Christian." And she left him that he might do this.

Brantôme (though he had an admiration for Margaret, whose lady of
honour his grandmother had been, and who, according to the Bourdeilles
tradition, composed her novels in travelling) thought this a pretty
fashion of converse. "Voilà," he says, "l'opinion de cette bonne
princesse; laquelle la tenait plus par gentillesse et par forme de devis
que par créance à mon avis." Sainte-Beuve, on the contrary, and with
better reason, sees in it faith, graciousness, feminine delicacy, and
piety at once. No doubt; but there is something more than this, and that
something more is what we are in search of, and what we shall find, now
in one way, now in another, throughout the book: something whereof the
sentiment of Donne's famous thoughts on the old lover's ghost, on the
blanched bone with its circlet of golden tresses, is the best known
instance in English. The madcap Nomerfide indeed lays it down, that
"the meditation of death cools the heart not a little." But her more
experienced companions know better. The worse side of this Renaissance
peculiarity is told in the last tale, a rather ghastly story of monkish
corruption; its lighter side appears in the story, already referred
to, of the "Grand Prince" and his pious devotions on the way to not
particularly pious occupation. But touches of the more poetical and
romantic effects of it are all over the book. It is to be found in the
story of the gentleman who forsook the world because of his beloved's
cruelty, whereat she repenting did likewise ("he had much better have
thrown away his cowl and married her," quoth the practical Nomerfide);
in that of the wife who, to obtain freedom of living with her paramour,
actually allowed herself to be buried; in that (very characteristic of
the time, especially for the touch of farce in it) of the unlucky
person to whom phlebotomy and love together were fatal; and in not a
few others, while it emerges in casual phrases of the intermediate