No such concealment, no such late discovery, has marked the course of Voiture, whose letters and poems were published by his nephew Pinchesne in 1650, only two years after the poet's death. In this remarkable miscellany, which has been incessantly reprinted, and which forms one of the recognized lesser classics of France, we find ourselves breathing the very atmosphere of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. It is, indeed, amusing to reflect that, for fifteen years before her death, the Marquise and all her circle possessed, and shared with a wide public, this elaborate body of evidence as to their friendships, their tastes, and their amusements. In the _Œuvres_ of Voiture, reprinted at least seventeen times during the lifetime of the Marquise, the world at large was admitted to the conversations of the Blue Room, and it eagerly responded to the invitation. There was something about the supple genius of Voiture, at once daring and discreet, apparently tearing every veil off an intimacy, and yet in fact wrapping it in an impenetrable gauze of mystery, which made him the ideal revealer to excite and baffle curiosity, so that though he tells so much, as he stands at the top of the stairs of the Hôtel and takes the town into his confidence, yet he leaves plenty of things untold, to be whispered into the ears of posterity by Tallemant and Conrart. The father of Voiture was a shopkeeper who sold wine at the sign of the Chapeau de Roses at Amiens, and there his son Vincent was born in 1595. The author of _Alcidalis et Zélide_, was therefore the contemporary of Herrick and of George Herbert. If the last-mentioned had not rejected "the painted pleasures of a Court-life" for the retirements of a saint, he might have been the English Voiture, with his charming gifts and ingenious graces. The year 1626, which saw Herbert adopt the solemn vocation of a priest, is probably that in which Voiture, introduced by Chardebonne, took up his station for the rest of his life, as principal literary oracle and master of the gaieties in the Hôtel de Rambouillet. His father was honestly supplying wine to the Queen-Mother, Marie de Médicis, and there was no question in his son's case, as in that of some others, of doubtful or partial nobility. Vincent Voiture was frankly and openly a _bourgeois_, admitted into that strictly guarded aristocracy because of his abundant talents, his wit, his pleasantness, his delicious social qualities, and also because it was part of the scheme of the Marquise de Rambouillet to break down the boredom of the exclusive privilege of rank for its own sake.