Playing Dead

Even as Molière started work on The Imaginary Invalid late in the winter of 1672, he knew that he was dying. For five years he had fought a chronic pulmonary infection and a violent, rattling cough that prevented him from sleeping and hindered his stage performances. His friends begged him to quit the theatre for the sake of his health, but he insisted that as a point of honor he must continue to write and act.

With characteristic wit and ingenuity, Molière created for himself the role of Argan in The Imaginary Invalid, a hypochondriac who stays seated on his commode for the entire length of the play and coughs constantly to impress upon his family and physicians the gravity of his condition. So concerned is Argan for his health that he resolves his daughter must marry a medical student, thereby ensuring he has a doctor near him at all times.

If Molière relished the irony of a dying actor playing a perfectly healthy hypochondriac, he must have been thrilled by the dramatic events surrounding his final exit from the stage. The first three performances of The Imaginary Invalid, which opened at the Palais Royal theatre in Paris on February 10, 1673, were among the most successful of Molière’s career. But the effort required to perform even the sedentary Argan was more than the ailing playwright could endure, and on the morning of the fourth performance, Molière seemed weaker than ever. His wife, the actress Armande Béjart, urged him to stay at home, but Molière was resolute. His friend and publisher La Grange recorded the events of that evening:

“On the 17th day of February, the day of the fourth performance of The Imaginary Invalid, [Molière] was so much troubled by the inflammation in his chest that he had difficulty in acting his part. He got through it, though he suffered much, and the audience saw easily that his performance was far from what he wished it to be. Immediately the play was over he went home, and no sooner had he got into bed than the cough which troubled him perpetually became very violent. The efforts he made were so great that he burst a vein in his lungs. Finding himself in that condition, he turned all his thoughts to heaven. A moment later he became speechless, and in half an hour he was suffocated by the quantity of blood that came up through his mouth.”

Since 1664, when a group of fanatical clergymen had persuaded Louis XIV to ban Molière’s Tartuffe on grounds of blasphemy and sedition, the playwright had been out of favor with the Church. No priest could be persuaded to attend his deathbed, and only after the intervention of the king himself was Molière granted a sanctified burial. Jacques Bossuet, the illustrious Archbishop of Meaux, even characterized his death as an act of divine justice, claiming that Molière had gone “from the laughter of the stage, where he uttered almost his last sigh, to the tribunal of Him who said, ‘Woe unto you that laugh now! For ye shall mourn and weep.'”

A Bruges surgeon administers an enema in 1679.The physicians of Paris, incensed by Molière’s attack on the medical profession in The Imaginary Invalid, were as reluctant as the clerics to ease his suffering. Their absence certainly did Molière no harm, for the practice of medicine in seventeenth-century France was at best rudimentary and at worst lethal. Doctors, trained more thoroughly in Latin and rhetoric than in anatomy and surgery, were taught that medical science had been invented by Apollo, improved by Asclepius, and perfected by Hippocrates and Galen. Dismissing all modern pharmacological advances as the work of charlatans, most graduates of the Paris Faculty of Medicine relied exclusively on two methods of treatment: bleeding and purging. In one year, Louis XIII received two hundred and fifteen doses of purgative, two hundred and twelve enemas, and forty-seven bleedings. Louis XIV’s physician firmly believed in a “purgative soup” that, when tried on the King, acted eleven times in eight hours, after which Louis felt himself “somewhat fatigued” and retired early to rest. As the historian W.H. Lewis notes, “we begin to understand the justness of the cynic’s remark that Louis XIV resisted the care of his physicians for over seventy-seven years.”

The medics of Paris managed to maintain some popular credibility by allying themselves closely with the Church. Acting as much as priests as doctors, they muttered elaborate prayers and invoked obscure saints over their dying patients. Anyone so foolish as to criticize a physician was reviled as a blasphemer; Louis XIV was said to be “as pious in medicine as in religion.” Certainly no physician would defile himself by touching the sick or performing surgery. Operations were carried out by untrained butchers and barbers who, though better skilled than the most eminent doctors, were paid virtually nothing for their services.

Those few physicians who claimed to provide treatments other than enemas, bleedings, and emetics found their remedies in superstition rather than science. According to Lewis, it was believed that “if a woman had a fall during pregnancy, all ill consequences could be obviated by giving her a morsel of crimson silk, cut up small, and served in an egg; pain at childbirth could be minimized by placing the husband’s hat on the woman’s belly; and as soon as a woman was delivered, her loins must be wrapped in the fleece of a newly killed black sheep, still warm from the carcass.”

In the face of such rampant quackery, the idiocy of Molière’s doctors in The Imaginary Invalid seems rather less improbable. But Molière’s satire is directed as much at the patient as it is at the physician. Argan’s obsession with sickness and medical paraphernalia is as foolish as the ignorance of his doctors; if he genuinely believes their phony prognostications, he deserves all the treatment they give him.

Molière declared many times that his plays were intended to serve a moral end. “The business of comedy,” he wrote, “is to present, in general, all the defects of men and principally of men of our century.” When Tartuffe was banned, Molière addressed a petition to Louis XIV that stated that “the function of comedy is to correct men while it amuses them.”

The great comic anti-heroes of Molière’s plays are all, in essence, moral archetypes; Argan is a representation of hy-pochondria, Tartuffe of hypocrisy, Alceste of misanthropy, Harpa-gon of miserliness, and so on. The origins of these magnificent creations lie both in the excesses of Louis XIV’s Versailles, where Molière enjoyed royal patronage, and in the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte, which he had ample opportunity to observe in the work of the great Italian actor Scaramouche whose troupe shared a theatre with Molière’s company in Paris.

Whether or not Molière truly intended his comedies to boost the moral fiber of his countrymen, his plays are no sermons. The magnificent grotesques that populate his finest works are born as much of a theatrical as moral impulse and are invariably livelier and more interesting than his right-thinking raisonneurs.

The Imaginary Invalid was almost certainly commissioned by Louis XIV for the great royal carnival of 1673. Like all carnival theatre, it is, at heart, a celebration of human folly, always teetering on the verge of anarchy and absurdity. The play’s greatest scene, a musical masque in which Argan is finally initiated as a physician, is a pageant in praise of foolishness, foreshadowing the comedies of Alfred Jarry and Eugène Ionesco by more than two hundred years. By the end of the play, Argan’s medical monomania has expanded until it is nothing less than a fantasy world, a magical realm to which he escapes when the mundane pressures of family life threaten to overwhelm him. It is his imagination that saves him and keeps him alive. For a playwright who was all too aware of his own mortality, nothing could have been more important.

Gideon Lester is A.R.T.’s resident dramaturg.