Précieuses ridicules

Two provincial sisters arrive in Paris dreaming of refined love and witty conversation. Their uncle arranges marriages with respectable men, but the sisters dismiss them with contempt, too crude, too ordinary for their delicate sensibilities. Enter Mascarille and Jodelet, two wily servants who pose as aristocrats of the highest refinement. The sisters swoon. But the joke is on them: their precious affectations have been their undoing, and the men they scorned were the ones pulling strings all along. Molière's vicious, sparkling satire exposes the absurdity of artificial refinement and the dangers of confusing fantasy with reality. More than three centuries later, it remains a gleeful demolition of pretension in all its forms.