JEAN

See also:

• FRANCOIS (1558-1614)

FRANCOIS

See also:

• JEAN FRANCOIS MARMONTEL (1723-1799)

MARMONTEL (1723-1799)  , French writer, was born of poor parents at Bort, in Cantal, on the 11th of July 1723 . After studying with the Jesuits at Mauriac, he taught in their colleges at Clermont and Toulouse; and in 1745, acting on the advice of Voltaire, he set out for Paris to try for literary honours . From 1748 to 1753 he wrote a succession of tragedies which,' though only moderately successful on the stage, secured the admission of the author to literary and fashionable circles . He wrote for the Encyclopedie a series of articles evincing considerable critical power and insight, which in their collected form, under the title Elements de Lilteralure, still rank among the French Denys le Tyran (1748) ; Aristomene (1749) ; Cleopdtre (1750) ; Heraelides (1752) ; Egyptus (1753) . MARMOSET 745 classics . He also wrote several comic operas, the two best of which probably are Sylvain (1770) and Zemire et Azore (1771) . In the Gluck-Piccini controversy he was an eager partisan of Piccini with whom he collaborated in Didon (1783) and Penelope (1785) . In 1758 he gained the patronage of Madame de Pompadour, who obtained for him a place as a civil servant, and the management of the official journal Le Mercure, in which he had already begun the famous series ,of Contes moraux . The merit of these tales lies partly in the delicate finish of the style, but mainly in the graphic and charming pictures of French society under Louis XV . The author was elected to the French Academy in 1763 . In 1767 he published a romance, Belisaire, now remark-able only on account of a chapter on religious toleration which incurred the censure of the Sorbonne and the archbishop of Paris . Marmontel retorted in Les Incas (1778) by tracing the cruelties in Spanish America to the religious fanaticism of the invaders .

He was appointed historiographer of

France (1771), secretary to the Academy (1783), and professor of history in the Lycee (1786) . In his character of historiographer Marmontel wrote a history of the regency (1788) which is of little value . Reduced to poverty by the Revolution, Marmontel in 1792 retired during the Terror to Evreux, and soon after to a cottage at Abloville in the department of Eure . To that retreat we owe his Memoires d'un pere (4 vols., 1804) giving a picturesque review of his whole life, a literary history of two important reigns, a great gallery of portraits extending from the venerable Massillon, whom more than half a century previously he had seen at Clermont, to Mirabeau . The book was nominally written for the instruction of his children . It contains an exquisitely drawn picture of his own childhood in the Limousin; its value for the literary historian is very great . Marmontel lived for some time under the roof of Mme Geoffrin, and was present at her famous dinners given to artists; he was, indeed, an habitue of most of the houses where the encyclopaedists met . He had thus at his command the best material for his portraits, and made good use of his opportunities . After a short stay in Paris when elected in 1797 to the Conseil des Anciens, he died on the 31st of December 1799 at Abloville . See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, iv.; Morellet, Eloge (1805) .