Fenelon promised nothing; he remained, and the foundation of his authority was laid forever in the soul of his pupil.  The young prince did not forget what he was, but he had felt the superiority of his master.  “I leave the Duke of Burgundy behind the door,” he was accustomed to say, “and with you I am only little Louis.”

God, at the same time with Fenelon, had taken possession of the Duke of Burgundy’s soul.  “After his first communion, we saw disappearing little by little all the faults which, in his infancy, caused us great misgivings as to the future,” writes Madame de Maintenon.  “His piety has caused such a metamorphosis that, from the passionate thing he was, he has become self-restrained, gentle, complaisant; one would say that that was his character, and that virtue was natural to him.”  “All his mad fits and spites yielded at the bare name of God,” Fenelon used to say; “one day when he was in a very bad temper, and wanted to hide in his passion what he had done in his disobedience, I pressed him to tell me the truth before God; then he put himself into a great rage and bawled, ’Why ask me before God?  Very well, then, as you ask me in that way, I cannot deny that I committed that fault.’  He was as it were beside himself with excess of rage, and yet religion had such dominion over him that it wrung from him so painful an avowal.”  “From this abyss,” writes the Duke of St. Simon, “came forth a prince affable, gentle, humane, self-restrained, patient, modest, humble, and austere towards himself, wholly devoted to his obligations and feeling them to be immense; he thought of nothing but combining the duties of a son and a subject with those to which he saw himself destined.”

“From this abyss " came forth also a prince singularly well informed, fond of study, with a refined taste in literature, with a passion for science; for his instruction Fenelon made use of the great works composed for his father’s education by Bossuet, adding thereto writings more suitable for his age; for him he composed the Fables and the Dialogues des Morts, and a Histoire de Charlemagne which has perished.  In his stories, even those that were imaginary, he paid attention before everything to truth.  “Better leave a history in all its dryness than enliven it at the expense of truth,” he would say.  The suppleness and richness of his mind sufficed to save him from wearisomeness; the liveliness of his literary impressions communicated itself to his pupil.  “I have seen,” says Fenelon in his letter to the French Academy, “I have seen a young prince, but eight years old, overcome with grief at sight of the peril of little Joash; I have seen him lose patience with the chief priest for concealing from Joash his name and his birth; I have seen him weeping bitterly as he listened to these verses:—­

         ’O! miseram Euridicen anima fugiente vocabat;
          Euridicen toto referebant flumine ripx.’”