JEAN FRANCOIS, a celebrated French writer, was born in 1723 at the picturesque village of Bort in the Limousin, in a family little removed above the rank of peasantry. He owed the early part of his education to private charity and gratuitous public institutions. After studying at the college of the Jesuits at Clermont, he went to Toulouse, where he delivered lectures in philosophy with considerable reputation, and gained an academical prize. An accidental correspondence with Voltaire finally led to his departure for Paris in 1745, where he obtained the personal acquaintance of that highly popular writer, who at that time extended the most friendly encouragement to all young men possessed of any talents for poetry. There Marmontel commenced his career of letters by gaining a prize for a poem on a subject proposed by the French Academy, La Gloire de Louis XIV. perpetuelle dans le Roi son Successeur. But in that age the theatre afforded the most ample field for the acquisition of wealth and eminence, and he accordingly next turned his attention to theatrical composition. His first tragedies, Dionysius and Aristomenes, obtained a flattering reception, but were soon forgotten; and his succeeding ones, Cleopatra, the Heraclides, and Numitor, had no success whatever. La harpe, who was a great dramatic critic, condemns them all as bad, except the Heraclides, which he calls a tolerable tragedy of the second rank. In fact, Marmontel does not appear to have been endowed with any great talents for poetry or dramatic composition. His dramatic writings, however, gained for him at once both friends and fortune, and he found himself suddenly elevated from the verge of utter want, and at once plunged into all the bustling intrigue of the first literary circles, and into all the glare and dissipation of fashionable society. His time was occupied with rehearsals, love intrigues, and parties of pleasure. By addressing flattering verses to the king, and gaining the favour of other persons of influence, Marmontel obtained the situation of under-secretary of the royal buildings. This employment fixed his residence at Versailles for five years, during which time he contributed articles to the Encyclopedie, which were afterwards printed together in alphabetical order, under the general title of Elements de Litterature. He afterwards commenced the Contes Moraux, written originally for the Mercure de France, which were subsequently collected and printed by themselves. Many of these tales, on which the fame of Marmontel principally, if not solely, rests, bear reference to the original idea with which they commence, being for the most part intended to expose some absurdity or extravagance of character. In most of them he displays a very happy imitation of nature in the manners and in the language; and it is only to be regretted that he has occasionally given too high Marmora, a colouring to conceptions of the most beautiful simplicity. As lively pictures of French manners, both simple and fashionable, they are admitted to be unrivalled. Having been suspected of writing a satire against some powerful nobleman, in the Mercure, of which he had now become the sole manager, he was, in consequence, shut up for a few days in the Bastille, and on his release deprived of his agreeable and lucrative situation. He next translated into prose the Pharsalia of Lucan, and added to it a supplement, in which he details the events of Caesar's wars in Africa, and concludes with his last campaign in Spain. His next publication was a romance called Bélisaire, which, on its first appearance in 1768, attracted universal attention, and involved the author in a dispute with the Sorbonne, who published a censure of it; which was opposed by the arguments of Turgot, and by the epigrams and squibs of Voltaire. He some time afterwards produced his Incas of Peru, and, irritated as he was by the recent anathemas of the Sorbonne, his great object in this new romance was to show, that all the evils inflicted by the Spaniards on the Indians had their origin in that fanaticism which he was desirous to bring into still deeper detestation. In these latter works he unluckily abandoned the simplicity which charmed so much in his Moral Tales, for a tone too highly rhetorical and turgid.

In 1763 Marmontel had been admitted, after considerable opposition, to the much-envied place of a member of the French Academy, and in 1783 he succeeded D'Alembert as its perpetual secretary. The situation of historiographer of France, and the chair of history in the Lyceum, which he successively obtained, fully indemnified him for the loss of the Mercure. He was in the full enjoyment of affluent circumstances, domestic felicity, and literary reputation, when the French Revolution suddenly changed the scene. During its alarming progress he led a retired life, and though reduced to indigent circumstances, remained secure amidst all the violent events of the period. In 1797 he was chosen a deputy to the National Assembly by the department of Eure, but he died soon afterwards, of an apoplectic attack, at his cottage near Abbeville, on the 31st December 1799.

After his death were published the Nouveaux Contes Moraux, 4 vols. 8vo, 1801; also a tolerable Histoire de la Régence du Due d'Orléans, 2 vols. 8vo, 1805; besides his Mémoires d'Une Perce, pour servir à l'Instruction de ses Enfants, 4 vols. 8vo, 1804,—perhaps the most attractive and amusing of all his writings,—containing, however, among many agreeable and happy sketches, much paradox and self-contradiction; with a vast gallery of portraits of the most distinguished names of his time in France, ranging from Massillon to Mirabeau. Many of his pieces are of very doubtful morality.