he enemy. . . . And, can you
believe it, gentlemen? this practical and austere soul, formidable to the
enemies of the state, inexorable to the factious, overwhelmed in
negotiations, occupied at one time in weakening the party of heresy, at
another in breaking up a league, and at another in meditating a conquest,
found time for literary culture, and was fond of literature and of those
who made it their profession!" From inclination and from personal
interest therein this indefatigable and powerful mind had courted
literature; he had foreseen its nascent power; he had divined in the
literary circle he got about him a means of acting upon the whole nation;
he had no idea of neglecting them; he did not attempt to subjugate them
openly; he brought them near to him and protected them. It is one of
Richelieu's triumphs to have founded the French Academy.

We must turn back for a moment and cast a glance at the intellectual
condition which prevailed at the issue of the Renaissance and the
Reformation.

For sixty years a momentous crisis had been exercising language and
literature as well as society in France. They yearned to get out of it.
Robust intellectual culture had, ceased to be the privilege of the
erudite only; it began to gain a footing on the common domain; people no
longer wrote in Latin, like Erasmus; the Reformation and the Renaissance
spoke French. In order to suffice for this change, the language was
taking form; everybody had lent a hand to the work; Calvin with his
Christian Institutes (_Institution Chretienne_) at the same time as
Rabelais with his learned and buffoonish romance, Ramus with his
Dialectics, and Bodin with his Republic, Henry Estienne with his essays
in French philology, as well as Ronsard and his friends by their
classical crusade. Simultaneously with the language there was being
created a public intelligent, inquiring, and eager. Scarcely had the
translation of Plutarch by Amyot appeared, when it at once became, as
Montaigne says, "the breviary of women and of ignoramuses." "God's life,
my love," wrote Henry IV. to Mary de' Medici, "you could not have sent me
any more agreeable news than of the pleasure you have taken in reading.
Plutarch has a smile for me of never-failing freshness; to love him is to
love me, for he was during a long while the instructor of my tender age;
my good mother, to whom I owe everything, and who set so great store on
my good deportment, and did not want