Busts in "Hall of Honor" at the Comédie Française. This photograph shows the Gallerie d'honneur of the Comédie Française, as it appears today; it still includes Caffieri's and Pigalle's eighteenth-century busts. Reproduction courtesy of the BCF. Photograph by Patricia LeGras.

Comédie Française at Odéon. The theater at the Place de l'Odéon, built to house the Comédie Française, opened in 1783. The new hall held about 200 more spectators than the Thuileries theater, where the royal actors had preformed for most of the century; more importantly, considerably more of the seats were in loges. This hand-colored engraving, by Jean-François Janninet from a drawing by Jean-Nicolas Louis Durand from the 1780s, is reproduced here from the BCF.

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de Molière. This engraving, drawn and executed in the early 1680s, depicts Molière beneath a clock, showing two twenty-five, supposedly the hour of his death; it is loosely based on a Pierre Mignard portrait from 1655 of Molière at age 35. [Bibliothèque Nationale, Département des Estampes, N2, vol 1267].

Voltaire. Voltaire's image as an autonomous writer, nearly unique in the eighteenth century, is evident in a 1765 portrait drawing of him at work at his desk, at his estate of Ferney. It was reproduced in numerous engravings at the end and after his life — as in this engraving by G. W. Weise, from 1779, which appears from the BN-Éstampes (Collection Henin, 9655).

Pierre Laurent Buirette de Belloy. This frontispiece appeared in the first volume of the Oeuvres completes de M. de Belloy, citoyen de Calais (Paris: Moutard, 1779); it is reproduced here courtesy of Columbia University, Butler Library [843 B 415 I, v. 1].

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de Molière. This is an eighteenth-century engraving by the royal engraver Jacques-Firmin Beauvarlet based on a seventeenth-century portrait painted by Sébastien Bourdon. It was published by Jean-Baptiste Mailly in 1774 Bibliothèque Nationale, Département des Estampes, N3, vol. 62. The depiction of Molière as a writer is a visual motif that appears only in post-humous portraits, yet had become standard by the mid-eighteenth century.

Voltaire. This image is a 1762 engraving by Étienne Ficquet based on Maurice Quentin de la Tour's portrait of 1736, "Voltaire à 41 ans;" it appears courtesy of the Library of Congress, Division of Special Collections, Rosenwald Collection [#1649].