In 1694, when Louis XIV. was at the height of that military glory which at once dazzled and ruined France, there was born in Paris on November 21st a little, puny, weak, sickly son. The house into which the infant was born was the ordinary house of a thoroughly comfortable well-to-do bourgeois of the time and place. A notary was M. Arouet père.His father had been a prosperous linen-draper; and Arouet the son, shrewd and thrifty in affairs, had bought, after the custom of his time and his profession, first one post and then another, until he was a man of some wealth and, for his class, of some position. Among his clients he could number the Dukes of Sully and of Richelieu, memoir-writing Saint-Simon, the poet Boileau, and the immortal Ninon de l’Enclos. He had a country house at Châtenay, five miles from Paris. Plenty of sound common-sense, liberal, practical, hospitable; just enough taste for literature to enjoy a doze over a book in the evening when his day’s labour was done; eminently respected and respectable; decently acquiescing in the national religion as such, and with no particular faith in anything but hard work and monetary prudence; not a little hasty in temper and deadly obstinate--such was Maître Arouet.