Moliere's
connection with the family of Bejard brought him much unhappiness.
The father of this family, Joseph Bejard the elder, was a
needy man, with
eleven children at least. His wife’s name was Marie
Herve. The most noted of his children, companions of Moliere,
were Joseph, Madeleine, Genevieve, and Armande. Of these,
Madeleine was a woman of great talent as an actress, and
Moliere’s friend, or perhaps mistress, through all the years
of his wanderings. On the 14th of February, 1662 Moliere married
Armande Claire Elisabeth Gresinde Bejard. His enemies at that
time, and a number of his biographers in our own day, have
attempted to prove that Armande Bejard was not the sister,
but the daughter of Madeleine, and even that Moliere’s wife
may have been his own daughter by Madeleine Bejard.
The arguments of M. Arsene Houssaye in support of this
abominable theory are based on reckless and ignorant
confusions, and do not deserve criticism.
But the system of M. Loiseleur is more
serious, and he goes no further
than the idea that
Madeleine was the mother of Armande. This certainly was the
opinion of tradition, an opinion based on the slanders
of Montfleury, a rival of Moliere’s, on the authority of the
spiteful and anonymous author of La Fameuse comidienne
(1688), and on the no less libelous play, Elomire
hypochondre. In 1821 tradition received a shock, or
Beffara then discovered Moliere’s “acte de manage,” in
which Armande, the bride, is spoken of as the sister of
Madeleine Bejard, by the same father and mother. The old
scandal, or part of it, was revived by M. Fournier and M.
Bazin, but received another blow in 1863. Soulie then
discovered a legal document of the 10th of March 1643,
in which the widow of Joseph Bejard renounced, in the name of
herself and her children, his inheritance, chiefly a
collection of unpaid bills. Now
in this document all the
children are described as minors, and among
them is
une petite non encore baptisée. This little girl, still
not christened in March 1643, is universally recognized as
the Armande Bejard afterwards married by
Moliere.
We reach this point, then,
that when Armande was an infant she was acknowledged as the
sister, not as the daughter, of Madeleine Bejard. M.
Loiseleur refuses to accept this evidence. Madeleine, says
he, had already become the mother, in 1638, of a daughter by
Esprit Raymond de Moirmoron, comte de Modene, and chamberlain
of Gaston duc d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII. In
1642 Modene, who had been exiled for political reasons, was
certain to return, for Richelieu had just died, and Louis
XIII was likely to follow him. Now Madeleine was again,
this is M. Loiseleur’s
hypothesis, about to become a
mother, and if Modene returned, and learned this fact, he
would not continue the liaison, still less would he
marry
her, which, by the way, he could not do, as his
wife was still alive. Madeleine, therefore, induced
her mother to acknowledge the little girl
as her own
child. In the first place, all this is pure
unsupported hypothesis. In the second place, it has always
been denied that Bejard’s wife could have been a mother in
1643, owing to her advanced age, probably fifty-three. But M.
Loiseleur himself says that Marie Herve was young enough ‘to
make the story “sufficiently probable.” If it was probable,
much more was it possible. M.
Loiseleur supports his contention
by pointing out that two of the other children, described
as legally minors, were over twenty-five, and that their age
was understated to make the account of Armande’s birth more
probable.
Nothing is less likely thanthat Modene would
have consulted this document to ascertain the truth about the
parentage of Armande, yet M. Loiseleur’s whole theory rests
on that extreme improbability. It must also be observed that
the date of the birth of Joseph Bejard is unknown, and he may
have been a minor when he was so described in the document of
the 10th of March 1643, while Madeleine had only passed her
twenty-fifth birthday, her legal majority, by two
months.
M. Loiseleur’s only other proof
is that Marie Herve gave Armande a respectable dowry, and
that, as we do not know whence the money came, it must have
come from Madeleine. The tradition in Grimarest, which makes
Madeleine behave en femme furieuse, when she heard of
the marriage, is based on a stereotypical appreciation of
the character of women. It will be admitted, probably, that
the reasons for supposing that Moliere espoused the daughter
of a woman who had been his mistress (if she had been his
mistress) are flimsy and inadequate. The affair of the dowry
is insisted on by M. Livet. But M. Livet explains the dowry by
the hypothesis that Armande was the daughter of Madeleine and
the comte de Modene, which exactly contradicts the theory of
M. Loiseleur, and is itself contradicted by dates, at least
as understood by M. Loiseleur. Such are the conjectures by
which the foul calumnies of Moliere’s enemies are supported
in the essays of modern French critics.