ery different importance is the Countess de la Fayette, who has the
credit, and justly, of substituting for mere romances of adventure on
the one hand, and for stilted heroic work on the other, fiction in which
the display of character is held of chief account. In the school,
indeed, of which Scarron set the example in France, especially in _Gil
Blas_, its masterpiece, the most accurate knowledge and drawing of human
motives and actions is to be found. But it is knowledge and drawing of
human motives and actions in the gross rather than in particular. Gil
Blas, and even Tom Jones, are types rather than individuals, though the
genius of their creators hides the fact. It is, perhaps, an arguable
point of literary criticism, whether the persevering analysis of
individual, and more or less unusual, character does not lead novelists
away from the best path--as it certainly leads in the long run to
monstrosities of the modern French and English 'realist' type. But this
is a detail of criticism into which there is no need to enter here. It
is sufficient that the style has produced some of the most admirable,
and much of the most characteristic, work of the last century, and that
Madame de la Fayette is on the whole entitled to the credit of being its
originator. Her pen was taken up in the next century by the Abbe Prevost
and by Richardson, and from these three the novel, as opposed to the
romance, may be said to descend. The maiden name of Madame de la
Fayette[249] was Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, and she was born
at Paris in 1634. Her father was governor of Havre. She was carefully
brought up under Menage and Rapin, among others, and was one of the most
brilliant of the _precieuses_ of the Hotel Rambouillet. In 1655 she
married the Count de la Fayette, but was soon left a widow. After his
death she contracted a kind of Platonic friendship with La
Rochefoucauld, who was then in the decline of life, tormented with gout,
and consoling himself for the departure of the days when he was one of
the most important men in France by the composition of his undying
Maxims. She survived him thirteen years, and died herself in 1693.
During the whole of her life she was on the most intimate terms with
Madame de Sevigne, as well as with many of the foremost men of letters
of the time. In particular there are extant a large number of letters
between her and Huet, bishop of Avranches, one of the most learned,
amiable, and upright prelat