Boileau had more to do with his friend’s reason than he probably knew.  Racine never acted without consulting him.  With Racine, Boileau lost half his life.  He survived him twelve years without ever setting foot again within the court after his first interview with the king.  “I have been at Versailles,” he writes to his publisher, M. Brossette, “where I saw Madame de Maintenon, and afterwards the king, who overcame me with kind words; so, here I am more historiographer than ever.  His Majesty spoke to me of M. Racine in a manner to make courtiers desire death, if they thought he would speak of them in the same way afterwards.  Meanwhile that has been but very small consolation to me for the loss of that illustrious friend, who is none the less dead though regretted by the greatest king in the universe.”  “Remember,” Louis XIV. had said, “that I have always an hour a week to give you when you like to come.”  Boileau did not go again.  “What should I go to court for?” he would say; “I cannot sing praises any more.”

At Racine’s death Boileau did not write any longer.  He had entered the arena of letters at three and twenty, after a sickly and melancholy childhood.  The Art Poetique and the Lutrin appeared in 1674; the first nine Satires and several of the Epistles had preceded them.  Rather a witty, shrewd, and able versifier than a great poet, Boileau displayed in the Lutrin a richness and suppleness of fancy which his other works had not foreshadowed.  The broad and cynical buffoonery of Scarron’s burlesques had always shocked his severe and pure taste.  “Your father was weak enough to read Virgile travesti, and laugh over it,” he would, say to Louis Racine, “but he kept it dark from me.”  In the Lutrin, Boileau sought the gay and the laughable under noble and polished forms; the gay lost by it, the laughable remained stamped with an ineffaceable seal.  “M.  Despreaux,” wrote Racine to his son, “has not only received from heaven a marvellous genius for satire, but he has also, together with that, an excellent judgment, which makes him discern what needs praise and what needs blame.”  This marvellous genius for satire did not spoil Boileau’s natural good feeling.  “He is cruel in verse only,” Madame de Sevigne used to say.  Racine was tart, bitter in discussion; Boileau always preserved his coolness:  his judgments frequently anticipated those of posterity.  The king asked him one day who was the greatest poet of his reign.  “Moliere, sir,” answered Boileau, without hesitation.  “I shouldn’t have thought it, rejoined the king, somewhat astonished; “but you know more about it than I do.”  Moliere, in his turn, defending La Fontaine against the pleasantries of his friends, said to his neighbor at one of those social meals in which the illustrious friends delighted, " Let us not laugh at the good soul (bonhomme) he will probably live longer than the whole of us.”  In the noble and touching brotherhood of these great