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Molière, l'Affaire Cressé, and le Médecin Fouetté et le Barbier Cocu

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Elizabeth Maxfield Miller
Elizabeth Maxfield Miller*
Affiliation:
Concord Academy, Concord, Mass.
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Extract

The letters of Dr. Gui Patin (1601–72) are deservedly famous as a source for seventeenth-century medical matters and other contemporary comment. In a letter dated 23 November 1669 to Dr. André Falconet (1612–91) of Lyon, Patin writes that it is rumored Molière wants to do a comedy about a certain Dr. Cressé and his pending court trial. A month later, 25 December 1669, having given details of the affair in previous letters, Patin writes more specifically: “Le procès de M. Cressé est sur le bureau, mais je n'entends point dire qu'il avance; on m'a dit que M. de Molière prétend en faire une comédie ridicule sous le titre du Médecin fouetté et du barbier cocu” (iii, 728). As far as I know, the outcome of this affair has never yet been presented. The Commentaires de la faculté de médecine for 1669–70 (Vol. xv) which gave more exact data led me to discover in the Archives Nationales the hitherto unmentioned final court settlement, dated 4 February 1670.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 5 , December 1957 , pp. 854 - 862
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

1 All quotations from Patin's letters are from the edition of Joseph Henri Reveillé-Parise, Lettres de Gui Patin, 3 vols. (Paris, 1846), hereafter referred to by volume and page. A later edition, by Paul Triaire, begun in 1907 is incomplete, only Vol. i, including letters up to 1649, having been published.

2 These accounts (hereafter referred to as Commentaires) appear in 24 MS volumes in folio (at the Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Médecine de Paris), dating from 1375 to 1786, containing the account in full by each Doyen of the 2 years of his deanship at the Faculté de Médecine de Paris.

3 Minutier Central of the Archives Nationales in Paris (hereafter referred to as Min. Centr.), Etude lxxv, Liasse 148.

4 In the summer of 1956 on a research grant from the American Philosophical Society, I discovered in the Archives Nationales (Min. Centr.) important additions to previous material collected on the Cressé family. Some of this material is incorporated in nn. 10, 12, and 14 below. Permissions were obtained for research and publication from the present notaires of the Etudes cited.

5 Reveillé-Parise says (iii, 728, n.) that a play, which he does not name, discovered in the early 19th century and thought to be this one, proved to be a pastiche. I think he means Le docteur amoureux which La Grange in his Registre says was composed in 1658 but never published. A manuscript play with this title, supposedly found among the papers of a descendant of La Grange, was produced at the Odéon Theater in 1845 and published in 1862 by Ernest Calonne.

6 The court settlement of this affair names it “rue de la Verrerie” which is the name of a Paris street at that time just around the corner from Cressé's home, rue Barre du Bec. Since there is no “rue de la Venerie,” this is possibly a misreading of Gui Patin's original manuscript.

7 In the 17th century, there were 3 distinct terms: barbier (e.g. Grisel) who did only shaving and haircutting; chirurgien or chirurgien-barbier (e.g. Cressé's father) who was a barber but also did lancing, amputations, and all kinds of surgery; and médecin (e.g. Cressé himself), highest in rank and most highly educated, who never touched a knife.

8 Pierre Cressé (1632–1714), Paris doctor in 1659, married Andrée Catherine Bonnet sometime before 1665. They had just had their 4th child, André Cressé (who also became a doctor), born 14 Oct. 1669 (Registre Saint Merri), only 2 weeks before the barber's assault on the doctor, 28 Oct. 1669. It is easy to see the comic possibilities of this situation. (For further biographical notes see Achille Chereau, Liste alphabétique des médecins de l'ancienne faculté de médecine de Paris, Bibliothèque Historique de Paris MS Vol. 26168, p. 1319, with vital statistics from parish records for all doctors of Paris of the 17th century.)

9 This letter continues: “Dies diem docebit.” Patin's letters are sprinkled with Latin quotations which I have omitted for the most part since they are usually a paraphrase for emphasis of something just said in French.

10 The wealth of this family is proved in an interesting document (Min. Centr., Etude cxiii, Liasse 46). It indicates that on 22 June 1660, Dr. Pierre Cressé's father, Pierre Cressé, chirurgien, loaned a large sum of money to the king's physician, Louis Henry Daquin, who was reconstructing his houses in the rue Saint Thomas du Louvre and who rented one of them to Molière in Sept. 1661. (See also Joseph Girard, Molière et Louis Henry Daquin, conseiller et médecin ordinaire du roi, Paris, 1948).

11 “Des nôtres” means the doctors of the Faculté de Médecine de Paris. All doctors who had received their degree from the Faculté belonged to it for life, though most did no teaching. The Faculté served as a combination medical school and closed medical association. Doctors educated at Montpellier and elsewhere were not allowed to practice in Paris (with the exception of royal physicians), and no Paris doctor could continue to practice in Paris if he were expelled from the Faculté de Médecine.

12 According to Achille Chereau, “Pierre Cressé, chirurgien, était un des plus fameux consultants et opérateurs de son temps. Il mourut le septembre de l'année 1661 et a eu un fils et un petit-fils docteurs en médecine de la Faculté de Paris” (Liste des chirurgiens de Paris, Bibliothèque Historique de Paris MS Vol. 26180, p. 360). This Pierre Cressé was the son of Thibault and Anne [Bance Cressé as proved by a document of 7 Feb. 1638 (Min. Centr., Etude xcvi, Liasse 29). This Thibault Cressé was a nephew of Guillaume Cressé, recently discovered great-grandfather of Molière (see n. 14 below).

13 Gui Patin, in a letter of 23 Nov. 1657 (ii, 359), mentions this portrait of Chancelier Séguier as one of the best engravings ever done by Robert Nanteuil (1623–78). The thesis was dedicated to Chancelier Séguier who presided over Cressé's presentation of it (Joseph Lévy-Valensi, La médecine et les médecins français au XVIIe siècle, Paris, 1933, p. 119).

14 The Cressé family were prosperous bourgeois merchants, most of them drapiers, tapissiers, marchands de soie, or, especially in earlier generations, orfèvres. Several ancestors of this family were prominent in the Corporation des Orfèvres and a Cressé was elected one of the 3 gardes jurés (for a term of 3 years) 15 times between 1492 and 1553 (Robert Berqueu, La liste de messieurs les gardes el anciens gardes de l'orfèvrerie de Paris, Paris, 1655, pp. 156 ff.). Pierre Cressé, a first cousin of Molière's grandfather, was “maître orfèvre valet de chambre du Prince de Condé” (document of 22 May 1604, Etude xlix, Liasse 257). Most of the Cressé family belonged to the parish of Saint Eustache, though some belonged to neighboring parishes. One of the best-known members of the family was Molière's uncle, Guillaume Cressé, tapissier to Richelieu. New material gathered in the documents of the Archives Nationales shows that an earlier Guillaume Cressé (father of Louis Cressé) was Molière's great-grandfather (document of 21 Jan. 1617, Etude lxxi, Liasse 53) and that this man was an uncle of Dr. Pierre Cressé's grandfather, Thibault Cressé (document of 30 Nov. 1581, Arch. Nat., Y 123, fol. 284); so that Molière's mother, Marie Cressé, and the chirurgien, Pierre Cressé, were second cousins, and Molière and the doctor third cousins. It might also be noted that Pierre Gigault, Molière's notary (for numerous documents from 1661–73, Etude cxiii), married Madeleine Cressé, sister of the doctor on 17 March 1659 (Etude lxviii, Liasse 176).

15 Le médecin volant (1659); 1 scene (ii.1) in Don Juan (1665); a sentence (i.viii) in L'avare (1668); the serious preface and the amusing 3rd placet of Tartuffe (1669); and the 4 plays mainly concerned with 17th-century medicine: L'amour médecin (1665); Le médecin malgrélui (1666); Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669); and Le malade imaginaire (1673).

16 When Boileau attacks Chapelain's poor poetry he lauds the man's character and explains:

Ma muse en l'attaquant, charitable et discrète
Sait de l'homme d'honneur distinguer le poète.
(Satire xi, ll. 211–212)

17 There are a few books of which the best are: Maurice Raynaud, Les médecins au temps de Molière (Paris, 1862; the 2nd ed. of 1863 is just a reprinting) and Lévy-Valensi, La médecine et les médecins français au XVIIe siècle (see n. 13 above). There are also a few doctoral theses on François Bernier (such as that of Bouger in 1931, Story in 1937, and Bachelet in 1940). But most of the material on Molière and the doctors appears in many short articles, mostly in French, though there are some in English and in German.

18 Incidentally, no one seems to have noted, as far as I know, that Mauvillain was elected dean in Nov. 1666 by 5 electors, one of whom was Des Fougerais (Commentaires, xv, fol. 202), who had been caricatured the preceding year as the Doctor Des Fonandrès of L'amóur médecin (1665) on which play Mauvillain is supposed to have collaborated with Molière. This election seems to indicate that Des Fougerais did not hold it against Mauvillain with whom he had worked shoulder to shoulder in the fight for the use of antimoine or vin émétique in medical practice.

19 Mauvillain's father was Jean Mauvillain (d. 1662) chirurgien and librarian to Richelieu and later “chirurgien du duc d'Orléans” (1628–60).

20 Chinese tea had been used somewhat earlier in Holland and England (Lévy-Valensi, p. 119).

21 An arthriditi the [thé] sinesium? (Patin ii, 359, n.); An the [thé] chinensium menti confert? (Lévy-Valensi, p. 119).

22 Eudore Soulié, Recherches sur Molière et sur sa famille (Paris, 1863), pp. 220–239, gives the inventaire après décès of Jean Poquelin père. This and later documents, such as the one of 12 April 1672 recently discovered, show that legal matters in the estate's settlement dragged on for several years. (See my transcription of document of 12 April 1672, with facsimile of Molière signature, in Revue d'histoire du théâtre, vie année, No. 4 [1954], pp. 164–165, and also my detailed study of the document in Romanic Rev., xlvii [1956], pp. 166–178.)

23 There is no biography of Mauvillain except a 15-page pamphlet by Achille Chereau, Le médecin de Molière (Paris, 1881), and 14 pages (423–437) in the Raynaud book.

24 Grimarest—La vie de M. Molière [originally published 1705]: Edition critique by Georges Mongrédien (Paris, 1955), p. 63, and the Menagiana (Paris, 1674), iv, 7.

25 Vie de Molière in Œuvres, 52 vols. (Paris, 1877–85).

26 Possibly in 1665 at the time of L'amour médecin on which Mauvillain is said to have collaborated.

27 Raynaud, pp. 58–62, for detailed parallel study.