ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the various ironies surrounding Moliere’s death are no less intriguing for Moliere having survived long enough to die in his own bed. Moliere was extremely ill during the writing and staging of his final play, The Imaginary Invalid, dying a few hours after the play’s fourth performance. In his own era, Moliere was so devoted to French Neoclassical expectations that of the thirty-six major plays that he wrote and produced in his lifetime, only his Don Juan dared to break with one of the unities, and its break with the unity of space is relatively inconsequential. That Moliere himself was deeply invested in the question of what precisely stood between himself and death comes into clearer focus by considering a quote Michel Baron attributes to Moliere in the hours before the final performance.
