The heroic and the elegant were the cult of the Hôtel, and of the society which it represented and reformed. The heroic spirit of the early century, its idealisation of freedom regarded not as licence but as the power of the will to rise superior to passion and circumstances, is expressed most perfectly in Descartes' Traité des Passions and Corneille's great tragedies. It was in the pursuit of elegance that the influence of a now decadent Italy—of Guarini and Marino, as well as the Spanish Guevara—made itself felt, and set the stamp of "préciosité" on conversation and literature. In France, as in England, as in Italy, as in Spain, poetry, lyric and dramatic, was infected by the passion for conceits—not the metaphysical scholastic conceits with which Donne lightened and darkened English poetry, but the Marinistic conceit, super-refined, super-elegant, super-absurd refinements of compliment and flattery. But what was a symptom of decadence in Italian poetry was in French literature—like euphuism at an earlier stage in English—a symptom of a higher concern about style. The preciousness which Moliére finally laughed out of fashion had by that time done its work in helping to refine and elevate the language of conversation and literature. Many of the phrases, it has often been pointed out, which Somaise collected in his Dictionnaire des Précieuses (1660), are simply felicitous and elegant expressions which have become part and parcel of literary French.
Among the poets most enamoured of conceit are
