public under the title of "Divers Portraits." They served the
double purpose of furnishing to the world faithful delineations
of many more or less distinguished people and of setting a
literary fashion. The taste for pen-portraits, which originated
in the romances of Mlle. de Scudery, and received a fresh impulse
from this novel and personal application, spread rapidly among
all classes. It was taken up by men of letters and men of the
world, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie. There were portraits
of every grade of excellence and every variety of people, until
they culminated, some years later in "Les Caracteres" of La
Bruyere, who dropped personalities and gave them the form of
permanent types. It is a literature peculiarly adapted to the
flexibility and fine perception of the French mind, and one in
which it has been preeminent, from the analytic but diffuse Mlle.
de Scudery, and the clear, terse, spirited Cardinal de Retz, to
the fine, penetrating, and exquisitely finished Sainte-Beuve, the
prince of modern critics and literary artists. It was this skill
in vivid delineation that gave such point and piquancy to the
memoirs of the period, which are little more than a series of
brilliant and vigorous sketches of people outlined upon a
shifting background of events. In this rapid characterization
the French have no rivals. It is the charm of their fiction as
well as of their memoirs. Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Daudet, are
the natural successors of La Bruyere and Saint-Simon.

The marriage of Louis XIV shattered one of the most brilliant
illusions of the Grande Mademoiselle, and it was about this time
that she wrote a characteristic letter to Mme. de Motteville,
picturing an Arcadia in some beautiful forest, where people are
free to do as they like. The most ardent apostle of socialism