Molière’s comedy, _Le Cocu Imaginaire_—which had created such unrestrainable delight in the ex-queen of Sweden—had been preceded a year earlier by the famous _Précieuses Ridicules_. To call this play the dramatist’s masterpiece, is to do rank injustice to his work of greater length and importance, notably, if one dare to choose, to _Le Tartufe_. The _Précieuses_, however, took Paris by storm, and was accounted a gem. Still a delightful little bit of humour, and not lacking now in its way of a home-thrust, it carried a double-edged power in the days of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, when the affectations of speech and conversation had run to such absurd extravagance, that Molière’s satire was little or no exaggeration. Mademoiselle de Scudéri’s “_Inutile! retranchez le superflu de cet ardente_,” is distinctly precious. Of the queens of these intellectual _réunions_, Mademoiselle de Scudéri was the reigning novelist. Her long life, exceeding Ninon’s in years, was devoted to the production of romances and the lighter sort of literature, which ran to a lengthy record. _Le Grand Cyrus_ stands best remembered, but is scarcely more than a memory. A long day’s journey would be needed to find the most ardent of fiction-readers who would now care to follow through the windings of that romance which in its day created such enthusiasm, and made a lioness of the amiable if some way from beautiful Madeleine de Scudéri. _Artamène; ou, le Grand Cyrus_, after all, was, to be sure, scarcely fiction. It was composed of little more than thinly-veiled facts, presenting under classic names the living men and women of society; heroes and heroines of antiquity stood sponsors to the fine, broad-skirted, perruqued gentlemen and fashionable dames of Versailles and the Louvre and the Palais Royal. Artaban, Agathyse, Zenocrates—these were, in their modish habit as they lived, severally the Duc de St Bignon, M. de Rainez, M. Ysern, and others—while Mademoiselle de Scudéri herself was Sappho. It was in her salon that was drawn up the famous _Carte du Tendre_—gazetteer of articles necessary to the pursuit of love. Mademoiselle de Scudéri wrote with grace and much sense; but her romances were insufferably prolix. Ninon found them wearisome to a degree, even though the _Grand Cyrus_ is a record of the great Prince de Condé. George de Scudéri, Madeleine’s brother, was also a very fertile novelist of his day, scarcely to be rivalled in speed of production by Dumas himself. Nor does there appear that the ghosts who worked for this great, more modern enchanter of the realm of historical romance, rendered any services to the seventeenth-century novelist. The salons of Madame de Rambouillet and of Madame de Sablé were the rendezvous of the most aristocratic of these versifiers and epigram-makers, who really occasionally uttered something witty or poetical; though for the most part the wit and poetry did not rise above such greatness as that