François Tristan l'Hermite

Tristan L' Hermite / tristɑ lɛrmit / (actually François L' Hermite, seigneur du Solier; * 1601 Castle Solier / Marche, † September 11, 1655 in Paris) was a French writer.

Life and work

The one in the history of literature carried under his pseudonym " Tristan " author was very much appreciated by his contemporaries and is now considered a typical representative of the literary Baroque.

He came from an old but impoverished noble family. Even as a 5 -year-old he was Page with a legitimate bastard of King Henry IV, in which he, partly as playmates, met many aristocratic people. At 13, he stabbed her in a duel a royal guardsmen and had to flee. After a restless wandering life, especially in England and Scotland in 1619, he returned to France, entered the service of a higher-ranking nobles and was the young King Louis XIII. pardoned. 1621 he even became gentilhomme ordinaire ( a kind Edeldomestik ) at Gaston d' Orléans, the rebellious younger brother of the king, which he served until 1634 and was followed into exile several times during its banishment from court.

After he had been active in literature since about 1624 under the pseudonym of " Tristan ," he tried from 1634 to live as a writer, that is, of the benefits of various patrons, but also by the marketing of his works, especially his plays. This does not rule out that he came from time to time in the service of upstanding people, such as Gaston's or the duke of Guise.

1633 was the poem ribbon Les Plaintes d' Acante ( " Acantes complaints " ) his breakthrough. In 1638 he gave his poetry collected as Les amours de Tristan out ( " Tristan's infatuations / Liaisons" ). In 1636 he wrote the first and most successful of its ten pieces, the tragedy La Marianne, who treated the Herod's Mariamne fabric of Jewish history. 1642 he presented Le Page disgrâcié done ( " The disgraced Page " ), an autobiographical novel in the style of Pfcaro novels, which shows the young Tristan as a plaything of a capricious fate and is considered one of the first French autobiographical novels of importance.

In 1648 he was admitted to the Académie française. Soon after his death, however, he fell (similar Théophile de Viau, for example ) in the shadow of the generation of classics that entered the literary stage for him and all authors had previously appear as secondary.