"Moliere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the play after all on Saturday. We went to the Lyceum, and saw the Hypocrite, an old play taken from Moliere's Tartuffe, and were well entertained. Dowton and Mathews were the good actors; Mrs. Edwin was the heroine, and her performance is just what it used to be. I have no chance of seeing Mrs. Siddons; she did act on Monday, but, as Henry was told by the box-keeper that he did not ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... in the Rue de la Tonnellerie, one of the narrow side-streets which link the Rue St. Honore with the Marche des Innocents, I felt positively degraded at having to take up my abode there. I needed all the consolation that could be derived from an inscription, placed under a bust of Moliere, which read: maison ou naquit Moliere, to raise my courage after the mean impression the house had first made upon me. The room, which had been prepared for us on the fourth floor, was small but cheerful, decently furnished, and inexpensive. From the windows we could see the frightful ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on one another's heels as the descendants of Banquo; but Euripides and Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Ibsen remain fixed ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... entrance everywhere, even in the saloons of the nobles and cabinets of princes. Berlin resounded with the name of Eckhof, who dared to rival the French actor, and with the name of Schonemein, who dared, every time a drama of Corneille or Racine, of Moliere or Voltaire, was given in the palace theatre, to represent the same in the Council-house on the following evening. This was a good idea. Those who had been so fortunate as to witness the performance at the palace, wished to ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... education of a limited number of people has no longer reason for existing unless there is hope of influence on the masses; philosophers have only to keep silent and those great minds on whom the need of your soul leans, Shakespeare, Moliere, Voltaire, etc. have no reason for existing ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... unfortunate invention, for the catastrophe has proved a stumbling-block to all that have dealt with the subject. The Spaniards of Molina's day may not have minded the clumsy deus ex machina, but later writers have been able to make nothing of it. In Moliere's play, for instance, the grotesque statue is absurdly inapposite, for his Don Juan is a wit and a cynic, a courtier of Louis XIV., with whose sins avenging gods are out of all proportion. Love for him is an intellectual exercise and a pastime. 'Constancy,' he says, 'is only good for fools. We ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... spirit, or their loyalty is monopolised by some fad or 'cause,' which is a poor substitute for love of country. The man who has no prejudices in favour of his own family and his own country is generally an unamiable creature. So we need not condemn Moliere for saying, 'L'ami du genre humain n'est pas du tout mon fait,' nor Brunetiere for declaring that 'Ni la nature ni l'histoire n'ont en effet voulu que les hommes fussent tous freres.' But French Neo-catholicism, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... de l'Enclos whose brilliant mentality and intellectual genius formed the minds, the souls, the genius, of such master minds as Saint-Evremond, La Rouchefoucauld, Moliere, Scarron, La Fontaine, Fontenelle, and a host of others in literature and fine arts; the Great Conde, de Grammont, de Sevigne, and the flower of the chivalry of France, in war, politics, and diplomacy. Even Richelieu was ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... him surrounded by these female worshippers, hanging upon his lips as he discoursed to us about new readings of old truths, one was irresistibly reminded of certain scenes in Moliere's "Femmes Savantes." ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... de Virelle blurted out aside, for even his dull senses saw I was not pleased, "our good Moliere must have had this hermit captain in his mind when he made Alceste to rail so at the hypocrisies of the world, and urge the telling of truth and looking of ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... superior to the best of Goldoni, and inferior only to the best of Moliere. It is the work of a man who, if he had devoted himself to the drama, would probably have attained the highest eminence, and produced a permanent and salutary effect on the national taste. This we ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by citing the example of Moliere. Just at that moment it came to pass that, while climbing the ladder to get a book, she upset a whole shelf-row. There was a heavy crash; and Mademoiselle Prefere, being, of course, a very delicate person, almost fainted. Jeanne quickly followed ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... than you did," was her reply. We were all omnivorous readers, and the old-fashioned accomplishment of reading aloud was cultivated by both brothers and sisters. I was the only one who could translate French at sight, thanks to Miss Phin's giving me so much of Racine and Moliere and other good French authors in my ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... Saxony, and is apt to complain and mourn over the undoable, rather than proceed to do it. The King's Correspondence with Henri, this Winter, is curious enough; like a Dialogue between Hope on its feet, and Despair taking to its bed. "You know there are Two Doctors in MOLIERE," says Friedrich to him once; "a Doctor TANT-MIEUX (So much the Better) and a Doctor TANT-PIS (So much the Worse): these two cannot be expected to agree!"—Instead of infinite arithmetical details, here is part of a Letter of Friedrich's to D'Argens; and a Passage, one ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... has been called the Moliere of Italy, wrote La Bottega di Caffe, (The Coffee House), a naturalistic comedy of bourgeois Venice, satirizing scandal and gambling, in 1750. The scene is a Venetian coffee house (probably Florian's), where several actions take place simultaneously. Among several ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... hour of its birth. A knowledge of the condition of political parties in Athens in 416 B.C. adds immensely to the enjoyment of the readers of Aristophanes; the fun becomes funnier and the daring even more splendid than before. Moliere's training as an actor does affect the dramaturgic quality of his comedies. All this is demonstrable, and to the prevalent consciousness of it our generation is deeply indebted to Taine and his pupils. But before displaying ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... Boule or Tricoche et Cacolet; and the modern plays, as I have said, are based on a study of life as it is, while the figures of the older comedies are frankly conventional. Nowhere in Regnard is there a situation equal in comic power to that in the final act of the Reveillon—a situation Moliere would ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... it might at least last out a generation, and descend to the author's blood, were they permitted to live on their father's glory, as in all other property they do on his industry.[10] Something of this nature has been instituted in France, where the descendants of Corneille and Moliere retain a claim on the theatres whenever the dramas of their great ancestors are performed. In that country, literature has ever received peculiar honours—it was there decreed, in the affair of Crebillon, that literary productions are ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... York's house to see the new play, called "The Man is the Master:" [A comedy, by Sir Wm. Davenant, taken from Moliere's "Joddelet."] where the house was, it being not one o'clock, very full. By and by the King came; and we sat just under him, so that I durst not turn my back all the play. The most of the mirth was sorry, poor stuffe, of eating of sack posset ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... in burlesque. But, in 1732, the same year in which he produced the Modern Husband, the Debauchees, and the Covent Garden Tragedy, he made an adaptation of Moliere's Medecin malgre lui, which had already been imitated in English by Mrs. Centlivre and others. This little piece, to which he gave the title of the Mock-Doctor; or, The Dumb Lady cur'd, was well received. The French original was rendered with tolerable ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... very reasons for having a theatre at all. Men go thither for amusement. This is the paramount purpose, and even acknowledged merit or absolute superiority must give way to it. Does a man at Paris expect to see Moliere reproduced in proportion to his admitted precedency in the French drama? On the contrary, that very precedency argues such a familiarization with his works, that those who are in quest of relaxation will reasonably prefer any recent drama to that which, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... through Goethe; from Rabelais through Victor Hugo; from Bryant and Irving through Hawthorne and Longfellow! How much they will translate from Homer and Virgil and Tacitus; from Schiller, Racine, Fenelon, and Moliere! How much philosophy they will read from Darwin, Spencer, Huxley! How they will trace the stars in the heavens, and the marks of God's fingers on the rocks and sands! How they will separate into their parts water and ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... in national empires. In Spain, Charles V and the Philips are the tyrants of the greatest single military power and of the first nation of the earth, and have as their subjects Rojas and Tirso, Lope and Cervantes, Calderon and Velasquez. Racine and Moliere serve le grand Monarque, as Apelles served Alexander. The mariners who sketched the bounds of this empire, which is at last attaining to the full consciousness of its mighty destinies, were the contemporaries of Marlowe and ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Sweet Spenser and Calderon moved arm in arm, While Milton and Sidney were there, Pope, Dryden, and Moliere added their charm, And ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... wit is excellently represented. We have here examples of Villon, Rabelais, and Moliere, but we have specimens also of La Rochefoucauld, Regnard, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Chamfort, Dumas, Gautier, Labiche, De Banville, Pailleron, and many others.... The book sparkles from beginning ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... should have no objection,—but wouldn't it lower one's dignity? No, no, Moliere used to read his plays to his servants, so I believe all's regular.—Come, ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... reading Rollin's Ancient History since you left me. I am determined to go through with it, if possible, in these days of solitude."[63] And again in a letter written on December 5, 1773, to Mercy Warren, she says: "I send with this the first volume of Moliere and should be glad of your opinion of the plays. I cannot be brought to like them. There seems to me to be a general want of spirit. At the close of every one, I have felt disappointed. There are ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... lessons of the finest art are those of life itself; they are not single but multiple. Who can declare what is the single moral contained in the "OEdipus" of Sophocles, the "Hamlet" of Shakespeare, the "Tartufe" of Moliere? No two spectators of these masterpieces would agree on the special morals to be isolated; and yet none of them would deny that the masterpieces are profoundly moral because of their essential truth. Morality, a specific moral—this is what the artist cannot ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... have called forth. In Walt Whitman we in America have known an American author who was an American martyr in a more literal sense than any of the men named by the great German. More than Heine, or Rousseau, or Moliere, or Byron, was Whitman a victim of the literary Philistinism of his country and times; but, fortunately for himself, his was a nature so large, tolerant, and self-sufficing that his martyrdom sat very lightly upon him. His unpopularity was rather a tonic to him than otherwise. It was of ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... through the device of Mazarin, he was proud of the genius that shed lustre on the French nation. Corneille and Racine wrote tragedies of classic fame, and Moliere, the greatest of all comedians, could amuse the wit of every visitor to the court. Louis gave banquets at Versailles in honour of the dramatists he patronized, and had their plays performed in a setting so brilliant that ambition might well be satisfied. ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... reverse &c. 218; disturb &c. 61; convert into &c. 144. Adj. changed &c. v.; newfangled; changeable &c. 149; transitional; modifiable; alterative. Adv. mutatis mutandis[Lat]. Int. quantum mutatus[Lat]! Phr. "a change came o'er the spirit of my dream" [Byron]; nous avons change tout cela [Fr][Moliere]; tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis[Lat][obs3]; non sum qualis eram [Lat][Horace]; casaque tourner[Fr]; corpora lente augescent cito extinguuntur [Lat][obs3][Tacitus]; in statu quo ante bellum[Lat]; "still ending and beginning ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... whole, into tolerably well-marked classes, and the ordinary uncritical judgment would, probably, enable most men to state with sufficient certainty the class to which each famous name in the world's literature belongs. Aristophanes, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Swift, Fielding, Lamb, Richter, Carlyle: widely as these writers differ from each other in style and genius, the least skilled reader would hardly need to be told that the list which includes them all is a ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... D'Alembert, "Let us not attribute to the stage the power of changing opinions or manners, when it has only that of following and heightening them. An author who offends the general taste may as well cease to write, for nobody will read his works. When Moliere reformed the stage he attacked modes and ridiculous customs, but he did not insult the public taste; he either followed or explained it." So far Rousseau was right. It is the public that gives the stage its bias—necessarily preceding ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... have said, 'Ah! no wonder now; the bark of a strong tree makes a strong man.' But if they had managed to serve the tree as you would like to serve homoeopathy, then it would have been 'We might have guessed it; all the virtus roborativa has settled in the bark.' They admitted, as we know from Moliere, the virtus dormitiva[343] of opium, for no other reason than that opium facit dormire.[344] Had the medicine not been previously known, they would, strange as it may seem to modern pharmacopoeists, have accorded a virtus ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... must create in his domains a servile imitation of the stiff parks of Versailles,—the days of powdered wigs and long cues,—when French ballet-dancers gave the tone, and French actors strutted on every stage,—when Boileau was the great canon of criticism, and Racine and Moliere perpetuated in tragedy and comedy a pseudo-classicism. They are far, those times when Frederick the Great wrote French at which Voltaire laughed, and could find no better occupation for his leisure hours at Sans-Souci than the discussion of the materialistic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... period which has kept (or indeed which ever received) competent applause is Tom Thumb, or the Tragedy of Tragedies, a following of course of the Rehearsal, but full of humour and spirit. The most successful of his other dramatic works were the Mock Doctor and the Miser, adaptations of Moliere's famous pieces. His undoubted connection with the stage, and the fact of the contemporary existence of a certain Timothy Fielding, helped suggestions of less dignified occupations as actor, booth-keeper, ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... He had a ringing English precedent in Sidney, whom he quotes. And he may have had one in Jonson; at least he thought he had. He cited Dryden and Dorset as collectors and readers of ballads; and he might have cited others. He found comfort in the fact that Moliere's Misanthrope was on his side. The modern or broadside version of Chevy Chase, the one which Addison quoted, had been printed, with a Latin translation, in the third volume of Dryden's Miscellany (1702) and had been appreciated ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... and Chloris. His only child was the witty and profligate Catherine S., mistress of James II., who created her Countess of Dorset. Bellamira and The Mulberry Garden, founded respectively on Terence and Moliere, are his best plays. His prose in pamphlets and essays ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... MOLIERE, one very much lower, both in range and depth, than the-others, but, as far as he goes, of the same character. Nothing secluded or partial is there about his genius,—a man of the world, and a man ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... also by his "neglige," if we may borrow from Moliere the word which Eliante uses to express the want of personal neatness. His clothes always seem to have been twisted, frayed, and crumpled intentionally, in order to harmonize with his physiognomy. He keeps one of his hands habitually in the bosom ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... it were in New England!), Camden has made a certain amend in putting Walt into the gay mosaic that adorns the portico of the new public library in Cooper Park. There, absurdly represented in an austere black cassock, he stands in the following frieze of great figures: Dante, Whitman, Moliere, Gutenberg, Tyndale, Washington, Penn, Columbus, Moses, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Longfellow and Palestrina. I believe that there was some rumpus as to whether Walt should be included; ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... him. So also will Elvire, though less dispassionately, watch the intellectual vagaries of her Don Juan, which embrace the heavens, but are always centred in earth. This prologue is preceded by a quotation from Moliere's "Don Juan," in which Elvire satirically prescribes to her lover the kind of self-defence—or something not unlike it—which Mr. Browning's ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... theatricals were added to the polite diversions of Quebec. The Marquis de Tracy's ball far back in 1667 had given grievous offence to the Jesuits, and the unholy acting of plays was now declared an open profanity. Nicomede and Mithridate were condemned as immoral; but when Tartuffe, Moliere's mordant satire upon religious hypocrisy, was put upon the boards, the limits of ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... was dangerous outside. But his family had practically cast him off—he owed nothing to them—and the change of name fostered a mysterious noble birth, an idea that he allowed to gain currency without contradiction. Moliere had changed his name from Poquolin—and was he not really following in Moliere's footsteps, even to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Wagner; no impressionist painting before Whistler; whilst as to myself, I was finding that the surest way to produce an effect of daring innovation and originality was to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Moliere; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... "Les Illusions;" and a third, "La Liberte;" but neither these, nor a longer one (which I fancy introduces the names of Moliere, Rousseau, and Fenelon), am I ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... Moliere takes his lead from Aristophanes and Plautus rather than from Terence and is the scourge of old age as well as "the scourge of the ridiculous"; he pursues the old as a hound his prey and never leaves them in peace either in his poetry or ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... Swinburne. 'In 1700 Congreve replied to Collier with the crowning work of his genius—the unequalled and unapproached masterpiece of English comedy. The one play in our language which may fairly claim a place beside, or but just beneath, the mightiest work of Moliere, is The Way of the World.' But he continues: 'On the stage, which had recently acclaimed with uncritical applause the author's more questionable appearance in the field of tragedy,'—The Mourning Bride,—'this final ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... and 'pandarism'. 'Rodomontade' is from Rodomont, a blustering and boasting hero of Boiardo, adopted by Ariosto; 'thrasonical', from Thraso, the braggart of the Roman comedy. Cervantes has given us 'quixotic'; Swift 'lilliputian'; to Moliere the French language owes 'tartuffe' and 'tartufferie'. 'Reynard' too, which with us is a duplicate for fox, while in the French 'renard' has quite excluded the older 'volpils', was originally not the name of a kind, but the proper name of the fox-hero, the vulpine Ulysses, in ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... was a farce founded by David Garrick on Moliere's "Le Mariage Force," and produced on the 23d ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... that it is impossible for the patient not to be hypochondriacally melancholic; or, even if he were not, he must surely become so because of the elegance of the things you have said and the accuracy of your reasoning." We might multiply examples, for all we need do would be to call up Moliere's doctors, one after the other. However far, moreover, comic fancy may seem to go, reality at times undertakes to improve upon it. It was suggested to a contemporary philosopher, an out-and-out arguer, that his arguments, though irreproachable in their deductions, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... realism, free-will and necessity, with which sort of learning he used to stuff his sermons and astound his learned hearers, the bumpkins. They never doubted that it was all true, but were apt to say with the old woman in Moliere: "He speaks so well that I ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... 1662. It is worth recalling some of the trends and conflicts that formed the medical environment during this period. Among the major trends, first place, perhaps, must be given to Galenic doctrine, which had come under progressively severe attack. Moliere, who lived from 1622 to 1673, showed in his comedies the popular reaction to a system which, although dominant, was clearly crumbling. The cracks in the edifice even the layman could readily see. Nevertheless, Galenism had its strong supporters. ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... that, amid all his falsifications, doctrinal and jocular, he has a genuine comic sense of character. "Most French critics," M. Hamon tells us ... "declare that Bernard Shaw does depict characters. M. Remy de Gourmont writes: 'Moliere has never drawn a doctor more comically "the doctor" than Paramore, nor more characteristic figures of women than those in the same play, The Philanderer. The character-drawing is admirable.'" M. Hamon himself goes on, however, to suggest an important contrast between the ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... now, so he was pleased to spend the time in almost childish enjoyments. A play al fresco was almost a necessity to a royal garden party, which was no affair of an hour like ours in the busy to-day, but extended the livelong day and evening. Moliere was ready with his sparkling satires at the king's caprice, and into the garden danced the players before an audience to whom vaudeville and cafe chantant were exclusively a royal novelty arranged ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... physician. At twenty-five he was elected corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. A handsome presence and a Tartarin de Tarascon disposition assured his success from the start. The medical world was then composed of the emulsion of charlatanry and science Moliere ridiculed. Success stimulated envy and jealousy. One of the richest of the older medical men set himself the job of procuring his scalp. On a trumped-up charge of stealing jewels from a dead patient—a favorite accusation against the doctors of ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... distinctions are necessary to them, but that they are necessary to the distinctions; after which the oi polloi are enrolled as they can find interest. Something very like an admission of this is contained in an inscription on the statue of Moliere, which stands in the vestibule of the hall of the Academy, which frankly says, "Though we are not necessary to your glory, you are necessary to ours." He was excluded from the forty, by intrigue, on account ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... with their own eyes, perceive better the end of humanity and comprehend better the course of Providence,—Balzac came forth serene and smiling from those redoubtable studies which produced melancholy in Moliere ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... (1623). Cp. also Brunetiere's illuminating study, "Jansenistes et Cartesiens" in Etudes critiques, 4me serie.] This libertinism had its philosophy, a sort of philosophy of nature, of which the most brilliant exponents were Rabelais and Moliere. The maxim, "Be true to nature," was evidently opposed sharply to the principles of the Christian religion, and it was associated with sceptical views which prevailed widely in France from the early years of the seventeenth century. The Jesuits sought to make terms by saying ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Moliere said that reasoning banished reason. It is possible also that the progress toward perfection we are so proud of is only a pretentious imperfection. Duty seems now to be more negative than positive; it means lessening evil rather than actual good; it is a generous discontent, but not happiness; ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... been decided by a plebiscite, the dirty boy would have had an overwhelming majority. What is the literature of the people? The idiotic stories of the Petit Journal. Don't talk of Shakespeare, Moliere, and the masters; they are accepted on the authority of the centuries. If the people could understand Hamlet, the people would not read the Petit Journal; if the people could understand Michel Angelo, they would not look at our Bouguereau or your Bouguereau, Sir F. Leighton. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... charity as an excuse for giving a theatrical performance, and obtained the theater of the Conservatoire and the promise of the Empress's presence. She chose two plays, one of Musset and the other, "l'Esclave," of Moliere—and asked me to take part in this ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... Audacious as this may seem, it was deliberately decided upon, and one pleasant day Mitchell and George and I loaded all our scenery into a wagon and drove away across the prairie to our first "stand" very much as Moliere did in his youth, leaving the ladies to follow (in the grandeur of hired buggies) later ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Voltaire, through the French imitators of Tassoni, took lessons from his caricature of Saturn, the old diseased senator traveling in a sedan chair to the celestial parliament, with a clyster-pipe in front of him and his seat upon a close stool. Moliere and Swift, votaries of Cloacina, were anticipated in the climax of Count Culagna's attempt to poison his wife, and in the invention of the enchanted ass so formidable by Parthian discharges on its ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... I will warrant that in many cases you discovered them and that this is why you love them. I discovered DeQuincey's romances, Praed's poetry, Beranger in French, Heine in German, "The Arabian nights", Moliere, Irving's "Alhambra," hundreds of others probably. I am sure that I love them all far more than if some one had told me they were good books. If I had been obliged to read them in school and pass an examination ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... stage, and the Archbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or subterfuge.[346] The atrocities connected with the refusal of burial, as well in the case of players as of philosophers, are known to all readers in a dozen illustrious instances, from Moliere and Adrienne ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... popular. Don Juan became such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. It reconciled him sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamored for his canonization for a whole century, thus treating him as English journalism has treated that comic foe of the gods, Punch. Moliere's Don Juan casts back to the original in point of impenitence; but in piety he falls off greatly. True, he also proposes to repent; but in what terms? "Oui, ma foi! il faut s'amender. Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette vie-ci, et puis nous songerons ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... explanation. After the guide's story of the previous evening, nothing but Stampa's death or Bower's flight could prevent it. But the woman from the Wellington Theater, how had she come to know of their feud? He was almost tempted to quote the only line of Moliere ever heard beyond the shores ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... evil, advantage and disaster; and it cannot dispense with a moral interpretation of the universe. Socrates, who spoke initially for common sense, even thought the moral interpretation of existence the whole of philosophy. He would not have seen anything comic in the satire of Moliere making his chorus of young doctors chant in unison that opium causes sleep because it has a dormitive virtue. The virtues or moral uses of things, according to Socrates, were the reason why the things had been created and were what they were; the admirable ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... the facts. All that can be said for medical popularity is that until there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in the doctor, the truth about the doctor is so terrible that we dare not face it. Moliere saw through the doctors; but he had to call them in just the same. Napoleon had no illusions about them; but he had to die under their treatment just as much as the most credulous ignoramus that ever paid sixpence for a bottle of strong medicine. In this predicament most people, to save themselves ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... has vouchsafed to our fathers and to us in the past, take courage and turn our faces resolutely, hopefully, trustingly to the future. I know of no words more fitting with which to close this humble tribute to the memory of Abraham Lincoln, than those inscribed upon the monument of Moliere: ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... "Tommy." I believe he had never heard of Keats or Tennyson; certainly he was quite unacquainted with their poems. He had a feeble, incipient knowledge of French, and occasionally read a page of Moliere, with an unimaginable pronunciation; but he knew nothing really of any modern literature. On the other hand, his knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics was more intimate than that possessed by any other teacher I had ever known. He was a thorough, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... to natural humour and the spontaneous rather than the fabricated repartee represent a small minority. Amongst the novelists Goldsmith and Jane Austen have few to follow them, and with the dramatists Moliere and Pinero are almost his solitary associates. Perfectly natural are the arguments, 'mid trips and assaults, between Mr. Burchell and Mrs. Primrose in The Vicar of Wakefield, and Hastings and Mrs. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... departure from the accent of the Parisian was that nuance of difference arising from the mere accidental circumstance of one having learned his French in Paris and the other in Boston. The French give much praise to Moliere for having changed the pronunciation of a great many French words; but his most successful efforts in that direction were far surpassed by the Boston young man. When he had finished his remarks a French gentleman sitting beside me inquired: ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... society, a satirist, and a painter of types and characters of modern life, Emile Augier ranks among the greatest French dramatists of this century. Critics consider him in the line of direct descent from Moliere and Beaumarchais. His collected works ('Theatre Complet') number twenty-seven plays, of which nine are in verse. Eight of these were written with a literary partner. Three are now called classics: 'Le Gendre de M. Poirier' (M. Poirier's Son-in-Law), 'L'Aventuriere' ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... humanity. Rabelais shows gleams of it in Panurge; but, in our opinion, no man ever possessed it in an equal degree with Shakspeare, except Cervantes; no man has since shown anything like an approach to it, (for Moliere's quality was comic power rather than humor,) except Sterne, Fielding, and Richter. Only Shakspeare was endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose point of rest was midway between the imagination and the understanding,— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Marius Reybas of the Bobino lifts a mighty larynx in "Mahi Mahi." Great talent? Well, maybe not. But show me a group of vaudevillians and acrobats who, like this group at the Gaite, can amuse one night with risque ballad and somersault and the next with Moliere—and not be ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... of 'Amphitryon' has been perhaps more popular on the modern stage than any other ancient play. It is the groundwork of one of the best comedies of the great Moliere, and of a once favourite English drama, which Sir Walter Scott, in an introduction not everywhere distinguished by his usual judgment, styles 'one of the happiest effusions of Dryden's comic muse.' It has been several times translated ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... had modelled his court very much on the plan of that of Louis XIV., which he had admired for its gaiety and spirit. Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, were encouraged by le Grand Monarque. Wycherley and Dryden were attracted by Charles to celebrate the festivities, and to amuse the great and the gay. In various points De Grammont found a resemblance. The queen-consort, Catherine of Braganza, was as complacent ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a picture is really just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a thousand times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand old times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together in the Mermaid Tavern, while Shakespeare and Moliere, crowned with summer roses, sipped their Falernian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they were to produce to-morrow in the crowded Colosseum, on the occasion of Napoleon's reception at Memphis by his victorious brother ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... humanity's conscious knowledge of itself in the way of fictitious exemplification. In a certain sense no higher praise can be given. To acknowledge it is at once to estate him, not only with Cervantes and Fielding themselves, but with Thackeray, with Swift, with Moliere, with Shakespeare. It places him well above Dickens, and, in the opinion of the present writer, it places him above even Balzac. But there are points wherein, according to that same opinion, he approaches much nearer to Balzac and Dickens than to the other and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... no poetic feeling can hardly rise to a style. Whoever has tried to read a play of Scribe will understand from this why Sainte-Beuve affirms of him that he is utterly devoid of the faculty of style (denue de la faculte du style). Contrast with Scribe his fellow-countryman, the great Moliere. Thence, Joubert says, "Many of our poets having written in prose, ordinary style has received from them a brilliancy and audacities which it would not have had without them. Perhaps, too, some prose writers, who were born poets without being born versifiers, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... put on pearls, and diamonds, and rings, that the Baronessa would never let me wear. And I 've got a whole bagful of books, to read in the train—Anatole France, and Shakespeare, and Gyp, and Pierre Loti, and Moliere, and Max Beerbohm, and everybody: all the books the Baronessa would have died a thousand deaths rather than let me look at. That's the nuisance of being a woman of position—you 're brought up never to read anything except the Lives of the Saints ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... the doctrine of instinct may say what they please, but young tailors have no intuitive method of making pantaloons; a new-born mercer cannot measure diaper; nature teaches a cook's daughter nothing about sippets. All these things require with us seven years' apprenticeship; but insects are like Moliere's persons of quality—they know everything (as Moliere says) without having learnt anything. 'Les gens de qualite savent ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... master; but in prose, when Pascal published his "Provincial Letters," French style reached at once a point of perfection beyond which it never since has gone. Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Fenelon, Massillon, Moliere, La Fontaine, Boileau, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere,—what a constellation of names are these, to glorify the age of Louis XIV.! And Louis XIV. himself, royal embodiment of a literary good sense carried to the pitch of something very like real genius in judgment ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... fancy; to work as I wish and in my own way; to do nothing if I wish it; to dream of a beautiful future; to think of you and to know you are happy; to have as ladylove the Julie of Rousseau; to have La Fontaine and Moliere as friends, Racine for a master, and Pere-Lachaise to walk to,—oh! if it ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the taint of degrading Plautus to the status of a petty moralizer[29]. In particular, he lauds the Aul unreservedly as a chef d'oeuvre of character delineation and pronounces it immeasurably superior to Moliere's imitation, "L'Avare."[30] This whole critique, while interesting, falls into the prevailing trend of imputing to Plautus far too high ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... account of the rank or fortune On domestic management depends the preservation of their fortune Spirit of party can degrade the character of a nation Tastes may change The anti-Austrian party, discontented and vindictive They say you live very poorly here, Moliere True nobility, gentlemen, consists in giving proofs of it We must have obedience, and no reasoning What do young women stand in need of?—Mothers! "Would be a pity," she said, "to stop when so fairly on the road" Your swords have ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger
... nature, and it is the comedy which we generally find in Shakespeare.—Whether the analysis here given be just or not, the spirit of his comedies is evidently quite distinct from that of the authors above mentioned, as it is in its essence the same with that of Cervantes, and also very frequently of Moliere, though he was more systematic in his extravagance than Shakespeare. Shakespeare's comedy is of a pastoral and poetical cast. Folly is indigenous to the soil, and shoots out with native, happy, unchecked luxuriance. Absurdity has ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... tell me," she confided. "She told me that Poquelin, the father of Moliere, made it." She was wan with fatigue, poor child, even after she lay, warm and cozy, in the great bed that had been her mother's. And the last thing she saw as she closed her eyes in the wavering candle light was Margot's fat and comfortable figure, trudging ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... Bernard Shaw as "incomparably the greatest writer France has produced since Moliere," and perhaps no writer ever wielded his pen more earnestly in the service of the race. To quote from an article by Edwin E. Slosson ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... with pleasure. If on the one hand he did not know much more of the literature of bygone days or of French tradition than his youthful contemporaries, he had more taste and more lively interests. And, like all Frenchmen, he loved Moliere, understood him, and felt ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... Red and Green Drawing-rooms on the next landing. There was a little group of miniatures in which the 'Beautiful Gunnings' and a charming 'Miss Temple' figured; in another group, miniatures of Addison, of Mme. Le Brun, of Moliere, came from Lady Morgan, whose pen of bog-oak and gold, a gift to her from the Irish people, hung in Sir Charles's own study. The best of the miniatures were those by Peter Oliver, and portrayed Frederick of Bohemia, Elector Palatine, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... etonne, as the French have it; at least Moliere and Corneille—whom I have been reading by and large of late, having read all the new things I could get hold of-are continually having their personages etonned. Or, I feel like Dominie Sampson, and say, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... but obsolescent connexion between the Parish and the School. The material of the "Speeches," so-called, was much the same as that provided at other schools—Shakespeare, Sheridan, Chatham, Aristophanes, Plautus, Moliere, Schiller. An age-long desire to play the Trial in Pickwick was only attained, under the liberal rule of Dr. Wood, in 1909. At the Speeches, one caught one's first glimpse of celebrities whom one was destined to see at closer quarters in the years to come; and I never can forget the radiant ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... authors who flourished during the reign of Louis includes Moliere, the greatest of French dramatists, La Fontaine, whose fables are still popular, Perrault, now remembered for his fairy tales, and Madame de Sevigne, whose letters are regarded as models of French prose. Probably the most famous ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... much to assist the medical man as his patient." Lectures (London, 1832), p. 14.] Opium is believed in, and quinine, and "rum," using that expressive monosyllable to mean all alcoholic cordials. If Moliere were writing now, instead of saignare, purgare, and the other, he would be more like to say, Stimulare, opium dare ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... fluttering his tiny wings, and still making an effort to fly, but the dancer is laughing with a satanical air. Moral: Love conquered by the colic. This platter, which is very curious, and which had, possibly, the honor of furnishing Moliere with an idea, was still in existence in September, 1845; it was for sale by a bric-a-brac merchant in the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... more than twice as long a term to Cicero's juvenile declamation in defence of Roscius Amerinus as to the Second Philippic. Go to France. My noble friend would give a far longer term to Racine's Freres Ennemis than to Athalie, and to Moliere's Etourdi than to Tartuffe. Go to Spain. My noble friend would give a longer term to forgotten works of Cervantes, works which nobody now reads, than to Don Quixote. Go to Germany. According to my noble friend's plan, of all the works of Schiller ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... irony, which fifty years later was to turn to philosophy, in the literature of the age, and the Protestant Tartuffe is unmasked by Swift just in the same way as the Catholic Tartuffe is denounced by Moliere. Although the England of the period quarrels and fights France, she imitates her and draws enlightenment from her; and the light on the facade of England is French light. It is a pity that Anne's reign lasted but twelve years, or the English ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Charras the Prussia of 1813. No enemy of Napoleon had ever dared to speak of him so harshly. Nothing was too greatly respected to escape their disparagement. Even under the great King the previous poets had had their freedom of speech. Moliere spared nothing, La Fontaine laughed at everything. Even Boileau gibed at the nobles. Voltaire derided war, flogged religion, scoffed at his country. Moralists, satirists, pamphleteers, comic writers, they all vied one with another in gay or somber ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Spenser's condemnation of the rhymers who sing of amatory adventures in which love is no sooner asked than it is granted. But the balladist carries everything before him by the verve and good humour and pawky wit of his song. There are touches worthy of the comedy spirit of Moliere in the description, in The Gaberlunzie Man, of the good-wife's alternate blessing and banning as she makes her morning discoveries about the 'silly poor man' whom she has lodged ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... diction in a poetical drama, or to imagine anything comparable to the attitude of a Parisian audience at the cheap holiday performances at the Francais or the Odeon, where the severe classic tragedies of Racine, of Corneille, of Victor Hugo, or the well-worn comedies of Moliere or of Beaumarchais are played with small lure of stage upholstery, and listened to with close attention by a popular audience responsive to the exquisite rhythm and grace of phrasing, the delicate and restrained tragic pathos, and the subtle comedy of their great dramatists. To witness a ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... theatre Feydeau or French comic opera, and the theatre Francais, chiefly engage my attention. Yesterday evening I went to the last-mentioned theatre purposely to see Mademoiselle CONTAT, who played in both pieces. The first was Les Femmes Savantes, a comedy, in which Moliere, wishing to aim a blow at female pedantry, has, perhaps, checked, in some French women, a desire for improvement; the second was La fausse Agnes, a laughable afterpiece. Notwithstanding the enormous embonpoint which this celebrated ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... invitation performances given to the people at the "Theatre de la Republique," where Rachel sang the Marseillaise and acted in Les Horaces, Madame Sand wrote a little "occasional" prologue, Le Roi Attend, a new and democratic version of Moliere's Impromptu de Versailles. The outline is as follows:—Moliere is discovered impatient and uneasy; the King waits, and the comedians are not ready. He sinks asleep, and has a vision, in which the muse emerges ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... verdict. These works, in whatever shape we may be able to possess them, are the necessary foundations of even the smallest collections. Homer, Dante and Milton Shakespeare and Sophocles, Aristophanes and Moliere, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon, Swift and Scott,—these every lover of letters will desire to possess in the original languages or in translations. The list of such classics is short indeed, and when we go ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... itself through his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable obsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Moliere, Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in the Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La Debacle," the whole Rougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and particularly of "Fecondite," turned meliorist and idealist, and became ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... compose the second line of his couplet first! which gives one the crowning idea of the 'artificial school of poetry'. Perhaps the most perfect master of rhyme, the easiest and most abundant, was the greatest writer of comedy that the world has seen,—Moliere. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... is excellent in wit, satire, and invention. As a playwright he wrote, among many lesser efforts, one supreme comedy, Mandragola, which Macaulay declares to be better than the best of Goldoni's plays, and only less excellent than the very best of Moliere's. Italian critics call it the finest play in Italian. The plot is not for nursery reading, but there are tears and laughter and pity and anger to furnish forth a copious author, and it has been not ill observed ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... her Juvenal; Spain has had her Cervantes; France her Rabelais, her Moliere, her Voltaire; Germany her Jean Paul, her Heine; England her Swift, her Thackeray; and America has her Lowell. By the side of all those great masters of satire, though kept somewhat in the rear by provincialism of style and subject, the author of the "Biglow ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... (Hercules Furens) he survived this expedition, and was slain by his son in his madness. Amphitryon was the title of a lost tragedy of Sophocles; the episode of Zeus and Alcmene forms the subject of comedies by Plautus and Moliere. From Moliere's line "Le veritable Amphitryon est l'Amphitryon ou l'on dine'' (Amphitryon, iii. 5), the name Amphitryon has come to be used in the sense of a generous entertainer, a good ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and are only worn by common people. A good bootmaker will not make high heels now, even if paid double price to do so. Ladies—that is, real ladies—now wear flat-soled shoes and boots, a la Cinderella. For morning walking, boots or high Moliere shoes ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... throughout truly noble, and the more so that he never intellectually appreciated Moliere's real greatness. But he must have had great original fineness of tact, though it was in the end nearly extinguished by adulation and incense. His court was an extraordinary creation, and the greatest ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... one member ask the government whether they were aware that herrings were being imported from Hamburg to Harwich. The government said no. Another member rose and asked the government whether they considered Shakespere or Moliere the greater dramatic artist. The government answered that ministers were taking this under their earnest consideration and that a report would be submitted to Parliament. Another member asked the government if they knew who won the Queen's Plate this season at Toronto. They did,—in fact ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... to that medical science in which Prometheus boasted himself proficient? I had thought the 'faculty' dealt in fears, on the contrary, and scared you into obedience: but I know most about the doctors in Moliere. However the joyous truth is—must be, that you are better, and if one could transport you quietly to Pisa, save you all worry,—what might ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... existed, the exchequer of the King's Attorney showed a perpetual deficit. The stratagems to which he resorted from time to time in order to raise unimportant sums reminded one of certain scenes in Moliere's comedies. ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... couched in verse. Civilisation prefers prose. Fiction, from the earlier ages, intended to convey Moral Instruction. Opinion of Aristotle defended against that of Plato. Morality in mediaeval Romance. Criticism of Mr. Frederic Harrison. Opinion of Moliere. Yet French novels usually immoral, and why. Remarks on Popery. To be avoided. Morality of Richardson and of Sir Walter Scott. Impropriety re-introduced by Charlotte Bronte. Unwillingness of Lecturer to ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... the Commander's Statue. In the familiar story of Don Juan, where the audacious rake accepts the Commander's invitation to supper. For treatments of this theme, see Moliere's play Don Juan, or Mozart's opera Don Giovanni; see also Bernard Shaw's paradoxical play, Man and Superman.... We have something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. It is possible that Stevenson's words here are an unconscious reminiscence of Colley Cibber's letter to ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unfailing verve and variety of its action: in the fine open-air atmosphere of the scenes, the sense of the stir of life they convey: most of all, in an indescribable manliness or humanness which bespeaks the true comic force—something of that same comic view that one detects in Shakspere and Moliere and Cervantes. It means an open-eyed acceptance of life, a realization of its seriousness yet with the will to take it with a smile: a large tolerancy which forbids the view conventional or parochial or aristocratic—in brief, the view limited. There is this ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the Duke's thoughts would have wandered off to the impending dearth of guano, or the probable exhaustion of Suffolk punches, and the famous breed of Chillingham oxen. So, for want of anyone better, Lady Mabel was constrained to read her verses to her future husband; just as Moliere reads his plays to his housekeeper, for want of any other hearer, the two Bejarts, aunt and niece, having naturally plays enough and to spare in ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... maid of honor had just read aloud one of Moliere's biting, satirical comedies, and received leave of absence for a few hours. The princess had also dismissed her chamberlain till dinner, and he had left the castle; only two pages waited in the anteroom, which was separated by two chambers from the boudoir. Amelia ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... not one of the French-English kind. The historical and other literature that is thus opened up to you enables you to live in another world, with a point of view impossible to one who reads for pleasure only in his own tongue. To take two instances: Moliere is a complement to Shakespeare, and the man who knows his Moliere as he does his Shakespeare has made a propitious beginning in that study of human character which must be understood if he desires to write a history that shall gain readers. "I have known and ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... ghost. The design for the frontispiece of the edition of 1731, here reproduced, is from the pencil of Hogarth; and is the first trace of a connexion between Fielding and the painter who was to be honoured so frequently in his pages. An adaptation from Moliere, produced in 1733, under the title of the Miser, won from Voltaire the praise of having added to the original "quelques beautes de dialogue particulieres a sa [Fielding's] nation." The leading character in the Miser, Lovegold, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... books, only Aristophanes and Lucian, Horace, Rabelais, Moliere, Voltaire's novels, 'Gil Blas,' 'Don Quixote,' Fielding, a play or two of Shakespeare, a volume or so of Swift, Prior's Poems, and Sterne—that divine Sterne! And a Latin Grammar and Virgil for you, little ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... drama hath begot, Planned after some new model's freak, Which, merging all things in its plot, Makes Calderon with Moliere speak. ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... swingeing sound, her face suddenly suffused, as though shame had touched her or some humiliating idea had come. But she turned to Justine almost immediately, and soon after said calmly: "Bring a play of Moliere, and read to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... countrymen) to make it manifest that epic poems may be made "without a genius," nay, without learning, or much reading. This must necessarily be of great use to all those poets who confess they never read, and of whom the world is convinced they never learn. What Moliere observes of making a dinner, that any man can do it with money, and if a profest cook can not without, he has his art for nothing, the same may be said of making a poem—it is easily brought about by him that has a genius, but the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... d'E——, had offered me a refuge in rooms which he occupied in the Rue Richelieu; these rooms adjoining the Theatre Francais, were on the first floor of a house which, like M. Grevy's residence, had an exit into the Rue Fontaine Moliere. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... patriot, have always been splendid examples to those who are apt to think on the world's progress. The birthplace of the forerunners of the modern social and civic spirit and the mother of the most genuine philhellenism, the France of Rabelais, Moliere and Voltaire and Beranger and Hugo has always been an object of respectful sympathy for those in Greece who are admirers of the beautiful, the liberal, ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... good.' JOHNSON. 'A few of them are good; but we have one book of that kind better than any of them; Selden's Table-talk. As to original literature, the French have a couple of tragick poets who go round the world, Racine and Corneille, and one comick poet, Moliere.'—BOSWELL. 'They have Fenelon.' JOHNSON. 'Why, sir, Telemachus is pretty well.' BOSWELL. 'And Voltaire, sir.' JOHNSON. 'He has not stood his trial yet And what makes Voltaire chiefly circulate is collection; ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... from his mother, who was its victim in its most furious form; and her father 'was strongly suspected of suicide.' He was said to have resembled more his maternal grandfather than any of his father's family. The daughter of Moliere was like her father in her wit and humor. Beethoven had for a maternal grandmother an excellent musician. The mother of Mozart gave the first lessons to her son. A crowd of composers have descended from John Sebastian Bach, who long stood unrivaled as a performer on the organ, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... point he finally transported himself by gradual movements which he believed appeared unstudied and indifferent. He was confronted by a good deal of French—to him an unfamiliar language. Here a long row of Balzac; then, the Waverley Novels in faded red cloth of very old date. Racine, Moliere, Bulwer following in more modern garb; Shakespeare in a compass that promised very small type. His quick trained glance sweeping along the shelves, contracted into a little frown of resentment while he sent his hand impetuously through ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... Berni, le Pulci, et tant d'autres, chez les Italiens; ni dans Cervantes, chez les Espagnols; ni dans Rabener, chez les Allemands; ni dans le Pantagruel, la satire Menippee, le Roman comique, les comedies de Moliere, de Dufreny, de Regnard etc., nous ne savons pas ce que c'est, et nous ne prendrons pas la peine de la chercher."—Suard, Melanges de Litterature, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... irresistible when its target is a false moral law or convention of morals set up to protect anti-social practices. Among these we may reckon bribery of politicians, oppression of the poor, vulgar ostentation, the habit of adultery and the writing of bad verse. Aristophanes, Moliere, Byron, and Dickens—these attempted to correct the social vices ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... in either the first or second week of January, Sir Patient Fancy was received with great applause. A hint from Brome, more than a hint from Moliere, much wit, vivacity, and cleverness make up this admirable comedy. Throughout the whole of her career it is amply evident that Mrs. Behn, an omnivorous reader, kept in constant touch with and profited by the French literature and theatre of her day. The debt of the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... does not mean that there are no dramatic masterpieces which do not run so fast or that there was not an author of great talent, Moliere, who often brought about his ending by the grace of God. Only, let me add that to secure absolution for the last act of 'Tartuffe' you must have written ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various
... heat, and sooterkins of wit. Next, o'er his books his eyes began to roll, In pleasing memory of all he stole; How here he sip'd, how there he plunder'd snug, And suck'd all o'er like an industrious bug. Here lay poor Fletcher's half-eat scenes, and here The frippery of crucify'd Moliere; There hapless Shakspeare, yet of Tibbald sore, Wish'd he had blotted for himself before. The rest on outside merit but presume, Or serve (like other fools) to fill a room; Such with their shelves as due proportion hold, Or their fond parents ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... not at all too strong. When one has passed whole months away from what is unwholesome and artificial, such things as make up life in Paris, one becomes a little like Alceste, Moliere's misanthrope, when one gets back to them. It is ridiculous at my age, and yet if I ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... masterpiece. He must still try his hand on lesser themes. Occasional pieces for the orchestra or choruses strengthened his hold on these important elements of lyric composition, and in 1858 he produce "Le Medecin malgre lui," based on Moliere's comedy, afterward performed as an English opera under the title of "The Mock Doctor." Gounod's genius seems to have had no affinity for the graceful and sparkling measures of comic music, and his attempt to rival Rossini ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... country. A development of this kind would be natural enough. The Boers of South Africa speak Dutch, but not the Dutch spoken in Holland. The French Canadians speak French, but not the French of Moliere. Half a century ago, when America was exploring and settling her own country, in wild and lone places, her pioneers enriched the English speech with all kinds of new and vivid phrases. The tendency was then for ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... Isle of Dreams, In vast contentment at last, With every grief done away, While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait, And Moliere hangs on his words, And Cervantes not far off Listens and smiles apart, With that incomparable drawl He ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... appeal to a boy's taste than seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors. At an after-period only, when he had definitely entered upon his maturer literary career, was he to take up the latter and use them, together with Rabelais, La Bruyere, Moliere, and Diderot, as his best, if not his constant, sources of inspiration. In the stories of the first of the three above-mentioned modern writers, the reader usually meets with some child of poor parentage, who, after most extraordinary ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... has retained a few words now fallen into disuse in the mother country, like to tarry, to progress, fleshy, fall, and some others; it has changed the meaning of some, as in freshet; and it has clung to what I suspect to have been the broad Norman pronunciation of e (which Moliere puts into the mouth of his rustics) in such words as sarvant, parfect, vartoo, and the like. It maintains something of the French sound of a also in words like ch[)a]mber, d[)a]nger (though the latter had certainly begun to take its ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... be more critical and narrow. The author to be thus honoured by his posterity must have a certain bouquet and vogue. He must be a Shakespeare, a Jonson, a Herrick, a Burton, a Defoe, a Bunyan, a Burns, or (if we cross the sea) a Moliere, a ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... on ole pole and wave him, and ebry time de wind blow, I been-a-tremble, and drap down in de bushes,"—because, being between two fires, he doubted whether friend or foe would see his signal first. And so on, with a succession of tricks beyond Moliere, of acts of caution, foresight, patient cunning, which were listened to with infinite gusto and perfect comprehension by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... brethren were mutes. True, it was like apostrophizing your own grandmother, in the hope of raising a laugh or of bringing tears into her eyes, to make speeches at one another across the table, whatever Moliere might be able to do, when alone with his aged servant. Nor did it much help the matter, when, with a view to the treasury, which began to threaten a collapse, we made a law, like that of the Medes and Persians ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... various combinations produced all material substances; but there was no explanation how all these different elements came into existence. Each appeared to be an original creation, and there was no accounting for them. But now-a-days, as the rustic physician says in Moliere's play of the "Medecin Malgre Lui," "nous avons change tout cela." Modern science has shown conclusively that every kind of chemical atom is composed of particles of one original substance which appears to pervade all space, and to ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... lofty, when he scored that success with "Walter Lorraine." Where did Mr. Bowes, the hopeless admirer of the Fotheringay, dwell? Every one should know, but that question might puzzle some. Or where was the lair of the Mulligan? Like the grave of Arthur, or of Moliere, it is unknown; the whole of the postal district known as W. is haunted by that tremendous shade. "I live there," says he, pointing down towards Uxbridge with the big stick he carries; so his abode is in that ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... been a member of either house of Congress. But if his form in marble, or his portrait upon canvas, were placed within these walls, a suitable inscription for it would be that of the statue of Moliere in the hall of the French Academy: 'Nothing was wanting to his glory; he was wanting ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... desired that your victorious name should help to win a victory for this work that I inscribe to you, a work which, if some persons are to be believed, is an act of courage as well as a veracious history. If there had been journalists in the time of Moliere, who can doubt but that they, like marquises, financiers, doctors, and lawyers, would have been within the province of the writer of plays? And why should Comedy, qui castigat ridendo mores, make an exception ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... enjoyed. All great humorists have been men grave at heart, and often men of more than ordinary trials. None but the superficial can fail to recognize the severity of Rabelais's genius. The best portion of poor Moliere's manhood was steeped in sorrow. The life of Swift was a hidden tragedy. The immortal wit of "Hudibras" did not save Butler from the straits and struggles of narrow means. Cervantes spent much of his time ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... at any rate have come to him so soon. The whole man too was so different from what she had thought him to be. Before their marriage no word as to money had ever reached her ears from his lips. He had talked to her of books,—and especially of poetry. Shakespeare and Moliere, Dante and Goethe, had been or had seemed to be dear to him. And he had been full of fine ideas about women, and about men in their intercourse with women. For his sake she had separated herself from all her old friends. For his sake ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope |
