Philippe Néricault Destouches

Philippe Néricault Destouches (9 April 1680 – 4 July 1754) was a French playwright who wrote 22 plays.

When he was nineteen years of age, he became secretary to M. de Puysieux, the French ambassador to Switzerland.

Destouches wished to revive the comedy of character as understood by Molière, but he thought it desirable that the moral should be directly expressed.

After eleven years of diplomatic service, Destouches returned to the stage in 1727 with Le Philosophe Marié, followed in 1730 by Les Philosophes Amoureux and in 1732 by Le Glorieux, a picture of the struggle then beginning between the old nobility and the wealthy parvenus who found opportunity in the poverty of France.

vi) was the origin of the oft-quoted maxim, “The absent are always in the wrong.”[1] Bergen Evans, in his Dictionary of Quotations, said: “Though Néricault ... is credited with the first statement of this thought in this form, the idea is old and, in other forms, universal.”[2]In "le Glorieux" he wrote "To critic is easy, only the art is difficult".