Pigault-Lebrun
Charles-Antoine-Guillaume Pigault de l'Espinoy, better known as Pigault-Lebrun, (8 April 1753 – 24 July 1835) was a French novelist, playwright, and EpicureanScript error: No such module "Unsubst".. Victor Hugo references Pigault-Lebrun in chapter I part 8 of Les Misérables, describing a senator as "probably a product of Pigault-le Brun."
Life
He was born at Calais; he is said to have traced his pedigree on the mother's side to Eustache de Saint Pierre. His youth was stormy. He twice carried off young ladies of some position, and was in consequence twice imprisoned by lettre de cachet. The first, a Miss Crawford, the daughter of an English merchant whose office Pigault had entered, died almost immediately after her elopement; the second, Mlle de Salens, he married. He became a soldier in the Queen's Guards, then a very unsuccessful actor, and a teacher of French. At the breaking out of the great war he re-enlisted and fought at Valmy.Template:Sfn
He wrote more than twenty plays, and a large number of novels, the first of which appeared in 1787. In his old age he took to graver work, and executed an abridgment of French history in eight volumes, besides some other work. His Œuvres complètes were published in twenty volumes between 1822 and 1824, but much of his work is subsequent to this collection.Template:Sfn
The style of Pigault's novels is lively and rich, and the morality is very far from severe. As almost the father of a kind of literature which later developed enormously, Pigault-Lebrun deserves a certain place in literary history. Among the most celebrated of his novels may be mentioned L'Enfant du Carnaval (1792) and Angelique et Jeanneton de la place Maubert (1799). His Citateur (2 vols., 1803), a collection of quotations against Christianity, was forbidden and yet several times reprinted.Template:Sfn
References
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External links
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- Template:Internet Archive author
Template:EB1911 article with no significant updates
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- Pages with script errors
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- Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
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- 1753 births
- 1835 deaths
- People from Calais
- 18th-century French novelists
- 19th-century French novelists
- People imprisoned by lettre de cachet
- French male novelists
- 19th-century French male writers
- 18th-century French male writers