savours of the academic conference. When they met, and had sufficiently
discussed their amusements, if chance threw them upon any point of
science or belles-lettres, they profited by the occasion; it was,
however, without dwelling too long on the same subject, flitting from one
thing to another like the bees that meet divers sorts of flowers on their
way. Neither envy, malice, nor cabal, had any voice among them. They
adored the works of the ancients, never refused due praise to those of
the moderns, spoke modestly of their own, and gave each other sincere
counsel, when any one of them--which rarely happened--fell into the
malady of the age, and published a book."

The absent-mindedness of our fabulist not unfrequently created much
amusement on these occasions, and made him the object of mirthful
conspiracies. So keenly was the game pursued by Boileau and Racine, that
the more considerate Moliere felt obliged sometimes to expose and rebuke
them. Once, after having done so, he privately told a stranger, who was
present with them, the wits would have worried themselves in vain; they
could not have obliterated the _bon-homme_.

La Fontaine, as we have said, was an admirer of Rabelais;--to what a
pitch, the following anecdote may show. At one of the meetings at
Boileau's were present Racine, Valincourt, and a brother of Boileau's, a
doctor of the Sorbonne. The latter took it upon him to set forth the
merits of St. Augustin in a pompous eulogium. La Fontaine, plunged in one
of his habitual reveries, listened without hearing. At last, rousing
himself as if from a profound sleep, to prove that the conversation had
not been lost upon him, he asked the doctor, with a very serious air,
whether he thought St. Augustin had as much wit as Rabelais. The divine,
surprised, looked at him from head to foot, and only replied, "Take care,
Monsieur La Fontaine;--you have put one of your stockings on wrong side