Some of the _Nouvelles_, moreover, have been putatively
fathered on Louis XI. himself, in which case the royal house of France
would boast of two distinguished taletellers instead of one. However
this may be, they all display the somewhat hard and grim but keen and
practical humour which seems to have distinguished that prince, which
was a characteristic of French thought and temper at the time, and which
perhaps arose with the misfortunes and hardships of the Hundred Years'
War. The stories are decidedly amusing, with a considerably greater,
though also a much ruder, _vis comica_ than that of the _Heptameron_;
and they are told in a style unadorned indeed, and somewhat dry, lacking
the simplicity of the older French, and not yet attaining to the
graces of the newer, but forcible, distinct, and sculpturesque, if not
picturesque. A great license of subject and language, and an enjoyment
of practical jokes of the roughest, not to say the most cruel character,
prevail throughout, and there is hardly a touch of anything like
romance; the tales alternating between jests as broad as those of the
Reeve's and Miller's tales in Chaucer (themselves exactly corresponding
to verse _fabliaux_, of which the _Cent Nouvelles_ are exact prose
counterparts, and perhaps prose versions), and examples of what has been
called "the humour of the stick," which sometimes trenches hard upon
the humour of the gallows and the torture-chamber.
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