Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne receive short shrift from the Abbe de Saint-Pierre.

[Footnote: Compare Voltaire, Lettres sur les Anglais, xii., where Newton is acclaimed as the greatest man who ever lived.] He was superficial in his knowledge both of history and of science, and his conception of utility was narrow and a little vulgar.
Great theoretical discoverers like Newton and Leibnitz he sets in a lower rank than ingenious persons who used their scientific skill to fashion some small convenience of life.

Monuments of art, like Notre Dame, possessed little value in his eyes compared with a road, a bridge, or a canal.
Like most of his distinguished contemporaries he was a Deist.

On his deathbed he received the usual rites of the Church in the presence of his household, and then told the priest that he did not believe a word of all that.

His real views are transparent in some of his works through the conventional disguises in which prudent writers of the time were wont to wrap their assaults on orthodoxy.