BÉRAIN, JEAN (1638-1711), known as “the Elder,” Belgian draughtsman and designer, painter and engraver of ornament, was born in 1638 or 1639 at Saint Mihiel (Meuse) and died in Paris on the 24th of January 1711. In 1674 he was appointed dessinateur de la chambre et du cabinet de Roi, in succession to Gissey, whose pupil he is believed to have been. From 1677 onward he had apartments, near to those of André Charles Boulle (q.v.), for whom he made many designs, in the Louvre, where he died. After the death of Le Brun he was commissioned to compose and supervise the whole of the exterior decoration of the king’s ships. Without possessing great originality he was inventive and industrious, and knew so well how to assimilate the work of those who had preceded him (especially Raffaelle’s arabesques) and to adapt it to the taste of the time that his designs became the rage. He furnished designs for the decorations and costumes used in the opera performances, for court festivals, and for public solemnities such as funeral processions, and inspired the ornamentations of rooms and of furniture to such an extent that a French writer says that nothing was done during his later years which he had not designed, or at least which was not in his manner. He was, in fact, the oracle of taste and the supreme pontiff whose fiat was law in all matters of decoration. His numerous designs were for the most part engraved under his own superintendence, and a collection of them was published in Paris in 1711 by his son-in-law, Thuret, clockmaker to the king. There are three books, Œuvre de J. Bérain, Ornements inventés par J. Bérain and Œvres de J. Bérain contenant des ornements d’architecture. His earliest known works show him as engraver—twelve plates in the collection of Diverses pièces de serrurerie inventées par Hughes Brisville el gravées par Jean Bérain (Paris, 1663), and in 1667 ten plates of designs for the use of gunsmiths. M. Guilmard in Les Maîtres ornemanistes, gives a complete list of his published works.
His son Jean Bérain, “the Younger” (1678-1726), was born in Paris, where he also died. He was his father’s pupil, and exercised the same official functions after his death. Thus he planned the funeral ceremonies at St Denis on the death of the dauphin, and afterwards made the designs for the obsequies of Louis XIV. He is perhaps best known as an engraver. He engraved eleven plates of the collection Ornements de peinture et de sculpture qui sont dans la galerie d’Apollon au chasteau du Louvre, et dans le grand appartement du roy au palais des Tuileries (Paris, 1710), which have been wrongly attributed to his father, the Mausolei du duc de Bourgogne, and that of Marie-Louise Gabrielle de Savoie, reine d’Espagne (1714), &c. His work is exceedingly difficult to distinguish from his father’s, the similarity of style being remarkable.
Claude Bérain, brother of the elder Jean, was still living in 1726. He was engraver to the king, and executed a good number of plates of ornament and arabesque of various kinds, some of which are included in his more distinguished brother’s works.
(J. P. B.)
BÉRANGER, PIERRE JEAN DE (1780-1857), French song-writer, was born in Paris on the 19th of August 1780. The aristocratic de was a piece of groundless vanity on the part of his father, who had assumed the name of Béranger de Mersix. He was descended in truth from a country innkeeper on the one side, and, on the other, from a tailor in the rue Montorgueil. Of education, in the narrower sense, he had but little. From the roof of his first school he beheld the capture of the Bastille, and this stirring memory was all that he acquired. Later on he passed some time in a school at Péronne, founded by one Bellenglise on the principles of Rousseau, where the boys were formed into clubs and regiments, and taught to play solemnly at politics and war. Béranger was president of the club, made speeches before such members of Convention as passed through Péronne, and drew up addresses to Tallien or Robespierre at Paris. In the meanwhile he learned neither Greek nor Latin—not even French, it would appear; for it was after he left school, from the printer Laisney, that he acquired the elements of grammar. His true education was of another sort. In his childhood, shy, sickly and skilful with his hands, as he sat at home alone to carve cherry stones, he was already forming for himself those habits of retirement and patient elaboration which influenced the whole tenor of his life and the character of all that he wrote. At Péronne he learned of his good aunt to be a stout republican; and from the doorstep of her inn, on quiet evenings, he would listen to the thunder of the guns before Valenciennes, and fortify himself in his passionate love of France and distaste for all things foreign. Although he could never read Horace save in a translation, he had been educated on Télémaque, Racine and the dramas of Voltaire, and taught, from a child, in the tradition of all that is highest and most correct in French.
After serving his aunt for some time in the capacity of waiter, and passing some time also in the printing-office of one Laisney, he was taken to Paris by his father. Here he saw much low speculation, and many low royalist intrigues. In 1802, in consequence of a distressing quarrel, he left his father and began life for himself in the garret of his ever memorable song. For two years he did literary hackwork, when he could get it, and wrote pastorals, epics and all manner of ambitious failures. At the end of that period (1804) he wrote to Lucien Bonaparte, enclosing some of these attempts. He was then in bad health, and in the last state of misery. His watch was pledged. His wardrobe consisted of one pair of boots, one greatcoat, one pair of trousers with a hole in the knee, and “three bad shirts which a friendly hand wearied itself in endeavouring to mend.” The friendly hand was that of Judith Frère, with whom he had been already more or less acquainted since 1796, and who continued to be his faithful companion until her death, three months before his own, in 1857. She must not be confounded with the Lisette of the songs; the pieces addressed to her (La Bonne Vieille, Maudit printemps, &c.) are in a very different vein. Lucien Bonaparte interested himself in the young poet, transferred to him his own pension of 1000 francs from the Institute, and set him to work on a Death of Nero. Five years later, through the same patronage, although indirectly, Béranger became a clerk in the university at a salary of another thousand.
Meanwhile he had written many songs for convivial occasions, and “to console himself under all misfortunes”; some, according to M. Boiteau, had been already published by his father, but he set no great store on them himself; and it was only in 1812, while watching by the sick-bed of a friend, that it occurred to him to write down the best he could remember. Next year he was elected to the Caveau Moderne, and his reputation as a song-writer began to spread. Manuscript copies of Les Gueux, Le Sénateur, above all, of Le Roi d’Yvetot, a satire against Napoleon, whom he was to magnify so much in the sequel, passed from hand to hand with acclamation. It was thus that all his best works went abroad; one man sang them to another over all the land of France. He was the only poet of modern times who could altogether have dispensed with printing.
His first collection escaped censure. “We must pardon many things to the author of Le Roi d’Yvetot,” said Louis XVIII. The second (1821) was more daring. The apathy of the Liberal camp, he says, had convinced him of the need for some bugle call of awakening. This publication lost him his situation in the university, and subjected him to a trial, a fine of 500 francs and an imprisonment of three months. Imprisonment was a small affair for Béranger. At Sainte Pélagie he occupied a room (it had just been quitted by Paul Louis Courier), warm, well furnished, and preferable in every way to his own poor lodging, where the water froze on winter nights. He adds, on the occasion of his second imprisonment, that he found a certain charm in this quiet, claustral existence, with its regular hours and long evenings alone over the fire. This second imprisonment of nine months, together with a fine and expenses amounting to 1100 francs, followed on the appearance of his fourth collection. The government proposed through Laffitte that, if he would submit to judgment without appearing or making defences, he should only be condemned in the smallest penalty. But his public spirit made him refuse the proposal; and he would not even ask permission to pass his term of imprisonment in a Maison de santé, although his health was more than usually feeble at the time. “When you have taken your stand in a contest with government, it seems to me,” he wrote, “ridiculous to complain of the blows it inflicts on you, and impolitic to furnish it with any occasion of generosity.” His first thought in La Force was to alleviate the condition of the other prisoners.