A Short History of French Literature
remarkable is the _Corrivaux_ of Troterel (1612). Saint-Evremond among
his earlier works produced a _Comedie des Academistes_, satirising the
then young Academy.
[241] Ed. Moland. 7 vols. Paris, 1863. Ed. (in 'Grands Ecrivains'
series) Despois, Regnier, and Mesnard. Paris (in progress).
CHAPTER III.
NOVELISTS.
[Sidenote: D'Urfe.]
Prose fiction, for reasons which it is not at all hard to discover, is
in its more complete forms always a late product of literature. Up to
the beginning of the seventeenth century, France had known nothing of it
except the short prose tales which had succeeded the Fabliaux, and which
had been chiefly founded on imitation of the Italians, with the late and
inferior prose versions of the romances of chivalry, the isolated
masterpiece of _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_, and the translated and
adapted versions of the _Amadis_ and its continuations. The imitation of
Spanish literature was constant in the early seventeenth century, and
the great wave of conceited style which, under the various names of
Euphuism, Gongorism, Marinism, invaded all the literary countries of
Europe, did not spare France. The result was a very singular class of
literature which, except for a few burlesque works, almost monopolised
the attention of novelists during the first half of the century. The
example of it was in a manner set by Honore d'Urfe in the _Astree_,
which was, however, rather pastoral than heroic. D'Urfe, who was a man
of position and wealth in the district of Forez, imagined, on the banks
of the Lignon, a stream running past his home, a kind of Arcadia, the
popularity of which is sufficiently shown by the adoption of the name of
the hero, Celadon, as one of the stock names in French for a lover. He
took, perhaps, some of his machinery from the _Aminta_ of Tasso and from
the other Italian pastorals, but he emulated the _Amadis_ in the
interminable series of adventures and the long-windedness of his
treatment. He had, however, some literary power, while the necessary
verisimilitude was provided for by the adaptation of numerous personal
experiences, and the book has preserved a certain reputation for
graceful sentiment and attractive pictures of nature. It was
extraordinarily popular at the time and long afterwards, so much so that
a contemporary ecclesiastic, Camus de Pontcarre, considered it necessary
to supply an antidote to the bane in the shape of a series of Christian
pastorals, the name of one of which, _Palombe_, is known, because of an
edition of it in the present century.
[Sidenote: The Heroic Romances.]
D'Urfe belonged as much to the sixteenth as to the seventeenth century,
though the _Astree_ was the work of the latter part of his life, and was
indeed left unfinished by him. It was shortly afterwards, under the
influence chiefly of the growing fancy for literary _coteries_, that the
heroic romance properly so called was born. This was usually a narration
of vast length, in which sometimes the heroes and heroines of classical
antiquity, sometimes personages due more or less to the author's
imagination, were conducted through a more than Amadis-like series of
trials and adventures, with interludes and a general setting of
high-flown gallantry. This latter possessed a complete jargon of its
own, and (though the hypothesis of its power over the classical French
drama is for the most part exaggerated) continued to exercise a vast
influence on literature and on society, even after Moliere had poured on
its chief practitioners and advocates the undying mockery of his
_Precieuses Ridicules_. There were three prominent authors in this
style, Mademoiselle de Scudery, La Calprenede, and Gomberville.
Mademoiselle de Scudery, known in the _coterie_ nomenclature of the time
as 'Sapho,' was the sister of Georges de Scudery, and a woman of
considerable talent and more considerable industry. Madeleine de Scudery
was born at Havre in 1607, and died at Paris in 1701, her life thus
covering nearly the whole of the century of which she was one of the
most conspicuous literary figures. She had no beauty--indeed she was
very ugly--but the eccentric military and literary reputation of her
brother and her own talents made her the centre and head of an important
_coterie_ in the capital. Her romances, the earliest of which was
_Ibrahim_, were published under her brother's name, but their
authorship was well known. She was extremely accomplished, not merely in
the accomplishments of a blue-stocking but in art, and even in
housewifery. After her series of romances was finished she published
many volumes, chiefly condensed or extracted from them, containing
_Conversations_ of the moral kind, which attracted attention from some
persons who had not condescended to the romances themselves. It ought
never to be forgotten that among the most fervent admirers of her books
and of their fellows was Madame de Sevigne, who was certainly almost as
acute in literary criticism as she was skilful in literary composition.
Her novels, the most famous of their class, are the _Grand Cyrus_,
otherwise _Artamene_, _Clelie_, _Ibrahim_, or the _Illustrious Bassa_,
and _Almahide_, the latter being partly, but chiefly in the name of the
heroine, the source of Dryden's _Conquest of Granada_. The _Grand Cyrus_
is, at least by title, the best remembered, but it is in _Clelie_ that
the best-known and most characteristic trait appears, the delineation
and description namely of the _Carte de Tendre_[242]. Tendre is the
country of love, through which flows the river of Inclination watering
the villages of 'Pretty Verses,' 'Gallant Epistles,' 'Assiduity,' etc.,
while elsewhere in the region are the less cheerful localities of
'Levity,' 'Indifference,' 'Perfidy,' and so forth. La Calprenede, a
Gascon by birth, was the author of _Cleopatre_ (which ranks perhaps with
_Cyrus_ as the chief example of the style), of _Cassandre_ and of
_Pharamond_. Gauthier de Coste (which was his personal name) figures,
like most of the notable persons of the middle of the century, in the
_Historiettes_ of Tallemant, who says of him, 'Il n'y a jamais eu un
homme plus Gascon que celui-ci.' The assertion is supported by some
characteristic but not easily quotable anecdotes. The criticism of
Tallemant, however, does not apply badly to the whole class of
compositions. 'Les heros,' says he, speaking of _Cassandre_, 'se
ressemblent comme deux gouttes d'eau, parlent tous _Phebus_ (the
euphuist jargon of the time), et sont tous des gens a cent mille lieues
au dessus des autres hommes.' Marin le Roy, Seigneur de Gomberville, who
was something of a Jansenist, attended rather to edification than
gallantry in his _Alcidiane_, _Caritee_, _Polexandre_, and _Cytheree_.
Though earlier in date he is inferior in power to Mademoiselle de
Scudery and to La Calprenede, the first of whom had some wit and much
culture, while La Calprenede possessed a decided grasp of heroic
character and some notion of the method of composing historical novels.
Gomberville, a man of wealth and position, was also a writer of moral
works. Putting the artificiality of the general style out of the
question, the chief fault to be found with these books is their enormous
length. They fill eight, ten, or even twelve volumes; they consist of
five, six, or even seven thousand pages, though the pages are not very
large and the print by no means close. Even the liveliest work--work
like Fielding's or Le Sage's--would become tiresome on such a scale as
this; and it is still incomprehensible how any one not having some
special object to serve by it could struggle through such enormous
wastes of verbiage and unreality as form the bulk of these novels. Even
when the passion for the heroic style strictly so called began to wane
no great improvement at first manifested itself. Catherine
Desjardins[243] (who wrote under the name of Madame de Villedieu)
produced numerous books (the chief of which is _Le Grand Alcandre_), not
indeed so absolutely preposterous in general conception, but even more
vapid and destitute of originality and distinction[244].
These impracticable and barren styles of fiction were succeeded in the
latter half of the century by something much better. The Picaroon
romance of Spain inspired Paul Scarron with the first of a long line of
novels which, in the hands of Le Sage, Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett,
enriched the literature of Europe with remarkable work. Madame de la
Fayette laid the foundation of the novel proper, or story of analysis of
character; and towards the close of the century the fairy tale attained,
in the hands of Anthony Hamilton, Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy, its
most delightful and abundant development.
[Sidenote: Scarron.]
Paul Scarron was one of the most remarkable literary figures of the
century in respect of originality and eccentric talent, though few
single works of his possess formal completeness. He was of a family of
Piedmontese origin and very well connected, his father, of the same
name, being a member of the Parliament of Paris, and of sufficiently
independent humour to oppose Richelieu. Paul Scarron the younger (he had
had an elder brother of the same name who had died an infant) was born
in 1610, and his mother did not outlive his third year. His father
married again; the stepmother did not get on well with Paul, and he was
half obliged and half induced to become an abbe. For some years he lived
a merry life, partly at Rome, partly at Paris. But when he was still
young a great calamity fell on him. A cock-and-bull story of his having
disguised himself as a savage in a kind of voluntary tar-and-feather
suit, and having been struck with paralysis in consequence of plunging
into an ice-cold stream to escape the populace, is usually told, but
there seems to be no truth in it. An attack of fever, followed by
rheumatism and mismanaged by the physicians of the day, appears to have
been the real cause of his misfortune. At any rate, for the last twenty
years of his life he was hopelessly deformed, almost helpless, and
subject to acute attacks of pain. But his spirit was unconquerable. He
had some preferment at Le Mans and a pension from the queen, which he
lost on suspicion of writing _Mazarinades_. Besides these he had what he
called his 'Marquisat de Quinet,' that is to say, the money which Quinet
the bookseller paid him for his wares. In 1652 he astonished Paris by
marrying Francoise d'Aubigne, the future Madame de Maintenon, the
granddaughter of Agrippa d'Aubigne. The strange couple seem to have been
happy enough, and such unfavourable reports as exist against Madame
Scarron may be set down to political malice. But Scarron's health was
utterly broken, and he died in 1660 at the age of fifty. His work was
not inconsiderable, including some plays and much burlesque poetry, the
chief piece of which was his 'Virgil travestied,' an ignoble task at
best, but very cleverly performed. His prose, however, is of much
greater value. Many of his _nouvelles_, mostly imitated from the
Spanish, have merit, and his _Roman Comique_[245], though also inspired
to some extent from the peninsula, has still more. It is the unfinished
history of a troop of strolling actors, displaying extraordinary truth
of observation and power of realistic description in the style which, as
has been said, Le Sage and Fielding afterwards made popular throughout
Europe.
[Sidenote: Cyrano de Bergerac.]
With Scarron may be classed another writer of not dissimilar character,
but of far less talent, whose eccentricities have given him a
disproportionate reputation even in France, while they have often
entirely misled foreign critics. Cyrano de Bergerac was a Gascon of not
inconsiderable literary power, whose odd personal appearance, audacity