Le docteur amoureux Pièce inédite de Molière en un acte, en prose Précédée d’un avis au lecteur et d’un prologue en vers par Ernest de Calonne

8vo. pp. 131 pages, f. [1] (folded). Half morocco. Presentation inscription on half title page by ‘l’auteur’ (unambigiously inscribed by Calonne ‘avec l’hommage de l’auteur,’ not attempted in a 17th-century hand) to M. Saint Germain. Slip of cardboard with handwritten “Calonne, Molière, Le Docteur amoureux” removed from volume. The item is available in MS 580 in Special Collections (Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University). At head of title page: “Petit complément des œuvres de Molière.”

A forgery, literary and physical of Molière’s early comedy, then thought lost, Le docteur amoureux, by the young (aged 23) playwright Ernest de Calonne, whose own offerings were being rejected by Auguste Lirieux for the Odéon. Called upon to provide evidence of his ‘find’, Calonne simply wrote out the text in a transparently ‘antique’ hand (nothing remotely like Molière’s, but comparisons were not forthcoming), and exhibited it at the theatre, where it passed general inspection, and the play itself enjoyed a modest success. In 1862, while no longer insisting upon its authenticity (but neither entirely confessing the hoax), Calonne published it as Le docteur amoureux, pièce inédite de Molière, prefaced by an account of the production, a charming explanatory ‘prologue’ spoken by the manuscript itself, and a facsimile of one page of its text. See J. M. Quérard, Les supercheries littéraires dévoilées. Galerie des écrivains français de toute l’Europe qui se sont déguisés sous des anagrammes, des astéronymes, des cryptonymes, des initialismes, des noms littéraires, des pseudonymes facétieux ou bizarres, etc. Paris, 1869, I, p. 16; A. Thierry, Les grandes mystifications littéraires. Paris, 1913, vol. II, pp. 71-92.

Doubted in its time by Gautier, inter alios, but sometimes still catalogued as genuine, see the note on the Bodleian copy in COPAC, the statement by the Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des chartes (t. 1, 2. ser.) that it was one of the first farces written by Molière, and the entry of the play under Molière by the Catalogue général des livres imprimés de la Bibliothèque nationale. For the ‘real’ 17th-century Docteur amoureux, discovered later, see the editions by Guibert (Bib# 4102989/Fr# 1354 in this collection) and Pierre Lerat (Paris, A.-G. Nizet, 1973).

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