pretty good judge," Boileau kept repeating to him: "it is about the best
you have done; the public will come round to it."  Racine died before
success was achieved by the only perfect piece which the French stage
possesses,--worthy both of the subject and of the sources whence Racine
drew his inspiration.  He had, with an excess of scrupulousness,
abandoned the display of all the fire that burned within him; but beauty
never ceased to rouse him to irresistible enthusiasm.  Whilst reading the
Psalms to M. de Seignelay, when lying ill, he could not refrain from
paraphrasing them aloud.  He admired Sophocles so much that he never
dared touch the subjects of his tragedies.  "One day," says M. de
Valicour, "when he was at Auteuil, at Boileau's, with M. Nicole and some
distinguished friends, he took up a Sophocles in Greek, and read the
tragedy of _OEdipus,_ translating it as he went.  He read so feelingly
that all his auditors experienced the sensations of terror and pity with
which this piece abounds.  I have seen our best pieces played by our best
actors, but nothing ever came near the commotion into which I was thrown
by this reading, and, at this moment of writing, I fancy I still see
Racine, book in hand, and all of us awe-stricken around him."  Thus it
was that, whilst repeating, but a short time before, the verses of
_Mithridate,_ as he was walking in the Tuileries, he had seen the workmen
leaving their work and coming up to him, convinced as they were that he
was mad, and was going to throw himself into the basin.

Racine for a long while enjoyed the favors of the king, who went so far
as to tolerate the attachment the poet had always testified towards
Port-Royal.  Racine, moreover, showed tact in humoring the
susceptibilities of Louis XIV. and his counsellors.  "Father Bonhours and
Father Rapin (Jesuits) were in my study when I received your letter," he
writes to Boileau.  "I read it to them, on breaking the seal, and I gave
them very great pleasure.  I kept looking ahead, however, as I was
reading, in case there was anything too Jansenistical in it.  I saw,
towards the end, the name of M. Nicole, and I skipped boldly, or, rather,
mean-spiritedly, over it.  I dared not expose myself to the chance of
interfering with the great delight, and even shouts of laughter, caused
them by many very amusing things you sent me.  They are both of them, I
assure you, very friendly towards you, and indeed very good fellows."

All this caution did not prevent Racine, however, from dis pleasing the
king.  After a conversation he had held with Madame de Maintenon about
the miseries of the people, she asked him for a memorandum on the
subject.  The king demanded the name of the author, and flew out at him.
"Because he is a perfect master of verse," said he, "does he think he
knows everything?  And because he is a great poet, does he want to be
minister?"---Madame de Maintenon was more discreet in her relations with
the king than bold in the defence of her friends; she sent Racine word
not to come and see her 'until further orders.'  "Let this cloud pass,"
she said; "I will bring the fine weather back."  Racine was ill; his
naturally melancholly disposition had become sombre.  "I know, Madame,"
he wrote to Madame de Maintenon, "what influence you have; but in the
house of Port-Royal I have an aunt who shows her affection for me in
quite a different way.  This holy woman is always praying God to send me
disgraces, humiliations, and subjects for penitence; she will have more
success than you."  At bottom his soul was not sturdy enough to endure
the rough doctrines of Port-Royal; his health got worse and worse; he
returned to court; he was re-admitted by the king, who received him
graciously.  Racine continued uneasy; he had an abscess of the liver, and
was a long while ill.  "When he was convinced that he was going to die,
he ordered a letter to be written to the superintendent of finances,
asking for payment, which was due, of his pension.  His son brought him
the letter.  'Why,' said he, 'did not you ask for payment of Boileau's
pension too?  We must not be made distinct.  Write the letter over again,
and let Boileau know that I was his friend even to death.'  When the
latter came to wish him farewell, he raised himself up in bed with an
effort.  'I regard it as a happiness for me to die before you,' he said
to his friend.  An operation appeared necessary.  His son would have
given him hopes.  'And you, too,' said Racine, 'you would do as the
doctors, and mock me?  God is the Master, and can restore me to life, but
Death has sent in his bill.'"

He was not mistaken: on the 21st of April, 1699, the great poet, the
scrupulous Christian, the noble and delicate painter of the purest
passions of the soul, expired at Paris, at fifty-nine years of age;
leaving life without regret, spite of all the successes with which he had
been crowned.  Unlike Corneille with the Cid, he did not take tragedy and
glory by assault, he conquered them both by degrees, raising himself at
each new effort, and gaining over, little by little, the most passionate
admirers of his great rival.  At the pinnacle of this reputation and this
victory, at thirty-eight years of age, he had voluntarily shut the door
against the intoxications and pride of success; he had mutilated his
life, buried his genius in penitence, obeying simply the calls of his
conscience, and, with singular moderation in the very midst of
exaggeration, becoming a father of a family and remaining a courtier, at
the same time that he gave up the stage and glory.  Racine was gentle and
sensible even in his repentance and his sacrifices.  Boileau gave
religion the credit for this very moderation.  "Reason commonly brings
others to faith; it was faith which brought M. Racine to reason."

Boileau had more to do with his friend's reason than he probably knew.
Racine never acted without consulting him.  With Racine, Boileau lost
half his life.  He survived him twelve years without ever setting foot
again within the court after his first interview with the king.  "I have
been at Versailles," he writes to his publisher, M. Brossette, "where I
saw Madame de Maintenon, and afterwards the king, who overcame me with
kind words; so, here I am more historiographer than ever.  His Majesty
spoke to me of M. Racine in a manner to make courtiers desire death, if
they thought he would speak of them in the same way afterwards.
Meanwhile that has been but very small consolation to me for the loss of
that illustrious friend, who is none the less dead though regretted by
the greatest king in the universe."  "Remember," Louis XIV. had said,
"that I have always an hour a week to give you when you like to come."
Boileau did not go again.  "What should I go to court for?" he would say;
"I cannot sing praises any more."

At Racine's death Boileau did not write any longer.  He had entered the
arena of letters at three and twenty, after a sickly and melancholy
childhood.  The _Art Poetique_ and the _Lutrin_ appeared in 1674; the
first nine _Satires_ and several of the _Epistles_ had preceded them.
Rather a witty, shrewd, and able versifier than a great poet, Boileau
displayed in the _Lutrin_ a richness and suppleness of fancy which his
other works had not foreshadowed.  The broad and cynical buffoonery of
Scarron's burlesques had always shocked his severe and pure taste.  "Your
father was weak enough to read _Virgile travesti,_ and laugh over it," he
would, say to Louis Racine, "but he kept it dark from me."  In the
_Lutrin,_ Boileau sought the gay and the laughable under noble and
polished forms; the gay lost by it, the laughable remained stamped with
an ineffaceable seal.  "M. Despreaux," wrote Racine to his son, "has not
only received from heaven a marvellous genius for satire, but he has
also, together with that, an excellent judgment, which makes him discern
what needs praise and what needs blame."  This marvellous genius for
satire did not spoil Boileau's natural good feeling.  "He is cruel in
verse only," Madame de Sevigne used to say.  Racine was tart, bitter in
discussion; Boileau always preserved his coolness: his judgments
frequently anticipated those of posterity.  The king asked him one day
who was the greatest poet of his reign.  "Moliere, sir," answered
Boileau, without hesitation.  "I shouldn't have thought it, rejoined the
king, somewhat astonished; "but you know more about it than I do."
Moliere, in his turn, defending La Fontaine against the pleasantries of
his friends, said to his neighbor at one of those social meals in which
the illustrious friends delighted, " Let us not laugh at the good soul
(bonhomme) he will probably live longer than the whole of us."  In the
noble and touching brotherhood of these great minds, Boileau continued
invariably to be the bond between the rivals; intimate friend as he was
of Racine, he never quarrelled with Moliere, and he hurried to the king
to beg that he would pass on the pension with which he honored him to the
aged Corneille, groundlessly deprived of the royal favors.  He entered
the Academy on the 3d of July, 1684, immediately after La Fontaine.  His
satires had retarded his election.  "He praised without flattery; he
humbled himself nobly" says Louis Racine; "and when he said that
admission to the Academy was sure to be closed against him for so many
reasons, he set a-thinking all the Academicians he had spoken ill of in
his works."  He was no longer writing verses when Perrault published his
_Parallele des anciens et desmodernes-.  "If Boileau do not reply," said
the Prince of Conti, "you may assure him that I will go to the Academy,
and write on his chair, 'Brutus, thou sleepest.'"  The ode on the capture
of Namur,--intended to crush Perrault whilst celebrating Pindar, not
being sufficient, Boileau wrote his _Reflexions sur Longin,_ bitter and
often unjust towards Perrault, who was far more equitably treated and
more effectually refuted in Fenelon's letter to the French Academy.

[Illustration: La Fontaine, Boileau, Moliere, and Racine----657]

Boileau was by this time old; he had sold his house at Auteuil, which was
so dear, but he did not give up literature, continuing to revise his
verses carefully, pre-occupied with new editions, and reproaching himself
for this pre-occupation.  "It is very shameful," he would say, "to be
still busying myself, with rhymes and all those Parnassian trifles, when,
I ought to be thinking of nothing but the account I am prepared to go and
render to God."  He died on the 13th of March, 1711, leaving nearly all
he had to the poor.  He was followed to the tomb by a great throng.  "He
had many friends," was the remark amongst the people, "and yet we are
assured that he spoke evil of everybody."  No writer ever contributed
more than Boileau to the formation of poetry; no more correct or shrewd
judgment ever assessed the merits of authors; no loftier spirit ever
guided a stronger and a juster mind.  Through all the vicissitudes
undergone by literature, and spite of the sometimes excessive severity of
his decrees, Boileau has left an ineffaceable impression upon the French
language.  His talent was less effective than his understanding; his
judgment and his character have had more influence fluence than his
verses.

Boileau had survived all his friends.  La Fontaine, born in 1621 at
Chateau-Thierry, had died in 1695.  He had entered in his youth the
brotherhood of the Oratory, which he had soon quitted, being unable, he
used to say, to accustom himself to theology.  He went and came between
town and town, amusing himself everywhere, and already writing a little.

"For me the whole round world was laden with delights;
My heart was touched by flower, sweet sound, and sunny day,
I was the sought of friends and eke of lady gay."

Fontaine was married, without caring much for his wife, whom he left to
live alone at Chateau-Thierry.  He was in great favor with Fouquet.  When
his patron was disgraced, in danger of his life, La Fontaine put into the
mouth of the nymphs of Vaux his touching appeal to the king's clemency:--

"May he, then, o'er the life of high-souled Henry pore,
Who, with the power to take, for vengeance yearned no more
O, into Louis' soul this gentle spirit breathe."

Later on, during Fouquet's imprisonment at Pignerol, La Fontaine wrote
further,--

"I sigh to think upon the object of my prayers;
You take my sense, Ariste; your generous nature shares
The plaints I make for him who so unkindly fares.
He did displease the king; and lo his friends were gone
Forthwith a thousand throats roared out at him like one.
I wept for him, despite the torrent of his foes,
I taught the world to have some pity for his woes."

La Fontaine has been described as a solitary being, without wit, and
without external charm of any kind.  La Bruyere has said, "A certain man
appears loutish, heavy, stupid; he can neither talk nor relate what he
has just seen; he sets himself to writing, and it is a model of
story-telling; he makes speakers of animals, trees; stones, everything
that cannot speak.  There is nothing but lightness and elegance, nothing
but natural beauty and delicacy in his works."  "He says nothing or will
talk of nothing but Plato," Racine's daughters used to say.  All his
contemporaries, however, of fashion and good breeding did not form the
same opinion of him.  The Dowager-duchess of Orleans, Marguerite of
Lorraine, had taken him as one of her gentlemen-in-waiting; the Duchess
of Bouillon had him in her retinue in the country; Madame de Montespan
and her sister, Madame de Thianges, liked to have a visit from him.  He
lived at the house of Madame de La Sabliere, a beauty and a wit, who
received a great deal of company.  He said of her,

"Warm is her heart, and knit with tenderest ties
To those she loves, and, elsewise, otherwise;
For such a sprite, whose birthplace is the skies,
Of manly beauty blent with woman's grace,
No mortal pen, though fain, can fitly trace."

"I have only kept by me," she would say, "my three pets (_animaux_): my
dog, my cat, and La Fontaine."  When she died, M. and Madame d'Hervart
received into their house the now old and somewhat isolated poet.  As
D'Hervart was on his way to go and make the proposal to La Fontaine, he
met him in the street.  "I was coming to ask you to put up at our house,"
said he.  "I was just going thither," answered Fontaine with the most
touching confidence.  There he remained to his death, contenting himself
with going now and then to Chateau-Thierry, as long as his wife lived, to
sell, with her consent, some strip of ground.  The property was going,
old age was coming:--

"John did no better than he had begun,
Spent property and income both as one:
Of treasure saw small use in any way;
Knew very well how to get through his day;
Split it in two: one part, as he thought best,
He passed in sleep--did nothing all the rest."

He did not sleep, he dreamed.  One day dinner was kept waiting for him.
"I have just come," said he, as he entered, "from the funeral of an ant;
I followed the procession to the cemetery, and I escorted the family
home."  It has been said that La Fontaine knew nothing of natural
history; he knew and loved animals; up to his time, fable-writers had
been, merely philosophers or satirists; he was the first who was a poet,
unique not only in France but in Europe, discovering the deep and secret
charm of nature, animating it, with his inexhaustible and graceful
genius, giving lessons to men from the example of animals, without making
the latter speak like man; ever supple and natural, sometimes elegant and
noble, with penetration beneath the cloak of his simplicity, inimitable
in the line which he had chosen from taste, from instinct, and not from
want of power to transport his genius elsewhither.  He himself has said,

"Yes, call me truly, if it must be said,
Parnassian butterfly, and like the bees
Wherein old Plato found our similes.
Light rover I, forever on the wing,
Flutter from flower to flower, from thing to thing,
With much of pleasure mix a little fame."

And in _Psyche:_--

"Music and books, and junketings and love,
And town and country--all to me is bliss;
There nothing is that comes amiss;
In melancholy's self grim joy I prove."


The grace, the naturalness, the original independence of the mind and the
works of La Fontaine had not the luck to please Louis XIV., who never
accorded him any favor, and La Fontaine did not ask for any:--

"All dumb I shrink once more within my shell,
Where unobtrusive pleasures dwell;
True, I shall here by Fortune be forgot
Her favors with my verse agree not well;
To importune the gods beseems me not."

Once only, from the time of Fouquet's trial, the poet demanded a favor:
Louis XIV., having misgivings about the propriety of the _Contes of La
Fontaine,_ had not yet given the assent required for his election to the
French Academy, when he set out for the campaign in Luxemburg.  La
Fontaine addressed to him a ballad:--

"Just as, in Homer, Jupiter we see
Alone o'er all the other gods prevail;
You, one against a hundred though it be,
Balance all Europe in the other scale.
Them liken I to those who, in the tale,
Mountain on mountain piled, presumptuously
Warring with Heaven and Jove.  The earth clave he,
And hurled them down beneath huge rocks to wail:
So take you up your bolt with energy;
A happy consummation cannot fail.

"Sweet thought! that doth this month or two avail
To somewhat soothe my Muse's anxious care.
For certain minds at certain stories rail,
Certain poor jests, which nought but trifles are.
If I with deference their lessons hail,
What would they more?  Be you more prone to spare,
More kind than they; less sheathed in rigorous mail;
Prince, in a word, your real self declare
A happy consummation cannot fail."

The election of Boileau to the Academy appeased the king's humor, who
preferred the other's intellect to that of La Fontaine.  "The choice you
have made of M. Despreaux is very gratifying to me," he said to the board
of the Academy: "it will be approved of by everybody.  You can admit La
Fontaine at once; he has promised to be good."  It was a rash promise,
which the poet did not always keep.

The friends, of La Fontaine had but lately wanted to reconcile him to his
wife.  They had with that view sent him to Chateau-Thierry; he returned
without having seen her whom he went to visit.  "My wife was not at
home," said he; "she had gone to the sacrament (_au salut_)."  He was
becoming old.  Those same faithful friends--Racine, Boileau, and Maucroix
--were trying to bring him home to God.  Racine took him to church with
him; a Testament was given him.  "That is a very good book," said he;
"I assure you it is a very good book."  Then all at once addressing Abbe
Boileau, "Doctor, do you think that St. Augustin was as clever as
Rabelais?"  He was ill, however, and began to turn towards eternity his
dreamy and erratic thoughts.  He had set about composing pious hymns.
"The best of thy friends has not a fortnight to live," he wrote to
Maucroix; "for two months I have not been out, unless to go to the
Academy for amusement.  Yesterday, as I was returning, I was seized in
the middle of Rue du Chantre with a fit of such great weakness that I
really thought I was dying.  O, my dear friend, to die is nothing; but
thinkest thou that I am about to appear before God?  Thou knowest how I
have lived.  Before thou hast this letter, the gates of eternity will,
perchance, be opened for me."  "He is as simple as a child," said the
woman who took care of him in his last illness; "if he has done amiss, it
was from ignorance rather than wickedness."  A charming and a curious
being, serious and simple, profound and childlike, winning by reason of
his very vagaries, his good-natured originality, his helplessness in
common life, La Fontaine knew how to estimate the literary merits as well
as the moral qualities of his illustrious friends.  "When they happened
to be together," says he, in his tale of _Psyche,_ "and had talked to
their heart's content of their diversions, if they chanced to stumble
upon any point of science or literature, they profited by the occasion,
without, however, lingering too long over one and the same subject, but
flitting from one topic to another like bees that meet as they go with
different sorts of flowers.  Envy, malignity, or cabal had no voice
amongst them; they adored the works of the ancients, refused not the
moderns the praises which were their due, spoke of their own with
modesty, and gave one another honest advice when any one of them fell ill
of the malady of the age and wrote a book, which happened now and then.
In this case, Acanthus (Racine) did not fail to propose a walk in some
place outside the town, in order to hear the reading with less noise and
more pleasure.  He was extremely fond of gardens, flowers, foliage.
Polyphile (La Fontaine) resembled him in this; but then Polyphile might
be said to love all things.  Both of them were lyrically inclined, with
this difference, that Acanthus was rather the more pathetic, Polyphile
the more ornate."

When La Fontaine died, on the 13th of April, 1695, of the four friends
lately assembled at Versailles to read the tale of _Psyche,_ Moliere
alone had disappeared.  La Fontaine had admired at Vaux the young comic
poet, who had just written the _Facheux_ for the entertainment given by
Fouquet to Louis XIV.:--

"It is a work by Moliere;
This writer, of a style so rare,
Is nowadays the court's delight
His fame, so rapid is its flight,
Beyond the bounds of Rome must be:
Amen! For he's the man for me."

In his old age he gave vent to his grief and his regret at Moliere's
death in this touching epitaph:--

"Beneath this stone Plautus and Terence lie,
Though lieth here but Moliere alone
Their threefold gifts of mind made up but one,
That witched all France with noble comedy.
Now are they gone: and little hope have I
That we again shall look upon the three
Dead men, methinks, while countless years roll by,
Terentius, Plautus, Moliere will be."


[Illustration: Moliere----664]

Moliere and French comedy had no need to take shelter beneath the mantle
of the ancients; they, together, had shed upon the world incomparable
lustre.  Shakespeare might dispute with Corneille and Racine the sceptre
of tragedy; he had succeeded in showing himself as full of power, with
more truth, as the one, and as full of tenderness, with more profundity,
as the other.  Moliere is superior to him in originality, abundance, and
perfection of characters; he yields to him neither in range, nor
penetration, nor complete knowledge of human nature.  The lives of these
two great geniuses, authors and actors both together, present in other
respects certain features of resemblance.  Both were intended for another
career than that of the stage; both, carried away by an irresistible
passion, assembled about them a few actors, leading at first a roving
life, to end by becoming the delight of the court and of the world.  John
Baptist Poquelin, who before long assumed the name of Moliere, was born
at Paris in 1622; his father, upholstery-groom-of-the-chamber (_valet de
chambre tapissier_) to Louis XIV., had him educated with some care at
Clermont (afterwards Louis-le-Grand) College, then in the hands of the
Jesuits.  He attended, by favor, the lessons which the philosopher
Gassendi, for a longtime, the opponent of Descartes, gave young Chapelle.
He imbibed at these lessons, together with a more extensive course of
instruction, a certain freedom of thinking which frequently cropped out
in his plays, and contributed later on to bring upon him an accusation of
irreligion.  In 1645 (?1643), Moliere had formed, with the ambitious
title of _illustre theatre,_ a small company of actors, who, being unable
to maintain themselves at Paris, for a long while tramped the provinces
through all the troubles of the Fronde.  It was in 1653 that Moliere
brought out at Lyons his comedy _l'Etourdi,_ the first regular piece he
had ever composed.  The _Depit amoureux_ was played at Beziers in 1656,
at the opening of the session of the States of Languedoc; the company
returned to Paris in 1658; in 1659, Moliere, who had obtained a license
from the king, gave at his own theatre _les Precieuses ridicules_.  He
broke with all imitation of the Italians and the Spaniards, and, taking
off to the life the manners of his own times, he boldly attacked the
affected exaggeration and absurd pretensions of the vulgar imitators of
the Hotel de Rambouillet.  "Bravo! Moliere," cried an old man from the
middle of the pit; "this is real comedy."  When he published his piece,
Moliere, anxious not to give umbrage to a powerful clique, took care to
say in his preface that he was not attacking real _precieuses,_ but only
the bad imitations.

Just as he had recalled Corneille to the stage, Fouquet was for
protecting Moliere upon it.  The _Ecole des Mans_ and the _Facheux_ were
played at Vaux.  Amongst the ridiculous characters in this latter,
Moliere had not described the huntsman.  Louis XIV. himself indicated to
him the Marquis of Soyecour.  "There's one you have forgotten," he said.
Twenty-four hours later, the bore of a huntsman, with all his jargon of
venery, had a place forever amongst the _Facheux_ of Moliere.  The _Ecole
des Femmes,_ the _Impromptu de Versailles,_ the _Critique de l'Ecole des
Femmes,_ began the bellicose period in the great comic poet's life.
Accused of impiety, attacked in the honor of his private life, Moliere,
returning insult for insult, delivered over those amongst his enemies who
offered a butt for ridicule to the derision of the court and of
posterity.  The _Festin de Pierre_ and the signal punishment of the
libertine (free-thinker) were intended to clear the author from the
reproach of impiety; _la Princesse d'Elide_ and _l'Amour medecin_ were
but charming interludes in the great struggle henceforth instituted
between reality and appearance.  In 1666, Moliere produced _le
Misanthrope,_ a frank and noble spirit's sublime invective against the
frivolity, perfidious and showy semblances of court.  "This misanthrope's
despitefulness against bad verses was copied from me; Moliere himself
confessed as much to me many a time," wrote Boileau one day.  The
indignation of Alceste is deeper and more universal than that of Boileau
against bad poets; he is disgusted with the court and the world because
he is honest, virtuous, and sincere, and sees corruption triumphant
around him; he is wroth to feel the effects of it in his life, and almost
in his own soul.  He is a victim to the eternal struggle between good and
evil without the strength and the unquenchable hope of Christianity.  The
_Misanthrope_ is a shriek of despair uttered by virtue, excited and
almost distraught at the defeat she forebodes.  The _Tartuffe_ was a new
effort in the same direction, and bolder in that it attacked religious
hypocrisy, and seemed to aim its blows even at religion itself.  Moliere
was a long time working at it; the first acts had been played in 1664, at
court, under the title of _l'Hypocrite,_ at the same time as
_la Princesse d'Elide_.  "The king," says the account of the
entertainment in the _Gazette de Loret,_ "saw so much analogy of form
between those whom true devotion sets in the way of heaven and those whom
an empty ostentation of good deeds does not hinder from committing bad,
that his extreme delicacy in respect of religious matters could with
difficulty brook this resemblance of vice to virtue; and though there
might be no doubt of the author's good intentions, he prohibited the
playing of this comedy before the public until it should be quite
finished and examined by persons qualified to judge of it, so as not to
let advantage be taken of it by others less capable of just discernment
in the matter."  Though played once publicly, in 1667, under the title of
_l'Imposteur,_ the piece did not appear definitively on the stage until
1669, having undoubtedly excited more scandal by interdiction than it
would have done by representation.  The king's good sense and judgment at
last prevailed over the terrors of the truly devout and the resentment of
hypocrites.  He had just seen an impious piece of buffoonery played.
"I should very much like to know," said he to the Prince of Conde, who
stood up for Moliere, an old fellow-student of his brother's, the Prince
of Conti's, "why people who are so greatly scandalized at Moliere's
comedy say nothing about _Scaramouche?_"  "The reason of that," answered
the prince, "is, that Scaramouche makes fun of heaven and religion, about
which those gentry do not care, and that Moliere makes fun of their own
selves, which they cannot brook."  The prince might have added that all
the blows in _Tartuffe,_ a masterpiece of shrewdness, force, and fearless
and deep wrath, struck home at hypocrisy.

Whilst waiting for permission to have _Tartufe_ played, Moliere had
brought out _le Medecin malgre lui, Amphitryon, Georges Dandin,_ and
_l'Avare,_ lavishing freely upon them the inexhaustible resources of his
genius, which was ever ready to supply the wants of kingly and princely
entertainments. _Monsieur de Pourceaugnac_ was played for the first time
at Chambord, on the 6th of October, 1669; a year afterwards, on the same
stage, appeared _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,_ with the interludes and music
of Lulli.  The piece was a direct attack upon one of the most frequent
absurdities of his day; many of the courtiers felt in their hearts that
they were attacked; there was a burst of wrath at the first
representation, by which the king had not appeared to be struck.  Moliere
thought it was all over with him.  Louis XIV. desired to see the piece a
second time.  "You have never written anything yet which has amused me so
much; your comedy is excellent," said he to the poet; the court was at
once seized with a fit of admiration.

The king had lavished his benefits upon Moliere, who had an hereditary
post near him as groom-of-the-chamber; he had given him a pension of
seven thousand livres, and the license of the king's theatre; he had been
pleased to stand godfather to one of his children, to whom the Duchess of
Orleans was godmother; he had protected him against the superciliousness
of certain servants of his bedchamber, but all the monarch's puissance
and constant favors could not obliterate public prejudice, and give the
comedian whom they saw every day on the boards the position and rank
which his genius deserved.  Moliere's friends urged him to give up the
stage.  "Your health is going," Boileau would say to him, "because the
duties of a comedian exhaust you.  Why not give it up?"  "Alas!" replied
Moliere, with a sigh, "it is a point of honor that prevents me."
"A what?" rejoined Boileau; "what! to smear your face with a mustache as
Sganarelle, and come on the stage to be thrashed with a stick?  That is a
pretty point of honor for a philosopher like you!"

Moliere might probably have followed the advice of Boileau, he might
probably have listened to the silent warnings of his failing powers, if
he had not been unfortunate and sad.  Unhappy in his marriage, justly
jealous and yet passionately fond of his wife, without any consolation
within him against the bitternesses and vexations of his life, he sought
in work and incessant activity the only distractions which had any charm
for a high spirit, constantly wounded in its affections and its
legitimate pride: _Psyche, Les Fourberies de Scapin, La Comtesse
d'Escarbagnas,_ betrayed nothing of their author's increasing sadness or
suffering. _Les Femmes Savantes_ had at first but little success; the
piece was considered heavy; the marvellous nicety of the portraits, the
correctness of the judgments, the delicacy and elegance of the dialogue,
were not appreciated until later on.  Moliere had just composed
_Le Malade Imaginaire,_ the last of that succession of blows which he had
so often dealt the doctors; he was more ailing than ever; his friends,
even his actors themselves pressed him not to have any play.  "What would
you have me do?"  he replied; "there are fifty poor workmen who have but
their day's pay to live upon; what will they do if we have no play?  I
should reproach myself with having neglected to give them bread for one
single day, if I could really help it."  Moliere had a bad voice, a
disagreeable hiccough, and harsh inflexions.  "He was, nevertheless," say
his contemporaries, "a comedian from head to foot; he seemed to have
several voices, everything about him spoke, and, by a caper, by a smile,
by a wink of the eye and a shake of the head, he conveyed more than, the
greatest speaker could have done by talking in an hour."  He played as
usual on the 17th of February, 1673; the curtain had risen exactly at
four o'clock; Moliere could hardly stand, and he had a fit during the
burlesque ceremony (at the end of the play) whilst pronouncing the word
Juro.  He was icy-cold when he went back to Baron's box, who was waiting
for him, who saw him home to Rue Richelieu, and who at the same time sent
for his wife and two sisters of charity.  When he went up again, with
Madame Moliere, into the room, the great comedian was dead.  He was only
fifty-one.

[Illustration: Death of Moliere----669]

It has been a labor of love to go into some detail over the lives, works,
and characters of the great writers during the age of Louis XIV.  They
did too much honor to their time and their country, they had too great
and too deep an effect in France and in Europe upon the successive
developments of the human intellect, to refuse them an important place
in the history of that France to whose influence and glory they so
powerfully contributed.

Moliere did not belong to the French Academy; his profession had shut the
doors against him.  It was nearly a hundred years after his death, in
1778, that the Academy raised to him a bust, beneath which was engraved,

"O His glory lacks naught, ours did lack him."

It was by instinct and of its own free choice that the French Academy had
refused to elect a comedian: it had grown, and its liberty had increased
under the sway of, Louis XIV.  In 1672, at the death of Chancellor
Seguier, who became its protector after Richelieu, "it was so honored
that the king was graciously pleased to take upon himself this office:
the body had gone to thank him; his Majesty desired that the dauphin
should be witness of what passed on an occasion so honorable to
literature; after the speech of M. Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, and the
man in France with most inborn talent for speaking, the king, appearing
somewhat touched, gave the Academicians very great marks of esteem,
inquired the names, one after another, of those whose faces were not
familiar to him, and said aside to M. Colbert, who was there in his
capacity of simple Academician, 'You will let me know what I must do for
these gentlemen.'  Perhaps M. Colbert, that minister who was so zealous
for the fine arts, never received an order more in conformity with his
own inclinations."  From that time, the French Academy held its sittings
at the Louvre, and, as regarded complimentary addresses to the king on
state occasions, it took rank with the sovereign bodies.

For thirty-five years the Academy had been working at its Dictionnaire.
From the first, the work had appeared interminable:--

"These six years past they toil at letter F,
And I'd be much obliged if Destiny
would whisper to me, Thou shalt live to G,--

wrote Bois-Robert to Balzac.  The Academy had intrusted Vaugelas with the
preparatory labor.  "It was," says Pellisson, "the only way of coming
quickly to an end."  A pension, which he had, not been paid for a long
time past was revived in his favor.  Vaugelas took his plan to Cardinal
Richelieu.  "Well, sir," said the minister, smiling with a somewhat
contemptuous air of kindness, "you will not forget the word pension in
this Dictionary."  "No, Monsignor," replied M. de Vaugelas, with a
profound bow, "and still less _reconnaissance_ (gratitude)."  Vaugelas
had finished the first volume of his _Remarques sur la Langue Francaise,_
which has ever since reniained the basis of all works on grammar.  "He
had imported into the body of the work a something or other so estimable
(_d'honnete homme_), and so much frankness, that one could scarcely help
loving its author."  He was working at the second volume when he died, in
1649, so poor that his creditors seized his papers, making it very
difficult for the Academy to recover his _Memoires_.  The Dictionary,
having lost its principal author, went on so slowly that Colbert, curious
to know whether the Academicians honestly earned their modest medals for
attendance (_jetons de presence_) which he had assigned to them, came one
day unexpectedly to a sitting: he was present at the whole discussion,
"after which, having seen the attention and care which the Academy was
bestowing upon the composition of its Dictionary, he said, as he rose,
that he was convinced that it could not get on any faster, and his
evidence ought to be of so much the more weight in that never man in his
position was more laborious or more diligent."

The Academicians who were men of letters worked at the Dictionary; the
Academicians who were men of fashion had become pretty numerous; Arnauld
d'Andilly and M. de Lamoignon, whom the body had honored by election,
declined to join, and the Academy resolved to never elect anybody without
a previously expressed desire and request.  At the time when M. de
Lamoignon declined, the kin, fearing that it might bring the Academy into
some disfavor, procured the appointment, in his stead, of the Coadjutor
of Strasbourg, Armand de Rohan-Soubise.  "Splendid as your triumph may
be," wrote Boileau to M. de Lamoignon, "I am persuaded, sir, from what I
know of your noble and modest character, that you are very sorry to have
caused this displeasure to a body which is after all very illustrious,
and that you will attempt to make it manifest to all the earth.  I am
quite willing to believe that you had good reasons for acting as you have
done."  The Academy from that moment regarded the title it conferred as
irrevocable: it did not fill up the place of the Abbe de St. Pierre when
it found itself obliged to exclude him from its sittings, by order of
Louis XV.; it did not fill up the place of Mgr. Dupanloup, when he
thought proper to send in his resignation.  In spite of court intrigues,
it from that moment maintained its independence and its dignity.
"M. Despreaux," writes the banker Leverrier to the Duke of Noailles,
"represented to the Academy, with a great deal of heat, that all was rack
and ruin, since it was nothing more but a cabal of women that put
Academicians in the place of those who died.  Then he read out loud some
verses by M. de St. Aulaire.  .  .  .  Thus M. Despreaux, before the eyes
of everybody, gave M. de St. Aulaire a black ball, and nominated, all by
himself, M. de Mimeure.  Here, monseigneur, is proof that there are
Romans still in the world, and, for the future, I will trouble you to
call M. Despreaux no longer your dear poet, but your dear Cato."

With his extreme deafness, Boileau had great difficulty in fulfilling his
Academic duties.  He was a member of the Academy of medals and
inscriptions, founded by Colbert in 1662, "in order to render the acts of
the king immortal, by deciding the legends of the medals struck in his
honor."  Pontchartrain raised to forty the number of the members of the
_petite acadamie,_ extended its functions, and intrusted it thenceforth
with the charge of publishing curious documents relating to the history
of France.  "We had read to us to-day a very learned work, but rather
tiresome," says Boileau to M. Pontchartrain, "and we were bored right
eruditely; but afterwards there was an examination of another which was
much more agreeable, and the reading of which attracted considerable
attention.  As the reader was put quite close to me, I was in a position
to hear and to speak of it.  All I ask you, to complete the measure of
your kindnesses, is to be kind enough to let everybody know that, if I am
of so little use at the Academy of Medals, it is equally true that I do
not and do not wish to obtain any pecuniary advantage from it."

The Academy of Sciences had already for many years had sittings in one of
the rooms of the king's library.  Like the French Academy, it had owed
its origin to private meetings at which Descartes, Gassendi, and young
Pascal were accustomed to be present.  "There are in the world scholars
of two sorts," said a note sent to Colbert about the formation of the new
Academy.  "One give themselves up to science because it is a pleasure to
them: they are content, as the fruit of their labors, with the knowledge
they acquire, and, if they are known, it is only amongst those with whom
they converse unambitiously and for mutual instruction; these are _bona
fide_ scholars, whom it is impossible to do without in a design so great
as that of the _Academie royale_.  There are others who cultivate science
only as a field which is to give them sustenance, and, as they see by
experience that great rewards fall only to those who make the most noise
in the world, they apply themselves especially, not to making new
discoveries, for hitherto that has not been recompensed, but to whatever
may bring them into notice; these are scholars of the fashionable world,
and such as one knows best."  Colbert had the true scholar's taste; he
had brought Cassini from Italy to take the direction of the new
Observatory; he had ordered surveys for a general map of France; he had
founded the _Journal des Savants;_ literary men, whether Frenchmen or
foreigners, enjoyed the king's bounties.  Colbert had even conceived the
plan of a Universal Academy, a veritable forerunner of the Institute.
The arts were not forgotten in this grand project; the academy of
painting and sculpture dated from the regency of Anne of Austria; the
pretensions of the Masters of Arts (maitres is arts), who placed an
interdict upon artists not belonging to their corporation, had driven
Charles Lebrun, himself the son of a Master, to agitate for its
foundation; Colbert added to it the academy of music and the academy of
architecture, and created the French school of painting at Rome.  Beside
the palace for a long time past dedicated to this establishment, lived,
for more than thirty-five years, Le Poussin, the first and the greatest
of all the painters of that French school which was beginning to spring
up, whilst the Italian school, though blooming still in talent and
strength, was forgetting more and more every day the nobleness, the
purity, and the severity of taste which had carried to the highest pitch
the art of the fifteenth century.  The tradition of the masters in vogue
in Italy, of the Caracci, of Guido, of Paul Veronese, had reached Paris
with Simon Vouet, who had long lived at Rome.  He was succeeded there by
a Frenchman "whom, from his grave and thoughtful air, you would have
taken for a father of Sorbonne," says M. Vitet in his charming _Vie de
Lesueur_: "his black eye beneath his thick eyebrow nevertheless flashed
forth a glance full of poesy and youth.  His manner of living was not
less surprising than his personal appearance.  He might be seen walking
in the streets of Rome, tablets in hand, hitting off by a stroke or two
of his pencil at one time the antique fragments he came upon, at another
the gestures, the attitudes, the faces of the persons who presented
themselves in his path.  Sometimes, in the morning, he would sit on the
terrace of Trinity del Monte, beside another Frenchman five or six years
younger, but already known for rendering landscapes with such fidelity,
such, fresh  and marvellous beauty, that all the Italian masters gave
place to him, and that, after two centuries, he has not yet met his
rival."

[Illustration: Lebrun----674]

"Of these two artists, the older evidently exercised over the other the
superiority which genius has over talent.  The smallest hints of Le
Poussin were received by Claude Lorrain with deference and respect; and
yet, to judge from the prices at which they severally sold their
pictures, the landscape painter had for the time an indisputable
superiority."

Claude Gelee, called Lorrain, had fled when quite young from the shop of
the confectioner with whom his parents had placed him.  He had found
means of getting to Rome; there he worked, there he lived, and there he
died, returning but once to France, in the height of his renown, for just
a few months, without even enriching his own land with any great number
of his works; nearly all, of them remained on foreign soil.  Le Poussin,
born at the Andelys in 1593, made his way with great difficulty to Italy.
He was by that time thirty years old, and had no more desire than Claude
to return to France, where painting was with difficulty beginning to
obtain a standing.  His reputation, however, had penetrated thither.
King Louis XIII. was growing weary of Simon Vouet's factitious lustre;
he wanted Le Poussin to go to Paris.  The painter for a long while held
out; the king insisted.  "I shall go," said Le Poussin, "like one
sentenced to be sawn in halves and severed in twain."  He passed eighteen
months in France, welcomed enthusiastically, lodged at the Tuileries,
magnificently paid, but exposed to the jealousies of Simon Vouet and his
pupils.  Worried, thwarted, frozen to death by the hoarfrosts of Paris,
he took the road back to Rome in November, 1642, on the pretext of going
to fetch his wife, and did not return any more.  He had left in France
some of his masterpieces, models of that, new, independent, and
conscientious art, faithfully studied from nature in all its Italian
grandeur, and from the treasures of the antique.  "How did you arrive at