Jécrivis

J'écrivis is the first-person singular form of the French verb écrire in the passé simple, a literary past tense used primarily in written narration. The form comes from the verb stem écri- and ends with -is, as in j'écrivis, tu écrivit, il écrivit, nous écrivîmes, vous écrîtes, ils écrivirent. The standard orthography uses an apostrophe after the Je, j', before a vowel.

The passé simple, including j'écrivis, is associated with narrative prose, historical writing, and classical literature. It denotes a completed action in the past and is typically used to advance the sequence of events in a story. In contemporary spoken French, the passé simple is rare and generally replaced by the passé composé or other tenses.

A common feature of j'écrivis is its elision: the je becomes j' before a vowel, producing j'écrivis. In some casual transcriptions or dialectal writing, you may see jécrivis, but the correct standard spelling includes the apostrophe: j'écrivis.

Usage context examples include historical narratives, fairy tales, and modern literature that intentionally adopts a traditional or elevated style. For everyday speech and writing, forms like j'ai écrit (passé composé) are used instead to express past actions with present relevance or conversational immediacy.

Relation to other tenses: the passé simple contrasts with the passé composé, which uses the auxiliary avoir plus the past participle (j'ai écrit) and is more common in modern French. It also contrasts with the imperfect (écrivais), which describes ongoing past actions, whereas j'écrivis marks a single completed event within a sequence.