The _Contes et Nouvelles_ of the Queen of Navarre have nothing, as we can readily believe, that is much out of keeping or contradictory with her life and the habitual character of her thoughts. M. Genin has already made that judicious remark, and an attentive reading will only justify it. Those Tales are neither the gayeties nor the sins of youth; she wrote them at a ripe age, for the most part in her litter while travelling, and by way of amusement--but the amusement had its serious side. Death prevented her from concluding them; instead of the seven Days which we actually have, she intended to make ten, like Boccaccio; she wished to give, not an _Heptameron_, but a French _Decameron_. In her prologue she supposes that several persons of condition, French and Spanish, having met, in the month of September, at the baths of Cauterets, in the Pyrenees, separate after a few weeks; the Spaniards returning as best they can across the mountains, the French delayed on their way by floods caused by the heavy rains. A certain number of these travellers, men and women, after divers adventures more extraordinary than agreeable, find themselves again in company at the Abbey of Notre-Dame-de-Serrance, and there, as the river Gave is not fordable, they decide to build a bridge. “The abbé,” says the narrator, “who was very glad they should make this outlay, because the number of pilgrims would thus be increased, furnished the workmen, but not a penny to the costs, such was his avarice. The workmen declaring that they could not build the bridge under ten or a dozen days, the company, half men, half women, began to get very weary.” It became necessary to find some “pleasant and virtuous” occupation for those ten days, and for this they consulted a certain Dame Oisille, the oldest of the company.