r 1500, he committed suicide in 1544, either during a fit
of insanity, or, as has been thought more likely, in order to escape
the danger of the persecution which, in the last years of the reign of
Francis, threatened the unorthodox, and which Margaret, who had
more than once warded it off from them, was then powerless to avert.
Desperiers, to speak truth, was in far more danger of the stake than
most of his friends. The infidelity of Rabelais is a matter of inference
only, and some critics (among whom the present writer ranks himself) see
in his daring ridicule of existing abuses nothing inconsistent with a
perfectly sound, if liberally conditioned, orthodoxy. Desperiers, like
Rabelais, was a Lucianist, but his modernising of Lucian (the remarkable
book called _Cymbalum Mundi_), though pretending to deal with ancient
mythology, has an almost unmistakable reference to revealed religion.
It is not, however, by this work or by this side of his character at all
that Desperiers is brought into connection with the work of Margaret,
who, if learned and liberal, and sometimes tending to the new ideas in
religion, was always devout and always orthodox in fundamentals. Besides
the _Cymbalum Mundi_, he has left a curious book, not published, like
the _Heptameron_ itself, till long after his own death, and entitled
_Nouvelles Recreations et Joyeux Devis_. The tales of which it consists
are for the most part very short, some being rather sketches or outlines
of tales than actually worked-out stories, so that, although there
are no less than a hundred and twenty-nine of them, the whole book is
probably not half the bulk of the _Heptameron_ itself. But they are
extremely well written, and the specially interesting thing about them
is, that in them there appears, and appears for the first time (unless
we take the _Heptameron_ itself as earlier, which is contrary to all
probability), the singular and, at any rate to some persons, very
attractive mixture of sentiment and satire, of learning and a love of
refined society, of joint devotion to heavenly and earthly love, of
voluptuous enjoyment of the present, blended and shadowed with a
sense of the night that cometh, which delights us in the prose of the
_Heptameron_, and in the verse not only of all the Pleiade poets in
France, but of Spenser, Donne, and some of their followers in England.
The scale of the stories, which are sometimes mere anecdotes, is so
small, the room for miscellaneou