acknowledged his services by entrusting him with a special commission as magistrate at Marseilles, and made him master of requests. In 1595 appeared his treatise De l’éloquence française et des raisons pour quoi elle est demeurée si basse, in which he criticizes the orators of his day, adding by way of example some translations of the speeches of ancient orators, which reproduce the spirit rather than the actual words of the originals. He was sent to England in 1596 with the marshal de Bouillon to negotiate a league against Spain; in 1599 he became first president of the parlement of Province (Aix); and in 1603 was appointed to the see of Marseilles, which he soon resigned in order to resume the presidency. In 1616 he received the highest promotion open to a French lawyer and became keeper of the seals. He died at Tonneins (Lot-et-Garonne) on the 3rd of August 1621. Both as speaker and writer he holds a very high rank, and his character was equal to his abilities. Like other political lawyers of the time, Du Vair busied himself not a little in the study of philosophy. The most celebrated of his treatises are La Philosophie morale des Stoïques, translated into English (1664) by Charles Cotton; De la constance et consolation ès calamités publiques,[1] which was composed during the siege of Paris in 1589, and applied the Stoic doctrine to present misfortunes; and La Sainte Philosophie, in which religion and philosophy are intimately connected. Pierre Charron drew freely on these and other works of Du Vair. F. de Brunetière points out the analogy of Du Vair’s position with that afterwards developed by Pascal, and sees in him the ancestor of the Jansenists. Du Vair had a great indirect influence on the development of style in French, for in the south of France he made the acquaintance of Malherbe, who conceived a great admiration for Du Vair’s writings. The reformer of French poetry learned much from the treatise De l’éloquence française, to which the counsels of his friend were no doubt added.
Du Vair’s works were published in folio at Paris in 1641. See Nicéron, Mémoires, vol. 43; and monographs by C. A. Sapey (1847 and 1858).
DUVAL, ALEXANDRE VINCENT PINEUX (1767–1842), French dramatist, was born at Rennes on the 6th of April 1767. He was in turn sailor, architect, actor, theatrical manager and dramatist. He is the characteristic dramatist of the Empire, but the least ambitious of his dramas have best stood the test of time. Les Projets de ménage (1790), Les Tuteurs vengés (1794) and Les Héritiers (1796) have been revived on the modern French stage. Others among his plays, which number more than sixty, are Le Menuisier de Livonie (1805), La Manie des grandeurs (1817) and Le Faux Bonhomme (1821). In 1812 he was elected to the Academy. He died on the 1st of September 1842.
DUVAL, CLAUDE (1643–1670), a famous highwayman, was born at Domfront, Normandy, in 1643. Having entered domestic service in Paris, he came to England at the time of the Restoration in attendance on the duke of Richmond, and soon became a highwayman notorious for the daring of his robberies no less than for his gallantry to ladies. Large rewards were offered for his capture, and he was at one time compelled to seek refuge in France. In the end he was captured in London, and hanged at Tyburn on the 21st of January 1670. His body was buried in the centre aisle of Covent Garden church, under a stone with the following epitaph:—
“Here lies Du Vall: Reader if male thou art,
Look to thy purse: if female to thy heart.”
A full account of his adventures, ascribed to William Pope, was reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, and Samuel Butler published a satirical ode To the Happy Memory of the Most Renowned Du Val.
DUVENECK, FRANK (1848– ), American figure and portrait painter, was born at Covington, Kentucky, on the 9th of October 1848. He was a pupil of Diez in the Royal Academy of Munich, and a prominent member of the group of Americans who in the ’seventies overturned the traditions of the Hudson River School and started a new art movement. His work shown in Boston and elsewhere about 1875 attracted great attention, and many pupils flocked to him in Germany and Italy, where he made long visits. After returning from Italy to America, he gave some attention to sculpture, and modelled a fine monument to his wife, now in the English cemetery in Florence.
DU VERGIER DE HAURANNE, JEAN (1581–1643), abbot of St Cyran, father of the Jansenist revival in France, was born of wealthy parents at Bayonne in 1581, and studied theology at the Flemish university of Louvain. After taking holy orders he settled in Paris, where he became known as a mine of miscellaneous erudition. In 1609 he distinguished himself by his Question royale, an elaborate answer to a problem casually thrown out by King Henry IV. as to the exact circumstances under which a subject ought to give his life for his sovereign. His learning was presently diverted into a more profitable channel. The Louvain of his time was the scene of many conflicts between the Jesuit party, which stood for scholasticism and Church-authority, and the followers of Michael Baius (q.v.), who upheld the mysticism of St Augustine. Into this controversy Du Vergier was presently dragged by his friendship with Cornelius Jansen, a young champion of the Augustinian party, who had come to Paris to study Greek. The two divines went off together to Du Vergier’s home at Bayonne, where he became a canon of the cathedral, and Jansen a tutor in the bishop’s seminary. Here they remained some years, intently studying the fathers. Eventually, however, Jansen went back to Louvain, while Du Vergier became confidential secretary to the bishop of Poitiers, and was presently made sinecure abbot of St Cyran. Thereafter he was generally called M. de St Cyran. At Poitiers he was brought into contact with Richelieu—as yet unknown to political fame, and simply the zealous young bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Luçon. Western Touraine being the headquarters of French Protestantism, the two prelates turned St Cyran’s learning against the Huguenots. He began to dream of reforming Catholicism on Augustinian lines, and thus defeating the Protestants by their own weapons. They appealed to primitive antiquity; he answered that his Church understood antiquity better than theirs. They appealed to the spirit of St Paul; he answered that Augustine had saved that spirit from etherealizing away, by coupling it with a high sacramental theory of the Church. They flung practical abuses in the teeth of Rome; he entered on a bold campaign to bring those abuses to an end. Before long, his reforming zeal involved him in many quarrels—so much so that he left Poitiers and settled down in Paris. Here he became widely known as a director of consciences, forming a particular friendship with the influential Arnauld family. But his general projects of reform were by no means allowed to sleep, though here he worked hand in hand with his old friend Jansen. Both traced the evils of their time to the Jesuits and Schoolmen. Their dialectic had corrupted theology; their hand-to-mouth utilitarianism had played havoc with traditional church-institutions. Accordingly, Jansen set to work to remedy one evil by writing a big book on St Augustine, the great master of theological method. St Cyran dealt with the other evil in an equally bulky treatise, the Petrus Aurelius (1633). This indicts the Jesuits for every sort and kind of misdemeanour. It deals much with what Pascal will presently call their dévotion aisée; but still more with crimes of a technical sort, especially their defiance of episcopal authority. Thereby the book gained for its author’s projects of reform a great deal of Gallican support. On the other hand, it gave much annoyance to Richelieu, now the all-powerful and extremely Erastian prime minister. After failing more than once to stop St Cyran’s mouth with a bishopric, he had him arrested as a disturber of ecclesiastical peace (14th of March 1638). He remained shut up in the castle of Vincennes until Richelieu’s death (December 1642). Then he was at once set free; but the long imprisonment had told heavily on his health, and he died of a stroke of apoplexy in October 1643.
St Cyran’s character has been always something of a puzzle. Many excellent contemporary judges were profoundly impressed; others, as one of them said, went away bewildered by this strange abbé, who never argued a question out, but leapt from
- ↑ Translated into English by Andrew Comt in 1622 as A Buckler against Adversitie.
