The Guilty Mother

The Guilty Mother (French: La Mère coupable) subtitled The Other Tartuffe is the third play of the Figaro trilogy by Pierre Beaumarchais; its predecessors were The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. This was the author's last play. It is rarely revived. Like the earlier plays of the trilogy it has been turned into operatic form, but it has not entered the general opera repertoire.

The characters of Figaro and his associates were so popular that other dramatists had written sequels to The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, most notably M-N Delon, who brought out Le Mariage de Cherubin in 1785 and Le Mariage de Fanchette the following year. In the preface to the first published edition of The Marriage of Figaro, Beaumarchais had declared his intention of writing a sequel.

The Tartuffe figure who insinuates himself into the household for his own enrichment is Bégearss. Like Molière's original, he gains such influence over the head of the household that even when the latter finally understands the deception, the intruder is so firmly in control of the family's affairs that is only with difficulty that he is defeated. Bégearss is almost certainly based one of Beaumarchais's enemies, a lawyer called Nicolas Bergasse, with whom the author had been embroiled in an acrimonious legal case in the last days of the Ancien Régime.

Beaumarchais completed the play early in 1791. It was to have been staged by the Comédiens-Français, but the author fell out with the management over authors' rights. Instead the piece was premiered at the new Théâtre du Marais on 26 June 1792, and ran for fifteen performances across six weeks. Soon after this, Beaumarchais found it prudent for political reasons to go into voluntary exile. In his absence his friends arranged for the text of the play to be published, in the hope of preventing unauthorised editions by opportunistic publishers. They made some changes to comply with the prevailing orthodoxy of the French Revolution: most particularly they suppressed the Almavivas' aristocratic titles "Count" and "Countess". By 1796 Beaumarchais had returned to Paris and the play was finally presented at the Comédie-Française in 1797 and again in 1799–1800. The work thereafter fell out of the general repertoire, but was revived successfully at the Comédie-Française in 1990.

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