The kitchen lad was a born courtier and revelled in the “atmosphere of passion, love, and pleasure, that radiant aurora.”  He was always a very dissipated man, but in July, 1662, “regularised” his life by marrying Madeleine Lambert, daughter of the music-master of the court.  “The honour of the new family, and the dot of twenty thousand francs which he received, made Lully a personage, and the second phase of his life commenced.”  His wife bore him three sons and three daughters, who are said to have shared his stinginess, though they built him a magnificent monument.

It was a brilliant circle Lully moved in.  He had the honour of being hated by Boileau and La Fontaine, and of being first the friend and collaborator, and later the enemy, of Moliere.  His contract of marriage was signed by the king, queen, and the queen-mother.  Of his marriage, Fetis says:  “Never was a union better arranged, for if Lully was quick to procure riches, his wife knew how to fructify them by the order and the economy that reigned in her house.  Lully reserved for his menus plaisirs only the price of the sale of his works, which amounted annually to seven or eight thousand francs.”

His dissipations, like those of Haendel, were chiefly confined to excesses in eating and drinking, but for all his doubtful fidelity to his wife, he cannot have been an ideal husband, for he was of a miserly disposition, and his temper was enforced by a ruthless brutality.  On one occasion the singer Rochis, being in a condition that compelled a postponement of “Armide,” he demanded, angrily, “Qui t’a fait cela?” and gave her a kick qui lui fit faire une fausse couche.  This poor woman was revenged upon him by his own temper, for at the age of fifty-four, while conducting his orchestra, he grew indignant, and in wildly brandishing his baton struck his own foot so fierce a blow that gangrene set in and he died of the wound.  While he was on his death-bed, he was called upon by one of his old friends, whom his wife reproached with having been the last to get him drunk.  Whereupon the dying man spoke up with the gaiety for which he was famous, “That’s true, my dear, and when I get well he shall be the first to get me drunk again.”

In his will he named his wife as executrix, and took great care that she and the children should preserve the royal monopoly in the Academy of Music.  Lully had been reconciled only eight days before his death, with his son, whom he had previously disinherited.  His wife outlived him twenty-three years, and died May 3, 1720, at the age of seventy-seven.

When the superb mausoleum was built for Lully by his widow, some unknown poet, who hated him for his moeurs infames, scrawled on his tomb these terrific lines: 

  “Pourquoi, par un faste nouveau,
  Nous rappeler la scandaleuse histoire
  D’un libertin, indigne de memoire,
  Peut-etre meme indigne du tombeau.”