is.

[123]

[Sidenote: Note on Helisenne de Crenne.]

There should be added here a very curious, and now, if not in its own
time, very rare book, my first knowledge of which I owed to a work
already mentioned, M. Gustave Reynier's _Le Roman Sentimental avant
l'Astree_ (Paris, 1908), though I was able, after this chapter was
composed, to find and read the original in the British Museum. It was
first printed in 1538, and bears, like other books of its time, a
disproportionately long title, which may, however, be easily shortened,
"_Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procedent d'Amour_ ... composees par
dame Helisenne de Crenne." This Helisenne or Helisaine seems to have
been a real person: and not the least of the remarkable group of women
authors who illustrate her time in France, though M. Reynier himself
admits that "it is difficult to know exactly _who_ she was." She appears
to have been of Picardy, and other extant and non-extant works are
attributed to her. Like almost everybody of her time she wrote in the
extreme _rhetoriqueur_ style--so much so indeed as to lead even Pasquier
into the blunder of supposing that Rabelais hit at her in the dialect of
the "Limousin scholar." The _Angoisses_, which M. Reynier's acute
examination shows to have been written by some one who must have known
Boccaccio's _Fiammetta_ (more than once Frenched about this time), is,
or gives itself out to be, the autobiography of a girl of noble birth
who, married at eleven years old and at first very fond of her husband,
becomes at thirteen the object of much courtship from many gallants. Of
these she selects, entirely on the love-at-first-sight principle, a very
handsome young man who passes in the street. She is well read and tries
to keep herself in order by stock examples, classical and romantic, of
ill-placed and ill-fated affection. Her husband (who seems to have been
a very good fellow for his time) gives her unconsciously what should
have been the best help of all, by praising her self-selected lover's
good looks and laughing at the young man's habit of staring at her. But
she has already spoken frankly of her own _appetit sensuel_, and she
proceeds to show this in the fashion which makes the fifteenth century
and the early sixteenth a sort of trough of animalism between the
altitudes of Mediaeval and Renaissance passion. Her lover turns out to
be an utter cad, boastful, blabbing, and almost cowardly (he tells her
in the usual stolen c