From the solitude of that closet went forth a book unique of its sort, full of sagacity, penetration, and severity, without bitterness; a picture of the manners of the court and of the world, traced by the hand of a spectator who had not essayed its temptations, but who guessed them and passed judgment on them all,—“a book,” as M. de Malezieux said to La Bruyere, “which was sure to bring its author many readers and many enemies.” Its success was great from the first, and it excited lively curiosity. The courtiers liked the portraits; attempts were made to name them; the good sense, shrewdness, and truth of the observations struck everybody; people had met a hundred times those whom La Bruyere had described. The form appeared of a rarer order than even the matter; it was a brilliant, uncommon style, as varied as human nature, always elegant and pure, original and animated, rising sometimes to the height of the noblest thoughts, gay and grave, pointed and serious. Avoiding, by richness in turns and expression, the uniformity native to the subject, La Bruyere riveted attention by a succession of touches making a masterly picture, a terrible one sometimes, as in his description of the peasants’ misery:

“To be seen are certain ferocious animals, male and female, scattered over the country, dark, livid, and all scorched by the sun, affixed to the soil which they rummage and throw up with indomitable pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and, when they rise to their feet, they show a human face; they are, in fact, men. At night they withdraw to the caves, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the trouble of sowing, tilling, and reaping for their livelihood, and deserve, therefore, not to go in want of the very bread they have sown.” Few people at the court, and in La Bruyere’s day, would have thought about the sufferings of the country folks, and conceived the idea of contrasting them with the sketch of a court-ninny. “Gold glitters,” say you, “upon the clothes of Philemon; it glitters as well as the tradesman’s. He is dressed in the finest stuffs; are they a whit the less so when displayed in the shops and by the piece? Nay; but the embroidery and the ornaments add magnificence thereto; then I give the workman credit for his work. If you ask him the time, he pulls out a watch which is a masterpiece; his sword-guard is an onyx; he has on his finger a large diamond which he flashes into all eyes, and which is perfection; he lacks none of those curious trifles which are worn about one as much for show as for use; and he does not stint himself either of all sorts of adornment befitting a young man who has married an old millionaire. You really pique my curiosity: I positively must see such precious articles as those. Send me that coat and those jewels of Philemon’s; you can keep the person. Thou’rt wrong, Philemon, if, with that splendid carriage, and that large number of rascals behind thee, and those six animals to draw thee, thou thinkest thou art thought more of. We take off all those appendages which are extraneous to thee to get at thyself, who art but a ninny.”

More earnest and less bitter than La Rochefoucauld, and as brilliant and as firm as Cardinal de Retz, La Bruyere was a more sincere believer than either. “I feel that there is a God, and I do not feel that there is none; that is enough for me; the reasoning of the world is useless to me. I conclude that God exists. Are men good enough, faithful enough, equitable enough to deserve all our confidence, and not make us wish at least for the existence of God, to whom we may appeal from their judgments and have recourse when we are persecuted or betrayed?” A very strong reason and of potent logic, naturally imprinted upon an upright spirit and a sensible mind, irresistibly convinced, both of them, that justice alone can govern the world.

La Bruyere had just been admitted into the French Academy, in 1693. In his admission speech he spoke in praise of the living, Bossuet, Fenelon, Racine, La Fontaine; it was not as yet the practice. Those who were not praised felt angry, and the journals of the time bitterly attacked the new academician. He was hurt, and withdrew almost entirely from the world. Four days before his death, however, “he was in company. All at once he perceived that he was becoming deaf, yes, stone deaf. He returned to Versailles, where he had apartments at Conde’s house. Apoplexy carried him off in a quarter of an hour on the 11th of May, 1696,” leaving behind him an incomparable book, wherein, according to his own maxim, the excellent writer shows himself to be an excellent painter; and four dialogues against Quietism, still unfinished, full of lively and good-humored hostility to the doctrines of Madame Guyon. They were published after his death.

We pass from prose to poetry, from La Bruyere to Corneille, who had died in 1684, too late for his fame, in spite of the vigorous returns of genius which still flash forth sometimes in his feeblest works. Throughout the Regency and the Fronde, Corneille had continued to occupy almost alone the great French stage. Rotrou, his sometime rival with his piece of Venceslas, and ever tenderly attached to him, had died, in 1650, at Dreux, of which he was civil magistrate. An epidemic was ravaging the town, and he was urged to go away. “I am the only one who can maintain good order, and I shall remain,” he replied. “At the moment of my writing to you the bells are tolling for the twenty-second person to-day; perhaps to-morrow it will be for me; but my conscience has marked out my duty. God’s will be done!” Two days later he was dead.

Corneille had dedicated Polyeucte to the regent Anne of Austria. He published in a single year Rodogune and the Mort de Pompee, dedicating this latter piece to Mazarin, in gratitude, he said, for an act of generosity with which his Eminence had surprised him. At the same time he borrowed from the Spanish drama the canvas of the Menteur, the first really French comedy which appeared on the boards, and which Moliere showed that he could appreciate at its proper value. After this attempt, due perhaps to the desire felt by Corneille to triumph over his rivals in the style in which he had walked abreast with them, he let tragedy resume its legitimate empire over a genius formed by it. He wrote Heraclius and Nicomede, which are equal in parts to his finest masterpieces. But by this time the great genius no longer soared with equal flight. Theodore and Pertharite had been failures. “I don’t mention them,” Corneille would say, “in order to avoid the vexation of remembering them.” He was still living at Rouen, in a house adjoining that occupied by his brother, Thomas Corneille, younger than he, already known by some comedies which had met with success. The two brothers had married two sisters.

It is said, that when Peter Corneille was puzzled to end a verse he would undo a trap that opened into his brother’s room, shouting, “Sans-souci, a rhyme!”

Corneille had announced his renunciation of the stage; he was translating into verse the Imitation of Christ. “It were better,” he had written in his preface to Pertharite, “that I took leave myself instead of waiting till it is taken of me altogether; it is quite right that after twenty years’ work I should begin to perceive that I am becoming too old to be still in the fashion. This resolution is not so strong but that it may be broken; there is every, appearance, however, of my abiding by it.”

Fouquet was then in his glory, “no less superintendent of literature than of finance,” and he undertook to recall to the stage the genius of Corneille. At his voice, the poet and the tragedian rose up at a single bound.

wrote Corneille in his thanks to Fouquet. He had some months before said to Mdlle. du Pare, who was an actress in Moliere’s company, which had come to Rouen, and who was, from her grand airs, nicknamed by the others the Marchioness,

Corneille reappeared upon the boards with a tragedy called OEdipe, more admired by his contemporaries than by posterity. On the occasion of Louis XIV.‘s marriage he wrote for the king’s comedians the Toison d’or, and put into the mouth of France those prophetic words:—

Sertorius appeared at the commencement of the year 1662. “Pray where did Corneille learn politics and war?” asked Turenne when he saw this piece played. “You are the true and faithful interpreter of the mind and courage of Rome,” Balzac wrote to him; “I say further, sir, you are often her teacher, and the reformer of olden times, if they have need of embellishment and support. In the spots where Rome is of brick, you rebuild it of marble; where you find a gap, you fill it with a masterpiece, and I take it that what you lend to history is always better than what you borrow from it. . . .” “They are grander and more Roman in his verses than in their history,” said La Bruyere. “Once only, in the Cid, Corneille had abandoned himself unreservedly to the reality of passion; scared at what he might find in the weaknesses of the heart, he would no longer see aught but its strength. He sought in man that which resists and not that which yields, thus giving his times the sublime pleasure of an enjoyment that can belong to nought but the human soul, a cherished proof of its noble origin and its glorious destiny, the pleasure of admiration, the appreciation of the beautiful and the great, the enthusiasm aroused by virtue. He moves us at sight of a masterpiece, thrills us at the sound of a noble deed, enchants us at the bare idea of a virtue which three thousand years have forever separated from us.” (Corneille et son temps, by M. Guizot.) Every other thought, every other prepossession, are strangers to the poet; his personages represent heroic passions which they follow out without swerving and without suffering themselves to be shackled by the notions of a morality which is still far from fixed and often in conflict with the interests and obligations of parties, thus remaining perfectly of his own time and his own country, all the while that he is describing Greeks, or Romans, or Spaniards.

There is no pleasure in tracing the decadence of a great genius. Corneille wrote for a long while without success, attributing his repeated rebuffs to his old age, the influence of fashion, the capricious taste of the generation for young people; he thought himself neglected, appealing to the king himself, who had ordered Cinna and Pompee to be played at court:—

Posterity has done for Corneille more than Louis XIV. could have done: it has left in oblivion Agesilas, Attila, Titus, and Pulcherie; it preserved the memory of the triumphs only. The poet was accustomed to say with a smile, when he was reproached with his slowness and emptiness in conversation, “I am Peter Corneille all the same.” The world has passed similar judgment on his works; in spite of the rebuffs of his latter years, he has remained “the great Corneille.”

When he died, in 1684, Racine, elected by the Academy in 1673, found himself on the point of becoming its director; he claimed the honor of presiding at the obsequies of Corneille. The latter had not been admitted to the body until 1641, after having undergone two rebuffs. Corneille had died in the night. The Academy decided in favor of Abbe de Lavau, the outgoing director. “Nobody but you could pretend to bury Corneille,” said Benserade to Racine, “yet you have not been able to obtain the chance.” It was only when he received into the Academy Thomas Corneille, in his brother’s place, that Racine could praise to his heart’s content the master and rival who, in old age, had done him the honor to dread him. “My father had not been happy in his speech at his own admission,” says Louis Racine ingenuously; “he was in this, because he spoke out of the abundance of his heart, being inwardly convinced that Corneille was worth much more than he.” Louis XIV. had come in for as great a share as Corneille in Racine’s praises. He, informed of the success of the speech, desired to hear it. The author had the honor of reading it to him, after which the king said to him, “I am very pleased; I would praise you more if you had praised me less.” It was on this occasion that the great Arnauld, still in disgrace and carefully concealed, wrote to Racine: “I have to thank you, sir, for the speech which was sent me from you. There certainly was never anything so eloquent, and the hero whom you praise is so much the more worthy of your praises in that he considered them too great. I have many things that I would say to you about that, if I had the pleasure of seeing you, but it would need the dispersal of a cloud which I dare to say is a spot upon this sun. I assure you that the ideas I have thereupon are not interested, and that what may concern myself affects me very little. A chat with you and your companion would give me much pleasure, but I would not purchase that pleasure by the least poltroonery. You know what I mean by that; and so I abide in peace and wait patiently for God to make known to this perfect prince that he has not in his kingdom a subject more loyal, more zealous for his true glory, and, if I dare say so, loving him with a love more pure and more free from all interest. That is why I should not bring myself to take a single step to obtain liberty to see my friends, unless it were to my prince alone that I could be indebted for it.” Fenelon and the great Arnauld held the same language, independent and submissive, proud and modest, at the same time. Only their conscience spoke louder than their respect for the king.

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:—

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 displeasing 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 melancholy 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.