on 5 August 1667. Immediately the following day, on 6 August, as the king was away from Paris, Guillaume de Lamoignon, first president of the Paris Parlement, censored public performances. Even throughout Molière's conflict with the church, Louis XIV continued to support the playwright; it is possible that without the King's support, Molière might have been excommunicated. Although public performances of the play were banned, private performances for the French aristocracy did occur. In 1669, after Molière's detractors lost much of their influence, he was finally allowed to perform the final version of his play. However, due to all the controversy surrounding Tartuffe, Molière mostly refrained from writing such incisive plays as this one again. An ally of Molière (believed by Robert McBride to be François de La Mothe Le Vayer, but a hotly-debated point) responded to criticism of Tartuffe in 1667 with a Lettre sur la comédie de l'Imposteur. The anonymous author sought to defend the play to the public by describing the plot in detail and then rebutting two common arguments made for why the play was banned. The first being that theatrical works should not discuss religion at all; the second being that Tartuffe's actions on stage, followed by his pious speech, would make the audience think that they were to act as Tartuffe did. This section of letter contradicts the latter by describing how Tartuffe's actions are worthy of ridicule, in essence comic, and therefore by no means an endorsement. Centuries later, when the satirical anticlerical magazine La Calotte started publication in 1906, its first editorial asserted that Laughter is the only weapon feared by the soldiers of Tartuffe; the new magazine proposed to effectively deploy that weapon, with articles and cartoons mercilessly lampooning the Catholic Church and its clergy. Production history The original version of the play was in three acts and was first staged on 12 May 1664 at the Palace of Versailles' Cour de Marbre as part of festivities known as Les Plaisirs de l'île enchantée. Because of the attacks on the play and the ban that was placed on it, this version was never published, and no text has survived, giving rise to much speculation as to whether it was a work in progress or a finished piece. Many writers believe it consisted of the first three acts of the final version, while John Cairncross has proposed that acts 1, 3, and