ANTOINE

See also:

• ANTOINE FURETILRE (1619-1688)

FURETILRE (1619-1688)  , French scholar and miscellaneous writer, was born in Paris on the 28th of December 1619 . He first studied law, and practised for a time as an advocate, but eventually took orders and after various preferments became abbe of Chalivoy in the diocese of Bourges in 1662 . In his leisure moments he devoted himself to letters, and in virtue of his satires—Nouvelle Allegorique, ou histoire des derniers troubles arrives au royaume d'eloquence (1658); Voyage de Mercure (1653)—he was admitted a member of the French Academy in 1662 . That learned body had long promised a complete dictionary of the French tongue; and when they heard that Furetiere was on the point of issuing a work of a similar nature, they interfered, alleging that he had purloined from their stores, and that they possessed the exclusive privilege of publishing such a book . After much bitter recrimination on both sides the offender was expelled in 1685; but for this act of injustice he took a severe revenge in his satire, Couches de l'academie (Amsterdam, 1687) . His Dictionnaire universel was posthumously published in 1690 (Rotterdam, 2 vols.) . It was afterwards revised and improved by the Protestant jurist, Henri Basnage de Beauval (1656-1710), who published his edition (3 vols.) in 17o1; and it was only superseded by the compilation known as the Dictionnaire de Trevoux (Paris, 3 vols., 1704; 7th ed., 8 vols., 1771), which was in fact little more than a reimpression of Basnage's edition . Furetiere is perhaps even better known as the author of Le Roman bourgeois (1666) . It cast ridicule on the fashionable romances of Mlle de Scudery and of La Calprenede, and is of interest as descriptive of theeveryday life of his times . There is no element of burlesque, as in Scarron's Roman comique, but the author contents himself with stringing together a number of episodes ,and portraits, obviously drawn from life, without much attempt at sequence . The book was edited in 18J4 by Edward Fournier and Charles Asselineau and by P . Jannet .

The Fureteriana, which appeared in Paris eight years after Furetiere's

death, which took place on the 14th of May 1688, is a collection of but little value .