Molière. Anniversary of his birth. A chosen fragment

Moliere. (Nicolas Mignard (1658))

Molière, Or what is the same, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, was born a day like today of 1622 en Paris. It was one of the great french playwrights besides actor. In the wake of Racine and Corneille, the other vertices of that eternal triangle of the Gallic theater, and pursuing his fame, Molière was a standard bearer of comedy, as he failed to succeed in the drama. Today, in his memory and in mine, I remember his work choosing a fragment of one of his titles.

Molière et moi

I have a certain predilection for this French author, I have to admit it. Maybe because the first work I saw hers was Scapin's Tangles, at the Spanish Theater. And I remember it fondly because it was also a very special day. Because you never forget the first time they say "I love you." So that day spent in Madrid, on a high school excursion, in full adolescence and in love, finish off with this delicious comedy (not one of the great ones) in which she starred Jose Pedro Carrion Well, that cannot be forgotten.

Years later I went back to enjoying enormously with The bourgeois gentleman, on another of those occasions that you should not waste if you live just less than 50 kilometers from Almagro. So we went to see her at Classical Theater Festival, unavoidable cultural event of the summer of La Mancha, national and international.

And the last thing I saw recently was the adaptation of The misanthrope what did those of Kamikaze. But I stay with those first two. Maybe they weren't the most relevant, like The miser, The imaginary patient o Truffle, but they are, say, mine.

However today I remember this fragment of one of the works perhaps less known from Molière, The ridiculous beautiful. And let's also remember that its great merit was adapting the art comedy Italian company of his time to the French theater, in addition to fight hypocrisy of their society through irony of its texts and characters. Like in this one.

A chosen fragment

The ridiculous beautiful

MADELÓN: My father, here is my cousin, who will tell you the same as I did: that marriage should never come until after the other adventures. In order to be agreeable, a lover must know how to declaim the beautiful feelings, exhale the tender, the delicate and the ardent, and that his dedication consists of the forms. First, you must see in the temple or on the walk, or in some public ceremony, the person with whom you are in love, or else, be fatally taken to her house by a relative or a friend and leave there all dreamer or melancholic. For some time he will hide his passion for the loved object, making several visits, however, where he does not fail to bring up a gallant topic that spurs the people in the meeting. When the day comes, the statement must generally be made on the avenue of some garden, while the company has moved away a little, and this statement must be followed by a quick anger, which is revealed in our blush and which drives away for a while the loving our presence. Then he finds ways to appease us, to insensibly get used to the discourse of his passion, to elicit that disagreeable confession from us. After this come the adventures, the rivals who are crossed before an ingrained inclination, the persecutions of the parents, the jealousy based on false appearances, the complaints, the despairs, the kidnappings and everything else. Here is how things are carried out in elegant ways, and with those rules, which could not be dispensed with in good gallantry. But arriving right away to the conjugal union, making love only when concluding the marriage contract and just starting the novel from the tail, I repeat, my father, that there is nothing more vulgar than that procedure, and they give me nausea just thinking about it.