Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée

Background

Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée was born in Paris in 1692.

Career

In 1731 Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée published an Epttre a Clio, a didactic poem in defence of Leriget de la Faye in his dispute with Antoine Houdart de la Motte, who had maintained that verse was useless in tragedy.

L'Ecole des amis (1737) followed, and, after an unsuccessful attempt at tragedy in Maximinien, he returned to comedy in Melanide (1741).

In Melanide the type known as comedie larmoyante is fully developed.

Comedy was no longer to provoke laughter, but tears.

The new method found bitter enemies.

Alexis Piron nicknames the author " le Reverend Pere Chaussee, " and ridiculed him in one of his most famous epigrams.

L'Ecole des meres (1744) and La Gouvernante (1747) form, with those already mentioned, the best of his work.

The strict moral aims pursued by La Chaussee in his plays seem hardly consistent with his private preferences.

Villemain said of his style that he wrote prosaic verses with purity, while Voltaire, usually an adverse critic of his work, said he was " un des premiers apres ceux qui ont du genie.

"For the comedie larmoyante see G. Lanson, Nivelle de la Chaussie et la comedie larmoyante (1887).

Achievements

• Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée was the Creator of the genre of moralizing, the so-called lacrimal Comedy that anticipated some of the trends of bourgeois drama.