(1636-1711)

The name of Louis XIV. suggests ultra-lavishness in life and taste; a time when French society, surfeited with pleasure, demanded a stimulus of continual novelty in current literature.  The natural result was preciosite, hyperbole, falsetto sentiment, which ranked the unusual above the natural, clever conceit above careful workmanship.  It was tainted with artificiality, and now seems mawkish and superficial.

But Boileau changed all that.  Perhaps no author unendowed with genius has ever so influenced literature,

[Illustration:  BOILEAU]

Aside from his work, the man and his life seem essentially commonplace.  Nicholas Boileau, who, adding another name to his own,—­quite a fashion then,—­was usually called Despreaux by his contemporaries, was born in Paris, in the palace court, nearly opposite the royal Sainte Chapelle.  He rarely went farther from the city than to the little house at Auteuil, where he spent twenty summers.  So he knew his Paris very intimately, and was limited too by knowing only her life and thought.  To his repressed youth, guarded by a strict father and a cross servant,—­for his mother died in his babyhood,—­is sometimes attributed his lack of emotional quality.  But his was not an intense nature, and probably no training could have made the didactic poet lyric or passionate.  Sincerity and common-sense were his predominating qualities, and he had the rare faculty of obedience to his own instincts.  He first studied for the priesthood, but anything like mysticism was too repellent to his matter-of-fact mind.  Then, as many of his family had been lawyers, he naturally turned toward that career.  But the practice as taught him seemed senseless and arbitrary.  Its rational basis upon a logical theory only dawned upon him later.  In spite of his literary tastes, there was something extremely mundane about the pleasure-loving bachelor, so fond of good eating and of jovial cafe revels with Racine, Furetiere, Ninon de L’Enclos, and other witty Bohemians.  With them he was much happier than in the more fastidious society of the Hotel Rambouillet, from which he retired after reading aloud a satiric poem not favorably received.  Neither was he happy at court, in spite of the favor of Louis XIV., who, entertained by his rough honesty, gave him a pension of two thousand francs.  Later, when appointed with Racine to write a history of the reign,—­that unfortunate history which was accidentally burned,—­we find him an unwilling follower on royal expeditions, his ungainly horsemanship the mock of high-bred courtiers.  In fact, he was bourgeois through and through, and not at ease with the aristocrats.  He was thrifty bourgeois too; so often called miserly as well as malicious that it is pleasant to remember certain illustrations of his nobler side.  The man who offered to resign his own pension if that of old disfavored Corneille might be continued, and when the latter was forced to sell his library, paid him its full value and then left him in lifelong possession,—­was generous if he did love to save sous.  His was a fine independence, which felt his art too lofty for purchase, and would accept nothing from the booksellers.