He was sent, in 1636, being then fourteen years old, to the Collége de Clermont, named a little later, and still named, Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Rebuilt during the Second Empire, it stands on its old site behind the Collége de France, in widened Rue Saint-Jacques. Here, during his course of five years, he was sufficiently diligent in such studies as happened to please him; and was prominent in the plays, acted by the scholars at each prize-giving. He made many friendships with boys who became famous men; with one, just leaving school as he came, who especially stood his friend in after life—the youthful Prince de Conti, younger brother of the great Condé. And this elder brother became, years after, the friend and protector of the young actor-playwright, just as he was of some others of that famous group, Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau. All these, along with all men eminent in any way, were welcomed to his grand seat at Chantilly, and were frequent guests at his great town-house, whose salon was a rival to that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. His mansion, with its grounds, occupied the whole of that triangular space bounded now by Rues de Vaugirard, de Condé, and Monsieur-le-Prince. At the northern point of that triangle, nearly on the ground now covered by the Second Théâtre Français, the Odéon, stood the prince's private theatre; wherein Molière, by invitation, played the rôles of author, actor, manager. Molière's customary rôle in this great house was that of friend of the host, who wrote to him: "Come to me at any hour you please; you have but to announce your name; you visit can never be ill-timed."
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin betook himself early to the boards for which he was born, from which he could not be kept by his course at college or at law. He studied law fitfully for a while; sufficiently, withal, to lay up a stock of legal technicalities and procedure, which he employed with precision in many of his plays. So, too, he took in, no doubt unconsciously, details of his father's business; and his references, in his stage-talk, to hangings, furniture, and costumes, are frequent and exact.
The father, unable to journey with the King to Narbonne in the spring of 1642, as his official duties demanded, had his son appointed to the place, and the young man, accompanying the court and playing tapissier on this journey, saw, it is said, the execution of Cinq-Mars and de Thou. In the provinces at this time, or it may have been in Paris earlier, he met, became intimate with, and soon after joined, a troupe of strolling players, made up of Joseph Béjart, his two sisters Madeleine and Geneviève, and other young Parisians.
This troupe was touring in Languedoc early in 1642, and was rather strong in its talent and fortunate in its takings; in no way akin to that shabby set of barnstormers satirized by Scarron in his "Roman Comique." We cannot fix the date of Poquelin's début in the company, but we know that—with the unhallowed ambition of the born and predestined comedian—he began in tragedy, and that he was greeted by his rural audiences with hootings, punctuated by the pelting of fried potatoes, then sold at the theatre door. And we know that the troupe came north to Rouen in the autumn of 1643, playing a night or two in the natal town of Corneille. It is a plausible and a pleasing fancy that sees the glory of French dramatic art of that day, at home on a visit to his mother, receiving free tickets for the show, with the respects of the young recruit to the stage, the glory of French dramatic art at no distant day. The troupe had gone to Rouen and to other provincial towns only while awaiting the construction of their theatre in the capital, contracted for during the summer. At last, on the evening of December 31, 1643, it raised its first curtain to the Parisian public, under the brave, or the bumptious, title of "l'Illustre Théâtre."
To trace, from his first step on Paris boards, the successive sites of Molière's theatres is a delightful task, in natural continuation of that begun in an earlier chapter, where those theatres in existence before his time were pointed out. In England, we know, stage-players were "strollers and vagabonds" by statute; not allowed to play within London's walls. All their early theatres were outside the City limits. The Globe, the summer theatre of Shakespeare and his "fellows"—"whereon was prepared scaffolds for beholders to stand upon"—was across the Thames, on Bankside, Southwark. So, too, were the Hope, the Rose, the Swan. The Curtain was in Shoreditch, Davenant's theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the Blackfriars theatre on Ludgate Hill, just without the old wall.
The early playhouses of Paris were built—but for another reason—on the outer side of the town wall of Philippe-Auguste, and their seemingly unaccountable situations are easily accounted for by following on either bank the course of that wall, already plainly mapped out in preceding pages.
This magnificent wall of a magnificent monarch had lost much of its old significance for defence with the coming of gunpowder, and a new use was found for it, in gentler games than war, as the town outgrew its encircling limits. In the Middle Ages, tennis—the oldest ball-game known—was a favorite sport of kings and of those about them. It was called le jeu de paume, being played with the hand until the invention of the racket; the players standing in the ditch outside the wall, against which the ball was thrown. Beyond the ditch was built the court for onlookers, the common folk standing on its floor, their betters seated in the gallery. When the game lost its vogue, these courts were easily and cheaply turned into the rude theatres of that day, with abundant space for actors and spectators; those of low degree crowding on foot in the body of the building, those who paid a little more seated in the galleries, those of high degree on stools and benches at the side of the stage, and even on the stage itself. This encroachment on the stage, within sight of the audience, grew to such an abuse that it was done away with in 1759, and the scene was left solely to the players.
Where a tablet is let into the wall of the present Nos. 12 and 14 Rue Mazarine, then named the Fossé-de-Nesle—the ancient outer ditch of the old wall—a roomy playhouse had been contrived from a former tennis-court owned by Arnold Mestayer, a solid citizen of the town, captain of the Hundred Musketeers of Henri IV.'s day. This was the theatre taken by the Béjart troupe and named "l'Illustre Théâtre." Here young Poquelin made his first bow to Paris. The building stood on the sites of the present Nos. 10, 12, and 14 Rue Mazarine, its only entrance for spectators reached by an alley that ran along the line between Nos. 14 and 16, and so through to Rue de Seine, to where the buildings extended over the ground now covered by Nos. 11 and 13. These latter houses are claimed by local legend for Molière's residence, and it may well be that the rear part of the theatre served as sleeping-quarters for the troupe. The interior of No. 11 is of very ancient construction, its front being of later date. In the wall between it and No. 9—a low wooden structure, possibly a portion of the original fabric—is hidden the well that served first the tennis-players and then the stage-players. There is no longer any communication between these houses in Rue de Seine and those in Rue Mazarine. These latter were built in 1830, when the street was widened, that portion of the old theatre having been demolished a few years earlier.
It was in June, 1644, that the name Molière first appears, signed—it is his earliest signature in existence—among the rest of the company, to a contract with a dancing man for the theatre. How he came to select this name is not known, nor was it known to any of his young comrades; for he always refused to give his reasons. What is known, is that it was a name of weight even then, proving that, within the first six months of the theatre's existence, his business ability had made him its controlling spirit. But his abilities as manager and as actor could not bring success to the theatre. Foreign and civil wars made the State poor; wide-spread financial troubles made the people poor; that cruelly cold winter froze out the public. "Nul animal vivant n'entra dans notre salle," are the bitterly true words, put into the mouth of the young actor-manager, by an unknown writer of a scurrilous verse.
He and the troupe were liberated from their lease within the year, and, early in 1645, they migrated over the river to the Jeu de Paume de la Croix-Noire. On either end of the long, low building at No. 32 Quai des Célestins is a tablet; the western one showing where stood the Tour Barbeau that ended the wall on this river-bank; that at the eastern end marking the site of this theatre, just without the wall. It had an entrance on the quay-front for the boatmen and other water-side patrons, another in Rue des Barrés for its patrons coming by coach. Molière lodged in the house—probably a portion of the theatre—at the corner of the quay and of Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul—that country lane wherein had died Rabelais, nearly a century earlier. Little Rue des Barrés, already seen taking its name from the barred or striped gowns of the monks who settled there, is now Rue de l'Ave-Maria, and at its number 15 you will find the stage entrance of this theatre, hardly changed since it was first trodden by the players from over the river. There is the low and narrow door, one of its jambs bent with the weight of the more modern structure above, and beyond is the short alleyway, equally narrow, by which they passed to the stage. At its inner end, where it opens into a small court, is the stone rim of a well, half hidden in the wall. It is the well provided in each tennis-court for the players, and handed on, with the court itself, for the use of the actors. Molière has leaned over this well-curb to wash away his rouge and wrinkles. It is an indisputable and attractive witness of his early days. In Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, where he knelt at the altar for his marriage and stood at the font with his son; in Saint-Eustache, where he carried his second son for baptism; in Saint-Roch, where he wrote his name as godfather of a friend's daughter—within these vast and dim aisles, his bodily presence is vaguely shadowed forth; here we can touch the man.