Synopsis
D'Amville is a wealthy French nobleman and a cynical, ruthless, Machiavellian atheist. He engineers the murder of his brother, the Baron Montferrers, and schemes to ruin his nephew Charlemont, who is away on military service, and to possess the nephew's inheritance. When Charlemont (the "honest man" of the subtitle) returns home, he finds that he has been declared dead, and his fiancée Castabella has been married to D'Amville's son Rousard. Charlemont confronts his uncle and fights with Sebastian, D'Amville's younger son; Charlemont wins the duel but spares his cousin's life. D'Amville has Charlemont arrested. Sebastian, at heart a decent and well-meaning fellow, uses money given him by D'Amville to bail Charlemont from prison. D'Amville feigns a reconciliation with his nephew, but secretly plans his murder; he also attempts to rape Castabella, but is interrupted.
Charlemont kills his intended assassin. D'Amville is able to arrange the arrest of Charlemont and Castabella on a false charge of adultery. But the aristocrat's machinations begin to sour; Sebastian is killed in a duel with his lover's husband, Baron Belforest, and the sickly Rousard dies as well. D'Amville, facing the collapse of his dynastic ambitions, begins to lose his reason. In the play's climactic scene, Charlemont and Castabella are on the scaffold, facing their death sentences; but D'Amville smashes his own skull with the axe intended for them. With his dying breaths he confesses his murder of Montferrers and his other crimes. Charlemont and Castabella are freed, and can marry, as originally intended, at the play's end.
The primary plot is supported by a second-level action centering on Levidulchia, Castabella's stepmother. Levidulchia and Castabella represent the alternative negative and positive responses to similar situations: both have unwanted and unloved husbands, and both are attracted to other men. But Levidulchia is sensuous and unprincipled where Castabella remains virtuous. Levidulchia pursues an adulterous relationship with Sebastian, and attempts to seduce another man too. Her affair results in a duel that causes the deaths of both participants, her lover Sebastian and her husband Baron Belforest. In its aftermath, Levidulchia commits suicide.
A tertiary comic subplot features the clownish Languebeau Snuffe, who attempts to seduce Soquette, Castabella's servant. Snuffe is Baron Belforest's chaplain; he is a Puritan, and also a hypocrite who is tangentally involved in both the superior plots as a willing stooge for both D'Amville and Levidulchia. His attempted seduction of Soquette is a ridiculous failure.
The play takes a negative view of personal vengeance, stressing instead divine judgement upon sinners and wrongdoers. The ghost of Montferrers appears in the play — but unlike the ghost in Hamlet and other plays of the era (which draw on the precedents of the revenge ghosts in the plays of Seneca the Younger), Montferrers' ghost counsels Charlemont to abjure revenge, to leave it in the hands of divine providence.
Read more about this topic: The Atheist's Tragedy