Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset

Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset (born Aug. 29, 1709, Amiens, Fr.—died June 16, 1777, Amiens) was a French poet and dramatist who received immediate and lasting acclaim for his irreverently comic narrative poem Ver-Vert (1734; Ver-Vert, or the Nunnery Parrot), describing with wit tinged with malice the adventures of a parrot who attempts to maintain his decorous convent background while on a visit to another convent.

Brought up by Jesuits, Gresset was a brilliant pupil and, after entering the Jesuit order in 1726, continued his education in Paris before returning to teach in Amiens and Tours. Ver-Vert, which was circulated privately and printed without the author’s permission, brought him instant success in Parisian circles, where the literati were astounded that such a refined wit could come from within the Catholic church.

In spite of the objections of some of his superiors, Gresset continued to write light occasional verse, within a year publishing La Carême impromptu (“The Lenten Impromptu”) and Le Lutrin vivant (“The Living Lectern”). Returning to Paris in 1735 for a year’s study of theology, he wrote La Chartreuse (“The Carthusian”) and Les Ombres (“The Shadows”). These lively accounts of life in a Jesuit college, precise and pointed in detail, led first to his banishment to the provinces and then to his expulsion from the order; his keen eye for absurdity and his natural frivolity were seen as anticlerical and impious. Supported by an official pension, he turned to drama; his first plays, the tragedy Édouard III (performed 1740), which included the first murder ever enacted on the French stage, and a verse comedy, Sidney (1745), were not especially successful, but Le Méchant (1747; “The Sorry Man”), a witty exposé of salon life, was highly praised for its pithy, polished dialogue. Admitted to the Académie Française in 1748, he caused a stir with his criticism of nonresident bishops (1754). In 1759 Gresset wrote Lettre sur la comédie, in which he renounced all his previous poetic and dramatic works as irreligious. He retired to Amiens in the same year, where he remained (except for trips to Paris for meetings of the Académie Française) until his death.