[2] For a brief view of the facts, usually misconceived, see Lanson, pp. 610–11. Fénelon seems to have been uncandid, while Bossuet, by common consent, was malevolent. There is probably truth, however, in the view of Shaftesbury (Characteristics, ed. 1900, ii, 214), that the real grievance of Fénelon’s ecclesiastical opponents was the tendency of his mysticism to withdraw devotees from ceremonial duties. [↑]
[3] Now remembered chiefly through the account of his intercourse with Fénelon (repr. in Didot ed. of Fénelon’s misc. works), and Hume’s long extract from his Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion in the concluding note to the Essays. Cp. M. Matter, Le Mysticisme en France au temps de Fénelon, 1865, pp. 352–54. [↑]
[4] Tyssot de Patot was Professor of Mathematics at Deventer. In his Lettres choisies, published in 1726, there is an avowal that “he might be charged with having different notions from those of the vulgar in point of religion” (New Memoirs of Literature, iv (1726), 267); and his accounts of pietists and unbelieving and other priests sufficiently convey that impression (id. pp. 268–84). [↑]
[5] Towards the close of his “poem” Polignac speaks of a defence of Christianity as a future task. He died without even completing the Anti-Lucretius, begun half a century before. Of him are related two classic anecdotes. Sent at the age of twenty-seven to discuss Church questions with the Pope, he earned from His Holiness the compliment: “You seem always to be of my opinion; and in the end it is yours that prevails.” Louis XIV gave him a long audience, after which the King said: “I have had an interview with a young man who has constantly contradicted me without my being able to be angry for a moment.” (Éloge prefixed to Bougainville’s trans., L’Anti-Lucrèce, 1767, i. 131.) [↑]
[6] Cp. Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire, ch. i. Rivarol (Lettres à Necker, in Œuvres, ed. 1852, p. 138) wrote that under Louis XV there began a “general insurrection” of discussion, and that everybody then talked “only of religion and philosophy during half a century.” But this exaggerates the beginnings, of which Rivarol could have no exact knowledge. [↑]
[7] La verité de la religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits: précédée d’un discours historique et critique sur la méthode des principaux auteurs qui ont écrit pour et contre le christianisme depuis son origine, 1722. Rep. 1741, 3 vols. 4to., 4 vols. 12mo. [↑]
[8] Nouveau Dictionnaire historique portatif, 1771, art. Houteville, tom. ii. [↑]
[9] Whose Considérations sur les Mœurs (1751) does not seem to contain a single religious sentiment. Historiographer of France, he had not escaped the suppression of his Histoire de Louis XI, 1745. [↑]
[10] See above, p. 130. Buffier seems to have begun an attempt at spelling reform (by dropping doubled letters), followed in 1725 by Huard and later by Prémontval. [↑]
[11] 7 vols. 4to., 10 vols. 12mo. Rep. with corrections 1733. Seconde partie, 1753, 8 vols. 12mo. [↑]