Moliere, by way of Prof. Hemkes

 The most readable formation of letters of the alphabet on this photograph is the name of the writer featured in both volumes--vols 1 and 2 of the plays of Moliere, an old French playwright (17th century). Here's the way one source describes him:

Molière was born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in 1622, the son of a prosperous upholstery tradesmen. Educated by Parisian Jesuits, the young Jean-Baptiste had a promising inheritance awaiting him in his father’s trade; instead, however, he turned to acting, adopted the stage name of Molière, and aimed to become a great tragic actor. His first theatrical enterprise in Paris did not go well, and Molière spent the next thirteen years touring the provinces of France. During this time he began writing short comic farces, inspired by fashionable French verse comedy as well as the improvisational Italian commedia dell’arte. These comic trifles were the building blocks of The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and the five-act verse comedies that would later prove to be some of the most enduring works of French drama.

Both volumes, 1 and 2, are respectfully encased in plastic, which helps explain their longevity, having been published, according to the title pages, in 1858, 200 years after many of the dramas inside were performed, and just about 200 years ago. Let me be perfectly candid here--these two books, drawn from my own library (they escaped the flood!) are of no use whatsoever to me--they're in Moliere's own French, which I can't hope to read. 

They're mine because I'm the one who ended up with them. I didn't spot them on some bibliophile's old-and-precious shelf, order them from e-bay or some other dealer in antiquities. I'd have to say, I suppose, I inherited them. I came by them having been designated by someone in the family tree as the person in this family who actually cares about such things, about such books. Once along a long time ago, they belonged to my great-grandfather, a college professor 150 years ago at Christian Reformed School that became Calvin College.

These two books are mine only because the name written on the title page belongs to my grandfather's father-in-law (subsequently my great-grandfather-in-law) Geert Hemkes.

When I first discovered his name in these books, I was shocked because that he owned the works of a French playwright and actor seemed preposterous. I mean, it seemed a scandal. Did the administration of the college know that he had books like Moliere's plays in his library? what about the school's constituents? After all, not all that long before, Moliere wrote scripts that satirized the church's social positioning and its fairly obvious hypocrisy. He was no friend of the church.

My great-grandpa was. I simply assumed that Grandpa Geert fit the stereotype--if he was strict and principled, so was everyone else in the Dutch Reformed world back then. 

I loved finding Moliere's dramatic works in whatever fragment of his library ended up in our house, honestly loved it. It made me think that what I had assumed through the years could have been dead wrong. Maybe the old professor was, gasp!, something of a liberal.

But there's more to this story.