Abstract EN:

Fontaine's memoirs are part of the most important documents we have to understand the religious and literary group of Port-Royal. Fontaine was a "solitaire" and a secretary to the biblist le Maistre de Sacy and Antoine Arnauld. He also participated in the translation and comment of the bible, in the translating works of church fathers, was involved in the controversial history of the port-royal group and gathered a huge collection of original documents: Fontaine is to be considered a unique eye-witness of his time. The only edition available, faulty and distorted, dates back to 1736. The edition of the original manuscript which had remained unpublished provides a new approach with a great number of documents(more than 105 letters), the famous Entretien de Pascal avec M. De Sacy in its authentic version, a text which is restored in its entirely supplied with all the autobiographical developments inaccessible so far. The footnotes provide the reader with helpful information about history, language, bibliographical references and the identification of many hundred quotations. Several indexes, a glossary and unpublished documents are complementary to the text. The writer's itinerary path, the story of the manuscript, the literary antecedents of the memoirs and a study of their own significance are given in an extensive introduction (more than 500 p. ). Within a literary movement deeply rooted in the Augustinian literature, the writer achieves an original work at the end of the century (1695-1700). In an autobiographical perspective whose model is to be found in the confessions by saint Augustine (around 400), he associated all the literary resources he had to use in his contact with the group of port-royal and in is long career as a writer: letter writing, conversation, hagiography, chronicle and personal lyricism. Fontaine's Memoirs whose historical interest is thus renewed and opened to new researches, are to be regarded as a major work in introspective literature.