Pierre Daniel Huet - Works

Works

He translated the pastorals of Longus, wrote a tale called Diane de Castro, and gave with his Traitté de l'origine des romans (1670), his Treatise on the Origin of Romances the first world history of fiction. On being appointed assistant tutor to the Dauphin in 1670, he edited, with the assistance of Anne Lefêvre, afterwards Madame Dacier, the well-known edition of the Delphin Classics. This series was a comprehensive edition of the Latin classics in about sixty volumes, and each work was accompanied by a Latin commentary, ordo verborum, and verbal index. The original volumes have each an engraving of Arion and the Dolphin, and the appropriate inscription in usum serenissimi Delphini.

He issued one of his major works, the Demonstratio evangelica, in 1679. At Aulnay he wrote his Questiones Aletuanae (Caen, 1690), his Censura philosophiae Cartesianae (Paris, 1689), his Nouveau mémoire pour servir à l'histoire du Cartésianisme (New Memoirs to Serve The History of Cartesianism, 1692), and his discussion with Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux on the Sublime.

In the Huetiana (1722) of the abbé d'Olivet will be found material for arriving at an idea of his prodigious labours, exact memory and wide scholarship. Another posthumous work was his Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l'esprit humain (original spelling: Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain) (Amsterdam, 1723), which he considered to be his best work. His autobiography, found in his Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus (Paris, 1718), has been translated into French and into English.