Background
He was born and died in Paris.
He was born and died in Paris.
He afterwards became private tutor to the two sons of Henri II d"Orléans, duc de Longueville. He was sent to Dunkirk to the Romanist refugees from the Commonwealth of England, and in the midst of his missionary occupations published several books In 1665 or 1666 he returned to Paris, and published in 1671 Les Entretiens d"Ariste et d"Eugène, which was reprinted four more times at Paris, twice at Grenoble, and afterwards at Lyon, Brussels, Amsterdam, Leiden and other cities.
The popularity of Bouhours" discursive, heuristic Entretiens extended to Poland, where Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski imitated them in Dialogues of Artakses and Ewander.
His thoughts on the elusive je ne sais quoi that was in vogue in the seventeenth century, expressed through his characters, ends in assessing it a mystery that escapes a rational inquiry. His Doutes sur la langue française proposés aux Messieurs de l"Académie française (Paris, 1674.
Corrected second edition, 1675) was called "the most important and best organized of his numerous commentaries on the literary language of his time" when it was edited in a critical edition His doubts are collected under five headings: vocabulary, phrases and collocations, grammatical constructions, clarity, and stylistic consistency, in each case setting literary quotations under scrutiny.
His standards, expressed in the suggestions he offered for improving each example, showed the way out of ambiguities, skirting incongruous juxtapositions and untidy constructions.
The work was widely accepted and Bouhours standards are still the accepted norm among literate readers today. The chief of his other works are Louisiana Manière de bien penser sur les ouvrages d"esprit (1687), which appeared in London in 1705 under the title, The Art of Criticism, Vie de Saint Ignace de Loyola (1679), Vie de Saint François Xavier (1682), and a translation of the New Testament into French (1697). His letters against the Jansenists had a wide circulation.
His practice of publishing secular books and works of devotion alternately led to the mot, qu"il servait le monde et le ciel par semestre.
Bouhours died at Paris in 1702. According to the book Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, Bouhours" dying words were "I am about to -- or I am going to -- die: either expression is correct.".
lieutenant determined by its delicate presence, its grace and invisible charm, the sense of what pleases or displeases in Nature as well as Art, and remained an essential part of the French critical vocabulary until the advent of Romanticism.
