[140] La Vie et les Œuvres de Honoré d'Urfé. Par le Chanoine O. C. Reure, Paris, 1910.
[141] The Abbé Reure, to whom I owe my own knowledge of the translation and dedication, says nothing more.
[142] M. Reynier, in the useful book so often quoted, has shown that, as one would expect, this influence is not absent from the smaller French love-novels which preceded the Astrée; indeed, as we saw, it is obvious, though in a form of more religiosity, as early as the Heptameron. But it was not till the seventeenth century in France, or till a little before it in some cases with us, that "Love in fantastic triumph sat" between the shadowing wings of sensual and intellectual passion.
[143] They had, indeed, neither luck nor distinction after Honoré's death: and the last of the family died, like others of the renegade nobles of France, by his own hand, to escape the guillotine which he himself had helped to establish.
[144] The more orthodox "laws of love" which Celadon puts up in his "Temple of Astraea" are less amusing.
[145] He constantly plays this part of referee and moraliser. But he is by no means exempt from the pleasing fever of the place, and some have been profane enough to think his mistress, Diane, more attractive than the divine Astrée herself.
[146] Very delicate persons have been shocked by the advantages afforded to Celadon in his disguise as the Druid's daughter, and the consequent familiarity with the innocent unrecognising heroine. But honi soit will cover them.
[147] There is plenty of this, including a regular siege of the capital, Marcilly.
[148] The constant confusion, in these quasi-classical romances, of masculine and feminine names is a rather curious feature. But the late Sir W. Gilbert played some tricks of the kind in Pygmalion and Galatea, and I remember an English novelist, with more pretensions to scholarship than Gilbert, making the particularly unfortunate blunder of attributing to Longus a book called "Doris and Chloe."
[149] It is fair to say that Urfé has been praised for these historical excursions or incursions of his.