accesses of seriousness,
almost of sentiment. At these times the spirit of the French
Renaissance, in its more cultivated and refined representatives, comes
out in him very strongly. This spirit may be defined as a kind of
cultivated sensuality, ardently enamoured of the beautiful in the world
of sense, while fully devoted to intellectual truth, and at the same
time always conscious of the nothingness of things, the instant pressure
of death, the treacherousness of mortal delights. The rare sentences in
which Des Periers gives vent to the expression of this mental attitude
are for the most part admirably written, while as a teller of tales,
either comic or romantic, he has few equals and fewer superiors.

[Sidenote: The Heptameron.]

The same spirit which has just been described found even fuller
expression, with greater advantages of scale and setting, in the
_Heptameron_[184] of Marguerite of Navarre. The exact authorship of this
celebrated book is something of a literary puzzle. Marguerite was a
prolific author, if all the works which were published under her name be
unhesitatingly ascribed[185] to her. Besides the poems printed under the
pretty title of _Les Marguerites de la Marguerite_, she produced many
other works, as well as the _Heptameron_ which was not given to the
world until after her death (1558). The House of Valois was by no means
destitute of literary talent. But that which seems most likely to be the
Queen's genuine work hardly corresponds with the remarkable power shown
in the _Heptameron_. On the other hand, Marguerite for years maintained
a literary court, in which all the most celebrated men of the time,
notably Marot and Bonaventure des Periers, held places. If it were
allowable to decide literary questions simply by considerations of
probability, there could be little hesitation in assigning the entire
_Heptameron_ to Des Periers himself, and then its unfinished condition
would be intelligible enough. The general opinion of critics, however,
is that it was probably the result of the joint work of the Queen, of
Des Periers, and of a good many other men, and probably some women, of
letters. The idea and plan of the work are avowedly borrowed from
Boccaccio, but the thing is worked out with so much originality that it
becomes nothing so little as an imitation. A company of ladies and
gentlemen returning from Cauterets are detained by bad weather in an
out-of-the-way corner of the Pyrenees, and be