The chair in which Molière played Argan on 17 February 1673 is kept at the Comédie-Française

On 17 February 1673, seated in this very chair, the dying Molière played the part of Argan, the "imaginary invalid" who is forever convinced that something ails him. In the play, Argan resolves to feign death in order to see how those around him will behave once he is gone. So when, in the final scene, the 51-year-old Molière suddenly felt genuinely unwell (his heart seized, and he all but collapsed into the chair, gasping for breath), the audience merely laughed the louder: no one could have supposed that by the evening after the performance the comic dramatist would truly be dead. The chair in which the theatrical career of the creator of classical comedy ended with such cruel irony is kept at the Comédie-Française.