Antoine Jacob

His first productions, Le Mariage de rien (The void marriage) and Les Bestes raisonnables (The Reasoning Beasts), were the kind of one act farces that were fashionable at the time.

On the isle of Circe, Ulysses encounters the beasts she has transformed from humans: an ass that was once a doctor, a lion that had been a valet, a female doe and a horse, all of whom denounce the decadence of the times and resist being changed back.

[1] His first play to bring him to notice, however, was another satirical one-act verse drama, The Impromptu of the Hôtel de Condé (1663), written as a tit-for-tat response to one by Molière that had mocked his father Zacharie.

Having produced a play more or less annually between 1660 and 1678, he turned tax collector in Provence with such success that in 1684 he was recalled to Paris to receive the post of Farmer General but died on the journey.

[4] In 1999 there appeared Lovers and Executioners, an English-language adaption by the American playwright John Strand of La Femme juge et partie[5][6]