But if the poor had their Danse Macabre, the great ones of the city spared nothing to impress on their survivors that the magnificence of their lives should follow them even to the tomb. In the Chapelle de la Vierge of Rouen Cathedral are two of the most famous funereal monuments of the sixteenth century, and in one of these you will notice a very remarkable example of the way in which the sculptors of the rich understood their task. Their orders, no doubt, were to give of their best to celebrate the dead man's greatness; their designs were evidently as unfettered by suggestion as by expense; and they had their inevitable revenge. Beneath the magnificent figure of the knight in armour lies the corpse, naked in death and as poor as the beggar in the street. In the Louvre you may see a monument by Germain Pilon that is even more suggestive of this feeling on the part of the artist. It is the tomb of Madame de Birague, Valentina Balbiani.[64] Under a sumptuous dress, covered with sculpture so delicate that the marble looks like lace, a thin and shrunken form can be distinguished. The wasted hand holds a tiny book whose pages it has no strength to turn. Her little dog tries vainly to awake her from a slumber that is eternal. A corpse that is almost a skeleton lies beneath. This is not the sincere expression of the sorrow Villon knew; for we can easily imagine the unhappy Valentina's fate from our knowledge of her husband, one of the hell-hounds of Catherine de Medicis, who was foremost in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. This is not the old longing of the lover for his mistress:-- Mort, j'appelle de ta rigueur, Qui m'as ma maistresse ravie, Et n'est pas encore assouvie Si tu ne me tiens en langueur. Onc puis n'euz force ne vigneur; Mais que te nuysoit-elle en vie Mort? Deux estions, et n'avions qu'ung cueur; S'il est mort, force est que devie, Voire, ou que je vive sans vie, Comme les images, par cueur, Mort! [Footnote 64: This has been admirably described in Mrs Mark Pattison's volumes on the "Renaissance of Art in France," though the authoress refuses to admit that Michelet's view of Pilon's motive is correct. But in Vol. I. compare pp. 236 and 21.] It is the changed note of Ronsard's passionate regret that every lovely feature must be marred by Death:-- "Pour qui gardes-tu tes yeux Et ton sein delicieux Ta joue et ta bouche belle En veux-tu baiser Platon La-bas apres que Charon T'aura mise en sa nacelle?"