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PARAVICINO Y ARTEAGA, HORTENSIO FELIX (158o–1633), Spanish preacher and poet, was born at Madrid on the 12th of October 158o, was educated at the Jesuit college in Ocana, and on the 18th of April 1600 joined the Trinitarian order. A sermon pronounced before Philip III. at Salamanca in 16o5 brought Paravicino into notice; he rose to high posts in his order, was entrusted with important foreign missions, became royal preacher in 1616, and on the death of Philip III. in 1621 delivered a famous funeral oration which was the subject of acute controversy. He died at Madrid on +;'e 12th of December 1633. His Oraciones evangelical (1638–1641) show that he was not without a vein of genuine eloquence, but he often degenerates into vapid declamation, and indulges in far-fetched tropes and metaphors. His Obras posthumas, divinas y humans (1641) include his devout and secular poems, as well as a play entitled Gridonia; his verse, like his prose, exaggerates the characteristic defects of Gongorism.
PARAY-LE-MONIAL, a town of east-central France in the department of Saone-et-Loire, 58 m. W.N.W. of Macon by the Paris-Lyon railway, on which it is a junction for Moulins, Lozanne, Clermont and Roanne. Pop. (1906), 3382. It lies on the slope of a hill on the right bank of the Bourbince and has a port on the Canal du Centre. The chief building in the town is the priory church of St Pierre. Erected in the 12th century in the Romanesque style of Burgundy, it closely resembles the abbey church of Cluny in the length of the transepts, the height of the vaulting and the general plan. The town is the centre of a district important for its horse-raising; bricks, tiles and mosaics are the chief manufactures of the town. In the loth century a Benedictine priory was founded at Paray-le-Monial. In the 16th century the town was an industrial centre, but its prosperity was retarded by the wars of religion and still more by the revocation of the edict of Nantes. In 1685 the visions of Marguerite Marie Alacoque, a nun of the convent of the Visitation, who believed herself to possess the Sacred Heart of Jesus, attracted religious gatherings to the town, and yearly pilgrimages to Paray-le-Monial still take place.