“Tho’ old the thought and oft expressed,
’Tis his at last who says it best.”
It is, however, an interesting question whether this was the true meaning intended by Molière.
The story is told by Grimarest, the first biographer of the great dramatist. In 1671 Molière produced Les Fourberies de Scapin, in which he had inserted two scenes taken from Le Pedant Joué, of Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655). (They are the amusing scenes where Geronte repeatedly says, Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère, “What the deuce was he doing in that Turkish galley?”) Grimarest says that Cyrano had used in these scenes what he had overheard from Molière, and that the latter, when taxed with the plagiarism, replied, “Je reprends mon bien où je le trouve” (“I take back my property, wherever I find it”). That is to say, he definitely denied the plagiarism.
Voltaire, in a “Life of Molière,” makes a general assertion (not referring specially to this incident) that all Grimarest’s stories are false. This must, of course, be far too sweeping an assertion, and Grimarest is in fact quoted as an authority. Voltaire himself (1694-1778) uses the saying in the sense given by Grimarest (La Pucelle, Chant III.):
Cette culotte est mienne; et je prendrai
Ce que fut mien où je le trouverai.
(“These breeches are mine, and I shall take what was mine wherever I find it.”) Agnès Sorel had been captured dressed as a man and wearing the garment in question, which had been previously stolen from the speaker.
It seems to me that Grimarest’s story must be accepted, that Molière claimed the scenes as originally his and denied plagiarism. There is no evidence to the contrary, and the saying is given its obvious meaning. (It is word for word as in the Digest, Ubi rem meam invenio, ibi vindico, “Where I find my own property, I appropriate it.”) But the question then arises, Why should so commonplace a statement have attained such notoriety?