n and other
legends, and we have a certain number of short prose stories of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, of which the most famous is that
of _Aucassin et Nicolette_. These latter, however, are rather short
romances than distinct prose tales of our kind. Of that kind the first
famous book in French, and the only famous book, besides the one before
us, is the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_. The authorship of this book
is very uncertain. It purports to be a collection of stories told by
different persons of the society of Louis XI., when he was but Dauphin,
and was in exile in Flanders under the protection of the Duke of
Burgundy. But it has of late years been very generally assigned
(though on rather slender grounds of probability, and none of positive
evidence), to Anthony de la Salle, the best French prose writer of
the fifteenth century, except Comines, and one on whom, with an odd
unanimity, conjectural criticism has bestowed, besides his acknowledged
romance of late chivalrous society, _Petit Jehan de Saintre_ (a work
which itself has some affinities with the class of story before us), not
only the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_, but the famous satirical treatise
of the _Quinze Joyes du Mariage_, and the still more famous farce of
_Pathelin_. Some of the _Nouvelles_, moreover, have been putatively
fathered on Louis XI. himself, in which case the royal house of France
would boast of two distinguished taletellers instead of one. However
this may be, they all display the somewhat hard and grim but keen and
practical humour which seems to have distinguished that prince, which
was a characteristic of French thought and temper at the time, and which
perhaps arose with the misfortunes and hardships of the Hundred Years'
War. The stories are decidedly amusing, with a considerably greater,
though also a much ruder, _vis comica_ than that of the _Heptameron_;
and they are told in a style unadorned indeed, and somewhat dry, lacking
the simplicity of the older French, and not yet attaining to the
graces of the newer, but forcible, distinct, and sculpturesque, if not
picturesque. A great license of subject and language, and an enjoyment
of practical jokes of the roughest, not to say the most cruel character,
prevail throughout, and there is hardly a touch of anything like
romance; the tales alternating between jests as broad as those of the
Reeve's and Miller's tales in Chaucer (themselves exactly corresponding
to verse _fabli