the command of Louis XIV, who had
determined upon an eight-days' festival in honor of Louise de la
Valliere.

It was during these festivities that for the first time was represented
the first three acts of Moliere's masterpiece, _Tartuffe ou
l'Imposteur_, a play well worthy of the best and most legitimate subject
which satire can have to deal with. Nothing can be fairer or more
appropriate than that the art which consists in feigning a
representation of real life on the stage should take, as the butt of its
ridicule and the object of its skill, the man whose whole life and
character are engaged in feigning the possession of virtue and seeming
to be that which he is not. The earliest satirists and dramatists have
seized on the topic with avidity; and to go no further out of our way
than Moliere's predecessors in France, we may mention the authors of the
romance of _Reynard the Fox_, Ruteboeuf; Jean de Meung, the author of
the _Farce des Brus_, Regnier, Scarron, even Pascal.

Very various, no doubt, are the hypocritical types encountered in the
works of these and other satirists; but all must necessarily have a
certain amount of family likeness, and many a hereditary trait is
recognized as common to at least two, if not to all, of the race.
"Moliere gives us the hypocrite by nature, the man who would be a
canting scoundrel even if it did not 'pay'; who cannot help being so;
who is a human being, and therefore not perfect; who is a man, and thus
sensually inclined; who employs certain means to subdue his passions and
to become a 'whited sepulchre,' but who gives way all the more to them
when he imagines that he can do so with impunity." Tartuffe, who ought
to be bound to Orgon by the strongest ties of gratitude, allows the son
to be turned out of the house by his father, because the latter will not
believe the accusations brought against the hypocrite--tries to seduce
his benefactor's wife, to marry his daughter by a first marriage; and
finally, after having obtained all his dupe's property, betrays him to
the king as a criminal against the state. The _denouement_ of the play
is that Tartuffe himself is led to prison, and that vice is for the
nonce punished on the stage as it deserves to be.

_Tartuffe_ made many enemies for Moliere, especially among the clergy,
who were not afraid of being twitted with their too ready application to
themselves of the moral of the play. It was prohibited in 1664; and some
zealous clerg