Claude Favre de Vaugelas, grammarian, translator and member of the French Academy, is best known for his Remarques sur la langue françoise, utiles à ceux qui veulent bien parler et bien escrire (Observations on the French Language, Useful for Those Who Wish to Speak and Write Well, 1647), a collection of more than five hundred observations promoting good usage of the French language. Viewed as a kind of "applied grammar," Vaugelas's translation of Quintus Curtius Rufus's Life of Alexander was deemed a model of good prose style for a hundred years after he first started working on it.

Vaugelas was born in Meximieux, probably on 5 January 1585, the second of eleven children. He came from a well-established family of magistrates and officers to the counts and dukes of Savoy, who had lived in Bourg, according to Samuel Guichenon's Histoire de Bresse et de Bugey (1650), at least since the...