Jean-Baptiste de Grécourt

Jean-Baptiste de Grécourt

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Willart de Grécourt (* 1683 in Tours ; † April 2, 1743 ibid) was a French poet .

Life

Grécourt came from a noble but poor Scottish family. His mother had to work as a postmaster in Tours to support the family financially. For him, as the youngest son, the spiritual career was planned. Under the supervision of his uncle, a cleric, he studied in Paris and, at his instigation , became a canon at the Saint-Martin Basilica of Tours in 1697 at the age of 14 .

After his ordination , Grécourt experienced a great success through his talent as a preacher , but a scandal put an end to it; in a sermon he had made allusions to some of the city's ladies. His inclination was more for amusements and poetry. Glorious positions were offered to him, but he always refused, as he z. B. the offer of John Laws , the French general controller of finances, who wanted to employ him, with the verse Le Solitaire et la fortune (Eng. "The lonely and the luck") rejected.

Although he was still a canon, Grécourt gave up the spiritual life and spent much time in Paris, where he made friends with Marshal Victor-Marie d'Estrées , the peer of France , and other young freethinkers . Finally he settled entirely in the capital, where he frequented the free-spirited and sensitive circles of the Poésie fugitive . As an Epicurean and woman lover , he wrote some lewd stories and poems, many of them libertine , among them Philotanus , a detailed poem against the Jesuits , burlesques , epistle parodies , fables , epigrams and madrigals . Grécourt decided not to have them printed, but had no objection to their free distribution and also read them to a select group.

Grécourt was one of the main authors of the Recueil de poésies choisies rassemblées par un cosmopolite for Louis de Vignerot du Plessis, which was printed in only 62 copies in 1735 .

plant

Grécourt's work was first published in two volumes in 1711, then in 1746, and has been reprinted several times since then. The four-volume edition from 1746 is considered the best, although it also contains some works not by Grécourt. Guillaume Apollinaire re-published the edition L'Œuvre badine in 1913.

• Philotanus, ou l'Histoire de la constitution Unigenitus (poem, 1720)
• Les Appellants de l'autre monde (1731–1732)
• Les Nouveaux Appellants; ou la Bibliothèque des damnés. Nouvelles de l'autre monde (1732)
• L'Enfer révolté, ou les Nouveaux appellants de l'autre monde, confondus par Lucifer (1732)
• L'Enfer en déroute par la doctrine des jésuites. Nouvelles de l'autre monde (1733)
• Maranzakiniana (1733)
• Recueil de pièces choisies rassemblées par les soins du cosmopolite (1735)
• Histoire véritable et divertissante de la naissance de M ^lle Margo, et de ses aventures jusqu'à présent (1735)