who was, Boileau declared, too much of a poet to speak ill of, to much of a madman to praise—is the best, flamboyant but imaginative in its descriptions, and sonorous in versification.
The ideals of refined gallantry, of exquisite heroism, which ruled in the Hôtel de Rambouillet and penetrated polite society, are most fully portrayed in the long prose romances,[1] pastoral and heroic, whose period of growth and efflorescence is just the sixty years with which this volume deals. The earliest of these, the famous pastoral romance L'Astrée of Honoré d'Urfé, the first part of which appeared in 1607, was, indeed, one of the main sources of these ideals, shaping as it did the life and spirit of the Hôtel.
Honoré d'Urfé (1568-1625), brought up in Forez, on the banks of the "belle et agréable rivière de D'Urfé. Lignon," which he has made the scene of his romance, had an eventful career. At the age of twelve or thirteen he became, at his parents' instance, a knight of Malta and took vows. He was educated by the Jesuits at Tournon, and was
- ↑ To the histories and essays cited above add Koerting's Geschichte des französischen Romans im XVIIten Jahrhundert, Oppeln u. Leipzig, 1891, on which the following paragraphs are mainly based. The literary sources of the seventeenth century heroic romance Koerting finds in the Amadis, the Greek romances, and the pastoral literature of Italy and France. The social and personal factors, however, are of the greatest importance. See some lectures on Le Roman français au XVIIe Siècle, by Professor Abel Lefranc, reported in the Revue des Cours et Conférences for 1904-5. Koerting gives exhaustive analyses of the chief romances which are difficult of access. A slighter work is Le Breton's Le Roman, &c., Paris, 1890.
