Opening of the book
Introductory Note
Louis XIV entertained his court, in May of 1664, at his recently finished palace and pleasure-grounds of Versailles, with a week of uninterrupted festival. Molière, now the chief furnisher of the king’s pleasures, gave during the week four plays: The Bores; The Forced
Marriage; The Princess of Elis, begun in verse, but hastily finished in prose to be ready for the king’s entertainment; and the first three acts of Tartuffe. These three acts taken alone must have seemed much less serious than the play as a whole seems to us now. They are in fact made up for the most part of excellent light comedy: — the harangues of Madame Pernelle, the retorts of Dorine, the quarrel and reconciliation of the lovers, the famous scene of “The poor man!”, and that of the confounding of Damis. Tartuffe himself does not enter until the second scene of the third act, and in that act he is odious and comical; not, as in the later acts, odious and almost terrifying. The character of Cléante was less seriously conceived than in later versions of the play, since part of his original role was later transferred to Dorine. And some of the more serious passages of these three acts as we have them now, especially in the speeches of Cléante, were probably not yet written.
Nevertheless the character of Tartuffe was clearly enough indicated, and the seriousness of Molière’s attack upon religious hypocrisy was evident enough, to arouse immediate opposition. Anne of Austria, the queen-mother, and all the religious or pseudo-religious “cabal” of the court, in which the Jesuits were powerful, united to persuade the young king that Molière’s play was dangerous to true religion; and its public representation was forbidden. A contemporary account of the week’s festivities says: “Although the play was thought most amusing, yet the king, realising what a resemblance there is between those who in true devoutness seek the way to Heaven, and those who with a vain show of good works nonetheless do evil, could not in his delicate carefulness for the things that concern
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