Malherbe’s immediate influence, however, was very limited.  Upon the generation of writers that followed him, his doctrines of sobriety and simplicity made no impression whatever.  Their tastes lay in an entirely different direction.  For now, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, there set in, with an extreme and sudden violence, a fashion for every kind of literary contortion, affectation and trick.  The value of a poet was measured by his capacity for turning a somersault in verse—­for constructing ingenious word-puzzles with which to express exaggerated sentiments; and no prose-writer was worth looking at who could not drag a complicated, ramifying simile through half a dozen pages at least.  These artificialities lacked the saving grace of those of the Renaissance writers—­their abounding vigour and their inventive skill.  They were cold-blooded artificialities, evolved elaborately, simply for their own sake.  The new school, with its twisted conceits and its super-subtle elegances, came to be known as the ‘Precious’ school, and it is under that name that the satire of subsequent writers has handed it down to the laughter of after-generations.  Yet a perspicacious eye might have seen even in these absurd and tasteless productions the signs of a progressive movement—­the possibility, at least, of a true advance.  For the contortions of the ‘Precious’ writers were less the result of their inability to write well than of their desperate efforts to do so.  They were trying, as hard as they could, to wriggle themselves into a beautiful pose; and, naturally enough, they were unsuccessful.  They were, in short, too self-conscious; but it was in this very self-consciousness that the real hope for the future lay.  The teaching of Malherbe, if it did not influence the actual form of their work, at least impelled them towards a deliberate effort to produce some form, and to be content no longer with the vague and the haphazard.  In two directions particularly this new self-consciousness showed itself.  It showed itself in the formation of literary salons—­of which the chief was the famous blue drawing-room of the Hotel de Rambouillet—­where every conceivable question of taste and art, grammar and vocabulary, was discussed with passionate intensity; and it showed itself even more strongly in the establishment, under the influence of Richelieu, of an official body of literary experts—­the French Academy.

How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.  It was formed for the purpose of giving fixity and correctness to the language, of preserving a high standard of literary taste, and of creating an authoritative centre from which the ablest men of letters of the day should radiate their influence over the country.  To a great extent these ends have been attained; but they have been accompanied by corresponding drawbacks.  Such an institution must necessarily be a conservative