In 1627, four years after Pascal, and, like him, in a family of the long robe, was born, at Dijon, his only rival in that great art of writing prose which established the superiority of the French language.  At sixteen, Bossuet preached his first sermon in the drawing-room of Madame de Rambouillet, and the great Conde was pleased to attend his theological examinations.  He was already famous at court as a preacher and a polemist when the king gave him the title of Bishop of Condom, almost immediately inviting him to become preceptor to the dauphin.  A difficult and an irksome task for him who had already written for Turenne an exposition of the Catholic faith, and had delivered the funeral orations over Madame Henriette and the Queen of England.  “The king has greatly at heart the dauphin’s education,” wrote Father Lacoue to Colbert; “he regards it as one of his grand state-strokes in respect of the future.”  The dauphin was not devoid of intelligence.  “Monseigneur has plenty of wits,” said Councillor Le Gout de Saint-Seine in his private journal, “but his wits are under a bushel.”  The boy was indolent, with little inclination for work, roughly treated by his governor, the Duke of Montausier, who was endowed with more virtue than ability in the superintendence of a prince’s education.  “O,” cried Monseigneur, when official announcement was made to him of the project of marriage which the king was conducting for him with the Princess Christine of Bavaria, “we shall see whether M. Huet (afterwards bishop of Avranches) will want to make me learn ancient geography any more!” Bossuet had better understood what ought to be the aim of a king’s education.  “Remember, Monseigneur,” he constantly repeated to him, “that destined as you are to reign some day over this great kingdom, you are bound to make it happy.”  He was in despair at his pupil’s inattention.  “There is a great deal to endure with a mind so destitute of application,” he wrote to Marshal Bellefonds; “there is no perceptible relief, and we go on, as St. Paul says, hoping against hope.”  He had written a little treatise on inattention, De Incogitantia,—­in the vain hope of thus rousing his pupil to work.  “I dread nothing in the world so much,” Louis XIV would say, “as to have a sluggard (faineant) dauphin; I would much prefer to have no son at all!” Bossuet foresaw the innumerable obstacles in the way of his labors.  “I perceive, as I think,” he wrote to his friends, “in the dauphin the beginnings of great graces, a simplicity, a straightforwardness, a principle of goodness, an attention, amidst all his flightiness, to the mysteries, a something or other which comes with a flash, in the middle of his distractions, to call him back to God.  You would be charmed if I were to tell you the questions he puts to me, and the desire he shows to be a good servant of God.  But the world! the world! the world! pleasures, evil counsels, evil examples!  Save us, Lord! save us!  Thou didst verily preserve the children from the furnace, but Thou didst send Thine angel; and, as for me, alas! what am I?  Humility, trepidation, absorption into one’s own nothingness!”