When the Christian pessimism of Racine had—in the words of Jules Lemaître—succeeded the stoical optimism of Corneille, all the conditions evolving their diverse lines of thought had changed.
The nature of La Grande Mademoiselle was exemplified in the moral revolution which gave us Phédre thirty-four years (the space of a generation) after the apparition of Pauline.
In the first part of her life,—the part depicted in this volume,—Mademoiselle was as true a type of the heroines of Corneille as any of her contemporaries. Not one of the great ladies of her world had a more ungovernable thirst for grandeur; not one of them cherished more superb scorn for the baser passions, among which Mademoiselle classed the tender sentiment of love. But, like all the others, she was forced to renounce her ideals; and not in her callow youth, when such a thing would have been natural, but when she was growing old, was she carried away by the torrent of the new thought, whose echoes we have caught through Racine.
The limited but intimately detailed and somewhat sentimental history of Mademoiselle is the history of France when Louis XIII. was old, and when young Louis—Louis XIV.—was a minor, living the happiest years of all his life.
If I seem presumptuous, let my intention be my excuse for so long soliciting the attention of my reader in favour of La Grande Mademoiselle.
ERRATA.
Page [83], ninth line from top, read de Lormes for de Lorme.
Page [272], fifth line from bottom, dele hypnotic.