The history of "little John of Saintre and the Lady of the Beautiful Cousins"[86] has not struck all judges, even all English judges,[87] in the same way. Some have thought it mawkish, rhetorical, clumsily imitative of the manners of dead chivalry, and the like. Others, admitting it to be a late and "literary" presentation of the stately society it describes, rank it much higher as such. Its author was a bitter enough satirist if he wrote, as he most probably did, the famous _Quinze Joyes de Mariage_, one of the most unmitigated pieces of unsweetened irony--next to _A Tale of a Tub_ and _Jonathan Wild_--to be found in literature; but not couched in narrative form. The same quality appears of course in the still more famous farce of _Pathelin_, which few good judges deny very stoutly to him, though there is little positive evidence. In the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ again, as has been said, he certainly had a hand, and possibly a great hand, as well as perhaps elsewhere. The satiric touch appears even in _Petit Jehan_ itself; for, after all the gracious courtship of the earlier part, the _dame des belles Cousines_, during an absence of her lover on service, falls a by no means, as it would seem, very reluctant victim to the vulgar viciousness of a rich churchman, just like the innominatas of the _nouvelles_ themselves. But the earlier part _is_ gracious--a word specifically and intensively applicable to it. It may be a little unreal; does not the secondary form and sense which has been fastened upon reality--"realism"--show that, in the opinion of many people at least, reality is _not_ gracious? The Foozles of this world who "despise all your kickshaws," the Dry-as-dusts who point out--not in the least seeing the real drift of their argument--that the fifteenth century was, in the greater part of Europe if not the whole, at a new point of morals and manners, may urge these things. But the best part of _Petit Jehan_ remains a gracious sort of dream for gracious dreamers--a picture of a kind of Utopia of Feminism, when Feminism did not mean votes or anything foolish, but only adoration of the adorable. [Sidenote: _Jehan de Paris._]