Moliere had just composed Le Malade Imaginaire, the last of that succession of blows which he had so often dealt the doctors; he was more ailing than ever; his friends, even his actors themselves pressed him not to have any play.  “What would you have me do?” he replied; “there are fifty poor workmen who have but their day’s pay to live upon; what will they do if we have no play?  I should reproach myself with having neglected to give them bread for one single day, if I could really help it.”  Moliere had a bad voice, a disagreeable hiccough, and harsh inflexions.  “He was, nevertheless,” say his contemporaries, “a comedian from head to foot; he seemed to have several voices, everything about him spoke, and, by a caper, by a smile, by a wink of the eye and a shake of the head, he conveyed more than, the greatest speaker could have done by talking in an hour.”  He played as usual on the 17th of February, 1673; the curtain had risen exactly at four o’clock; Moliere could hardly stand, and he had a fit during the burlesque ceremony (at the end of the play) whilst pronouncing the word Juro.  He was icy-cold when he went back to Baron’s box, who was waiting for him, who saw him home to Rue Richelieu, and who at the same time sent for his wife and two sisters of charity.  When he went up again, with Madame Moliere, into the room, the great comedian was dead.  He was only fifty-one.

[Illustration:  Death of Moliere——­669]

It has been a labor of love to go into some detail over the lives, works, and characters of the great writers during the age of Louis XIV.  They did too much honor to their time and their country, they had too great and too deep an effect in France and in Europe upon the successive developments of the human intellect, to refuse them an important place in the history of that France to whose influence and glory they so powerfully contributed.

Moliere did not belong to the French Academy; his profession had shut the doors against him.  It was nearly a hundred years after his death, in 1778, that the Academy raised to him a bust, beneath which was engraved,

          “O His glory lacks naught, ours did lack him.”

It was by instinct and of its own free choice that the French Academy had refused to elect a comedian:  it had grown, and its liberty had increased under the sway of, Louis XIV.  In 1672, at the death of Chancellor Seguier, who became its protector after Richelieu, “it was so honored that the king was graciously pleased to take upon himself this office:  the body had gone to thank him; his Majesty desired that the dauphin should be witness of what passed on an occasion so honorable to literature; after the speech of M. Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, and the man in France with most inborn talent for speaking, the king, appearing somewhat touched, gave the Academicians very great marks of esteem, inquired the names, one after another, of those whose faces were not familiar