of treatises from eminent Churchmen, defending the faith against
unpublished attacks, and on the other hand by the prevailing tone in
belles lettres. Malherbe, the literary dictator of the first quarter
of the century, had died in 1628 with the character of a scoffer;
[558] and the fashion now lasted till the latter half of the reign of
Louis XIV. In 1621, two years after the burning of Vanini, a young man
named Jean Fontanier had been burned alive on the Place de Grève at
Paris, apparently for the doctrines laid down by him in a manuscript
entitled Le Trésor Inestimable, written on deistic and anti-Catholic
lines. [559] He was said to have been successively Protestant,
Catholic, Turk, Jew, and atheist; and had conducted himself like one
of shaken mind. [560] But the cases of the poet Théophile de Viau,
who about 1623 suffered prosecution on a charge of impiety, [561] and
of his companions Berthelot and Colletet--who like him were condemned
but set free by royal favour--appear to be the only others of the kind
for over a generation. Frivolity of tone sufficed to ward off legal
pursuit. It was in 1665, some years after the death of Mazarin, who had
maintained Richelieu's policy of tolerance, that Claude Petit was burnt
at Paris for "impious pieces"; [562] and even then there was no general
reversion to orthodoxy, the upper-class tone remaining, as in the age
of Richelieu and Mazarin, more or less unbelieving. When Corneille
had introduced a touch of Christian zeal into his Polyeucte (1643)
he had given general offence to the dilettants of both sexes. [563]
Molière, again, the disciple of Gassendi [564] and "the very genius
of reason," [565] was unquestionably an unbeliever; [566] and only
the personal protection of Louis XIV, which after all could not avail
to support such a play as Tartufe against the fury of the bigots,
enabled him to sustain himself at all against them.