Answer to Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps. Why Molière most likely did write his plays.

Résumé En

In this article, Messrs. Cafiero and Camps claim to provide definitive proofs that P. Corneille did not write any of the plays presented by Molière. They use six "features" (lemmas, word forms, function words, rhymes, affixes, n-grams) coupled with two metrics (Burrows' distance and MinMax distance) and automatic classifications. In fact, the authors provide little precise information on these methods as to no figures like the distance matrices. The limited information, particularly in the online appendices, is sufficient to raise many doubts. For example, the list of "function words" contains many oddities that cannot be explained simply by clumsiness. Similarly, they sorted Molière's plays, drawing from experience 24 of the 33 plays. Among the discarded plays: Psyché, that should not have been removed because it's a collaboration between Corneille and Molière that has always been so acknowledged. Finally, the details of the classifications (published in a separate online appendix to the article) show that their methods are unable to recognize any of these authors: Boursault, Chevalier, Dancourt, Donneau de Visé, Gillet de la Tessonnerie, Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, La Fontaine, Ouville, Quinault, Régnard, Rotrou... and Molière.