Works
His attitude exposed him to the animosity of the League party and of the Holy See, and to their persecution when the first edition of his history appeared. This history was his life's work. In a letter of March 31, 1611, addressed to the president Pierre Jeannin, he described his labours. His materials were drawn from his rich library, which he established in the Rue des Poitevins in the year 1587, with the two brothers, Pierre and Jacques Dupuy, as librarians. His object was to produce a scientific and unbiased work, and for this reason he wrote it in Latin, giving it as title Historia sui temporis. The first 18 books, embracing the period from 1545–1560, appeared in 1604 (1 vol. folio), and the work was at once attacked by those whom the author himself calls les envieux et les factieux.
The second part, dealing with the first wars of religion (1560–1572) including the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (November 9, 1609). The third part (up to 1574), and the fourth (up to 1584), which appeared in 1607 and 1608, caused a similar outcry, in spite of de Thou's efforts to remain just and impartial. He carried his scruples to the point of forbidding any translation of his book into French, because in the process there might, to use his own words, "be committed great faults and errors against the intention of the author"; this, however, did not prevent the Jesuit Father Machault from accusing him of being "a false Catholic, and worse than an open heretic" (1614); de Thou, we may say, was a member of the third order of St Francis. As an answer to his detractors, he wrote his Mémoires, which are a useful complement to the History of his own Times.
To de Thou we also owe certain other works: a treatise De re accipitraria (1784), a Life, in Latin, of Papyre Masson, some Poemata sacra, etc.
Read more about this topic: Jacques Auguste De Thou
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.”
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“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
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