page_title: Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
section_title: Later work
hierarchical_section_title: Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle / Later work
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Élements de la geometrie de l'infini. Suite des memoires de l'Academie Royale des sciences. - Paris&#160;: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1727. - [28], 548 p., 1 c. di tav. ripiegata&#160;; 4º. - Il nome dell'autore si desume dall'Extrait des registres de l'Academie Royale des Sciences a c. c3v .
context_page_description: Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, also called Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, was a French author and an influential member of three of the academies of the Institut de France, noted especially for his accessible treatment of scientific topics during the unfolding of the Age of Enlightenment.
context_section_description: Fontenelle had made his home in Rouen, but in 1687 he moved to Paris; and in the same year he published his Histoire des oracles, a book which made a considerable stir in theological and philosophical circles. It consisted of two essays, the first of which was designed to prove that oracles were not given by the supernatural agency of demons, and the second that they did not cease with the birth of Jesus. It excited the suspicion of the Church, and a Jesuit, by name Jean-François Baltus, published a ponderous refutation of it; but the peace-loving disposition of its author impelled him to leave his opponent unanswered. To the following year (1688) belongs his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, in which he took the modern side in the controversy then raging; his Doutes sur le système physique des causes occasionnelles (against Nicolas Malebranche) appeared shortly afterwards.
  He remained influential in his older years and when a then unknown Jean-Jacques Rousseau met him in 1742, when Fontenelle was 85, he passed on the advice he gave all young writers that came to him: "You must courageously offer your brow to laurel wreaths and your nose to blows."
  A noted gourmand, he attributed his longevity to eating strawberries. At ninety-two one woman wrote that he was as lively as a man of twenty-two. When, in his late nineties he met the beautiful Madame Helvétius, he reportedly told her, "Ah Madame, if only I were eighty again!"
caption: Éléments de la géométrie de l'infini, 1727
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