attested to by the king's not permitting a public performance of it for five years although he himself thought it amusing. The king had good reason to believe that the play, with the grasping, hypocritical Tartuffe, clad in clerical garb and hair shirt, would offend the powerful French higher clergy (Britannica 91).
             The ever-popular Le Misanthrope (1666) pictures a young suitor, Alceste, sincere but humorless, trying to woo Célimène, a flirtatious court soubrette. Because this play does not end happily, it is sometimes characterized as a tragedy (Earley and Keil 92).
             Others among Molière's most successful plays (numbering about 33) are L'avare (The Miser, 1668), a stark “comedy,” loosely based on a work by the Roman comic dramatist Plautus, and Le médecin malgré lui (The Physician in Spite of Himself, 1666), a satire on the medical profession. Le bour
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