite sporadic adjustments to court tastes (in his comedies and ballets), Moliere’s democratic, “plebeian” tendencies still prevail, which are explained by the fact that Moliere was an ideologist of a non-aristocratic the top of the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois class as a whole, and sought to draw into the orbit of its influence even its most inert and backward layers, as well as the masses of working people who followed the bourgeoisie at that time.

This desire of Moliere to consolidate all layers and groups of the bourgeoisie (due to which he was repeatedly awarded the honorary title of “people's” playwright) determines the great breadth of his creative method, which does not quite fit into the framework of classical poetics, which served only a certain part of the class. By outgrowing these boundaries, Moliere is ahead of his era and outlines a program of realistic art that the bourgeoisie was able to fully implement only much later.

The significance of Moliere's work

Moliere had a tremendous influence on the subsequent development of bourgeois comedy both in France and abroad. Under the sign of Moliere, the entire French comedy of the 18th century developed, reflecting the entire complex interweaving of the class struggle, the entire contradictory process of the formation of the bourgeoisie as a “class for itself,” entering into a political struggle with the noble-monarchical system. She relied on Moliere in the 18th century. both an entertaining comedy by Regnard and a satirically pointed comedy by Lesage, who developed in his “Turkar” the type of tax farmer-financier, briefly outlined by Molière in “The Countess d’Escarbanhas.” The influence of Moliere’s “high” comedies was also felt by the secular everyday comedy of Piron and Gresset and the moral-sentimental comedy of Detouches and Nivelle de Lachausse, reflecting the growth of class consciousness of the middle bourgeoisie. Even the resulting new genre of bourgeois or bourgeois drama, this antithesis of classical drama, was prepared by the comedies of manners of Moliere, which so seriously developed the problems of the bourgeois family, marriage, raising children - these are the main themes of bourgeois drama. Although some ideologists of the revolutionary bourgeoisie of the 18th century. in the process of reassessing the noble monarchical culture, they sharply dissociated themselves from Moliere as a court playwright, but the famous creator of “The Marriage of Figaro” Beaumarchais, the only worthy successor to Moliere in the field of social-satirical comedy, came from Moliere’s school. Less significant is Moliere's influence on bourgeois comedy of the 19th century, which was already alien to Moliere's basic attitude. However, Molière's comedic technique (especially his farces) is used by the masters of entertaining bourgeois comedy-vaudeville of the 19th century from Picard, Scribe and Labiche to Méillac and Halévy, Palleron and others.

Moliere's influence outside France was no less fruitful, and in various European countries translations of Moliere's plays were a powerful stimulus for the creation of national bourgeois comedy. This was the case primarily in England during the Restoration (Wycherley, Congreve), and then in the 18th century Fielding and Sheridan. This was the case in economically backward Germany, where familiarization with Moliere’s plays stimulated the original comedic creativity of the German bourgeoisie. Even more significant was the influence of Moliere's comedy in Italy, where the creator of the Italian bourgeois comedy Goldoni was brought up under the direct influence of Moliere. Moliere had a similar influence in Denmark on Holberg, the creator of the Danish bourgeois-satirical comedy, and in Spain on Moratin.

In Russia, acquaintance with Moliere's comedies begins already at the end of the 17th century, when Princess Sofia, according to legend, acted out “The Captive Doctor” in her mansion. At the beginning of the 18th century. we find them in Peter's repertoire. From the palace performances, Moliere then moved on to the performances of the first state-owned public theater in St. Petersburg, headed by A.P. Sumarokov. The same Sumarokov was the first imitator of Moliere in Russia. The most “original” Russian comedians of the classical style were brought up at Moliere’s school - Fonvizin, V.V. Kapnist and I.A. Krylov. But the most brilliant follower of Moliere in Russia was Griboyedov, who in the image of Chatsky gave Moliere’s congenial version of his “The Misanthrope” - however, the version is completely original, growing in the specific environment of Arakcheev-bureaucratic Russia in the 20s. XIX century Following Griboyedov, Gogol paid tribute to Moliere by translating one of his farces into Russian (“Sganarelle, or the Husband Thinking He’s Been Deceived by His Wife”); Traces of Moliere's influence on Gogol are noticeable even in The Government Inspector. The later noble (Sukhovo-Kobylin) and bourgeois everyday comedy (Ostrovsky) also did not escape the influence of Moliere. In the pre-revolutionary era, bourgeois modernist directors attempted a stage re-evaluation of Moliere's plays from the point of view of emphasizing the elements of “theatricality” and stage grotesque in them (Meyerhold, Komissarzhevsky).

A crater on Mercury is named after Molière.

Legends about Moliere and his work

• In 1662, Moliere married the young actress of his troupe, Armande Béjart, the younger sister of Madeleine Béjart, another actress of his troupe. However, this immediately caused a whole series of gossip and accusations of incest, since there is an assumption that Armande is, in fact, the daughter of Madeleine and Moliere, born during the years of their wanderings around the province. To stop these conversations, the King becomes godfather of the first child of Moliere and Armande.
• In 1808, Alexander Duval's farce "The Wallpaper" (French) was performed at the Odeon Theater in Paris. "La Tapisserie"), presumably an adaptation of Moliere's farce "Cossack". It is believed that Duval destroyed Moliere's original or copy to hide obvious traces of borrowing, and changed the names of the characters, only their characters and behavior were suspiciously reminiscent of Moliere's heroes. Playwright Guyot de Say tried to restore the original source and in 1911 presented this farce on the stage of the Foley-Dramatic theater, returning it to its original name.
• On November 7, 1919, an article by Pierre Louis “Molière - the creation of Corneille” was published in the magazine Comœdia. Comparing the plays “Amphitryon” by Moliere and “Agésilas” by Pierre Corneille, he concludes that Moliere only signed the text composed by Corneille. Despite the fact that Pierre Louis himself was a hoaxer, the idea known today as the “Moliere-Corneille Affair” became widespread, including in such works as “Corneille in the Mask of Moliere” by Henri Poulay (1957), “Moliere , or The Imaginary Author” by lawyers Hippolyte Wouter and Christine le Ville de Goyer (1990), “The Moliere Case: The Great Literary Deception” by Denis Boissier (2004), etc.

Works

The first edition of Moliere's collected works was carried out by his friends Charles Varlet Lagrange and Vino in 1682.

Plays that have survived to this day

• Crazy, or Everything Is Out of Place, comedy in verse ()
• Love's Annoyance, comedy (1656)
• Funny cutesy girls, comedy (1659)
• Sganarelle, or the Imaginary Cuckold, comedy (1660)
• Don Garcia of Navarre, or the Jealous Prince, comedy (1661)
• Husband school, comedy (1661)
• Annoying, comedy (1661)
• Wives school, comedy (1662)
• Criticism of "School for Wives", comedy (1663)
• Versailles impromptu (1663)
• Reluctant marriage, farce (1664)
• Princess of Elis, gallant comedy (1664)
• Tartuffe, or the Deceiver, comedy (1664)
• Don Juan, or the Stone Feast, comedy (1665)
• Love is a healer, comedy (1665)
• Misanthrope, comedy (1666)
• A reluctant doctor, comedy (1666)
• Melicert, pastoral comedy (1666, unfinished)
• Comic pastoral (1667)
• The Sicilian, or Love the Painter, comedy (1667)
• Amphitryon, comedy (1668)
• Georges Dandin, or The Fooled Husband, comedy (1668)
• Stingy, comedy (1668)
• Monsieur de Poursogniac, comedy-ballet (1669)
• Brilliant Lovers, comedy (1670)
• Tradesman in the nobility, comedy-ballet (1670)
• Psyche, tragedy-ballet (1671, in collaboration with Philippe Quinault and Pierre Corneille)
• Scapin's tricks, farce comedy (1671)
• Countess d'Escarbanhas, comedy (1671)
• Scientists women, comedy (1672)
• Imaginary patient, a comedy with music and dancing (1673)

Unsurvived plays

1. Doctor in love, farce (1653)
2. Three rival doctors, farce (1653)
3. School teacher, farce (1653)
4. Kazakin, farce (1653)
5. Gorgibus in a bag, farce (1653)
6. Gobber, farce (1653)
7. Gros-Rene's Jealousy, farce (1663)
8. Gros-Rene schoolboy, farce (1664)

Other writings

• Gratitude to the King, poetic dedication (1663)
• Glory of the Val-de-Grâce Cathedral, poem (1669)
• Various poems, including
  • Verse from d'Assousi's song (1655)
  • Poems for Mr. Beauchamp's ballet
  • Sonnet to M. la Motte la Vaye on the death of his son (1664)
  • Brotherhood of Slavery in the Name of Our Lady of Mercy, quatrains placed under an allegorical engraving in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mercy (1665)
  • To the king for victory in Franche-Comte, poetic dedication (1668)
  • Burime to order (1682)

Jean-Baptiste Moliere.

The 19th century is the century of theatre. For people who have too little knowledge of literacy, he is theater - EVERYTHING! The artist is his servant.

He's everywhere. He is everywhere, he is counter-transverse;
Sword-carrying stench; the needs of the eternal wanderer;
Lord's parrot; always looks funny
He is full of stupidity, but masters it,
A skilled swimmer in her boundless seas;
A living mirror of fleeting moments;
Amusing Aristipus; in the temple of laughter there is a guard;
Shadow incarnate; chattering mirage. (Constantine Hagens)

The playwright is the God of the theater, its Creator. Monsieur de Molière was the god of the theater and he also received the great honor of being King Louis XIV's bed servant for many years. He made the royal bed with dignity and a sense of accomplishment. He was proud of his position. Such were the times, such were the circumstances of life.

The Russian writer Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov, who devoted many pages of his work to the life of Monsieur de Molière, was mentally transported to the 18th century and appeared before the astonished gaze of “a certain midwife who studied her art in the obstetric House of God in Paris. On January 13, 1622, she received her first child from the dear Madame Poquelin - a premature male baby. I can say with confidence,” the writer writes, “that if I had a chance to explain to the venerable midwife who exactly she was receiving, it is possible that out of excitement this midwife would have caused some harm to the baby, and at the same time to France.

“Wax candles are burning in front of me, and my brain is inflamed,” Mikhail Afanasyevich recalls the event that happened in his imagination.

Seeing the baby in the midwife’s arms, he turns to her:

Madam! Turn the baby carefully! Don't forget that he was born prematurely. The death of this baby would mean a grave loss for the entire country!

My God! Madame Poquelin will give birth to another.

Madame Poquelin will never give birth to something like this again, and no other lady will give birth to something like this for several centuries.

You amaze me, sir. I have held in my arms more noble babies.

What do you understand by the word “noble”? This baby will become more famous than your living king Louis XIII. He will become more famous than the next king, madam, and this king will be called Louis the Great or the Sun King. This baby was born to the applause of the Muses. The words of this child will be translated into many languages ​​of the world.

Is this possible, sir? - the midwife was indescribably amazed.

I could tell you dozens of writers who have been translated into foreign languages, while they do not even deserve to be published in their native language. Scholars from various countries will write detailed studies of this child's works and try to trace his mysterious life step by step. They will prove to you that it is this man, who now shows only faint signs of life in your hands, who will influence many writers of future centuries.”

Let us allow ourselves, like Mikhail Afanasyevich, to fantasize a little about the birth of the great playwright of the world, who saw the first glimmers of light in France. We know that when great rulers and conquerors of the world are born, their mothers, as a rule, see the riot of the elements of nature in their prophetic dreams. And what dreams did Mother Poquelin, who was afraid of her first birth, have? Perhaps, instead of thunder and lightning, she dreamed of various letters raining down from the sky in an endless stream? Or perhaps another dream: the jester and the king are sitting peacefully and talking to each other? But suddenly her dream was filled with terrible visions: lumps of earth, rotten eggs and rotten apples flying at her boy?

Was the newborn baby able to shout to the world about his appearance or did his premature body lack the strength for this and he, like a small kitten, only squeaked quietly, feeling in the depths of his subconscious that his time would come and he would be able to speak out loud?

Who knows about this?..

It is thoroughly known that the boy was born into the family of a court upholsterer and decorator, now they would call him a designer, Mr. Jean Baptiste Poquelin. The fairly high position of the child's father provided him with a decent material existence. However, fate does not put all the delicious peas in one spoon. She will definitely take something away.

“In the spring of 1632, the tender mother of little Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who later took the literary pseudonym Moliere, fell ill. Her eyes became bright and anxious. In one month she became so thin that it was difficult to recognize her, and bad spots bloomed on her pale cheeks. Then the poor thing began to cough up blood, and doctors began to come to the house on mules, wearing ominous caps. On May 15, the little chubby contemplative wept bitterly, wiped away his tears with his dirty fists, and the whole house sobbed with him. Quiet Maria Poquelin lay motionless, crossing her arms over her chest.

When she was buried, it was like continuous twilight in the house. The father fell into melancholy and absent-mindedness, and his first-born saw him several times on summer evenings sitting alone in the twilight and crying. This made the contemplator upset and wandered around the house, not knowing what to do. But then the father stopped crying and began visiting a certain family more often. And then eleven-year-old Jean-Baptiste was told that he would have a new mother.” (M. Bulgakov)

The new mother was, in all likelihood, a kind woman. In any case, there is no record in history that she treated her stepson badly. Little Poquelin’s grandfather, who had lost his beloved daughter, turned all his attention to his grandson and began to take him to all the theater establishments in Paris. The fact is that grandfather Louis Cresset was fascinated by this world, could not live without it and with all his heart wanted to give it to his granddaughter. And he succeeded in this as well as possible.

“In Jean-Baptiste’s eyes, pedants, doctors, stingy old men, boastful and cowardly captains flew by, smeared with flour and paint or in disguise, spinning as if in a carousel. Amid the laughter of the public, frivolous wives deceived their grumpy foolish husbands, and the farcical pimps and gossips rattled like magpies. Cunning, dexterous as feathers, the servants fooled the old people by the nose, beat the old guys with sticks and stuffed them into sacks. And the walls of the theater called the Burgundy Hotel shook with the laughter of the French. The grandfather and grandson laughed and applauded with them.” (M. Bulgakov)

But you cannot live by theater alone. A boy from a wealthy family had to study, and his father managed to enroll him in such a prestigious educational institution that even royalty did not disdain him. Three princes studied at the same time as the son of a furniture upholsterer. At the age of nineteen, Jean-Baptiste received a law degree and remained in it for some time. But not for long. He did not like this path in life.

The then-famous actress Madeleine Bejart added fuel to the fire of confrontation with everyday life. “Madelena was red-haired, charming in manners, intelligent, had a delicate taste and, in addition - which, of course, is a rarity - was literary educated and wrote poetry herself. She was also, by all accounts, a truly great talent. Therefore, it is not surprising that Madeleine enjoyed great success with men.

At the age of twenty she gave birth to a girl, christened Françoise. Her father was the Comte de Moden. Actress Bejart not only did not hide her connection with de Moden, but, on the contrary, as can be understood at least from the act of baptism of her daughter, she advertised it. The girl's godfather was the young son of the Count de Modena. By this time, Jean-Baptiste had managed to get behind the scenes of the theater, and it is not surprising that the charming flame-haired actress completely captivated the young man who was four years younger than her.” (M. Bulgakov)

Surprisingly, the successful and beautiful actress paid attention to the still very yellow-faced young man and gave him her life. Jean-Baptiste, who fell in love with her and never stopped loving the theater, decisively told his father that he was leaving the prestigious legal field forever and going to the theater stage. To this the father replied: in that case, I will deprive him of his inheritance. Apparently, for the future comedian, his training in legal practice was not in vain and he managed to take from his angry father a certain amount of the part of the Poquelin family property that was allotted to him. He invested all this money in creating a theater troupe. Madeleine also invested her money there.

The theater troupe that had reappeared in Paris rented a dirty and cramped hall, but at the same time proudly took on the magnificent and majestic name - “Brilliant Theater”. Such an action was quite in the character of Moliere. He's self-confident. “He has a temper. He had sudden mood swings. He moved easily from moments of fun to moments of deep thought. He finds funny sides in people and likes to make jokes about it. At times he carelessly falls into frankness. At other times he tries to be secretive and cunning. At other moments he was recklessly brave, but he could immediately fall into indecision and cowardice. It must be said that under these conditions a difficult life awaited him, and with success he soon made many enemies.

So, the Moliere Theater is in front of us. In the damp and gloomy hall, tallow candles floated and floated in crappy tin chandeliers. And the squeak of four violins did not in any way resemble the thunder of a large orchestra. Great playwrights did not come here. Moliere stuttered on stage, and the devil, into whose claws he actually fell, as soon as he got involved with comedians, inspired him with the idea of ​​​​playing tragic roles.

Every day everything went worse and worse. The audience behaved disgracefully and indulged in dark antics, such as swearing out loud during the performance. Madeleine is a wonderful actress, but she alone could not play out the whole tragedy! Oh, dear friend of Jean-Btiste Molière! She made every effort to save the theater, called Brilliant. When her old lover, Count de Moden, appeared in Paris after exile, Madeleine turned to him, and he obtained the right for the theater to be called the Troupe of His Royal Highness Prince Gaston of Orleans. This name provided a more or less worthy material existence.

But success and decent income did not come. When Madeleine's savings ran out, the Children of the Family went to the market to visit Poquelin the Father. The most painful scene took place in the shop. In response to a request for a loan of money, Poquelin was at first unable to utter a single word. And... imagine, he gave money. Then the tenant appeared to the comedians asking whether they would pay the rent or not. He was given a vague answer, full of vows and promises.

So get out! - the tenant exclaimed. – Together with their violins and red-haired actresses.

The latter was already superfluous, because Madeleine was the only redhead in the group.

I was about to leave this vile ditch myself! - Moliere cried, and the brotherhood rushed after their commander.

Soon the leader of the theater was taken to prison. Following him were the moneylender, the linen maker and the candle maker. They ran again to Father Poquelin.

How?.. You?.. - Jean Baptiste Poquelin said in a choked voice. - You... Did you come?.. Again to me?.. What is this?

He's in prison, Monsieur Poquelin, and we won't say anything more. He's in jail!

Father Poquelin... gave me money.

But then creditors rushed in from all sides, and Moliere would not have left prison for the rest of his life if Leonard Aubry had not vouched for the debt of the Brilliant Theater, who at one time built a brilliant and useless, due to the non-arrival of spectators, pavement in front of the entrance of the first Moliere theater

May the name of Leonard Aubry be passed down to posterity!

And yet, despite all efforts, in the fall of 1645 the Brilliant Theater ceased to exist. Three difficult years, debts, moneylenders, prison and humiliation dramatically changed Moliere. There were sarcastic lines of experience in the corners of his lips, but one had only to look closely at his face to understand that no misfortunes would stop him, because this man could not become a lawyer, a notary, or a furniture dealer, he could only be a comedian .

Today, in front of the red-haired Madeleine stood a seasoned professional twenty-four-year-old actor who had seen all sorts of things. The remains of his caftan hung on his shoulders, and the last sou jingled in his pockets as he walked around the room. The head of the Brilliant Theater, completely burned out, went to the window and in masterly expressions cursed Paris with all its suburbs. He continued to wag his tongue for a long time, but finally asked in despair his beloved and leading actress of his theater:

Now will you leave me too?

Red-haired Madeleine listened to all this nonsense, remained silent, and then the lovers began to whisper and whispered until the morning. How else. After all

The first feelings of love, sacred fire
Burns with such unchanging power,
That one must deprive oneself of life forever
Rather than allow a second love.

When the Brilliant Theater died, Moliere led the remnants of the faithful fraternal army from under its ruins and put it on wheels. This man could not exist without the theater for a single second, and he had the strength to move to the position of a traveling comedian, swallowing the dust of French roads.

At first, the nomads had an extremely difficult time. It happened that we had to sleep in the haylofts, and play in the villages in barns, hanging some dirty rags instead of curtains. Sometimes, however, the actors ended up in rich castles, and if the noble owner, out of boredom, expressed a desire to watch comedians, Melpomene’s dirty servants, smelling of road sweat, played in the reception rooms.

The clergy everywhere greeted the actors with uniform unkindness. Then it was necessary to resort to cunning tricks, for example, offering the first collection in favor of the monastery or for charity. In this way it was very often possible to save the performance.

In one of the carts, under the vigilant care and supervision of Madeleine, a new creature was riding. This creature was only ten years old, and was an ugly, but very lively, intelligent and flirtatious girl. Madeleine explained the appearance of the girl this way: this is her little sister.

One day, the miserable existence receded, and the actors managed to stay in the ducal possessions. For the first time they heard the pleasant ringing of gold coins. And then one very important circumstance became clear. It turned out that Mr. Moliere feels an inclination not only to acting in plays, but also to writing plays himself. Despite the backbreaking daytime work, he began to compose things of a dramatic nature at night.

It is somewhat strange that a person who devoted himself to the study of tragedy and was considered a tragic role, in his writings does not return to tragedy at all, but writes cheerful, reckless one-act farces. Moliere's companions really liked these farces, and they were introduced into the repertoire. And here we encounter another oddity. Moliere himself, who played funny roles, began to enjoy the greatest success with the public in these farces. After the premiere of his farces, the public rushed to the box office in droves. There was a case when two nobles had a mortal argument in a stampede and fought a duel for an extra ticket.

But how can such oddities be explained? Why is this? The tragedian failed in the tragic, but succeeded in the comic? There can be only one explanation and it is very simple. It was not the world that went blind, as Moliere, who considered himself to be sighted, believed, but it was just the opposite: the world saw magnificently, but only Monsieur de Moliere was blind. And, oddly enough, over a very long period of time. He alone among everyone around him did not understand that by nature he was a brilliant comic actor, but could not be a tragedian. Both Madeleine’s gentle hints and the devious speeches of her comrades did not help at all: the commander of the troupe stubbornly tried to play roles that were not his own. This was one of the reasons for the tragedy of the fall of the Brilliant Theater. She was hiding in Moliere himself.

New young actresses began to appear in the theater, which felt success. Jean-Baptiste was the first to fall, struck by one of them. Passion gripped him, and he began to seek reciprocity. So, before the eyes of Madeleine, who had endured all the hardships of a nomadic life, a Molière novel played out. He was unsuccessful." (M. Bulgakov)

But this did not stop Jean-Baptiste. He saw something else in the cold refusal:

I am always glad to appreciate the mystery in love.
Victory is dearer to us, since there are many obstacles,
And our souls are filled with bliss with pure light
The slightest conversation when it is prohibited.

Neither conversations nor courtship could lead to a love victory. And Moliere kept dragging after the beautiful actress. Perhaps she was not as good as he thought, perhaps he later noticed this, and put his own experience into poetic form, forever telling about the eternal truth: that love is blind:

A lover is always proud of his choice.
Everything is an unnecessary reason for praise.
Love is always prone to blindness:
She will consider any vice as a quality:
And it will produce him in virtue.
Pale - only a branch of jasmine can be compared with it;
Black to horror - a lovely brunette;
Thin - nothing is lighter and slimmer;
Tolsta - the greatness of her posture is visible in her;
Small as a dwarf - that little miracle;
Hulk is a delightful whim of fate;
A slob, devoid of feminine charms and taste -
The beauty is full of careless charm;
Be cunning - a rare mind, be a fool - a meek angel;
Be an intolerable chatty rattle -
Gift of eloquence; always silent as a tree stump -
Shy and modest, and virginally proud.
So if in a lover the impulses of feelings are deep,
He also loves the vices in his beloved being.

Moliere's second love did not materialize, but he never returned to Madeleine. There was talk of a third romance being played out - and it turned out to be successful. Poor Madeleine, who had turned men's heads in the recent past, felt abandoned. A few years later she will pronounce a monologue of an unhappy wife, from a play not yet written by Moliere:

He gives affection to others, perhaps to many,
And the wife is paid with a rather strict fast.
But most husbands don’t give a damn:
What is permitted loses all taste.
At first they all seem to be excellent,
Their feelings are ardent and very noble,
But soon they get tired of our passion,
And they take our property to others.
Oh, it’s a pity that the law doesn’t give us any concessions
Changing your husbands like dirty shirts!
That would be good! And not just one wife
It would be to my heart's content, not just mine.

Abandoned Madeleine did not leave the theater and continued to travel with him along the roads of France.

Almost twelve years have passed.

“It was autumn sunset in 1658 when the theater wagons approached the capital. Moliere stopped the caravan and got out of the cart to stretch his legs. He stepped aside and began to peer into the city that, twelve years ago, had driven him out, ruined and disgraced. Pieces of memories flashed through Jean-Baptiste's head. For a moment he felt scared and was pulled back. It seemed to him that he was old. He became cold and thought that he had nothing in his carts except farces and his other first comedies. He thought that the strongest royal actors were playing in the Boulogne Hotel theatre. And he was again drawn to Lyon to his old winter apartment. He was suddenly frightened by the ghost of a damp and vile prison that had almost swallowed up the aspiring director of a theater troupe twelve years ago, and he said, moving his lips alone:

To turn back? Yes, turn back.

Then Molière turned around, went to the head of the caravan, saw the heads of actors and actresses sticking out of their carts and said to the vanguard:

Well, go ahead!

And so Prince Condi invited Molière’s troupe to permanent service and awarded the artists a permanent pension. These are truly golden days for actors. The crafty stutterer Moliere seemed to bewitch the prince. The performances went on continuously and all kinds of benefits flowed to the comedians in a continuous stream.

Needless to say, art flourishes under strong government!

And suddenly the prince gave the order to remove the name Conti assigned to the troupe. Ah, the life of a comedian is not all roses and laurels! The spat upon troupe was waiting for explanations, and they were not slow to appear: over the past two years, everything had turned upside down in the soul of His Highness. The former frontier, and then a passionate theater lover, now found himself surrounded by the clergy and immersed in the study of religious and moral issues. One of the bishops, who had a magnificent gift of speech, inspired him that he must first of all run away from comedy performances, like from fire, so as not to subsequently fall into eternal fire. The bishop received lush shoots from the seeds that he sowed in Conti’s soul.

This is how Moliere encountered for the first time such a concept as the bondage of the saint.

Moliere's creative predisposition set its own conditions for his theater. The solemn and proud heroes of Corneille left the stage, they were replaced by characters in farces, many of which Moliere wrote himself. The French farce was a short play with a simple plot, richly equipped with salty words, blows with a stick, immodest gestures, and mocking songs.

As soon as the hero of the farce, the doctor in love, ran out to the audience, smiles bloomed in the audience. At the first grimace of the newly minted comedian, they burst into laughter. Immediately after the first remark, they burst out laughing. And after a few minutes the laughter turned into roar. And you could see how the arrogant man in the chair fell back and began to sob and wipe away his tears. It was then that the great comic actor felt a sweet chill in the back of his head. He thought: “Victory!” - and added some tricks. Then the musketeers on duty at the door were the last to laugh. And they were not supposed to laugh under any circumstances.” (M. Bulgakov)

In his farces and plays, Moliere often shamelessly uses plots from previously written works and his own rich observations, which life generously presents to the future great playwright who carefully observes it. As for the subjects used, Moliere was not the first and not the last so-called “graphomaniac”. And let’s just say how small the arsenal of these plots is. Everything has long been told and retold. The difficulty of the task was how to say what had already been said and retold many times in our own new language.

The heroes of farces and plays by the French comedian often treat women with disdain. One compares her to ivy entwined around a man who

Hugging a tree - beautiful and strong,
But falls to the ground when separated from him.

In matters of love, his negative heroes do not see and are not going to even glance at its romantic side. They curse stupid love books that fool foolish girls' heads:

You can't tear yourself away from this nonsense,
Your brains are filled with love chatter.

In farces it is stated that life must be looked at from a practical point of view. Wealth in marriage is the foundation.

The husband has a substantial treasury,
What else do you need?
Gold will transform the freak miraculously,
And the rest is completely uninteresting.

A man's rights in marriage are sacred and must be respected at all costs. Here is one of the heroes dictating his lifestyle for his unhappy wife:

I'll make mine
Live not with your own mind, but as I direct you.
Let modest twill be her clothing
And the black dress is only for Sundays;
So that when you shut yourself up at home, you don’t wander around everywhere
And she devoted her thoughts to the household,
She fixed my laundry, if she gets an hour,
For fun, I could knit a stocking,
So that the chatter of the rake would not be familiar to her,
She never left home without an escort.
I know: the flesh is weak. I foresee noise and controversy,
But I don’t want to wear a headdress made of horns.
And I know: the woman will remain forever
Just a woman. Hence: a certain Greek
He said that her head was like loose sand.
Here's the reasoning, now I give you a case
Think it all over; as you know,
For the body, the head plays the role of the head,
But a body without a head, like a wild beast, is dangerous;
When not everything is arranged according to them,
And neither compasses nor compass were used,
Troubles happen sometimes.

Another hero reasons rationally:

Excessive severity, it seems to me, is harmful.
Isn't it true, it would be an unprecedented find
To see a woman forced to be faithful?
In vain will we guard them every step,
Isn't it better to buy hearts for yourself?
And I would consider my honor unprotected,
If she were in the hands of an enslaved woman,
She, having tested the power of her desires,
I would, perhaps, only be looking for an opportunity to fall.

But is it possible to convince a persistent husband who keeps on repeating only one thing:

But can a woman be completely trusted?
Of these, the best is one sheer malice;
After all, this sex was born to torment us until the grave.
For all eternity I am glad to curse him,
So that he fails - and straight into the devil's mouth.

Many of Moliere's heroes suffer mercilessly from violent attacks of jealousy, apparently well known to the author, if one of the heroes treats this feeling quite peacefully and says:

Out of jealousy, I began to lose fat.

Then the other suffers seriously:

The shameless insolent is like an evil hell
Mad jealousy injected poison into my heart.

But this hero of the play gives quite reasonable love advice:

Who is always sad, jealous and gloomy,
That debut in love is often unsuccessful,
And he makes himself unhappy on credit.

Moliere carefully looks at the world around him and then describes it. This is the theme of fashion - a perpetual motion machine moving who knows what, who knows where. Blindly following fashion means

Wear your outfit not for yourself, but for the world.
So don’t you want to dishonor me further?
I should set your dandies as an example worthy
And force me to wear narrow hats,
Tailored so that the forehead in them is weak and cold?
Or false hair that has grown immeasurably,
Why did my face probably drown in them?
Short camisoles - here fashion is stingy again, -
But the collars go all the way to the navel?
Huge sleeves - such that they fit into soup,
And skirts that are now called pants,
Or tiny shoes, each with a skein of ribbons on it,
And you look - a man is like a dove, a furry leg?
Or such trouser legs, huge and bloated,
That each leg in them is like a slave in fetters.
And here is a fool dressed in a fashionable way,
Like an inverted shuttlecock bristling.

But a metropolitan little thing came to the theater - a rake. And immediately Moliere caught him on the hook of his sharply sharpened pen:

And so this obnoxious bastard is accepted at court, hangs out in the Louvre itself, spews out tired, hackneyed jokes and puns, picked up in the dirt of the market, like this - “Madam! You are so amazing that you should be brought to justice: you have stolen a whole cartload of hearts!”

“Ugh, ugh, ugh,” Monsieur de Moliere spits.

Rumors about the new theater quickly spread around Paris, and in 1658 Moliere's troupe was invited to the Louvre. It was a miracle! There are countless unrest and turmoil. What to show? The young King Louis XII himself will be present at the performance. We decided to stage Corneille's tragedy.

Poor Monsieur de Molière! He was once again in trouble with his passion for tragedy. The actors on stage felt the complete indifference of the audience; yawns and phrases reached their ears:

And why was this troupe praised? The boredom is utter. Moreover, the main character stutters on every word.

The actors and Moliere were seized with fear. It was he who gave strength and impudence to Jean-Baptiste, who came forward and asked the king’s gracious permission to show a small farce. The king graciously deigned. And I was not mistaken.

A scene similar to this was enacted in front of the courtyard. She talked about an innocent girl who knows nothing in life, who is raised by a guardian who wants to take her as his wife. And then one day a girl asks her guardian if it is true that babies are born from the ear. The guardian is touched: oh, how simple-minded and naive she is. But it is precisely this innocence that almost leads to trouble.

Madeleine on stage, playing innocence itself, says to her guardian, disguised as the old man Moliere:

You won't believe how strange everything happened.
One day I sat down on the balcony with my sewing,
When I suddenly saw: under a nearby tree
Handsome gentleman; he apparently met my gaze
And then he answered me with a polite bow,
And I, not wanting to be considered impolite,
She answered him, sitting down respectfully.
And after another polite bow,
I had to answer again from the balcony;
Then a third followed at the same hour;
I answered immediately for the third time.
The next morning, as soon as I opened the door,
Some old lady approached me,
Whispering, “My child, may God protect you
And it will protect your beauty for a long time!
God didn’t create you so charming for this reason,
So that the culprit of evil is his heavenly gift.
Yes, you need to know: you caused harm,
You have seriously hurt someone in the heart.”

The guardian is horrified by what he heard and says, addressing the audience: “Oh, let the scoundrel fail to hell!”

The audience is crying with laughter.

The girl continues her story:

- “Did I hurt you in the heart?” - I was so surprised!
"Yes! - she says, - you just wounded
The one who was not far from you yesterday.”
“I can’t imagine,” I told the old lady, “
Surely something heavy fell from the balcony?”
“No,” she says, “the eyes are to blame:
Your patient suffers from your gaze.”
"How! – I was amazed, - Oh God! Evil from the eye!
Where did the infection come from in my eyes?
“Yes,” he says, “they conceal all the destruction.
They contain, my child, a poison unknown to you.
The poor thing is seriously in danger,
And if,” the good old lady continues, “
Deny him your help,
He’ll be in a coffin these days, oh, oh!”
"Oh my God! - I say. - If so, I suffer too,
But I can’t figure out how to help him.”
“It’s not difficult to cure him,” she said:
He wants to see you and talk to you,
To protect him from death
The same eyes that caused grief.”
“Well,” I say, “if that’s the case, I’ll always help;
He can come here to me now.”
So he came to me, and the illness disappeared from him.
Well, tell me, what was my fault?
And how in good conscience could I agree,
Let him die and not help him heal,
When do I feel sorry for everyone who has suffered grief?
Whether the chicken dies, I won’t hide my tears.

The audience was rolling and rolling with laughter. As a reward for the pleasure provided, the king transferred the troupe under the patronage of his brother, the Duke of Orleans, and from now on it became known as the “Troupe of the King’s Only Brother,” because Louis no longer had other brothers.

The time will come and Jean-Baptiste Moliere will write poems about Louis, not at all hypocritical, but sincere and truthful.

Majestic and young, all - courage, courtesy,
So gentle, so harsh,
So strict, so generous in mercy,
He knows how to rule France and himself,
Maintain a high order among important matters of fun,
In great plans there is nothing to be mistaken,
To see everything, to understand, to devote one’s soul to deeds;
Anyone who can be like this can do anything. Himself
Obedience will command the heavens -
And the baths will move, and, honoring his laws,
The oaks will speak wiser than the trees of Dodona.
His wonderful age will be filled with miracles,
Don't you have the right to expect the same from heaven?

And when Louis XIV won one of his many battles, Moliere wrote these lines:

Avalanche? Vortex? Fire? Useless comparisons...
Like the thunderer Zeus, he is filled with wondrous powers,
You have called a whole new region to obedience
And his native united him with France.

The success of the troupe inspired Moliere to write new plays and new productions. His first full-fledged comedy was a comedy called “Naughty or All Out of Place.” The brilliance and wit of her dialogues were significantly different from the background of the farces that existed at that time. In the play, a young nobleman longs to marry a slave, but his father, of course, does not allow him to do so. Then a servant is called to help.

I know your mind is full of tricks
That he is resourceful, and flexible, and omnipotent,
“That you should be the king of all servants,” says the young nobleman.

The servant answers his master in a far from obsequious manner:

Don't flatter me like that!
When our brother servant is needed for some reason,
He is more precious than diamonds and pearls,
Well, in an evil hour your hand is angry -
Then we are a vile rabble, and then wait for a kick.
Dreamer, sir, you build chimeras,
And your father, you know, will take drastic measures,
Often bile boils in his liver,
He parts and scolds you so well,
When he gets tired of your youthful ardor!
Only he will know that you are so in love,
Why don’t you want their chosen wife,
What a fatal passion for a lovely creature
It takes you out of filial obedience, -
When thunder strikes, don't bring the creatures!

But soon the servant changes his anger to mercy:

Hey, I think these old people
We're just trying to fool the masters
They envy: having lost the sweetness of life,
They want to steal love and joy from young people.
Use me. I am ready to serve myself.

The servant, a quick-witted, smart, cunning one, comes up with all sorts of ways to help his master, but he does everything at the wrong time, ruining, as they say, in the bud the business conceived by the servant. And every time he counts the owner:

You misunderstood everything!
However, expect a trick from you every moment,
You speak so often out of place,
That your mistakes won't surprise me.

It must be said that in Molière, servants always surpass their masters in ingenuity and often play a leading role in the play. The author unobtrusively expressed one of the axioms of human life: difficulties toughen a person, and an imposing life makes him an unadapted mummy's boy. Moliere's servants often express their will and in no case refuse it. Here's an example:

Am I to fight? No way! I'm not fit for this
I am not like the brave knight Roland.
I'm too nice to myself, and it's worth remembering
That two inches of steel is quite enough,
So that the doors of the coffin would immediately open before me,
How strange anger overwhelms me.
My good sir! Alas! Because life is beautiful
And they die once - and for a long time.

Mister de Molière, who has seen a lot in life with his own eyes and experienced it with his own soul, knows firsthand about human vices and talentedly transfers them first to a piece of paper, and then to the stage, himself depicting his negative heroes on it.

Here is Jean-Baptiste, dressed in all sorts of rags, crooked, with hands trembling with greed, representing the Miser. But his Miser is not just stingy, he is extremely aggressive. At the end of the play, the vile old man, who has lost his money, utters vile words: “Torture every single one of them, hang them, cut them on the wheel. I'll hang it myself. If I don’t find the money, I’ll hang myself.”

A terrible, eternal, inexorable passion for money.

But here is a completely different image of a person, consumed by other passions. This is a tradesman who passionately wants to penetrate noble society. To do this, Jourdain hires teachers of dance, music, fencing, and philosophy. They play along with him - “after all, you can’t live on incense alone, and, whatever you say, money still straightens the crookedness of his judgment,” all understanding teachers decide for themselves. And Jourdain, puffed up as a dandy and a scientist, looks funny and absurd.

Tricky nobles often borrow money from him, with no intention of paying it back. Jourdain is proud of his debtors, because they talk about him in the royal bedroom itself. Jourdain definitely wants to marry his daughter to a nobleman, albeit a skinny one. My daughter has completely different intentions. Therefore, her friends urgently organize a dress-up performance in the house. Her lover is dressed in the costume of a Turkish sultan and, as such, is married to a sweet girl. Jourdain, as they say, was fooled by the nose.

Such was the obsession of the tradesman with the nobility and social manners.

It seems to the playwright Moliere that the confusion in his works that arises among his heroes is insufficient. Not only do they constantly change clothes, but it happens that some heroes turn out to be completely different: in particular, it turns out that some boys or girls turn out to be the own children of the heroes whom they lost at an early age. This time, Mister de Moliere calls on the ancient gods to help him create a confusion. But confusion is a secondary task, the main one is to transform the same themes that constantly wander from one work to another.

Here Mercury, seated on a cloud, talks to Night, which rushes across the sky in its chariot. Mercury says to Night:

Lush night! Pause a moment.
I have to tell you a dozen words.
I have an errand for you
From the very father of the gods.

Night answers:

Is that you, Mr. Mercury?
Who would guess you in such a figure?

Oh, I have so many assignments
Jupiter told me that I was completely tired.
And then I quietly sat down on this cloud
And I was expecting you here.

Do you want to laugh at me, Mercury?
Is it proper for the gods to admit to being tired?

We are not made of iron.

But you should always
Divinity preserve decorum.

Mercury sighs:

Yes, it's good for you to say!
You, beauty, have a chariot.
Lounging lazily, you proudly, like a queen,
Let the horses ride you across the sky.
I can't compare with you in this!
In my misfortunes I know no evils,
Whatever I wish for poets!
And really, what an outrage!
Other gods are given possession
All modes of transportation
And I’m like a messenger in the villages
I trudge from end to end on foot!
And it is I who got the lot
To be an ambassador of Jupiter on Earth and in Heaven!

Let's leave it at that, what's the matter?

Tell me without further words,” Night interrupted Mercury’s roulades.

You see: the father of the gods
Skillful service awaits from your mantle.
It's all about new love
It promises him, as before, an adventure.
Marveling at his pranks is nothing new for us:
After all, Olympus is often neglected for the Earth!
You yourself know: all the images are for him
It happened to be accepted because of a passionate beauty,
And the ways he knows darkness,
To master even the most uncontrollable.

This time, Jupiter wanted to get along with Alcmene, the wife of the Theban king Amphitryon, who was currently absent due to a military campaign.

Jupiter himself took on the face of Amphitryon
And, as a reward for all labors,
Accepts joy in the arms of his wife.
And with the ardent passion of the newlywed
He used it successfully.

The night is perplexed:

I wonder at Jupiter, but why, why
Does he invent quirk after quirk?

Mercury explains:

He wants to be everything in turn.
For God, he is not behaving badly.
And no matter how the human race looks at it,
I would consider him unhappy
If only, always shining with a golden crown,
He hovered in the skies solemnly and powerfully.
In my opinion, there is nothing more stupid -
To be a prisoner of your own greatness.
When the heart is full of passion,
Sometimes it is uncomfortable to shine with power.
Jupiter knows how to leave his palace,
Descend from the heights of supreme Glory,
For the woman whose gaze ignited his dream.
Rejecting the majestic image,
He is no longer a god before her.

Oh, if only in bold transformations
He kept within human limits!
Otherwise we see him as a bull,
Either a swan, or a snake, or something else?
And if we sometimes laugh at him,
I don't see anything strange in that.

Let's leave such judgments to the censors.
They don’t understand that these transformations
Full of special charm.
Jupiter's decisions are always thought out.
And animals, if they are in love,
No less people are smart.

What does he need and what does my cloak have to do with it?

Let your fast running slow down your horses,
And let, in order to quench all the ardor of passions,
The night in the sky will linger,
Becoming the longest of all nights.
Let him fully enjoy the delight
And don’t let the Dawn into the sky,
With which I must return
The hero whose name he took.

Night agrees to fulfill Jupiter's request. Meanwhile, Amphitryon’s servant named Sozius goes to his master’s house to tell his young wife about her husband’s exploits on the battlefield and that he is returning home in the morning. And then Mercury comes out of the house to meet Sozius in his own image - Sozius. True Soziy is perplexed: is he in a dream or has he gone crazy, seeing himself in front of him? Mercury excellently and happily walked along the back of the discouraged Sosius and kicked him out. While Jupiter, in the form of a young husband, was enjoying the lovely Alcmene, Mercury, without wasting time, looked at Sosius’s wife, taking advantage of his appearance, and began to lavish her with tenderness and courtesy. After staying with her for a short time, he plans to leave.

Cleanthes is dissatisfied:

But doesn't it hurt me?
Why are you running away from me so quickly?

That's the importance, if you look!
We've gotten pretty tired of each other.

Traitor! You're leaving me like an animal!
And won’t you say a kind word to me now?

For mercy, where do you tell me to look?
Any favors for me at this hour?
In fifteen years of marriage you will say everything,
And everything has been explained to us a long time ago.

Are you standing then for me to feed the heat?
To you, as a woman, what does honor look like?

Oh! You were too faithful to me!
I don't really like it.
Less fidelity, more peace -
And I will bless you.

What? What? Am I worth reproaches for my honesty?

Kindness in my wife is dearer to me than anything else,
Honesty is of little use.
Shawls, but only on the sly!

Cleanthes is furious, but when Mercury, in the form of her husband, leaves the discouraged woman, she sadly says:

To tell the truth, it's very embarrassing
That I don’t dare take revenge for such a conversation.
Alas! Sometimes it's so frustrating
Be a virtuous wife!

At this time, the true Sosius returned to his master and announced to Amphitryon that in the house of his mistress he had found the second Sosius, who had seriously crushed his sides. Amphitryon, of course, does not believe him, but the servant continues to convince the owner:

And I didn’t believe it myself until I was beaten.
Seeing that there were two of us, at first I was confused,
And I wanted to consider someone else a liar,
But by force he forced himself to admit,
And I was soon convinced that he was definitely “me”:
He looks like me from toe to temple -
He's smart, he's handsome. Proud, noble appearance;
I'll say: two drops of milk
They are not so similar to each other.
And if only his hand were not so heavy,
I would love a double!

Amphitryon, hearing such nonsense, exhaled in anger:

Let the sky strike you with thunder for nonsense!

Ah, this is all, alas, not nonsense!
“I”, the other one, is more dexterous than me;
He is as brave as he is cunning
And he proved this on my own neck.

Amphitryon rushes to his young wife, and she greets him with an unexpected question:

How! Are you back already?

Amphitryon is perplexed:

In this meeting
I don’t see much tenderness in Alcmene.
"How! Are you back already? - these speeches
They show how great your love is for me!
It seemed to me that infinity
I've been away from you.
Wanting to be together, we count it as eternity
The day, every hour and moment that has passed in the distance.
For those who love to be different, it is torment,
And, no matter how small it is, there is still endless separation.
I confess - this is the reception
My love was put to the test.
I was waiting for you to meet me
You are with a new fervor of passion and desire.

And I must admit, I don’t understand
What are you talking to me about?
I don't even know why
You are not happy with our meeting.
Everything you are waiting for is me
Yesterday evening I passionately expressed to you,
When I first saw you here in the house,
When, the delight is not melting,
I didn’t know how best to express my love.

What are you saying?
Wasn’t it a dream that preceded my return to you?

Isn't there a thick fog in your imagination?
Enveloped, my husband, and you, upon returning
Having completely forgotten yesterday,
Forgetting how passionately I received you yesterday,
Now you think that in reality it’s in vain
Should you be fair to me?

The fog you talk about
Alkmena, he’s somehow strange!

Like the dream you want
Impose on me, Amphitryon!

O heaven! My blood boils and runs cold.
Hearing this nonsense, who wouldn’t be amazed?

Both spouses remain completely bewildered. Here Amphitryon says that he was going to send Alcmene his gift as a sign of his ardent love - a diamond crown, which he got in the war. The wife unexpectedly confirms the receipt of this crown:

You gave me a precious gift -
The crown that you took as spoils of war.
You revealed it to me
All your passion, all your sorrow, and hearts of torment:
Concerns associated with war
The delight of being home again, the languor of separation;
Like a young man who is in love for the first time,
Confessed how greedily you rushed to me,
And never before have you seemed so tender
Your confessions to me, Amphitryon.

I am amazed to death by these words!

Realizing that there was another man with his wife, Amphitryon gives her, supposedly a traitor, the last word:

There is no mercy in the soul when honor is hurt!
It’s enough for me to know that you were in bed!
And now I have only one thing in my heart:
Curse and revenge.

Who should I take revenge on? Your anger is like madness.
What is my honor guilty of before you?

Don't know. I'm on fire and I'm capable of anything.
But know one thing: I wasn’t here yesterday!

Alcmene's honor is insulted as well as her husband's honor. She says in anger:

Away! You are no longer worthy of me.
Events are clearer than day,
Your deceptions are obscene...
How! Accuse me of infidelity?
Perhaps you are looking for a dark excuse,
To break the bonds that unite us?
You worked hard in vain
I decided everything at that hour:
From now on, each of us has his own path.

Yes, after your confession this is what
Which, of course, you need to prepare for.
But this is less! Nobody knows
Where will my anger, my frustration find its limit?
I'm dishonored, yes! My shame is clear to everyone;
They try to cover it up in vain;
But all the details of the events are unclear,
And my fair gaze wants to see everything.
That today they didn’t leave the troops until morning
We, your brother can confirm under oath,
And I follow him: he can do it without effort
He will open your eyes to my imaginary return.
We will be able to cope with this strange mystery,
Let's analyze the whole question to the depths,
And woe to those who, willingly or accidentally
He insulted me!
When the soul burns under a bloody ulcer,
I would give all my honors, really,
Just for one quiet hour!
No, jealousy will not stop counting
Rows of my terrible troubles.
The more I try to think
The more difficult it is to find an answer in the black chaos.
Perhaps it was all just a random dream,
A dream that her illness gave life to.
Oh gods, I am turning to you!
Let me not be mistaken in this,
Luckily for me, she went crazy.
O heaven! Everything scares me.
It contradicts all the laws of the world,
And my honor trembles before
What my mind can't accommodate.

The servant Sozius and his wife have an equally stormy scene in their house.

And now, finally, Amphitryon sees another Amphitryon, like two peas in a pod similar to him. To break this spell, Amphitryon draws his sword. Jupiter, having had enough of misunderstandings, decides to leave for his heavenly penates. Then Mercury will reveal to the feuding married couples the true state of affairs:

So that there is no doubt,
I will say ahead that the king of the gods
Under this image, dear to you, to Alcmene
Came down from the high clouds.
As for me, who brings you the news -
Mercury, I have the honor!

Then a terrible thunder erupted. And from the cloud Jupiter said:

Look, Amphitryon: here is your deputy!
Recognize Jupiter in your features. appeared
With thunder I let you know who is here in front of you.
This is enough for you to reconcile your soul,
May you find happiness and peace again.
That name that the whole world, timidly, pronounces,
Dispel all slander and lies here:
Sharing with Jupiter
Doesn't bring dishonor.
Knowing now that your rival is the god of gods,
You can be proud and call yourself happy.
There is no room for bitter words here,
Not you, but I'm ready now,
Even though I reign in the sky, admit that I am jealous.
Alcmene is all yours, conjugal honor
She protects from foe and friend.
To please her, there is only one way:
Appear to her in the form of a husband.
You can rejoice that Jupiter himself, I,
I did not defeat her with all my glory;
Everything that she gave me
She hid it in her soul for you.

Here the servant, unable to bear it, inserts his word:

Needless to say: the god of gods knows how to gild pills.

And, interrupted by the servant, Jupiter continues:

I want the trace of worries in your soul to disappear,
So that all doubts in you fall asleep forever.
You will have a glorious son, Hercules,
He will fill all the ends of the universe with glory.
Great gifts of unchanging Fortune
From now on it will be revealed to everyone: you are heaven’s favorite.

In the play “Don Juan or the Stone Guest,” Moliere used Tirso de Molina’s work about this tireless ladies’ man and joined the line of authors who took advantage of the traditional “Don Juan” plot.

Don Juan's servant hates his master and tries to warn his future victims from taking a disastrous step. He says:

- “Don Juan is the greatest of all the villains that the earth has ever bore, a monster, a dog, a devil, a Turk, a heretic, who does not believe in heaven, nor in saints, nor in God, nor in the devil, who does not want to listen to Christian teachings, which lives like vile cattle, like an Epicurean pig. For the sake of his passion, he can marry a woman, her dog, and her cat as many times as he likes. It costs him nothing to get married. He uses it as a trap to lure beauties into it.

Don Juan directly expresses his life credo: “How! Do you want me to connect myself with the very first object of my passion, so that for its sake I renounce the world and not look at anyone else? It’s an excellent idea to give yourself some imaginary merit of being faithful, to bury yourself forever for the sake of one hobby, and from your very youth to die for all the other beauties that might strike my gaze. No, consistency is for weirdos.

Any beauty is free to charm us; the advantage of the first meeting should not deprive others of the legal rights that they have to my heart. For example, beauty delights me wherever I meet it; I easily succumb to the gentle violence with which it captivates me. Nothing will stop the fury of my desires. My heart, I feel, could love the whole earth. Like Alexander the Great, I wish there were other worlds where I could continue my love victories.”

The insidious womanizer without pity, without a twinge of conscience, seduces women on his way. He is sure that many people practice the same craft and wear a mask like his to deceive the light. At the end of the play, as expected in the plot, Don Juan dies in the hands of the Commander.

Moliere tirelessly denounces all kinds of human vices, and perhaps the most hated vice is hypocrisy. He writes: “Nowadays hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtues. Nowadays, hypocrisy has a huge advantage. Thanks to this art, deception is always held in high esteem: even if it is discovered, no one will dare to say a single word against it.

All other human vices are subject to criticism, everyone is free to openly attack them, but hypocrisy is a vice that enjoys special benefits: it silences everyone with its own hand and calmly enjoys complete security. Pretense brings together those who are bound by the mutual guarantee of hypocrisy. If you hurt one, everyone will fall on you, and those who act obviously honestly and whose sincerity cannot be doubted remain fools: in their simplicity, they fall for the bait of these crooks and help them get their affairs done.”

High society itself provided Moliere with its subjects with tireless enthusiasm. Just take the story of Finance Minister Fouquet. “What happened in the Ministry of Finance under Fouquet was unthinkable. Allocations were issued for payment from already spent funds, false figures were written in reports, bribes were taken...

Fouquet was not a vile miser, he was a broad, elegant embezzler. He surrounded himself not only with the best lovers in France, but also with artists, thinkers, and writers, and the latter included La Fontaine and Moliere. Only honest people live boring lives! Thieves always have a great time, and everyone loves thieves because it’s always satisfying and fun around them.

But the arbiters of destinies can control all destinies, with the exception of their own, and Fouquet did not know only one thing: at the time when he was preparing for the holidays, the king was working as a financier - checking the statements of the ministry. This check was urgent and secret. The king was young, but he was cold and smart and calmly looked at the fake statements and real statements given to him. Fouquet, carried away by fate, completed the preparation for his death by inscribing the Latin motto on the pediment of his palace: “What have I not yet achieved?”

And so King Louis XIV with his retinue came to Fouquet. Witnesses say that the king's never-changing face seemed to tremble when he looked up and saw Fouquet's motto on the pediment, but the next moment the royal face returned to normal. And the festivities took place, opening with a breakfast for five hundred people, followed by theatrical performances, ballets, masquerades and fireworks.

The Molière Theater showed a play in which it satirically depicted the types of high society. Here the question arises: how did he dare to present his courtiers in an ironic light in front of the king? However, Moliere had a completely accurate and correct calculation. The king did not at all treat the higher nobility of France well and did not consider himself the first among the nobles. According to Louis, his power was divine, and he stood completely separate and immeasurably above everyone in the world. He was somewhere in the sky, in close proximity to God, and was very sensitive to the slightest attempts by any of the major lords to rise to a height greater than what was required. In a word, it would be better to cut your own throat with a razor than to inscribe such a motto as Fouquet inscribed. Louis remembered what happened during the Fronde, and held the grand lords in his steely hands. In his presence one could laugh at the courtiers.

“You are under arrest,” the captain said quietly to the Minister of Finance.

It was with these two words that Fouquet’s life ended.

Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with the playwright grew in society. Soon they began to say that Moliere shamelessly used the works of Italian authors, borrowing from them. Over time, it became so fashionable to point out Molière’s thefts that if it was impossible to say with certainty where and what exactly he borrowed, they said that he “apparently” borrowed. In the end, Moliere was even credited with the loud and cheeky phrase: “I take my goods where I find them.” In justification, one thing can be said: what was borrowed in his processing was immeasurably higher in quality than in the originals.

This is how Moliere recently began to notice with surprise that fame looks a little different from how some people imagine it, but is expressed mainly in unbridled swearing at all crossroads. One day an offensive incident happened to him. Having met the playwright in the Versailles gallery, a certain nobleman, pretending that he wanted to hug Moliere, grabbed him, pressed him to himself and tore his face bloody with the precious buttons of his caftan. Jean-Baptiste suffered from such troubles with illness - fatigue and a strange state of mind, and only later did they realize that this condition has a very impressive medical name - hypochondria.

Moliere moved in the highest Parisian society and observed how salons appeared there where women's society gathered. In honor of her mistress, who was resplendent in the salon, the poets composed a whole wreath of madrigals. The madrigals were followed by first-rate witticisms, but so complex that lengthy explanations were required to understand them. Until now, all this would have been half a tragedy if, following the madrigals and witticisms, the ladies had not taken up great literature in earnest.

The further, the higher the sophistication rose, and the thoughts expressed in the salon became more and more mysterious, and the forms in which they were clothed, more and more pretentious. A simple mirror in which they looked turned in their language into an “advisor of grace,” and a turnip into a “vegetable garden phenomenon.” Having heard some kindness from the marquis, the lady answered:

You, Marquis, add wood of courtesy to the fireplace of friendship.

And so a huge cartload of nonsense entered French literature. In addition, the ladies, having completely clogged their language, jeopardized spelling itself. A wonderful plan matured in one of their heads: in order to make spelling accessible to women, who were significantly behind men, the lady suggested writing words the way they are pronounced.

But then disaster struck the ladies of the salon. Mister de Molière released a new comedy, “Funny Primroses,” from the very first words of which the orchestra was joyfully wary. From the fifth apparition onwards, the ladies in the boxes went wide-eyed. In the eighth appearance, the marquises, who, according to the custom of that time, were sitting on the sides of the stage, were amazed, and the stalls began to laugh and laughed until the very end of the play.

Its content was as follows. Two foolish young ladies drove away their suitors for the reason that they seemed to them insufficiently sophisticated people. The suitors took revenge on them. They dressed up their two footmen as marquises, and these scoundrels came to visit the fools. They accepted the rogue servants with open arms. One insolent bastard spouted all sorts of nonsense for an hour, and the other lied about his military exploits. With an impudent face, he sang a song of his own composition that went something like this:

Until, without taking my eyes off you,
I admired you in the light of day,
Your eye stole my heart
Stop the thief, thief, thief!

To have a wife so pompous with imaginary wisdom and affectation is pure hell.

A wife is costly to many,
Who is gifted with a great mind.
I would be burdened by a wife from those scientists,
Who would try to shine in salons,
I would write a lot of prose and poetry
And would receive nobles and wits,
Meanwhile, I, the husband of such a creature,
I would languish like a saint, deprived of veneration.

The salons in which such poems were written were spat upon by the play, but, in addition, both the authors and visitors to these salons were spat upon. A daring farce was played on stage, and it was by no means innocent. It was a farce of the morals and customs of Paris at that time, and the owners of these morals and the creators of customs sat right there, in the boxes and on the stage. The parterre cackled and could point his fingers at them. He recognized the bar salons that the former upholsterer had disgraced in front of the entire honest public. The marquises sat on the stage, purple.

However, we must pay tribute to the fact that not all ladies were like those mentioned above. Moliere was friends with one of the smartest and most interesting women in France, Nino de Lenclos, nicknamed the French Aspasia, in whose salon the playwright, without much publicity, read excerpts from his comedies.

But then night came. The show was ending. The chandeliers were going out. It was completely dark on the streets. Moliere, wrapped in a cloak, with a lantern in his hands, coughing from the November dampness, strives for Madeleine. He was attracted by the fire in the hearth, but he was more attracted by something else. He wanted to see Madeleine’s sister and pupil, Armande Bejart, the same girl who played Ether six years ago. Now she has turned into a sixteen-year-old girl. Moliere was in a hurry to see Armande, but winced painfully at the thought of Madeleine’s eyes. Madeleine forgave him for all his previous loves, but now it’s as if a demon has possessed her. Her eyes became unpleasant whenever Jean-Baptiste entered into an animated conversation with the flirtatious and fidgety Armande.

Won't you deceive me? - he asked. - You see, I already have wrinkles, I’m starting to turn grey. I am surrounded by enemies and shame will kill me.

No, no, how can you do this!.. - Armande answered.

I want to live another century with you! With you! But don't worry, I'll pay for it. I will create you. You will be the first, you will be a great actress. This is my dream, and therefore it will be so. But remember, if you don't keep your vow, you'll take everything from me.

I don't see any wrinkles on your face. You are so brave and so great that you cannot have wrinkles. You are Jean...

I am Baptiste...

You are Moliere!

You and I will get married. True, I will have to endure a lot because of this.

In the November darkness, in the chilly fog, a lamplighter runs along the embankment. Mister Moliere! Whisper to us, no one can hear us, how old are you? Thirty-eight, and she’s sixteen! And besides, where was she born? Who are her father and mother? Are you sure that she is Madeleine's sister?

The next day, Mr. Moliere received an official notice from the Parisian authorities that his play “Funny Primroses” was prohibited from further performances. It should be noted that for the first time the playwright experienced something that he would have to experience often in the future. This condition is not worth describing. Anyone whose plays have not been filmed after the first successful performance will never understand this anyway, and those who have had them filmed do not need this.

There was a meeting with Madeleine, the alarmed troupe ran in, Moliere went somewhere to make inquiries and bow, and when he returned, he decided to resort to yet another method in order to bring the play back to life. This method has long been known to playwrights and consists in the fact that the author, under pressure from force, deliberately mutilates his work. Last resort! This is what lizards do; when they are grabbed by the tail, they break it off and run away. Because every lizard understands that it is better to live without a tail than to lose life altogether. Moliere thoroughly reasoned: the royal censors do not know that no alterations in the work will change its basic meaning one iota. And he broke off part of the play. Then he found some patrons among the powers that be, very successfully referred to the fact that he would ask the king for protection, and two weeks later the comedy was allowed to be presented.

Denouncing hypocrisy himself, Moliere, for the sake of the opportunity to stage the play, sent hypocritical letters to the king: “I want to express my gratitude to you for the success of my comedy. I owe this success, which exceeded my expectations, firstly, to the gracious approval with which you, Your Majesty, bestowed upon my comedy from the very beginning, thereby arousing general favor towards it, and secondly, to your order to add the character of another hero ; at the same time, you were so kind, Your Majesty, that you revealed his features to me, and then this image was recognized as the best in all comedy. I confess that nothing has so far come to me as easily as exactly that place in the comedy that you, Your Majesty, told me to work on - the joy of obeying you inspired me more than Apollo and all the muses combined, and now I see “What I could create if I wrote the entire comedy under your direction.”

But it is possible that these words were sincere and truthful, because the king and the comedian were on friendly terms.

When the performance was eventually allowed to go ahead, the troupe rejoiced. Madeleine whispered only one phrase to Moliere:

Double your prices!

The practical actress was right: the news of the ban added fuel to the fire, and the theater's faithful barometer - the box office - showed a storm.

The storm was also foreshadowed by the personal life of Moliere himself. His wedding took place with Armande. Next to the stooped, coughing director of the Palais-Royal troupe, Jean-Baptiste Moliere, stood under the aisle a girl of about twenty - ugly, large-mouthed, with small eyes, but filled with inexpressible attractive power. The girl was dressed in the latest fashion and stood with her head thrown back proudly. The organ hummed over the wedding party, but neither the organ waves nor the well-known Latin reached the groom, who was burning with devilish passion for his bride. Behind the wedding couple stood the actors, a group of relatives and Madeleine, with a strange and seemingly petrified face.

Rumors circulated in Paris that Armande was not Madeleine's sister, but Madeleine's daughter. The anonymous author of the libelous book wrote: “She was the daughter of Madeleine Bejart, a comedian who enjoyed enormous success among young people at the time of her daughter’s birth.” But the most important thing is yet to come. But who was Armande's father? First of all, suspicion fell on the Count de Modena, Madeleine’s first lover, already known to us, and the father of her first child, Françoise. And it immediately becomes clear that this suspicion is unfounded.

There is a lot of evidence that Madeleine at one time wanted the Count to consummate his relationship with her with a legal marriage, due to which she not only did not try to hide the birth of Françoise from de Modena from people, but, on the contrary, noted this event in an official act. The appearance of a second child from the count would have further connected Madeleine with de Moden, fully contributing to her marriage plans. There was absolutely no need to hide this baby and attribute him to his mother. Here completely opposite circumstances took place: it was not Modena’s child that Madeleine hid from people with the help of her accomplice-mother, but, while mysteriously giving birth, Madeleine hid the child from de Modena.

Amanda's father could have been a gentleman who was closely acquainted with Madeleine in the summer of 1642, when the future mother was in the south of France. It was at the waters where King Louis XIII drank healing waters, and in the king’s retinue as a valet and upholsterer was... Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. Undoubtedly, the closeness at that time of Moliere and Madeleine gave rise to terrible rumors - Armande was considered the daughter of Jean-Baptiste. Rumors crawled from all sides, poisoning Moliere's life, that he had committed grave incest, that he had married his own daughter. However, in fact, everything was refuted by major French historians, who completely proved the absurdity of this assumption.

Some witnesses say that Armande’s marriage took place after such terrible and difficult scenes between Moliere and Madeleine that life next to each other for these three persons became unbearable.

One day before the marriage, Jean-Baptiste said to Madeleine:

Madeleine, there is a very important matter. I want to get married.

On your sister.

I beg you. Tell me you're kidding. And what about me? – Madeleine’s eyes welled up with tears.

God be with you. Well, Madelena, we have a long friendship with you, you are a faithful comrade, but there has been no love between us for a long time.

Do you remember how twenty years ago you were in prison? Who brought you food?

Who looked after you for twenty years?

No one will kick out a dog that has guarded the house all its life. Well, Moliere, can you kick me out? You are a terrible man, Moliere, I am afraid of you.

Don't touch me... Passion has taken over me...

Now Madeleine is crawling on her knees towards Moliere.

But still... change your mind, Moliere. Let's act as if this conversation never happened. Let's go home, you light the candles, I will come to you... And if you need to consult, who will you consult with, Moliere? After all, she is a girl... You love a hot water bottle. I'll arrange everything for you. Let's light the fireplace and everything will be fine.

Hush, Madelena, hush, I forgive you...

The vast cathedral where Moliere married Armande was full of incense, fog and darkness.

In the house of the married Molière, misfortunes began within a very short time. It turned out that the spouses were completely unsuitable for each other. The aging and sick husband still had passion for his wife, but his wife did not love him. Their life together very soon became hell.

The couple gave birth to a boy. When Moliere's first-born son was baptized, everything was furnished with unusual pomp and ceremony. Next to the font stood a guard with a long halberd, and the priest had an expression of extraordinary delight on his face. The fact is that Moliere achieved an exceptional honor: the King of France agreed to be the child’s godfather. The boy, as is quite clear, was named Louis. So the comedian and playwright became godfathers.

The christening made a great impression in Paris, and the abuse directed at Moliere subsided significantly. The shadow of the king began to appear to everyone behind the shoulders of the director of the troupe, and many of those who like to take the side of the winner enthusiastically talked about how the informer against the playwright with his denunciation was not listened to in the palace, but was kicked out almost out of nowhere.

Neither the king nor the comedian cared about spiteful critics. Both were preparing for a big holiday. The time of mourning for yet another deceased nobleman is over, and sadness in the royal houses ceases on the day when etiquette dictates it. It's time to celebrate.

Along the vast alley, between the walls of trimmed greenery, a motorcade was moving, and at its head rode the king of France himself on horseback. The spring rays hit the shell directly, and one could go blind by looking up at the king. The harness on the horse glowed with gold, and diamonds sparkled on the king’s helmet. Feathers developed on the helmets of the convoy, and blood cavalry horses danced under the convoy.

The orchestras were marching, and the trumpets in them screamed so deafeningly that it seemed as if they could be heard twenty kilometers away, in Paris. Chariots rode between the choirs of music, and above one of them stood the god Apollo, made up. On the next chariots, actors dressed in costumes of the signs of the zodiac constellations advanced. Costumed knights, blacks and nymphs walked and rode. And the god of the forests was visible among them - Pan with goat legs, portrayed by Monsieur de Molière.

The trumpets of the heralds announced to the whole world that the “Joys of the Charming Island” - the great Versailles holidays - had begun. For the holiday, machines were built for theatrical performances, and the royal gardeners carved out entire theaters in the sea of ​​Versailles greenery and decorated them with garlands and flower ornaments, pyrotechnicians prepared fireworks that had never been seen in the brilliance and power of explosions. Multi-colored flames spread throughout the gardens of Versailles, stars fell from the sky with a roar, and from afar it seemed as if the forest of Versailles was burning.

Moliere worked feverishly for this holiday, and in a very short time, borrowing a canvas from one of the Spanish playwrights, he composed a play. In this performance, Armande Moliere performed as the princess. Then the whole court saw what enormous talent the wife of the famous comedian had and what kind of school she went through with him. The actress's performance was amazing. Court gentlemen swarmed around a witty, malicious woman in lemon silks embroidered with gold and silver.

The play brought great pleasure to the king, but brought new grief to the author. The gentlemen, dangerous with their youth, beauty and wealth, completely poisoned his holiday. Gossip about his wife started right there on the first day. All of them, in the form of poisonous regrets or ugly hints, immediately fell into Moliere’s ears, but he no longer even snapped, but only bared his yellowed teeth like a wolf. In addition, misfortune befell him: the royal godson Louis died immediately after the premiere.

The grief was endless. Moliere began to get sicker and sicker. He was hopelessly ill, protracted, gradually falling more and more into hypochondria, which exhausted him. All of Paris in his eyes was covered with an unpleasant gray net. The patient winced, twitched, and often sat in his office, ruffled like a sick bird. At other moments he was overcome by irritation and even rage. Then he could not control himself, he became intolerable in dealing with his loved ones.

He looked for help and rushed to doctors, but received no help from them. And, perhaps, he was right in his attacks on the doctors he described in his plays, because Moliere’s time was one of the saddest times in the history of this great art, that is, medicine. In most cases, Moliere's doctors treated unsuccessfully, and all their exploits cannot even be listed. They killed someone by bloodletting; they sent Moliere’s best friend to the next world, giving him three times an emetic tincture, which was absolutely contraindicated for his illness.

In a word, Moliere's time was a dark time in medicine. As for the purely external signs that distinguished the doctors, we can say: these people rode around Paris on mules, wore gloomy long robes, grew beards and spoke some mysterious jargon. They, of course, simply asked to take the stage in the comedy.” (M. Bulgakov)

On May 12, 1664, another grand celebration took place on the occasion of the opening of the Palace of Versailles, and at this celebration, in the presence of the king, the premiere of the play “Tartuffe” was performed, which belonged to the genre of high comedy, involving the combination of the tragic and the comic together.

The court performance has begun. “The mother of the hero of the play Orgon, Madame Pernelle, scolds her grandchildren Damis and Mariana because they do not want to honor the saint Tartuffe, who recently appeared in their house. All Tartuffe’s opponents tell her out loud:

Your Mr. Tartuffe is a trickster, there is no doubt about that.

And Madame Pernelle insists:

He is a righteous man. His good instructions are soul-saving,

And my son teaches you to have respect for him.

Here the maid Dorina inserts her sharp words:

No, think about it! Isn't this a miracle?
God knows who appeared, from God knows where,
In beggar's rags, almost barefoot,
And - here you go, I've already taken over the whole house
And it got to such a point that, contrary to reason,
We all must now dance to his tune.

But Madame Pernel keeps repeating and repeating:

Ah, it would be better for you not to argue with him,
And to live, as he teaches, according to holy rules.

Saints? Is it fitting for you to be so gullible?
Is there any holiness here? Just hypocrisy!

It’s not difficult to guess what made him angry:
He speaks the whole truth without embellishment.
He is a fierce enemy of sin and a guardian of purity,
Brands immorality and glorifies virtue.

Here's how and why this moralizing lesson
Have you kept all the guests away from our house?

You no longer know what to come up with out of anger.
But all these guests of ours are suspicious
He's not the only one. Not so big secret
What a line of carriages crowding under the windows
And there are always servants milling around the porch
It has long been an eyesore throughout the area.
Serving Satan. Hmm... Friendly meetings!
Blasphemous speeches are made there,
The most worthy persons there are judged at random,
They say such nonsense - at least stop it!
Fools are blessed, but wise people
My head is fuzzy from these noisy gatherings.

The maid does not give up and retorts to the mistress, accusing Tartuffe:

Such people will hear something, take a peek,
They'll lie like crazy and spread rumors,
In a minute they will make an elephant out of a molehill.
What is their vile fuss designed for?
Decent people are defamed and mobbed,
They hope that it will be more comfortable for them:
In the midst of the general blackness one cannot see their tricks,
And if you don’t push the crowd onto the wrong trail,
You will have to answer for your sins yourself.
This person is indeed highly moral.
But what was she like at the time?
Old age helped her overcome temptations.
Yes, morality grows stronger when the flesh becomes decrepit.
Their passion is to judge people. And how harsh is their judgment.
No, they do not recognize mercy.
They look for stains on someone else's conscience,
But not out of good feelings - out of envy, of course.

Yes, yes, madam! You are deaf to my words.
But I will also speak out, now it’s my turn.
My son was wise when, by inspiration from above,
He gave shelter to the pious man under this roof.
A righteous man has been sent to you to bring you out of darkness.
And bring lost minds back to the truth.
His holy teachings are saving,
And what he stigmatizes is worthy of condemnation.

However, the maid Dorina got angry in earnest:

From the day Tartuffe came to our house,
The owner is out of his mind, he is obsessed with him.
Frankly, he rushes around with this empty light,
Like chicken and egg. He calls him brother
And he loves his brother - I won’t lie to you for a penny -
Stronger a hundred times than mother, daughter, son and wife.
This rogue became his confidant.
The pet is surrounded by such cares,
The kind the beloved could not wish for.
At meals he is always at the head of the table;
He eats for six, and my master melts
And he pushes the best pieces towards him.
Tartuffe burps, and he: “Hey, dear brother!”
Tartuffe is his idol. He is omniscient and holy.
Whatever he does, he “committed the deed”
Whatever he says, “he uttered a prophecy.”
Well, Tartuffe is cunning and simply masterful
He rubs glasses on our Orgon.
We were all squeezed into the fist of this lying scoundrel,
He made bigotry a source of profit.

And he succeeded in this like no one else. This is how the owner of the house, Orgon, praises his dear guest, literally and figuratively:

I met him and fell in love forever...
He prayed next to me in church every day,
In a fit of piety, I kneel down.
He attracted everyone's attention:
Then suddenly lamentations flowed from his lips,
Then he raised his hands to heaven in tears,
Otherwise he would lie down for a long time, kissing the ashes;
When I left, he ran down the aisle,
To serve me holy water in the vestibule.
Here's a man! He... He... Well, in a word, a man!
I'm happy. His mighty verb inspired me,
That the world is a big dung heap.
How comforting this thought is to me, my brother!
After all, if our life is just rot and stench,
Is it possible to value anything in the world?
Now let both my mother and children die,
Let me bury both my brother and my wife -
Believe me, I won’t even blink an eye.
I offered Tartuffe assistance,
However, he blamed the generosity of my mites:
It’s not worth it, they say, he’s doing these good deeds,
And, in his modesty, content with little,
He gave the surplus to the orphans and the poor.
Hearing the heavens, I offered him shelter,
And happiness has reigned in my home ever since.
Tatruff goes into everything with me together,
He stands guard over my family honor,
He is more jealous than me. Few people to my wife
With pleasantries - he immediately informs me.
How virtuous! How full of humility!
He accuses himself of a crime
The most insignificant trifle, trifle, nonsense.
So, while praying the other day I caught a flea,
So he then brought repentance to heaven,
That he crushed her without any sense of compassion.

Cleante, the brother of Orgon’s wife, having heard such a panegyric addressed to Tartuffe, exhaled his opinion in one breath:

How are you not ashamed? What kind of nonsense is this?
Are you kidding me right? I don't believe my ears.
Only a rogue or a madman can do this.

Vain words. “You, brother-in-law, are a freethinker,” Orgon said, snapping.

Cleant continued:

Brave fighters are not guilty of bragging,
And the righteous are those who set an example for us,
They do not engage in hypocritical antics.
Is there really no difference for you?
Between true faith and ostentatious faith?
How could you not separate reality from fairy tales?
How could you not distinguish a face from a mask?
How did you not understand where the swamp is and where the solid path is?
Where is fiction, where is reality? Where is the appearance, where is the essence?
How did you confuse the truth with inveterate lies?
A genuine chervonets with a counterfeit coin?

How can we compete with such a philosopher!
You are knowledgeable in everything, your judgment is infallible.
You are a storehouse of wisdom. Prophet. Compared to you
“All others should be considered fools,” Orgon scoffed in response.

I am not a storehouse of wisdom, sir, not a prophet,
I don't want to teach a lesson at all -
I'm not that educated for this occupation, -
But I can distinguish lies from truth.
Of all the virtues I honor most
High thoughts, holy purity,
And I don’t know a nobler example,
Than people in whose hearts a living faith burns.
And therefore there is nothing in the world
More disgusting than lies, pretense, hypocrisy.
Isn't it a shame when the bigots of the square
Soulless liars, corrupt leaders,
Dressing up blasphemously in robes of holiness,
Everything that is dear to us is trampled into the dirt.
When money-grubbers are fiercely competitive
They sell conscience like a petty commodity,
And, rolling his eyes, taking on a lean look,
They figure out who will reward them with what;
When they hasten on the path of piety
Where they see money and estates;
When, shouting that it is a sin to live in the world,
They are trying to get to the court;
When slanderers are without conscience, without honor,
Hiding the thirst for revenge with a blissful mask,
In order to more accurately destroy someone who is not dear to them,
Are they screaming that he is a rebel against higher powers?
And that’s why they are twice as dangerous for us,
That they adapted the sword of faith for robbery,
They carry out criminal deeds with prayer,
And in their hands good became a weapon of evil.
There are many such pretenders in our time,
However, it is not difficult to distinguish this tribe
From righteous people. But there are righteous people.
They do good without ostentatious zeal,
Avoiding pompous phrases and self-praise.
They have no honor for arrogant slander:
They are happy to find good things in people.
They don’t weave intrigues, they don’t dig holes for their neighbors,
Their thoughts are pure and their judgments are straightforward.
They harbor hatred, let me tell you.
Not to poor sinners, but only to the sins themselves.
It will not occur to them to be zealous beyond measure.
And stand guard over faith more zealously than heaven.
Here are the people! This is who we should follow as an example.
I'm afraid that your Tartuffe is sewn in a different style
And his righteousness is empty hypocrisy.
Didn't he gain your trust too easily?
Were you deceived by his pious appearance?
Not all that glitters is gold, believe me.

Alas, Cleanthe's reasonable words had no effect. But all the troubles associated with the appearance of a sanctimonious saint in the house are nothing compared to the fact that the planned wedding of Orgon’s daughter Marianne with her beloved Valer is upset. This marriage became a chimera, but the marriage with Tartuffe was preparing to become a reality. Orgon dreams of entering into ties of kinship with the saint he loves. And he says to his daughter Mariana:

Having married you, Tartuffe will become my son-in-law,
We will become related to him. Know this: this is my order.

Mariana is in despair from what she heard, and Dorina is angry.

Soon you will become the talk of the town.
Such a groom would be filthy with a broom:
After all, he has such an appearance,
That it will drive sinlessness itself into sin.
Why is your daughter humble and quiet,
And being married to him will not avoid sin.
And, since Tartuffe is so dear to the venerable father,
Let him go to the crown with this groom himself.

Mariana sheds bitter tears and through them, sobbing, says:

ABOUT! I would rather die than submit to force!

Dorina reproaches her:

Will you die? Right! What a simple outcome!
You die and it’s over: no grief, no worries.
Here everyone will begin to feel sorry, everyone will begin to mourn...
Ugh! If you listen to you, your ears will really fade.

You are always trying to offend and sting,
But you don’t sympathize with someone else’s misfortune at all.

Who should I sympathize with? Isn't it for you?
Well, no, madam: I don’t like mumbles.

You know that I was timid from birth.

He who loves must be as solid as a rock.

But Mariana is unable to fight. She, as Dorina aptly put it, was “stuffed from head to toe.” Valer, having learned about what happened and about the submission of his bride, also gives up and is ready to link his fate with another. Dorina reproaches him, shames him that he, a man, behaves worse than a girl. A cunning maid teaches foolish lovers:

As far as I understand my father's nature,
Outright reject the ridiculous idea
Very risky. Or rather a roundabout way:
You need to reconcile for the sake of appearances, but drag it out.
Whoever wins time wins in the end.
You need to endlessly come up with excuses:
Either you were sick, or you had a bad dream,
The mirror broke, the brownie was fiddling,
Then the neighbor's dog howled at the moon...
Well, in a word, are there many obstacles to marriage?
So act like this, and these gentlemen
They won’t force the desired “yes” out of you.
But still, so that things don’t turn out badly,
It would be better for lovers not to see each other for now.
Don't waste your time. What's most needed now
Call upon the sympathy of our friends to help us.
For you, both your brother and stepmother - with grief,
I, too, am somehow worth something.

So, with the help and blessing of the maid, the lovers perked up and decided to act. And so Mariana's stepmother Elmira comes into play. She pretends to accept Tartuffe's advances in order to help her husband see through his vile nature. And the false righteous man, who has desired not only the daughter, but also the mother, pours himself into roulades, not forgetting to give free rein to his hands:

No matter how pious I am, I am still a man,
And the power of your spell, believe me, is such
That reason has yielded to the laws of nature.
Having rejected vanity for heavenly joy,
Still, madam, I am not a disembodied angel,
But, condemning me for insolence, part of the blame
On your beauty you should place:
She immediately took possession of me forever,
My thoughts belong entirely to you;
This serene look and wondrous brow
They pierced my heart, it became weak.
I resorted to prayer and fasting, but in vain,
I thought about one thing: oh, how beautiful she is!
My every breath and glance told you this,
And so I finally trusted the words.
But if the lowest prayers touch you
And you will give your blessing
To me, an unworthy and pathetic slave,
Raising the insignificant fate beyond the clouds,
I will show you devotion, my priceless idol,
Which has not been seen before in the universe.
If you make your servant happy,
I will protect you from all accidents.
Women put honor at stake, as we know
Trusting the whippersnappers, the careless scoundrels:
A barely young helipad has achieved something,
Vanity pulls him by the tongue,
And he dirtys with vulgar chatter without embarrassment
The altar where he himself performed sacrifices.
But I'm not one of those people. No, I am my love
I will safely hide from prying eyes:
After all, I myself lose a lot with publicity,
Therefore, trust me with the honor without fear.

Elmira, extinguishing her disgust, answers Tartuffe:

Know that I won’t complain to my husband, so be it.
With the condition: you must - look, no cheating! –
Get Mariana to be with Valera
Immediately married. I'm waiting,
What will you take away the trouble from their heads?
And save us from your harassment.

But there is no strength to calm down Tartuffe. It is under his influence that Orgon disinherits his son. Elmira decides to act for sure. She invites her husband to secretly, that is, under the table, attend her date with the saint, having previously warned him:

I will touch on a sensitive topic:
Don’t reproach your wife later,
If it manifests itself in my behavior
A cheeky manner unusual for me -
This makes it easier for us to rip off the face of a hypocrite.
I’ll go with him in tenderness, I’ll cheer him up a little,
To spur the villain on to his daring antics.
But I agree to listen to sugary confessions
I'm just here for you, to open your eyes,
So that he becomes visible to you to the very core;
As soon as you see the light, the game will end in an instant.

And so the unsuspecting Tartuffe, burning with passionate desire, comes on a date with Orgon’s wife, and immediately his behavior becomes excessively frivolous. To Elmira’s protests, the saint replies:

I will believe to the end the kind words,
And I will forget your former aloofness,
When will you show me favor
Not just in words; so that I could be happy,
I need your feelings as a significant guarantee.

Elmira, under the pressure of the unbridled advance of the saint, tries to cough to draw her husband’s attention to the fact that the atmosphere is heating up to an incredibly high degree. But the husband remains silent. Moving away from Tartuffe, Elmira tries to stop him herself:

How in a hurry you are! Is it really not enough for you yet?
Why didn’t I hide my affection from you?
This confession was not easy for me,
But gratitude to you, as I see it, is alien,
And your fold is too practical:
You need to get everything at once, without any leftovers.

If you really haven’t despised my devotion,
Why shouldn’t we show the flame of feelings in practice?

However, if I gave in to you,
Wouldn't I challenge the heavens?
Whose commandments do you order to honor so strictly?

Does the sky scare you? Unnecessary worry!
Here I will settle everything, I vouch for success.

To break a commandment is a mortal sin.

Oh, I will deliver you from the smallest shadow
Such naive fears torment you!
Yes, we are prohibited from other pleasures,
But people are smart when they want to
They always collide with heavenly providence,
The circle of conscience, when it becomes narrow,
We can expand: after all, for any sins
There is justification in good intentions.
I will skillfully lead you along this secret path,
Don't be afraid of anything, trust me completely,
Without fear you can heed my pleas:
Only I myself am responsible for all the consequences.

Here an enraged Orgon appears from under the table, pouncing on Tartuffe, he yells:

The world has never seen such a scoundrel!
Out! Alive!..

But Tartuffe interrupts him:

Make sure you don't get kicked out of the house!
We can’t do it in a good way, so we will do it in a bad way:
The house is mine, and I will claim it.
You will answer me for swear words,
You will regret your vile machinations,
You will torture yourself in the later sorrows
About the fact that they offended heaven,
Pointing to the door. I will repay you for everything!

Here it turns out that Orgon’s gullibility knew no bounds. He not only drew up a deed of gift in Tartuffe’s name, but also entrusted him with a casket containing his friend’s secret papers. As they say: in his simplicity, he gave everything to the villain. All the relatives are horrified. Cleant says:

It seems to me that you are in trouble
As with this deed of gift, so with the casket, alas!
You decided so recklessly
That they themselves gave weapons to the enemy.
Yes, it would be better not to step on the viper’s tail.
No matter how much you wanted to drive him away,
It would be smarter to restrain yourself, dear son-in-law.

To think - an evil creature, an insignificant soul,
And he played piety so subtly!
And I - I saved him from a beggar's bag!
Behold the righteous! It's a pity there's no plague on them!
I've had enough of this kind of people
For righteous people I will become worse than the devil.

It’s always like this: as soon as there’s noise and thunder.
You can't be moderate in anything
And, alien to sanity, recklessly
You rush from one extreme to another.
If in your life you have met a hypocritical rogue,
What, tell me, do all the righteous people have to do with it?
May you fall for the bait of a charlatan,
Let piety serve deception here,
But does this mean that the whole world is vile,
That there are no pious people at all?
Leave such conclusions to freethinkers.
You can't be a gullible madman, of course.
And reveal your soul to the bottom before the scoundrel, -
The wise middle is here, as is needed in everything.

The bailiff immediately appears with a demand to vacate the house for the new owner. Everything is in turmoil. And then... An officer enters and says to Tartuffe:

I invite you to follow me
To prison, and there I will arrange a place for you to live.

And the officer gives the following explanations to Orgon:

You, sir, should cast aside your fears.
Our sovereign is the enemy of lies. From his vigilance
Deception and trickery cannot hide.
He shows vigilant insight
And, seeing the essence of things, he executes injustice.
He does not obey the voice of passions,
This great mind does not know extremes.
He crowns the worthy with immortal glory,
But their zeal does not blind him
And rewarding them for their good deeds,
He strictly monitors the machinations of evil.
Could the insidious tricks of this creature
Do not immediately raise doubts in the sovereign,
Revealed many and not such intrigues?

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief:

Oh, thank heavens!

Phew, a weight has been lifted from my shoulders!

Happy turnover!

Unexpected mercy!

This is how this story ended happily, thanks to the wisdom and intervention of the king.

“The comedy at the opening celebration of the Versailles court began with general enthusiastic and supportive attention, which immediately gave way to the greatest amazement. By the end of the third act, the audience no longer knew what to do, and even some had the thought: maybe Monsieur de Moliere was not entirely in his right mind.

This play portrayed a complete and complete swindler, liar, scoundrel, informer and spy, hypocrite, libertine and seducer of other people's wives. And this very character, clearly dangerous to the surrounding society, was none other than... a clergyman. All his speeches are filled with sweet pious phrases, and, moreover, the hero accompanied his dirty actions with quotes from... the Holy Scriptures at every step.

The long-suffering secular marquises were already accustomed to the fact that the king gave them, as it were, on lease to be torn to pieces by Molière. But in Tartuffe the playwright invaded an area that was not supposed to be invaded. Indignation matured with extraordinary speed and was expressed in deathly silence. An unheard of thing happened. The comedian from the Palais-Royal with one stroke of his pen ruined and stopped the Versailles celebrations: the Queen Mother defiantly left the theater hall.

Further events took a very serious turn. A fiery mantle suddenly appeared in the king’s eyes, and none other than the Archbishop of the city of Paris appeared before him, who very persistently and impressively begged Louis to immediately stop the performance. In his opinion, Moliere is not a man, but a demon, only clothed in flesh and dressed in human dress. And in view of the fact that the fire of hell is still completely guaranteed for Moliere, the said Moliere should, without waiting for this fire of hell, be burned in front of all the people along with his “Tartuffe”.

This was the first, and perhaps the only time in the king’s life when he felt exhausted after a theatrical performance.

And then the moment came when both godfathers - the king and the playwright - were left alone. They contemplated each other in silence for some time. Louis, who since childhood had a manner of expressing himself briefly and clearly, felt that the words somehow did not come from his tongue. Sticking out his lower lip, the king looked sideways at the pale comedian, and the following thought was spinning in his head: “However, this Monsieur de Moliere is a rather interesting phenomenon.”

Here the comedian allowed himself to say the following:

So, Your Majesty, I wanted to most humbly ask permission to perform Tartuffe.

Amazement struck the godfather-king.

But, Monsieur de Moliere,” said the king, looking into the eyes of his interlocutor with great curiosity, “everyone unanimously asserts that your play contains ridicule of religion and piety.”

“I dare to report to your Majesty,” the artist answered thoughtfully, “piety can be true and false...

“That’s true,” answered the godfather, without taking his eyes off Moliere, “but again, excuse me for being frank, everyone says that in your play it’s impossible to tell what piety you’re laughing at, true or false? For God’s sake, excuse me, I’m not an expert in these matters,” the polite king, as always, added to this.

There was silence, and then the king said:

So I will ask you not to play this play.

Then a cold breath blew at Molière’s back, and he had the feeling that some huge figure was standing behind his shoulders and suddenly moved away. There was no need to deceive himself: the king was leaving him. How can this be explained? The fact that everything in the world ends, including even the long-term affection of the powers that be.

The play was banned, but there was no way to stop its spread, and it began to spread across lists throughout France.” (M. Bulgakov)

After some time, having revised the play, Moliere sent a petition to the king with the following content: “Since the purpose of comedy is to entertain people, to correct them, I decided that, due to the nature of my occupation, I cannot do anything more worthy than to scourge the vices of my age, exposing them in a funny way. And since hypocrisy is undoubtedly one of the most widespread, intolerable and dangerous vices, I, Your Majesty, decided that I would do a considerable service to honest people in your kingdom if I wrote a comedy exposing hypocrites and showing off, as it should be, all the learned antics of these super-righteous people, all the secret machinations of these counterfeiters of piety, who try to fool people with counterfeit zeal for faith and sugary love for their neighbor.

The ban imposed on my work is a painful blow for me. A book appeared, written by a certain priest, in which it is said that my comedy is satanic, and my way of thinking is satanic, and that I myself am an unclean spirit in the flesh and in human form, a wicked person, an atheist, deserving of exemplary punishment. Because of my sins, it’s not enough for me to be burned at the stake - I’ll get off cheaply with that. The philanthropic ardor of this true zealot of piety goes further: he objects to God’s mercy touching me, he demands at all costs that I be damned forever, and I have no doubt that this will be the case. There is no doubt that if Tartuffe triumphs, then I have no need to even think about composing comedies in the future - this will give grounds to intensify the persecution.

This book was presented to Your Majesty, and now you yourself, sir, can judge how painful it is for me to be subjected to the constant insults of these gentlemen, what damage such slander will cause me in the opinion of society if I am forced to endure them. Such enlightened monarchs as you, sir, are not told what is expected of them; they, like God, themselves see our needs and know better than us what kindnesses to show us. It is enough for me that I entrust myself to Your Majesty, and I will most respectfully accept everything that you deign to command in this matter.

There was a lot of talk about this comedy, it was attacked for a long time, and the people ridiculed in it proved in practice that in France they have much more power than those whom I have ridiculed until now. The dandies, minces, cuckolds and doctors meekly tolerated being brought onto the stage, and even pretended that the characters based on them amused them no less than the rest of the audience. But the hypocrites did not bear the ridicule; They immediately raised a commotion and declared it to be an extraordinary insolence that I had depicted their antics and tried to cast a shadow on the craft in which so many honorable persons were involved. They could not bear this crime, and all of them, as one, took up arms against my comedy with furious rage.

Of course, they were afraid to attack what hurt them most: they are quite cunning and experienced and would never discover the secrets of their soul. According to their laudable custom, these people presented the defense of their interests as a godly deed - if you listen to them, Tartuffe is a farce that offends piety. This comedy, they say, is full of abominations from beginning to end, and everything in it deserves a fire. Every syllable in it is ungodly, every gesture is ungodly.

Since the purpose of comedy is to castigate human vices, then why should it bypass and whitewash some of them? The vice exposed in my play is the most dangerous in its consequences for the state, and the theater, as we have seen, has enormous potential for correcting morals. The most brilliant treatises on moral topics often have much less influence than satire, for nothing touches people so much as to depict their shortcomings by its methods. By exposing vices to universal ridicule, we deal them a crushing blow. It is easy to endure reproach, but ridicule is unbearable. Some people don’t mind being considered a villain, but they never want to be funny.”

This letter to the king was written not only out of a desire to explain himself, but also out of fear. The danger over Molière was serious. He came under the radar of the Jesuit order, which flourished under the patronage of the Queen Mother. The militant zealots of the faith of this order interpreted the Holy Scriptures in their own way and argued that, supposedly, good intentions could justify any most heinous act. Thank God, the king was wise and kind. After some time, Tartuffe saw the stage again.

The play "The Misanthrope" turned out to be the least funny and the most sarcastic. Her hero Alceste sees the whole world as a continuous accumulation of vices. He is dissatisfied with everyone and everything:

Everything that surrounds us at court and in society,
Everything I see irritates my eyes.
I fall into darkness and feel oppressed,
Just look around at how the human race lives!
Everywhere there is betrayal, treason, deceit, deceit,
Vile injustice reigns everywhere.
I'm furious, I can't control myself,
And I would like to challenge the entire human race to battle!

His friend Philinte reproaches the overly enraged Alceste:

It’s better not to waste your anger.
Your efforts cannot change the light!..
Since you have begun to value frankness so much,
Let me tell you frankly then:
Your quirks undoubtedly harm you;
Your anger, unleashed on society, is for everyone
Without exception, it just makes you laugh.

So much the better, damn it, that's what I need:
This is a great sign, the best reward for me!
All people are so vile, I feel so sorry for them!
To be smart in their eyes - God forbid!

So you want harm to the entire human race?

I hated their breed immensely.

But does such anger really inspire you?
Without exception, the entire poor human race?
And in our century there is...

No, I hate everyone!
Some for being evil, criminal and selfish;
Others for encouraging those
And sin does not arouse hatred in them,
And indifference reigns in the hearts of criminals
To replace the anger of souls inaccessible to vice.
I can find a lot of examples for you.
At least the villain with whom I am in litigation.
Betrayal is visible from under his mask,
His sugary tone and pious expressions
They'll deceive someone else,
But everyone here knows what a low rogue he is.
Yes Yes! Everyone in society knows very well themselves,
What dirty paths he made his way through.
Just the thought of how in the present moment
He achieved all this luxury, wealth, -
Honor is indignant! Virtue blushes!
And yet he is warmly received everywhere,
No one will throw contempt in his face,
He always succeeds in ranks and positions,
He will surpass all decent people.
I can't see without bitter contempt
The insidious machinations of such encouragement,
And, really, sometimes I want to hurry up
To escape into the desert from the proximity of people.

Oh my God, why such condemnation!
Have mercy on the human race;
We will not be so strict towards human weaknesses,
We will forgive them for their other sins! –

The peace-loving Philint concludes this dialogue.

Alcet loves Selimina, who has a frivolous disposition and a slanderous tongue. Here are examples of the characteristics of the men around her:

He penetrated the art of loud phrases without meaning.
Nothing he says reaches his brain,
It only makes some vague noise.

Here is another characteristic:

From head to toe he is not a man, but a mystery!
Absent-mindedly he glances briefly;
Looks preoccupied and terribly businesslike,
Meanwhile, he has nothing to do.

Here is the third characteristic:

He is inflated by selfishness, like a round balloon;
He believes that he was not appreciated here;
He is angry with the whole world, always offended by the court:
Whoever is awarded, it means he is humiliated.

Here's another characteristic:

This one is unbearable
The most boring boasting, and vulgar and empty,
He is obsessed, poor thing, with friendship with the highest circle!
He will be the first friend of princes and dukes;
All are just titles; the whole range of his ideas -
Comparison of rides, dogs and horses;
With all the higher ones, he will certainly be on first name terms,
And he treats all other mortals arrogantly.

From the sarcastic girl and the representatives of her tribe:

Poor thing! This is someone who has no sign of intelligence!
Her visit to me is more terrible than any torture:
Attempts to keep her busy are always fruitless.
I'm getting hot while I'm looking for something
But there is no way to revive her, nothing.
I'm trying to cope with dull sadness,
I bother in vain about all the commonplaces:
Weather, sun, rain, heat, cold - no way!
Look, the supply of these topics has already dried up
You don’t know what to start, but the visit lasts,
The terrible torment is not nearing its end;
You look at your watch, you’ve been yawning for a long time -
The girl doesn't know. Not moving like a log.

As a result of this life situation, the benevolent, peace-loving Filint finds his happiness next to a sweet girl, and Alcet and Selimene break up. Having fought in verbal battles, scratched their tongues, they are left, as they say, with their noses.

The image of a misanthrope, a person who hates people, appeared much later before the audience in the play “Woe from Wit” by the Russian writer Griboedov. Chadsky exclaims at the end of it:

You are right: he will come out of the fire unharmed,
Who will have time to spend a day with you,
Breathe the air alone
And his sanity will survive.
Get out of Moscow! I don't go here anymore.
I’m running, I won’t look back, I’ll go looking around the world,
Where there is a corner for the offended feeling.

And here are the lines from the finale of Moliere’s play “The Misanthrope”:

And I, having been a victim of deceit and betrayal,
I will leave forever those harmful walls,
That hellish abyss where depravity reigns,
Where neighbor to neighbor is a fierce enemy, not a brother!
I’ll go look for a corner in the land, far away from here,
Where you can somehow be an honest person.

“One day, a cheerful group of young people came to the already old and sick Jean-Baptiste to tear him away from work, chat about literary topics and write epigrams. Such meetings usually ended with dinners. That day Moliere felt bad; he only dropped in for a moment to join the cheerful company, refused to drink and went home. Those who remained had dinner until three o'clock in the morning, and at three o'clock in the morning it became clear to them that life was disgusting.

“It’s all vanity of vanities and all sorts of vanity,” shouted one of the cheerful company.

“You and I completely agree,” answered the drinking companions.

Yes, my poor friends, everything is vanity! Look around and tell me what do you see?

We don't see anything good.

Science, literature, art - all these are vain, empty things. And love! What is love, my unfortunate friends?

This is a lie.

Absolutely right! All life is sadness, injustice and misfortune that surround us on all sides - and then Moliere’s friend began to cry. - When his upset friends consoled him somewhat, he ended his speech with an ardent appeal: What should we do, friends? If life is such a black pit, then you must leave it immediately! Let's go drown ourselves! Look, there is a river outside the window that beckons us to it.

“We will follow you,” the friends said, and the whole company began to fasten their swords and put on their cloaks to go to the river.

The noise intensified. Then the door opened, and Moliere appeared on the threshold, wrapped in a cloak, wearing a nightcap, with a candle stub in his hand.

Drowning yourself is a good idea,” he said. “But it’s not good of you that you forgot me.” After all, I am your friend too.

He is right. It was disgusting on our part. Come with us, Moliere!

Well, go ahead like that,” said Moliere, “but here’s the thing, friends. It's not good to drown yourself at night after dinner, because people will say that we did it while drunk. That's not how it's done. We will lie down now, sleep until the morning, and at ten o’clock, having washed ourselves and put ourselves in decent appearance, with our heads held high, we will go to the river so that everyone can see that we drowned ourselves like real thinkers.

This is a brilliant idea! - everyone exclaimed and went to bed together.

The next morning the mass suicide was canceled for some reason.

The aged Madeleine no longer took part in such parties. She left not only the theater, she completely abandoned everything worldly, became unusually religious, prayed incessantly, mourned her sins and talked only with clergy or with her notary. Her death occurred on February 17, 1672.

And on February 17, 1673, at the performance of the play “The Imaginary Invalid,” Moliere felt attacks of suffocation, and after playing to the end, he allowed his fellow actors to carry him home.

Not a single doctor or priest came to see him. “Just before his death, Moliere had time to think with curiosity: “What does death look like?” - and saw it immediately. She ran into the room wearing a monastic headdress and immediately crossed the comedian with a flourish. With the greatest curiosity, he wanted to look at her carefully, but he couldn’t look at anything else.

There was no question of burying Moliere according to church rites. The main comedian died without repentance, without renouncing his profession, condemned by the church, and without giving a written promise that if God, in His infinite goodness, restored him to health, he would never play comedy again in his life.

When Armande came to the archbishop for permission to bury her husband according to church rites, he replied:

I'm very sorry, but nothing can be done. I cannot give permission for the comedian's burial.

But he died like a good Christian,” the widow said worriedly. “In addition, during last Easter he confessed and received communion.

I’m very sorry... - the archbishop repeated, - but understand, madam, I cannot offend the law.

Where should I put his body? – Armande asked and began to cry. “So I’ll have to take him out of town and bury him by the main road.”

The king, having learned about the death of Moliere, his godfather, asked the archbishop:

What is happening there?

They answered him:

Sire, the law prohibits burying Moliere on illuminated ground.

How deep does the illuminated earth extend?

Four feet, Your Majesty.

Deign, Archbishop, to bury him at a depth of five feet,” replied Louis, “but bury him inconspicuously, avoiding both triumph and scandal.”

Then Louis took off his hat and said:

Moliere did not die. Moliere is immortal.

A whole forest of lights flowed behind the comedian’s coffin. Moliere was buried in the section where suicides and unbaptized children are buried. And in the church they noted briefly: on February 21, 1673, the upholsterer and royal chamberlain Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was buried.

His wife laid a stone slab on his grave and ordered one hundred bundles of firewood to be brought to the cemetery so that the homeless could keep warm. During the first harsh winter, a huge fire was lit on this stove. It cracked and fell apart from the heat. Time scattered its pieces, and when one hundred and ninety years later, during the Great Revolution, commissars came to dig up the body of Jean-Baptiste Moliere and transfer it to the mausoleum, no one could accurately indicate the place of his burial. And although someone’s remains were dug up and enclosed in a mausoleum, can anyone say with certainty that these are the remains of de Molière? (M. Bulgakov)

At the beginning of the 19th century, a bust of Moliere was installed at the French Academy with the inscription: “Nothing is needed for his glory, but for our glory he is needed.”