Nevertheless, _Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ is a book of great interest and value, despite serious defects due to its time generally and to its place in the history of fiction in particular. Its obscenity, on which even Sir Walter Scott, the least censorious or prudish-prurient of men, and with Southey, the great witness against false squeamishness, has been severe,[81] is unfortunately undeniable. But it is to be doubted whether Sir Walter knew much of the _fabliaux_; if he had he would have seen first, that this sort of thing had become an almost indispensable fashion in the short story, and secondly, that there is here considerable improvement on the _fabliaux_ themselves, there being much less mere schoolboy crudity of dirty detail and phrase, though the situations may remain the same. It suffers occasionally from the heavy and rhetorical style which beset all European literature (except Italian, which itself did not wholly escape) in the fifteenth century. But still one can see in it that improvement of narrative method and diction which has been referred to: and occasionally, amid the crowd of tricky wives, tricked husbands, too obliging and too hardly treated chambermaids, ribald priests and monks, and the like, one comes across quite different things and persons, which are, as the phrase goes, almost startlingly modern, with a mixture of the _un_modern heightening the appeal. One of the most striking of these--not very likely to be detected or suspected by a careless reader under its sub-title of "La Demoiselle Cavaliere," and by no means fully summarised in the quaint short argument which is in all cases subjoined--may be briefly analysed. [Sidenote: Analysis of "La Demoiselle Cavaliere".]