Louis Du Four de Longuerue dating history

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Louis Dufour de Longuerue (1652, Charleville-Mézières, Ardennes) – 22 November 1733), abbé of Sept-Fontaines (from 1674) and of Saint-Jean-du-Jard near Melun (from 1684), known simply as the abbé de Longuerue, was an antiquarian, a linguist and historian, a child prodigy who became the protégé of Fénelon; in his turn Longuerue encouraged the Abbé Alary and the young cartographer-to-be, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697–1782), perhaps the greatest geographical author of the eighteenth century. As a philologist, he remarked on the astonishing progress the French language had made, in its refinement and conscious purification from 1630 to 1670. The abbé was a free-thinker, for a man ostensibly of the cloth: Helvétius quoted his remark that, if all the good and all the evil done in the name of religion were weighed together, the evil would preponderate.