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Author: Lebrun, Pierre-Antoine

Biography:

LEBRUN, Pierre-Antoine (1785-1873: NBG)

As a foreign-language author, Lebrun requires only a brief headnote. Born in Paris on 29 Dec. (or Nov.) 1785, Lebrun was selected for elite schools once his precocious literary talent had been recognised. Napoleon is said to have been struck by his performance at the military college of Saint Cyr, where even as a student he was temporarily filling in for one of the professors. One of his earliest published odes, celebrating Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz in Dec. 1805, earned him a pension of 1200 francs from the Emperor, but he lost it in 1822 after the publication of the “lyric poem” lamenting his death. (The identity of the English translator is not known.) Lebrun does not appear to have married, and to have devoted himself to the arts of letters. A poem on the happiness arising from study took the gold medal from the Académie française in 1817—a prize noted even in British newspapers. Of his several plays the most successful was Marie Stuart (1820). In 1825 he was a guest of Walter Scott (q.v.) at Abbotsford. Travels in 1820 led to a major poem, Le Voyage en Grèce (1828), and to his election to the Académie française in the same year. Awards and honours followed: he was a director of the Imprimerie royale (1831-48) and of the Journal des savants (from 1838), and was made a senator in 1853. He died of “apoplexy,” aged 87, at his Paris home on the rue de Beaune on 27 May 1873. (NBG 30, cols. 164-9; New Times 27 Mar. 1817; American Register [London] 31 May 1873) 

 

 

Other Names:

  • P. Le Brun
 

Books written (1):

London: J. Appleyard, 1822