La Fontaine frequently uses the distique as a moral conclusion to his Fables, encapsulating the lesson of each narrative in a paired couplet of epigrammatic force: "Rien ne sert de courir, il faut partir à point" ends "Le Lièvre et la Tortue" with a moral that has become proverbial; Boileau's Art poétique is composed in rhyming alexandrine distiques, each couplet delivering a complete critical doctrine: "Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement / Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément" encapsulates his classical ideal in two perfectly balanced lines; The Latin elegiac distique of Ovid and Tibullus, alternating hexameter and pentameter, provided the model for French poets seeking to combine the authority of the couplet with the tenderness of the elegiac mode; A student learning to write distiques should practice creating self-contained couplets that express a complete thought with the economy and point of a proverb, discovering how the constraint of two lines forces precision and memorable formulation; The distique's use as an epitaph, inscribed on a tombstone, represents its most permanent form: reduced to two lines, the poem must compress an entire life and an entire emotional response to death into the most minimal possible verbal space; Marot's epigrammatic distiques demonstrate how wit and brevity reinforce each other: the shorter the poem, the more perfectly every word must work, making the distique the ultimate test of a poet's ability to say the maximum with the minimum.