six ans

The six-year-old age is the last clearly remembered stage of Nisida’s childhood before her father, Arlequin, carried her from Bergame to Paris. It defines her as a child still dependent on paternal protection, while also fixing the moment when a private Italian family history was transplanted into the social dangers of Paris and into the inheritance secret that eventually governs the household’s fate.

Childhood and Relocation

Arlequin recalls that he had already lost Nisida’s mother and her two brothers after becoming wealthy through his long association with the comte de Valcourt. Grief and disgust with his native country led him to realize his property and settle in Paris with Nisida, who was then no more than six years old. The age therefore belongs to a decisive geographical movement: a father and young daughter leave Bergame and establish themselves in Paris, where their Italian origin, lack of an extended family, and reliance on purchased security remain important to their later vulnerability.

The move also separates Nisida from the world in which her father’s identity was fully known. In Italy, Arlequin says, he would not have hesitated to approve her attachment to Cléante because everyone knew who he was. In Paris, however, he has acquired vanity about his social position and becomes reluctant to accept a match that might appear beneath the household’s wealth and respectability. The six-year-old child brought into the city thus becomes the young woman whose future is shaped by the social identity imposed after migration.

The Family History Behind the Age

By the time Nisida was six, Arlequin’s fortune had already passed through a morally complicated history. While living in Bergame with Nisida’s mother, he befriended the French comte de Valcourt, who had purchased the house containing their apartment. After six months, Valcourt could scarcely do without him. When the comte left, he abandoned half his fortune to a secretly married woman in France and to a six-month-old son whom he refused to acknowledge; years later, he made Arlequin heir to the wealth he had brought to Italy.

That inheritance explains why the apparently simple childhood detail becomes structurally important. Arlequin’s fortune is not merely the result of ordinary labor or secure lineage: it comes from a French nobleman, passes through Italy, and is then carried with Nisida to Paris. He tells her that his investments have approximately doubled over ten years and that she possesses an income of sixty thousand livres, free of debt. The financial security surrounding the six-year-old child is therefore inseparable from an absent son, an uncertain legal family, and a fortune whose rightful destination has never been openly settled.

Protection, Isolation, and Marriage

Arlequin’s recollection of Nisida at six also explains his fear of leaving her unprotected. If he dies, he believes she will be alone in Paris: a foreigner without family, support, or a secure social network, and at an age when even the slightest imprudence could damage the rest of her life. His proposed marriage between Nisida and the marquis d’Yrville is presented as an extension of paternal care. The marquis, in Arlequin’s view, would make her happy and replace her aging father.

Nisida answers this protective logic by asking for time and for permission to enter a convent rather than marry immediately. She insists that she will do her duty and, because her father commands less, obey more willingly. She even offers to overcome and sacrifice her passion, asking to be separated from Cléante and promising that she will marry the marquis d’Yrville if given time. The six-year-old girl remembered in Arlequin’s account has become an adult who still accepts the language of filial duty, yet whose emotional life resists the paternal plan.

The Age Reinterpreted by Cléante’s Revelation

The childhood relocation gains a darker significance when Cléante reveals that he is the son of the comte de Valcourt. Cléante explains that he has loved Nisida for more than a year and entered Arlequin’s household in disguise as a secretary because he could not otherwise approach the wealthy father. He had hoped to earn Arlequin’s esteem through respectful companionship before confessing his love, believing that an account of his poverty and misfortunes might awaken the compassion of a man who could listen as a friend rather than merely as Nisida’s father.

Cléante then discloses that, just as an old friend of his father was preparing to help him obtain permission to visit and embrace the comte for the first time, news arrived that his father had died in Italy and left his entire fortune to a stranger. When Arlequin asks the father’s name, the answer is the comte de Valcourt. The six-year-old age consequently stands at the intersection of two broken childhoods: Nisida was brought to Paris by the man who received Valcourt’s fortune, while Cléante grew up separated from the father whose wealth was diverted to that same man.

Consequences and Significance

Arlequin responds by identifying Cléante as the son of the person who had left them their fortune and declaring that everything they possess belongs to him. The revelation transforms the household’s apparent prosperity into an ethical debt. Arlequin acknowledges that they were rich that morning and will become poor, but insists that surrender is necessary if they are to remain honest people. Cléante initially argues that his parents’ marriage was never declared and that the law gives him no claim, yet Arlequin chooses moral restoration over the advantage that legal uncertainty might offer.

The final settlement joins this inherited past to the family’s present. Arlequin cannot give Cléante to Nérine according to his earlier plans, so he doubles the dowry intended for her and asks her to remain as the family’s good friend. Nisida and Cléante are to be united, while the household’s loss of wealth becomes the price of integrity. The age of six is thus more than a chronological detail: it marks the beginning of Nisida’s displacement into the world created by Valcourt’s fortune, a world whose buried obligations eventually overturn wealth, marriage arrangements, and social pride in favor of family recognition and duty.