"I shouldn't have thought it, rejoined the king, somewhat astonished; "but you know more about it than I do." Moliere, in his turn, defending La Fontaine against the pleasantries of his friends, said to his neighbor at one of those social meals in which the illustrious friends delighted, " Let us not laugh at the good soul (bonhomme) he will probably live longer than the whole of us." In the noble and touching brotherhood of these great minds, Boileau continued invariably to be the bond between the rivals; intimate friend as he was of Racine, he never quarrelled with Moliere, and he hurried to the king to beg that he would pass on the pension with which he honored him to the aged Corneille, groundlessly deprived of the royal favors.

He entered the Academy on the 3d of July, 1684, immediately after La Fontaine.

His satires had retarded his election.

"He praised without flattery; he humbled himself nobly" says Louis Racine; "and when he said that admission to the Academy was sure to be closed against him for so many reasons, he set a-thinking all the Academicians he had spoken ill of in his works." He was no longer writing verses when Perrault published his _Parallele des anciens et desmodernes-.

"If Boileau do not reply," said the Prince of Conti, "you may assure him that I will go to the Academy, and write on his chair, 'Brutus, thou sleepest.'" The ode on the capture of Namur,--intended to crush Perrault whilst celebrating Pindar, not being sufficient, Boileau wrote his _Reflexions sur Longin,_ bitter and often unjust towards Perrault, who was far more equitably treated and more effectually refuted in Fenelon's letter to the French Academy.
[Illustration: La Fontaine, Boileau, Moliere, and Racine----657] Boileau was by this time old; he had sold his house at Auteuil, which was so dear, but he did not give up literature, continuing to revise his verses carefully, pre-occupied with new editions, and reproaching himself for this pre-occupation.