It is doubtful at what particular time he wrote the _Historiettes_. He was composing, or perhaps revising, part of them in 1657, but some must be later, and many may be earlier in date than that; it is probable that he ceased writing in 1665. He has been accused of being a spiteful chronicler of the vices of the great, and he has been charged with a love of looseness. But his own description is more just: "Je prétends dire le bien et le mal, sans dissimuler la vérité." He writes with an air of humorous malice, pleased to draw the cloak off the limbs of hypocrisy, but not moved by any strong moral indignation. Like Pepys, he enjoyed giving a disinterested picture of the details of ordinary private life, but was rather more cynically amused by them than scandalized. He wrote, or at least intended to write, _Mémoires de la régence d'Anne d'Autriche,_ but this has totally disappeared, and we need not regret it. Gédéon Tallemant is amply immortalized by the _Historiettes_, which fill ten closely printed volumes in the excellent edition of MM. Monmerqué and Paulin of Paris. They are like the work of some brilliant Dutch painter of sordid interiors. He is not always well inspired. He says nothing more adequate about Pascal than that he was "ce garçon qui inventa une machine admirable pour l'arithmétique," but Pascal was hardly of his world. In 1685 Tallemant became a Catholic, converted by the Père Rapin, and, having outlived all his friends, he died, probably in November, 1692, leaving a huge MS., the principal subject of which is an analysis of the society that met within the Hôtel de Rambouillet. At his death that MS. vanished, "as rare things will." It turned up again in a library at Montigny-Lencoup in 1803. We may note, as a curious coincidence, that while the publication of Evelyn's _Diary_ dates from 1818, and while the deciphering of Pepys began in 1819, it was in 1820, that Châteaugiron set to work at copying out the _Historiettes_, which were not published until 1835. Three of the most important MS. memoirs of the seventeenth century were thus independently examined for the first time at practically the same moment of the nineteenth. Each publication was an event in literary history.