there
is nothing like the extraordinary mixture of unity and variety--a pure
gift of genius--which succeeds in making the _Decameron_ a real book as
well as a bundle of narratives. Nor is there anything like the literary
brilliancy of the actual style and handling.

Nevertheless, _Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ is a book of great interest
and value, despite serious defects due to its time generally and to its
place in the history of fiction in particular. Its obscenity, on which
even Sir Walter Scott, the least censorious or prudish-prurient of men,
and with Southey, the great witness against false squeamishness, has
been severe,[81] is unfortunately undeniable. But it is to be doubted
whether Sir Walter knew much of the _fabliaux_; if he had he would have
seen first, that this sort of thing had become an almost indispensable
fashion in the short story, and secondly, that there is here
considerable improvement on the _fabliaux_ themselves, there being much
less mere schoolboy crudity of dirty detail and phrase, though the
situations may remain the same. It suffers occasionally from the heavy
and rhetorical style which beset all European literature (except
Italian, which itself did not wholly escape) in the fifteenth century.
But still one can see in it that improvement of narrative method and
diction which has been referred to: and occasionally, amid the crowd of
tricky wives, tricked husbands, too obliging and too hardly treated
chambermaids, ribald priests and monks, and the like, one comes across
quite different things and persons, which are, as the phrase goes,
almost startlingly modern, with a mixture of the _un_modern heightening
the appeal. One of the most striking of these--not very likely to be
detected or suspected by a careless reader under its sub-title of "La
Demoiselle Cavaliere," and by no means fully summarised in the quaint
short argument which is in all cases subjoined--may be briefly analysed.

[Sidenote: Analysis of "La Demoiselle Cavaliere".]

In one of the great baronial households of Brabant there lived, after
the usual condition of gentle servitude, a youth named Gerard, who fell
in love, after quite honourable and seemly fashion, with Katherine, the
daughter of the house--a fact which, naturally, they thought known only
to themselves, when, as naturally, everybody in the Court had become
aware of it. "For the better prevention of scandal," an immediate
marriage being apparently out of the quest