TOULOUSE
The observatory gardens open their doors for a night-time play.
La comédie d’Épideaure is one of Molière’s best-known works:
Monsieur Jourdain is a rich bourgeois who has only one obsession: to become a nobleman, to be considered a “man of quality”. To achieve this, he is prepared to do anything, including tyrannically sacrificing his family, his people and his possessions. Whatever it takes, he has to equip himself with everything he needs to appear to be a man of ‘quality’.
To this end, he incurs the most extravagant expenses. The worry is that this good man, despite all his will and money, has no talent, no wit, no grace. You can’t buy the status of a man of quality! Because in order to look good, you have to be good, and Monsieur Jourdain, whatever he does, is not noble, and never will be. Where once he was a respected bourgeois and family man, now, through his shortcomings, he has become a man covered in ridicule, whom everyone laughs at and … takes advantage of with impunity.