The Learned Women | Page 7

call a language founded on
reason and polite custom a jargon!
MAR. Provided one is understood, one speaks well enough, and all
your fine speeches don't do me no good.
PHI. You see! Is not that her way of speaking, _don't do me no good!_
BEL. O intractable brains! How is it that, in spite of the trouble we
daily take, we cannot teach you to speak with congruity? In putting not
with no, you have spoken redundantly, and it is, as you have been told,
a negative too many.
MAR. Oh my! I ain't no scholar like you, and I speak straight out as
they speaks in our place.
PHI. Ah! who can bear it?
BEL. What a horrible solecism!
PHI. It is enough to destroy a delicate ear.
BEL. You are, I must acknowledge, very dull of understanding; they is
in the plural number, and speaks is in the singular. Will you thus all
your life offend grammar? [Footnote: Grammaire in Molière's time was
pronounced as _grand'mère_ is now. Gammer seems the nearest
approach to this in English.]
MAR. Who speaks of offending either gammer or gaffer?
PHI. O heavens!
BEL. The word grammar is misunderstood by you, and I have told you
a hundred times where the word comes from.

MAR. Faith, let it come from Chaillot, Auteuil, or Pontoise, [Footnote:
In Molière's time villages close to Paris.] I care precious little.
BEL. What a boorish mind! Grammar teaches us the laws of the verb
and nominative case, as well as of the adjective and substantive.
MAR. Sure, let me tell you, Ma'am, that I don't know those people.
PHI. What martyrdom!
BEL. They are names of words, and you ought to notice how they agree
with each other.
MAR. What does it matter whether they agree or fall out?
PHI. (to BÉLISE). Goodness gracious! put an end to such a discussion.
(To CHRYSALE) And so you will not send her away?
CHRY. Oh! yes. (_Aside_) I must put up with her caprice, Go, don't
provoke her, Martine.
PHI. How! you are afraid of offending the hussy! you speak to her in
quite an obliging tone.
CHRY. I? Not at all. (_In a rough tone_) Go, leave this place. (_In a
softer tone_) Go away, my poor girl.

SCENE VII.--PHILAMINTE, CHRYSALE, BÉLISE.
CHRY. She is gone, and you are satisfied, but I do not approve of
sending her away in this fashion. She answers very well for what she
has to do, and you turn her out of my house for a trifle.
PHI. Do you wish me to keep her for ever in my service, for her to
torture my ears incessantly, to infringe all the laws of custom and
reason, by a barbarous accumulation of errors of speech, and of garbled
expressions tacked together with proverbs dragged out of the gutters of

all the market-places?
BEL. It is true that one sickens at hearing her talk; she pulls Vaugelas
to pieces, and the least defects of her gross intellect are either pleonasm
or cacophony.
CHRY. What does it matter if she fails to observe the laws of Vaugelas,
provided she does not fail in her cooking? I had much rather that while
picking her herbs, she should join wrongly the nouns to the verbs, and
repeat a hundred times a coarse or vulgar word, than that she should
burn my roast, or put too much salt in my broth. I live on good soup,
and not on fine language. Vaugelas does not teach how to make broth;
and Malherbe and Balzac, so clever in learned words, might, in cooking,
have proved themselves but fools. [Footnote: Malherbe, 1555-1628;
Balzac, 1594-1654.]
PHI. How shocking such a coarse speech sounds; and how unworthy of
one who calls himself a man, to be always bent on material things,
instead of rising towards those which are intellectual. Is that dross, the
body, of importance enough to deserve even a passing thought? and
ought we not to leave it far behind?
CHRY. Well, my body is myself, and I mean to take care of it; dross if
you like, but my dross is dear to me.
BEL. The body and the mind, brother, exist together; but if you believe
all the learned world, the mind ought to take precedence over the body,
and our first care, our most earnest endeavour, must be to feed it with
the juices of science.
CHRY. Upon my word, if you talk of feeding your mind, you make use
of but poor diet, as everybody knows; and you have no care, no
solicitude for....
PHI. Ah! Solicitude is unpleasant to my ear: it betrays strangely its
antiquity. [Footnote: Many of the words condemned by the purists of
the time have died out; solicitude still remains.]

BEL. It is