The Doctor in French Drama 1700–1775 9780231893206

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THE

DOCTOR

IN

FRENCH

i7°o-i775

DRAMA

The Doctor in French Drama 1700-177/ CHRISTINE

E.

PETERSEN

AMS PRESS, INC. NEW YORK 1966

Copyright 1938, Columbia University Press, New York

Reprinted 1966 with permission of Columbia University Press

AMS P R E S S , INC. New York, N.Y. 10003

M a n u f a c t u r e d in t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s of A m e r i c a

To DR. H O W A R D C. PETERSEN

An art upon whose successes the sun is proud to shine. And whose blunders the earth makes haste to cover! —BEAUMARCHAIS, Le Barbier de Seville, Act II, scene 1).

Acknowledgments A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S ARE DUE TO A R T H U R

LIVINGSTON,

T H E LATE GUSTAVE L. V A N ROOSBROECK, A N D T H E O T H E R MEMBERS O F T H E GRADUATE F A C U L T Y O F F R E N C H I N COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

Contents i Introduction II Doctors of the Commedia dell'Arte Type

3 14

hi Molieresque Types and Jokes

26

iv The Quarrel of the Faculties

56

v Quacks and Faddists

68

vi Society Doctors

85

VII The Doctor off the Stage

106

Chronology of Flays Containing Medical Characters or Medical References

117

Sources Cited

125

Index

133

THE

DOCTOR IN

FRENCH

1700-177S

DRAMA

I

Introduction H E doctor has been a familiar figure in literature throughout the ages. Besides providing interesting portrayals of the various types of doctors who have lived in the world, this non-Hippocratic literature sheds an indispensable light on the state of medicine in the different periods of history. O n this subject the eminent Sir William Osier writes: Many details relating to the character and to the life of physicians are gleaned only from secular authors. So much of the daily life of a civilized community relates to problems of health and disease that the great writers of every age of necessity throw an important sidelight, not only on the opinions of the people on these questions, but often on the condition of special knowledge in various branches. . . . The satire of Molière, malicious though it be, has preserved for us phases of medical life in the seventeenth century for which we scan in vain the strictly medical writings of that period.1 And Edmond Dupouy says as to the value of such writings to scholars of the history of medicine: In the works of these writers [poets and dramatists] we find, really, the most exact appreciation of the medical ideas of an epoch, because the customs of an epoch cannot be judged, its defects criticized, its tendencies accounted for, without at a given moment bringing in medical science, either with its precepts or with its errors and its prejudices.2 1 "Physic and Physicians as Depicted in Plato," Boston Medical and Surgical nal,- C X X V I I I ( 1 8 9 3 ) , 129. 2 Le Moyen Age medical, p. 277.

Jour-

4

Introduction

There are already in existence a multitude of studies on tie doctor and medicine in literature, and one would hardly thirc that there were need for one more; but very few of then have any phase of the French drama for their subject, with the single exception, perhaps, of Molière's plays. The eighteenth century, a most interesting period in the evolution cf the doctor as a stage character, has been left practically urtouched. In Constant Saucerotte's pamphlet, Les Médecins au théâtre depuis Molière, only six eighteenth-century plays aie mentioned, and the character of only one doctor taken fron them is analyzed at all adequately. In his edition of Favart's L'Empirique,3 Gustave van Roosbroeck briefly discusses attacks on physicians and quacks by eighteenth-century French dramatists, and gives a list of fifteen plays of that century in which physicians are more or less burlesqued. Yves J. J. Nédélec, in a thesis entitled Les Médecins dans la littérature française depuis Molière, examines only nine works, none cf which come within the scope of our study. In La Littérature et les médecins en France, a paper read at a session of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium,4 Georges Doutrepont includes a few medical plays of this period. Gustave J. Witkowski, author of Les Médecins au théâtre de l'antiquité au dix-septième siècle, began a very thorough study of the doctor in the theater of the eighteenth century. To the Witkowski study, deposited in the University of Minnesota Library, the writer is indebted for thirty-seven titles. T H E DOCTOR OF T H E COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE

The pedantic and shallow doctor of the commedia dell'arte (the professional comedy which we discover in Italy in the sixteenth century existing alongside a court or society theater) is the ancestor of many of the doctors in our group of medical 3

Introduction, pp. 4, 5.

4

May 13, 1 9 3 3 .

Introduction

5

plays. This doctor corresponds quite exactly to a type of pedant for which the old University town of Bologna was famous. 6 He is often called Graziano Baloardo (as Rabelais might have said, Docteur Cuellons), or Balanzoni Lombarda, but sometimes he has more pompous designations, such as the Plusquamperfetto Dottor Gratiano Partesana de Francolin. Really the doctor in the commedia dell'arte is just a variety of the old man and appears rather in domestic than in professional rôles. He is usually either a father scheming for a good match for a son, a daughter, a niece, a nephew, or even a servant, or else he is a jealous lover ridiculous in view of his age. At any rate, whatever his rôle, he is a gullible ignoramus who swallows the most fantastic shams and is generally fooled and exploited by someone. He talks and reasons endlessly. The least occurrence, the most insignificant remark, incites in him a flow of grandiloquent language, embellished with classical allusions or absurd maxims and crammed with quibbling redundancies and heavy philosophical lucubrations. The pedantic drollery of his speech is emphasized by his Bolognese dialect, as well as by the ponderous gravity with which he utters his sentences in macaronic Latin. 6 He has been spoken of as one "who squirts his words out from a clyster-pipe." 7 Of course, such a doctor might belong to any department of the university faculty, 8 but under the name of Balanzoni Lombarda he B

We find this same type of doctor in Boccaccio's Decameron. Maestro Alberto da Bologna, w h o m we meet on the first day, is a seventy-year-old gallant, of whose professional reputation Boccaccio speaks with deference. (See below, p. 9 Î , n. 27.) In Maestro Simone da Villa, of the f o u r t h day, Boccaccio satirizes the Florentines w h o return f r o m Bologna bedizened with the academic robes of doctors of law or of medicine. See Adams, " T h e Doctors in the Decameron," Practitioner, XCI ( 1 9 1 3 ) , 7 1 8 - 2 3 ; Rossi, Storia della letteratura ilaliana, I, 292. 6 Cf. Merccy, "Les Q u a t r e Masques du théâtre italien," Revue des deux mondes, 4. série, X X I I I ( 1 8 4 0 ) , ' 7 0 3 - 2 4 ; Smith, 'The Commedia dell'arte, pp. 35 ff.; D u c h a r t r e , La Comédie italienne, pp. 199-211; Mic, La Commedia dell'arte, pp. 3 8 42. 7 Garzoni, Piazza universale, quoted by Symonds in Gozzi's Memoirs, I n t r o d u c tion, I, 74. 8 Bartoli, Scenari inediti, p. xviii, enumerates the various rôles that were played b y this mask.

Introduction

6

was usually a medical man, as Maurice Sand points out in his diverting description: Doctor Balanzoni Lombarda . . . wears a great hat turned up on both sides. Like the other Doctor already mentioned [Graziano Baloardo], he is from Bologna. There is a deal of analogy between the two, or perhaps they are the same personage in different social strata. This Doctor is particularly a man of medicine, [a f a c t ] which, however, does not hinder him from practising alchemy and the occult sciences. He is avaricious, egotistical and very weak in resisting his coarse and sensual appetites. When he goes to see a patient he chatters of anything but that patient's illness. He is interested in a thousand nothings, he touches everything, breaks vessels, feels the pulse of his patient as a matter of conscience, whilst discussing the talents of Columbine or the figure of Violetta. The dying man ends by falling asleep, worn out by the amorous exploits which form the subject of the chatter of this ignorant Doctor, with his rubicund nose, his inflamed cheeks and his gleaming eye. The patient having fallen asleep, the Doctor makes love to the waiting-woman, or plays the gallant towards the daughter or even the mistress of the house. There is no evidence that he has ever cured anybody with the exception of Polichinelle, who cannot die, and who once pretended to be ill so as to draw the Doctor to his house and there administer a sharp correction on the subject of a little rivalry in an affair of love, or gluttony, the details of which have never been ascertained.9 T h e black mask which covered only the doctor's forehead and nose m a d e a vivid contrast with his red cheeks and helped to make him look foolish. O f his costume, Sand writes: From 1560 to the middle of the seventeenth century the Doctor was always dressed from head to foot in black, arrayed in the robe usual to men of science, professors and lawyers of the sixteenth century; under this long robe he wore another shorter one reaching to the knees; his shoes were black. It was only with the coming of the Italian company to Paris in 1653 that Agostino Lolli assumed the short breeches, the wide soft ruff, cut his doublet after the fashion of that of the days of Louis XIV, and replaced the bonnet, which 9

History

of the Harlequinade,

II, 34 (French ed„ II, 3 0 ) .

Introduction

7

presented too much analogy with that of the lackeys, by a felt hat with an extravagant brim. 1 0 MOLIÈRE'S

DOCTORS

Molière diversifies and animates the character of the doctor. He treats the fixed type of the commedia dell'arte with a new vigor and gives it some actuality. Instead of a traditional figure, a mask playing as a monotonous buffoon, we have a flexible character with a living physiognomy. The Italian character is symbolic of pedantry carried to its most ridiculous point by clownish imagination. Molière looked around at life and from rich material selected innumerable models for his comic characters, who satirize the contemporary doctors and their practices. His doctors are not, as a rule, grossly distorted caricatures. Their language is reasonably natural and they fit into their environment. The novel humor of his lines and the richness of his scenes, which he works out and develops to perfection, also help to make his doctors seem more real. Struck by the simple, half-ludicrous faith that the country folk had in the worst kind of charlatans, Molière attacks the ignorance of these impostors (and of the Faculty) in his type of the mock doctor. Sganarelle plays this rôle in three of Molière's early comedies. In the slight farce, Le Médecin volant, he is a "doctor out of the ordinary," whose witticisms are reduced to tautologies of the commedia dell'arte type, such as (scene 4 ) : "Hippocrates says — and Galen, too, argues with strong reasons — that a person does not feel well when he is sick." Rigged out in the ridiculous togs of an old doctor, in the beginning of Act III of Don Juan ( 1 6 6 5 ) , Sganarelle wishes " t o sustain the honor of his gown" and talks learnedly to the country folk, who ask his opinion about their diseases. In the joyous buffoonery of Le Médecin malgré lui ( 1 6 6 6 ) , Sganarelle amuses as an ignorant woodcutter, acting as a doctor under compulsion of the cudgel. He impresses his ill-educated 10

Ibid.,

p. 32 (French ed., II, 2 8 ) .

8

introduction

listeners by interlarding his diagnosis with unintelligible Latin, as was the custom of the physicians of the time. He advises bleeding against diseases to come, thus ridiculing the abuse of the divine institution of bloodletting. His intimation that the gown makes the doctor was perhaps not far wide of the mark. Clitandre, the lover in L'Amour médecin ( 1665 ), comes disguised as a doctor, and tells the patient's father that his remedies are different from those of other physicians (Act III, scene i ) : "They use emetics, bleeding, drugs, and injections; but I cure by words, sounds, with the help of letters, talismans, and constellated rings." 11 Toinette, the soubrette in Le Malade imaginaire (1673), has a good time at the expense of Diafoirus and Purgon in a scene (Act III, scene 10) in which she is disguised as an itinerant physician. These gay and extravagant improvised doctors, with their new therapeutics, are not only significant as an attack on the humbugs and quacks prevalent in Molière's day, but are also used by Molière as a foil to the solemn and traditionalist doctor of the legitimate schools. Molière laughs at the manners and customs of contemporary physicians. In L'Amour médecin (Act II, scene 3) there is a delightful travesty of a consultation of the court physicians. N o reference is made to the patient's illness, but the doctors argue in their best professional manner upon the weighty subject of whether it is easier to get around Paris on a mule or on a horse. When these contentious practitioners finally get to the subject of the malady, their opinions differ, according to tradition. Molière has Filerin censor his colleagues for their quarrels and bickerings. He also has the conciliatory doctor state this truth (Act III, scene 1 ) : Love of life is man's greatest weakness. We benefit by it with our pompous jargon and we know how to take advantage of the veneration for our profession which the fear of death gives. 11

These rings had certain stars or planets engraved upon them and were supposed to quiet the mind. H . Van I.aun, translator of Molière's Dramatic Works, III, 227, n. 31.

Introduction

9

12

The theory of the humors, fast losing ground, is also derided. The consultation scene (Act I, scene 8) in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (the screaming farce in which an intriguer declares the hero a lunatic and fastens two doctors on him) is a parody of the pedantic and stilted style which the members of the profession affected at that time. The First Doctor reasons with some degree of intelligence, but the Second Doctor is a stupid ass, and the fact that their patient is not really mad makes their pomposity and cleverness appear all the more ludicrous. Their rapacity is also satirized. Forego their fee they will not, even though they have to resort to curing a well man. We hear from Desfonandrès 18 that professional etiquette should always be respected, no matter what happens. Molière interprets in his individual manner the respect due to senior colleagues. Although Theophrastus was right, he "ought not to have been of a different opinion from his senior," thinks Tomès. This precept was declared sacred, in the biting burlesque of the medical graduation exercises of the Paris Faculty, which ends Le Malade imaginaire. We hear the candidate for the degree swear in macaronic Latin to be "in omnibus consultationibus ancieni aviso aut bono aut mauvaiso." Tomès was excessively strict on the subject of etiquette. One day he and three others were called in to consult with an outsider (a physician who had not received his degree from the Faculty of Medicine of Paris), but Tomès stopped the whole affair and would hold no consultation unless things were conducted according to etiquette. "A dead man is but a dead man and not of any consequence; but a formality once neglected compromises the prestige of the whole medical corps," concludes Tomès. The unrestrained dogmatism of the Faculty comes in for its share of satire. Bahis claims, "It is better to die according 12 T h e f o u r bodily fluids (blood, phelgm, choler or yellow bile, and melancholy or black bile) were conceived as determining a person's health and temperament. 18 L'Amour midtcin, Act II, scene 3.

10 Introduction to rule than to recover in violation of it." 14 And Monsieur de Pourceaugnac's apothecary says, "One is at least glad to have died methodically." 15 Argan refuses an injection and "already feels the vengeance of the Faculty." 16 But it is, above all, the Faculty's blind respect for the doctrines of the ancients and their obstinate resistance to contemporary medical discoveries that furnished Molière with many opportunities for cuts and thrusts. A coachman who is dead and buried cannot be dead according to Tomès, because "Hippocrates says that that kind of malady ends only on the fourteenth or the twenty-first day, and it is only six days since he was taken sick." 17 The First Doctor in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac is one "who, were the patient to die for it, would not abate one iota of the rules of the ancients" (Act I, scene 5). Outrageously provoked by the pedantic reaction to Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, Molière subjected the traditionalists to the ironic laughter of the audience in Diafoirus' speech in praise of his reactionary son: "The thing in which he pleases me most, and in which he follows my example, is his blind attachment to the opinions of the ancients and his complete disregard for the reasons and experiments of the pretended discoveries of our age concerning the circulation of the blood and other opinions of the kind." 18 Béralde, the brother of the malade imaginaire who is suffering from "doctoritis," portrays the ignorant Purgon with his formalism (Act III, scene 3) : He is a thorough doctor f r o m head to foot, a man who believes more in the rules of his profession than in all the demonstrations of mathematics, and who would think it a crime even to question them. He sees nothing obscure in the medical art, nothing doubtful or difficult, and with an impetuous prepossession, an obstinate assurance, 14 15 16 17 18

L'Amour médecin, A c t II, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Le Malade imaginaire, Act L'Amour médecin, A c t II, Le Malade imaginaire, A c t

scene 5. A c t I, scene 5. III, scene 6. scene 2. II, scene 5.

Introduction

11

a brutal reasoning, gives purgings and bleedings right and left and hesitates at nothing.

Molière undoubtedly sums up his personal opinion of doctors in a speech by Béralde, the common-sense figure of the play (Act III, scene 3 ) : Most of them are well versed in the best classics, know how to speak fine Latin, to give Greek names to all the maladies, to define them and to classify them; but, as to curing these maladies, that is something about which they know absolutely nothing. . . . All the excellency of their art consists in a pompous gibberish, in a specious prating, that gives you words instead of reasons and promises instead of results.

Since the Molière doctor is, as it were, the pivot around which our classification of the various doctors is to revolve, one might define Molière's doctor more exactly. In Molière, as in the commedia dell'arte, the doctor is still a type, or caractère, and often times he is even a mask. He differs radically from the doctor of the commedia dell'arte in that the latter served as a mere pretext for witticisms, slapstick, or verbal acrobatics (lazzi). In Molière, he is made the vehicle for social satire. Through him, Molière voices his criticism of an important aspect of life in his day. But Molière's doctor is not a character in the most evolved modern sense. He is still constructed a priori to impersonate the foibles of a whole profession, just as Harpagon, the miser, is constructed a priori to impersonate one weakness of human nature. If one studies the doctor in the drama or novel of today, one usually finds a full-fledged individual, endowed with a complex psychology and a mass of individual traits to which his professional status is more or less incidental. We are thinking of the doctor in Behrman's End of Summer, or of the grim murderer-physician in Guido da Verona's Life Begins Tomorrow. Balzac's country doctor of a century ago is much closer to the Molière type than to these modern individuals.

12

Introduction

Balzac's characters are types, just as Molière's characters are types; though the social and psychological background which they are constructed a priori to impersonate is, not to say richer, more complicated than Molière's. There has, furthermore, been a vast change in the social status of the physician and in the public attitude toward him.19 DIVERSIFICATIONS OF THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DOCTORS

Constant Saucerotte states that the campaign begun by Molière ended with him and that the doctor remained almost the same until the end of the eighteenth century.20 But the campaign did not end with Molière, and the stage in the eighteenth century continued the time-honored tradition of ridiculing the medical profession. The critical genius of more than one dramatist was inspired by the charlatanry and the gross ignorance of the doctor of the day. Dancourt, in one of his clever and amusing farces, traces a sketch of a quack whose prototype was the Prince of Charlatans. Regnard, in his brilliant farces, added sketches to the century's gallery of ignorant doctors, and his jests on bodily miseries outstrip those of Molière. Lesage, the creator of the immortal Doctor Sangrado, pokes malicious fun at the doctors in several of his plays, and the clever Marivaux does not completely overlook our hero. Carmontelle puts the doctor in the foreground in his plays and dramatic proverbs, which reveal eighteenthcentury society with punctilious realism. The talented Beaumarchais is outstanding among other authors of eighteenthcentury medical plays. Neither did the doctor remain almost unchanged until the 1 9 Of the m a n y works on Molière's doctors, we shall mention merely R a y n a u d , Les Médecins au temps de Molière; Brown, Molière and His Medical Associations; Vialard, Essai médical sur Molière; Clarke, "Molière and the Doctors," Bulletin of the Society of Medical History of Chicago, III ( 1 9 2 3 ) , 2 3 J - Í Í ; Thuillier, Molière, essai médical. 20 Les Médecins au théâtre, p. 4.

Introduction 13 end of the century. To be sure, the commedia dell'arte type stays on for a while, and the doctor of Molière survives for a time. Then the Molièresque types are replaced by realistic types drawn from a changing scene. In 1726 Piron gives us a light sketch of a fashionable fop of a doctor, who had already been in vogue in Paris for some time. Later, other dramatists draw full-length portraits of this same type, who has all the gaiety and affectation of the petit-maître. Different as he is, however, he still has one trait in common with his predecessors: he is just as impotent as they were in the face of disease. As Chamfort says: Doctors see no better than the plain man into diseases and the insides of human bodies. They are just as blind as he is. But doctors are like blindmen who know the roads and so are better able to get along. 21 21

Maximes et pensées, IV, 31.

II

Doctors of the Commedia dell'Arte Type H E doctor, or pedant, of the Cinquecento passed across the seventeenth-century stage to the eighteenth with his baggage of pedantry and ignorance intact. It is on the stage of the Théâtre de la Foire (the theaters at the fairs of Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent) that we meet the doctor, together with four or five of his comrades of the commedia dell'arte, after Madame de Maintenon had forced the regular theater to close its doors to Gherardi's Italian troupe in 1697? The rôle of the pedant is, however, going somewhat out of fashion in France. At the Foire he figures in a rather large number of prologues, in which he is usually the spokesman for the other actors. He rarely appears in the body of the comedy. He is neither physician nor magistrate in these plays, but rather a "retired" gentleman, or something of the sort.2 The pedant is occasionally a physician at the Comédie Italienne, reestablished in 1716 under the direction of Louis Riccoboni, the famous actor and playwright. Riccoboni records that the doctor is "an eternal babbler, a man who cannot open his mouth without sputtering maxims and scraps of Latin." 3 1 The doctor in Gherardi's theater (scenarios interspersed with texts written by French authors for the Italian actors in 1682—97) is the traditional character of the commedia dell'arte adapted to French requirements. For a discussion of the doctor in Le Théâtre italien de Gherardi, see Klinger, Die Comédie-italienne in Paris nach der Sammlung von Gherardi, pp. 62-64, 148-5 3. 2 Cf. Barberet, Lesage et le Théâtre de la foire, pp. 158-61. See also: Parfaict, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des spectacles de la Foire; Albert, Les Théâtres de la Foire (¡660-1789). 3 Riccoboni's Histoire du théâtre italien (1731 ed.) lias a description of the doctor's character and a picture of his costume (end of Vol. I I ) .

Commedia dell'Arte Type

15

Only three doctors of the commedia dell'arte type, so far as we can determine, appeared during the eighteenth century at the Théâtre Français. They owed their introduction to that more august stage to Dancourt, Legrand, and Beaumarchais. As in the commedia dell'arte, even when this tiresome pedant is cast as a physician, he appears preferably in some domestic rôle. He is always an old man, but the part played by him varies. At times he is a father, arranging or opposing marriages, sometimes a sighing lover, then again a jealous guardian outwitted by lovers' stratagems. In addition to these popular rôles of the old Italian theater, he appears as an "apostle of abstinence" in the numerous dramatizations of an incident from Cervantes' Don Quixote.4 APOSTLES OF

ABSTINENCE

In Dancourt's Sattcho Pança gouverneur (1712), Carizal, a nobleman, appears in the first part of the play merely as a "harangueur" — a "humble" substitute for the noble word orator — later on as counselor to the governor, and finally as the latter's physician. This wearisomely prolix pedant resembles the doctor of the old Italian comedy and, for that matter, that curious physician whom Nicolas de la Chesnaye worked into his Condamnacion de banquet, a French morality play of 1Î07. 5 In officially welcoming Sancho Panza to his island, Carizal heaps verbose praise upon him, promoting him forthwith from his native illiteracy to a doctorate in the humanities and in laws Attic and Roman. That is very satisfactory to Sancho Panza, but tiresome indeed to "Don Guichot," who continually interrupts, nudging the pedant to say something nice about him. True to the commedia dell'arte type, this pedant also * See Part II, Chap. X L V I I , for the doctor episode. 5 See Doutrepont's study on La Condamnacion de banquet; also Boutarel, La Médecine dans notre théâtre comique depuis ses origines jusqu'au XVI' siècle, pp. 3 2 49.

16

Commedia dell'Arte Type

displays his erudition by naming long lists of classical authorities and volunteering his advice on many subjects. Sancho is eventually conducted with gubernatorial ceremony to a table, laid with regal magnificence, in a spacious chamber of his palace. Overjoyed, his appetite raging, he sits down; but Carizal, now in the rôle of Doctor Pedro Rezio d'Aguerre, charged with responsibility for the governor's health, places himself at his elbow and, under pretext of saving his life, has all the food sent back to the kitchen before Sancho can get a bite of it, lecturing him meantime on the virtues of sobriety.6 Willing enough to recognize the doctor as a basin inspector, Sancho dismisses him on the spot as a supervisor of diet and, in fact, threatens to strangle him if he does not leave at once (Act IV, scene 3). In the last act (Act V, scene 12) Sancho has decided that the business of being governor, on a diet restricted to a dinner of "two slices of quince and a dozen wafer-rolls," is not all that it might be, and appoints the doctor his successor, on the condition that he too be confined to "the light but wholesome diet" that was recommended for him. This incident from Cervantes' novel is included in all the Sancho Panza plays of the century, namely in Sancho-Pança (170Î) by Bellavoine, Sancho Pança gouverneur, ou La Bagatelle (1727) by Thierry, and Sancho Pança dans son isle (1762) by Poinsinet. In Arlequin, roi de Serendib (1713), the masterpiece of the so-called placard plays,7 Lesage parodies (Act IV, scene 3 ) this same episode, which is, in fact, very congenial to plays of this pie-throwing genre. In Lesage's farce, Arlequin plays the part of Sancho. Another similar scene may be found in Act II of Arlequin prince et paysan of the same year, by an anonymous author.8 This incident is also dramatized by Like the Doctor Prolocutor of the sixteenth-century morality. When speaking was forbidden at the Théâtre de la Foire, the actors produced silent plays with scrolls of explanatory verses let down from the ceiling of the stage — very much like the subtitles of the old silent movies. 8 Cf. Dictionnaire des théâtres, I, 274-77. 6

7

Commedia dell'Arte

Type

17

Panard, Fuzelier, and Pontau in Le Malade par complaisance ( 1730), and again in Le Comte de Bel fior (1740) by Panard." T H E DESIGNING

FATHER

The characters in Autreau's La Fille inquiète, ou Le Besoin d'aimer (1723) also belong to the old Italian comedy. In this play the doctor is, by way of exception, provided with a name, Lanternon. As regards the plot, he is much occupied with marrying his son to a daughter of a patient of his, the traditional Pantalon, who is miser and hypochondriac in one. Lanternon's son, known as "Le philosophe," is himself a jocose pedant, his main interest lying in teaching "natural philosophy" to Pantalon's daughter. This comedy failed after one performance, and in fact the most amusing scene is the one where Lanternon dictates an oral prescription to Arlequin, whose brain is quite overtaxed as he tries to remember a literal brush heap of roots — roots of strawberries, nettles, sorrels, pimpernels, and finally roots of cochlearia. Trivelin, Lanternon's right-hand man, also provides us with a prescription (Act I, scene 14) : Every day take a large glass of lukewarm broth two hours before eating and another two hours after eating. Then make two or three very fast rounds in your garden and, if you can, go for a horseback ride and gallop a little in the country. Sydenham, the famous English doctor,10 would surely have cured his patients of melancholy by making them go at poste-haste.11 SIGHING LOVERS

We know that the Italian authors found the old doctor in love fair game and often made an absurd figure of him. Continuing this tradition, Le Brun, in a "comic pastoral »See Bardon, "Don Quichotte" en French au XVII' et au XVIII* tiiclt, pp. 475-J27, « J 4 - Ì 4 ; also La Grone, Imitations of "Don Quixote" in the Spanish Drama, pp. 109-10. 10 Thomas Sydenham (1624—89), the reviver of the Hippocratic methods of observation and experience. Garrison, History of Medicine, p. 269. 11 Cf. Mercuri de France, mai, 1724, pp. 989-1009.

18

Commedia

dell'Arte

Type

play" entitled Hippocrate amoureux ( 1712), shows the learned doctor in the transports of love. The celebrated Doctor Hippocrates is desperately in love with a pretty shepherdess, who has given her heart to a shepherd and gently spurns the doctor. Furious, he threatens to revenge himself. He begs Pluto, in view of the many inhabitants he, Hippocrates, has contributed to the other world, to favor his wishes. Then he implores the black inhabitants of the Styx to come to his aid, and reminds them that their supreme power is due to his art. In a burlesque scene, Aesculapius, the god of medicine, descends from heaven mounted on a mule,12 and tries to console Hippocrates by promising him absolute power of life and death. Legrand burlesques the amorous and ignorant doctor in L'Aveugle clairvoyant (1716), 1 3 a play cut after the pattern of the commedia dell'arte. The old Italian play is usually a solution of an intrigue by some clever device or other. Legrand's device of blind eyes, that see when they want to, is a novel one. Doctor Lempesé (Stuffed-Shirt), an intruder and a bore, figures in this trick. To get out of an embarrassing situation, he prescribes a skin tonic for the eyes of the clairvoyant blind man (his rival in love), and cannot believe his own eyes when he sees that he has cured him. Stupefied, he exclaims (Act I, scene 25) : Je vois que désormais On peut tout hasarder après un tel succès. 14

In 1717 appeared Le Docteur médecin amoureux by an anonymous author,15 and in 1721 a doctor as an ardent lover is to be found in Desportes' play, La Veuve coquette. This doctor is merely a shameless adventurer, however, whose sole See below, p. 8 J . Substantially a réduction to one act of Debrosse's full-length comedy o f the same name produced in 1649. Parfaict, Histoire du Théâtre Français, X V , 2 4 2 . 1 4 C f . Saucerotte, Les Médecins au théâtre, p. 5. l r 'Played in Italian, under the title of Le Nozze in sogno. An outline of the plot, in French, was distributed before the curtain rose. Dictionnaire des théâtres, II, 332. 12

13

Commedia

dell'Arte

Type

19

interest in marriage is a financial one. Rhubarbini, the Italian doctor, remarks (scene 1) that "a doctor sometimes has privileges," and we are sure that he would not be above taking advantage of any opportunity the profession offered, no matter how sacred the duty not to do so. He reasons prudently that a moneyed widow is an excellent preservative against the cruelties of fortune, and makes a passionate avowal of his love to her (scene 12): But Madam, how long do you wish to defer putting a specific balm on the violent wounds which your charms have made? Love which circulates in my veins inflames my lungs in such a manner that the emetic of your favors is all that can cure the fever with which my heart is burning. . . . For you I neglect my art, all my patients complain of me, and now while I am talking to you a patient of quality waits for me; but on seeing you I forget that his pain is acute.

This jingle of word play is in the purest Italian tradition. When it is learned that the widow has signed away threefourths of her property, Trivelin suggests that they leave, as there is no longer anything to marry there. Flaminia now makes a play for the doctor, who, in his medical jargon interspersed with Latin phrases, befittingly requites the designing widow for her maltreatment of him (scene 20) : Madam, par pari refertur, you have mistreated me — each one has his turn — and the bleeding by which you have been relieved of your property has cured me of my amorous inflammation. Good-day.

This play is noteworthy as reviving the traditional lazzi, or quips, of the doctor on a fairly large scale.16 In Les Ombres parlantes (1740), by Romagnesi and Dominique, the old physician is kept from marrying Isabelle by a stratagem instigated by Leandre.17 And the old doctor in Bailly's Bolan, ou Le Médecin amoureux (175 5 ) , a parody

of Roland by Quinault-Lully, also has a young rival who is pre16 17

Cf. Histoire du théâtre italien, II, 36-39. IbiJ., VII, 387-88.

20

Commedia

dell'Arte

Type

ferred and who vexes him outrageously. Among the advantages of the rich Bolan's love that a practical maid points out to her mistress is that of the excellent medical care she would receive at his hands. Bolan even sends an apothecary whom he has chosen for her, in case she should have an attack of the colic. But the pitiless girl merely laughs at the desperate lover, who finds even her pulse seductive. The apothecary, Fleuran, begs Bolan to give up Angélique and asks (scene 12), Is a doctor created To people the world? 18 But Bolan is not so easily daunted. In the next scene he learns that she has fled with the younger man. This sends him into a foaming rage, and in his delirium he imagines that he sees the spirits of all the patients who have died under his care. Like others of his ilk, he is not too savory a character. 19 In La Noce de Montargis (1773), by Régnard de Pleinchesne, old Bistouri is physician, surgeon, and apothecary in one and, like old Bolan, very amorous and very rich. H e couches his love declarations to Manette in scientific language in the manner of Rhubarbini, and speaks of the contusion of which her beautiful eyes have been the cause. H e will die of indigestion if the avowal he has made to her does not serve as a cupping glass and a topic for his love. He promises her sweet and well-gilded pills after they are married. But he, too, finds his inamorata inhuman and swears by his science, by his lancet, and by his syringe to love her whether she will or no, and to renounce his scalpel, Hippocrates, and "the barbarous a r t " sooner than his celestial passion. 18

Reminiscent of the epitaph by D u f r e s n y and Brugicre de Barantc, in et Marforio, médecins des moeurs (1697): "This doctor, who knew the art of dealing death, T o engender children would emphatically dccline. Believing is he did t h a t giving life Was hardly in his line." 19 C f . Gruyer, " D e la parodie au théâtre," Revue d'art dramatique,

(1893), 218-32.

Pasquin

XXXII

Commedia dell'Arte Type JEALOUS

GUARDIANS:

BARTHOLO,

AND

21 OTHERS

The relation of Beaumarchais' Le Barbier de Seville (1775) to Sedaine's On ne s'avise jamais de tout (1761) 20 is noted by Lintilhac. 21 Like Tue, who envies the merchant whom no one can rob, since he has his wife and gold right under his eyes, Bartholo keeps a vigilant eye on his ward. They both forbid their wards to have stationery and ink; and, in moments of effusion, complain of the hardships of their profession. Tue is always "allant, venant, trottant, courant," and Bartholo "va, vient, toupille." But the doctor in Sedaine's play does not particularly amuse us; whereas Bartholo in Beaumarchais' masterpiece interests and diverts.22 Figaro, the barber of Seville, describes Bartholo (Act I, scene 4) as a fine b i g , s h o r t , y o u n g o l d m a n , d a p p l e g r a y , c r a f t y , w e l l - s h a v e n ,

blasé,

p e e p i n g a n d p r y i n g , g r u m b l i n g a n d m o a n i n g , all a t o n c e . . . .

B r u t a l , a v a r i c i o u s a n d a b s u r d l y j e a l o u s o f his w a r d , w h o h a t e s h i m with a deadly hatred.23

The count, who is in love with Rosine, comes to Bartholo's house, disguised as a soldier and feigning intoxication. He asks for Doctor Balordo and then tells Bartholo that he recognized him immediately by his description, which he sets forth in lyrics (Act II, scene 13): 2 0 The plot of Sedaine's play is taken from La Fontaine's "proverbe" of the same title. In 1741 Panard had utilized this source for Le Registre inutile. In this play Orgon, Julie's guardian and lover, is not a physician. In the prologue, however, a physician, together with a Gascon and a solicitor, come to see the play. Cf. Dictionnaire des théâtres, IV, 397-406; Histoire Je l'Opéra Comique, I, 3 9 6 407; II, 127-32. 21 Beaumarchais, pp. 229-30. See also Arnoldson, Sedaine, p. 104, n. 31. 22 A contemporary of Beaumarchais writes: " T h e characters, without any energy, a rather pronounced point, are sometimes contradictory." And he sums up his criticism of this sparkling comedy by calling it "a tiresome parade, an insipid farce, unworthy of the Théâtre Français." Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, VII, 298-99. " 3 English passages of this play are from Arthur B. Myrick's translation, in Chief European Dramatists, ed. by Brander Matthews.

22

Commedia

dell'Arte

Type

The nodding head, the bald and polished crown, The wall-eyed, blear, and savage-squinting frown, The manners like a fierce Algonquin chief, The heavy figure, warped beyond belief, The crooked shoulder and [the] swarthy skin, As black as any Moorish child of sin, The nose, moreover, like a baldaquin, The bent and twisted leg, forever flexed, The hangman's voice, confused with words perplexed, And all his vicious appetites declare This man's the pearl of doctors, rich and rare! Bartholo is not pedantic and ignorant like the old Italian doctor, Baloardo. In f a c t he is quite intelligent about everything except his love and his suspicions. 24 W h a t follows resembles very closely scene 13 in Lesage, Fuzelier, and Dorneval's L'Obstacle

favorable

(1726),

in

which the farrier and veterinary surgeon calls the doctor confrère and considers himself his equal ( A c t II, scene 1 3 ) : Count. Can you read, doctor . . . ? Bartholo. Another silly question. Count. Oh! don't let that worry you; for I, who am at least as much of a doctor as yourself . . . Bartholo. What is that? Count. Am I not horse-doctor to the regiment? That is why they have lodged me with a colleague. Bartholo. He dares to compare a farrier! . . . Count. No, doctor, I will not proclaim That this our art can put to shame Old Hippocrates and his crew; Your knowledge, comrade, it is true, Hath a success of wider sway, The ill it may not bear away, Yet bear off patients not a few. Do I not speak you fairly? Bartholo. It becomes you well, you ignorant manipulator, so to revile the first, the greatest, and the most useful of the arts! Count. Useful, indeed, for those who practice it. 24

G a i f f e , Le Mariage

Je Figaro,

p. i f .

Commedia

dell'Arte

Type

23

Bartholo. An art upon whose successes the sun is proud to shine.25 Count. And whose blunders the earth makes haste to cover. 28 Bartholo. I see very well, you saucy fellow, that you are accustomed to talk only to horses.27 Count. Talk to horses! Ah, doctor! a poor wit for a witty doctor. . . . Is it not notorious that the farrier always cures his patients without speaking to them, though, on the contrary, the physician talks much to his. . . . Bartholo. Without curing them, you mean? W h e n the c o u n t is about to leave, Beaumarchais another witticism at the expense of the Faculty

makes

(Act

II,

scene 1 4 ) : Count. Pray Death to forget me for a few more campaigns: life has never been so dear to me. Bartholo. Never mind, if I had so much credit with Death. . . . Count. With Death? Are you not a physician? You do so much for Death that he can refuse you nothing. O n e of the most amusing scenes in the play ( A c t III, scene 11 ) is the one in w h i c h Bartholo, c o m p l e t e l y duped, joins in w i t h those w h o are intriguing against h i m ; but as it contains n o t h i n g medical, w e shall stop at a mere reference t o it and turn to the w i t t y Figaro — Bartholo's barber, surgeon, and apothecary. 2 8 *J5 Myrick has erroneously translated this line as " A n art honoring the sun which shines upon its successes." The French of the last t w o lines is: " U n art dont le soleil s'honore d'éclairer les succès. Et dont la terre s'empresse de couvrir les bévues." W e find in Brécourt's L'Ombre de Molière, 1674 (scene 1 3 ) : "Les scélérats osent t o u t tenter sur cette confiance que le soleil éclairera leurs succès et que la terre couvrira leurs f a u t e s . " Montaigne had said: "Le soleil éclaire leur succès, et la terre cache leur f a u t e . " Essais, Book II, Chap. X X X V I , pl. 692. Paris, 1912. Facsimile reprint of the edition of H 8 8 . " I sec very well that you associate only with horses and donkeys," says Trousse-Galant in Lesage's play. But best of all is Béralde's retort to the apothecary in Le Malade imaginaire ( A c t III, scene 4 ) : " I see very well t h a t you are not used to talking to faces." 28 Le Barbier de village, b y Beaunoir, was produced late in 1775. Beaunoir surely knew Beaumarchais' play, staged in February of the same year. H o w ever, although their point of departure is almost the same, the development of the intrigue and of the character differs so much in the t w o plays t h a t no compari-

24

Commedia

dell'Arte

Type

"There is not a stroke of the razor, the lancet, or the syringe in his house," Figaro tells the count, "which does not proceed from the hand of your humble servant" ( A c t I, scene 4 ) . Figaro is capable of crippling Bartholo's whole household in a j i f f y : He gives Eveillé a sleeping powder, La Jeunesse something to make him sneeze, he bleeds Marcelline in the foot, he even puts a poultice over the eyes of a poor blind m u l e ! The old physician turns upon Figaro for his zeal in bleeding, drugging, and prostrating his whole household ( A c t III, scene 5 ) : W h a t have you to say, master zealot, to that wretch who yawns and sleeps, though wide awake? and the other, who, for the last three hours, has been sneezing enough to crack his cranium, or blow out his brains!

Bartholo, to whom Figaro owes a hundred crowns, thinks that Figaro is t r y i n g to settle his account without opening his purse. Do you doubt my honesty, sir? [says the witty barber]. Your hundred crowns! I would rather owe them to you all my life than deny them to you for a single moment. 29

Strictly speaking, one could hardly put Beaumarchais' doctor on a par with the others whom we have mentioned. The plot in the Barbier, and for that matter in the Figaro, is "Italian," in the sense that it is the solution of an intrigue b y the wiles of servants; but if one looks closely, one observes that in the traditional "Italian" comcdy the presumption is that the world described on the stage is a real world. T h a t world Beaumarchais, with the instinct of the surpassing artist, son, and furthermore no accusation of plagiarism, should be made. Abbott, "Robineau, dit de Beaunoir, et les petits théâtres du XVIII" siècle," Revue d'histoire littéraire, XLIII ( 1 9 3 6 ) , 36. 2 9 In Beaumarchais' second master stroke, Le Mariage de Figaro ( 1 7 8 4 ) , Bartholo has only a subsidiary rôle, and Figaro becomes a valet and house porter to the Count. In the famous monologue he says (Act V, scene 3 ) : "I learnt chemistry, pharmacy, surgery, yet all the influence of a great nobleman barely succeeded in putting a veterinary surgeon's lancet in my h a n d ! "

Commedia dell'Arte Type 25 transports to the realm of fancy, and the poetry which derives from that translation suffuses all his characters. They are the inhabitants of an imaginary comic world. There is the same nuance of difference between Beaumarchais' doctor and those of the traditional stage that there is between A Sausage of Bologna of John Jay Chapman and a farce of Goldoni. One feels that the doctor of Beaumarchais, the doctor who originated in the mask of the commedia dell'arte, has lived his historic cycle, and in fact Bartholo is the last important doctor of this type.

Ill

M.olièresque Types and Jokes

F

OR half a century or so after Molière, the writers of medical plays worked along the lines of this great benefactor of medicine, as he has been called by noted physicians of today. If these imitators fall short of their model, both in character delineation and in penetrating satire of the medical profession, they do have the talent and the wit to ridicule the doctors amusingly. They catch the quackery and the medical pomposity of their day with remarkable verve. Sometimes their doctors are grossly caricatured; but, after all, a caricature is merely an exaggeration of a peculiarity that may be true to life. If their jokes are a little threadbare from long service, one should remember that theater audiences like to hear old jokes. As one critic has said, they hail with recognition witticisms that they are hearing for the hundredth time. 1 Speaking of French comedy after Molière, Augustin Gazier relates an anecdote about Florian, who, writing fables after La Fontaine, wanted to throw his collection in the fire. A judicious old man prevented him from doing so: "Do not burn your fables," he advised; "there are many ranks beneath La Fontaine that are still very creditable." Gazier adds, " W e can say the same of Molière." 2 1 Planche, "Le T h é â t r e et l'esprit public en France ( 1 6 3 6 - 1 8 5 6 ) , " Revue des deux mondes, 2. sér., V ( 1 8 5 6 ) , 130. 2 " L a Comédie en France après Molicrc," Revue des cours et conférences, 1. sér., XVIII ( 1 9 0 9 - 1 0 ) , 200.

Molièresque Types and Jokes GÉRONTE:

ARGAN'S

27

SUCCESSOR

Of the eighteenth-century dramatists, Regnard is the closest to Molière.3 While he does not have the depth of the master, he is frequently more brilliant. He was obviously greatly influenced in his last play, Le Légataire universel (1708), by Le Malade imaginaire, which was likewise Molière's last work. Both comedies center around an avaricious dotard, tottering on the brink of the grave, whose departure is anxiously awaited by those who are conspiring for his money. While the subject is far from being a gay one, Regnard, with his inexhaustible gaiety and his magic power to provoke laughter, has made a side-splitting comedy of it. Géronte is a hybrid of the protagonists of Le Malade imaginaire and L'Avare. He differs from Argan in that he is not an imaginary invalid — he suffers from real ills. H e is a helpless old child of sixty-eight, afflicted with nearly all possible human infirmities and always preoccupied with his medicaments and his health. He resembles Harpagon in his sordid avarice. The stingy churl begrudges, even more than Argan, the money he spends for his cures. His avarice sometimes gives him a certain wit. He thinks that if he has to die he might better do so at once (Act I, scene 4) : "The house is not worth the repairs that are being put on it." Yet this "old worn-out, feverish, epileptic, paralytic, consumptive, asthmatical, dropsical" Géronte, a victim of gout and colic as well, for a moment considers marrying a young girl, who he thinks would cure his ills better than any doctor and give him an heir, to boot, in nine months' time. He is, of course, extremely repugnant to his young fiancée, whom Regnard, taking unfair advantage of a sick man, it seems to me, introduces to him while he is suffering from the humiliating consequences of a treatment. 3

See Toldo, "Etudes sur le théâtre de R c g r u r d , " Revue X ( 1 9 0 3 ) , 2 J - Î 2 ; XI (1904), J6-87.

d'histoire

littéraire,

28

Molièresque Types and Jokes

In Act II we are introduced to Clistorel, an irascible apothecary, physician, and surgeon. He is very angry with the Faculty and calls them all asses, or at least three-fourths of them, because ( A c t II, scene 2 ) "they wanted to force all apothecaries to compound their potions and place their clysters in position themselves, so our apprentices would be nothing but assistants." This person is very similar to Purgon in the way he exploits his prey. 4 He harshly reprimands Géronte for considering marriage ( A c t II, scene 1 1 ) : Believe me, y o u r p u n y body is not made f o r that kind of fencing. In Hippocrates — it makes no difference where — I read a sound aphorism and it leaves no middle course: " A n y old man w h o marries a l i v e l y o v e r f r i s k girl, threatens his life w i t h his o w n dagger." Virgo libtdinosa senern jugulat.

Instead, with an eye on his till, Clistorel recommends medicines, syrups and soothing drugs, good catholicon, good senna, good refined extract of polyshrest salt, good tartar emetic, and a good strong diuretic clyster. Trenchant is Lisette's description of Clistorel ( A c t II, scene 12) : Measure him accurately and I believe that he's no taller than his syringe, y e t screeches like three. These little abortions are all of an obstinate disposition.

This character, Clistorel, is really not necessary to the action of the play, 5 and the rôle was suppressed when the play was revived in Paris some years ago. Diagnosis was very rudimentary in the eighteenth century, as compared with what it is today, or was even a century ago. In Act III the mad whirl of events instigated by Crispin revolves around Géronte's lethargy. It is all fantasy and folly, but it is excellent fun. The valet, disguised as one or another of Géronte's distant relatives, talks much nonsense and makes 4 T h e o n l y scene in w h i c h he appears is a weak imitation of Act III, scene f , of Le Malade imaginaire. 5 C f . P a r f a i c t , Histoire du Théâtre Français, XIV, 470-72.

Molièresque Types and Jokes

29

many insults in order to disgust the old man with his "collaterals." The one threatens to bury him, dead or alive, at the end of six days; the other vows to have him declared non compos mentis. This being more than Géronte can bear, he falls into a coma. In Act IV, Crispin, the covetous scamp, thinking Géronte dead, carries his knavery a little further by impersonating him before the notaries and dictates a will in favor of his master, not forgetting Lisette and himself. This incident has recently been copied by Forzano in Gianni Schicc/n, an opera by Puccini. Schicchi, however, makes himself the sole heir. The most amusing scene in the whole comedy is the one in the final act in which the notaries return to read to Géronte a copy of his last will. The perplexed patient does not remember having made a will and understands nothing of what is being said to him. Then he naively concludes that his lapse of memory is due to his lethargy. So after each clause of the will that is read, followed by Géronte's exclamation of surprise, comes this refrain, " 'Tis your lethargy! . . . 'Tis your lethargy!" 0 Wearied by so many lethargies, Géronte finally accepts Crispin's will as his own. TROUSSE-GALANT, DESCENDANT OF TOMES AND

PURGON

Lesage has been called the Molière of the Théâtre de la Foire. Like the great comic author, he always sees the humorous side of things. He, too, aims to amuse his public by making members of the medical profession the butt of a caustic humor. He has good opportunity for this in La Tontine,7 a play dealing with mutual life insurance, founded on the principle that as each annuitant died, his share reverted to the survivors in his group.8 The last survivor took all the money. "This is commonly compared to the reiteration of "Le poumon!" in Le Malade

imaginaire,

A c t I I I , scene 10.

7

W r i t t e n in 1 7 0 8 b u t not produced until

8

Lorenzo T o n t i , a N e a p o l i t a n , suggested this kind o f insurance t o M a z a r i n in

1732.

165 3, whence its name " t o n t i n e . " Claretie, Lesage,

pp. 78—79.

30

Molièresque Types and Jokes

Lesage, like Molière, attaches much importance to the names of his characters. He calls the doctor in two of his comedies Trousse-Galant (Sure-Death). Trousse-Galant in La Tontine is an avaricious phlebotomist, who resembles the bloodletting Tomès in L'Amour médecin and already prefigures the famous Doctor Sangrado in Gil Bias. He knows "la médecine à fond" like the First Physician in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, and is just as staunch an adherent to the rules of the ancients. "Of what can one complain?" he asks with a self-conceited air, on learning that his patient is dead. "I had him bled more than twenty times; I refreshed him with an infusion; and he ought to have gotten well, according to our ancients." "And to have died, according to our moderns," adds the maid impertinently. Frosine is reprimanded for speaking against the doctors and is advised to leave that to the surgeons (scene 2 ) . Trousse-Galant thinks it a crime to question a remedy that the Faculty has recommended, even though it has already carried off a large number of people, including his wife. He believes, like Purgon, that the remedies of the Faculty are infallible. When no rule has been neglected, he is as unconcerned about a death as Tomès and says with assurance (scene 3 ) : " A good doctor always goes on in the old way, and never resorts to methods that shock the established principles of the Faculty." The confidences that Trousse-Galant and Bolus (Large Pill) 9 exchange satirize the collusion that commonly existed between physician and apothecary. "I clear your shelves of all your useless drugs," says Trousse-Galant benevolently, "and when an expensive medicine can be tucked into a prescription, I never fail to prescribe five or six scruples more than are absolutely necessary." "And I always put in seven or eight less than you order," replies Bolus, not to be outdone 9

L i t t r e defines bolus as " A colored clayish e a r t h , f o r m e r l y used in medicine as

a t o n i c and a s t r i n g e n t . * '

Molièresque Types and Jokes

31

in fraternal considerateness. "In that way I save the patients' life and your reputation too" (scene 4 ) . All the same, Trousse-Galant must be assumed to believe in his own cures, since he prescribes them for Ambroise, a robust peasant on whom he has taken out a tontine policy for ten thousand livres. He inundates him with clysters and pampers him with attentions until Ambroise yawns with boredom. The doctor becomes alarmed (scene f ) : How he yawns! H u m ! Yawning is not a good sign. It denotes a plentitude of the vessels, a tension of the muscles, an extension of the diaphragm, with an irregular effusion of the animal spirits. My! My! That disorder must be attended to! A good big bleeding!

"Mercy, still another?" cries Ambroise, whimpering. "Still another!" adds the doctor pitilessly. "Preceded by an injection of emollient plants to prevent coarse juices from taking the place of the blood that is to be drawn off." Ambroise must have had an iron constitution to have resisted both the cures of Trousse-Galant and the drugs with which Bolus stuffed him.10 " T H E DOCTOR KILLS R A T H E R

THAN

CURES"

We gather, by a harvest of allusions to the old libel, that the words doctor and assassin were synonymous in the eighteenth century, as they had been in the preceding one and, for that matter, since the time of Philemon, who said that only physicians and judges can kill without being killed. Lesage never misses a chance for a sneer at the doctors. In La Foire des fées (1722) he has Millioni say (scene 9 ) , "the doctors deserted their patients — and the patients got well." Destouches, in his moral dissection of contemporary society, does not overlook this propensity of the medical profession. In Le Curieux impertinent (1710), his maiden play, we hear — through some remarkably flat dialogue — of a man afflicted with apoplexy, who is being attended by a young foppish follower of Galen, by an aged surgeon, and by an apothecary. By some 10

Claretie, op. cit., pp. 7 9 - 8 1 .

Molièresque Types and Jokes

32

miracle this medical trinity does not kill him, but actually brings him to life again (Act I, scene 9) : Mais le h a s a r d s o u v e n t supplée à l ' i g n o r a n c e .

In Le Dissipateur (1753) the interests of Pasquin are not being served by the longevity of his uncle. A diligent messenger comes twice every year to report that the old man lies at the point of death. But just as his heirs are getting ready to go and bury him, another messenger disappoints them by reporting that the traitor has recovered, in spite of two doctors — for a moment they had left his bedside. "Oh," exclaims Finette (Act III, scene 2), "he will never die if two doctors have not been able to kill him." It is said that when Crébillon was lying seriously ill, his doctor begged the two first acts of Catilina as a gift. The dramatist replied with a line from his masterpiece, Rbadamiste et Zénobie (1711) (Act III, scene 2) : Ah!

d o i t - o n h é r i t e r de c e u x q u ' o n assassine?

11

Piron was himself the son of a ballad-writing apothecary. He satirizes the homicidal facility of doctors in four of his bantering comedies. In L'Antre de Trophonius, 1722 (scene 2) a thief asks Arlequin for his purse. "Are you a sheriff?" asks Arlequin. "Your purse or your life!" prompts a second thief. "So, I take it you are a doctor!" concludes Arlequin piquantly. 12 Le Mariage de Momus, of the same year, is a fanciful dispute between two Sovereigns of Destruction: Mars, the god of war, and Apollo, the god of medicine. Monsieur de la Fosse is the medical man in Les Trois Commères (1723), by Lesage, Dorneval, and Piron. He appears only in Act II, the part contributed by Piron.13 There are a few ancient gibes at the profession — nothing more. In Piron's Le Fâcheux Veuvage (1725), Arlequin wishes to get rid of his old, 11

Sue, Anecdotes historiques I, 2 1 - 2 2 . Doutrepont, ta Littérature et les médecins en France, pp. 12, 15. 13 Lesage has failed to give Piron credit for this act. Dictionnaire des IV, 150. 12

théâtres,

Molièresque

Types

and Jokes

33

apoplectic wife. H e sends for two doctors, rather than one, to make sure of expeditious and effective service. H e warns them that the woman has an iron constitution, and urges them to leave nothing undone that can further his cause (Act I, scene 5 ) : Cut her, carve her, lavishly, Medicate her well for me. Bleed her most excessively Purge her all you can and more, Above all, syringe thoroughly.

We get only mere glimpses of the two doctors in question; but at one point Pirouzé, the maid whom Arlequin wants to marry, appears disguised as a doctor, and in defense of her assumed profession makes a speech that is very much to its discredit. Trying to persuade a cadi to banish a person who is able to resurrect the dead, she argues (Act III, scene Î ) : " T h e dead are colonies of dangerous, or superfluous, living people, of whom the heavens, by our hands and yours, continually purge the earth in order to make it more comfortable." The cadi, however, is not convinced and salutes the hero as follows (Act III, scene 8 ) : Come, man of rare magnificence, Give us happy evidence Of your unequaled skill. I used to suspect it, But now I respect it Since Medicine speaks you so ill.14

In L'Embarras des richesses (1725), by d'Allainval, Arlequin pretends ignorance of the meaning of the word doctor and wonders in fright whether it may not stand for a serious malady of which one dies.15 The same author in Le Tour de carnaval, of the following year, directs the final vaudeville 14 ,s

Cf. ibid., VI, 142-5«. Cf. Histoire du théâtre italien, II, 379-93.

34

Molièresque Types and Jokes

against cuckold doctors. These final vaudevilles, or ballads, which end plays, have no relation to the subject of the main play, and were used by authors as a sort of general curtain call.16 Frequently, as in this play, the audience was amused at the expense of the medical corps. Here are two piquant couplets with the corresponding refrain:

Refrain:

Contre ce docte médecin, C'est à tort qu'en tous lieux on crie: Lorsqu'il détruit le genre humain, Son épouse le multiplie. Censeurs, n'en dites point de mal Tout est permis en carnaval. 17

Le Chevalier errant (1726) by Legrand is a parody of La Motte's Oedipe. Alcipe utters a cry of alarm when he hears from his wife that a doctor was the assassin of her former husband. She asks (scene 18): D'où vient ce cri bizarre? Est-ce une chose donc si nouvelle et si rare, Qu'un médecin ait pû tuer?

Alcipe feels qualmish as he confesses that he gave an ounce of emetic to a man who was attacked with a strange colic and who proved to be her husband. The colic passed away immediately — and so did the man.18 L'Isle de la raison, ou Les Petits Hommes (1727), by Marivaux, is a virulent satire of Europeans, based on Gulliver's Travels.19 In it a doctor makes one appearance (Act II, scene 2 ) , in order to hear from a peasant that since he is rich and does not need to earn his living by taking the lives of others, he should allow people to die in peace. 1(1

See Nougaret,

De

l'art

du

théâtre,

"Observations

204—6; II, 3 0 1 - 6 . 1 7 C f . Histoire du théâtre italien, II, 43 3 - 4 7 . 18 Ibid., pp. 4 6 2 - 7 1 . 1 9 C f . Goulding, Swift en France, pp. 8 4 - 8 8 .

sur

le

vaudeville,"

I,

Molièresque Types and Jokes

35

The animosity of the god of Hades for the medical corps (an enmity, after all, that would be to the credit of the latter) goes back very far. Aesculapius himself was thunderstruck by Zeus, at the instigation of Pluto, who accused the son of Apollo of depopulating his empire of the dead. In Dorneval's Arlequin traitant (1716) a physician in Hades "circulates" incessantly on Ixion's wheel. He is being punished for having all the blood of his patients drawn out "in order to make it circulate." 20 In Fleury's Olivette, juge des enfers ( 1 7 2 6 ) , a doctor is brought before Pluto's tribunal on a charge of having killed a patient in a week's time with a "chicken-water" cure. He is sentenced to undergo a metamorphosis, whereby he becomes the patient and the patient his doctor.21 A little comedy by Philippe Poisson has for its title La Boîte de Pandore 22 ( 1729), which figuratively means the source of many evils. Jupiter has declared war on the entire human race and has charged Mercury with bringing all imaginable evils to the earth. Headache, vapors, gout, paralysis, and fever, personified, are taken there in a metal box. Mercury tells Pluto that, together with these evils, he intends to send some doctors. To this the god of Hades objects: What! That they may aid to mortals bring, And to their greatest ills relief extend?

Mercury answers: Relief extend! I fear your fancy's strayed! Quite the reverse! The job's to make them worse.

We see the doctor, together with a solicitor and a tax assessor, being called out of Hades by a troupe of sorcerers in Arlequin Bellerophon ( 1 7 2 8 ) , by Romagnesi and Dominique. These "monsters," who had already ravaged the country, were Histoire Je l'Opéra Comique, I, J J - 4 1 . Cf. Dictionnaire des théâtres, IV, 15-17. 2 2 Strikingly like Lesage's La Boite Je PanJore tains no doctors. 20

21

( 1 7 2 1 ) , which, however, con-

36

Molièresque

Types

and

Jokes

summoned to help Queen Sténobée get revenge on Arlequin, who preferred Philonoé to the queen. To hasten this revenge, the power of these public prosecutors was collected in one monster. This play is a parody of the opera Bellerophon, of which the music is by Lully and the words by Fontenelle.23 Romagnesi and Dominique ridicule the Faculty in a number of their keen satires. In Alceste (1728), a parody of the opera of the same name by Quinault and Lully, they treat the old joke about the doctor in an original way. Kill some one he must; so for Admetus to get well, another person (Alcestis) must take his medicine for him and die.24 Mathurin and Colette in Les Paysans de qualité (1729) cannot marry until the girl's mother is either in better health or dead. Mathurin brings the good news that the doctors have deserted the patient; so he feels very hopeful about her recovery. Le Temple de la vérité (1726) deals with the adventures of the editor of a newspaper. The business in itself does not yield very much, but there are incidental profits. An abbé pays the Gazette thirty pistoles to declare that the smallpox has not disfigured him. A doctor pays four pistoles for a statement that a patient, whom he has killed with a bleeding, has died of an apothecary's blunder. "If that doctor intends to hide all his murders at the same price, he will soon be ruined" (Act II, scene 6). 25 There is much innocent malice in the plays of contemporary life by Panard, a bacchic ballad writer who extolled virtue, but who often takes the medical profession as a butt for his gibes and taunts. The profession is frequently ridiculed in his final vaudevilles.26 In Le Magasin des modernes (1736), Mercury sings: L'art de la santé Fut bien inventé 23 C f . Mercure de France, mai, 1728, pp. 1019-31. Histoire III, 165-77. 24 Cf. Histoire du théâtre italien, III, 2 0 7 - 2 1 . 25 C f . ibid., II, 4 8 2 - 9 2 . 28 See above, p. 34.

du théâtre

italien,

Molièresque Types and Jokes

37

Par nombre de gens qui nous bernent. Et voilà comment ils s'y gouvernent: Le médecin fait en tatant, Le chirurgien en piquant, L'apothicaire en se baissant, Tous trois font faire au patient: Aye, aye, aye! Turelure, lure, Flon, flon, flon.27 La Pièce à deux acteurs ( 1 7 3 8 ) contains this couplet: Deux médecins, quoique fameux, C'est trop, ma foi, c'est trop de deux. And again in Le Qu-ett dira-1-on?

Refrain:

( 1 7 4 1 ) we find:

Que l'orgueil chirurgical De la Faculté se mocque Que le bonnet doctoral Aux ânes serve de toque Quand je bois rien ne me choque Cela m'est égal.

In Les Tableaux ( 1 7 4 7 ) there is a doctor "qui fait des orphelins." In La Critique à l'Opéra-Comique ( 1 7 4 2 ) , Doctor Clam a r t 2 8 comes to tell the Opéra Comique, impersonated by Mlle Raimond, that it is wrong to make light of the Faculty, a corps so necessary to others. Mile Raimond replies that it is true they do render service to many people waiting for inheritances ( A c t I, scene 2 ) : Air: Le Bal du Cours Par vous d'une grand'mcre On recueille le bien; Vous délivrez d'un frère Un cadet qui n'a rien. Vous ôtez un gardien A de jeunes fillettes; 27 2S

Cf. Histoire Je l'Opéra Comique, I, 25 9 - 7 « . Allusion to the cemetery by that name.

38

Molièresque Types and Jokes Aux femmes, un époux Jaloux! Aux fils, un vieux papa. Voilà Les plaisirs que vous faites.29

In La Gageure ( 1 7 4 1 ) , by Procope-Couteaux and La Grange, a stanza of the final vaudeville30 expresses the authors' doubt of the efficacy of the medical corps:

Refrain:

Un disciple de Galien Sur tous les maux raisonne bien. Oh! s'il dit vrai la cure est sûre: Parieriez-vous qu'il guérira? Ma foi, le juge qui voudra. Je ne suis pas de la gageure.

When the lawyer in Guyot de Merville's Les Talens déplacés (1744) accuses the doctor of helping people to die, the latter asks if the lawyer wins all the suits that he tries. "When one loses, another gains, and someone is happy," is the answer. "But the doctor could say as much," remarks the second interlocutor. The same author had written a mediocre play in 1739 entitled Le Médecin de l'esprit.31 Voisenon may be alluding to it in L'Ombre de Molière, produced in the following month. He has one of the characters say to Pasquin, who is complaining (scene 9) : Ah! nous allons voir un beau bruit, C'est le médecin de l'esprit.

Mortifer in Favart's Acajou (1744) knows how to kill a man in more than one way, for he is both a physician and a fencing master. We see him arrayed as the president of the Faculty, presenting foils to Acajou: 29

C f . Junge, Charles-François Panard, pp. 144—45. See C a r m o d y , "Le Répertoire de l'opéra-comique en vaudevilles de 1708 à 1764." 31 Dictionnaire des théâtres, III, 360. Léris, Dictionnaire portatif, p. 287, attributes this play to Abbe Dcsfontaincs. 30

Molièresque

Types

and Jokes

39

Seigneur, recipe ce fleuret; Je vais démontrer le secret De tuer proprement un homme. Pour cet art, je suis un trésor,

In utroque l'on me renomme, Medicus sum et doctor. Mortifer becomes indignant when Acajou questions his medical system, because he radically knows how to cure the disease — the patient simply loses his life by it. Mortifer is hurt in the fencing bout because he refuses to parry, as such a surgical act would debase his hand. 32 The next two digs about the homicidal facility of doctors are in burlesque tragedies. These absurd extravagances mock the grandiloquent style of speaking of the heros of the classic tragedies and parody the sterotyped situations and devices. Trivial objects are substituted for noble ones, and the more absurd the object, the greater the comic contrast. In La Mort de Bucêphale ( 1 7 4 8 ) , by Pierre Rousseau, there are lamentations over the death of Alexander's horse, Bucêphale. Statire forms a conspiracy with Aridée to kill the animal, for which she is being scorned. The plotters t r y to persuade the king's physician to join in the murder, b u t he is afraid (scene 5 ) : Too easily in his doctor the king can see the cutthroat.

H e does promise, however, to get rid of the animal if they will give him a little time: Our art for such deeds doesn't have to be told: I'll order heat if he ought to have cold; By degrees I'll exhaust the source of his blood, Of the most potent purgatives fashion a flood. And if these devices don't bring on the slaughter, I'll try everything else, even Passy water. 33

But Aridée will not p u t up with such indirect methods. H e suggests that the doctor put poison in the horse's oats and 32 33

Cf. Histoire de l'Opéra Comique, I, 444-56. For Pissy water, se« below, p. 102, n. 4$.

40 Molièresque Types and Jokes have done with it. But Philippe thinks that that procedure would not be consistent with the dignity and honor of his profession: Poison! How Macedonia will discourse! Philip the Poisoner! And of what? A horse!

Aridée finally decides to kill the horse himself, and he puts poison in a truss of hay. In its convulsions, the horse gives Aridée a fatal kick, and in dying the man chances to mention Philippe's name (scene 11). The king's suspicions are aroused (scene 12) : Faut-il que sur le front d'un assassin chymiste Règne la gravité d'un docteur galéniste? Et ne devroit-on pas à ces traits éclatans Reconnoitre le cœur de tous ces charlatans?

He continues castigating the doctors who, he thinks, are no better than those whom Molière slandered.34 La Mort de Goret (1753), by Fleury, or Delorme, is of the same genre. The animal is somewhat lower in the hierarchy of beasts, but the theme is the same. Doctor Babiche has given his whole affection to a pig, Goret, lavishing on it endearing names, which his neglected wife feels are due to her. She conspires with a neighbor, promising him her favors if he will get rid of her detested rival. This is a parody of the scene in Andromaque (Act IV, scene 3) where Hermione begs Oreste to kill Pyrrhus. The doctor's sleep is disturbed by horrible dreams, which foretell the inevitable loss of Goret. La Casse, his assistant, wonders whether some patient may be the cause of his agitation, but learns that the patients are all peacefully lodged in their coffins. However, La Casse has sensed the true character of the doubly criminal conversation between Mme Babiche and her neighbor, and, having had his fill of such an unwholesome atmosphere, decides to go to Paris to practice. This supplies him with a pretext for 34

C f . G r a n n i s , Dramatic

Parody

in Eighteenth

Century

France,

pp. 6 0 - 6 5 .

Molièresque Types and Jokes

41

a discourse on succcss in the medical profession in the capital. "There," he says, "wits are of more use than science," and there is more than one sure way of succeeding. On the one hand, one may assume a very stern and busy aspect and declare oneself so vehemently hostile to phlebotomy as not even to bleed at the hazard of life. Then again, one may be an ardent apologist of the lancet and maintain that all ills reside in the blood. In this case, to get at the bottom of a malady, one will pitilessly draw the patient's blood to the last drop.36 PERSONAL

ALLUSION

Two dramatists reduce the satirical element to personal satire of a sharper edge. Le Docteur Fagotin (1732), 36 by a certain Delile, who signs himself "premier médecin du corps de S. A. évêque et prince de Liège," is a malignant lampoon against Michel Procope-Couteaux, an ugly little hunchback doctor in Paris, who was frequently caricatured by literary men.37 Procope troubled himself very little about medicine, but he frequented the theaters assiduously and is the author of several plays. However, he occasionally wrote in serious vein on his profession, and his audacious criticism of Delile's Réflexions sur l'eau prompted the dull play here in question. Delile vents his wrath by making an odious character of his colleague, under the name of Fagotin, and abuses him cruelly. Still unsatisfied, he returns to the attack in L'Emblesme de la calomnie ( 1734), which deals not only with Procope but with those who had undertaken Procope's defense.38 The author meantime draws a very favorable portrait of himself under as

Ibid., pp. 212-13. Dictionnaire des theatres, VII, 545-46. Histoire Je l'Opéra Comique, II, 54}. 3 6 Cf. Bibliothèque du Théâtre Français, III, 326-27. 87 His real name was Michel Coltelli (1684-1753). He is Doctor Cuchillo (Spanish for knife) in Gil Bias, and the character Bavaroise in La Faculté vengée. Aspersions are cast upon him in La Procopiade, ou Apothéose du Docteur Procope, a short comic poem by one of his colleagues, Claude Marie Giraud. 88 Procope replies to each play by a letter to Delile. Catalogue Soleinne, nos. 3783, 3784. Desnoiresterres, La Comédie satirique, pp. 69-70.

42

Molièresque Types and Jokes

the name of Intègre, and less flattering ones of his enemies, whom he calls Lantivray, Ignare, du Soupçon and du PontNeuf. 3 9 Delile does not scruple at ill-treating his adversaries, while he castigates backbiting and calumny as execrable vices in others: Si l'on traite un bon médecin D'empoisonneur ou d'assassin, Je le nie C'est une calomnie.

In this comedy, one can die only if one does so suddenly, for on every street corner stand people who have infallible remedies for all imaginable diseases. Besides, there are extraordinary doctors whose kindnesses alone frequently cure the bedridden. Doctors are also considered as guardian angels of the commonwealth, for they make peace in families — the peace of the graveyard. They rid husbands of troublesome wives, children of ever-living fathers, and poor nephews of rich uncles. In 1746 La Mettrie — physician, pamphleteer, and philosopher — wrote La Politique du médecin de Machiavel, a vigorous castigation of his confreres, the noble members of the Faculty, and the eminent doctors of Paris. In the same year, by sentence of parliament, this libel was burned, and the author of the pernicious work fled to Leiden. There he continued to show unreserved disrespect for the scions of H i p pocrates, and consoled himself by writing with his barbed pen one of the most biting medical satires that has ever been printed, La Faculté vengée (1747). 4 0 In it, the obstinate, rebellious La Mettrie ridicules the sentence of parliament with overt irony and asks: " O f what use is it to burn the book when the author is still l e f t ? " H e humorously exaggerates and flaunts his disloyalty by signing this comedy, "M.* * * Docteur Régent de la Faculté de Paris." Actually, La Mettrie had 39

T h e mecca of t h e c h a r l a t a n s , p a t e n t - m e d i c i n e sellers, and m o u n t e b a n k s . • " T h i s play was reprinted u n d e r a new title: Les Charlatans démasqués, ou Pluton vengeur Je la Société de Médecine, in 1762, eleven years a f t e r the death of the author.

Molièresque Types and Jokes

43

never been much more than physician to the French guards. He ironically offers this satire as a defense and justification of the accusations he makes in La Politique, and nearly all the doctors who were attacked in that first libel are reassailed in this one. We meet, in addition, many of his other enemies. To this work {La Faculté vengée) he had the impudence to add a key. The scene of this satire in dialogue form is the School of Medicine in Paris, which Chat-Huant (La Mettrie) calls a Noah's Ark into which all the animals go for money. He belittles the very School of Medicine at Reims, of which he was a graduate, and speaks of it as one of those "pettifogging faculties that haggle over the doctors' bonnets that they peddle about like so many yards of cloth." The intrigue of La Faculté vengée is slight, and its lasting merit lies in the author's odious and grotesque pictures of his colleagues, though these pictures are not, of course, as fully appreciated by us as they were by contemporaries. These venerable doctors are assembled (Act II) in official conclave, under the presidency of their dean, Boudinau,41 to plead their case against ChatHuant, the author of La Politique. They are, however, so occupied with singing their own panegyrics and with insulting one another that they nearly forget the purpose of their meeting. The cupidity, pedantry, ignorance, jealousy, and vanity of this assembly are brought out in vivid relief. We are reminded of Molière's pungent raillery of the doctors in L'Amour médecin. Old Somnambule 42 is exhausted by visits from royalty and and complains of his dog's life as valet to Aesculapius. This mercenary somnambulist finds consolation, however, in think 4 1 Louis Claude Bourdelin ( 1 6 9 Î - 1 7 7 7 ) . Elected dean o f the Faculty in 173«, and reelected in 1 7 3 7 . He was short and f a t , whence his pseudonym of Boudinau (blood sausage). 4 2 Jacques Molin, or Dumoulin ( 1 6 6 6 - 1 7 5 J ) . A celebrated physician. O n his deathbed he said, " I leave behind me three great physicians — Diet, Water, and Exercise." His stolid nature explains the name Somnambule.

44

Molièresque Types and Jokes

ing of his fees, which he regards as "the universal balm for all the doctor's wounds." We are again reminded of the feegrasping propensity of this physician when he tells us that either his patients pay him after every visit or he does not return. 43 Jaunisse 44 is deeply hurt by Chat-Huant's shaming cuts, and begs Grésillon 48 to stand by him in seeing that justice is done. "Without you what would have become of the strongest pillar of our triumvirate — the poor Labrusca?" 46 he asks. Grésillon, a capricious Captain Irresistible, speaks boastfully of his conquests with the ladies of the court. He confides that the portrait that was drawn of him in La Politique so upset him that he suffered from two consecutive attacks of terrible diseases — apoplexy and paralysis, for which he had to go and take the cure.47 He thinks that the book merits being burned in the presence of the whole Faculty: To laugh in the face of a man like me! Why, I laugh in the face of Descartes, of Boerhaave,48 and I have even eclipsed Sydenham.49 43 T h e rapacity of the representatives of the medical profession is satirized in Le Valet embarrassé, ou La Vieille amoureuse ( 1 7 4 2 ) by Avisse. The t w o surgeons in this play are pictured as grasping individuals. Eustache Marcot (1709—57). First physician-in-ordinary to the king, and a children's doctor. His nickname, Jaunisse, alluded to his sallow complexion. 46 Jean Claude Adrien Helvétius ( 1 6 8 5 - 1 7 6 ! ) - Attended Louis XV, was made councilor of state, and first physician to the queen, Marie Leczinski. A member of the Academies of Sciences of Paris, Berlin, and London. Used his lancct freely, and some t h o u g h t t h a t Lesage caricatured him in Sangrado. He, Vernage, and Silva are praised by Voltaire in one of his philosophical discourses. Voltaire probably praised Helvétius as f a t h e r of the philosopher and author Helvétius, his friend. See Petits Poëmes (Œuvres, IX, 3 9 1 ) . 46 Claude de la Vigne ( 1 6 9 5 - 1 7 5 8 ) , docteur-régent of the Faculty of Paris. Appointed physician to the king in 1726, to the queen in 1729. He finally became Helvétius* successor. 47 Boissier (La Mettrie, p. 90) notes t h a t Helvétius did become paralysed in 1746. 48 H e r m a n Boerhaave ( 1 6 6 8 - 1 7 3 8 ) . A D u t c h physician and philosopher, whose celebrity has scarcely been equaled by t h a t of any physician in modern times. H e gave a classification of diseases, and explained their causes, nature, and treatm e n t , in his Apborismi de cognoscendis et curandis morbis ( 1 7 0 9 ) . His medical system was generally adopted by his contemporaries. La Mettrie translated most of his i m p o r t a n t works. See Fontenelle's "Eloge de M. Boerhaave" ( Œ u v r e s , VI, 343-55). 49

See above, p. 17, n. 10.

Molièresque Types and Jokes

45

La Tulipe wants the author himself burned for having slandered not only him, but also his library of medical books, which he boasts of placing at the service of young practitioners. This doctor makes no pretention at research, and is content to reap the ample harvest of Somnambule's labor, and stuff himself after a fashion with the ideas of Croquignole." He agrees with his old-time confrere, Gui Patin, 52 that a doctor cannot be too honest, if he does not care to die of starvation. Don Quichote 63 is the most enraged of all in the "rue de la Bûcherie." He draws his sword in the Spanish manner and offers to avenge the Faculty, and incidentally the ghost of a worthy father-in-law." W e have an example of the absentminded doctor in Sot-Encour, 55 who was so completely preoccupied over his loss of fifteen louis at cards that he prescribed fifteen grains of stibial tartar for an emetic, which of course killed the patient. 58 The callous Vardaux 57 announces 50

6 0 Camille Falconnet ( 1 6 7 1 - 1 7 É 2 ) , named La Tulipe because he often wore that flower in his buttonhole. A distinguished physician and medical writer. A member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, before which he read a number of dissertations. His library was estimated to contain nearly 40,000 volumes. He left several thousand of them, including the rare books, to his majesty, who showed his gratitude by giving him a pension of 1,200 livres. Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, I, 59, 40. 6 1 Michel Louis Vernage ( 1 6 9 7 - 1 7 7 J ) . Docteur-régent of the Faculty of Paris at twenty-one. 5 2 A physician and writer ( 1 6 0 1 ? - 7 2 ) , distinguished for his learning and wit. His reputation is founded chiefly on his Letters, which contain curious details, witticisms, and anecdotes. M Charles Dionis (1710-7Î). 6 4 Dionis' marriage to Bourdelin's daughter cannot be documented. Boissier, La Met trie, p. »1. 6 5 One Bouillac. See Delaunay, Le Monde médical, pp. 125-28. Barbier, d'Argenson, and the Duke of Luynes all reproach Bouillac for his heedlessness, ignorance, and filthiness. Boissier, op. cit., p. 127. 5 8 There is a similar type in Panard's Le Nouvelliste dupé ( 1 7 3 2 ) . Doctor Repic (Dr. Spade) is a lover of the Queen of Spades. He has just lost in a game of cards and is so completely absorbed in his disaster that when a servant comes to tell him about his master's illness he can associate the symptoms only with his own "case." 5 7 François Pousse ( 1 6 7 9 - 1 7 i 2 ) . He might have been a soldier and kept the uncouth language of the barracks. "Vardaux: Wer da? Qui va là?" Boissier, op. cit., pp. 89, 123.

46

Molièresque

Types

and

Jokes

a death with the same composure that he declares a patient cured. Besides what is one man! Nature destroys a thousand of them in the making of one.

Bavaroise,58 the "harangueur," or great "prater" of the group, remains on the stage after the other members of the tumultuous assembly have made a noisy exit, and without regard to the absence of an audience recites a superb monologue which he has learned by heart. We get silhouettes of Muscadin 89 and Maqui,80 but the prize goes to the author for the portrait of his pet aversion, Savantasse,81 the dull erudite "who makes books with other books, just as one earns money with money, who imagines nothing, does not think, but knows what everybody else has thought." In Act III these victims of "Chat-huantisme" air their grievances before Pluto, who has come up from Hades to try the impenitent sinner. In speaking to the illustrious assembly of the eternal fear of death, Pluto says (what Filerin had already said in L'Amour médecin) : "As long as fear lasts, doctors will be ridiculed, but well paid." 02 Although this god of Hades sanctions the doctors' right impune tuandi et vastandi per totam terram and begs them to respect an ignorance 88 Procope-Couteau. See above, p. 41, n. 37. The word Bavaroise ( f r o m Bavaria) means an infusion of tea and capillaire, sweetened, and mixed w i t h milk or chocolate ( L i t t r é ) . His father sold this concoction at the famous C a f é Procope. 89 Antoine S. Sidobre, a perfumed fop, as his stage name suggests. 90 J e a n Baptiste Nicolas Boyer ( 1 6 9 3 - 1 7 6 8 ) . Born at Marseilles, he was c o n spicuous f o r his skill and devoted service during the prevalence of the plague in t h a t city in 1720. 61 Jean A i t r u c (1684—1766). Medical writer and teacher of high reputation. By v i r t u e of an excellent memory and methodical habits, he acquired great book learning. According t o Littré, a "savantasse" is a person who affects an appearance of learning, b u t has only a muddle of knowledge. La Mettrie attacks A s t r u c in all of his various works. 82 La Bruyère had w r i t t e n : "As long as men can die and like to live, the doctor will be ridiculed and well paid." Caractères, II (Chap. XIV, "De quelques usages"), 161.

Molièresque Types and Jokes

47

that is so precious to them, it is needless to say that he is lenient with Chat-Huant. He condemns him to exile in "the free country of Holland," where he will be able to continue his attacks.63 To mitigate the already mild sentence, Pluto orders that his wife shall not follow him there. The plaintiff's joyous exclamation ends the play: "How many husbands there are who would like to be exiled at the same price!" 6 4 Much of this satire is Molièresque in tone, though many of the caricatures are of society doctors.65 Helvétius, Molin, Marcot, Vernage, Sidobre, and Boyer all frequented the salons. PARODIES OF CONSULTATIONS

The quarrelsomeness of medical consultations has been another line of able literary endeavor through the centuries. Sirop-au-cul, ou L'Heureuse Déltverance (1754?), by the gross Grandval, resembles Molière's L'Amour médecin in that four court doctors in consultation are ridiculed. However, the general plan, as well as the details, have no analogy to Molière's comedy. Grandval's piece is one of the most vigorous samples of the scatological genre. One could hardly venture to summarize its content, much less give the list of characters who are named with scurrilous obscenity. One may quote one passage, which explains that men die unconscious of the failure of the remedy and of the doctor: 6 3 La Mcttric, in fact, wrote L'Ouvrage de Pénélope the next year ( 1 7 4 8 ) . It is another polemical work against doctors, in which we find a great deal of La Politique. In the same year appeared his famous L'Homme machine, which La Mettrie had the impertinence to dedicate to Albert von Haller ( 1 7 0 8 - 7 7 ) , the distinguished Swiss physiologist, botanist, poet, whose evangelical religious views were well known. The book was burned by order of the magistrates, and the author was exiled from Holland as well as France. He found refuge in Prussia, where he was awarded a pension by Frederick II. He died in 1751, at the age of 43. See Frederick II's "Eloge de La Mettrie" in L'Homme machine, ed. Assézat; also Desnoiresterres, Voltaire, IV, 3 0 - 5 0 .

Cf. de Gourcuff, "Un Médecin breton disciple de Molière," Gazette Médicale de Nantei, II ( 1 8 8 3 ) , 1 7 - 2 0 ; Ballieu, "Une Satire contre les médecins au X V I I I * siècle," Revue d'art dramatique, VI ( 1 8 8 7 ) , 2 0 3 - 7 ; Bibliothèque du Théâtre Français, III, 3 3 3 - 3 5 . Boissier, op. cit., pp. 87 f., reproduces Act. II. 6 5 See below, Chap. VI.

48

Molièresque

Types

and

Jokes

Il crève bien souvent malgré notre science, Mais il va chez les morts rempli de confiance Q u e le remède opère en le faisant mourir; E t l'on voit de notre art le germe se nourrir De façon que les morts, en sortant de la vie, Ignorent qu'en mourant elle leur soit ravie.

There seem to be no personal allusions in GrandvaPs characters. He justifies his obscene play by saying that his aim is to amuse himself and his public, and that he is sorry if he has wasted his time. According to Grimm, this play is a satire against the doctors, in the manner of Sticcoti, a bad Italian actor. 68 A consultation between a doctor and a surgeon is grossly caricatured in Les Bûcherons, ou Le Médecin de village (1750), a short ballet-pantomine by Dehesse. The doctor and the surgeon have been called to treat a woodcutter, who has fallen from a tree and broken some bones. The doctor proposes one operation, the surgeon another. They finally come to terms by agreeing to perform both. After each operation, the one tries to prove the other wrong, and the dispute ends in a fight. A few months later the same theme appears in a ballet by Marcouville,87 produced with Le Réveil de Thalie, called Le Sommeil de Thalie for the first performance. In this comic consultation the first doctor orders a bleeding, a surgeon wants to operate, and a second doctor prescribes draughts of good wine. The woodcutter drinks the wine and is immediately cured.88 There is a consultation scene in Armide (1762), a parody of Quinault-Lully's opera by that name, by Laujon and Riccoboni. Armide is exasperated with Rénaud, who remains unCorrespondence, II, 128. This play is included in Voisenon's works, and Desboulmiers is sure that it is by this author. Barbier states that it is generally ascribed to Voisenon. Q u é r a r d , however, credits Chevrier with it, and the Catalogue Je la Bibliothèque Nationale lists it under Marcouville. 66

67

88

C f . Histoire

du théâtre

italien,

V, 475-80.

Molièresque

Types

and Jokes

49

shaken after many subtle efforts at seduction on her part. She finally calls on Hatred to help her get revenge for his indifference. Hatred appears dressed as a doctor, accompanied by two consultants and six apothecaries, each carrying a mortar decorated with figures of two vipers. These acolytes beat an accompaniment to the consultation scene with their pestles. The Second Physician prescribes hellebore for Armide, but Hatred suggests a more agreeable lenitive. She advises the enraged woman to drink a wine that will "chase away love." On thinking matters over, Armide decides that she "is not thirsty" and prefers to be left with her distemper.69 ABUSE

OF

VENESECTION

SATIRIZED

In the seventeenth century one was bled on the least provocation. Pitiless bloodletting continued to be practiced through the eighteenth century. The theme of Le Docteur Sangrado (1758), a comic opera by Anseaume and Lourdet de Santerre, is taken from an amusing episode in Lesage's Gil Bias.10 In the novel, Lesage impersonates the contemporary craze for venesection in Doctor Sangrado (Spanish for bloodletter), who is supposed to represent Philippe Hecquet, 71 a well-known doctor of the time, who advocated the free use of the lancet.72 Noteworthy in Lesage's therapeutics was the remedy of drinking unlimited amounts of hot water. This treatment is also advised by Anseaume's doctor. Simple as the remedy is, it wins him a great reputation and people flock to consult him from far and wide. Duni's lively music contributed much to this slight piece. "By his short, jerky phrases," writes Georges Cucuel, "the composer described wonderfully well the old sententious physician, with his 'tufted wig' and his 'billheaded cane.' " 7 3 A short aria glorifies the miraculously im69

/£«/., VII, 271-7«. Book II, Chap. II. 71 1661-1737. Professor of materia medica at the Faculty in Paris. 70

72 73

Delaunay, Le Monde médical, p. 209. français, Les Créateurs de l'opéra-comique

p. 124.

50

Molièresque

Types

and

Jokes

pregnating virtues of the mineral waters of Passy, the smirt spa of that day: De Passay prenez l'eau souveraine Il n'est rien de si bon que cela. D'un enfant soyez sûre ma Reine, Il ne f a u t que ce voyage-là.' 4

There is contemptuous derision of the practice of phlebotomy in several other plays. Gamier paints a heart-stirring picture in La Saignée (1770). To obtain bread for his starving family, a man goes the rounds of the barbers and to the School of Surgery, where apprentices are trained in bleeding by experimenting on poor wretches. These receive a few cents in return for the abuse of their bodies. The character in this play goes from one bloodletter to another, until both his arms are white.75 "There is nothing to do but to bleed him quickly in the middle of the forehead," says the surgeon, surveying a pretended lunatic in a gross farce in the Italian style, entitled Le Nouveau Marié, ou Les Importuns (1770), by Cailhava. Robineau's La Nuit anglaise (1772) was undoubtedly inspired by the humorous scene in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, in which two physicians, who have been told that a man from the provinces is a lunatic, nearly drive him crazy with their bleedings and purgings. Milady Tempête, in Robineau's imbroglio, seeking vengeance on an impertinent knight, summons Doctor Tuehomme, who has the reputation of living up to his significant name. The perplexed knight storms violently when the doctor attempts to take his pulse, and six anodyne pills are required to quell his fury. Four of the doctor's aids are ordered to bleed him copiously from his four limbs as soon as he calms a little, and then to plunge him immediately into an ice-cold bath, and to keep him there 74 75

Histoire de I'Opera Comique, II, 8 4 - 8 9 . I know this play only through Witkowski, op.

cit.

Molièresque

Types

and Jokes

51

until he has completely lost consciousness. The doctor consoles the patient by assuring him that he is not like most of his colleagues, who prolong the maladies to multiply their visits. His method is "dead or cured within twenty-four hours — there is no middle course." In Merey's La Mode et le goût (1774), a doctor cleverly orders a bleeding for a young danseuse from the opera, who has sent for him to relieve an attack of abdominal pains, caused by a fall six months before. The doctor boasts that at the end of three months more, the trouble disappeared. CARMONTELLE'S DOCTORS

No author since Molière has utilized the doctor as a comic figure to the extent that Carmontelle does in his dramatic proverbes76 (1768-81). The dramatic proverbe is a satirical genre that originated in the life of the salons in the second half of the seventeenth century. After a short popularity, it sank into oblivion, and reappeared as something new to the society of the eighteenth century." It replaced the parade, an obscene farce that had a great vogue between 1730 and 176 $.78 Carmontelle's dramatic proverbes were fully appreciated by his contemporaries, and one of them, Mme Genlis, writes: I know no author who has better depicted the world and the manners of the people who make it up. In that respect, his collection of proverbes will always be valuable to the eyes of all those who wish to have a true idea of a part of the society of the eighteenth century. 79

What Mme Genlis says is probably true. The only trouble with this author's proverbes, and for that matter with his comedies, is that they are dull. As Grimm points out, in speak76 Playlets developed around a proverb or maxim that may be taken as expressing the gist of the plot, like the moral in a fable. 77 Cf. Brenner, "Le Développement du proverbe dramatique," University of California Publications in Modern Philology, XX (1937), 1 - J i . 78 See below, p. 9i, n. 22. 79 Thierry, Trois amuseurs d'autrefois, p. 122.

52

Molièresque

Types

and

Jokes

80

ing of these pieces, a thing that may very well be shocking or amusing in real life often loses its piquancy when transferred to the stage. The dramatist, therefore, should impart a little of his wit and much of his imagination to his characters and their language. This Carmontelle did not do. H e simply depicted them as he saw them. Carmontelle's doctor's, like Molière's and like those of his own day, have scant medical knowledge. They have a very limited understanding of the human body and of its functions. Their treatments come down to diet, bleeding, and purging. Like so many of the doctors that we have already met, they assume an air of importance to conccal their ignorance. Doctor Frémont, in Le Poulet, gives his patient an enema, and puts him on a very thin chicken-broth diet for a week. Doctor Roselin, in Le Suisse malade, is proud of having discovered that the captain's illness is the old-fashioned "hardened mucus." H e orders plenty to drink and a guard for the patient. An army major, misinterpeting this ambiguous prescription, sends out for wine and sentinels, instead of tisane and a nurse. After gulping down several bottles of wine, the Swiss soldier feels much better. Bournin, in L'Abbé de couredîner, is an honest and scrupulous doctor. For his patient he orders a bleeding and a clyster, the approved therapeutics of the day. In Carmontelle's Doctor Marcelin, we again meet the pedant of the Molière tradition, who will not forego his stilted formality, even in urgent cases where life or death depend upon a rapid diagnosis. Fortunately in Le Faux Empoisonnement 81 the poisoning is fictitious, as the title indicates, for the patient would surely have died while this savant was groping for a Greek word to apply to his malady. "Physicians Correspondance, IX ( 1 7 7 1 ) , 264. In La Fauste Peur ( 1 7 7 4 ) , by Mar:o!licr des Vivetières, a mock doctor, M. Raille, alarms a f o p who thinks he has been poisoned by his jealous sweetheart. Mercure de France, août ( 1 7 7 4 ) , pp. 171-75. 80

81

Molièresque Types and Jokes 53 think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name," said Kant, the eighteenth-century German metaphysician. We have already met several doctors with gross sensual traits. In Le Médecin gourmand, Carmontelle presents one of a different stamp, in that his uncurbed appetite is for food. This play is built around the proverbial locution: "Il m'a fait chère de médecin, car il defend ce qu'il y a de meilleur et il le mange." 82 The patient in this play was in the very best of health, save for an inordinate hunger. Bremen convinces him that he has symptoms indicating a serious illness, and that he must forestall it by eating nothing all day except weak chicken broth. This leaves the spitted dotterel and the teal for the gluttonous doctor. Broute, the old physician in L'Ane dans le potager, recalls the Macroton of L'Amour médecin (Act II, scene 5), who summarizes his type in the sentence, "One must proceed very carefully, and do nothing inconsiderately." Broute is an agreeable dotard, whom no one can move from his state of calm. He repeats incessantly, "Allons doucement, allons doucement." Carmontelle usually dresses his doctors in black, but Broute wears a brown suit with a gold-buttoned cutaway, and an old wig of enormous spread. He carries a bill-headed cane. Doctor Sobrin, in La Diète, is another imperturbable individual, who hides his ignorance behind the monosyllabic "Bon" that he returns to every one of Madam Babas' observations regarding her master's health. When the housekeeper finally loses her temper at the doctor's phlegmatic attitude toward the patient, the doctor is frightened, changes his diagnosis, and shifts in his treatment from diet to bleeding. Before we are introduced to Februgin, a country doctor in Le Malentendu, we learn that he does not understand chemistry and knows very little about anatomy; but, as is so 82

Proverbes dramatiques,

Méry éd., IV, xcix.

54

Molieresque

Types and Jokes

often the case in this world, "Le hasari sert rnieux que la science." In this play, as in Le Suisse malade, we have the misunderstood prescription. Here the mistake turns on the word eaux, which is interpreted as os. Instead of getting the strict water-gruel diet ordered by the doctor, the patient receives bones, and more bones, with an increasing amount of meat daily, and therefore soon gets well. The effective results of the treatment strike the attending sisters with awe, and they hold the man of science in high esteem. His ability does not dazzle Father Saturnin, who has penetrated the secret and is laughing in his sleeve. When Doctor Februgin learns what has actually taken place, he cannot contain his astonishment (scene II): "Curing stomach trouble by sucking bones!" Who had ever heard of such a thing? This situation reminds one of the maid in Bandello's tales. Being given a written prescription by a doctor, with the command to "take it," she proceeded to eat the document and straightway got well.83 Carmontelle wrote his comedies proper, which are merely a lengthened form of his proverbes, for the amateur actors of provincial society theaters, which were very common in the latter half of the eighteenth century, as for that matter they are today. In Le Patagon, one of his most amusing comedies, an English doctor figures among the characters in a cosmopolitan set. Doctor Bristol is "a sensible, honest man — as for being a good doctor, that is another matter." 84 His optimism and simple remedies are a good tonic for his patient, a neurasthenic countess. Each pain is "a very good symptom," and for all diseases "pleasure is the best remedy." 86 In the course of the play, this quack complains sadly of the disloyalty of one of his patients. He had treated the man through a lingering illness of five years, doing nothing but call on him to urge patience as the best means to a cure. Now, after 8 3 See Kurt, Carmontelle pp. 130—J fi. 8 4 Le Marquis: scene 1. 8 5 Le Docteur: scene 5.

und seine Proverbes Jramatiques, Section "Artzte,"

Molièresque

Types

and Jokes

55

all those years, the traitor has gone to another physician, and is giving the latter credit for the improvement that has been manifest during the last month. 86 The medical fraternity of the eighteenth century must have had no great reputation for respecting the code of their profession in the matter of secrecy. Too many references to violations of this principle of medical ethics appear in these plays. In La Maladie supposée, a guardian suggests to his ward that she verify a rumor that her fiancé has epilepsy. She has merely to consult his doctor. This proposal is tossed off as a matter of course, as though Carmontelle were assuming that his audience would in no way be shocked by it.87 88

C f . K u r z , European Characters in French Drama, pp. I 9 4 - 9 J , 241. Catalogue Soleinne, no. 3 ( 3 £ , lists an unpublished play by Carmontelle, entitled Le Mari médecin. 87

IV

The Quarrel of the Vacuities H E historic three-cornered conflict between physicians, surgeons, and barbers — we say nothing of the apothecaries — takes on new and interesting aspects in the eighteenth century. As is well known, just as the physician, as a basininspector, had to make an age-long struggle to win parity with the gentleman, so surgical science had to make an agelong fight to win parity with medicine proper (or even to surpass the latter in public esteem, as seems to be the case today). The surgeon was always impeded in his development by two strange but powerful prejudices which are deepseated in human nature and are widespread in space and time: namely, the prejudice against manual labor, or anything that smacks of it; and then a feeling of revulsion against anything that is associated with corpses in particular, or with contacts with the component parts of the human body in general. All through the centuries, the surgeon was under the handicap of a belief that, as the University of Paris claimed, the edict of the church (Tours, 1163) Ecclesia abhorret a sanginne, applied to surgery. Though some knowledge of the structure of the human body was essential to the most elementary requirements of life-preservation, the dissector, in common with the executioner and the undertaker, was looked upon with loathing. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, the operator who functioned at autopsies and in the dissecting room was regarded as a menial in the employ of the physician. Diderot was aware of the im-

Quarrel of the Faculties

57

portance of autopsies, and rose against the contemporary prejudices against all work on corpses.1 Dissections were made near graveyards, for medical students were forced to rob the graves for corpses to dissect.2 Mankind's recovery from these morbid superstitions makes a fascinating story, which is nothing else than the history of surgery. As regards the historic relations of surgeons to physicians proper, one may quote the words of Fielding H. Garrison, the great American historian of medicine: "In France, the medical profession had consisted for centuries of a grande bourgeoisie of physicians, a petite bourgeoisie of clerical barber-surgeons, and a proletariate of laic barbers or outcast surgeons (barbitonsores), all hating and despising one another and adhering to rigid caste distinctions." 3 These antagonisms had been long-standing. While medicine had been, from the founding of universities, one of the recognized faculties, surgery was barred from the universities on the basis of the Tours decree of 1163. This forced the surgeons into a development independent of the development of the Faculty of Medicine. Meantime the surgeon was having his troubles in distinguishing his art from the trade of plain barber, who, deft at wielding the razor, could serve for the ordinary tasks of opening a vein or a boil, and who could, on occasion, presume to essay major operations, such presumptions being limited only by the willingness of certain feudal lords to resort to the gallows in rewarding unsuccessful operations. In 1226 Louis I X organized the Confrérie des chirurgiens de robe longue. The distinction between chirurgiens de robe longue and chirurgiens de robe courte was not so much a scientific distinction as a distinction between clerical barbers and lay barbers. Naturally the clerical barber could be assumed to surpass the ordinary 1 Sec his Essai sur les règnes Je Claude et Je Néron, 1778 335-37). 2 See Knyvcton, Diary of a Surgeon in tlx Year ¡751-1752. 3 History of MeJicine, p. 294.

(Œuvres,

III,

58

Quarrel

of the

Faculties

barber in education and to know his bit of Latin. He insisted that his apprentices be "grammarian-clerks." Nevertheless, the right of the ordinary lay barber to practise minor surgery was recognized by a royal decree of 1372. That the barber and the surgeon were confused in the public mind and in social customs is indicated by the fact that in the German armies the surgeons were required to shave officers as late as the day of Frederick the Great, and in France they were formally and legally organized in the same guild in 1656. But the subordination of surgery to medicine, and the tendency to regard the surgeon as the physician's assistant were solidly established in customs and in institutions. The surgical College of St. Come, the ancient institute of the Confrérie des chirurgiens de robe longue, did its best to win and to retain scientific status and individuality, but with varying fortunes. The College won university privileges and exemptions under Francis I in 1544, only to lose them again in 1660, when the Faculty of Medicine was accorded exclusive supervision over the "corporation of master barber-surgeons and sworn-surgeons" (chirurgiens de robe longue).* In the year 1687 the surgeon Félix 5 cured Louis XIV of an anal fistula, from which the king had been suffering the tortures of the damned, and which the Faculty had failed to cure or to relieve by its ointments and poultices. The king's gratitude must be regarded as a determining element in the whole future history of modern surgery. Félix was made royal surgeon, rewarded with a gratuity of 300,000 livres, and elevated to the rank of grand seigneur. Félix' esteem at the French court passed on to his successor, Maréschal,6 who was * Garrison, op. cit., p. 295, gives 1660 for the date of the royal decree w h i c h unified barbers and surgeons in one guild. T h e decree was, however, issued in 165 6. C f . Peyrilhe, "Histoire de la chirurgie," Vol. I l l , MS (Daremberg, Histoire des sciences médicales, II, 1 2 7 6 - 7 7 ) ; H a h n , "Collège et École de Chirurgie," La Grande Encyclopédie, XI, 9 1 4 - 5 5 ; E. J. F. Barbier, Journal, II ( 1 7 4 3 ) , 365-66; I I I ( 1 7 4 9 ) , 59. 5 Charles François Félix de Tassy; died 1703. 8 G e o r g e s M. Maréschal ( 1 6 5 8 - 1 7 3 6 ) .

Quarrel of the Faculties

59

not only a distinguished scientist, according to the lights of his day, but a public-spirited citizen, devoted especially to improving the social and scientific status of the surgeon. In 1724 Maréschal obtained from Louis XV five professorships for surgical instruction at the College of St. Come. In 1731 the Academy of Surgery was founded by Maréschal and his great colleague La Peyronie,7 a surgeon from Montpellier who devoted his life and left his large fortune to the advancement of his art. In 1743 the king issued an edict separating surgeons from barbers and wigmakers, the three having been united in one guild for almost a century. The same edict also forbade the practice of surgery to barbers and wigmakers and required a surgeon to have the liberal education represented by the degree of Master of Arts. These developments made Paris the surgical center of the world, and, up to the time of John Hunter (1728-93), the French undoubtedly led in surgery. At the same time, the surgeon won independence of the physician on the one hand, and of his rival, the barber, on the other. The revolution in the status of surgery, caused by Félix' triumph over the fistula of Louis XIV, disturbed vested interests and long-established traditions. The physicians reacted violently, and their efforts to retain their prerogatives and superiorities brought the quarrel between the faculties to its height. What happened on the appointment of MaréschaPs five professorships in 1724 is thus described by the chroniclers of the time: Decked out in their scholastic robes, the physicians, headed by the dean of Faculty, preceded by a beadle and an usher, marched to St. Còme in solemn array, in spite of the bitter cold weather, the snow and sharp sleet, which made their red robes almost unrecognizable. Cheering one another on with cries and oaths and followed by a great crowd of people, they at length ranged themselves in a long line against the wall, while the dean presented himself at the 7

François Gigot de 1» Peyronie (1 «78-1747).

60

Quarrel

of

the

Faculties

door of the College accompanied by the only anatomist of the Faculty, who stood behind him holding a skeleton. Cries and imprecations, knocks, and threats to break down the door, were only greeted by the jeers of the students from within, and when an usher tried to make himself heard as to what the surgeons owed to the physicians, the people suddenly turned against these formalities, which they had once respected like a religion, and drove the doctors away without regard for their furs and costly raiment. 8 From the standpoint of the plain man, one might say in connection w i t h all these quarrels that it made little d i f ference to him whether he was killed by a surgeon or a p h y sician. A n d that was the substance of a famous bon mot of the time. W h e n La Peyronie was soliciting the support of Chancellor Aguesseau for the surgeons, he said to h i m : " A wall of separation must be erected between these t w o corps so that they will have no further communication." " V e r y well," replied the Chancellor, "but on what side shall the sick person be placed?" This witticism was thus p u t

in

verse by Villemain d'Ablancourt: Deux bourreaux de l'humanité, L'altière médecine et l'humble chirurgie, Tous deux en bonne santé, Plaidoient pour une minutie. La médecine prétendoit Que son vénérable bonnet Devoit avoir la préséance, La chirurgie à son tour soutenait Qu'étant sccurs, la prééminence A personne n'appartenoit. Elle n'avoit pas tort. Fourré comme une hermine Le Doyen de la Faculté S'en va trouver le juge: il entre en qualité de député De Messieurs de la médecine. Monseigneur, lui dit-il, il faut absolument, 8 G a r r i s o n , op. cit., p. 3 9 3 , quotes F o r g u c , Montpellier médical, X X X I I I ( 1 9 1 1 ) , 10, 11. F o r g u e does n o t give his source. I n 1744 La Mcttric w r o t e a p a m p h l e t , Saint Come Vengé; and in 1748 t h e conflict p r o m p t e d a little w o r k by D i d e r o t , Lettre d'un citoyen zélé sur les troubles qui divisent la médecine et la chirurgie (Œuvres I X , 2 1 3 - 2 3 ) . B o t h La M c t t r i c and D i d e r o t took the p a r t of t h e s u r g e o n s .

Quarrel of the Faculties

61

Pour éviter toute incartade, Q u ' u n mur d'airain . . . C'est penser sagement. Mais, Monsieur le Docteur, reprit le Président, De quel côté mettra-t-on le malade? 9

T h e same note of g a y indifference is reflected in the plays of the period. L'Obstacle favorable ( 1 7 2 6 ) , by Lesage, F u z e lier, and Dorneval, reflects the emotions aroused b y the r e f o r m of 1724. D o c t o r Trousse-Galant, troubled by seeing the surgeons rivaling the physicians and presuming to free themselves f r o m dependence on the Faculty, leaves Paris and goes to live in the country with his children, Valère and Argentine. H o w ever, his hope o f thus having peace f r o m his worst enemies is frustrated, f o r he discovers that he is to be in continuous struggle with them. H e finds that Dorante, a y o u n g surgeon, is enamored of Argentine, whereas Valère has fallen in love with Dorante's sister. It chances that his horse falls ill and is cured b y a veterinary surgeon, who refuses money on the g r o u n d that " O n e does not take money f r o m one's colleagues — there is honor a m o n g thieves." T h e term " c o l l e a g u e " arouses the indignation o f the man of science and provokes a v e r y comical scene. T h e doctor, spitting his Latin phrases, tells the veterinary, who speaks the French o f a peasant, that it is easy to see that he frequents the society only of horses a n d donkeys (scene 1 3 ) . T o cap Trousse-Galant's misfortune, m a n y of his patients die. Their servants organize in a m o b and beat him unmercifully for depopulating the town. H e is obliged to appeal to D o r a n t e for aid and is, in fact, rescued. B u t this is a slight consolation for the doctor, who thinks it i n f a m o u s to owe his life to surgery: Ciel! aux chirurgiens je vais devoir la vie! N'ai-je donc tant vécu que pour cette infamie?

10

9 Mercure de France, fevrier, 1777 (Suc, Anecdotes historiques, I, 12—14). Another product of the dispute is La Peyronie aux enfers, a parody of D a n c h e t aux enfers by Piron. It is an unjust satire against La Peyronie and his faction. See Delaunay, Le Monde médical, pp. 166-208. 1 0 C f . Histoire de l'Opéra Comique, I, 122-25.

62

Quarrel of the Faculties

While the quarrel between the physicians and surgeons was at its height, the physicians were also wrangling with the apothecaries. There are allusions to these polemics in La Grandmère amoureuse ( 1 7 2 6 ) , a parody of Quinault's Atys, by Fuzelier and Dorneval. " H o w is it that m y attendants do not follow m e ? " asks Aesculapius, who has been called by Cybèle, in revenge on the faithless Atys. " I never ought to walk without a detachment of apothecaries." C o m m e n t ? Il ne paroit personne! Lorsque la Médecine ordonne, La seringue devroit voler. Q u o i donc? L'Apoticairerie Veut-elle aussi se rebeller A Pinstans de la Chirurgie, (scene 11)

Cybèle is disappointed that the god does not bring any surgeons with him, as she thinks the quickest way to dispatch A t y s would be to bleed him. Aesculapius tells her that the Faculty has discontinued that practice, in order to punish the surgeons: Une vengeance rafinée Change le tic des Galiens: N o u s n'ordonnons plus la saignée, Pour punir les chirurgiens.

" B u t what have the surgeons done to incur the anger of the physicians?" asks Cybèle. Aesculapius replies that the surgeons have presumed to cure without any knowledge of Greek or Latin: C o m m e n t ! Ces Messieurs les Fraters Veulent se donner des airs. E t lorsqu'il s'agit d'une cure, Les faquins nous font l'injure De guérir fièvre et blessure, E t maux de toute nature, Sans sçavoir, ni Grec, ni Latin.

Quarrel of the Faculties

63

B u t I see t w o half-faithful carabineers [he adds]. T h e y will do for the expedition you desire. . . . Come, level your barrels. [Pointing o u t A t y s t o t h e m . ] There is the patient w h o m you must attack. [ T h e apothecaries pursue A t y s with their syringes.] 1 1

In Le Bolus ( 1 7 3 1 ) , a parody of Voltaire's Brutus, Dominique and Romagnesi, true to a general custom of the parodists, followed the text of the original rather closely. Instead of presenting a struggle between republic and king, however, the Italian authors concern themselves entirely with the dispute between the physicians and surgeons as to their respective prerogatives. The play was written at a bitter moment — when the long-drawn-out quarrel was in the acute state. It abounds in malicious satire. The scene is laid in the School of Medicine in Paris. Dean Bolus, who is presiding over a meeting of the august fraternity, announces that the great surgeon Turquin has sent a frater, La Sonde, to conciliate the Faculties. Coclicola objects to a conciliation, on the grounds that the surgeons have not restricted themselves to manual labor, but have written prescriptions as well. However, La Sonde is admitted, and opens the negotiations by ironically saluting Doctors Pill, Cure-all, Quinine, and other medical heroes (scene 2) : J e viens offrir la paix à ces grands médecins, D u salut des mortels arbitres souverains, E t dans ces lieux fumans de fréquentes saignées, Qu'ils ont pendant l'hyver pour le rhume ordonnées, (Bien souvent, entre nous, remèdes superflus,) J e reconnois ici cet insigne Bolus, Qui risque tout pour rendre un malade à la vie, E t qui ne l'abandonne enfin qu'à l'agonie. J e revois près de lui le grand Coclicola, L'intrépide Pancrace, et le fier Quinquina, E t t a n t d'autres Héros dont les vertus sublimes, Eternisent les noms par d'illustres victimes: 11

Cf. Barberet, Lente et le Théâtre de la Foire, pp. 193-94.

64 Quarrel of the Faculties La Sonde insists upon equal rights for physicians and surgeons, for, even though their method of killing may be different, both parties abide, for all that, by the standard of Galen, and gain is their common objective: Le gain est notre objet; nos juges, le hazard. Orgueilleux médecins, quelle est votre manie? N'ose-t-on s'affranchir de votre tyrannie? U n malade à nos soins n'ose-t-il recourir, N'est-il permis qu'à vous de le faire mourir?

La Sonde declares war when his request is ignored, and then plans a conspiracy. His first recruit is Massacra, whom Syrop depicts as stingy, grasping, and skeptical: Incrédule à la fois, et sur la pharmacie, Et sur la médecine, et sur la chirurgie, Il les détruit, les sert sans aucun fondement: C'est un Pirrhonien anté sur un Normand.

This disrespectful portrait puts La Sonde in high spirits. He feels that "cet honnête homme" will be very necessary to him. The next step is to get Tétu to join the conspiracy. He is the son of Bolus, in love with Tutie, the daughter of the Great Turquin. Tutie's tender pleas, together with Massacra's malicious provocations, decide Tétu to join the plot against his father. The conspiracy is discovered through the treason of Coclicola (scene 1 5 ) : Turquin, hidden in Paris, awaits but the propitious moment to invade the school with his partisans. Fleurant, the chief of the apothecaries, comes to confirm the treason and to tell Bolus how, with the aid of his cohorts, he has forced La Sonde to flee and Massacra to take his own life. To compensate Fleurant for all that he has done, Bolus makes him a doctor, in spite of his ignorance of Latin (scene 1 8 ) : O toi, dont l'ignorance et l'aveugle destin A u lieu d'un Clistorel dut faire un médecin, Sois-le, prends ce bonnet, que ta tête le porte!

Quarrel of the

Faculties

65

FLEURANT

Je ne sais pas un mot de Latin. BOLUS

Et qu'importe? FLEURANT

Ce n'est pas mon savoir que vous récompensez. BOLUS

Pour être médecin, vous en sçavez assez.12 The famous quarrel gave rise to another play by Romagnesi (one of the authors of Le Bolus), who wrote Le Superstitieux in 1740. It is an imbroglio of the commedia dell'arte type, in which the strife between the Faculty of Medicine and the College of Surgeons is broadly echoed. The author gives us one innovation, in the character Hidropoplex, physician to the hypochondriac Chrisante, in that Hidropoplex tells honestly that nothing is wrong with his patient. Enraged, Chrisante shows the doctor the door, and waits for "a famous celebrity." The celebrity appears in the person of Valentin, a valet masquerading as a surgeon (Act III, scene 9 ) . H e pronounces Chrisante's illness mortal, so that the soi-disant invalid is entirely satisfied with him. Hidropoplex returns to make a new attempt to expel from his patient's mind the phantom illness that is troubling him. " W h o is that coxcomb?" he asks, at sight of Valentin. " H e is a clever surgeon," answers Chrisante. A lively conversation follows between the two rivals. HIDROPOPLEX

It's impudent in you to venture here Without a doctor's order. VALENTIN

Well, I fear The impudence is yours. The case we fight Is still before the courts. You have no right To play the master. 1! See Van Roosbroeck's ed. of L'Empirique, pp. 6—16; Mercure février, 1731, pp. 342 f.; Histoire du theatre italien, III, 367-81.

de

France,

66

Quarrel

of the

Faculties

HIDROPOPLEX

Tell me, what's your name? VALENTIN

Trombus. 13 HIDROPOPLEX

Well of all things! What a shame! Trombus! A tell-tale label! By that apt name you show That anyone to whom you go Your ignorant hands disable. VALENTIN

Speaking of hands, your hands end many a life. Death owes more to prescriptions than to the knife.

Hidropoplex remarks that Valentin has not learned how to argue; consequently he cannot cure. The physician admits, however, that in spite of the sublime knowledge of the doctors, fate removes a large number of victims from their care, but "one at least tries to cure, and that consoles them." 14 Though surgeons were put on an equal footing with physicians in 1743," the jealousy between the two factions did not cease. The old doctor in Bolan, ou Le Médecin amoureux (175 5) goes crazy, and in his mania raves about the rising power of the surgeons (scene 13): Pour accabler la Faculté, Je vois le corps de chirurgie Balancer notre autorité Et former une Académie.

Another crazy doctor storms against the cursed race of the surgeons in Taconet's Les Fous des boulevards (1760), a parody of Favart's La Soirée des boulevards. "They never do what they are told, or else they do it all wrong." The phy13

Thrombus is an arterial or cerebral blood clot. Cf. Dictionnaire des théâtres, V, 275-305; Histoire IV, 500-17. 15 See above, p. 59. 14

du

théâtre

italien,

Quarrel of the Faculties 67 sician's disdain for the surgeon is reflected in one of Carmontelle's dull comedies, L'Attestation. There the doctor refuses to see the surgeon, on the ground that he is an ignoramus, and gives a caricature of the surgeon's mistakes. Finally, to get rid of the persistent fellow, the doctor feigns to be dead and allows his valet to call the surgeon in. Ducharpi proves his ignorance by his observations on the supposedly dead doctor.

V

Quacks and Faddists

I

N F R A N C E , as in other countries, mountebanks were always a popular class of entertainers at fairs, markets, and other places o f public resort. Their chief object, o f course, was not to provide free entertainment, but to dispose of nostrums and cure-alls to the crowds which their performances attracted. These quacks had to be natural orators, and they advertised their wares with such force, ease, and smoothness that thousands of mouths were always agape to consume their medicines. The status of these dispensers o f "snake remedies" is brightly described by Mercier, 1 who notes that toward the middle o f the eighteenth century their activities came under public supervision. They had to register with the police, and their remedies were examined to be sure they contained no poison nor other harmful substances. A century earlier, two famous mountebanks, Orviétan and Barry, had a shop and theater in the neighborhood of the Pont-Neuf. The shop was the central mart of a drug called "orviétan." As for the theater, Molière, no less, was said to have once acted in their employ.2 A history and description of the renowned Gilles Barry, by his illegitimate daughter, Alison, was published in 1704. 3 Two years previous to that, Tableau Je Paris, VIII (Chap. 6 6 0 ) , 178-81. Cf. Le Paulmicr, L'Orviétan, pp. 4 0 - 4 } . a Le Voyage de Guibray, ou Les Avanlnres de Princes de B*** et Je C ***. Pièce comique, avec l'histoire du fameux Barry, de Philandre et d'Alison. Dictionnaire Jes théâtres, X I V , 268. 1 2

Quacks

and Faddists

69

Dancourt had given him the biblical name of Melchisedech, in L'Opérateur Barry. This play is a pure Italian farce with all the traditional characters, and is similar to the farces that the mountebank Barry had played on his boards. We do not have to read far in the prologue to discover that the hero (l'opérateur) is a braggart, full of offensive and aggressive self-conceit. He considers himself a better orator than Cicero, wiser than Cato, a hundred times more learned than Aristotle. N o man ever puffed himself better than Barry: You see, Ladies and Gentlemen, you see, I say, the greatest person in the world, a virtuoso, a Phenix for his profession, a paragon of medicine, the successor of Hippocrates in a straight line, and the inheritor of his aphorisms, the scrutinizer of nature, the conqueror of diseases, and the plague of all the members of the Faculty. You see, I say, with your own eyes, a methodical, galenic, hippocratic, pathologic, chemical, spagyrical doctor. . . . As there is only one sun in heaven, so is there only one Barry on earth.

He tells of all the places he has been since 1609, when he made a great stir in Paris, and of all the cures he has effected. He has the "clinquant de l'homme de la foire," as he glibly recommends quack medicines that he claims to have brought from many foreign lands. For the ladies he has something to preserve beauty and youth beyond decrepitude. His most miraculous remedy, however, is one from China, which enlarges the eyes and brings the corners of the mouth closer together, elongates noses that are too small, and abbreviates noses that are too long. 4 An adventure of the once-famous charlatan forms the nucleus of this vivacious one-act comedy, but after the prologue Barry does not appear in person again until the divertissement, where he recommends wine, women, and laughter as the best cures for melancholy: * Lemaître, La Comédie après Molière, p. 202, draws an analogy between Barry's claptrap speech in this play and those of the charlatans of the twentieth century.

70

Quacks and Faddists Les chagrins, la mélancolie, Sont les plus grands maux de la vie; Les secrets dont je les guéris, Sont les plaisirs, les jeux, les ris, Un peu d'amoureuse folie, Et l'usage des meilleurs vins, Avec cela, quel mal peut vous surprendre? Que mes remèdes sont bénins, Et qu'ils sont faciles a prendre.

We have this same type of boastful and garrulous mountebank in Autreau's Le Port-à-l'anglais, ou Les Nouvelles Débarquées (1718), the first comedy written in French for the Comédie Italienne. We first see the quack in a closed chariot drawn by his suite; then the chariot opens and becomes a charlatan's shop. In his greeting, the quack begs his illustrious assembly not to think badly of his science because of his accent and jargon. He thinks that a foreign doctor should be permitted to speak the French language poorly, since even in France the doctors interest themselves only in speaking correct Greek and Latin. The psychology of this vogue for foreign doctors is partly explained when he tells us (Act II, scene 9) that the best drugs come, like himself, from the other end of the world. Among his many miraculous medicines, he has a syrup which rejuvenates men and a "poudre de sympathie" 5 that gives appeal to women, and which, he guarantees, will get husbands for them, too. His most marvelous drug, however, is one that has the virtue of increasing amounts of money. Arlequin naturally supposes that his own money is to show the increase. As things turn out, the drug proves its efficiency only in the amount in the charlatan's pocket. There were charlatans whose panaceas were nothing but fresh or salt water, with perhaps a flavoring. In the first part s I n Le Menteur ( A c t IV, scene 3 ) , by Pierre Corneille, there is question of the famous poudre de sympathie, put into vogue by Kenelm Digby, an English c h a r latan of some importance. The remedy is ridiculed as "vitriol [i.e., poison] dried lovingly in the sun." W i t k o w s k i , Les Médecins au théâtre, pp. 213, 329.

Quacks and Faddists

71

of the eighteenth century, a famous charlatan, Villars by name, confided to some friends that his uncle, who had lived nearly 100 years and then had died only because he was killed in an accident, had left him the secret of a water which could easily prolong life to 150 years, provided a man were temperate. This miraculous water was plain "eau de Seine," with a little nitre added to it.8 In La Rupture du carnaval et de la folie (1719), a parody of Amours du carnaval et de la folie, Fuzelier alludes (scene 3 ) to just such a charlatan "who boasts of curing all past, present, and future ills with a liquid which those who know no better might mistake for mere water from the Seine." 7 For a long time sea water was considered to have many magical properties. Among other things, it was an excellent remedy for rabies. On this old belief La Rage d'amour, ou Les Enragés (1725), by Lesage, Fuzelier, and Dorneval, is based. The scene is laid at Dieppe, and on the front of the stage is an inn, bearing the sign "The Green Dog," with the sea in the background. Stopping at this inn is Gabbanon, a celebrated English physician, who gives himself out as a curer of "all rages, physical or psychical." Girls come filing into his office, "possessed of the incensement of love." For them he advises marriage. For husbands who are afflicted with the "rage of jealousy," he recommends sea baths and Burgundy, pressed during an eclipse of the moon. The charlatan confesses that he can do nothing for a poet who has the "rage of poetry." The poor fellow is brought in and locked up in a cage because he wants to bite everybody.8 Among the patients, finally, comes Arlequin, exhibiting all the symptoms of hydrophobia. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, "Charlatan" (Œuvres, X V I I I , 158). Cf. Dictionnaire des théâtres, IV, 5 3 9—4S ; Histoire du théâtre italien, I, 3 5 1 - 6 0 ; Mercure de France, juillet, 1719, pp. 9 9 - 1 0 6 . 8 The treatment of the insane in the eighteenth century was very bad. "They were either chained or caged when housed," writes Garrison, "or, if harmless, were allowed to run at large. . . . Until well into the nineteenth century, insanity was regarded not only as incurable, but as a disgrace, rather than a misfortune." Garrison, History of Medicine, p. 400. 6 7

72

Quacks and Faddists

Gabbanon simply throws him, much to his disgust, into the sea.9 Favart, who made merry with the solemn doctors, riddles the quacks with sharp-edged darts, on which the points are never dull. In Le Bal bourgeois (1738), a mountebank appears with his wife, valet, and monkey, to distribute his drugs. The real mission of this quack, however, is to deliver a letter to Orgon, who is being tricked by his ward.10 In L'Empirique (1743) Favart directs his shafts of ridicule at the pomp and ignorance of the quack. He imitates Voltaire's popular Mahomet, using the lines that were ringing in people's ears to put his satire over.11 Marmouset, the médecin empirique in this parody, belongs to the group of doctors "who pour drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less" — a witticism of which Voltaire was supposed to be the author. The empiric gulls the common people with his secret nostrums, till they think he is a real sorcerer. He fails, however, to dupe an old acquaintance of his, Sot Père, the country doctor (scene 1 ) : I knew him when he drove his flock of sheep, A n ordinary shepherd, shrewd and deep In lies and wiles designed to trick our girls.

In Favart's Tircis et Doristée (1752), a pastoral 12 that is a parody of Lully-Campistron's Acis et Galathée, there is another charlatan, Guillaume by name, whose cure-all is peerless water. As a credential for his powders and syrups, the mountebank in the Supplément de la soirée des boulevards (1760) exhibits himself as a phenomenon of health. He distributes his 9

C f . Histoire Je l'Opéra Comique, I , 9 J - 9 7 . Ibid., pp. 3 1 0 - 1 2 . Dictionnaire Je s théâtres, I, 3 5 9 - 6 2 . 11 T h e r e has been some discussion as t o w h e t h e r or not L'Empirique is a parody of V o l t a i r e ' s Mahomet. W e k n o w t h a t F a v a r t admired Voltaire, and wc feel t h a t he is merely i m i t a t i n g his language, r a t h e r t h a n mimicking or criticizing it. 12 T h e theatrical pastoral was very m u c h in vogue in the eighteenth c e n t u r y . See M o r n e t , Le Sentiment Je la nature en France, pp. 1 6 3 - 6 8 , 1 7 8 - 8 1 . 10

Quacks and Faddists

73

remedy free — the client has only to pay a tip of two sous to the boy and a crown for the bottle. In La Foire de Cythere (1742), a farce in the Italian style by Fagan and Panard, a mountebank sells his unguents at a fair, and Panard again, in Le Vaudeville (1743), presents another mountebank, who boasts of his cures and satirizes the learned jargon of the medical profession: On trouve un jargon sçavant Chez la Médecine, Mais elle trompe souvent, Et nous assassine. Pour moi qui parle très mal, Je sçais arracher le mal, Jusqu'à la racine; Crac, Jusqu'à la racine.1*

In 1748 one notices an Opérateur chinois, by Dehesse. Boucher's painting, "Le Ballet," is believed to represent the scene of this play.14 A mountebank figures in Collé's La Foire du Parnasse (1754). In Lacombe's Le Charlatan (1756) a quack, Tracolin, engages one Octave to simulate sickness, and then pretends to cure him with his elixirs. Tracolin himself discloses that fraud is nearly always required to bring a "secret remedy" into popular vogue. This comic opera is adapted from an Italian original, the Tracollo medico ignorante, by Pergolesi.15 In Les Deux Compères (1772), by an unknown author, a quack, who is following the lucrative trade of bonesetting, appears grotesquely disguised as a German doctor, in order to help a wife dupe her drunken husband. The comedy is based on La Fontaine's fable, "L'Ivrogne et sa femme." 18 13

Dictionnaire des théâtres, VI, 4 2 - 5 1 . Jutlien, Histoire du théâtre de Madame de Pompadour, p. 38. 15 C f . Histoire du théâtre italien, VI, 2 8 4 - 8 9 ; Cucuel, Les l'opcra-comique français, p. 79. 10 C f . Mercure de France, octobre, 1772, pp. 154-57. 14

Créateurs

de

74

Quacks and Faddists QUACKS

AND

"SICK."

THEATERS

A doctor or a quack (the line of demarcation is faint in many plays) is often called for "sick" theaters, in plays that reflect the strife among the various Parisian stages. Just before the Foire was temporarily closed in 1718, Lesage and Dorneval wrote a comic opera in allegorical form, Les Funérailles de la Foire, as a parting jest over their own death and a final rap at their rivals. In this play a famous Doctor Craquet, of GraveDiggers Alley,17 is summoned. He is a bumptious, cocksure doctor, who boasts of discovering ills before they originate. He tells the dying Foire that her troubles are due to the delicate food she has been eating, instead of the coarse diet to which she had been accustomed for so long a time.18 La Foire agrees that she has not been in good health since her return to "delicacy," that, in fact, she has had several violent attacks, complicated by loss of speech.19 Her life has been saved only by frequent bleedings, which have weakened her devilishly.20 In 1729 the same authors again expose the continual animosities among these various theaters in an allegorical prologue to Le Corsaire, entitled Les Spectacles malades. The sick theaters each in turn have consultations with the housekeeper of one Doctor Lavisière.21 In putting this woman in charge of his afternoon consultation, Doctor Lavisière says (scene 1 ) : " I have explained my new system to you and now you have it better than I." Dame Alizon, herself, at one point exclaims (scene 2 ) : L o n g l i v e m e d i c i n e w h e n i t is p r a c t i c e d a s w e p r a c t i c e i t ! W e in eyes w h a t g y p s i e s read in

read

palms.

R u e des Fossoyeurs. T h e reference is perhaps to the sentimental plays that the Foire tried to introduce alongside the gay ones. Guillemot, " L a Comédie dans le vaudeville/' Revue contemporaine, 2. série, LI, 717. 17

18

See above, p. 16, n. 7. C f . Histoire Je l'Opéra Comique, I, 6 4 - 6 7 ; Witkowski, Les Médecins au théâtre, pp. 21, 22. 2 1 There was a doctor in Paris at that time who pretended to know by the eyes all the diseases that one had, or with which one was threatened, whence the name Lavisière. 19

20

Quacks and faddists

75

In three of his light plays, Panard has jovial doctors try to cheer up despondent theaters. The first of these is Le Départ de l'Opéra Comique ( 1 7 3 3 ) , 2 2 in which joy is personified in a doctor who appears on the stage singing, "Let us laugh, let us rejoice." Doctor La Joie identifies himself as follows: Air: Du

confiteor.

Of health Joy is the favorite child, Ergo, health's by me beguiled More than by the Faculty And its purgative company; All my choicest remedies Are games and other things that please. La Joie breaks into some rather pointless satire: Air: Tuton tut aine. Je fais cependant mon séjour, Plus à la ville qu'à la cour; Et tu, tu, tu, Qui ne m'a pas vu? J'habite souvent Avec le marchand Qui sans crédit vend; Avec l'officier Dans un bon quartier; Avec l'héritier D'un riche banquier; Avec le tuteur Qui vole un mineur, Et le procureur Qui pille un plaideur. Que dirai-je enfin? 23 2 2 Commenting on the criticisms of the opera, beginning from 17J0, Guiet writes ("L'Evolution d'un genre: Le Livret d'opéra en France de Gluck à la Révolution," Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, X V I I I , 3 1 ) : "Opera becomes an inexhaustible source of pleasantries for the authors of comic operas, who parody it and chuckle over i t , " and then cites Panard's Le Départ de l'Opéra Comique as of 1753. This play was, however, produced in 1733, and there had been many parodies of operas before that date. 2 3 C f . Dictionnaire des théâtres, II, 2 7 0 - 7 « ; Histoire de l'Opéra Comique, I, 198-211.

76

Quacks and Faddists

La Foire has again summoned medical aid for the Opéra Comique in La Fée bienfaisante (1736). The doctor examines the patient and gives up all hope."4 Cheerfulness is personified in Doctor Rubardin, in Les Ennuis de Thalie ( 1 7 4 5 ) . But even this doctor's gaiety cannot drive away Thalie's melancholy at the closure of her theater. 25 In Favart's La Noce interrompue ( 1758), another burlesque of the Alceste of Quinault and Lully, the plays come to consult Doctor Glouton. W e hear about this quack from M. de la Casse, a surgeon who has been called in to treat a blow that Mazette has received on his head: H e is a hermetical, cabalistic, balsamic, sudorific, empiric, and magical philosopher, w h o inhabits a solitary island in order to decompose the sun's rays. . . . I am the depository of this balm; b u t as there remains only one drop of it, I am permitted to give it o n l y on one condition — t h a t is to procure f o r our doctor the means of renewing his remedy. . . . The pure breath of a true friend, or of a f a i t h f u l w i f e , is necessary to preserve the fire of his melting pot night and day.

Despairing of finding such a rarity, Mazette considers himself already dead. His wife, however, sacrifices herself for him. Among her other tasks in the play, this "matrimonial phoenix" reads the list of the patients, that is the plays, who have been to see the doctor that day. 28 THE W O M A N

DOCTOR

Lesage liked to use the country of the enchanter Merlin, where nothing happens as in the rest of the universe, as a foil to his own country. In a chimerical fancy entitled Le Monde renversé (1718J, 2 7 he imagined an innovation which seemed 24

Cf. Histoire

de l'Opéra

Comique,

II, 317.

Cf. Dictionnaire des théâtres, II, 4 1 5 - 1 6 ; VII, 492-501 ; Mercure août, 1745, pp. 148-5 5; Junge, Charles-François Panard, p. 85. 2 8 Cf. Histoire du théâtre italien, VI, 328-42. 25

Je

France,

2 7 This play was retouched b y Mme Lesage, Dorncval, and Anscaumc, and played at the O p é r a C o m i q u e on April 2, 175 3. It was taken u p again at the

Quacks and Faddists 77 foolish at the time, without anyone suspecting that it would become a reality in the following century: a woman doctor. The mere notion of such a creature furnishes a gay and frivolous scene to this play. The lovely young Hippocratine in a doctor's furred gown, comes in dancing, singing, and boasting about the miracles she performs. Arlequin and Pierrot, who come from another world, our world, are astounded to find women practicing medicine. Hippocratine finds their astonishment astonishing. She wonders if the sick are any better off in the world where medicine is practiced only by men. They can find no answer to that argument, and admit that the cleverest doctor, with all his Latin, is just a stupid idiot. "It is his Greek and Latin that makes him ignorant," says Hippocratine. " I f the women in the WorldTurned-Upside-Down are skillful doctors, the reason is that they disregard books and consult only nature." And she describes their method (scene 10): A i r : Amis, sans regrctter Paris. W e bleed, but very gingerly, Most deftly we insert; [going through the motions of giving a clyster] We purge, but most agreeably, O u r physic does not hurt.

" A s for that," comments Pierrot, "we have women in France who know how to bleed a man wonderfully well, without using either lancet or cassia." Actually, however, that is only half the story. Hippocratine's description of her full treatments is such that Arlequin and Pierrot can imagine nothing better than falling ill at once.28 The audience must have gone into Foire St. Laurent in the same year. König produced Die Verkehrte Welt at Dresden in 172J. As Witkowski points out, this version differs from the original mostly in the fact that the Saxon doctoress is called Sassafras instead of Hippocratine. One might note that in his article, "Lcs Doctercsses sur les planches," Dr. Mathot (pseudonym of Dr. Paul Michaut) regards this play by König as an imitation of Molicre. He seems not to know that it was an adaption, merely, of Lesage. L'8 Claretie, Lesage, pp. 7 5 - 7 6 , quotes part of the scene mentioned. See also Hisloire Je ¡'Opera Comique, I, 5 J - 6 0 ; Sue, Anecdotes historiqnes, II, 4J—46.

78

Quacks and Faddists

gales of laughter when this comic opera was revived at the Odèon in 1899 (February 4 ) . At that time Paris was full of women doctors, and yet the world had not turned upside down. 29 ARLEQUIN

Frequent in the Italian repertory and in Molière's plays, and all through the eighteenth century from Regnard to Beaumarchais, is the type of the mock doctor, or charlatan, who is nothing but one of the characters in disguise. This mock doctor is now Arlequin, now the valet or the chambermaid, now the lover or the sweetheart. Arlequin is thus metamorphosed more often than any other character. 30 One might almost say that he is always "mounting the bench" or donning the charlatan's garb. Changing his guise, he does not change his ways: he remains liar, swindler, and thief. A play called Arlequin, médecin malgré lui was produced in 1715 by Carolet. Léris 31 styles it a mediocre imitation of Molière's Médecin malgré lui. It was never published and the manuscript seems to be lost. Arlequin and Mezzetin decide to become retailers of Merlin's magic water, in Les Eaux de Merlin (1715) by Lesage. They know that in order to make any sales they must dress ridiculously, for after all (Act I, scene 1) "A man who wears a strange costume immediately wins peoples' confidence, especially in France." We see them in their shop, dressed as charlatans, romancing and ballading about their nonpareil water. Their customers are easily recognizable as true types of the day, and Lesage 28 W e do not find the F a c u l t y of Medicine again represented by a woman u n t i l 1740, in L'Ecole d'Anières, by Panard. In this play the woman in question applies to one Aliboron, to be appointed principal of a school. See Histoire de l'Opéra Comique, II, 284; Junge, Charles-François Panard, p. 73. 30 For other metamorphosis of Arlequin see Doutrcpont, Let Types populaires Je la littérature française, II, î—44; Celler, Études dramatiques, I, 39-86; Beaumont, The History of Harlequin. 31 Dictionnaire portatif, p. 288.

Quacks and Faddists

79 32

was evidently satirizing them in this play. The following year Arlequin médecin volant was put on the boards. The many plays by this title are close imitations of the old Italian farce. 33 Arlequin serves as a doctor in Chinese costume in two plays — one, Arlequin barbet, pagode,34 et médecin (1723), by Lesage and Dorneval; and the other, Arlequin docteur, major chinois (1722), of unknown authorship. In Arlequin, chirurgien de Barbarie (a parade 35 forming the first part of Act I of L'Histoire de l'Opéra-Comique, ou Les Métamorphoses de la Foire (1736) by Lesage and Panard), Arlequin feels the traditional eagerness of the surgeon to operate. Arlequin amputates both arms and legs of Scaramouche, in an attempt to locate a bullet that has lodged in his body.36 The Italian buffoon in Ansart's Les Ressorts amoureux d'Arlequin (1768) fits nicely into the rôle of a celebrated doctor. He is decked out in ermine, flashes a diamond ring, and carries a gold-headed cane. A month later, Ansart again dressed Arlequin up as a doctor in scene 5 of Henriette, ou Le Triomphe de l'amour par la fatuité. In this play the clown meditatively pronounces a diagnosis in technical drivel, with a touch of lingua franca: The membranes and the fibers of the brain are disturbed. A kindled blood has boiled over, burned the chyle, and so ruined his good constitution and destroyed the symptoms of health. Therefore, only by giving clysters and by cupping can the parts be moistened and refreshed — sinon crevare!

Arlequin is told, as he had been in the previous play, that the patient's illness is due to the trouble he is having in breathing. To prove that "it is not breathing that he lacks" Arlequin, for a piece of slapstick, grips the patient's nose and puts a muzzle 32 Cf. Bernardin, La Comédie italienne, pp. 129-30; Histoire de l'Opéra Comique, I, 25-28. 33 Dictionnaire des théâtres, Vol. I, p. 254. 34 Barbet, spaniel. The pagode wis a doll with a nodding head dressed like a Chinese mandarin. 35 See below, p. 93, n. 22. 36 Dictionnaire des théâtres, I, 208-9; Histoire de l'Opéra Comique, I, 276-77.

80 Quacks and Faddists over his mouth. Coming to his prescription, Arlequin orders a daily diet of "three pecks of pills" which he has compounded himself. And he adds "Faute de quoi — foi de docteur-régent — crevare!" The author of these two plays may have had in mind recent medical discoveries: the changes in the body caused by diseases, the mechanism of breathing, and the theory of respiration.87 T H E VALET

Crispin, of Les Folies amoureuses (1704), by Regnard, is the traditional Crispin whom Grimm so well defines as "an unusually clever, gay, often clownish, artful, and knavish valet, who is used by his master in under-handed affairs and intrigues, or is busy deceiving and duping the master himself." 88 One might add that in this particular comedy he is also a great braggart and a shameless liar, and in his doctor's rig says and does many droll things. He assures Albert, the aged guardian, that he has a thousand secrets for curing all ills, and gains his confidence so completely that Albert asks him to treat his ward's mental disorders. The ward, of course, is in love with a young man, and is feigning madness in order to escape the clutches of her guardian. At one point in the play (Act III, scene 7 ) , Albert is impatient because Crispin, the mock doctor, has kept him waiting, as doctors will. Crispin justifies himself by condemning haste: Un savant philosophe a dit élégamment: "Dans tout ce que tu fais, hâte-toi lentement."

And falling into his rôle, he says that "Hippocrates says Yes, but Galen says No." A little magic enters into Crispin's suddenly adopted profession. Leaving the physicians to practice their science on bodily ills, he raises his art to a loftier plane — that of curing 37 38

See below, p. 112. Correspondance, 15 octobre, 1753, II, 2 9 1 - 9 2 .

Quacks and Faddists

81

mental ills. He wishes that Albert were maniac, splenetic, insane, hypochondriac, all at the same time, that he, Crispin, might have the pleasure of making him as sane and healthy a person as he is himself. Crispin finally gets to the point. Agatha's illness is due to an "irritated mind." Some love demon has taken possession of her reason. In a farcical scene, he makes the demon pass from her body to that of Erastus by pronouncing the decisive words, Microc, Salam, Hypocrata, while brandishing a magic wand over the two lovers. The audience of that day laughed, and we still have to laugh, at the faith that the simple Albert manifested in Crispin's medical experiment.89 Nothing could be more jocose nor more amusing than Les Folies amoureuses. It is wholly in the Italian style, but that is not surprising, since the author worked for the Italian troupe for a long time. One notes in this comedy many resemblances to Molière's plays. The subject is the same as that of L'Amour médecin. Lucinde, in Le Médecin malgré lui, feigns muteness in circumstances similar to those in which Agatha feigns madness. Crispin's wish in respect to Albert resembles the wish of Toinette in Le Malade imaginaire (Act III, scene 10). The theme of illness, affected for love, is found in Malezieu's La Tarentole ( 1705 ), though it is not treated with the literary talent of a Regnard. Here at issue is the legend of the tarantula's sting, which was supposed to produce madness. Isabelle, as usual, is trying to avoid marriage to an old man (Fatolet), and feigns having been stung by a tarantula. In this play the valet is duping the master. Posing as a doctor, Crotesquas persuades Fatolet that Isabelle can be curcd only by marriage, but that whoever she marries will surely die within six weeks, by contracting her disease. Fatolet swallows the story, and Isabelle marries a younger lover. There is an animated scene in the play which serves as a pretext for an exhibition in tap3 9 Cf. Parfaict, Histoire du Théâtre Français, XIV, 321-22; Lenient, La Comédie en France au XVIll' siècle, I, 56-67; Guyot, Le Poète J. Fr. Regnard, pp. 122-23.

82

Quacks and Faddists

dancing. Crotesquas tries to prove that Isabelle can be cured, not by medicine, but only by love. He introduces some confederate valets, who pretend to be suffering from Isabelle's disease. In conformity with the tradition of folklore that tarantism could be cured by dancing the tarentella, a lively, passionate Neapolitan dance, the valets trip rhythmically, and in the end are cured. This "treatment," however, has no effect on Isabelle.40 Martel may have known Malezieu's play when he wrote La Tarentule in 1745.41 The plot of the play is the same. Antonio, a valet passing for a musician, knows that the antidote for tarantism is music, and more music. A doctor by the significant name of Cacarelli is not of that opinion, however. The tarantula [he says in a mock discourse] instills in the blood a venom which gayety alone cannot disperse. It is necessary to deobstruct the entrails and wash out the brain, whereafter Mr. Musician, you will be allowed to attend to the spleen, though you will be invited only as an instrument of the Faculty.

Frontin is both valet and surgeon in Le Chevalier Bayard ( 1741 ), a play by Autreau, but he is particularly interested in bringing his master's love intrigue to a happy ending. This is also the business of La Rose, the pretended doctor in Les Vapeurs ( 1 7 J 3 ) , by Le Fort de la Morinière. In this play the satire bears more especially on the doctor's lust for money. To help Léandre win Isabelle, a valet is disguised to play the hero's rôle in Collé's Le Chirurgien anglois (1774). 42 We learn from this farce that Hippocrates, and since his day, Doctor Crac40 C f . D u Bled, La Comédie de société au XVIII' siècle, pp. 2 2 - 2 5 ; Jullien, La Comédie i la cour, pp. 4 9 - 5 1 ; Font, Essai sur Favart, p. 67. 41 This play was retouched by Collé in 1776. 42 Q u é r a r d (Supercheries littéraires dévoilées, III, 1064) states t h a t this play is b y Monet and t h a t it has been falsely credited to Collé. Catalogue de la Bibliothèque Nationale lists it under both authors. It is not mentioned in Collé's Journal, nor in the chronological list of Collé's works in Correspondance inédite. Perhaps it is Gilles chirurgien, a parade written in 1748 and produced in 175 0, published under this title.

Quacks

and

Faddists

83

belly, a celebrated Scotch Highlander, recommend curing the colic by tickling the belly with a hare's tail. A f t e r examining Cassandre's tongue and eyes, the English surgeon decides that he is too far gone even for that positive remedy. THE

LOVER

OR

SWEETHEART

The fourth act of Les Muses ( 1 7 0 3 ) , by Danchet, is a play complete in itself 4 3 called L'Amour médecin, ou La Comédie.** In L'Amour médecin, Éricine disguises herself as a doctor and attends her lover, in order to test his feeling for her. She thinks her gown and some skilful guessing will see her through (scene 1 ) : Cet ornement va me donner Un sçavoir à qui rien n'échappe; Souvent le grand art d'Esculape Consiste en l'art de deviner. In L'Amour charlatan (Act III of Dancourt's La Comédie des comédiens of 1710 45 ) Angélique plays the rôle of the doctor and Léandre that of Pierrot. This disguise tricks the girl's father, and enables her to marry her lover. Like the learned doctors of the commedia dell'arte, Angélique knows everything: all the arts — mathematics, science, philosophy, and so forth. She is no more modest regarding her medical ability than they were: Do you need any medicine? [she asks.] I am Aesculapius's greatest friend. I have made more aphorisms than Hippocrates. I have read Galen and Avicenna four or five times. I challenge dropsy, palsy, dysentery, pleurisy, frenzy, quinsy, apoplexy, and all the diseases which end in y, to attack any constitution which I have taken under my protection. 4 3 A play within a play was not an uncommon device with eighteenth-century French dramatists. 4 4 In Théâtre de M. Danchet (4 vols., Paris, 17Î1 ) , the act bears the simple title of La Comédie. Witkowski, Les Médecins au théâtre, p. 321, states the act is entitled L'Amour médecin, in pointing out that it was suggested by La Dame Médecin (1678) by Montfleury. The Catalogue Soleinne gives both titles. " See above, n. 45.

84

Quacks and Faddists

Thoroughly to convince everyone that she is a doctor, she sputters nonsensical, macaronic Latin and lingua franca: Sa, son Dutor? Now do you doubt it? Yes, Gentlemen, I am a doctor, non solum in utroque: but, cinquantoque & centupliquoque jure, in omnibus & per omnia Doctor excellens, excellentior # excellentissimus.

In Boissy's Le Médecin par occasion (1745), a French officer, disguised as a Prussian doctor, comcs to restore health to a lovesick girl, who is no other than his own sweetheart. This pseudodoctor cures without remedies and, what is even more surprising, without fees. He soon manages to cure a whole neurasthenic family by his mere presence and his very nonmedical advice, and people from outside the château flock to consult him.4® Le Médecin par amour (1764), by Contant d'Orville, is an imitation of this play. In Riccoboni's Le Prétendu (1760), the lover, also a pretended doctor, divines that the trouble with his patient lies in the heart.47 48 47

Cf. Zeek, Louis de Boissy, pp. 186-87. Cf. Histoire du théâtre italien, VI, 420.

VI

Society Doctors HE metamorphosis of the doctor into the fashionable physician dates from the first decade of the eighteenth century. In 1739 Voltaire points out the dissimilarities between the doctors whom Molière described and the society doctors of the eighteenth century: They were very different from those of today. They almost always went around in a robe and band, and spoke in Latin. If the doctors of our day do not understand nature better, they do have a better knowledge of the world and know that the great art of the doctor is to please. Molière may have contributed to ridding them of their pedantry; but the customs of the age have undergone a complete change, and that has helped still more. The spirit of reason has been introduced into all sciences, and politeness into every condition of life. 1

In his remarks on Pascal, Voltaire comments further on the transformation of the doctor's external appearance since the time of Molière. Pascal had said (Pensées, no. 8 2 ) : "If the physicians did not have their cassocks and their mules, if the university doctors did not have their mortar boards and their robes four times too wide, they would never have duped the world, which cannot resist such an original appearance." Voltaire disagrees, as he so frequently does with Pascal, and writes in 1738: 1La

Vic Je Molière

(Œuvres,

XXIII, 109).

Society Doctors

86

Nevertheless physicians did not cease being ridiculous and did not acquire real consideration till they left off those pedantic liveries. University doctors were not received in the world of polite people until they had discarded their mortar boards and their cavilling arguments. 2 . . . Today [ 1 7 7 8 ] a physician would be ridiculed should he come in a cassock to feel a pulse and examine a stool. 3

But we have, in 1774, a letter from L'Espion anglois, by Pidansat de Mairobert, that shows the new type of physician in action: Instead of the solemn, cold, sententious, gloomy, and affected pedant whom I had expected, I was quite surprised to see a fop dressed in black silk lined with ermine, powdered and perfumed like a young magistrate, lightly turning up his lace ruffles and gracefully touching the pulse of the mistress of the house, while complimenting her on her lovely complexion. After chatting a little about the theaters and the news of the day, he hurried away so suddenly that he had to be called back to write his prescription, which he had completely forgotten. The reports [of these doctors] are masterpieces of eloquence in which all the possibilities of rhetorical figure are exhausted. Even medicines have become pleasant to take with these doctors, and the practice of medicine has become so sophisticated in Paris that it is just a sport, a game of banter, a round of frivolous small talk. After all, perhaps one should be grateful to these doctors, for even if they stay neither disease nor death, they at least charm the imagination by filling it with lively if idle fancies, and they send their credulous enthousiasts more agreeably to their death. 4

And Mercier, writing just before the Revolution, remarks: I f Molière were to come back to this world, he would not find one of his doctors left. Where are the Guénauds on their mules? Where are MM. Purgon and Diafoirus? Instead of a grave gentleman with a stern expression and a pompous gait who weighs his words and scolds when his orders are not obeyed, Molière would Remarques sur les Pensées de M. Pascal (Œuvres, XXII, 59). Derniires remarques sur les Pensées de Pascal (Œuvres, XXXI, 31); and see Rollatoti, "Voltaire and Medicine," Proceedings of tie Royal Society of Medicine (Section, History of Medicine) XIX (1921), 17-28, 79-94. * Doutrepont, La Littérature et les médecins en France, pp. 18, 19, quotes this letter from an abridged edition of Mairobert's L'Espion anglois by Jean-Toussaint Merle. 2 8

87

Society Doctors

see an amiable person with a gentle smile who talks wittily and of everything except his art, and meticulously turns back his lace ruffles with a delicate white hand on which he flashes a large diamond. When he feels a pulse, he does it with particular charm. He finds everybody in perfect health — and he never suspects any danger. A t the bedside of a dying patient his face radiates hope. He says a few cheering words and then makes his departure, continuing his jests all the way down the stairs, though that very night his patient leaves for the other world. 5

The tremendous prestige of the eighteenth-century society doctor is noted and described by the Due de Levis: T h e influence which the best-known doctors exercised in France on their society patients, and especially on the ladies at that time, was amazing. The latter displayed reliance and submission towards their medical attendants, and their boundless admiration showed itself in the most delicate attentions. I can only compare it with that which their grandmothers, at the end of the reign of Louis X I V , felt for their spiritual directors; but, in truth, this change in their affections may easily be explained by the fact that the body had by this time supplanted the soul in importance. As in fifteen cases out of twenty they were summoned for a whim rather than from necessity, they obviously had more complaints to listen to than remedies to prescribe. They were obliged to listen with the utmost attention to long accounts of their patients' ills, and, at the same time, not to take them too seriously for fear of instilling real alarm, a sure way of becoming unpopular and being shown the door; whereas if they roughly described the symptoms as pure imagination they would, as infallibly, have wounded their patients' self-esteem and come to be regarded as harsh and unsympathetic. There was an art in reviving the courage of these delicate souls, by prescribing for them, with some semblance of attention, those harmless remedies which calmed their nerves without injuring their health, and in terminating their visit, which had begun under the appearance of deep solicitude, with a light and graceful pleasantry. What a difference between these charming doctors and those of Pascal! When this great thinker said: " W h o wants a physician without a soutane?" he did not foresee so great a change. 6 Tableau de Paris, II (Chap. C X X X V ) , 57. Souvenirs et portraits, p. 258, quoted in Ducros, French Eighteenth Century, tr. from the French by de Geijer, p. 173. 5 6

Society

in

the

Society

88

Doctors

DOCTOR TYPES CONTRASTED O N T H E STAGE A s early as 1726, w e find a dramatist effectively contrasting Molière's solemn and pedantic doctors with the more modern tant-mieux type. In Piron's L'Enrôlement d'Arlequin, Arlequin refuses to become a doctor, and argues (scene 6 ) , "But see h o w they are ridiculed in the comedies?" H i s uncle, the surgeon Massacre, replies: I should say so — in Molière's day, when doctors were old men, riding around on jaded mules, bagged in long black robes and sputtering Greek, Latin, or Arabic nonsense. But go to Paris today and see what a doctor is! You find him an amiable, well-groomed gentleman who rides to his calls in a coach, trips lightly up the stairs, touches the lady graciously on the arm, says tant-mieux, tant-mieux, five or six times, cracks two or three jokes, then trips down the stairs again, gets back into his carriage and is off. 7 In L'Hiver

( 1 7 3 3 ) , b y Soulas d'Allainval, Fashion

(La

Mode) explains h o w she has metamorphosed the lugubrious old-fashioned doctor by enlivening his costume and brightening up his manners and disposition (scene 4 ) : Je les ai déguisez En Adonis; j'ay mis leurs personnes charmantes: Sous les coulers les plus brillantes. Ils sont brodez, poudrez, frisez, Ils ont des teints fleuris, des yeux vifs, des voix claires Comme des courtisans, même des airs aisez: Enfin, vous les croiriez d'aimables mousquetaires, S'ils n'étoient pas un peu trop empesez; Bref, la seringue et la lancette en France Vont aujourd'hui sous le velours. D o c t o r s no longer spend their lives over Greek and Arabic tomes, but read the latest novels and sing the latest hits: 7

C f . Dictionnaire

des

théâtres,

2 9 2 - 9 3 ; C h a p o n n i è r e , Alexis médecins

en France,

Piron,

p p . 17, 18.

II, 4 1 7 - 1 9 ;

Histoire

Je ¡'Opéra

Comique,

pp. 1 9 9 - 2 0 0 ; Doutrcpont, La Littérature

II, et les

Society Doctors

89

Je leur fais lire à présent les gazettes, Les livres de bons mots, et les nouveaux romans: Ils sont toujours farcis de chansonnettes, De brevets de calote, 8 et de telles sornettes, De caquets du quartier; d'un malade aux abois, Ils vont en égayer l'oreille.9

Favart makes merry with the old-time doctor and entertainingly contrasts him with the petit-maître of the day. In Le Génie de l'Opéra-Comique (173 5 ) , Favart versifies thus about this type (scene 8) : A u temps jadis le médecin bizarre, Sur une mule alloit morne et rêveur; Il ne parloit qu'un langage barbare, Et du beau sexe il étoit la terreur. Mais aujourd'hui plus à son aise, Le médecin ne va qu'en chaise; Leste, galant propre au plaisir, Du grec il ne fait plus parade. Exprès pour se faire guérir, Le beau sexe tombe malade. 10

There are two handsomely dressed medical men in L'Abondance ( 1 7 3 7 ) , which Favart wrote in collaboration with Laffichard and d'Orville. "The doctor," writes Salvatore, "relies chiefly on a sort of 'pseudo-psycho-analytical' method in treating his patients, which he finds much more practical and effective than the antiquated practices of his predecessors; whereas the surgeon still has to fall back on his 'blood-tapping' for a living." Favart notes the importance of appear8 The " R e g i m e n t de la Calotte," founded in 1702, was an association of y o u n g and old madcaps, who, in order to censure the ridicules of the time, delivered "brevets de calotte," in verse and in prose, to a m u l t i t u d e of persons, promised rank of différent grades for their stupidities. Piron was the orator of the regiment. See Chaponnicre, La Vie joyeuse de Piron, p. 45, n. 1; also La Grande Encyclopédie, VIII, 995. " C f . Histoire du théâtre italien, IV, 1 4 - 2 1 . 1 0 Salvatore, Favart's Unpublished Plays, p. 151; see also Mercure de France, juin, 1735, pp. 159}—94; Dictionnaire des théâtres, III, 1 6 - 1 9 .

90 Society Doctors ances, especially appearances of prosperity: "A physician who has no coach," says the doctor in this play, "is considered an ignorant person, a man without practice." "A surgeon who has no carriage (chaise roulante)," adds a colleague, "passes for a knave or for a barber." 11 Again, in La Folie du jour, ou Les Portraits à la mode

(1760), Favart sings, in jeering verse, of the funereal oldfashioned doctor, and of the jewel-bedecked modern fops: En habit lugubre le médecin Traitait gravement son art assassin, Une mule composoit tout son train. C'étoit la vieille méthode. Chargés de bijoux plus que de latin, Nos petits docteurs ont le ton badin Et vont dans un char verni par Martin. Voilà leur portrait à la mode.12

Doctor Omoplate, in scene 3 of Yon's La Métempsycose (1752), is mistaken for a gallant magistrate because of his affected demeanor and his florid, blooming complexion. This doctor rarely employs medical treatments. He amuses and flatters the patient in seductive, anodyne language. Momus, the god of mockery and censure, on being asked whether he knows what a doctor formerly was, characteristically replies that the doctor was what he still is — and he makes long-familiar charges against the medical profession. If words could cure, he finally concludes, the doctor would never be a murderer. Omoplate describes the old practitioner as a hypochondriac, a caustic bear, who rode around in melancholy guise on a jibbing mule, and spoke in a sepulchral tone that dashed all hope in the patient. With that type he contrasts the contemporary doctor — a fashionable coquettish fop, who cannot make his rounds short of using four horses. 1 1 Silvitore, op. cit., pp. 218-20. Dictionnaire des theatres, I, 515-16; Histoire Je l'Opéra Comique, II, 135-34. 1 2 Witkowski, Les Médecins au théâtre de l'antiquité au dix-septième siècle, p. 378, n. 1. Douirepont, La Littérature et les médecins en France, p. 19.

Society Doctors

91

Doctor Omoplate himself is conscientious, meticulous, and loyal to bloodletting. He prescribes that treatment for all cases, whatever they may be. He never thinks of returning home at night without having ordered a hundred veins opened. If the patient fails to get well, his trouble evidently cannot lie in the blood, so that the doctor is free to train his batteries upon the humors, by ordering strong emetics. For obstinate cases, there is always the recourse of the watering place. As its title indicates, this play deals with the theme of the transmigration of souls, and one of the characters is Pythagoras, to whom the doctrine of metempsychosis is, in fact, credited. Pythagoras predicts to the doctor that in forty years' time he, the doctor, will return to earth as a timid hypochondriac and will become the victim and plaything of the charlatans. Durimon, a giddy fifty-year-old physician and dilettante of all the arts, breezes in upon the stage in a little play by Chevrier, La Campagne ( 1754). 1 3 The doctor here is a house guest at the country home of a wealthy patient. He is a doctor in the modern style. He disapproves of the once popular cassia and senna, though he still allows bleeding by a surgeon. His art comes down to a thousand pretty nothings. But if, in spite of so much politeness on the doctor's part, the patient is obstinate and grows worse, what can Durimon do but let him die ett suivant le bouton (watching the pocks multiply). Durimon revives the spirits, chases spleen away, and pleases the ladies by admitting their vapors. He prefers scented waters to drugs. His apothecaries are perfumers. He has no confidence even in mineral waters, though occasionally, as a concession to the fad, he will prescribe Vichy: "One must risk something in deference to prevailing fashion." Molière, he thinks, was right in ridiculing the sullen pedants of that 13 Desnoiresterres (La Comédie satirique au dix-huitième siècle, p. 158) mistakenly implies that Chevrier was the first to create the stage type of the society doctor.

92

Society

Doctors

day. Modern science knows the value of a laugh. The best remedy is the latest jest of the day. His patient he compares to the operatic hero who dies, but dies singing. Death at the hands of the old-timers was a distressing business. With the moderns, one is amused up to the last minute. 14 T H E LOVE SPECIALIST

We have already noted a number of plays in which the valet, lover, or sweetheart poses as a doctor, in order to cure the person who pretends to be ill, but who is really in love.15 Sometimes this love specialist is one of the Faculty. The treatment, nevertheless, is the same. They all prescribe the desired marriage. This theme, which goes back to Boccaccio,1" is a familiar one on the French stage.17 It reappears in Le Médecin de l'amour (17$8) by Anseaume and Marcouville. This play is the story of Stratonice 18 transplanted to the country, with the characters transformed to harmonize with the setting. Selcucus, the King of Syria and a widower, becomcs Géronte, a village bailiff. Prince Antiochus takes the name of Léandre. Stratonice, the daughter of the King of Macedonia, promised to Seleucus, is Laure. The court physician is now only a country doctor. H e is still, nevertheless, a variety of the society doctor. H e leaves everything to nature. Perhaps he is a forerunner of the naturalist doctor, who appeared in the eighteenth century. 10 H e never gives drugs. He treats by amusing. This he claims "is a new secret" and in the case involved, 14

C f . Histoire du théâtre italien, V I , 1 7 4 - 8 2 . See above, pp. 8 0 - 8 4 . A y o u n g p h y s i c i a n , in a talc of t h e second d a y of t h e Decameron, guesses t h e cause of t h e flickering pulse. 15

instantly

17 W e find it in La Princesse Je Carizme ( 1 7 1 8 ) by Lcsage a n d L a f o n t , in Cydippe ( 1 7 3 1 ) b y M a r i g n i e r , in La Force Je l'amitié ( 1 7 4 8 ) by R i c c o b o n i and Veronese, and in La Frirolité ( 1 7 S 3 ) b y Boissy. 18 C o n f o r m i n g w i t h t h e n a r r a t i v e of t h e historians, DeBrosse w r o t e a m e d i o c r e play in 1644, called La Stratonice, OH Le Malade d'amour. 10

Cf. Delaunay,

(pp. 397-431).

Le

Monde

médical.

Chap.

XII,

"Les

Médecins

naturalistes

Society Doctors

93

a case of which "he can make nothing at all," he advises such pleasant medications as music and dances, in order to "clear the congested vessels, gradually excite perspiration, and break down obstructions of glutinous blood." Dame Perrette, Laure's mother, is astonished when merrymaking is ordered to amuse the patient. Such a treatment would never have occurred to her stupid old doctor, whose only remedy was water. 20 During the dance the doctor watches Léandre and perceives that he is in love with Laure, who has been promised to old Géronte. Trained to showing every consideration for his patients, the doctor tactfully tells Géronte that Léandre is pining for the girl he, the doctor, loves. Géronte begs the doctor to break off his engagement and to make a sacrifice for Léandre. The doctor feigns to object to this proposal, asking Géronte to put himself in his place. "I would do it instantly," replied Géronte. The doctor takes him at his word and tells him that Léandre is his, Géronte's, rival. This leaves Géronte stunned, but he finally resigns himself to being only the father-in-law of the girl whom he had wished to marry. 2 1 La Médecine de Cythere (1765), a parade22 "tirée des Fastes de Syrie," is the story of Stratonice written in the ribald style of a Grandval, to whom the authorship is credited. Instead of using country characters, as Anseaume and Marcouville did, Grandval dresses up the stock characters of the old Italian comedy in oriental costume. Cassandre wears the royal cloak and the crown of Seleucus; Pierrot wears Antiochus' 20 Allusion to Le Docteur Sattgrado of that year by the same author. See above, p. 49. 21 C f . Histoire de l'Opéra Comique, II, 9 0 - 9 S . " T h e parades were burlesques staged out of doors at the fairs, in order to lure the crowds that gathered inside the theaters. This low genre was also well adapted to the stages of the society theaters. T h e characters bears the names of commedia dell'arte types; but in substance they generally represented local characters, and made copious use of Parisian slang and patois elements. The doctor rarely appears in these parades. His functions are taken over by a stock character called Cassandre, who is an old man but almost never a physician. C f . D'Aimeras and d'Estrée, Les Théâtres libertins au XVlll' siècle.

94

Society Doctors

costume; Isabelle is Stratonice; and Columbine plays the rôle of Ismène, suivante to Stratonice and wife of the doctor. The Italian doctor is transformed into a royal physician. He is a man "qui ferait la barbe à Tronchin." 23 Though a complaisant doctor, he protests when the king (Cassandre) begs him to concede his wife Ismène (Columbine) to the lovesick prince (Pierrot). Ismène, however, accepts the sacrifice philosophically, saying (scene 4 ) , "You'll be the doctor and I'll be the medicine." Ismène (Columbine) tells Stratonice (Isabelle), who is supposed to be married to the king (Cassandre) on that day, not to be prudish: Ah! le beau jour pour vous! Vous couchiez toujours seule; Vous allez coucher deux, sans faire la bégueule.

This does seem like an incongruous remark to Isabelle, whose outstanding trait, in the words of Fréron,24 is that "she is almost always with child or at least has a great hankering for becoming so." These farces are so vulgar that one can hardly reprint the titles, though they serve to show the so-to-say "comic-strip" vicissitudes and adventures of this character, as she passes from play to play." As Gaiffe well notes,2" the audiences that witnessed these vulgar buffooneries contained not a few of the aristocrats and grand seigneurs, who were so very fastidious in the matter of morals at the Comédie Italienne or at the Théâtre 23

The

renowned

Theodore

Tronchin

(1709-81 ),

of

Geneva,

became

the

popular doctor in Paris in the sixties. Me was appointed physician to the Duke o f O r l é a n s in 1 7 6 5 . H e was also d o c t o r f o r M m e d ' E p i n a y , and V o l t a i r e ,

among

c o u n t l e s s o t h e r s . H e r e c o m m e n d e d fresh air, diet, and exercise. See H e n r y T r o n c h i n ,

Un Médecin du X V / / / ' siècle, Théodore 24 Année littéraire, I ( 1 7 5 7 ) , 343. 25

T h e s e parades

Tronchin.

were published, in p a r t , in a c o l l e c t i o n called the Théâtre

des

boulevards, Paris, 1756, 3 vols. For instance, Fagan's Isabelle grosse par vertu, Gueullette's Isabelle double, Les Deux Doubles, and Collé's Léandre grosse (in this play Léandre, a man, is disguised as Isabelle). L'Eunuque, ou La Fidelle Infidélité (1749) by the younger Grandval, and L'Accouchement invisible (175 3) b y C o l l é ( n o t in t h e above c o l l e c t i o n ) are also f o r adults o n l y .

Le

M

Drame en France au XVIII'

siècle, p. 146.

Society Doctors

9S

Français. That is a general phenomenon, and the trait is just as conspicuous in our modern theatrical life as it was in those days. On the stages of our great cities today, the crowds that will boycott an improper play on the serious stage will tolerate the broadest immoralities in musical comedies, burlesques and night clubs. In such cases, evidently, it is a question of social proprieties, rather than of morals. There is always a proper world, a proper sphere, in which even a prudish society can coddle and enjoy its vulgar human impulses. L E MÉDECIN DES DAMES

The humorous writer Boissy was the first French dramatist to put à "médecin des dames" on the boards. According to Éraste, in Le Triomphe de l'ignorance (1732), the whole art of this physician lay in knowing how to please the fair sex, since then, as in the Middle Ages 27 and perhaps now, it was the women who made the doctors great. A doctor was sure to succeed, whatever his ignorance, if he spread flattery with a heavy brush when he called on an ailing lady. Éraste brings the scene vividly before us: Ah, good day, Madame. What a charming patient! I have never seen the like! Fever? Fever beautifies you! It gives you color — the vermilion on your cheeks would throw the most beautiful carmine into the shade! And what life it gives to your eyes! Truly, you are so beautiful in your present condition that, did I not fear the consequences, I would keep you such instead of curing you!

This "médecin du bel air," sums up his medical philosophy to the tune of Quand le péril est agréable. The doctor should console, amuse, and satisfy: E n trois points consiste l'affaire: Malade, il faut la consoler; Convalescente, l'amuser, Dans la santé lui plaire. 2 7 Maestro Alberto da Bologna (see above, p. 5, n. J ) owes his success to the ladies — particularly rich widows.

96

Society

Doctors

Éraste calls himself the brilliant pupil of M. de la Forêt, a name in which we recognize a translation of the word Silva. Jean Baptiste Silva 28 was society's favorite physician before the day of Tronchin and Lorry. Though the medical profession ranked high in French society in the eighteenth century, the place occupied by the individual physician then, as now, depended primarily on his own personality. According to the lights of that fashionable world, the gay, sympathetic, handsome Lorry was, like Silva, a perfect physician. Modishly tricked out in the gayest colors of the day, he was petted and adored by the ladies for his personal charm, his overpowering appearance, and his impressive bedside manner. 29 As one might guess, Lorry was far too good a type to escape representation on the stage; and he was, in fact, impersonated by the great comedian Préville, in Palissot's Le Cercle, ou Les Originaux of 175 5. This satirical portrayal of a smart social gathering was written for a fête given by King Stanislas Leczinski at Nancy. To give a sharper and more realistic impression of his prototype, the talented Préville claims that he feigned an illness and called Lorry to his home, in order to study his ways and mannerisms at first hand. 30 Despite Voltaire's inability to admire Palissot's plays, the author of Le Cercle, ou Les Originaux has a certain talent for satire and portraiture. As Lenient well states, " H e conceived of comedy as founded on the general types of humanity, but adapted to contemporary individualities." 31 The contemporary doctor, who appears on the stage in scene 11 of this play, docs not hold his colleagues of the preceding century, nor, for 28 Born in 1682, he died in 1742. H e was m a d e Louis X V in 1724. I k n o w Le Triomphe de l'ignorance l'Opéra Comique, I, 1 7 6 - 8 6 .

c o n s u l t i n g physician o n l y f r o m Hi foire

to Je

29 A n n e C h a r l e s L o r r y ( 1 7 2 6 - 8 3 ) . H e a t t a i n e d t h e highest r a n k in his p r o fession. H e became docteur-régent of t h e f a c u l t y , and a t t e n d e d Louis X V in his last illness. C f . D e l a u n a y , Le Monde médical, pp. 39—41. 30 Prcville, Mémoires ( C o l l e c t i o n de B a r r i c r e - D i d o t ) , V I , 151, 15 2, n.; cited in Desnoirestcrres, La Comédie satirique au dix-huitième siècle, p. 15 8. 31

La Comédie

en France,

I I , 85.

Society Doctors

97

that matter, the illustrious Hippocrates, in very high esteem. He proclaims, in a tone of affected superiority, that he does not want to be like his predecessors. He knows that Hippocrates was a good enough sort of fellow, with plenty of common sense. But his treatments were so disagreeable! What's the use of getting well if one has to be treated with such uncivil attentions? . . . Hippocrates worried too much about the body. We have gone beyond all that. We think of spiritual ills. . . . H e wasted no end of time observing diseases! . . . We observe patients, and let the diseases take care of themselves.

Beginning his diagnosis of Lucinde, this doctor flatteringly remarks upon her interesting face, and alludes to her little affairs of the heart. He admits in the end that she may be suffering from vapors, but then, regretting the bluntness of that concession, he quickly adds: "More exactly it is the ethereal humor, the nervous fluid — what we now call electric — that is responsible for your tenseness of nerves, your irritations, your spasmodic movements." The pedantry of this dapper little doctor is quite the reverse of the heavy solemnness of Moliere's physicians. He seasons his prescriptions with plentiful adjectives, speaking of "aerial honeys," "pretty little juleps," "soothing cordials," "golden sleep." When Lucinde impatiently says that she has had more than her fill of all that, he grows earnest and takes her pulse, holding her wrist very graciously and much longer than necessary. He is attentive to the forms of his diagnosis and reports. They read, says Palissot, like pretty madrigals. When his diagnosis is questioned, he does not lose his composure, but deftly alludes to his large and important clientele: I confess that m y idea was just a guess. All the same, very probably it is only the vapors. [ H e looks at his watch.] What? Six o'clock already! My, m y ! And still a hundred calls to make before night! I must fly to the Marais 3 2 to see Madame Belise — you know — 3

- An aristocratic quarter in the eighteenth century.

98 Society Doctors the wife of the judge. This is her regular headache day.33 Then I am expected at a consultation in the faubourg Saint-Germain — a question of getting a young duchess to sleep. Her insomnia so far has held out against a sentimental novel in twelve volumes. From there I go to the Marquis Mondor's. He has made me promise to stop in there to see that little dancer who is ruining him. She wants me to look at a young priest who has been living incognito at her place for the past six weeks. In a word, I can't call myself my own. I haven't a minute for myself. How the doctors of the old days got along without carriages is more than I can imagine. Well — good day, Madame — and you, Mademoiselle, mind my directions and don't forget, naughty girl! 34 This medical dandy was lifted bodily from this comedy and put into a play called Le Cercle, ou La Soirée à la mode (1764) by Poinsinet. Asked why he did not protest the plagiarism, Palissot contemptuously replied: "Would it be decent for a gentleman to claim the coat his valet was wearing?" 35 Constant Saucerotte 36 was evidently unaware of this escapade in literary purloining and, with no knowledge of the existence of Boissy's Éraste, makes Poinsinet the first dramatist to present a ladies' doctor on the stage.37 As a matter of fact, we find the type in several other plays, though not again so well drawn. Doctor Corbin, in Taconet's Le Bouquet de Louison (1761), relates the success of his "apozems," "epithems," and juleps with not a little gusto. Taconet also wrote Le Médecin universel (1766). 33 This allusion is not altogether gratuitous. As is well k n o w n , the ability to f a i n t at the appropriate times and places was part of a lady's accomplishment. According to Mme de Genlis (Dictionnaire critique et raisonné des etiquettes de la cour, pp. 367—68), it was a matter of fashion for women to have attacks of one sort or another twice a week, always on the same days and at the same hours. 34 D u Bled reproduces a large part of this scene in La Société française, 6. série, pp. 8 î—8 î ; ste also Delafarge, Palissot, p. 48. 33 Monnet, Mémoires, p. 19$; Hawkins, trench Stage in the Eighteenth Century, II, 114; Desnoiresterres, La Comédie satirique au dix-huitième siècle, p. 15S, n. 2. 36 Les Médecins au théâtre, p. 24. 37 Poinsinet's play has a considerable literature. See, for instance, Lintilhac, La Comédie au XVHl' siècle, pp. 241—42; Geoffroy, Cours de littérature dramatique, III, 3 6 3 - 6 4 ; Lemaître, Impressions de théâtre, III, 117-24.

Society Doctors

99

In 1764, under title of 11 est possédé, Mme Riccoboni translated an English farce called The Deuce Is in Him, written in 1763 by the elder George Colman. This farce was based in part, as the author acknowledges in an advertisement at the beginning of the play, on two of Marmontel's moral tales: Le Scrupule, ou L'Amour mécontent de lui-même, and Alcibiade, ou Le Moi. Colonel D'Herby (Colonel Tamper, in the English version) desiring to test the fidelity of his fiancée Emily, feigns to have lost both an eye and a leg in the war. Emily, suddenly taken ill from the shock, calls in a babbling and pretentious health officer named Doctor Prattle. Prattle cannot boast of a hundred calls in a morning. He stops at forty, but, in compensation, they are urgent ones. Busy as he is, he has time for a call on the charming Emily, and wastes not a little time gossiping about his patients and other irrelevant matters. At the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane, Prattle's rôle was played by King. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, the rôle appears to have been the first of the socalled "patter-parts" in which, in days comparatively recent, Charles Mathews won repute.38 In Marmontel's tale, the officer writes to his fiancée about his mutilations. He receives a very cold reply, in which he is addressed as "Sir." No doctor is needed for this girl. Furthermore, Marmontel, in his Moral Tales, does not seem to make use of the doctor in his portrayals of the various members that make up the society of his day. He does, however, write about Lorry and other doctors in his Memoirs. A character similar to Prattle is Doctor Minoratif (laxative), in La Comtesse (1765) by Collé.39 He, too, comes in a hurry to call on a neurasthenic countess, but then spends no 38 Cf. Thorn, George Colman the Elder's Komödie "The Man of Business" und die Farce "The Deuce Is in Him," pp. 4 7 - i J . 39 The Catalogue de la Bibliothèque de Pont-de-Veyle ( 1 8 4 8 ) , drawn u p by the bibliophile Jacob, credits this play to Grandval. D'Alméras and d'Estrée, Les Théâtres libertins, p. 50.

Society Doctors

100

end of time in gossip, in which he divulges professional secrets of the most intimate kind. In f a c t , he becomes so absorbed in his prattle that he finally leaves without concerning himself with the trouble o f his patient. She, however,

finds

him d e l i g h t f u l , all the more since her illness was imaginary in the first place. W e have an inoculator in F a v a r t ' s La

Fête

du

château

( 1 7 6 6 ) . In this play the convalescence of a y o u n g lady, whose recent cure was a t t r i b u t a b l e to inoculation, is being feted. D o c t o r Gentil extols the merits of this practice in the opening o f the p l a y : O n apprendra par le succès, Q u ' o n en est plus c h a r m a n t e après O n a le teint plus v i f , plus frais. P a r t o u t m a méthode, D e v i e n t à la m o d e ; C ' e s t pour plaire, un nouvean moyen; C ' e s t un mal qui f a i t du bien. 4 0

Gentil is an old b l a c k g u a r d , who finds it hard to control his desires in diagnosing the s y m p t o m s of a " t e m p t i n g "

fifteen-

year-old girl. H e is a wheedler, who slips his hand under her chin to feel her pulse. H e is still only a c o u n t r y doctor, b u t , as he is ambitious to m a k e a n a m e for himself, he wears a w i g t o give him the dignity and importance of the society d c c tor. 4 1 In C l e m e n t ' s Les Francviaçons

(1769), the grand master o f the Masons does not have a v e r y high regard for the medical profession. D o c t o r C h r y s o l o g u e excuses himself for practici n g it b y s a y i n g : " I go to see m y patients to amuse m y s e l f , to amuse them, to talk with them, to tell them the news o f the day, and, I m i g h t add, to give others the a d v a n t a g e of such little wit as nature has bestowed on m e . " T h e doctor in Saurin's Le Mariage

de Julie ( 1 7 7 2 ) is a f r a n k h a l f - w i t , with a taste f o r interjections. H e keeps e x 40 41

For inoculation and vaccination, see below, p. 112. C f . Histoire du théâtre italien, VII, 149-5 9.

Society Doctors

101

claiming, "Ah, ah, ah!" (scene 16). His patient is one more of the habitual "ailers" whom we frequently encounter about the middle of the century, and who increase in numbers down to the Revolution. The doctor begins his examination, of course, by taking his patient's pulse, finding it a trifle fast. That enables him to forbid her coffee, and to confiscate a cup of the beverage that stands near-by. He tells her a piece of gossip from the news of the day. She is shocked and her pulse beats faster. She wonders whether she should not be bled. H e does not advise it, in fact he thinks it would be harmful to her; but she has it in her head that a bleeding is what she needs — and, anyway, how is one to pass the time when one is in the country? After a little coaxing, the doctor consents to a slight bleeding. A little more coaxing and he even allows her to begin on her pills again. Madam Durval accordingly finds her doctor just delightful, and what she likes in him especially is the fact that he is not obstinate — along, perhaps, with his stock of slanderous gossip, which, added to everything else, makes him a divine man. THE

SPA

DOCTOR

42

Watering places were much in vogue in the eighteenth century, and life at these fashionable spas is pictured in a number of plays, such as Les Eaux de Wisau (1710) and Les Eaux d'Eauplet (1717?) by anonymous authors, Les Eaux de Passy (1724) by Carolet, Les Eaux de Bagnères (1763) by Sabatier de Castres, La Parisienne aux eaux de spa, ou L'Heureux Déguisement (1767), also anonymous,43 and Les Eaux de 42 We know that a special feature of Greek and Roman medicine was the cultivation of warm public baths (thermae) and of mineral springs. Mineral baths were introduced into France in the sixteenth century by Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim ( 1 4 9 3 - 1 5 4 1 ) , or Paracelsus, and this precursor of chcmical pharmacology was one of the first to analyze mineral waters. Garrison, op. cit., p. 124. 43 Catalogue Soleinne, no. 3204, "Pièces de théâtre sur les eaux minérales." See also Sue, Anecdotes historiques, I, 109—15, "Eaux minérales." There are several plays and novels of the seventeenth c e n t u r y t h a t deal with spas.

102 Society Doctors Forges (1772) by Carmontelle.44 According to the prologue of Isabelle arlequin (1731) by Fagan, Panard, and Pontau, the cure at Passy 45 was "le badinage," rather than the waters. Many people today go to the smart spas to dispel their boredom, rather than to take the cure. It is a well-known fact, however, that even those who are actually ailing may receive much benefit from a change of air and a change in daily routine, with perhaps a little badinage thrown in. The doctor of the watering places is described by Du Bled in "Les Médecins avant et après 1789": The doctor of the thermal stations is the diplomat of the corporation — an amiable, smiling, and practical diplomat. Oh, surprisingly practical, making a very pretty income f r o m the sympathy, the confidence, or the fear which he instills in his credulous patients! He does not kill. He is not a man who prescribes harmful solutions. He is rather a person acting by routine in the sense that he repeats almost the same formula to five or six hundred people every season.46

The stage portrayals of this doctor are more amusing, though sometimes not altogether respectful. The inimitable Boissy is the creator of M. de la Joie, an extremely gay doctor in Le Mari garçon (1742). The weakness of this affable and charming medico is intemperance. His remarks are frequently interrupted by hiccoughs that are due to excessive eating and drinking. Finette, suivante to the countess who is taking the cure at Forges, sings the praises of Doctor de la Joie (Act I, scene 1): L'aimable homme! C'est un modèle Que devraient suivre ses rivaux. Il veut que les buveurs respirent Ibid., no. 3536. The mineral waters of Passy had a certain vogue about the middle of the eighteenth century. They were a cold ferruginous, sulphatic water, taken internally for the cure of dyspepsia and chloroanaemia. The commercial exploitation of these waters ended when the springs became the property of the Bartholdi family. They were situated at what is now Number 62 quai de Passy. La Grande Encyclopédie, XXVI, 68. 40 La Société française, 6. série, pp. 147—48. 44

45

Society Doctors

103

Le plaisir en tout temps, la joie à tout propos, Plus on a soin, dit-il, de tracasser les eaux, Plus elles font de bien, et plus elles transpirent.

The "médecin à la mode" himself gives us a detailed account of his epicurean and not-a-little Machiavellian system. In accord with the prevailing fashion, he prescribes wellvaried pleasure. Pleasure, he insists, contains so much goodness in itself that too much of it can never be taken ( A c t I, scene 2) : Un excès de plaisir ne peut jamais produire (Mettons la chose au pis) qu'un excès de santé.

He tries to live up to his own definitions of a doctor and of his art: Un professeur en médecine Est un docteur en volupté; Et mon art, puisqu'il faut dévoiler ce mystère, N'est que l'art d'amuser, d'égayer et de plaire.

The doctor, according to M. de la Joie, is a universal entertainer: . . . tout à la fois, musicien, gourmet, Poète, cuisinier, et maître de ballet. De toute façon il s'escrime. Il change, comme il veut, de ton et de maintien; Tantôt vif et badin, tantôt grave et sublime. Tout digne enfant de Galien Doit être né comédien: Notre profession n'est qu'une pantomine.

M. de la Joie's system involves a deal of diplomacy. No one ever dies in his hands. To begin with, he treats only patients who are substantially well, but who grow alarmed at the first slight headache or the least indisposition. To relieve them of these worries, he orders fine meals, charming walks, and, above all, good wines. As a last resort, he may prescribe a min-

104

Society

Doctors

eral water. So much the worse for his patients if they really come down with a fever. He abandons them as soon as they show signs of being seriously ill, leaving the glory of burying them to some colleague. The performances of this play, according to Desboulmiers,47 were well attended by enthusiastic audiences. This success shows that this vivacious doctor, exaggerated as he may be, stood out in the opinion of the day as something new, original, and yet true to life. The watering place of Passy, in Paris itself,48 is the setting of Les Vapeurs*9 by Le Fort de la Morinière in 175 3. A lovesick girl has been sent to Passy for her "vapors," but, as we learn from the soubrette in the play, there were two kinds of waters at Passy, and since the old doctors and the younger ones cannot agree as to their respective merits, the patient is too prudent to take either of them. The apothecary in this play asks despairingly what is going to become of cassia and senna, and he reproaches the doctor (a valet in disguise) for giving too much acclaim to mineral waters. Naquet paints in glowing colors the personal charm of Doctor Vaporet, the petit-maître who directs the spa in Les Eaux de Passy, ou Les Coquettes à la mode (1761). Says a female character, of this delightful person: H e is one of the handsomest ornaments of our circle, a charming man, both a poet and a musician. As a doctor he is most agreeable and most accommodating. He does not bore you with any regime. 47

Histoire du théâtre italien, V, 35; see also Zeck, Louis Je Boissy, pp. 2 1 1 - 1 3 . See above, p. 102, n. 4 5 . 49 In 1770 Linguet, under the title of Les Vapeurs, ou La Fille Jélicate, t r a n s lated Los Melindres de Belisa ( 1 6 1 7 ) by Lope de Vega. A new edition of Lope de Vega's comedy had been published in Spain in t h e eighteenth c e n t u r y , u n d e r t h e title of La Dama Melindrosa. Le Médecin des vapeurs of 1771, by a Maillé de la Malle, is mentioned in Anecdotes dramatiques, III, 317. W e have been unable either to identify the author or to verify the title of this play. W e d o k n o w t h a t there was an actor b y the name of Maillé w h o played at t h e Ambigu Comique, and t h a t Campardon (Les Spectacles de la Foire, II, 87, n. 2) believes t h e actor and Maillé de Marencourt, who wrote plays for that theater, to be the same person. Perhaps the latter is the author of this play. 48

Society Doctors

105

His enthusiasm for mineral waters knows no limit — he orders them for all sorts of cases. A male character returns: Doctors are the best people in the world. They treat their patients by making merry with them and let them die cheerfully. This establishment [i.e., at Passy] is the Faculty's Wayside Inn. Doctor Vaporet compounds a prescription for us: a few drugs, much gayety, a pinch of anecdote and witticism, finally a little music and a dance. Naturally, too gay a doctor might fall under suspicion of carelessness. To avoid that [Vaporet explains], I deliberately use one remedy that serves for all cases — a compound, a balm, that is a blend of mineral waters and is almost divine. I have made a number of analyses and experiments with these powerful waters. They had already been recognized as diuretic, laxative, purgative, diluent, and diaphoretic. I have successfully demonstrated that they have an infinite number of other properties and that they are beneficial for most diseases. That is not all. They are also useful to the state in that they increase the population by making sterile women fertile. . . . If you have a wife of that sort, I advise you to send her to me and you will see the good results for yourself.

VII

The Doctor off the Stage R O M all that we have been saying, it appears that, between the time of Dancourt and Beaumarchais, there are over two hundred plays in which members of the medical profession have parts or in which allusions to the profession occur. In all these plays, the attitude of eighteenth-century dramatists toward the medical profession is uniformly unfavorable, the only exception being that of Lépidor, pseudonym of Michel Julien Mathieu, who, in 1774, in need of a fine character for his play entitled Améliesends to London for an old practitioner, whom he calls All Hearty. This doctor is cast in a paternal, rather than a medical, rôle. The only other play in the century in which a doctor is portrayed as a good man, and not ridiculous in any sense, is in a translation of a German play: La Réconciliation, ou Les Deux Frères ( 1799), translated from Kotzebue's Die Versöhnung ( 1 7 9 8 ) by Weiss, Jauffret, and Patrat. Doctor Blum, in this play, is a true humanitarian. He not only gives his services free to the needy, but, unbeknown to his patients, pays for their drugs. He plays the reconciliatory rôle of reuniting two brothers, for he believes that "peace of the soul contributes much to the health of the body." It is significant, perhaps, that both of these doctors are importations from abroad. 1 In Fielding's Amelia, written in 1751 and translated by Mme Riccoboni in 17É2, there is a paternal and generous character called Doctor Harrison. This doctor is, however, not a medical man, but a clergyman. A surgeon is depicted, in the French manner, as a conceited and ignorant person. After uttering a set of terms that were not to be found in any dictionary or lcxicon, he strutted off in his coach.

Off the Stage

107

If the theater be accepted as fairly representative of a given period, therefore, French doctors of the eighteenth century cannot be credited with any great amount of intelligence, humanitarianism, or skill in their profession. A modern critic of eighteenth-century plays makes the startling statement that comedy, which is sometimes accused of exaggeration in respect to doctors, is overconservative; and that to prove the barbarity and the lack of probity of the physicians of this period, one has only to consult the registers of the Hôtel-Dieu. 2 The intellectuals, or wits, of the century take the attitude of the satirical and merry dramatists in condemning the profession. They differ from them in that they occasionally praise the better doctors. Voltaire, the voice of the Age of Reason, divulges his skepticism of doctors and their "murderous and conjectural" art, in much of his writing. Medicine, he states, consists in "clearing up, cleaning up, and keeping up the house that one cannot rebuild." "In all violent maladies," he continues, "we have only Molière's prescription: seignare, purgare, (and if one will) clhterium donare." 3 He denounces violently the poisonous remedies that were so popular in his time, and protests vehemently against quackery of all sorts.4 He is horrified at the deplorable state of the hospitals in Paris, and mentions one "where an eternal contagion reigns and where the sick piled one on another spread the pest and death one to another." 5 He was vitally interested in medicine and knew the most eminent doctors of his day. Like Rousseau and Diderot, for instance, he had high esteem for Tronchin (though Tronchin did not have any very high regard for him). He also admired Doctor Gervasi, to whom he publicly attributed his recovery from the smallpox.6 Barberet, Lesage et le Theatre de la foire, p. 193, n. 1. Dictionnaire philosophique, "Maladie, Médecine," 1771 (Œuvres, X X , 2 4 - 2 6 ) . 4 Ibid. 6 Correspondance, Letter 7245, April 22, 1768, to Paulet (Œuvres, X L V I , 2 6 ) . 6 Épitre ( X X V ) , 1725 (Œuvres, X , 2 5 6 ) . See also, Libby, Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences, pp. 2 4 0 - 6 9 ; Dcsnoirestcrrcs, Voltaire, I, 2 8 5 - 8 6 ; Rattel, Étude médico-littéraire sur Voltaire. 2

3

108 Off the Stage Rousseau did not conceal his horror of the "lying art." In Émile he has much to say about its uselessness, and writes in part: A weak body enfeebles the soul so that it becomes the kingdom of the medical art, an art more pernicious to men than the ills which it pretends to cure. As for me, I do not know of what malady the physicians cure us, but I do know that they inflict some very fatal ones upon us, such as cowardice, pusillanimity, credulity, and fear of death! 7

Diderot, himself an amateur doctor,8 aims the shaft of satire at medical incompetence. "A pseudo-doctor is worse than a pseudo-savant," he writes. "The latter pesters sometimes, the other kills." 9 He deplores the lack of clinical instruction, and questions the methods of diagnosis. "Do the doctors not believe in their art," he wonders, "or do they think more of their fees than of our lives?" 10 He thinks that nature is the best doctor, and writes in his article. "Médecins, Médecine,": "Remedies are often more harmful than beneficial." 11 He, too, sketches a startling picture of the Hôtel-Dieu, the hotbed of disease. As to the mortality, one-fourth of the patients who entered this institution perished.12 We have only to read Diderot's letters to Mademoiselle Volland 13 to know that medical practices had not changed much since the time of Molière. The theory of the humors still prevailed, along with the rage for bleedings and purgings. We do learn, however, from Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles 14 that cataract operations were performed in the first half of the eighteenth century. 7 Book I (Œuvres, IV, 4 9 ) . Set also Sibiril, Histoire médicale de Jean Jacques Rousseau; Régis, "Étude médicale sur J . J . Rousseau," Chronique médicale, VII (1900), 65-76, 132-40, 173-77, 353-71, 391-99. 8 See Cabanès, Médecins amateurs, pp. 15 6 - 9 5 . 9 Plan d'une université pour le gouvernement de Russie, 1776 (Œuvres, III, 497). 10 Ibid., p. 4 9 8 . 11 Éléments de physiologie (Œuvres, IX, 4 2 7 ) . 12 Encyclopédie, " H ô t e l - D i e u " (Œuvres, X V , 1 4 4 - 4 5 ) . 1 3 From November 3, 1760, to September 3, 1774 (Œwrrcs, XIX, 1-3 5 2 ) . 14 Œuvres, I, 275.

Off the Stage

109

While Diderot could not tolerate the pseudo-scientist, he respected the better doctors and learned a great deal f r o m t h e m . " In La Rêve de d'Alembert18 he presents a lively and realistic picture of Théophile de Bordeu ( 1 7 2 2 - 7 6 ) , one of the good doctors of the eighteenth century and one of the restorers of Hippocratic medicine. Bordeu was a f a i t h f u l observer of nature and wished that art might be subordinated to it. H e was the first to distinguish between animal life and organic life. Montesquieu draws no distinction between good and bad doctors, and is not kind in his criticism of the whole profession. In his Lettres persanes, he declares that physicians not only let their patients die, but assist them into the other world. "Heirs prefer physicians to confessors," he writes in one letter ( N u m b e r 57). In criticizing "foreign laws which have introduced [into Persia] formalities so excessive as to be a disgrace to human reason," he continues ( N u m b e r 1 0 0 ) : " I t would be very difficult to decide whether pedantry has been more h u r t f u l in jurisprudence or in medicine; whether it has played more mischief under the cloak of a lawyer, or the broad brim 17 of a physician ; and whether the one has ruined more people than the other has killed." In writing of books on anatomy ( N u m b e r 135), Montesquieu states that they can never cure the sick man of his disease nor the physician of his ignorance. "Here are alchemists," he adds, " w h o sometimes inhabit hospitals and sometimes madhouses, which are residences equally well suited to them." 18 In one letter ( N u m b e r 143) there is a curious prescription by a country physician, who 15 Cf. Doublet, La Médecine dans les œuvres de Diderot; Paitre, Diderot biologiste. 16 Œuvres, II, 122-91. 17 See above, p. 7; also Witkowski, Les Médecins au théâtre, Fig. 16, p. 309; Cabines, Le Costume du médecin en France et à l'étranger; Avalon, "Le Costume du médecin," Aesculape, XIV (1924), 212-1$; Casselli and Legrand, "Le Costume du médecin à la fin du XVII siècle et au XVIII*," Médecine et médecins, mai, juillet, 1912. 18 There are alchemists in madhouses in several of Carolet's plays. See below, p. 119.

110 Off the Stage is tired of the apothecaries, their syrups, their juleps, and all their Galenic drugs. Now how does all this criticism of the dramatists and the literati correspond to the status of the doctor in actual life? Did he deserve the treatment that was meted out to him by these satirists? We have already seen, from the memoirs of the day, that the eighteenth-century physician enjoyed a unique social consideration, unmatched in any earlier period. It was not often the doctor's skill in science, however, that raised him to the highest eminence, that brought him honors and affluence, that secured for him a fashionable practice, and sometimes a court appointment. It was rather his polished manner, his fashionable dress, and the wealth of wit (the god of the century) which he always had ready as part of his business. Howard W. Haggard, in a chapter entitled "Doctors in Laces and Frills," 19 calls the eighteenth-century physician a fashionable fop, who was more interested in fashions and systems and theories than in discovering facts. That was certainly true of at least the majority of the doctors of the gallant century. While there was no complete stagnation of medicine, its inactivity is commented upon by Louis Hahn in an article in La Grande Encyclopédie. He states that while the surgeons advanced, the Faculty, bound by its privileges and opposed to every innovation, stood still.20 Charles V. Daremberg writes: "The eighteenth century [in medicine] is the immediate direct continuation of the seventeenth; one continued to move on but for a long time in the same tracks." 21 The seventeenth century had been a period of scientific progress, in which three great medical discoveries had been made: the circulation of the blood, and the medical uses of antimony and quinquina (quinine). Toward 19 20 21

The Doc/or in History, pp. 307-28. "Collège et École de C h i r u r g i e , " XI, 954-5 5. Histoire des sciences médicales, II, 1001.

Off the Stage

111

the end of the century, microscopes had been constructed. The Faculty had vigorously resisted the growing scientific progress. It could see things only as Hippocrates and Galen had seen them. At the end of the century, a severe attack against the authority of the ancients developed, in the famous quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.22 While this dispute was literary, it had its repercussions in the scientific world. Discussing the idea of progress, Fontenelle states, in his Digressions sur les anciens et les modernes ( 1 6 8 8 ) , that while in purely imaginative literature no progress is discernible through the ages, in the sciences, on the contrary, there are accumulations which are passed on from generation to generation, and hence our sum total of knowledge is always increasing. The moderns are therefore superior to the ancients in the fields of science. Fontenelle and Pierre Bayle assaulted traditional religious and historical doctrines and believed that all accepted opinions, especially the most ancient, should be reexamined in the light of reason. This movement gave encouragement to the experimental method,23 the effect of which was for long far from apparent on the medical sciences. We again quote Daremberg, who states: "The first two-thirds of the eighteenth century were used in putting an end to the authority of the ancients, but at the same time in imitating those ancients that were so discredited for having imagined systems." "The third part of this century," he continues, "was used in restoring and expanding the empire of clinical medicine, without, however, putting an end to the systems." 24 Fielding H. Garrison, in a chapter on eighteenth-century medicine,25 comments on the empty formalism of the age, ~ Cf. Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des modernes. See Lanson, "Le Rôle de l'expérience dans la formation de la philosophie du X V I I I " siècle en France," Revue du mois, I X ( 1 9 1 0 ) , $ - 2 8 , 4 0 9 - 2 9 ; also Mornet, La Pensée française au XVIII' siècle, pp. 7 9 - 9 6 , "Les Sciences expérimentales." 24 Op. cit., II, 1003. For the mania for systems in the eighteenth century, see also Mornet, Les Sciences de la nature en France au XVIIT siècle, pp. 7 3 - 1 0 7 , "Les vstèmes." 25 History of Medicine, pp. 310-406. 23

112

Off the Stage

and states that it was essentially one of theorists and systemmakers. There were only a few original spirits throughout Europe who offered epoch-making contributions to medicine. Stephen Hales made the first measurements of blood pressure in 1726. Haller investigated the mechanism of breathing in 1746, and published a study on the specific irritability of the tissues in 1752. In 1761 Morgagni published the results of his life work, On the Seat and Causes of Diseases Discovered 20 b y Anatomy. Morgagni made pathology a branch of modern science. In 1775 the great French scientist Lavoisier isolated and defined oxygen. This completed the modern theory of respiration, which turned upon the discovery of the different gases in the atmosphere. Cheselden, the Monros, and the Hunters (particularly John Hunter) advanced anatomic teaching in Edinburgh and London, as Félix, Maréschal, and La Peyronie had advanced it in France. The great medical event of the century, however, was the introduction of the practice of vaccination against smallpox by Jenner, in 1798. Like all new practices, it provoked a flood of caricature and satire.27 Before this discovery, variolation — or inoculation as it was commonly called — was the preventive acclaimed for this prevalent disease. Inoculation, or "buying the small-pox," as one writer phrases it, was a purely eighteenth-century innovation and was combatted during the first half of the century in France. It finally triumphed and became the vogue among the better class. This triumph was due to the fashionable and wealthy Doctor Tronchin, 28 who acquired his high reputation particularly for his efforts to promote the practice of inoculation. Voltaire was an ardent advocate of this preventive, and had prepared the way for Tronchin. 29 De sedibus et causis morborum per artatomcn indagatis. 2 vols. See, for example, La Vaccine ( 1 8 0 1 ) , folie-vaudeville, by Moreau, Ponet, and T * * * (Dumersan). In this play Madame Dervieux is not yet prepared to accept the new discovery. 2 8 See above, p. 94, n. 23. 2 9 Cf. Rowbotham, "The Philosophes, and the Propaganda for Inoculation of Smallpox in Eighteen-Century France." University of California Publications in Modern Philology, XVIII (No. 4 ) , 265-90. 28

27

Off the Stage

113

In spite of the progress made in the eighteenth century, the essential discoveries in medicine, — anesthesia,30 antisepsis and asepsis, bactcria, X-ray, radium, and many instruments for observing, all belong to the nineteenth century. Medical practice, to the end of the eighteenth century, remained a somewhat barbarous affair, coming down to physic, emetic, broth, simples, poulticing, and bleeding. Most maladies were attributed to inflammation of the blood, and there were doctors who phlebotomized their patients to death. About the middle of the century, there was a revulsion against polypharmacy and, instead of the many powders and potions, mineral waters were recommended. 31 The disproportion between the unknown and the known in medicine was vast and offered ample room for superstition, hocus-pocus, and vicious quackery. One of the most interesting superstitions of medicine was the ancient practice of the royal touch for the king's-evil (scrofula, or tuberculosis of the glands of the neck). This superstition was practiced in England in the seventeenth century and was revived by Queen Anne in the eighteenth century. In France, the kings from Clovis to Louis XVI "touched" for the evil. In 1775, on the day he was crowned king, Louis XVI touched 2,400 suffering people. Another superstition thoroughly believed in until the middle of the eighteenth century, was astrology.3" Swarms of charlatans of all kinds were rampant in France, and all over Europe for that matter, during this period. The rhetorical mountebank, with his unguents, could perform wonders; the unscrupulous empiric, with his "secret" remedies, had no less ability; while the faddists gulled credulous 30 For anesthesia and anesthetics in the Middle Ages, see Corradi, "Escursioni d ' u n medico nel Decamerone," Memoire del Reale hlitulo Lombardo, X I V ( 1 8 8 1 ) , 127-75. 31 T h e Bordeus ( f a t h e r and son) did much to popularize the usage of mineral waters by their treatises, between 1746 and 1750, on the beneficial effect of t h e waters of Beam and the neighboring provinces. 32 Haggard, The Doctor in History, pp. 2 5 4 - 5 « , 262.

Off the Stage

114

victims by their tricks. Many quacks made fortunes by feeding like carnivorous animals upon their prey. Mesmer

33

and

Cagliostro were the two quacks who created the greatest fury in Paris in the latter part o f the century — the one with his magnetism and spiritualism, and the other with his sedatives and patent medicines. W i t h medical France in such a deplorable state, it is small wonder that doctors and their practices were

ridiculed

by

the dramatists and condemned by the intellectuals of the century.

However,

as experimentation

tended

to

replace

empiricism late in the century, the doctor began to be esteemed for his skill in science, as he had been admired through the century for his manner and dress. But, as Francisque Sarcey said, when an evolution takes place in the social body, it requires long years before it arrives on the stage. So we do not find many respectable pictures o f the doctor on the stage until well into the nineteenth century. By the middle o f the nineteenth century, however, the transformation has been so complete that we find on the stage a person called a physician who is really a doctor in moral science. Instead o f a pedant and a fop, as he was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, he has become family adviser and director o f consciences, and a real intimate of the family, part physician, part priest. H e knew all the family skeletons, and people respected and admired him. 34 H o w has medicine thus risen to a position of respect among men of letters? T h e interplay o f causes and effects is not hard to trace. For under the reign o f Louis X I V , letters were all powerful, and medical science was in a state o f obscure mediocrity. In the Century o f Reason, science became one o f the chief concerns o f society, a socially smart subject for conversation in the salons, which now exercised an increasing part 3 3 For plays on mesmerism, see Guigoud-Pigalc, Le Baquet magnétique (1784); Barré and Radet, Les Docteurs modernes (1784). 3 4 Doutrepont (La Littérature et les médecins en France, pp. 22, 23 ) cites Nos Intimes ( 1 8 6 1 ) by Sardou and Jean qui rit ( 1865 ) by Féval and Robert.

Off the Stage

115

of the prestige formerly belonging to the court. Belief in scientific progress, moreover, was so complete that the eighteenth-century pbilosophes seized upon it, in the eager belief that its methods, transferred to the realm of sociology, would lead to a panacea for social ills. A t the same time, medicine was making definite progress, as noted above, and it seems certain that this progress was rendered possible partly by the salutary dramatic thrusts which continued throughout the century. Thus the very defects of medical science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bore the seeds of healthy growth; and the progress of medical science, coinciding with society's new interest in science as a whole, aided the truly great discoveries of the nineteenth century.

Chronology of Plays C O N T A I N I N G MEDICAL CHARACTERS OR MEDICAL REFERENCES 1 1702 1703 1704 170J 1706

1707 1708 1710

1711 1712

Dancourt. L'Opérateur Barry. Danchet. Les Muses. Regnard. Les Folies amoureuses. Le Médecin de village. Bellavoine. Sancho-Pança. Malezieu. La Tarentole. Les Importuns de Chastenay. [Contains an apothecary.] Brueys and Palaprat. L'Avocat Pathelin. [As in the old farce itself, interesting allusions to medical practices and remedies. ] Dufresny. Le Faux Instinct. [Two babies, confided to a mercenary wet-nurse, die from smallpox.] Regnard. Le Légataire universel. Dancourt. La Comédie des comédiens, ou L'Amour charlatan. Destouches. Le Curieux impertinent. Les Eaux de Wisau. Crcbillon. Rhadamiste et Zénobie. Dominique. Arlequin, gentilhomme par hasard. [Translation of II Mondo à la reversa published under above title. It had been produced in 1669 under the title of Le Monde renversé, ou Arlequin jouet de la fortune. Question of the apothecary's weapon.] Divertissement. [An imitation of the above play.] Le Brun. Hippocrate amoureux. Dancourt. Sancho Pança gouverneur.

1 The date given is that of the first performance of the play. If this is not known, or if the play was not produced, the date of publication is given.

118 1713 1714

1715

1716

1717 [?] 1718

1719

1720 1721

1722

172Î

1724

Chronology

of Plays

Arlequin prince et paysan. Lesage. Arlequin, roi de Serendib. Vivier de Saint Bon. Arlequin, jouet de la fortune. [ A n old apothecary, to please his young fiancée, gives himself out to be a doctor.] Carolet. Arlequin, médecin malgré lui. Lesage. Les Eaux de Merlin. La Peine et misère des garçons-chirurgiens, autrement appelés fratres. [A "joyous and w i t t y " dialogue according to its anonymous author, between a chirurgien and a clerc.] [Dorneval.] Arlequin traitant. Legrand. L'Aveugle clairvoyant. Arlequin, feint guéridon, momie et chat, ou L'Apoticaire ignorant. Arlequin, médecin volant. Le Docteur médecin amoureux. Les Eaux d'Eauplet. Autreau. Le Port-à-1'anglais, ou Les Nouvelles Débarquées. Lesage. Le Monde renversé. Lesage and Dorneval. Les Funérailles de la Foire. Lesage and Lafont. La Princesse de Carizme. Fuzelier. La Mode [The Faculty called for "sick" fashions.] La R u p t u r e du carnaval et de la folie. Autreau. Les Amans ignorans. [Trivelin is a barber and chirurgien de village — sawbones.] Legrand. Le Fleuve d'oubli. [ A n apothecary is warned that the waters are taken only through the mouth.] Lesage and Dorneval. La Forêt de Dodone. [Adultery, rather than pharmacy, is emphasized.] Desportes. La Veuve coquette. Lesage. La Foire des fées. Piron. L'Antre de Trophonius. Le Mariage de Momus. Lesage and Dorneval. Arlequin barbet, pagode, et médecin. Lesage, Dorneval, and Piron. Trois Commères. Autreau. La Fille inquiète, ou Le Besoin d'aimer. Carolet. Les Eaux de Passy.

Chronology 172 5

1726

1727

1728 1729

1730 1731

1732

of Plays

119

Lesage, Fuzelier, and Dorneval. La Rage d'amour, ou Les Enragés. Dominique and Romagnesi. L'Italienne françoise. [An apothecary and four matassins with syringes pursue Pourceaugnac.] Allainval, d'. L'Embarras des richesses. Piron. Le Fâcheux Veuvage. L'Enrôlement d'Arlequin. Allainval, d'. Le Tour de carnaval. Fleury. Olivette, juge des enfers. Romagnesi and Dominique. Le Temple de la vérité. Legrand. Le Chevalier errant. Lesage, Fuzelier, and Dorneval. L'Obstacle favorable. Fuzelier and Dorneval. La Grand-mère amoureuse. Thierry. Sancho Pança gouverneur, ou La Bagatelle. Marivaux. L'Ile de la raison, ou Les Petits Hommes. Carolet. Divertissement comique. [Chemists in a Parisian asylum for madmen.] Romagnesi and Dominique. Alceste. Arlequin Bellerophon. Les Paysans de qualité. Poisson. La Boîte de Pandore. Lesage and Dorneval. Les Spectacles malades. Panard, Fuzelier, and Pontau. Le Malade par complaisance. Dominique and Romagnesi. Le Bolus. Marignier. Cydippe. Fagan, Panard, and Pontau. Isabelle arlequin. Carolet. Le Sénat Calotin. [Setting is the courtyard of the "petites maisons," or madhouse.] Boissy. Le Triomphe de l'ignorance. Lesage. La Tontine. Delile. Le Docteur Fagotin. Carolet. Les Petites Maisons. [Madhouse.] Panard. Le Nouvelliste dupé. Bougeant. Les Quakres françois, ou Les Nouveaux Trembleurs. [A Jesuit satire on the Jansenists who fell in convulsions on the tomb of François de Paris, where miraculous cures were performed.] Le Saint déniché, ou La Banqueroute des marchands de miracles. [Same theme as above play.]

120 1733 1734

173 5 1736

1737

1738

1739

1740

1741

1742

1743 1744

Chronology of Plays Panard. Le Départ de l'Opéra Comique. Allainval, d\ L'Hiver. Delile. L'Emblesme de la calomnie. Panard. L'Absence. [ A doctor appears, but not professionally. ] Favart. Le Génie de l'Opéra-Comique. Lesage and Panard. L'Histoire de l'Opéra-Comique, ou Les Métamorphoses de la Foire. (Arlequin, chirurgien de Barbarie. ) Panard. La Fée bienfaisante. Le Magasin des modernes. Favart, Laffichard, and d'Orville. L'Abondance. Carolet. Momus oculiste. [Momus supplies spiritually blind with eyeglasses.] Les Oreilles d'âne. [Contains a garrulous barber.] Le Souffleur, ou Le Palais de la fortune. [Rôle of a mad chemist, Chrisophile by name.] Panard. La Pièce à deux acteurs. [Fagan.] Isabelle grosse par vertu. Favart. Le Bal bourgeois. Les Réjouissances publiques. [An apothecary, M. Cacarelle, as an amorous guardian.] Guyot de Merville. Le Médecin de l'esprit. Voisenon. L'Ombre de Molière. Arlequin barbier paralytique. Romagnesi. Le Superstitieux. Romagnesi and Dominique. Les Ombres parlantes. Panard. Le Comte de Belflor. L'École d'Anières. Le Registre inutile. Panard and Pontau. Le Qu'en dira-t-on? Autreau. Le Chevalier Bayard. Procope-Couteaux and La Grange. La Gageure. Boissy. Le Mari garçon. Avisse. Le Valet embarrassé, ou La Vieille amoureuse. Fagan and Panard. La Foire de Cythère. Panard. La Critique à l'Opéra-Comique. Le Vaudeville. Favart. L'Empirique. Acajou. Guyot de Merville. Les Talens déplacés.

Chronology 1745

1747 1748

1749 1750

1752

1753

1754 [?]

175 5 1756

1758

of Plays

121

Boissy. Le Médecin par occasion. Panard. Les Ennuis de Thalie. Martel. La Tarentule. [La Mettrie.] La Faculté vengée. Panard. Les Tableaux. Pierre Rousseau. La Mort de Bucéphale. Riccoboni and Veroneze. La Force de l'amitié. Dehesse. L'Opérateur chinois. [Grandval fils.] L'Eunuque, ou La Fidèle Infidélité. [Collé.] Gilles chirurgien. Dehesse. Les Bûcherons, ou Le Médecin de village. [Marcouville.] Le Réveil de Thalie. Yon. La Métempsycose. Drouin. Le Triomphe d'Esculape. [About the convalescence of the dauphin.] [Collé.] Le Remède à la mode. [An obscene parade, in which Léandre is disguised as an apothecary.] Favart. Tircis et Doristée. Le Fort de la Morinière. Les Vapeurs. [Fleury, or Delorme.] La Mort de Goret. Boissy. La Frivolité. Destouches. Le Dissipateur. Collé. L'Accouchement invisible. La Foire du Parnasse. [Grandval fils.] Sirop-au-cul, ou L'Heureuse Délivrance. Chevrier. La Campagne. Palissot. Le Cercle, ou Les Originaux. [Bailly.] Bolan, ou Le Médecin amoureux. Lacombe. Le Charlatan. Veroneze. Scapin médecin. [Another valet.] [Piron.] Le Marchand de m. . . . [Taken from Merlin Cocaye's farce of the same title. Arlequin sells an apothecary a tub of manure in place of honey.] [Gueullette.] Isabelle double. Les Deux Doubles. [Collé.] Léandre grosse. Anseaume and [Lourdet de Santerre.] Le Docteur Sangrado. Anseaume and Marcouville. Le Médecin de l'amour. Favart. La Noce interrompue.

122 1760

Chronology of Plays

Cassandre apoticaire, nouvelliste, et chevalier. [The protagonist, too absorbed in politics to fill prescriptions, turns his customers over to an apprentice.] Favart. Supplément de la soirée des boulevards. La Folie du jour, ou Les Portraits à la mode. Riccoboni. Le Prétendu. H a r n y de Guerville. Les Nouveaux Calotins. [A doctor figures in the rôle of a lady's maid.] Taconet. Les Fous des boulevards. 1761 Le Bouquet de Louison. [Naquet.] Les Eaux de Passy, ou Les Coquettes à la mode. Sedaine. O n ne s'avise jamais de tout. 1762 Laujon and Riccoboni. Armide. La Métrie [sic]. Les Charlatans démasqués, ou Pluton vengeur de la Société de Médecine. Poinsinet. Sancho Pança dans son isle. 1763 Sabatier de Castres. Les Eaux de Bagnères. 1764 Contant d'Orville. Le Médecin par amour. Riccoboni, Mme. Il est possédé. [Translation of The Deuce Is in Him, 1763, by the elder George Colman.] Poinsinet. Le Cercle, ou La Soirée à la mode. 176$ [Grandval fils.] La Médecine de Cythère. [Collé.] La Comtesse. [La Flotte.] L'Hôpital des fous. [Translation of Aesculapius, or The Hospital of Fools, 1714, a dialogue by William Walsh. N o one comes to the free consultations, because it is always a man's neighbor who is possessed of madness, and never he.] 1766 Taconet. Le Médecin universel. Favart. La Fête du château. 1767 La Parisienne aux eaux de spa, ou L'Heureux Déguisement. 1768 Ansart. Les Ressorts amoureux d'Arlequin. Henriette, ou Le Triomphe de l'amour par fatuité. 1768-81 Carmontelle. Le Poulet. Le Suisse malade. L'Abbé de coure-dîner. Le Faux Empoisonnement. Le Médecin gourmand. Le Seigneur du village, amoureux. [An apothecary figures as a matchmaker.]

Chronology of Plays

1769 1770

1771

1772

1773 1774

123

La Dent. [Dr. Tirefort pulls a false tooth.] L'Ane dans le potager. La Diète. Le Malentendu. Le Mari médecin. Le Patagón. L'Attestation. La Maladie supposée. Les Eaux de Forges. Les Compères. [Contains a midwife called Madam Adam. ] Clément. Les Francmaçons. Linguet. Les Vapeurs, ou La Fille délicate. [Translation of La Dama Melindrosa, or Los Melindres de Belisa, 1617, by Lope de Vega.] Le Malade imaginaire. [Translation of the Spanish interlude, Dom Juan Rana Comilon.] Garnicr. La Saignée. Cailhava de l'Estendoux. Le Nouveau Marié, ou Les Importuns. Chamfort. Le Marchand de Smyrne. [French doctor prescribes home air for a Spanish girl who has been enslaved by the Turks.] Moissy [Mouslier]. Les Deux Médecines. ["Proverbe" for children.] La Petite Vérole. [Same genre as above.] La Vraie Mère. [Subject of Les Remplaçantes of 1901 by Brieux: The Rousseauean question of maternal nursing.] Maillé de la Malle. Le Médecin des vapeurs. Sauvigny. Le Persifleur. [The author makes use of a joke that Doctor Tronchin had played on Count Albaret.] Les Deux Compères. Arlequin docteur, major chinois. Saurin. Le Mariage de Julie. Beaunoir [pseudonym of Robineau]. La Nuit anglaise. Les Écoliers. Medical student in a triangle with the doctor's wife.] Pleinchesne. La Noce de Montargis. Merey. La Mode et le goût. Lépidor [pseudonym of Mathieu]. Amélie.

124 1775

Chronology of Plays [Collé.] Le Chirurgien anglois. [Marsollier des Vivetières.] La Fausse Peur. Beaumarchais. Le Barbier de Seville. Beaunoir [pseudonym of Robineau]. Le Barbier de village. Pleinchesne. L'Alchymiste.

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Index Abbé de court-diner, L', 52 Ablancourt, Villemain d', 60 Abstinence, apostles of, 15-17 Academy of Surgery, 59 Acajou, 38 Acit et Galathée, 72 Aguesseau, Henri François d', 60 Alberto da Bologna, 95 n Alceste, 36, 76 Alchemists in madhouses, 109 Alcibiade, 99 Allainval, Leonor Jean Christine Soulas d', Abbé, L'Embarras des richesses, 33; L'Hiver, 88; Le Tour de carnaval, 33 Amelia, 106 n Amélie, 106 Amour charlatan, L', 83 Amour médecin, L', 8, 30, 43, 46, 47, 53, 81, 83 Amours du carnaval et de la folie, 71 Amusement as treatment, 86, 87, 88, 92 {., 100, 101 ff. Ancients and modems, quarrel between, 111 Andromaque, 40 Ane dans le potager, L', 53 Animals, killing of, 39, 40 Ansart, Jean Baptiste François, Henriette; Les Ressorts amoureux d'Arlequin, 79 Anseaume, Louis, and Marcouville, Pierre Augustin Le Fèvre de, Le Médecin de l'amour, 92 and Santerre, Lourdet de, Le Docteur Sangrado, 49 Antre de Trophontus, L', 32 Aphorismi de cognoscendis et curandis morbis, 44 n Apothecaries, 10, 20, 28, 30, 31, 49,

56, 64, 104; quarrel of physicians with, 62 Appearance, transformation of, since times of Molière, 85 ff. Arlequin, médecin malgré lui, 78 Arlequin, roi de Serendib, 16 Arlequin barbet, pagode, et médecin, 79 Arlequin Bellerophon, 3 5 Arlequin docteur, major chinois, 79 Arlequin médecin volant, 79 Arlequin prince et paysan, 16 Arlequin traitant, 35 Armide, 48 Assassin, doctor as, 31 ff., 42, 48, 73 Astruc, Jean, 46 n Attestation, L', 67 Atys, 62 Autopsies, status of, 56 Autreau, Jacques, Le Chevalier Bayard, 82; La Fille inquiète, 17; Le Portà-l'anglais, 70 Avare, L', 27 Avarice, 9, 27 Aveugle clairvoyant, L', 18 Avisse, Étienne, Le Valet embarrassé, 44 n

Bailly, Jacques, Bolan, 19 Bal bourgeois, Le, 72 Ballads ending plays, 34 "Ballet, Le," 73 Balzac, Honoré de, doctors, 11 f. Barbers, conflict with surgeons and doctors, 56-67; work and status of, 57 ff. Barbier de Séville, Le, 21 ff. Barbier de village, Le, 23 n Barry, Gilles, 68-69 Bayle, Pierre, 111

134

Index

Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin, 12, 15, 24; Le Barbier ie S¿ville, 21 ff.; Le Mariage it Figaro, 24 n Beaunoir (pseudonym), see Robineau, Alexandre Louis Bertrand Bedside manner, 96 Behrman, Samuel Nathaniel, Etti of Summer, 11 Bellavoine, Sancho-Pança, 16 Bellerophon, opera, 36 Bleeding, 8, 11, J3, 35, 41, 52, 77, 91, 101, 108, 113; abuse of, 49-51 Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron, 5 n, 92, 95 n, 113 • Boerhaave, Herman, 44 n Boissy, Louis de, Le Mari garçon, 102; Le Médecin par occasion, 84; Le Triomphe ie l'ignorance, 95 Boîte ie Pandore, La, 35 Bolan, 19, 66 Bologna, doctors from, 5, 6 Bolus, Le, 6 3 Bordeu, Théophile de, 109, 113 n Boucher, François, "Le Ballet," 73 Bouillac, Doctor, 45 n Bouquet ie Louison, Le, 98 Bourdelin, Louis Claude, 43 n, 45 n Boyer, Jean Baptiste Nicolas, 46 n, 47 Brugière de Barante, see Dufresny, C. R. Brutus, 63 Bûcherons, Les, 48 Burlesque tragedy doctors, 39 Cagliostro, quack, 114 Cailhava d'Estendoux, Jean François, Le Nouveau Marié, 50 Campagne, La, 91 Campistron, Jean Gilbert de, Acis et Galthée, 72 Carmontelle (i.e. Carrogis, Louis), 12, 51-55; L'Abbé ie coure-diner, 52; L'Ane ians le potager, 53; L'Attestation, 67; La Diète, 53; Eaux ie Forges, 102; Le Faux Empoisonnement, 53; La Maladie supposée, 55; Le Malenteniu, 53; Le Méiecin gourmand, 53; Le Patagon, 54; Le Poulet, 52; Le Suisse malade, 52 Carolet, Arlequin, médecin malgré lui, 78; Les Eaux ie Passy, 101

Caste distinctions, 57 Cataract operations, 108 Catilina, 32 Cercle, Le, ou Les Originaux, 96 Cercle, Le, ou La Soirée i la moie, 98 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 15, 16 Chamfort, Sébastien Roch Nicolas, quoted, 13 Chapman, John Jay, A Sausage of Bologna, 25 Character of doctor gleaned from literature, 3 Characters in the plays: Aesculapius, 18, 62; Aguerre, Pedro Rezio d', 16; Alberto da Bologna, 5 n; All Hearty, 106; Angélique, 83; Antonio, 82; Argan, 27; Arlequin, 16, 32, 33, 71, 77, 78-80, 88; Babiche, 40; Bahis, 9; Baloardo, 5, 6, 21, 22; Bartholo, 21 fï.; Bavaroise, 41 n, 46; Bistouri, 20; Blum, 106; Bolan, 20; Bolus, 30; Bolus, Dean, 63 f.; Boudinau, 43; Bournin, 52; Bristol, 54; Broute, 53; Cacarelli, 82; Carizal, 15; Cassandre, 93; Casse, de la, 76; Chat-Huant, 43 ff.; Chrysologue, 100; Clamart, 37; Clistorel, 28; Clitandre, 8; Coclicola, 63 f.; Corbin, 98; Cracbelly, 82; Craquet, 74; Crispin, 28, 80 f.; Crotesquas, 81; Cuchillo, 41 n; Desfonandrés, 9; Don Quichote, 45; Dorante, 61; Ducharpi, 67; Durimon, 91; Éraste, 95 f., 98; Éricine, 83; Fagotin, 47; Februgin, 53, 54; Figaro, 21, 23 f.; Filerin, 8, 46; Fleurant, 64; Forêt, de la, 96; Fosse, de la, 32; Francolin, Plusquamperfetto Dottor Gratiano Partesana de, 5; Frémont, 52; Frontin, 82; Gabbanon, 71; Gentil, 100; Géronte, 27-29; Glouton, 76; Guillaume, 72; Harpagon, 11, 27; Harrison, 106 n; Hidropoplex, 65; Hippocrates, 18; Hippocratine, 77; Ignare, 42; Intègre, 42; Jaunisse, 44; La Casse, 40; La Joie, 75, 102-3; Lanternon, 17; Lantivray, 42; La Rose, 82; La Sonde, 63 f.; Lavisière, 74; Lempesé, 18; Lombarda, Balanzoni, 5, 6; Macroton, 53; Maqui, 46; Marcelin, 52; Marmouset, 72;

Index

135

Characters (Con/.) Mission, 64; Massacre, 88; Melchisedech, 69; Minoratif, 99; Mortifer, 38, 39; Muscadin, 46; Omoplate, 90 {.; Philippe, 40; PontNeuf, du, 42; Prattle, 99; Purgon, 8, 10, 28, 29, 30; Raille, 52 n; Rhubarbini, 19; Roselin, 52; Rubardin, 76; Sancho Panza, 15, 16; Sangrado, 12, 30, 49; Savantasse, 46; Sganarelle, 7; Simone da Villa, J n; Sobrin, 53; Somnambule, 43, 41; Sot-Encour, 4$; Sot Père, 72; Soupçon, du, 42; Stratonice, 92, 93 f.; Toinette, 8; Tomès, 9, 10, 29, 30; Tracolin, 73; Trousse-Galant, 29-31,