Marmontel, JEAN FRANÇOIS, a famous but hardly a great French writer, was born of an obscure family at Bort, in the Limousin, 11th July 1723. He made his studies in a Jesuit college, and found employment in a seminary at Toulouse, but early turned to literature, and went to Paris in 1745 by advice of Voltaire. Here he wrote successful tragedies and operas, and was fortunate enough in 1753 to get a secretaryship at Versailles through the influence of Madame Pompadour. Soon after he received a more lucrative appointment, the official journal, Le Mercure, being entrusted to his charge. In its columns he commenced the publication of his finished and oft-translated Contes Moraux (1761). Marmontel was elected to the Academy in 1763, and became its secretary in 1783, as well as Historiographer of France. After the Revolution he retired to the village of Abbeville, near Evreux, where he died, 31st December 1799. His most celebrated work was the well-known Bélisaire, a dull and wordy political romance, containing a chapter on toleration which excited the most furious hostility on the part of the Sorbonne, to which Marmontel replied in Les Lucas by ascribing the cruelties in Spanish America to religious fanaticism. In 1787 appeared his interesting, but completely uncritical, Éléments de Littérature, consisting of his contributions to the Encyclopédie. His Moral Tales were edited by Professor Saintsbury (1895). His Mémoires is an interesting survey of his whole life, brightened by glimpses of all the great figures he had seen cross the stage from Massillon to Mirabeau.
His own edition of his complete works fills 17 volumes (1786-87), to which must be added 14 volumes published posthumously. Good editions are those of Villeneuve (1819-20) and Saint-Surin (1824-27). See Sainte-Beuve's Causeries du Lundi, vol. iv.