The Background of The Turkish Ceremony in Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

THE BACKGROUND OF THE TURKISH CEREMONY IN MOLIERE'S LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME C.D. ROUILLARD Since the lirst performance of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme there have always been critics who consider the Turkish ceremony a regrettable lapse On the part of Moliere. No doubt there always will be, though they may lind it difficult to phrase their disdain more devastatingly than that lively nineteenth-century critic, Ie comte de Saint-Victor, who called Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme "une comedie entem,e vivante dans un sareophage turc." Such occasional strictures of the Turkish nonsense in the play may be a matter of taste or of judgement warped by idolatry; Moliere, like Shakespeare, suffers from being worshipped as a sacred cow. One answer to these critics would be an analysis of the plot and character to demonstrate that the Turkish hoax and ceremony furnish a logical and litting climax to Moliere's satire of a "would-be nobleman" as drawn in the lirst three acts of the comedy. Despite all that is laudable and often winning about the bourgeois M. Jourdain's desire to improve his mind and manners by learning all "Ies belles choses," he has already been shown to be so vain in his parading of his line clothes, so naive in his fancying that the unscrupulous Dorante could be his friend or Dorimene his mistress, so blind in his ambition to achieve the status of a Man of Quality at whatever cost to the welfare and happiness of his family, that surely only a monumental demonstration of his folly would be appropriate. If he is willing to marry his daughter to the highest noble bidder, why not bring on the heir to the fabulous throne of the Ottoman Empire? If he is so eaSily duped by Dorante's rather crude pretences, why not by CovielIe and his scheme for disguising Lucile's real lover as "Ie IiIs du grand Turc"? If he is so infatuated with his new linery as to allow the derisive tailors to dress him "en cadence," why not a full-dress ritual, complete with ceremonious initiation to a title of oriental aristocracy , conducted by the Mufti himself with the aid of four dervishes, a dozen singing and danCing Turks, and "instruments II Ia Turquesque"? There is another aspect of this question, however, which is sometimes Volume XXXIX, Number 1. October 1969 34 C. D. ROUILLARD overlooked: even if Moliere had not wanted to use such extravagant buffoonery as the climax of his characterization of M. Jourdain, he was not a free agent. We must remember that we are dealing here not with a comedie, but with a comedie-ballet, and that this comedie-ballet was a royal command performance for the delectation of the court. Add to this the crucial fact that Louis XIV himself, for both personal and traditional reasons, had requested a burlesque Turkish ceremony as the basis of the entertainment, and we have the fabric upon which the pattern of this brief study is embroidered.' When we visit the Chateau de Chambord, nowadays a magnificent empty shell, our guide shows us the hall where the Bourgeois Gentilhamme was first presented in October 1670, at the foot of the great spiral staircase which inspired the stunning decor of the modem production by the Comedie Fran~aise, and our imagination must fill the chateau with the elegance of the king and his courtiers, gathered after the autumn day's hunting to be regaled with some lavish spectacle. That the young king and his guests were indeed royally diverted by Le BourgeOis Gentilhomme is well indicated by the fact that the comedieballet was repeated three times in the same week during that October sojourn at Chambord, and again three times in mid-November in the palace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, before it was released, so to speak, for public performance at Moliere's Palais-Royal theatre. There it found a delighted public and became a favourite item in the repertory, even when reasons of economy required eventual curtailment of the initial lavish presentation, which meant among other things abbreViating the Turkish ceremony. This scene had by no means lost its attraction, however. In 1675, when Lulli...