mbers were overcome. The
_Academie Francaise_ held its first sitting on March 13, 1634; three
years later the letters patent were registered; the number of members
was fixed at forty; when vacancies occurred, new members were co-opted
for life. Its history to the year 1652 was published in the following
year by Pellisson, and obtained him admission to a chair. The
functions of the learned company were to ascertain, as far as possible,
the French language, to regulate grammar, and to act as a literary
tribunal if members consented to submit their works to its examination.
There were hopes that authoritative treatises on rhetoric and poetics
might be issued with its sanction; but these hopes were not fulfilled.
A dictionary, of which Chapelain presented the plan in 1638, was,
however, undertaken; progressing by slow degrees, the first edition
appeared in 1694. Its aim was not to record every word of which an
example could be found, but to select those approved by the usage
of cultivated society and of the best contemporary or recent authors.
Thus it tended to establish for literary use an aristocracy of words;
and while literary expression gained in dignity and intellectual
precision, gained as an instrument of reason and analysis, such
regulation created a danger that it might lose in elements that have
affinities with the popular mind--vivacity, colour, picturesqueness,
variety. At its commencement no one was more deeply interested in
the dictionary than Vaugelas (1585-1650), a gentleman of Savoie,
whose concern for the purity of the language, as determined by the
best usage, led him to resist innovations and the invasion of foreign
phraseology. His _Remarques sur la Langue Francaise_ served as a guide
to his fellow-members of the Academy. Unhappily he was wholly ignorant
of the history of the language. With the erudite Chapelain he mediated
between the scholarship and the polite society of the time. But while
Vaugelas was almost wholly occupied with the vocabulary and grammar,
Chapelain did much to enforce the principles of the classical school
upon literary art. The Academy took up the work which the _salons_
had begun; its spirit was more robust and masculine than theirs; it
was freer from passing fashions, affectations, prettinesses; it
leaned on the side of intellect rather than of sentiment.

In what may be called the regulation of French prose the influence
of JEAN-LOUIS GUEZ DE BALZAC (1594-1654) was considerabl