Do you not observe, dear reader, that this anonymous libel, addressed to King Louis XIV. in order to prevent the performance of Tartuffe, is very similar to the petition addressed to King Charles X. in order to hinder the performance of Henri III.? except that the author or authors of that seventeenth century libel had the modesty to preserve their anonymity, whilst the illustrious Academicians of the nineteenth boldly signed their names: Viennet, Lemercier, Arnault, Étienne Jay, Jouy and Onésime Leroy. M. Onésime Leroy was not a member of the Academy, but he was very anxious to be one! Why he is not is a question I defy any one to answer. These insults were at any rate from contemporaries and can be understood; but Bossuet, who wrote ten years after the death of Molière; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote eighty years after the production of Tartuffe; and Bourdaloue and Fénelon ... Ah! I must really tell you what Fénelon thought of the author of the Précieuses ridicules. After the Eagle of Meaux, let us have the Swan of Cambrai! There are no fiercer creatures when they are angered than woolly fleeced sheep or white-plumed birds!
"Although Molière thought rightly he often expressed himself badly; he made use of the most strained and unnatural phrases. Terence said in four or five words, and with the most exquisite simplicity, what it took Molière a multitude of metaphors approaching to nonsense to say. I much prefer his prose to his poetry. For example, l'Avare is less badly written than the plays which are in verse; but, taken altogether, it seems to me, that even in his prose, he does not speak in simple enough language to express all passions."
Remark that this was written twenty years after the death of Molière, and that Fénelon, the author of Télémaque, in speaking to the Academy, which applauded with those noddings of the head which did not hinder their naps, boldly declared that the author of the Misanthrope, of Tartuffe and of the Femmes Savants did not know how to write in verse. O my dear Monsieur François de Salignac de la Motte de Fénelon, if I but had here a certain criticism that Charles Fourier wrote upon your Télémaque, how I should entertain my reader! In the meantime, the man whom seventeenth and eighteenth century criticism, whom ecclesiastics and philosophers, Bossuet and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, treated as heretical, a corrupter and an abomination; who, according to the anonymous writer of the letter to the king, spoke French passably well; who, according to Fénelon did not know how to write in verse—that man, in the nineteenth century, is considered a great moralist, a stern corrector of manners, an inimitable writer!
Yet more: men who, in their turn, write letters to the descendant of Louis XIV., in order to stop the heretics, corrupters of morals, abominable men of the nineteenth century from having their works played, grovel on their knees before the illustrious dead; they search his works for the slenderest motives he might have had or did not have, in writing them; they poke about to discover what he could have meant by such and such a thing, when he was merely giving to the world the fruits of such inspiration as only genius possesses; they even indulge in profound researches concerning the man who furnished the type for Tartuffe and into the circumstances which gave him the name of Tartuffe (so admirably appropriate to that personage, that it has become not only the name of a man, but the name of men.)
"We have pointed out where Molière got his model; it now remains to us to discuss the origin of the title of his play. To trace the derivation of a word might seem going into unnecessary detail in any other case; but nothing which concerns the masterpiece of our stage should be devoid of interest. Several commentators, among others Bret, have contended that Molière, busy over the work he was meditating, one day happened to be at the house of the Papal Nuncio where many saintly persons were gathered. A truffle-seller came to the door and the smell of his wares wafted in, whereupon the sanctimonious contrite expression on the faces of the courtiers of the ambassador of Rome lit up with animation, 'TARTUFOLI, Signor Nunzio! TARTUFOLI!' they exclaimed, pointing out the best to him. According to this version, it was the word tartufoli, pronounced with earthly sensuality by the lips of mystics, which suggested to Molière the name of his impostor. We were the first to dispute that fable and we quote below the opinion of one of the most distinguished of literary men, who did us the honour of adopting our opinion.
"In the time of Molière, the word truffer was generally used for tromper (i.e. to deceive), from which the word truffe was taken, a word eminently suitable to the kind of eatable it describes, because of the difficulty there is in finding it. Now, it is quite certain that, formerly, people used the words truffe and tartuffe indiscriminately, for we find it in an old French translation of the treatise by Platina, entitled De konestâ voluptate, printed in Paris in 1505, and quoted by le Duchat, in his edition of Méntage's Dictionnaire Étymologique. One of the chapters in Book IX. of this treatise is entitled, Des truffes ou tartuffes, and as le Duchat and other etymologists look upon the word truffe as derived from truffer, it is probable that people said tartuffe for truffe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, just as they could equally say tartuffer for truffer."
That is by M. Taschereau, whose opinion, let us hasten to say, is worth nothing in the letter to Charles X., but which is of great weight in the fine study he has published upon Molière. But here is what M. Étienne says, the author of Deux Gendres, a comedy made in collaboration with Shakespeare and the Jesuit Conaxa:
"The word truffes, says M. Étienne, of the French Academy, comes, then, from tartufferie, and perhaps it is not because they are difficult to find that this name was given them but because they are a powerful means of seduction, and the object of seduction is deception. Thus, in accordance with an ancient tradition, great dinner-parties, which exercise to-day such a profound influence in affairs of State, should be composed of Tartuffes. There are many more irrational derivations than this."
Really, my critical friend, or, rather, my enemy—would it not be better if you were a little less flattering to the dead and a little more tolerant towards the living? You would not then have on your conscience the suicide of Escousse, and of Lebras, the drowning of Gros and the suspension of Antony.
[1] Maximes et Réflexions sur la comédie.