for miscellaneous work. Gringore first emerges as a pamphleteer
in verse, on the side of the policy of Louis XII. He held the important
position of _mere sotte_ in the company of persons who charged
themselves with playing the sotie, and Louis perceived the advantages
which he might gain by enlisting such a writer on his side. Gringore's
early works are allegorical poems of the kind which the increasing
admiration of the _Roman de la Rose_, joined to the practice of the
Rhetoriqueurs, had made fashionable in France; but they are directly
political in tone, and an undercurrent of dramatic intention is always
manifest in them. _Les folles Entreprises_ is a very remarkable work. It
might be described as a series of monologues of the kind usual and
already described, but continuous, and having the independent parts
bound to each other by speeches of the author _in propria persona_. The
titles of the separate sections--_L'Entreprise des folz Orgueilleux_,
_Reflexions de l'Auteur sur la Guerre d'Italie_, _le Blason de
Pratique_, _Balade et Supplication a la Vierge Marie_ (_et se peult
Interpreter sur la Royne de France_), etc.--explain the plan of this
curious book as well as any laboured analysis could do. The author takes
what he considers to be the chief grievances in Church and State, and
dilates upon them in the manner, half moralising, half allegoric, which
was popular. An argument of _Les folles Entreprises_ would, however,
require considerable space. It enters into the most recondite
theological questions, and of its general tone the heading of the last
chapter tells as good a story as anything else can do: 'Comme le
tres-chrestien roy et Justice relevent Foy qui estait abattu par
Richesse et Papelardise.' Other works of the same semi-dramatic,
semi-poetical kind are even more directly political in substance: _Les
Entreprises de Venise_; _La Chasse du Cerf des Cerfs_ (Pope Julius),
etc. Sometimes, as in _La Coqueluche_, the author becomes a simple
chronicler describing incidents of his time. Indeed it would hardly be
an exaggeration to describe Gringore's work as the result of a kind of
groping after journalism condemned by the circumstances of the time to
the most awkward and inappropriate form. In his definitely dramatic work
the same practical tendency reappears. The tetralogy is of a directly
politico-social kind. The _cry_, a summons in ironical terms to _sots_
of all kinds to come and hear their lesson; the sotie,