Attempted on Rabelais and on Montaigne, the same work of adjustment has been less successful. Rabelais, in particular, has discouraged the most stubbornly naïve; and, since it was impossible to glean virtuous sheaves in his abbey of good pleasure, Pantagruel was classed among the vague precursors of modern ideas--which has no appreciable meaning, modern ideas being extremely contradictory. La Fontaine has lent himself to the caprices of the moralists with that indifference to good and evil which was the peculiarity of his exclusively sensual temperament; while, as for Racine, whose work would be frightful, were it not expressed in a language as cold and abstract as algebra, the Jansenist devotion of his last days has made it possible to discover pious intonations even in his most delirious celebrations of cruelty and lust.[9] Why has not the same process been applied to a Saint-Amant or a Théophile? Here is seen the influence of Boileau, whom it is still dangerous to contradict when seeking a certain quality of reputation. Happy to find their task limited and determined by a celebrated authority, the educators closed their catalogue of glories the moment it was decently long enough. Their enterprise was one of moral, far more than literary, criticism. A single book--the _Fables_, for example--would have sufficed them as an album wherein to deposit the cunning aphorisms of the old catechism. The educator's ideal is the _Koran_, whose pages contain, at the same time, a sample of writing, a model of style, a religious code, and a handbook of morals. We may, then, conclude that, in reality, there is no literary glory. The great writers are offered to our admiration not as writers, but as moralists. Literary glory is an illusion. And yet, in reserving for school-use some of the greatest French men of genius, the literary historians have been obliged to justify their choice, to feign artistic preoccupations. Nisard wrote a history of French literature concerned with little else than morality. Such a preoccupation was found noble, but too exclusive. The common handbooks mingle adroitly the two orders. A child should not know quite whether La Fontaine is prescribed for him as a great poet or as an old chap who counselled prudence--as the author of _Philémon et Baucis_, or as the precursor of Franklin. Armed with the four rules of literature, the professors have examined talents and classified them. They have conferred prizes and honourable mentions. There is the first order and there are orders graduated all the way down to the fourth and the fifth. French literature has become arranged hierarchically like a tenement house. "Villon," one of these measurers once said to me, "is not of the first order." Admiration must be shaded according to the seven notes of the university scale. Earnest flutists excel at this game.