Molière replied that he would have striven to leave his very deathbed to plead the cause he sought to win of His Majesty; and then he went on to tell of Ninon’s captivity, of which the king appeared to be ignorant. “It is, moreover, very absurd, Sire,” added Molière, “for I assure your Majesty, that Ninon is neither fille nor répentie.”
The king laughed at this view of the case, as did his minister Colbert, who was seated near, and Molière, not losing sight of the royal proclivity of promise-breaking, wasted not a moment in causing the order vouchsafed for Ninon’s release, to be delivered in to the Superior of the Répenties. Then a coach was sent for, the gates were opened, and Ninon was free.
Full of gratitude for the favour which she had not so much as sought of Molière, she hastened to his house. He was seated wearily in a chair, but for the moment, in her joyful excitement, she did not notice his appearance, more especially as he sprang up briskly to meet her and to take her in his arms, while her tears fell fast, assuring her that she had done him a world of good. Before she came in he owned that he had been feeling unusually ill, and was about to ask Croisy to take his place on the stage that evening; but now—“No, I will play myself,” added Molière, and his pale cheeks flushed, and his eyes gathered their wonted brightness and animation. “I will be Le Malade Imaginaire once more!”
Alas! once more. And a little while before the curtain fell for the last time on the closing interlude, the word “juro,” several times reiterated through the dialogue, came faintly on a stream of blood from his lips, and the dying Molière was borne from the stage.
It was but the fulfilment of the apprehensions of his friends. His lungs had been for some time affected, and he had broken a blood-vessel. Already half-unconscious, they conveyed him homeward to his house in the rue de Richelieu; but he fainted on the way, and he was carried into the convent of St Vincent de Paul and laid on a couch in the parlour, where, in sore distress, the good sisters tended him, for he had frequently shown them much hospitality and generous kindness, and in the arms of the two supporting him he passed away. His half-inaudible dying request was for religious consolation; but ere that came he was dead. The priest of St Eustache did not hurry to attend a stage-player—the “rogue and vagabond”—for what else in the sight of the law was this fine literary genius, great philosopher and noble-hearted man? Neither was it the fault of Monseigneur Harlay de Champvallon, Archbishop of Paris (“so notorious,” writes the poet’s great biographer, “for his gallant intrigues”) that he was denied Christian burial.
Molière’s young wife had not been a pattern of conjugal propriety; but she revered her husband; and in her indignation at the archbishop’s refusal, she cried—“They refuse to bury a man to whom in Greece, altars would have been erected!” and asking the Curé of Auteuil, whose views differed from the archiepiscopal ones, to accompany her to Versailles, she found her way into the king’s presence and demanded justice. “If my husband was a criminal, his crimes were sanctioned by your Majesty in person,” she said. Louis’s response was elusive, as it was apt to be in the face of difficult questions. It was, he said, an affair of the archbishop’s; but he sent secret commands to Monseigneur, which resulted in a compromise, and the body of the dead poet was interred in the cemetery of St Joseph, rue Montmartre, accompanied by two priests. But it was not first admitted into the church, for he had died, as Monseigneur said, “without the consolations of religion.”
“A ministering angel shall my sister be when thou liest howling.” Irresistibly the words of that other great dramatic genius force themselves into the record of Molière’s laying to his long rest. It was still only to be secured amid the riot of a rabble which, having got wind of the dispute in high places, assembled outside the house in the rue de Richelieu. The disgraceful uproar was quelled only by Madame Molière throwing money, to a large amount, out of window. Then the mob silenced down, and followed the simple cortège respectfully.
The widow of Molière subsequently married again; but his memory must have remained warm in her heart; for some years later, during a bitter cold winter, she had a hundred loads of wood conveyed to the cemetery, and burned on the tomb of her husband, to warm all the poor people of the quarter. “The great heat split in two the stone, which was still to be seen cracked across the middle in the early part of the eighteenth century.”[6] The Fontaine Molière, in the rue de Richelieu, now commemorates the poet, and in the green-room of the Comédie Française are the bust, and the portrait, by the painter Coypel, of him who was practically the founder of the world-famous institution. There were countless epitaphs on Molière, generated for the most part, by the injustices done him in life as in death. The following is accounted the most noteworthy:—
“Tu réformas et la ville et la cour;
Mais quelle en fut la récompense?