France was the home of the memoire, the personal record in which the individual portrays himself as the centre of his world, and describes events and persons in the light of his own experience.  It was established as a characteristic form of French literature in the sixteenth century,[8] and it reached its full vigour and variety in the century of Sully, Rohan, Richelieu, Tallemant des Reaux, Bassompierre, Madame de Motteville, Mlle de Montpensier, La Rochefoucauld, Villars, Cardinal de Retz, Bussy-Rabutin—­to name but a few.  This was the age of the memoire, always interesting, often admirably written; and, as might be expected, sometimes exhibiting the art of portraiture at perfection.  The English memoir is comparatively late.  The word, in the sense of a narrative of personal recollections, was borrowed at the Restoration.  The thing itself, under other names, is older.  It is a branch of history that flourishes in stirring and difficult times when men believe themselves to have special information about hidden forces that directed the main current of events, and we date it in this country from the period of the Civil Wars.  It is significant that when Shaftesbury in his old age composed his short and fragmentary autobiography he began by saying, ’I in this follow the French fashion, and write my own memoirs.’  Even Swift, when publishing Temple’s Memoirs, said that ’’tis to the French (if I mistake not) we chiefly owe that manner of writing; and Sir William Temple is not only the first, but I think the only Englishman (at least of any consequence) who ever attempted it.’  Few English memoirs were then in print, whereas French memoirs were to be numbered by dozens.  But the French fashion is not to be regarded as an importation into English literature, supplying what had hitherto been lacking.  At most it stimulated what already existed.

The memoire was not the only setting for French portraits at this time.  There were the French romances, and notably the Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus and the Clelie of Madeleine de Scudery.  The full significance of the Grand Cyrus has been recovered for modern readers by Victor Cousin, with great skill and charm, in his Societe francaise au XVIIe siecle, where he has shown it to be, ’properly speaking, a history in portraits’.  The characters were drawn from familiar figures in French society.  ‘Ainsi s’explique’, says Cousin, ’l’immense succes du Cyrus dans le temps ou il parut.  C’etait une galerie des portraits vrais et frappants, mais un peu embellis, ou tout ce qu’il y avait de plus illustre en tout genre—­princes, courtisans, militaires, beaux-esprits, et surtout jolies femmes—­allaient se chercher et se reconnaissaient avec un plaisir inexprimable.’[9] It was easy to attack these romances.  Boileau made fun of them because the classical names borne by the characters were so absurdly at variance with the matter of the stories.[10] But instead of giving, as he said, a French air and spirit to Greece and Rome, Madeleine de Scudery only gave Greek and Roman names to France as she knew it.  The names were a transparent disguise that was not meant to conceal the picture of fashionable society.