Quotes:Ménage, Gilles

Zirkoff, Boris

Ménage, Gilles. Renowned French scholar, son of Guillaume Ménage, King’s advocate at Angers; b. there, Aug. 15, 1613; d. at Paris, July 23, 1692. Prodigious memory since childhood, especially inclined to ancient languages. Lived for some years in the household of J. E. P. de Gondi, Cardinal of Retz, but quarrelled with him, 1652, and withdrew to a house in the cloister of Notre-Dame, where he gathered round him literary assemblies called “Mercuriales,” which met for forty years on Wedn. evenings, attracting the élite of the day. At one time, he was a lawyer, practising in Paris, but conceived disgust for the profession and became an ecclesiastic; he was a philologist and a satirist of considerable influence, whose proud temperament and fiery emotions drew him into all the literary battles of his time; his satirical epigrams were the cause of many quarrels with celebrities. Endowed with immense erudition, he published a large number of scholarly works at his own expense, such as: Requeste des dictionnaires, 1638, aimed at the Dictionary of the French Academy, a work which prevented his becoming member of that body.—Dictionnaire étymologique, ou origines de la langue française, 1650 and 1694, one of his most important contributions.—Origines de la langue italienne, Geneva, 1669, 1685.—Poemata latina, gallica, graeca, et italica, 1656. —Molière portrayed Ménage under the guise of Vadius in his Femmes savantes.

Source: Boris de Zirkoff, «H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings», vol. 7, p. 383