Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/224

 debarred from claiming any benefit or advantage whatsoever either under this my English Will or under my Dutch Will: and the legacy which would have been otherwise due to the said parties shall in such case go to and be equally divided among my other relations, who are the legatees in this Will of the four shares of my English estate.

Finally, being sensible as I ought to be, and truly am, of the many most friendly and undeserved helps and good advices in my concerns, which I have from time to time received from my most worthy friend Henry Temple, Esquire, who has already been at no small trouble, and is yet to undergo more before the full execution of this my last will, I hope His Honour will not find fault with my having left him (only as a bare token of my gratitude) a legacy of two hundred pounds sterling, which I hereby bequeath unto him to be bestowed upon a silver toilet to a daughter of his that shall be married first, or otherwise as he shall think fit. And I do hereby constitute and appoint my said most honoured friend Henry Temple, Esquire of East Sheen, in the county of Surrey in England, and Mr. Harrald Johannis Pels and Robert Pierre Chilton, Esquire, Seigneur de la Davière, a Dutchman and a Frenchman now living at the Hague in Holland, joint executors of this my last Will and Testament, hereby revoking all former Wills by me made in relation to my estate I have in England. In witness whereof, &c, &c, at the Hague in Holland, 1st July 1721.

.

Witnesses. — S. Johnson, A. Gilly, B. Lindeman.

Proved by Henry, Viscount Palmerston, one of the executors named in the Will. London, 12th December 1723.





The father of this able man was a surgeon at Vitry, in the province of Champagne. His surname was Moivre, according to Haag and the French authorities. Rut the young refugee styled himself De Moivre.

Abraham was born at Vitry, May 26th, 1667, and there his first school education was superintended by the Brethren of Christian Doctrine (les frères de la doctrine chrétienne). At the age of eleven he was sent to the University of Sedan, and was placed under the charge of the Greek Professor Du Rondel. His masters, struck with his precocious talents, aimed at making him an eminent classical scholar, and were disappointed by observing his strong bent for arithmetic. It was probably Du Rondel who was in the habit of asking “what the little rogue meant to do with those cyphers.” He dutifully pursued classical studies ; but he deserted his fellow-students in their hours of recreation, shutting himself up with a dumb companion, namely, Le Gendre’s Arithmetic. He had completed his “humanities” in 1681, when the College of Sedan was tyrannically suppressed. He took his course of philosophy at the University of Saumur. He then came to Paris for Physics. Here his father joined him, having retired from his medical practice at Vitry — probably a forced retirement, as Protestants were, by successive curtailments of the Edict of Nantes, excluded from the liberal professions. Abraham pursued his mathematical studies under a tutor of great reputation, Jacques Ozanam. But the Revocation of the Edict of .Nantes found the student firm in Protestant doctrine. The agents of government, accordingly, shut up the young heretic, now in his nineteenth year, in the Priory of St Martin, in order that he might discover it to be right or politic to go over to the Roman Catholic religion.

The obstinate boarder gave his ecclesiastical guardians no more satisfaction than the majority of the Huguenot boys and girls gave to the various teachers and masters under whom persecution drove them. There is nothing more interesting in Benoist’s History than his account of the steady resistance which mere children offered to ghostly proselytizers. This fortitude, associated with a mutual support of each other’s resolution, often resulted in their returning home better instructed