Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
Marmontel, however, himself admits, that he was only once in the society, and that in order to read his 'Aristomenes, and that greater simplicity and good humor prevailed there than in the house of Madame Geoffrin, in which he was properly at home.
Marmontel, desirous of writing tragedies, took lessons from the famous Mlle. Clairon—at his friend's expense.
He chose to finish his suffering years in Paris, and in humble furnished rooms in the street of the Peacock, where he was consoled by the visits of Voltaire and Marmontel. We find him settled there in May 1745, and seven months later there crept into circulation an anonymous volume of moral essays, which was absolutely ignored by the literary world of France.
Quentin had dismissed him his house on account of a very malignant sally of passion: a horse having thrown him by accident, the young demon took a knife from his pocket, and deliberately stabbed him three several times. Such was a peasant boy, now seemingly enveloped in the interesting simplicity of Marmontel. How inconsistent is what is called character!
Turgot and Malesherbes represented its political side; Marmontel, the Abbe Morellet, and Suard lent it some of the wit and vivacity that shone in the old salons. Literature, science, and the arts were discussed here, and there was more or less reading, music, or recitation. But the tendency was towards serious conversation, and the tone was often controversial.
"I have lost half of my being," he wrote "a soul for which mine was made." To Marmontel he says: "Come and share my sorrow. I have lost my illustrious friend. I am in despair. I am inconsolable." One cannot believe that so clear-sighted a man, even though a poet, could live for twenty years under the spell of a pure illusion.
Whatever powers a youth may have received from nature, it is impossible that his taste and judgment can be ripe, that his mind can be richly stored with images, that he can have observed the vicissitudes of life, that he can have studied the nicer shades of character. How, as Marmontel very sensibly said, is a person to paint portraits who has never seen faces?
Marmontel observed how many little things a well-bred man was obliged to know, if he would avoid being ridiculous at the tables of his friends. "They are, indeed, innumerable," said Delille; "and the most annoying fact of all is, that not all the wit and good sense in the world can help one to divine them untaught.
To this song, which was much applauded, succeeded those light and witty tales in which the Italian novelists furnished Voltaire and Marmontel with a model each, in his or her turn, taking up the discourse, and with an equal dexterity avoiding every lugubrious image or mournful reflection that might remind those graceful idlers of the vicinity of Death.
The minute accounts which Grimm has given, for the most part affect only the later periods; we turn our attention therefore the rather to what the weak, vain, talkative Marmontel has related to us on the subject in his 'Autobiography, because Rousseau was by far too one-sided in his notices, and drew public attention to the most demoralized and degraded members of the circle only.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking