Pigault-Lebrun

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Pigault-Lebrun

Charles-Antoine-Guillaume Pigault de l'Épinoy (8 April 1753 – 24 July 1835), better known as Pigault-Lebrun, was a French novelist and playwright.

Biography

Pigault-Lebrun was born at Calais, France. From a family traditionally traced back to Eustache de Saint Pierre, he was the son of Guillaume-Antoine-Hippolyte Pigault de l'Epinoy and Antoinette Maché de Lespinoy (1732–1793). His father was a very strict magistrate, mayor of Calais, king's counsellor, president of his rights, lieutenant general of police for the town and government of Calais, who was created a Roman count and knight of the Order of the Golden Spur by the Bull of Clement XIII in 1764, and Imperial Knight by Joseph II of the Holy Roman Empire in 1769.

Pigault was educated by the Oratorians in Boulogne and sent to work in a trading house in London, but having seduced his boss's daughter, who died in the shipwreck on which the two lovers had fled, he did not dare return to England and went back to Calais, where his father had him imprisoned by means of a letter of the signet.

After two years in captivity, he joined the elite gendarmerie of the king's household and became, through his frankness, cheerfulness and love of pleasure, the laughing stock of the regiment. When the elite gendarmerie was abolished, he returned to Calais, entered into a new love affair and was once again imprisoned by letter of the signet, at his father's request. This second captivity lasted two years, at the end of which he escaped and became an actor in the provinces. A pitiful actor, he nevertheless managed to discourage the public's hisses with his wit and good humour. Having seduced a workman's daughter in Paris, he took her to Holland, married her and lived in Brussels and Liège, continuing to act, giving French lessons and performing a few plays of his own, including Il faut croire à sa femme (1786), a one-act comedy in verse.

However, his father, on hearing of his marriage, had him entered in the Calais civil registers as no longer existing. He petitioned the Parliament of Paris, which confirmed his death. He then changed his name from Pigault de l'Épinoy to Pigault-Lebrun. The storming of the Bastille saved him from another letter of the signet. Full of indignation, he wrote a comedy in five acts, in prose, about his latest adventures, entitled Charles et Caroline, which he performed at the Théâtre des Variétés in the Palais-Royal (formerly the Théâtre des Variétés-Amusantes) in 1789 and 1790. Despite the declamations and the weakness of the plot and the characters, this play, in which the accent of truth was felt, was warmly applauded. The author was admitted to the Théâtre-Français at the same time as stage manager, director and actor, but he soon joined the dragoons, became a second lieutenant and fought at Valmy. After a mission to Saumur in 1793 as chef de remonte, he left military service.

The following year, he published one of his most popular novels, the adventure novel L'Enfant du carnaval, and his success won back the affection of his father, who even made him the eldest in his will, but Pigault-Lebrun did not want to have anything beyond what was his by equal division between his brothers and sisters. In 1806, he took up a position in the customs administration, which he did not leave until 1824. He served as librarian to Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia. A personal friend and collaborator of the great Talma, he lived a patriarchal old age among his children and grandchildren. He died in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, Seine-et-Oise, Kingdom of France.

Pigault-Lebrun's dominant quality is verve, a disposition that was part of his nature and not a youthful one, since he was nearly forty when he wrote his first novel. He pushed it to the point of gaiety and does not seek to guarantee it against the indecencies then in fashion. The reader, at first put off by the multiplicity of adventures that go as far as extravagance and coarseness, is drawn in by the movement, the fertility of the imagination and the inexhaustible gaiety, sometimes combined with fine observations and glimmers of sensitivity. The style, which leaves something to be desired in terms of correctness, has the liveliness and vivacity typical of the author's genre.

One of his brothers, Gaspard-Jean-Eusèbe Pigault de Beymont, known as Pigault-Maubaillarcq (1755–1839), published two novels in the style of Ann Radcliffe, La Famille Wieland (1809) and Isaure d'Aubigné (1812) etc...

Pigault-Lebrun was the grandfather of Émile Augier and the great-grandfather of Paul Déroulède, André Déroulède and Émile Guiard.

Works

  • Le Pessimiste (1789; commedy in one act)
  • L’Amour et la Raison (1791; commedy in one act)
  • Les Dragons et les Bénédictines (1791; vaudeville)
  • L'Enfant du carnaval (1792)
  • Les Dragons en cantonnement (1794; vaudeville)
  • Les Barons de Felsheim (1798)
  • Les Rivaux d’eux-mêmes (1798; commedy in one act)
  • Le Cordonnier de Damas ou la Lanterne magique, piece curieuse (1798)
  • Angélique et Jeanneton (1799)
  • Mon oncle Thomas (1799)
  • Les Cent-vingt jours (1799)
  • La Folie espagnole (1799; 1801)
  • M. de. Kinglin (1800)
  • Théodore (1800)
  • Métusko (1800)
  • M. Botte (1802)
  • Jérôme (1804)
  • La Famille Luceval (1806)
  • L'Homme à projets (1807)
  • Une macédoine (1811)
  • Tableaux de société (1813)
  • Adélaïde de Méran (1815; epistolary novel)
  • Le Garçon sans souci (1816; with R. Perrin)
  • M. de Roberval et l’Officieux (1818)
  • L'Homme à projets (1819)
  • Nous le sommes tous (1819)
  • L'Observateur (1820)
  • Le Beau-père et le Gendre (1820; with his son-in-law Victor Augier)
  • La Sainte-Ligue (1829)

His novels and plays, as well as his Mélanges littéraires et critiques (1816), have been collected under the title Œuvres complètes (1822–1824). His other works include: Le Citateur (1803), a collection of quotations against the Christian religion, largely borrowed from Voltaire and mixed with jokes in the author's own style; this book, published under his initials P-T L.B., seized and condemned under the Restoration, was reprinted several times after 1830; Histoire de France abrégée, à l'usage des gens du monde (1823–28), a work that goes only as far as the death of Henry IV; Contes à mon petit-fils (1831).

References

Amadieu, Jean-Baptiste (2004). "La littérature française du XIXe siècle à l'Index," Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France, 104e Année, No. 2, pp. 395–422.
Barba, Jean-Nicolas (1846). Souvenirs. Paris: Ledoyen et Giret.
Boutry, Philippe (2020). "Saint-simoniens et fouriéristes devant l'Index romain (1835-1837)," Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 65e Année, No. 190, pp. 65–86.
Graczyk, Annette (1989). Vorhang auf für die Revolution. Das französische Theater, 1789-1794. Weinheim: Quadriga.
Ludlow, Gregory (1973). "Pigault-Lebrun: A Popular French Novelist of the Post-Revolutionary Period," The French Review, Vol. XLVI, No. 5, pp. 946–50.
Minor, Lucian W. (1975). The Militant Hackwriter. French Popular Literature, 1800-1848, Its Influence, Artistic and Political. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press.
Montandon, Alain (2004). Les Baisers des Lumieres. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal.
Rodmell, G. E. (1990). French Drama of the Revolutionary Years. New York: Routledge.
Vapereau, Gustave (1876). Dictionnaire universel des littératures. Paris: Hachette, p. 1599.

External links

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