The Zenith

In Dec. 1671 Moliere was summoned to St. Germain to organize yet another entertainment for the king. La Comtesse d'Escar bargnas, a hasty sketch which served the occasion, was a play which Moliere did not himself desire to publish. For this festival he also improvised a ballet from previous entertainments of the kind and wrote a Pastorale. The Comtesse d'Escarbargnas was transferred to the Palais Royal in July 1672, where it was played along with a revival of Le Mariage Force. This was the last of the royal festivals to which Moliere was to contribute. He was at St. Germain from Dec. 1671 to Feb. 1672.

On Feb. 17 occurred the death of Madeleine Bejart. In accord ance with custom she solemnly renounced her profession and was accorded Christian burial with the permission of the archbishop of Paris. Exactly a year later Moliere died, as he had lived, an actor. For him the archbishop would be less accommodating.

Last Plays and Death.

In the year that remained to him, Moliere, free for the moment from his royal taskmaster, wrote the last two of his comedies. Les Femmes Savantes was produced at the Palais Royal on March II, 1672, and Le Malade Imaginaire on Feb. 1o, 1673. Les Femmes Savantes inevitably provokes com parison with Les Precieuses Ridicules. The earlier play for all its brilliance and verity is thin and superficial beside this product of an observation more penetrating and mature. The first was aimed at a polite affectation which socially was absurd and artistically mischievous. The second deals more seriously with the dangers of a little learning, and is of a more general application. The history of Le Malade Imaginaire is more than a theatrical event. It is the history of the death of Moliere. For some time his health had caused his friends the greatest anxiety, and on Aug. 11 and 12 the theatre of the Palais Royal was closed owing to his indisposi tion. He had, as we have noted, left the house at Auteuil, and was now living again with Armande in the house in the Rue de Richelieu. Madeleine had died in February, and his second son, born on Sept. I 5, 1672, died on Oct. i 1. Meanwhile, sick unto death, he was, writing his comedy of the man sick only in imagina tion, an act of courage and detachment rarely equalled in the history of genius. The play was produced at the Palais Royal on

Feb. 1o, and repeated on Feb. 12 and 14. On Friday, Feb. Moliere was feeling worse, and was urged by his wife and the young actor Baron not to go to the theatre. The reply attributed to him by Grimarest, who had it from Baron himself, is celebrated : "Comment voulez-vous que je fasse. Il y a cinquante pauvres ouvriers qui n'ont que leur journee pour vivre; que feront-ils si l'on ne joue pas. Je me reprocherais d'avoir neglige de leur Bonner du pain un seul jour, le pouvant faire absolument." Moliere went to the theatre and acted with difficulty. In the course of the per formance he was seized with a convulsion which he covered with a forced laugh. When the play was finished he complained of being cold, and Baron had him carried home. He ate a little bread and cheese and went to bed, where he was taken with a violent fit of coughing. He asked for his wife, but before she could arrive he died in the arms of two lay-sisters who had come to Paris during Lent to collect for charity and were at the time staying at his house.

Armande, in the appeal which she subsequently addressed to the king, says that, while dying, he sent urgently to the parish priests of St. Eustache, who refused to come to his assistance. He accordingly died without the sacraments or any formal re nunciation of his profession, and the archbishop of Paris was thus canonically justified in refusing him Christian burial. His wife appealed to the king against this decision, and for the last time Louis XIV. intervened on behalf of his faithful servant. The royal intervention, however, as in the case of Tartuffe, resulted only in a compromise. The archbishop signed an order permitting ecclesiastical burial in the cemetery of St. Eustache, but the funeral was to be without ceremony, with two priests only and after sunset. The obscurity that covers the birthplace of Moliere rests also upon his grave. It is even doubted whether, as the king wished, he was actually interred in consecrated ground or, by secret instructions of the archbishop, in a portion of the cemetery reserved for those who were denied this privilege. In spite of the most careful researches it has since proved impossible to identify the tomb or the bones of Moliere.