Paper! that the rest of your white surface may not blush at my shame, suffer me to blacken it with my sorrow!
It has always been a sad mystery to me why rude and dull intelligences should sneer at, or denounce, these delightful fantastries, the very stuff of which dreams and love and poetry—the three best things of life—are made.[134]
Montreux and the Bergeries de Juliette.
The British Museum possesses not very many of the, I believe, numerous works of Nicolas de Montreux, alias, as has been said, Ollenix du Mont Sacré, a "gentleman of Maine," as he scrupulously designates himself. But it does possess two parts (the first two) of the Bergeries de Juliette, and I am not in the least surprised that no reader of them should have worried any librarian into completing the set. Each of these parts is a stout volume of some five hundred pages,[135] not very small, of close small print, filled with stuff of the most deadly dulness. For instance, Ollenix is desirous to illustrate the magnificence and the danger of those professional persons of the other sex at Venice who have filled no small place in literature from Coryat to Rousseau. So he tells us, without a gleam or suspicion of humour, that one customer was so astonied at the decorations of the bedroom, the bed, etc., that he remained for two whole hours considering them, and forgetting to pay any attention to the lady. It is satisfactory to know that she revenged herself by raising the fee to an inordinate amount, and insisting on her absurd client's lackey being sent to fetch it before the actual conference took place. But the silliness of the story itself is a fair sample of Montreux' wits, and these wits manage to make anything they deal with duller by their way of telling it.
Des Escuteaux and his Amours Diverses.
It is still more unfortunate that our national collection has none of the numerous fictions[136] of A(ntoine?) de Nervèze. His Amours Diverses (1606), in which he collected no less than seven love-stories, published separately earlier, would be useful. But it luckily does provide the similarly titled book of Des Escuteaux, who is perhaps the most representative and prolific writer, next to Montreux and Nervèze, of the whole, and who seems to me, from what I have read of the first and what others say of the second, to be their superior. The collections consist of (Amours de in every case) Filiris et Isolia, dedicated to Isabel (not "-belle") de Rochechouart; Clarimond et Antoinette (to Lucresse [sic] de Bouillé); Clidamant et Marilinde (to Jane de la Brunetière), and Ipsilis et Alixée (to Renée de Cossé, Amirale de France!).[137]
Some readers may be a little "put off" by a habit which Des Escuteaux has, especially in the first story of the volume, of prefixing, as in drama, the names of the speakers—Le Prince, La Princesse, etc.—to the first paragraphs of the harangues and histoires of which these books so largely consist.[138] But it is not universal. The most interesting of the four is, I think, Clidamant et Marilinde, for it introduces the religious wars, a sojourn of the lovers on a desert island, which M. Reynier[139] not unjustly calls Crusoe-like, and other "varieties."
François de Molière—Polyxène.
I have not seen the other—quite other, and François—Molière's Semaine Amoureuse, which belongs to this class, though later than most; but his still later Polyxène, a sort of half-way house between these shorter novels and the ever-enlarged "Heroics," is a very fat duodecimo of 1100 pages. The heroine has two lovers—one with the singular name of Cloryman,—but love does not run smooth with either, and she ends by taking the (pagan) veil. The bathos of the thought and style may be judged from the heroine's affecting mention of an entertainment as "the last ballet my unhappy father ever saw."
Du Périer—Arnoult et Clarimonde.