Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy

His father then placed him in the Jesuit College of Clermont, where he acquired a solid education in classics and Christian doctrine; but the boy was always sneaking away to watch the puppeteers and organ grinders on the Pont-Neuf.

By the time he was 17, Charles had left Paris and had begun his long life of wandering, eking out a livelihood by composing, singing for local elites, and teaching the lute.

Shortly after that, he went to England and performed at the court of Charles I, and then to the Low Countries, where he played and sang for the exiled Marguerite de Lorraine, duchess of Orléans.

Other members of the circle were Cyrano de Bergerac, Tristan l'Hermite, Saint-Amant, Paul Scarron, and a young playwright who went by the name "Molière".

Saint-Amant and Scarron had already introduced into France the burlesque travesty or parody, a distinctive poetic genre written in eight-syllable rhyming couplets studded with puns and erotic allusions, that treated mythological or historical subjects in a comic fashion, rather than the usual heroic or epic manner.

That same year saw the creation and publication of d'Assoucy's own Les Amours d'Apollon et de Daphné, the first comédie en musique, a new genre that was the forerunner of the French-language operas Lully would begin writing in the early 1670s.

Back in Paris by late 1652, d'Assoucy reminded Louis XIV of the position he had once held in the royal music, collected what was due on his pension, and played occasionally for the king.

In the early summer of 1655, he set off for Turin with yet another musical "page," a talented boy named Pierre Valentin, known to d'Assoucy's readers as "Pierrotin" and to Italian music-lovers as "Pietro Valentino".

Once again d'Assoucy's bid to join the musicians of Madame Royale failed, probably because the elderly and pious Duchess was repelled by his equivocal verse and his maladroit conduct.

Captivated by the talents of thirteen-year-old Pierrotin, the Duke of Mantua tried to buy him, and when that failed he kidnapped the boy and spirited him off to Venice, where he was castrated and studied with the famous master, Giovanni Bicilli.

Back in Paris by the fall of 1670, he renewed his friendship with Molière, who proposed that d'Assoucy write music for his forthcoming pièce à machines, the Malade imaginaire.

55–56): "D'Assoucy was influenced by some of the most liberal free-thinkers of his day, from the epicurian philosophy of Gassendi and La Mothe le Vayer to the unbounded hedonism of his close friend Chapelle.

This group, among whom were Cyrano, Tristan, Scarron, Chapelle, d'Assoucy and Le Royer de Prade, expounded a literary theory that ran counter to the rule-governed 'classical' esthetic which was fast developing."