The best master in a bad class of lumbering and tiresome fiction was the author of the book which is the text of this chapter. La Calprenède, whose full name was nothing less than Gautier de Costes de la Calprenède, was a Gascon gentleman of the Guards, of whose personal history the most notorious fact is that he had the temerity to marry a woman who had already buried five husbands. Some historians relate that she proceeded to poison number six, but this does not appear to be certain, while it does appear that Calprenède lived in the married state for fifteen years, a longer respite than the antecedents of madame gave him any right to anticipate. He made a great fame with his two huge Roman novels, _Cassandra_ and _Cleopatra_, and then, some years later, he produced a third, _Pharamond_ which was taken out of early French history. The translator, in the version before us, says of this book that it "is not a romance, but a history adorned with some excellent flourishes of language and loves, in which you may delightfully trace the author's learned pen through all those historians who wrote of the times he treats of." In other words, while Gombreville--with his King of the Canaries, and his Vanishing Islands, and his necromancers, and his dragons--canters through pure fairyland, and while Mlle. de Scudéry elaborately builds up a romantic picture of her own times (in _Clélie_, for instance, where the three hundred and seventy several characters introduced are said to be all acquaintances of the author), Calprenède attempted to produce something like a proper historical novel, introducing invention, but embroidering it upon some sort of genuine framework of fact.