still in the same prolific year, Moliere returned to social satire in _Les Facheux_, an audacious lampoon on the forms of fashionable boredom common among the courtiers of the time. In 1662 appeared _L'Ecole des Femmes_, which is generally considered the best of Moliere's plays before _Tartuffe_. A certain slyness about the character of Agnes is its only drawback. This gave occasion to the brilliant and most amusing _Critique de L'Ecole des Femmes_, 1663. Here the author is once more the satirist of contemporary society, which he introduces as criticising his own work. _L'Impromptu de Versailles_ (same date), according to a curious habit which Moliere did not originate, brings the author himself and his troupe in their own names and persons before the spectator. _Le Mariage Force_, 1664, a slight piece, was worked up into a ballet for the court. _La Princesse d'Elide_ (same date) is Moliere's most important court piece, or _comedie-ballet_, and, though necessarily artificial, has great beauty. Next in point of composition came _The Hypocrite_, that is to say _Tartuffe_, but the difficulties which this met with made _Le Festin de Pierre_, 1665, appear first. This is a tragi-comic working up of the Don Juan story, and is of a different class from any other of Moliere's comedies. It has been thought, but without sufficient ground, that Moliere here gave expression to a modified form of the freethinking which was so common at the time. It may, perhaps, be more truly regarded as an excursion into romantic comedy--the comedy which, like Shakespeare's work, is not directly satiric on society or on individuals, but tells stories poetically and in dramatic form with comic touches. It is noteworthy that Don Juan is of all Moliere's heroes least exposed to the charge of being an abstraction rather than a man. The pleasant trifle, _L'Amour Medecin_ (same date), was succeeded by _Le Misanthrope_, 1666. Here Moliere's special vein of satire was worked most deeply and to most profit, though the reproach that the handling is somewhat too serious for comedy is not undeserved. Alceste the impatient but not cynical hero, Celimene the coquette, Oronte the fop, Eliante the reasonable woman, Arsinoe the mischief-maker, are all immortal types. The admirable farce-comedy of the _Medecin malgre Lui_ (same date), founded upon an old _fabliau_, followed, and this was succeeded almost immediately by the graceful pastoral of _Melicerte_, the amusing _Pastorale Comique_, and the slight sketch of _Le Sicilien, ou L'Amour Peintre_. At last, in 1667, _Tartuffe_ got itself represented. It is a vigorous and almost ferocious satire on religious pretension masking vice, and many of its separate strokes are of the dramatist's happiest. Here however, more than elsewhere, is felt the drawback of the method. Comparing Tartuffe with Iago, we have all the difference between a skilful but not wholly probable presentation of wickedness in the abstract, and a picture of a wicked man.