considered vulgar or coarse was allowed to pass muster; and though in
process of time this censorship became pedantic and petty, there is no
doubt that much was done to purify both the language and the tone of
thought. Poems, plays, epigrams, eulogiums, and even sermons were
rehearsed before the committee of taste in the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and
a wonderful new stimulus was there given, not only to ornamental but to
solid literature. Many of the great men who made France illustrious were
either ending or beginning their careers at this time. Memoir writing
specially flourished, and the characters of the men and women of the
court are known to us on all sides. Cardinal de Retz and the Duke of
Rochefoucauld, both deeply engaged in the Fronde, have left, the one
memoirs, the other maxims of great power of irony. Mme. de Motteville,
one of the queen's ladies, wrote a full history of the court. Blaise
Pascal, one of the greatest geniuses of all times, was attaching
himself to the Jansenists. This religious party, so called from Jansen,
a Dutch priest, whose opinions were imputed to them, had sprung up
around the reformed convent of Port Royal, and numbered among them some
of the ablest and best men of the time; but the Jesuits considered them
to hold false doctrine, and there was a continual debate, ending at
length in the persecution of the Jansenists. Pascal's "Provincial
Letters," exposing the Jesuit system, were among the ablest writings of
the age. Philosophy, poetry, science, history, art, were all making
great progress, though there was a stateliness and formality in all that
was said and done, redolent of the Spanish queen's etiquette and the
fastidious refinement of the Hôtel Rambouillet.


5. Court of Louis XIV.--The attempt from the earliest times of the
French monarchy had been to draw all government into the hands of the
sovereign, and the suppression of the Fronde completed the work. Louis