place. Simontault begins, and
the system of tale-telling goes round on the usual plan of each speaker
naming him or her who shall follow. It should be observed that no
general subject is, as in the _Decameron_, prescribed to the speakers
of each day, though, as a matter of course, one subject often suggests
another of not dissimilar kind. Nor is there the Decameronic arrangement
of the "king." Between the stories, and also between the days, there is
often a good deal of conversation, in which the divers characters, as
given above, are carried out with a minuteness very different from the
chief Italian original.

From what has been said already, it will be readily perceived that the
novels, or rather their subjects, are not very easy to class in any
rationalised order. The great majority, if they do not answer exactly to
the old title of _Les Histoires des Amants Fortunes_, are devoted to
the eternal subject of the tricks played by wives to the disadvantage
of husbands, by husbands to the disadvantage of wives, and sometimes by
lovers to the disadvantage of both. "Subtilite" is a frequent word in
the titles, and it corresponds to a real thing. Another large division,
trenching somewhat upon the first, is composed of stories to the
discredit of the monks (something, though less, is said against the
secular clergy), and especially of the Cordeliers or Franciscans, an
Order who, for their coarse immorality and their brutal antipathy to
learning, were the special black (or rather grey) beasts of the literary
reformers of the time. In a considerable number there are references
to actual personages of the time--references which stand on a very
different footing of identification from the puerile guessings at the
personality of the interlocutors so often referred to. Sometimes these
references are avowed: "Un des muletiers de la Reine de Navarre," "Le
Roi Francois montre sa generosite," "Un President de Grenoble," "Une
femme d'Alencon," and so forth. At other times the reference is somewhat
more covert, but hardly to be doubted, as in the remarkable story of a
"great Prince" (obviously Francis himself) who used on his journeyings
to and from an assignation of a very illegitimate character, to turn
into a church and piously pursue his devotions. There are a few curious
stories in which amatory matters play only a subordinate part or none
at all, though it must be confessed that this last is a rare thing.
Some are mere anecdote p