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I. Anne of Austria and Richelieu – Birth of Louis XIV. – II. L'Astrée and its Influence – III. Transformation of the Public Manners – The Creation of the Salon – The Hôtel de Rambouillet and Men of Letters.

I

But little information concerning the affairs of the day previous to the last months of the reign of Louis XIII. can be gleaned from the Mémoires of La Grande Mademoiselle. It is hardly credible that a young girl raised at the Court of France, not at all stupid, and because of her birth so situated as to see and to hear everything, could have gone through some of the most thrilling catastrophes of that tragic time without seeing or hearing anything. At a later day Mademoiselle was the first to wonder at it; she furnishes an example surpassing imagination.

In 1637, before starting on her journey into the province, she went to bid adieu to "their Majesties," who were at Chantilly. Mademoiselle fell upon a drama. Richelieu had just disgraced the Queen of France, who had been declared guilty of abusing her religious retreat at the Convent of Val-de-Grâce by holding secret correspondence with Spain. Val-de-Grâce had been ransacked, and one of Anne of Austria's servants had been arrested. Anne herself had been questioned like a criminal, and she had had a very bitter tête-à-tête in her chamber with such a Richelieu as she had never met before.

It was then ten years since Louis XIII., abruptly entering his wife's private apartments, had interrupted a declaration of love made by his Minister. After Marie de Médicis, Anne of Austria! Evidently it was a system of policy in which pride of personal power played its part. Possibly the heart also played some small rôle when Anne of Austria was young and beautiful; but it was the heart of a Richelieu, and unless we know what such a thing is like it is difficult to explain the Minister's attitude at Chantilly. Historians have not taken the trouble to tell us, because there were things more important to them and to the history of Europe than the exploits of so high-flying a Cardinal. Nevertheless, even an historian could have made an interesting chapter out of the sentimental life of Richelieu. It was a violent and cruel life; as violent and as pitiless as the passions that haunted his harrowed soul. Michelet compared the Duke's life to "a lodging that had been ransacked." In him love was a cloak thickly lined with hatred. Mme. de Motteville, who witnessed Richelieu's courtship of the Queen, was astonished by his way of making love. "The first marks of his affection," she writes, "were his persecutions of her. They burst out before everybody, and we shall see that this new way of loving will last as long as the Cardinal lives."

Anne of Austria felt only his persecutions. Richelieu was not pleasing to women. He was the earthly All-powerful. He possessed riches and genius, but they knew that he was cruel – even pitiless – in anger; and he could not persuade them to pretend to love him; all, even Marion de Lorme, mocked and laughed at him, and Retz gave a reason for their conduct:

Not being a pedant in anything else, he was a thorough pedant in gallantry, and this is the fault that women never pardon. The Queen detested Richelieu, and she made him feel it; but he took his revenge at Val-de-Grâce. After the outburst – after the word treason had been spoken – it rested with him to have mercy, or to send into shameless banishment the barren Queen. It gave him pleasure to see her cowering before him, frightened and deprived of all her pride. He exulted in disdaining her with an exaggerated and insulting affectation of respect, and fearing lest the scene should not be known to posterity, he painted it with all the zest of the reaction of his wounded dignity.27 He listened complacently while she drove the nails into her coffin, rendering more proofs of her docility "than he should have dared to expect"; incriminating herself, as she explained in her own way, by palpable untruths, all her treasonable letters to her brothers and to her friends in Spain. When she had told a great deal more than she knew, Richelieu put a few sharp questions, and the Queen completely lost her head.

Then [wrote Richelieu, in his chronicle] she confessed to the Cardinal everything which is in the paper signed by her afterwards. She confessed with much displeasure and confusion, because she had taken oaths contrary to what she was confessing. While she made the said confession to the Cardinal her shame was such that she cried out several times, "Oh, how kind you must be, Monsieur the Cardinal!" protesting that all her life she should be grateful and recognise the obligation she was under to those who drew her out of the affair. She had the honour to say to the Cardinal: "Give me your hand," presenting her own as a mark of the fidelity with which she should keep all her promises. Through respect the Cardinal refused to give her his hand. From the same motive he retired instead of approaching her.

Officially Louis XIII. pardoned the intrigue of Val-de-Grâce, but the courtiers were not deceived, and they immediately deserted the Queen's apartment. When they passed her windows they modestly lowered their eyes. It was just at that time that Mademoiselle arrived. It was at the end of August. She read her welcome in every face. Now that she had come gayety became a duty and amusements an obligation. The feeling of relief was general. Mademoiselle wrote:

I put all the Court in good humour. The King was in great grief because of the suspicions they had awakened against the Queen, and not long before that they had found the strong box that had made all the trouble at Val-de-Grâce, about which too much has been said already. I found the Queen in bed, sick. Any one would be sick after such an affront as she had received.

Of all at Court, Anne of Austria was not the least happy to see Mademoiselle. Now she could pour out her sorrow. Mme. de Saint Georges, Mademoiselle's governess, was one of her familiar friends. The Queen told her everything. Mademoiselle was permitted to sit with the two ladies to avert suspicion. So the child found herself in possession of secrets whose importance and danger must have been known to her. It may be that she would have liked nothing better than to recount them in her memoirs, but she was "forced to admit with sheepish reticence that to her grief she had never remembered anything of it."

Some months later she was entangled in the King's romance with Mlle. de Hautefort, and "did not notice anything" – and this is to her credit – of all the struggles made by the Cabals to turn the adventure to their profit. In spite of her lack of memory she had opened wide both eyes and ears. The schemes of lovers always interested her, as they interest all little girls. To this instinct of her sex we owe a very pretty picture of the transformation of man by love. And the man was no other than the annoying and annoyed Louis XIII. Mademoiselle gives us the picture in default of more serious proof of her observation. Hunting was the King's chief pleasure.

In 1638, during the luminous springtime, he was seen in the forests gay, at times actually happy – thanks to two great blue eyes. When he followed his dogs he took his niece and other young people with him that he might have an excuse for taking Mlle. de Hautefort.

We were all dressed in colours [recounts Mademoiselle]. We were on fine, ambling horses, richly caparisoned, and to guarantee us against the sun each of us had a hat trimmed with a quantity of plumes. They always turned the hunt so that it should pass fine and handsome houses where grand collations could be found, and, coming home, the King placed himself in my coach, between Mme. de Hautefort and me. When he was in good humour he conversed very agreeably to us of everything. At that time he suffered us to speak freely enough of the Cardinal de Richelieu, and the proof that it did not displease him was that he spoke thus himself.

Immediately after the hunting party returned they went to the Queen. I took pleasure in serving at her supper, and her maids carried the dishes (viands). There was a regular programme. Three times a week we had music, they of the King's chamber sang, and the most of the airs sung by them were composed by the King. He wrote the words, even; and the subject was never anything but Mme. de Hautefort. The King was in humour so gallant that at the collations that he gave us in the country he did not sit at table at all; and he served us nearly everything himself, though his civility had only one object. He ate after us, and did not seem to feel more complaisance for Mme. de Hautefort than for the others, so afraid was he that some one should perceive his gallantry.

Despite these precautions, the Court and the city, Paris, and the province were informed of the least incidents of an affair of such importance. The only person whom the King's passion left indifferent was the Queen. Anne of Austria had never been jealous. She did not consider Louis XIII. worth the pains of jealousy, – and now jealousy would have been out of place. Anne, after twenty-three years of marriage, was enceinte. The people who had loaded her with outrages while she was bowed by shame now knelt at her feet, sincere in their respectful demonstrations of devotion for the wife of the King who might one day become Queen-mother, or even Regent of France. It was like one of the fairy plays in a theatre. Nature had waved her wand, and the disgraced victim of enchantment had arisen "clothed on with majesty." It was an edifying and delightful transformation. After all her shame, the novelty of being cared for and treated gently was so great and so agreeable that when she saw her royal spouse sighing before the virtuous and malignant de Hautefort – "whose chains" were said to be heavy and hard to bear – she looked upon it very lightly. Anne of Austria smiled at the benumbed attitudes of the King, at his awkward ardour, and equally awkward prudery. The Queen learned with amusement that when among her companions, the young girls of the Court, Mlle. de Hautefort mocked the King, and boasted that he "dared not approach her, though he maintained her," and that she was "bored to death by his talk of dogs, and birds, and the hunt." Friends repeated these criticisms. Louis XIII. heard of them and took offence "at the ingrate," and the Court went into mourning. "If there should be some serious quarrel between them," wrote Mademoiselle, "all the comedies and the entertainments will be over. At that time, when the King came to the Queen's apartments, he did not speak to anybody, and nobody dared to speak to him. He sat in a corner, and very often he yawned and went to sleep. It was a species of melancholy which chilled the whole world, and during this grief he passed the most of the time writing what he had said to Mme. de Hautefort, and what she had answered. It is so true that after he died they found great bundles of papers recounting all his differences with his mistresses – to the praise of whom it must be said, and to his praise also, that he had never loved any women who were not very virtuous."

Mademoiselle never seemed to realise the political importance of the King's favourites. That subject, like all else serious, escaped her. She writes:

"I listened to all that they told me – all that I was old enough to hear."

We need not hope to learn from her what Richelieu thought of the King's chaste affection; why, though he had encouraged it, he was angered by it; why he looked with disfavour upon Mlle. de Lafayette, and manipulated her affairs so well that he introduced her into the cell of a convent, and ordered the King to take medicine whenever he suspected that Louis aspired to contemplate her through the grating of her prison; if Mademoiselle had ever known such things "they had never presented themselves to her memory." Nor will it do us any good to search her memoirs for reasons making it clear why Louis XIII., who worked incessantly against Richelieu, and "did not love him," sacrificed, for the Cardinal's pleasure, all his friends and near relations. Throughout all the reverses of 1635 and 1636, when France was trembling under the trampling feet of the invader, when the enemy's skirmishers lay at the gates of Pontoise, the King was faithful to the dictator, whose policy had drawn ruin on the nation. Mademoiselle had never known these things. They had been far below her horizons. The ungrateful years had buffeted her as they passed. She had been pretty and sprightly in early childhood. At the age of eleven she was a buxom girl, with swollen cheeks, thick lips, and a stupid mien, – in a word: a frankly ill-favoured creature, too absorbed in the preoccupations of animal life (the need to skip and jump, to be seen and heard) to listen, to observe, or to reflect. The Queen's condition gave her one more occasion to manifest the lengths to which she had carried her innocence, though she had lived in a world where innocence was not regarded as the most important item in an outfit. She rejoiced that there was to be a Dauphin. Evidently she did not know that his advent would strip her father of his rights as heir-presumptive to the throne. In her own words, she "rejoiced without the least reflection." Anne of Austria was touched by a simpleness of heart to which her life had not accustomed her. "You shall be my daughter-in-law!" she cried repeatedly to her young niece. For she could not bear the thought that the child's later reflections might awake regret.

Mademoiselle embraced the idea only too ardently, and to it she owed one of the bitterest hours of her existence.

The child who was to be Louis XIV. was born at the Château of Saint Germain, 5th September, 1638. Mademoiselle made him her toy. She writes: "The birth of Monsieur the Dauphin gave me a new occupation. I went to see him every day and I called him my little husband. The King was diverted by this and he thought that I did well." She had counted without her godfather the Cardinal, who was more of a Croquemitaine, and more of a spoil-sport than he had ever been. He considered her childish talk very indecorous. Mademoiselle pursues:

Cardinal de Richelieu, who does not like me to accustom myself to being there, nor to have them accustomed to seeing me there, had me given orders to return to Paris. The Queen and Mme. de Hautefort did all that was possible to keep me. They could not obtain their wish, – which I regretted. It was all tears and cries when I left there. Their Majesties gave many proofs of friendship, especially the Queen, who made me aware of a particular tenderness on that occasion. After this displeasure I had still another to endure. They made me pass through Rueil to see the Cardinal, who usually lived there when the King was at Saint Germain. He took it so to heart that I had called the little Dauphin my little husband that he gave me a great reprimand: he said that I was too large to use such terms; that I had been ill-behaved to do so. He spoke so seriously – just as if I had been a person of judgment – that, without answering him, I began to weep. To pacify me he gave me collation, but I did not pass it over. I came away from there very angry at all he had said to me.

Richelieu meant that his orders should be obeyed. Mademoiselle adds: "When I was in Paris I only went to Court once in two months; and when I did go there I only dined with the Queen and then returned to Paris to sleep." It must be said that if the Cardinal had submitted to it for a night or two, she might have found it difficult to sleep at the château. At that time our kings had strange and very inconvenient arrangements for receiving guests; their household appointments had brought them to such a pass that they had suppressed their guest-chamber. When the royal family went to Saint Germain there was a regular house-moving; they carried all their furniture with them, and nothing was left in the Louvre, – not even enough for the King to sleep on when business called him to the capital. Henry IV., a monarch who did not stand on ceremony, invited himself to the house of some lord or of some rich bourgeois, where he put himself at his ease, receiving the Parliament, and also his fair friends, and bidding adieu to his hosts only when he was ready to go home. He took leave of them in his own time and at his own hour.

The timid Louis XIII. had never dared to do such things; he had never thought of having two beds: one in the city, the other in the country.

When the Court came back to Paris they brought all their furniture; not a mattress was left in the palace at Saint Germain. This singular custom had evolved another, which appears to us to have lacked hospitality. When the King of France invited distinguished guests, he never furnished their rooms. He offered them the four walls, and let them arrange themselves as best they could. From as far back as people could remember, they had seen the great arrive at the château closely followed by their beds, their curtains, and even their cooks and their stew-pans. This was the case with Monsieur and his daughter; and so it was with Mazarin, in the following reign. Mademoiselle was not ignorant of the peculiar methods of the royal housekeeping. She knew that the King's friends could not be made comfortable for the night, on the spur of the moment, and she rested very well in Versailles, and thought of nothing but her amusements.

The people saw a gratuitous malevolence in her exile from Court; but the Fronde proved the justice of the Cardinal's action. La Grande Mademoiselle made civil war to constrain Mazarin to marry her to Louis XIV., who was eleven years her junior. Her godfather had guessed well: the idea of being Queen had germinated rapidly in the little head in which the influence of Astrée– still active despite its age – was busily forming romantic visions far in advance of its generation. D'Urfé died in 1620; to his glory be it said that we are obliged to go back to him and to his work when we would explain the moral state of the later days.

II

Few books in any country or in any time have equalled the fortune of Astrée,28 a pastoral romance in ten volumes, in which the different effects of honest friendship are deduced from the lives of shepherds and others, under a long title in the style of the century. Honoré d'Urfé's work immediately became the "code of polite society" and of all who aspired to appear polite. Everything was à l'Astrée– fashions, sentiments, language, the games of society, and the conversation of love. The infatuation extended to classes of society who read but little. In a comedy familiar to the lesser bourgeoisie,29 some one reproached marriageable girls for permitting themselves to be captured by the insipid flattery of the first coxcomb who addresses them thus:

Success had crossed the frontiers of France. People in foreign lands found material for their instruction in Astrée. The work was a novel with a key; a story with a meaning. "Celadon" was the author; "Astrée" was his wife (the beautiful Diane de Chateaumorand, with whom he had not been happy). The Court of le grand Enric was the Court of Henry IV. "Galatée" was the Queen (Marguerite) and so on. "All the stories in Astrée were founded on truth," wrote Patru, who had gathered his information from the lips of d'Urfé. But "the author has romanced everything – if I dare use the word." The charm found in the scandalous reality of the scenes and in the truth of the characters crowned the work's success; the book was translated in most languages, and devoured with the same avidity by all countries. In Germany there was an Académie des Vrais Amants copied from the "Academy" of Lignon. In Poland, in the last half of the century, John Sobieski, who was not by any means one of the be-musked knights of the carpet, played at Astrée and Celadon, with Marie d'Arquien. "To grass with the matrimonial love which turns to friendship at the end of three months! … Celadon am I, now as in the past; the ardent lover of those first glad days!"30 he wrote after marriage.

When the people's infatuation had passed, the book still remained the standard of all delicate minds, and it continued to wield its literary influence.

Through two centuries [said Montégut] Astrée lost nothing of its renown. The most diverse and the most opposite minds alike loved the book; Pellisson and Huet the Bishop of Avranches were enthusiastic admirers of its qualities. La Fontaine and Mme. de Sévigné delighted in it. Racine, in his own silent and discreet way, read it with fond pleasure and profit, but did not say so.

Marivaux had read it and drawn even more benefit from it than Racine… Last of all, Jean Jacques Rousseau admired it so much that he avowed that he had re-read it once a year the greater part of his life. Now as Jean Jacques exerted a dominant influence upon the destinies of our modern imaginative literature, it follows that the success of Astrée has been indirectly prolonged even to our own day. Madame George Sand, for example, derived some little benefit from d'Urfé, though she was not too well aware of it.

Montégut had forgotten the Abbé Prévost; but M. Brunetière repairs the omission, and adds: "One may say that Astrée's success shaped the channel for the chief current of our modern literature."

Its social influence was equal to its influence upon literature. And yet, to-day, not one of all the books that had their time of glory and of popularity is more neglected. No one reads Astrée now, and no one can read it; with the best will in the world, the most indulgent must throw the book down, bored by its dulness. It has become impossible to endure the five thousand pages of the amorous dissertations of the shepherds of Lignon. At the best such a debauch of subtlety would be only tolerable, even had it emanated from a writer of genius. And d'Urfé had no genius; he had nothing but talent.

D'Urfé was a little gentleman of Forez, whom his epoch (he was born in 1568) had permitted to examine the society of the Valois. We know that no social body was ever more corrupt; nevertheless those who saw it were dazzled by it; and because they had looked upon it they were considered – in the time of Louis XIII. – exquisitely elegant and polite; they were regarded as the survivors of a superior civilisation.

The ladies of the Court of Anne of Austria were proud of their power to attract the notice of the elderly noblemen "thanks to whom," in the words of a contemporary writer, "remnants of the polite manners brought by Catherine de Médicis from Italy were still seen in France." The homage of the antique gentlemen was insistent, of a kind which refuses to be repelled. Even the Queen accepted it. Anne of Austria, whose habitually correct attitude was notable, felt that she was constrained to receive the attentions of the old Duc de Bellegarde, though the Duke's character and customs were notorious. Duc de Bellegarde had been one of the deplorable favourites of Henri III.

Anne of Austria was hypercritical in regard to forms of conversation; her own language was fastidiously delicate; she exacted minute attention to the superficial details of civility; yet the notorious de Bellegarde sat at ease before the Court, displaying all the peculiar gallantry of his epoch, "and," said the Queen's friend, Mme. de Motteville, "it was the more noticeable and the fame of it was the more scandalous because the Queen did not hesitate to accept from him incense whose smoke might well blacken her reputation. The Queen permitted the Duke to treat her as he had treated the women of his own day, a day when gallantry and women reigned."

The civil wars swept away the splendid but rotten world, but the prestige of the Valois still asserted its power.

In 1646, a posthumous romantic tale appeared in Paris, entitled Orasie. It was generally attributed to the pen of Mlle. de Senterre, a maid-of-honour of the Court of Catherine de Médicis. "This book," said the editorial preface, "is a true history, full of very choice events; there is nothing fictitious in it but the names given to its heroes and its heroines. Orasie is a mirror reflecting the most magnificent and the most pompous of kingly Courts, the Court where reigned the truest civility and the purest politeness, where false gallantry, like base action, was unknown."

The Court thus eulogised had been the centre of delicate mannerism and the incubating cell of the refinement of vice. Though the civil wars had annihilated the splendid rottenness of the Court, the memory of the delicacy of the Valois survived. When peace was declared, when men had leisure to look about them, they were confronted by the rude Court of Henry IV. They felt the need of a re-establishment of polite society, but where could they find the elements of such society? Foreign influences had enervated the national imagination, Spanish literature with its romances of cruel chivalry, its pastorals, and its theatrical dramas had imbued the Romanticism of France with its poison, and symptoms of moral debility were generally evident. A period of fermentation and expectancy follows war. When the civil wars were over, the men of France sat waiting; their need was pressing, but they could form no idea of its nature. At such a time the eager watchmen on the towers acclaim the bearer of tidings, be they tidings of good or of evil.

Honoré d'Urfé's chief merit lay in the fact that he was the man of the hour, he came when he was most needed, holding the mirror up to nature, and clearly reflecting the common feeling. If I may use the term, he presented his countrymen with an intelligent mirror reflecting their confused and agitated aspirations. Nature and occasion had fitted him for his work: he had all the accessories and all the requirements of his art; best of all, he had the imperious vocation which is the first and the essential qualification of authorship, without which no man should have the hardihood to lay hold upon an inkstand. D'Urfé knew that war demoralises a people; he comprehended the situation of his country; he had been a member of the League, and one of the last to surrender. He knew that the spirit of love was hovering over France, waiting to find a resting-place. François de Sales and d'Urfé were friends, and in such close communion of thought that, to quote the words of Montégut, "there was not a simple analogy, there was almost an identity of inspiration and of talent between Astrée and the Introduction à la vie dévote."

D'Urfé had only to remember the æstheticism which surrounded his expanding youth to comprehend the general weariness caused by the lack of intellectual symmetry and by the rusticity of the manners of the new reign. He was a serious and thoughtful man; he had devoted long months, even years, to meditation and to study before he had touched his pen, and by repeated revisions he had ranged in his book the greater part of the thoughts and the aspirations of his epoch. In a word, the obscure provincial writer who had never entered the Louvre had composed a quasi-universal work resuming all the intellectual and sentimental life of an epoch. Astrée was a powerful achievement; but one, or at most but two, such books can be produced in a century.31 D'Urfé's laborious efforts attained a double result. While he extricated and brought into the light the ideal for which he had searched years together, he excited his contemporaries to strive to be natural and real, and the first French novel, Astrée, was our first romance with a thesis. The subject is commonplace: lovers whose theme is love, and a lovers' quarrel; in the last volume of the book, love triumphs, the quarrel is forgotten, and the lovers marry.

In the beginning of the work, the shepherdess Astrée, beside herself with causeless jealousy, overwhelms the shepherd Celadon with reproaches and Celadon, tired of life, throws himself into the Lignon. Standing upon the bank of the river, he apostrophises a ring and the riband left in his hand when his shepherdess escaped his grasp:

"Bear witness, O dear cord! that rather than break one knot of my affections I will renounce my life, and then, when I am dead, and my cruel love beholds thee in my hand, thou shalt speak for me, thou shalt say that no one could be loved as I loved her… Nor lover wronged like me!" Then he appeals to the ring. "And thou, emblem of eternal, faithful love, be glad to be with me in death, the only token left me of her love!"

Hardly has he spoken when, turning his face toward Astrée, he springs with folded arms into the water. The nymphs save him, and his romantic adventures serve as the wire carrying the action of the romance.

But the system is inadequate to its strain. Dead cars bring about a constantly recurring block, and more than an hundred personages of more or less importance stop the way by their gallant intrigues. The romance mirrors the passing loves and the fevered and passionate life of the be-ribanded people who hung up their small arms in their panoplies, twisted their lances into pruning-hooks, and replaced the pitiless art of war by the political arts of peace. Honoré d'Urfé's heroes appear to be more jealously careful of their fine sentiments than of the sword-thrusts lavishly distributed by the lords and gentlemen of their days. They are much more zealous in their search for elegant expressions than in bestirring themselves to serious action. The perfumed students of phraseology have changed since the night of Saint Bartholomew, when more than one of them fought side by side with Henry de Guise; but it is not difficult to recognise the precursors of the Fronde in the druids, shepherds, and chevaliers of Astrée, and so thought d'Urfé's first readers.

With extreme pleasure they contemplated themselves in the noble puppets seen in the romance, basking in the sun of peace. Away with care! They had nothing worse to fight than lovers' casuistries, and they lay in the shadows of the trees, enjoying the riches of a country redeemed by their own blood. With them were their ladies; lover and lass were disguised as shepherd and shepherdess, or as mythological god and goddess. Idle and elegant as they were, the happy lovers had been tortured by wounds, racked by pride, stung by the fire of battle; to sleep for ever had been the vision of many a bivouac, and now war was over, and to lie in a day-dream fanned by the summer winds and watched by the eye of woman, – this was the evolution of the hope of death! This was the restorative desired by the provincial nobles when they stood firm as rocks in ranks thinned and broken by thirty years of civil and religious war. Such a rest the jaded knights had hoped for when they accepted their one alternative, and, by their recognition of Henry IV., acknowledged submission to a principal superior to private interest and personal ambition.

The high nobility had soon tired of order and obedience. Never was it more turbulent or more undisciplined than under Louis XIII. and in the minority of Louis XIV., but it must be noted as one of the signs of the times that it no longer carried its jaunty ease of conscience into its plots and its mutinies. Curious proofs of this fact are still in existence; the revolting princes and lords stoutly denied that they had taken arms against the King. If they had openly made war, and so palpably that they could not deny it, they invariably asserted with affirmations that they had done it "to render themselves useful to the King's service." Gaston d'Orléans gave the same reason for his conduct when he deserted France for a foreign country. All averred that they had been impelled to act by a determination to force the King to accept deliverance from humiliating tyranny, or from pernicious influences. During the Fronde, when men changed parties as freely as they changed their gloves, the rebels protested their fidelity to the King, and they did it because the idea of infidelity was abhorrent to them.

No one in France would have admitted that it could be possible to hold personal interests or personal caprice above the interests of the State, and in the opinion of the French cavalier this would have been reason enough for any action; but there was a more practical reason; the descendants of the great barons were beginning to doubt their power to maintain the assertion of their so-called rights. By suggesting subjects for the meditations of all the people of France who could read or write Astrée had contributed a novelty in scruples. In our day such a book as Astrée would excite no interest; the reiteration of the "torrents of tenderness" to which it owed its sentimental influence would make it a doubtful investment for any publisher, and even the thoughtful reader would find its best pages difficult reading; but when all is said and done, it remains, and it shall remain, the book which best divines our perpetually recurring and eternal necessities.

It treats of but one passion, love, and yet it gives the most subtle study in existence. In it all the ways of loving are minutely analysed in interminable conversations. All the reasons why man should love are given, with all the reasons why he should not love. All the joys found by the lover in his sufferings are set forth, with all the sufferings that his joys reserve for him. All the reasons for fidelity and all the reasons for inconstancy are openly dissected. A complete list is given of all the intellectual sensations of love (and of some sensations which are not intellectual). In short, Astrée is a diagnosis of the spiritual, mental, and moral condition of the love-sick. It contains all the "cases of conscience" which may or might arise, under the same or different circumstances, in the lives of people who live to love, and who, thus loving, see but one reason for existence – people who severally or individually, each in his own way and according to his own light, exercise this faculty to love, – still loving and loving even then, now, and always.

D'Urfé's conception was of the antique type. He regarded love as a fatality against which it were vain to struggle. Toward the middle of the book the sorrowful Celadon, crushed by the wrath of Astrée, is hidden in a cavern where he "sustains life by eating grasses." The druid Adamas knows that Celadon is perishing by inches, and he essays to bring the lover to reason. Celadon answers him:

"If, as you say, God gave me full possession of power over myself, why does He ask me to give an account of myself? – for just as He gave me into my own hands and just as He gave me to myself, so have I given myself to her to whom I am consigned for ever. First of all! If He would have account of Celadon, let Him apply to her of whom I am! Enough for me if I offend not her nor violate my sacred gift to her. God willed my life, for by my destiny I love; and God knows it, and has always known it, for since I first began to have a will I gave myself to her, and still am hers. In brief, I should not have been blest by love as I have been in all these years had God not willed it.32 If He has willed it would it be just to punish me because I still remain as He ordained that I should be? No! for I have not power to change my fate. So be it, if my parents and my friends condemn me! They all should be content and glad, when for my acts, I give my reason; that I love her."

"But," answered Adamas, "do you count on living long in such away?"

"Election," answered Celadon, "depends not on him who has neither will nor understanding."

La Grande Mademoiselle and most of her contemporaries escaped Astrée's influence in this respect; they did not admit that man has "neither will nor understanding" where his passions are concerned; or that his feelings depend on "destiny." Corneille, who had confronted the question, set forth the principle that the heart should defer to the will. "The love of an honest man," he wrote in 1634,33– "The love of an honest man should always be voluntary. One ought never to love to the point where he cannot help loving, and if he carries love so far, he is the slave of a tyranny whose yoke he should shake off."