Two received ideas beset our vision of eighteenth-century French comedy. The first is that the comic stage was so haunted by the ghost of Molière that dramatists had little or no room for creative manoeuvre. Frequently performed and constantly cited, Molière's plays put eighteenth-century comic dramatists in an impossible situation, as the poet figure suggests in the prologue to Dufresny's three-act prose comedy Le Négligent, first performed at the Comédie-Française in February 1692, less than twenty years after Molière's death: ‘Molière a bien gâté le théâtre. Si l'on donne dans son goût: Bon, dit aussitôt le critique, cela est pillé, c'est Molière tout pur; s'en écarte-t-on un peu: Oh! ce n'est pas là Molière’ (‘Molière has really spoilt the theatre. If you write like him: Right, says the critic straightaway, that's borrowed, it's pure Molière; and if you try to be a little different: Oh! that's not Molière’) (Scene 3). And the second received idea – the first notwithstanding – is that the only comic dramatists of any lasting interest and significance in eighteenth-century France, and therefore the only worthy successors to Molière, were Marivaux and Beaumarchais. However, neither of these received ideas, on closer inspection, holds good, since eighteenth-century French comedy, encompassing plays performed at public theatres in Paris (the Comédie-Française, the Théâtre Italien, the fairground theatres) and in the provinces, as well as on innumerable private stages, or théâtres de société, across the country, was a site of enormous creativity and experimentation as well as a space of significant contestation in the context of the Enlightenment.