iest part
of _Francion_ is duller than the dullest of _Buncle_, and duller still
than the least lively thing in Graves. The points of resemblance are in
pillar-to-postness, in the endeavour (here almost entirely a failure,
but still an endeavour) to combine fancy with realism, and above all in
freedom from following the rules of any "school." Realism in the good
sense and originality were the two things that the novel had to achieve.
Sorel missed the first and only achieved a sort of "distanced" position
in the second. But he tried--or groped--for both.

[Sidenote: The _Berger Extravagant_ and _Polyandre_.]

I am bound to say that in Sorel's other chief works of fiction, the
_Berger Extravagant_ and _Polyandre_, I find the same curious mixture of
qualities which have made me more lenient than most critics to
_Francion_. And I do not think it unfair to add that they also incline
me still more to think that there was perhaps a little of the _Pereant
qui ante nos_ feeling in Furetiere's attack (_v. inf._ p. 288). Neither
could possibly be called by any sane judge a good book, and both display
the uncritical character,[250] the "pillar-to-postness," the
marine-store and almost rubbish-heap promiscuity, of the more famous
book. Like it, they are much too big.[251] But the _Berger Extravagant_,
in applying (very early) the _Don Quixote_ method, as far as Sorel could
manage it, to the _Astree_, is sometimes amusing and by no means always
unjust. _Polyandre_ is, in part, by no means unlike an awkward first
draft of a _Roman Bourgeois_. The scene in the former, where Lysis--the
Extravagant Shepherd and the Don Quixote of the piece,--making an
all-night sitting over a poem in honour of his mistress Charite (the
Dulcinea), disturbs the unfortunate Clarimond--a sort of "bachelor," the
sensible man of the book, and a would-be reformer of Lysis--by constant
demands for a rhyme[252] or an epithet, is not bad. The victim revenges
himself by giving the most ludicrous words he can think of, which Lysis
duly works in, and at last allows Clarimond to go to sleep. But he is
quickly waked by the poet running about and shouting, "I've got it! I've
found it. The finest _reprise_ [= refrain] ever made!" And in
_Polyandre_ there is a sentence (not the only one by many) which not
only gives a _point de repere_ of an interesting kind in itself, but
marks the beginning of the "_farrago libelli_ moderni": "Ils ont des
mets qu'ils nomment des _bisqu