Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/159

144 less miserable mind, yet keen enough to see that his cure was as yet but half begun. He must still be amused, roused, entertained; the on-coming of melancholy must incessantly be watched. And then it entered into Margaret's eager brain to compose another book like those novels of Boccaccio which had delighted him so much, to write a Decameron herself, in which the adventures should belong to people at the Court of the King, or, at the least, of his time and country. On her frequent journeys from place to place, she wrote these novels as the horses slowly jogged along with her great curtained litter, "my grandmother holding the ink-horn for her," says Brantôme in his Memoir. And, as she first began to write these stories in that city of Alençon, where she had spent unwillingly so much of her youth, old memories thronged her mind; and many of the adventures of the Heptameron take place at Alençon, always "in the time of the last Duke Charles."

It has been the fashion hitherto to date the Heptameron too early. Miss Freer, Margaret's principal biographer in England, misled, perhaps, by the constant occurrence of the words Alençon and Argentan, and yet more by an eager desire to do the best for her favourite, has placed the Heptameron in Margaret's thoughtless youth. But, after all, all the Heptameron does not need our excuses for its thoughtlessness. It is gross, but not so gross as the time; it is worldly and amorous, but less so than the Court. On the whole, the remarkable thing about it is the ideal of religion and virtue, which it still lifts, however feebly, in opposition to the gay society for which it was written.

We can see that Margaret has no natural distaste