The father did not abandon his cherished hopes until he beheld his son arrived at the age of nineteen, when, disappointed of making him a poet, he took the more feasible resolution of making him a priest. With no other fruits of education than such a stock of Latin as a dull boy could have acquired under a village schoolmaster, La Fontaine, now in his twentieth year, entered the religious order of the "oratoire,"--in passive compliance with the wishes of his father, and the example of his brother, a respectable ecclesiastic, who was affectionately attached to the poet, and who subsequently made over to him his share of their paternal inheritance. It may be set down among the instances of La Fontaine's characteristic simplicity, that he did not perceive his utter inaptitude for such a life. He renounced the cloister and returned to society after eighteen months. "The wonder is not," says the abbe Olivet, "that La Fontaine threw off the fetters of a monastic life, but that he ever assumed them;" to which it may be added, as a second wonder, that after living, as he did, in ease and freedom, without system or control, he was able to bear them so long. It seems to have been his destiny in early life to have conditions chosen for him by others, and adopted by himself, with a curious opposition to his habits and character. Upon his return to the paternal roof, his father proposed to him the transfer of his charge, and a marriage with Marie d'Hericart, the daughter of a friend of his family. La Fontaine accepted both, with the same unthinking docility. The duties of his mastership of the royal domains were light and few, and his wife had talents and beauty; but he neglected alike his official and domestic obligations, with an innocent unconsciousness of both which disarmed censure and silenced complaint. It would appear that his father now thought once more of seeing him a poet, hopeless as this appeared to everybody else, and to none more than to La Fontaine. His perseverance was strangely rewarded at last. An accident, or an incident so described, called forth the latent fire at the age of twenty-two. The best company of the neighbourhood, and more particularly those who had any pretensions to literature, visited the father of La Fontaine. Among them an officer of the garrison at Château Thierry, a great admirer and reciter of verse, brought with him the poems of Malherbe, and read before young La Fontaine the ode on the assassination of Henry IV. beginning-- "Que direz vous races futures."