Owing to the intrigues of a lady of fashion, Phedre, when it first appeared, was a complete failure.  An extraordinary change then took place in Racine’s mind.  A revulsion of feeling, the precise causes of which are to this day a mystery, led him suddenly to renounce the world, to retire into the solitude of religious meditation, and to abandon the art which he had practised with such success.  He was not yet forty, his genius was apparently still developing, but his great career was at an end.  Towards the close of his life he produced two more plays—­Esther, a short idyllic piece of great beauty, and Athalie, a tragedy which, so far from showing that his powers had declined during his long retreat, has been pronounced by some critics to be the finest of his works.  He wrote no more for the stage, and he died eight years later, at the age of sixty.  It is difficult to imagine the loss sustained by literature during those twenty years of silence.  They might have given us a dozen tragedies, approaching, or even surpassing, the merit of Phedre.  And Racine must have known this.  One is tempted to see in his mysterious mortification an instance of that strain of disillusionment which runs like a dark thread through the brilliant texture of the literature of the Grand Siecle.  Racine had known to the full the uses of this world, and he had found them flat, stale, and unprofitable; he had found that even the triumphs of his art were all compact of worldliness; and he had turned away, in an agony of renunciation, to lose himself in the vision of the Saints.

The influence and the character of that remarkable age appear nowhere more clearly than in the case of its other great poet—­LA FONTAINE.  In the Middle Ages, La Fontaine would have been a mendicant friar, or a sainted hermit, or a monk, surreptitiously illuminating the margins of his manuscripts with the images of birds and beasts.  In the nineteenth century, one can imagine him drifting among Paris cafes, pouring out his soul in a random lyric or two, and dying before his time.  The age of Louis XIV took this dreamer, this idler, this feckless, fugitive, spiritual creature, kept him alive by means of patrons in high society, and eventually turned him—­not simply into a poet, for he was a poet by nature, but into one of the most subtle, deliberate, patient, and exquisite craftsmen who have ever written in verse.  The process was a long one; La Fontaine was in his fifties when he wrote the greater number of his Fables—­where his genius found its true expression for the first time.  But the process was also complete.  Among all the wonderful and beautiful examples of masterly craftsmanship in the poetry of France, the Fables of La Fontaine stand out as the models of what perfect art should be.