Do you not observe, dear reader, that this anonymous libel, addressed to King Louis XIV. in order to prevent the performance of _Tartuffe_, is very similar to the petition addressed to King Charles X. in order to hinder the performance of _Henri III._? except that the author or authors of that seventeenth century libel had the modesty to preserve their anonymity, whilst the illustrious Academicians of the nineteenth boldly signed their names: Viennet, Lemercier, Arnault, Étienne Jay, Jouy and Onésime Leroy. M. Onésime Leroy was not a member of the Academy, but he was very anxious to be one! Why he is not is a question I defy any one to answer. These insults were at any rate from contemporaries and can be understood; but Bossuet, who wrote ten years after the death of Molière; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote eighty years after the production of _Tartuffe_; and Bourdaloue and Fénelon ... Ah! I must really tell you what Fénelon thought of the author of the _Précieuses ridicules._ After the Eagle of Meaux, let us have the Swan of Cambrai! There are no fiercer creatures when they are angered than woolly fleeced sheep or white-plumed birds! "Although Molière thought rightly he often expressed himself badly; he made use of the most strained and unnatural phrases. Terence said in four or five words, and with the most exquisite simplicity, what it took Molière a multitude of metaphors approaching to nonsense to say. _I much prefer his prose to his poetry._ For example, _l'Avare_ is less badly written than the plays which are in verse; but, taken altogether, it seems to me, that even in his prose, he does not speak in simple enough language to express all passions." Remark that this was written twenty years after the death of Molière, and that Fénelon, the author of _Télémaque_, in speaking to the Academy, which applauded with those noddings of the head which did not hinder their naps, boldly declared that the author of the _Misanthrope_, of _Tartuffe_ and of the _Femmes Savants_ did not know how to write in verse. O my dear Monsieur François de Salignac de la Motte de Fénelon, if I but had here a certain criticism that Charles Fourier wrote upon your _Télémaque_, how I should entertain my reader! In the meantime, the man whom seventeenth and eighteenth century criticism, whom ecclesiastics and philosophers, Bossuet and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, treated as heretical, a corrupter and an abomination; who, according to the anonymous writer of the letter to the king, _spoke French passably well_; who, according to Fénelon _did not know how to write in verse_--that man, in the nineteenth century, is considered a great moralist, a stern corrector of manners, an inimitable writer!