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Philippe Quinault (3 June 1635 – 26 November 1688), French dramatist and librettist, was born in...

Philippe Quinault (3 June 1635 – 26 November 1688), French dramatist and librettist, was born in Paris. He was educated by the liberality of Tristan L'Hermite, the author of Marianne. Quinault's first play was produced at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1653, when he was only eighteen. The piece succeeded, and Quinault followed it up, but he also read for the bar; and in 1660, when he married a widow with money, he bought himself a place in the Cour des Comptes. Then he tried tragedies (Agrippa, etc.) with more success. He received one of the literary pensions then recently established, and was elected to the Académie française in 1670. Up to this time he had written some sixteen or seventeen comedies, tragedies, and tragi-comedies, of which the tragedies were mostly of very small value and the tragi-comedies of little more. But his comedies--especially his first piece Les Rivales (1653), L'Amant indiscret (1654), which has some likeness to Molière's Étourdi, Le Fantôme amoureux (1659), and La Mère coquette (1665), perhaps the best--are much better. But in 1671 he contributed to the singular miscellany of Psyché, in which Corneille and Molière also had a hand, and which was set to the