Argentine

Argentine is the deceased wife of Arlequin and the mother of Nisida, remembered not as a remote genealogical fact but as the lost center of a once-happy household. Her absence shapes Arlequin’s grief, his tenderness toward Nisida, and his distrust of the happiness that wealth is supposed to secure. Through her memory, the play contrasts domestic peace and mutual love with the loneliness that follows bereavement and prosperity.

Identity and Family Background

Argentine belonged to the earlier, poorer phase of Arlequin’s life in Bergame. Before his unexpected inheritance from the comte de Valcourt made him wealthy, she lived with him in a small Italian town, where their marriage was marked by affection and harmony. Arlequin recalls that they had been married for vingt ans and had quarreled only once, on that occasion because he was in the wrong. The detail presents their union as unusually peaceful while also giving the widower a precise memory of personal fault within an otherwise idealized relationship.

Argentine was the mother of Nisida and of two sons. Arlequin’s recollection therefore joins conjugal loss to the destruction of an entire domestic world: he does not mourn only a wife, but also the two little boys who died before the action of the play. Nisida’s resemblance to her mother makes her a living continuation of Argentine, while the family portrait becomes the tangible remnant through which Arlequin can still address the past.

Memory, Grief, and Wealth

Arlequin remembers Argentine with an intensity that resists conventional consolation. When Nérine points to his fortune, public esteem, friends, and only daughter as reasons to expect a comfortable old age, he answers through the memory of the woman he loved. He insists that weeping for the dead is not merely an affliction: remembering Argentine and the two boys also gives him pleasure, because it restores the happiness they shared while alive.

That happiness existed before wealth. Arlequin states that the family had not been rich, yet possessed peace, joy, and love, and that these were enough to make life feel abundant. The inheritance arrived at the moment he lost Argentine, so prosperity is permanently fused in his experience with bereavement. His later remark that grief came as soon as he became rich turns fortune into an ambiguous gift: it provides Nisida with security, but it cannot replace the people whose deaths accompanied its arrival.

The portrait of Argentine concentrates this contradiction. It is described as all that remains of her, an object that converts private mourning into a visible household presence. Arlequin’s gesture toward it recalls a marriage that wealth did not create and cannot restore. His warning to Nérine never to marry, because it is dreadful for spouses to love one another and then die one after the other, reveals how completely his present judgment has been formed by Argentine’s death.

Influence on Arlequin’s Fatherhood

Argentine’s memory governs Arlequin’s conduct as a father. Having lost his wife and sons, he treats Nisida as his sole surviving family and carries the responsibility of securing her future with unusual urgency. He leaves Bergame, realizes his property, and settles in Paris with Nisida when she is six years old. His financial success thereafter increases his protective power, but the emotional source of that protectiveness is the earlier collapse of his household.

Arlequin’s wish to arrange Nisida’s marriage is therefore presented as both care and control. He fears that, if he dies, she will remain alone, foreign, without family or support in Paris, at an age when even a small mistake could damage the rest of her life. He wants her to marry the marquis d’Yrville, an estimable and respected man who could replace the protection of her aging father. Yet his appeal to Argentine’s memory also makes him capable of sympathy: Nérine argues that the man who loved Argentine so deeply should be able to forgive the errors caused by love.

The family’s past gives Arlequin a moral vocabulary for judging the present. He recognizes the seriousness of passion because he has experienced enduring marital love himself. At the same time, the fear of losing Nisida’s honor and future makes him react harshly when he learns that Cléante has entered the household under a false identity. Argentine is thus present indirectly in the conflict: the dead wife is the remembered model of legitimate affection, while the threatened reputation of the daughter becomes the new family danger.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Argentine never appears in the action, but her absence organizes its emotional structure. She is the reason Arlequin can speak with such authority about love, the measure against which he understands domestic happiness, and the wound that makes his later wealth feel insufficient. Her memory also complicates the play’s treatment of marriage: the union that brought Arlequin genuine peace is set against the proposed marriage of Nisida, which begins as a paternal arrangement rather than an expression of her own choice.

Her role becomes especially significant when the hidden history of the comte de Valcourt is disclosed. Arlequin’s fortune came from the man with whom he had shared twelve years of intimate friendship, while Argentine and the children were lost during the period in which that fortune transformed his circumstances. The inheritance is therefore not a neutral resource. It carries obligations to the neglected son of the comte de Valcourt, and it has already been marked by the deaths of the people Arlequin loved most.

At the conclusion, the surviving characters resolve the conflict by placing honesty and familial duty above possession. Arlequin gives up the wealth that had once seemed to guarantee Nisida’s security, acknowledges Cléante as the son of the man who left the fortune, and offers Nisida a doubled dowry while retaining Nérine within the family circle. Argentine’s remembered household—poor but peaceful, joyful, and loving—helps explain why this moral reversal is emotionally credible. Her legacy is not property but a standard of affection against which wealth, reputation, and legal advantage are measured.