This book provides a global interpretation of Molière's work based upon a study of the secret behind his poetry. The author suggests that this secret consists of the conjunction between Molière's two contradictory goals : that of portraying the mores of his time, which involves plausibility, and that of making people laugh, which implies immoderate caricaturisation. To combine them, the poet merely had to observe that his human models and their own foolish behavior sometimes exemplified these caricatural deformities : since even reality may conceal ridicule, he knew that sustaining plausibility required him to use comic exaggeration. This book discusses, one by one, the components of the aesthetic of ridicule that resulted from this point of view.

Patrick Dandrey, who is a professor at Université de Paris-Sorbonne, has written some twenty books and over a hundred articles on 17th-century French literature. A leading expert on Molière and La Fontaine, he is the President of the Société des Amis de Jean de la Fontaine and the Chief Editor of Le Fablier magazine.