[249] Ed. Garnier. Paris, 1864.
[250] Madame de la Fayette also wrote La Comtesse de Tende, and interesting Memoirs of Henrietta of England. Zaïde was published under the name of Segrais, who was a nouvelle-writer of no great merit, though a pleasant poet.
[251] See H. Bonhomme, Le Cabinet des Fées.
[252] Ed. Lefèvre. Paris, 1875. Ed. Lang. Oxford, 1888.
CHAPTER IV.
HISTORIANS, MEMOIR-WRITERS, LETTER-WRITERS.
Although the seventeenth century did not witness the acceptance in France of what may be called a philosophical conception of history, and though few or none of the regular histories of the time (with the exception of that of Mézeray) hold high rank as literature, no period was more fruitful in memoirs, letters, and separate historical sketches of the first merit. The names of Madame de Sévigné, of the Cardinal de Retz, of La Rochefoucauld, and at the extreme end of the period of Saint Simon, rank among those of the most original writers of France, while the historical essay has rarely assumed a more thoroughly literary form than in the short sketches of Retz, Sarrasin, and others. The subject of the present chapter may, therefore, be divided into four parts, the historians properly so called (the least interesting of the four), the historical essayists, the memoir-writers, and the letter-writers, with an appendix of erudite cultivators of historical science and of miscellaneous authors of historical gossip and other matters.
General Historians. Mézeray.