François Tristan L'Hermite

François Tristan L'Hermite (1601–1655)

Tristan L'Hermite / trisˈtɑ̃ lɛrˈmit / (actually François L'Hermite, seigneur du Solier ; * 1601 at Solier Castle / Marche ; † September 11, 1655 in Paris ) was a French writer .

life and work

The author, who figured in literary history under his pseudonym “Tristan”, was highly valued by his contemporaries and is now considered a typical representative of the literary baroque .

He came from an old but impoverished noble family. As a 5-year-old he became a page with a legitimate bastard of King Henry IV , where he got to know many noble people, sometimes as a playmate. At 13 he stabbed a royal guardsman in a duel and had to flee. After an unsteady wandering life, especially in England and Scotland, he returned to France in 1619, entered the service of a higher-ranking nobleman and was taken over by the young King Louis XIII. pardoned. In 1621 he even advanced to gentilhomme ordinaire (a kind of noble domestics) with Gaston d'Orléans , the rebellious younger brother of the king, whom he served until 1634 and followed several times when he was banished from the court into exile.

After he had been active as a literary writer under the pseudonym "Tristan" from around 1624, he tried to live as an author from 1634, i. H. from the donations of various patrons , but also from the marketing of his works, especially his plays. This did not rule out that from time to time he returned to the service of high-ranking people, e.g. B. Gastons or the Duke of Guise .

In 1633 the volume of poetry Les Plaintes d'Acante ("Acantes Lamentations") was his breakthrough. In 1638 he published his poetry as Les amours de Tristan ("Tristan's infatuations / love affairs"). In 1636 he wrote the first and most successful of his ten or so plays, the tragedy La Marianne , which deals with the Herod - Mariamne material from Jewish history. In 1642 he completed Le Page disgrâcié ("Page fallen in disgrace"), an autobiographical novel in the style of the Picaro novels , which shows the young Tristan as the plaything of a capricious fate and is considered one of the first French autobiographical novels of importance.

In 1648 he was accepted into the Académie française . Soon after his death, however, he (like Théophile de Viau, for example ) fell into the shadow of the generation of classics who entered the literary stage after him and made all authors appear as secondary.

Web links

Commons : Tristan L'Hermite  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about François Tristan L'Hermite in the catalog of the German National Library
• Article in "Name, title and dates of the French. Literature " (source)
• Short biography and list of works of the Académie française (French)