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A pious-seeming fraud worms his way into a credulous household, nearly ruins it, and is exposed only at the last moment, in Molière's comedy about the danger of confusing the show of devotion with the real thing.
Mind Map
Core Message
Tartuffe never argues for vice openly. He cloaks greed and lust in fasting, prayer, and loud humility, and that disguise is exactly what makes him dangerous. The play studies the con artist who hides behind what other people revere.
Tartuffe could do nothing without Orgon, who is so dazzled that he signs over his estate, disinherits his son, and tries to marry his daughter to the impostor. The household's ruin grows less from the cheat's cunning than from one man's refusal to see.
Through Cléante the play insists that real piety is quiet and shown in deeds, while the loud, censorious, display-making kind is its counterfeit. The target is not religion but its abuse as a mask for self-interest.
The clear-eyed characters, the maid Dorine, the brother-in-law Cléante, the wife Elmire, see Tartuffe for what he is from the start. The comedy turns on how long reason can be shouted down before evidence finally forces its way through.
Summary
Tartuffe is a five-act verse comedy set in a single Paris household. Orgon, a prosperous and otherwise sensible man, has taken in a poor stranger named Tartuffe who presents himself as a model of piety. Orgon and his mother, Madame Pernelle, are completely taken with him, while everyone else in the family sees a fraud and says so plainly.
The first acts establish the split. Dorine, the sharp-tongued maid, mocks Orgon's infatuation; he answers her every report about his sick wife with a doting 'Poor man!' for Tartuffe instead. Orgon decides to break off his daughter Mariane's match with the man she loves and hand her to Tartuffe, and he brushes aside his brother-in-law Cléante's careful argument that true devotion looks nothing like this showy kind.
Tartuffe finally appears in the third act, performing humility, and then drops the act in private by making a frank pass at Elmire, Orgon's wife. Orgon's son Damis overhears and denounces him, but Tartuffe responds with such theatrical self-accusation that Orgon believes the slandered saint over his own son, disinherits Damis, and deeds his entire property to Tartuffe on the spot.
Elmire then proposes to show Orgon the truth directly. She has her husband hide under a table while she draws Tartuffe out, and he obliges, pressing his suit and explaining that heaven's commands can be quietly arranged around. Orgon, hearing it himself, finally erupts and orders Tartuffe out, only to learn that the deed of gift and some compromising papers now put the family at the impostor's mercy.
Tartuffe turns on his benefactor, brings an officer to evict the household, and reveals he has denounced Orgon to the king. The reversal comes from outside the family: the officer arrests Tartuffe instead, on the king's order, the monarch having seen through the swindler, recognized him as a known criminal, voided the gift, and pardoned Orgon. The play ends with the impostor jailed and the interrupted marriage restored.
Key Concepts
Tartuffe uses the outward forms of devotion, fasting, prayer, downcast eyes, professed humility, as a screen for greed and desire. The play dissects the type rather than mocking faith itself.
It names a permanent human con: the abuse of what people hold sacred as a tool to gain trust, money, and power. The disguise is what disarms the victim.
Cléante draws a sharp line between genuine piety, which is modest and shown in conduct, and the noisy, judgmental, self-advertising kind that Tartuffe performs. One is reality; the other is its semblance.
This distinction is the play's defense against the charge of irreligion. The attack falls on counterfeits, not on the real thing they imitate.
Orgon's blindness is not simple stupidity but a stubborn investment in his own delusion. He defends Tartuffe against direct evidence and turns on his own children rather than admit error.
It locates the danger in the dupe as much as the deceiver. A fraud only succeeds where someone insists on being fooled, so seeing clearly becomes a moral duty.
Mental Models
The play repeatedly sets the mask against the face, artifice against sincerity, counterfeit coin against honest coin. Tartuffe is a hundred masks of virtue worn over a single appetite.
It offers a habit of asking what lies under a polished surface, and of judging people by deeds rather than by the display they make of their own goodness.
Argument cannot move Orgon, so Elmire stops arguing and stages a demonstration: she hides him where he must watch Tartuffe betray himself in his own words.
It shows that a fixed believer is reached not by reasoning but by being made to witness the proof firsthand, a lesson in convincing those who have stopped listening.
Tartuffe claims a science for enlarging conscience and making sin agreeable to heaven, dressing wrongdoing in the language of scruple and pure motive.
It warns against reasoning flexible enough to license anything. When an argument exists to make every desire permissible, the argument itself is the warning sign.
Selected Quotes
In fact, he's nothing but a hypocrite.
That there's a difference 'twixt false and true.
But we find means to make things right with Heaven.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of Tartuffe; Or, The Hypocrite by Molière, translated by Curtis Hidden Page.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2027/pg2027.txt
Project Gutenberg states that this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
Written by Molière and first staged in the 1660s; this page uses the Curtis Hidden Page English verse translation on Project Gutenberg.