François-Antoine Devaux

François-Antoine Devaux (12 December 1712, Lunéville - 11 April 1796, or 22 germinal year IV, Lunéville) was a Lorraine (and, after 1766, French) poet and man of letters. He was called Panpan by his friends.

Devaux trained as a lawyer and worked briefly for a lawyer cousin in Nancy. He soon quit to live with his parents in Lunéville, resisting their efforts to make him marry and earn a living. His dream was to become a writer, an ambition encouraged by his friend Françoise de Graffigny, who became his sponsor in the court society of Lorraine. They collaborated on several literary projects and confided in each other about their problems, both financial and emotional. In the 1730s Devaux wrote a one-act prose play, called Les Portraits, which was accepted by the Comédie-Française; but the troupe stalled on performing the play, and for about fifteen years Devaux struggled to get it staged.

In 1737, the duke of Lorraine, François Étienne, signed away his duchy to France, in exchange for French support for his marriage to Maria Theresa of Austria. The court of Lorraine, which had been presided over by Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans, widow of Leopold I of Lorraine, was dispersed, and Stanislas Leszczynski, former king of Poland and father-in-law of Louis XV of France, was made duke of Lorraine. As a result, Françoise de Graffigny left Lorraine for Paris, and her intermittent correspondence with Devaux became an almost daily record of both their lives, until her death in 1758. She used her influence for his benefit, getting him a post as a revenue collector in 1741, helping secure his election to the Académie de Nancy in 1752, obtaining for him a sinecure as reader to King Stanislas, and thanks to her success as a playwright, persuading the actors to produce his play, which had been retitled Les Engagements indiscrets. It had its premiere on 26 October 1752. The performance was intended to coincide with the ceremony of Devaux's reception into the Académie de Nancy (now called the Académie de Stanislas), when he delivered his Discours sur l’esprit philosophique, but the indisposition of one of the actors delayed it. Françoise de Graffigny also supervised the publication of the play in 1753.

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