Part 1 (1/2)

Queens of the French Stage.

by H. Noel Williams.

I

THE WIFE OF MOLIeRE

Few women in French history have been the subject of more discussion than the young girl whom Moliere married, at the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, on February 20, 1662.

Armande Gresinde Claire Elisabeth Bejart, for that was the bride's name, is described in the marriage deed as the daughter of the late Joseph Bejart, _ecuyer_, sieur de Belleville, and of his widow, Marie Herve.

Joseph Bejart, it should be stated, had died shortly before, or shortly after, Armande's birth.

The Bejarts were very poor, for the only means which Joseph seems to have possessed wherewith to maintain his pretensions to n.o.bility were derived from a small government appointment (_huissier ordinaire du roy es eaux et forets de France_), and his wife had presented him with ”at least eleven children.” They lived in the Marais, then the theatrical quarter of Paris. On its northern outskirts, near the Halles, in the Rue Mauconseil, stood the old Hotel de Bourgogne, the first home of the regular drama; in the centre, in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, was the theatre which took its name from the quarter, the Theatre du Marais, where Corneille's _Cid_ was first performed; while nearer the Seine, the playgoer could make choice between the Italian troupes, the _Trois Farceurs_, Gaultier-Garguille, Gros-Guillaume, and Turlupin,[1] and open-air entertainments on the Pont-au-Change, the Pont-Neuf, and the Place Dauphine. It is, therefore, not surprising that the little Bejarts should have been in the habit of varying the monotony of their poverty-stricken lives by occasional visits to one or other of these spectacles, or that, dazzled by those well-known attractions, which were doubtless as potent in the seventeenth century as they are to-day, the two eldest, Joseph and Madeleine, should have decided, while still very young, to make the stage their profession.

What theatre witnessed their _debuts_ we do not know. The majority of authors are of opinion that they joined a company of strolling players which was at this time exploiting Languedoc; M. Larroumet hesitates between one of the unlicensed playhouses of the fairs in the neighbourhood of Paris and a troupe of amateurs, several of which were to be found in the capital; while another of Madeleine's biographers, M.

Henri Chardon, thinks that she obtained admission to the Theatre du Marais, though it appears very improbable that a young and inexperienced actress could have met with such good fortune.

However that may be, Madeleine seems to have prospered in her profession from the very outset, as on January 10, 1636, supported by her _curateur_, one Simon Courtin, her father, a paternal uncle, a ”_chef du gobelet du roi_,” and divers other relatives and friends, she appears before the Civil Lieutenant of Paris[2] to request permission to contract a loan of 2000 livres, wherewith to supplement a like sum of her own and enable her to acquire a little house and garden situated in the Cul-de-Sac Thorigny.

Two and a half years later (July 11, 1638), we hear of her again, under circ.u.mstances which perhaps explain her desire to secure a residence of her own--a desire, it must be admitted, not a little singular in a young lady of eighteen--for on that day is baptized at Saint-Eustache ”Francoise, daughter of Esprit Raymond, chevalier, seigneur de Modene and other places, chamberlain of the affairs of Monseigneur, only brother of the King, and of the demoiselle Madeleine Bejart.”

M. de Modene and Madeleine were not married; indeed, there was already a Madame de Modene, residing at Le Mans, who did not die until 1649. But this trifling accident, as it was regarded in those days, did not prevent the son of the former (by proxy)[3] and the mother of the latter (in person) standing as sponsors to the little Francoise, whose birth was fated to be the cause of much trouble, not to her guilty parents, but to two perfectly innocent persons, one of whom was as yet unborn.

A few words must here be said of the father of Madeleine Bejart's child.

Esprit Raymond de Mormoiron, Comte de Modene, who was then about thirty years of age, came of an old family in the Venaissin. His father, Francois Raymond de Mormoiron, had at one time held the office of Grand Provost of France and had also been employed on several diplomatic missions. Appointed page to Gaston d'Orleans, brother of Louis XIII., he became later one of the chamberlains of that prince, and seems to have done his best to imitate him in his dissipated and turbulent conduct. He early ranged himself among the enemies of Richelieu, joined the famous league ”for the universal peace of Christendom,” and fought on its behalf at the battle of La Marfee, at the head of a body of cavalry which he had raised at his own expense. In consequence of this, he was condemned to death, by a decree of the Parliament of Paris (September 6, 1641), but took refuge in Flanders, with the Duc de Guise, against whom a similar sentence had been p.r.o.nounced, and remained there until the death of Richelieu, followed by that of Louis XIII., left him at liberty to return to France. When, in 1647, Guise went to Naples, to endeavour to exploit the revolt of Masaniello to his own advantage, Modene accompanied him and greatly distinguished himself. He was eventually, however, taken prisoner by the Spaniards and held captive until 1650. On his return to France, he meddled no more with public affairs, but occupied himself with the care of his neglected estates and in the compilation of a valuable history of the revolution in Naples, reprinted, in 1826, under the t.i.tle of _Memoires du Comte de Modene_. It is to be noted here that from the early autumn of 1641 until the summer of 1643 the Comte de Modene was absent from France.

Some time in the early weeks of the year 1643, probably either in the last week in February or the first in March, Madeleine's father, Joseph Bejart the elder, died; and on March 10, Marie Herve, his widow, presented herself before the Civil Lieutenant of Paris, where, in the name, and as guardian, of Joseph, Madeleine, Genevieve, Louis, and _”a little girl not yet baptized,” children under age_ (_i.e._ under twenty-five) of the said deceased and herself, she represented that ”the inheritance of her deceased husband being charged with heavy debts without any property wherewith to acquit them, she feared that it would be more burdensome than profitable,” and, accordingly, declared her intention of renouncing it. Her request was supported by her brother-in-law, Pierre Bejart, _procureur_ to the Chatelet, and other relatives, and on June 10 of the same year she was permitted to make the renunciation she desired.

Now who was this ”little unbaptized girl”? Without a shadow of doubt, Armande Bejart, the future wife of Moliere; on this point all the poet's biographers are unanimous. Was she, as represented, the daughter of Marie Herve? That is the question which has afforded material for a controversy which has already lasted for nearly two hundred and fifty years and seems not unlikely to continue till the end of all things, for the most fantastic theories, for a small library of books and pamphlets, and for review and newspaper articles without number. For some see in this little girl a sister, others a _daughter_ of Madeleine Bejart, and the truth is of the most vital importance to the honour of the great man whose wife Armande became.

That the latter impression was almost universal amongst Moliere's contemporaries is beyond question, nor is the fact one that need occasion any surprise. Every one, that is to say, every one connected with, or interested in, the theatrical world, was aware that, early in life, Madeleine Bejart had had a little girl; while, on the other hand, the birth of Marie Herve's child, which was of no public interest, and which, moreover, probably took place not in Paris, but in one of the adjacent villages,[4] was known to very few. A young girl grew up with Madeleine, who was tenderly attached to her; it was Armande; but gossip confounded her with the child Francoise, of whom all trace seems to have been lost, and the wiseacres smiled the smile begotten of superior knowledge when any stranger to Paris chanced to refer to the girl as Madeleine's sister.

For over a century and a half this belief remained unchallenged. Hostile or sympathetic, all who wrote of Moliere--La Grange, Grimarest, Breuze de la Martiniere, Bayle, Donneau de Vise--shared the common opinion in regard to the origin of Armande Bejart. In 1821, however, there was quite a flutter of excitement in literary circles, for in that year Beffara discovered Moliere's _acte de mariage_, in which Armande is spoken of as the daughter of Joseph Bejart and his widow, Marie Herve.

Forty-two years later, the old scandal, which in the interim had been partly revived by M. Fournier (_etudes sur la vie et les uvres de Moliere_) and M. Bazin (_Notes historiques sur Moliere_), received another severe blow by Eudore Soulie's discovery of the deed of March 10, 1643, already mentioned, wherein Marie Herve requested permission to renounce the succession to her husband's property, and which confirmed the statement made in the _acte de mariage_. Such evidence, one would naturally suppose, would have been accepted as conclusive, and the matter set at rest once and for all. But tradition dies hard; not a few _Molieristes_ refused to renounce an opinion sanctioned by so many generations, and M. Jules Loiseleur, a writer who enjoyed a considerable, and not undeserved, reputation as an unraveller of historical mysteries, propounded, on behalf of his fellow-sceptics, the following theory.

The declarations made by Marie Herve, in the deed of March 10, 1643, and again in the _acte de mariage_, that Armande was her child, were, he maintains, deliberate falsehoods, conceived in the interests of her daughter, Madeleine. At the beginning of the year 1643, Madeleine was about to become a mother, for the second time, not, of course, by the Comte de Modene, who had been in exile for nearly two years, but by some new lover. Fearing that if Modene returned and learned the fact, he would refuse to resume the _liaison_, which she hoped might one day be regularised (M. Loiseleur was under the impression that Madame de Modene was dead, whereas she lived until 1649), she begged her mother to recognise the child as her own; a request to which that complacent old lady, whose husband was just dead, or on the point of death, readily consented.

Now this ingenious theory is based on the advanced age of Marie Herve--she was then about fifty-three--and the belief that she had not had a child since the birth of Louis Bejart, afterwards a prominent member of Moliere's troupe, who was born on November 14 or 15, 1630, that is to say, more than twelve years earlier, which facts rendered it highly improbable that she could have been the mother of Armande; and M.

Loiseleur supports his contention by pointing out that the two eldest children, Joseph and Madeleine, described in the deed of March 10, 1643, as minors, were over twenty-five, and that their age was purposely understated to make their mother appear younger than she was, and so facilitate the fraud. This point has been contested by Mr. Andrew Lang, in his admirable article on Moliere in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, but is really of no importance, as if M. Loiseleur had exercised a little more care, he would have found that so far from more than twelve years having elapsed between the birth of the last of Marie Herve's children and that of Armande, she had had a little girl _less than three and a half years before_ (November 30, 1639), baptized, in the parish of Saint-Sauveur, by the name of Benigne Madeleine, the second name being doubtless intended as a compliment to Madeleine Bejart, who acted as _marraine_.[5] Whereby M. Loiseleur's argument disappears, and his theory with it.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Armande's contemporaries saw in her not a sister, but a daughter of Madeleine Bejart, and, with this belief, they held another, to wit, that Moliere had been, previous to his marriage with the younger sister, the lover of the elder. From which two suppositions sprang one of the most hideous accusations that has ever sullied the reputation of a great man.

Moliere, like most successful men, had a good many enemies, and was accustomed to give and receive very hard knocks. With the company of the Theatre du Marais he appears to have been on tolerably amicable terms; but with the actors of the third great theatre, the Hotel de Bourgogne, his relations were decidedly strained, and whenever an opportunity arose of turning one or other of them into ridicule, he seldom failed to avail himself of it, though he made an exception in the case of Floridor, who was too great a favourite with the public for them to tolerate any attacks upon him. In his _Impromptu de Versailles_, played before the Court in October 1663, Moliere satirised several actors of the Hotel de Bourgogne, and, among them, one named Montfleury,[6] whose ponderous style of declamation he imitated with great success. To this, Montfleury's son, Antoine Montfleury, who was a prolific and successful dramatist, replied with another play, called _l'Impromptu de l'hotel de Conde_, in which he endeavoured to turn the tables on Moliere; but the vengeance of the father took a very different form.

In December 1663, Racine wrote to the Abbe Le Va.s.seur: ”Montfleury has drawn up a memorial and presented it to the King. He accuses him [Moliere] of having married the daughter [Armande], and of having formerly lived with the mother [Madeleine]. But Montfleury is not listened to at Court.”[7] From this pa.s.sage it is evident that Montfleury intended Louis XIV. to believe that Moliere had married his own daughter; which is the starting-point of the abominable calumny which so long weighed, and which still weighs, on the memory of the great dramatist.

Beyond what Racine tells us, we have no information about this memorial of Montfleury. That he advanced any proofs in support of his accusation is extremely improbable; although it is quite possible that he would have endeavoured to substantiate it had he received any encouragement from the King. Any way, Louis XIV. appears to have satisfied himself that the charge was merely the outcome of jealousy and spite, and when, in the following February, Moliere's first child was baptized at Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, he and his sister-in-law, the ill-fated Henrietta of England, stood sponsors. Than which the poet could have desired no more complete reparation.