This brings us to the mention of La Fontaine's one great, solitary, and brief fit of anger. Always ready to yield to the advice of his friends, he imprudently listened to Lulli, who had importuned him to produce, at a very short notice, the libretto of an opera. The music was to be marvellous, the Court would applaud to the skies the author and the composer, and the poet would be free of the theatre, and have acquired all the rights of dramatic authorship. What a temptation was this! La Fontaine courageously set himself to work under the guidance of Lulli, who urged him forward, and day by day made fresh suggestions. The poet readily obeyed the spur, and even yielded to the sacrifice of some of his verses; but he had scarcely finished, when he discovered that his perfidious employer had passed over, with all his musical baggage, to the Proserpine of Quinault. We may judge of the poet's rage. The four months' labour utterly lost; the nights passed without sleep; the treachery of the instigation; the heartless abandonment! Ah! how many causes of complaint had the poet against this traitor! La Fontaine could not contain himself, and wrote a satire, compound of gall and bile, in which he complains of having been made a fool of. This fit of passion, however, did not last long. Madame de Thianges brought about a reconciliation between the culprit and the victim, and that without much difficulty, for, after all, Lulli was an excellent companion, and La Fontaine was incapable of nursing anger long. To be angry was a trouble to him, and consequently he never kept up a sense of ill-feeling for any length of time. His friends might become estranged from or quarrel with each other; but he remained on the best of terms with them, and saw them separately. One might have thought that he had taken for his motto the verse of the old poet, Garnier-- "To love I am plighted, but never to hate."