nevertheless she never, she declares, possessed a more steady
friend, nor one more confiding and better adapted to advise. Brave as he
was, he held personal valour, or affected to do so, in light estimation.
His ambition was to rule others. Lively in conversation, though
naturally pensive, he assembled around him all that Paris or Versailles
could present of wit and intellect.

The old Hotel de Rochefoucault, in the Rue de Seine, in the Faubourg St.
Germain, in Paris, still grandly recalls the assemblies in which Racine,
Boileau, Madame de Sevigne, the La Fayettes, and the famous Duchesse de
Longueville, used to assemble. The time honoured family of De la
Rochefoucault still preside there; though one of its fairest ornaments,
the young, lovely, and pious Duchesse de la Rochefoucault of our time,
died in 1852--one of the first known victims to diphtheria in France, in
that unchanged old locality. There, when the De Longuevilles, the
Mazarins, and those who had formed the famous council of state of Anne
of Austria had disappeared, the poets and wits who gave to the age of
Louis XIV. its true brilliancy, collected around the Duc de la
Rochefoucault. What a scene it must have been in those days, as Buffon
said of the earth in spring '_tout four-mille de vie!_' Let us people
the salon of the Hotel de Rochefoucault with visions of the past; see
the host there, in his chair, a martyr to the gout, which he bore with
all the cheerfulness of a Frenchman, and picture to ourselves the great
men who were handing him his cushion, or standing near his _fauteuil_.

Racine's joyous face may be imagined as he comes in fresh from the
College of Harcourt. Since he was born in 1639, he had not arrived at
his zenith till La Rochefoucault was almost past his prime. For a man at
thirty-six in France can no longer talk prospectively of the departure
of youth; it is gone. A single man of thirty, even in Paris, is '_un
vieux garcon_:' life begins too soon and ends too soon with those
pleasant sinners, the French. And Racine, when he was first routed out
of Port Royal, where he was educated, and presented to the whole
Faubourg St. Germain, beheld his patron, La Rochefoucault, in the
position of a disappointed man. An early adventure of his youth had
humbled, perhaps, the host of the Hotel de Rochefoucault. At the battle
of St. Antoine, where he had distinguished himself, 'a musket-ball had
nearly deprived him of sight. On this occasion he had quot