the extreme brevity of some has perhaps sometimes prejudiced readers
against them, have always seemed to the present writer to form the most
remarkable book, as literature, of all the department at the time except
_Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_ and the _Heptameron_, and to supply a
strong presumption that their author had more than a minor hand in the
_Heptameron_ itself. It must, of course, be admitted that the fashion in
which they are delivered may not only offend in one direction, but may
possibly mislead in another. One may read too much into the brevity, and
so fall into the error of that other Englishman who was beguiled by the
mysterious signs of Desperiers' greatest contemporary's most original
creation. But a very large and long experience of literary weighing and
measuring ought to be some safeguard against the mistake of Thaumast.

[Sidenote: _Contes et Joyeux Devis._]

One remarkable difference which may seem, at first sight, to be against
the theory of Desperiers having had a large share in the _Heptameron_ is
the contrasted and, as it may seem again at first sight, antagonistic
tone of the two. There are purely comic and even farcical passages in
Marguerite's book, but the general colour, as has been said, is
religious-sentimental or courtly-amatory, with by no means infrequent
excursions into the purely tragical. The _Contes et Joyeux Devis_, on
the other hand, in the main continue the wholly jocular tone of the old
_fabliaux_. But Desperiers must have been, not only _not_ the great man
of letters which the somewhat exaggerated zeal of his editor, M. Louis
Lacour, ranked him as being, but a very weak and feeble writer, if he
could not in this way write comedy in one book and tragedy in another.
In fact Rabelais gives us (as the greatest writers so often do) what is
in more senses than one a master-key to the contrast. Desperiers has in
the _Contes_ constant ironic qualifications and asides which may even
have been directly imitated from his elder and greater contemporary;
Marguerite has others which pair off in the same way with the most
serious Rabelaisian "intervals," to which attention has been drawn in
the last chapter. One point, however, does seem, at least to me, to
emerge from the critical consideration of these two books with the other
works of the Queen on the one hand and the other works of
Desperiers[116] on the other. It is that the latter had a much crisper
and stronger style than Marguerite