Here we deal with what might be called the first stirrings of musical comedy. While Molière's personal choice as an actor, playwright, and company manager, was for farce and the classics, he was increasingly subject to the choices made for him by Louis XIV. The King was Absolute. The king was not a modest man. His philosophy of life was set down in his Memoirs (italics mine):

Louis dictated much of what, when, where and even how Molière was to write during the next five years. Between 1667 and his death in 1673, eight of his remaining fourteen plays were court entertainments given in the gardens of various palaces, and his collaborator on six of them was Jean-Baptiste Lully. Lully had been for some time the supervisor of music for the king, and when, back in 1661 at Vaux-le-Vicomte, he and Molière hurriedly devised a new form that alternated interludes of music and dance with the novel addition of comic acts, the two artists became an ongoing team working at the pleasure of the king. Their collaboration may have begun in Les Fâcheux (The Bores) with a simple scheme in which the play stopped now and then and the dancers came out and did a short number.