sceticism, and over the wiser temper
of religious moderation. _Les Prisons_ tells in allegory of her
servitude to passion, to worldly ambition, and to the desire for human
knowledge, until at last the divine love brought her deliverance.
The union of the mundane and the moral spirit is singularly shown
in Marguerite's collection of prose tales, written in imitation of
Boccaccio, the _Heptameron des Nouvelles_ (1558).

These tales were not an indiscretion of youth; probably Marguerite
composed them a few years before her death; perhaps their licence
and wanton mirth were meant to enliven the melancholy hours of her
beloved brother; certainly the writer is ingenious in extracting
edifying lessons from narratives which do not promise edification.
They are not so gross as other writings of the time, and this is
Marguerite's true defence; to laugh at the immoralities of monks and
priests was a tradition in literature which neither the spirit of
the Renaissance nor that of the Reformation condemned. A company of
ladies and gentlemen, detained by floods on their return from the
Pyrenean baths, beguile the time by telling these tales, and the pious
widow Dame Oisille gives excellent assistance in showing how they
tend to a moral purpose. The series, designed to equal in number the
tales of the Decameron, is incomplete. Possibly Marguerite was aided
by some one or more of the authors of whom she was the patroness and
protector; but no sufficient evidence exists for the ascription of
the _Heptameron_ to Bonaventure des Periers.

Among the poets whom Marguerite received with favour at her court
was CLEMENT MAROT, the versifier, as characterised by Boileau, of
"elegant badinage." His predecessors and early contemporaries in the
opening years of the sixteenth century continued the manner of the
so-called _rhetoriqueurs_, who endeavoured to maintain allegory, now
decrepit or effete, with the aid of ingenuities of versification and
pedantry of diction; or else they carried on something of the more
living tradition of Villon or of Coquillard. Among the former, Jean
le Maire de Belges deserves to be remembered less for his verse than
for his prose work, _Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troie_,
in which the Trojan origin of the French people is set forth with
some feeling for beauty and a mass of crude erudition. Clement Marot,
born at Cahors in 1495 or 1496, a poet's son, was for a time in the
service of Francis I. as _valet