d
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