MOLIERE (1622-1673), the name taken by the great French actor and dramatist, Jean Baptiste Poquelin. He was born in Paris, probably in Jan. 1622. His certificate of baptism is dated Jan. 15 of that year, in the parish of St. Eustache. The place of his birth is disputed. Part of his boyhood and early youth was passed in a house known as the maison des singes at the corner of the Rue St. Honore and the Rue des Vieilles Etuves, but in 1622 his father may have occupied another house in the same street. The maison des singes no longer exists, but there is extant the drawing of a pillar of the house which stood at the angle of the street, decorated with sculptures representing a group of monkeys playing about an orange tree. The monkey was tradi tionally the emblem of the comic actor. If Moliere was not born in the maison des singes, his destiny was at least symbolically determined for him when his father moved to it a few years later.
Jean Poquelin, Moliere's father, came of an old family of Beauvais which for generations had been engaged in the same trade. Jean Poquelin, upholsterer, and the son of an upholsterer, married Marie Cress& the daughter of an upholsterer, and in 1631, when Moliere was only nine years old, succeeded his uncle as valet tapissier de chambre du roi. Six years later he arranged that his son should have the reversion of this office. The young Moliere was to go the way of his ancestors. There was nothing which pointed to unusual genius in the family, though Marie Cresse was clearly a woman of taste and method. She had a Bible, a copy of Plutarch's Lives, excellent furniture and a plentiful supply of linen. Jean Poquelin was of a shrewd and amiable dis position, with a faith in education which reminds us of M. Jourdain. But the books in his house belonged to his wife, and his supreme ambition was, undoubtedly, that his son should suc ceed him in the family business.
The biographers of Moliere look for early signs and influences that might have turned him towards the theatre, but the evidence is extremely suspect. Grimarest (1705) tells us that Louis Cresse, the maternal grandfather of Moliere had a passion for the stage and that he perfidiously advised Jean Poquelin to release his grandson from the shop and send him to the celebrated college of the Jesuits at Clermont. This story is extremely improbable.
Noblesse oblige. Louis Cresse was himself an upholsterer. The college of Clermont, moreover, was hardly a preparation for the stage. It is more reasonable to believe that Jean Poquelin, of his own initiative and from a wise belief in the value of learning, decided that his son should have as good an education as possible in preparation for his duties at the court. There is no sign in Moliere of any vocation for the stage till he left college as a young man of 20. The utmost we can say of him in early boy hood is that he had special opportunities of frequenting the theatre. One of the friends of Jean Poquelin, also an upholsterer, was one of the masters of the Confrerie de la Passion, and in the theatre of the Hotel de Bourgogne, which was owned by the Confrerie, the masters had a private box reserved for them and for their friends. This box was known as le paradis, and paradise
it may well have been for the young Moliere. There he would see, as a child, the tragedies of the period and the famous buffoons, Turlupin, Gaultier-Gargouille and Gros-Guillame, then at the height of their popularity. The father of Moliere himself, more over, inherited two boxes within the enclosure of the famous fair of St. Germain, the home of the theatre de la foire, where in the first half of the 17th century Bary and Orvietan delighted the crowd with their burlesques.
Marie Cresse died in 1632, when Moliere was only ten years old, and a year later Jean Poquelin married Catherine Fleurette. There is no evidence in support of the allegation that Catherine in any way disliked or neglected the children of Marie Cresse, and critics who have assumed that she served as a model for the odious step-mother in Le Malade Imaginaire betray more inge nuity than common sense. Catherine died within three years of her marriage, so that Moliere knew her only between the ages of 10 and 13. It is difficult to establish when exactly he went to Clermont. The evidence is conflicting. Clearly, however, his education was at no time neglected. There can be no doubt of the pride and affection with which Jean Poquelin regarded the eldest child of his first marriage. The college at Clermont was attended by the sons of the best families in France, and Jean Poquelin must have had considerable influence, or the young Moliere must have shown considerable promise, to secure admission. Moliere at Clermont acquired a thorough grounding in the humanities. Terence is said to have been his favourite dramatist, and Lucre tius was his chosen philosopher. Special attention was paid to the French language, and the masters cultivated in their pupils a love of poetry and the theatre, encouraging them to compose and to produce ballets and plays. The attendance of Moliere partly coincided with that of his future patron, the Prince de Conti, though the prince was nearly eight years younger. Tradi tion, questioned in this as in so many other points by modern research, obstinately affirms that, with Chapelle, his friend in later years, and with Cyrano de Bergerac and others, he studied philoso phy under the celebrated Gassendi. Gassendi, to the scandal of his contemporaries, was a champion of Epicurus and the most for midable adversary of Descartes. Whether Moliere was actually a member of the group of privileged youths who had private lessons from Gassendi may be doubted, but there is no doubt at all con cerning his studies in philosophy. He is said to have translated Lu cretius. The translation is unhappily lost, but its existence is attested by several independent witnesses and is hardly open to doubt. The plays are enough to show that Moliere was thor oughly familiar with the philosophic learning of the time. There is, on the other hand, nothing to justify the legend that Moliere was ever at the Sorbonne, or that he studied theology. On leaving Clermont, however, he almost certainly studied law and was probably called to the bar in 1641.