Pierre Daniel Huet

In the following year Samuel Bochart, being invited by Queen Christina of Sweden to her court at Stockholm, took his friend Huet with him.

This journey, in which he saw Leiden, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, as well as Stockholm, resulted chiefly in the discovery, in the Swedish royal library, of some fragments of Origen's Commentary on St Matthew, which gave Huet the idea of editing and translating Origen into Latin, a task he completed in 1668.

Huet was also the cofounder of the Académie de Physique in Caen, the first provincial academy of science to be granted a royal charter (1668).

Huet was the initial patron of the academy, and along with Andre Graindorge, directed the work of the group, which focused on the empirical study of nature, with a special emphasis on anatomy and dissections.

All this time he was a frequent visitor to the salons of Mlle de Scudéry and the studios of painters; his scientific researches did not interfere with his classical studies, for during this time he was discussing with Bochart the origin of certain medals, and was learning Syriac and Arabic under the Jesuit Adrien Parvilliers.

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.

At Aulnay he wrote his Questiones Aletuanae (Caen, 1690),[2] his Censura philosophiae Cartesianae (Paris, 1689), his Nouveau mémoire pour servir à l'histoire du Cartésianisme (New Memoirs to Serve The History of Cartesianism, 1692), and his discussion with Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux on the Sublime.

[3] In the Huetiana (1722) of Pierre-Joseph Thoulier d'Olivet will be found material for arriving at an idea of his prodigious labours, exact memory and wide scholarship.

His autobiography, found in his Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus (Paris, 1718), has been translated into French[4] and into English.