It was not for Bossuet that the honor was reserved of succeeding in the difficult task of a royal education.  Fenelon encountered in the Duke of Burgundy a more undisciplined nature, a more violent character, and more dangerous tendencies than Bossuet had to fight against in the grand-dauphin; but there was a richer mind and a warmer heart; the preceptor, too, was more proper for the work.  Bossuet, nevertheless, labored conscientiously to instruct his little prince, studying for him and with him the classical authors, preparing grammatical expositions, and, lastly, writing for his edification the Traite de la Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-mime (Treatise on the Knowledge of God and of Self), the Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle (Discourse on Universal History), and the Politique tiree de l’Ecriture Sainte (Polity derived from Holy Writ).  The labor was in vain; the very loftiness of his genius, the extent and profundity of his views, rendered Bossuet unfit to get at the heart and mind of a boy who was timid, idle, and kept in fear by the king as well as by his governor.  The dauphin was nineteen when his marriage restored Bossuet to the church and to the world; the king appointed him almoner to the dauphiness, and, before long, Bishop of Meaux.

Neither the assembly of the clergy and the part he played therein, nor his frequent preachings at court, diverted Bossuet from his duties as bishop; he habitually resided at Meaux, in the midst of his priests.  The greater number of his sermons, written at first in fragments, collected from memory in their aggregate, and repeated frequently with divergences in wording and development, were preached in the cathedral of Meaux.  The dauphin sometimes went thither to see him.  “Pray, sir,” he had said to him, in his childhood, “take great care of me whilst I am little; I will of you when I am big.”  Assured of his righteousness as a priest and his fine tact as a man, the king appealed to Bossuet in the delicate conjunctures of his life.  It is related that it was the Bishop of Meaux who dissuaded him from making public his marriage with Madame de Maintenon.  She, more anxious for power than splendor, did not bear him any ill-will for it; amidst the various leanings of the court, divided as it was between Jansenism and Quietism, it was to the simple teaching of the Catholic church, represented by Bossuet, that she remained practically attached.  Right-minded and strong-minded, but a little cold-hearted, Madame de Maintenon could not suffer herself to be led away by the sublime excesses of the Jansenists or the pious reveries of Madame Guyon; the Jesuits had influence over her, without her being a slave to them; and that influence increased after the death of Bossuet.  The guidance of the Bishop of Meaux, in fact, answered the requirements of spirits that were pious and earnest without enthusiasm:  less ardent in faith and less absolute in religious practice than M. de St. Cyran and Port-Royal, less