Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset

On the way it falls among bad companions, forgets its convent language, and shocks the sisters on arrival by profane swearing.

The treatment of the subject, the atmosphere which surrounds it, and the delicacy with which the little prattling ways of the nuns, their jealousies and trifling concerns, are presented, takes the reader entirely by surprise.

[1] Gresset, now famous, left Rouen for Paris, where he found refuge in the same garret which had sheltered him when a boy at the Collège Louis le Grand, and there wrote his second poem, La Chartreuse.

[1] Gresset was transferred to the Jesuit school of La Flèche, and soon after (30 September 1735) left the Order, without having been ordained priest.

These were followed by Le Méchant which was qualified by Ferdinand Brunetière as the best verse comedy of the French 18th century theatre, even surpassing the Métromanie of Alexis Piron.