The grace, the naturalness, the original independence of the mind and the works of La Fontaine had not the luck to please Louis XIV., who never accorded him any favor, and La Fontaine did not ask for any:—

“All dumb I shrink once more within my shell,
Where unobtrusive pleasures dwell;
True, I shall here by Fortune be forgot
Her favors with my verse agree not well;
To importune the gods beseems me not.”

Once only, from the time of Fouquet’s trial, the poet demanded a favor: Louis XIV., having misgivings about the propriety of the Contes of La Fontaine, had not yet given the assent required for his election to the French Academy, when he set out for the campaign in Luxemburg. La Fontaine addressed to him a ballad:—

“Just as, in Homer, Jupiter we see
Alone o’er all the other gods prevail;
You, one against a hundred though it be,
Balance all Europe in the other scale.
Them liken I to those who, in the tale,
Mountain on mountain piled, presumptuously
Warring with Heaven and Jove. The earth clave he,
And hurled them down beneath huge rocks to wail:
So take you up your bolt with energy;
A happy consummation cannot fail.
“Sweet thought! that doth this month or two avail
To somewhat soothe my Muse’s anxious care.
For certain minds at certain stories rail,
Certain poor jests, which nought but trifles are.
If I with deference their lessons hail,
What would they more? Be you more prone to spare,
More kind than they; less sheathed in rigorous mail;
Prince, in a word, your real self declare
A happy consummation cannot fail.”

The election of Boileau to the Academy appeased the king’s humor, who preferred the other’s intellect to that of La Fontaine. “The choice you have made of M. Despreaux is very gratifying to me,” he said to the board of the Academy: “it will be approved of by everybody. You can admit La Fontaine at once; he has promised to be good.” It was a rash promise, which the poet did not always keep.

The friends, of La Fontaine had but lately wanted to reconcile him to his wife. They had with that view sent him to Chateau-Thierry; he returned without having seen her whom he went to visit. “My wife was not at home,” said he; “she had gone to the sacrament (au salut).” He was becoming old. Those same faithful friends—Racine, Boileau, and Maucroix —were trying to bring him home to God. Racine took him to church with him; a Testament was given him. “That is a very good book,” said he; “I assure you it is a very good book.” Then all at once addressing Abbe Boileau, “Doctor, do you think that St. Augustin was as clever as Rabelais?” He was ill, however, and began to turn towards eternity his dreamy and erratic thoughts. He had set about composing pious hymns. “The best of thy friends has not a fortnight to live,” he wrote to Maucroix; “for two months I have not been out, unless to go to the Academy for amusement. Yesterday, as I was returning, I was seized in the middle of Rue du Chantre with a fit of such great weakness that I really thought I was dying. O, my dear friend, to die is nothing; but thinkest thou that I am about to appear before God? Thou knowest how I have lived. Before thou hast this letter, the gates of eternity will, perchance, be opened for me.” “He is as simple as a child,” said the woman who took care of him in his last illness; “if he has done amiss, it was from ignorance rather than wickedness.” A charming and a curious being, serious and simple, profound and childlike, winning by reason of his very vagaries, his good-natured originality, his helplessness in common life, La Fontaine knew how to estimate the literary merits as well as the moral qualities of his illustrious friends. “When they happened to be together,” says he, in his tale of Psyche, “and had talked to their heart’s content of their diversions, if they chanced to stumble upon any point of science or literature, they profited by the occasion, without, however, lingering too long over one and the same subject, but flitting from one topic to another like bees that meet as they go with different sorts of flowers. Envy, malignity, or cabal had no voice amongst them; they adored the works of the ancients, refused not the moderns the praises which were their due, spoke of their own with modesty, and gave one another honest advice when any one of them fell ill of the malady of the age and wrote a book, which happened now and then. In this case, Acanthus (Racine) did not fail to propose a walk in some place outside the town, in order to hear the reading with less noise and more pleasure. He was extremely fond of gardens, flowers, foliage. Polyphile (La Fontaine) resembled him in this; but then Polyphile might be said to love all things. Both of them were lyrically inclined, with this difference, that Acanthus was rather the more pathetic, Polyphile the more ornate.”

When La Fontaine died, on the 13th of April, 1695, of the four friends lately assembled at Versailles to read the tale of Psyche, Moliere alone had disappeared. La Fontaine had admired at Vaux the young comic poet, who had just written the Facheux for the entertainment given by Fouquet to Louis XIV.:—

“It is a work by Moliere;
This writer, of a style so rare,
Is nowadays the court’s delight
His fame, so rapid is its flight,
Beyond the bounds of Rome must be:
Amen! For he’s the man for me.”

In his old age he gave vent to his grief and his regret at Moliere’s death in this touching epitaph:—

“Beneath this stone Plautus and Terence lie,
Though lieth here but Moliere alone
Their threefold gifts of mind made up but one,
That witched all France with noble comedy.
Now are they gone: and little hope have I
That we again shall look upon the three
Dead men, methinks, while countless years roll by,
Terentius, Plautus, Moliere will be.”