Before, however, either tragedy or comedy in France entered into the period of their history when genius was to illuminate both of them with creations of undying merit, and before the theatre had associated itself enduringly with the artistic and literary divisions of court and society and the people at large, the country had passed through a new phase of the national life. When the troubles and terrors of the great civil and religious wars of the 16th century were over at last, they were found to have produced a reaction towards culture and refinement which spread from certain spheres of society whose influence was for a time prevailing. The seal had been set upon the results of the Renaissance by Malherbe, the father of French style. The masses meanwhile continued to solace or distract their weariness and their sufferings with the help of the accredited ministers of that half-cynical gaiety which has always lighted up the darkest hours of French popular life. In the troublous days preceding Richelieu's definitive accession to power (1624), the _tabarinades_--a kind of street dialogue recalling the earliest days of the popular drama--had made the Pont-Neuf the favourite theatre of the Parisian populace. Meanwhile the influence of Spain, which Henry IV. had overcome in politics, had throughout his reign and afterwards been predominant in other spheres, and not the least in that of literature. The _stilo culto_, of which Gongora was the native Spanish, Marino the Italian, and Lyly the English representative, asserted its dominion over the favourite authors of French society; the pastoral romance of Honoré d'Urfé--the text-book of pseudo-pastoral gallantry--was the parent of the romances of the Scudérys, de La Calprenède and Mme de La Fayette; the Hôtel de Rambouillet was in its glory; the true (not the false) _précieuses_ sat on the heights of intellectual society; and J. L. G. de Balzac (ridiculed in the earliest French dramatic parody)[95] and Voiture were the dictators of its literature. Much of the French drama of this age is of the same kind as its romance-literature, like which it fell under the polite castigation of Boileau's satire. Heroic love (quite a technical passion), "fertile in tender sentiments," seized hold of the theatre as well as of the romances; and La Calprenède, G. de Scudéry[96] and his sister and others were equally fashionable in both species. The Gascon Cyrano de Bergerac, though not altogether insignificant as a dramatist,[97] gained his chief literary reputation by a Rabelaisian fiction. Meanwhile, Spanish and Italian models continued to influence both branches of the drama. Everybody knew by heart Gongora's version of the story of "young Pyramus and his love Thisbe," as dramatized by Th. Viaud (1590-1626); and the sentiment of Tristan[98] (1601-1655) overpowered Herod on the stage, and drew tears from Cardinal Richelieu in the audience. J. Mairet was noted for superior vigour.[99] P.