Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de Molière. This engraving, drawn and executed in the early 1680s, depicts Molière beneath a clock, showing two twenty-five, supposedly the hour of his death; it is loosely based on a Pierre Mignard portrait from 1655 of Molière at age 35. [Bibliothèque Nationale, Département des Estampes, N2, vol 1267].

From A field of honor: writers, court culture and public theater in French literary life from Racine to the Revolution by Gregory S. Brown