“Sweet thought! that doth this month or two avail
          To somewhat soothe my Muse’s anxious care. 
          For certain minds at certain stories rail,
          Certain poor jests, which nought but trifles are. 
          If I with deference their lessons hail,
          What would they more?  Be you more prone to spare,
          More kind than they; less sheathed in rigorous mail;
          Prince, in a word, your real self declare
          A happy consummation cannot fail.”

The election of Boileau to the Academy appeased the king’s humor, who preferred the other’s intellect to that of La Fontaine.  “The choice you have made of M. Despreaux is very gratifying to me,” he said to the board of the Academy:  “it will be approved of by everybody.  You can admit La Fontaine at once; he has promised to be good.”  It was a rash promise, which the poet did not always keep.

The friends, of La Fontaine had but lately wanted to reconcile him to his wife.  They had with that view sent him to Chateau-Thierry; he returned without having seen her whom he went to visit.  “My wife was not at home,” said he; “she had gone to the sacrament (au salut).”  He was becoming old.  Those same faithful friends—­Racine, Boileau, and Maucroix —­were trying to bring him home to God.  Racine took him to church with him; a Testament was given him.  “That is a very good book,” said he; “I assure you it is a very good book.”  Then all at once addressing Abbe Boileau, “Doctor, do you think that St. Augustin was as clever as Rabelais?” He was ill, however, and began to turn towards eternity his dreamy and erratic thoughts.  He had set about composing pious hymns.  “The best of thy friends has not a fortnight to live,” he wrote to Maucroix; “for two months I have not been out, unless to go to the Academy for amusement.  Yesterday, as I was returning, I was seized in the middle of Rue du Chantre with a fit of such great weakness that I really thought I was dying.  O, my dear friend, to die is nothing; but thinkest thou that I am about to appear before God?  Thou knowest how I have lived.  Before thou hast this letter, the gates of eternity will, perchance, be opened for me.”  “He is as simple as a child,” said the woman who took care of him in his last illness; “if he has done amiss, it was from ignorance rather than wickedness.”  A charming and a curious being, serious and simple, profound and childlike, winning by reason of his very vagaries, his good-natured originality, his helplessness in common life, La Fontaine knew how to estimate the literary merits as well as the moral qualities of his illustrious friends.  “When they happened to be together,” says he, in his tale of Psyche, “and had talked to their heart’s content of their diversions, if they chanced to stumble upon any point of science or literature, they profited by the occasion, without, however, lingering too long over one and the same subject,