the précieuse fashion and Boileau's influential ridicule[1] had
discredited the romance in the eyes of writers with classical
predilections. Mme de La Fayette far outshines her rivals, but a host of
obscure women, headed by Hortense Desjardins, better known as Mme de
Villedieu, hastened to supply the popular demand for romantic stories.
In drawing their subjects from the histories of more modern courts than
those of Rome, Greece, or Egypt they endeavored to make their
"historical" romances of passion more lifelike than the heroic romances,
and while they avoided the extravagances, they also shunned the
voluminousness of the _romans à longue haleine_. So the stories related
in "La Belle Assemblée" by Mme de Gomez, translated by Mrs. Haywood in
1725 and often reprinted, are nearer the model of Boccaccio's novelle
than of the Scudéry romance, both in their directness and in being set
in a framework, but the inclusion, in the framework, of long
conversations on love, morals, politics, or wit, with copious examples
from ancient and modern history, of elegant verses on despair and
similar topics, and of such miscellaneous matter as the "General
Instructions of a Mother to a Daughter for her Conduct in Life," showed
that the influence of the salon was not yet exhausted. In the
continuation called "L'Entretien des Beaux Esprits" (translated in
1734), however, the elaborate framework was so far reduced that fourteen
short tales were crowded into two volumes as compared with eighteen in
the four volumes of the previous work. Writers of fiction were evidently
finding brief, unadorned narrative most acceptable to the popular taste.

That the "novels" inserted in these productions had not ceased to
breathe the atmosphere of romance is sufficiently indicated by such
titles as "Nature outdone by Love," "The Triumph of Virtue," "The
Generous Corsair," "Love Victorious over Death," and "Heroick Love."
French models of this kind supplied Mrs. Haywood with a mine of romantic