Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme [French English Bilingual Edition]

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Wannabe Aristocrat)
by Molière
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme aims at the set ways of the rich middle class, which yearns for nobility, but has not been born or bred for it. The play takes place at Mr. Jourdain's house in Paris. Mr. Jourdain is a rich "bourgeois" whose father was a merchant who made money. He would like to be a nobleman (which by definition and by birth is impossible), and to this aim, he hires all kinds of people to dress him, to teach him talk, fence, dance like a nobleman. In the process, he makes himself ridiculous, who is obvious to many around him. This also reflects the view that for him (and he certainly was not unique) mimicking behavior meant the real thing.
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme was acted before the King for the first time at Chambord, on October 14, 1670, and on November 28 at the Palais Royal. After the second representation, Louis XIV. said to Molière, "You have never written anything which amused me more, and your play is excellent." But it obtained a still greater success in Paris, where the bourgeois willingly and good-humouredly laughed at what they deemed their neighbours' weaknesses. Molière acted the part of the Bourgeois.

About the Bilingual Edition
Project Bilingual (A division of Wolf Pup Books) is a continuing project making available great original French writers' texts along with their English translation. This edition, which offers after every original language paragraph its translation, makes both grammar and vocabulary checks as painless as possible. Idiomatic forms that could be overlooked can be easily detected.
Furthermore, large paragraphs have been broken down to much smaller units so that the check is as effortless as possible. We do hope that by reading French writers that defined the language itself or whose work permeated the French culture, you will be able to get the maximum benefit from this language series. Although this edition is not a replacement for traditional methods of learning language, it is a very powerful tool to speed up the process once you have attained the intermediate level and beyond.
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