Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/179

164 human wisdom, which have saved greater writers for the pleasures of an altered age. Its virtues, as well as its faults, are merely of the time, and not particular, and it is well that the Heptameron should be merely the delight of students and the treasure of antiquarians.

There is, to begin with, but one truly pathetic situation in the book. It is in the second novel, where the Queen's muleteer, returning from Amboise, sees, stretched across the doorway of his house, a bier, with the white-covered corpse of the wife whom he left well and safe two days ago, and who has been foully outraged, since then, and murdered. Singularly little is made of this poignant moment. What interested Margaret and her courtly readers is no longer interesting to the taste of to-day, at once much simpler and far more subtle. Yet, not to be unfair to a very famous book, I have translated two extremely characteristic stories; and, as the conversations in between the novels are by far the liveliest and most vigorous part of the Heptameron, I have chosen two that follow each other.

LXIV.

A gentleman, disdained in marriage, enters a monastery, wherefore his lady does as much for him.

the town of Valencia there lived a gentleman who, during five or six years, had loved a lady so perfectly that neither of them was hurt in honour nor in conscience thereby; for his intention was to make her his wife—and reasonably enough, as he was handsome, rich, and of a noble house, and he had not placed himself at her service without first making known