Saint-Seine in his private journal,
"but his wits are under a bushel." The boy was indolent, with little
inclination for work, roughly treated by his governor, the Duke of
Montausier, who was endowed with more virtue than ability in the
superintendence of a prince's education. "O," cried Monseigneur, when
official announcement was made to him of the project of marriage which
the king was conducting for him with the Princess Christine of Bavaria,
"we shall see whether M. Huet (afterwards bishop of Avranches) will want
to make me learn ancient geography any more!" Bossuet had better
understood what ought to be the aim of a king's education. "Remember,
Monseigneur," he constantly repeated to him, "that destined as you are to
reign some day over this great kingdom, you are bound to make it happy."
He was in despair at his pupil's inattention. "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. Fenelon encountered in the Duke of
Burgundy a more undisciplined nature, a more violent character, and more
dangerous tendencies than Bossuet had to fight against in the
grand-dauphin; but there was a richer mind