The Miser

Overview

The Miser is five acts of prose, about a hundred pages, first performed at the Palais-Royal in September 1668. Moliere played Harpagon.

It is a prose play, which matters. His other five-act comedies of this period are in verse, and the contemporary preference for verse in serious comedy meant that the first run was only moderately successful; it recovered later and became the most frequently performed of all his works.

The plot is borrowed openly from the Aulularia of Plautus, a Roman comedy about a miser and a pot of gold, and Moliere takes from it the buried treasure, the theft, the monologue and several jokes. What he adds is everything domestic. Plautus’ miser has a daughter; Moliere’s has a household, a steward, a cook who is also the coachman, horses, debts, a marriage market and two children with plans of their own, and the avarice is shown working its way through all of it.

The character is a humour in the old sense, a single trait taken to its limit, and Moliere plays him without a redeeming moment. He is also, and this is the play’s cruelty, entirely consistent: everything he does follows from the same principle, and you can predict him.

What happens

Act I. Harpagon’s two children have secrets. Élise is engaged to Valère, who has taken service in the household as a steward under a false name in order to be near her. Cléante is in love with Mariane, a girl who lives nearby in poverty with her mother, and has no money of his own because his father gives him none.

Harpagon’s first scene establishes him. He has just buried ten thousand crowns in the garden and is convinced the whole household is watching him. He searches the servant La Flèche, accuses him, demands to see his other hands, and is by turns furious and terrified.

Then he announces the family’s marriages. Élise is to marry Seigneur Anselme, a man of fifty. Cléante is to marry a widow. And Harpagon himself will marry Mariane, the girl his son loves. Élise objects, and he answers her objections with the three words that recur through the play: she comes without a dowry.

Act II. Cléante, desperate for money, has been negotiating a loan through a broker at fifteen thousand francs’ worth of interest and a quantity of worthless goods in place of cash. The lender turns out to be his father. Each discovers the other in a scene of mutual outrage, and neither backs down.

Act III. Harpagon prepares a dinner for Mariane and instructs the household on how to spend nothing. Maître Jacques, who is both cook and coachman, is asked in his cooking capacity what will be needed and in his driving capacity why the horses look so poor, and reports that the animals are too weak to stand because they are not fed. Asked by Harpagon what people in the town say about him, he tells him honestly and is beaten for it.

Mariane arrives, discovers who her intended husband is, and Cléante, forbidden to speak, manages a long and public declaration of love by pretending to speak on his father’s behalf, then takes the diamond ring off Harpagon’s finger and gives it to her as a present from him.

Act IV. The confrontation. Father and son admit they love the same woman and neither will give way, and Harpagon disinherits and curses him.

Then the theft. La Flèche digs up the cash box and gives it to Cléante. Harpagon discovers the loss and delivers the monologue, which is the most famous minute in French comedy: he cries murder, seizes his own arm believing he has the thief, demands that the audience tell him who took it, announces that he will have everyone in the house questioned and then hanged, and then hang himself.

Act V. A magistrate investigates. Maître Jacques, who has been beaten and wants revenge, accuses Valère of the theft. Valère, assuming the accusation concerns his secret engagement to Élise, confesses at length to something else entirely, and the two men conduct a whole conversation at cross purposes, one about a girl and one about a box.

The knot is untied by pure machinery. Seigneur Anselme, the elderly bridegroom, turns out to be a Neapolitan nobleman who lost his wife and two children in a shipwreck sixteen years ago, and Valère and Mariane turn out to be those children. Everyone is suddenly wealthy and well-born, both young couples can marry, and Anselme offers to pay for everything.

Harpagon’s conditions are two. He wants his cash box. And he will need a new suit of clothes for the wedding, which Anselme must buy. He goes off to see his dear box, and the play ends.

How to read it

Read it quickly and expect farce. This is not The Misanthrope; the pleasures are broad and the construction is loose.

Read the Act IV monologue aloud. It is built to be performed and the effect depends on the shifts: terror, then rage, then the moment he grabs his own arm, then the turn to the audience.

Watch the phrase without a dowry. Moliere uses it four times in a row in Act I and it is a piece of comic engineering: each time it silences a different objection, and each repetition establishes that no argument about his daughter’s happiness will ever land.

Notice how the household works. The steward flatters Harpagon by agreeing that everyone should be starved, the cook and coachman is the same man because two servants would cost more, and Harpagon lends money at criminal rates to his own son. The avarice is not a personal failing observed from outside; it is the economy of the house.

Do not expect the ending to satisfy. The shipwreck and the lost children are lifted from the conventions of the period and Moliere is not trying to make them plausible. What he is doing is keeping Harpagon unchanged through a general reconciliation, so that the last thing the audience hears is a man who has learned nothing asking someone else to pay for his coat.

And read it beside Tartuffe. Both are about a household captured by one man’s obsession, and both end with an external intervention because nothing inside the house can stop him.

Questions it raises

• Harpagon ends the play unchanged and unpunished except by the loss he recovers. Is a comedy obliged to correct its central figure?
• The money is buried and unspent. What does the play think avarice actually is, if it is not the desire for anything money buys?
• Cléante borrows at ruinous rates from his own father without either knowing. Is that a joke about usury or about families?
• Every objection is answered with sans dot. Is Moliere satirising a miser, or the marriage market that makes the phrase decisive?
• The recognition scene is absurd and Moliere makes no attempt to disguise it. What is gained by an ending that announces its own artificiality?
• The last thing Harpagon wants is his box. Is that the funniest line in the play or the bleakest?