F N F N 365 as the amazing versatility, of his talents. His teachers, who readily appreciated these, were anxious to allure him into their order, but his father had designed him for the bar, and an advocate accordingly he became ; but, having lost the first cause which was entrusted to him, he soon abandoned law in disgust and gave himself wholly to literary pursuits. His attention was first directed to poetical composition ; and more than once he competed for the poetry prizes of the French Academy, but never with success. He had also the sorrow of witnessing, in 1680, the total failure of his tragedy Aspar, a failure which was all the more mortifying because, for the purpose of annoying Racine, Thomas Corneille had previously sounded forth in the Mercure the praises of his nephew as the most gifted of all the younger dramatists. Fontenelle afterwards acknowledged the justice of the public verdict by burning his unfortunate drama, of which nothing but the name now survives. But for several years he persisted in the belief that poetry was his true vocation, and continued to produce dramatic compositions, the mediocrity of which, considering the author s real talent, is positively astonish ing. His opera of Thetis et Pelee, though highly praised by Voltaire, cannot be said to rise much above the others ; and it is significant that of all his dramatic works, not one has kept the stage. His Poesies Pastorales have no greater claim to permanent repute, being characterized by stiffness and affectation ; and the utmost that can be said for his poetry in general is that it displays much of the limce labor, great purity of diction, and occasional felicity of expression. It was by his Dialogues des Marts, published in 1683, that Fontenelle first established a genuine claim to high literary rank ; and that claim was very much enhanced three years later by the appearance of the Entretiens sur la Pluralite des Monties, a work which was
- mong the very first to illustrate the possibility of being
scientific without being either uninteresting or unin telligible to the ordinary reader. It was precisely the kind of work which Fontenelle was capable of executing well, both from the natural bent of his intellect and from the course of his previous studies. His object was to popularize among his countrymen the astronomical theories of Descartes ; and it may well be doubted if that philo sopher ever ranked a more ingenious or successful ex pounder among the number of his disciples. Hitherto Fontenelle had continued to reside in Rouen, but in 1687 he removed to Paris for permanent residence there ; and in the same year he published his Histoire des Oracles, a book which made a considerable noise in the theological as well as in the philosophical world. It was not so much an original work as a reduction from the Latin of Van Dale, and consisted of two essays, the first of which was designed to prove that oracles were not given by the supernatural agency of demons, and the second, that they did not ce.ise with the birth of Christ. The clearness and precision of the style, and the smooth flow of the reasoning in this treatise, have been always much admired. It excited the suspicion of the church, however, and a Jesuit, by name Baltus, published a ponderous refutation of it ; but the peace-loving disposition of its author impelled him to leave his opponent unanswered. He was too busy, he wrote to Leclerc, and added, " Enfin, je n ai point du tout 1 humeur pole mique, et toutes les querelles me de plaisent. J aime mieux que le diable ait e"te prophete, puisque le pere je suite le veut, et qu il croit cela plus orthodoxe." To the follow ing year (1688) belongs his Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes, in which he took the modern side in a somewhat imnecessary controversy then raging ; his Doutes sur le Systeme Physique des Causes Occasionelles (against Male- branche) appeared shortly afterwards. In 1691 he was received into the French Academy in spite of the determined efforts of Racine and Boileau, who on four previous occa sions had secured his rejection. He subsequently was admitted a member both of the Academy of Inscriptions and of the Academy of Sciences ; and in 1699 he became perpetual secretary to the latter body. This office he actually held for the long period of forty-two years ; and it was in this official capacity that he wrote the Histoire de VAcadcmie des Sciences, containing extracts and analyses of the proceedings, and also the Eloges of the members. These last are written with great simplicity and delicacy; while of the prefaces to the Histoire, Sainte-Beuve declares that in them " il a atteint a une veritable perfection, encore agreable et presque severe." The only other works of Fontenelle that require to be mentioned are his Geometric de Vlnjiid and his Apologie des Tourbillons. Of the former, his Academy composition, he himself is reported to have said (so far, justly) "There, now, is a book which only eight men in Europe can understand, and the author is not one of the eight." Fontenelle forms a link of connexion bstween two very widely different periods of French litera ture, that of Corneille, Racine, and Boileau on the one hand, and that of Voltaire, D Alembert, and Diderot on the other. It is not in virtue of his great age alone that this can be said of him ; he actually had much in common with the beaux esprits of the 17th century, as well as with the j)hilosophes of the 18th. But it is to the latter rather than to the former period that he properly belongs ; and it is not a little significant that while as a poet and man of fashion he was " the butt of all the clever men in Paris" during the first fifty years of his life, he latterly came to be " a force and an authority in the intellectual life " of the period. He has no claim to be regarded as a genius ; but, as Sainte-Beuve has said, he well deserves a place " dans la classe des esprits infiniments distingue"s " distinguished, however, it ought to be added by intelli gence rather than by intellect, and less by the power of saying much than by the power of saying a little well. In personal character he has sometimes been described as having been revoltingly heartless ; and it is abundantly plain that he was singularly incapable of feel ing strongly the more generous emotions a misfortune, or a fault, which revealed itself in many ways. " II faut avoir de 1 aine pour avoir du gout" But the cynical expressions of such a man are not to be taken too literally ; and the mere fact that he lived and died in the esteem of many friends suffices to show that the theoretical selfish ness which he sometimes professed cannot have been con sistently and at all times carried into practice. There have been several collective editions of Fontenelle s works. The best are those of Paris, in 8 vols. 8vo, 1790, and 5 vols. 8vo, 1825. Some of his separate works have been very frequently re printed and also translated. The Pluralite des Mcmdcs was trans lated into modern Greek in 1794. Sainte-Beuve has an interesting essay on Fontenelle, with several useful references, in the Causcrics du Luiidi, vol. iii. FONTEVRAULT, or FONTEVRAUD, in Latin Fons Ebraldi, a town of France, with a population of about 2500, in the department of Maine-et-Loire, 10 miles S.E. of Saumur, and 2 miles from the confluence of the Loire and Vienne. It is situated in the midst of a forest district, and the inhabitants carry on various minor industries fostered by the timber trade. The interest of the place centres in its abbey, which since 1804 has been utilized and abused as a central house of detention for convicts. In spite of mutilation and " translation," the building remains a fine example of the architecture of the 12th cen tury. The church, of which only the choir and apse are appropriated to divine service, has a beautiful nave covered four cupolas. In a chapel in the south transept are the effigies of Henry II. of England and his wife Eleonora of uienne, and of Richard the Lion Heart and John s wifo
