Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux

Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763), French dramatist and novelist, whose distinctive manner of writing came to be called marivaudage. Born in Paris, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux trained as a lawyer but as a young man began a writing career. In the early 1720s he founded his own magazine, Le spectateur français (The French Spectator), which was inspired by the English publication The Spectator (edited by writers Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele). Marivaux later became a member of various Parisian literary salons (private gatherings of writers and intellectuals), and in 1742 he was elected a member of the French Academy.

Marivaux is well known for his comedies, which usually focus on aspects of love. They include La surprise de l'amour (The Surprise of Love, 1722), Le jeu de l'amour et du hasard (The Game of Love and Chance, 1730), and Le legs (The Legacy, 1736). In writing his comedies he developed a unique tone of language, called marivaudage, characterized by a strong sense of human emotion and a sophisticated attention to linguistic detail. Marivaudage was criticized by many writers of the time as an affected and artificial language. In addition to his many plays, Marivaux also wrote two unfinished novels, La vie de Marianne (The Life of Marianne, 1731-1741) and Le paysan parvenu (The Successful Peasant, 1734-1735). They are considered realistic treatments of 18th-century middle-class French life.