Moliere was born in Paris,
probably in January 1622. The baptismal certificate which
is usually and almost with absolute certainty accepted as his
is dated the 15th of January 1622, but it is not possible to
infer that he was born
on the day of his christening. The exact place of
his birth is also disputed, but it seems tolerably certain
that he saw the light in a house of the Rue St Honore. His
father was Jean Poquelin, an upholsterer, who, in 1631,
succeeded his own uncle as valet tapissier de chambre du
roi. The family of Poquelin came from Beauvais, where
for some centuries they had been prosperous tradesmen. The
legend of their Scotch descent seems to have been finally
disproved. The mother of Moliere was Marie Cresse; and on his
father ‘s side he was connected with the family of Mazuel
musicians attached to the court of France.
In 1632 Moliere lost his mother; his
father married again in 1633. The father possessed certain
shops in the covered Halle de la Foire, Saint Germain des
Prés, and biographers have imagined that Moliere might have
received his first bent towards the stage from the spectacles
offered to the holiday people at the fair. Of his
early education little is known; but it is certain that his
mother possessed a Bible and Plutarch’s Lives, books
which an intelligent child would not fail to study. In spite
of a persistent tradition, there is no reason to believe that
the later education of Moliere was neglected. “II fit
ses
humanitez au college de Clermont,” says the brief
life of the comedian
published by his friend and fellow
actor, La Grange, in the edition of his works printed in
1682. La Grange adds that Moliere “eut l’advantage de suivre
M. le Prince de Conti dans toutes ses classes.” As Conti
was seven years younger than Moliere, it is not easy to
understand how Moliere came to be the school contemporary of
the prince.
Among more serious studies the
Jesuit fathers encouraged their pupils to take part in
ballets, and in later life Moliere was a distinguished master
of
this sort of entertainment. According to Grimarest, the
first writer who published a life of Moliere in any detail
(1705), he not only acquired “his humanities,” but finished
his “philosophy” in five years. He left the College de
Clermont in 1641, the year when Gassendi, a great historian
of Aristotle, arrived in Paris. The Logic and Ethics
of Aristotle, with his Physics and Metaphysics,
were the chief philosophical textbooks at the College de
Clermont. But when he became the pupil of Gassendi (in
company with Cyrano de Bergerac, Chapelie, and Hesnaut),
Moliere was taught to appreciate the atomic philosophy of
Lucretius. There seems no doubt that Moliere began, and almost or
quite finished, a translation of the De natura rerum.
According to a manuscript note of Trallage, published by M.
Paul Lacroix, the manuscript was sold by Moliere’s widow to a
bookseller.
His philosophic studies left a
deep mark on the genius of Moliere. In the Jugement
de Pluton sur les deux parties des nouveaux dialogues des
morts (1684), the verdict is que Moliere ne parleroit
point de philosophie. To talk
philosophy was a
favorite exercise of his during his life, and his ideas are
indicated with sufficient clearness in several of his
plays. There seems no connection between them and the
opinions of Moliere le Critique in a dialogue of that
name, published in Holland in 1709. From his study of
philosophy he gained his knowledge of the ways
of contemporary pedants: of Pancrace the Aristotelian, of
Marphorius the Cartesian, of Trissotin, of Philaminte, who
loves Platonism, of Belise, who relishes “les petits corps,”
and Armande, who loves “les
tourbillons.”
Grimarest has an amusing anecdote
of a controversy in which Moliere, defending Descartes, chose
a lay brother of a begging order for umpire, while
Chapelle appealed to the same expert in favor of Gassendi.
His college education over, Moliere studied law, and there is
even evidence that of tradition in Grimarest, and of Le
Boulanger de Chalussay, the libelous author
of a play called
Elomire hypochondre to prove that he was actually
called
to the bar. More trustworthy is the passing remark
in La Grange’s short
biography (1682), “an sortir des
écoles de droit, il choisit la profession de
comédien.”
Before joining a troop of half amateur
comedians, however, Moliere had some experience in his
father’s business. In 1637 his father had obtained for him
the right to succeed of his own office as valet tapissier
de chambre du roi. The document is mentioned in the
inventory of Moliere’s effects, taken after
his death. When the
king traveled the valet accompanied him to arrange the
furniture of the royal quarters. There is very good reason to
believe that Moliere accompanied Louis XIII as his valet
tapissier to Provence in 1642. It is even not impossible
that Moliere was the young valet de chambre who
concealed Cinq Mars just before his arrest at Narbonne, on
the 13th of June 1642.
But this is part of the romance rather
than of the history of Moliere. From a document of
January 6th, 1643. Moliere acknowledges the receipt of
money
due to him from his deceased mother’s estate, and gives
up his claim to
succeed his father as valet de chambre
du roi. On the 28th of December
of the same year we
learn, again from documentary evidence, that
Jean
Baptiste Poquelin, with Joseph Bejard, Madeleine
Bejard, Genevieve Bejard, and others, have hired a tennis
court and fitted it up as a stage for dramatic performances.
The company called themselves L’Illustre
Theatre, illustre being then almost a slang word,
freely employed by the writers of the period.