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Pierre Daniel Huet
(February 8, 1630 - January 26, 1721) France

Pierre Daniel Huet

Man of letters

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Born in Caen, Normandy, into a family of recent converts to Roman Catholicism who had some pretensions to belonging to lower nobility, Huet understood at an early age that, being fatherless, with two sisters for whom he would become legally responsible, the only carreer that was open to him, given his natural gifts for the humanities, was that of the church.

He soon realized he had to conceal his libertin tendencies and to assert his independence by manoeuvering between Church and State, weaving networks of friends with whom he had passionate affairs, some platonic and some not. In his early twenties he was already the toast of humanist circles in Paris, a boy-wonder.

At 21 he pocketed some of his inheritance and took himself, on horseback, to Holland and Sweden, where he had a passionate affair with a certain Morus, later to become a pastor and a minor Latin poet, an affair full of jealousy, bad nights and recrimination. They broke off in a tiff.

Back to France, he became under-preceptor of Louis XIV's son, the Grand Dauphin, and in 1674 he entered the French Academy. At 45 he fell seriously ill, he then took holy orders and was given the most prestigious Soissons bishopric. In terms of the history of gay literature, his annotations to the Greek Anthology - a collection of mainly pederastic verse - are still used today.

In 1685 he was made bishop of Soissons, but after waiting for installation for four years he took the bishopric of Avranches instead. He exchanged the cares of his bishopric for what he thought would be the easier chair of the Abbey of Fontenay, but there he was vexed with continual lawsuits.

Aged, having lost his two dearest friends, the writer Gilles Mènage and the diplomat Ezéchiel Spanheim, he settled at the Jesuits' house in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, Paris. He lived there for 20 years. Here he held court, surrounded by younger men who seem to have helped him pass sweet old years.

His great library and manuscripts, after being bequeathed to the Jesuits, were bought by the king for the Royal Library. The Jesuits house is now the Lycée Charlemagne, located near Saint-Paul Métro station, in the middle of Paris' gay district. Huet is buried in Saint-Paul church, next to the lycée.

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Source: excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, from Antiquity to WWII, Routledge, London, 2001 - et alii

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