J ean-Baptiste Poquelin is tired.
That evening of February 17, 1673, when he played his already famous “imaginary patient” at the Palais-Royal theater, he sensed that he was perhaps not only going to
“counterfeit the dead”
… He was not the only one to guess that his last hour is near.
In the dressing rooms, the marquises who cackle loudly, the Trissotins who argue over the status of the fattest bourgeois, the bishop who intends not to give the actor a Christian burial: all these precious ridiculous voyeurists wait, with more or less haste and excitement, the fateful moment - it will be their revenge on the genius who made fun of them so much.
In Molière's troupe (himself becoming a Molière character), we tremble a little.
Between two milk baths, her supposed lover moans.
The other actors wonder: what will become of them.
Will they survive when the boss leaves?
Or will they join their rivals from the Burgundy theater to merge into a single troupe (which we…
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