A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

of treatises from eminent Churchmen, defending the faith against unpublished attacks, and on the other hand by the prevailing tone in belles lettres. Malherbe, the literary dictator of the first quarter of the century, had died in 1628 with the character of a scoffer; [558] and the fashion now lasted till the latter half of the reign of Louis XIV. In 1621, two years after the burning of Vanini, a young man named Jean Fontanier had been burned alive on the Place de Grève at Paris, apparently for the doctrines laid down by him in a manuscript entitled Le Trésor Inestimable, written on deistic and anti-Catholic lines. [559] He was said to have been successively Protestant, Catholic, Turk, Jew, and atheist; and had conducted himself like one of shaken mind. [560] But the cases of the poet Théophile de Viau, who about 1623 suffered prosecution on a charge of impiety, [561] and of his companions Berthelot and Colletet--who like him were condemned but set free by royal favour--appear to be the only others of the kind for over a generation. Frivolity of tone sufficed to ward off legal pursuit. It was in 1665, some years after the death of Mazarin, who had maintained Richelieu's policy of tolerance, that Claude Petit was burnt at Paris for "impious pieces"; [562] and even then there was no general reversion to orthodoxy, the upper-class tone remaining, as in the age of Richelieu and Mazarin, more or less unbelieving. When Corneille had introduced a touch of Christian zeal into his Polyeucte (1643) he had given general offence to the dilettants of both sexes. [563] Molière, again, the disciple of Gassendi [564] and "the very genius of reason," [565] was unquestionably an unbeliever; [566] and only the personal protection of Louis XIV, which after all could not avail to support such a play as Tartufe against the fury of the bigots, enabled him to sustain himself at all against them.