Jean Francois Marmontel remotely recalls our Pepys. It is true that his memoirs, from which the following account of his school days are culled, are not a diary, and were written late in life for his children’s benefit. But they give a vivid picture of his times, from his peasant home life (after all, not so wretched as might be expected from Victorian literature), through school, college, a brief and ‘distasteful’ ecclesiastical career as a tonsured abbè, and the intrigues, amorous and otherwise, of Parisian life. He writes charmingly as a man of letters, but his confessions are no less candid than those of our Samuel. The spirit of the times made any watering down for his children’s eyes quite superfluous. He was the friend of Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour, and his office of Perpetual Secretary to the French Academy brought him into contact with all who were worth knowing. He was never in the first rank of literature, but was ‘successful in all styles.’ He attained to European celebrity chiefly through his Belisaire, a work deprecating the use of carnal weapons in spiritual warfare. The book was fortunate enough to incur the wrath of the Doctors of the Sorbonne, who drew up an ‘indiculus’ of twenty-seven condemned propositions. Voltaire christened the list ‘indiculus ridiculus,’ and, in conjunction with others, succeeded in making the learned Doctors appear exceedingly foolish.

In spite of his moral obliquity, Marmontel stands out as a likeable, and in some ways, admirable character.