Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, the French author, forerunner of the Enlightenment, was born in Rouen and died in Paris, having lived one month short of a century. Schooled by the Jesuits, he also studied law, but soon abandoned the career of advocate to follow in the literary footsteps of his uncles, Pierre and Thomas Corneille. Neither then nor later was he to distinguish himself as a poet or dramatist but, in 1683, with the appearance of the Dialogues des morts (Dialogues of the Dead), he achieved immediate success as a man of letters. The witty paradoxes and sparkling conversations in these imaginary dialogues of illustrious and notorious figures of the past confirmed the reputation of their twenty-six-year-old author as a seventeenth-century belesprit; more important, they revealed him as a singularly independent thinker, skeptical of traditional values and, as...