Moliere, taken ill, was rushed off his own stage one night in his fifty-first year and

died
with celerity. His wife had that night acted with him as Argan's wife, Angelique, in a
fatalistic play on the uselessness of doctors, the uselessness of mind, of hope itself before
fate, as the brain's fault struck, taking him down. From earliest adulthood, he had lived
for the theater and perfected his sense of life's various rhythms as best he could. Clearly,
he loved the hopeless human ego. How could he not? To show even our basest acts part
of a larger music, is that not a quixotic love? It's pleasant to think of the maestro pacing
the empty stage alone, before curtain, picking up the various props. A bell, a purse, a fur
cloak, some syringes... He was a playwright with none of the coldness of poets; he
wanted the linkage of life to life, the audience close. And in another of his plays (mortally
comic, comically mortal) a misanthrope is rendered laughable, self-banished at the end,
the message clear: complicity or nothing; that is our fate. To play at ideals is a fine
distraction.

You can be sure Moliere's funeral was quite a play, random joy and grief radiating all
directions, strange laughter, broken lines, actors watching the monumental drama seep
away, tongue-tied and giddy with uncertainty as the simple human lover stepped over the
unpolished manuscript none of us can edit.