[Illustration:  Fontenelle——­274]

Born at Rouen in February, 1657, and nephew of Corneille on the mother’s side, Fontenelle had not received from nature any of the unequal and sublime endowments which have fixed the dramatic crown forever upon the forehead of Corneille; but he had inherited the wit, and indeed the brilliant wit (bel esprit), which the great tragedian hid beneath the splendors of his genius.  He began with those writings, superfine (precieux), dainty, tricked out in the fashion of the court and the drawing-room, which suggested La Bruyere’s piquant portrait.

“Ascanius is a statuary, Hegio a metal-founder, AEschines a fuller, and Cydias a brilliant wit.  That is his trade; he has a sign, a workshop, articles made to order, and apprentices who work under him.  Prose, verse, what d’ye lack?  He is equally successful in both.  Give him an order for letters of consolation, or on an absence; he will undertake them.  Take them ready made, if you like, and enter his shop; there is a choice assortment.  He has a friend whose only duty on earth is to puff him for a long while in certain society, and then present him at their houses as a rare bird and a man of exquisite conversation, and thereupon, just as the musical man sings and the player on the lute touches his lute before the persons to whom he has been puffed, Cydias, after coughing, pulling up his wristband, extending his hand and opening his fingers, gravely spouts his quintessentiated ideas and his sophisticated arguments.”

Fontenelle was not destined to stop here in his intellectual developments; when, at forty years of age, he became perpetual secretary to the Academy of Sciences, he had already written his book on the Pluralite des Mondes, the first attempt at that popularization of science which has spread so since then.  “I believe more and more,” he said, “that there is a certain genius which has never yet been out of our Europe, or, at least, has not gone far out of it.”  This genius, clear, correct, precise, the genius of method and analysis, the genius of Descartes, which was at a later period that of Buffon and of Cuvier, was admirably expounded and developed by Fontenelle for the use of the ignorant.  He wrote for society, and not for scholars, of whose labors and discoveries he gave an account to society.  His extracts from the labors of the Academy of Science and his eulogies of the Academicians are models of lucidness under an ingenious and subtle form, rendered simple and strong by dint of wit.  “There is only truth that persuades,” he used to say, “and even without requiring to appear with all its proofs.  It makes its way so naturally into the mind, that, when it is heard for the first time, it seems as if one were merely remembering.”