This week, my parish kicks off Advent with this seasonal perennial. It\u2019s our entrance hymn for this Sunday. Judging from the evidence on YouTube, a lot of parishes have this in their repertoire and will likely be singing this over the next four weeks.<\/p>\n
It is actually a French hymn, written by Simon Joseph Pellegrin<\/strong><\/a> over 400 years ago:<\/p>\n He was born at Marseille<\/a>, the son of a conseiller<\/i> to the Si\u00e8ge Pr\u00e9sidial<\/a> of the city. He was at first designated for an ecclesiastical career, from which he retained the courtesy title abb\u00e9<\/i>. Though he was for a time a novitiate of the Servites<\/a> at Moustiers-Sainte-Marie<\/a>, he soon embarked on a career as a ship\u2019s bursar.<\/p>\n <\/sup>Returning to France in 1703, he settled in Paris and composed his earliest poems, among them an Ep\u00eetre \u00e0 Louis XIV<\/i>, praising the Sun King\u2019s military successes, which gained the king\u2019s attention and the Acad\u00e9mie fran\u00e7aise prize in 1704.<\/p>\n Probably thanks to Madame de Maintenon, Pellegrin succeeded in escaping the urging of his superiors that he become more fully integrated with his order; instead a papal dispensation enabled him to enter the Cluniac<\/a> order, whereupon he was at the service of various schools, such as Saint-Cyr, for which he provided numerous pious cantiques spirituelles<\/i>, in which he translated psalms and canticles and set them to familiar tunes from the opera, at the same time that his services were retained for the theatres and the opera, which permitted an otherwise unknown poet R\u00e9mi the epigram:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Catholic in the morning and idolater in the evening, he dined from the altar and supped from the theatre.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Check it out below.<\/p>\n