These characteristics
have made the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ no great favourites of late,
but their unpopularity is somewhat undeserved. For all their coarseness,
there is much genuine comedy in them, and if the prettiness of romantic
and literary dressing-up is absent from them, so likewise is the
insincerity thereof. They make one of the most considerable prose
books of what may be called middle French literature, and they had much
influence on the books that followed, especially on this of Margaret's.
Indeed, one of the few examples to be found between the two, the _Grand
Paragon de Nouvelles Nouvelles_ of Nicolas de Troyes (1535), obviously
takes them for model. But Nicolas was a dull dog, and neither profited
by his model nor gave any one else opportunity to profit by himself.
Rabelais, the first book of whose _Pantagruel_ anticipated the _Paragon_
by three years, while the _Gargantua_ coincided with it, was a great
authority at the Court of Margaret's brother Francis, dedicated one
of the books (the third) of _Pantagruel_ to her, before her death, in
high-flown language, as _esprit abstrait, ravy et ecstatic_, and must
certainly have been familiar reading of hers, and of all the ladies and
gentlemen, literary and fashionable, of her Court.
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