The
Ranums'
Panat Times
Volume 1, redone Dec. 2014
Guise Musicians Loulié and Beaupuis
Étienne Loulié
See my biography of Loulié: "Etienne Loulié (1654-1702), musicien de Mademoiselle de Guise, pédagogue et théoricien," Recherches sur la Musique française classique, 23 (1987), pp. 27-76, and 24 (1988-1990), pp. 5-49
Pierre Beaupuis
Pierre Beaupuis was the son of a marchand pourpointier of the rue des Lombards, in the parish of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. His father, Charles Beaupuis, was the son of Jean Beaupuis, a laboureur at "Lachelle" in Picardy, and Anne Le Blond [MC, LXVII, ----, February 18, 1645]. If the "bourg" in question is the same town as today's "Leschelle," the Beaupuis family lived some thirteens kilometers northeast of Guise, on the road to La Capelle-en-Tierache. In other words, there is a strong possibility that Pierre Beaupuis was admitted to the service of Marie de Lorraine not only because of his outstanding vocal talents but because his family had "belonged" to the Guises for generations.
Moving to the capital did not separate Charles Beaupuis from kith and kin: his brother Pierre was also a master pourpointier in Paris (the brothers lived on the same street so they apparently ran the business jointly), and another brother, Michel, had purchased the office of juré porteur de grains at the Halles of Paris [MC, II, 187, inventory, June 17, 1648]. In 1645, Charles Beaupuis married Marie Petit, the illiterate daughter of a shoemaker in a small market town in Picardy, who had already reached the age of majority and may have come to Paris in order to marry a man chosen by her Paris-based relatives — her brothers François and Antoine, fringe-makers, her uncle Jean Petit, a tissutier-rubannier of the capital, and her brother-in-law and several cousins, who were also in the ribbon business. Through their sister, the Beaupuis brothers had contacts with the region of Compiègne, and more specifically with the town of Rémy, just west of that royal castle [MC, II, 187, inventory, June 17, 1648].
We can only guess the year when Charles Beaupuis's only surviving son, Pierre, was born. Although the future singer could have appeared on the scene as early as 1646, the fact that he lived on until 1732 suggests that Pierre was born in the early 1650s, like his future colleague Étienne Loulié, q.v., and that he entered the service of the Guises at approximately twenty, that is, circa 1673. Pierre was therefore only a young child in March 1659 when the notary came to list the items belonging to the late doublet-maker in the three rooms the family occupied on the "rue des Longbars," at the sign of the "Image of Saint Christopher."
The future musician's parents lived modestly, yet their andirons were topped with brass balls, they possessed a pewter plates and porringers and a few silver plates, and Marie Petit had decorated both the walls and the fireplace mantel with "tapestries" of some sort. The couple slept in the usual canopy bed with red serge hangings, while their young son snuggled into a little folding bed nearby [MC, LXVII, March 14, 1659, inventory].
Marie Petit remarried with the rapidity characteristic of households where a woman is left to support a child. Two weeks after the inventory, she contracted marriage with Jean Gouton, a twenty-eight year-old tailor of the nearby rue Beaubourg. She brought her husband 1,200 livres worth of furniture, and half of a rente of 800 livres (the other half went to little Pierre) ,and she stipulated that her child by her first marriage would be "nourry, instruit et entretenu au depenses de ladite communauté [de biens], sans en être demandé aucune chose, jusqu'à ce qu'il ait atteint l'age de seize ans, [...] à condition qu'il ne pourra rien demander ni pretendre du revenu de son bien" [MC, LXVII, marriage, March 26, 1659]. In short, although Pierre would not have to work for his bread, when he reached sixteen he could lay no claims to his step-father's business nor even to the rente that was theoretically his.
Pierre Beaupuis drops out of sight and does not resurface until the early 1670s (he was not yet twenty), when his fine bass voice began to attract attention. Although his name does not appear on the surviving lists of Pierre Perrin's opera singers, Beaupuis may have been among the extremely young vocalists (the girls were between fifteen and twenty-two years old and the men between twenty and thirty) who worked for Perrin and Cambert. Indeed, one twentieth-century scholar asserts that he had "fait partie du théâtre de Perrin" and that he joined Robert Cambert in London and stayed on there for an unspecified length of time.
Just a year after Marc-Antoine Charpentier's arrival at the hôtel de Guise, Perrin and Cambert's Pomone was being rehearsed in the presence of a certain Bellinzani. Supposing that Beaupuy was a member of the cast, this apparently unimportant bit of information casts considerable light on the circumstances surrounding Beaupuis's selection by the Guises a few years later. Since the 1650s, Perrin had "belonged" to the Orléans, and in August 1672 Mme de Guise would pay his debts and enable him to once again become a free man. In other words, Charpentier had a ringside seat, so to speak, for the events surrounding the creation of Pomone — just as François Bellinzani, the brother-in-law of Étiennette Charpentier's friend, Françoise Ferrand, had a ringside seat at rehearsals. (Bellinzani had ties to Italy that went beyond his name: he had been Cardinal Mazarin's intendant, then served at Louis XIV's resident at Mantua.) Indeed, it is quite possible that Charpentier was in contact with Beaupuis by late 1671, for the singer's name appears on the score of H. 160, a psalm that the composer copied into notebook IX, which seems to date from December 1671. The manuscript also bears Dun's name, written in a brownish ink that may date from the 1690s. That the ink of "Beaupuy" is, by contrast, dark like the rest of the score, suggests that this work, which is copied out onto simili-jesuit paper, was written for the jesuit church of Saint-Louis, known to have engaged Perrin's singers in the early 1670s. There is therefore evidence to support the hypothesis that Charpentier was in contact with Perrin's troop before 1672 and knew Beaupuis well enough to compose a melodic line especially for him.
When Perrin lost his privilege in 1672, many of his singers joined Lully's troop, but other promising young beginners set off for London — among them Pierre Beaupuis, whose name appears sporadically in the Stuart royal accounts. Beaupuis was, however, back in Paris in September 1673, to perform with Mlle Cartilly, one of Perrin's singers in Pomone (she had also performed with Dassoucy). Beaupuis had been invited to sing in two operas being planned by sieur Filz, who kept a school for young men from good families and was seeking singers to participate in the musical interludes alongside his pupils. Among these schoolboys was "le fils Bellinzani," that is, François's son Antoine. The elder Bellinzani's enthusiasm for opera surely is behind Filz's project and explains how an otherwise unknown school master got it into his head to hire some of the musical stars of the day. Thus it came to pass that "Beaupuits" was engaged for "Sédécias and Zénobie, tragedies qui seront chantées dans la maison de Mr Fil, au faubourg Saint-Germain, rue de Seve [Sèvres], le lundy 11, le jeudy 14 et samedy 16 septembre et les mèmes jours de la semaine suivante." Sieur Le Seur, the school's dancing master, helped by the famous theatrical dancer and choreographer Beauchamps, supervised the dancers and wrote the music. In addition to Beaupuis and Cartilly, sieur Prunier and Mlle Turpin were hired for these performances. Now, as early as 1673, an operatic thread clearly linked Charpentier at the Hôtel de Guise to Perrin and Cambert, to Bellinzani, to Beaupuis. (A thread clearly also led to the Sainte-Chapelle, where eighteen year-old Étienne Loulié was a choir boy. On September 20, 1673, the very week when the operas were being performed at Filz's academy, Loulié asked permission to leave the choir school, apparently to enter the service of the Guises.)
In other words, not only does Pierre Beaupuis' s London career seem
to have been extremely brief, he also seems to have been willing to
travel back and forth across national boundaries, like a modern-day
operatic star. His career in England seems to have ended when Cambert's
ill-fated troop returned to France on June 1, 1674. By then, each Guise
princess lived in a palace of her own; and, having cast off their deep
mourning of 1671-1673, each princess was focusing on the devotional uses
she could make of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's talents. Since Beaupuis's
name immediately follows Loulié's in Mlle de Guise's will of 1688, and
since the two musicians received exactly the same amount of money,
Beaupuis would seem to have begun serving the Guises shortly after
Loulié, probably by early 1674. That his bass voice does not appear in
Charpentier's "French" (Guise) notebooks until early 1676 can
doubtlessly be explained by the renewed and profound mourning that
followed the death of Mme de Guise's little son in March 1675. (Aside
from Judith, a devotional statement that Mme de Guise made in September
1675, and musical prayers for peace in early 1676, Charpentier added
virtually nothing to his "French" notebooks between March 1675 and Psalm
8 (H. 163) of cahier 12, the first of a long series of pieces for haut
dessus, dessus and bass. In short, Beaupuis may have been at the Hôtel
de Guise for the better part of 1674, even though Charpentier's
notebooks do not reveal his presence until early 1676. For the next
eighteen years, Beaupuis sang the bass line in the ensemble that one
might call the "trio de l'hôtel de Guise," that is, two women's voices
and a bass, accompanied by two treble instruments and continuo. His
protectress did, however, permit Beaupuis to sing for the royal academy
of music; and to reward him for some twelve years of service, she willed
Beaupuis 3,000 livres.
It is not clear whether Beaupuis lodged at
the Hôtel de Guise during Mlle de Guise's lifetime, for his quarters are
not mentioned in the inventory of the urban palace. The notaries were,
however, only interested in furnishings owned by the late princess and
did not describe quarters in the orangery wing that were entirely
furnished by the occupant. In April 1689, when he was paid the first
installment of his legacy, 750 livres, Beaupuis lived on the rue Bar-du-Bec,
midway between the Hôtel de Guise and the Hôtel de Ville [Chantilly, A
15].
Now that Beaupuis was, so to speak, a free agent, music lovers vied for him. Only a month after Mlle de Guise's death, Colbert, the coadjutor for the archbishopric of Rouen, wrote Roger de Gaignières to see whether he could purchase any of the fabled furnishings of the Hôtel de Guise prior to the start of the public auction. The prelate's mind soon turned to another fabled Guise possession, Beaupuis: "J'ay esté fort ayse d'apprendre ce que vous m'avés mandé de Beaupuis. Je suis persuadé que je seray content de luy dans la suitte" [BN, ms. 24991, April 11, 1688]. "Content," because throughout his life, "M. Colbert, archevêque de Rouen [...] y étoit fort considéré, moins par sa capacité, à ce que j'ai ouï dire, n'étoit au plus que médiocre, que par la délicatesse de sa tabale et par les autres plaisirs qu'il procuroit aux députés [of the assembly of the clergy]. Le plaisant jansénisme que celui de cet archevêque! Il tonnait dans ses mandements contre la morale relâchée, et il avoit une musique entretenue, et les meubles les plus somptueux ne l'étoient point assez pour lui" [Abbé Le Gendre, p. 167]. Beaupuis apparently preferred to remain in Paris, so Colbert seems to have settled on another Guise musician, François Anthoine, q.v. Did Charpentier, the Jesuits' new music master, encourage Beaupuis to remain in Paris by promising to write specifically for him? If so, he held good on the promise, for Beaupuis's name appears five times in the cahiers made of simili-jesuit paper that Charpentier copied out between 1688 and 1698. During the 1690s, Beaupuis, now described as a "maître de musique," remained on the rue Bar-du-Bec [Yolande de Brossard, "Musiciens de Paris]. He continued to use that title, until his death in 1732, at approximately eighty years of age.
By the 1730s, Pierre Beaupuis was reduced lending money, sometimes for I.O.U.'s and sometimes for precious snuffboxes and corkscrews, in order to stay alive. Sometimes he was reduced to hocking for a brief time the items entrusted him. (The persons involved in these transfers gave the notary the impression that they were merely taking care of the items, or that Beaupuis was caring for them on their behalf, but the exchanges surely were somewhat more sordid.) The old man would climb the dark stairs to his fourth-floor room at the back of a house in the rue Couture Saint-Gervais, just behind the former Hôtel de Guise, refurbished and now known as the Hôtel Soubise. The room was hung with mass-produced "tapisseries de Bergame" described as being "old." In it stood a lower half of a wardrobe (a door was missing), a narrow four-poster bed with green serge curtains, two small cabinets and an armchair with a moveable back (it may also have served as a commode) and four straw-seated chairs. A small mirror in a black frame and an oil painting of Christ were remnants of better days. Beaupuis's clothes had doubtlessly once been elegant, but now the old musician's flesh-colored mantel, brown vest and jacket, cotton houserobe, hat, wig, cane, shoes and silver shoe-buckles were described as "old." He owned only six music books, all bound in brown calf and containing "different airs." The four second cousins who accompanied the notary to the room and attempted to make heads and tails of their late relative's financial dealings, were scantily rewarded for their assiduousness: the total value of Pierre Beaupuis's earthly goods were estimated as worth only 96 livres.
For Beaupuis's career, see Perrin's famous letter to Della Rovere,
quoted by Nuitter and Thoinon, p. 47; André Tessier, "Robert Cambert à
Londres," Revue musicale, Dec. 1927, p. 115, n.; Pierre Danchin,
"The Foundation of the Royal Academy of Music..." Theater Survey
25/1 (May 1984), p. 64; "Prison" de Dassoucy, ed. Colombey, p. 459, but
no date is given for Mlle Cartilly's collaboration with Dassoucy; for
Filz's opera, B.N., Y 6051, and Nuitter and Thoinan, p. 164; and for
Lully, Le Cerf de la Viéville, 1705 ed., II, p. 226.