e novels, to
interest and satisfy readers, without a style, or a group of styles,
providing easy and clear narrative media. We shall see how, in the next
century, writers in forms apparently still more alien from the novel
helped it in the same way.

[111] The character of this Bourbon prince seems to have been very
faithfully though not maliciously drawn by Margaret (for the name,
_Gallice pulchrum_, is _Anglice pulchrius_, and our form may be
permitted in a note) as not ungenial, not exactly ungentlemanly, and by
no means hating his wife or being at all unkind to her, but constantly
"hard" on her in speech, openly regarding infidelity to her as a matter
of course, and not a little tinged by the savagery which (one is afraid)
the English wars had helped to introduce among the French nobility;
which the religious wars were deepening, and which, in the times of the
Fronde, came almost to its very worst, and, though somewhat tamed later,
lasted, and was no mean cause, if not so great a one as some think, of
the French Revolution. Margaret's love for her brother was ill rewarded
in many ways--among others by brutal scandal--and her later days were
embittered by failure to protect the new learning and the new faith she
had patronised earlier. But one never forgets Rabelais' address to her,
or the different but still delightful piece in which Marot is supposed
to have commemorated her Platonic graciousness; while her portrait,
though drawn in the hard, dry manner of the time, and with the tendency
of that time to "make a girl's nose a proboscis," is by no means
unsuggestive of actual physical charm.

[112] This phrase, though Biblical, of course, in spirit, is not, so far
as I remember, anywhere found textually in Holy Writ. It may be
patristic; in which case I shall be glad of learned information. It
sounds rather like St. Augustine. But I do not think it occurs earlier
in French, and the word _impossibilite_ is not banal in the connection.

[113] The famous phrase "amoureux _transi_" is simply untranslatable by
any single word in English for the adjective, or rather participle. Its
unmetaphorical use is, of course, commonest in the combination _transi
de froid_, "frozen," and so suggests in the other a lover shivering
actually under his mistress's shut window, or, metaphorically, under her
disdain.

[114] The expression (_passe oultre_) commented on in speaking of
Rabelais, and again one which has no English equivalent