It is, as we have said elsewhere, an exceedingly difficult task to arrive at a definite conclusion in regard to the conduct of Armande. That she was the abandoned woman that the _Fameuse Comédienne_ and the writers who follow it have depicted her we entirely decline to believe. If she had been, is it conceivable that Molière would have lived with her so long, or that, once having broken with her, he would ever have been brought to consent to a reconciliation? On the other hand, to pretend that she was an irreproachable wife seems as hazardous as to affirm her misconduct. There is no smoke without fire, and the separation between her and her husband--a separation lasting for five years--is a highly suspicious circumstance. Its immediate cause may, of course, have been merely incompatibility of temper--for the account of the matter given by the _Fameuse Comédienne_ is utterly unreliable--but, at the same time, it may very well have been occasioned by a far graver reason. On the whole, the wisest course would appear to be to adopt a middle position, and, while refusing to accept the statements of her detractors, to be equally diffident about associating ourselves with the somewhat violent reaction in the lady's favour which has set in within recent years. Whatever may have been Armande's sins or shortcomings, however, we should, in justice to her, remember that the responsibility for Molière's unhappiness did not rest entirely with her. If she was selfish, vain, and frivolous, greedy for pleasure, and impatient of contradiction, Molière possessed the nervousness and irritability so frequently associated with genius in a very marked degree, and which, in his case, were aggravated by ill-health and overwork. The servant of a public ever exacting and eager for novelties, the strain to which he was subjected, always very great, must, at times, have been well-nigh unbearable; for we must remember that he was not only a dramatist, but an actor, not only an actor, but a manager. The financial affairs of the troupe, it is true, were in the capable hands of La Grange; but Molière made himself responsible for its efficiency, and though the _Impromptu de Versailles_ no doubt conveys an exaggerated idea of his difficulties in this direction, they were probably considerable. The jealousy between the two principal actresses, Armande and Mlle. de Brie, must have been alone a fruitful source of trouble. In these circumstances, it is not difficult to understand that the little trials of domestic life, which in the majority of men arouse but a passing feeling of annoyance, should have presented themselves to him as intolerable vexations, and that the sudden gusts of passion in which, we are told, he was wont to indulge on the most trifling provocation, should have widened the breach between himself and Armande, whose narrow mind was incapable of comprehending that in such outbursts men of her husband's temperament