Évrard Titon du Tillet

Évrard Titon du Tillet (January 1677 – 26 December 1762) is best known for his important biographical chronicle, Le Parnasse françois, composed of brief anecdotal lives of famous French poets and musicians of his time, under the reign of Louis XIV and the Régence.

Unluckily, Titon du Tillet could not stop there: scattered among the bronze trees were to be seen further medallions of distinctly secondary figures, now slightly passé as musical taste had shifted towards the galante, choices that elicited from Voltaire the epigram The expected expenditure, estimated at nearly two million livres, forced him to terminate a project that had something to it of the character of a folly.

Titon du Tillet then decided to carry the project out to some extent in a virtual form: he published in 1727, "a Description of the Parnasse François" followed by "an alphabetical List of the Poets and Musicians gathered on this monument".

This collection constitutes an invaluable source of biographical information for the mysterious Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, Marin Marais, Louis Couperin, Michel Richard Delalande, Nicolas Bernier and other celebrated poets and musicians.

The diarist Edmond Jean François Barbier, himself a lawyer attached to the Parlement of Paris, noted disapprovingly that Titon du Tillet lived in public debauchery with girls at the dinner table in a manner not "appropriate to a magistrate".