Scudéry, MADELEINE DE, an interminable French novelist, was born at Havre in 1607, her father of Provençal origin. Left an orphan at six, she received a careful education from an uncle, and, still young, came up to Paris, where she soon became a notable figure in the brilliant society of the Hôtel Rambouillet. She was plain, if not ugly, thin, dark, and long-faced, full of vanity and prudishness, a 17th-century Madame de Genlis plus virtue, as Sainte-Beuve styles her. But blue-stockings as she was she had a woman's heart, and loved after the fashion of her heroines, with an exalted and chaste affection, the ill-favoured but learned Pellisson, in whom she had inspired a passion. Her half-crazy brother Georges (1601-67) left the service in 1630 to devote himself to literature, and, being gifted with fatal facility, posed as a rival of Corneille, and wrote many pieces long since securely forgotten. To Christina of Sweden he dedicated one poem, Alaric, of 11,000 verses. A kind of swashbuckler among men of letters, he wrote prefaces that read like cartels of defiance to any who had the temerity to doubt his genius. His sister used to help him in his writing, and Tallemant ascribes to her the entire responsibility of Ibrahim ou l'illustre Bassa, a romance in four large volumes, which he signed and published in 1641. Similarly Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (10 vols. 1649-53) and Clélie (10 vols. 1654-60) both bore the name of Georges de Scudéry, although he contributed only the framework of the two, that is to say, the part which is the worst in both. Mdlle. de Scudéry lacked real invention, and took her figures from her acquaintance and from the society of the day, travestying them as Romans, Greeks, Persians, or Carthaginians—thus, she has half-painted herself as Sapho in vol. x. of the Grand Cyrus. Victor Cousin discovered a key (1657) which named all the figures definitely, as Artamène for Condé, Mandane for Mme. de Longue- ville, Parthénie for Mme. de Sablé, &c. But she had real skill in polished conversation, and, in later days when her stories had gone out of fashion, she reproduced ten volumes (1680-92) of these taken from her novels. Madame de Sévigné writes her daughter, 'Mdlle. de Scudéry has just sent me two little volumes of conversations; it is impossible that they should not be good, now that they are not drowned in a great romance.' The Grand Cyrus is one of the masterpieces amongst the romans de longue haleine, as their order has been felicitously named, but a modern reader seldom strays far into its 15,000 pages. The incidents follow in the most helpless monotony and lack of verisimilitude, but the naïveté of the reflections completely disarms the critic. The virtuous authoress prided herself on her ability to fathom all the depths of love without having sounded them in her own experience, and the famous 'Carte de Tendre' in Clélie, histoire Romaine, is a fantastic but pretentious attempt to construct an analysis and guide to the whole kingdom of Love. It was not an invention of Mdlle. de Scudéry, but due to the collaboration of the superfine ladies and gentlemen who frequented her Satndays. She lived till the age of ninety-four, respected and honoured to the last, dying at Paris, 2d June 1701. The etherealised sentiment of her novels had already wearied the world, but the death-blow waited to be dealt by the hand of Boileau. Cousin calls her, but not happily, 'a sort of French sister of Addison.' As a woman it should not be forgotten to her honour that her brave devotion to friends like Mme. Longueville and Fouquet survived their fall; and none could ever be an object of indifference to the world of whom Madame de Sévigné could write, 'In a hundred thousand words I could tell you but one truth, which reduces itself to assuring you, Made-moiselle, that I shall love you and adore you all my life; it is only this word that can express the idea I have of your extraordinary merit. I am happy to have some part in the friendship and esteem of such a person. As constancy is a perfection, I say to myself that you will not change for me; and I dare to pride myself that I shall never be sufficiently abandoned of God not to be always yours.'
See Victor Cousin, La Société Française au Dix-septième Siècle (1858); Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, vol. iv.; André Le Breton, Le Roman au Dix-septième Siècle (1890); and chapter iii. of Amelia Gere Mason's work, The Women of the French Salons (1891).