There was no pretension to truth in the portraying of
manners and customs.--A reaction was natural and took the form of
either a kind of parody or gross realism. These novels, of which
_Francion_ and _Berger Extravagant_ were the best known, depicted
shepherds of the Merovingian times, heroes of Persia and Rome, or
procurers, scamps, and scoundrels; but no descriptions of the manners
of decent people (_honnetes gens_) were to be found.

The novels of Mlle. de Scudery, while interesting as portraitures, are
not thoroughly reliable in their representation of the sentiments
and environment of the times; on the other hand, those of Mme. de La
Fayette are impersonal--no one of the characters is recognizable; yet
their atmosphere is that of the court of Louis XIV., and the language,
never so correct as to be unnatural, is that used at the time. Her
novels reflect perfectly the society of the court and the manner of
life there. "Thus," says M. d'Haussonville, "she was the first to
produce a novel of observation and sentiment, the first to paint
elegant manners as they really were."

Her first production was _La Princesse de Montpensier_ (1662); in
1670, appeared _Zayde_, it was ostensibly the work of Segrais, her
teacher and a writer much in vogue at the time; in 1678, _La Princesse
de Cleves_, her masterpiece, stirred up one of the first real quarrels
of literary criticism. For a long time after the appearance of that
book, society was divided into two classes--the pros and the cons. It
was the most popular work of the period.

M. d'Haussonville says it is the first French novel which is an
illustration of woman's ability to analyze the most subtile of human
emotions. Mme. de La Fayette was, also, the first to elevate, in
literature, the character of the husband who, until then, was a
nonentity or a booby; she makes of him a hero--sympathetic, noble, and
dignified.

In no fictitious tale before hers was love depicted with such rare
delicacy and pathos. In her novel, _La Princesse de Cleves_, "a novel
of a married woman, we feel the woman who has loved and who knows what
she is saying, for she, also, has struggled and suffered." The writer
confesses her weakness and leaves us witness of her virtue. All
the soul struggles and interior combats represented in her work the
authoress herself has experienced. As an example of this we cite the
description of the sentiments of Mme. de Cleves when she realizes that
her feeling to