The Final Performance

On February 17, 1673, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known to the world as Molière, sat in his dressing room at the Palais-Royal theater, applying makeup with trembling hands. His wife Armande pleaded with him to cancel the performance. He had been coughing blood for days, and the bitter February cold made breathing agony. But the troupe depended on him—no Molière meant no pay for actors, musicians, stagehands. Besides, he had a point to prove.

"Le Malade Imaginaire" (The Imaginary Invalid) was his newest comedy, a savage satire of hypochondria and medical charlatanry. The irony was not lost on anyone: Molière, genuinely ill, was playing Argan, who only imagined himself sick. His enemies at court whispered that God was punishing the impious comedian who had dared mock everything sacred—religion, medicine, marriage, even the King's nobles.

As he struggled into Argan's nightgown and cap, Molière must have reflected on the strange journey that had brought him here. The respectable bourgeois boy who had thrown away his inheritance to become a vagrant actor. The provincial failure who had conquered Paris. The king's favorite who remained an outsider. The comic genius who understood human folly because he had lived it all.

The theater bell rang. Time for the show. Molière stood, steadying himself against the table, and walked toward the stage. For two hours, he would make Paris laugh at death, pretending to be a well man pretending to be sick while his own body betrayed him. During the final scene, as Argan underwent a mock medical examination, Molière convulsed—the audience laughed, thinking it part of the act. He finished the performance, took his bows, and collapsed.

Four hours later, he was dead. The Church refused him burial in consecrated ground—actors were excommunicated unless they renounced their profession on their deathbed. Only the king's intervention secured him a nighttime burial in a corner of the cemetery. But Molière had already achieved his immortality. In theaters around the world, audiences would continue to see themselves in his comic mirror, laughing at their own follies, forever cured and forever ill.