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LaMaupin.com experienced severe disk problems in mid-January. We have it mostly recovered but for some reason many UTF-8 characters, that is characters with accents on them like "è" are displaying wrong. Please do not post here until this is fixed. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but then again it has been just a little bit quiet here the last few months anyway.

Things have been a little quiet here on La Maupin of late. The demands of family and my paying career have interfered with my intent to write La Maupin's tale, and I apologize to those of you loyal enough to have been following what little progress I have made here. Julie is not forgotten, but much though I love her, familial responsibilities to the living and recently living do take precedence.

Speaking of loyalty, though, my long time corespondent and most frequent translator, Rappar, and his wife have supplied me with a full translation of the Escudiers' section on La Maupin from "Vie et aventures des cantatrices célèbres", for which I am extremely grateful. Together with the yeoman's work that clorinde has performed, I now have a fine translation of this work. Bravo! Brava! Merci!

JimB.

It's been a while since I blogged here or even managed to respond to the input of others. My apologies. Family, work and health have all distracted me. Clorinde recently asked what operas were playing in Marseille, which ties in with the whole question of where la Maupin was performing. Some sources say that she actually performed in Gautier's Opera. Others doubt that and relegate her to lesser stages. Since I want to tell the tale of the young Marseillaise and the burning of the convent in Avignon, I need to settle how I'm going to handle it. This blog posting will serve to collect some of what we know and as a place for me to ruminate a bit about what makes the best story.

Background - The Opera in Marseille

I've found a couple of sources for operas that were playing in the Marseille Opera. They include "Jean-Baptiste Lully and the music of the French Baroque" by James R. Anthony and John Hajdu Heyer and "The birth of the orchestra: history of an institution, 1650-1815" by John Spitzer... [read more]

Progress has been a bit slow lately, due to my need to work for a living, and such. Still there have been things happening here on the site. A couple of new contributors have shown up, adding valuable information in comments, both on the resources and on my outline, and contributing to the resources by translating from the French and the like. On the whole, it feels like the site is taking off, and at least my outline is shaping up. I am very grateful to everyone who has contributed.

New Features

The site itself has a couple of new features: new features for tracking new contents. First off, there is a new entry under "Background Material" in the Site Navigation sidebar: Resource Changes which will take you to a new page that lists the most recently created and updated reference pages: Characters, Events, Sources and Pictures. It doesn't list chapters or other book sections, blog postings or comments. Those are listed in their own sections in the right-hand sidebar on each page. If you... [read more]

There are a couple of interesting problems in early chronology. The first is the question of Julie's birth. Most sources cite it as 1673. The main notable counter-example is Gabriel Letainturier-Fradin, who has her birth in 1670, a date that he says he can find no documentation for, but which works better given the richness of her pre-debut days. The second issue is that very richhness and how to come up with a chronology that allows for her time with d'Armagnac, M. Maupin, Sérannes, the young Marseillaise, Marechal, d'Albert and Thévenard, all before a 1690 debut.

So far, I have found only one author, Edouard George Jacques Gregoir, who used the 1670 date before Letainturier-Fradin, and he contradicts himself. He writes (in my poor translation):

1693. - Mademoiselle Maupin, born in 1670, settled in Paris, and began this year in the role of the Magician in the opera Dido by Desmarest.

but later writes,

She died in November or December 1707, aged 33 years.