La Grande Mademoiselle and most of her contemporaries escaped Astrée's influence in this respect; they did not admit that man has "neither will nor understanding" where his passions are concerned; or that his feelings depend on "destiny." Corneille, who had confronted the question, set forth the principle that the heart should defer to the will. "The love of an honest man," he wrote in 1634,[33]—"The love of an honest man should always be voluntary. One ought never to love to the point where he cannot help loving, and if he carries love so far, he is the slave of a tyranny whose yoke he should shake off."
In her youth Mademoiselle de Montpensier was one of the truest of the Cornéliennes of her generation; she practised what others were contented to restrict to preaching. Love's tyranny appeared to her a shameful thing, and she was so convinced that it rested with the lover whether he should be a slave or free himself "by shaking off the yoke," that even the most honest attacks of moral faintness were, in her eyes, occasions for judgment without mercy. One day—she tells it herself—she turned a young femme de chambre out of her service simply "because the girl had married for love." The shame then attendant upon love increased in proportion to the "condition" of the slaves of the questionable passion. The lower orders were insignificant, and their loves and their antipathies, like their sufferings, were beneath the consideration of reason, but when men were of a certain rank, sentiment was debarred from the conditions of marriage. Mademoiselle followed all the precepts of high quality, and throughout the first half of her life her line of action lay parallel with the noble principles introduced by Corneille. Jansenism, which, like Corneille, raised the veil of life for many of the humbler human hearts, made no impression upon "tall Mademoiselle." Lauzun was needed to break her pride.
Concerning moral questions, public sentiment was calm; the only serious difference raised by d'Urfé's work during a period of half a century was the conflict of opinions[34] on human liberty; on all other subjects, notably the things of taste, d'Urfé was in harmony with public feeling; at times Astrée exceeded public feeling, but it seldom conflicted with it. The sentiments of the book were far in advance of the epoch.
But the nature with which d'Urfé communed and which he loved was the nature viewed by Louis XIII., and fashioned according to the royal taste, improved, repaired, decorated with artificial ornaments, and confined within circumscribed landscapes composed of complicated horticultural figures; a composite nature in which verdure was nothing but a feature. The fashion of landscape-gardening—an invention of the Renaissance—had arrived in France from Italy. In the land of its birth very amusing specimens of the picturesque were maintained by intelligent property-owners.
"There are fountains," [said M. Eugene Muntz,][35] "groves, verdant bowers, trellises, vine-wreathed arbours, flowers cherished for their beauty, and plants cultivated for their medicinal properties; and under ground there are caves and grottoes. There are bird-houses, hydraulic organs, single statues, groups of statues, obelisks, vases, pavilions, covered walks, and bathhouses; everything is brought together within a limited space to charm the eye and to favour the imagination."
The landscape-gardening of France offered the same spectacle, and the cultivated parks bore close resemblance to the shops of the venders of bric-à-brac. "In those rare gardens," said an enthusiastic historian, "he who promenades may pass from one surprise to another, losing himself at every step in all sorts of labyrinths." ("Dedalus" was the name in use, for in those days much was borrowed from mythology and from other ancient sources.) The labyrinths were complicated by ingenious devices intended to deceive the vision. Æstheticism of style demanded such delusions. The most renowned landscape-gardens were the royal parks, on which money had been freely lavished to perfect and to elaborate nature. Among the "rarities" in the gardens of the Gondis and at Saint Cloud, were fountains whose waters played invisible instruments. At the Duke de Bellegarde's (rue de Grenelle Saint Honoré) the most marvellous thing in the garden was an illuminated grotto of arcades, ornamented with grotesques and with marine columns, and covered with a vaulting encrusted with shells and with a quantity of rock-work; and more than that, so full of water-spouts, canals, water-jets, and invisible faucets[36] that even the King had no greater number on his terraces at Saint Germain—nor had Cardinal de Richelieu a greater number in his gardens at Rueil, though the first artificial cascades ever seen in France[2] had been built in his garden.[37] At the Château of Usson, the home of Queen Marguerite, who appears in Astrée under the name of Galatée, the garden was provided with all the rarities the place would hold. Nothing that artifice could add to it had been forgotten. The woods were embellished with divers grottoes so well counterfeiting nature that the eye often deceived the judgment.[38] The most remarkable grotto was
the cave of old Mandragora, a place so full of witcheries that surprise followed surprise, and hour by hour, something continually occurred to delight the vision. The vaulting of the entrance was sustained by two sculptured figures very industriously arrayed with minute stones of divers colours; the hair, the eyebrows, and the beards of the statues, and the two sculptured horns of the god Pan were composed of sea shells so neatly and so properly set in that the cement could not be seen. The outer coping of the door was formed like a rustic arch, and garlands of shells, fastened at the four corners, ended close to the heads of the two statues. The inside of the arch tapered to a rocky point, which, in several places, seemed to drip saltpetre. The retaining walls of the arch were set back in niches to form fountains, and all of the fountains depicted some of the various effects of the power of love. In the grotto arose a tomb-like monument ornamented with images representing divers objects, all formed of coloured marble, and trimmed with pictures; wherever such an effect was possible, the trees were pruned to take the appearance of some other object or objects.
Thus the laborious and unrestrained intervention of man evoked a factitious type of nature as far from precious as the false Précieuses. By the unreserved admiration of its florid descriptions Astrée had consecrated the artificial mode. Nature demanded Lenôtre to strip her gardens of their ridiculous decorations, and to redeem them by simplicity, but when Lenôtre accomplished the work of regeneration the public taste was wounded; the people had become accustomed to the sight of parks decorated like the stage of the theatre, and the simplicity of nature shocked them. La Grande Mademoiselle considered Chenonceaux incomplete; she complained that it "looked unfinished"; her artificially nourished taste missed something, because the owners of Chenonceaux had respected the work of God, and left their park just as they had received it from the hand of its Creator; she wondered why Provence was called beautiful—to her it seemed "ugly enough." She lived at the gate of the Pyrenees thirty days and never entered the country, yet she delighted in the pretentious trinkets with which the landscape-gardeners of the Italian school decorated French woods and gardens. Honoré d'Urfé was responsible for her ignorance. Many of d'Urfé's tastes[39] were noble, and Astrée was a work of excellent purpose—almost a great work; but it lacked the one thing demanded by true art,—love of nature in its simplicity.
D'Urfé's artificial taste was more regrettable because his successors, they who continued his work, accentuated his faults, as, generally speaking, the disciples of all innovators accentuate the faults of their masters. Few among the Précieuses knew how to sift the chaff from the wheat when the time came to take or to leave the varied gifts of their inheritance. The true Précieuses precipitated the revolution of which d'Urfé had been the prophet; they alone consummated the moral transformation which, according to his light, he had prepared.