In attempting to revitalize the materials and methods of the romances Mrs. Haywood was but following the lead of the French _romancières_, who had successfully invaded the field of prose fiction when the passing of the précieuse fashion and Boileau's influential ridicule[1] had discredited the romance in the eyes of writers with classical predilections. Mme de La Fayette far outshines her rivals, but a host of obscure women, headed by Hortense Desjardins, better known as Mme de Villedieu, hastened to supply the popular demand for romantic stories. In drawing their subjects from the histories of more modern courts than those of Rome, Greece, or Egypt they endeavored to make their "historical" romances of passion more lifelike than the heroic romances, and while they avoided the extravagances, they also shunned the voluminousness of the _romans à longue haleine_. So the stories related in "La Belle Assemblée" by Mme de Gomez, translated by Mrs. Haywood in 1725 and often reprinted, are nearer the model of Boccaccio's novelle than of the Scudéry romance, both in their directness and in being set in a framework, but the inclusion, in the framework, of long conversations on love, morals, politics, or wit, with copious examples from ancient and modern history, of elegant verses on despair and similar topics, and of such miscellaneous matter as the "General Instructions of a Mother to a Daughter for her Conduct in Life," showed that the influence of the salon was not yet exhausted. In the continuation called "L'Entretien des Beaux Esprits" (translated in 1734), however, the elaborate framework was so far reduced that fourteen short tales were crowded into two volumes as compared with eighteen in the four volumes of the previous work. Writers of fiction were evidently finding brief, unadorned narrative most acceptable to the popular taste.