“ Amongst his early studies history, chronology and mythology held a prominent place. To please his father he studied law and began to practise at the bar; but the force of his genius soon carried him into his own path. At nineteen he was admitted to a society of learned men before whom he read memoirs on the religion of the Greeks, on the worship of Bacchus, of Ceres, of Cybele and of Apollo. ”

“ The list of his memoirs, many of them posthumous, occupies four columns of the Nouvelle Biographie générale. They treat of history, chronology, geography, mythology and religion. Throughout he appears as the keen, learned and original critic; examining into the comparative value of documents, distinguishing between the mythical and the historical, and separating traditions with an historical element from pure fables and legends. He rejected the extreme pretensions of the chronology of Egypt and China, and at the same time controverted the scheme of Sir Isaac Newton as too limited. ”

“ One of the first memoirs which he read was a learned and critical discourse, Sur l’origine des Francs (1714) . He maintained that the Franks were a league of South German tribes and not, according to the legend then almost universally received, a nation of free men deriving from Greece or Troy, who had kept their civilization intact in the heart of a barbarous country. ”