But Molière adored his wife: about this all his contemporaries are agreed. Bold and courageous in his works, ever ready to castigate vice and ridicule folly, without troubling himself about the possibility of reprisals, he showed himself in regard to her feeble and irresolute to the last degree. His relations with Mlle. de Brie and other women were after all but passing caprices; his passion for Armande was the one serious love of his life; a love which survived indifference, ingratitude, it may be even infidelity, and to which he always returned, in spite of vows and good resolutions.
Under these circumstances, a reconciliation could be only a matter of time, and, thanks to the good offices of their common friends, Chapelle and the Marquis de Jonzac, it took place towards the end of the year 1671. The author of the _Fameuse Comédienne_ is discreetly silent about this, fearing that it might weaken her indictment; and, between whiles, places a new intrigue of Armande; this time with a member of her husband's troupe.
Some years before, Molière had rescued a little boy named Michel Baron from the hands of some strolling players, and, perceiving in him the makings of an excellent actor, had attached him to himself and trained him for the stage. His confidence was justified, for Baron became in later years the greatest actor of his time and also a successful dramatist. Armande, however, was far from sharing Molière's liking for the boy; she detested him for his precocity and impertinent airs, and still more for the influence which she suspected him of exercising over her husband; and one day, during a rehearsal of _Mélicerte_, in which Baron had been cast for the title-part, carried her resentment to the point of dealing him a sound box on the ear. In high dudgeon, Baron forthwith took himself off and joined a strolling company; nor was it until four years later that, at the urgent entreaty of Molière, he consented to return. He was then a tall lad of seventeen, exceedingly handsome, full of assurance, and "already in great request among the ladies of the theatre and also among certain ladies of the fashionable world." It did not appear at first, says the author of the _Fameuse Comédienne_, that time had greatly modified the hostility with which Mlle. Molière and he regarded one another. But when they appeared together in _Psyché_, at the carnival of 1671, Armande in the title-part, Baron as Love, there came a change. "The common praises that they received compelled them to examine one another more attentively, and even with some degree of pleasure. He was the first to break the silence by complimenting her on the good fortune that had befallen him in being chosen to represent her lover, and observing that he owed the approbation of the public to this happy chance, and that it was not difficult to play the part of a person whose feelings one could so well understand. The Molière replied that the praises bestowed on a man like himself were the reward of merit, and that she had no share in them; but that gallantry on the part of one who was said to have so many mistresses did not surprise her, and that he must be as accomplished an actor outside the theatre as he was on the stage.