ared interminable:--

"These six years past they toil at letter F,
And I'd be much obliged if Destiny
would whisper to me, Thou shalt live to G,--

wrote Bois-Robert to Balzac. The Academy had intrusted Vaugelas with the
preparatory labor. "It was," says Pellisson, "the only way of coming
quickly to an end." A pension, which he had, not been paid for a long
time past was revived in his favor. Vaugelas took his plan to Cardinal
Richelieu. "Well, sir," said the minister, smiling with a somewhat
contemptuous air of kindness, "you will not forget the word pension in
this Dictionary." "No, Monsignor," replied M. de Vaugelas, with a
profound bow, "and still less _reconnaissance_ (gratitude)." Vaugelas
had finished the first volume of his _Remarques sur la Langue Francaise,_
which has ever since reniained the basis of all works on grammar. "He
had imported into the body of the work a something or other so estimable
(_d'honnete homme_), and so much frankness, that one could scarcely help
loving its author." He was working at the second volume when he died, in
1649, so poor that his creditors seized his papers, making it very
difficult for the Academy to recover his _Memoires_. The Dictionary,
having lost its principal author, went on so slowly that Colbert, curious
to know whether the Academicians honestly earned their modest medals for
attendance (_jetons de presence_) which he had assigned to them, came one
day unexpectedly to a sitting: he was present at the whole discussion,
"after which, having seen the attention and care which the Academy was
bestowing upon the composition of its Dictionary, he said, as he rose,
that he was convinced that it could not get on any faster, and his
evidence ought to be of so much the more weight in that never man in his
position was more laborious or more diligent."

The Academicians who were men of letters worked at the Dictionary; the
Academicians who were men of fashion had become pretty numerous; Arnauld
d'Andilly and M. de Lamoignon, whom the body had honored by election,
declined to join, and the Academy resolved to never elect anybody without
a previously expressed desire and request. At the time when M. de
Lamoignon declined, the kin, fearing that it might bring the Academy into
some disfavor, procured the appointment, in his stead, of the Coadjutor
of Strasbourg, Armand de Rohan-Soubise. "Splendid as your triumph may
be," wrote Boileau to M