PIRON, Alexis (1689-1773), the foremost epigrammatist of France, was born at Dijon on the 9th July 1689. His father, Aimé Piron, was an apothecary, but was also a frequent writer of verse in Burgundian patois. Alexis began life as clerk and secretary to a banker, and then studied law without any success or much seriousness. As a young man he made himself notorious by the composition of a piece of licentious verse which might have brought him into serious difficulties but for the good nature of a high legal official, the president Bouhier. His sarcastic tongue made him unpopular in his neighbourhood, and at last in 1719, when nearly thirty years old, he went to seek his fortune at Paris. His first experiences were not very encouraging, and he had to put up with the unpleasant and not very honourable position of literary adviser and corrector to the Chevalier de Belle Isle. An accident, however, brought him money and notoriety. The jealousy of the regular actors produced an edict restricting the Théâtre de la Foire, or licensed booths at fair times, to a single character on the stage. None of the ordinary writers for this theatre, not even Lesage, would attempt a monologue-drama for the purpose, and Piron obtained a footing as a dramatic author, much applause, and three hundred crowns, with a piece called Arlequin Deucalion. Thenceforward he was constantly employed for this theatre, and not seldom for the more dignified Comédie Française, but with the exception of the excellent verse comedy of La Métromanie no one of his comedies and none of his tragedies at all deserve mention. His real vocation was that of an epigram maker, and this, though it made him not a few enemies, recommended him to not a few patrons who supplied his necessities. His most intimate ...associates, however, during the middle period of his life were two ladies of talent though not of position, Mademoiselle Quinault, the actress, and her friend Mademoiselle Quenaudon or De Bar, companion to a lady of rank. She was slightly older than Piron and not beautiful, but after twenty years acquaintance he married her in 1741, lived happily enough with her for four years, and nursed her tenderly during an attack of madness which in other two years proved fatal. He long outlived her, dying on the 21st January 1773 in his eighty-fourth year. The discredit of his early literary misdeed, and perhaps his indiscriminate habits of lampooning, prevented his election to the Academy, certain persons having induced the king to interpose his veto. But Piron was pensioned, and during the last half century of his life was never in any want. He was a complete literary free-lance, and lampooned Fréron and Desfontaines as sharply as he lampooned Voltaire and the philosophe coterie. Socially he was a rather loose liver, though probably, except on paper, not worse than most of his contemporaries. He was a member of the somewhat famous convivial society of the Caveau. But his true title to remembrance lies in his epigrams, one of which, the burlesque epitaph on himself but reflecting on the Academy (see vol. viii. p. 496), is known to almost everybody, while many others equal or surpass it in brilliancy. Grimm called him a “machine à saillies,” and probably no man who ever lived possessed more of the peculiarly French faculty of sharply pointed verbal wit than he. It is noteworthy too that he was as ready with conversational retort as with his pen.
Piron published, his own theatrical works in 1758, and after his death his friend and literary executor Rigollot de Juvigny published his Oeuvres Complètes. During the last thirty years a good deal of unpublished work has been added by MM. Bonhomme, Lalanne, and others. But the epigrams, which take up but little room and have been frequently reissued in various selections, are alone of great importance.
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