dix ans

Ten years is the period over which Arlequin says his investments have approximately doubled, transforming the inheritance received from the comte de Valcourt into a substantial income for Nisida. The interval marks the passage from private bereavement and migration to apparent financial security, while also preparing the conflict in which wealth, legal possession, gratitude, and family duty are placed in opposition.

Financial Growth in Paris

Arlequin explains that after the deaths of Nisida’s mother and two brothers, he left Italy, realized his property, and settled in Paris with Nisida, who was then no more than six years old. He invested the money carefully, and ten years later his funds had nearly doubled. The resulting income amounts to sixty thousand livres a year, free of debt. Thus the period is not merely a chronological marker: it measures the accumulation that makes Arlequin wealthy enough to contemplate Nisida’s future as a matter of protection, status, and provision.

The growth also changes the meaning of Arlequin’s earlier inheritance. The original fortune came from the comte de Valcourt, whose household Arlequin had entered when he was poor in Bergame and whose intimate friendship he had maintained for twelve years. By the time Arlequin recounts the history, the comte has been dead for eleven years, and the money entrusted to Arlequin has become a larger Parisian fortune. The ten-year interval therefore separates the benefactor’s gift from the prosperity that later appears to belong entirely to its possessor.

Security and the Marriage Plan

Arlequin’s concern for Nisida is shaped by the future he imagines beyond his own life. He fears that she might be left alone in Paris, a foreigner without family or support, at an age when a small act of imprudence could damage the rest of her life. The fortune accumulated during the ten years gives force to his plan to marry her to the marquis d'Yrville, a man he considers respectable and capable of making her happy.

Nisida does not accept this financial solution as a simple guarantee of happiness. She declares that she will perform her duty and asks both that the marriage be delayed and that she be placed in a convent. When Arlequin learns of her attachment to Cléante, she offers to overcome and sacrifice her passion for the sake of his old age, even agreeing to marry the marquis if she can be separated from Cléante. The wealth built over ten years thus becomes part of a pressure toward an arranged marriage, although Arlequin ultimately refuses to force that marriage and instead speaks of treating her emotional suffering as an illness whose remedies can be stopped if they cause too much pain.

The Reversal of Ownership

The significance of the ten-year accumulation is reversed when Cléante reveals that his father was the comte de Valcourt. Cléante had entered Arlequin’s household under the guise of a secretary because he had loved Nisida for more than a year and could not otherwise gain access to her. He further explains that, just as an old friend of his father was preparing to seek permission for Cléante to visit him, news arrived that the comte had died in Italy and left his fortune to a stranger.

Cléante possesses proof of his identity, and Arlequin recognizes him as the son of his benefactor. The apparent fortune of the Parisian household is suddenly exposed as property whose moral destination has been obscured by time, migration, and the comte’s complicated family history. Cléante maintains that he has no legal claim because his father’s marriage was never declared, but Arlequin refuses to let that technical point settle the matter. In his judgment, the son of the man who made him prosperous cannot remain poor while Arlequin remains rich.

Moral Meaning of the Interval

Arlequin’s account contrasts poverty and wealth through time. He says that he had been happy while poor, whereas sorrow came as soon as he became rich: first Nisida’s mother and her two brothers died, then he abandoned his country and began a new life in Paris. The ten years of investment success therefore do not represent uncomplicated improvement. They produce comfort and social possibility, but they are joined to grief, displacement, paternal anxiety, and the danger of forgetting where the fortune came from.

At the ending, Arlequin is ready to return everything to Cléante and describes the choice as necessary if he and Nisida are to remain honest people. Cléante accepts the fortune, but only in order to place it at Nisida’s feet and obtain permission to marry her. The ten-year period consequently becomes the temporal hinge of the play’s ethical reversal: money accumulated as protection for a daughter is revealed as money inherited from her lover’s father, and its restoration does not destroy the family’s prospects but makes a marriage founded on love possible.