ors, exacted from men
that deference, not of bearing merely, but of speech, to which every woman
is entitled and which, everywhere, save only in Italy, women had gone
without. Hitherto people of position had not been recognizable by their
manners, they had none; nor by their language which was coarse as a string
of oaths. They were known by the elegance of their dress. In the Hotel de
Rambouillet, and thereafter little by little elsewhere, they became known
by the elegance of their address. It was a great service and an enduring
one and though, through the abolition of the use of the exact term, it
faded the color from ink, it yet induced the lexical refinement from which
contemporaneous good form proceeds. In polishing manners it sandpapered
morals. It gave to both the essential element of delicacy which they
possess to-day. Subsequently, under the dissolvent influences of
Versailles and through ridicule's more annihilating might, though manners
persisted morals did not. But before the reaction came attar of rose was
really distilled from mud. Gross appetites became sublimated. Instead of
ribaldry there were kisses in the moonlight, the caress of eyes from which
recklessness had gone. Petrarchism returned, madrigals came in vogue, the
social atmosphere was deodorized again. Into gallantry an affected
sentimentality entered, loitered awhile and languished away. Women,
hitherto disquietingly solid, became impalpable as the Queens of Castile
whom it was treason to touch. Presently, when, in the _Precieuses
Ridicules_, Moliere laughed at them, the shock was too great, they
disintegrated. In the interim, sentiment dwindled into nonsense and love,
evaporating in pretentiousness, was discoverable, if anywhere, only on a
map.

That surprising invention was the work of Mlle. de Scudery, one of the
affiliated in the Hotel de Rambouillet. A little before, Honore d'Urfe had
written a pastoral in ten interminable volumes. Entitled _Astree_ it was a
mirror for the uncertain aspirations of the day, a vast flood of
tenderness in which every heart-throb, every reason for loving and for not
loving, every shape of constancy and every form of infidelity, every joy,
every deception, every conscience twinge that can visit sweethearts and
swains was analyzed, subdivided and endlessly set forth. To a world still
in fermentation it provided the laws of Love's Twelve Tables, the dream
after realism, the high flown after the matter of fact. Its v