Athalie had not the same brilliant success as Esther.  The devotees and the envious had affrighted Madame de Maintenon, who had requested Racine to write it.  The young ladies of St. Cyr, in the uniform of the house, played the piece quite simply at Versailles before Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon, in a room without a stage.  When the players gave a representation of it at Paris, it was considered heavy; it did not, succeed.  Racine imagined that he was doomed to another failure like that of Phedre, which he preferred before all his other pieces.  “I am a pretty good judge,” Boileau kept repeating to him:  “it is about the best you have done; the public will come round to it.”  Racine died before success was achieved by the only perfect piece which the French stage possesses,—­worthy both of the subject and of the sources whence Racine drew his inspiration.  He had, with an excess of scrupulousness, abandoned the display of all the fire that burned within him; but beauty never ceased to rouse him to irresistible enthusiasm.  Whilst reading the Psalms to M. de Seignelay, when lying ill, he could not refrain from paraphrasing them aloud.  He admired Sophocles so much that he never dared touch the subjects of his tragedies.  “One day,” says M. de Valicour, “when he was at Auteuil, at Boileau’s, with M. Nicole and some distinguished friends, he took up a Sophocles in Greek, and read the tragedy of OEdipus, translating it as he went.  He read so feelingly that all his auditors experienced the sensations of terror and pity with which this piece abounds.  I have seen our best pieces played by our best actors, but nothing ever came near the commotion into which I was thrown by this reading, and, at this moment of writing, I fancy I still see Racine, book in hand, and all of us awe-stricken around him.”  Thus it was that, whilst repeating, but a short time before, the verses of Mithridate, as he was walking in the Tuileries, he had seen the workmen leaving their work and coming up to him, convinced as they were that he was mad, and was going to throw himself into the basin.

Racine for a long while enjoyed the favors of the king, who went so far as to tolerate the attachment the poet had always testified towards Port-Royal.  Racine, moreover, showed tact in humoring the susceptibilities of Louis XIV. and his counsellors.  “Father Bonhours and Father Rapin (Jesuits) were in my study when I received your letter,” he writes to Boileau.  “I read it to them, on breaking the seal, and I gave them very great pleasure.  I kept looking ahead, however, as I was reading, in case there was anything too Jansenistical in it.  I saw, towards the end, the name of M. Nicole, and I skipped boldly, or, rather, mean-spiritedly, over it.  I dared not expose myself to the chance of interfering with the great delight, and even shouts of laughter, caused them by many very amusing things you sent me.  They are both of them, I assure you, very friendly towards you, and indeed very good fellows.”