DUFRESNY, Charles Rivière (1648-1728), a French dramatist, better remembered by the comedy of his own life than by any of the numerous plays which he contributed to the Théâtre Italien and the Théâtre Français. The fact that his grandfather was an illegitimate son of Henry IV. procured him the liberal patronage of Louis XIV., who not only gave him the post of valet de chambre, but affixed his name now to one lucrative privilege and now to another. The protégé, however, appeared as eager to squander as the king was to bestow; and the pathetic confession of exhausted generosity—“I cannot enrich Dufresny —was probably taken by the careless spendthrift as a signal compliment; though to one of his friends who consoled him with the remark that poverty is no sin, he replied, “It is worse.” On Louis’s death he was almost as necessitous as if Louis had never lived; but he obtained 200,000 francs from the duke of Orleans in answer to an ingenious request that his highness for his own glory would leave Dufresny in his excessive indigence as a sole example of the condition of the whole kingdom before the golden days of his regency. As if to furnish a piquant commentary on the proverb that poverty makes us acquainted with strange bed-fellows, he married his washerwoman in discharge of her bill—a whimsicality which supplied Le Sage with an episode in the Diable Boiteux, and was made the subject of a comedy by J. M. · Deschamps— Charles Rivière Dufresny, ou le mariage impromptu. Clever, veι∙satile, and superficial, he obtained in his own day a considerable reputation not only as an author and a wit, but also as a landscape gardener and architectural designer: to his great patron he furnished plans for the park at Versailles, and was appointed in return ...