Les Precieuses Ridicules was followed in May 166o by Le Cocu Imaginaire. Posterity feels that this was a retrogression. The public of his own day, however, was all applause, and the king was pleased to witness it on no less than nine occasions. Moliere was, meanwhile, in danger of losing his theatre. M. Ratabon, in charge of building operations at the Louvre, began to demolish the Salle du Petit Bourbon in which the company of Moliere was housed. He gave no warning to the actors, either from malice or more probably from negligence. The king at once intervened, and assigned to Moliere the Salle du Palais Royal, in which he remained until his death in 1673. The rival companies of the Marais and the Hotel de Bourgogne seized this opportunity to approach the members of the company of Moliere with advantageous offers; but according to Lagrange : "all the actors loved M. Moliere, their chief, who, in addition to his extraordinary merit and capacity, was of so honourable a nature and so charming a disposition, that they swore to follow his fortunes and never to abandon him whatever proposal might be made to them or whatever advantage might be offered them elsewhere." Even Mademoiselle du Parc, who, less loyal than her companions, had been enticed to the Hotel de Bourgogne a short time before, had since returned to Moliere.
The first production of Moliere in the new theatre of the Palais Royal was Don Garcie, his only tragedy. We have noted before the obstinate devotion of Moliere to the tragic muse. The Illustre Theatre had been founded with a special view to the tragic gifts of Madeleine, and Moliere on his return to Paris, had chosen to make his first appearance before the king in a tragedy. In 1659, during his first season at the Salle du Petit Bourbon, Moliere presented no less than five tragedies of Corneille. All of them were failures and had to be abandoned in favour of L'Etourdi and Le De pit Amoureux. Thomas Corneille describes the tragic acting of Moliere and his friends as "detestable." Don Garcie was a final experiment, and, after endeavouring for nearly three years to obtain for it the favour of the king and the public, Moliere at last accepted the verdict of his contemporaries. He never pub lished the play and the fact that he afterwards incorporated some of its best verses in Le Misanthrope may be taken as a proof that he came to regard it as a lost cause. He did not, however, abandon tragedy without a struggle and some bitterness of spirit. He had ideas on the subject of tragic declamation which were wholly opposed to the feeling of the time and to the essential character of the French classical school. He pleaded for a greater simplicity of phrase and diction, and for a more natural and less organized emotion. His own views are expressed in L'Impromptu de Ver
sailles, a direct attack upon the tragedians of the Hotel de Bourgogne with which in Oct. 1663 he supported the last pro duction of his own tragedy, and which reminds us in places of Hamlet's advice to the players at Elsinore. Don Garcie leaves us convinced that heroic tragedy in the manner of Corneille and Racine was incompatible with his genius, but it leaves us also wondering whether Moliere might not have been a successful author of tragedy in the Elizabethan manner, with its mingling of tragic and comic scenes.
The failure of Don Garcie was more than balanced by the brilliant success of L'Ecole des Maris, produced on June 24, 166i. This play is a more considerable achievement than Les Precieuses Ridicules, being a comedy not of manners, but of character. Two rival conceptions of the education of women are opposed, and judgment given in favour of freedom and a reasonable indulgence. Each of two brothers is entrusted with the protection of two young girls, and each of them desires to marry his ward. The one mistrustfully prohibits all amusements, and endeavours to coerce youth into conformity with the tastes and inclinations of middle age. The other allows all innocent liberties and uses no constraint. The first loses and the second wins his wife. The friends of the author might see in the play a biographical significance not yet clear to the public ; Moliere, 4o years of age, was about to marry Armande at 19. Already he had asked for and obtained the right to two shares in the company which were to be accorded "to him and to his wife if he should marry." From June 24 to Sept. 11 L'Ecole des Maris was played daily. The author was meanwhile, at the special request of the king, writing the comedie-ballet of Les Facheux, which was per formed on Aug. 17,1661, at a reception given to the king and his court by Fouquet in the gardens of Vaux. Le Brun painted the decorations ; Torelli was engineer ; La Fontaine contributed verses ; Le Notre designed the gardens ; while Moliere exhibited for the delight of the court his famous gallery of bores, each of whom might be matched with an original in the brilliant audience. The thread on which Moliere strung the episodes of the ballet was of an admirable simplicity. A pair of lovers desiring a quiet rendez vous are interrupted by a succession of intruders, each of them more tediously disconcerting than the last. Louis XIV. after the performance drew the author's attention to a famous bore whom he had omitted to present, by name Soyecourt, his own Master of the Chase, and Moliere, in a subsequent revival of the play, made good this omission with the assistance, it is said, of the victim himself.