“Their houses twain were made in one;
               With keys and purse the same was done;
               Their wives can never have been two. 
               Their wishes tallied at all times;
               No games distinct their children’ knew;
               The fathers lent each other rhymes;
               Same wine for both the drawers drew.” —­[Ducis.]

It is said, that when Peter Corneille was puizled to end a verse he would undo a trap that opened into his brother’s room, shouting, “Sans-souci, a rhyme!”

Corneille had announced his renunciation of the stage; he was translating into verse the Imitation of Christ.  “It were better,” he had written in his preface to Pertharite, “that I took leave myself instead of waiting till it is taken of me altogether; it is quite right that after twenty years’ work I should begin to perceive that I am becoming too old to be still in the fashion.  This resolution is not so strong but that it may be broken; there is every, appearance, however, of my abiding by it.”

Fouquet was then in his glory, “no less superintendent of literature than of finance,” and he undertook to recall to the stage the genius of Corneille.  At his voice, the poet and the tragedian rose up at a single bound.

         “I feel the selfsame fire, the selfsame nerve I feel,
          That roused th’ indignant Cid, drove home Iloratius’ steel;
          As cunning as of yore this hand of mine I find,
          That sketched great Pompey’s soul, depicted Cinna’s mind,”—­

wrote Corneille in his thanks to Fouquet.  He had some months before said to Mdlle. du Pare, who was an actress in Moliere’s company, which had come to Rouen, and who was, from her grand airs, nicknamed by the others the Marchioness,

“Marchioness,” if Age hath set
On my brow his ugly die;
At my years, pray don’t forget,
You will be as—­old as I.

               “Yet do I possess of charms
               One or two, so slow to fade,
               That I feel but scant alarms
               At the havoc Time hath made.

               “You have such as men adore,
               But these that you scorn to-day
               May, perchance, be to the fore
               When your own are worn away.

               “These can from decay reprieve
               Eyes I take a fancy to;
               Make a thousand, years believe
               Whatsoe’er I please of you.

               “With that new, that coming race,
               Who will take my word for it,
               All the warrant for your face
               Will be what I may have writ.”

Corneille reappeared upon the boards with a tragedy called OEdipe, more admired by his contemporaries than by posterity.  On the occasion of Louis XIV.’s marriage he wrote for the king’s comedians the Toison d’or, and put into the mouth of France those prophetic words:—­