Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/281

Rh well versed in philosophy, mathematics, and languages, including Italian, Spanish, and German. Tradition says that in boyhood he formed an attachment for the fair Diane de Châteaumorand—the original of the shepherdess Astrée—who about 1574 became the wife of his brother Anne. The marriage was annulled by the Pope in 1598. D'Urfé was released from his vows in the following year, and in 1600 the two were wedded. It has been customary of late to distrust the story of an early attachment, and to assert that after their marriage they lived apart from one another; but the researches of Abbé Reure have shown that the latter statement is not true, and there is no inherent probability in the hypothesis that an affection had sprung up between the two in the earlier years of her nominal marriage. D'Urfé's pastoral poem, the Sirène, and the Astrée were both coloured by his own experience.

The part which d'Urfé took in the wars of the League procured him more than one imprisonment, and compelled him to spend most of his later years at the court of Savoy, a rendezvous of all the most celebrated Italian poets. He himself wrote an epic on the fortunes of the House of Savoy—La Savoysiade, of which a fragment was published in 1621,—and his principal work combined Italian and Spanish influences in a way that appealed powerfully to his country and generation. The Astrée was one of the sources of the ideal in which Italian refinement and elegance were blended with the heroic French temper of the early seventeenth century.