Not one of the worst of these four or five score minors, though scarcely in itself a positively good thing, is the Sieur du Périer's La Haine et l'Amour d'Arnoult et de Clarimonde. It begins with a singularly banal exordium, gravely announcing that Hate and Love are among the most important passions, with other statements of a similar kind couched in commonplace language. But it does something to bring the novel from an uninteresting cloudland to earth by dealing with the recent and still vividly felt League wars: and there is some ingenuity shown in plotting the conversion of the pair from more than "a little aversion" at the beginning to nuptial union—not at the end. For it is one of the points about the book which are not commonplace, though it may be a survival or atavism from mediaeval practice—that the latter part of it is occupied mainly, not with Arnoult and Clarimonde, but with the loves, fortunes, and misfortunes of their daughter Claride.
Du Croset—Philocalie. Corbin—Philocaste.
The Philocalie of Du Croset (1593) derives its principal interest from its being not merely a Bergerie before the Astrée, but, like it, the work of a Forézian gentleman who proudly asserts his territoriality, and dedicates his book to the "Chevalier D'Urfé." And its part name-fellow, the Philocaste of Jean Corbin—a very tiny book, the heroine of which is (one would hardly have thought it from her name) a Princess of England—is almost entirely composed of letters, discourse on them, and a few interspersed verses. It belongs to the division of backward-looking novels, semi-chivalrous in type, and its hero is as often called "The Black Knight" as by his name.
Jean de Lannoi and his Roman Satirique.
The Roman Satirique (1624) of Jean de Lannoi is another example of the curious inability to "hit it off" which has been mentioned so often as characterising the period. Its 1100 pages are far too many, though it is fair to say that the print is exceptionally large and loose. Much of it is not in any sense "satiric," and it seems to have derived what popularity it had almost wholly from the "key" interest.
Béroalde de Verville outside the Moyen de Parvenir.
The minor works—if the term may be used when the attribution of the major is by no means certain—of Béroalde de Verville have, as is usual, been used both ways as arguments for and against his authorship of the Moyen de Parvenir. Les Aventures de Floride is simply an attempt, and a big one in size, to amadigauliser, as the literary slang of the time went. The Histoire Véritable, owing nothing but its title and part of its idea to Lucian, and sub-titled Les Princes Fortunés, is less conventional. It has a large fancy map for a frontispiece; there are fairies in it, and a sort of pot-pourri of queernesses which might not impossibly have come from the author or editor of the Moyen in his less inconveniently ultra-Pantagruelist moments. Le Cabinet de Minerve is actually a glorification of "honest" love. In fact, Béroalde is one of the oddest of "polygraphers," and there is nobody quite like him in English, though some of his fellows may be matched, after a fashion, with our Elizabethan pamphleteers. I have long wished to read the whole of him, but I suppose I never shall.
And it is time to leave these very minor stars and come to the full and gracious moon of the Astrée itself.
The Astrée—its author.
Honoré D'Urfé, who was three years younger than Shakespeare, and died in the year in which Charles I. came to the throne, was a cadet of a very ancient family in the district or minor province of Forez, where his own famous Lignon runs into the Loire. He was a pupil of the Jesuits and early fort en thème, was a strenuous ligueur, and, though (or perhaps also because) he was very good friends with Henri's estranged wife, Margot, for some time decidedly suspect to Henri IV. For this reason, and others of property, etc., he became almost a naturalised Savoyard, but died in the service of his own country at the beginning of Richelieu's Valtelline war. The most noteworthy thing in his rather eventful life was, however, his marriage. This also has a direct literary interest, at least in tradition, which will have his wife, Diane de Châteaumorand, to be Astrée herself, and so the heroine of "the first [great] sentimental romance." The circumstances of the union, however, were scarcely sentimental, much less romantic. They were even, as people used to say yesterday, "not quite nice," and the Abbé Reure, a devotee of both parties to it, admits that they "heurte[nt] violemment nos idées." In fact Diane was not only eight years older than Honoré and thirty-eight years of age, but she had been for a quarter of a century the wife of his elder brother, Anne, while he himself was a knight of Malta, and vowed to celibacy. Of course (as the Canon points out with irrefragably literal accuracy in logic and law) the marriage being declared null ab initio (for the cause most likely to suggest itself, though alleged after extraordinary delay), Diane and Honoré were not sister- and brother-in-law at all, and no "divorce" or even "dispensation" was needed. In the same way, Honoré, having been introduced into the Order of St. John irregularly in various ways, never was a knight of it at all, and could not be bound by its rules. Q.E.D. Wicked people, of course, on the other hand, said that it was a device to retain Diane's great wealth (for Honoré was quite poor in comparison) in the family; sentimental ones that it was a fortunate and blameless crowning of a long and pure attachment. As a matter of fact, no "permanent children" (to adopt an excellent phrase of the late Mr. Traill's) resulted; Diane outlived her husband, though but for a short time, and left all her property to her relations of the Lévis family. The pair are also said not to have been the most united of couples. In connection with the Astrée their portraits are interesting. Honoré d'Urfé, though he had the benefit of Van Dyck's marvellous art of cavalier creation, must have been a very handsome man. Diane's portrait, by a much harder and dryer hand, purports to have been taken at the age of sixty-four. At first sight there is no beauty in it; but on reinspection one admits possibilities—a high forehead, rather "enigmatic" eyes, not at all "extinguished," a nose prominent and rather large, but straight and with well, but not too much, developed "wings," and, above all, a full and rather voluptuous mouth. Such may have been the first identified novel-heroine. It is a popular error to think that sixty-four and beauty are incompatibles, but one certainly would have liked to see her at sixteen, or better still and perhaps best of all, at six and twenty.