François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac

After practising some time at Nemours, he abandoned law, took holy orders, and was appointed tutor to one of Richelieu's nephews, the duc de Fronsac.

Against Gilles Ménage he wrote Térence justifié (1656); he laid claim to having originated the idea of the Carte de tendre of Mlle de Scudéry's Clélié; and after being a professed admirer of Corneille, he turned against Corneille for having neglected to mention the abbé in his Discours sur le poème dramatique.

In return, the dramatic authors whom he was in the habit of criticizing were quick to take advantage of the opportunity for retaliation offered by the production of these plays.

The credit of having been the first to play so large a part in the history of the French stage belongs to Jean Chapelain; but the laws of dramatic method and construction generally were codified by d'Aubignac in his Pratique du théâtre.

His Conjectures académiques ou dissertation sur l'Iliade d'Homère, which was not published until nearly forty years after his death, threw doubts on the existence of Homer, and anticipated in some sense the conclusions of Friedrich August Wolf in his Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795).