Richelieu's Desmarets and the Century of Louis XIV.

-Clarendon Press, 1990-. First edition. ix+399 pages with index. Illustrated. Cloth. Very good in dustjacket. Jean Desmarets was a late Renaissance "universal man": first Chancellor and founder-member of the Adademie-francaise, last jester of the French royal court and star performer in ballets, novelist, playwright, poet, architect, inventor and mystic. He was also the first man to publicise the notion of "a century of Louis XIV". Hugh Gaston Hall's book examines that notion by looking fresh at Desmarets' vigorous career and relating the century of Louis XIV to its origins in the reign of Louis XIII. It questions historical misconceptions about Cardinal Richelieu's cultural policies and demonstrates the importance for the Court ballet of his patronage. Giovanni Bernini's illusionist sets and lighting effects for the Grand Salle, which later became Moliere's theatre and the Opera, are discussed here in English for the first time. Desmarets' many high-level court offices, his family connections, and his works - ballets, plays, poems and religious and polemical pieces - reveal new and important links with contemporary institutions and preocccupations. In particular Dr Hall considers the plays in the light of exemplary eloquence, and considers the intentions of the Academie-francaise, and the Quarrel of the "Imaginaires", in relation to royal policy and Descartes' revolution. Richelieu's Desmarets and the Century of Louis XIV. oxbridge 0198151578