Author: Fontenelle
Biography:
FONTENELLE, Bernard Le Bovier de (1657-1757: WBIS)
Fontenelle is a "prior" author, extracts from whose work were first translated into English verse in 1784. The son of Marthe (Corneille) and François Le Bovier de Fontenelle, he was born in Rouen and educated at the Jesuit college there. On his father's side he descended from a family of lawyers; his mother was a sister of the great dramatist Pierre Corneille. Fontenelle qualified as a lawyer but argued only one case before turning to his favourite study, literature. He did not make a definitive move to Paris until 1687 but by then he had already written poetry in Latin and French, had a tragedy fail in performance, and published some acclaimed philosophical prose in the forms of letters, dialogues, and fiction. In 1689 the first of his successful opera libretti opened in Paris. The most original and influential of his many works were probably his dialogues of the dead (1683) and his treatise on the plurality of worlds (1686). In 1691 after several attempts he was elected to the Académie française; he was also a member of the Académie des inscriptions and became permanent secretary of the Académie des sciences. With polymathic interests and a gift for lucid exposition, he also wrote an introduction to geometry (1727) and a three-volume history of the Académie des sciences (1702-33). He never married and died in Paris one month before his hundredth birthday. (La grande encyclopédie [1885-1902] 17: 756; Encyclopedia Britannica [1911] 10: 608-9) HJ