JEAN

See also:

• BAPTISTE

BAPTISTE

See also:

• JEAN BAPTISTE PIGALLE (1714-1785)

PIGALLE (1714-1785)  , French sculptor, was born in Paris on the 26th of January 1714 . He was the seventh child of a carpenter . Although he failed to obtain the grand prix, after a severe struggle he entered the Academy and became one of the most popular sculptors of his day . His earlier work, such as " Child with Cage " (model at Sevres) and " Mercury Fastening his Sandals " (Berlin, and lead cast in Louvre), is less commonplace than that of his maturer years, but his nude statue of Voltaire, dated 1776 (Institut), and his tombs of Comte d'Harcourt (c . 1764) (Notre Dame) and of Marshal Saxe, completed in 1777 (Lutheran church, Strassburg), are good specimens of French sculpture in the 18th century . He died on the 28th of August 1785 . See P . Tarbe, Vie et ieuv. de Pigalle (1859) ; Suard, Eloge de Pigalle; Melanges de litterature . PIGAULT-LEBRUN (PIGAULT DE L'EPINOY), CHARLES ANTOINE GUILLAUME (1753-1835), French novelist, was born at Calais (he is said to have traced his pedigree on the mother's side to Eustache de St Pierre) on the 8th of April 1753 . His youth was stormy . He twice carried off young ladies of some position, and was in consequence twice imprisoned by lettre de cachet . The first, a Miss Crawford, the daughter of an English merchant whose office Pigault had entered, died almost immediately after her elopement; the second, Mlle de Salens, he married .

He became a soldier in the

Queen's Guards, then a very unsuccessful actor, and a teacher of French . At the breaking out of the great war he re-enlisted and fought at Valmy . He wrote more than twenty plays, and a large number of novels, the first of which appeared in 1787 . In his old age he took to graver work, and executed an abridgement of French history in eight volumes, besides some other work . His fEuvres completes were published in twenty volumes between 1822 and 1824, but much of his work is subsequent to this collection . He died on the 24th of . July 1835 . The style of Pigault's novels is insignificant, and their morality very far from severe . As almost the father of a kind of literature which later developed enormously, Pigault-Lebrun deserves a certain place in literary history . Among the most celebrated of his novels may be mentioned L'Enfant du Carnaval (1792) and Angelique et Jeanne-ton de la place Maubert (1799) . His Citateur (2 vols., 1803), a collection of quotations against Christianity, was forbidden and yet several times reprinted .