Monseigneur le Dauphin, Madame la Dauphine, and Madame Marguerite, have taken such delight . . . that the two last-mentioned ladies would fain have done as much themselves, and many others of the court deliberated to do as much—only in one thing differing from Boccace, that they would write no novel that was not veritable history. And with Monseigneur le Dauphin with them, and as many as would make ten persons in all, whom they thought worthy to tell such stories, they concluded each to write ten; but they would not admit students and men of letters to their number, for Monseigneur le Dauphin did not wish that their art should be mingled with this sport. Also he feared that the beauties of rhetoric might do wrong to some portion of the veritable story. But the great affairs that since then have happened to the King [the double invasion, 1543–44], also the peace between him and the King of England [this was not signed and ratified until 1546, but serious hostilities ceased after the peace of Crespy in September 1544; this earlier date must be meant, since no allusion is made to the death of the Duke of Orleans in 1545], and the confinement of Madame la Dauphine [Jan. 20, 1544], with many other things sufficiently important to engross the Court, have caused this enterprise to fall into oblivion."
I believe that a comparison of the dates cited here, and a little consideration of the events of the time, will convince my readers that, in her solitary state at Alençon in 1544, and in her frequent journeys about the duchy, Margaret began the book of which she meant to make a modern Decameron, but which her untimely death cut short before the end.
The mechanism of her stories is clearly borrowed
