Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

Biography

Wire of a Shoe-maker enriched, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau was high carefully and made good studies at the Jésuites with the Louis-the-Large college. According to contemporary testimonys, it was always ashamed of its obscure birth which it sought to dissimulate and it is claimed that it went until disavowing his father.

To agree to the spirit of devotion that Madam de Maintenon spread on the end of the reign of Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau started by composing the imitation of a psalm which it put, one says, between the hands of the marshal of Noailles. The poem rained and its author had to compose of the religious odes for the construction of the duke of Burgundy. In same time, it rimait in secrecy of the licentious epigrams for the large-prior of Vendôme and the Société of the Temple, into which it had been introduced by the marquis of Fare and the abbot of Chaulieu. It was said that it composed its psalms without devotions and its epigrams, that it called the gloria patri first, without libertinage.

The skill which it showed in versification attracted him the protection of Boileau, which guided it its councils and regarded it as the only one which was able to continue the traditional manner. It was also protected by the baron de Breteuil, introducer of the Ambassadors and father of the marchioness of Châtelet, and the future marshal of Tallard. This last took it along with him in 1697 at the time of its embassy to London near Guillaume III of England, which enabled him to become acquainted with Saint-Evremond. On his return, the director of finances, Hilaire Rouillé of Coudray, was made his patron and offered to him, in 1708, an use of director of the farms that Rousseau is praised to have refused like not very compatible with the necessary independence of a man of letters. In 1701, it was elected with the Académie of the inscriptions and the humanities.

Rousseau had been tested with the theater but without success it had given three comedies and two operas. Only one of these works, the comedy Flattering the , had had some success at the beginning, before falling to the recovery. The author, furious of these reverses, allotted them to cabals assembled by his enemies and indicated some accustomed of the coffee of the Laurent widow, located street Dauphine near the Th3e4atre Fran1cais, where met men of letters such as Houdar of the Mound, Danchet, Saurin, Crébillon, Boindin and where Rousseau itself was assiduous.

He undertook to exert his vindication on his designated enemies. One started by finding under the tables of the coffee of the satirical worms against Danchet, which one easily recognized for the work of Rousseau. The same process was repeated several times, so that the widow Laurent requested Rousseau not to more give the feet in its establishments. The epigrams are then reflected to arrive by the post office, dispatched Versailles where Rousseau remained. The police force was prevented and the sendings ceased.

In 1710, Rousseau presented to the French Academy against Houdar of the Mound and was beaten. It conceived a very sharp spite of it. The verses started again and became truly odious, filled of insults for its adversaries but also against of high-ranking persons and blasphemies against the religion. Rousseau accepted, with the Palais Royal, a correction of Faye, captain to the guards and poet to whom one had allotted them. Rousseau carried felt sorry for against Faye for way in fact, but Faye counteracted by an action for libel. Rousseau desisted then from its complaint, involving the withdrawal of that of its adversary, but was to show Saurin to be the author of the verses. Saurin was stopped, but it could show that the witnesses produced against him had been suborned. A stop of the Parlement of Paris dated March 27th 1711 released it and condemned Rousseau to pour 4.000 books of damages to him. A second stop, dated April 7th 1712, condemned Rousseau to the banishment with perpetuity “as reached and convinced to have composed and have distributed the impure, satirical and defamatory worms”.

The question of knowing if Rousseau were the true author of the verses cleared up forever. Itself affirmed that they had been composed by Saurin, with the assistance of the Mound and a jeweller named Malafaire. The invoice of these worms, very poor, is indeed very distant from that of Rousseau, but the same faults as they contain are so coarse that it make think of somebody who would have tried to disguise his style.

Rousseau, preceding the stop of the Parliament, had left France and had initially gone in Suisse, near the ambassador of France, the count of the Luc. This last took it along with him to the congress of Bade, where it was presented to the prince Eugene, near which it spent three years to Vienna. It then settled at the duke of Aremberg to Brussels, where the baron de Breteuil made him obtain, in 1717, of the letters of grace. Rousseau did not want however to use about it, claiming to be rejugé, which could not be to him granted.

In 1722, in Brussels, Rousseau met Voltaire. What occurred exactly during this interview is not clear, but it resulted, between the two authors, deep and forces enmity. According to Rousseau, at the time of a walk fits with body some, “the small rascal of Arouet had so much made indignant it by the license of its remarks and the reading of an impious ode, which it had had to threaten it to only descend and to leave it”.

In 1737, tired exile, Rousseau requested the authorization to return to France. Its guards having advised to him to come to Paris, it went there towards the end of 1738 and a few months incognito resided at it, under the name of Richer. “It is a soup of Panurge and Resentment”, told then him Piron. “He does not say of good of anybody In spite of gravity and the visible nullity where its apoplexy threw, he carries an very-vain wig with cadenettes, and which swears perfectly with a destroyed face and a head which grouille He makes his court with the Jesuits ardently and lives as a wise schoolboy with them. He is as inconsistent as stupid”.

The steps made in its favor were not crowned success and it had to take again the road of Brussels in February 1739. It died there in 1741.

Works

Literary posterity

For its contemporaries, Rousseau was regarded as “ the prince of our lyric poets ”. When he died, Lefranc de Pompignan devoted a splendid ode to him whose Holy-Beuve said with mischievousness that it was the most beautiful ode due to Rousseau. Because, at the 19th century, the work of Rousseau was almost universally scorned.

Its versification is of an extreme correction, and its worms are harmonious, and sometimes even musical. But its lyric poetries are entirely deprived of feeling, and often even of thought. In fact beautiful frozen mechanics tries to dissimulate their vacuity under the abuse mythology and the pump of a rhetoric as agreed as hollow. The odes feel the effort, the psalms miss sincerity, the epistles of naturalness, in fact finally the cantatas support best the reading today, with the epigrams, kind for which Rousseau had a real talent, been useful by a spite which made the misfortune of second half of its existence.

Chronological list

the Coffee , comedy in 1 act, prose (1694)
Jason , opera in 5 acts, worms (1696)
Flattering the , comedy in 5 acts, prose (1698)
Venus and Adonis , opera in 5 acts, worms (1697)
the Capricious , comedy in 5 acts, worms (1700)
the Wedding of village , masquerade (1700)
the magic Belt , comedy in 1 act, prose (1702)
Works (1712)
Works , 2 vol. (1723)
the Hypochondriac , comedy not represented
the Easily deceived one of itself , comedy not represented
the Mandrake , comedy not represented
Aïeux chimerical , comedy not represented
Letters on various subjects of literature (1750)

External bonds

Its plays and their representations on site CÉSAR
Voltaire, Life of Mr. J.B. Rousseau , 1738: Lampoon of Voltaire (published anonymously) against Rousseau.

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