Moliere, the French Shakespeare

17^th February 1673 was the day on which the “French Shakespeare”, Molière, died. Although he did not have the variety of output that the English Shakespeare had, his influence on the drama of his native land was every bit as great.

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born in Paris in 1622. He became an actor and adopted the name Molière as his stage name when aged about 22, possibly to spare his father the shame of having an actor in the family.

He came to royal notice in 1658 when he performed one of his own plays before King Louis XIV and this led eventually to his company of players becoming “The King’s Troop”. By this time he was already writing, directing and acting in plays, mainly comedies, that were proving to be highly popular.

Although his personal preference was for tragedy, the demand was for farce and comedy and this was where his talents seemed to lie. Among his many “hits” were “Tartuffe” (1664), “Le Misanthrope” (1666), “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme” (1670) and “Le Malade Imaginaire” (1673).

It was during a performance of the last of these plays that Molière was taken seriously ill just as the curtain was about to fall. Ironically, the main character of the play, which Molière was playing, is a hypochondriac, but Molière’s illness was real enough. He was rushed to his home from the theatre but died within an hour from pulmonary tuberculosis – he had probably contracted it during a spell in a debtor’s prison when he had been much younger and now it had finally caught up with him at the age of 51.

Some of his plays had poked fun at the Church, and it took the intervention of the King for him to be allowed a burial in consecrated ground, which was in any case usually denied to members of the acting profession. The Church authorities reluctantly gave way but insisted that the funeral should take place at night so as not to attract attention.

© John Welford

Honoré de Balzac: an influential 19th century French novelist

The French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) made an important contribution to the development of the modern novel. He is also an important illustration of the principle that failure can be followed by great success if one refuses to give up.

He was born in Tours, a city on the River Loire about 130 miles southwest of Paris. His parents wanted him to become a lawyer, but this idea did not excite Honoré who, from the age of about 19, made up his mind that he was going to be a great writer. To this end he left Tours and headed for Paris.

He would spend the next decade enduring a series of disappointments and considerable poverty. As well as writing he tried his hand at printing and publishing, plus some even less likely ventures such as growing pineapples, but the only result was a steady accumulation of debt.

His attempts at writing got him absolutely nowhere. He started with a verse tragedy entitled “Cromwell”, which was a failure, as was a string of potboilers that were either slushy, sensationalist, or both. He had the notion that because writers such as Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper had enjoyed huge success from their historical fiction in English, he could do the same in French. He was wrong – mainly because his efforts lacked originality.

But when he was about 30 Balzac got an idea that was not only original but revolutionary. This was to create a body of work that was based on a central theme and in which characters made appearances in more than one book. The theme was life in Paris and the surrounding region, as lived by the huge variety of people to be found there. He discovered a gift for description of people and places that had not been appropriate to his earlier derivative work, and once he had started on creating his self-contained world he did not stop until he died from exhaustion 20 years later.

He gave his new venture an overall title, “La Comédie Humaine” – The Human Comedy – which he hoped would be every bit as significant to literature as “The Divine Comedy” of Dante Alighieri. His ambition was not misplaced.

The project ran to nearly 100 works, some being novels and others stories of varying lengths. They introduced more than 2000 characters, many of whom made re-appearances in later works and helped to bind them together. Titles included “Le Père Goriot”, “Eugénie Grandet” and “La Cousine Bette”.

Once started, there was no stopping Honoré de Balzac. He would routinely work for 18 hours at a stretch, drinking as many as 50 cups a coffee a day. His story “The Illustrious Gaudissart”, which is 14,000 words long, was written in a single overnight sitting. He was no slapdash writer, in that he would survey publishers’ proofs with keen attention and revise his work six or seven times before allowing it to be printed.

Despite his dedication to work Balzac was constantly searching for the perfect woman to make his life complete. This turned out to be a Polish countess, whom he eventually married after corresponding with her for 15 years. However, married bliss turned out to be short-lived, because he died only five months after the wedding.

Balzac’s work showed that the novel could be an art form capable of representing life in considerable detail, warts and all, but with sympathy and humour thrown in. This was a gift that he shared with his near contemporary across the English Channel, Charles Dickens. Between them they set the tone for the 19^th century realist novel.

© John Welford