guile the time by telling
stories. The interludes, however, in which the tale-tellers are brought
on the stage in person, are more circumstantial than those of the
Decameron, and the individual characters are much more fully worked out.
Indeed, the mere setting of the book, independently of its seventy-two
stories (for the eighth day is begun), makes a very interesting tale,
exhibiting not merely those characteristics of the time and its society
which have been noticed in connection with the _Contes et Joyeux Devis_,
but, in addition, a certain religiosity in which that time and society
were also by no means deficient, though it existed side by side with
freethinking of a daring kind and with unbridled licentiousness. The
head of the party, Dame Oisille, is the chief representative of this
religious spirit, though all the party are more or less penetrated by
it. The subjects of the tales do not differ much from those of
Boccaccio, though they are, as a rule, occupied with a higher class of
society, and of necessity display a more polished condition of manners.
They are much longer than the anecdotes of the _Contes et Joyeux Devis_,
and generally, though not always, deal with something like a connected
story instead of with mere isolated traits or apophthegms. The best of
them are animated by the same spirit of refined voluptuousness which
animates so much of the writing and art of the time, and which may
indeed be said to be its chief feature. But this spirit has seldom been
presented in a light so attractive as that which it bears in the
_Heptameron_.

[Sidenote: Noel du Fail.]

[Sidenote: G. Bouchet.]

[Sidenote: Cholieres.]

The influence of Rabelais on the one hand, of the _Heptameron_ on the
other, is observable in almost all the work of the same kind which the
second half of the sixteenth century produced. The fantastic buffoonery
and the indiscriminate prodigality of learning, which were to the
outward eye the distinguishing characteristics of _Pantagruel_, found
however more imitators than the poetical sentiment of the _Heptameron_.
The earliest of the successors of Rabelais was Noel du Fail, a gentleman
and magistrate of Britanny, who, five years before the master's death,
produced two little books, _Propos Rustiques_[186] and _Baliverneries_,
which depict rural life and its incidents with a good deal of vividness
and colour. The imitation of Rabelais is very perceptible, and sometimes
a little irritating,