French Literature Companion:
Les Précieuses ridicules
Précieuses ridicules, Les. One-act farce by Molière, first performed 1659. Two spurned suitors, La Grange and Du Croisy, decide to take revenge on the affected Cathos and Magdelon whose ideas about courtship and society have been culled from the novels of Madeleine de Scudéry. The suitors ask their valets, Mascarille and Jodelet, to dress up as members of the nobility and fashionable salongoers and to visit the gullible girls. The resultant conversation is the occasion for mordant satire of the current literary and social vogue for preciosity, which earned Molière the hostility of at least one powerful Parisian clique. The farce was the first of Molière's great theatrical successes after his return to Paris in 1658.
[Ian Maclean]
