Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme

1670

At Chambord, Moliere's company performed a new comedy-ballet before Louis XIV mocking social climbing and fashionable intellectual pretensions. The scene in which Monsieur Jourdain discovers he has been speaking prose all his life without knowing it became the most quoted moment in French theater, and the play remains an enduring satire on the anxieties of the aspiring middle class.