Samuel Chappuzeau

Samuel Chappuzeau (16 June 1625, Paris – 31 August 1701) was a French scholar, author, poet and playwright whose best-known work today is Le Théâtre François, a description of French Theatre in the seventeenth century.

Chappuzeau’s play Le Cercle des Femmes is widely regarded as one of the main sources for Molière’s masterpiece Les Précieuses Ridicules, but his influence on the "Golden Age of French Drama" has in the past been seriously underestimated. Among other things, Chappuzeau played a substantial part in "discovering" Molière when he gave his travelling troupe a glowing review in his book Lyon dans son lustre in 1656.

Chappuzeau is credited with a number of "firsts," including being the first writer to introduce satire to French farce, and the first to set a play in China.

Later, he composed Tavernier's famous travel guides from notes and dictation, though this task seems to have been forced upon him, much against his will, by the King (Louis XIV).

Chappuzeau also wrote sermons, odes, dictionaries, and geographical books, and was still working on his Nouveau Dictionaire almost up to his death.

Though his family originated in Poitiers, where his grandfather François was a 'procureur' and owned hemp fields and a vinyard, Chappuzeau was born in Paris, where his father Charles was a lawyer and member of the Noblesse de Robe. The youngest of six, or possibly seven, children, he was educated in the Calvinist school in Châtillon-sur-Loing (now known as Châtillon-Coligny) and in Geneva. In 1643, he went to Montauban to study Theology.

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