The Book of Lost Books (24 page)

Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)

{1622–1673}

“MANUSCRIPTS DON'T BURN,” wrote Mikhail Bulgakov in his greatest work,
The Master and Margarita,
even though, as a biographer of Molière, he knew that the letters and unpublished works of his hero, including the final masterpiece,
L'Homme du cour,
had been consigned to the flames. But Bulgakov does not mention in
The Life of Monsieur de
Molière
another work we know to be lost: though whether or not it is truly lost is problematic.

Despite many of the events of his life, Molière was the luckiest and sanest of comedians. When his stammering on the stage elicited catcalls and well-aimed vegetables, he turned into a writer, and a writer of genius at that. When his company was thrown out on the street, he bounced back into opulent surroundings. When his daring works caused outrage, he was safely under the patronage of the duc d'Orléans. When an outraged theatergoer stood up during a performance of
Sganarelle, ou le
cocu imaginaire,
and loudly declared he was being libeled, the audience laughed twice as hard that anyone would willingly claim he was the model for an avaricious, jealous, bourgeois fool. Fortune's vacillations and vicissitudes always ended up as opportunities, and every brickbat became a laurel. Even the rumor that he had married his own daughter barely scratched his public standing—though his former mistress's offspring made his life a misery nonetheless.

Molière's comedy proceeded from a sense that vices were follies. It was not just the gulling of the miserly Harpagon in
L'Avare
that was funny; it was the intrinsically ludicrous nature of thinking that hoarding one's wealth was a feasible scheme. Intellectual pretension in
Les Précieusesridicules,
the fear of death in
Le Malade imaginaire,
hypocrisy in
Tartuffe,
cynicism in
Le Misanthrope,
lust in countless disguises: every atrocious kink in human psychology, whereby the inevitable was pointlessly avoided, was the source of gloriously unaffected glee.

But from what secure vision of the world did Molière's iron-hard ironic castigation stem? As a boy he had been taught, like countless other young men, to read the work of the Latin philosopher Lucretius. In
De Rerum Natura,
Lucretius advocated an Epicurean worldview: the gods were unnecessary, error was its own punishment, and, as individuals from St. Paul to Samuel Johnson found, there was no use kicking against the pricks of a cosmos that cared nothing about the vanity of human wishes. Happiness was the product of avoiding pain: so, syllogistically, the person who not only provided pleasure, but also highlighted the unprofitability of mankind's habitual sloppy thinking and silly desires, would be nothing less than a mundane saint in a heavenless universe.

In one instance, Molière outdid his mentor. Lucretius, to prevent the future sufferings he would no doubt have to endure, committed suicide. Molière, on finding his friends so lachrymose in drink that they were intent on drowning themselves, agreed with them, but cautioned that such a philosophically relevant protest at the conditions of existence would no doubt be undermined if it transpired that they performed the action when flushed with wine. The suicide would take place the next day, after breakfast, when, of course, it didn't.

Molière wrote a translation of Lucretius. The Abbé de Marolles had mentioned in 1661 that Molière intended to publish the work, the year before his first major success with
L'École des femmes.
It never appeared. Since we have Lucretius himself, the loss of a French version might seem a minor affair. To an extent, this is true. Just as the orbit of Uranus, strained out of kilter by the presence of Neptune, allowed Verrier to predict the existence of another planet without having seen it, so Molière's debt to Lucretius can be fathomed in the elliptical circuit of his thinking, even though the actual homage has perished, save for a speech on the blindness of lovers derived from Lucretius in
Le Misanthrope.

To hear him, with his own elegance, express the futility of striving and the fiction of the divine, would have been invigorating. But—as he might well have chosen to translate the title of
De Rerum Natura—c'est
la vie.

Jean Racine

{1639–1699}

IN ERIC LINKLATER'S satirical novel
Magnus Merriman
(1934), the eponymous hero and his friend Meiklejohn end up spending the night in the cells of Edinburgh's Central Police Station after an argument gets out of hand. The dispute was occasioned by Merriman's assertion that Shakespeare is “the greatest poet of all time.” When asked to “name a better poet,” Meiklejohn had retorted, “Racine.” Magnus responds:

That dull, pedantical schoolroom exercise! That prosy, plodding, weary, unimaginative padding for a deserted library! That's not poetry: that's route marching to Parnassus with a full pack and a sergeant alongside to see that you keep step.

Though they did not use this as their defense the next morning, their contretemps enacted cultural assumptions that stretched back 150 years. Praising Shakespeare over Racine was a convenient shorthand for any number of political or aesthetic debates. Johann Gottfried von Herder thundered, “Woe betide the frivolous Frenchman who arrives in time for Shakespeare's fifth act, expecting it will provide him with the quintessence of the play's touching sentiment.” William Hazlitt denounced the “didactic” Racine, saying, “tragedy is human nature tried in the crucible of affliction, not exhibited in the vague theorems of speculation.”

An easy method of extolling the northern, natural passion of Shakespeare was to set it in invidious comparison with the perceived courtly
froideur
of Racine. For example, Pyrrhus in Racine's
Andromaque
(1667) attempts to force the reluctant Andromache (whose husband has been murdered by Pyrrhus' late father) into marriage by threatening to kill her son; he does so nonetheless in tones of stifling politesse.

Well, then, my lady, you must be obeyed.
I must forget, or rather hate you. Yes
My passion's violence has gone too far
Ever to halt in mere indifference.

The original French elegantly rhymes
leur violence
with
l'indifférence.

Moreover, as the influential critical theorist Roland Barthes observed, Racine's plays rely upon stylized chains of romantic disappointment. Orestes loves Hermione, who loves Pyrrhus, who loves Andromache. Amurat is married to Roxane, who falls for Bajazet, who loves Atalide. Theseus is married to Phaedra, who lusts after Hippolytus, who is forbidden to love Aricie.

It is, however, a mistake to suppose Racine was merely the “literature which appealed to our great-grandfathers,” as Stendhal claimed in
Racine et Shakespeare.
In his day, he was the very archetype of the rebellious avant-garde.

Jean Racine was born in 1639, in the backwater village of La Ferté-Milon, to a family of minor bureaucrats. He was orphaned at the age of four and subsequently brought up by his grandparents. When his grandfather died in 1649, his grandmother decided to retire to Port-Royal, a center of religious seclusion inextricably associated with the movement known as Jansenism. Cornelius Otto Jansen, the bishop of Ypres, developed his theology after studying the works of St. Augustine. Pope Urban VIII condemned the Jansenist movement in the 1641 papal bull
In Eminenti.
Jansenism, however, had a secure foothold in France, and included among its adherents the philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Jansenism taught of an immeasurably distant God, whose grace alone could redeem man from a state of ingrained and perpetual sinfulness. It was outspoken about the moral laxity of the age, dismissive of the carnivals and gallantries of Louis XIV, and positively puritanical about the theater.

We do not know exactly when Racine became dissatisfied with the piety of his guardians, nor do we know when he first entertained thoughts of a dramatic career. He was, however, a truculent pupil. He was taught Greek by the sacristan Claude Lancelot, and it was undoubtedly from him that he first learned of the works of the Athenian playwrights. According to one anecdote, he was caught reading a less than ennobling Greek romance called the
Aethiopica,
attributed to Heliodorus of Emesa. Lancelot threw the book in the fire. Racine, undeterred, found another copy, read it through, and gave it to the sacristan, saying, “You can burn this one now as well.” A boast about his memory or a judgment on the literary merit of the tale? The
Aethiopica
resurfaced during Racine's faltering steps toward theatrical acclaim.

After schooling, Racine went to Paris to study philosophy. With his distant, and dissolute, cousin, the fable writer La Fontaine, he was “
un
loup avec les loups
”—running with the wolves. He wrote eulogies for Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV's chief minister and an implacable opponent of the Jansenists, and received one hundred louis d'or from the king for a poem on the Nymph of the Seine. He frequented the court, where showmanship and elegance glossed over realpolitik.

Racine's first attempt at a dramatic composition was entitled
Amasie.
Apart from the title, all we know is that the Marais Theatre accepted it in 1660, but never performed it. The title itself adds nothing more: it may, perhaps, have been about the Egyptian ruler Amasis, and offer an early indication of Racine's interest in exotic locales.

In 1661, the Hôtel de Bourgogne turned down a tragedy, now lost, called
Les Amours d'Ovide.
The Roman poet Ovid, who was exiled to Tomis for an unspecified indiscretion, had appeared on the stage before: he is the hero of Ben Jonson's comedy
The Poetaster.
Racine obviously took some care in the plot construction, and, in a letter, he described how writing the well-turned verse was an easy matter once he had streamlined the actions, choices, and consequences. Drama was plot, not poetry.

The tragedy lingered in Racine's mind, and, when he wrote to his friend L'Abbé le Vasseur from the small town of Uzès, where he was studying theology with his uncle, in late 1661, he compared himself to Ovid, the “
si gallant homme,
” languishing with the barbarous Scythians.

The next year, after he returned to Paris, Racine's third attempt at theatrical success was offered to the company of the comic playwright Molière. It was based on his childhood reading of the
Aethiopica,
and took its name from the hero and heroine,
Théagène et Chariclée.
Chariclea is the daughter of King Hydaspes of Ethiopia. Her mother, Queen Perside, unfortunately looked at a marble statue during her pregnancy, with the unforeseen outcome that the girl is born with white skin. Terrified that Hydaspes will think she has been unfaithful, she secretly sends the child to Delphi to become a priestess. Theagenes, the prince of Thessaly, falls in love with her, and the two elope. After various shenanigans involving pirates, disguises, and the like, all the characters converge on Meroe, where, through another series of improbabilities, Hydaspes is going to sacrifice Chariclea. As luck would have it, all the convolutions and contortions of the plot are resolved in the nick of time.

Although the plot may seem artificial and melodramatic, it was not without appeal to earlier writers. Torquato Tasso based the early life of Clorinda in his epic
Gerusalemme Liberata
on the story, and Miguel de Cervantes wrote the first part of a version of it in
Persiles and Sigismunda.
The climactic scene, with the father preparing to sacrifice his daughter, would be reprised in Racine's
Iphigénie
(1674).

Although the play was not performed, it did provide Racine with his debut. The Parisian theaters were engaged in serious rivalries, and were not averse to a little one-upmanship. The Hôtel de Bourgogne was rumored to be rehearsing a play called
La Thébaïde,
by Boyer, and Molière asked Racine to adapt the story for them. Jean Racine's
La Thébaïde
was performed on June 20, 1664.

Racine did not repay Molière's kindness with loyalty. His next play,
Alexandre le Grand,
was to be performed in 1665, by Molière's company. After the success of
La Thébaïde,
Molière had invested in elaborate sets for the new play, depicting the shores of Hydaspe (an odd echo of the lost
Théagène et Chariclée
) and the first instance of the shoreside setting of many of Racine's tragedies: Racine, incidentally, never saw the sea.

Secretly, and perhaps as some form of insurance, Racine had the manuscript sent to Molière's rivals at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. He also persuaded one of the actresses, Mlle. Duparc, to transfer with him—not wholly because of her acting ability. She would later become Racine's mistress. In an unprecedented move,
Alexandre le grand
played in both theaters on December 18. Molière was livid, and never spoke to Racine again.

Was it ambition, or arrogance, or some real or imagined slight that led Racine to double-cross Molière? Racine's son, in his biography of his father, claims the split was due to Racine's frustration at the lackluster delivery and diction of Molière's players. His next play,
Andromaque
(1667), with Mlle. Duparc in the lead role, certainly drew some comments about the hyperbolic acting style. In a satirical snipe at Racine, a poem called
Le Parnasse réformé,
the renowned actor Montfleury, who played Orestes and died in 1668, is made to say, “If anyone . . . should wish to know what I died of, let him not ask whether it was of fever, dropsy or gout, but let him know that it was of
Andromaque.
”

The rivalry between Racine and Molière simmered on for years, and, not content with one enemy, Racine also took up against Corneille, the leading tragedian of the age, who had made some rather dismissive remarks about
Alexandre le grand
with the effect of cementing a relationship between his antagonists. Racine and Corneille competed with versions of the Emperor Titus' relinquishment of love for duty, with
Bérénice
by Racine being premiered the week before Corneille's
Tite et
Bérénice
(at Molière's theater) in 1670. Racine regularly sniped at Corneille in the prefaces to the printed editions of his plays, referring to “a certain malicious old poet.” Racine's plays had the more modern edge: they presented amoral heroes who would sacrifice their honor for their desire, unscrupulous admissions of expediency, overwhelming urges that stripped their sufferers of each shred of self-control, and each vestige of self-interest.

That year, Mlle. Duparc having died in 1688, Racine also obtained a new mistress, Mlle. Champmeslé. According to the rumors of Mme. de Sévigné, the actress enjoyed “
diableries,
” or orgies, with Racine and the poet-critic Nicolas Boileau. The boy educated by Jansenists seemed determined to conform to every cliché of the degraded stage.

By 1677, Paris was enthralled by
Phèdre,
a drama about the tragic love of a stepmother for her stepson. Unfortunately for Racine, the plaudits were for a protégé of Cardinal Mazarin's niece, Nicolas Pradon, who wrote a work of the same name as the play that many still regard as Racine's masterpiece. His response has been a puzzle for biographers ever since: Racine did not write for the theater again for twelve years.

Instead, he married a rich, childbearing woman whom he did not love, was appointed royal historiographer, and was reconciled with his Jansenist past to the extent that his children were brought up in its strictest devotions. Mme. de Sévigné wryly observed that Racine now loved God as much as he once had his mistresses. The enfant terrible became a stolid, churchgoing, academic historian.

At the behest of Mme. de Maintenon, whom Louis XIV had secretly married, Racine wrote two final works: biblical dramas that were performed by the schoolgirls of Madame's charitable foundation, Saint-Cyr.
Athalie,
the final work, is imbued with Jansenist theology. The pagan queen Athaliah is crushed by a God as unrelenting as a juggernaut. Imprecations cannot alter His Inevitable Plan. No pity, tears, or change of conscience can stay the executioner's hand. To Voltaire it was “the work which closest approaches perfection by a mortal man.”

No doubt many scholars would dearly love to pore over the pages of a rediscovered
Amasie,
or
Les Amours d'Ovide,
or
Théagène et Chariclée.
Interesting and salient material about Racine's versification, narrative dynamics, or conceptions of heroism would certainly be forthcoming. But a glimpse into the twelve-year silence would outbalance all three. Was it professional pique, age, a handsome salary, or a profound change of belief that made him reject the theater? Had he come to agree with his Jansenist inheritance about the luxury and worthlessness of the stage, or merely retired, a comfortable bourgeois with no inclination to muddy his hands with greasepaint and fripperies? Behind the wig, thin lips, and hooded eyes, Racine is frustratingly, confrontationally silent, as silent as the God in whom he came to believe.