aux_, of which the _Cent Nouvelles_ are exact prose
counterparts, and perhaps prose versions), and examples of what has been
called "the humour of the stick," which sometimes trenches hard upon
the humour of the gallows and the torture-chamber. These characteristics
have made the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ no great favourites of late,
but their unpopularity is somewhat undeserved. For all their coarseness,
there is much genuine comedy in them, and if the prettiness of romantic
and literary dressing-up is absent from them, so likewise is the
insincerity thereof. They make one of the most considerable prose
books of what may be called middle French literature, and they had much
influence on the books that followed, especially on this of Margaret's.
Indeed, one of the few examples to be found between the two, the _Grand
Paragon de Nouvelles Nouvelles_ of Nicolas de Troyes (1535), obviously
takes them for model. But Nicolas was a dull dog, and neither profited
by his model nor gave any one else opportunity to profit by himself.

Rabelais, the first book of whose _Pantagruel_ anticipated the _Paragon_
by three years, while the _Gargantua_ coincided with it, was a great
authority at the Court of Margaret's brother Francis, dedicated one
of the books (the third) of _Pantagruel_ to her, before her death, in
high-flown language, as _esprit abstrait, ravy et ecstatic_, and must
certainly have been familiar reading of hers, and of all the ladies and
gentlemen, literary and fashionable, of her Court. But there is little
resemblance to be found in his style and hers. The short stories which
Master Francis scatters about his longer work are, indeed, models of
narration, but his whole tone of thought and manner of treatment are
altogether alien from those of the "ravished spirit" whom he praises. His
deliberate coarseness is not more different from her deliberate delicacy
than his intensely practical spirit from her high-flown romanticism
(which makes one think of, and may have suggested, the Court of La
Quinte), and her mixture of devout and amatory quodlibetation from his
cynical criticism and all-dissolving irony. But there was a contemporary
of Rabelais who forms a kind of link between him and Margaret, whose
work in part is very like the _Heptameron_, and who has been thought to
have had more than a hand in it. This was Bonaventure Desperiers, a man
whose history is as obscure as his works are interesting. Born in or
about the yea