His portraiture by pen, too, would have been lost to us, but for an old lady who has left a detailed and vivid description of "Monsieur Molière." This Madame Poisson was the daughter of Du Croissy, whose name appears in the troupe's early play-bills; and the wife of Paul Poisson, also an actor with Molière, and with his widow. Madame Poisson died in 1756, aged ninety-eight, so that she was an observant and intelligent girl of fifteen at the time of Molière's death. In her recollections, written in 1740, she says that he was neither stout nor thin; in stature he was rather tall than short, his carriage noble, his leg very fine, his walk measured, his air most serious; the nose large, the mouth wide, the lips full, his complexion dark, his eyebrows black and heavy, "and the varied movements he gave them"—and, she might have added, his whole facial flexibility—"made him master of immense comic expression."
"His air most serious," she says; it was more than that, as is proven by hints of his companions, and shown by strokes in the surviving portraits. All these go to assure us of his essential melancholy. Not only did he carry about with him the traditional dejection of the comic actor, but he was by character and by habit contemplative—observant of human nature—as well as introspective—peering into his own nature. The man who does this necessarily grows sad. Molière's sadness was mitigated by a humor of equal depth, a conjunction rare in the Latin races, and found at its best only in him and in Cervantes. This set him to writing and acting farces; and into them he put sentiment for the first time on the French stage. There is a gravity behind his buffoonery, and a secret sympathy with his butts. So, when he came to write comedy—that hard and merciless exposure of our common human nature, turned inside out for scorn—he left place for pity in his ridicule, and there is no cruelty in his laughter. His wholly sweet spirit could not be soured by the injustices and insolences that came into his life. If there was a bitter taste in his mouth, his lips were all honey. "Ce rire amer," marked by Boileau in the actor's Alceste, was only his stage assumption for that character. The inborn good-heartedness that made his comedy gracious and unhostile, made his relations with men and women always kindly and generous. You see that sympathy with humanity in Mignard's portrait, and in the bust in the foyer of the Comédie Française, made by Houdon from other portraits and from descriptions. Under the projecting brow of the observer are the eyes of the contemplator, shrewd and speculative, and withal infinitely sorrowful, with the sadness of the man who knew how to suffer acutely, mostly in silence and in patience; and this is the face of the man who made all France laugh!
Pierre Corneille stands in bronze on the bridge of his natal town, Rouen, where he stood in the flesh of his twenty-eight years, among other citizens who went to welcome Louis XIII. and his ruler, Richelieu, on their visit in 1634. The young advocate by profession and poet by predilection presented his verses in greeting and in honor of the King, and was soon after enrolled one of the small and select band of the Cardinal's poets. With the Cardinal's commission and a play or two, already written when only twenty-three, he made his way to Paris. For nearly thirty years, the years of his dramatic triumphs, Corneille lived alternately in Paris and in Rouen, until his mother's death, in 1662, left him free to make his home in the capital. In that year he settled in rooms in the Hôtel de Guise, now the Musée des Archives, whose ducal owner was a patron of the Théâtre du Marais, close at hand. At his death, in or about 1664, Corneille sent in a rhymed petition for rooms in the Louvre, where lodging was granted to men of letters not too well-to-do. His claim was refused, and he took an apartment in Rue de Cléry during that same year. It was a workman's quarter, and none of its houses were very grand, but that of Corneille is spoken of as one of the better sort, with its own porte-cochère. Pierre's younger brother, Thomas, came to live in the same house. And from this time on, the two brothers were never parted in their lives. They had married sisters, and the two families dwelt in quiet happiness under the common roof. This house in Rue de Cléry cannot be fixed. It may be one of the poor dwellings still standing in that old street, or it may no longer exist. It is the house famous in anecdotal history for owning the trap-door in the floor between the working-rooms of the brothers, which Pierre—at loss for an adequate rhyme—would lift up, and call to Thomas, writing in his room below, to give him the wished-for word.
This dull street formed the background of a touching picture, when, in 1667, Corneille's son was brought home, wounded, from the siege of Douai. The straw from the litter was scattered about the street as the father helped them lift his boy to carry him into the house, and Corneille was summoned to the Châtelet, for breaking police regulations with regard to the care of thoroughfares; he appeared, pleaded his own cause, and was cast in damages!
Here in 1671, Corneille and Molière, in collaboration, wrote the "tragedy-ballet 'Psyche'"; this work in common cementing a friendship already begun between the two men, and now made firmer for the two years of Molière's life on from this date. The play was begun and finished in a fortnight, to meet the usual urgency of the King in his amusements. Molière planned the piece and its spectacular effects, and wrote the prologue, the first act, and the first scenes of the second and third acts; Corneille's share being the rest of the rhymed dialogue and the songs. It was set to music by Lulli—"the incomparable Monsieur Lulli," as he was called by Molière—whose generous laudation of the musician was not lessened by his estimate of the man. For Lulli was not an honest man, and he prospered at the expense of his fellows. His magnificent home was built by money borrowed from Molière, whose widow was repaid as we have seen. Lulli's hôtel is still in perfect condition as to its exterior, at the corner of Rues des Petits-Champs and Sainte-Anne. This latter front is the finer, with its pilasters and composite capitals, its masks carved in the keystones of the low entresol windows, and the musical instruments placed above the middle window of the first grand floor.
They make a pretty picture, not without a touch of the pathetic—and M. Gèrôme has put it on canvas—as they sit side by side, planning and plotting their play: Molière at the top of his career, busy, prosperous, applauded; Corneille past his prime and his popularity, beginning to bend with age and to break in spirit. He had, by now, fallen on evil days, which saw him "satiated with glory, and famished for money," in his words to Boileau. Richelieu may not have done much for him, but he had been at least a power in his patronage, and his death, in 1642, had left the old poet with no friend at court, albeit the new minister, Mazarin, had put him on the pension list. His triumphs with "Le Cid" and "Les Horaces" had not saved him from—nor helped him bear—the dire failures of "Attila" and of "Agésilas." Poetry had proved a poor trade, royalty had forgotten him, Colbert's economies had left his pension in arrears along with many others, and finally, after Colbert's death, the new minister, Louvois, had suppressed it entirely. Against the earlier default he had made patient and whimsical protest in verse; each official year of delay had been officially lengthened to fifteen months; and Corneille's Muse was made to hope that each of the King's remaining years of reign might be lengthened to an equal limit!
The contrast between the two figures—the King of French Tragedy shabby in Paris streets, the King of French people resplendent at Versailles—is sharply drawn by Théophile Gautier in his superb verses, read at Corneille's birthday fête at the Comédie Française, on June 6, 1851. Gautier had not been able to find any motive for the lines, which he had promised to prepare for Arsène Houssaye, the director, until Hugo gave him this cue.
The faithful, generous Boileau—the man called "stingy," because of his exactness, which yet enabled him always to aid others—offered to surrender his own well-secured and promptly-paid pension in favor of his old friend; a transfer not allowed by the authorities, and the King sent a sum of money, at length, to Corneille. It came two days before the poet's death, when he might have quoted, "I have no time to spend it!" There is extant a letter from an old Rouen friend of his who, visiting Paris in 1679, describes a walk he took with Corneille, then aged seventy-three. In Rue de la Parcheminerie—that ancient street on the left bank of the Seine, which we have already found to be less spoiled by modern improvements than are its neighbors—Corneille sat down on a plank by a cobbler's stall, to have one of his worn shoes patched. That cobbler's stall, or its direct descendant, may be seen in that street, to-day. Corneille counted his coppers and found just enough to pay the cobbler's paltry charge; refusing to accept any coin from the proffered purse of his friend, who, then and there, wept in pity for such a plight for such a man.
