At the time when Racine was thus praising at the Academy the king and the great Corneille, his own dramatic career was already ended. He was born, in 1639, at La Ferte-Milon; he had made his first appearance on the stage in 1664 with the Freres ennemis, and had taken leave of it in 1673 with Phedre. Esther and Athalie, played in 1689 and 1691 by the young ladies of St. Cyr, were not regarded by their author and his austere friends as any derogation from the pious engagements he had entered into. Racine, left an orphan at four years of age, and brought up at Port-Royal under the influence and the personal care of M. Le Maitre, who called him his son, did not at first answer the expectations of his master. The glowing fancy of which he already gave signs caused dismay to Lancelot, who threw into the fire one after the other two copies of the Greek tale Theayene et Chariclee which the young man was reading. The third time, the latter learnt it off by heart, and, taking the book to his severe censor, "Here," said he, "you can burn this volume too, as well as the others."

Racine's pious friends had fine work to no purpose; nature carried the day, and he wrote verses. "Being unable to consult you, I was prepared, like Malherbe, to consult an old servant at our place," he wrote to one of his friends, "if I had not discovered that she was a Jansenist like her master, and that she might betray me, which would be my utter ruin, considering that I receive every day letter upon letter, or rather excommunication upon excommunication, all because of a poor sonnet." To deter the young man from poetry, he was led to expect a benefice, and was sent away to Uzes to his uncle's, Father Sconin, who set him to study theology. "I pass my time with my uncle, St. Thomas, and Virgil," he wrote on the 17th of January, 1662, to M. Vitard, steward to the Duke of Luynes; "I make lots of extracts from theology and some from poetry. My uncle has kind intentions towards me, he hopes to get me something; then I shall try to pay my debts. I do not forget the obligations I am under to you. I blush as I write; Erubuit puer, salva res est (the lad has blushed; it is all right). But that conclusion is all wrong; my affairs do not mend."

Racine had composed at Uzes the Freres ennemis, which was played on his return to Paris in 1664, not without a certain success; Alexandre met with a great deal in 1665; the author had at first intrusted it to Moliere's company, but he was not satisfied and gave his piece to the comedians of the Hotel de Dourgogne. Moliere was displeased, and quarrelled with Racine, towards whom he had up to that time testified much good will. The disagreement was not destined to disturb the equity of their judgments upon one another. When Racine brought out Les Plaideurs, which was not successful at first, Moliere, as he left, said out loud, "The comedy is excellent, and they who deride it deserve to be derided." One of Racine's friends, thinking to do him a pleasure, went to him in all haste to tell him of the failure of the Misanthrope at its first representation. "The piece has fallen flat," said he; "never was there anything so dull; you can believe what I say, for I was there." "You were there, and I was not," replied Racine, "and yet I don't believe it, because it is impossible that Moliere should have written a bad piece. Go again, and pay more attention to it."

Racine had just brought out Alexandre when he became connected with Boileau, who was three years his senior, and who had already published several of his satires. "I have a surprising facility in writing my verses," said the young tragic author ingenuously. "I want to teach you to write them with difficulty," answered Boileau, "and you have talent enough to learn before long." Andromaque was the result of this novel effort, and was Racine's real commencement.

He was henceforth irrevocably committed to the theatrical cause. Nicole attacking Desmarets, who had turned prophet after the failure of his Clovis, alluded to the author's comedies, and exclaimed with all the severity of Port-Royal, "A romance-writer and a scenic poet is a public poisoner not of bodies but of souls." Racine took these words to himself, and he wrote in defence of the dramatic art two letters so bitter, biting, and insulting towards Port-Royal and the protectors of his youth, that Boileau dissuaded him from publishing the second, and that remorse before long took possession of his soul, never to be entirely appeased. He had just brought out Les Plaideurs, which had been requested of him by his friends and partly composed during the dinners they frequently had together. "I put into it only a few barbarous law-terms which I might have picked up during a lawsuit and which neither I nor my judges ever really heard or understood." After the first failure of the piece, the king's comedians one day risked playing it before him. "Louis XIV. was struck by it, and did not think it a breach of his dignity or taste to utter shouts of laughter so loud that the courtiers were astounded." The delighted comedians, on leaving Versailles, returned straight to Paris, and went to awaken Racine. "Three carriages during the night, in a street where it was unusual to see a single one during the day, woke up the neighborhood. There was a rush to the windows, and, as it was known that a councillor of requests (law-officer) had made a great uproar against the comedy of the Plaideurs, nobody had a doubt of punishment befalling the poet who had dared to take off the judges in the open theatre. Next day all Paris believed that he was in prison." He had a triumph, on the contrary, with Britannicus, after which the, king gave up dancing in the court ballets, for fear of resembling Nero. Berenice was a duel between Corneille and Racine for the amusement of Madame Henriette. Racine bore away the bell from his illustrious rival, without much glory. Bajazet soon followed. "Here is Racine's piece," wrote Madame de Sevigne to her daughter in January, 1672; if I could send you La Champmesle, you would think it good, but without her, it loses half its worth. The character of Bajazet is cold as ice, the manners of the Turks are ill observed in it, they do not make so much fuss about getting married; the catastrophe is not well led up to, there are no reasons given for that great butchery. There are some pretty things, however, but nothing perfectly beautiful, nothing which carries by storm, none of those bursts of Corneille's which make one creep. My dear, let us be careful never to compare Racine with him, let us always feel the difference; never will the former rise any higher than Andromaque. Long live our old friend Corneille! Let us forgive his bad verses for the sake of those divine and sublime beauties which transport us. They are master-strokes which are inimitable." Corneille had seen Bajazet. "I would take great care not to say so to anybody else," he whispered in the ear of Segrais, who was sitting beside him, "because they would say that I said so from jealousy; but, mind you, there is not in Bajazet a single character with the sentiments which should and do prevail at Constantinople; they have all, beneath a Turkish dress, the sentiments that prevail in the midst of France." The impassioned loyalty of Madame de Sevigne, and the clear-sighted jealousy of Corneille, were not mistaken; Bajazet is no Turk, but he is none the less very human. "There are points by which men recognize themselves, though there is no resemblance; there are others in which there is resemblance without any recognition. Certain sentiments belong to nature in all countries; they are characteristic of man only, and everywhere man will see his own image in them." [Corneille et son temps, by M. Guizot.] Racine's reputation went on continually increasing; he had brought out Mithridate and Iphigenie; Phedre appeared in 1677. A cabal of great lords caused its failure at first. When the public, for a moment led astray after the Phedre of Pradon, returned to the master-work of Racine, vexation and wounded pride had done their office in the poet's soul. Pious sentiments ever smouldering in his heart, the horror felt for the theatre by Port-Royal, and penitence for the sins he had been guilty of against his friends there, revived within him; and Racine gave up profane poetry forever. "The applause I have met with has often flattered me a great deal," said he at a later period to his son, "but the smallest critical censure, bad as it may have been, always caused me more of vexation than all the praises had given me of pleasure." Racine wanted to turn Carthusian; his confessor dissuaded him, and his friends induced him to marry. Madame Racine was an excellent person, modest and devout, who never went to the theatre, and scarcely knew her husband's plays by name; she brought him some fortune. The king had given the great poet a pension, and Colbert had appointed him to the treasury (tresorier) at Moulins. Louis XIV., moreover, granted frequent donations to men of letters. Racine received from him nearly fifty thousand livres; he was appointed historiographer to the king. Boileau received the same title; the latter was not married, but Racine before long had seven children. "Why did not I turn Carthusian!" he would sometimes exclaim in the disquietude of his paternal affection when his children were ill. He devoted his life to them with pious solicitude, constantly occupied with their welfare, their good education, and the salvation of their souls. Several of his daughters became nuns. He feared above everything to see his eldest son devote himself to poetry, dreading for him the dangers he considered he himself had run. "As for your epigram, I wish you had not written it," he wrote to him; "independently of its being commonplace, I cannot too earnestly recommend you not to let yourself give way to the temptation of writing French verses which would serve no purpose but to distract your mind; above all, you should not write against anybody." This son, the object of so much care, to whom his father wrote such modest, grave, paternal, and sagacious letters, never wrote verses, lived in retirement, and died young without ever having married. Little Louis, or Lionval, Racine's last child, was the only one who ever dreamt of being a writer. "You must be very bold," said Boileau to him, "to dare write verses with the name you bear! It is not that I consider it impossible for you to become capable some day of writing good ones, but I mistrust what is without precedent, and never, since the world was world, has there been seen a great poet son of a great poet." Louis Racine never was a great poet, in spite of the fine verses which are to be met with in his poems la Religion and la Grace. His Memoires of his father, written for his son, describe Racine in all the simple charm of his domestic life. "He would leave all to come and see us," writes Louis Racine; "an equerry of the duke's came one day to say that he was expected to dinner at Conde's house. 'I shall not have the honor of going,' said he; 'it is more than a week since I have seen my wife and children who are making holiday to-day to feast with me on a very fine carp; I cannot give up dining with them.' And, when the equerry persisted, he sent for the carp, which was worth about a crown. 'Judge for yourself,' said he, 'whether I can disappoint these poor children who have made up their minds to regale me, and would not enjoy it if they were to eat this dish without me.' He was loving by nature," adds Louis Racine; "he was loving towards God when he returned to Him; and, from the day of his return to those who, from his infancy, had taught him to know Him, he was so towards them without any reserve; he was so all his life towards his friends, towards his wife, and towards his children."

Boileau had undertaken the task of reconciling his friend with Port-Royal. Nicole had made no opposition, "not knowing what war was." M. Arnauld was intractable. Boileau one day made up his mind to take him a copy of Phedre, pondering on the way as to what he should say to him. "Shall this man," said he, "be always right, and shall I never be able to prove him wrong? I am quite sure that I shall be right to-day; if he is not of my opinion,—he will be wrong." And, going to M. Arnauld's, where he found a large company, be set about developing his thesis, pulling out Phedre, and maintaining that if tragedy were dangerous, it was the fault of the poets. The younger theologians listened to him disdainfully, but at last M. Arnauld said out loud, "If things are as he says, he is right, and such tragedy is harmless." Boileau declared that he had never felt so pleased in his life. M. Arnauld being reconciled to Phedre, the principal step was made next day the author of the tragedy presented himself. The culprit entered, humility and confusion depicted on his face; he threw himself at the feet of M. Arnauld, who took him in his arms; Racine was thenceforth received into favor by Port-Royal. The two friends were preparing to set out with the king for the campaign of 1677. The besieged towns opened their gates before the poets had left Paris. "How is it that you had not the curiosity to see a siege?" the king asked them on his return: "it was not a long trip." "True, sir," answered Racine, always the greater courtier of the two, "but our tailors were too slow. We had ordered travelling suits; and when they were brought home, the places which your Majesty was besieging were taken." Louis XIV. was not displeased. Racine thenceforth accompanied him in all his campaigns; Boileau, who ailed a great deal, and was of shy disposition, remained at Paris. His friend wrote to, him constantly, at one time from the camp and at another from Versailles, whither he returned with the king. "Madame de Maintenon told me, this, morning," writes Racine, "that the king had fixed our pensions at four thousand francs for me and two thousand for you: that is, not including our literary pensions. I have just come from thanking the king. I laid more stress upon your case than even my own. I said, in as many words, 'Sir, he has more wit than ever, more zeal for your Majesty, and more desire to work for your glory than ever he had.' I am, nevertheless, really pained at the idea of my getting more than you. But, independently of the expenses and fatigue of the journeys, from which I am glad that you are delivered, I know that you are so noble-minded and so friendly, that I am sure you would be heartily glad that I were even better treated. I shall be very pleased if you are." Boileau answered at once: "Are you mad with your compliments? Do not you know perfectly well that it was I who suggested the way in which things have been done? And can you doubt of my being perfectly well pleased with a matter in which I am accorded all I ask? Nothing in the world could be better, and I am even more rejoiced on your account than on my own." The two friends consulted one another mutually about their verses; Racine sent Boileau his spiritual songs. The king heard the Combat du Chretien sung, set to music by Moreau

"O God, my God, what deadly strife! Two men within myself I see One would that, full of love to Thee, My heart were leal, in death and life; The other, with rebellion rife, Against Thy laws inciteth me."

He turned to Madame de Maintenon, and, "Madame," said he, "I know those two men well." Boileau sends Racine his ode on the capture of Namur. "I have risked some very new things," he says, "even to speaking of the white plume which the king has in his hat; but, in my opinion, if you are to have novel expressions in verse, you must speak of things which have not been said in verse. You shall be judge, with permission to alter the whole, if you do not like it." Boileau's generous confidence was the more touching, in that Racine was sarcastic and bitter in discussion. "Did you mean to hurt me?" Boileau said to him one day. "God forbid!" was the answer. "Well, then, you made a mistake, for you did hurt me."



Racine had just brought out Esther at the theatre of St. Cyr. Madame de Brinon, lady-superior of the establishment which was founded by Madame de Maintenon for the daughters of poor noblemen, had given her pupils a taste for theatricals. "Our little girls have just been playing your Andromaque, wrote Madame de Maintenon to Racine, "and they played it so well that they never shall play it again in their lives, or any other of your pieces." She at the same time asked him to write, in his leisure hours, some sort of moral and historical poem from which love should be altogether banished. This letter threw Racine into a great state of commotion. He was anxious to please Madame de Maintenon, and yet it was a delicate commission for a man who had a great reputation to sustain. Boileau was for refusing. "That was not in the calculations of Racine," says Madame de Caylus in her Souvenirs. He wrote Esther. "Madame de Maintenon was charmed with the conception and the execution," says Madame de La Fayette; "the play represented in some sort the fall of Madame de Montespan and her own elevation; all the difference was that Esther was a little younger, and less particular in the matter of piety. The way in which the characters were applied was the reason why Madame de Maintenon was not sorry to make public a piece which had been composed for the community only and for some of her private friends. There was exhibited a degree of excitement about it which is incomprehensible; not one of the small or the great but would go to see it, and that which ought to have been looked upon as merely a convent-play became the most serious matter in the world. The ministers, to pay their court by going to this play, left their most pressing business. At the first representation at which the king was present, he took none but the principal officers of his hunt. The second was reserved for pious personages, such as Father La Chaise, and a dozen or fifteen Jesuits, with many other devotees of both sexes; afterwards it extended to the courtiers." "I paid my court at St. Cyr the other day, more agreeably than I had expected writes Madame de Sevigne to her daughter: listened, Marshal Bellefonds and I, with an attention that was remarked, and with certain discreet commendations which were not perhaps to be found beneath the head-dresses' of all the ladies present. I cannot tell you how exceedingly delightful this piece is; it is a unison of music, verse, songs, persons, so perfect that there is nothing left to desire. The girls who act the kings and other characters were made expressly for it. Everything is simple, everything innocent, everything sublime and affecting. I was charmed, and so was the marshal, who left his place to go and tell the king how pleased he was, and that he sat beside a lady well worthy of having seen Esther. The king came over to our seats. 'Madame,' he said to me, 'I am assured that you have been pleased.' I, without any confusion,' replied, 'Sir, I am charmed; what I feel is beyond expression.' The king said to me, 'Racine is very clever.' I said to him, 'Very, Sir; but really these young people are very clever too; they throw themselves into the subject as if they had never done aught else.' 'Ah! as to that,' he replied, 'it is quite true.' And then his Majesty went away and left me the object of envy. The prince and princess came and gave me a word, Madame de Maintenon a glance; she went away with the king. I replied to all, for I was in luck."

Athalie had not the same brilliant success as Esther. The devotees and the envious had affrighted Madame de Maintenon, who had requested Racine to write it. The young ladies of St. Cyr, in the uniform of the house, played the piece quite simply at Versailles before Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon, in a room without a stage. When the players gave a representation of it at Paris, it was considered heavy; it did not, succeed. Racine imagined that he was doomed to another failure like that of Phedre, which he preferred before all his other pieces. "I am a 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.



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."



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.



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."



"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 such perfection?" people would ask Le Poussin. "By neglecting nothing," the painter would reply. In the same way Newton was soon to discover the great laws of the physical world, by always thinking thereon."



During Le Poussin's stay at Paris he had taken as a pupil Eustache Lesueur, who had been trained in the studio of Simon Vouet, but had been struck from the first with the incomparable genius and proud independence of the master sent to him by fate. Alone he had supported Le Poussin in his struggle against the envious; alone he entered upon the road which revealed itself to him whilst he studied under Le Poussin. He was poor; he had great difficulty in managing to live. The delicacy, the purity, the suavity of his genius could shine forth in their entirety nowhere but in the convent of the Carthusians, whose cloister he was commissioned to decorate. There he painted the life of St. Bruno, breathing into this almost mystical work all the religious poetry of his soul and of his talent, ever delicate and chaste even in the allegorical figures of mythology with which he before long adorned the Hotel Lambert. He had returned to his favorite pursuits, embellishing the churches of Paris with incomparable works, when, overwhelmed by the loss of his wife, and exhausted by the painful efforts of his genius, he died at thirty-seven, in that convent of the Carthusians which he glorified with his talent, at the same time that he edified the monks with his religious zeal. Lesueur succumbed in a struggle too rude and too rough for his pure and delicate nature. Lebrun had returned from that Italy which Lesueur had never been able to reach; the old rivalry, fostered in the studio of Simon Vouet, was already being renewed between the two artists; the angelic art gave place to the worldly and the earthly. Lesueur died; Lebrun found himself master of the position, assured by anticipation, and as it were by instinct, of sovereign, dominion under the sway of the young king for whom he had been created.



Old Philip of Champagne alone might have disputed with him the foremost rank. He had passionately admired Le Poussin, he had attached himself to Lesueur. "Never," says M. Vitet, "had he sacrificed to fashion; never had he fallen into the vagaries of the degenerate Italian style." This upright, simple, painstaking soul, this inflexible conscience, looking continually into the human face, had preserved in his admirable portraits the life and the expression of nature which he was incessantly trying to seize and reproduce. Lebrun was preferred to him as first painter to the king by Louis XIV. himself; Philip of Champagne was delighted thereat; he lived, in retirement, in fidelity to his friends of Port-Royal, whose austere and vigorous lineaments he loved to trace, beginning with M. de St. Cyran, and ending with his own daughter, Sister Suzanne, who was restored to health by the prayers of Mother Agnes Arnauld.



Lebrun was as able a courtier as he was a good painter. The clever arrangement of his pictures, the richness and brilliancy of his talent, his faculty for applying art to industry, secured him with Louis XIV. a sway which lasted as long as his life. He was first painter to the king; he was director of the Gobelins and of the academy of painting. "He let nothing be done by the other artists but according to his own designs and suggestions. The worker in tapestry, the decorative painter, the statuary, the goldsmith, took their models from him: all came from him, all flowed from his brain, all bore his imprint." The painter followed the king's ideas, being entirely after his own heart. For fourteen years he worked for Louis XIV., representing his life and his conquests, at Versailles; painting for the Louvre the victories of Alexander, which were engraved almost immediately by Audran and Edelinck. He was jealous of the royal favor, sensitive and haughty towards artists, honestly concerned for the king's glory and for the tasks confided to himself. The growing reputation of Mignard, whom Louvois had brought back from Rome, troubled and disquieted Lebrun. In vain did the king encourage him. Lebrun, already ill, said in the presence of Louis XIV. that fine pictures seem to become finer after the painter's death. "Do not you be in a hurry to die, M. Lebrun," said the king; "we esteem your pictures now quite as highly as posterity can."



The small gallery at Versailles had been intrusted to Mignard. Lebrun withdrew to Montmorency, where he died in 1690, jealous of Mignard at the end as he had been of Lesueur at the outset of his life. Mignard became first painter to the king. He painted the ceiling of Val-de-Grace, which was celebrated by Moliere; but it was as a painter of portraits that he excelled in France. "M. Mignard does them best," said Le Poussin not long before, with lofty good nature, "though his heads are all paint, without force or character." To Mignard succeeded Rigaud as portrait painter, worthy to preserve the features of Bossuet and Fenelon. The unity of organization, the brilliancy of style, the imposing majesty which the king's taste had everywhere stamped about him upon art as well as upon literature, were by this time beginning to decay simultaneously with the old age of Louis XIV., with the reverses of his arms, and the increasing gloominess of his court; the artists who had illustrated his reign were dying one after another, as well as the orators and the poets; the sculptor James Sarazin had been gone some time; Puget and the Anguiers were dead, as well as Mansard, Perrault, and Le Notre; Girardon had but a few months to live; only Coysevox was destined to survive the king, whose statue he had many a time moulded. The great age was disappearing slowly and sadly, throwing out to the last some noble gleams, like the aged king who had constantly served as its centre and guide, like olden France, which he had crowned with its last and its most splendid wreath.

END OF VOL. V.