de Maintenon, ‘beaucoup d’esprit, et peu de savoir;’ an expressive phrase.  ‘He was,’ she adds, ’pliant in nature, intriguing, and cautious;’ nevertheless she never, she declares, possessed a more steady friend, nor one more confiding and better adapted to advise.  Brave as he was, he held personal valour, or affected to do so, in light estimation.  His ambition was to rule others.  Lively in conversation, though naturally pensive, he assembled around him all that Paris or Versailles could present of wit and intellect.

The old Hotel de Rochefoucault, in the Rue de Seine, in the Faubourg St. Germain, in Paris, still grandly recalls the assemblies in which Racine, Boileau, Madame de Sevigne, the La Fayettes, and the famous Duchesse de Longueville, used to assemble.  The time honoured family of De la Rochefoucault still preside there; though one of its fairest ornaments, the young, lovely, and pious Duchesse de la Rochefoucault of our time, died in 1852—­one of the first known victims to diphtheria in France, in that unchanged old locality.  There, when the De Longuevilles, the Mazarins, and those who had formed the famous council of state of Anne of Austria had disappeared, the poets and wits who gave to the age of Louis XIV. its true brilliancy, collected around the Duc de la Rochefoucault.  What a scene it must have been in those days, as Buffon said of the earth in spring ‘tout four-mille de vie!’ Let us people the salon of the Hotel de Rochefoucault with visions of the past; see the host there, in his chair, a martyr to the gout, which he bore with all the cheerfulness of a Frenchman, and picture to ourselves the great men who were handing him his cushion, or standing near his fauteuil.

Racine’s joyous face may be imagined as he comes in fresh from the College of Harcourt.  Since he was born in 1639, he had not arrived at his zenith till La Rochefoucault was almost past his prime.  For a man at thirty-six in France can no longer talk prospectively of the departure of youth; it is gone.  A single man of thirty, even in Paris, is ’un vieux garcon:’  life begins too soon and ends too soon with those pleasant sinners, the French.  And Racine, when he was first routed out of Port Royal, where he was educated, and presented to the whole Faubourg St. Germain, beheld his patron, La Rochefoucault, in the position of a disappointed man.  An early adventure of his youth had humbled, perhaps, the host of the Hotel de Rochefoucault.  At the battle of St. Antoine, where he had distinguished himself, ’a musket-ball had nearly deprived him of sight.  On this occasion he had quoted these lines, taken from the tragedy of ‘Alcyonnee.’  It must, however, be premised that the famous Duchess de Longueville had urged him to engage in the wars of the Fronde.  To her these lines were addressed:—­

    ’Pour meriter son coeur, pour plaire a ses beaux yeux,
     J’ai fait la guerre aux Rois, je l’aurais faite aux dieux.’