. François de Maucroix (Noyon 1619-1708),... - Lot 328 - Conan Belleville Hôtel d'Ainay

. François de Maucroix (Noyon 1619-1708), poet and translator, close friend of La Fontaine]. 2 autograph manuscripts from 3 different unattributed hands, the first one from two different hands, bearing numerous erasures and corrections. The manuscript is contained in a folder bearing the following mention of the period: "Translation of the first three Catilinaries [of Cicero] and the Phormion of Terence. The author of this translation is probably the abbot of Maucroix. 41 pp. in-4 for the first text, 36 pp. in-4 for the second (the end is missing). Maucroix published a number of translations. As Louis Paris points out in his warning to Maucroix's Works, shortly before his death, he gave some of his unpublished translations to Fabio Brulart de Sillery, who engaged Abbé d'Olivet, his colleague at the Academy, to review these various pieces and to deliver them to the printing press, which he did in 1710 by publishing the Posthumous Works (he had known him in Rheims in 1700 and became his confidant). But Olivet was not satisfied with seeing them again, he retouched them and partly reworked them. Then he published the rest under the title: Nouvelles œuvres de M. de Maucroix (Paris, André Cailleau, 1726). Flattered by the reception given to this edition, the abbot d'Olivet then claimed these translations as his own. That same year, he published a translation of Cicero's Catilinaires. These translations seem to have remained unpublished and do not appear in the list of manuscripts bequeathed by the author to the Jesuits of Reims. This text also differs from the translation by Abbé d'Olivet. It should be noted that the abbot of Maucroix was a close friend of Jean de La Fontaine since the college. At the very beginning of his career, de La Fontaine published another play from Térence, l'Eunuque. It should be noted that the Eunuch and the Phormion were the only two pieces by Terence to appear in the classical studies programme of the time, as R