The best master in a bad class of lumbering and tiresome fiction was the author of the book which is the text of this chapter.  La Calprenede, whose full name was nothing less than Gautier de Costes de la Calprenede, was a Gascon gentleman of the Guards, of whose personal history the most notorious fact is that he had the temerity to marry a woman who had already buried five husbands.  Some historians relate that she proceeded to poison number six, but this does not appear to be certain, while it does appear that Calprenede lived in the married state for fifteen years, a longer respite than the antecedents of madame gave him any right to anticipate.  He made a great fame with his two huge Roman novels, Cassandra and Cleopatra, and then, some years later, he produced a third, Pharamond which was taken out of early French history.  The translator, in the version before us, says of this book that it “is not a romance, but a history adorned with some excellent flourishes of language and loves, in which you may delightfully trace the author’s learned pen through all those historians who wrote of the times he treats of.”  In other words, while Gombreville—­with his King of the Canaries, and his Vanishing Islands, and his necromancers, and his dragons—­canters through pure fairyland, and while Mlle. de Scudery elaborately builds up a romantic picture of her own times (in Clelie, for instance, where the three hundred and seventy several characters introduced are said to be all acquaintances of the author), Calprenede attempted to produce something like a proper historical novel, introducing invention, but embroidering it upon some sort of genuine framework of fact.

To describe the plot of Pharamond, or of any other heroic novel, would be a desperate task.  The great number of personages introduced in pairs, the intrigues of each couple forming a separate thread wound into the complex web of the plot, is alone enough to make any following of the story a great difficulty.  On the fly-leaf of a copy of Cleopatra which lies before me, some dear lady of the seventeenth century has very conscientiously written out “a list of the Pairs of Lovers,” and there are thirteen pairs. Pharamond begins almost in the same manner as a novel by the late Mr. G.P.R.  James might.  When the book opens we discover the amorous Marcomine and the valiant Genebaud sallying forth along the bank of a river on two beautiful horses of the best jennet-race.  Throughout the book all the men are valiant, all the ladies are passionate and chaste.  The heroes enter the lists covered with rubies, loosely embroidered over surcoats of gold and silk tissue; their heads “shine with gold, enamel and precious stones, with the hinder part covered with an hundred plumes of different colours.”  They are mounted upon horses “whose whiteness might outvie the purest snow upon the frozen Alps.”  They pierce into woodland dells, where they by chance