Word: jourdain
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...Monsieur Jourdain...
...Moliere's chief contribution here was the creation of the leading character, Monsieur Jourdain, a wealthy but penny-pinching middle class tradesman who will nevertheless squander any amount of money to acquire the social graces and intellectual refinement that characterize people of "quality." Jourdain will live forever as the man who was overcome with astonished glee upon learning that what he had been speaking for forty years was prose. But he is also the man who puts on his gown in order to hear music better; and who, on being asked whether he understands the Latin that has just been...
...from Molière something so relatively familiar and so lightly entertaining as Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Far from the great Molière of Le Misanthrope, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme is indeed not only broad Molière, but also broad comedy. Its picture of the rich, gullible upstart M. Jourdain, who desires, with the most impassioned fatuousness, to live like-and among-persons of quality, is a sort of satiric-strip characterization. There is a delightful absurdity about him, whether in the family scenes, or with the lackeys he yells for "just to see if they heard...
Molière's joking is broad, but his character sense is broad-bottomed; somehow, though M. Jourdain's head swims with wild delusions, his clumsy feet stay on the ground. And the Comédie Franchise's Louis Seigner keeps him that way, makes him seem human while remaining idiotic, and so childish as to be likable. Actor Seigner's would-be gentleman becomes a solid center round which revolve a succession of sideshows...
Seventeenth-Century Moliére (real name: Jean Baptiste Poquelin) might have been a little startled at what has happened to his doltish M. Jourdain, who was already an outrageous enough butt. Everybody swindled and snickered at him-the dancing masters and fencing masters hired to teach him the graces; the count who was to present him at court; the marquise with whom he craved a modish liaison. But Moliére's butt-who suddenly learned with rapture that he had been speaking prose all his life-was a passably solid character. When Zany Clark gets through with...