Elmire tells her husband to move the table and get underneath it. Orgon asks what she means, then why he must hide there. He is not accustomed to taking instructions in his own house. She tells him to conceal himself properly and remain silent.

The man who usually decides whose words deserve attention must first remove himself from view. Only then, it seems, can he hear what members of his family have already told him.

In Molière’s Tartuffe, Orgon has welcomed an apparently devout man into his household and placed extraordinary trust in him. He wants his daughter to marry this moral guide. Yet Tartuffe has made advances to Elmire, and Orgon’s son Damis has overheard them.

Damis’s revelation made matters worse. Tartuffe responded by declaring himself sinful with such extravagant humility that Orgon took the confession as evidence of innocence. The son was expelled; the accused man received firmer support.

Elmire had initially hoped to reject the advance without a public quarrel. Her composure now counts against her. Orgon wants to know why a genuinely offended wife did not respond more fiercely. She must explain that a firm refusal need not be delivered in a rage. He is not simply questioning an allegation. He has decided in advance what a believable woman’s reaction should look like.

The table becomes her alternative to another unsuccessful explanation. Before Tartuffe arrives, she tells Orgon what the performance will involve. She will appear receptive in order to expose him. Once the evidence is sufficient, her husband must intervene. She is not offering unlimited access to herself for the sake of convincing him.

The responsibilities are therefore shared, though unequally. Elmire must construct the encounter. Orgon must stop it before she is unnecessarily exposed. Concealment does not release him from having to act.

When Tartuffe enters, she has him shut the door and check for intruders. She then recasts her previous refusals as modesty and her opposition to his proposed marriage as jealousy. The audience knows that her husband is under the table. Tartuffe thinks the conversation has become private precisely when it has acquired an additional listener.

He is not easily satisfied. He suspects that she wants to trick him into abandoning the marriage and asks for something more substantial than declarations. Elmire brings his customary religious language back into the exchange. Would what he proposes not offend heaven?

Tartuffe explains how such difficulties can be managed. Intention can soften the offense; discretion can prevent scandal. The man whose authority depends on conspicuous moral rigor is now instructing her in the means of escaping it. His principles expand to accommodate his desires.

Elmire coughs. The play specifies that she is signaling to her husband. Tartuffe hears a cough and offers licorice. She replies that hers is a stubborn case, beyond the help of all the licorice in the world.

The stage arrangement makes the courtesy absurd. The person apparently responding to her distress has misunderstood what she needs. The person who should understand has yet to emerge. Her attempt to summon help produces a suggestion for treating her throat.

The scene’s joke carries an increasing pressure. Elmire says that words evidently cannot suffice and that she will have to supply further proof. To Tartuffe, she appears to concede his demand. Under the table, Orgon is also requiring more proof from the same woman. One man doubts her desire; the other doubts that she has been pursued. Their different suspicions push her toward the same predicament.

She can still maneuver. She insists that Tartuffe look outside for her husband. He assures her that Orgon is easily led and could be persuaded to disbelieve even what he saw. He goes to check, and only then does the actual Orgon crawl out.

Elmire does not hurry to welcome his discovery. Why emerge so soon? she asks. He should go back underneath and wait for firmer evidence rather than act on conjecture. His own demands for caution return to him in the form of a joke he can no longer comfortably enjoy.

Her command of the scene is real. She chooses the space, exploits Tartuffe’s vanity, and gives Orgon a taste of the standard he has imposed on others. Calling her merely a passive victim would miss that intelligence. But being able to devise the experiment does not mean she should have had to undertake it.

There are reasonable grounds for checking an accusation. Family members can be mistaken, partial, or angry; Damis is not free from old resentment. What makes Orgon’s skepticism troubling is its flexibility. His son’s anger proves malice, while his wife’s calm proves that nothing serious happened. Opposite reactions both become reasons to reject the same information.

Under the table he finally finds a witness he will trust: himself. His family’s eyes, ears, and judgments must apparently pass through his own before they can affect the household’s decisions. The successful demonstration exposes that failure even as it overcomes it for this occasion.

Tartuffe returns expecting to enjoy the privacy he has checked. Elmire moves aside and reveals her husband. Orgon resumes the master’s voice and orders the intruder out. This might have been a sufficient comic victory: the impostor exposed, the patriarch chastened, the family reunited.

Instead, Tartuffe tells Orgon that he is the one who must leave. The house now belongs to Tartuffe.

The reversal is more than a clever retort. Orgon has already made a gift of his property. Another danger follows: confidential papers entrusted to him by an exiled friend have also passed into Tartuffe’s hands. Trust has become a deed, a transfer, and a delivery. Disbelief cannot simply reverse those completed actions.

Elmire’s experiment is thus effective without being sufficient. It destroys Orgon’s confidence in the man and interrupts the marriage he intended to impose on his daughter. It cannot itself retrieve the documents, undo the gift, or prevent a denunciation. Exposure may even prompt the deceiver to use powers he acquired while he was still trusted.

Molière also refuses to make awakening the end of Orgon’s foolishness. He now condemns everyone who appears religious. Cléante urges him to distinguish genuine devotion from hypocrisy. Then Orgon’s mother doubts his own account and tells him not to be misled by appearances. He discovers how infuriating it is to have seen something and still not be believed.

That repetition supplies comic justice, but external events keep moving. An officer arrives to require the family’s departure. Tartuffe later brings an official to arrest Orgon. Only at the last moment does the official turn on Tartuffe instead.

The king has recognized a criminal with other offenses in his past. The papers will be returned, the gift revoked, and Orgon pardoned for his part in the affair involving his friend. The household is rescued by a new intervention, not by an automatic consequence of discovering the truth.

The rescue matters. The family keeps its home and is no longer at the mercy of the impostor’s documents. It does not certify that Orgon has learned to listen. Recovering property and recovering the standing of one’s family members are different tasks.

Elmire’s deception is also different from Tartuffe’s. Both conceal what they mean, but their purposes and responsibilities are not interchangeable. Her performance exposes an existing abuse of trust, with an agreed limit and a husband obliged to intervene. His seeks to exploit trust for private advantage. The audience’s knowledge of who hears what allows it to distinguish actions that resemble one another at the level of words.

At the close, gratitude to the king and plans for a marriage can proceed. There is no further scene guaranteeing how Orgon will hear his wife and children tomorrow. The table has changed this judgment. It need not become the required furniture of every future disagreement.

What remains is the image of him underneath it, unable to interrupt, depending on someone else to arrange what he is finally prepared to hear. His family should not always need such a table in order to reach him.