The
_Historiettes_ of Tallemant contain short suggestions for a hundred
novels and romances; the memoirs, genuine or forged, of public and
private persons have not seldom, in more modern times, formed the actual
basis of some of the greatest fiction. Everybody ought long to have
known Thackeray's perhaps rather whimsical declaration that he
positively preferred the forged D'Artagnan memoirs of Courtils de
Sandras (as far at least as the Gascon himself was concerned) to the
work of that Alexander, the truly Great, of which he was nevertheless
such a generous admirer: and recently mere English readers have had the
opportunity of seeing whether they agree with him. In fact, as the
century went on, almost all kinds of literature began to be more or less
pervaded with the novel appeal and quality.

[Sidenote: The divisions of its contribution.]

The letters of "Notre Dame des Rochers" constantly read like parts or
scenes of a novel, and so do various compositions of her ill-conditioned
but not unintelligent cousin Bussy-Rabutin. Camus de Pontcarre in the
earlier and Fenelon in the later century determined that the Devil
should not have this good prose to himself, and our own Anthony Hamilton
showed the way to Voltaire in a kind, of which, though the Devil had
nothing immediately to do with it, he might perhaps make use later. In
fact, the whole century teems with the spirit of tale-telling, _plus_
character-analysis; and in the eighteenth itself, with a few notable
exceptions, there was rather a falling-off from, than a further advance
towards, the full blossoming of the aloe in the nineteenth.

It will probably, therefore, not be excessive to give two chapters (and
two not short ones) to this period. In the first of them we may take the
two apparently opposite, but by no means irreconcilable schools of
Pastoral and Heroic Romance[125] and of Fairy Tale, including perhaps
only four persons, if so many, of first-rate literary rank--Urfe,[126]
Madeleine de Scudery, Madame d'Aulnoy, and Perrault; in the second, the
more isolated but in some cases not unimportant names and works of
Sorel, Scarron, Furetiere, and the capital ones of Madame de la Fayette
and Hamilton. According to the plan previously pursued, less attempt
will be made to give exhaustive or even full lists of practitioners than
to illustrate their practice thoroughly by example, translated or
abstracted, and by criticism; and it is necessary that this latter
cou