During the changing years of half a century the Précieuses "kept the school" of manners and fine language, laying on the ferule whenever they found pupils as recalcitrant as the damsel whose story I am attempting to relate. They did not try—far from it!—to train the public taste, to correct it, or to guide it aright; they urged France into the tortuous by-paths of false ethics and superficial art; but, taken all in all, their influence was good. La Grande Mademoiselle, the abrupt cavalier-maiden, proved its virtue. To the Hôtel de Rambouillet she owed it that she did not end as she began—a dragoon in petticoats, and she recognised the fact, and was grateful for the benefits that she had received.
THE ABBEY OF ST. GERMAIN DES-PRES IN THE 16TH CENTURY
FROM AN OLD PRINT
It has been asked: Was the Society of the Précieuses a result of the influence of Astrée? With the exception noted, it is probable that d'Urfé made no attempt to form new intellectual or sentimental currents; he confined himself to the observation of the thoughts and the feelings at work in the depths of human souls within his own view; he was a close student of character, his book was a study, and his influence reformed opinions and manners; but as the Society of the Précieuses was in process of incubation before Astrée appeared, it must have taken shape had d'Urfé never written his book. The world of fashion had long deemed it witty to ridicule the Précieuses; from too much handling, jests upon that subject had lost their effervescence, and in time it was considered more original to find virtue in the delicate mannerisms of the refined ladies than to adhere to the old fashion of mocking them. Their exaggerations were numerous and pronounced, but their civility was in pleasant contrast with the abrupt indelicacies of the Béarnais; and even now, looking back to them across the separating centuries, we can find few causes for reproach. They subjected their literature to the yoke of the Spanish and Italian schools, but they could hardly have done less at a time when the Court was Italian, and when Spanish influences were entering by all the frontiers. Aside from their submission to foreign influences, the Précieuses were sturdy champions of the right, and unless we are prepared to falsify more than thirty years of our history of morals, and of literature, we must admit that they rendered us services which cannot be forgotten or misunderstood.
They were women of the world, important after the fashion of their day, and by the power of their worldly influence they freed literature from the pedantry with which Ronsard—and Montaigne, also, to a certain extent—had entangled it. They forced the writers to brush the dust from their bookshelves; they imposed upon them some of the exigencies of their own sex, and by the bare fact of their influence literature which had been almost wholly erudite acquired a quality assimilating it to the usages of the world, and an air of decency and of civility which it had always lacked. The Précieuses compelled men to grant them the respect due to all women under civilisation, and to count them as members of the body politic; they exacted concessions to their modesty; they purified language; they obliged "all honest men" to select their topics of conversation; they habituated people to discern the delicate shades of thought and to dissect ideas and find the hidden meanings of words; they made demands for concessions to the rights of precocity, and, as a result, propriety of verbal expression and closely attentive analyses entered conversation hand in hand. Many and eminent were the services rendered unto France by the amiable band of worldly reformers; theirs was a mighty enterprise; we cannot measure the transformation wrought by the influence of women in the indecent manners of that day unless we make a minute examination of the subject. Before the advent of the Précieuses, exterior elegance and a graceful bearing had been a cloak covering the words and the conduct of barbarians. Proofs of this fact abound in the records of that day. La Grande Mademoiselle was of the second generation of the Précieuses; her wit, her love of wit, and her intellect, gave her rank in the Livré d'Or[40]; but the habits of youth are difficult to overcome, and when she first visited the Hôtel de Rambouillet she used the words and the gestures of a pandour, her squared shoulders and out-thrust chest bore evidences of the natural investiture of the Cossack. Speaking of that epoch, her most impartial critic tells us that she "voiced a thousand imprecations."[41] In one of her attacks of indignation she threatened the Maréchal de l'Hôpital: "I will tear your beard out with my own hands!" she cried fiercely, and the marshal took fright and ran away. Several ladies of Mademoiselle's society were known to possess brisk and heavy hands, and feet of the same alert and virile character. Their people and their lovers knew something of their "manuals and pedals," and bore visible tokens of the efficacy of those phenomenal members on their own persons,—and in all the colours of the rainbow. Madame de Vervins, who assisted with La Grande Mademoiselle at the fêtes given in honour of Mademoiselle de Hautefort, "basted her lackeys and other servants at will," and she did it with no slack hand. One of the subjects on whom she plied her dexterity died under the operation, and the people of Paris avenged his death by sacking her palace.[42] Following is the record:
On brisa vitré, on rompit porte, ...
Bref: si fort s'accrut le tumulte
Que de peur de plus grande insulte,