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Updated: May 13, 2025
But what immediately caught my attention, and filled me with delight, was an absolutely contemporary account, written specially for this 1688 edition, of the great quarrel between the French Academy and the Abbé Furetière. Of this I propose to speak to-day. We live in an age of Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, which we look upon as universal panaceas for culture.
Furetière lacked the skill and the insight needful for the satisfactory attainment of the standard he set up indeed, the attainment of that standard is beyond the power of most novelists even now.
Other Academicians did this also, such men as Patru and Boisrobert, but they had not Furetière's nasty way of putting things. One perceives that about the year 1680 the sarcasms of Furetière had really become something more than the rest of the Immortals could put up with. He delivered himself into their hands, and here my little volume takes up the tale.
Thus it was only in the middle years of the nineteenth century, after Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, after Thackeray and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, that the novel found out its true field. And yet it was in the middle years of the seventeenth century that the ideal to which it was aspiring had been proclaimed frankly by the forgotten Furetière in the preface to his "Roman Bourgeois."
But no sooner was Furetière an Immortal than he began to distinguish himself in unanticipated ways.
One wonders whether Furetière himself was present on the 3rd of January; if so, what puttings of periwigs together there must have been in corners, and what taps of gold-headed canes on lace-frilled cuffs!
It was felt, as my little volume puts it, that "Monsieur the Abbé Furetière, being one of the Forty Academicians, ought not to have been privately busying himself on a work which he knew to be the principal occupation of the whole Academy."
"I shall tell you," said Furetière, "sincerely and faithfully, several stories or adventures which happened to persons who are neither heroes nor heroines, who will raise no armies and overthrow no kingdoms, but who will be honest folk of mediocre condition, and who will quietly make their way. Some of them will be good-looking and others ugly.
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