Nicolas-Charles-Joseph Trublet

File:Abbé Trublet.jpg

Nicolas Charles Joseph Trublet (French pronunciation: ​[nikɔla ʃaʁl ʒozɛf tʁyblɛ]; 4 December 1697 – 14 March 1770) was a French Roman Catholic priest, immortal and moralist, best known today for his clash with Voltaire, whose La Henriade he critiqued.

Biography

Nicolas Trublet was born in Saint-Malo, the son of Charles Joseph Trublet, sieur de la Flourie, and Françoise Lebreton. He studied at the Jesuit college in Rennes, entered the priesthood and was ordained on September 18, 1723. He became royal censor of Belles-Lettres in 1736, secretary to Cardinal de Tencin from 1739 to 1748 and Roman conclavist in 1740. He became treasurer of the Church of Nantes in 1741 and archdeacon of Dinan in the chapter of Saint-Malo on June 4, 1742.

Canon of Saint-Malo and companion in Rome of the cardinal de Tencin, friend of Maupertuis (1698), of Offray de La Mettrie (1709), of Vincent de Gournay (1712), his "companions" from Saint-Malo, admirer of Fontenelle and de La Motte, whom he often met in the salon of his close friend, Madame de Tencin. He became known for his Essays on various subjects of literature and morals, the first volume of which was published in 1735 and immediately met with honorable success. "The abbot, who had knowledge and reading, [...] was welcomed in the best salons. His gentle, caressing character had won him many friends; and his books [...] had their clientele of amateurs". Maupertuis said that the Essays had such a great reputation in Germany that the postmasters refused horses to those who had not read them. The Essays of the Abbé Trublet were indeed translated into German and earned him admission to the Academy of Sciences and Letters in Berlin.

A "ragman of literature"

In 1760, the Abbé Trublet published a review of Voltaire's La Henriade in the fourth volume of his Essays, with whom he had been on friendly terms until then. Alluding to a remark of La Bruyère on the boredom that the opera inspires to him, he writes: "It is not the poet who bores and makes you yawn in the Henriade, it is the poetry or rather the verses

Voltaire's reply was immediate:

L'abbé Trublet avait alors la rage

D'être à Paris un petit personnage;

Au peu d'esprit que le bonhomme avait

L'esprit d'autrui par supplément servait.

Il entassait adage sur adage;

Il compilait, compilait, compilait...

— Le Pauvre Diable, Pièces en vers: Satires (1760)

"Trublet, however stigmatized by Voltaire as the dull compiler of his generation, was not destitute of merit as an original writer, and a man of good understanding. Soon after Voltaire had published his Pauvre Diable, the satire in which Trublet is particularly wounded, he met an acquaintance, of whom he asked whether he had yet seen Voltaire’s new poem? Being answered in the negative, he began reciting all that part of the satire in which he himself was alluded to, and, when he came to this verse, ‘Il compilait, compilait, compilait,’ "Un sot," he observed, "aurait pu faire ce vers-là, mais il ne l'aurait pas laissé." The [...] verse in question is a gross plagiarism from La Fontaine, who had long before said of a financier, ‘Il supputait, supputait, supputait.’

Even if Voltaire wrote to him: "I am obliged, in conscience, to tell you that I was not born more malignant than you, and that, basically, I am a good man", the reputation of the abbot Trublet was established. The Abbé de Voisenon said of him: "He spent thirty years of his life listening and transcribing. He is, so to speak, the ragman of literature".

Abbé Trublet tried his hand at theater, but no play of his was ever published. In 1767, he left Paris to retire in his native town, where he died two years later.

Works

• Réflexions sur Télémaque (1717)
• Essais sur divers sujets de littérature et de morale (1735). Édition en 2 volumes : 1749. Édition en 4 volumes : 1754-60. Réédition : Slatkine, Genève, 1968.
• Panégyriques des saints, précédés de Réflexions sur l'éloquence en général, et sur celle de la chaire en particulier (1755)
• Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de M. de Fontenelle, tirés du « Mercure de France », 1756, 1757 et 1758 (1759)
• Un journal de la vie littéraire au XVIIIe siècle : La correspondance de l'Abbé Trublet, documents inédits sur Voltaire, La Beaumelle, Malesherbes, Fontenelle, Mme Geoffrin, La Condamine, etc. (1926)

References

• Armogathe, Jean Robert (1976). "Un Anti-Grimm: La Correspondance Littéraire Inédite de Trublet," Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l'Ouest, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 4, pp. 675–79.
• Gargett, Graham (1996). "Religion, journalism and the struggle against philosophie: Trublet at the Journal chrétien (1758-1760)," Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century, No. 336, pp. 195–331.
• Gargett, Graham (1997). "Trublet, the Journal chrétien, and Protestantism: an œcumenism of convenience?," The Modern Language Review, Vol. XCII, pp. 36–47.
• Gargett, Graham (1997). "Une revanche des Lumières: les Essais historiques sur Paris de Saint-Foix et le Journal chrétien." In: Ulla Kölving & Christiane Mervaud, Voltaire et ses combats: Actes du congrès international Oxford-Paris, 1994 [29 septembre-5 octobre]. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, pp. 953–62.
• Jacquart, Jean (1926). Un témoin de la vie littéraire et mondaine au XVIIIe siècle: l'Abbé Trublet, critique et moraliste, (1697-1770), d'après des documents inédits. Paris: Picard.
• Niderst, Alain (2002). "Modernisme et catholicisme de l'abbé Trublet," Dix-huitième siècle, Vol. XXXIV, pp. 303–13.

External links

• Trublet, Nicolas
• Works by Nicolas-Charles-Joseph Trublet at Gallica
• Académie française