Jean de La Chapelle
Jean de La Chapelle (24 October 1651 – 29 May 1723) was a French writer and dramatist. He was born at Bourges, France, was elected to the Académie française in 1688, and died in Paris. Biography. Born into minor nobility, nephew of Nicolas Boileau, his literary talents attracted the attention of Louis Armand, prince of Bourbon-Conti, whose assistant he became in 1678. Louis XIV of France gave him a number of diplomatic missions to Switzerland to negotiate agreements with the government at Neufchâtel. Benefiting from a sizeable personal fortune, La Chapelle wrote and staged tragedies inspired  by classical antiquity at the Comédie-Française: "Zaïde", "Téléphonte", "Cléopâtre", "Ajax". His connections and the skill of the actor Michel Baron brought them success in the theatre, but none survived to join the standard repertoire. A small prose comedy, "Les Carrosses d'Orléans" (1680), was on the other hand a genuine success and was frequently staged. It was later adapted into a popular English hit "The Stage Coach" by George Farquhar and Peter Motteux. La Chapelle published two novels, "Les Amours de Catulle" (1680) and "Les Amours de Tibulle" (1700), both dry collections of translations from the Latin poets Catullus and  Tibullus respectively. In 1688, La Chapelle was elected chairman of the Académie française, succeeding Antoine Furetière. In 1695 he purchased the Château of Sainte-Assise; he sold it in 1700 to Jean Glucq.