Works
His first serious publication was the History of Louis XI, which is dry and epigrammatical in style but displays considerable powers of research and impartiality. The reputation of Duclos as an author was confirmed by the publication of his Considérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle (1751), a work justly praised by La Harpe as containing a great deal of sound and ingenious reflection. It was translated into English and German. The Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du dix-huitième siècle, intended by the author as a sort of sequel to the preceding work, are much inferior in style and matter, and are, in reality, little better than a kind of romance. In consequence of his History of Louis XI, he was appointed historiographer of France, when that place became vacant on Voltaire's retirement to Prussia. His Secret Memoirs of the Reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV (for which he was able to utilize the Mémoires of Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, suppressed in 1755), were not published until after the French Revolution.
A complete edition of the works of Duclos, including an unfinished autobiography, was published by Auger (1821). See also Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, t. ix.; René Kerviler, La Bretagne et l'Académie française du XVIIIe siècle (1889); L. Mandon, De la valeur historique des mémoires secrets de Duclos (1872).
Read more about this topic: Charles Pinot Duclos
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The man who builds a factory builds a temple, that the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“... no one who has not been an integral part of a slaveholding community, can have any idea of its abominations.... even were slavery no curse to its victims, the exercise of arbitrary power works such fearful ruin upon the hearts of slaveholders, that I should feel impelled to labor and pray for its overthrow with my last energies and latest breath.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)