The Abbé de Saint-Pierre and the Emergence of the 'Quantifying ...

Abbé Saint-Pierre and the “Quantifying Spirit” 12
public tasks, performing them with great distinction throughout his forty-year tenure as academy
secretary. But he was also a producer of original scientific work even if these efforts pale in
comparison to his work as a writer of plays, poems, and literary works or his efforts as the public
spokesperson for the royal academy. Interestingly, the precise scientific topic that attracted his
focused intellectual attention was the new analytical mathematics. Fontenelle spent his lifetime
studying the new calculus, and his work culminated in a 1727 treatise entitled Eléments de la
géometrie de l’infini. He too had close ties to the “MalebrancheCircle,” writing the “Preface” to
l’Hôpital’s pioneering 1696 treatise on the infinitesimal calculus L’Analyse des infinimens petits.
In his role as historian of the academy he also used his pen to offer a detailed, year by year
account of their work. He also used his tremendous rhetorical gifts to advocate for advanced
mathematics before the public at large. Saint-Pierre was again at close hand during these and all
of Fontenelle’s other intellectual endeavors, and the influence on his own thought and work was
unmistakable. 30
In the wake of the new mathematical interests of his Norman comrades, however, Saint-
Pierre chose neither to pursue a career in mathematics like Varignon, nor even a career which
made mathematical work a significant part of a diverse set of intellectual practices like
Fontenelle. Instead, he charted his own course while nevertheless carrying the legacy of his
mathematical encounters with him. When Varignon’s appointment earned him lodging at the
Collège Mazarin in 1687, the “cradle of the eighteenth-century” as one scholar has called the
cabane in the Faubourg St. Jacques was abandoned. 31 Vertot went his own way, becoming a
leading scholar of antiquities and a member of Académie royale des Inscription et Belles-lettres,
while Saint-Pierre looked elsewhere for opportunities.