Dufresny, Charles Rivière (1648-1724). Despite general acknowledgement of Dufresny's talents in several areas—music, landscape-gardening, the plastic arts, and literature—his work has been over-shadowed by that of more-easily classifiable contemporaries, such as Regnard, with whom he collaborated in the 1690s, and Lesage. His best-known plays were written for the Comédie-Française: L'Esprit de contradiction (1700), Le Double Veuvage (1702), La Coquette de village (1715), Le Mariage fait et rompu (1721). He wrote initially, however, for the Comédie-Italienne, and his compositions, fusing music, dance, and text, had a strong influence over its subsequent development. Without adopting the moralizing tone of some later comedies, he high-lights social and personal corruption, through characters who exemplify the general malaise of an age of changing values. His work is generally marked by a taste for the unusual and the irregular. He is also remembered for his prose narrative Les Amusements sérieux et comiques (1699)—one source of inspiration for Montesquieu's Lettres persanes —and for his innovative and personalized editorship of Le Mercure galant (1710-13).
[John Dunkley]
