This year marks the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Molière, sometimes called France’s Shakespeare, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in January 1622 in the center of Paris. France has recently been plagued by doubts and confusion about her identity and history, just as her English-speaking cousins have about their own: all the more reason to celebrate an enduring triumph of French culture who continues to entertain audiences. A book shop in Vincennes on the edge of Paris announced on its window that Molière is more relevant in 2022 than ever.

That may be publicity, but seeing a recent production of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, a minor masterpiece of Molière’s from 1669, at Paris’s Comédie Saint-Michel, in which an eager doctor brandishes an oversized needle before his terrified victim, makes one see the point. Throughout his career as a playwright, Molière mocked doctors and showed skepticism with regard to what it is now called “following the science,” doubtless agreeing with his Dom Juan that medicine was mere superstition. His last masterpiece made fun of his own anxiety about his health, while his maladies proved to be not imaginary when he died the evening after the play’s fourth performance.

It is odd that Molière, a figure at Louis XIV’s court, covered his tracks so completely, leaving us only his plays and three surviving poems but no letters or diaries.

Just as Shakespeare is sometimes said to have remade or even created the English language, our French