Word: poquelin
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...story tells it, taking an occasional liberty with the facts, Moliére was born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. His father was a master upholsterer and a minor functionary of the court, whose duty it was to prepare the king's bed three months of the year. He intended that his son would turn down the royal sheets after he had gone, but the young man decided to become a lawyer and went to Orléans for training. He eventually concluded that all lawyers are frauds and decided to become a legitimate fraud, which is to say an actor...
...taught some 220,000 students, including the future St. Francis de Sales. The Jesuits welcomed anyone who could hurdle the entrance exams. They lured rich and poor, Jansenists and Protestants, Bourbon princes, colonial Americans, Turks and even Chinese. The best students were often uncut diamonds like Jean Baptiste Poquelin, son of a long line of upholsterers. The Jesuits put him on a diet of Terence, Lucretius, and French drama. Wielding a pen sharper than a needle, he became the playwright Molière. Perverts & Premiers. All this so impressed Louis XIV, the Sun King, that in 1682 he took over...
...February 1673, the great French dramatist Jean Baptiste Poquelin, whose nom de plume was Moliere, ignored his failing health and insisted on acting in Le Malade Imaginaire, the last play he ever wrote. Unlike the hero of his comedy, Moliere, 51, was suffering from no imaginary illness. He had a convulsion on the stage of Paris' Palais Royal Theater, was carried home, where he died after a violent fit of coughing...
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...
Jean Baptiste Poquelin, son of respectable parents, assumed the name "Móliere" when he joined an unrespectable troupe of vagabond players. For 13 years he mimed through the provinces, died at 51, coughing and spitting blood, less than an hour after playing the title role in his Le Malade Imaginaire. Concludes Dr. Moorman: "Móliere rendered a great service to humanity through his satirical arraignment of the medical profession. The antiquated and extravagant practices of the Paris Faculty . . . inflamed his genius for reform. . . . Soon after Moliere's death, Paris was leading the world in medical thought...