Early in 1667 we find Molière leasing a little cottage, or part of a cottage, at Auteuil, for a retreat at times. He needed its pure air for his failing health, its quiet for his work, and its distance from the disquiet of his home with Armande and Madeleine. He had laid by money; and his earnings, with his pension from the King—who had permitted to the troupe the title of "His Majesty's Comedians"—gave him a handsome income. He was not without shrewdness as a man of affairs, and not without tact as a courtier. Success, in its worst worldly sense, could come only through royal favor in that day, and no man, whatever his manliness, seemed ashamed to stoop to flatter. Racine, La Fontaine, the sterling Boileau, the antiquely upright Corneille, were tarred, thickly or thinly, with the same brush.
Auteuil was then a tranquil village, far away from the town's turmoil, and brought near enough for its dwellers by the silent and swift river. Now it is a bustling suburb of the city, and the site of Molière's cottage and grounds is covered by a block of commonplace modern dwellings on the corner of Rue Théophile Gautier and Rue d'Auteuil, and is marked by a tablet in the front wall of No. 2 of the latter street. It has been claimed that this is a mistaken localization, and that it is nearly opposite this spot that we must look for his garden and a fragment of his villa, still saved. The conscientious pilgrim may not fail to take that look, and will ring at the iron gate of No. 57 Rue Théophile Gautier. It is the gate of the ancient hôtel of Choiseul-Praslin, a name of unhappy memory in the annals of swell assassins. The ducal wearer of the title, during the reign of Louis-Philippe, stabbed his wife to death in their town-house in the Champs Élysées, and poisoned himself in his cell to save his condemnation by his fellow-peers of France. The ancient family mansion has been taken by "Les Dominicaines," who have devoted themselves for centuries to the education of young girls, and have placed here the Institution of Saint Thomas of Aquinas.
A white-robed sister graciously gives permission to enter, and leads the visitor across the spacious court, through the stately rooms and halls—all intact in their old-fashioned harmony of proportion and decoration—into the garden that stretches far along Rue de Rémusat, and that once spread away down the slope to the Seine. Here, amid the magnificent cedar trees, centuries old, stands a mutilated pavilion of red brick and white stone or stucco, showing only its unbroken porch with pillars and a fragment of the fabric, cut raggedly away a few feet behind, to make room for a new structure. Over the central door are small figures in bas-relief, and in the pediment above one reads, "Ici fut la Maison de Molière." It would be a comfort to be able to accept this legend; the fact that prevents is that the pavilion was erected only in 1855 by the owner of the garden, to keep alive the associations of Molière with this quarter!
It is in his garden, behind the wall that holds the tablet, that we may see the player-poet as he rests in the frequent free hours, and days withal, that came in the actor's busy life then. Here he walks, alone or with his chosen cronies: Rohault, his sympathetic physician; Boileau, a frequent visitor; Chapelle, who had a room in the cottage, the quondam schoolfellow and the man of rare gifts; a pleasing minor-poet, fond of fun, fonder of wine, friendly even to rudeness, but beloved by all the others, whom he teased and ridiculed, and yet counselled shrewdly. He sympathized with, albeit his sceptic spirit could not quite fraternize with, the sensitive vibrating nature of Molière, that brought, along with acutest enjoyment, the keenest suffering. In this day-and-night companionship, craving consolation for his betossed soul, Molière gave voice to his sorrows, bewailing his wife's frailties and the torments they brought to him—to him, "born to tenderness," as he truly put it, but unable to plant any root of tenderness in her shallow nature—loving her in spite of reason, living with her, but not as her husband, suffering ceaselessly.
This garden often saw gayer scenes of good-fellowship and feasting, and once a historic frolic, when the convives, flushed with wine, ran down the slope to the river, bent on plunging in to cool their blood, and were kept dry and undrowned by Molière's steadier head and hand. His ménage was modest, and his wife seldom came out from their town apartment, but his daughter was brought often for a visit from her boarding-school near by in Auteuil. He was beloved by all his neighbors, to whom he was known less by his public repute than by his constant kindly acts among them. It was not the actor-manager, but the "tapissier valet-de-chambre du Roi," then residing in Auteuil, who signed the register of the parish church, as god-father of a village boy on March 20, 1671; just as he had signed, in the same capacity, the register of Saint-Roch on September 10, 1669, at the christening of a friend's daughter, Jeanne Catherine Toutbel. These signatures were destroyed when all the ancient church registers, then stored in the Hôtel de Ville, were burned by the Commune.
On the night of Friday, February 16, 1673, while personating his Malade Imaginaire—its fourth performance—Molière was struck down by a genuine malady. He pulled through the play, and, as the curtain went down at last, he was nearly strangled by a spasm of coughing that broke a blood-vessel. Careful hands carried him around to his bedroom on the second floor of No. 40, where in a few days—too few, his years being a little more than fifty—death set him free from suffering.
This fatal crisis was the culmination of a long series of recurrent paroxysms, coming from his fevered life and his fiery soul, that "o'er informed the tenement of clay," in Dryden's phrase. And his heart had been crushed by the death of his second boy, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste-Armand, in October of the previous year. Then, on the physical side, he had been subjected throughout long years to constant exposure to draughts on the stage, and to sudden changes within and without the theatre, most trying to so delicate a frame. His watchful friend, Boileau, had often urged him to leave the stage before he should break down. Moreover, it distressed Boileau that the greatest genius of his time, as he considered Molière, should have to paint his face, put on a false mustache, get into a bag and be beaten with sticks, in his ludicrous rôle of comic valet. But all pleading was thrown away. The invalid maintained that nothing but his own management, his own plays, and his own playing, kept his theatre alive and his company from starvation; and so he held on to the end, dying literally in harness. His wife appeared too late on the last scene, the priest who was summoned could not come in time, and the dying eyes were closed by two stranger nuns, lodging for the time in the house.
The arm-chair, in which sat the Malade Imaginaire on the last night of his professional life, is treasured among the relics of the Théâtre Français. It is a massive piece of oak furniture, with solid square arms and legs; the roomy back lets down, and is held at any required angle by an iron ratchet; there are iron pegs in front for the little shelf, used by the sick man for his bottles and books. The brown leather covering is time-worn and stitched in spots. It is a most attractive relic, this simple piece of stage property. Its exact copy as to shape, size, and color is used on the boards of the Théâtre Français in the performances of "Le Malade Imaginaire." And, with equal reverence, they kept for many years in the ancient village of Pézénas, in Languedoc—where the strolling troupe wintered in 1655-6, playing in the adjacent hamlets and in the châteaux of the seigneurie about—the big wooden arm-chair belonging to the barber Gély, and almost daily through that winter occupied by Molière. Upon it he was wont to sit, in a corner, contemplating all who came and went, making secret notes on the tablets he carried always for constant records of the human document. It has descended to a gentleman in Paris, by whom it is cherished.
The curé of Saint-Eustache, the parish church, refused its sacrament for the burial of the author of "Tartufe." "To get by prayer a little earth," in Boileau's words, the widow had to plead with the King; and it was only his order that wrung permission from the Archbishop of Paris for those "maimed rites" that we all know. They were accorded, not to the player, but, as the burial register reads, to the "Tapissier valet-de-chambre du Roi." Carried to his grave by night, he was followed by a great concourse of unhired mourners, of every rank and condition; and to the poor among them, money was distributed by the widow. The grave—in which was placed the French Terence and Plautus in one, to use La Fontaine's happy phrase—was dug in that portion of the cemetery of the Chapel of Saint-Joseph, belonging to Saint-Eustache, that was styled consecrated by the priesthood. This cemetery going out of use, the ground, which lay on the right of the old road to Montmartre, was given to a market. This, in its turn, was cleared away between 1875 and 1880, and on the site of the cemetery are the buildings numbered 142 and 144 Rue Montmartre, 24 and 26 Rue Saint-Joseph. Over the grave, as she thought, the widow erected a great tombstone, under which, tradition says, Molière did not lie. Tradition lies, doubtless, and Armande's belated grief and posthumous devotion probably displayed themselves on the right spot. The stone was cracked—going to bits soon after—by a fire built on it during the terrible winter a few years later, when the poor of Paris were warmed by great out-of-door fires. The exact spot of sepulture could not be fixed in 1792, when the more sober revolutionary sections were anxious to save the remains of their really great men from the desecrations of the Patriots, to whom no ground was consecrate, nor any memories sacred. Then, in the words of the official document, "the bones which seemed to be those of Molière" were exhumed, and carried for safe keeping to the Museum of French Monuments begun by Alexandre Lenoir in 1791, in the Convent of the Petits-Augustins. Its site is now mostly covered by the court of the Beaux-Arts in Rue Bonaparte. Those same supposed bones of Molière were transferred, early in the present century, to the Cemetery of Père-Lachaise, where they now lie in a stone sarcophagus. By their side rest the supposed bones of La Fontaine, removed from the same ground to the same museum at the same time; La Fontaine having really been buried, twenty-two years after Molière's burial, in the Cemetery of the Innocents, a half-mile from that of Saint-Joseph!
Our ignorance as to whether these be Molière's bones, under the monument in Père-Lachaise, is matched by our unacquaintance with the facts of his life. And we know almost as little of Molière the man, as we know of the man called Shakespeare—the only names in the modern drama which can be coupled. We have no specimens of the actual manuscript, and few specimens of the handwriting, of either. The Comédie Française has a priceless signature of Molière given by Dumas fils, and there are others, it is believed, on legal documents in notaries' offices, but no one knows how to get at them.