Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/291

Rh biographical fragment by the dramatist Tristan l'Hermite. Especially original and interesting are the fantastic romances of Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655), collected as the Histoire Comique des États et Empires de la Lune. Cyrano's discoveries in the moon and the sun, suggested by Lucian and others, including a couple of English writers of the century, have had many sequels down to the days of Jules Verne and Mr Wells. But the most popular realistic romance of the period was the Roman Comique (1651) of Paul Scarron (1610-1660), famous as the husband of Madame de Maintenon, for the physical sufferings he endured with courage and gaiety, and as the author of the Virgile Travesti and some comedies in the same burlesque vein. Scarron's romance, suggested by a Spanish one, and containing several interpolated stories translated from that language, was left unfinished. It owes its popularity to the delightful gaiety with which the story is told,—if Sorel makes one think of Smollett, Scarron has a touch of Fielding,—the distinctness and interest of the characters, and also to the fact that the author succeeds to some extent in enlisting our sympathies for his hero, the wandering actor Le Destin. His story is doubtless of a kind more proper to the heroic than the realistic romance; but it may be questioned whether some degree of idealism, some heightening of the principal characters, is not essential to the success as romance even of the most realistic story.