learness and that they give a more pleasant
turn to the things they say."

Mme. de La Fayette exercised a great influence upon La
Rochefoucauld--an influence that was wholesome in every way. It was
through her influential friends at court that he was helped into
possession of his property, and it was she who maintained it for him.
As to his literary work (his _Maxims_), her influence over him was
supposed to have somewhat modified his ideas on women and to have
softened his tone in general. She wrote: "He gave me wit, but I
reformed his heart." M. d'Haussonville has proved, without doubt, that
her restraint modified many of his maxims that were tinged with
the spirit of the commonplace and trivial. While Mme. de
Sable--essentially a moralist and a deeply religious woman--was more
of a companion to him, and though his maxims were, for the greater
part, composed in her salon, Mme. de La Fayette, by her tenderness and
judgment, tempered the tone of them before they reached the public.

Mme. de La Fayette will always be known, however, as the great
novelist of the seventeenth century. Two novels, two stories, two
historical works, and her memoirs, make up her literary budget. M.
d'Haussonville claims that her memoirs of the court of France are not
reliable, because she was so often absent from court; also, in
them she shows a tendency to avenge herself, in a way, upon Mme. de
Maintenon, whose friend she was until the trouble between this lady
and Mme. de Montespan occurred. The latter was the intimate friend
of Mme. de La Fayette. As for her literary work proper, her desire to
write was possibly encouraged, if not created, by her indulgence in
the general fad of writing portraitures, in which she was especially
successful in portraying Mme. de Sevigne. Her literary effort was,
besides, a revolt of her own taste and sense against the pompous
and inflated language of the novels of the day and against the great
length of the development of the events and adventures in them. Thus,
Mme. de La Fayette inaugurated a new style of novel; to show her
influence, it will be well to consider the state of the Romanesque
novel at the period of her writing.

In the beginning of the century, D'Urfe's novels were in vogue; these
works were characterized by interminable developments, relieved by an
infinite number of historical episodes. All characters, shepherds
as well as noblemen, expressed the same sentiments and in the same
language.