THE CENTENNIAL OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE. 719 



a serious one under Louis XIV. The " gentlemen upholsterers" and 

 "valets de chambre" of the King would not have desired to be made 

 members of the academy. I do not know what Moliere himself would 

 have thought of his election. People were then preservers of rank as 

 we are now of propriety. It was necessary to compel Catinat to allow 

 himself to be made a marshal of France. As to the other great men, 

 whose absence the convention regretted so bitterly, they belonged to 

 the category of those whom we styled a moment ago great men above 

 the average. They were justly admired by their contemporaries, but 

 posterity has the right to choose from among them. Dufresny, Eaynal, 

 Helvetius are great men the omission of whose names caused much 

 indignation in 1793, but we of to-day would disapprove of it had they 

 been elected by the academy. 



Of all charges brought against the academy, the one most frequently 

 made was its fawning upon the King. It was a society of courtiers 

 who could have given lessons upon this subject to all the Dangeaus 

 who ever existed, for was it not they who had offered a prize for the 

 best answer to the question, "Which of all the King's virtues deserves 

 the most praise?" 



But this style and these sentiments no longer existed when Gregoire, 

 reproaching his "good Fenelon" for having written a treatise on "the 

 control over a King's conscience," added, "as if Kings had any con- 

 science! One might as well write a dissertation on the gentleness of 

 wild beasts." 



The mistake which men blinded by passion make, is to wish always 

 to form a judgment without taking into account the time and the sur- 

 roundings. With all respect for the levelers of 1793, the liberal spirit 

 which had manifested itself in the midst of the academy at the moment 

 of its official creation contiuued during its whole existence. The mem- 

 bers combined with it an admiration of the King the nature of which 

 we do not understand. The academy saw France in the King. At 

 that epoch of history one was powerful only on the condition of being 

 dependent. It can not be doubted that the academies, surrounded by 

 the monarchy with honors, had become little by little veritable aristoc- 

 racies. They had in the eyes of the ".Republicans the double defect of 

 being corporations, and privileged corporations, much tainted by their 

 privileges. A practice, introduced by Colbert, or rather by l'Abbe Big- 

 non, his nephew and his representative in the government of scientific 

 societies, divided the academies of inscriptions, of sciences, and of let- 

 ters into three classes of academicians — the honoraries, the pensioners, 

 and the pupils; thus, this constituted a privilege within a privilege. 

 The French Academy alone resisted energetically; it refused to suffer 

 the affront of such a regulation. The French Academy, cince its crea- 

 tion, had always had in its midst dukes, marshals, bishops, and mag- 

 istrates of supreme courts. These great lords learned to treat men 

 of letters as their equals ; but at the same time these men of letters 



