Charles Pineau Duclos was a French writer of biographies and novels,
who lived and worked during the first half of the eighteenth century. He
prospered sufficiently well, as a literary man, to be made secretary to the
French Academy, and to be allowed to succeed Voltaire in the office of
historiographer of France. He has left behind him, in his own country,
the reputation of a lively writer of the second class, who addressed the
public of his day with fair success, and who, since his death, has not
troubled posterity to take any particular notice of him.
Among the papers left by Duclos, two manuscripts were found, which
he probably intended to turn to some literary account. The first was a
brief Memoir, written by himself, of a Frenchwoman, named
Mademoiselle Gautier, who began life as an actress and who ended it as a
Carmelite nun. The second manuscript was the lady\'s own account of the
process of her conversion, and of the circumstances which attended her
moral passage from the state of a sinner to the state of a saint. There are
certain national peculiarities in the character of Mademoiselle Gautier and
in the narrative of her conversion, which are perhaps interesting enough to
be reproduced with some chance of pleasing the present day.