Jeanne Quinault
Encyclopedia
Jeanne Quinault was a French actress, playwright and salon hostess.
She was usually called Mlle Quinault la cadette (the younger), to distinguish her from her older sister, Marie-Anne-Catherine Quinault
, also an actress. She herself thought her name was Jeanne-Françoise Quinault until 1726, when she obtained a copy of her baptismal record and discovered her legal name, but most references to her use the two given names.
on 14 June 1718 and was accepted into the company in December 1718, becoming the sixth member of the Quinault family
to be admitted. She gave her first performance in the title role of Racine's Phèdre and five days later played Chimène in Pierre Corneille
's Le Cid. The choices are rather surprising, because she became famous in soubrette
and comic character roles.
In 1727 Jeanne Quinault created the role of Céliante in Le Philosophe marié by Philippe Néricault Destouches
. It was an ideal role for her, a strange, proud, moody and capricious woman, who was nonetheless vivacious, appealing and entertaining. This hugely popular play established her as one of the stars of the troupe.
s, a term from the Commedia dell'arte
meaning comic pantomime. The other Lazzistes included Jeanne's sister-in-law, formerly Mlle de Seine; her cousin Mlle Balicourt, who had joined the Comédie-Française in 1727; the poet and playwright Alexis Piron
; the Comte de Caylus; Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Count of Maurepas; and Charles-Alexandre Salley. The Lazzistes were not the only such group that Jeanne Quinault frequented in this period, but it stands out, both because the men continued to play an important part in her life for years afterward, and because they kept a record of their activities, which has recently been rediscovered and published. This document shows Jeanne to have been the driving spirit in the group.
During the 1730s Jeanne Quinault became close friends with Piron; she advised him about his writing and, along with other members of her family, acted in his best play, La Métromanie (Obsession with Rhyming, 1738). She is credited with having suggested the ideas for Le Préjugé à la mode (The Fashionable Prejudice, 1735) to La Chaussée
and for L'Enfant prodigue (The Prodigal Son, 1736) to Voltaire
. Voltaire, who often wrote to Mlle Quinault for advice, told Françoise de Graffigny
that the actress "was constantly imagining subjects for comedies and tragedies, and offered them to authors, urging them to work on them." She thus played a significant part in creating the vogue for comédie larmoyante
(tear-jerking comedy), and it is not surprising that she later helped Francoise de Graffigny write her very successful example of the genre, Cénie (1750).
called the Bout-du-Banc". Françoise de Graffigny arrived in Paris just before the actress retired, and they soon became close friends. Her letters to her friend back in Lorraine, François-Antoine Devaux
, give an unusually detailed account of the Bout-du-Banc's activities. Regulars included the poet Moncrif
, the novelist Claude Crébillon
, the novelist and historian Charles Pinot Duclos
, and the financier philosophe Claude Adrien Helvétius
. The fare was simple but good, and they entertained themselves by singing, acting skits, reading works in progress, and collaborating on anthologies of facéties, parodies of popular genres.
The first Bout-du-Banc ended in the late 1740s, in part because of dissension among the group, and in part because Jeanne Quinault was distracted by the need to take care of the children of her oldest brother, who died in 1745. For the next few years she was closer than ever to Françoise de Graffigny, advising her on Cénie and helping to bring about the marriage of her ward, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, to Helvétius.
By August 1752 the Bout-du-Banc was convening regularly again, with some new members like the playwright and songwriter Charles Collé
and Charles-Just de Beauvau
, a prince from Lorraine. The most famous episode in the history of the Bout-du-Banc took place in 1754, when Duclos brought Jean-Jacques Rousseau
to a dinner. Rousseau mentions the incident briefly in his Confessions
, citing the invitation as proof of Duclos's continued friendship when others were abandoning him, and saying that he was cordially welcomed. Later, however, the scene was fictionalized, mainly by Diderot, as a debate between the anti-religious regular guests and the unexpectedly pious newcomer; and while the novel was never published, a nineteenth-century editor found the manuscript, replaced the fictional names with real ones, changed the title from Histoire de Mme de Montbrillant to "Mémoires de Mme d'Épinay, and published it in 1818. For decades, this work, now called "pseudo-Memoirs of Mme d'Épinay", was regarded as authentic, and because of it the Bout-du-Banc was thought to be a den of Encyclopédistes
and a hotbed of Enlightenment
philosophy and its hostess a shameless freethinker.
In reality, Jeanne Quinault was careful to conceal her views, whatever they were, on religion and politics. She observed strict proprieties in her conduct, and seemed rather prudish at times to Françoise de Graffigny. She was received by the nobility, and raised her wards to make marriages answering to the ideal of respectability of the time. In 1758, she moved from her Paris apartment to the more rural Saint-Germain-en-Laye
, where she lived quietly and corresponded with friends, until failing health led her to return to the city in 1778.
She was usually called Mlle Quinault la cadette (the younger), to distinguish her from her older sister, Marie-Anne-Catherine Quinault
Marie-Anne-Catherine Quinault
Marie-Anne-Catherine Quinault was a French singer and composer. Her father was the actor Jean Quinault , and her brother was Jean-Baptiste Maurice Quinault, a singer, composer, and actor. She made her debut at the Paris Opera in 1709 in Jean-Baptiste Lully's Bellérophon. She remained at the...
, also an actress. She herself thought her name was Jeanne-Françoise Quinault until 1726, when she obtained a copy of her baptismal record and discovered her legal name, but most references to her use the two given names.
Stage career
She made her début at the Comédie-FrançaiseComédie-Française
The Comédie-Française or Théâtre-Français is one of the few state theaters in France. It is the only state theater to have its own troupe of actors. It is located in the 1st arrondissement of Paris....
on 14 June 1718 and was accepted into the company in December 1718, becoming the sixth member of the Quinault family
Quinault family
This Quinault family were French actors, active in the first half of the 18th century.*Jean Quinault was the father of this family. He was born at Bourges around 1656 or 1658, and died before June 1728. Said to be the son of a doctor from Issoudun, he joined an acting company based in Rouen called...
to be admitted. She gave her first performance in the title role of Racine's Phèdre and five days later played Chimène in 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...
's Le Cid. The choices are rather surprising, because she became famous in soubrette
Soubrette
A soubrette is a female stock character in opera and theatre. The term arrived in English from Provençal via French, and means "conceited" or "coy".-Theater:...
and comic character roles.
In 1727 Jeanne Quinault created the role of Céliante in Le Philosophe marié by Philippe Néricault Destouches
Philippe Néricault Destouches
Philippe Néricault Destouches was a French dramatist.-Biography:Destouches was born at Tours, in the today's department of Indre-et-Loire....
. It was an ideal role for her, a strange, proud, moody and capricious woman, who was nonetheless vivacious, appealing and entertaining. This hugely popular play established her as one of the stars of the troupe.
Writer
Over a period of several months beginning in December 1731, Jeanne joined with a group of seven other friends to meet regularly and produce light-hearted, often parodic and satirical, theatrical entertainments, which they called lazziLazzi
Lazzi is an improvised comic dialogue or action commonly used in the Commedia dell'arte. Most English-speaking troupes use the Italian plural "lazzi" as the singular and "lazzis" for the plural....
s, a term from the Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. The closest translation of the name is "comedy of craft"; it is shortened...
meaning comic pantomime. The other Lazzistes included Jeanne's sister-in-law, formerly Mlle de Seine; her cousin Mlle Balicourt, who had joined the Comédie-Française in 1727; the poet and playwright 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...
; the Comte de Caylus; Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Count of Maurepas; and Charles-Alexandre Salley. The Lazzistes were not the only such group that Jeanne Quinault frequented in this period, but it stands out, both because the men continued to play an important part in her life for years afterward, and because they kept a record of their activities, which has recently been rediscovered and published. This document shows Jeanne to have been the driving spirit in the group.
During the 1730s Jeanne Quinault became close friends with Piron; she advised him about his writing and, along with other members of her family, acted in his best play, La Métromanie (Obsession with Rhyming, 1738). She is credited with having suggested the ideas for Le Préjugé à la mode (The Fashionable Prejudice, 1735) to La Chaussée
Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée
Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée , French dramatist who blurred the lines between comedy and tragedy with his comédie larmoyante....
and for L'Enfant prodigue (The Prodigal Son, 1736) to 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...
. Voltaire, who often wrote to Mlle Quinault for advice, told Françoise de Graffigny
Françoise de Graffigny
Françoise de Graffigny, née d'Issembourg Du Buisson d'Happoncourt was a French novelist, playwright and salon hostess....
that the actress "was constantly imagining subjects for comedies and tragedies, and offered them to authors, urging them to work on them." She thus played a significant part in creating the vogue for comédie larmoyante
Comédie larmoyante
Comédie larmoyante was a genre of French drama of the 18th century. In this type of sentimental comedy, the impending tragedy was resolved at the end, amid reconciliations and floods of tears. Plays of this genre that ended unhappily nevertheless allowed the audience to see that a "moral...
(tear-jerking comedy), and it is not surprising that she later helped Francoise de Graffigny write her very successful example of the genre, Cénie (1750).
Salon Bout-du-Banc
Mlle Quinault also continued to see Caylus in the 1730s, and in the 1740s they became co-hosts of the first incarnation of the informal salonSalon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
called the Bout-du-Banc". Françoise de Graffigny arrived in Paris just before the actress retired, and they soon became close friends. Her letters to her friend back in Lorraine, François-Antoine Devaux
François-Antoine Devaux
François-Antoine Devaux was a Lorraine poet and man of letters. He was called Panpan by his friends.-Life:...
, give an unusually detailed account of the Bout-du-Banc's activities. Regulars included the poet Moncrif
François-Augustin de Paradis de Moncrif
François-Augustin de Paradis de Moncrif was a French writer and poet, of a family originally of Scots origin. He was appointed royal historiographer to Louis XV of France. His parody of owlishly pedantic scholarship, Histoire des chats, and the protection of the house of Orléans gained him entry...
, the novelist Claude 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...
, the novelist and historian 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...
, and the financier philosophe Claude Adrien Helvétius
Claude Adrien Helvétius
Claude Adrien Helvétius was a French philosopher and littérateur.-Life:...
. The fare was simple but good, and they entertained themselves by singing, acting skits, reading works in progress, and collaborating on anthologies of facéties, parodies of popular genres.
The first Bout-du-Banc ended in the late 1740s, in part because of dissension among the group, and in part because Jeanne Quinault was distracted by the need to take care of the children of her oldest brother, who died in 1745. For the next few years she was closer than ever to Françoise de Graffigny, advising her on Cénie and helping to bring about the marriage of her ward, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, to Helvétius.
By August 1752 the Bout-du-Banc was convening regularly again, with some new members like the playwright and songwriter Charles Collé
Charles Collé
Charles Collé was a French dramatist and songwriter.The son of a notary, he was born in Paris. He became interested in the rhymes of Jean Heguanier, the most famous writer of couplets in Paris. From a notary's office, Collé was transferred to that of the receiver-general of finance, where he...
and Charles-Just de Beauvau
Charles-Just de Beauvau
Charles Juste de Beauvau , 2nd Prince of Beauvau , Marshal of France was a French scholar, nobleman and general...
, a prince from Lorraine. The most famous episode in the history of the Bout-du-Banc took place in 1754, when Duclos brought Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
to a dinner. Rousseau mentions the incident briefly in his Confessions
Confessions (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
Confessions is an autobiographical book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In modern times, it is often published with the title The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to distinguish it from St. Augustine of Hippo's Confessions...
, citing the invitation as proof of Duclos's continued friendship when others were abandoning him, and saying that he was cordially welcomed. Later, however, the scene was fictionalized, mainly by Diderot, as a debate between the anti-religious regular guests and the unexpectedly pious newcomer; and while the novel was never published, a nineteenth-century editor found the manuscript, replaced the fictional names with real ones, changed the title from Histoire de Mme de Montbrillant to "Mémoires de Mme d'Épinay, and published it in 1818. For decades, this work, now called "pseudo-Memoirs of Mme d'Épinay", was regarded as authentic, and because of it the Bout-du-Banc was thought to be a den of Encyclopédistes
Encyclopédie
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. It was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert...
and a hotbed of Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
philosophy and its hostess a shameless freethinker.
In reality, Jeanne Quinault was careful to conceal her views, whatever they were, on religion and politics. She observed strict proprieties in her conduct, and seemed rather prudish at times to Françoise de Graffigny. She was received by the nobility, and raised her wards to make marriages answering to the ideal of respectability of the time. In 1758, she moved from her Paris apartment to the more rural Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Saint-Germain-en-Laye is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France in north-central France. It is located in the western suburbs of Paris from the centre.Inhabitants are called Saint-Germanois...
, where she lived quietly and corresponded with friends, until failing health led her to return to the city in 1778.