It had this piece of good fortune, that Cardinal Richelieu died without being able to carry out the project he had conceived.

He had intended to open on the site of the horse-market, near Porte St.Honore and behind the Palais-Cardinal, "a great Place which he would have called Ducale in imitation of the Royale, which is at the other end of the city," says Pellisson; he had placed in the hands of M.de la Mesnardiere, a memorandum drawn up by himself for the plan of a college "which he was meditating for all the noble sciences, and in which he designed to employ all that was most telling for the cause of literature in Europe.

He had an idea of making the members of the Academy directors and as it were arbiters of this great establishment, and aspired, with a feeling worthy of the immortality with which he was so much in love, to set up the French Academy there in the most distinguished position in the world, and to offer an honorable and pleasant repose to all persons of that class who had deserved it by their labors." It was a noble and a liberal idea, worthy of the great mind which had conceived it; but it would have stifled the fertile germ of independence and liberty which he had unconsciously buried in the womb of the French Academy.

Pensioned and barracked, the Academicians would have remained men of letters, shut off from society and the world.

The Academy grew up alone, favored indeed, but never reduced to servitude; it alone has withstood the cruel shocks which have for so long a time agitated France; in a country where nothing lasts, it has lasted, with its traditions, its primitive statutes, its reminiscences, its respect for the past.