He was not mistaken: on the 21st of April, 1699, the great poet, the scrupulous Christian, the noble and delicate painter of the purest passions of the soul, expired at Paris, at fifty-nine years of age; leaving life without regret, spite of all the successes with which he had been crowned. Unlike Corneille with the Cid, he did not take tragedy and glory by assault, he conquered them both by degrees, raising himself at each new effort, and gaining over, little by little, the most passionate admirers of his great rival. At the pinnacle of this reputation and this victory, at thirty-eight years of age, he had voluntarily shut the door against the intoxications and pride of success; he had mutilated his life, buried his genius in penitence, obeying simply the calls of his conscience, and, with singular moderation in the very midst of exaggeration, becoming a father of a family and remaining a courtier, at the same time that he gave up the stage and glory. Racine was gentle and sensible even in his repentance and his sacrifices. Boileau gave religion the credit for this very moderation. “Reason commonly brings others to faith; it was faith which brought M. Racine to reason.”

Boileau had more to do with his friend’s reason than he probably knew. Racine never acted without consulting him. With Racine, Boileau lost half his life. He survived him twelve years without ever setting foot again within the court after his first interview with the king. “I have been at Versailles,” he writes to his publisher, M. Brossette, “where I saw Madame de Maintenon, and afterwards the king, who overcame me with kind words; so, here I am more historiographer than ever. His Majesty spoke to me of M. Racine in a manner to make courtiers desire death, if they thought he would speak of them in the same way afterwards. Meanwhile that has been but very small consolation to me for the loss of that illustrious friend, who is none the less dead though regretted by the greatest king in the universe.” “Remember,” Louis XIV. had said, “that I have always an hour a week to give you when you like to come.” Boileau did not go again. “What should I go to court for?” he would say; “I cannot sing praises any more.”

At Racine’s death Boileau did not write any longer. He had entered the arena of letters at three and twenty, after a sickly and melancholy childhood. The Art Poetique and the Lutrin appeared in 1674; the first nine Satires and several of the Epistles had preceded them. Rather a witty, shrewd, and able versifier than a great poet, Boileau displayed in the Lutrin a richness and suppleness of fancy which his other works had not foreshadowed. The broad and cynical buffoonery of Scarron’s burlesques had always shocked his severe and pure taste. “Your father was weak enough to read Virgile travesti, and laugh over it,” he would, say to Louis Racine, “but he kept it dark from me.” In the Lutrin, Boileau sought the gay and the laughable under noble and polished forms; the gay lost by it, the laughable remained stamped with an ineffaceable seal. “M. Despreaux,” wrote Racine to his son, “has not only received from heaven a marvellous genius for satire, but he has also, together with that, an excellent judgment, which makes him discern what needs praise and what needs blame.” This marvellous genius for satire did not spoil Boileau’s natural good feeling. “He is cruel in verse only,” Madame de Sevigne used to say. Racine was tart, bitter in discussion; Boileau always preserved his coolness: his judgments frequently anticipated those of posterity. The king asked him one day who was the greatest poet of his reign. “Moliere, sir,” answered Boileau, without hesitation. “I shouldn’t have thought it,” rejoined the king, somewhat astonished; “but you know more about it than I do.” Moliere, in his turn, defending La Fontaine against the pleasantries of his friends, said to his neighbor at one of those social meals in which the illustrious friends delighted, “Let us not laugh at the good soul (bonhomme) he will probably live longer than the whole of us.” In the noble and touching brotherhood of these great minds, Boileau continued invariably to be the bond between the rivals; intimate friend as he was of Racine, he never quarrelled with Moliere, and he hurried to the king to beg that he would pass on the pension with which he honored him to the aged Corneille, groundlessly deprived of the royal favors. He entered the Academy on the 3d of July, 1684, immediately after La Fontaine. His satires had retarded his election. “He praised without flattery; he humbled himself nobly” says Louis Racine; “and when he said that admission to the Academy was sure to be closed against him for so many reasons, he set a-thinking all the Academicians he had spoken ill of in his works.” He was no longer writing verses when Perrault published his Parallele des anciens et desmodernes. “If Boileau do not reply,” said the Prince of Conti, “you may assure him that I will go to the Academy, and write on his chair, ‘Brutus, thou sleepest.’” The ode on the capture of Namur,—intended to crush Perrault whilst celebrating Pindar, not being sufficient, Boileau wrote his Reflexions sur Longin, bitter and often unjust towards Perrault, who was far more equitably treated and more effectually refuted in Fenelon’s letter to the French Academy.

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Boileau was by this time old; he had sold his house at Auteuil, which was so dear, but he did not give up literature, continuing to revise his verses carefully, pre-occupied with new editions, and reproaching himself for this pre-occupation. “It is very shameful,” he would say, “to be still busying myself, with rhymes and all those Parnassian trifles, when, I ought to be thinking of nothing but the account I am prepared to go and render to God.” He died on the 13th of March, 1711, leaving nearly all he had to the poor. He was followed to the tomb by a great throng. “He had many friends,” was the remark amongst the people, “and yet we are assured that he spoke evil of everybody.” No writer ever contributed more than Boileau to the formation of poetry; no more correct or shrewd judgment ever assessed the merits of authors; no loftier spirit ever guided a stronger and a juster mind. Through all the vicissitudes undergone by literature, and spite of the sometimes excessive severity of his decrees, Boileau has left an ineffaceable impression upon the French language. His talent was less effective than his understanding; his judgment and his character have had more influence than his verses.

Boileau had survived all his friends. La Fontaine, born in 1621 at Chateau-Thierry, had died in 1695. He had entered in his youth the brotherhood of the Oratory, which he had soon quitted, being unable, he used to say, to accustom himself to theology. He went and came between town and town, amusing himself everywhere, and already writing a little.

“For me the whole round world was laden with delights;
My heart was touched by flower, sweet sound, and sunny day,
I was the sought of friends and eke of lady gay.”

Fontaine was married, without caring much for his wife, whom he left to live alone at Chateau-Thierry. He was in great favor with Fouquet. When his patron was disgraced, in danger of his life, La Fontaine put into the mouth of the nymphs of Vaux his touching appeal to the king’s clemency:—

“May he, then, o’er the life of high-souled Henry pore,
Who, with the power to take, for vengeance yearned no more
O, into Louis’ soul this gentle spirit breathe.”