Dominique Bouhours

Who was Dominique Bouhours?

Dominique Bouhours was a French Jesuit priest, essayist, grammarian and neo-classical critic. He was born and died in Paris.

Bouhours entered the Society of Jesus at the age of sixteen, and was appointed to read lectures on literature in the Collège de Clermont at Paris, and on rhetoric at Tours and Rouen. He afterwards became private tutor to the two sons of Henri II d'Orléans, duc de Longueville.

He was sent to Dunkirk to the Romanist refugees from the Commonwealth of England, and in the midst of his missionary occupations published several books. In 1665 or 1666 he returned to Paris, and published in 1671 Les Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugène, which was reprinted four more times at Paris, twice at Grenoble, and afterwards at Lyon, Brussels, Amsterdam, Leiden and other cities. The work consists of six conversations between two companionable friends whose Greek- and Latin-derived names both mean "well-born", in the agreeable discursive manner of the well-informed amateur as it had become established in the salons— "the free and familiar conversations that well-bred people have when they are friends, and which do not fail to be witty, and even knowledgeable, though one never dreams there of making wit show, and study has no part in it." The subjects, erudite but devoid of pedantry, are the Sea, considered as an object of contemplation, the French language, Secrets, True Wit, The Ineffable and Mottoes, all expressed in flawless idiom and effortless allusions to the Classics or Torquato Tasso. The popularity of Bouhours' discursive, heuristic Entretiens extended to Poland, where Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski imitated them in Dialogues of Artakses and Ewander.