Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy

Charles Coypeau (16 October 1605 Paris – 29 October 1677, Paris) was a French musician and burlesque poet. In the mid-1630s he began using the nom de plume "D'Assouci" or "Dassoucy".

From the time he was eight or nine, Charles Coypeau began running away from home. His father then placed him in the Jesuit College of Clermont, where he acquired a solid education in classics and Christian doctrine; but the boy was always sneaking away to watch the puppeteers and organ grinders on the Pont-Neuf. These contacts with players and musicians were a major factor in the formation of Charles's musical and poetic talents, and encouraged his bent for the "burlesque".

By the time he was seventeen, Charles had left Paris and had begun his long life of wandering, eking out a livelihood by composing, singing for local elites, and teaching the lute. By his mid-twenties, he apparently had made his way to Italy: at any rate, by the early 1630s he had mastered the Italian theorbo, an instrument still rare in France.

In 1630, while in Grenoble, Charles met Pierre de Nyert, the gifted singer. Shortly after that, he went to England and performed at the court of Charles I, and then to the Low Countries, where he played and sang for the exiled Marguerite de Lorraine, duchess of Orléans. By 1636, Charles, who now called himself "Charles Coypeau, sieur of Assoucy" (or simply "d'Assoucy"), was living in Paris. Having been presented to Louis XIII, he was soon entertaining the French court and writing poems for the royal family. For over a decade, d'Assoucy participated in numerous court concerts, having been made a "musician in ordinary to the King" (musicien ordinaire du Roi).

In 1642, he made the acquaintance of Claude-Emmanuel L'Huillier, known as "Chapelle", the natural son of a wealthy financier. Through this connection to the L'Huilliers, d'Assoucy became part of a group of "free spirits" (libertins) around the philosopher Pierre Gassendi. Other members of the circle were Cyrano de Bergerac, Tristan l'Hermite, Saint-Amant, Paul Scarron, and a young playwright who went by the name "Molière". Saint-Amant and Scarron had already introduced into France the burlesque travesty or parody, a distinctive poetic genre written in eight-syllable rhyming couplets studded with puns and erotic allusions, that treated mythological or historical subjects in a comic fashion, rather than the usual heroic or epic manner. D'Assoucy was soon writing in this "burlesque" style: his first travesty was Le Jugement de Pâris (1646–1647); his second was Ovide en belle humeur, a travesty of Ovid's Métamorphoses (1649).

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