CHERON par ses hauts Chants
surpasse les Neufs Sœurs,
Ses Sujets sont Divins, & Sa Voix est
touchante:
En marquant les Regrets d’une Ame
Pénitente,
Elle instruit les Esprits & convertit
les Cœurs.

[CHERON with her lofty songs
surpasses the nine sisters,
Her subjects are divine and her voice
most touching,
She notes the regrets of a penitent soul,
She gives spiritual instruction and
converts hearts.]

As “Erato,” Chéron had mastered the art of writing lyric poetry. We know from Titon du Tillet that the great success of her Essay de pseaumes et cantiques was partially due to the fact that she had studied Hebrew so as to get as close as possible to understanding the fine points of the text. Her brother Louis made the engravings that accompany each of the paraphrases, even if not all editions included them. Libraries in Europe and the United States today preserve dozens of copies of this work, both from in its 1694 printing as well as the reprints issued posthumously in 1715.

Even if Chéron did not actually compose music, her psalm paraphrases provided the texts for compositions penned by at least two composers. The musicologist Thierry Favier recently matched a setting of Psalm 68 by Jean-Baptiste Drouart de Bousset (1662-1725) with Chéron’s paraphrased verse. Bousset set the psalm as an air spirituel for treble voice and basso continuo and had it published by the Ballard printers in 1701. The second composer, Antonia Bembo (c. 1640-c. 1720)—a Venetian noblewoman who had been living in France since the mid-1670s [see Goldberg 6]—set all seven “Pseaumes de la Pénitence,” which had been grouped together in one section of the Essay. In the 1930s Yvonne Rokseth discovered that Chéron’s texts matched Bembo’s work, entitled Les sept Pseaumes de David. Unlike Bousset’s, Bembo’s music was never published, but the set of seven penitential psalms is preserved in a bound manuscript volume at the Bibliothèque Nationale. It seems quite possible that Bembo and Chéron could have been acquainted, given that both were on the king’s pension rolls, both were Parisian residents involved in music-making, and that Chéron had become a member of an academy based in Bembo’s homeland, the Veneto. Bembo’s complete penitential psalm settings-for 1-4 voices, all with the accompaniment of two obbligato treble parts with basso continuo-may represent something of a collaborative effort and could conceivably have been performed in Chéron’s salon.