An ‘in context’ biography. What is available to a biographer when he is deprived of all correspondence and personal papers and is reduced to working on impersonal documents and archives? What can he do if his subject lived at a time when it was unthinkable to reveal anything about oneself in a work of fiction? What remains if he wants to eliminate all the invented tales and imaginary anecdotes contained in the first ‘lives of Molière’? What is left is to contextualise Molière. There is the historical, documentary (and thereby sociological) contexualisation that, over the last century, has radically transformed the traditional image of Molière the homme du théâtre; the aesthetic contextualisation made possible by the last fifty years of studies of galanterie, which can only be fully understood when linked to its socio-literary context; the recontextualisation of the conditions in which Molière’s plays were created; the contextualisation of theatre practices; the contextualisation of his sources in connection with their aesthetic context… Contextualising Molière, is to leave behind the vicious circles (the misanthropic Molière), legends (the jealous Molière) and errors (the sick Molière and medicine) to capture as best one can one of the most extraordinary comic dramatists of all time.