"I want to teach you to write them with difficulty," answered Boileau, "and you have talent enough to learn before long." _Andromaque_ was the result of this novel effort, and was Racine's real commencement.
He was henceforth irrevocably committed to the theatrical cause.

Nicole attacking Desmarets, who had turned prophet after the failure of his _Clovis,_ alluded to the author's comedies, and exclaimed with all the severity of Port-Royal, "A romance-writer and a scenic poet is a public poisoner not of bodies but of souls." Racine took these words to himself, and he wrote in defence of the dramatic art two letters so bitter, biting, and insulting towards Port-Royal and the protectors of his youth, that Boileau dissuaded him from publishing the second, and that remorse before long took possession of his soul, never to be entirely appeased.

He had just brought out _Les Plaideurs,_ which had been requested of him by his friends and partly composed during the dinners they frequently had together.

"I put into it only a few barbarous law-terms which I might have picked up during a lawsuit and which neither I nor my judges ever really heard or understood." After the first failure of the piece, the king's comedians one day risked playing it before him.

"Louis XIV.