Monastic life

Monastic life appears in the play not as an established vocation but as Nisida’s desperate strategy for containing a love that conflicts with filial duty, paternal plans, and the social inequalities surrounding marriage. When Arlequin arranges her marriage to the marquis d’Yrville, Nisida does not simply reject her father’s authority; she asks for distance, solitude, and time in which to recover command of her own feelings.

The Proposed Refuge

Nisida presents entry into a convent as one of two necessary requests: the marriage should be deferred, and she should be placed in monastic life. She says that she needs solitude and reflection, making the convent a space of withdrawal from the immediate pressures of courtship and family decision. The request is therefore both practical and emotional. It would postpone the marriage Arlequin has arranged while removing her from Cléante, whose presence keeps alive the passion she is trying to resist.

The proposal also reveals how little freedom Nisida feels she possesses within her household. Arlequin has just declared that he wishes to see her become the wife of the marquis d’Yrville, though he admits that her own reasons for refusing would be better than his reasons for proposing the match. Nisida responds by invoking duty rather than open defiance: the more strongly he commands, the more determined she is to obey. Monastic life becomes the form her obedience takes when ordinary marriage would force her either to betray her love or to wound her father.

Conflict with Arlequin’s Fatherly Love

Arlequin reacts with alarm to the idea of his daughter entering a convent. He treats monastic separation as intolerable because Nisida is the child he has loved and around whom his life is organized. In his view, a convent may suit girls whose fathers have not had time to love them, but it cannot suit Nisida without depriving him of the daily presence on which his own happiness depends. His objection is thus not merely matrimonial strategy: it arises from fear of losing his daughter.

At the same time, Arlequin’s fatherly protection contains a controlling force. He wants Nisida to marry the marquis d’Yrville, yet he insists that she will not be compelled if the proposed remedies make her suffering worse. He casts himself as her physician and promises to abandon the treatment if it harms her, but he still decides to remove Cléante from the household and attempts to manage the conditions under which Nisida may choose. Monastic life consequently stands at the intersection of care and authority: it is Nisida’s own proposed withdrawal, but it is also a challenge to the father’s power to determine her future.

Love, Duty, and Self-Imposed Sacrifice

Nisida’s request is inseparable from her confession that she loves someone whom she cannot easily name. She hides her face, blushes at the thought of identifying him, and describes a passion she has repeatedly tried to conceal and overcome, only for it to return with greater force. The convent promises a disciplined setting in which that recurring passion might finally be subdued.

Her later decision makes the sacrificial logic explicit. Believing that her love for Cléante threatens Arlequin’s old age and happiness, she asks her father to separate her from Cléante, grant her time, and then allow her to marry the marquis d’Yrville. She is prepared to immolate her passion for her father’s sake. Monastic life therefore functions as the first, more drastic version of the same renunciation: before accepting an arranged marriage, Nisida imagines removing herself from marriage altogether so that she can become obedient without continuing to nourish an attachment she regards as dangerous.

Reversal and Resolution

The convent is never entered. Arlequin refuses the proposed retreat and instead undertakes to cure Nisida through separation from Cléante, ordering Cléante to leave despite his genuine affection for the young man. The plan initially deepens the anguish that monastic life was meant to contain, since Nisida leaves her father believing that she will never see Cléante again.

The later revelation of Cléante’s identity changes the meaning of Nisida’s proposed withdrawal. Cléante explains that he has lived as Arlequin’s secretary because poverty and misfortune prevented him from declaring his love, while Arlequin finally learns that he is the son of the man who left the family its fortune. Arlequin then returns that fortune to Cléante, accepting poverty because retaining wealth would violate the standard of an honest man and good father. Once the social and financial obstacle is removed, Nisida no longer needs monastic life as an escape from an impossible marriage: she and Cléante are to be united, while Nérine remains with the family as its friend.

Narrative Significance

Monastic life gives visible form to the play’s central conflict between love and wealth, private feeling and filial obligation, and paternal protection and personal choice. Nisida does not initially claim the convent as a liberated alternative; she offers it as a severe discipline through which she might sacrifice love for duty. Its rejection becomes meaningful because the final resolution does not simply reward romantic desire. It requires Arlequin to surrender the wealth that made the marriage seem unequal and to place moral honesty above material security.

The abandoned convent thus marks the limit of self-denial as a solution. Nisida’s love need not be destroyed once Cléante’s true status is known and the inheritance is restored to its rightful possessor. The ending replaces withdrawal with an ethically reconstituted marriage, while preserving the paternal bond Arlequin had feared losing. Monastic life remains important precisely because it records how near Nisida came to converting emotional conflict into permanent separation before truth and sacrifice made another future possible.