----Bien poli, bien frisé Pourvu qu' il sache un mot des livres d'_Astrée_.
Success had crossed the frontiers of France. People in foreign lands found material for their instruction in _Astrée_. The work was a novel with a key; a story with a meaning. "Celadon" was the author; "Astrée" was his wife (the beautiful Diane de Chateaumorand, with whom he had not been happy). The Court of _le grand Enric_ was the Court of Henry IV. "Galatée" was the Queen (Marguerite) and so on. "All the stories in _Astrée_ were founded on truth," wrote Patru, who had gathered his information from the lips of d'Urfé. But "the author has romanced everything--if I dare use the word." The charm found in the scandalous reality of the scenes and in the truth of the characters crowned the work's success; the book was translated in most languages, and devoured with the same avidity by all countries. In Germany there was an _Académie des Vrais Amants_ copied from the "Academy" of Lignon. In Poland, in the last half of the century, John Sobieski, who was not by any means one of the be-musked knights of the carpet, played at Astrée and Celadon, with Marie d'Arquien. "To grass with the matrimonial love which turns to friendship at the end of three months! ... Celadon am I, now as in the past; the ardent lover of those first glad days!"[30] he wrote after marriage.
When the people's infatuation had passed, the book still remained the standard of all delicate minds, and it continued to wield its literary influence.
Through two centuries [said Montégut] _Astrée_ lost nothing of its renown. The most diverse and the most opposite minds alike loved the book; Pellisson and Huet the Bishop of Avranches were enthusiastic admirers of its qualities. La Fontaine and Mme. de Sévigné delighted in it. Racine, in his own silent and discreet way, read it with fond pleasure and profit, but did not say so.
Marivaux had read it and drawn even more benefit from it than Racine.... Last of all, Jean Jacques Rousseau admired it so much that he avowed that he had re-read it once a year the greater part of his life. Now as Jean Jacques exerted a dominant influence upon the destinies of our modern imaginative literature, it follows that the success of _Astrée_ has been indirectly prolonged even to our own day. Madame George Sand, for example, derived some little benefit from d'Urfé, though she was not too well aware of it.