ample space for sacred exercises, they resolved that every day, after
dinner and an interval, they should assemble in a meadow on the bank of
the Gave at midday and tell stories. The device is carried out with
such success that the monks steal behind the hedges to hear them, and an
occasional postponement of vespers takes place. Simontault begins, and
the system of tale-telling goes round on the usual plan of each speaker
naming him or her who shall follow. It should be observed that no
general subject is, as in the _Decameron_, prescribed to the speakers
of each day, though, as a matter of course, one subject often suggests
another of not dissimilar kind. Nor is there the Decameronic arrangement
of the "king." Between the stories, and also between the days, there is
often a good deal of conversation, in which the divers characters, as
given above, are carried out with a minuteness very different from the
chief Italian original.

From what has been said already, it will be readily perceived that the
novels, or rather their subjects, are not very easy to class in any
rationalised order. The great majority, if they do not answer exactly to
the old title of _Les Histoires des Amants Fortunés_, are devoted to
the eternal subject of the tricks played by wives to the disadvantage
of husbands, by husbands to the disadvantage of wives, and sometimes by
lovers to the disadvantage of both. "Subtilité" is a frequent word in
the titles, and it corresponds to a real thing. Another large division,
trenching somewhat upon the first, is composed of stories to the
discredit of the monks (something, though less, is said against the
secular clergy), and especially of the Cordeliers or Franciscans, an
Order who, for their coarse immorality and their brutal antipathy to
learning, were the special black (or rather grey) beasts of the literary
reformers of the time. In a considerable number there are references
to actual personages of the time--references which stand on a very