The attitude to Moliere and his friends of the public authori ties and of private persons is well-defined by La Bruyere : "The actor was disreputable in the opinion of the Romans and honour able in the opinion of the Greeks ; we ourselves esteem them as the Romans, but we live with them as the Greeks." In other words, the actor, though in 165o he was still in theory infamous and must normally renounce his profession in order to be ad mitted to the sacraments or to Christian burial, was in fact al most universally welcome and respected. The worthiest repre sentatives of the Estates might be kept waiting while a prince conferred with his actor friends, and Moliere is one of the few men of whom it has been recorded that he dined with Louis XIV. The status and prosperity of the theatrical profession was at that time steadily rising. In 1641 Louis XIII. had issued a de cree affirming that the theatre should henceforth be regarded as a source of innocent amusement to his subjects, and likely to distract them from evil pursuits ; that actors should not be blamed for the exercise of their profession, and that it should not in any way prejudice their public intercourse.
For Moliere the dramatist these were mainly years of observa tion and preparation. The repertory of the company would seem to have consisted mainly of contemporary French tragedies, of farces from the Italian and tragicomedies from the Spanish. As an author Moliere was as yet an apprentice. In 1655, before the Prince and Princess de Conti, he appeared in the Ballet des Incompatibles, to which he may have contributed some verses, and shortly afterwards, at Lyon, he produced L'Etourdi, the first of his authentic plays. Two years later came the first perform ance of Le Depit Amoureux, given at Beziers in 1657. It was at this moment, when Moliere was beginning his career as an au thor, that the Prince de Conti, in the throes of his pious conver sion, intimated that he could no longer reconcile it with his con science to be a patron of the drama.
Moliere returned to Paris in 1658 after his long absence. Thir teen years in the provinces had given him a thorough command of the arts and crafts of the theatre, secured for him the leadership of a devoted company, and provided him with a repertory which included two full-length plays of his own, and, probably, a num ber of small farces and sketches on which he was afterwards to draw during the next 54 years of production and authorship. He approached Paris by way of Rouen, from which he made a number of secret visits to the capital to prepare the way for his return. Who it was who gave Moliere his introduction to the court is unknown. Possibly it was Mazarin, who might have heard of Moliere through the Prince de Conti or through the painter, Mignard, who had met Moliere at Avignon in 1657, and had there started with him a life-long friendship. All that we know for certain is that in the spring of 1658 Moliere was in Rouen, and that, on Oct. 24 of the same year, under the protection of the Duc d'Orleans, he appeared before the king and his court in the guardroom of the Vieux Louvre. Loyal to his passion for tragedy, he played on this decisive occasion the Nicomede of Corneille. Among the spectators were the royal tragedians of the Hotel de Bourgogne, who had often played this tragedy themselves, and with whom Moliere was so shortly to be engaged in a bitter rivalry. The most devoted friends of Moliere are lukewarm in their references to his tragic powers. The most they could say of his performance in Nicomede was that it did not displease the audience, and that the women of the company were excellent. At the end of the play Moliere came forward, thanked the king for his graciousness, excused the shortcomings of himself and his company, with a judicious reference to the royal players whom they could not hope to excel, and asked permission to present one of the small entertainments with which he had regaled the prov inces. We have only a brief summary of this little speech, but it was apparently made in the most felicitous terms, and the farce of Le Docteur Amoureux which followed it, but which un fortunately is not extant, still further pleased the king and his court. Louis XIV., as a result of the performance, arranged for Moliere and his company to share the Salle du Petit Bourbon with the famous Italian comedians under Scaramouche, and it was there that in Nov. 1658 Moliere began a series of produc tions which included a revival of his own provincial successes, L'Etourdi and Le Depit Amoureux.
Moliere was now 37. He had overcome the material obstacles
to the career he had chosen. He was admittedly a comic actor of merit and an author who, on the lines of the old classic farces and of the more recent Italian models, could write a play of intrigue with a blend of exuberance and discretion peculiarly his own. In 1658, however, we cannot fail to admire with respectful astonishment the discernment of Louis XIV., who decided so quickly and on such slender grounds that this was a man to be watched and encouraged. L'Etourdi and Le Depit Amoureux were popular successes and resulted in substantial profits for each member of the company, and they were equally successful when played before the king and his court in the spring of 1659. The dexterity of the plots, the easiness of the dialogue, and the excel lence of the acting put these productions in a class apart from any comic plays yet produced on the French stage, with the single exception of the Menteur of Corneille, produced over 16 years previously. But these plays were in substance a clever exploiting of the conventional situations and characters of an ancient theatre. It was not till Nov. 1659 that the comic genius of Moliere found its first individual expression in Les Precieuses Ridicules, and posterity has confirmed the verdict of the anonymous old gentle man who rose from his seat in the pit and cried out in his excite ment : "Courage, Moliere ! Voila la veritable comedie." Les Precieuses Ridicules.—This is the first, and perhaps the most perfect, comedy of manners. It has been maintained that Moliere wrote it or an early version of it during his provincial wanderings, but the evidence for so unlikely an hypothesis is inadequate. It was aimed directly at the capital. The brilliant salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet had begun under Louis XIII. as a legitimate protest against the brutal and illiterate society of the Frondeurs. It included a company of wits, poets and writers of memoirs who were to make the period illustrious. By the time Moliere arrived in Paris, however, it had elaborated a code of gallantry, a standard of literary values, and a system of social etiquette in comparison with which the most eccentric affectations of the aesthetes of the last decade of the 19th century in England would seem the sports of an Arcadian simplicity. Critics like Boileau secretly appreciated its absurdity, but no one dared to attack so distinguished a coterie at the height of its vogue. It was left for Moliere, newly arrived in Paris, with one foot precariously on the ladder of success, to invite this peculiar world to laugh at its own discomfiture. The sensation was immediate. The more discerning of the coterie admitted its justice, and ap plauded its genius. Madame de Rambouillet herself was present at the first performance, and Ménage, hitherto devoutly precious, declared on leaving the theatre that "we must now burn what we have adored, and adore what we have burned." Other members of the precious sect, however, were less amenable. The first per formance was given on Nov. 18. The king and his brother were absent from Paris, and among those hit by the satire was a cabal sufficiently powerful to intrigue successfully against its repetition. The ms. was sent to the king, who thus became arbiter of the dispute, and he decided at once in its favour. The play was re peated on Dec. 2, before a crowded house at double prices. Moliere returned often to his imitations of the classic farce : he wrote many ballets to please the public and the court. But henceforth the principal events in his life are his comedies of observation and satire. His career henceforth is mainly a record of the bitter controversies excited by these plays, and his own persistent strug gle for the freedom of the comic art. For the moment the omens were good. It is true that Thomas Corneille, writing to the Abbe de Pure, author of a tenth rate tragedy, regarded the success of Les Precieuses Ridicules as "sufficient proof that Moliere and his friends are only capable of presenting trifles of this kind," and that the tragedians of the Hotel de Bourgogne, already taking alarm, were openly contemptuous of their rivals. But there were 32 performances of Les Precieuses Ridicules between Dec. 2, 1659, and Easter 166o. People came to Paris from 20 leagues' distance to see the play, and the king on his return from the Pyrenees witnessed it on three separate occasions in the summer and autumn of 166o. On the third occasion he accorded the com pany a grant of 3,000 livres.