[38] Guichard was convicted of the charge of attempted poisoning, declared "infamous," and sentenced to the amende honorable and to pay a heavy fine, while the printers of the memoir in which he had libelled Armande and others were also punished. He appealed against the sentence, which, in the following year, was quashed, a result undoubtedly due to the fact that he had powerful protectors at Court.
[39] An epigram ran:—
| "Elle avoit un mari d'esprit, qu'elle aimoit peu, |
| Elle en prend un de chair, qu'elle aime d'avantage." |
[40] M. Larroumet, La Comédie de Molière, p. 174.
[41] No. 11 Rue des Pierres. See Arsène Houssaye's interesting account of a visit paid to it, in his beautifully illustrated work, Molière: sa femme et sa fille (Paris: Dentu, 1880), p. 129 et seq.
[42] Paul Foucher, Les Coulisses du Passé.
[43] And not of a marchana des rubans, of the Pont-au-Change, as so many writers state, so that the epigram of Le Noble:—
| "Tu les as mesuré sans doute [tes vers] à l'aune antique |
| Dont jadis ton papa mesurant ses rubans," |
loses its point.
[44] It was performed twenty-one times, and the average receipts were 680 livres. But for twenty-four representations of Molière's comedy, the Bourgeois gentilhomme, which was played concurrently with Tite et Bérénice, the average takings were 1000 livres. Corneille received 2000 livres for his play, the same amount as Molière had paid him for Attila.