Évariste de Forges de Parny

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Évariste Desiré de Forges, vicomte de Parny (February 6, 1753 - December 5, 1814), was born in the Isle of Bourbon.

He was sent to France at nine years old, was educated at Rennes, and in 1771 entered the army. He was, however, shortly recalled to the Isle of Bourbon, where he fell in love with a young lady whom he addresses as Eleonore. Her father refused to consent to her marriage with Parny, and she married someone else. Parny returned to France, and published his Poésies érotiques in 1778.

He also published about the same time his Voyage de Bourgogne (1777), written in collaboration with his friend Antoine de Berlin (1752-1790); Épître aux insurgents de Boston (1777), and Opuscules poétiques (1779). In 1796 appeared La Guerre des Dieux, a poem in the style of Voltaire's Pucelle, directed against Christianity.

Parny devoted himself in his later years almost entirely to the religious and political burlesque. He was elected to the Academy in 1803, and in 1813 received a pension from Napoleon. In 1805 he produced an extraordinary allegoric poem attacking George III, his family and his subjects, under the eccentric title of "Goddam! Goddam! par un French-dog."

Parny's early love poems and elegies, however, show a remarkable grace and ease, a good deal of tenderness, and considerable fancy and wit. One famous piece, the Elegy on a Young Girl, is scarcely to be excelled in its kind.

His Œuvres choisies were published in 1827. There is a sketch of Parny in Sainte-Beuve's Portraits contemporains.

The Soviet-era poet Anna Akhmatova recorded Pushkin's admiration for Parny in a poem: "There lay your three-cornered hat, and a dog-eared tome of Parny."