the best of it. But Wellington more than retrieved his position in the battle (see Salamanca), and inflicted a severe defeat on the French, Marmont himself being gravely wounded in the right arm and side. He retired to France to recover, and was still hardly cured when in April 1813 Napoleon, who soon forgot his fleeting resentment for the defeat, gave him the command of a corps. With it he served at the battles of Lützen, Bautzen and Dresden, and throughout the great defensive campaign of 1814 until the last battle before Paris, from which he drew back his forces to the commanding position of Essonne. Here he had 20,000 men in hand, and was the pivot of all thoughts. Napoleon said of this camp of Essonne, “C’est là que viendront s’addresser toutes les intrigues, toutes les trahisons; aussi y ai-je placé Marmont, mon enfant élevé sous ma tente.” Marmont then took upon himself a political rôle which has, no doubt justly, been stigmatized as ungrateful and treasonable. A secret convention was concluded, and Marmont’s corps was surrounded by the enemy. Napoleon, who still hoped to retain the crown for his infant son, was prostrated, and said with a sadness deeper than violent words, “Marmont me porte le dernier coup.”
This act was never forgiven by Marmont’s countrymen. On the restoration of the Bourbons he was indeed made a peer of France and a major-general of the royal guard, and in 1820 a knight of the Saint Esprit and a grand officer of the order of St Louis; but he was never trusted. He was the major-general of the guard on duty in July 1830, and was ordered to put down with a strong hand any opposition to the ordinances (see France). Himself opposed to the court policy, he yet tried to do his duty, and only gave up the attempt to suppress the revolution when it became clear that his troops were outmatched. This brought more obloquy upon him, and the duc d’Angoulême even ordered him under arrest, saying, “Will you betray us, as you betrayed him?” Marmont did not betray them; he accompanied the king into exile and forfeited his marshalate thereby. His desire to return to France was never gratified and he wandered in central and eastern Europe, settling finally in Vienna, where he was well received by the Austrian government, and strange to say made tutor to the duke of Reichstadt, the young man who had once for a few weeks been styled Napoleon II. He died at Venice on the 22nd of March 1852.
Much of his time in his last years was spent upon his Mémoires, which are of great value for the military history of his time, though they must be read as a personal defence of himself in various junctures rather than as an unbiased account of his times. They show Marmont, as he really was, an embittered man, who never thought his services sufficiently requited, and above all, a man too much in love with himself and his own glory to be a true friend or a faithful servant. His strategy indeed tended to become pure virtuosity, and his tactics, though neat, appear frigid and antiquated when contrasted with those of the instinctive leaders, the fighting generals whom the theorists affect to despise. But his military genius is undeniable, and he was as far superior to the mere theorist as Lannes and Davout were to the pure divisionnaire or “fighting” general.
His works are Voyage en Hongrie, &c. (4 vols., 1837); Voyage en Sicile (1838); Esprit des institutions militaires (1845); César; Xenophon; and Mémoires (8 vols., published after his death in 1856). See the long and careful notice by Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, vol. vi.
MARMONTEL, JEAN FRANÇOIS (1723–1799), French writer, was born of poor parents at Bort, in Cantal, on the 11th of July 1723. After studying with the Jesuits at Mauriac, he taught in their colleges at Clermont and Toulouse; and in 1745, acting on the advice of Voltaire, he set out for Paris to try for literary honours. From 1748 to 1753 he wrote a succession of tragedies which,[1] though only moderately successful on the stage, secured the admission of the author to literary and fashionable circles. He wrote for the Encyclopédie a series of articles evincing considerable critical power and insight, which in their collected form, under the title Éléments de Littérature, still rank among the French classics. He also wrote several comic operas, the two best of which probably are Sylvain (1770) and Zémire et Azore (1771). In the Gluck-Piccini controversy he was an eager partisan of Piccini with whom he collaborated in Didon (1783) and Pénélope (1785). In 1758 he gained the patronage of Madame de Pompadour, who obtained for him a place as a civil servant, and the management of the official journal Le Mercure, in which he had already begun the famous series of Contes moraux. The merit of these tales lies partly in the delicate finish of the style, but mainly in the graphic and charming pictures of French society under Louis XV. The author was elected to the French Academy in 1763. In 1767 he published a romance, Bélisaire, now remarkable only on account of a chapter on religious toleration which incurred the censure of the Sorbonne and the archbishop of Paris. Marmontel retorted in Les Incas (1778) by tracing the cruelties in Spanish America to the religious fanaticism of the invaders.
He was appointed historiographer of France (1771), secretary to the Academy (1783), and professor of history in the Lycée (1786). In his character of historiographer Marmontel wrote a history of the regency (1788) which is of little value. Reduced to poverty by the Revolution, Marmontel in 1792 retired during the Terror to Evreux, and soon after to a cottage at Abloville in the department of Eure. To that retreat we owe his Mémoires d’un père (4 vols., 1804) giving a picturesque review of his whole life, a literary history of two important reigns, a great gallery of portraits extending from the venerable Massillon, whom more than half a century previously he had seen at Clermont, to Mirabeau. The book was nominally written for the instruction of his children. It contains an exquisitely drawn picture of his own childhood in the Limousin; its value for the literary historian is very great. Marmontel lived for some time under the roof of Mme Geoffrin, and was present at her famous dinners given to artists; he was, indeed, an habitué of most of the houses where the encyclopaedists met. He had thus at his command the best material for his portraits, and made good use of his opportunities. After a short stay in Paris when elected in 1797 to the Conseil des Anciens, he died on the 31st of December 1799 at Abloville.
See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, iv.; Morellet, Éloge (1805).
MARMORA (anc. Proconnesus), an island in the sea of the same name. Originally settled by Greeks from Miletus in the 8th century B.C., Proconnesus was annexed by its powerful neighbour Cyzicus in 362. The island has at all times been noted for its quarries of white marble which supplied the material for several famous buildings of antiquity (e.g. the palace of Mausolus at Halicarnassus).
See C. Texier, Asie mineure (Paris, 1839–1849); M. I. Gedeon, Προικόννησος (Constantinople, 1895); an exhaustive monograph by F. W. Hasluek in Journ. Hell. Stud., xxix., 1909.
MARMORA, SEA OF (anc. Propontis; Turk. Mermer Denisi), the small inland sea which (in part) separates the Turkish dominions in Europe from those in Asia, and is connected through the Bosporus with the Black Sea (q.v.) and through the Dardanelles with the Aegean. It is 170 m. long (E. to W.) and nearly 50 m. in extreme width, and has an area of 4500 sq. m. Its greatest depth is about 700 fathoms, the deepest parts (over 500 fathoms) occurring in three depressions in the northern portion—one close under the European shore to the south of Rodosto, another near the centre of the sea, and a third at the mouth of the Gulf of Ismid. There are several considerable islands, of which the largest, Marmora, lies in the west, off the peninsula of Kapu Dagh, along with Afsia, Aloni and smaller islands. In the east, off the Asiatic shore between the Bosporus and the Gulf of Ismid, are the Princes’ Islands.
MARMOSET, a name derived from Fr. marmouset (meaning
“of a gross figure”), and used to designate the small tropical
American monkeys classed by naturalists in the family Hapalidae
(or Chrysothricidae). Marmosets are not larger than squirrels,
and present great variation in colour; all have long tails, and
many have the ears tufted. They differ from the other American
monkeys in having one pair less of molar teeth in each jaw. The
common marmoset, Hapale (or Chrysothrix) jacchus, is locally
- ↑ Denys le Tyran (1748); Aristomène (1749); Cléopâtre (1750); Héraclides (1752); Egyptus (1753).
