Henri Desmarets

According to Duron and Ferraton, he may have also previously sung as a choir boy in Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois which was the parish church of the kings of France.

[3] By 1680 he had become an "ordinaire de la musique du roi" (court musician) and had composed the first of his grand motets (Te Deum 1678).

The idyll-ballet which he composed in August 1682 to celebrate the birth of the king's grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, found great favour at court and the following year he entered the competition to select four maîtres (masters) of the Chapelle Royale.

[4] After the competition, Desmarets petitioned the king to allow him to leave France for study with Italian composers, but Lully objected on the grounds that it would diminish his command of the French style.

Desmarets remained at the court and made money by "ghost-writing" works for one of the composers who had won the competition, Nicolas Goupillet.

In the meantime, Desmarets continued to find favour with his own compositions, most notably his motet Beati quorum (1683); his divertissement, La Diane de Fontainebleau (1686) and his first full-length opera, Endymion (1686).

Desmarets' Te Deum was performed in the oratory of the Louvre Palace in February 1687 to celebrate Louis XIV's recovery from illness, and later that year the king granted him a pension of 900 livres.

During these visits, Desmarets and the now eighteen-year-old Marie-Marguerite fell in love and within six months of his wife's death, they asked her father, Jacques de Saint-Gobert, for permission to marry.

While he was in exile, his friends Jean-Baptiste Matho and Anne Danican Philidor kept his artistic reputation alive in France by ensuring that his works continued to be performed and published there.

Only two of their many children survived them, Francois-Antoine (1711–1786), who became a high-ranking official in Senlis and Léopold (1708-1747), who became a cavalry officer and for many years was the lover of novelist and playwright Françoise de Graffigny.