glow and the steadfast flame of the wood-fire on Racine's home
hearthstone. It lights up the gloomy, mean street, even as we stand
here. He was, in truth, an admirable husband and father, and it is
this side of the man that we prefer to regard, rather than that side
turned toward other men. Of them he was, through his over-much
ambition, easily jealous, and, being sensitive and suspicious as well,
and given to a biting raillery, he alienated his friends. Boileau
alone was too big of soul to allow any estrangement. These two were
friends for almost forty years, in which not one clouded day is known.
The letters between them--those from 1687 to 1698 are still
preserved--show the depth of Racine's manly and delicate feeling for
his friend, then "in his great solitude at Auteuil." They had been
appointed royal historiographers soon after Racine's marriage in 1677,
and, in that office, travelled together a good deal, in the Ghent
campaign of 1678 and again with the army in other fields. They worked
together on their notes later, and gathered great store of material;
but the result amounted to nothing, and they were posthumously lucky
in that their unfinished manuscript was finally burned by accident in
1726.
Whether with Boileau in camp, or alone in the Luxembourg campaign of
1683--Boileau being too ill to go--or at Namur in 1692, or with the
King and court at Fontainebleau, Marly, Versailles, in these royal
residences where he had his own rooms, wherever he was, Racine never
seemed to cease thinking of his home, that home in Rue des Maçons when
he first went away, and for the last seven years of his life in Rue
Visconti. When absent from home he wrote to his children frequently,
and when here he corresponded constantly with his son, who was with
the French Embassy at The Hague. To him he gave domestic details and
"trivial fond records" of what his mother was doing, of the colds of
the younger ones, and of the doings of the daughter in a convent at
Melun. He sends to this son two new hats and eleven and a half _louis
d'or_, and begs him to be careful of the hats and to spend the money
slowly.
Yet he was fond of court life, and, an adroit courtier, he knew how to
sing royal prowess in the field and royal splendor in the palace. He
had a way of carrying himself that gave seeming height to his slight
stature. His noble and open expression, his fine wit, his dexterous
address, his notable gifts as a reader to the King at his bedside,
made him a favorite in that resplendent circle. And he was all the
more unduly dejected when the _Roi Soleil_ cooled and no longer smiled
on him; he was killed when Madame de Maintenon--"Goody Scarron," "Old
Piety," "the hag," "the hussy," "that old woman," are the usual pet
epithets for her of delicious Duchesse d'Orléans--who had liked and
had befriended him, saw the policy of showing him her cold shoulder,
as she had shown it to Fénelon. From this shock, Racine, being already
broken physically by age and illness, seemed unable to rally. As he
sank gradually to the grave he made sedulous provision for his family,
dictating, toward the last, a letter begging for a continuance of his
pension to his widow, which, it is gladly noted, was afterward done.
He urged, also, the claim of Boileau to royal favor: "We must not be
separated," he said to his amanuensis; "begin your letter again, and
let Boileau know that I have been his friend to my death."
His death came on April 21, 1699. His body lay one night in the choir
of Saint-Sulpice, his parish church, and then it was carried for
burial to the Abbey of Port-Royal. On the destruction of that
institution, his remains were brought back to Paris, in 1711, and
placed near those of Pascal, at the entrance of the lady-chapel of
Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. Racine's epitaph, in Latin, by Boileau, the
friend of so many men who were not always friendly with one another,
is cut in a stone set in the first pillar of the southern aisle of the
choir.
* * * * *
JEAN DE LA FONTAINE began to come to Paris, making occasional
excursions from his native Château-Thierry, in Champagne, toward 1654,
he being then over thirty years of age. A little later, when under the
protection and in the pay of the great Fouquet, his visits to the
capital were more frequent and more prolonged. He commonly found
lodgings on Quai des Grands-Augustins, just around the corner from
young Racine, and the two men were much together during the years 1660
and 1661. La Fontaine made his home permanently in the capital after
1664, when he arrived there in the train of the Duchesse de Bouillon,
born Anne Mancini, youngest and liveliest of Mazarin's many dashing
nieces. Her marriage with the Duc de Bouillon had made her the feudal
lady of Château-Thierry, and if she were not compelled to claim, in
this case, her privilege as _châtelaine_ over her appanage, it was
because there was ampler mandate for the impressionable poet in the
caprice of a wilful woman. Incidentally, in this flitting, he left
behind his provincial wife. He had taken her to wife in 1647, mainly
to please his father, and soon, to please her and himself, they had
agreed on a separation. They met scarcely any more after his definite
departure. There is a tradition that he chatted, once in a _salon_
somewhere, with a bright young man by whom he found himself attracted,
and concerning whom he made inquiry of the bystanders, who informed
him that it was his son. Tradition does not record any attempt on his
part to improve his acquaintance with the young stranger, or to show
further interest in his welfare.
He did not entirely desert his country home, for the duchess carried
him along on her autumnal visits to Château-Thierry. He took advantage
of each chance thus given him to realize something upon his patrimony,
that he might meet the always pressing claims on his always overspent
income.
He writes to Racine during one of these visits, in 1686: "My affairs
occupy me as much as they're worth it, and that's not at all; and the
leisure I thus get is given to laziness." He almost anticipated in
regard to himself the racy saying of the Oxford don of our day of
another professor: "Such time as he can save from the adornment of
his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties." But La Fontaine
neglected not only his duties all through life, but, more than all
else, did he neglect the care of his dress. A portion of the income he
was always anticipating came from his salary at one time, as gentleman
in the _suite_ of the dowager Duchesse d'Orléans, that post giving him
quarters in the Luxembourg. These quarters and his salary went from
him with her death. For several years after coming to town with the
Duchesse de Bouillon he had a home in the duke's town-house on Quai
Malaquais.
This quay had been built upon the river-front soon after the death, in
1615, of Marguerite de Valois, Henri IV.'s divorced wife. The streets
leading from Quais Malaquais and Voltaire, and those behind, parallel
with the quays, were cut through her grounds and through the fields
farther west. This was the beginning of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. To
save the long detour, to and from the new suburb, around by way of
Pont-Neuf, a wooden bridge was built in 1632 along the line of the
ferry, that had hitherto served for traffic between the shore in front
of the Louvre and the southern shore, at the end of the road that is
now Rue du Bac. The Pont Royal has replaced that wooden bridge. One of
the buildings that began this river-front remains unmutilated at the
corner of Quai Malaquais and Rue de Seine, and is characteristic of
the architecture of that period in its walls and roofs and windows
clustering about the court. It was the many years' dwelling of the
elder Visconti, and his death-place in 1818. The house at No. 3 was
erected early in the nineteenth century, on the site of Buzot's
residence, as shall be told in a later chapter. In it Humboldt lived
from 1815 to 1818. The associations of No. 5 have already been
suggested. The largest builder on the quay was Cardinal Mazarin, whose
college, to which he gave his own name, and to which the public gave
the name Collége des Quatre-Nations, is now the Palais de l'Institut.
He paid for it with money wrung from wretched France, as he so paid
for the grand _hôtel_ he erected for another niece, Anne Marie
Martinozzi, widow of that Prince de Conti who was Molière's school
friend. On the ground that it covered was built, in 1860-62, the wing
of the Beaux-Arts at Nos. 11 and 13 Quai Malaquais. That school has
also taken possession of the Hôtel de Bouillon of the cardinal's other
niece, almost alongside. It had been the property of the rich and
vulgar money-king Bazinière, whom we shall meet again, and he had sold
it to the Duc de Bouillon. The pretty wife of this very near-sighted
husband had the house re-decorated, and filled it with a marvellous
collection of furniture, paintings, _bric-à-brac_. She filled it,
also, by her open table twice a day, with thick-coming guests, some of
whom were worth knowing. The _hôtel_ came by inheritance in 1823 to M.
de Chimay, who stipulated, in making it over to the Beaux-Arts, in
1885, that its seventeenth-century façade should be preserved, and by
this agreement we have here, at No. 17 Quai Malaquais, an admirable
specimen of the competence of the elder, the great Mansart. It is
higher than he left it, by reason of the wide, sloping roof, with many
skylights toward the north, placed there for the studios within, but
its two well-proportioned wings remain unchanged, and between them the
court, where La Fontaine was wont to sit or stroll, has been laid out
as a garden. While living here he brought out the first collection of
his "Contes" in 1665, and of his "Fables" in 1668. His "Les Amours de
Psyché," written in 1669, begins with a charming description of the
meetings in Boileau's rooms of the famous group of comrades.
From this home he went to the home of Madame de la Sablière, with
whom, about 1672, he had formed a friendship which lasted unbroken
until her death. This tender and steadfast companionship made the
truest happiness of La Fontaine's life. For twenty years an inmate of
her household, a member of her family, he was petted and cared for as
he craved. In her declining years she had to be away from home
attending to her charitable work--for she followed the fashion of
turning _dévote_ as age advanced--and then he suffered in unaccustomed
loneliness. His tongue spoke of her with the same constant admiration
and gratitude that is left on record by his pen, and at her death he
was completely crushed.
When he was invited by Madame de la Sablière and her poet-husband to
share their home, they were living at their country-place, "_La Folie
Rambouillet_," not to be mistaken for the Hôtel de Rambouillet.
Sablière's _hôtel_, built by his father, a wealthy banker, was in the
suburb of Reuilly, on the Bercy road, north of the Seine, not far from
Picpus. The Reuilly station and the freight-houses of the Vincennes
railway now cover the site of this splendid mansion and its extensive
grounds. Here Monsieur de la Sablière died in 1680, and his widow,
taking La Fontaine along, removed to her town-house. This stood on the
ground now occupied by the buildings in Rue Saint-Honoré, nearly
opposite Rue de la Sourdière. In the court of No. 203 are bits of
carving that may have come down from the original mansion. Here they
dwelt untroubled until death took her away in 1693. It is related that
La Fontaine, leaving this house after the funeral, benumbed and
bewildered by the blow, met Monsieur d'Hervart. "I was going," said
that gentleman, "to offer you a home with me." "I was going to ask
it," was the reply. And in this new abode he dwelt until his death,
two years later.
Berthélemy d'Hervart, a man of great wealth, had purchased, in 1657,
the Hôtel de l'Éperon, a mansion erected on the site of Burgundy's
Hôtel de Flandre. M. d'Hervart had enlarged and decorated his new
abode, employing for the interior frescoes the painter Mignard,
Molière's friend. The actor and his troupe had played here, by
invitation, nearly fifty years before La Fontaine's coming. It stood
in old Rue Plâtrière, now widened out, entirely rebuilt, and renamed
Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau; and on the wall of the Central Post-office
that faces that street, you will find a tablet stating that on this
site died Jean de la Fontaine on April 13, 1695.
Madame d'Hervart was a young and lovely woman, and as devoted to the
old poet as had been Madame de la Sablière. She went so far as to try
to regulate his dress, his expenditure, and his morals. Congratulated
one day on the splendor of his coat, La Fontaine found to his surprise
and delight that his hostess had substituted it--when, he had not
noticed--for the shabby old garment that he had been wearing for
years. She and her husband held sacred, always, the room in which La
Fontaine died, showing it to their friends as a place worthy of
reverence.
He was buried in the Cemetery of Saints-Innocents, now all built over
except its very centre, which is kept as a small park about the
attractive fountain of Saints-Innocents. The Patriots of the
Revolution, slaying so briskly their men of birth, paused awhile to
bring from their graves what was left of their men of brains. Misled
by inaccurate rumor, they left La Fontaine's remains in their own
burial-ground, and removed what they believed to be his bones from the
graveyard of Saint-Joseph, where he had not been buried, along with
the bones they believed to be those of Molière, who _had_ been buried
there. These casual and dubious remains were kept in safety in the
convent of Petits-Augustins in present Rue Bonaparte, until, in the
early years of the nineteenth century, they were removed for final
sepulture to Père-Lachaise.
No literary man of his time--perhaps of any time--was so widely known
and so well beloved as La Fontaine. He attracted men, not only the
best in his own guild, but the highest in the State and in affairs.
Men various in character, pursuits, station, were equally attached to
him; the great Condé was glad to receive him as a frequent guest at
Chantilly; the superfine sensualist, Saint-Évremond, in exile in
England, urged him to come to visit him and to meet Waller. He nearly
undertook the journey, less to see Saint-Évremond and to know Waller,
than to follow his Duchesse de Bouillon, visiting her sister, the
Duchess of Mazarin, in her Chelsea home. It was at this time that
Ninon de Lenclos wrote to Saint-Évremond: "You wish La Fontaine in
England. We have little of his company in Paris. His understanding is
much impaired."
Racine, eighteen years his junior, looked up to La Fontaine as a
critic, a counsellor, and a friend, from their early days together in
1660, through long years of intimacy, until he stood beside La
Fontaine's bed in his last illness. He even took an odd pleasure in
finding that he and La Fontaine's deserted country wife had sprung
from the same provincial stock. Molière first met La Fontaine at Vaux,
the more than royal residence of Fouquet, at the time of the royal
visit in 1661. La Fontaine wrote a graceful bit of verse in praise of
the author of "Les Fâcheux," played for the first time before King and
court during these festivities, and the two men, absolutely opposed in
essential qualities, were fast friends from that time on. "They make
fun of the _bonhomme_," said the ungrudging player once, "and our
clever fellows think they can efface him; but he'll efface us all
yet."
It is needless to say that La Fontaine was beloved by Boileau, the
all-loving. That kindly ascetic was moved to attempt the amendment of
his friend's laxity of life, and to this blameless end dragged him to
prayers sometimes, where La Fontaine was bored and would take up any
book at hand to beguile the time. In this way he made acquaintance
with the Apocrypha, and became intensely interested in Baruch, and
asked Boileau if he knew Baruch, and urged him to read Baruch, as a
hitherto undiscovered genius. During his last illness, he told the
attendant priest that he had been reading the New Testament, and that
he regarded it as a good, a very good book.
In truth, his soul was the soul of a child, and, childlike, he lived
in a world of his own--a world peopled with the animals and the plants
and the inanimate objects, made alive by him and almost human. He
loved them all, and painted them with swift, telling strokes of his
facile pen. The acute Taine points out that the brute creations of
this poet are prototypes of every class and every profession of his
country and his time. His dumb favorites attracted him especially by
their unspoiled simplicity, for he loathed the artificial existence of
his fellow-creatures. With "a sullen irony and a desperate
resignation" he let himself be led into society, and he was bored
beyond bearing by its high-heeled decorum. It is said that he
cherished, all his life long, a speechless exasperation with the
King, that incarnation of pomposity and pretence to his untamed Gallic
spirit. Yet this malcontent had to put on the livery of his
fellow-flunkies, and his dedication, to the Dauphin, of his "Fables,"
is as fulsome and servile as any specimen of sycophancy of that
toad-eating age.
Yet, able to make trees and stones talk, he himself could not talk, La
Bruyère tells us; coloring his portraiture strongly, as was his way,
and rendering La Fontaine much too heavy and dull, with none of the
skill in description with his tongue that he had with his pen. He may
be likened to Goldsmith, who "wrote like an angel and talked like poor
Poll." Madame de Sablière said to him: "_Mon bon ami, que vous seriez
bête, si vous n'aviez pas tant d'esprit!_" Louis Racine, owning to the
lovable nature of the man, has to own, too, that he gave poor account
of himself in society, and adds that his sisters, who in their youth
had seen the poet frequently at their father's table in Rue Visconti,
recalled him only as a man untidy in dress and stupid in talk. He gave
this impression mainly because he was forever dreaming, even in
company, and so seemed distant and dull; but, when drawn out of his
dreams, no man could be more animated and more delightful.
[Illustration: La Fontaine.
(From the portrait by Rigaud-y-Ros.)]
So he was found by congenial men, and so especially by approving
women. These took to him on the spot, women of beauty and of wit, and
women commonplace enough. To them all his prattle was captivating,
devoid as it was of the grossness so conspicuous in his poems. He
depended on women in every way all through his life; they catered to
his daily needs, and they provided for his higher wants; they helped
him in his money troubles, they helped him in all his troubles. And he
requited each one's care with a genuine affection, not only at the
time, but for all time, in the record he has left of his gratitude and
his devotion to these ministering women. His verse is an unconscious
chronicle of his loves, his caprices, his inconstancies, and his
loyalties. Nor did a woman need to be clever and cultivated to be
bewitched by his inborn, simple sweetness. A matter-of-fact nurse,
hired to attend him during an illness which came near being fatal,
said to the attending priest: "Surely, God could not have the courage
to damn a man like that."
This memory he has left is brought pleasantly home to the passer-by in
Rue de Grenelle by the sign of a hotel, a quiet clerical house,
frequented by churchmen and church-loving provincials visiting Paris.
The sign bears the name "_Au bon La Fontaine_," in striking proof of
the permanent place in the common heart won by this lovable man.
He was content to drift through life, his days spent, as he put it in
his epitaph on "Jean," one-half in doing nothing, the other half in
sleeping. He had no library or study or workroom, like other
pen-workers; he lived out of doors in the open air, and wandered
vaguely, tasting blameless epicurean delights. Some of us seem to see,
always in going along Cours la Reine, that quaint figure, comical and
pathetic, as he was seen by the Duchesse de Bouillon on a rainy
morning, when she drove to Versailles. He was standing under a tree on
this wooded water-side, and on her return on that rainy evening he was
standing under the same tree. He had dreamed away the long day there,
not knowing or not caring that he was wet. He explained, once when he
came late--inexcusably late--to a dinner, that he had been watching a
procession of ants in a field, and had found that it was a funeral; he
had accompanied the _cortége_ to the grave in the garden, and had then
escorted the bereaved family back to its home, as bound by courtesy.
This genuine poet, of dry, sly humor and of unequalled suppleness of
phrase, was by nature a gentle, wild creature, and by habit a docile,
domesticated pet, attaching himself to any amiable woman who was
willing to give him a warm corner in her heart and her house. And how
such women looked on him was prettily and wittily put by one of them:
"He isn't a man, he is a _fablier_"--a natural product of her own
sudden inspiration--"who blossoms out into fables as a tree blossoms
out with leaves."
* * * * *
NICOLAS BOILEAU began his acquaintance with Molière by his tribute of
four dainty verses to the author of "L'École des Femmes," and the
friendship thus formed was broken only by the death of Molière, to
whose memory Boileau inserted his magnificent lines in the "Epître à
Monsieur Racine." It was Boileau who criticised the early verse of
young Racine, so justly and so gently, that the two men were drawn
together in an amity that was never marred. It was Boileau who, after
nearly forty years of finding him out by the distrustful Racine, was
acknowledged to be "noble and full of friendship." It was Boileau who
sang without cessation praises of Racine to Louis XIV., and who
startled the nimble mediocrity of his majesty's mind by the assertion
that Molière was the rarest genius of the Grand Monarch's reign and
realm. It was Boileau who made, in his fondness for La Fontaine, the
unhappy and hopeless attempt to reform his friend's loose living, and
in so doing nearly led to the undoing of La Fontaine's goodwill for
him. It was Boileau, prompted by compassion for Corneille's
impoverished old age, who offered to surrender his own pension in
favor of the distressed veteran of letters. It was Boileau who found
Patru forced to sell his cherished books that he might get food, and
it was Boileau who bought them, on condition that Patru should keep
them and look after them for their new owner. It was Boileau who tried
to work a miracle in his comrade Chapelle by weaning him from his
wine-bibbing; and when Chapelle found the lecture dry, and would
listen to it only over a bottle or two, it was Boileau who came out of
the _cabaret_ the tipsier of the pair. It was Boileau who was known to
every man who knew him at all--and he was known to many men of merit
and demerit--as a loyal, sincere, helpful, unselfish friend. It was of
Boileau that a perplexed woman in the great throng at his burial said,
in the hearing of young Louis Racine: "He seems to have lots of
friends, and yet somebody told me that he wrote bad things about
everybody."
Those friends could have explained the puzzle. They mourned the
indulgent comrade who was doubled with the stern satirist. The man, so
rigid in morals and austere of life, was tolerant to the foibles of
his friends, tender in their troubles, open-handed for their needs.
The writer, so exacting in his standard and severe in his judgment,
was cruel only with his pen. Trained critic in verse, rather than
inspired poet, Boileau had an enthusiasm for good work in others equal
to his intolerance of bad. He loathed the powdered and perfumed
_minauderies_ of the drawing-room poetasters, and he loved the swift
and sure stroke of Molière's "_rare et fameux esprit_." It was in
frank admiration that he demanded of his friend: "_Enseigne-moi où tu
trouves la rime!_" For this impeccable artist in words, who has left
his profession of faith in the power of a word in its right place, had
to reset and recast, file and polish, to get the perfection he craved.
And so this bountiful admirer was easily an unsparing censor. Sincere
in letters as in life, he insisted on equal sincerity from his
fellow-workers, and would not let them spare their toil or scamp their
stint. He watched and warned them; his reproof and his approval
brought out better work from them; and he may well be entitled the
Police President of Parnassus of his country and his day.