How the French Invented Love (11 page)

The School for Husbands
is a victory for female choice—Isabelle chooses Valère, Léonor chooses Ariste. But since one of the two women prefers to marry her older guardian, it does not argue against the marriage of an older man and a younger woman. Indeed, in 1662, Molière, aged forty, would marry Armande Béjart, a woman twenty-one years his junior—a fact that undoubtedly contributed to his understanding of an older suitor’s plight. Simultaneously, as he became caught up in the social whirl of Paris and the court, Molière limited his attacks against preciosity and gallantry to their most outrageous excesses. How could he not when Louis XIV honored him in 1663 as godfather to his first-born child (a son who died shortly after birth) and sponsored the production of Molière’s plays at Versailles in the presence of the king himself and his first official mistress, Mademoiselle de La Vallière?

T
he year of Molière’s marriage is better known as the year of his controversial
School for Wives
, a fully developed five-act play that once again takes up the subject of an older man with a younger ward whom he intends to marry. Like Sganarelle in
The School for Husbands
, Arnolphe in
The School for Wives
is convinced that his ward Agnès’s thorough education in the domestic arts and thorough ignorance of everything else will ensure that she will be the perfect wife. It should be enough for her “to know how to pray to God, to love me, and to sew.”

His friend Chrysalde—the counterpart to Ariste in
The School for Husbands
—chides him for his narrow-minded views.

    C
HRYSALDE
: A stupid woman is your delight?

    A
RNOLPHE
: I would prefer a very stupid ugly woman

    To a very beautiful one with lots of wit.

Arnolphe has tricked himself into thinking that a chaste adolescent brought up in a convent will be immune to the seductions of society. His major fear, one that haunts him from the beginning of the play, is that the “gallant humor” of the times will corrupt his future wife and force him to wear the horns of cuckoldry. Determined at all cost to prevent this scenario, he outlines to his ward, Agnès, his expectations for her after they are married.

    
Marriage is not a light-hearted affair.

    
The rank of wife requires duties most severe.

    
And you must not attain it, according to my view,

    
To become a libertine and live at your ease.

    
Your sex is there only for dependence:

    
All power belongs on the side of the beard.

Arnolphe’s long speech to Agnès and “The Marriage Maxims or Duties of the Married Woman” that he makes her read out loud are a parody of patriarchy. To ask an upper-class woman to lower her eyes when talking to her husband and never look him straight in the face; to dress up only for him; to forgo all lotions that embellish the skin, as well as writing equipment—ink, paper, pens; and to make no attempt to please anyone but her husband would come across to Molière’s audience as hopelessly and ridiculously outdated.

Of course, Arnolphe’s plan to mold Agnès like a “piece of wax” is doomed to failure. Agnès, who leaves the convent wondering whether babies are born through the ears, quickly discovers romantic delights in the person of Horace, and, without tutelage, she surrenders to the force of love. Love helps her pierce the veils of ignorance and stupidity, which had enclosed her since birth, and teaches her to outwit her guardian with the skill of a practiced deceiver.

But Arnolphe, ridiculous as he is made to appear, is not a one-dimensional stock character. His profound love for Agnès, his anguished jealousy, his fear of becoming a cuckold all ring true and make him more sympathetic by the end of the play than one could have imagined at the beginning. Even knowing that Agnès is in love with Horace, he wants her more than ever and offers marriage on new terms.

    
Listen only to my amorous sighs,

    
Look at my dying gaze, contemplate my person,

    
Refuse this snot-nosed jerk and his proffered love.

    
Surely he has thrown a spell over you.

    
Surely you will be happier with me.

    
As for your wish to be bold and sprightly,

    
You will be all that, this I promise you.

    
Ceaselessly, day and night, I shall caress you,

    
Massage you, kiss you, eat you;

    
You can conduct yourself just as you like.

And he asks himself in a pathetic aside: “How far can passion go?” It is too late. The union of Arnolphe and Agnès was never meant to be. She and Horace, already joined by “mutual ardor,” will marry with the good wishes of all but Arnolphe. It’s a play that ends with thanks to heaven, “which arranges everything for the best.”

I
n these early plays, Molière’s vision of love reflected his encounter with high society. After thirteen years in the provinces, he was not immune to the niceties of conversation and the suave exercise of gallantry found among the elite, as well as the freedom and wit of its sophisticated ladies. At the same time, he was not blind to stupidity and silliness wherever he found it: he mocked the affectations and euphemisms of overly purified women and he skewered fashionable men dripping with ribbons, along with their impromptu poems composed days in advance. When his
School for Wives
provoked heated controversy, he wrote his own
Critique of the School for Wives
, which ridiculed the prudes who had attacked him. And in his own defense, one of his male characters asserts: “All the ridiculous pictures that one exposes on the stage . . . are public mirrors.” Despite their comic exaggerations, Molière’s plays are indeed “public mirrors” of court and Parisian manners during the reign of Louis XIV.

In
The School for Wives
, the scene most criticized by Molière’s detractors was Arnolphe’s passionate declaration to Agnès. His heartfelt sighs and facial contortions and promises to massage and kiss her were judged out of keeping with the stolid bourgeois character presented earlier in the play. But Molière’s defenders argued that “it is not incompatible for a person to be ridiculous in certain things and reasonable in others.” The love of an older man—or woman—for a younger person can be the source of unspeakable desire and torment. Molière gave Arnolphe the heart of a hero for whom we feel compassion, even if the rest of him inspires ridicule. It is this paradox of love that Molière will explore more deeply in his greatest play,
The Misanthrope
(1666).

I
f a twenty-first-century spectator could see only one play from the seventeenth century, I would recommend
The Misanthrope
. It is at once a comedy of gallant manners and a tragedy of true love unrequited. In the character of the young widow Célimène, we see a woman who has become fatally warped by the fraudulent world around her, and in the character of Alceste, we see a man so opposed to inauthenticity that he can find salvation only by being alone. Given their totally opposite natures, Alceste’s love for Célimène is destined for defeat, but not before it has run the gamut of every emotion in the lover’s book. He is captivated by Célimène’s beauty and charm, jealous of her constant attention to other suitors, appalled by her propensity for bad-mouthing supposed friends, simultaneously willing to believe her private declarations of love and wary that she is as duplicitous with him as she is with everyone else. Smitten as he is, Alceste condemns society for Célimène’s flighty behavior, and he lives with the illusion that she can be changed by his love. For he does indeed love her with an irrational force that borders on madness. (The lover, the poet, and the madman, as Shakespeare reminds us, have much in common.)

Alceste’s friend Philinthe points out that the rectitude Alceste demands from “the whole human race” is conspicuously lacking in Célimène. Her coquetry and love of scandal, so close to the manners of the age, are faults that Alceste has managed to set aside. Yet he is not blind to her defects:

    
I see her faults, despite my ardent love,

    
And all I see I fervently reprove.

    
And yet I’m weak; for all her falsity,

    
That woman knows the art of pleasing me.

    
And though I never cease complaining of her,

    
I swear I cannot manage not to love her.
²

Alceste’s efforts to reform Célimène through his love are, of course, unsuccessful. While his love for her is earnest and exclusive, her feelings for him are playful and superficial. Their sparring duets reveal her inbred coquettishness, his churlish disposition, and their mutual incomprehension of one another. For example:

    A
LCESTE
: Shall I speak plainly, Madame? I confess

    Your conduct gives me infinite distress.

     . . .

    C
ÉLIMÈNE
: You kindly saw me home, it would appear,

    So as to pour invectives in my ear.

    Alceste: I’ve no desire to quarrel. But I deplore

    Your inability to shut the door.

     . . .

    C
ÉLIMÈNE
: You’re jealous of the whole world, Sir.

    A
LCESTE
: That’s true.

    Since the whole world is well-received by you.

     . . .

    Well, if I mustn’t be jealous, tell me, then,

    Just how I’m better treated than other men.

    C
ÉLIMÈNE
: You know you have my love. Will that not do?

    A
LCESTE
: What proof have I that what you say is true?

    C
ÉLIMÈNE
: I would expect, Sir, that my having said it

    Might give the statement a sufficient credit.

     . . .

    A
LCESTE
: I make no secret of it: I’ve done my best

    To exorcise this passion from my breast;

    But thus far all in vain; it will not go;

    It’s for my sins that I must love you so.

     . . .

    C
ÉLIMÈNE
: Yes, it’s a brand-new fashion, I agree:

    You show your love by castigating me,

    And all your speeches are enraged and rude.

    I’ve never been so furiously wooed.

Despite her worldly ways and skill in repartee, Célimène overplays her hand by sending declarations of love to two other suitors, exposing herself for what she is:
une femme galante
, a faithless woman who confirms the stereotype of female inconstancy. Even so, Alceste continues to love her. Like Arnolphe in
The School for Wives
, he gives in to what he recognizes as an ignoble love and offers to marry her, but only if she is willing to renounce her milieu and flee with him to a deserted locale far from the perverting influences of society. Célimène refuses.

    C
ÉLIMÈNE
: What! I renounce the world at my young age,

    And die of boredom in some hermitage?

    A
LCESTE
: Ah, if you really loved me as you ought,

    You wouldn’t give the world a moment’s thought;

    Must you have me, and all the world beside?

    C
ÉLIMÈNE
: Alas, at twenty, one is terrified

    Of solitude. I fear I lack the force

    And depth of soul to take so stern a course.

So off Alceste goes to his desert, leaving behind the world of gallantry for which he was so ill suited. Though we have laughed throughout the play—at Alceste’s monomaniacal fits, at Célimène’s satirical wit, at secondary characters who embody foolish human weaknesses—we do not laugh at the end. Alceste, however impossible as a social being, has a strain of truth that Molière’s contemporaries were loath to recognize. It would take succeeding generations, those bred on Rousseau in the eighteenth century, and the romantic poets in the nineteenth, to side with Alceste against society’s compromises and betrayals. Gallantry was too firmly entrenched in the 1660s and 1670s for a spoilsport like Alceste to shake up the game of love. However, Molière’s younger contemporary, Jean Racine, would have a different kind of success treating love with gravitas.

Incestuous Desire in Racine’s
Phèdre

In January 2010, I attended a production of Racine’s
Phèdre
in San Francisco. A new translation of the play, commissioned by the American Conservatory Theater, had already been workshopped at Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival and was now making a rare appearance on an American stage.
³

I went to the play in the company of my husband, hiding my fears from him. How could Racine’s limpid poetry be gracefully translated into English, a language that does not lend itself easily to French verse? How could today’s dual-career couples connect with the patriarchal mentality of seventeenth-century France? How would a sexually liberated audience react to the tortured passion and overwhelming guilt expressed by an author imbued with Jansenism, the most austere form of seventeenth-century Catholicism? Could the audience make the leap back to the requisite formality of court life under Louis XIV and a second leap back to ancient Greece, which furnished the original characters and plot for the play?

I feared incomprehension, even ridicule. And I was wrong. The audience sat transfixed through an hour and fifty minutes of elegant speech, without explosions or police chases, without even an intermission. My husband was among the first to initiate a standing ovation for a cast that had risen to the level of Racine and forcefully projected
Phèdre
into our hearts and minds. And I left the theater with the renewed conviction that Racine had given voice to the tyranny and turmoil of primordial passion as known through the ages, even if his voice was intrinsically seventeenth-century French.