Widowerhood

Widowerhood is the emotional and ethical condition through which Arlequin understands his past and organizes his responsibilities in the present. Having lost his wife after twenty years of marriage and his two young sons, he carries grief into his life as a wealthy father in Paris. His memories preserve a lost household of peace, joy, and love, but they also make him intensely protective of Nisida and help drive the choices that ultimately place honesty above property.

Loss and Memory

Widowhood begins in Arlequin’s recollection of Argentine, whom he loved throughout their twenty-year marriage. He explains that they had suffered only one quarrel, and that he had been at fault; the portrait he keeps is therefore not merely a likeness but nearly all that remains of the marriage. Argentine’s death came just as Arlequin acquired his great fortune, creating a painful contrast between material success and domestic bereavement. His wealth arrives at the very moment when the family that might have enjoyed it disappears.

Arlequin does not regard tears as weakness or as a refusal to recover. When Nérine urges him to remember the fortune, friends, public esteem, and daughter still left to him, he answers that recalling his dead wife and sons gives him pleasure as well as sorrow. Their former poverty had not prevented happiness: while they lived, the family possessed peace, joy, and love, and he felt that these were enough to keep anyone from lacking much. In this memory, widowhood becomes a measure by which wealth is judged and found insufficient.

From Bergame to Paris

The loss of his family helps explain Arlequin’s departure from Bergame. He says that sorrow made him detest his country, so he realized his assets and moved to Paris with Nisida, who was then no more than six years old. The move is not presented as an adventure undertaken for its own sake; it is a migration shaped by bereavement, an attempt to begin again while carrying the surviving child and the memory of those who had died.

Paris intensifies his anxiety about her future. He sees Nisida as a young foreign woman without nearby family or support, living in what he calls the most dangerous city in the world, where a slight imprudence could ruin the rest of her life. His widowerhood thus becomes inseparable from guardianship: because Argentine and the boys are absent, Arlequin must act as the entire remaining household. His wish to secure Nisida’s marriage is partly a response to the solitude he knows too well.

Wealth, Inheritance, and Fatherly Protection

Arlequin’s fortune comes through the comte de Valcourt, a French nobleman who had lived in Bergame and befriended him. After twelve years of close intimacy, the comte died in Italy and left Arlequin all the property he had brought there. Arlequin later invested the money in Paris; over ten years, his funds approximately doubled, giving Nisida an income of sixty thousand livres a year. The inheritance therefore transforms a grieving, formerly poor man into a financially powerful father.

Yet prosperity does not make him feel secure. The death of his wife and sons has taught him that possession cannot prevent catastrophe, and he fears that his daughter will be left alone if he dies. He consequently presses Nisida toward marriage with the marquis d'Yrville, whom he describes as estimable and respected and as someone who could replace, at least in part, her aging father. His protective purpose is genuine, but widowhood also makes his protection controlling: he attempts to manage the emotional and marital future of the only child who remains to him.

Nisida responds by offering a different form of sacrifice. She says that she will overcome and immolate her passion for the happiness of his old age, asking him to separate her from Cléante and promising that she will marry the marquis d'Yrville. Arlequin refuses to force that marriage and instead says that he will try to cure her, presenting himself as her physician and leaving open the possibility of stopping the treatment if it causes too much pain. His conduct reveals the contradiction at the heart of his fatherhood: grief makes him demand obedience, yet love makes him unwilling to destroy his daughter’s happiness outright.

The Inheritance Revelation

The history of widowerhood is radically reinterpreted when Cléante discloses that he is the son of the comte de Valcourt. Cléante recounts that, for more than a year, he has loved Nisida passionately and had entered Arlequin’s household as secretary because he could find no other way to approach her. He then explains that news of his father’s death in Italy arrived just as an old friend was preparing to ask permission for him to visit the comte. The inheritance had gone to a stranger, and Cléante possesses proof of his identity.

When Cléante names the comte de Valcourt, Arlequin recognizes him as the son of his benefactor. The revelation turns the fortune that followed Argentine’s death into a contested moral inheritance. Arlequin tells Nisida that the young man is the person to whom everything they possess belongs: they were rich that morning, but would become poor because an honest household cannot retain what ought to be another man’s.

Cléante points out that his parents’ marriage was never declared and that the law gives him no claim. Arlequin nevertheless refuses to let written legality settle the matter. He insists that his heart tells him the property is not his and cannot accept being rich while the benefactor’s son is poor. His response makes widowhood part of a larger ethical structure: the fortune that once failed to restore his family must not now be used to dispossess the family of the man who enabled it.

From Mourning to Moral Action

Arlequin does not return the inheritance coldly or without qualification. He asks Cléante to secure Nisida’s means of living, saying that he would die of grief if he left her in indigence and trusting that the comte’s son would not permit such an outcome. The father’s fear of losing his daughter to poverty survives even when he is prepared to surrender his wealth. His moral action therefore joins restitution to care rather than treating them as opposing duties.

Cléante accepts the fortune only in order to place it at Nisida’s feet. The exchange reverses the original direction of the inheritance: what passed from the comte to Arlequin, and then became the source of Nisida’s security, is reclaimed by the son and immediately redirected toward the daughter. Arlequin’s widowhood has begun as a story of irreparable loss, but it ends by producing an ethical choice in which property is returned, gratitude is acknowledged, and paternal responsibility remains active even after wealth has vanished.

Narrative Significance

Widowerhood gives Arlequin’s character its deepest contrast. He remembers that poverty once contained everything essential, while wealth coincided with the deaths of Argentine and the boys; nevertheless, he uses wealth to protect Nisida and initially treats a socially advantageous marriage as the safest continuation of his care. The condition is therefore neither sentimental background nor simple sadness. It governs his movement from Bergame to Paris, his fear of isolation, his attachment to Nisida, and his willingness to sacrifice property.

The play also makes mourning a test of moral identity. Arlequin’s final decision shows that grief has not reduced him to possessiveness or self-pity. He can distinguish the comfort of memory from the legitimacy of ownership, and he can surrender the fortune without abandoning the child for whose sake he accumulated it. In that sense, widowerhood becomes the hidden history behind his claim to be an honest man and a good father: the dead remain present not through supernatural return, but through the standards by which he chooses to act for the living.