D'Urfé's artificial taste was more regrettable because his successors, they who continued his work, accentuated his faults, as, generally speaking, the disciples of all innovators accentuate the faults of their masters. Few among the _Précieuses_ knew how to sift the chaff from the wheat when the time came to take or to leave the varied gifts of their inheritance. The true _Précieuses_ precipitated the revolution of which d'Urfé had been the prophet; they alone consummated the moral transformation which, according to his light, he had prepared. During the changing years of half a century the _Précieuses_ "kept the school" of manners and fine language, laying on the ferule whenever they found pupils as recalcitrant as the damsel whose story I am attempting to relate. They did not try--far from it!--to train the public taste, to correct it, or to guide it aright; they urged France into the tortuous by-paths of false ethics and superficial art; but, taken all in all, their influence was good. La Grande Mademoiselle, the abrupt cavalier-maiden, proved its virtue. To the Hôtel de Rambouillet she owed it that she did not end as she began--a dragoon in petticoats, and she recognised the fact, and was grateful for the benefits that she had received. [Illustration: THE ABBEY OF ST. GERMAIN DES-PRES IN THE 16TH CENTURY FROM AN OLD PRINT] It has been asked: Was the Society of the _Précieuses_ a result of the influence of _Astrée_? With the exception noted, it is probable that d'Urfé made no attempt to form new intellectual or sentimental currents; he confined himself to the observation of the thoughts and the feelings at work in the depths of human souls within his own view; he was a close student of character, his book was a study, and his influence reformed opinions and manners; but as the Society of the _Précieuses_ was in process of incubation before _Astrée_ appeared, it must have taken shape had d'Urfé never written his book. The world of fashion had long deemed it witty to ridicule the _Précieuses_; from too much handling, jests upon that subject had lost their effervescence, and in time it was considered more original to find virtue in the delicate mannerisms of the refined ladies than to adhere to the old fashion of mocking them. Their exaggerations were numerous and pronounced, but their civility was in pleasant contrast with the abrupt indelicacies of the Béarnais; and even now, looking back to them across the separating centuries, we can find few causes for reproach. They subjected their literature to the yoke of the Spanish and Italian schools, but they could hardly have done less at a time when the Court was Italian, and when Spanish influences were entering by all the frontiers. Aside from their submission to foreign influences, the _Précieuses_ were sturdy champions of the right, and unless we are prepared to falsify more than thirty years of our history of morals, and of literature, we must admit that they rendered us services which