Comédie-Française

We went to the Comédie-Française to see Molière. L'Avare—The Miser. In French. I barely understood a word, but I enjoyed it anyway because it was big and bawdy and in period costume. It was obviously quite funny—the audience laughed a lot. I got one joke, a very simple one. There was a point where the main character crawled out over the seats into the audience and talked directly to us. That was the part I understood the best.

I read about the play before going, so I knew the gist of the story and what to expect. I caught bits of dialogue here and there. The Miser is about a greedy old man who loves his money more than life and he wants to marry a beautiful young woman who is in love with his son. He also wants his daughter to marry a very old man who doesn't require a dowry. It's kind of a dark comedy that pokes fun at the insidiousness of greed and the social structure that allowed men to do as they pleased with their children and wives. Mostly, it's a farce—very physical comedy.

Molière is for the French, what Shakespeare is for the English and part of what was fun about seeing it, was that it was classical French theatre. Molière is considered one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature. He lived during the reign of Louis XIV who did so much for the arts. Louis established Molière's troupe as The King's Troupe (Troupe du Roi).

La Salle Richelieu, where we saw the production, has been a theatre since the French Revolution. It's beautiful inside even though many of the original boxes have been taken out and replaced with rows of seats.

The ceilings are especially wonderful, painted with a reverse perspective that makes it appear as if people are looking down from outside a window above you. It's called Di sotto in sù which means, "seen from below" or "from below, upward." We had to identify one such piece on our midterm, so when I looked up, I went, "I know what that is." In Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo art, a technique called trompe l'oeil, (trick the eye) was used to create the illusion of three-dimensional space. Di sotto in sù was a version of that.

It impressed me that I knew something about what I was seeing, and the painting is quite amazing. There's also a fancy chandelier that hangs over the audience, and that ceiling too, is very ornate and interesting. French Baroque, I think.

The Comédie-Française is across the street from the Louvre. It's next to (or part of) the Palais-Royal which is another of the elegant buildings that once housed the court. Molière used to perform in the Palais-Royal and in the Louvre.

The original Comédie-Française was on the Left Bank across from Café Procope, which is the first café in Paris, and the place that introduced coffee to the French. The Comédie-Française was established in 1680 seven years after Molière's death (from pulmonary tuberculosis). I saw the old theatre building several weeks ago when I went on a tour of sites related to the Revolution. It's not far from where Madame Lanormande lived, and yes, she was a theatre-goer.

I wanted to see a play at the Palais Royal because it's where Victor Hugo's Hernani opened in 1830—in Salle Richelieu, the exact same theatre we were just in, and, except for the redesign of the boxes, just as it was. It's actually a very small theatre, much smaller than Palais Garnier where we saw the ballet. It's not as grand, either, and it's much older.

All this helps me think about the staging of my chapter on Hernani. It was nice to arrive at night and think about how it would have looked when Louise and Aristide Farrenc pulled up to the theatre in a carriage on that cold February evening, (we, of course, rode the Metro). There's not much of a lobby in the traditional sense of the word. The "social area" is upstairs on the second floor.  We had very nice seats, actually, in an area that was once all boxes.

We arrived in the rain, which in its own way was kind of cool. There's a fountain on one side of the square, the Louvre on the other. The fountain is actually behind, (or perhaps beside is a better description) the theatre. I'm wondering if that's where the carriage should stop.

Inside, I have a scene where Louise is sitting in her seat, eavesdropping on Delacroix. I got some very specific ideas about how to refine that. And the whole scene at the theatre has taken on greater consequence as I'm thinking that almost every minor character in the book, everyone who plays a role in supporting the story, will probably be at the theatre that night.