In February 1673, Moliere collapsed with a tuberculosis hemorrhage while playing a hypochondriac in The Imaginary Invalid, finished the performance, and died hours later, wearing green, a color French actors still avoid on stage. This deep dive explores how Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, born into the Parisian bourgeoisie with a purchased royal post as the king’s keeper of carpets waiting for him, threw it all away at 21 to start a theater troupe that went bankrupt and landed him in debtors’ prison.

We follow the twelve-year provincial tour where he studied commedia dell’arte and replaced physical masks with psychological ones, the make-or-break 1658 performance before Louis XIV that he rescued with an improvised farce, and the campaign of satire that followed: The School for Wives, Tartuffe, Don Juan, and his obsessive war on the medical profession. We also examine the incest rumors his enemies spread about his wife Armande, the king’s intervention as godfather, the invention of the comedy-ballet, and the secret midnight burial the church forced on him.

• Why the Catholic Church denied actors civil rights and Christian burial in 17th-century France
• How mocking the nobility and clergy served Louis XIV’s consolidation of absolute power
• The quarrel of The School for Wives and Moliere’s strategy of doubling down on his critics
• Comedy-ballet as a scheduling hack that became a new genre with Lully and Beauchamp
• Tartuffe, Harpagon, and galere: the words Moliere left permanently in the French language