." Boileau answered at once: "Are you mad with
your compliments? Do not you know perfectly well that it was I who
suggested the way in which things have been done? And can you doubt of
my being perfectly well pleased with a matter in which I am accorded all
I ask? Nothing in the world could be better, and I am even more rejoiced
on your account than on my own." The two friends consulted one another
mutually about their verses; Racine sent Boileau his spiritual songs.
The king heard the _Combat du Chretien_ sung, set to music by Moreau

"O God, my God, what deadly strife!
Two men within myself I see
One would that, full of love to Thee,
My heart were leal, in death and life;
The other, with rebellion rife,
Against Thy laws inciteth me."

He turned to Madame de Maintenon, and, "Madame," said he, "I know those
two men well." Boileau sends Racine his ode on the capture of Namur.
"I have risked some very new things," he says, "even to speaking of the
white plume which the king has in his hat; but, in my opinion, if you are
to have novel expressions in verse, you must speak of things which have
not been said in verse. You shall be judge, with permission to alter the
whole, if you do not like it." Boileau's generous confidence was the
more touching, in that Racine was sarcastic and bitter in discussion.
"Did you mean to hurt me?" Boileau said to him one day. "God forbid!"
was the answer. "Well, then, you made a mistake, for you did hurt me."

[Illustration: Boileau-Despreaux----650]

Racine had just brought out _Esther_ at the theatre of St. Cyr. Madame
de Brinon, lady-superior of the establishment which was founded by Madame
de Maintenon for the daughters of poor noblemen, had given her pupils a
taste for theatricals. "Our little girls have just been playing your
_Andromaque,_ wrote Madame de Maintenon to Racine, "and they played it so
well that they never shall play it again in their lives, or any other of
your pieces." She at the same time asked him to write, in his leisure
hours, some sort of moral and historical poem from which love should be
altogether banished. This letter threw Racine into a great state of
commotion. He was anxious to please Madame de Maintenon, and yet it was
a delicate commission for a man who had a great reputation to sustain.
Boileau was for refusing. "That was not in the calculations of Rac