La Bruyere had just been admitted into the French Academy, in 1693.  In his admission speech he spoke in praise of the living, Bossuet, Fenelon, Racine, La Fontaine; it was not as yet the practice.  Those who were not praised felt angry, and the journals of the time bitterly attacked the new academician.  He was hurt, and withdrew almost entirely from the world.  Four days before his death, however, “he was in company.  All at once he perceived that he was becoming deaf, yes, stone deaf.  He returned to Versailles, where he had apartments at Conde’s house.  Apoplexy carried him off in a quarter of an hour on the 11th of May, 1696,” leaving behind him an incomparable book, wherein, according to his own maxim, the excellent writer shows himself to be an excellent painter; and four dialogues against Quietism, still unfinished, full of lively and good-humored hostility to the doctrines of Madame Guyon.  They were published after his death.

We pass from prose to poetry, from La Bruyere to Corneille, who had died in 1684, too late for his fame, in spite of the vigorous returns of genius which still flash forth sometimes in his feeblest works.  Throughout the Regency and the Fronde, Corneille had continued to occupy almost alone the great French stage.  Rotrou, his sometime rival with his piece of Venceslas, and ever tenderly attached to him, had died, in 1650, at Dreux, of which he was civil magistrate.  An epidemic was ravaging the town, and he was urged to go away.  “I am the only one who can maintain good order, and I shall remain,” he replied.  “At the moment of my writing to you the bells are tolling for the twenty-second person to-day; perhaps to-morrow it will be for me; but my conscience has marked out my duty.  God’s will be done!” Two days later he was dead.

Corneille had dedicated Polyeucte to the regent Anne of Austria.  He published in a single year Rodogune and the Mort de Pompee, dedicating this latter piece to Mazarin, in gratitude, he said, for an act of generosity with which his Eminence had surprised him.  At the same time he borrowed from the Spanish drama the canvas of the Menteur, the first really French comedy which appeared on the boards, and which Moliere showed that he could appreciate at its proper value.  After this attempt, due perhaps to the desire felt by Corneille to triumph over his rivals in the style in which he had walked abreast with them, he let tragedy resume its legitimate empire over a genius formed by it.  He wrote Heraclius and Nicomede, which are equal in parts to his finest masterpieces.  But by this time the great genius no longer soared with equal flight. Theodore and Pertharite had been failures.  “I don’t mention them,” Corneille would say, “in order to avoid the vexation of remembering them.”  He was still living at Rouen, in a house adjoining that occupied by his brother, Thomas Corneille, younger than he, already known by some comedies which had met with success.  The two brothers had married two sisters.