To this same "laborieux valet," to this same
"Antoine, gouverneur de mon jardin d'Auteuil,"
Boileau wrote his letter in verse in 1695. The widow Racine came, too, for frequent outings with her children, who loved the garden and adored Boileau, for the peaches he picked for them and the ninepins he played with them. Louis Racine, a sort of pupil of his, says that the old poet was nearly as skilful at this game as in versifying, and usually knocked over the entire nine with one ball. And when he went to town, no warmer welcome met the crusty old bachelor than in Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, still the dwelling-place of Racine's family.
In great mansions, too, he had long been cordially received. He was a visitor at that of Madame de Guénégaud, which has given its site to the Hôtel de la Monnaie, and its name to the street alongside. He was fond of meeting kindred spirits and kindly hosts in the hôtel of the great Condé and his younger brother Conti. He was one of the select set that sat about the table of Lamoignon, every Monday, at his home in the Marais, to be visited by us later. And whenever old Cardinal Retz came to town, Boileau hastened to the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, of which no stone stands in the street of its name. Here the white-headed, worn-out old fighter, compelled to live in retirement, after the storms and scandals of his active life, was made at home by his admirable niece, Madame de Lesdiguières, and here he was encircled by admiring men and women. Here, writes Madame de Sévigné, his other niece, who came often to sit with him, Boileau presented to Retz early copies of "Le Lutrin," and of "L'Ars Poétique."
Boileau could not live in the country in winter, and even in summer he had to go often into town to get the care of his trusted physician. For he was an invalid from boyhood, and all his life an uncomplaining sufferer. But he hurried back, whenever permitted, to the pure air and the congenial solitude of his small cottage, where three faithful servants cared for him; not as would have cared the wife, whom he ought to have had, all his friends said, and so, too, he thought sometimes. He grew lonely as life lengthened, and as he saw his cronies passing away, fast and faster, old Corneille being the last of them to go.
His winters in the great city were spent in lodgings on the island, in the cloisters of Notre-Dame. Their quiet had always attracted him, as he avows in the verse that quivers with his nervous irritability, caused by the noises of the noisiest of towns. He cries, "Does one go to bed to be kept awake?" Indeed, he had rooms in the cloisters as early as 1683, keeping them for town quarters, in the official residence of l'Abbé de Dreux, his old friend, a canon of Notre-Dame. To this address Racine sent him a letter as late as 1687. The ecclesiastical settlement within the cathedral cloisters, and its only remaining cottage, have been spoken of in an earlier chapter. The cloisters themselves survive only in the name of the street that has been cut through their former site.
In 1699 we find Boileau living with his confessor, the Abbé Lenoir, also a canon of the cathedral, who had the privilege of residing within the cloisters. This house stood exactly where now is the southern edge of the fountain behind Notre-Dame, above Le Terrain and the Seine. His rooms were on the first floor, his bed in an alcove, and his windows looked out on the terrace over the river, as we learn by the amiable accuracy of the lawyer who drew up his will. Here Boileau lived through painful years of breaking bodily health, but with unbroken faculties. He yearned for his old home at Auteuil, and yet he was too feeble to go so far. He had sold his cottage to a friend, under the condition that a room should be reserved always for his use. That use never came. One day toward the end, he summoned up strength to drive to the beloved place; but all was changed, he changed most of all, and he hurried home to his lonely quarters, where death found him at ten o'clock in the morning of March 2, 1711.
His devoted servants were requited for years of faithful service by handsome legacies, then the relatives were provided for, and no friend was forgotten. The remainder of his fortune went to the "pauvres honteux" of six small parishes in the City. A vast and reverent concourse of mourners of every rank followed his coffin to its first resting-place. This was in the lower chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle, as he had ordered; the church of his baptism, and of the burial of his mother and father. By a strange chance, his grave had been dug under that very reading-desk which had suggested to him the subject of his most striking production, the heroic-comic poem "Le Lutrin." Early in the Revolution his remains were removed, to save them from fortuitous profanation by the "Patriots," to the Museum of French Monuments established in the convent of the Petits-Augustins, in the street of that name, now Rue Bonaparte. In 1819 his bones were finally placed in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where, in the chapel of Saint-Peter and Saint-Paul, they are at rest behind a black marble tablet carved with a ponderous Latin inscription.