GONEBERVILLE, gON'bar'velf, MARIN LE ROY, Seigneur de (1600-74). A French novelist of considerable imaginative originality, one of the first to make the novel a vehicle of exotic and geographic description and of historic informa tion. He was born in Paris and was a wealthy nobleman, a cherished member of the Precieux blue-stocking circle, to whose vocabulary he con tributed sonic gems, as may be seen from So maise's Dictionnaire des Precieuses. While still a youth he wrote Carithee (1621) , whose heroine furnished the type for Sorel's burlesque Dulcinea in the Berger extravagant. Eleven years later Gomberville published the first draught of Polex andre (1632), which he extended in 1634 by the injection of a story of Mexican adventure, and since this piqued curiosity, he again greatly ex tended the story in 1637. Meantime Gomber ville had aided in founding the Academy. A few years later he fell under the influence of Port Royal, and, in penitential regret for having amused a worldly generation, he published Young Alcidiane (1651). He was a facile polygraph,
but Polexandre, which in its final shape contains 4409 closely printed pages, is his only signifi cant work. It rejuvenated the interest in the romance of chivalry by transporting it to the New World in a generation whose imagination was intoxicated by strange voyages and un dreamed-of conquests. The story is almost wan tonly inartistic, but Gomberville is the first im portant pedagogue of fiction, bent on remolding the 'perfect lives' of the old romances into a model for the gentlemen of the seventeenth cen tury. He died in Paris, June 14, 1674. Consult Korting, Geschichte des franzosischen Romans im XVII. Jahrhundert, vol. i., ch. 6 (2d ed., Oppeln, 1891).