The Parliament was not disposed to fulfil the formality of enregistration.  The cardinal had compressed it, stifled it, but he had never mastered it; the Academy was a new institution, it was regarded as his work; on that ground it inspired great distrust in the public as well as the magistrates.  “The people, to whom everything that came from this minister looked suspicious, knew not whether beneath these flowers there were not a serpent concealed, and were apprehensive that this establishment was, at the very least, a new prop to support is domination, that it was but a batch of folks in his pay, hired to maintain all that he did and to observe the actions and sentiments of others.  It went about that he cut down scavenging expenses of Paris by eighty thousand livres in order to give them a pension of two thousand livres apiece; the vulgar were so frightened, without attempting to account for their terror, that a tradesman of Paris, who had taken a house that suited him admirably in Rue Cinq Diamants, where the Academy then used to meet at M. Chapelain’s, broke off his bargain on no other ground but that he did not want to be in a street where a ’Cademy of Canspirators (une Cademie e Manopoleurs) met every week.”  The wits, like St. Evremond, in his comedy of the Academistes, turned into ridicule the body which, as it was said, claimed to subject the language of the public to its decisions:—­

               “So I, with hoary head, to’ school
               Must, like a child, go day by day,
               And learn my parts of speech, poor fool, when
               Death is taking speech away!”

said Maynard, who, nevertheless, was one of the forty.

The letters patent for establishment of the French Academy had been sent to the Parliament in 1635; they were not registered until 1637 at the express instance of the cardinal, who wrote to the premier President to assure him that “the foundation of the Academy was useful and necessary to the public, and the purpose of the Academicians was quite different from what it had been possible to make people believe hitherto.”

The decree of verification, when it at length appeared, bore traces of the jealous prejudices of the Parliament.  “They the said assembly and academy,” it ran, “shall not be powered to take cognizance of anything but the ornamentation, embellishment, and augmentation of the French language, and of the books that shall be made by them and by other persons who shall desire it and want it.”

The French Academy was founded; it was already commencing its Dictionary in accordance with the suggestion enunciated by Chapelain at the second meeting; the cardinal was here carrying out that great moral idea of literature which he had expressed but lately in a letter to Balzac:  “The conceptions in your letters,” said he, “are forcible and as far removed from ordinary imaginations as they are in conformity with the common