If we wish to do justice to Brantôme as the author of Fair and Gallant Ladies, we must try and picture his position in his age and in his society. It is not to be understood that he suddenly invented all of these stories during his long illness. Let us try and follow the origin of these memoirs. At that time the most primitive conceptions of literary work in general prevailed. The actual writing down of the stories was the least. An author laboriously working out his stories was ridiculous. The idea and the actual creative work came long before the moment when the author sat down to write. None of Brantôme’s stories originated in his abbey, but in Madrid, in Naples, in Malta before La Rochelle, in the Louvre, in Blois and in Alençon. Writing down a story was a reproduction of what had already been created, of what had been formed and reformed in frequent retelling and polished to perfection. The culture of the court was of great aid to him in his style, but his own style was nevertheless far superior. For decades Brantôme was a nobleman of his royal masters. He was constantly present at the court and participated in all of the major and minor events of its daily life, in quarrels and celebrations. He was a courtier. He was entirely at home in the halls and chambers of the Louvre, but even though he stopped to chat with the idle courtiers in the halls of the Louvre he never lowered himself to their level. He could be extremely boisterous, yet inwardly he was reserved and observant. He was the very opposite of the noisy, impetuous Bussy-Rabutin. His intelligence and his wisdom made him a source of danger among the chamberlains. His was a dual nature, he was at the same time cynical and religious, disrespectful and enthusiastic, refined and brutal, at the same time abbot, warrior and courtier. Like Bernhard Palissy he ridiculed the astrologers, yet he was subject to the superstitions of his age. His temperament showed that his cradle had not been far from the banks of the Garonne, near the Gascogne. There was combined with his bold, optimistic, adventurous and restless spirit, with his chivalrous ideas and prejudices, a boundless vanity. A contemporary said of him: “He was as boastful as Cellini.” Indeed he believed himself far superior to his class, he not only boasted of himself and his family, but also of his most insignificant deeds. He was irreconcilable in hate, and even admonished his heirs to revenge him. His royal masters he treated with respect tempered by irony. As a contemporary of Rabelais, Marot and Ronsard, he was an excellent speaker. If Rabelais had a Gallic mind then Brantôme’s was French. His cheerful and lively conversation was pleasing to all. He had a reputation of being a brilliant man. But he was also known as a discreet person. Alençon, who was a splendid story-teller himself and liked to hear love stories more than anything else, preferred conversation with him to anyone. His naïveté and originality made