Volume V Part 28 (2/2)
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 pa.s.s,”
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 G.o.d to send me disgraces, humiliations, and subjects for penitence; she will have more success than you.” At bottom his soul was not st.u.r.dy 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? G.o.d 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 n.o.ble and delicate painter of the purest pa.s.sions 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 a.s.sault, he conquered them both by degrees, raising himself at each new effort, and gaining over, little by little, the most pa.s.sionate 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 n.o.ble 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 ill.u.s.trious friends delighted, ” Let us not laugh at the good soul (bonhomme) he will probably live longer than the whole of us.” In the n.o.ble 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 pa.s.s 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded his election. ”He praised without flattery; he humbled himself n.o.bly” 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 a.s.sure 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: La Fontaine, Boileau, Moliere, and Racine----657]
Boileau was by this time old; he had sold his house at Auteuil, which was so dear, but he did not give up literature, continuing to revise his verses carefully, pre-occupied with new editions, and reproaching himself for this pre-occupation. ”It is very shameful,” he would say, ”to be still busying myself, with rhymes and all those Parna.s.sian trifles, when, I ought to be thinking of nothing but the account I am prepared to go and render to G.o.d.” 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sessed 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 fas.h.i.+on and good breeding did not form the same opinion of him. The Dowager-d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, Marguerite of Lorraine, had taken him as one of her gentlemen-in-waiting; the d.u.c.h.ess 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble, 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, Parna.s.sian b.u.t.terfly, 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.”
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