Complete Works, Volume I

my youth, and the closest representation of intimacy. I shall therefore proceed to say a few things by way of preface, since those most eloquent men, upon whom this burden fell because of their fuller information on all matters and greater abundance of speech, are now silent due to very heavy business which does not permit that funeral oration and the performance of the funeral rites.

Let them remember, if ever they have the leisure, to offer victims and a votive shrine to the pious Shades of our Friend; meanwhile, we shall sacrifice a humble lamb. So you command, HENRI-LOUIS HABERT DE MONTMORT, most illustrious man; so urge DU PRAT and MARTEL, souls than whom the Earth has borne none more pure, nor any to whom another is more bound than I; the Printers desire it, others encourage it; and now my health, by the kind favor of GOD, allows it; as does my return to the City, my sorrow somewhat calmed, tranquility restored to my mind, the little desks brought back with me, my library equipment, and the leisure in which I abound.

PIERRE GASSENDI, commonly considered a native of Digne because of the Provostship of that Church, an office which he held for twenty years, nevertheless had as his birthplace not Digne, which he called his fatherland, but Champtercier, a village or small town in the territory of Digne, distant one league from the city to the west, in the ninety-second year of the previous century, on the twenty-second day of January. His father was ANTOINE GASSENDI and his mother FRANÇOISE FABRE, people conspicuous in their homeland for the sweetness of their character and perseverance in the faith of the religion of their ancestors, rather than for lineage or wealth. By these parents he was so formed to piety from his tenderest years that he was not able to utter any words before he was ready to pour out prayers to God, with eyes raised to Heaven and hands joined; which prayers, as I have heard, were the very first words he learned to pronounce. Whence, as soon as he was able at four years old to leave the house with a steady step, he either imitated a preacher among his peers, or alone until late into the night, under a dry and clear sky, he contemplated the Moon and the Stars; not without much fear from his parents, who sought the boy through trackless places while he was practicing astronomy in his cradle. As soon, therefore, as a more advanced education had to be applied, he was sent to DIGNE, where in a very short space of time he gave proofs of a most elegant genius, having GODEFROY WENDELIN as his teacher. Wherefore, since everyone admired such clear pledges of present virtue and future learning, even against the will, or at least without the knowledge, of one of his parents, who was more concerned with tilling the field than with advancing his son in good letters, he not only overcame the rudiments of the Latin language, but made such progress in Rhetoric