Life
His mother, a Spanish lady named Gilette de Salgues, died when he was a child. He was brought up by his grandfather and studied at St. Hippolyte. His uncle and guardian, the Marquis of Florian, who had married a niece of Voltaire, introduced him at the château de Ferney and in 1768 he became page at Anet in the household of the Duc de Penthièvre, who remained his friend throughout his life. Having studied for some time at the artillery school at Bapaume he obtained from his patron a captain's commission in the dragoon regiment of Penthièvre.
He left the army soon after and began to write comedies, and was elected to the Académie Française in 1788. On the outbreak of the French Revolution he retired to Sceaux, but he was soon discovered and imprisoned; and though Robespierre's death spared him, he died a few months later still in prison.
Read more about this topic: Jean-Pierre Claris De Florian
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“And he thought to himself...., ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 12:17-20.
“Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-class parents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement—a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“There’s something tragic in the fate of almost every person—it’s just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life.... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)