The Magnificent Lies of Madeleine Béjart - by Richard Goodkin

Book Synopsis

The Magnificent Lies of Madeleine Béjart transports readers to 17th-century France, a time when the stage was as full of intrigue as the lives of those who performed on it.

At the heart of this richly imagined historical novel is Madeleine Béjart--a bold, ambitious actress and theatre director navigating the world of French theater alongside legends like Molière, Pierre and Thomas Corneille, and Tristan L'Hermite. Richard Goodkin masterfully weaves history with a tale of ambition, love, and deception. From tangled family ties and secret romances to hidden pregnancies and the ruthless pursuit of artistic success, Madeleine's life is as dramatic as the plays she brings to life.

Originally written in French and now available in English for the first time, The Magnificent Lies of Madeleine Béjart is a compelling portrait of a woman ahead of her time--one who shaped the world of theatre while carefully crafting her own myth.

Review Quotes

"There is no historical novel I know that more vividly and more surely portrays the exciting world of the French stage in the golden age of Molière, Corneille, and Racine, that time when the great performers like Madeleine Béjart were viewed simultaneously as gifted performers and abject sinners. Richard Goodkin brings to this book both his knowledge as a critic and historian of early modern French literature and a stylistic inventiveness that makes it seem that the story emerges almost as a rediscovered text by an eyewitness to life in Paris in the mid-seventeenth century."

--John D. Lyons, Commonwealth Professor of French (emeritus), University of Virginia

"This abundant and generous book, yet still too short, succeeds in nothing less than making us fall in love with its heroine--a love that is admiring, tender, respectful, sensual. This is because all the author's qualities converge in this character: his dazzling erudition; the finesse of his historical reconstruction; the accuracy of his dialogue; the breathless pace of her plot mixed with a gift for contemplation; the richness of the characters and the subtility of the relationships between them (anything but binary!); the breadth of her reflection on literature, which he puts into action through the story, and the breadth of her reflection on life. Madeleine is made by all that, but is more than all that. And once the book is finished, we miss her in the same measure that we miss her lies and those of the author."

--Sarah Nancy, Professeure de Littérature à l'Université Paris 8

"Contending that bad literature is written with good feelings, André Gide would have been enthralled by Magnificent Lies. Astute, sensuous, wrought with wit and irony, Goodkin's historical fiction of the brief life of Madeleine Béjart--actress, administrator, co-director of the Illustre Théâtre and what it became--animates le Grand Siècle as no academic study could ever do. A perfect complement and antidote to Antoine Adam's foundational literary history of seventeenth-century France, Goodkin's fiction pulsates on every page. Sparkling, wry, veracious too, translated by the author from his original in pellucid French, the account tells us how and why Madeleine Béjart, her daughter, and their milieu endowed theater, poetry, and literature with force and agency. As if he had lived with Béjart and her kin, Goodkin utterly changes our received ideas of the classical age.'

--Tom Conley, Harvard University, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Research Professor

"If All the World's A Stage then we are all actors dissembling the truth. Richard Goodkin's The Magnificent Lies of Madeleine Béjart (1618-1672) gives readers a chance to encounter a consummate liar, who grew up in 17 th -century France with barely enough to eat, but reached the pinnacle of its theatrical wordle as actress, director, collaborator, and the unmarried mother of three children whose fathers (Molière? Thomas Corneille?) never knew their progeny. Goodkin, the author of an impressive number of scholarly works on 17 th- century drama as well as studies of Mallarmé and Proust, and a novel on AIDS, has produced a historical fiction which fills in the uncertain blanks of his protagonist's life, work and relationships, and which is both profoundly pleasurable and informed. Somehow, this bold, independent woman even managed at life's end to convince a priest she should be buried as a Christian!"

--Domna C. Stanton, Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center, CUNY

About the Author

Richard Goodkin is a professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published five monographs on seventeenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century French literature and a historical novel, written in French, about Molière's mistress and collaborator, Madeleine Béjart.