nd abuses of the monastic orders. It can hardly be said that any of the
other stock subjects, lawyers, doctors, citizens, even husbands (for she
is less satirical on marriage than encomiastic of love), are dealt with
much by her. She found also in some, but chiefly in older books of the
Chartier and still earlier traditions, and rather in Italian than in
French, a certain strain of romance proper and of adventure; but of
this also she availed herself but rarely. What she did not find in
any example (unless, and then but partially, in the example of her own
servant, Bonaventure Des-periers) was first the interweaving of a great
deal not merely of formal religious exercise, but of positive religious
devotion in her work; and secondly, the infusing into it of the peculiar
Renaissance contrast, so often to be noticed, of love and death, passion
and piety, voluptuous enjoyment and sombre anticipation.

But it is now time to say a little more about the personality and work
of this lady, whose name all this time we have been using freely, and
who was indeed a very notable person quite independently of her literary
work. Nor was she in literature by any means an unnotable one, quite
independently of the collection of unfinished stories, which, after
receiving at its first posthumous publication the not particularly
appropriate title of _Les Amants Fortunes_, was more fortunately
re-named, albeit by something of a bull (for there is the beginning
of an eighth day as well as the full complement of the seven), the
_Heptameron_.

Few ladies have been known in history by more and more confusing titles
than the author of the _Heptameron_, the confusion arising partly from
the fact that she had a niece and a great-niece of the same charming
Christian name as herself. The second Margaret de Valois (the most
appropriate name of all three, as it was theirs by family right) was the
daughter of Francis I., the patroness of Ronsard, and, somewhat late
in life, the wife of the Duke of Savoy--a marriage which, as the bride
carried with her a dowry of territory, was not popular, and brought some
coarse jests on her. Not much is said of her personal appearance after
her infancy; but she inherited her aunt's literary tastes, if not her
literary powers, and gave Ronsard powerful support in his early days.
The third was the daughter of Henry II., the "Grosse Margot" of her
brother, Henry III., the "Reine Margot" of Dumas' novel, the idol of
Brant