He probably owed, and the world owes it, to his acquaintance with the duchess of Bouillon, that he did not pass his life idly and obscurely at Château Thierry. This lady was one of the celebrated _Mancinis_, nieces of Cardinal Mazarin. She inherited her uncle's ambition, sagacity, and love of intrigue: she shared with her sisters wit, gaiety, and the graces; and, with her family, a taste for literature. Whilst living in court disgrace at Château Thierry, some verses of La Fontaine happened to meet her eye. She immediately had the poet introduced to her, and soon became his friend. She had, it is said, the merit of discerning not only his genius but its peculiar bent. La Fontaine had yet written neither tales nor fables. She advised him to devote himself to simple and playful narrations in verse. His first tales in point of time, and some of the first in point of merit, are said to have been composed by him according to her suggestions, both of the matter and the manner. He is supposed indebted to her for that grace and delicacy of perception and expression which he combined with so much of simplicity and nature. He lived in her intimate society, and that alone must have been a great advantage to him. The conversation of a woman who knew the world, loved poetry, and judged of both with discernment, must have been the best school for one so simple and inexperienced, yet so ingenious and inspired, as La Fontaine. It may appear strange that La Fontaine, a simple bourgeois, and village poet, was thus familiarly treated by a woman of the highest rank. His charge even placed him in the relation of a servant to the duke of Bouillon, her husband, who held some superior and sinecure charge of the royal domains. But, strongly as the gradations of birth and title were marked in France, it will be found that sense, wit, and genius conferred privilege, or, like love and death, levelled all degrees. Voiture, the son of a vintner, was the companion of princes, the lover of princesses, and would never have been reminded of his birth, had he not had the weakness to be ashamed of it; and even then only in pleasantries, which he well deserved for his weakness and vanity. A court lady, provoked by his conceit, one evening, whilst "playing at proverbs," as it was called, said to him, "Come, that won't do; give us a fresh tap--(_percez nous en d'un autre_)."