The Life of Monsieur de Molière

Mikhail Bulgakov

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780795348334
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Blending biography with fiction, this portrait of the famed French playwright is written by a kindred spirit: the author of The Master and Margarita.
 
Mikhail Bulgakov and Jean-Baptiste Poquelin—more commonly known as Molière—had much in common. The twentieth-century Russian satirist and dramatist and the seventeenth-century French playwright known for Tartuffe and The Misanthrope shared a love for finding material in the shortcomings and follies of the human condition. They both created their art under unpredictable and often repressive regimes—Bulgakov under the Bolsheviks and Molière under King Louis XIV—and often saw their work censored or banned. Both were also favored by influential men: King Louis was Molière’s patron, and Stalin, despite his oppressive rule, was a fan of Bulgakov’s work. Perhaps it is not surprising that Bulgakov penned such a vibrant, affectionate biography of one of the greatest masters of comedy in the Western canon.
 
Written between 1932 and 1933 and eventually published posthumously in 1963, Bulgakov’s portrait of the famed French playwright and actor goes beyond the usual boundaries of biography—the two men at times seem to be communicating with each other across the centuries through Bulgakov’s lively prose and inspired interpretations of the life of a literary kindred spirit. Sliding delightfully between fiction and meticulous fact,   The Life of Monsieur de Molière  is not to be missed.
 
“In its playfulness and hybridity, this book looks forward to contemporary 'faction' that fuses fiction and biography.” —John Dugdale, The Guardian Book Review

1

In the Monkey House

And so, on about the thirteenth of January, 1622, the first child, a sickly infant, was born in Paris to Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Poquelin and his spouse, Marie Cressé Poquelin. On 15th January he was christened in the church of Saint-Eustache and named, in honour of his father, Jean-Baptiste. Neighbours congratulated Poquelin, and it became known in the upholsterers’ guild that yet another upholsterer and furniture merchant had come into the world.

Every architect follows his own fancy. At the corners of the pleasant three-storey house with a pointed roof sloping down on either side, situated on the corner of Rue Saint-Honoré and Rue des Vielles-Étuves, the street of the Old Baths, the fifteenth-century builder had placed wooden carvings of orange trees with neatly trimmed branches. Along these trees stretched a chain of tiny monkeys plucking the fruit. Naturally, the house became known among Parisians as the monkey house. And the comedian Molière had to pay dearly later on for these marmosets! Many a well-wisher was to say that it was no wonder the elder son of the estimable Poquelin had chosen the career of a buffoon. What, indeed, could be expected of a man who had grown up in the company of grimacing monkeys? Nevertheless, the future comedian never renounced his monkeys; and in his later days, designing his coat of arms—Heaven alone knows what he needed it for—he depicted on it his long-tailed friends, the guardians of his childhood home.

This home was situated in the noisiest commercial section in the centre of Paris, not far from Pont-Neuf. The house was owned by Jean-Baptiste the father, Upholsterer and Draper to the Royal Court, who both lived and conducted his business in it.

In time the upholsterer attained yet another title—that of Valet to His Majesty, the King of France. And he not only bore this title with honour, but also secured its succession for his elder son, Jean-Baptiste.

It was rumoured on the quiet that Jean-Baptiste the father, in addition to selling armchairs and wallpaper, engaged in lending money at handsome interest. I see nothing prejudicial in that for a merchant. But evil tongues asserted that Poquelin the elder somewhat overdid it in regard to interest extracted, and that the playwright Molière depicted his own father in the image of the revolting miser Harpagon. And Harpagon was the man who tried to palm off on a client all sorts of rubbish in lieu of money, including a crocodile stuffed with hay, which, he suggested, could be suspended from the ceiling as a decoration.

I refuse to believe these empty gossip-mongers! The dramatist Molière did not malign his father’s memory, and I will not malign it either.

Poquelin the father was a merchant, an eminent and respected member of his honourable guild. He sold his wares, and the entrance to the monkey shop was adorned with a flag bearing, yet once more, the image of the monkey.

The darkish first floor, taken up by the shop, smelt of paint and wool, coins tinkled in the cash box, and all day long a stream of customers arrived to choose rugs and wallpaper. Among the customers were both bourgeois and aristocrats. And in the back, in the workshop with windows looking out upon the courtyard, the air was dense with dust, chairs were piled on chairs, everything was littered with pieces of furniture wood, scraps of leather and fabric; and in the midst of this chaos Poquelin’s master workmen and apprentices were busily at work with hammers and scissors.

The rooms on the second storey, above the flag, were the mother’s domain, filled with the sounds of her constant, light coughing and the rustle of her heavy skirts. Marie Poquelin was a woman of substance. Her chests were filled with expensive dresses, cuts of Florentine materials, underwear of the finest linen. In the drawers she kept necklaces, diamond bracelets, pearls, emerald rings, gold watches and costly table silver. When she prayed, Marie fingered a rosary of mother of pearl. She read the Bible, and was even said—although I do not put much credence in it—to have read the Greek writer Plutarch in abridged translation. She was quiet, amiable and educated. Most of her forebears had been upholsterers, but there had also been occasional men of other professions, such as musicians and lawyers.

There was also in the upstairs rooms of the monkey house a fair-haired, thick-lipped boy. He was the eldest son, Jean-Baptiste. Sometimes he came down to the shop and the workshops and interfered with the apprentices, plying them with endless questions. The master workmen laughed good-naturedly at his stuttering, but were fond of him. At times he sat by the window, resting his cheeks on his fists, and looked at the dirty street where people hurried to and fro.

On one occasion, his mother, passing by, patted him on the back and said:

“Ah, my contemplator…”

And one fine day the contemplator was sent off to the parish school. At the parish school he learnt precisely what could be learnt in such a school; namely, he mastered the first four rules of arithmetic, learnt to read freely, assimilated the rudiments of Latin, and became acquainted with many interesting facts related in the Lives of the Saints.

And life went on, peacefully and happily. Poquelin the elder was growing wealthier; there were now four children, when suddenly misfortune struck the monkey house.

In the spring of 1632 the delicate mother took ill. Her eyes began to glitter and looked strangely troubled. Within a single month she became so thin that she was scarcely recognizable, and ominous red spots bloomed on her pale cheeks. Then she began to cough blood, and a succession of doctors, mounted on donkeys and wearing sinister tall caps, began to frequent the monkey house. On 15th May the plump contemplator sobbed loudly, wiping his tears with grimy fists, and the entire household sobbed with him. The quiet Marie Poquelin lay motionless, her arms crossed on her breast.

When she was buried, it was as though a constant twilight settled over the house. The father fell into distraction and melancholy, and his first-born saw him several times sitting alone on dark summer evenings, crying. The contemplator would get upset and wander all over the house, not knowing how to occupy himself. But then the father stopped crying and began to frequent a certain family by the name of Fleurette, and the eleven-year-old Jean-Baptiste was told that he would have a new mother. Soon after that Catherine Fleurette, the new mother, appeared in the monkey house. At this point, however, the family left the monkey house, because the father had bought a new one.

2

The Story of Two Theatre-lovers

The new house was situated in the marketplace itself, in the district where the famous Saint-Germain fair was usually held. And in the new place the enterprising Poquelin displayed his goods with even greater flair. In the old house Marie Cressé had governed the home and borne children; in the new one she was replaced by Catherine Fleurette. What can be said about this woman? Nothing, it seems to me, either bad or good. But because she had entered the family as a stepmother, many of those who were interested in my hero’s life began to say that the younger Jean-Baptiste had been ill-treated by Catherine Fleurette, that she was a bad stepmother, and that it was she who had served as the model for Béline, the faithless wife, in Molière’s comedy The Imaginary Invalid.

I believe all this to be untrue. There is no evidence that Catherine mistreated Jean-Baptiste, and none to prove that Béline was she. Catherine Fleurette was not a bad second wife, and she fulfilled her mission on earth: a year after the wedding, she bore Poquelin a daughter, Catherine, and two years later another, Marguerite.

And so Jean-Baptiste was a pupil at the parish school and finally graduated from it. Poquelin the elder decided that his son had broadened his horizons quite sufficiently and ordered him to start paying attention to the business of the store. Jean-Baptiste began to measure cloth, to use hammer and nails, and to banter with the apprentices. And in his free time he read the well-worn little book of Plutarch left from the days of Marie Cressé.

And now, in the light of my candles, I see a gentleman of bourgeois appearance on my threshold, in a modest but respectable kaftan, in a wig, and with a cane in his hands. He is very lively for his years, with bright, alert eyes and good manners. His name is Louis, his surname Cressé. He is the father of the late Marie, and hence the grandfather of the younger Jean-Baptiste.

By occupation Monsieur Cressé was also an upholsterer. But Cressé was not a court upholsterer; he was a private merchant and conducted his trade in the Saint-Germain market. He lived in a suburb of Paris, where he owned an excellent house with a good deal of land. On Sundays the Poquelin family usually went to visit the grandfather, and the children retained happy memories of these visits.

Well, then, the old Cressé and the young Jean-Baptiste became great friends. What could have bound the old man and the youngster together? Perhaps the Devil himself? Yes, surely, that was his work! Their mutual devotion, however, did not go unobserved for very long by Poquelin the elder, and soon provoked his glum astonishment. It turned out that both grandfather and grandson were passionately in love with the theatre!

On the free evenings, when the grandfather came to Paris, the two upholsterers, old and young, would exchange mysterious glances, whisper something, and leave the house. It was easy to discover where they turned their steps. They usually proceeded to the Rue Mauconseil, where the King’s players were giving performances in the low-ceilinged and gloomy Hôtel de Bourgogne. The estimable grandfather Cressé had firm connections with the elders of a certain society whose members were bound by both religious and commercial ties. This society was called the Fraternity of the Lord’s Passion, and possessed the privilege of presenting mystery plays in Paris. It was this Fraternity that had built the Hôtel de Bourgogne, but at the time when Jean-Baptiste was a boy it no longer presented the mysteries, but leased the Hôtel to various groups of actors.

And so grandfather Cressé would pay a visit to one of the elders of the Fraternity, and the estimable upholsterer and his grandson would be given free seats in one of the unoccupied loges.

The leading actor at the Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre at that time was the famous Bellerose. The troupe presented tragedies, tragicomedies, pastorals and farces, and the foremost playwright of the hotel was Jean de Rotrou, a great admirer of Spanish dramatic models. Grandfather Cressé derived the greatest pleasure from the acting of Bellerose, and the grandson applauded heartily together with his grandfather. The grandson, however, preferred the farces to the tragedies enacted by Bellerose. These crude and light farces, borrowed for the most part from the Italians, had found in Paris most excellent performers, who freely juggled topical comments in their comic roles.

Yes, to the misfortune of Poquelin the elder, grandfather Cressé had shown the boy the way to the Hôtel de Bourgogne! And together with his grandfather when he was a boy, and with comrades when he had grown into a youth, Jean-Baptiste had managed to see a great many marvellous plays at the Hôtel.

The famed Gros-Guillaume, who appeared in the farces, struck the boy’s imagination with his flat-topped red beret and white coat barely closing over his monstrous belly. Another celebrated figure, Gaultier-Gargouille, dressed in a black camisole with red sleeves, with huge spectacles on his nose and a walking stick, also had the Bourgogne audience in stitches. Jean-Baptiste was equally impressed by Turlupin, with his inexhaustible store of tricks, and Alizon in the roles of ridiculous old women.

In the course of several years an endless number of figures whirled past Jean-Baptiste’s eyes as in a carousel—pedantic doctors, old misers, bragging and cowardly captains, masked or made up with flour and paint. To the wild laughter of the audience, frivolous wives deceived their grumbling, stupid husbands, and comic bawds chattered away like magpies. Cunning, light-footed servants led aged Gorgibuses by the nose, old fogies were thrashed with sticks and stuffed into sacks. And the walls of the Hôtel de Bourgogne shook with the roaring laughter of Frenchmen.

Having seen everything that could be seen at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the infatuated upholsterers would proceed to another large theatre, the Theatre on the Swamp—the Hôtel du Marais. This playhouse was the home of tragedy, in which the famous actor Montdory excelled, and of high comedy, the best examples of which were composed for this theatre by the most eminent dramatist of the time, Pierre Corneille.

It was as though the grandson of Louis Cressé was immersed in turn in different waters. At the Bourgogne, Bellerose, adorned in finery like a rooster, declaimed in sugary, tender tones. He rolled his eyes; then, fixing them at some invisible distant point, he would wave his hat in a graceful gesture and recite his monologues in a sing-song, so that it was impossible to tell whether he was speaking or singing. And at the Marais, Montdory would shake the walls with his thunderous voice and gurgle, dying tragically.

The boy returned to his father’s house with fevered, glittering eyes, and at night he dreamt of the buffoons—Alizon, Jacquemin Jadot, Philippin and the famed Jodelet with his chalk-white face.

Alas! The Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Swamp did not exhaust all possibilities for those sick with the incurable disease of passion for the theatre.

At the Pont-Neuf and in the market district trade proceeded at full swing. Paris grew fat with it and spread out, growing more and more beautiful, in all directions. In the shops and in the street before them life ran riot, dazzling the eye and setting up a ringing in the ears. And where the Saint-Germain fair spread its tents, it was a veritable Babel. Din! Clatter! And the filth, the filth!

“My God, my God!” the crippled poet Scarron exclaimed about the fair. “The mountains of filth that can be raised all over by rear ends unfamiliar with underpants!”

All day long the crowds shuffle, walk, mill about! The townsmen and their pretty women! The barbers in their shops busily shave, soap chins, pull teeth. Riders rise above the dense mass of pedestrians. Doctors, as ponderous and self-important as crows, ride by on mules. Royal musketeers, with the golden arrows of their insignia emblazoned on their coats, sit lightly on their cantering mounts. Capital of the world, eat, drink, trade, grow! Hey you, rear ends unfamiliar with underpants, come here, to the New Bridge! Look, they are setting up tents and draping rugs over them. Who is this, shrilling like a pipe? A crier. “Do not delay, sirs, hurry, the show is just about to begin! Don’t miss the chance! Here only, and nowhere else, can you see the marvellous marionettes of Monsieur Brioché! There they swing over the dais on their cords! See the sensational trained monkeys of Fagotin!”

In the various stalls by Pont-Neuf there are street doctors, pullers of teeth, corn surgeons and quack apothecaries. They sell the people panaceas against every illness, and often, the better to draw attention to themselves, they enter into compacts with itinerant street actors, or even with actors playing in the theatres, and the latter give entire performances demonstrating the miraculous properties of the cure-alls.

There are solemn processions. Comedians, dressed up and adorned with dubious, rented finery, ride by on horses, shouting advertisements and calling the people. Street urchins follow them in flocks, whistling, diving in and out among the feet of the crowd and increasing the general pandemonium.

Thunder, Pont-Neuf! Amid your din I hear the birth cries of French comedy, born of the charlatan father and the actress mother. It screams piercingly, and its coarse face is powdered with flour!

All of Paris is agog over the mysterious, astonishing Cristoforo Cantugi, the purveyor of “orviétan”, who has engaged an entire company and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Preface
• The Life of Monsieur de Molière
• Prologue
• 1 In the Monkey House
• 2 The Story of Two Theatre-lovers
• 3 Should the Grandfather Be Given Orviétan?
• 4 Not Everybody Likes to Be an Upholsterer
• 5 For the Greater Glory of God
• 6 Improbable Adventures
• 7 A Brilliant Band
• 8 The Itinerant Player
• 9 Prince de Conti Makes His Entry upon the Stage
• 10 Look Out, Bourgogne—Molière Is Coming!
• 11 Brouhaha!
• 12 Petit Bourbon
• 13 Lampoon on the Blue Salon
• 14 He Who Sows the Wind
• 15 The Puzzling Monsieur Ratabon
• 16 The Sad Tale of the Jealous Prince
• 17 After the Demise of the Jealous Prince
• 18 Who is She?
• 19 The Playwright’s School
• 20 The Egyptian Godfather
• 21 May Lightning Strike Molière
• 22 A Bilious Lover
• 23 The Magic Clavecin
• 24 He Revives and Dies Again
• 25 Amphitryon
• 26 The Great Rebirth
• 27 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac
• 28 The Egyptian Is Transformed into Neptune, Neptune into Apollo, and Apollo into Louis
• 29 Collaboration
• 30 Scenes in the Park
• 31 Madeleine Departs
• 32 Black Friday
• 33 Dust Thou Art
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• List of Plays
• Other Books by Mikhail Bulgakov