Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/192

Rh influential bourgeoisie, these signs of prosperity are quite intrinsic, quite natural and unconsidered. Immoral, lax, irreligious as it is, this world of the Heptameron compares favourably enough with the world of the Italian novelists, full of wars, plague, cruelty, and unnatural vices; although infinitely less pure, it has superior points to the world of Cervantes's Novelas, with its violent contrasts of squalid beggars and merchants from the Indies, fabulously rich, with its gold-fever in the air, its epidemic of vagabondage, its national blight of jealousy and slavery and persecution. It is still the world of Gargantua; although at the solemn Court of the Dauphin a more decorous world is already taking shape—the orthodox world of Tartuffe.

This actuality is the true salt of the Heptameron. It is a document which instructs one in the life of France at that time; in the characters also of the rulers of France. Here one meets the King as he was in life: light-minded, chivalric in battle, picturesquely magnanimous to the traitor who would have murdered him, a traitor himself to the advocate who would have served him. Free-liver and free-lover as he was, free-thinker almost (worst crime of all), one sees in the Heptameron the dashing, effective qualities which secured to Francis the devotion of his subjects and the admiration of the world. Impetuous, impulsive, heroic at a pinch, the very qualities which made him an unsteady ruler made him a prince to adore. His reckless battles, his sudden determinations (one day for Luther, the next for the Inquisition; one day the friend of the Pope, the next of Soliman), his worship of beauty and pleasure, his public magnificence, his affable splendour, even his misfortunes, combined to give a most picturesque light and shade to his character.