and having forgotten all about his dead love, came to Pau and went to pay his respects to the Queen.  He met her coming back from vespers, and she greeted him graciously, and they talked of this matter and of that.  But, as they walked together hither and thither, the Queen drew him, without cause shown, into the church she had just left, where Mademoiselle de la Roche was buried.  “Cousin,” said she, “do you feel nothing stirring beneath you and under your feet?” But he said, “Nothing, Madame.”  “Think, cousin,” then said she once again.  But he said, “Madame, I have thought well, but I feel nought; for under me there is but a stone, hard and firmly set.”  “Now, do I tell you,” said the Queen, leaving him no longer at study, “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