rst quarter of the century. The former indeed[166] owes his
place here rather to a theory than to certain information; for if M.
d'Hericault's notion that Jehan du Pontalais is the author of a work
entitled _Contreditz du Songecreux_ be without foundation, Jehan falls
back into the number of half mythical Bohemians, bilkers of tavern bills
and successful out-witters of the officers of justice, who possess a
shadowy personality in the literary history of France. _Les Contreditz
du Songecreux_ ranks among the most remarkable examples of the liberty
which was accorded to the press under the reign of Louis XII., a king
who inherited some affection for literature from his father, Charles
d'Orleans, and a keen perception of the importance of literary
co-operation in political work from his ancestor, Philippe le Bel, and
his cousin Louis XI. In precision and strikingness of expression Jehan
recalls Villon; in the boldness of his satire on the great and the
bitterness of his attacks on the character of women he recalls Antoine
de la Salle and Coquillart. A trait illustrating the former power may be
found in the line descriptive of the hen-pecked man's condition--

Tous ses cinq sens lui fault retraire.

while his attacks on the nobility are almost up to the level of Burns--

Noblesse enrichie Richesse ennoblie Tiennent leurs estatz,
Qui n'a noble vie Je vous certifie Noble n'est pas.

[Sidenote: Roger de Collerye.]

[Sidenote: Minor Predecessors of Marot.]

Roger de Collerye[167] was a Burgundian, living at the famous and vinous
town of Auxerre, and he has celebrated his loves, his distress, his
amiable tendency to conviviality, in many rondeaux and other poems,
sometimes attaining a very high level of excellence. 'Je suis
Bon-temps, vous le voyez' is the second line of one of his irregular
ballades, and the nickname expresses his general attitude well enough.
Mediaeval legacies of allegory, however, supply him with more unpleasant
personages, Faute d'Argent and Plate-Bourse, for his song, and his
mistress, Gilleberte de Beaurepaire, appears to have been anything but
continuously kind. Collerye has less perhaps of the _rhetoriqueur_
flavour than any poet of this time before Marot, and his verse is very
frequently remarkable for directness and grace of diction. But like most
verse of the kind it frequently drops into a conventionality less
wearisome but not much less definite than that of the mere allegorisers.