Philippe Goibaud-Dubois

Biography

Arrived at Paris without knowing another thing that to play of the violin, it is made Maître dance. It is in this quality that it enters to the Louis Joseph de Guise, still child. The small duke sticks to him and does not want an other governor. Thus at the thirty years age, the internal caliper gauge puts himself at Latin under the direction of the professors of Port-Royal. “It took even enough their manner of writing, tells the abbot of Olivet, this serious style, supported, periodic, but a little too uniform. ”

When the duke of Own way dies prematurely of the small pox in 1671, Goibaud-Dubois devotes himself entire to the translation of the Latin works which it considers most useful. He thus translates the majority of works of Saint Augustin, several works of Cicéron, like the Imitation of Jesus-Christ . He publishes Catulle and publishes a work on the Jansénisme in 1685. He writes the Mémoires Henri II of Own way, which are published and supplemented by the rider of the duke in 1668 and 1687. He is elected member of the French Academy in 1693.

One reproached Goibaud-Dubois for having put the authors whom it translated in a single mould. The abbot of Olivet reports on this subject the following anecdote:

A lady of taste asked me how it could be that S. Augustin and Cicéron, two authors who wrote on so different matters, and which lived in times so distant one from the other, had a completely similar style. I asked him in my turn where it had thus found this claimed conformity. Is this, added I, in the choice or the arrangement of the words? Is this in the turn of the thoughts? - It is, says me it, in Mr. Dubois. I find there that S. Augustin and Cicéron were two large speechifiers which said all on the same tone.

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