ay) whilst pronouncing the word
Juro. He was icy-cold when he went back to Baron's box, who was waiting
for him, who saw him home to Rue Richelieu, and who at the same time sent
for his wife and two sisters of charity. When he went up again, with
Madame Moliere, into the room, the great comedian was dead. He was only
fifty-one.

[Illustration: Death of Moliere----669]

It has been a labor of love to go into some detail over the lives, works,
and characters of the great writers during the age of Louis XIV. They
did too much honor to their time and their country, they had too great
and too deep an effect in France and in Europe upon the successive
developments of the human intellect, to refuse them an important place
in the history of that France to whose influence and glory they so
powerfully contributed.

Moliere did not belong to the French Academy; his profession had shut the
doors against him. It was nearly a hundred years after his death, in
1778, that the Academy raised to him a bust, beneath which was engraved,

"O His glory lacks naught, ours did lack him."

It was by instinct and of its own free choice that the French Academy had
refused to elect a comedian: it had grown, and its liberty had increased
under the sway of, Louis XIV. In 1672, at the death of Chancellor
Seguier, who became its protector after Richelieu, "it was so honored
that the king was graciously pleased to take upon himself this office:
the body had gone to thank him; his Majesty desired that the dauphin
should be witness of what passed on an occasion so honorable to
literature; after the speech of M. Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, and the
man in France with most inborn talent for speaking, the king, appearing
somewhat touched, gave the Academicians very great marks of esteem,
inquired the names, one after another, of those whose faces were not
familiar to him, and said aside to M. Colbert, who was there in his
capacity of simple Academician, 'You will let me know what I must do for
these gentlemen.' Perhaps M. Colbert, that minister who was so zealous
for the fine arts, never received an order more in conformity with his
own inclinations." From that time, the French Academy held its sittings
at the Louvre, and, as regarded complimentary addresses to the king on
state occasions, it took rank with the sovereign bodies.

For thirty-five years the Academy had been working at its Dictionnaire.
From the first, the work had appe