there
were not a serpent concealed, and were apprehensive that this
establishment was, at the very least, a new prop to support is
domination, that it was but a batch of folks in his pay, hired to
maintain all that he did and to observe the actions and sentiments of
others. It went about that he cut down scavenging expenses of Paris by
eighty thousand livres in order to give them a pension of two thousand
livres apiece; the vulgar were so frightened, without attempting to
account for their terror, that a tradesman of Paris, who had taken a
house that suited him admirably in Rue Cinq Diamants, where the Academy
then used to meet at M. Chapelain's, broke off his bargain on no other
ground but that he did not want to be in a street where a _'Cademy of
Canspirators (une Cademie e Manopoleurs)_ met every week." The wits,
like St. Evremond, in his comedy of the Academistes, turned into ridicule
the body which, as it was said, claimed to subject the language of the
public to its decisions:--

"So I, with hoary head, to' school
Must, like a child, go day by day,
And learn my parts of speech, poor fool, when
Death is taking speech away!"

said Maynard, who, nevertheless, was one of the forty.

The letters patent for establishment of the French Academy had been sent
to the Parliament in 1635; they were not registered until 1637 at the
express instance of the cardinal, who wrote to the premier President to
assure him that "the foundation of the Academy was useful and necessary
to the public, and the purpose of the Academicians was quite different
from what it had been possible to make people believe hitherto."

The decree of verification, when it at length appeared, bore traces of
the jealous prejudices of the Parliament. "They the said assembly and
academy," it ran, "shall not be powered to take cognizance of anything
but the ornamentation, embellishment, and augmentation of the French
language, and of the books that shall be made by them and by other
persons who shall desire it and want it."

The French Academy was founded; it was already commencing its Dictionary
in accordance with the suggestion enunciated by Chapelain at the second
meeting; the cardinal was here carrying out that great moral idea of
literature which he had expressed but lately in a letter to Balzac: "The
conceptions in your letters," said he, "are forcible and as far removed
from ordinary im