Saint-Sulpice
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Sur la mort d'Adrienne Lecouvreur" is a poem by French writer Voltaire on the death of Adrienne Lecouvreur and the refusal of the Catholic Church to give her a Christian burial.
- When her former lover tried to arrange for her funeral at the church of Saint-Sulpice, to which she left 1,000 livres in her will, the curé M. Languet de Gergy refused; she was an actress, and as such excommunicate. Placed in a cab and taken under police escort to a patch of wasteland at the corner of the rues de Grenelle et de Bourgogne, she was cast without ceremony into a pauper's grave and sprinkled with quicklime. Voltaire himself penned her eulogy delivered by Grandval at the Comédie française. Seven months later, to Voltaire’s eternal bitterness, her English equivalent, Ann Oldfield - whom he had seen and described as “Lecouvrier anglaise” - was buried with grand ceremony in Westminster Abbey.
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