Fontenelle forms a link between two very widely different periods of French literature, that of Corneille, Racine and Boileau on the one hand, and that of Voltaire, D'Alembert and Diderot on the other. It is not in virtue of his great age alone that this can be said of him; he actually had much in common with the "beaux esprits" of the 17th century, as well as with the "philosophes" of the 18th. But it is to the latter rather than to the former period that he properly belongs.