This is the earliest of the five-act verse comedies of manners for which Molière is chiefly remembered today. Molière himself took the main role, that of Arnolphe, a respected bourgeois of Paris, who has an obsessive fear of bein cuckolded. He has adopted a four-year-old orphan, Agnès, and has had her brought up in complete ignorance, planning to make her his wife. He believes that her naivety will preserve her virtue. When the play begins, he is 42 and she is 18. He returns from a trip and runs in Horace, the son of an old friend. Horace is new to Paris, but has already fallen in love – with Agnès. He fails to connect Arnolphe with the absent M. de la Souche, Agnès’s amourous guardian: he is not to know that Arnolphe has recently changed his name to M. de la Souche for snobbish reasons, so he innocently tells Arnolphe every detail of his new romance.