A remarkable incident in the history of the genius of Moliere is the frequent recurrence of the poet to the passion of jealousy.  The “jaundice in the lover’s eye,” he has painted with every tint of his imagination.  “The green-eyed monster” takes all shapes, and is placed in every position.  Solemn, or gay, or satirical, he sometimes appears in agony, but often scorns to make its “trifles light as air,” only ridiculous as a source of consolation.  Was Le Contemplateur comic in his melancholy, or melancholy in his comic humour?

The truth is, that the poet himself had to pass through those painful stages which he has dramatised.  The domestic life of Moliere was itself very dramatic; it afforded Goldoni a comedy of five acts, to reveal the secrets of the family circle of Moliere; and l’Abbate Chiari, an Italian novelist and playwright, has taken for a comic subject, Moliere, the Jealous Husband.

The French, in their “petite morale” on conjugal fidelity, appear so tolerant as to leave little sympathy for the real sufferer.  Why should they else have treated domestic jealousy as a foible for ridicule, rather than a subject for deep passion?  Their tragic drama exhibits no Othello, nor their comedy a Kitely, or a Suspicious Husband.  Moliere, while his own heart was the victim, conformed to the national taste, by often placing the object on its comic side.  Domestic jealousy is a passion which admits of a great diversity of subjects, from the tragic or the pathetic, to the absurd and the ludicrous.  We have them all in Moliere.  Moliere often was himself “Le Cocu Imaginaire;” he had been in the position of the guardian in L’Ecole des Maris.  Like Arnolphe in L’Ecole des Femmes, he had taken on himself to rear a young wife who played the same part, though with less innocence; and like the Misanthrope, where the scene between Alceste and Celimene is “une des plus fortes qui existant au theatre,” he was deeply entangled in the wily cruelties of scornful coquetry, and we know that at times he suffered in “the hell of lovers” the torments of his own Jealous Prince.

When this poet cast his fate with a troop of comedians, as the manager, and whom he never would abandon, when at the height of his fortune, could he avoid accustoming himself to the relaxed habits of that gay and sorrowful race, who, “of imagination all compact,” too often partake of the passions they inspire in the scene?  The first actress, Madame Bejard, boasted that, with the exception of the poet, she had never dispensed her personal favours but to the aristocracy.  The constancy of Moliere was interrupted by another actress, Du Parc; beautiful but insensible, she only tormented the poet, and furnished him with some severe lessons for the coquetry of his Celimene, in Le Misanthrope.  The facility of the transition of the tender passion had more closely united the susceptible poet to Mademoiselle de Brie.  But Madame Bejard,