The Marriage of Moliere

Moliere's connection with the family of Bejard brought him much unhappiness. The father of this family, Joseph Bejard the elder, was a needy man, with eleven children at least. His wife’s name was Marie Herve.

The most noted of his children, companions of Moliere, were Joseph, Madeleine, Genevieve, and Armande. Of these, Madeleine was a woman of great talent as an actress, and Moliere’s friend, or perhaps mistress, through all the years of his wanderings. On the 14th of February, 1662 Moliere married Armande Claire Elisabeth Gresinde Bejard. His enemies at that time, and a number of his biographers in our own day, have attempted to prove that Armande Bejard was not the sister, but the daughter of Madeleine, and even that Moliere’s wife may have been his own daughter by Madeleine Bejard. The arguments of M. Arsene Houssaye in support of this abominable theory are based on reckless and ignorant confusions, and do not deserve criticism.

But the system of M. Loiseleur is more serious, and he goes no further than the idea that Madeleine was the mother of Armande. This certainly was the opinion of tradition, an opinion based on the slanders of Montfleury, a rival of Moliere’s, on the authority of the spiteful and anonymous author of La Fameuse comidienne (1688), and on the no less libelous play, Elomire hypochondre. In 1821 tradition received a shock, or Beffara then discovered Moliere’s “acte de manage,” in which Armande, the bride, is spoken of as the sister of Madeleine Bejard, by the same father and mother. The old scandal, or part of it, was revived by M. Fournier and M. Bazin, but received another blow in 1863. Soulie then discovered a legal document of the 10th of March 1643, in which the widow of Joseph Bejard renounced, in the name of herself and her children, his inheritance, chiefly a collection of unpaid bills. Now in this document all the children are described as minors, and among them is une petite non encore baptisée. This little girl, still not christened in March 1643, is universally recognized as the Armande Bejard afterwards married by Moliere.

We reach this point, then, that when Armande was an infant she was acknowledged as the sister, not as the daughter, of Madeleine Bejard. M. Loiseleur refuses to accept this evidence. Madeleine, says he, had already become the mother, in 1638, of a daughter by Esprit Raymond de Moirmoron, comte de Modene, and chamberlain of Gaston duc d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII. In 1642 Modene, who had been exiled for political reasons, was certain to return, for Richelieu had just died, and Louis XIII was likely to follow him. Now Madeleine was again, this is M. Loiseleur’s hypothesis, about to become a mother, and if Modene returned, and learned this fact, he would not continue the liaison, still less would he marry her, which, by the way, he could not do, as his wife was still alive. Madeleine, therefore, induced her mother to acknowledge the little girl as her own child. In the first place, all this is pure unsupported hypothesis. In the second place, it has always been denied that Bejard’s wife could have been a mother in 1643, owing to her advanced age, probably fifty-three. But M. Loiseleur himself says that Marie Herve was young enough ‘to make the story “sufficiently probable.” If it was probable, much more was it possible. M.

Loiseleur supports his contention by pointing out that two of the other children, described as legally minors, were over twenty-five, and that their age was understated to make the account of Armande’s birth more probable. Nothing is less likely thanthat Modene would have consulted this document to ascertain the truth about the parentage of Armande, yet M. Loiseleur’s whole theory rests on that extreme improbability. It must also be observed that the date of the birth of Joseph Bejard is unknown, and he may have been a minor when he was so described in the document of the 10th of March 1643, while Madeleine had only passed her twenty-fifth birthday, her legal majority, by two months.

M. Loiseleur’s only other proof is that Marie Herve gave Armande a respectable dowry, and that, as we do not know whence the money came, it must have come from Madeleine. The tradition in Grimarest, which makes Madeleine behave en femme furieuse, when she heard of the marriage, is based on a stereotypical appreciation of the character of women. It will be admitted, probably, that the reasons for supposing that Moliere espoused the daughter of a woman who had been his mistress (if she had been his mistress) are flimsy and inadequate. The affair of the dowry is insisted on by M. Livet. But M. Livet explains the dowry by the hypothesis that Armande was the daughter of Madeleine and the comte de Modene, which exactly contradicts the theory of M. Loiseleur, and is itself contradicted by dates, at least as understood by M. Loiseleur. Such are the conjectures by which the foul calumnies of Moliere’s enemies are supported in the essays of modern French critics.