Gabriel-Marie Legouvé

Gabriel Marie Jean Baptiste Legouvé (or Gouvé) is a French poet born in Paris the June 23rd 1764 and died in Paris the August 30th 1812.

Biography

Gabriel-Marie Legouvé was the son of Jean-Baptiste Legouvé, distinguished lawyer, itself author of a tragedy not represented of Attilie (1750), which made him make good éudes and raised it in the taste of the Beautiful Letters. Having inherited a handsome fortune with died his/her father in 1782, it did not seek an other career. Its first test, a héroïde on the Death of wire of Brutus , was published with two parts of his/her friend Jean-Louis Laya under the title Essais of two friends in 1786.

It gained success in 1792 with a tragedy in three acts, the Death of Abel adapted poem of Solomon Gessner. It was maintained with the poster until in 1820. The tragedy of Épicharis and Néron (1793) also had success because the public wanted to find there allusions to the men of the moment and Talma gave a great relief to the role of Néron.

The tragedies which followed did not locate at the same level as the two first. Quintus Fabius (1795) wants to describe the iron discipline to which were subjected the Roman armies. Laurence (1798) represents under supposed names the noise which had made the abbot of Châteauneuf in love with his mother Ninon de Lenclos and fell. Étéocle and Polynice (1799) took again the subject of Thébaïde of Racine. the Death of Henri IV (1806) had success although she was very criticized, in particular because the author allots the assassination of Henri IV to it to his wife Marie de Médicis with the contempt of historical probability.

Legouvé was allowed with the Institut of France in 1798. It published elegant elegiac poems: the Burial (1798), the Memories (1799), the Melancholy (1800) then, in 1801, the poem which returned it celebrates, the Merit of the women , which had more than forty editions and which one retains only two worms today that a double unhappy direction makes forever ridiculous:

And, if the voice of blood is not a dream,

Tombe with the feet of this sex with which you owe your mother!

During several years, Legouvé compensated Delille in its pulpit of Latin poetry for the Collège de France. Of 1807 with 1810, it directed the Mercure de France . It lost his wife in 1810, sank in the madness and died in 1812 in a psychiatric asylum.

He is the father of the writer Ernest Legouvé (1807 - 1903), who will be itself member of the French Academy.

“ It composed much of worms , note Maurice Allem in the note that it devotes to him in the French poetic Anthologie (XVIIIe century, 1966) ; its parts are in general long and serious, and of more than one it releases a rather heavy perfume from trouble. It has this uniform correction and without projections which is worst qualities. One finds in his poetry some of the features characteristic of his time like the taste of funeral and the worship of the melancholy. ”

Works

Polyxène , tragedy (1784)
the Death of wire of Brutus , Héroïde (1786)
the death of Abel , tragedy in 3 acts (1792)
Épicharis and Néron , tragedy (1793)
Quintus Fabius , tragedy (1795)
Laurence , tragedy (1798)
the Burial , reduced (1798)
Étéocle and Polynice , tragedy (1799)
the Memories , elegy (1799)
the Melancholy , reduced (1800)
the Merit of the women , poem (1801)
Christophe Morin (1801)
the Death of Henri IV , tragedy (1806)
memories or advantages of the Memory (1813)

Quotations

“ a brother is a friend given by nature. ”

( the Death of Abel , Act III, Scene 3)

“ the women polishes the manners, they are truths tutors of the good taste, the instigators of all devotions. The man who cherishes them is seldom a barbarian. ”

( the Merit of the women )

“ For him more languors, more evils, more troubles;

the love fills, enchants and its days and its nights

It has one object which occupies it and

sets it ablaze And its happy life is long a extase. ”

( the Merit of the women )

“ I blackened my brushes of the mourning of the universe. ”

( the Melancholy )

“ It is true too often for a significant heart

Of the records of Clio the reading is painful.

Under its sad brushes, the fatal combat

embellish glare of the bay-trees at least;

But when it describes the flooded cities

By the volcanos on fire, by the overflowed seas;

But when it describes these bloody emperors,

Which, crueler still than the seas, volcanos,

Joignent cruelty with the vice immonde,

And in gold cuts the tears of the world drink; : One groans of knowing so much of words, so much of crimes;

One would like that the lapse of memory could reopen its abymes.

imprudent Wishes! evil the dreadful memory

With the memory of the good gives a happier price. ”

( memories or advantages of the Memory )

External bonds

biographical Card on the site of the French Academy
Ernest Legouvé, Sixty years of memories , Chapter X, “My Father”

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