PFSCL XLI, 80 (2014) Gabriel Conesa : Le Pauvre homme ! Molière et l’affaire du Tartuffe. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2012. 270 p. The distinguished Moliériste Gabriel Conesa turns to the novel with this book, or perhaps more precisely to the genre of creative non-fiction. Scrupulously observing the known evidence of Molière’s life and works, he seeks successfully to create believable personalities and environments for the main characters of the Tartuffe affair, ranging from the acting companies themselves to figures in the court and the world of publishing. The timeline is somewhat weighted towards the beginning of the 1664 to 1669 period for reasons of exposition. Conesa does not limit himself strictly to the members of the Troupe de Monsieur, as Molière’s company was still identified in 1664, but also to the Italian company with whom they shared the physical stage on alternating days of the week. Indeed, Tiberio Fiorelli (Scaramouche) emerges as a guiding presence throughout the period that Gustave Michaut earlier called “les luttes de Molière”. Madeleine and Armande Béjart are also fleshed out to become active influences in the playwright’s life. In fact, it is from their teasing refrains that Conesa draws his title. His approach to these two women, whom he hypothesizes to be mother and daughter, is crucial to the overall architecture of the tale. Conesa’s Madeleine is wise in the ways of the emotional and artistic world and armed with a powerful sense of tact. Armande is more surprising, in terms of her common negative historical image, for she proves to be a sensitive and attentive wife, quite content within the cozy confines of the troupe’s intimate circle. It may be a bit disappointing to some that Conesa does not touch on Madeleine’s previous amorous engagements, nor on Armande’s subsequent controversial entanglements, but clearly he reserves his novelistic license to limit himself to the time frame he has staked out. The character of Molière himself is that of a man who cares and feels deeply responsible for his fellow actors and to some extent to his society in general. This care tends toward a certain attitude of benevolent patronism, which is tempered by his ability to laugh at himself as much as at others. He realizes as he guides Le Tartuffe through its successive stages that he is creating a work with “une portée qui lui échappait” (127). Conesa’s treatment is extremely interesting in that he devotes a great deal of attention to the portrayal of many political and cultural personalities who are often left in the wings by biographers: the duc de Saint-Aignan, master of revels for His Majesty, the theatrical engineer Vigarani, an archly conspiratorial Donneau de Visé, supportive Pierre Mignard, the reticent and somewhat creaky Pierre Corneille, bold and confrontational Boileau, wily and secretive Chapelle, and, most gratifyingly, the abbé La Mothe Le Vayer. PFSCL XLI, 80 (2014) 214 Colbert is portrayed as a quintessential bureaucrat, rather philistine in his tastes but manipulative of everything surrounding the King. Louis IV himself is painted as anything but impetuous, despite his overweening sexual appetite. This Sun King has already learned by 1664 that he must be sphinxlike in his opinions and more concerned about his political body than his physical one. The king’s primary motivation in the Tartuffe controversy, Conesa argues convincingly, is his desire to involve the production of the play with the eventual establishment of peace within the French Catholic church, based on the acceptance by the Jansenists to sign the formulaire of five theological propositions that essentially amount to a negation of their own spiritualism. The villains in the drama are likewise quite unique. The Prince de Conti is virtually white-washed as far as being an enemy of Molière, his antitheatrical writings ascribed to a presumably diminished mental state shortly before his death. Jesuits are implied to be imprinting their bile on Conti and various others in the Tartuffe affair, though they remain vague and anonymous. As for the Jansenists, they are seen in a mainly sympathetic light, enduring persecutions that have hardened them to the pleasure principle that reigns at court. It is suggested that some of the anti-Molière pamphlet authors may not exist, or serve as mere straw men for the Hôtel de Bourgogne and its sympathizers. It is even hinted at one point by Chapelle that he or other pro-Molière personalities may have written some of the invectives to create a succès de scandale. The only individual who emerges as motivated by a deep animus against Molière is Hardouin de Péréfixe, who charges on-stage as a cursing, bumbling, over-reactive fool right out of the playwright’s own comic repertory. If Conesa fiddles somewhat with the interpretation of some of these potential adversaries, it must be said in all truth that he also makes occasionally startling changes among the list of Molière supporters. The most notable instance is probably the papal legate Cardinal Flavio Chigi, who fails to appear for the reading of the comedy and is nevertheless cited as giving his approbation. It would almost require another novel on the scale of Dan Brown to delve into the reasons why Chigi could possibly have let such a false report circulate. Yet this is perhaps in keeping with Conesa’s overall attitude to the Italians around Louis XIV’s court, full of aesthetic sprezzatura and expert hedonists with a talent for the byzantine game of political chess. Molière absorbs enough of this Italian aura to try a few gambits of his own, such as secretly penning the Observations sur le Festin de Pierre in order to stir up discussion and interest in his challenge to religious bigotry. It should be noted that Conesa, a supreme master of things stylistic, has carefully studied not only the intricacies of seventeenth-century languages Comptes rendus 215 and expression, but additionally the fine points of the contemporary novel. His thirty-six chapters are lean and hard-hitting, organized around one or two well-examined moments or issues. He has stripped away any remnants of the anachronistic, “ye olde” jargon that so often hampers historical plots, creating dialogues that are capable of both depth and rapid development. The text is neither a 500-page endurance contest, nor an easily-discarded TGV potboiler, but instead a genial and convincing tale that integrates the finest of scholarly tradition with an admirable sense of what a novel should be. Without doubt, it makes those of us who dabble in creative historical fiction or non-fiction in English dream of what could be done. Maybe… James F. Gaines Tetsuya Shiokawa : Entre foi et raison : l’autorité. Études pascaliennes. Paris : Champion, 2012 (coll. “Lumière classique”, n o 97). 252 p. On any list of the major contributors to the francophone scholarship on Blaise Pascal the last forty years, the name of a Japanese scholar will figure prominently. Since the 1977 publication of his dissertation, Pascal et les miracles, which is still today considered the seminal study on the subject, Tetsuya Shiokawa has published a long series of important articles in leading French journals and collective volumes. However, it was not until 2012 that a second book on Pascal came out in French, from the by now professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo, bringing together seventeen important titles, a few of which are here made available for a French audience for the first time, the others revised for the occasion. Although written over four decades, the texts in the volume show a clear coherence both when it comes to method and subject. They are all studies in the very concrete sense that they are problem-driven; they have a clear and concrete starting point in a specific and perplexing question that propels the reflection forward. For example, what exactly did Pascal understand by the term imagination? (The driving question in article I-3.) The answer may seem wrongly obvious to a modern reader, but the strangeness of Pascal’s use of the term is highlighted by the fact that in the Port-Royal edition of the Pensées the word is often replaced by “fantaisie et opinion” or quite simply “opinion”. And as a second example, the most consistently recurring question of the book: How can it be that Pascal spent his last years working on a rational persuasion of his readers, all while stressing that such a persuasion would be useless for their salvation? (The question around which the central section of the volume revolves.) The result is an intellectual stance that combines erudition and humility in the best possible way. Assisted by the author’s immense learnedness, the