The story of Molière, one of the greatest comic geniuses the world has ever known

It was a first night like no other. The young Poquelin – now styling himself the Sieur de Molière, a stage name by which he’d be known for ever more – along with members of the Béjart family – Madeleine, her brother Joseph, her sister Geneviève and her youngest brother Louis – formed the nucleus of the troupe, with others joining, coming and going, rising and falling as time passed. He gained the patronage of a great personage, the Prince de Conti, who’d been a much younger pupil at the College de Clermont during Molière’s time there, but who would reject the company and anything to do with the theatre once the shady Compagnie du Saint-Sacrament – an ultra-religious society of bigots and bores who would cross swords with Molière several years later – had converted him. *** In a moment of sweet fantasy, the great French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine imagined a scene in which four friends – himself, the satirist Nicholas Boileau, Molière and his fellow playwright Jean Racine – all visited the newly planted gardens of Versailles one summer’s day. He was collaborating with Lully on court spectaculars – Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Psyché in 1670 and 1671 respectively – and he still had two major new plays that he would write in 1672: Les Femmes Savantes, a more sophisticated riff on the subject of supercilious bluestockings than Les Precieuses Ridicules, and Le Malade Imaginnaire, which would shudder onto the stage in such a strange echo of Molière’s life and presage of its end.