rlier works produced a _Comedie des Academistes_, satirising the
then young Academy.

[241] Ed. Moland. 7 vols. Paris, 1863. Ed. (in 'Grands Ecrivains'
series) Despois, Regnier, and Mesnard. Paris (in progress).

CHAPTER III.

NOVELISTS.

[Sidenote: D'Urfe.]

Prose fiction, for reasons which it is not at all hard to discover, is
in its more complete forms always a late product of literature. Up to
the beginning of the seventeenth century, France had known nothing of it
except the short prose tales which had succeeded the Fabliaux, and which
had been chiefly founded on imitation of the Italians, with the late and
inferior prose versions of the romances of chivalry, the isolated
masterpiece of _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_, and the translated and
adapted versions of the _Amadis_ and its continuations. The imitation of
Spanish literature was constant in the early seventeenth century, and
the great wave of conceited style which, under the various names of
Euphuism, Gongorism, Marinism, invaded all the literary countries of
Europe, did not spare France. The result was a very singular class of
literature which, except for a few burlesque works, almost monopolised
the attention of novelists during the first half of the century. The
example of it was in a manner set by Honore d'Urfe in the _Astree_,
which was, however, rather pastoral than heroic. D'Urfe, who was a man
of position and wealth in the district of Forez, imagined, on the banks
of the Lignon, a stream running past his home, a kind of Arcadia, the
popularity of which is sufficiently shown by the adoption of the name of
the hero, Celadon, as one of the stock names in French for a lover. He
took, perhaps, some of his machinery from the _Aminta_ of Tasso and from
the other Italian pastorals, but he emulated the _Amadis_ in the
interminable series of adventures and the long-windedness of his
treatment. He had, however, some literary power, while the necessary
verisimilitude was provided for by the adaptation of numerous personal
experiences, and the book has preserved a certain reputation for
graceful sentiment and attractive pictures of nature. It was
extraordinarily popular at the time and long afterwards, so much so that
a contemporary ecclesiastic, Camus de Pontcarre, considered it necessary
to supply an antidote to the bane in the shape of a series of Christian
pastorals, the name of one of which, _Palombe_, is known, because of an
edition of it in the