Author: Delille, Jacques
Biography:
Delille, Jacques (1738-1813: Biographie universelle)
Born in the Auvergne, the illegitimate son of a lawyer named Monpanier, without a fortune but well educated, he earned his living at first as a teacher but had such a great success with his verse translation of Virgil's Georgics in 1769 that he was elected to the Académie française on the recommendation of Voltaire. (He did not take his seat until 1774: it is said that the King declared that he was too young.) He became professor of Latin poetry at the Collège de France and Abbot of St. Severin. He was an abbot by title but not a priest; he married and led the life of a man of letters, publishing original poetry as well as further translations. His wife was Marie-Jeanne Vaudechamp, an uneducated domestic who had been his mistress for many years before they married. Deprived of his abbey and the associated income at the time of the Revolution, he left France and emigrated to Switzerland, Germany, and for a time, England, but returned to Paris in 1802 and there published major translations of the Aeneid (1804) and Paradise Lost (1804). (Biographie universelle 10 [1813] 674-80; Historical Dictionary of Napoleonic France, 1799-1815, ed. Owen Connelly [1985] 148-50)
Other Names:
- Abbe Delille
- De Lille