y, "that you are above the tomb and the body of
Mademoiselle de la Roche, who is buried beneath you, and whom you loved
so much in her lifetime. And since our souls have sense after our death,
it cannot be but that this faithful one, dead so lately, felt your
presence as soon as you came near her; and if you have not perceived it,
because of the thickness of the tomb, doubt not that none the less she
felt it. And forasmuch as it is a pious work to make memory of the dead,
and notably of those whom we loved, I pray you give her a _pater_ and an
_ave_, and likewise a _de profundis_, and pour out holy water. So
shall you make acquist of the name of a right faithful lover and a good
Christian." And she left him that he might do this.

Brantome (though he had an admiration for Margaret, whose lady of
honour his grandmother had been, and who, according to the Bourdeilles
tradition, composed her novels in travelling) thought this a pretty
fashion of converse. "Voila," he says, "l'opinion de cette bonne
princesse; laquelle la tenait plus par gentillesse et par forme de devis
que par creance a mon avis." Sainte-Beuve, on the contrary, and with
better reason, sees in it faith, graciousness, feminine delicacy, and
piety at once. No doubt; but there is something more than this, and that
something more is what we are in search of, and what we shall find, now
in one way, now in another, throughout the book: something whereof the
sentiment of Donne's famous thoughts on the old lover's ghost, on the
blanched bone with its circlet of golden tresses, is the best known
instance in English. The madcap Nomerfide indeed lays it down, that
"the meditation of death cools the heart not a little." But her more
experienced companions know better. The worse side of this Renaissance
peculiarity is told in the last tale, a rather ghastly story of monkish
corruption; its lighter side appears in the story, already referred
to, of the "Grand Prince" and his pious devotions on the way to not
particularly pious occupation. But touches of the more poetical and
romantic effects of it are all over the book. It is to be found in the
story of the gentleman who forsook the world because of his beloved's
cruelty, whereat she repenting did likewise ("he had much better have
thrown away his cowl and married her," quoth the practical Nomerfide);
in that of the wife who, to obtain freedom of living with her paramour,
actually allowed herself to be buried; in that (v