Madame de Sévigné, so to speak, dwarfs all other letter-writers of her time. Yet many of those already mentioned under the head of memoirs left letters which have been preserved, and which are of merit. It is, however, not necessary to specify any except Madame de Maintenon, whose correspondence is voluminous and important both as history and as literature. It has not the charm of Madame de Sévigné, but it displays the great intellectual powers of the writer[262]. Of a very different kind, but not less worthy of notice are the letters of Guy Patin, which are for the most part violent Mazarinades, and full of scandalous anecdotes, but full also of lively wit. Scandal, indeed, was very much the order of the day, as appears from the large and curious collection of broadsheets and pamphlets republished by the late M. Fournier in his Variétés Historiques et Littéraires[263]. These, most of which refer to the present period, form a kind of appendix to historical and biographical writing of the more serious kind. There is, however, one remarkable work which remains to be noticed, and which, for want of a better place for it, must be noticed here, the Historiettes of Tallemant des Réaux[264]. The author of this singular book, Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, was born at La Rochelle about 1619, and died in 1692. He was of a family not noble but wealthy and well connected, and he himself was able, by marriage with a cousin who was an heiress, to live without any profession, and to purchase an estate and seignory of some importance. Little, however, is known of his life except that he was much at the Hôtel de Rambouillet in his youth, and that in his old age he underwent some not clearly defined misfortune or disgrace. The Historiettes were written in the years immediately preceding 1660, and form an almost complete commentary on the persons most celebrated in society and literature for three quarters of a century before that date. There is no other book to which they can be exactly compared, though they have, with much less literary excellence, a certain resemblance in form to the work of Brantôme. They are, as published by Monmerqué, 376 in number, filling five (nominally ten) stout volumes. Each is as a rule headed with the name of a single person, though there are a few general or subject headings. The articles themselves are not regular biographies, but collections of anecdotes, not unfrequently of the most scandalous kind. Tallemant, though by no means of small ability, appears to have been a somewhat malicious person, and not too careful to examine the value of the stories he tells, especially when they bear heavily on the old nobility, of whom, as a new man, he was very jealous. Yet his sources of information were in many cases good, and his statements are confirmed by independent evidence sufficiently often to show that, if they are in other cases to be accepted with caution, they are not the work of a mere libeller. No one, even in that century of unstinted personal revelations, has taken us so much behind the scenes, and certainly no one has left a more amusing book of its kind or (with the proper precautions) a more valuable one.
Historical Antiquaries.
Du Cange.
The class of learned investigators into the sources of history cannot be omitted in any account of French literature; though their work was chiefly in Latin, and though even when it was not it was rather of value as material for future literature than as literature itself. This century and the earlier part of the succeeding one were the palmy time of really laborious erudition—the work of the Benedictines and Bollandists, and of many isolated writers worthy of being ranked with the members of these famous communities. The individuals composing this class are, however, too numerous, and, from the purely literary view, too unimportant to detain us. Exceptions may be made in favour of André Duchesne, whose collections of French and Norman Chronicles, and his genealogical histories of the houses of Laval and Vergi, are valuable examples of their kind; of Mabillon, famous for his labours in hagiology, in the history of France, and above all in that of Italy; and lastly, of Du Cange. The last-named has a special right to a place here because, both directly and indirectly, he did much towards the rediscovery of old French literature. Du Cange was his seignorial style, his personal name being Charles Dufresne. He devoted himself to the study of the middle ages generally, and particularly of the Byzantine Empire. He edited Joinville, wrote a history of the Latin Empire, and in his most famous work, the Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, contributed not a little to the study of the oldest form of French.
FOOTNOTES:
[253] The following paragraph contains, except as far as Mézeray is concerned, chiefly second-hand information. I have hitherto been unable to devote the time necessary to enable me to speak at first hand of these books, which are very bulky, not as a rule interesting or important in manner, and for the most part long obsolete in matter.
[254] The legend, familiar probably to most readers, is that Vertot required documents for his account of a certain military operation. Tired with waiting for them, he constructed the history out of his own head, and when they arrived made the ejaculation in the text.
[255] This, with some other of the pieces here mentioned, will be found in two volumes of the Collection Didot, entitled Petits Chefs d'œuvre Historiques.
[256] Ed. Feillet, Gourdault and Chantelauze. Paris (in progress).