In the prose romances, which are epics emancipated from the trammels of verse, there was more vitality. Bishop Camus, the friend of François de Sales, had attempted to sanctify the movement which d'Urfé had initiated; but the spirit of the Astrée would not unite in a single stream with the spirit of the Introduction à la Vie Dévote. Gomberville is remembered rather for the remorseless war which he waged against the innocent conjunction car, never to be admitted into polite literature, than for his encyclopædic romance Polexandre, in which geography is illustrated by fiction, as copious as it is fantastic; yet it was something to annex for the first time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of adventure. Gombauld, the Beau Ténébreux of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, secured a reading for his unreadable Endymion by the supposed transparence of his allusions to living persons. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin relieved the amorous exaltations of his Ariane, a tale of the time of Nero, by excursions which touch the borders of comedy. These are books on which the dust gathers thick in ancient libraries.
But the romances of LA CALPRENÈDE and of GEORGES and MADELEINE DE SCUDÉRY might well be taken down by any lover of literature who possesses the virtue of fortitude. Since d'Urfé's day the taste for pastoral had declined; the newer romance was gallant and heroic. Legend or history supplied its framework; but the central motive was ideal love at odds with circumstance, love the inspirer of limitless devotion and daring. The art of construction was imperfectly understood; the narratives are of portentous length; ten, twelve, twenty volumes were needed to deploy the sentiments and the adventures. In Cassandre, in Cléopâtre, in Pharamond, La Calprenède exhibits a kind of universal history; the dissolution of the Macedonian empire, the decline of the empire of Rome, the beginnings of the French monarchy are successively presented. But the chief personages are idealised portraits drawn from the society of the author's time. The spirit of the Hôtel de Rambouillet is transferred to the period when the Scythian Oroondate was the lover of Statira, daughter of Darius; the Prince de Condé masks in Cléopâtre as Coriolan; Pharamond is the Grand Monarch in disguise. Notwithstanding the faded gallantries and amorous casuistry of La Calprenède's interminable romances, a certain spirit of real heroism, offspring of the writer's ardent imagination and bright southern temper, breathes through them. They were the delight of Mme. de Sévigné and of La Fontaine; even in the eighteenth century they were the companions of Crébillon, and were not forgotten by Rousseau.
Still more popular was Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus. Mdlle. de Scudéry, the "Sapho" of her Saturday salon, a true précieuse, as good of heart and quick of wit as she was unprepossessing of person, supplied the sentiment and metaphysics of love to match the gasconading exploits of her brother's invention. It was the time not only of preciosity, but of the Fronde, with its turbulent adventures and fantastic chivalry. Under the names of Medes and Persians could be discovered the adventurers, the gallants, the fine ladies of the seventeenth century. In Clélie an attempt is made to study the curiosities of passion; it is a manual of polite love and elegant manners; in its carte de Tendre we can examine the topography of love-land, trace the routes to the three cities of "Tendre," and learn the dangers of the way. Thus the heroic romance reached its term; its finer spirit became the possession of the tragic drama, where it was purified and rendered sane. The modern novel had wandered in search of its true self, and had not succeeded in the quest. When Gil Blas appeared, it was seen that the novel of incident must also be the novel of character, and that in its imitation of real life it could appropriate some of the possessions which by that time comedy had lost.
The extravagances of sentiment produced a natural reaction. Not a few of the intimates of the Hôtel de Rambouillet found a relief from their fatigue of fine manners and high-pitched emotions in the unedifying jests and merry tales of the tavern. A comic, convivial, burlesque or picaresque literature became, as it were, a parody of the literature of preciosity. Saint-Amand (1594-1661) was at once a disciple of the Italian Marini, the admired "Sapurnius" of the salon, author of at least one beautiful ode—La Solitude—breathing a gentle melancholy, and a gay singer of bacchic chants. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, in his comedy Les Visionnaires (1637), mocked the précieuses, and was applauded by the spectators of the theatre. One of his heroines is hopelessly enamoured of Alexander the Great; one is enamoured of poetry, and sees life as if it were material for the stage; and the third is enamoured of her own beauty, with its imagined potency over the hearts of men. As early as 1622 CHARLES SOREL expressed, in his Histoire Comique de Francion, a Rabelaisian and picaresque tale of low life, the revolt of the esprit gaulois against the homage of the imagination to courtly shepherdesses and pastoral cavaliers. It was reprinted more than forty times. In Le Berger Extravagant (1628) he attempted a kind of Don Quixote for his own day—an "anti-romance"—which recounts the pastoral follies of a young Parisian bourgeois, whose wits have been set wandering by such dreams as the Astrée had inspired; its mirth is unhappily overloaded with pedantry.
The master of this school of seventeenth-century realism was PAUL SCARRON (1610-60), the comely little abbé, unconcerned with ecclesiastical scruples or good manners, who, when a paralytic, twisted and tortured by disease, became the husband of D'Aubigné's granddaughter, destined as Madame de Maintenon to become the most influential woman in all the history of France. In his Virgile Travesti he produced a vulgar counterpart to the heroic epics, which their own dead-weight would have speedily enough borne downwards to oblivion. His Roman Comique (1651), a short and lively narrative of the adventures of a troupe of comedians strolling in the provinces, contrasted with the exaltations, the heroisms, the delicate distresses of the ideal romance. The Roman Bourgeois (1666) of ANTOINE FURETIÈRE is a belated example of the group to which Francion belongs. The great event of its author's life was his exclusion from the Academy, of which he was a member, on the ground that he had appropriated for the advantage of his Dictionary the results of his fellow-members' researches for the Dictionary, then in progress, of the learned company. His Roman is a remarkable study of certain types of middle-class Parisian life, often animated, exact, effective in its satire; but the analysis of a petty and commonplace world needs some relief of beauty or generosity to make its triviality acceptable, and such relief Furetière will not afford.
Somewhat apart from this group of satiric tales, yet with a certain kinship to them, lie the more fantastic satires of that fiery swashbuckler—"démon des braves"—CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1619-55), Histoire Comique des États et Empires de la Lune, and Histoire Comique des États et Empires du Soleil. Cyrano's taste, caught by the mannerisms of Italy and extravagances of Spain, was execrable. To his violences of temper he added a reputation for irreligion. His comedy Le Pédant Joué has the honour of having furnished Molière with the most laughable scene of the Fourberies de Scapin. The voyages to the moon and the sun, in which the inhabitants, their manners, governments, and ideas, are presented, mingle audacities and caprices of invention with a portion of satiric truth; they lived in the memories of the creator of Gulliver and the creator of Micromégas.
CHAPTER II
THE FRENCH ACADEMY—PHILOSOPHY (DESCARTES)—RELIGION (PASCAL)
The French Academy, an organised aristocracy of letters, expressed the growing sense that anarchy in literature must end, and that discipline and law must be recognised in things of the mind. It is one of the glories of RICHELIEU that he perceived that literature has a public function, and may indeed be regarded as an affair of the State. His own writings, or those composed under his direction—memoirs; letters; the Succincte Narration, which sets forth his policy; the Testament, which embodies his counsel in statecraft—belong less to literature than to French history. But he honoured the literary art; he enjoyed the drama; he devised plots for plays, and found docile poets—his Society of five—to carry out his designs.