The famous Collège de Clermont, later known as the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, was indeed quite unlike the parish school. The Collège was maintained by members of the powerful Order of Jesus, and it must be admitted that the Jesuit fathers did their job brilliantly—“for the greater glory of God”—like everything else they put their hand to.
The Collège, headed by its Rector, Father Jacques Dinet, was attended by nearly two thousand boys and youths of noble and bourgeois families. Three hundred were resident students, the rest lived at home. The Society of Jesus educated the flower of French youth.
The fathers taught courses in history, classical literature, the juridical sciences, chemistry and physics, theology, philosophy, and Greek. As for Latin, that goes without saying. The students at Clermont not only read and studied the Latin authors constantly, but were required to converse in Latin during recess hours between classes. You can easily understand yourself that under such conditions it was not difficult to assimilate this language so essential for human culture.
Special hours were devoted to dancing lessons. At other hours the halls resounded with the clanking of rapiers: French youths were learning to wield weapons so that they might defend the honor of the King of France in mass battle, and their own—in single combat. On gala occasions the resident students presented plays by ancient Roman authors, chiefly Publius Terentius and Seneca.
Such was the educational institution to which Louis Cressé had sent his grandson. Poquelin the father could by no means complain that his son, the future Royal Valet, was in bad company. The roster of Clermont students included the names of many highborn families; the highest nobility sent its sons to the Clermont lycée. At the time when Poquelin was attending the Collège, Clermont boasted of three princes among its students, one of whom was none other than Armand de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, the brother of another Bourbon, Louis Condé, duc d’Angoulême, later known as the Great. In other words, Poquelin was a fellow student of a personage of Royal blood. This alone would suffice to prove that the teaching at the Collège de Clermont was of a high level of excellence.
It must be noted, however, that the youths of blue blood were segregated from the sons of the wealthy bourgeois, of whom Jean-Baptiste was one. Princes and marquises were boarders at the lycée, with their own servants, their own instructors, their own separate hours of study, as well as their own separate classrooms.
It must further be said that Prince Conti, who will subsequently play an important role during the wanderings of my restless hero, was seven years younger than Jean-Baptiste. He was sent to Clermont as a young boy, and, naturally, never had any contact with our hero.
And so Poquelin the younger immersed himself in the study of Plautus, Terence, and Lucretius. According to custom, he let his hair grow down to his shoulders and wore out his wide trousers on the schoolbench, stuffing his head with Latin. The furniture shop was veiled in mist; he found himself in an altogether different world.
“It must be the will of fate,” muttered Poquelin the elder, falling asleep. “Well, then, I shall have to turn the business over to the second son. And this one may, perhaps, become a lawyer, or a notary, or something along that line.”
Did his boyhood passion for the theater die out in the heart of the scholar Baptiste? Alas, not in the least! Breaking out of the Latin vise during his free hours, he would still hurry off to Pont-Neuf and the theaters—this time not in his grandfather’s company, but with several of his fellow students. And during his years at the Collège, Baptiste became thoroughly acquainted with the repertory of the Swamp and the Hôtel de Bourgogne. He saw Pierre Corneille’s plays The Widow, Place Royale, The Palace Gallery, and the famous The Cid,* which won its author wide renown and the envy of his fellow writers.
But this was not all. Toward the end of his days at the lycée, Jean-Baptiste had learned to find his way not only into the theater loges or pit, but also backstage, where he made one of the most important acquaintances of his life. He met a woman, Madeleine Béjart, an actress who played for a time in the Theater on the Swamp. Madeleine was a redhead, with exquisite manners and, by general consensus, a great and genuine talent. A fervent admirer of the dramatist Jean de Rotrou, Madeleine was intelligent, had fine taste, and, which was a great rarity, knew literature and herself wrote poetry. No wonder, then, that the enchanting Parisian actress completely captivated the Clermont student, who was four years her junior. What is interesting is that Madeleine reciprocated his feelings.
And so, the course of studies at the Collège lasted five years, and was crowned, so to speak, with the study of philosophy. And throughout those five years, Jean-Baptiste worked diligently, finding time, nevertheless, for visits to the theater.
Did my hero become an educated man at the Collège? I do not believe that any institution of learning can produce an educated man. But a well-conducted institution can turn out a disciplined man, with the habit of study that can later be of good use when the man begins to educate himself outside the walls of the school.
Yes, at the Collège de Clermont Jean-Baptiste was taught discipline; he was taught to respect knowledge and shown a way to it. When he was completing his course in 1639, his head was no longer filled with the odds and ends of his parish-school studies. His mind was laced, to quote Mephisto, in Spanish boots.
During his years at the lycée Poquelin struck up a friendship with a certain Claude-Emmanuel Chapelle, the illegitimate son of an eminent finance official, Pierre Luillier, a man of great wealth, whose home he began to visit. At the time when the young students were completing their studies, a remarkable man appeared at the Luillier home as a dear and welcome guest. The man’s name was Pierre Gassendi.
Professor Gassendi, a native of Provence, was a highly educated man. His erudition could have been enough for ten men. He was a teacher of rhetoric, an excellent historian, a widely informed philosopher, physicist, and mathematician. The scope of his learning in the field of mathematics alone was so great that he was offered a chair at the Royal College. But mathematics did not exhaust Pierre Gassendi’s intellectual baggage.
A keen and restless mind, he had begun his studies with the works of the most famous philosopher of antiquity, the peripatetic Aristotle, and, having studied him in the fullest measure, he came to detest him in the same measure. Then, after acquainting himself with the great heresy of the Pole Nicholas Copernicus, who had declared to the whole world that the ancients were mistaken in assuming that the earth was the motionless center of the universe, Pierre Gassendi became a fiery admirer of Copernicus.
Gassendi was enchanted with the great thinker Giordano Bruno, who had been burned at the stake in 1600 for insisting that the universe was infinite and contained a multitude of worlds.
Gassendi was heart and soul behind the brilliant physicist Galileo, who had been compelled with his hand on the Bible to renounce his conviction that the earth moved.
Anyone with courage enough to attack the teachings of Aristotle or the scholastic philosophers who followed him found a most loyal accomplice in Gassendi. He made a thorough study of the teachings of the Frenchman Pierre de la Ramée, who attacked Aristotle and perished during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. He sympathized with the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives, who demolished scholastic philosophy, and the Englishman Francis Bacon, whose Instauratio Magna was written in opposition to Aristotle. But it is impossible to name them all!
Professor Gassendi was an innovator by nature; he admired clarity and simplicity of thought, had boundless faith in experience, and respected experimentation.
Beneath all this was the granite foundation of his own philosophy. This philosophy was derived from the same deep antiquity, from the philosopher Epicurus, who lived some three hundred years before our era.
If anyone had asked Epicurus for the formula of his teaching, he would probably have answered:
“What does every living creature strive for? Every living creature strives for pleasure. Why? Because pleasure is the highest good. Live wisely, then—and seek enduring pleasure.”
The formula of Epicurus pleased Pierre Gassendi enormously, and in the course of time he constructed his own: “The only thing man is born with,” Gassendi would say to his pupils, tugging at his pointed scholarly beard, “is love for himself. And the goal of every man’s life is happiness! But what elements does happiness consist of?” the philosopher would ask, his eyes flashing. “Only two, my friends, only two: a serene spirit and a healthy body. Any good doctor will tell you how to preserve your health. And I shall tell you how to achieve serenity of spirit: commit no crimes, my children, and you shall feel neither repentance nor regret, and only these make men unhappy.”
The Epicurean Gassendi began his scholarly career by producing a long work in which he argued the total worthlessness of Aristotelian astronomy and physics and defended the theory of Copernicus, of whom I spoke earlier. This most interesting work, however, remained unfinished. If anyone had asked the professor why this was so, I strongly suspect that he would have replied like a certain Chrysale, the hero of one of Molière’s future comedies who said to an excessively learned lady, Philaminte:
What, are our bodies trash?
This trash to me is much too dear!
“I have no wish to go to prison, my dear sirs, because of Aristotle,” Gassendi would have said.
And indeed, when this trash, your body, is thrown into prison, how, it may be asked, would your philosophic spirit fare?
In short, Gassendi stopped just in time; he did not complete his work on Aristotle and devoted himself to other pursuits. The Epicurean was too fond of life, and the edict passed by the Paris Parliament in 1624 was still too fresh. The point is that Aristotle was, if one may put it this way, canonized by all the learned faculties of the time, and the Parliamentary edict spoke quite unequivocally of the death penalty for all who dared to criticize Aristotle and his successors.
And so, having avoided serious unpleasantness, having journeyed through Belgium and Holland, and having written a number of significant works, Gassendi wound up in Paris, at the home of Luillier, his old friend.
Luillier was a clever man, and he asked the professor to give private lessons to his son Chapelle. And since Luillier was not only clever but also generous, he permitted Chapelle to form a whole group of young men to share Gassendi’s lectures with him.
This group included Chapelle, our Jean-Baptiste, a certain François Bernier, a young man with a passion for the natural sciences who later became a famous traveler in the Orient and was nicknamed “Great Mogol” by the Parisians, and finally, a personage entirely original and unlike the rest of the company. This last member was older than the others; he was not a student at Clermont, but a guards officer, recently wounded in battle, a drunkard, a duelist, a wit, a Don Juan, and a beginning playwright. While still in college in the city of Beauvais, in the class of rhetoric, he had composed an interesting drama, The Tricked Pedant, in which he satirized the director of his college, Jean Grangier. This guardsman’s name was Cyrano de Bergerac.
And so this company, seated in Luillier’s luxurious apartments, absorbed the fiery discourses of Pierre Gassendi. This was the man who polished my hero’s mind! This Provençal with a face furrowed by passions! It was from him that Jean-Baptiste inherited the triumphant philosophy of Epicurus and a great deal of serious knowledge of the natural sciences. In the charming light of wax candles, Gassendi instilled in him a love for clear and precise thought and a hatred of scholasticism, respect for empirical experience and contempt for falseness and flowery bombast.
Then came the moment when both the Clermont Collège and Gassendi’s lectures were over. My hero became an adult.
“You will now be kind enough to take a trip to Orléans,” said Poquelin the elder to the graduate of Clermont, “and take an examination in jurisprudence. You must get a degree. And see that you don’t fail, for I spent plenty of money on you.”
And Jean-Baptiste went to Orléans to receive a diploma in jurisprudence. I do not know how much time he spent in Orléans, or the precise dates. But it seems to have taken place very early in 1641.
One of the innumerable slanderers who hated my hero asserted many years later that any ass could have received a learned degree in Orléans, provided he had money. This, however, is not true. An ass could not receive any degrees, nor did my hero resemble an ass in any way whatever.
True, some spirited young men who had gone to Orléans for their examinations related afterward that they had come to the university late in the evening and had roused the professors from sleep. They said further that the yawning professors had put on their scholarly hats over their greasy nightcaps, examined them then and there, and issued their degrees. But it may well be that these young men lied.
Whatever the situation in Orléans, it is definitely known that Jean-Baptiste won his degree as Licentiate in Law.
And so, the boy in his fluted collar and the long-haired scholar are no more. I see before me a young man in a light-colored wig.
I study this man avidly.
He is of medium height, slightly stooped, with a hollow chest. In the swarthy face with high cheekbones the eyes are wide-set, the chin sharp, and the nose wide and flat. In short, he is extremely unprepossessing. But his eyes are remarkable. I read in them a strange and everpresent caustic smile, and at the same time an unquenchable wonder at the surrounding world. There is something sensual, almost feminine in these eyes, but in reality there is a secret illness in their depths. Some worm, believe me, is already gnawing at this twenty-year-old man.
The man stutters and breathes improperly when he speaks. I can also see that he is quick-tempered and subject to abrupt changes of mood. He easily passes from moments of gaiety to moments of dark reflection. He finds ridiculous traits in men and likes to make them the butt of his jests.
On occasion he carelessly slips into frankness. At other times he tries to be secretive and cunning. He can be recklessly brave, but he can also shift within the moment to irresolution and cowardice. You must agree with me that with these characteristics he will not have an easy life, and will make many enemies!
But let him live his life!
* All play titles mentioned in the text are given in French and English in the List of Plays.