Tillemont became a priest at the age of thirty-nine and settled at Port-Royal. When Port-Royal was dissolved in 1679, he moved to his family estate at Tillemont, where he spent the rest of his life, pursuing his historical work with single-minded devotion. His Histoire began to issue from the press in 1690 and his Mémoires in 1693, though the publication of both works was not completed until after his death.
Tillemont is cited frequently by Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His works were among the first to provide critical surveys of the full range of source material. His prose style is considered dry, but he had a reputation for accuracy, detail and conscientiousness. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a major literary achievement of the Eighteenth Century, was written by the English historian, Edward Gibbon. ...
Here, we have no mere series of annals, such as were presented even by the excellent Tillemont, to whom Gibbon was indebted for much of his material, 52 but a complete work.
It is as a whole that his work has maintained the position which it conquered for itself at once in historical literature.
Tillemont, Le Nain de, Histoire des Empereurs, etc., treats each successive reign in a series of short chapters or headed articles, with notes appended on a wide variety of points, in the way that Gibbon loved.
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