United States or Ecuador ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Fontenelle glanced at her and saw that her face had grown as pale as it was recently flushed, and that her lips were tightly set; and in a vague way he was sorry to have spoken.
I have been told that M. de Fontenelle had been the tender friend of Madame du Tencin, that M. d'Alembert was the offspring of their intimacy, and that Le Rond had only been his foster-father. I knew d'Alembert at Madame de Graffigny's.
Were trees in ancient times greater than to-day? If they were, then Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes cannot be equalled in modern times; if they were not, they can. Fontenelle states the problem in this succinct way at the beginning of the Digression.
It was generally supposed that Leibnitz had been admirably praised by Fontenelle, and that the subject was exhausted. But from the moment that Bailly's essay, crowned in Prussia, was published, former impressions were quite changed. Every one was anxiously asserting that Bailly's appreciation of his subject might be read with pleasure and benefit, even after Fontenelle's.
Such is the force of an elegant and delicate style! I wish you would be so good as to give me a more particular and circumstantial account of the method of passing your time at Paris. For instance, where it is that you dine every Friday, in company with that amiable and respectable old man, Fontenelle? Which is the house where you think yourself at home?
But Descartes did not explicitly insist on it, and it was Fontenelle, perhaps more than any one else, who made it current coin. He exposed with masterly ability the reciprocal relations of physics and mathematics. No man of his day had a more comprehensive view of all the sciences, though he made no original contributions to any.
"Marquis, you are tricked!" he cried, "Everything is prepared seconds, pistols, all! But your man your man has gone!" "Gone!" exclaimed Fontenelle furiously, "Where?" "Out of Rome! In a common fiacre taking his latest mistress, one of the stage-women with him. They were seen driving by the Porta Pia towards the Campagna half an hour ago! He dare not face fire bully and coward that he is!"
CLEFTS OR RILLS. Though Fontenelle, in his Entretiens sur la Pluralite des Mondes, informs his pupil, the Marchioness, that "M. Cassini discovered in the moon something which separates, then reunites, and finally loses itself in a cavity, which from its appearance seemed to be a river," it can hardly be supposed that what the French astronomer saw, or fancied he saw, with the imperfect telescopes of that day, was one of the remarkable and enigmatical furrows termed clefts or rills, first detected by the Hanoverian selenographer Schroter; who, on October 7, 1787, discovered the very curious serpentine cleft near Herodotus, having a few nights before noted for the first time the great Alpine valley west of Plato, once classed with the clefts, though it is an object of a very different kind.
The actor complied with this formality in a sufficiently composed way, and with a certain grace and dignity which Fontenelle might almost have taken for bravery if he had not been so convinced that the man was "acting" still in his mind, and was going through a "part" which he disliked, but which he was forced to play.
The duel between the Marquis Fontenelle and the actor Miraudin had furnished food for gossip at all the social gatherings in Rome, and Sylvie's name, freely mentioned as the cause of the dispute, had been thus given an unpleasant notoriety.
Word Of The Day