ame, as it were, a parody of
the literature of preciosity. Saint-Amand (1594-1661) was at once
a disciple of the Italian Marini, the admired "Sapurnius" of the
_salon_, author of at least one beautiful ode--_La Solitude_--breathing
a gentle melancholy, and a gay singer of bacchic chants. Desmarets de
Saint-Sorlin, in his comedy _Les Visionnaires_ (1637), mocked the
_precieuses_, and was applauded by the spectators of the theatre. One
of his heroines is hopelessly enamoured of Alexander the Great; one is
enamoured of poetry, and sees life as if it were material for the
stage; and the third is enamoured of her own beauty, with its imagined
potency over the hearts of men. As early as 1622 CHARLES SOREL
expressed, in his _Histoire Comique de Francion_, a Rabelaisian and
picaresque tale of low life, the revolt of the _esprit gaulois_ against
the homage of the imagination to courtly shepherdesses and pastoral
cavaliers. It was reprinted more than forty times. In _Le Berger
Extravagant_ (1628) he attempted a kind of Don Quixote for his own
day--an "anti-romance"--which recounts the pastoral follies of a young
Parisian bourgeois, whose wits have been set wandering by such dreams
as the _Astree_ had inspired; its mirth is unhappily overloaded with
pedantry.

The master of this school of seventeenth-century realism was PAUL
SCARRON (1610-60), the comely little abbe, unconcerned with
ecclesiastical scruples or good manners, who, when a paralytic,
twisted and tortured by disease, became the husband of D'Aubigne's
granddaughter, destined as Madame de Maintenon to become the most
influential woman in all the history of France. In his _Virgile
Travesti_ he produced a vulgar counterpart to the heroic epics, which
their own dead-weight would have speedily enough borne downwards to
oblivion. His _Roman Comique_ (1651), a short and lively narrative
of the adventures of a troupe of comedians strolling in the provinces,
contrasted with the exaltations, the heroisms, the delicate
distresses of the ideal romance. The _Roman Bourgeois_ (1666) of
ANTOINE FURETIERE is a belated example of the group to which
_Francion_ belongs. The great event of its author's life was his
exclusion from the Academy, of which he was a member, on the ground
that he had appropriated for the advantage of his Dictionary the
results of his fellow-members' researches for the Dictionary, then
in progress, of the learned company. His _Roman_ is a remarkable study
of cer