Nicolas Joseph Laurent Gilbert Biography | Poet

GILBERT, NICOLAS JOSEPH LAURENT (1751-1780), French poet, was born at Fontenay-le-Château in Lorraine in 1751. Having completed his education at the college of Dôle, he devoted himself for a time to a half-scholastic, half-literary life at Nancy, but in 1774 he found his way to the capital. As an opponent of the Encyclopaedists and a panegyrist of Louis XV., he received considerable pensions. He died in Paris on the 12th of November 1780 from the results of a fall from his horse. The satiric force of one or two of his pieces, as Mon Apologie (1778) and Le Dix-huitième Siècle (1775), would alone be sufficient to preserve his reputation, which has been further increased by modern writers, who, like Alfred de Vigny in his Stello (chaps. 7-13), considered him a victim to the spite of his philosophic opponents. His best-known verses are the Ode imitée de plusieurs psaumes, usually entitled Adieux à la vie.