A good memory and enthusiasm for learning carried him quickly through his literary and professional studies, and he practised at the bar at Angers before he was twenty.

He became prior of Montdidier without taking holy orders, and lived for some years in the household of Cardinal de Retz (then coadjutor to the Archbishop of Paris), where he had leisure for literary pursuits.

[1] Some time after 1648, he quarrelled with his patron and withdrew to a house in the cloister of Notre-Dame de Paris, where he gathered round him on Wednesday evenings those literary assemblies which he called "Mercuriales."

He was admitted to the Accademia della Crusca of Florence, but his caustic sarcasm led to his exclusion from the Académie française.

[1] In 1664 he published at London an edition of the Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius that contains an unedited anonymous life of Aristotle; this life was known as 'Vita Menagiana' before the critical edition by Ingemar Düring, (Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell 1957; reprinted New York, Garland, 1987, pp.