Saint Amant[228], who, to do him justice, did not call _Moise Sauve_ an epic but an 'idylle heroique,' is the link between this school and a third composed of purely convivial poets, who even in this century furnished work of remarkable excellence, and who produced a numerous and brilliant progeny in the next. Saint Amant's Anacreontic poems are of great merit. Of the same class was Saint Pavin, who was not merely a free liver, but a member of the small but influential free-thinking sect which preceded and gave birth to the _Philosophes_ of the next century. This time, moreover, was the period of a curious literary trick, the resuscitation or forging of the convivial poems of Oliver Basselin by a Norman lawyer of the name of Jean le Houx. A genuine and contemporary Basselin, in the person of a carpenter named Adam Billaut, produced some notable work of the same kind. Unfortunately the Anacreontic poetry of this time suffers from the too frequent coarseness of its language; a fault which indeed was not fully corrected until Beranger's days. [Sidenote: La Fontaine.] The members, however, of all these schools have long lost their hold on all but students of literature, and, with the exception of La Fontaine and Boileau, it is not easy to mention any non-dramatic poet of the seventeenth century who has kept a place in the general memory. Jean la Fontaine[229] was born at Chateau Thierry in Champagne in the year 1621, and died at Paris in 1695. His father held a considerable post as ranger of the neighbouring forests, an office which passed to his son. La Fontaine seems to have been carelessly educated, but after a certain time literature attracted him, and he began to study in a desultory fashion, without however, as it would appear, being himself tempted to write. At the age of six-and-twenty he married Marie Hericart, a girl of sixteen, who is said to have been both amiable and beautiful, and not long afterwards he was left his own master by his father's death. He was suited very ill by nature either to fill a responsible office or to be head of a house. The well-known stories of his absence of mind, his simplicity, his indifference to outward affairs, have no doubt been exaggerated, but there is, equally without doubt, a foundation of fact in them. On the other hand, though the most serious charges against his wife seem to rest on no foundation, it is certain that she had little aptitude for housewifery. After a time the household was broken up, though there was offspring of the marriage. A division of goods was effected, and husband and wife separated, not to meet again except on visits and for brief spaces of time, though they seem to have remained on perfectly friendly terms. La Fontaine went to Paris, and very soon attracted the notice of Fouquet, the magnificent superintendent of the finances, who gave him a pension of a thousand livres and made him a member of his literary household. Here La Fontaine began to write. At