The grafts of our desires being inarched long since in the tree of our loves, the branches thereof bore the lovely bouquets of our hopes. And this is fine: Paper! that the rest of your white surface may not blush at my shame, suffer me to blacken it with my sorrow! It has always been a sad mystery to me why rude and dull intelligences should sneer at, or denounce, these delightful fantastries, the very stuff of which dreams and love and poetry--the three best things of life--are made.[134] [Sidenote: Montreux and the _Bergeries de Juliette_.] The British Museum possesses not very many of the, I believe, numerous works of Nicolas de Montreux, _alias_, as has been said, Ollenix du Mont Sacre, a "gentleman of Maine," as he scrupulously designates himself. But it does possess two parts (the first two) of the _Bergeries de Juliette_, and I am not in the least surprised that no reader of them should have worried any librarian into completing the set. Each of these parts is a stout volume of some five hundred pages,[135] not very small, of close small print, filled with stuff of the most deadly dulness. For instance, Ollenix is desirous to illustrate the magnificence and the danger of those professional persons of the other sex at Venice who have filled no small place in literature from Coryat to Rousseau. So he tells us, without a gleam or suspicion of humour, that one customer was so astonied at the decorations of the bedroom, the bed, etc., that he remained for two whole hours considering them, and forgetting to pay any attention to the lady. It is satisfactory to know that she revenged herself by raising the fee to an inordinate amount, and insisting on her absurd client's lackey being sent to fetch it before the actual conference took place. But the silliness of the story itself is a fair sample of Montreux' wits, and these wits manage to make anything they deal with duller by their way of telling it. [Sidenote: Des Escuteaux and his _Amours Diverses_.] It is still more unfortunate that our national collection has none of the numerous fictions[136] of A(ntoine?) de Nerveze. His _Amours Diverses_ (1606), in which he collected no less than seven love-stories, published separately earlier, would be useful. But it luckily does provide the similarly titled book of Des Escuteaux, who is perhaps the most representative and prolific writer, next to Montreux and Nerveze, of the whole, and who seems to me, from what I have read of the first and what others say of the second, to be their superior. The collections consist of (_Amours de_ in every case) _Filiris et Isolia_, dedicated to Isabel (not "-bel_le_") de Rochechouart; _Clarimond et Antoinette_ (to Lucresse [_sic_] de Bouille); _Clidamant et Marilinde_ (to _Jane_ de la Brunetiere), and _Ipsilis et Alixee_ (to Renee de Cosse, Amirale de France!).[137]