Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 19, 2025
"Mais, si tu crois qu'il est coupable, Il ne veut point être innocent." Two years of prison had not broken him down to this point of self-abasement. Could any Sultan, or even the "Oriental Despot" of a radical penny-a-liner, be implored in more abject terms? Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Scudéry, Le Fèvre, talked, wrote, and spared no expense for their dear friend.
Lady Fareham and I are old playfellows. We were reared in the pays du tendre, Loveland the kingdom of innocent attachments and pure penchants, that country of which Mademoiselle Scudery has given us laws and a map. Your vulgar London lover cannot understand platonics the affection which is satisfied with a smile or a madrigal. Fareham knows his wife and me better than to doubt us."
To his house came the noted characters of the day, Mademoiselle de Scudéry the novelist, Marigny the songwriter, Hénault the translator of Lucretius, De Grammont the pet of the court, Chatillon, the duchesses de la Salière and De Sévigné, even Ninon de L'Enclos; all bright and fashionable people, whose wit and raillery were the admiration of the city.
Nor were they restricted to the realities of the present and the memories of the past; they had that wider world of unreality in which to circulate; they had the Scudery language at the tips of their tongues, the fantastic sentimentalism of that marvellous old maid who invented the seventeenth-century hero and heroine; or who crystallised the vanishing figures of that brilliant age and made them immortal.
De Scudery has just sent me two little volumes of conversations; it is impossible that they should not be good, when they are not drowned in a great romance." When the Hotel de Rambouillet was closed, Mlle. de Scudery tried to replace its pleasant reunions by receiving her friends on Saturdays.
"It is of an insipidity to make one sick." "And what absence of grace, gallantry, and the belle flamme!" said Scudery, coldly. "Ah, how different from our immortal D'Urfe!" said Baro, the continuator. "Where is the 'Ariane, where the 'Astrea?" cried, with a groan, Godeau, the annotator.
The novels of Mlle. de Scudéry, while interesting as portraitures, are not thoroughly reliable in their representation of the sentiments and environment of the times; on the other hand, those of Mme. de La Fayette are impersonal—no one of the characters is recognizable; yet their atmosphere is that of the court of Louis XIV., and the language, never so correct as to be unnatural, is that used at the time.
It was in the church of San Lorenzo that Boccaccio saw Maria of Sicily, and it was a case of love at first sight, the coup de foudre that Mlle. de Scudéry has talked about; and if the man's word may be worthy of belief under such circumstances, the lady returned his passion with an equal ardor.
The principal heroic novels were eight in all; of these there is but one, the Almahide of Mile, de Scudéry, which we have not already mentioned, and the original publication of the whole school is confined within less than thirty years. The best master in a bad class of lumbering and tiresome fiction was the author of the book which is the text of this chapter.
Nosebag." In short, "while the leading persons and events are as remote from ordinary life as the inventions of Scudery, the picture of human nature is as faithful as could have been given by Fielding or Le Sage."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking