Biography
Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt was born into a Protestant family; his father Paul Perrot (de la Salle) converted during his studies at Oxford, and his mother, Anne des Forges, was the daughter of a Protestant. Perrot d’Ablancourt himself renounced his religious beliefs at one stage, but later changed his mind.
After reading law at the Huguenot Academy of Sedan, he later travelled to Leiden in the Netherlands and then to England. Upon returning to France, he established links with contemporary intellectuals., and in 1673 he was elected a member of the Académie française. Between 1637 and 1662, he published numerous translations of classical Greek and Latin texts; including the works of Julius Caesar, Cicero, Frontinus, Homer, Plutarch, Tacitus, Thucydides and Xenophon, as well as other less well known writers, and some contemporary Spanish works, such as the writings of the chronicler Luis del Mármol Carvajal.
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