(Bernard de Bovier de, 1657-1757) was a nephew of Corneille, and hence was early in life directed towards literature. Like Perrault, he took the Modern side in the controversy against Boileau and Racine, moved thereto partly by an utter absence of any germ of literary taste, and partly by the restless spirit of free-thought in which he anticipated the epoch into which his own old age extended. Irreverence, bred of a certain intellectual acuteness and intrepidity, was not mitigated in Fontenelle by any real interest in, or sympathy with, what was great in literature.