Note 306 — Chapter IX · The Gothic Art of Burgundy[267]

“La gloire de Bossuet est devenue l’une des religions de la France; on la reconnaît, on la proclame, on s’honore soi-même en y apportant chaque jour un nouveau tribut. Bossuet, c’est le génie hébreu, étendu, fécondé par le Christianisme, et ouvert à toutes les acquisitions de l’intelligence, mais retenant quelque chose de l’interdiction souveraine. Il est la voix éloquente par excellence, la plus simple, la plus forte, la plus brusque, la plus familière, la plus soudainement tonnante.”—Sainte-Beuve.

No city has been more prolific in notable sons than Dijon, where, as Voltaire said, “le mérite de l’esprit semble être un des caractères des citoyens.” Among them are Rameau, the musician (1683-1764), who founded French opera and discovered important laws in harmony; he and his descendants were exempted from tithes by their native city; Dubois, the sculptor (1626-94), whose Assumption and the high altar of Notre Dame, Dijon, are his best works; the critic and philologist, La Monnaye (b. 1641); the playwright, Crébillon (d. 1762); Piron, the witty epigrammatist (d. 1773); the learned Président de Brosse (1709-77), whose Lettres d’Italie are full of Burgundian vivacity and salt, and whose friend, Buffon, the naturalist (1707-88), though born at Montbard, was educated in Dijon, where his father was counselor in the parliament. The grandmother of Madame de Sévigné, St. Jeanne Françoise de Chantal, founder of the Visitation Order, was born at 17 rue Jeannin, 1572. Her father was a president of Dijon’s parliament. The sculptor Rude was a son of Dijon (d. 1855), and in this same city that had produced St. Bernard and Bossuet, the most eloquent preacher of the XIX century, Lacordaire, spent his childhood and youth, as his mother came of an old legal family here. Léon Deshairs, Dijon, architecture des XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles (Paris, 1910).