657 



DUCIS, JEAN-FRANCOIS. 



DUDEVANT, MADAME AMANTINE-AURORE. 



663 



1640, in consequence of having been crushed by a carriage when 

 travelling from Paris to his country-residence. 



Duchesne was a writer of considerable erudition and of the most 

 laborious research in various departments of history. His works are 

 so numerous and of such importance as to have acquired for him, per- 

 haps not unfairly, the title of the ' Father of French History." Among 

 the more important of his publications may ba mentioned the fol- 

 lowing : ' Historic Francorum Scriptores Coetauei,' 5 vols. folio, 1636, 

 tc.; 'Historiaj Normannorum Scriptores Antiqui,' folio, Paris, 1619; 

 ' Histoire des Roi.*, Dues, et Comtes de Bourgogne depuis 408 jusqu'en 

 1350,' 4 vols. 4to, Paris, 1628; 7 vols. folio of Genealogical Histories 

 of various Families of French Nobility. Among his earlier works is a 

 translation of the ' Satires ' of Juvenal, with notes, which is now very 

 scarce, ' Satires de Juvenal, traduites en Franjois, avec des Notes,' Svo, 

 Paris, 1616. He appears also to have edited the first edition of the 

 works of Abelard and Eloisa, though many copies have the name of 

 Francxris d'Amboise in place of that of Andre" Duchesne, ' Petri 

 Abelardi ct HeloUa) Conjugis ejus Opera, none primum edita ex MSS. 

 Codd.,' 4to, Paris, 1616. [ABELARD.] NiceYon makes the following 

 remarks on this extraordinary fact : " If it may be allowed to make 

 a conjecture, one might believe that from some secret motive which it 

 hag not been thought proper to transmit to posterity, Duchesne may 

 hare relinquished the glory of bis work to D'Amboise, who was then 

 in a situation to recompense a sacrifice of this nature." 



FBisgois DUCUESXE, son of Andre, who was born in 1616 and died 

 in 1693, completed and published several of the works of his father, 

 among which U the ' Histoire des Chancellors et Gardes des Sceaux de 

 France,' folio, 1680. 



(Nouvelle Sioyraphie Generate.) 



DUCIS, JEAN-FRANCOIS, was born at Versailles in 1732, and 

 became a dramatic writer somewhat late in life. His first pieces made 

 but little impression, and it was not until he had produced a version 

 of Shaksperc's ' Hamlet ' that his name began to acquire some 

 celebrity. ' Romeo and Juliet,' the second tragedy from Shakspere, 

 had great success. But Ducis has so altered the works of our great 

 author, that were it not for the name we should with difficulty dis- 

 cover any connection between the original and the version. He 

 subsequently tried to imitate the Greek drama in a tragedy called 

 UMipus with Admetus;' but he soon returned to Shakspere, and 



? reduced, among other pieces, ' Macbeth,' ' Othello,' and ' Lear.' In 

 778 he was called to the Academy to fill the vacancy left by 

 Voltaire. He afterwards became secretary to Louis XVIII., and was 

 ever most devotedly attached to him. Even when almost starving, 

 he refused a pension of 40,000 francs and the cross of the legion of 

 honour, which were offered him by Napoleon. The restoration of his 

 beloved king rendered his old age happy. At his first audience the 

 king recited to him some of his own verses : " I am more fortunate," 

 cried the old poet in ecstacy, " than Boileau or Racine ; they recited 

 their verses to Louis XIV., but my king recites my verses to me." 

 He died in 1816. 



DUCKWORTH, ADMIRAL SIR JOHN THOMAS, Bart, G.C.B., 

 wan a son of the Rev. H. Duckworth, rector of Fulmer, Bucks, and 

 was born in February 1743. His family was anciently settled in 

 Devonshire. He was sent to Eton at an early age, and entered the 

 navy in 1759 under Admiral Boscawen, on board the 'Namur,' and in 

 the same year took part in two naval engagements with the French 

 admirals De la Clue and De Con Hans. After serving in several ships, 

 in 1 776 he went to America as lieutenant of the ' Diamond,' and con- 

 tinued there for three years, when he was appointed to the 'Princess 

 Royal,' and subsequently served on the West India station. In 1793 

 he was attached to Lord Howe's fleet, and is mentioned with great 

 praise in that admiral's despatches for the part he took in the action 

 of the 1st of June 1794, as having displayed not only great bravery 

 but great skill in naval tactics. Having again served on the West 

 India and Channel stations, he reduced Minorca in 1798 without the 

 loss of a single man. In 1800 he was appointed to the command of 

 the Leeward Isles, and in 1801 having taken part in the reduction of 

 the Danish and Swedish West India islands, was created a K.C.B. 

 In 1803 he was commander-in-chief at Jamaica, and blockaded the 

 harbours of the island of St. Domingo. His success hi protecting the 

 commerce and the coasts of Jamaica was acknowledged by the House 

 of Assembly of Jamaica, who presented him with a sword of 10001. 

 value. In 1805, relinquishing the blockade of Cadiz in which he was 

 engaged, he defeated the French in the bay of St. Domingo, for which 

 he received the thanks of both Houses of Parliament and an annuity 

 of lOOOt Having been sent out to watch the Turkish fleet, in 

 February 1807, he forced the passage of the Dardanelles, an enter- 

 prise at once most successful aud unexampled, and also moat import- 

 ant in its consequences. From 1810 to 1815 he was governor and 

 commander-in-chief of Newfoundland, when he was recalled to 

 England and appointed governor of Plymouth. He was created a 

 baronet in 1813, and died at Plymouth Dock, now called Devonport, 

 August Slut, 1817. 



DUCLOS, CHARLES-PINEAU, was born in the year 1704, at 

 Diimnt, in Bretagne, whence he was sent to Paris to prosecute his 

 studies. He soon formed a connection with the wits of the age, and 

 published a Romance called ' Acajou et Zirphile.' This work attained 

 only moderate celebrity ; but a subsequent romance, entitled ' Con- 



fessions du Comte de * * *,' was more successful. His reputation 

 however depends on a collection of moral essays, published under the 

 title of ' Considerations sur les Mceurs de ce Siecle," which have been 

 greatly extolled by many writers, and which Louis XV. characterised 

 as " the work of an honest man." In 1739 Duclos was admitted into 

 the Academy of Inscriptions, and in 1747 into the Academic 

 Franjaise, of which he became perpetual secretary. The citizens of 

 his native town, to testify their respect for him, made him their mayor 

 in 1744, but he contined to reside at Paris, where he died in 1772. 



The romances of Duclos, though less indecent than the works of 

 Crebillon the younger, are sufficiently indelicate to offend persona of 

 refined taste, while they lack the bitter satire and deep knowledge 

 of human nature which characterise that acute though obscene author. 

 His ' Considerations ' are a series of essays on the opinions which 

 regulate society, and though free from the misanthropic ill-nature 

 which appears in Rochefoucauld and occasionally in La Bruyere, they 

 are deficient in the real depth which those writers exhibit, and want 

 that charm of novelty and originality which is necessary to make mere 

 moral essays palatable. The romances and essays have been collected 

 into four vols., Svo, under the title of ' CEuvres Morales et Galantes.' 

 Duclos also wrote a history of Louis XI., and a secret history of 

 Louis XIV. and XV., which have acquired some reputation. 



* DUDEVANT, MADAME AMANTINE-AURORE, better known 

 by her assumed name of Oeorge Sand, was born in 1804, in the 

 department of Indre (part of the old province of Berri), in the very 

 centre of France. Her father, Maurice Dupin, was a captain in the 

 army of the empire, after having served since 1793 in the wars of the 

 revolution. His father was a fermier-general ; but his mother, who 

 had been previously married to Count de Horn, was the only daughter 

 of the celebrated Mareschal Maurice de Saxe, who was a natural sou 

 of the handsome Augustus II. of Poland. Thus the future authoress, 

 by her paternal descent, had the royal blood of Poland iu her veins 

 a fact which, with the mixture of that blood through her mother 

 with blood more plebeian and popular, she herself commemorates. 

 Left an orphan by the death of her father, who was killed by a fall 

 from his horse, Mademoiselle Dupin was educated under the care of 

 her grandmother, the Comtesse de Horn, who still survived, at the 

 Chateau de Nohant, in a retired valley in her native province of Berri. 

 As her grandmother (a genuine Frenchwoman of tho revolution) was 

 a believer in the doctrines of Rousseau, the education of the young 

 Aurore was somewhat peculiar. She roamed about as she chose, and 

 was brought up very much as if she had been a boy. Already how- 

 ever her intellectual tastes had declared themselves, and she was an 

 ardent and a various reader. At the age of fifteen, her grandmother, 

 persuaded at last that a girl educated on Rousseau's system in the 

 country would be an anachronism in the France of the restoration, 

 sent her to Paris, where she was placed in the Convent des Dames 

 Anglaises. Here, with all the enthusiasm of her nature, she entered 

 into the spirit of the place, so totally novel to her at the time, and 

 became an ardent Catholic. Her devoteeism went so fir that, on her 

 grandmother's death, she determined to take the veil. The remon- 

 strances of her family, if not their authority, prevented her from 

 carrying the design into effect ; and at the age of seventeen she was 

 married, by family arrangement, to M. Dudevaut, a country gentleman 

 of Berri, to whom she brought some fortune. Sho lived with him 

 about ten years, during which they had two children, a sou and a 

 daughter. But, although there was no disparity of years or other 

 ordinary cause of incompatibility between the husband and tho wife, 

 the marriage was not a suitable one ; and Madame Dudevant having, 

 in consequence of a severe illness, been sent to the Pyrenees for 

 change of air, and having then, for the first time since her girlhood, 

 come into free contact with the world, conceived such a distaste for 

 her existing mode of life that she resolved to bring it to a close. 

 Accordingly, she separated from her husband in 1831, allowing him to 

 retain her fortune, and came to Paris, to begin, at the age of twenty- 

 seven, a life of absolute independence. She resided first at the convent 

 where she had been educated, but afterwards in an obscure lodging in 

 the Quai-St-Michel, where Jules Sandeau, a young student with whom 

 she had some time before become acquainted, also had his abode. In 

 order to earn a mere subsistence, the two friends, so associated, betook 

 themselves to literature ; and, after some contributions to ' Figaro,' a 

 journal of that day, they jointly wrote a novel called 'Rose et Blanche,' 

 which was published (1832) with '.Jules Sand' on the title-page as the 

 author's name. Tho proceeds cf this work enabled the friends to live 

 for some time ; but again, on the compulsion of necessity, they atrreed 

 during a separation caused by Madame Dudevant's return on business 

 to Berri, to write each a portion of a tale to be published as one. 

 Madame Dudevant alone executed her part of the work, and the result 

 was 'Indiana,' which was published in 1832, and to which, in com- 

 memoration of her friendship with Sandeau, she affixed the name of 



des Deux Mondes' (1833). The genius of these works was acknow- 

 ledged by all, while the daring spirit of social revolt which they 

 showed, and especially their doctrines as to the institution of marriiigo 

 gave a peculiarity to their reputation which much affected their 

 reception as specimens of literary art, Tho game admiration of the 



