But the greatest prose-writer of the age devoted himself neither to history nor to criticism—though his works are impregnated with the spirit of both—but to Fiction. In his novels, FLAUBERT finally accomplished what Balzac had spasmodically begun—the separation of the art of fiction from the unreality, the exaggeration, and the rhetoric of the Romantic School. Before he began to write, the movement towards a greater restraint, a more deliberate art, had shown itself in a few short novels by GEORGE SAND—the first of the long and admirable series of her mature works—where, especially in such delicate masterpieces as La Mare au Diable, La Petite Fadette, and Francois le Champi, her earlier lyricism and incoherence were replaced by an idyllic sentiment strengthened and purified by an exquisite sense of truth. Flaubert's genius moved in a very different and a far wider orbit: but it was no less guided by the dictates of deliberate art. In his realism, his love of detail, and his penetrating observation of facts, Flaubert was the true heir of Balzac; while in the scrupulosity of his style and the patient, laborious, and sober treatment of his material he presented a complete contrast to his great predecessor. These latter qualities make Flaubert the pre-eminent representative of his age. The critical sense possessed him more absolutely and with more striking results than all the rest of his contemporaries. His watchfulness over his own work was almost infinite. There has never been a writer who took his art with such a passionate seriousness, who struggled so incessantly towards perfection, and who suffered so acutely from the difficulties, the disappointments, the desperate, furious efforts of an unremitting toil. His style alone cost him boundless labour. He would often spend an entire day over the elaboration and perfection of a single sentence, which, perhaps, would be altogether obliterated before the publication of the book. He worked in an apoplectic fervour over every detail of his craft—eliminating repetitions, balancing rhythms, discovering the precise word for every shade of meaning, with an extraordinary, an almost superhuman, persistence. And in the treatment of his matter his conscientiousness was equally great. He prepared for his historical novels by profound researches in the original authorities of the period, and by personal visits to the localities he intended to describe. When he treated of modern life he was no less scrupulously exact. One of his scenes was to pass in a cabbage-garden by moonlight. But what did a cabbage-garden by moonlight really look like? Flaubert waited long for a propitious night, and then went out, notebook in hand, to take down the precise details of what he saw. Thus it was that his books were written very slowly, and his production comparatively small. He spent six years over the first and most famous of his works—Madame Bovary; and he devoted no less than thirteen to his encyclopedic Bouvard et Pecuchet, which was still unfinished when he died.

The most abiding impression produced by the novels of Flaubert is that of solidity. This is particularly the case with his historical books. The bric-a-brac and fustian of the Romantics has disappeared, to be replaced by a clear, detailed, profound presentment of the life of the past. In Salammbo, ancient Carthage rises up before us, no crazy vision of a picturesque and disordered imagination, but in all the solidity of truth; coloured, not with the glaring contrasts of rhetoric, but with the real blaze of an eastern sun; strange, not with an imported fantastic strangeness manufactured in nineteenth-century Paris, but with the strangeness—so much more mysterious and significant—of the actual, barbaric Past.

The same characteristics appear in Flaubert's modern novels. Madame Bovary gives us a picture of life in a French provincial town in the middle of the last century—a picture which, with its unemphatic tones, its strong, sensitive, and accurate drawing, its masterly design, produces an effect of absolutely convincing veracity. The character and the fate of the wretched woman who forms the central figure of the story come upon us, amid the grim tepidity of their surroundings, with extraordinary force. Flaubert's genius does not act in sudden flashes, but by the method of gradual accumulation. The effects which it produces are not of the kind that overwhelm and astonish, but of the more subtle sort that creep into the mind by means of a thousand details, an infinitude of elaborated fibres, and which, once there, are there for ever.

The solidity of Flaubert's work, however, was not unaccompanied with drawbacks. His writing lacks fire; there is often a sense of effort in it; and, as one reads his careful, faultless, sculpturesque sentences, it is difficult not to long, at times, for some of the irregular vitality of Balzac. Singularly enough, Flaubert's correspondence—one of the most interesting collections of letters in the language—shows that, so far as his personal character was concerned, irregular vitality was precisely one of his dominating qualities. But in his fiction he suppressed this side of himself in the interests, as he believed, of art. It was his theory that a complete detachment was a necessary condition for all great writing; and he did his best to put this theory into practice. But there was one respect in which he did not succeed in his endeavour. His hatred and scorn of the mass of humanity, his conception of them as a stupid, ignorant, and vulgar herd, appears throughout his work, and in his unfinished Bouvard et Pecuchet reaches almost to the proportion of a monomania. The book is an infinitely elaborate and an infinitely bitter attack on the ordinary man. There is something tragic in the spectacle of this lonely, noble, and potent genius wearing out his life at last over such a task—in a mingled agony of unconscious frenzied self-expression and deliberate misguided self-immolation.

In poetry, the reaction against Romanticism had begun with the Emaux et Camees of THEOPHILE GAUTIER—himself in his youth one of the leaders of the Romantic School; and it was carried further in the work of a group of writers known as the Parnassiens—the most important of whom were LECONTE DE LISLE, SULLY PRUDHOMME, and HEREDIA. Their poetry bears the same relation to that of Musset as the history of Renan bears to that of Michelet, and the prose of Flaubert to that of Hugo. It is restrained, impersonal, and polished to the highest degree. The bulk of it is not great; but not a line of it is weak or faulty; and it possesses a firm and plastic beauty, well expressed by the title of Gautier's volume, and the principles of which are at once explained and exemplified in his famous poem beginning—

Oui, l'oeuvre sort plus belle D'une forme au travail Rebelle, —Vers, marbre, onyx, email.

The Parnassiens particularly devoted themselves to classical subjects, and to descriptions of tropical scenes. Their rich, sonorous, splendidly-moulded language invests their visions with a noble fixity, an impressive force. Among the gorgeous descriptive pieces of Leconte de Lisle, the exquisite lyrics of Sully Prudhomme, and the chiselled sonnets of Heredia some of the finest and weightiest verse of the century is to be found.

The age produced one other poet who, however, by the spirit of his work, belongs rather to the succeeding epoch than to his own. This was BAUDELAIRE, whose small volume—Les Fleurs du Mal—gives him a unique place among the masters of the poetic art. In his form, indeed, he is closely related to his contemporaries. His writing has all the care, the balance, the conscientious polish of the Parnassiens; it is in his matter that he differs from them completely. He was not interested in classical imaginations and impersonal descriptions; he was concerned almost entirely with the modern life of Paris and the actual experiences of a disillusioned soul. As intensely personal as the Parnassiens were detached, he poured into his verse all the gloom of his own character, all the bitterness of his own philosophy, all the agony of his own despair. Some poets—such as Keats and Chenier—in spite of the misfortunes of their lives, seem to distil nothing but happiness and the purest beauty into their poetry; they only come to their true selves amid the sunlight and the flowers. Other writers—such as Swift and Tacitus—rule supreme over the kingdom of darkness and horror, and their finest pages are written in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Writers of this kind are very rarely poets; and it is Baudelaire's great distinction that he was able to combine the hideous and devastating conceptions of complete pessimism with the passion, the imagination, and the formal beauty that only live in magnificent verse. He is the Swift of poetry. His vision is black and terrible. Some of his descriptions are even more disgusting than those of Swift, and most of his pages are no fit reading for the young and ignorant. But the wise reader will find in this lurid poetry elements of profundity and power which are rare indeed. Above all, he will find in it a quality not common in French poetry—a passionate imagination which clothes the thought with splendour, and lifts the strange words of this unhappy mortal into the deathless regions of the sublime.



CONCLUSION

With the death of Flaubert in 1880, French literature entered upon a new phase—a phase which, in its essential qualities, has lasted till to-day, and which forms a suitable point for the conclusion of the present sketch.

This last phase has been dominated by two men of genius. In prose, MAUPASSANT carried on the work of Flaubert with a sharper manner and more vivid style, though with a narrower range. He abandoned the exotic and the historical visions of his predecessor, and devoted himself entirely, in his brilliant novels and yet more brilliant short stories, to an almost fiendishly realistic treatment of modern life. A precisely contrary tendency marks the poetry of VERLAINE. While Maupassant completely disengaged prose from every alien element of poetry and imagination, pushing it as far as it could go in the direction of incisive realism, Verlaine and his fellow-workers in verse attempted to make poetry more truly poetical than it had ever been before, to introduce into it the vagueness and dreaminess of individual moods and spiritual fluctuations, to turn it away from definite fact and bring it near to music.

It was with Verlaine and his successors that French verse completely broke away from the control of those classical rules, the infallibility of which had been first attacked by the Romantics. In order to express the delicate, shifting, and indecisive feelings which he loved so well, Verlaine abolished the last shreds of rhythmical regularity, making his verse a perfectly fluid substance, which he could pour at will into the subtle mould of his feeling and his thought. The result justified the means. Verlaine's poetry exhales an exquisite perfume—strange, indistinct, and yet, after the manner of perfume, unforgettable. Listening to his enchanting, poignant music, we hear the trembling voice of a soul. This last sad singer carries us back across the ages, and, mingling his sweet strain with the distant melancholy of Villon, symbolizes for us at once the living flower and the unchanging root of the great literature of France.

* * * * *

We have now traced the main outlines of that literature from its dim beginnings in the Dark Ages up to the threshold of the present time. Looking back over the long line of writers, the first impression that must strike us is one of extraordinary wealth. France, it is true, has given to the world no genius of the colossal stature and universal power of Shakespeare. But, then, where is the equal of Shakespeare to be found? Not even in the glorious literature of Greece herself. Putting out of account such an immeasurable magnitude, the number of writers of the first rank produced by France can be paralleled in only one other modern literature—that of England. The record is, indeed, a splendid one which contains, in poetry and drama, the names of Villon, Ronsard, Corneille, Moliere, Racine, La Fontaine, Chenier, Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny, Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine; and in prose those of Froissart, Rabelais, Montaigne, Pascal, Bossuet, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Montesquieu, Saint-Simon, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Flaubert, and Maupassant. And, besides this great richness and variety, another consideration gives a peculiar value to the literature of France. More than that of any other nation in Europe, it is distinctive and individual; if it had never existed, the literature of the world would have been bereft of certain qualities of the highest worth which France alone has been able to produce. Where else could we find the realism which would replace that of Stendhal and Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant? Where else should we look for the brilliant lucidity and consummate point which Voltaire has given us? Or the force and the precision that glow in Pascal? Or the passionate purity that blazes in Racine?

Finally, if we would seek for the essential spirit of French literature, where shall we discover it? In its devotion to truth? In its love of rhetoric? In its clarity? In its generalizing power? All these qualities are peculiarly its own, but, beyond and above them, there is another which controls and animates the rest. The one high principle which, through so many generations, has guided like a star the writers of France is the principle of deliberation, of intention, of a conscious search for ordered beauty; an unwavering, an indomitable pursuit of the endless glories of art.



CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF AUTHORS AND THEIR PRINCIPAL WORKS

I. Middle Ages

CHANSONS DE GESTE, eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Chanson de Roland, circa 1080.

ROMANS BRETONS, twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

CHRETIEN DE TROYES, wrote circa 1170-80.

FABLIAUX, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Roman de Renard, thirteenth century. Aucassin et Nicolete, circa thirteenth century.

VILLEHARDOUIN, d. 1213. Conquete de Constantinople, 1205-13.

GUILLAUME DE LORRIS (?). La Roman de la Rose (first part), circa 1237.

JEAN DE MEUNG, d. 1305. La Roman de la Rose (second part), 1277.

JOINVILLE, 1224-1319. Vie de Saint Louis, 1309.

FROISSART, 1337-circa 1410. Chroniques, 1373-1400.

VILLON, 1431-(?). Grand Testament, 1461.

COMMYNES, 1445-1509. Memoires, 1488-98.

II. Renaissance

MAROT, 1496-1544.

RABELAIS, circa 1494-1553.

RONSARD, 1524-85.

DU BELLAY, 1522-60. Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise, 1549.

JODELLE, 1532-73. Cleopatre, 1552.

MONTAIGNE, 1533-92. Essays, 1580-88.

III. Age of Transition

MALHERBE, 1555-1628. Odes, 1607-28.

HARDY, 1570-1631 (circa). Tragedies, 1593-1630.

ACADEMY, founded 1629.

CORNEILLE, 1606-84. Le Cid, 1636. Les Horaces, 1640. Cinna, 1640. Polyeucte, 1643.

PASCAL, 1623-62. Lettres Provinciales, 1656-57. Pensees, first edition 1670, first complete edition 1844.

IV. Age of Louis XIV

MOLIERE, 1622-73. Les Precieuses Ridicules, 1659. L'Ecole des Femmes, 1662. Tartufe, 1664. Le Misanthrope, 1666. Le Malade Imaginaire, 1673.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, 1613-80. Maximes, 1665.

BOILEAU, 1636-1711. Satires, 1666. Art Poetique, 1674.

RACINE, 1639-99. Andromaque, 1667. Phedre, 1677. Athalie, 1691.

LA FONTAINE, 1621-95. Fables, 1668-92.

BOSSUET, 1627-1704. Oraisons Funebres, 1669-87. Histoire Universelle, 1681.

MADAME DE SEVIGNE, 1626-96. Letters, 1671-96.

MADAME DE LAFAYETTE, 1634-93. La Princesse de Cleves, 1678.

LA BRUYERE, 1645-96. Les Caracteres, 1688-94.

V. Eighteenth Century

FONTENELLE, 1657-1757. Histoire des Oracles, 1687.

BAYLE, 1647-1706. Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, 1697.

FENELON, 1651-1715. Telemaque, 1699.

MONTESQUIEU, 1689-1755. Lettres Persanes, 1721. L'Esprit des Lois, 1748.

VOLTAIRE (1694-1778). La Henriade, 1723. Zaire, 1732. Lettres Philosophiques, 1734. Essai sur les Moeurs, 1751-56. Candide, 1759. Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1764. Dialogues, etc., 1755-78.

LE SAGE, 1668-1747. Gil Blas, 1715-35.

MARIVAUX, 1688-1763. Vie de Marianne, 1731-41. Les Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard, 1734.

SAINT-SIMON, 1675-1755. Memoires, begun 1740, first edition 1830.

DIDEROT, 1713-84. Encyclopedie, 1751-80. La Religieuse, first edition 1796. Le Neveu de Rameau, first edition 1823.

ROUSSEAU, 1712-78. La Nouvelle Heloise, 1761. Contrat Social, 1762. Confessions, first edition 1781-88.

BEAUMARCHAIS, 1732-99. Le Mariage de Figaro, 1784.

CONDORCET, 1743-94. Progres de l'Esprit Humain, 1794.

CHENIER, 1762-94. Poems, 1790-94, first edition 1819.

VI. Nineteenth Century—I

CHATEAUBRIAND, 1768-1848. Atala, 1801. Genie du Christianisme, 1802. Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, published 1849.

LAMARTINE, 1790-1869. Meditations, 1820.

HUGO, 1802-85. Hernani, 1830. Les Feuilles d'Automne, 1831. Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831. Les Chatiments, 1852. Les Contemplations, 1856. La Legende des Siecles, 1859. Les Miserables, 1862.

VIGNY, 1797-1863. Poemes Antiques et Modernes, 1826. Servitude et Grandeur Militaires, 1835.

MUSSET, 1810-57. Caprices de Marianne, 1833. Lorenzaccio, 1834. Les Nuits, 1835-40.

GEORGE SAND, 1804-76. Indiana, 1832. Francois le Champi, 1850.

STENDHAL, 1783-1842. Le Rouge et le Noir, 1831.

BALZAC, 1799-1850. La Comedie Humaine, 1829-50.

MICHELET, 1798-1874. History, 1833-67.

VII. Nineteenth Century—II

SAINTE-BEUVE, 1804-69. Lundis, 1850-69.

RENAN, 1833-92. Vie de Jesus, 1863.

TAINE, 1828-93.

FLAUBERT, 1821-80. Madame Bovary, 1857. Salammbo, 1862.

GAUTIER, 1811-72. Emaux et Camees, 1852.

BAUDELAIRE, 1821-67. Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857.

LECONTE DE LISLE, 1818-94. Poems, 1853-84.

SULLY PRUDHOMME, 1839-1907. Poems, 1865-88.

HEREDIA, 1842-1905. Les Trophees, 1893.

MAUPASSANT, 1850-93.

VERLAINE, 1844-96.



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The number of works dealing with the history and criticism of French literature is very large indeed. The following are the most useful reviews of the whole subject:—

PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature francaise (8 vols.).

LANSON. Histoire de la Litterature francaise (1 vol.).

BRUNETIERE. Manuel de l'histoire de la Litterature francaise (1 vol.).

DOWDEN. History of French Literature (1 vol.).

An excellent series of biographies of the principal authors, by the leading modern critics, is that of Les Grands Ecrivains Francais (published by Hachette).

The critical essays of Sainte-Beuve are particularly valuable. They are contained in his Causeries du Lundi, Premiers Lundis, Nouveaux Lundis, Portraits de Femmes, Portraits Litteraires, and Portraits Contemporains.

Some interesting criticisms of modern writers are to be found in La Vie Litteraire, by Anatole France.

Editions of the principal authors are very numerous. The monumental series of Les Grands Ecrivains de la France (Hachette) contains complete texts of most of the great writers, with elaborate and scholarly commentaries of the highest value. Cheaper editions of the masterpieces of the language are published by Hachette, La Bibliotheque Nationale, Jean Gillequin, Nelson, Dent, Gowans & Gray.

There are also numerous lyrical anthologies, of which two of the best are Les Chefs-d'oeuvre de la Poesie lyrique francaise (Gowans & Gray) and The Oxford Book of French Verse (Clarendon Press). But it must be remembered that the greater part of what is most characteristic in French literature appears in its poetic drama and its prose, and is therefore necessarily excluded from such collections.



INDEX

Academy, the French, 34-36 Aesop, 80 Aristotle, 67 Arnold, Matthew, 64 Aucassin et Nicolete, 11-12, 13 Austen, Jane, 161

Balzac, Honore de (1799-1850), 160-164, 166, 168, 171, 175, 176 La Comedie Humaine, 161-164 Baudelaire, Charles (1821-67), 172-173, 175 Les Fleurs du Mal, 172 Bayle, Pierre (1647-1706) Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, 96 Beaumarchais, De [pseud. of Pierre Auguste Caron] (1732-99), 140-141 Le Mariage de Figaro, 140-141 Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), 130 Boileau, Nicolas (1636-1711), 53-55, 143, 167 Art Poetique, 53 A son Esprit, 54 Bolingbroke, 102 Bossuet, Jacques Benigne (1627-1704), 85-86, 122, 129, 144, 175 Elevations sur les Mysteres, 86 Histoire Universelle, 85, 122 Meditations sur l'Evangile, 86 Oraisons Funebres, 86 Bourgogne, Duc de, 95 Browne, Sir Thomas, 35 Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de (1707-88), 118 Byron, 35, 137, 146, 156

Calas, Jean (1698-1762), 126 Catherine of Russia, 115 Cervantes, 56 Chanson de Roland, 8, 12 Chansons de Geste, 8, 9 Chapelain, Jean (1595-1674), 55 Chateaubriand, Francois Rene, Vicomte de (1768-1848), 145-146, 148, 175 Genie du Christianisme, 145 Martyrs, 145 Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, 146 Chenier, Andre (1762-94), 142-143, 173, 175 Eglogues, 143 Chretien de Troyes (12th century), 14 Columbus, 111 Commynes, Philippe de (1445-1509), 17-18 Memoires, 17 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de Mably de (1715-80), 118 Condorcet, Marquis de (1743-94), 114, 118 Progres de l'Esprit Humain, 115 Congreve, 35 Constant, Benjamin (1845-1902), 158 Adolphe, 158 Copernicus, 44, 111 Corneille, Pierre (1606-84), 36-41, 48, 55, 77, 144, 175 Le Cid, 36, 37, 39 Cinna, 39 Les Horaces, 39 Polyeucte, 39 Cotin, l'Abbe (1604-82), 55

Dalembert, Jean le Rond (1717-83), 118 Dante, 8, 56, 101 Diderot, Denis (1713-84), 35, 116, 118, 131, 136, 139, 145, 158, 175 Le Neveu de Rameau, 116-117 La Religieuse, 158 Dryden, 64 Du Bellay, Joachim (1522-60), 22 Les Antiquites de Rome, 24 La Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise, 22 Du Chatelet, Mme., 119-120 Du Deffand, Mme. (1697-1780), 99 Dumas, Alexandra (1824-95), 148

Encyclopedie, 115-116

Fabliaux, 10, 144 Fenelon, Francois (1651-1715), 95, 110 Telemaque, 95 Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80), 35, 168-171, 172, 174, 175, 176 Bouvard et Pecuchet, 170 Madame Bovary, 170 Salammbo, 170 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovyer de (1657-1757), 95-96 Histoire des Oracles, 96 Francis I, 21 Frederick the Great, 115, 120 Froissart, Jean (c. 1337-c. 1410), 16-17, 41, 175 Chroniques, 16-17

Gautier, Theophile, (1811-72), 148, 171-172, 175 Emaux et Camees, 171-172 Gray, Thomas, 35

Hardy, Alexandra (c. 1570-c. 1631), 36, 37 Helvetius, Claude Adrien (1715-71), 118 Heredia, Jose-Maria de (1842-1905), 172 Holbach, Baron d' (1723-89), 118 Homer, 101 Hugo, Victor (1802-85), 37, 148, 149-155, 158, 159, 160, 161, 164, 172, 175 Les Chatiments, 155 Les Contemplations, 155 Les Feuilles d'Automne, 155 Hernani, 149, 152 La Legende des Siecles, 155 Les Miserables, 159, 161 Les Rayons et Les Ombres, 155 Hume, David, 139

James, Henry, 161 Jodelle, Etienne (1532-73), 36, 37 Cleopatre, 36 Johnson, Samuel, 167 Joinville, Jean, Sire de (1224-1319), 13-14, 41 Vie de Saint Louis, 13-14

Keats, John, 143, 173

Labe, Louise (c. 1520-66), 24 La Bruyere, Jean de (1645-96), 87, 88-92, 106-107, 144, 175 Les Caracteres, 89-91 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de (1741-1803), 158 Liaisons Dangereuses, 158 Lafayette, Mme. de (1634-93), 157, 158 La Princess de Cleves, 157, 158 La Fontaine, Jean de (1621-95), 11, 53, 79-84, 87, 143, 144, 175 Lamartine, Alphonse (1790-1869), 147, 148, 175 Le Lac, 147 La Rochefoucauld, Duc de (1613-80), 87-88, 175 Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie (1818-94), 172 Le Sage, Alain-Rene (1668-1747), 158 Gil Blas, 158 Locke, John, 102 Lorris, Guillaume de (fl. 13th century), 14-15 La Roman de la Rose, 14-15 Louis IX, 13-14 Louis XI, 17 Louis XIII, 32 Louis XIV, 31, 33, 41, 45-93, 94-95, 97, 105, 106, 168 Louis XV, 110 Luther, Martin, 111

Machiavelli, 17 Malherbe, Francois de (1555-1628), 32-34, 38, 41, 149 Marivaux, Pierre (1688-1763), 103-105, 157, 158 Les Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard, 104 Vie de Marianne, 158 Marlowe, Christopher, 37 Marmontel, Jean Francois (1723-99), 118 Marot, Clement (1496-1544), 21-22 Maupassant, Guy de (1850-93), 174, 175, 176 Meung, Jean de (c. 1250-1305), 14-15, 25 La Roman de la Rose, 15 Michelet, Jules (1798-1874), 166-167, 172 Milton, 62, 101, 153 Moliere [pseud. of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin] (1622-73), 35, 53, 55-64, 77, 84, 93, 175 Don Juan, 61, 62 L'Ecole des Femmes, 57 Les Femmes Savantes, 61 Le Malade Imaginaire, 58 Le Misanthrope, 59, 61, 63 Les Precieuses Ridicules, 57, 62 Tartufe, 60, 62 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533-92), 27-30, 31, 41, 175 Apologie de Raimond Sebond, 28 Montesquieu, Baron de (1689-1755), 96-100, 103, 110, 122, 175 Considerations sur la Grandeur et la Decadence des Romains, 98 L'Esprit des Lois, 98-99, 113 Lettres Persanes, 96-98, 100 Musset, Alfred de (1810-57), 148, 155, 156-157, 172 Lorenzaccio, 157 Les Nuits, 157

Parnassiens, Les, 172, 173 Pascal, Blaise (1623-62), 41-44, 129, 144, 175, 176 Lettres Provinciales, 41-42, 43, 129 Pensees, 43-44 Philosophes, Les, 111-115, 118, 133, 134 Pleiade, La, 22-24, 31, 32 Pombal, 115 Pope, Alexander, 135 Pradon, Nicolas (1632-98), 55 Precieux, Les, 33-34, 41, 55 Prevost, l'Abbe (1697-1763), 157-158 Manon Lescaut, 157-158, 159

Rabelais, Francois (c. 1494-c. 1553), 24-27, 28, 31, 117, 175 Racine, Jean (1639-99), 37, 48, 53, 55, 56, 64-79, 85, 87, 93, 100, 103, 143, 144, 150, 175, 176 Andromaque, 76 Bajazet, 77 Berenice, 68, 70-71 Britannicus, 77 Phedre, 77-79 Les Plaideurs, 77 Renan, Ernest (1823-92), 167, 172 Richelieu, Cardinal de (1585-1642), 32, 36 Romans Bretons, 9, 10 Roman de Renard, 10 Roman de la Rose, 14-16 Ronsard, Pierre de (1524-85), 22, 23-34, 175 La Franciade, 23 Odes, 23 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-78), 112, 131-139, 145, 146, 158, 159, 175 Confessions, 133, 137-138 Le Contrat Social, 132 La Nouvelle Heloise, 132, 158

Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin (1804-69), 167-168 Causeries du Lundi, 168 Port-Royal, 168 Saint-Simon, Duc de (1675-1755), 105-110, 136, 153, 175 Memoires, 105-110, 136 Sand, George [pseud. of Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin] (1804-76), 159, 168 Francois le Champi, 168 La Mare au Diable, 168 La Petite Fadette, 168 Scott, Sir Walter, 35 Scudery, Madeleine de (1607-1701), 157 Sevigne, Mme. de (1626-96), 48 Shakespeare, 35, 56, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 102, 152, 153, 157, 175 Sirven (1709-64), 126 Sophocles, 78 Stendhal [pseud, of Marie-Henri Beyle] (1783-1842), 160, 176 La Chartreuse de Parme, 160 Le Rouge et Le Noir, 160 Sully Prudhomme, Rene Francois Armand (1839-1907), 172 Swift, Jonathan, 173

Tacitus, 173 Taine, Henri (1828-93), 167 Theocritus, 143 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques (1727-81), 112, 118

Verlaine, Paul (1844-96), 174-175 Versailles, 45-47, 106 Vigny, Alfred de (1797-1863), 148, 155-156, 175 Colere de Samson, 156 Maison du Berger, 156 Moise, 156 Monts des Oliviers, 156 La Mort du Loup, 156 Servitude et Grandeur Militaires, 156 Villehardouin, Geoffroi de (c. 1160-1213), 13, 14 La Conquete de Constantinople, 12-13 Villon, Francois (1431-1463 or after), 18-19, 20, 24, 175 Grand Testament, 18 Petit Testament, 18 Virgil, 8, 101 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de (1694-1778), 35, 100-103, 105, 110, 119-131, 135, 136, 139, 140, 144, 145, 152, 175, 176 Alzire, 119, 152 Candide, 127-128 Correspondence, 129 Diatribe du Docteur Akakia, 120 Dictionnaire Philosophique, 123, 130 Le Diner du Comte de Boulainvilliers, 123 Essai sur les Moeurs, 121-122 Frere Rigolet et l'Empereur de la Chine, 123 La Henriade, 101 Lettres Philosophiques, 102, 119 Life of Charles XII, 101 Mahomet, 119 Merope, 119 Zaire, 119, 152

Watteau, Antoine, 104 Wordsworth, William, 74

THE END