er was a
sister of Corneille, whose life Fontenelle himself wrote. He was
educated by the Jesuits and studied for the bar, but was unsuccessful as
an advocate, and soon gave up active practice. He came to Paris very
young, and soon became distinguished, after a fashion, in society and
literature. He was one of the last of the _precieux_, or rather he was
the inventor of a new combination of literature and gallantry which at
first exposed him to not a little satire. Unfortunately too for him he
tried first to emulate his uncles in the drama, for which he had no
talent, and one of his plays (_Aspar_), failing completely, gave his
enemies abundant opportunity. No one, however, illustrated better than
Fontenelle the saying that 'no man was ever written down except by
himself.' He was the butt of the four most dangerous satirists of his
time--Racine, Boileau, La Bruyere, and J. B. Rousseau; but though the
epigrams which Racine and Rousseau directed against him are among the
best in the language, and though the 'portrait' of Cydias, in the
_Caracteres_, at least equals them, Fontenelle received hardly any
damage from these. Finding that he was not likely to be a successful
dramatic poet, even in opera, he turned to prose, and wrote 'dialogues
of the dead,' in avowed imitation of Lucian, and a kind of romance
called '_Lettres du Chevalier d'Her_...,' in which he may be said to
have set the example of the elaborate and rather affected style,
afterwards called Marivaudage, from his most famous pupil. Even here
his success was doubtful, and he again changed his ground. He had paid
some attention to science, and he saw that there was an opening in the
growing curiosity of educated people for scientific popularising. To
this and to literary criticism and history he devoted himself for the
remainder of his long life, becoming President of the Academy of
Sciences, and virtual dictator of the Academie Francaise. His _Eloges_
and his academic essays generally were highly popular. But his chief
single works are the famous _Entretien sur la Pluralite des Mondes_, an
example of singularly hardy speculation, and of no contemptible
learning, artfully disguised by an easy style, and his _Histoire des
Oracles_, of which much the same may be said. With hardly diminished
powers Fontenelle achieved an age not often paralleled in literary
history, though his contemporary, Saint Aulaire, a minor poet, nearly
equalled it. He died in his hundredth ye