self very
fortunate to hold the office I discharge towards you; disabuse yourself
once more, sir; I only took it in order to obey the king and give
pleasure to Monseigneur, and not at all for the painful privilege of
being your preceptor; and, that you may have no doubt about it, I am
going to take you to his Majesty, and beg him to get you another one,
whose pains I hope may be more successful than mine." The Duke of
Burgundy's passion was past, and he burst into sobs. "Ah! sir," he
cried, "I am in despair at what took place yesterday; if you speak to
the king, you will lose me his affection; if you leave me, what will be
thought of me? I promise you. I promise you . . . that you shall be
satisfied with me; but promise me . . ."

Fenelon promised nothing; he remained, and the foundation of his
authority was laid forever in the soul of his pupil. The young prince
did not forget what he was, but he had felt the superiority of his
master. "I leave the Duke of Burgundy behind the door," he was
accustomed to say, "and with you I am only little Louis."

God, at the same time with Fenelon, had taken possession of the Duke of
Burgundy's soul. "After his first communion, we saw disappearing little
by little all the faults which, in his infancy, caused us great
misgivings as to the future," writes Madame de Maintenon. "His piety has
caused such a metamorphosis that, from the passionate thing he was, he
has become self-restrained, gentle, complaisant; one would say that that
was his character, and that virtue was natural to him." "All his mad
fits and spites yielded at the bare name of God," Fenelon used to say;
"one day when he was in a very bad temper, and wanted to hide in his
passion what he had done in his disobedience, I pressed him to tell me
the truth before God; then he put himself into a great rage and bawled,
'Why ask me before God? Very well, then, as you ask me in that way, I
cannot deny that I committed that fault.' He was as it were beside
himself with excess of rage, and yet religion had such dominion over him
that it wrung from him so painful an avowal." "From this abyss," writes
the Duke of St. Simon, "came forth a prince affable, gentle, humane,
self-restrained, patient, modest, humble, and austere towards himself,
wholly devoted to his obligations and feeling them to be immense; he
thought of nothing but combining the duties of a son and a subject with
those to which he saw himself destined."