Most of the rest, putting aside the doubtful _Henriette de Molière_ already referred to, are collections of love-stories, which their titles, rather than their contents, would seem to have represented to the ordinary commentator as loose. There is really very little impropriety, except of the mildest kind, in any of them,[218] and they chiefly consist of the kind of quasi-historic anecdote (only better told) which is not uncommon in English, as, for instance, in Croxall's _Novelist_. They are rather well written, but for the most part consist of very "public" material, scarcely made "private" by any striking merit, and distinguished by curious liberties with history, if not with morals.
For instance, in one of her _Amours Galantes_ the Elfrida-Ethelwold-Edgar story is told, not only with "_Edward I._ of England" for the deceived and revengeful king, but with a further and more startling intrusion of Eleanor of Guyenne! That of Inez de Castro is treated in a still more audacious manner. Also (with what previous example I know not, but Hortense was exceedingly apt to have previous examples) the names of the heretic to whom Dante was not merciful and of his beloved Margaret--names to which Charles Kingsley made the atonement of two of the most charming of his neglected poems--appear as "Dulcin" and "Marguerite," King and Queen of Lombardy, but guilty of more offensive lubricity than the sternest inquisitor ever charged on the historical Dolcino and his sect. For this King and Queen set up, in cold blood, two courts of divorce, in one of which each is judge, with the direct purpose of providing themselves with a supply of temporary wives and husbands. Some have maintained that no less a thing than the _Princesse de Clèves_ itself was suggested by something of Mme. de Villedieu's; but this seems to me merely the usual plagiarism-hunter's blunder of forgetting that the treatment, not the subject, is the _crux_ of originality. Of her longer books, _Alcidamie_, the first, has been spoken of. The _Amours des Grandes Hommes_ and _Cléonice ou le Roman Galant_ belong to the "keyed" Heroics; while the _Journal Amoureux_, which runs to nearly five hundred pages, has Diane de Poitiers for its chief heroine. Lastly, _Carmente_ (or, as it was reprinted, _Carmante_) is a sort of mixed pastoral, with Theocritus himself introduced, after a fashion noted more than once before.