statements and suppressions, even if they were
not in themselves of a manifestly outrageous
character?

MOLIÈRE AND THE DOCTORS.

THE pedantry and pretence which the great
French comic dramatist unsparingly assailed
wherever he found it, presented no object of
attack more open to his merciless ridicule than
that which was supplied him by the Faculty of
Medicine of Paris. That Molière was really
sceptical as to the value of the healing art, is
an idea which no sane person can entertain:
his studies, his friendships, and, still more, his
habits of life, afford sufficient proof to the
contrary; nor need we trouble ourselves to assert
that he had no serious meaning when we read the
anecdote told by Grimarest, who says that Louis
the Fourteenth observed one day to Molière:
"I hear you have a doctor; what does he do for
you?" "Sire," replied the poet, "we have a
long talk together; he prescribes medicines, I
don't take them, and I find myself cured."

Molière was a pupil—in company with
Chapelle, Bernier, Hénault, Cyrano de Bergerac,
and the Prince de Conti—of the great Gassendi,
whom Tennemann has called "the most learned
among the philosophers, and. the most skilful
philosopher among the learned of the
seventeenth century."  It is possible that his
master's views with respect to simplicity of
diet may have inspired him with a horror of
drugs; but that which Molière more directly
learnt from the teaching of Gassendi, was a
contempt for the erudition which usurps the place
of science, a dislike for the subtleties which
mystify questions instead of solving them, and a
profound aversion for all pedants, for all talkers
who speak without saying anything, and for all
pretenders to knowledge who affect to teach
what they are ignorant of themselves. This
feeling is manifest even in his earliest works—
of which we have only outlines—and is broadly
developed in those which have mainly contributed
to his fame. It was a leading principle in
Molière's nature to expose hypocrisy under
whatever form it shrouded itself, whether he
scourged the hypocrisy of religion in the
Tartufe, or the hypocrisy of science in the Malade
Imaginaire. The former is, doubtless, the more
edifying lesson, for it is of universal application;
but the latter, though more special, is probably
the more amusing;—  and Heaven knows how
much amusement has been furnished by the
Doctors of Molière—as much as by the
pretence of Bottom, the cowardice of Parolles, or
the humour of Falstaff.

But besides the real worth which he had been
taught by Gassendi to reverence, Molière found
it in those whom he made his friends; and,
notably, amongst the rest, in his fellow-student
Bernier, the famous traveller, who was a doctor
of the school of Montpellier. After a residence
of twelve years in the East, Bernier returned to
Paris and gave himself up not only to philosophy
and science, but also to the society of which one
of the chiefest ornaments was Molière. Nicolas
Liénard, who subsequently became Dean of the
Faculty of Medicine, was another esteemed friend;
so also was Mauvillain, who, it is believed, rendered
valuable assistance to Molière in those plays
wherein the pedantic absurdities of his own
profession were so humorously satirised. It was
in favour of Mauvillain's son that the third
petition was written which precedes the Tartufe,
and which was addressed to the king on the 5th
of February, 1659. It ran as follows: "Sire. A
very honest doctor, whose patient I have the
honour to be, promises me, and is willing to bind
himself down before a notary, to prolong my
life for thirty years, if I can obtain for him a
favour from your majesty. I have told him that,
as to his promise, I will not ask so much from
him, but shall be quite satisfied if he will
undertake not to kill me. The favour, sire, is a
canonry in your royal chapel of Versailles, vacant
by the death of  ..... May I dare to ask this
favour of your majesty on the very day of the
great resurrection of Tartufe, revived by your
goodness? I am, by the first act, reconciled
with the devout, and by the second I shall be
so with the doctors. It is, without doubt, too
much for me to ask at once, but, perhaps, it is
not too much for your majesty to grant, and
I await, with respectful hope, the reply to my
petition." A satisfactory answer was returned;
and it is not a little singular that this letter, the
only one extant in which Molière appears as a
solicitor for another, should be written on behalf
of a doctor! But the tone of the petition helps
to show that the writer stood in no such great
need of that reconciliation with the doctors
which he gracefully requests the opportunity of
accomplishing.

Those who attach implicit faith to the dogma
that "great events from little causes spring,"
found their belief of the cause of Moliere's
hostility to the doctors in an alleged petty quarrel
between his own wife and the wife of a medical
neighbour. The story of this quarrel is told
in a species of contemporaneous comedy, called
"Elomire Hypochondriac, or the Doctors
Revenged," by one Le Boullanger de Chalussay:
it is a cruel and violent lampoon on Molière,
whose name is anagrarnmatised in the title,
and the gist of it is, that the Amour Médicin
was written because the doctor, who was Molière's
landlord as well as his neighbour, had raised the
poet's rent. It would be an insult to Molière's
memory to suppose that so contemptible a motive
could have influenced him. Let us look for the
reason of his satire in his disgust of quackery
and pedantry and his sense of the true purport
of comedy. Indeed, his own simple confession
of faith will suffice to set the question at rest.
"As it is the duty of comedy," he says, "to
correct mankind while directing them, I have
thought that, in the position I occupy, I could do
nothing better than attack the vices of the age
by means of ridiculous pictures." There was
material enough to fill his canvas.

The Faculty of Medicine of Paris—which
rejoiced in the Latin title of "Facultas