French novelist, poet and playwright who had always been passionate about poetry, Jean-François Marmontel (1723-1799) gave up his ecclesiastical career for literature. He was able to enjoy the protection of the illustrious and brilliant intellectual Voltaire and the royal favorite Madame de Pompadour and actively collaborated with the encyclopedists in the Encyclopedie of Diderot and D'Alembert. His literary production, extremely varied and abundant, met with great success & nbsp; among contemporaries. In 1777 he published Les Incas a sort of poetic novel in which, on the basis of his historical sources, he describes the conquest of Peru by the troops of Francisco Pizarro, underlining the political and religious intolerance and denouncing the barbarism of the Spanish colonizers & nbsp;