Then began a hue and cry with which the learned world of Paris rang for months.  Never was such a scandal, never such a rain of pamphlets and lampoons on one side and the other.  One has only to glance at the contemporary portraits of Furetiere to see that he was not the man to yield a point; his wrinkled face looks the very mirror of sarcastic obstinacy and brilliant ill-nature.  The Academy, in solemn session, appointed Regnier Desmarais, their secretary, to wait on the Chancellor to demand the cancelling of Furetiere’s privilege.  But the Abbe had powerful friends also, and by their help the Chancellor’s action was delayed, while Furetiere hurried out a specimen of his work.  He says in the preface that no author ever had a more pressing need for the protection of a prince than he has who sees the labour of years about to be sacrificed to the envy of others.  He goes on to explain that he has never dreamed of interfering with the work of the Academy, for which he has the greatest possible respect, but that he only hopes to render service to the public by supplementing its labours.  The Academy, in fact, had expressly declined to include in its Dictionary the technical terms of art and science, and it is particularly with these that Furetiere is occupied.  His answer to those who accuse him of stealing from the unpublished cahiers of the Academy is the uniformity of his work from A to Z; whereas, if he had stolen from his colleagues, he must have stopped at O-P, which was the point they had reached in 1684.

The Academy was not pacified, and began to take counsel how they could turn Furetiere out of their body.  There was no precedent for such a degradation, but a parallel was sought for in the fact that the Sorbonne had successfully ejected one of its most famous doctors, Arnauld.  Meanwhile the suit went on, the Thirty-nine versus the One.  Furetiere is said to have bowed for a moment beneath the storm, offering to blend his work in the general Dictionary of the Academy, or to remove from it all words not admitted to deal technically with art and science.  But passion had gone too far, and on the 22nd of January, 1685, at a general meeting, twenty Academicians being present, Furetiere was expelled from the body by a majority of nineteen to one.  It is believed that the one who voted for mercy was the most illustrious of all, Racine.  Boileau and Bossuet also defended the Abbe, and when the matter became at last so serious that the King himself was obliged to take cognisance of it, it was understood that his sympathies also were with Furetiere.

My little volume (written, I think, in 1687) does not know anything about the expulsion, which was therefore probably secret.  It says:  “As to Monsieur Furetiere, he no longer puts in an appearance at the meetings of the Academy, but it is not known whether any other Academician is to be elected in his place.”  As a matter of fact, the society hesitated to go so far as this, and the seat was left vacant.  Not