The king and the inimical bishops continued inveterate. The brief was received and registered according to form. The metropolitan assemblies applauded Fénélon's piety, virtue, and talents: some of his own suffragans had the indecency and servility to make irrelevant objections to his pastoral letter; but these were overruled. Bossuet drew up a report of the whole affair, to be presented at the next assembly of the clergy. Considerable want of candour is manifest in his account. He does what he can to weaken the effect of Fénélon's submission, while he insinuates excuses for his own vehemence. The report is remarkable with regard to the testimony it gives to the innocence of madame Guyon. "As to the abominations," it said, "which seemed the necessary consequences of her doctrine, they were wholly out of the question; she herself always mentioned them with horror." No reconciliation ever took place between Fénélon and Bossuet, who died in 1714.[114] Louis XIV. was inexorable. Fénélon continued in exile and his friends in disgrace; such displeasure was shown, that the servile courtiers, among whom we must rank, on this occasion, madame de Maintenon, kept aloof from him. His friends, however, were true and faithful. They took every opportunity of meeting together; it was their delight to talk of him, to regret him, to express their wishes for his return, and to contrive means of seeing him. The circumstance that confirmed the king's distaste to the virtuous archbishop, was the publication of Telemachus. Fénélon appears to have employed his leisure, while preceptor to the princes, on composing a work which hereafter would serve as a guide and instructor to the duke of Burgundy. The unfortunate affair of quietism led him from such studies; but Telemachus was already finished: he gave it to a valet to copy, who sold it to a bookseller in Paris. The spies, who watched every movement of the archbishop, gave notice of the existence of the book; and when the printing had advanced to the 208th page, the whole was seized, and every exertion to annihilate the work was made. Fortunately, motives of gain sharpened men's wits for its preservation; a manuscript copy was preserved; it was sold to Adrian Moetjens, a bookseller at the Hague, who published it in June, 1699,--incorrectly, indeed, as it remained during the author's life; but still it was printed; editions were multiplied; it was translated into every European language, and universally read and admired. In the work itself there was much to annoy Louis XIV., who, as he grew old and bigoted, lost all the generosity which he had heretofore possessed, and, spoilt by the sort of adoration which all writers paid, grasped at flattery more eagerly than in his earlier and more laudable career. The lessons of wisdom sounded like censure in his ear. The courtiers increased his irritability, by making particular applications of the personages in the tale[115]; but without