“You surprise me. So here I been talking prose these forty years and more without even knowing it! I am infinitely obliged to you for telling me.”
The above quote is from a hilarious play titled The Would-be Gentleman by one of the most famous comic playwrights of Europe, Moliere who was an actor as well. The speaker of the quoted lines is Monsieur Jourdain, a trader who has just made a pile of money and now wants to buy his way into becoming a “gentleman”. And so he fills his days with music, dance and fencing classes as well as lessons from a tutor who explains the difference between verse and prose and hence, Monsieur’s Jourdain’s moment of enlightenment in the quote above.
On the surface the play is a witty take on the childhood fable Emperor’s New Clothes in which it takes the spontaneous outburst of a child for everyone to recognize that the Emperor is actually dressed in his underclothes and has been duped because of his utter vanity. That such vain people deserve to be cheated is also the running theme of The Would-be Gentleman who thinks that by merely paying for a few music, dance and fencing classes, he can acquire the refined tastes and real knowledge of the arts and sports that marks the true “gentleman”.
Moliere was of course the most celebrated comic dramatist of 17th century French Classicist period which valued artistic refinement above all other cultural traits and believed it to be a preserve of the titled, hereditary aristocracy. At the same time, like the best of comic dramatists Moliere was astute enough to see through the posturing and vanity that often passed for worth in society and beneath which the wealthiest man could actually be the biggest fool.
Crumbs on my Notebook 