He did not entirely desert his country home, for the duchess carried him along on her autumnal visits to Château-Thierry. He took advantage of each chance thus given him to realize something upon his patrimony, that he might meet the always pressing claims on his always overspent income.
He writes to Racine during one of these visits, in 1686: "My affairs occupy me as much as they're worth it, and that's not at all; and the leisure I thus get is given to laziness." He almost anticipated in regard to himself the racy saying of the Oxford don of our day of another professor: "Such time as he can save from the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties." But La Fontaine neglected not only his duties all through life, but, more than all else, did he neglect the care of his dress. A portion of the income he was always anticipating came from his salary at one time, as gentleman in the suite of the dowager Duchesse d'Orléans, that post giving him quarters in the Luxembourg. These quarters and his salary went from him with her death. For several years after coming to town with the Duchesse de Bouillon he had a home in the duke's town-house on Quai Malaquais.
This quay had been built upon the river-front soon after the death, in 1615, of Marguerite de Valois, Henri IV.'s divorced wife. The streets leading from Quais Malaquais and Voltaire, and those behind, parallel with the quays, were cut through her grounds and through the fields farther west. This was the beginning of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. To save the long detour, to and from the new suburb, around by way of Pont-Neuf, a wooden bridge was built in 1632 along the line of the ferry, that had hitherto served for traffic between the shore in front of the Louvre and the southern shore, at the end of the road that is now Rue du Bac. The Pont Royal has replaced that wooden bridge. One of the buildings that began this river-front remains unmutilated at the corner of Quai Malaquais and Rue de Seine, and is characteristic of the architecture of that period in its walls and roofs and windows clustering about the court. It was the many years' dwelling of the elder Visconti, and his death-place in 1818. The house at No. 3 was erected early in the nineteenth century, on the site of Buzot's residence, as shall be told in a later chapter. In it Humboldt lived from 1815 to 1818. The associations of No. 5 have already been suggested. The largest builder on the quay was Cardinal Mazarin, whose college, to which he gave his own name, and to which the public gave the name Collége des Quatre-Nations, is now the Palais de l'Institut. He paid for it with money wrung from wretched France, as he so paid for the grand hôtel he erected for another niece, Anne Marie Martinozzi, widow of that Prince de Conti who was Molière's school friend. On the ground that it covered was built, in 1860-62, the wing of the Beaux-Arts at Nos. 11 and 13 Quai Malaquais. That school has also taken possession of the Hôtel de Bouillon of the cardinal's other niece, almost alongside. It had been the property of the rich and vulgar money-king Bazinière, whom we shall meet again, and he had sold it to the Duc de Bouillon. The pretty wife of this very near-sighted husband had the house re-decorated, and filled it with a marvellous collection of furniture, paintings, bric-à-brac. She filled it, also, by her open table twice a day, with thick-coming guests, some of whom were worth knowing. The hôtel came by inheritance in 1823 to M. de Chimay, who stipulated, in making it over to the Beaux-Arts, in 1885, that its seventeenth-century façade should be preserved, and by this agreement we have here, at No. 17 Quai Malaquais, an admirable specimen of the competence of the elder, the great Mansart. It is higher than he left it, by reason of the wide, sloping roof, with many skylights toward the north, placed there for the studios within, but its two well-proportioned wings remain unchanged, and between them the court, where La Fontaine was wont to sit or stroll, has been laid out as a garden. While living here he brought out the first collection of his "Contes" in 1665, and of his "Fables" in 1668. His "Les Amours de Psyché," written in 1669, begins with a charming description of the meetings in Boileau's rooms of the famous group of comrades.
From this home he went to the home of Madame de la Sablière, with whom, about 1672, he had formed a friendship which lasted unbroken until her death. This tender and steadfast companionship made the truest happiness of La Fontaine's life. For twenty years an inmate of her household, a member of her family, he was petted and cared for as he craved. In her declining years she had to be away from home attending to her charitable work—for she followed the fashion of turning dévote as age advanced—and then he suffered in unaccustomed loneliness. His tongue spoke of her with the same constant admiration and gratitude that is left on record by his pen, and at her death he was completely crushed.
When he was invited by Madame de la Sablière and her poet-husband to share their home, they were living at their country-place, "La Folie Rambouillet," not to be mistaken for the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Sablière's hôtel, built by his father, a wealthy banker, was in the suburb of Reuilly, on the Bercy road, north of the Seine, not far from Picpus. The Reuilly station and the freight-houses of the Vincennes railway now cover the site of this splendid mansion and its extensive grounds. Here Monsieur de la Sablière died in 1680, and his widow, taking La Fontaine along, removed to her town-house. This stood on the ground now occupied by the buildings in Rue Saint-Honoré, nearly opposite Rue de la Sourdière. In the court of No. 203 are bits of carving that may have come down from the original mansion. Here they dwelt untroubled until death took her away in 1693. It is related that La Fontaine, leaving this house after the funeral, benumbed and bewildered by the blow, met Monsieur d'Hervart. "I was going," said that gentleman, "to offer you a home with me." "I was going to ask it," was the reply. And in this new abode he dwelt until his death, two years later.
Berthélemy d'Hervart, a man of great wealth, had purchased, in 1657, the Hôtel de l'Éperon, a mansion erected on the site of Burgundy's Hôtel de Flandre. M. d'Hervart had enlarged and decorated his new abode, employing for the interior frescoes the painter Mignard, Molière's friend. The actor and his troupe had played here, by invitation, nearly fifty years before La Fontaine's coming. It stood in old Rue Plâtrière, now widened out, entirely rebuilt, and renamed Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau; and on the wall of the Central Post-office that faces that street, you will find a tablet stating that on this site died Jean de la Fontaine on April 13, 1695.
Madame d'Hervart was a young and lovely woman, and as devoted to the old poet as had been Madame de la Sablière. She went so far as to try to regulate his dress, his expenditure, and his morals. Congratulated one day on the splendor of his coat, La Fontaine found to his surprise and delight that his hostess had substituted it—when, he had not noticed—for the shabby old garment that he had been wearing for years. She and her husband held sacred, always, the room in which La Fontaine died, showing it to their friends as a place worthy of reverence.
He was buried in the Cemetery of Saints-Innocents, now all built over except its very centre, which is kept as a small park about the attractive fountain of Saints-Innocents. The Patriots of the Revolution, slaying so briskly their men of birth, paused awhile to bring from their graves what was left of their men of brains. Misled by inaccurate rumor, they left La Fontaine's remains in their own burial-ground, and removed what they believed to be his bones from the graveyard of Saint-Joseph, where he had not been buried, along with the bones they believed to be those of Molière, who had been buried there. These casual and dubious remains were kept in safety in the convent of Petits-Augustins in present Rue Bonaparte, until, in the early years of the nineteenth century, they were removed for final sepulture to Père-Lachaise.
No literary man of his time—perhaps of any time—was so widely known and so well beloved as La Fontaine. He attracted men, not only the best in his own guild, but the highest in the State and in affairs. Men various in character, pursuits, station, were equally attached to him; the great Condé was glad to receive him as a frequent guest at Chantilly; the superfine sensualist, Saint-Évremond, in exile in England, urged him to come to visit him and to meet Waller. He nearly undertook the journey, less to see Saint-Évremond and to know Waller, than to follow his Duchesse de Bouillon, visiting her sister, the Duchess of Mazarin, in her Chelsea home. It was at this time that Ninon de Lenclos wrote to Saint-Évremond: "You wish La Fontaine in England. We have little of his company in Paris. His understanding is much impaired."
Racine, eighteen years his junior, looked up to La Fontaine as a critic, a counsellor, and a friend, from their early days together in 1660, through long years of intimacy, until he stood beside La Fontaine's bed in his last illness. He even took an odd pleasure in finding that he and La Fontaine's deserted country wife had sprung from the same provincial stock. Molière first met La Fontaine at Vaux, the more than royal residence of Fouquet, at the time of the royal visit in 1661. La Fontaine wrote a graceful bit of verse in praise of the author of "Les Fâcheux," played for the first time before King and court during these festivities, and the two men, absolutely opposed in essential qualities, were fast friends from that time on. "They make fun of the bonhomme," said the ungrudging player once, "and our clever fellows think they can efface him; but he'll efface us all yet."