The abbé Augustin Nadal (1659 – 7 August 1741) was the author of plays, through the failure of which he became the butt of a withering public reply from Voltaire that has rendered the abbé immortal. He was born in Poitiers. Having finished his studies there, he was appointed tutor to the young comte de Valançay, who was killed at the battle of Blenheim (1704). Nadal put himself under the patronage of the house of Aumont. He was received in 1706 into the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. With Jean-Aymar Piganiol de La Force, he took on the editing of the Nouveau Mercure until 1711, a premature force for literary modernism that was not successful.