The Miser and The Would-Be Gentleman

Summary

Molière wrote these two prose comedies two years apart for the same troupe, and they make a natural pair: one father is ruined by love of money, the other by love of rank, and in both the children's marriages are held hostage to a parent's obsession. The Miser (L'Avare, 1668) takes its central device, a hoarded pot of gold, from Plautus's Aulularia. Harpagon, a rich Parisian widower, has buried ten thousand crowns in his garden and suspects everyone of wanting them. He plans to marry the poor young Marianne himself, to give his son Cléante to a rich widow, and to marry his daughter Élise to the elderly Anselme because Anselme will take her 'without dowry', a phrase Harpagon repeats as if it settled every objection. Élise is secretly engaged to Valère, who has entered the house as steward and flatters Harpagon's stinginess to stay near her; Cléante, short of money, tries to borrow at ruinous interest and discovers that the usurer is his own father. When Cléante's servant La Flèche digs up the money box, Harpagon's soliloquy of loss is one of the great comic speeches of the stage. A recognition scene reveals that Valère and Marianne are the lost children of Anselme, who pays for both weddings. Harpagon consents on condition that he gets his casket back and a new suit for the wedding. The Would-Be Gentleman (Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 1670), translated here as The Middle Class Gentleman, is a comedy-ballet made for Louis XIV at Chambord with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully. Monsieur Jourdain, a wealthy cloth merchant's son, hires masters of music, dancing, fencing and philosophy, orders a ridiculous suit, and is thrilled to learn that he has been speaking prose for more than forty years. He lends money to the impoverished Count Dorante, who uses Jourdain's gifts to court the Marquise Dorimène for himself. Madame Jourdain and the maid Nicole mock his pretensions. When Cléonte, an honest suitor, refuses to pass himself off as a gentleman, Jourdain rejects him; Cléonte's valet Covielle then disguises his master as the son of the Grand Turk, and Jourdain, made a 'Mamamouchi' in a burlesque Turkish ceremony, happily gives his daughter Lucile away. Both plays laugh at disordered love: Harpagon's makes him cruel, Jourdain's makes him gullible. Neither man reforms, and the young lovers are freed by contrivance rather than by any change of heart. Students can read them as studies in how a single passion, left unchecked, distorts a household, and as examples of how classical comedy corrects by ridicule. The library attaches Charles Heron Wall's translation of The Miser and Philip Dwight Jones's translation of The Middle Class Gentleman. Both are suitable for high school; the Turkish ceremony uses mock-Italian and Ottoman stereotypes of its time that are worth explaining in class.

Top Lessons

• Without dowry: when one passion rules a house

  Harpagon answers every objection to Élise's marriage with the words 'without dowry', and Valère, playing along, claims the phrase 'compensates for want of beauty, youth, birth, honour, wisdom, and probity.' The joke shows avarice as a vice that narrows judgment until a single consideration replaces every other good. Scripture calls the love of money a root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10), and Molière shows the root branching out into cruelty to children, servants and even horses.

• Fathers and sons as rival creditors

  In Act II Cléante, desperate for money, discovers that the anonymous usurer offering him a loan at extortionate terms is his own father; in Act IV the two are rivals for the same woman. Molière makes the family a market, where the father lends to his son at interest and the son wishes his father dead. The scenes invite reflection on the fifth commandment from both directions: what children owe parents, and what fathers owe their children (Ephesians 6:1-4).

• Speaking prose without knowing it

  Monsieur Jourdain's delight at learning that 'For more than forty years I have been speaking prose' is the best-known moment in the play. The philosophy master's lesson on the vowels, and the quarrel of the masters over whose art is most necessary, satirise education bought as a badge rather than pursued for wisdom. The scene is also gentle: Jourdain's appetite to learn is real, and the masters, not the pupil, are the cynics. It is a good occasion to ask what the liberal arts are for.

• Cléonte's honesty and the stolen title

  Asked whether he is a gentleman, Cléonte refuses to present himself 'with a stolen title', calling it cowardice to disguise 'what Heaven made us at birth.' Jourdain rejects him for it, and the plot then rewards him only through a masquerade far more false than any title. Molière thus sets a principled refusal of imposture against a comic world where imposture wins. Students can weigh the honour that comes from truthful speech against the honour of rank.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine is incidental in these two plays, unlike Molière's doctor comedies (The Doctor in Spite of Himself, The Imaginary Invalid). Valère's advice to Élise to feign an illness, because a doctor will always find a cause for any complaint, is an early sketch of Molière's lifelong satire of physicians. Harpagon's soliloquy after the theft, in which he grabs his own arm and says his mind is wandering, is comic exaggeration of a single ruling passion; reading it as a clinical obsession is an interpretation, not Molière's framing. Valère's 'precepts of health' against overeating parody dietetic advice used as cover for stinginess.

• The Miser, Act I, Scene VIII

  Valère tells Élise to feign an illness to delay the marriage, mocking doctors who can explain any disease a patient claims.

• The Miser, Act III, Scene V

  Valère cites the doctors and 'the precepts of health' against excess at table to justify Harpagon's meagre supper.

• The Miser, Act IV, Scene VII

  Harpagon's frenzied soliloquy after the theft, in which he suspects everyone, seizes his own arm, and says he is dying for want of his money.