Charles Dufresny

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles Dufresny , also Charles Du Fresny or Charles Rivière Dufresny (* April or May 1657 in Paris , † October 6, 1724 there ) was a French journalist and writer.

life and work

Life

Dufresny came from a middle-class family of court employees who believed they could go back to an illegitimate son of Henry IV . In 1682 he married a distant relative of Molière and was a widower from 1688. Professionally he was the royal valet from 1677 to 1681 and from 1682 to 1688 in the service of the royal chamberlain. He officially worked in the royal mirror manufacture from 1688 and as a royal garden designer from 1700. However, it is not clear to what extent he actually paid something in return for his income. He was a gambler and wasteful and died impoverished.

The salon person and literary journalist

Dufresny belonged to the salon of Mademoiselle Lhéritier , who continued the precious salon of Mademoiselle de Scudéry after her death in 1701. From summer 1710 to spring 1714 he published the magazine Mercure galant , which still exists today under the name Mercure de France . He took it over from Jean Donneau de Visé and introduced journalistic innovations ( Tribune libre and letters to the editor). He intervened on the side of the modern in the second Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes and rehabilitated Rabelais , whose books he called a "poem in prose".

The writer

From the age of 35 Dufresny wrote numerous comedies, both for the Comédie-Italienne de Paris (1692-1697) and for the Comédie-Française (1692-1721), first together with his friend Jean-François Regnard , after which soon occurred quarrel in sole authorship. His funny and inventive pieces inspired Voltaire , Carlo Goldoni , Alexis Piron and Beaumarchais . Marivaux called him his master. Balzac's novella La Paix du ménage owes the plot to him.

He was not only a theater writer, but also published short stories. His Amusements sérieux et comiques (1699) present a Siamese in Paris and inspired Montesquieu to write the Lettres persanes (German translation by Christian Friedrich Hunold under the title Ernsthaffter, ingenious and satyrical time-wasting ).

literature

Manual and lexicon information

  • Jean-Pierre Beaumarchais, "Charles Dufresny", in: Dictionnaire des écrivains de langue française , ed. by Jean-Pierre Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty and Alain Rey, Paris, Larousse, 2001, p. 554.
  • Pierre-Georges Castex and Paul Surer , Manuel des études littéraires françaises , Paris, Hachette, 1954, p. 306.
  • Robert Horville, Le XVIIe Siècle. Les ambiguïtés du baroque et du classicisme, in: Histoire de la littérature française , ed. by Henri Mitterand, Paris 1988, pp. 235–407 (here: p. 400).
  • Laffont-Bompiani. Le nouveau dictionnaire des auteurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays , Paris 1994, pp. 948-949 (Bouquins series).

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Dufresny, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES You Fresny, Charles; Dufresny, Charles Rivière (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 1657 or May 1657
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH October 6, 1724
Place of death Paris