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17-CENTURY HISTORY] of defects, and indeed is nearly unreadable. Now, prose is essentially an instrument of all work. The poet who has not genius had better not write at all; the prose writer often may and sometimes must dispense with this qualification. He has need, therefore, of a suitable machine to help him to perform his task, and this machine it is the glory of Balzac to have done more than any other person to create. He produced himself no great work, his principal writings being letters, a few discourses and dissertations, and a work entitled Le Socrate chrétien, a sort of treatise on political theology. But if the matter of his work is not of the first importance, its manner is of a very different value. Instead of the endless diffuseness of the preceding century, its ill-formed or rather unformed sentences, and its haphazard periods, we find clauses, sentences and paragraphs distinctly planned, shaped and balanced, a cadence introduced which is rhythmical but not metrical, and, in short, prose which is written knowingly instead of the prose which is unwittingly talked. It has been well said of him that he “écrit pour écrire”; and such a man, it is evident, if he does nothing else, sets a valuable example to those who write because they have something to say. Voiture seconded Balzac without much intending to do so. His prose style, also chiefly contained in letters, is lighter than that of his contemporary, and helped to gain for French prose the tradition of vivacity and sparkle which it has always possessed, as well as that of correctness and grace.

17th-century History.—In historical composition, especially in the department of memoirs, this period was exceedingly rich. At last there was written, in French, an entire history of France. The author was François Eudes de Mézeray (1610–1683), whose work, though not exhibiting the perfection of style at which some of his contemporaries had already arrived, and though still more or less uncritical, yet deserves the title of history. The example was followed by a large number of writers, some of extended works, some of histories in part. Mézeray himself is said to have had a considerable share in the Histoire du roi Henri le grand by the archbishop Péréfixe (1605–1670); Louis Maimbourg (1610–1686) wrote histories of the Crusades and of the League; Paul Pellisson (1624–1693) gave a history of Louis XIV. and a more valuable Mémoire in defence of the superintendent Fouquet. Still later in the century, or at the beginning of the next, the Père d’Orléans (1644–1698) wrote a history of the revolutions of England, the Père Daniel (1649–1728), like d’Orléans a Jesuit, composed a lengthy history of France and a shorter one on the French military forces. Finally, at the end of the period, comes the great ecclesiastical history of Claude Fleury (1640–1723), a work which perhaps belongs more to the section of erudition than to that of history proper. Three small treatises, however, composed by different authors towards the middle part of the century, supply remarkable instances of prose style in its application to history. These are the Conjurations du comte de Fiesque, written by the famous Cardinal de Retz (1613–1679), the Conspiration de Walstein of Sarrasin, and the Conjuration des Espagnols contre Venise, composed in 1672 by the abbé de Saint-Réal (1639–1692), the author of various historical and critical works deserving less notice. These three works, whose similarity of subject and successive composition at short intervals leave little doubt that a certain amount of intentional rivalry animated the two later authors, are among the earliest and best examples of the monographs for which French, in point of grace of style and lucidity of exposition, has long been the most successful vehicle of expression among European languages. Among other writers of history, as distinguished from memoirs, need only be noticed Agrippa d’Aubigné, whose Histoire universelle closed his long and varied list of works, and Varillas (1624–1696), a historian chiefly remarkable for his extreme untrustworthiness. In point of memoirs and correspondence the period is hardly less fruitful than that which preceded it. The Régistres-Journaux of Pierre de l’Étoile (1540–1611) consist of a diary something of the Pepys character, kept for nearly forty years by a person in high official employment. The memoirs of Sully (1560–1641), published under a curious title too long to quote, date also from this time.

Henri IV. himself has left a considerable correspondence, which is not destitute of literary merit, though not equal to the memoirs of his wife. What are commonly called Richelieu’s Memoirs were probably written to his order; his Testament politique may be his own. Henri de Rohan (1579–1638) has not memoirs of the first value. Both this and earlier times found chronicle in the singular Historiettes of Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux (1619–1690), a collection of anecdotes, frequently scandalous, reaching from the times of Henri IV. to those of Louis XIV., to which may be joined the letters of Guy Patin (1602–1676). The early years of the latter monarch and the period of the Fronde had the cardinal de Retz himself, than whom no one was certainly better qualified for historian, not to mention a crowd of others, of whom we may mention Madame de Motteville (1621–1689), Jean Hérault de Gourville (1625–1703), Mademoiselle de Montpensier (“La Grande Mademoiselle”) (1627–1693), Conrart, Turenne and Mathieu Molé (1584–1663), François du Val, marquis de Fontenay-Mareuil (1594–1655), Arnauld d’Andilly (1588–1670). From this time memoirs and memoir writers were ever multiplying. The queen of them all is Madame de Sevigné (1626–1696), on whom, as on most of the great and better-known writers whom we have had and shall have to mention, it is impossible here to dwell at length. The last half of the century produced crowds of similar but inferior writers. The memoirs of Roger de Bussy-Rabutin (1618–1693) (author of a kind of scandalous chronicle called Histoire amoureuse des Gaules) and of Madame de Maintenon (1635–1719) perhaps deserve notice above the others. But this was in truth the style of composition in which the age most excelled. Memoir-writing became the occupation not so much of persons who made history, as was the case from Comines to Retz, as of those who, having culture, leisure and opportunity of observation, devoted themselves to the task of recording the deeds of others, and still more of regarding the incidents of the busy, splendid and cultivated if somewhat frivolous world of the court, in which, from the time of Louis XIV.’s majority, the political life of the nation and almost its whole history were centred. Many, if not most, of these writers were women, who thus founded the celebrity of the French lady for managing her mother-tongue, and justified by results the taste and tendencies of the blue-stockings and précieuses of the Hôtel Rambouillet and similar coteries. The life which these writers saw before them furnished them with a subject to be handled with the minuteness and care to which they had been accustomed in the ponderous romances of the Clélie type, but also with the wit and terseness hereditary in France, and only temporarily absent in those ponderous compositions. The efforts of Balzac and the Academy supplied a suitable language and style, and the increasing tendency towards epigrammatic moralizing, which reached its acme in La Rochefoucauld (1663–1680) and La Bruyère (1639–1696), added in most cases point and attractiveness to their writings.

17th-Century Philosophers and Theologians.—To these moralists we might, perhaps, not inappropriately pass at once. But it seems better to consider first the philosophical and theological developments of the age, which must share with its historical experiences and studies the credit of producing these writers. Philosophy proper, as we have already had occasion to remark, had hitherto made no use of the vulgar tongue. The 16th century had contributed a few vernacular treatises on logic, a considerable body of political and ethical writing, and a good deal of sceptical speculation of a more or less vague character, continued into our present epoch by such writers as François de la Mothe le Vayer (1588–1672), the last representative of the orthodox doubt of Montaigne and Charron. But in metaphysics proper it had not dabbled. The 17th century, on the contrary, was to produce in René Descartes (1596–1650), at once a master of prose style, the greatest of French philosophers, and one of the greatest metaphysicians, not merely of France and of the 17th century, but of all countries and times. Even before Descartes there had been considerable and important developments of metaphysical speculation in France. The first eminent philosopher of French birth was Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655).