He also played in several of Molière’s comedies. He took the part of the physician in Pourceaugnac and he played the comical Muphti in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
ONE OF THE TWENTY-FOUR VIOLINS OF THE KING, 1688
Lully ruled like a king.
Lully was the King of Music, not only in France, but in all of Europe in those grand days when France stood at the head of all nations in wealth and power under her “Sun-King.”
One day in 1687, while conducting a Te Deum in honor of the King’s recovery from an illness, Lully, “the better to demonstrate his zeal,” the contemporary account relates, “he himself beat the time with the cane he used for this purpose, and he struck himself in the heat of action a blow upon the end of his foot. This caused a small blister.”[42] The quack doctor who was summoned was incompetent and Lully died from blood-poisoning. He left four houses in Paris and a large fortune.
His portraits, which represent him in the big flowing curls of the day—much like the King’s own wig—and with large heavy features, are said by contemporaries to flatter him.
Lully was an undoubted genius and he was always clever. We sometimes wonder if he did not know what he was doing when he wrote his satirical song on “Big Mademoiselle,” who had plenty of enemies ready to laugh at her expense.
Lully always knew how to attract attention to himself and he never seems to have made a mistake.