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She refused to accept the verdicts of the most competent judges; with instinctive attractions and repulsions, she found but few writers that pleased her. Boileau, Lesage, Chamfort, were her favorites. She said that Buffon was of an unendurable monotony.
When Rochefoucault said that Boileau and Racine had only one kind of genius, and could only talk about their own poetry, it is evident that the observation should not have extended to Racine, however it might to Boileau. It was Racine's excessive sensibility which made him the finest dramatic reciter.
But sometimes she may be allowed to raise her voice, and change her usual smile into a frown of just indignation. Pope. I like her best when she smiles. But did you never reprove your witty friend, La Fontaine, for the vicious levity that appears in many of his tales? He was as guilty of the crime of debauching the Muses as any of our comic poets. Boileau.
From the accounts of Black-Meat and Boileau at Fort Chipewyan we considered this river to be the Anatessy, and Cape Barrow to be the projection which they supposed to be the North-East termination of America.
Childebrand was a splendid cat of common kind, tawny and striped with black, like the hose of Saltabadil in 'Le Rois' Amuse. With his large, green, almond-shaped eyes, and his symmetrical stripes, there was something tigerlike about him that pleased me. Childebrand had the honor of figuring in some verses that I wrote to 'flout' Boileau:
Are you not pleased with that philosophical freedom of thought which discovers itself in all the works of Voltaire, but more particularly in those of an historical nature? Boileau. If it were properly regulated, I should reckon it among their highest perfections. Superstition, and bigotry, and party spirit are as great enemies to the truth and candour of history as malice or adulation.
It is said that, till his health failed him, he was glad to escape from the Countess Dowager and her magnificent dining-room, blazing with the gilded devices of the House of Rich, to some tavern where he could enjoy a laugh, a talk about Virgil and Boileau, and a bottle of claret, with the friends of his happier days. All those friends, however, were not left to him.
In describing Will's coffee-house, which was frequented by Dryden and all who pretended to be interested in polite letters, Macaulay says, "there was a faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the ancients." In the discussions on this subject a remarkable Frenchman who had long lived in England as an exile, M. de Saint Evremond, must have constantly taken part.
Her influence was at its height in the age of Corneille and Descartes, and she lived almost to the culmination of the era of Racine and Moliere, of Boileau and La Bruyere, of Bossuet and Fenelon, the era of simple and purified language, of refined and stately manners, and of at least outward respect for morality. To these results she largely contributed.
She, according to Boileau's account, liked my father better than him, and Madame de Montespan, on the contrary, liked Boileau better than my father, but they always paid their court jointly, without any jealousy between them.
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