to him, and said aside to M. Colbert, who was there in his capacity of simple Academician, ’You will let me know what I must do for these gentlemen.’  Perhaps M. Colbert, that minister who was so zealous for the fine arts, never received an order more in conformity with his own inclinations.”  From that time, the French Academy held its sittings at the Louvre, and, as regarded complimentary addresses to the king on state occasions, it took rank with the sovereign bodies.

For thirty-five years the Academy had been working at its Dictionnaire.  From the first, the work had appeared interminable:—­

          “These six years past they toil at letter F,
          And I’d be much obliged if Destiny
          would whisper to me, Thou shalt live to G,—­

wrote Bois-Robert to Balzac.  The Academy had intrusted Vaugelas with the preparatory labor.  “It was,” says Pellisson, “the only way of coming quickly to an end.”  A pension, which he had, not been paid for a long time past was revived in his favor.  Vaugelas took his plan to Cardinal Richelieu.  “Well, sir,” said the minister, smiling with a somewhat contemptuous air of kindness, “you will not forget the word pension in this Dictionary.”  “No, Monsignor,” replied M. de Vaugelas, with a profound bow, “and still less reconnaissance (gratitude).”  Vaugelas had finished the first volume of his Remarques sur la Langue Francaise, which has ever since reniained the basis of all works on grammar.  “He had imported into the body of the work a something or other so estimable (d’honnete homme), and so much frankness, that one could scarcely help loving its author.”  He was working at the second volume when he died, in 1649, so poor that his creditors seized his papers, making it very difficult for the Academy to recover his Memoires.  The Dictionary, having lost its principal author, went on so slowly that Colbert, curious to know whether the Academicians honestly earned their modest medals for attendance (jetons de presence) which he had assigned to them, came one day unexpectedly to a sitting:  he was present at the whole discussion, “after which, having seen the attention and care which the Academy was bestowing upon the composition of its Dictionary, he said, as he rose, that he was convinced that it could not get on any faster, and his evidence ought to be of so much the more weight in that never man in his position was more laborious or more diligent.”

The Academicians who were men of letters worked at the Dictionary; the Academicians who were men of fashion had become pretty numerous; Arnauld d’Andilly and M. de Lamoignon, whom the body had honored by election, declined to join, and the Academy resolved to never elect anybody without a previously expressed desire and request.  At the time when M. de Lamoignon declined, the kin, fearing that it might bring the Academy into some disfavor, procured the appointment,