was about to fall on England, does the real reason of this singular idiosyncrasy appear.  The company of the Heptameron are the latest representatives, at first hand, and with no deliberate purpose of presentment, of the mediaeval conception of gentlemen and ladies who fleeted the time goldenly.  They are not themselves any longer mediaeval; they have been taught modern ways; they have a kind of uneasy sense (even though one and another of themselves may now and then flout the idea) of the importance of other classes, even of some duty on their own part towards other classes.  Their piety is a very little deliberate, their voluptuous indulgence has a grain of conscience in it and behind it, which distinguishes it not less from the frank indulgence of a Greek or a Roman than from the still franker naivete of purely mediaeval art, from the childlike, almost paradisiac, innocence of the Belli-cents and Nicolettes and of the daughter of the great Soldan Hugh in that wonderful serio-comic chanson of the Voyage a Constantinople.  The mark of modernity is on them, and yet they are so little conscious of it, and so perfectly free from even the slightest touch of at least its anti-religious influence.  Nobody, not even Hircan, the Grammont of the sixteenth century; not even Nomerfide, the Miss Notable of her day and society; not even the haughty lady Ennasuite, who wonders whether common folk can be supposed to have like passions with us, feels the abundant religious services and the periods of meditation unconscionable or tiresome.

And so we have here three notes constantly sounding together or in immediate sequence.  There is the passion of that exquisite rondeau of Marot’s, which some will have, perhaps not impossibly, to refer to Margaret herself—­

     En la baisant m’a dit:  “Amy sans blasme,
     Ce seul baiser, qui deux bouches embasme,
     Les arrhes sont du bien tant espere,”
     Ce mot elle a doulcement profere,
     Pensant du tout apaiser ma grand flamme. 
     Mais le mien cour adonc plus elle enflamme,
     Car son alaine odorant plus que basme
     Souffloit le feu qu’Amour m’a prepare,
     En la baisant.

     Bref, mon esprit, sans congnoissance d’ame,
     Vivoit alors sur la bouche a ma dame,
     Dont se mouroit le corps enamoure;
     Et si la levre eust gueres demoure
     Contre la mienne, elle m’eust succe l’ame,
     En la baisant.

There is the devout meditation of Oisille, and that familiarity with the Scriptures which, as Hircan himself says, “I trow we all read and know.”  And then there is the note given by two other curious stories of Brantome.  One tells how the Queen of Navarre watched earnestly for hours by the bedside of a dying maid of honour, that she might see whether the parting of the soul was a visible fact or not.  The second tells how when some talked before her of the joys of heaven, she sighed and said, “Well, I know that this is true; but we dwell so long dead underground before we arise thither.”  There, in a few words, is the secret of THE HEPTAMERON:  the fear of God, the sense of death, the voluptuous longing and voluptuous regret for the good things of life and love that pass away.