Boindin, Nicholas

, born at Paris in 1676, the son of an attorney in the office of the finances, entered into the regiment of musqueteers in 1696. The weakness of his constitution, unable to resist the fatigues of the service, obliged him to lay down his arms and take to his studies. He was received in 1706 into the academy of inscriptions and belles-lettres, and would have been of the French academy, if the public profession he made of atheism had not determined his exclusion. He was afflicted towards the latter end of his days with a fistula, which carried him off the 30th of Nov. 1751, at the age of 75. He was denied the honours of sepulture; being inhumed the day following without ceremony at three o clock in the morning. M. Parfait the elder, who inherited the works of Boindin, gave them to the public in 1753, in 2 vols. 12mo. In the first we have four comedies in prose: and a memoir on his life and writings, composed by himself. This man, who plumed himself on being a philosopher, here gives himself, without scruple, all the praises that a dull panegyrist would have found some difficulty in affording him. There is also by him a memoir, very circumstantial and very slanderous, in which he accuses, after a lapse of forty years, la Motte, Saurin, and Malaffaire a merchant, of having plotted the stratagem that caused the celebrated and unhappy Rousseau to be condemned. Boindin, though an atheist, escaped the punishment due to his arrogance, because, in the disputes between the Jesuits and their adversaries, he used frequently to declaim in the coffeehouses against the latter. M. de la Place relates, that he said to a man who thought like him, and who was threatened for his opinions, “They plague you, because you are a Jansenistic atheist; but they let me alone, because | I am a Molinistic atheist.” Not that he inclined more to Molina than to Jansenius; but he fouiul that he should get more by speaking in behalf of those that were then in favour. 1