C'est la seule, l'unique pièce que nous avons vue à la Comédie Française à Paris, en 1968, quelques mois après les manifestations qui ont envahi les rues, et le nouveau parlement a été élu. On the banks of the Seine I had bought three volumes of the Hachette Moliere, luckily including the play running at the classic theater. So having read about half the play before we went, I understood a line here and there. Our lunch every day was Croque Messieur and white wine at a bar around the corner from our hotel near the Abattoirs, which we passed on our walk to the Louvre and Place de la Concorde. We had a VW bug, with no charge for parking by the hotel back then. When I returned to the University of Minnesota, I recovered from my Ph.D. orals by reading five plays of Moliere, and translating a few pages of this and his touching last play, where he may have tried to convince himelf that he had an imaginary disease.
For Femmes Savantes, I typed out Chrysale's sexist criticism of learned women, a passage that is arguably more applicable to US society now than it was in 1970 when I typed it up:
Chrysale:
It's to you I'm speaking sister.
The least solecism in speech irritates you,
but you conduct yourself eccentrically.
Your interminable books do not soothe me,
and your putting my cravat over a fat Plutarch.
You ought to burn all this useless junk
and leave science to the professors in the city.
Clean out, if you'd do something worthwhile, from the attic
to here, this far-flung sty that stinks out the help,
and a hundred other trifles whose sight offends.
Don't go looking for what they do on the Moon;
Get involved in what they DON'T at home,
where everything's run upside-down.
It's just not seemly, and for many reasons,
that a woman study to know so much of abstract things.
To raise children with good behavior,
to run the household, supervise the help,
and rule expenditures thriftily
ought to be her study and philosophy.
Our fathers were sensible on this subjet;
they said that a woman knows enough
when she has elevated her native capacity
to know a sportcoat from a pair of pants.
Theirs didn't read, but they lived, well.
Their household, all their learned conversation;
their books, a thimble, thread and needle
with which they'd work on the trousseaus of their girls.
Women nowadays are far from those ways;
they want to write, become celebrities.
No knowledge is too deep for them,
and here in France more than other paces.
They let themselves in on the secrets of sociology,
and I'd say they know everything they don't need to.
They know how the Moon moves, and the pole staar,
Venus, Saturn and Mars, that I have nothing to do with.
And, in this vain knowledge, they go looking so far,
they don't know how how my soup's cooking, which I do need.
The help aspire to science to please you,
and all do only what they have to do.
Reasoning is the occupation of all my house,
this reasoning that has banished all reason.
One burns the roast while reading a best-seller,
The other dreams up a verse when I ask for a drink.
Finally, I see your example followed by them;
one poor servant would be left, at least,
who was not infected with this bad air,
and damned if you haven't chased her off
because she speaks nonstandard English.
I tell you, Sister, this whole rout offends me
(because, as I've said, to you I address myself).
I don't like this gang of Latin-lovers,
especially this Professor Trissotin.
It's him whose verse you've trumpeted--
all his lines are like billiard balls--
you look for what he's said after he's said it.
And in my opinion, his tone's crackly.

Of course, see Richard Wilbur's rhymed pentameters for a better translation--he a prior grad of my own Amherst College. An A+ translator, Wilbur's own verse strikes me as too Romantic, himself-centered, and précieuse (term used for some 17C French verse). ( )

Moliere has long been on my to-read list because his comedies were on a list of "100 Significant Books" I was determined to read through. The introduction in one of the books of his plays says that of his "thirty-two comedies... a good third are among the comic masterpieces of world literature." The plays are surprisingly accessible and amusing, even if by and large they strike me as frothy and light compared to comedies by Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Wilde, Shaw and Rostand. But I may be at a disadvantage. I'm a native New Yorker, and looking back it's amazing how many classic plays I've seen on stage, plenty I've seen in filmed adaptation and many I've studied in school. Yet I've never encountered Moliere before this. Several productions of Shakespeare live and filmed are definitely responsible for me love of his plays. Reading a play is really no substitute for seeing it--the text is only scaffolding. So that might be why I don't rate these plays higher. I admit I also found Wilbur's much recommended translation off-putting at first. The format of rhyming couplets seemed sing-song and trite, as if I was reading the lyrics to a musical rather than a play. As I read more I did get used to that form, but I do suspect these are the kinds of works that play much better on stage than on the page.

The Learned Ladies - On the surface this play that pokes fun at women with scholarly aspirations and pretensions to authority may seem misogynistic. But given my reading of other plays by Moliere, I think it just plays against the very idea of pretensions and deceptions--both of self and those of swindlers who target the gullible--and in defense of common sense over pedantry. In that sense it plays as the distaff version of Tartuffe, where it's the male parent who is bamboozled and almost forces a daughter to wed a charlatan. And the daughter in Learned Ladies, Henriette is among the more witty Moliere heroines. ( )

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