For over a century and a half this belief remained unchallenged. Hostile or sympathetic, all who wrote of Molière--La Grange, Grimarest, Breuze de la Martinière, Bayle, Donneau de Visé--shared the common opinion in regard to the origin of Armande Béjart. In 1821, however, there was quite a flutter of excitement in literary circles, for in that year Beffara discovered Molière's _acte de mariage_, in which Armande is spoken of as the daughter of Joseph Béjart and his widow, Marie Hervé. Forty-two years later, the old scandal, which in the interim had been partly revived by M. Fournier (_Études sur la vie et les œuvres de Molière_) and M. Bazin (_Notes historiques sur Molière_), received another severe blow by Eudore Soulié's discovery of the deed of March 10, 1643, already mentioned, wherein Marie Hervé requested permission to renounce the succession to her husband's property, and which confirmed the statement made in the _acte de mariage_. Such evidence, one would naturally suppose, would have been accepted as conclusive, and the matter set at rest once and for all. But tradition dies hard; not a few _Molièristes_ refused to renounce an opinion sanctioned by so many generations, and M. Jules Loiseleur, a writer who enjoyed a considerable, and not undeserved, reputation as an unraveller of historical mysteries, propounded, on behalf of his fellow-sceptics, the following theory. The declarations made by Marie Hervé, in the deed of March 10, 1643, and again in the _acte de mariage_, that Armande was her child, were, he maintains, deliberate falsehoods, conceived in the interests of her daughter, Madeleine. At the beginning of the year 1643, Madeleine was about to become a mother, for the second time, not, of course, by the Comte de Modène, who had been in exile for nearly two years, but by some new lover. Fearing that if Modène returned and learned the fact, he would refuse to resume the _liaison_, which she hoped might one day be regularised (M. Loiseleur was under the impression that Madame de Modène was dead, whereas she lived until 1649), she begged her mother to recognise the child as her own; a request to which that complacent old lady, whose husband was just dead, or on the point of death, readily consented.