The suppleness and richness of his mind sufficed to save him from wearisomeness; the liveliness of his literary impressions communicated itself to his pupil.
"I have seen," says Fenelon in his letter to the French Academy, "I have seen a young prince, but eight years old, overcome with grief at sight of the peril of little Joash; I have seen him lose patience with the chief priest for concealing from Joash his name and his birth; I have seen him weeping bitterly as he listened to these verses:-- 'O! miseram Euridicen anima fugiente vocabat; Euridicen toto referebant flumine ripx.'" The soul and mind of Fenelon were sympathetic; Bossuet, in writing for the grand-dauphin, was responsive to the requirements of his own mind, never to those of the boy's with whose education he had been intrusted.
Fenelon also wrote _Telemaque_.

"It is a fabulous narrative," he himself says, "in the form of an heroic poem, like Homer's or Virgil's, wherein I have set forth the principal actions that are meet for a prince whose birth points him out as destined to reign.

I did it at a time when I was charmed with the marks of confidence and kindness showered upon me by the king; I must have been not only the most ungrateful but the most insensate of men to have intended to put into it satirical and insolent portraits; I shrink from the bare idea of such a design.

It is true that I have inserted in these adventures all the verities necessary for government and all the defects that one can show in the exercise of sovereign power; but I have not stamped any of them with a peculiarity which would point to any portrait or caricature.

The more the work is read, the more it will be seen that I wished to express everything without depicting anybody consecutively; it is, in fact, a narrative done in haste, in detached pieces and at different intervals; all I thought of was to amuse the Duke of Burgundy, and, whilst amusing, to instruct him, without ever meaning to give the work to the public." _Telemaque_ was published, without any author's name and by an indiscretion of the copyist's, on the 6th of April, 1699.