The year 1660 was notable in the annals of French civilisation. Molière's Les Précieuses Ridicules was performed in the presence of the young Louis XIV, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry published the tenth and final volume of her Clélie, thus ending the four years of expectancy and suspense in which her many readers had been held. In the following year, France, disillusioned by civil wars and emancipated from the dominion of an unpopular minister, Mazarin, eagerly welcomed her young, energetic king, who gave promise of providing, in abundant measure, that military glory and national prestige which were the best antidotes to the national malady of l'ennui. In literature, a brilliant school of writers, endowed with intelligence and wit and supported by royal patronage, was to discredit the more prolix and sententious of their predecessors and to confer an enduring lustre on a court, the most magnificent in modern times.

Yet the glory was to prove short-lived. Thirty years later most of the great men had gone or had retired into obscurity. Molière died in 1673; Racine, who survived until 1699, was unproductive in the last decade of his life; Boileau, on retirement to his suburban house at Auteuil in 1685, could look back on his best achievements; La Fontaine, having lost his patroness in 1693, sought refuge in repentance and theological studies; even Madame de Sevigne wrote few letters after 1691, for in that year she joined her beloved daughter in Provence. At court, the buoyancy and vivacity of earlier years were replaced by a régime of sombre pietism, and France seemed to follow the mood of her king. There was still, it is true, much intellectual activity in France—who could prevent Frenchmen from thinking?—but the lead was no longer taken by Versailles.