1 - The career strategy of an actor turned playwright: 'de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace’

Summary

On ignore ce grand Homme; & les foibles crayons, qu'on nous en a donnez, sont tous manquez; ou si peu recherchez, qu'ils ne suffisent pas pour le faire connôtre tel qu'il étoit. Le Public est rempli d'une infinité de fausses Histoires à son occasion. Il y a peu de personnes de son temps qui, pour se faire honneur d'avoir figuré avec lui, n'inventent des avantures qu'ils préendent avoir eues ensemble.

[We do not know this great Man, and the feeble sketches we have of him are all wide of the mark, or so lacking in depth that they are not enough to allow us to know him as he was. The general public has heard untold numbers of inaccurate stories about him. There are few among his contemporaries who, in order to enjoy the reflected glory of being associated with him, have not invented adventures that they claim to have shared with him.]

Thus wrote Grimarest in 1705. Three centuries later, we hardly know Molière's life, or his career, any better. We have only a few verifiable facts about his childhood and training. His thirteen years of life in the provinces have left few clues. Even in his last years in Paris, when his career as dramatist is well documented, his private life remains unknown. Moreover, Molière did not talk about himself. Few are the texts where he writes in the first person: a couple of prefaces, petitions and acknowledgements, generally linked to the debates arising from his work, and in the work itself a few passages where he acts out his own role as actor-director-author. Thus we can only get a feel of the man through what his contemporaries said; and their accounts generally take the form of unreliable anecdotes through which either his enemies sought to ridicule him, or else his friends aimed to make him the hero of a golden legend.