Le diable à quatre (The Devil to Pay) is an opéra comique in three acts by Christoph Willibald Gluck.
The French-language libretto is by Michel-Jean Sedaine and Pierre Baurans, after a translation by Claude-Pierre Patu of the 1731 ballad opera by Charles Coffey entitled The Devil to Pay, or The Wives Metamorphos’d.
[2][3] Klaus Hortschansky has noted that Le diable à quatre is one of Gluck's few stageworks where the composer neither used musical material from prior works nor recycled material from it into future works.
[6] (The same libretto was set to music arranged by Andre Danican Philidor and Jean-Louis Laruette and first staged with the above title on 19 August 1756 in Paris.)
An astrologer, to whom she had refused shelter at her chateau, transforms her into the wife of a surly cobbler named Jacques and transforms the cobbler's sweet-natured wife into the Marquise.