Lévesque

Lévesque is l'évêque, the bishop, written as one word, the article fused to the noun. The French record files it as a surname of northern France, an old variant of Lévêque that appears with or without the acute accent. The name was never the office: the byname went to the man who served in a bishop's household, to one who carried himself like a churchman, or to whoever took the mitre in a feast-day play.

Normandy chewed the article off again and was left with Vèque and Vesque, deglutinated forms of the same word. The word did the same work in the other languages of France and its borders: Besque and Bisbal in Occitan, Lescop in Breton, Bischoff on the Alsace and Lorraine frontier, De Bisschop in Flemish.

Jacques Lévesque, seigneur de Pouilly, and Marie Roland had three sons who all went into scholarship: Louis-Jean, born in 1691, Jean, born in 1692, and Gérard, born in 1694. To keep them apart they took the tails they are still indexed under: de Pouilly, de Burigny, de Champeaux. In 1713 the three began compiling a dictionary of universal knowledge on the plan of an encyclopedia; it ran to twelve large manuscript folios, and Burigny drew material out of it for the rest of his working life.

Their studies at Reims finished, the brothers moved to Paris together. By 1718 Burigny was at The Hague working with Saint-Hyacinthe on L'Europe savante, a journal in twelve volumes of which he wrote at least half. Pouilly kept company with the same editors, and between 1718 and 1720 corresponded with Bolingbroke about natural philosophy while working through Newton's Principia.

Elected an associate member of the Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1722, Louis-Jean Levesque de Pouilly went straight at the credibility of ancient history. On 15 December that year he read a Dissertation sur l'incertitude de l'Histoire des quatre premiers Siècles de Rome, and on 22 December 1724 he followed it with Nouveaux essais de critique sur la fidélité de l'Histoire. Both were printed in the Academy's Mémoires in 1729, the first from the Imprimerie Royale.

Poor health took him to England, where he met Pope. In January 1727 he married Anne Roland and became seigneur d'Arcis-le-Ponsart and Bouilly, and he gave up the Academy for good at his marriage. Their son Jean-Simon Levesque de Pouilly was born in 1734.

In 1746 Pouilly became Lieutenant des habitants of Reims and spent the office on public works: fountains put up with the help of the canon Godinot and Father Fery, streets laid out, a scheme for the place Royale, and two new schools, one of mathematics and one of drawing.

The philosophy he wrote alongside the office was the Théorie des sentiments agréables, encouraged by the chancellor d'Aguesseau, who read the manuscripts through for him. Its case was that happiness can be reached by a morality founded on feeling and an aesthetics of harmony, and reached by the greatest number rather than by a trained few. It ran through edition after edition from 1736 to the Paris printing of 1749 dedicated to Louis XV, and the Encyclopédie took notice of it.

Voltaire made the journey to Reims to see him, with Émilie du Châtelet. Pouilly died there in March 1750 and was buried in the church of Saint-Jacques; the canon de Saulx wrote him an ode and a eulogy, printed in the posthumous 1774 edition.

Back in Paris, Jean Lévesque de Burigny gave the rest of his life to historical research. He translated Porphyry on abstinence from meat, with the life of Plotinus, out of the Greek in 1740; the Histoire générale de Sicile came out at The Hague in 1745, the Histoire des révolutions de l'empire de Constantinople in 1750, the Théologie païenne in 1754 and a Vie de Bossuet in 1761.

His lives of Grotius and of Erasmus were held to carry information found nowhere else, which is the compliment a patient researcher earns. He shared the ideas of the philosophers of his day without any of their appetite for a quarrel: the account left of him is of a modest, peace-loving man whose only ambition was to be a scholar. The Traité de l'autorité du pape, published at Paris in 1782, reduced papal authority to a primacy of honour. He died in Paris in 1785, under a surname that meant the bishop.

Pierre-Alexandre Levesque de La Ravalière was born at Troyes on 6 January 1697, son of Pierre Levesque, chief clerk of the élection there. He read law at Orléans, was licensed in 1726, and went home to practise, but he preferred literature and left for Paris to go on learning. His Essay de comparaison entre la déclamation et la poésie dramatique of 1729 was written to provoke a dispute. Nobody attacked it, so he produced the attack himself.

History suited him better. A dissertation of 1736 on the true author of the Annales de Saint-Bertin was well received by the abbé Lebeuf, and in 1742 he was elected to the Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres in the place left by Guillaume de La Boissière de Chambors. He had a history of the counts of Champagne in hand, and when his eulogy came to be written nobody could say what state he had left it in.

What he did finish, in 1742, was an edition of the songs of Thibaut IV, count of Champagne and king of Navarre, with a glossary and a discourse on the antiquity of French song. He used it to argue that French had borrowed nothing from Latin: it came out of Celtic, and its likeness to Latin was that of twins born at the same moment rather than of a son to his father.

His own tail came with his wife. He married Esther-Catherine le Roi, daughter of a councillor in the parlement of Metz, and took La Ravalière from a fief in the Perche that reached him through her. He died on 4 February 1762.

Louise Levesque was born Cavelier at Rouen on 23 November 1703, daughter of a prosecutor at the parlement de Normandie, and was given a good education. At twenty she married Levesque, a gendarme of the King, and followed him to Paris. There she fell in with writers who valued the reach of her mind and pressed her to write; she read at leisure, allowed herself poetry, then tried nearly every genre going.

Between 1731 and 1740 came the Lettres et chansons de Céphise et d'Uranie, the allegorical Célénie, the comic Le Minet, Lélia ou Histoire de Carthage, a burlesque Sancho Pança gouverneur and a comedy called L'Auteur fortuné. The one that got away was Judith, a five-act opera finished in 1736 and never performed, because no composer would write the music for it. She died at Paris on 18 May 1745.

Prosper Levesque was born at Besançon in 1713 and made his profession at the abbey of Luxeuil on 29 September 1729, a Benedictine of the congregation of Saint-Vanne and Saint-Hydulphe. His superiors gave him the education of the novices, then the library of Saint-Vincent, where he assembled and wrote the Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du cardinal de Granvelle, published in two volumes at Paris in 1753. A three-volume Histoire du siècle de Charles-Quint never left manuscript and is kept at Besançon.

François Lévesque, born on 29 June 1732 and probably at Rouen, was of Huguenot descent, son of François Lévesque and Marie Pouchet. Some time before 1756 he joined his cousins François Havy and Jean Lefebvre, merchants at Quebec City. Both cousins left during the Seven Years' War; he stayed, and built a prosperous business in wheat. In 1769 he married Catherine Trottier Desauniers Beaubien and was made a justice of the peace, in 1772 he took a seat on the Council, and in 1775 he entered the Legislative Council for the Province of Quebec. He died at Quebec City in January 1787.

The heavier weight of the name now sits on the far side of the Atlantic, in the province François Lévesque settled in, among bearers such as Georges-Henri Lévesque (1903-2000), Dominican priest and sociologist, and the poet and songwriter Raymond Lévesque (1928-2021). A nickname for the man who looked like a churchman has spent three centuries in the hands of people who wrote things down.