Reaction against the heroical romances did not wait, however, till the eighteenth century to assert itself in England; it set in early and very amusingly: but it remained powerless. As the evil had chiefly come from France, so did the remedy; but the remedy in France proved sufficient for a cure. In that country at all times the tale had flourished, and at all times in the tale, to the detriment of chivalry and heroism, writers had prided themselves on seeking mere truth. Thus, in the charming preface of the Reine de Navarre's "Heptameron," Dame Parlamente establishes the theory of these narratives, and relates how, at the court, it had been decided to write a series of them, but to exclude from the number of their authors "those who should have studied and be men of letters; for Monseigneur the Dauphin did not wish their artifice to be introduced into them, and was also afraid lest the beauty of rhetoric should in some place injure the truth of the tale." In the seventeenth century, the tradition of the old story-tellers is carried on in France in more developed writings, in actual novels, such as the "Baron de Foeneste" of D'Aubigne, 1617; the "Francion" of Charles Sorel, 1622(?); the "Berger extravagant" of the same, 1628; the "Roman Comique" of Scarron, 1651; the "Roman bourgeois" of Furetiere, 1666, and many others. Scarron, who had travestied Virgil, was not the man to spare La Calprenede, and he does not lose his opportunity. "I cannot exactly tell you," he writes of one of his characters, "whether he had sup'd that night, or went to bed empty, as some Romance-mongers use to do, who regulate all their heroes' actions, making them rise early, and tell on their story till dinner time, then dine lightly, and after their meal proceed in the discourse: or else retire to some shady grove to talk by themselves, unless they have something to discover to the rocks and trees." Furetiere, writing in the same spirit, declares that he wishes to concern himself with "persons who are neither heroes nor heroines, who will neither raise armies nor overturn kingdoms; but who will be good people of middling rank who quietly go on their usual way, of whom some are handsome and others plain, some wise and others foolish; and the latter have the appearance indeed of forming the greatest number."[355]