Charles Collé was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 dramatist and songwriter

Songwriter

A songwriter is an individual who writes both the lyrics and music to a song. Someone who solely writes lyrics may be called a lyricist, and someone who only writes music may be called a composer...

.

The son of a notary

Civil law notary

Civil-law notaries, or Latin notaries, are lawyers of noncontentious private civil law who draft, take, and record legal instruments for private parties, provide legal advice and give attendance in person, and are vested as public officers with the authentication power of the State...

, he was born in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. He became interested in the rhymes of Jean Heguanier, the most famous writer of couplet

Couplet

A couplet is a pair of lines of meter in poetry. It usually consists of two lines that rhyme and have the same meter.While traditionally couplets rhyme, not all do. A poem may use white space to mark out couplets if they do not rhyme. Couplets with a meter of iambic pentameter are called heroic...

s in Paris. From a notary's office, Collé was transferred to that of the receiver-general of finance, where he remained for nearly twenty years. When about seventeen, however, he made the acquaintance of Alexis Piron

Alexis Piron

Alexis Piron was a French epigrammatist and dramatist.He was born at Dijon, where his father, Aimé Piron, was an apothecary. Piron senior wrote verse in the Burgundian language. Alexis began life as clerk and secretary to a banker, and then studied law...

, and afterwards, through Gallet (1698?-1757), of Panard. The example of these three masters of the vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 decided his future but also made him diffident; and for some time he composed nothing but amphigouris--verses whose merit was measured by their unintelligibility. The friendship of the younger Crébillon

Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon

Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon was a French novelist.Born in Paris, he was the son of a famous tragedian, Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon. He received a Jesuit education at the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand...

 helped broaden his horizons, and the establishment in 1729 of the famous "Caveau" gave him a field for the display of his fine talent for popular song.

In 1739 the Society of the Caveau, which numbered among its members Helvétius, Charles Pinot Duclos

Charles Pinot Duclos

Charles Pinot Duclos was a French author.-Life:He was born at Dinan, in Brittany. At an early age, he was sent to study at Paris...

, Pierre Joseph Bernard

Pierre-Joseph-Justin Bernard

Pierre-Joseph-Justin Bernard , called Gentil-Bernard by Voltaire for the measured grace of his discreetly erotic verses, was a French military man and salon poet with the reputation of a rake, the author of several libretti for Rameau...

, called Gentil-Bernard, Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era. He replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer for the harpsichord of his time, alongside François...

, Alexis Piron, and the two Crébillons, was dissolved, and was not reconstituted till twenty years afterwards. His first and his best comedy, La Vérité dans le vin, appeared in 1747.

Meanwhile, Philippe II of Orléans, who was an excellent comic actor, particularly in representations of low life, and had been looking out for an author to write suitable parts for him, made Collé his reader. It was for the duke and his associates that Collé composed the greater part of his Théâtre de société. In 1763 Collé produced at the Théâtre Français Dupuis et Desronais, a successful sentimental comedy, which was followed in 1771 by La Veuve, which was a complete failure. In 1774 appeared La Partie de chasse de Henri Quatre (partly taken from Dodsley

Robert Dodsley

Robert Dodsley was an English bookseller and miscellaneous writer.-Life:He was born near Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, where his father was master of the free school....

's King and the Miller of Mansfield), Collé's last and best play.

From 1748 to 1772, besides these and a multitude of songs, Collé was writing his Journal, a curious collection of literary and personal strictures on his companions as well as on their enemies, on Piron as on Voltaire

Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...

, on La Harpe

Jean-François de La Harpe

Jean-François de La Harpe was a French playwright, writer and critic.-Life:La Harpe was born in Paris of poor parents. His father, who signed himself Delharpe, was a descendant of a noble family originally of Vaud...

 as on Pierre Corneille

Pierre Corneille

Pierre Corneille was a French tragedian who was one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine...

.

Collé's lyrics are frank and jovial, though often licentious. The subjects are love and wine; occasionally, however, as in the famous lyric (1756) On the capture of Port Mahon

Mahon

Mahón is a municipality and the capital city of the Balearic Island of Minorca , located in the eastern part of the island. Mahon has the second deepest natural harbor in the world: 5 km long and up to 900m. wide...

, for which the author received a pension of 600 livres, the note of patriotism is struck with no unskilful hand, while in many others Collé shows considerable epigram

Epigram

An epigram is a brief, interesting, usually memorable and sometimes surprising statement. Derived from the epigramma "inscription" from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein "to write on inscribe", this literary device has been employed for over two millennia....

matic force.

See also H. Bonhomme's edition (1868) of his Journal et Mémoires (1748-1772); Grimm's ; and C.A. Sainte-Beuve

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was a literary critic and one of the major figures of French literary history.-Early years:...

, Nouveaux lundis, vol. vii.