Nicolas Boileau began his acquaintance with Molière by his tribute of four dainty verses to the author of "L'École des Femmes," and the friendship thus formed was broken only by the death of Molière, to whose memory Boileau inserted his magnificent lines in the "Epître à Monsieur Racine." It was Boileau who criticised the early verse of young Racine, so justly and so gently, that the two men were drawn together in an amity that was never marred. It was Boileau who, after nearly forty years of finding him out by the distrustful Racine, was acknowledged to be "noble and full of friendship." It was Boileau who sang without cessation praises of Racine to Louis XIV., and who startled the nimble mediocrity of his majesty's mind by the assertion that Molière was the rarest genius of the Grand Monarch's reign and realm. It was Boileau who made, in his fondness for La Fontaine, the unhappy and hopeless attempt to reform his friend's loose living, and in so doing nearly led to the undoing of La Fontaine's goodwill for him. It was Boileau, prompted by compassion for Corneille's impoverished old age, who offered to surrender his own pension in favor of the distressed veteran of letters. It was Boileau who found Patru forced to sell his cherished books that he might get food, and it was Boileau who bought them, on condition that Patru should keep them and look after them for their new owner. It was Boileau who tried to work a miracle in his comrade Chapelle by weaning him from his wine-bibbing; and when Chapelle found the lecture dry, and would listen to it only over a bottle or two, it was Boileau who came out of the cabaret the tipsier of the pair. It was Boileau who was known to every man who knew him at all—and he was known to many men of merit and demerit—as a loyal, sincere, helpful, unselfish friend. It was of Boileau that a perplexed woman in the great throng at his burial said, in the hearing of young Louis Racine: "He seems to have lots of friends, and yet somebody told me that he wrote bad things about everybody."
Those friends could have explained the puzzle. They mourned the indulgent comrade who was doubled with the stern satirist. The man, so rigid in morals and austere of life, was tolerant to the foibles of his friends, tender in their troubles, open-handed for their needs. The writer, so exacting in his standard and severe in his judgment, was cruel only with his pen. Trained critic in verse, rather than inspired poet, Boileau had an enthusiasm for good work in others equal to his intolerance of bad. He loathed the powdered and perfumed minauderies of the drawing-room poetasters, and he loved the swift and sure stroke of Molière's "rare et fameux esprit." It was in frank admiration that he demanded of his friend: "Enseigne-moi où tu trouves la rime!" For this impeccable artist in words, who has left his profession of faith in the power of a word in its right place, had to reset and recast, file and polish, to get the perfection he craved. And so this bountiful admirer was easily an unsparing censor. Sincere in letters as in life, he insisted on equal sincerity from his fellow-workers, and would not let them spare their toil or scamp their stint. He watched and warned them; his reproof and his approval brought out better work from them; and he may well be entitled the Police President of Parnassus of his country and his day.
Boileau's sturdy uprightness of spine stood him in good stead in that great court where all men grew sleek and servile, and where no pen-worker seemed able to escape becoming a courtier. His caustic audacity salted his sycophancy and made him a man apart from the herd of flatterers. His thrust was so suave, as well as sharp, that the spoiled monarch himself accepted admonition from that courageous cleverness. "I am having search made in every direction for Monsieur Arnauld," said Louis, when eager in his pursuit of the Jansenists. "Your Majesty is always fortunate; you will not find him," was Boileau's quick retort, received with a smile by the King. When money was needed for Dr. Perrault's new eastern façade of the Louvre and for its other alterations, the King naturally economized in the incomes of other men. The pensions of literary men—in many instances the sole source of their livelihood—were allowed to lapse; that of Boileau was continued by an order that his name should be entered on the Louvre pay-roll as "an architect paid for mason's work." His mordant reply to the questioning pay-clerk was: "Yes, I am a mason." His masonry in the stately fabric of French literature stands unmarred to-day; coldly correct, it may be, yet elegant, faultless, consummate.
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux was long believed to have been born in the country and to have played in the fields as a child, and so to have got his added name des préaux; but it is now made certain that the house of his birth, in 1636, was in Rue de Jérusalem, a street that led to the Sainte-Chapelle, from about the middle of the present Quai des Orfèvres. The only field he knew lay at the foot of his father's garden at Crosne, where the lad was sometimes taken. Fields and gardens had never anything to say to this born cockney, and there is not a sniff of real country air in all his verse. The street of his birth was one of the narrow, dark streets of oldest Paris, on Île de la Cité; and the house, tall and thin, had its gable end on the court of the old Palais de Justice. The earliest air breathed by this baby was charged with satire, it would seem. For the room of his birth had been occupied, nearly half a century earlier, by Jacques Gillot, the brilliant canon of Sainte-Chapelle. In this room assembled in secret that clever band of talkers and writers, who planned and wrote "La Ménippée"; the first really telling piece of French political satire, so telling, in its unbridled buffoonery, that it gave spirit to the arms that shattered the League, and helped to put Henry of Navarre on the throne of France.
After his father's death, young Nicolas kept his home with his elder brother Jérôme, who had succeeded to the paternal mansion, and who gave the boy a sort of watch-tower, built above the garrets, in which he could hardly stand upright. The house, the court, the old palace, were long since swept away, and with them went all the melodramatic stage-setting of Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris" and Sue's "Mystères de Paris." Only the Sainte-Chapelle is left of the scenes of Boileau's early years.
He was sent for a while to Collége d'Harcourt, where young Racine came a little later, and was then put to the study of law, the family trade; passing by way of Beauvais College to the Sorbonne. He is known to have pleaded in but one case, and then with credit to himself. Still the law did not please him, any more than did the dry theology and the pedantic philosophy that he listened to on the benches of the Sorbonne. He was enamoured early of poetry and romance, and soon affianced himself to the Muse. This was his only betrothal, and he made no other marriage. He was born an old bachelor, and he soon sought bachelor quarters, driven by the children's racket from his nephew's house—also in the Cour du Palais—where he had found a home. This nephew and this house were well known to Voltaire when a boy, as he tells us in his "Épître à Boileau":
"Chez ton neveu Dongois je passai mon enfance,
Bon bourgeois, qui se crut un homme d'importance."
It is first in the year 1664 that we can place with certainty Boileau's residence in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, in that small apartment which fills a larger place in the annals of literary life than any domicile of that day, perhaps of any day. It was the gathering-place of that illustrious quartette—
"The goodliest fellowship of famous knights