D'Urfé had only to remember the æstheticism which surrounded his expanding youth to comprehend the general weariness caused by the lack of intellectual symmetry and by the rusticity of the manners of the new reign. He was a serious and thoughtful man; he had devoted long months, even years, to meditation and to study before he had touched his pen, and by repeated revisions he had ranged in his book the greater part of the thoughts and the aspirations of his epoch. In a word, the obscure provincial writer who had never entered the Louvre had composed a quasi-universal work resuming all the intellectual and sentimental life of an epoch. _Astrée_ was a powerful achievement; but one, or at most but two, such books can be produced in a century.[31] D'Urfé's laborious efforts attained a double result. While he extricated and brought into the light the ideal for which he had searched years together, he excited his contemporaries to strive to be natural and real, and the first French novel, _Astrée_, was our first romance with a thesis. The subject is commonplace: lovers whose theme is love, and a lovers' quarrel; in the last volume of the book, love triumphs, the quarrel is forgotten, and the lovers marry. In the beginning of the work, the shepherdess _Astrée_, beside herself with causeless jealousy, overwhelms the shepherd Celadon with reproaches and Celadon, tired of life, throws himself into the Lignon. Standing upon the bank of the river, he apostrophises a ring and the riband left in his hand when his shepherdess escaped his grasp: "Bear witness, O dear cord! that rather than break one knot of my affections I will renounce my life, and then, when I am dead, and my cruel love beholds thee in my hand, thou shalt speak for me, thou shalt say that no one could be loved as I loved her.... Nor lover wronged like me!" Then he appeals to the ring. "And thou, emblem of eternal, faithful love, be glad to be with me in death, the only token left me of her love!" Hardly has he spoken when, turning his face toward _Astrée_, he springs with folded arms into the water. The nymphs save him, and his romantic adventures serve as the wire carrying the action of the romance.