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A pious-seeming fraud worms his way into a credulous household, nearly ruins it, and is exposed only at the last moment, in Molière's comedy about the danger of confusing the show of devotion with the real thing.
Idea map
Mental models
The play repeatedly sets the mask against the face, artifice against sincerity, counterfeit coin against honest coin. Tartuffe is a hundred masks of virtue worn over a single appetite.
It offers a habit of asking what lies under a polished surface, and of judging people by deeds rather than by the display they make of their own goodness.
Argument cannot move Orgon, so Elmire stops arguing and stages a demonstration: she hides him where he must watch Tartuffe betray himself in his own words.
It shows that a fixed believer is reached not by reasoning but by being made to witness the proof firsthand, a lesson in convincing those who have stopped listening.
Tartuffe claims a science for enlarging conscience and making sin agreeable to heaven, dressing wrongdoing in the language of scruple and pure motive.
It warns against reasoning flexible enough to license anything. When an argument exists to make every desire permissible, the argument itself is the warning sign.
Summary
Tartuffe is a five-act verse comedy set in a single Paris household. Orgon, a prosperous and otherwise sensible man, has taken in a poor stranger named Tartuffe who presents himself as a model of piety. Orgon and his mother, Madame Pernelle, are completely taken with him, while everyone else in the family sees a fraud and says so plainly.
The first acts establish the split. Dorine, the sharp-tongued maid, mocks Orgon's infatuation; he answers her every report about his sick wife with a doting 'Poor man!' for Tartuffe instead. Orgon decides to break off his daughter Mariane's match with the man she loves and hand her to Tartuffe, and he brushes aside his brother-in-law Cléante's careful argument that true devotion looks nothing like this showy kind.
Tartuffe finally appears in the third act, performing humility, and then drops the act in private by making a frank pass at Elmire, Orgon's wife. Orgon's son Damis overhears and denounces him, but Tartuffe responds with such theatrical self-accusation that Orgon believes the slandered saint over his own son, disinherits Damis, and deeds his entire property to Tartuffe on the spot.
Elmire then proposes to show Orgon the truth directly. She has her husband hide under a table while she draws Tartuffe out, and he obliges, pressing his suit and explaining that heaven's commands can be quietly arranged around. Orgon, hearing it himself, finally erupts and orders Tartuffe out, only to learn that the deed of gift and some compromising papers now put the family at the impostor's mercy.
Tartuffe turns on his benefactor, brings an officer to evict the household, and reveals he has denounced Orgon to the king. The reversal comes from outside the family: the officer arrests Tartuffe instead, on the king's order, the monarch having seen through the swindler, recognized him as a known criminal, voided the gift, and pardoned Orgon. The play ends with the impostor jailed and the interrupted marriage restored.
Key concepts
Selected Quotes
In fact, he's nothing but a hypocrite.
That there's a difference 'twixt false and true.
But we find means to make things right with Heaven.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of Tartuffe; Or, The Hypocrite by Molière, translated by Curtis Hidden Page.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2027/pg2027.txt
Project Gutenberg states that this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
Written by Molière and first staged in the 1660s; this page uses the Curtis Hidden Page English verse translation on Project Gutenberg.