Charles-Pierre Colardeau

Charles-Pierre Colardeau (12 October 1732 in Janville – 7 April 1776 in Paris) was a French poet. His most notable works are an imitation of Eloisa to Abelard by Alexander Pope and a translation of the first two sections of Night-Thoughts by Edward Young. They witness to the pre-Romantic sensibility of the 18th century, as also seen in the works of Rousseau, Diderot and Prévost. He also naturalized Ovid's term. Heroides, as 'héroïdes', imaginary poetic letters by famous people. The relatively small size of his œuvre is attributed by some to his fragile health (he died aged only 43) and by others to proverbial laziness.

Charles-Pierre Colardeau was the son of Charles Colardeau, collector of salt warehouse of Janville and his wife Jeanne Regnard. Orphaned at age 13, he was raised by his maternal uncle, pastor of Pithiviers who sent him to the college of Meung-sur-Loire to complete the humanities that he had begun with the Jesuits of Orléans. Then he came to his philosophy at College of Beauvais in Paris and then returned to Pithiviers.

His uncle had got him a position as a secretary to a lawyer at the Parliament of Paris, with the intention to prepare for the study of law and the legal profession. Colardeau then returned to the capital in 1753 but remained there for only a short time as his health faltered and he had to return to Pithiviers where he indulged his penchant for poetry, translated into verse fragments of holy scripture, undertook the writing of his tragedies Nicephore and Astarbé, the subject of the first having been taken from the Bible and that of the second from the Aventures de Télémaque (Adventures of Telemachus) of Fénelon .

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