istics, which will be noticed below, and which may be taken in
each case as a sort of revulsion from, or parody of, the solemn ways of
the regular romance. There may be even a special reference to the
"_Phebus_" the technical name or nickname of the "high language" in
these repeated burlesque introductions of the sun. And the almost pert
flings and cabrioles of the narrator form a still more obvious and
direct Declaration of Independence. But these are mere details, almost
trivial compared with the striking contrast of the whole presentation
and _faire_ of the piece, when taken together with most of the subjects
of the last chapter.

It may require a little, but it should not require much, knowledge of
literary history to see how modern this is; it should surely require
none to see how vivid it is--how the sharpness of an etching and the
colour of a bold picture take the place of the shadowy "academies" of
previous French writers.[256] There may be a very little exaggeration
even here--in other parts of the book there is certainly some--and
Scarron never could forget his tendency to that form of exaggeration
which is called burlesque. But the stuff and substance of the piece is
reality.

An important item of the same change is to be found in the management of
the insets, or some of them. One of the longest and most important is
the autobiographical history of Le Destin or Destin (the article is
often dropped), the tall young man with the patch on his face. But this
is not thrust bodily into the other body of the story, _Cyrus_-fashion;
it is alternated with the passages of that story itself, and that in a
comparatively natural manner--night or some startling accident
interrupting it; while how even courtiers could find breath to tell, or
patience and time to hear, some of the interludes of the _Cyrus_ and its
fellows is altogether past comprehension. There is some coarseness in
Scarron--he would not be a comic writer of the seventeenth century if
there were none. Not very long after the beginning the tale is
interrupted by a long account of an unseemly practical joke which surely
could amuse no mortal after a certain stage of schoolboyhood. But there
is little or no positive indecency: the book contrasts not more
remarkably with the Aristophanic indulgence of the sixteenth century
than with the sniggering suggestiveness of the eighteenth. Some remnants
of the Heroic convention (which, after all, did to a great extent