Marc-Antoine Charpentier, the most important French composer…

Marc-Antoine Charpentier, the most important French composer of his generation and the outstanding French composer of oratorios, had gone to Rome in about 1667, where he is believed to have studied composition, perhaps with Giacomo Carissimi.

On his return to France about three years later he had become chapelmaster to the dauphin but had lost that position through Jean-Baptiste Lully's influence.

He had composed the music for a new version of Molière's The Forced Marriage, first performed 1672, and collaborated with him again in 1673 in The Imaginary Invalid.

After Molière's death, Charpentier had continued to work for the Théâtre Français until 1685.

From perhaps 1670 to 1688, he had as his patron Marie de Lorraine, known as Mademoiselle de Guise, and from 1679 he composed music for the dauphin's chapel (Lully died in 1687).

He had in 1692 become composition teacher to the Duke d'Orleans.

He produces his greatest stage work, Médée, to Thomas Corneille's text, in 1693.

French satiric moralist Jean de La Bruyère is best known for one work, Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du grec avec Les Caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle (1688; The Characters, or the Manners of the Age, with The Characters of Theophrastus), which is considered to be one of the masterpieces of French literature.

He had studied law at Orléans, and through the intervention of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the eminent humanist and theologian, had become one of the tutors to the Duke de Bourbon, grandson of the Prince de Condé, and remained in the Condé household as librarian at Chantilly.

His years there were probably unhappy because, although he was proud of his middle-class origin, he was a constant butt of ridicule because of his ungainly figure, morose manner, and biting tongue; the bitterness of his book reflects the inferiority of his social position.

His situation, however, afforded him the opportunity to make penetrating observations on the power of money in a demoralized society, the tyranny of social custom, and the perils of aristocratic idleness, fads, and fashions.

The portrait sketches are expanded because of their great popularity; eight editions of the Caractère will appear during La Bruyère's lifetime.

Readers begin putting real names to the personages and compiling keys to them, but La Bruyère denies that any is a portrait of a single person.

Topical allusions in his book—La Bruyère attacks the extravagance and warmongering of the king himself—make his election to the French Academy difficult, but he is eventually elected in 1693.