The extravagances of sentiment produced a natural reaction. Not a few of the intimates of the Hotel de Rambouillet found a relief from their fatigue of fine manners and high-pitched emotions in the unedifying jests and merry tales of the tavern. A comic, convivial, burlesque or picaresque literature became, as it were, a parody of the literature of preciosity. Saint-Amand (1594-1661) was at once a disciple of the Italian Marini, the admired "Sapurnius" of the _salon_, author of at least one beautiful ode--_La Solitude_--breathing a gentle melancholy, and a gay singer of bacchic chants. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, in his comedy _Les Visionnaires_ (1637), mocked the _precieuses_, and was applauded by the spectators of the theatre. One of his heroines is hopelessly enamoured of Alexander the Great; one is enamoured of poetry, and sees life as if it were material for the stage; and the third is enamoured of her own beauty, with its imagined potency over the hearts of men. As early as 1622 CHARLES SOREL expressed, in his _Histoire Comique de Francion_, a Rabelaisian and picaresque tale of low life, the revolt of the _esprit gaulois_ against the homage of the imagination to courtly shepherdesses and pastoral cavaliers. It was reprinted more than forty times. In _Le Berger Extravagant_ (1628) he attempted a kind of Don Quixote for his own day--an "anti-romance"--which recounts the pastoral follies of a young Parisian bourgeois, whose wits have been set wandering by such dreams as the _Astree_ had inspired; its mirth is unhappily overloaded with pedantry.