But there is little
resemblance to be found in his style and hers. The short stories which
Master Francis scatters about his longer work are, indeed, models of
narration, but his whole tone of thought and manner of treatment are
altogether alien from those of the "ravished spirit" whom he praises. His
deliberate coarseness is not more different from her deliberate delicacy
than his intensely practical spirit from her high-flown romanticism
(which makes one think of, and may have suggested, the Court of La
Quinte), and her mixture of devout and amatory quodlibetation from his
cynical criticism and all-dissolving irony. But there was a contemporary
of Rabelais who forms a kind of link between him and Margaret, whose
work in part is very like the _Heptameron_, and who has been thought to
have had more than a hand in it. This was Bonaventure Desperiers, a man
whose history is as obscure as his works are interesting. Born in or
about the year 1500, he committed suicide in 1544, either during a fit
of insanity, or, as has been thought more likely, in order to escape
the danger of the persecution which, in the last years of the reign of
Francis, threatened the unorthodox, and which Margaret, who had
more than once warded it off from them, was then powerless to avert.
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