A question which arises on the reading of these _Nouvelles_, the image and faithful reproduction of the good society of that day, is on the singularity that the tone of conversation should have varied so much among honourable persons at different epochs before it settled down upon the basis of true delicacy and decency. Elegant conversation dates much farther back than we suppose; polished society began much earlier than we think. The character of conversation as we now understand it in society, and that which specially distinguishes it among moderns, is that women are admitted to it; and this it was that led, during the finest period of the middle ages, to charming conversations in certain Courts of the South, and also in Normandy, in France, and in England. In those castles of the South where troubadours disported, and whence the echo of their sweet songs comes to us, where exquisite and ravishing stories were composed (like that of _Aucassin et Nicolette_), there must have been all the delicacy, all the graces one could wish for in conversation. But taking matters as they appear to us at the end of the 15th century, we notice a mixture, a very perceptible struggle between purity and license, between coarseness and refinement. The pretty little romance _Jehan de Saintré_, in which the chivalric ideal is pictured from the start in the daintiest manner, and which assumes to give us a little code in action of politeness, courtesy and gallantry,--in a word, the complete education of a young equerry of the day,--this pretty romance is also full of pedantic precepts, essays on minute ceremonial, and towards the end it suddenly turns into gross sensuality and the triumph of the monk, after Rabelais. The vein of license and wanton language never ceased its flow from the time it originated, disguising itself in brilliant moments and noble companies only to again unmask at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when it seems to borrow still further audacity from the Latin Renaissance. This was the time when virtuous women told and openly discoursed of tales _à la_ Roquelaure. Such is the tone of the society which the _Nouvelles_ of Marguerite of Navarre represent to us, all the more naïvely because their intention is in no way indecent. Nearly a century was needed to reform this vice of taste; it was necessary that Mme. de Rambouillet and her daughter should come to reprimand and school the Court, that professors of good taste and polite language, like Mlle. de Scudéry and the Chevalier de Méré, should apply themselves for years to preach decorum; and even then we shall find many backslidings and vestiges of coarseness in the midst of even their refinement and formalism.