Thus wrote Grimarest in 1705. Three centuries later, we hardly know Molière's life, or his career, any better. We have only a few verifiable facts about his childhood and training. His thirteen years of life in the provinces have left few clues. Even in his last years in Paris, when his career as dramatist is well documented, his private life remains unknown. Moreover, Molière did not talk about himself. Few are the texts where he writes in the first person: a couple of prefaces, petitions and acknowledgements, generally linked to the debates arising from his work, and in the work itself a few passages where he acts out his own role as actor-director-author. Thus we can only get a feel of the man through what his contemporaries said; and their accounts generally take the form of unreliable anecdotes through which either his enemies sought to ridicule him, or else his friends aimed to make him the hero of a golden legend.