14

At the death of Molière on 17 February 1673, the text of his last comedy, Le Malade imaginaire, was left in a provisional state. The Palais-Royal comedians, who would give some more performances in March 1673, were soon faced with such difficulties that they could not perform the play again in its definitive version before May 1674. As soon as 1673, taking advantage of the situation, some comedians from the country got hold of the non-definitive text to perform the play in the provinces, while Dutch and French booksellers published pre-original editions with an incomplete and faulty text. Then, in 1674, two editions appeared successively, under the same false address of Jean Sambix in Cologne, which gave at last the complete and reworked text as it had been performed in May of the same year. The archaeological study of those two editions of Le Malade imaginaire shows that they were printed in Paris by Claude Audinet and Claude Blageart, two workshops working regularly for Jean Ribou, once Molière’s sole publisher. At that time Ribou was unable to practice his trade because of his difficulties and the sentences passed on him. Although associated by contract with Claude Barbin and Denis Thierry, two booksellers with whom he had equally shared all the rights to Molière’s comedies, it is likely that Jean Ribou did not hesitate to betray his colleagues to secretly give the definitive text of Le Malade imaginaire. His past as a daring bookseller, used to unlawful doings, can explain the discovery of the two 1674 Sambix editions, which must be seen as the original editions of Molière’s last comedy.