Lahontan, Louis-Armand, baron de (1666-after 1715). French military officer and adventurer who spent some years in Canada while it was still being explored and colonized, and published in Holland in 1703 interesting Nouveaux voyages and Mémoires on the subject, including conversations with a prominent Huron chieftain. In the Dialogues de Lahontan (also 1703), partly ghosted by a former monk, Nicolas Gueudeville, the chieftain, ‘Adario’, becomes a ‘noble savage’ with revolutionary ideas and a spokesman for deism, the natural religion of Native Americans being coupled with some criticisms of Catholic Christianity. Adario may have influenced Voltaire's Huron hero in L'Ingénu.
[Christopher Betts]
