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 appeared 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.