He survived him twelve years without ever setting foot again within the court after his first interview with the king.

"I have been at Versailles," he writes to his publisher, M.Brossette, "where I saw Madame de Maintenon, and afterwards the king, who overcame me with kind words; so, here I am more historiographer than ever.

His Majesty spoke to me of M.Racine in a manner to make courtiers desire death, if they thought he would speak of them in the same way afterwards.
Meanwhile that has been but very small consolation to me for the loss of that illustrious friend, who is none the less dead though regretted by the greatest king in the universe." "Remember," Louis XIV.

had said, "that I have always an hour a week to give you when you like to come." Boileau did not go again.

"What should I go to court for ?" he would say; "I cannot sing praises any more." At Racine's death Boileau did not write any longer.