ARTicles vol. 2 i.4b: Greed

“A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.” – Machiavelli, The Prince On 18 July 1668 Louis XIV threw a fête in the gardens of Versailles to congratulate himself on his military victories: “le Grand Divertissement royal.” Squeezed between the banquet, the ballet (the King himself condescended to dance the role of Apollo), and the fireworks, 12,000 spectators watched George Dandin, a comedy by Molière about a down-at-the-heels aristocrat who, suffering the harsh pinch of necessity, marries a wealthy peasant and humiliates him by committing adultery with a member of her own class. The court was amused. In one day, Louis spent 117,000£, one-third the yearly budget of Versailles. Royal parties are expensive, and so are royal wars. Louis, therefore, raised taxes, which fell heavily on peasants, and forced prosperous towns to render homage with “gifts” of huge sums. And should the royal coffers still come up short, one could always borrow. Even monarchs bend their knee to money. On 9 September 1668, two months after the Grand Divertissement royal, Paris saw the premiere of L’Avare, Molière’s bitter comedy about the love of money. It failed to please a bourgeois public. It struck too close to home. On 24 August 1665 two beggars had tried to rob Jean Tardieu, a notorious usurer and putatively the richest man in Paris. When Tardieu screamed “thief,” the young men panicked and silenced Tardieu and his wife by slitting their throats. The mother-in-law, who lived with them as a servant, was known to steal oats from horses for her breakfast. When friends visited Tardieu, the miser asked to borrow their lackeys to perform household tasks during the social call. The good citizens of Paris saw in Tardieu’s death the just judgment of a righteous God, who had punished the miser for a life of greed. To understand the seal of approval set on this grisly murder, one must look at attitudes towards usury, the general term applied to charging interest on monies lent. The Catholic Church interpreted passages from Deuteronomy as condemning it: profiting from another’s hardship was morally wrong, the opposite of caritas. But as Europe slowly transformed itself from a feudal society into a proto-capitalist economy, the demand for money accelerated, and forms of credit became necessary: banks, bills of exchange, interest. In the Renaissance, money itself became a commodity, and financiers started making money from money. As these business practices spread, they produced moral anxiety, but since they also produced profit, upright bourgeois took part – uneasily at first – in the forbidden activities. Sad tales circulated orally in seventeenth-century France about usurers and the miserable ends they met, but lending with interest increased. The popularity of these stories indicates a site of acute cultural anxiety. In addition to an outlet, guilt also needs a target. Someone must become the scapegoat. As every puta knows, you cannot do business without a john. But in a patriarchal society, sexual guilt is projected onto female prostitutes, who were rounded up regularly in France and shipped off to Louisiana to fornicate in the wilderness while their johns continued to debauch young girls in Paris. And in an anti-Semitic society, capitalistic guilt is projected onto Jewish moneylenders, hence Shylock. Under Louis XIV, aristocrats found themselves in a quandary. The monarch wanted the most brilliant court in Europe, and to shine at court cost a king’s ransom. Louis had a penchant for beautiful women beautifully gowned, shimmering with diamonds, but men also had to doll themselves up with silk and satin, plumes and lace. And don’t forget the bows on the high-heeled shoes for men. Who would pay the cobbler, the tailor, the periwig maker? Aristocratic fortunes were based on land, and agricultural prices were falling. Good coin of the realm was rare in France, which produced abundant foodstuffs, but with the exception of a few luxury exports, almost no manufactured goods that could have brought in specie. Despite the magnificence of his court, Louis did not promote economic expansion. In fact, the French Crown did almost everything possible to thwart market growth. Colbert, Louis’s minister of finance, lamented the scarcity of ready money in France. The country was importing more than it was exporting, and the upper crust lived beyond its means. Near the end of his reign, Louis, strapped for funds, had to melt down his gold plates and eat off silver gilt. Where could a needy aristocrat turn for cash? If one did not get a sinecure from the king or marry into the wealthy bourgeoisie, one would be forced to deal with the devil: a moneylender. Enter Harpagon, Molière’s most hideous character, a scarecrow stuffed with bourgeois guilt and aristocratic fear. The French have a proverb: à père avare, fils prodigue (a tightwad father engenders a spendthrift son). Dante, who saw avarice and extravagance as opposite forms of the same sin, put misers and wasters together in the fourth circle of the inferno, where they joust with each other for eternity, just as Harpagon and Cléante, his prodigal son, tussle in II.2, one of the funniest and saddest scenes in the canon. Earlier, Harpagon had reprimanded his son for throwing away money to ape the latest fashions of Versailles. Sizing up Cléante’s wardrobe with the trained eye of an appraiser, he estimates that his son has spent 220£ on ribbons and wigs. Since it would have taken the average worker one year and two months to earn 220£, Harpagon’s eruption is not unjustified. His son squanders money he doesn’t earn (a self-indulgence strongly condemned by the Church), and like the nobility, he gambles heavily, hoping to win big at cards to pay off his debts (a vice strongly condemned by the Church). The son cannot wait until the father dies to inherit his fortune, and the father hopes to outlive the son to get his hands on the deceased mother’s dowry, which by French law must go to the son when he reaches 25. Monetary, sexual, and Oedipal conflicts fuel the animosity that bursts into open warfare when father and son catch each other red handed in the murky business of usury. Feeling guilty, both have tried to hide their identities. The King had limited interest rates to 5%; Harpagon, through financial shenanigans, has raised the rate illegally to over 25%. Only a scoundrel would drive such a bargain, only a fool would accept. The difference between Harpagon – the name plays on the French verb “to harpoon” – and his son is that the son grows up. By the end Cléante has changed; Harpagon stays the same. According to Henri Bergson, a comic character is a jack-in-the-box, a mechanical bundle of unconscious tics he cannot control. Show Harpagon a piece of gold, and like Pavlov’s dogs he salivates. So where do Molière’s sympathies lie? With the greedy, grasping middle class or the elegant, irresponsible aristocrats? With young love, of course. After all, Molière is the culmination of classical comedy, and classical comedies end with a marriage and a feast. And Cléante’s future is set: he marries a beautiful, wealthy aristocrat, and they live happily ever after in a well-appointed town house in the Marais, subsidized by her father. Ribbons and wigs, it turns out, are a good investment. All’s well that ends well. Plaudite. Arthur Holmberg, Associate Professor of Theatre at Brandeis, is Literary Director of the A.R.T. and author of The Theatre of Robert Wilson.