Mme. de La Fayette lost her health a year before her epoch-making novel, “La Princess de Cléves,” was published. She lived fifteen years afterwards, “étant de ceux,” as Sainte-Beuve says, “qui traînent leur miserable vie jusqu’à la dernière goutte d’huile.” “La Princesse de Cléves” is not only intrinsically a work of real merit, which is still read with pleasure, but is important because it is the first novel of sentiment, the first novel, in the sense we moderns use the word, that was ever written. Le Sage was a handsome, engaging youth, but it was not until he was thirty-nine years old that he made his first success with the “Diable Boiteux.” Already his deafness was rapidly increasing; and he was sixty-seven years old and had long been completely deaf when the last volume of the masterpiece, “Gil Blas,” appeared. Vauvenargues was a soldier until he had both of his legs frozen during a winter campaign. This injury, from which he never recovered, forced him to leave the army. An attack of small-pox completed the ruin of his health, and thenceforth he led a secluded life devoted to literary pursuits. It is mainly as a novelist that Vauvenargues occupies a place in French literature, although his other works were held in high esteem by his contemporaries. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt are names famous in French literary history. “Learning something from Flaubert, and teaching almost everything to Zola, they invented a new kind of novel, and their works are the result of a new vision of the world.... A novel of the Goncourts is made up of an infinite number of details, set side by side, every detail equally prominent.... French critics have complained that the language of the Goncourts is no longer the French of the past, and this is true. It is their distinction, the finest of their inventions, that in order to render new sensations, a new vision of things, they invented a new language.” (Mr. Arthur Symons.) Their journal is a gold mine from which present-day writers still carry away unacknowledged nuggets. M. Paul Bourget said of them: “Life reduced itself to a series of epileptic attacks, preceded and followed by a blank.” Dostoievsky is considered by many critics the greatest of the great Russian novelists. His health was completely shattered by his spending four years in a Siberian prison as a political offender. This terrible experience, however, served to create “Recollections of a Dead House” and “Buried Alive in Siberia.” Anton Chekhov, the Russian novelist and short story writer, was only a little over twenty when he began to suffer from attacks of blood spitting. Although he believed that these came from his throat they were undoubtedly due to consumption. He was also a martyr to digestive trouble and headaches.