François-Antoine Devaux
François-Antoine Devaux (12 December 1712, in
Life
Devaux trained as a lawyer and worked briefly for a lawyer cousin in Nancy. He soon quit to live with his parents in Lunéville, resisting their efforts to make him marry and earn a living. His dream was to become a writer, an ambition encouraged by his friend Françoise de Graffigny, who became his sponsor in the court society of Lorraine. They collaborated on several literary projects and confided in each other about their problems, both financial and emotional. In the 1730s Devaux wrote a one-act prose play, called Les Portraits, which was accepted by the Comédie-Française; but the troupe stalled on performing the play, and for about fifteen years Devaux struggled to get it staged.
In 1737, the duke of Lorraine,
Relations between the two friends became strained in the 1750s, although they continued to correspond. Devaux made several trips to Paris in the entourage of a new patron,
From 1758 until his own death in 1796, Devaux lived an idle life in Lunéville, frequenting the houses of noble families of Lorraine, attending sessions of the Académie de Nancy, and writing occasional verse.[2] He survived to be the senior member of the Académie de Nancy, but published nothing more in his lifetime. The manuscripts of many of his poems are now in the Bibliothèque municipale de Nancy, and a generous selection of them, along with his play and his discourse, were edited and published by Angela Consiglio in 1977.
It has long been assumed that because eighteenth-century France was a notoriously libertine era, and because Devaux was befriended by several attractive women, he must have been having affairs with them. The truth is more interesting. He was bi-sexual; the greatest passion he talked to Françoise de Graffigny about was his infatuation with another man, Nicolas-François Liébault.
References
Works
- Les Engagements indiscrets, first performed in Paris 26 October 1752 at the Théâtre-Français; published Paris: Duchesne, 1753.
- Discours sur l’esprit philosophique, read at the Académie de Nancy on 20 October 1752, published in the Mémoires de l'Académie de Nancy, 1755.
Bibliography
- Boyé, Pierre. "Le Dernier Fidèle de la cour de Lunéville: la vieillesse de Panpan Devaux." In Quatre Etudes inédites. Nancy: Imprimerie des Arts graphiques modernes, 1933, pp. 35–97.
- Consiglio, Angela, ed. François-Antoine Devaux, Poésies diverses. Bari: Adriatica Editrice, and Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1977.
- Dainard, J. A., et al., eds. Correspondance de Madame de Graffigny. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1985--. In progress; 12 vols. in print in 2009, vol. 13 due in 2010, edition to be complete in 15 vols. Includes voluminous excerpts from Devaux's letters.
- Filipiuk, Marion. "Voltaire's Friend, 'Panpan' Devaux." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 332 (1995): 105-20.
- Showalter, English. Françoise de Graffigny : Her Life and Works, SVEC, 2004:11
- Showalter, English. "L'Élection de Panpan Devaux à l'Académie de Stanislas," in Jean-Claude Bonnefont, ed., Stanislas et son Académie: actes du colloque du 250e anniversaire, 17-19 septembre 2001. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2003. pp. 185–194.
External links
- François-Antoine Devaux on Data.bnf.fr