Gilles Ménage

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Gilles Ménage (Angers, August 15, 1613 - Paris, July 23, 1692), was a French scholar.

He was the son of Guillaume Ménage, king's advocate at Angers, where Gilles was born. A good memory and enthusiasm for learning carried him quickly through his literary and professional studies, and he practised at the bar at Angers before he was twenty. In 1632, he pleaded several causes before the parlement of Paris, but illness caused him to abandon the legal profession for the church. He became prior of Montdidier without taking holy orders, and lived for some years in the household of Cardinal de Retz (then coadjutor to the Archbishop of Paris), where he had leisure for literary pursuits.

Some time after 1648 he quarrelled with his patron and withdrew to a house in the cloister of Notre-Dame de Paris, where he gathered round him on Wednesday evenings those literary assemblies which he called "Mercuriales." Jean Chapelain, Paul Pellisson, Valentine Conrart, Jean François Sarrazin and Du Bos were among the habitués. He was tutor to Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de la Fayette, later the great writer, to whom he was very attached. He was admitted to the Accademia della Crusca of Florence, but his caustic sarcasm led to his exclusion from the Académie française. Ménage made many enemies and suffered under the satire of Boileau and of Molière. Molière immortalized him as the pedant Vadius in Les Femmes savantes, a portrait Ménage pretended to ignore.