PIERRE-FRANÇOIS GYOT DES, a French critic, the son of a councillor in the parliament of Rouen, was born in that city on the 18th December 1685, and terminated his career at Paris on the 16th December 1745. At the age of fifteen he entered into the society of the Jesuits, where he received orders; and at thirty quitted it to return to the world. He was a priest, and had a cure in Normandy, which he soon left, and, as a man of wit and letters, lived for a time with the Cardinal d'Auvergne. Having excited some attention at Paris by certain critical productions, Desfontaines was, in 1724, employed to conduct the Journal des Scavans. He acquitted himself well in this department, and was peaceably enjoying the applause of the public, when his enemies, exasperated by critical strictures in his journal, caused him to be accused of an abominable crime, and procured his imprisonment. By the credit of powerful friends, however, he was set at liberty in fifteen days: the magistrate of the police took upon himself the trouble of justifying him, in a letter addressed to the Abbé Bignon; and this letter having been read amidst his fellow-labourers in the journal, he was unanimously re-established in his former credit. This happened in 1725. But with whatever reputation he acquitted himself in conducting his journal, frequent disgusts induced him at length to abandon it. Meanwhile he laboured in some new periodical works, from which he derived his greatest fame. In 1731 he commenced one under the title of Le Nouvelliste du Parnasse, ou Réflexions sur les Ouvrages Nouveaux; but it only extended to two volumes, the work having been suppressed by authority, from the incessant complaints of the authors ridiculed therein. About three years after, in 1735, he obtained a new privilege for a periodical production entitled Observations sur les Ecrits Modernes, which, after extending to thirty-three volumes, was suppressed in 1743. Yet the year following, 1744, he published another weekly paper called Jugemens sur les Ecrits Nouveaux, which proceeded to eleven volumes; the last two having been executed by other hands. In 1745 he was attacked with a disorder in the chest, which ended in a dropsy that proved fatal in five weeks. "He was born a sentimental person," says Fréron; "a philosopher in conduct as well as in principle; exempt from ambition; and of a noble, firm spirit, which would not submit to sue for preferments or titles. In common conversation he appeared only a common man; but when subjects of literature, or anything out of the ordinary way, were agitated, he discovered great force of imagination and wit."