Gaston Miron Compagnon Des Ameriques

freed Roman slave, was applied pejoratively both to men who led immoral lives and to writers and thinkers who were indifferent or fractious in matters of faith. Examples of the first were numerous, and typified by the entourage of Louis XIII’s brother, Gaston d’Orléans. But more significant were the philosophical sceptics. By the 1620s, 94 THE CLASSICAL AGE they were associated with ‘blasphemous’ Italian writers implicated in the clandestine Traité des trois imposteurs (Moses, Christ, Muhammad)