mes when it appeared. La Harpe
said it was "the first romance that offered reasonable adventures
written with interest and elegance." It marked an era in the history of
the novel. "Before Mme. de La Fayette," said Voltaire, "people wrote
in a stilted style of improbable things." We have the rare privilege of
reading her own criticism in a letter to the secretary of the Duchesse
de Savoie, in which she disowns the authorship, and adds a few lines of
discreet eulogy.

"As for myself," she writes, "I am flattered at being suspected of it.
I believe I should acknowledge the book, if I were assured the author
would never appear to claim it. I find it very agreeable and well
written without being excessively polished, full of things of admirable
delicacy, which should be read more than once; above all, it seems to
be a perfect presentation of the world of the court and the manner
of living there. It is not romantic or ambitious; indeed it is not a
romance; properly speaking, it is a book of memoirs, and that I am told
was its title, but it was changed. VOILA, monsieur, my judgment upon
Mme. De Cleves; I ask yours, for people are divided upon this book to
the point of devouring each other. Some condemn what others admire;
whatever you may say, do not fear to be alone in your opinion."

Sainte-Beuve, whose portrait of Mme. de La Fayette is so delightful as
to make all others seem superfluous, has devoted some exquisite lines
to this book. "It is touching to think," he writes, "of the peculiar
situation which gave birth to these beings so charming, so pure, these
characters so noble and so spotless, these sentiments so fresh, so
faultless, so tender;" how Mme. de La Fayette put into it all that her
loving, poetic soul retained of its first, ever-cherished dreams, and
how M. de La Rochefoucauld was pleased doubtless to find once more in
"M. De Nemours" that brilliant flower of chivalry which he had too much
misused--a sort of flattering mirror in which he lived again his youth.
Thus these two old friends renewed in imagination the pristine beauty of
that age when they had not known each other, hence could not love each
other. The blush so characteristic of Mme. De Cleves, and which at first
is almost her only language, indicates well the design of the author,
which is to paint love in its freshest, purest, vaguest, most adorable,
most disturbing, most irresistible--in a word, in its own color. It is
constantly a question of that