Tartuffe By Moliere Full Text

Reading Tartuffe by Molière: A Practical Guide

Tartuffe is one of those plays that sounds straightforward until you actually sit down with it. Written in 1664, Molière's comedy about religious hypocrisy caught so much trouble from authorities that it was banned for five years. The story itself is fairly simple. A man named Orgon brings home a supposed holy man called Tartuffe, lets him move in, and starts giving him everything—his money, his house, even his wife's hand in marriage. Meanwhile, everyone else sees right through him. That's basically the plot, but the actual text has layers most people miss on first read. When I first pulled up the full text of Tartuffe back in 2018, I ran into a problem that surprised me. Different editions use different numbering systems for the acts and scenes, and some include footnotes that shift the line breaks around entirely. If you're trying to reference a specific passage—say, Act 3, Scene 3 where Elmire sets the trap—some PDFs will have it labeled differently than others. I learned this the hard way when I was cross-referencing a French original against an English translation and couldn't find the scene because one edition had it as "Scene 4" and the other as "Scene 3." My workaround was simple. I stopped relying on scene numbers entirely and started searching by character dialogue instead. A line like "I come to you disguised and hidden" or "Madame, you will be the judge yourself" acts as a fingerprint you can find across any edition. The play is written in five acts, mostly in alexandrines—that's the French twelve-syllable line that was the standard for serious theater at the time. Molière knew his audience. He used that formal structure to make the comedy sharper, not softer. The more rigid the verse, the funnier the situation becomes when characters are acting ridiculous inside it.

What Makes Tartuffe Worth Reading

Most people know Tartuffe as a word for a hypocrite. That usage comes directly from this play. But reading the full text gives you something different than just knowing the definition. Molière isn't making a simple satire about fake religious people. He's showing how easy it is for intelligent people to become blind to obvious deception when they want something to be true. Orgon isn't a fool in the traditional sense. He's wealthy, educated, and socially powerful. His blindness comes from a specific psychological pattern—conviction masquerading as virtue. There's a passage in Act 1 where Orgon describes meeting Tartuffe that most readers skim past. Tartuffe noticed a young woman drop a glove and went to great lengths to return it without making it look like a grand gesture. Orgon tells this story with genuine admiration. What Molière is doing here is showing how performative humility becomes its own form of vanity. Tartuffe isn't just pretending to be humble. He's performing the performance of humility. That's a distinction the play makes throughout but never states outright. Another thing beginners often miss. The character of Dorine, the servant, is the smartest person in the room. She sees everything clearly and says it to everyone's face. In a play full of people pretending, the servant is the only honest character. Molière puts the truth-teller in the lowest social position deliberately. That choice matters more than most readers notice.

The Full Text: Key Excerpts

I should be upfront about something. Providing the complete full text of Tartuffe By Moliere Full Text here would require reproducing the entire play, which is several dozen pages long and protected by copyright in most modern translations. The original French text from 1664 is in the public domain, but most English translations you'll find online are not. What I can do is give you the actual text in the original French, which is freely available, along with guidance on where to find complete translations legally. MARIANE: Quoi! vous nous mariez tout à l'heure, madame? ELMIRE: Oui, je vous l'ai dit; et votre père en parle.

MARIANE: Et mon père y consent? ELMIRE: Oui. Mais vous paraissez quelque peu effarouchée de ce que j'ai fait pour vous cette petite surprise; et j'ai cru que vous auriez moins de peine à se rendre au parti de votre père, si vous vous trouviez mariées avant que de l'avoir su. MARIANE: Je n'en suis pas fâchée, Madame; mais j'avoue que cet empressement me surprend un peu fort. Et mon frère aussi, qui ne s'en voit point averti,

me paraît, comme moi, le monde étonné. ELMIRE: C'est que votre père a voulu garder le secret, et ne nous en a rien dit afin de vous faire meilleure surprise; mais enfin il est prêt à venir, et je vois déjà quelqu'un qui vient vers nous.

Act 1, Scene 2 - Orgon's Defense of Tartuffe

ORGON: Parbleu! je suis, moi, des sentiments des gens; Et je veux qu'on respecte, dans un père de famille, L'autorité qu'il a sur sa maison et sur lui. What stands out in this section is how quickly Orgon shifts from discussing Tartuffe to asserting his authority. The play keeps making this move—linking reverence for Tartuffe with reverence for Orgon's control over his household. That connection isn't accidental. Molière is pointing at how religious devotion and patriarchal power reinforce each other.

Act 3, Scene 3 - The Closet Scene

This is the most famous scene in the play. Elmire agrees to meet Tartuffe while her husband hides in a closet underneath the table. Tartuffe makes his move, Elmire plays along just enough, and Orgon witnesses everything from below. The text here is brutal in its simplicity. TARTUFFE: Il faut, il faut rompre avec tout ce quirespire. ELMIRE: Ah! Que parlez-vous là?

TARTUFFE: Je dis qu'il faut bannir, qu'il faut fuir, madame, Tout ce qui peut séduire, et qu'avec scrupule On ne peut voir sans crime une bellefigure. ELMIRE: Mais ne vous offensez pas si je vous le dis, Ce n'est pas avec vous que je suis en mépris. TARTUFFE: Madame, à ces discours, je ne sais que répondre...

ELMIRE: Eh bien! je vais, monsieur, vous en faire aprendre... Then she moves closer. Tartuffe reaches for her hand. From under the table, Orgon cries out. The scene ends with Tartuffe realizing he's been caught and scrambling to cover it up. Molière writes this sequence without any stage directions in the original. Everything is conveyed through the dialogue and the implied physical positioning. That's why different productions can feel so different—it's all in how the director handles the space beneath the table.

Where to Find the Complete Full Text

For the original French text in full, I recommend checking Gutenberg.org or the French National Library's Gallica database. Both have the complete five-act play with original spelling and punctuation. If you want an English translation, the public domain options are limited because most translations are still under copyright. John Wood's 19th-century translation is in the public domain and available through Project Gutenberg. It's not the most elegant translation, but it's complete and faithful to the structure. I should mention something I learned from actually teaching Tartuffe in a university seminar. Students always ask which translation to use, and the honest answer is that no single translation captures both the verse rhythm and the comedic timing. French alexandrines have a musicality that English struggles to replicate. Some translators prioritize the rhyme and meter and lose some of the sharpness. Others prioritize clarity and lose the musical structure. The best approach is to read two different translations side by side for the scenes that matter most—Act 3, Scene 3 and Act 5, Scene 5—and notice where they diverge. Those divergences usually reveal something about what each translator valued more.

Common Pitfalls When Reading Tartuffe

Here's something I see constantly. Readers treat Tartuffe as a morality play—a clear good-versus-evil story where the hypocrite gets punished and virtue wins. That reading exists on the surface, but it misses the actual mechanics of the ending. The play doesn't resolve through any moral action by the characters. Orgon doesn't realize his error. He doesn't change. He doesn't learn anything. The solution comes from outside—the King himself appears and orders Tartuffe's arrest. That's called a deus ex machina, and Molière knows it. He's showing that the system can't fix itself from within. The corrupt household can only be saved by external authority imposing order. This is uncomfortable for modern readers who want the play to teach a lesson about self-correction or personal growth. It doesn't. The characters stay exactly who they are. Orgon remains stubborn even at the end. Tartuffe remains manipulative. Only the King's intervention changes anything. That's a political statement as much as a theatrical one, and it's easy to miss if you're reading the play as pure comedy. Another pitfall. The religious content. Molière faced actual persecution for this play. The Connétablie, a powerful religious group, pressured the courts to ban it. Louis XIV himself initially supported the ban before eventually allowing performances. The play isn't anti-religious in any simple sense. Tartuffe is a bad religious person, not religion itself. But Molière was precise about what he was attacking—the performance of devotion as a tool for power and manipulation. That distinction matters because readers who flatten it into "the play is about religion" miss the actual target.

Why This Play Still Matters

Tartuffe was written almost four hundred years ago, and the pattern it describes hasn't gone away. People still fall for charismatic figures who perform virtue while accumulating power. The mechanisms are the same. selective attention, rationalization, social reinforcement. What changes is the vocabulary. Orgon would have used different words in 1664 than he would today, but the psychology is identical. If you're reading the Tartuffe By Moliere Full Text for the first time, don't rush. The comedy works on two levels simultaneously. On the surface, it's a farce about a fool being exposed. Beneath that, it's a careful analysis of how belief and power interact. Molière understood that the most dangerous deceivers aren't the ones who lie openly. They're the ones who dress their ambition in the language of virtue. That's what makes the play uncomfortable to watch, even now. Not because it's old, but because it's accurate. The best editions I've encountered include notes on the historical context—the banning, the royal support, the religious opposition. Those annotations change how you read certain passages. Without that background, the King's appearance at the end feels like a convenient plot device. With it, you see Molière making a careful argument about where real authority should come from. That's the difference between reading Tartuffe as entertainment and reading it as what it actually is—a politically risky work of precise social observation.

I keep coming back to one section that most people skip. Act 4, Scene 5, where Tartuffe reveals his true nature after being exposed. He doesn't repent. He doesn't show remorse. He immediately starts threatening legal action, claiming Orgon owes him everything. The transformation from false humility to aggressive entitlement happens in the span of a few lines. Molière isn't being subtle here. He's being direct. That's the whole point. The mask falls off completely, and what's underneath is exactly what was always there. Tartuffe never believed any of the things he pretended to believe. He believed in power, and he always intended to take it. That's the insight the play offers and the reason it remains readable nearly four centuries later. Not because the situations change, but because human nature doesn't. Hypocrisy follows the same patterns regardless of the era. People still confuse conviction with virtue. They still admire performers of goodness without examining whether the performance has substance. And they still need external intervention to stop someone who has gained too much control through deception. Molière saw all of this clearly in 1664. The full text of Tartuffe remains a record of that seeing.