Monsieur De Pourceaugnac

Monsieur de Pourceaugnac is Molière at his most audacious, a farce that attacks the medical establishment while delivering some of the broadest comedy in French theater. The title character is a provincial gentleman from Limoges who arrives in Paris expecting to claim his promised bride, Julia. What he finds instead is a city full of people determined to make him look ridiculous. Julia's true love, Éraste, and his scheming Neapolitan servant Sbrigani engineer increasingly elaborate schemes to expose Pourceaugnac as a fool, culminating in the famous sequence where the poor man is disguised as a woman to escape his creditors. Molière himself created the role, performing it night after night to roaring audiences. The satire on doctors is vicious and personal, Molière was chronically ill and had already lost his first wife to tuberculosis, making his mockery of pompous physicians less a literary exercise than a furious indictment. Three centuries later, the play still works because the mechanics of comic deception remain timeless, and because Pourceaugnac himself, blustering and confused and somehow sympathetic in his ridiculousness, is a character we still recognize: the rube from the provinces outsmarted by worldly cynicism.