Francois Etienne Bernard Alexandre Viel was born on October 31, 1736, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
His father, Dr. Bernard Alexandre Viel, a native of France, emigrated to Louisiana and was among the first surgeons to practise in the colony. His mother was Marie Macarthy, part Irish and part Creole.
In 1747, Dr. Viel took his eleven-year-old son to France and placed him in the Royal Academy of Juilly conducted by the Oratorian brotherhood. He proved a splendid student and soon led his classes.
For nine years, he never left the institution even for holidays. Exposed to such continuous religious influence, it was almost inevitable that, after his graduation, he should join the Oratorians.
Viel was sent as an instructor to Soissons, then to Les Mans, and finally in 1760 returned to his alma mater, the Academy of Juilly, where he taught the humanities and rhetoric until, in 1776, he was appointed grand profet of the college.
When the French Revolution destroyed all the Oratorian institutions of learning and scattered the order in 1792, Abbe Viel returned to Louisiana and became the parish priest of the Attakapas, where for twenty years he served his simple agricultural flock, earning their love and affection.
In 1812, he was recalled to France to aid in the reestablishment of his order, and for five years taught at Juilly until he suffered a slight stroke. When he recovered he was permitted to devote the rest of his life to the useless but learned avocation to which he was fanatically attached the translation into Latin verse of the works of great French authors.
He was a Latin scholar of the utmost distinction. When he fled from Paris in 1792, he left with a friend a manuscript he had just completed, a rhymed version in Latin of Funolon's Tlumaque (1797). Six of his former pupils discovered it and, to do him honor, paid for its publication in 1808.
Four years later when Viel returned to Paris, he corrected this edition and in 1814, brought out the second one. He called it Telemachiada and dedicated it to his six ex-students who had made the first edition possible. Altogether he did five volumes of translations of the works of various authors, one of which, Le Voyage de la Grande Chartreuse (1782), ran into seven editions.
His rendering of these French masterpieces into Latin verse was so beautiful in its accuracy and richness that the poet Barthelemy, who had been his pupil, wrote a poem in which he spoke of "Viel qui de Funolon virgilisa la prose. "
The abbe died on December 16, 1821, at the College of Juilly, where he had spent the best part of his life, first in acquiring and then in disseminating learning.
