Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/271

Rh and brilliant society, in which poets and men of letters began for the first time to move, not in the feudal position of dependants on some great noble, as even Ronsard had done, but on a footing of equality. If rationalism, which was growing and was soon to take definite shape in the work of Descartes, may be described as the formal cause of the classical literature of the age of Louis XIV., the influence of polite society was the efficient, supplying the power which subordinated the individual, and imposed the rules of order, clearness, and dignity with all the rigour of social etiquette.

The opening of the seventeenth century is accordingly hardly less distinctly marked as an epoch by the arrival in Paris of Malherbe (1605), by the publication or D'Urfé's L'Astrée (1605), or the definitive establishment of Valleran de Léconte's company at the Hôtel de Bourgogne (1607), than by the rebuilding of the Hôtel Rambouillet (1607). Catherine de Vivonne, the daughter of a French ambassador at the Papal court and his Italian wife Julia Savelli, had, when little more than twelve, married Charles d'Angennes, Marquis de Rambouillet. Her sensitive and refined nature was repelled by the licentious morals and camp manners of the court of Henri IV., and after the birth of her eldest daughter, the celebrated Julie, she withdrew from court, rebuilt the Palais Pisaui as the Hôtel Rambouillet in a style which revolutionised domestic architecture, and drew around her all