received a yearly
pension till the Epic was finished, but your Muse was no Alcmena, and no
Hercules was the result of that prolonged night of creations. First you
gravely wrote out (it was the task of five years) all the compositions
in prose. Ah, why did you not leave it in that commonplace but
appropriate medium? What says the Precieuse about you in Boileau's
satire?

In Chapelain, for all his foes have said,
She finds but one defect, he can't be read;
Yet thinks the world might taste his maiden's woes,
If only he would turn his verse to prose!

The verse had been prose, and prose, perhaps, it should have remained.
Yet for this precious 'Pucelle,' in the age when 'Paradise Lost' was
sold for five pounds, you are believed to have received about four
thousand. Horace was wrong, mediocre poets may exist (now and then), and
he was a wise man who first spoke of _aurea mediocritas_. At length the
great work was achieved, a work thrice blessed in its theme, that
divine Maiden to whom France owes all, and whom you and Voltaire
have recompensed so strangely. In folio, in italics, with a score of
portraits and engravings, and _culs de lampe_, the great work was given
to the world, and had a success. Six editions in eighteen months are
figures which fill the poetic heart with envy and admiration. And then,
alas! the bubble burst. A great lady, Madame de Longveille, hearing the
'Pucelle read aloud, murmured that it was 'perfect indeed, but perfectly
wearisome.' Then the satires began, and the satirists never left you
till your poetic reputation was a rag, till the mildest Abbe at Menages
had his cheap sneer for Chapelain.

I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy had much to do with the
onslaught on your 'Pucelle.' These qualities, alas! are not strange to
literary minds; does not even Hesiod tell us 'potter hates potter, and
poet hates poet'? But contemporary spites do not harm true genius. Who
suffered more than Moliere from cabals? Yet neither the court nor the
town ever deserted him, and he is still the joy of the world. I admit
that his adversaries were weaker than yours. What were Boursault and Le
Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and De Vise, what were they all compared
to your enemy, Boileau? Brossette tells a story which really makes a man
pity you. There was a M. de Puimorin who, to be in the fashion, laughed
at your once popular Epic. 'It is all very well for a man to laugh who
cannot even read.' Whereon