"There is a great deal to endure with a mind so destitute of application," he wrote to Marshal Bellefonds; "there is no perceptible relief, and we go on, as St.Paul says, hoping against hope." He had written a little treatise on inattention, _De Incogitantia,_--in the vain hope of thus rousing his pupil to work.

"I dread nothing in the world so much," Louis XIV would say, "as to have a sluggard (_faineant_) dauphin; I would much prefer to have no son at all!" Bossuet foresaw the innumerable obstacles in the way of his labors.

"I perceive, as I think," he wrote to his friends, "in the dauphin the beginnings of great graces, a simplicity, a straightforwardness, a principle of goodness, an attention, amidst all his flightiness, to the mysteries, a something or other which comes with a flash, in the middle of his distractions, to call him back to God.

You would be charmed if I were to tell you the questions he puts to me, and the desire he shows to be a good servant of God.

But the world! the world! the world! pleasures, evil counsels, evil examples! Save us, Lord! save us! Thou didst verily preserve the children from the furnace, but Thou didst send Thine angel; and, as for me, alas! what am I?
Humility, trepidation, absorption into one's own nothingness!" It was not for Bossuet that the honor was reserved of succeeding in the difficult task of a royal education.