es of the age. Her first attempt at
novel-writing was _La Princesse de Montpensier_. This was followed by
_Zaide_, published in 1670, a book of considerable excellence; and this
in its turn by _La Princesse de Cleves_, published in 1677, which is one
of the classics of French literature. The book is but a small one, not
amounting in size to a single volume of a modern English novel, and this
must of itself have been no small novelty and relief after the
portentous bulk of the Scudery romances. Its scene is laid at the court
of Henri II., and there is a certain historical basis; but the principal
personages are drawn from the author's own experience, herself being the
heroine, her husband the Prince of Cleves, and Rochefoucauld the Duke de
Nemours, while other characters are identified with Louis XIV. and his
courtiers by industrious compilers of 'keys.' If, however, the interest
of the book had been limited to this it would now-a-days have lost all
its attraction, or have retained so much at most as is due to simple
curiosity. But it has far higher merits, and what may be called its
court apparatus, and the multitude of small details about court
business, are rather drawbacks to it now. Such charm as it has is
derived from the strict verisimilitude of the character drawing, and the
fidelity with which the emotions are represented. This interest may,
indeed, appear thin to a modern reader fresh from the works of those who
have profited by two centuries of progress in the way which Madame de la
Fayette opened. But when it is remembered that her book appeared thirty
years before _Gil Blas_, forty before the masterpieces of Defoe, and
more than half a century before the English novel properly so called
made its first appearance, her right to the place she occupied will
hardly be contested[250].

The precise origin of the fancy for writing fairy stories, which took
possession of polite society in France at the end of the seventeenth
century, has been the subject of much discussion, and cannot be said to
have been finally settled. Probably the fables of La Fontaine, which are
very closely allied to the style, may have given the required impulse.
As soon as an example was set this style was seen to lend itself very
well to the still surviving fancy for _coterie_ compositions, and the
total amount of work of the kind produced in the last years of the
seventeenth and the first of the eighteenth century must be enormous.
Much of