Montmor, Henri Louis Habert De
MONTMOR, HENRI LOUIS HABERT DE
(b. Paris [?], France, ca. 1600; d. Paris, 21 Januarv 1679)
scientific patronage.
Montmor’s family, which originally came from Artois, moved to Paris in the sixteenth century. Its leading members were high government officials who grew rich in the king’s service. Related to the greatest families in the kingdom, including the Lamoignons, the Bethunes, and the Phélypeaux, and a grandnephew of Guillaume Budé, he received an excellent education. When Montmor was twenty-five, his father obtained for him a position as conseiller in the Parlement of Paris; and on 6 April 1632 he was appointed maître des requêtes. His connections with two of his cousins, the brothers Philippe Habert, artillery commissioner and poet, and Germain Habert, abbé of Cerisy and likewise a poet, undoubtedly account for his having been well enough known to Valentin Conrart to have been included in the small group forming the Académic Francaise. He was elected to the latter in December 1634 and formally welcomed by his cousin Germain Habert on 2 January 1635. On 30 April 1635 the group met at the handsome town house on the Rue Sainte-Avoye (now 79 Rue du Temple) that his father had constructed about 1623.
On 29 March 1637 Montmor married a cousin, Marie Henriette de Buade de Frontenac, whose brother Louis later became governor of New France. Between 1638 and 1659 they had fifteen children, most of whom died young. The eldest son, who also became maître des requêtes, suffered a bankruptcy of 600,000 livres—which, if Jean Chapelain’s letter to François. Bernier is to be believed, was the cause of the “fatal melancholy” that overtook Montmor beginning in 1669. On 7 September 1671 Chapelain wrote to Nikolaas Heinsius: “M. de Montmor’s fate is deplorable. For a year he has lived only on milk and to his distress he is unable to leave this life…” (Lettres de Jean Chapelain, II, 752). He was obliged to sell his post and as a result “suffered such a great mental disturbance that he became almost insane” (ibid., to Régnier de Graff, 28 August 1671). Yet he lived until the beginning of 1679, having survived his wife by more than two years.
Very few of Montmor’s writings are extant. In the Histoirc de l’ Academie francoise Pellisson states that Montmor delivered an address to the Academy on 3 March 1635, “De 1’utilité des conférences.” Today he is of interest for his role as patron of the scientists and philosophers of his age. A fine scholar, Montmor assembled a very rich library, in which the correspondence of important contemporaries (for example, Gui Patin and Chapelain) had a major place, and he attracted to his residence on Rue Saint-Avoye both men of letters and scientists. A Cartesian throughout his life, he offered Descartes “the full use of a country house [Mesnil-Saint-Denis] worth 3,000 to 4,000 livres in rent” (A. Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Descartes, II, 462), which the latter declined.
No document proves conclusively that regular scientific meetings took place at Montmor’s residence before 1653. Toward the middle of the century political agitation attracted more attention than did scientific activity, and Montmor did not escape this preoccupation. Although not really a rebel, he stood with the Parlement and princes against the king and court. When the disorders of the Fronde had died down, and after Descartes was dead, Montmor, while remaining a Cartesian, offered Gassendi, Descartes’s great adversary, lodgings in his house. Gassendi moved into the second floor of the house in the Rue du Temple on 9 May 1653. He spent the month of August 1654 at Mesnil, where he made astronomical observations. Montmor encouraged him to write La vie de Tycho Brahe, and Gassendi dedicated it to his patron, whom he also made the executor of his will and to whom he left all his books, manuscripts, and the telescope Galileo had given him. When Gassendi died, on 24 October 1655, Montmor returned in haste from Mesnil to arrange his friend’s funeral; Gassendi was buried in the Montmor chapel in the church of St.-Nicolas-des-Champs. Montmor collected his writings—with the help of François Henri, Samuel Sorbière, and Antoine de La Poterie and wrote a preface to the six-volume Latin edition published at Lyons in 1658.
Gassendi’s presence in Montmor’s household certainly contributed to the development of the meetings held there by the cultivated men who had previously gathered around Mersenne, the brothers Pierre and Jacques Du Puy, the Abbé Picot, and François Le Pailleur and who, with several newcomers, now assembled on the Rue du Temple: Boulliau, Pascal, Roberval, Gérard Desargues, Carcavi, Jean Segrais, Gui Patin, Michel de Marolles, Balthazar de Monconys, and others. In a letter to his friend Regnault of Lyons, dated 4 August 1656, Monconys described a meeting in Montmor’s house in which experiments on glass drops were conducted. Although Monconys spoke of an “assemblée” (of which he was not then a member), it is only from the end of 1657 that the weekly gatherings of what came to be called the Academic Montmor can be dated.
At Montmor’s request, Sorbière prepared a plan for the organization of meetings in the form of nine articles. The goals of the meetings “will not be the vain exercise of the mind on useless subtleties; rather, one should alwavs propose the clearest knowledge of the works of God and the advancement of the conveniences of life, in the arts and sciences that best serve to establish them.” Sorbière was also charged with preparing the Mémoires of the assembly, but unfortunately they have been lost.
Among the members of the Academie Montmor were Chapelain, Sorbière, Montmor (named the “Modérateur”), Clerselier, Rohault, Pierre Huet, Roberval (until he was “uncivil,” boorish, and rude to Montmor, who supported the opinions of Descartes), and Huygens (when he was in Paris). The latter’s journal provides information on the weekly sessions and on those he met there; on 9 November 1660 he was introduced to Auzout, Frenicle de Bessy, Desargues, Pecquet, Rohault La Poterie, Sorbière, and Boulliau. Oldenburg also visited the house in the Rue du Temple when he staved in Paris.
The activities of the Académie Montmor during its first years included Chapelain’s announcement of Huygens’ discoveries (the pendulum clock, the first known satellite of Saturn, a diagram of his system of Saturn—planet and ring), Rohault’s experiments on the magnet, Pecquet’s dissections, and Thévenot’s presentation of his tubes “made expressly to examine the ascension of water that mounts by itself beyond its level.”
Two currents soon appeared within the Académie Montmor: the first, a tendency to seek natural causes, was associated with the philosophers, both Cartesians and Gassendists; the second, a preference for observation and experiment, was emphasized by Auzout, Petit, and Rohault, who complained of sterile discussions and prating that explained nothing.
The problem worsened in the following years, and on 3 April 1663 Sorbiére delivered “Discours à l’ouverture de l’Académie des Physiciens qui s’assemblent tous les mardis chez Monsieur de Montmor,” which he sent to Colbert. Although he began by honoring the “illustrious moderator” who “first aroused interest in Paris in the studies we cultivate” and by praising the early meetings and experiments, he soon turned to severe criticism of the disputes and interruptions; “people who have come here only to waste time and to acquire esteem”; and the mutual intolerance of the partisans of experiment and philosophy. Even though Montmor had provided his guests with “an infinity of machines and instruments with which he has stimulated his curiosity for thirty years,” he could not furnish them with a forge and a laboratory or an observatory. That was not within the power of an individual but, rather, of a sovereign. This implicit appeal to the king for the creation of an institution under royal patronage explains why the Académie Montmor has been seen as a forerunner of the Académie Royale des Sciences.
In response to all the criticism, the Académie Montmor attempted to reform itself. Experiments were tried there with an air pump constructed according to Huygens’ plans. Nevertheless, so Huygens wrote to Moray in March 1664, a widespread desire was felt to establish the academy on a new basis. On 12 June, he wrote to Moray that “the academy has ended forever chez M. de Montmor” but that another was being born from its ruins. Montmor, meanwhile, continued to receive scientists and to take an interest in philosophers. Experiments on blood transfusion were carried out by Jean-Baptiste Denis at his home in 1668; and when the human subject died, Montmor exerted his influence to save the experimenters from legal penalties. It was to Montmor that Henri Justel sent Hooke’s Micrographia. He also received the first copy of the Saggi dell’esperienze naturali fatte nell’Accademia del Cimento, and on the advice of Chapelain, Louis de La Forge dedicated his Traitté de l’esprit de l’homme, which was inspired by Descartes’s philosophy, to Montmor (as had Mersenne his Harmonie universelle). Montmor’s continued attachment to Descartes is proved by the fact that he undertook the writing of a Latin poem on Cartesian physics with the Lucretian title De rerum natura and by the fact that he was among the faithful Cartesians who followed Descartes’s bier to the church of Ste.-Geneviève-du-Mont on 25 June 1667.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Information on Montmor’s life may be found in Adrien Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Descartes (Paris, 1691), 266–267, 346–347, 462; Faustin Foiret, “L’hôtel de Montmor,” in La Cité, Bulletin trimestriel de la Société historique et archéologique du IVc arrondissement de Paris, 13 (1914), 309–339; “Habert, Henri Louis, de Montmor,” in Moreri’s Dictionnaire… (1759); René Kerviler, “Henri-Louis Habert de Montmor, de l’Académie française et bibliophile (1600–1679),” in Le bibliophile français, VI (Paris, 1872), 198–208; Frédéric Lachévre, Bibliographie des recueils collectifs de poésies publiés de 1597 à 1700, III (Paris, 1903), 455; Pellisson and d’Olivet, Histoire de l’Académie françoise depuis son établissement jusqu’en 1652 (Paris, 1729), 81, 175, 276, 344; and Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, Antoine Adam, ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1960–1961).
On Montmor’s relations with Gassendi see, in addition to the classic works on Gassendi, Georges Bailhache and Marie-Antoinette Fleury, “Le testament, l’inventaire après décès, la sépulture et le monument funéraire de Gassendi,” in Tricentenaire de Pierre Gassendi, 1655–1955. Actes du Congrès Gassendi, 4–7 août 1955 (Paris, 1957), 19–68.
Information on the Académie Montmor is in The Corrspondence of Henry Oldenburg, A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas-Hall, eds., I–IV (Madison–Milwaukee, Wis., 1965–1971); F. Graverol, ed., Sorberiana (Toulouse, 1691), 28–29; Lettres et Discours de Monsieur de Sorbière sur diverses Matières Curieuses (Paris, 1660), 60, 181, 190, 193, 369, 631, 694, 701; Lettres de Gui Patin, J. H. Réveillé-Parise, ed., II (Paris, 1846), 107, 211, 317–318; Lettres de Jean Chapelain, P. Tamizey de Larroque, ed., II (Paris, 1883), passim; Balthazar de Monconys, Journal des voyages (Lyons, 1666), 162–169; and Oeuvres de Christiaan Huygens, J. Volgraf, ed., I-V, XXII (The Hague, 1888–1950).
The following studies have made extensive use of the above sources: M. G. Bigourdan, Les premières sociétés savantes de Paris au XVIIc siècle et les origines de l’Académie des sciences (Paris, 1919); Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth Century France (1620–1680) (Baltimore, 1934), 64–134; and René Taton, Les origines de l’Académie royale des sciences (Paris, 1966), 47–54.
Suzanne Delorme