Pontard, Pierre

Pontard, Pierre a French prelate, was born at Mussidan Sept. 23,1749. He was curate of Sarlat when the Revolution broke out. He then embraced the new principles with an enthusiasm that was rewarded by his appointment as constitutional bishop of the Dordogne in 1791. A few months later he was elected deputy of this department to the Legislative Assembly. He spoke in favor of divorce, attacked the dogmas of the Catholic Church, authorized the marriage of priests, and finally took a wife himself. It is this same Pontard who induced the visionary Suzanne Labrousse to go to Paris. Under the consulate he kept a boarding school at Paris, but his institution waned after a few years. He was intimate with Pigault-Lebrun, and aided him, if the report be true, in the composition of some of his novels. After the Restoration, the duchess-dowager of Orleans, to whom he had rendered some services during the Reign of Terror, on hearing of his precarious situation, bestowed on him a life-rent, which enabled him to enter the institution of St. Perine at Chaillot, where he died, without apparent contrition, Jan. 22, 1832. He left, Recueil des Ouvrages de la celebre Mlle. Labrousse (Bordeaux, 1797, 8vo): — Grammaire Mecanique elementaire de l'Orthographe Française (Paris, 1812, 8vo). He is also the author of the Journal prophetique, which was edited at Paris in 1792 and 1793. — Hoefer, Nouv. Biog. Géneralé, s.v.