Walpole, it may be mentioned, denied having had any knowledge either of the _Heptameron_ or of Bandello when he wrote _The Mysterious Mother_, which was suggested to him, he declared, by a tale he had heard when very young, of a lady who had waited on Archbishop Tillotson with a story similar to that which is told by Queen Margaret’s heroine to the Legate of Avignon. According to Walpole, Tillotson’s advice was identical with that given by the Legate. Dunlop mentions that a tale of this character is given in Byshop’s _Blossoms_ (vol. xi.); and other authors whose writings contain similar stories are: Giovani Brevio, _Rime e Prose vulgari_, Roma, 1545 (Novella iv.); Desfontaine’s _L’Inceste innocent, histoire véritable_, Paris, 1644 5 Tommaso Grappulo, or Grappolino, _Il Convito Borghesiano_, Londra, 1800 (Novella vii.); Luther, _Colloquia Mens alia_ (article on auricular confession); and Masuccio de Solerac, _Novellino_, Ginevra, 1765 (Novella xxiii.). Curiously enough, Bandello declares that the story was related to him by a lady of Navarre (Queen Margaret?) as having occurred in that country, while Julio de Medrano, a Spanish author of the sixteenth century, asserts that it was told to him in the Bourbonnais as being actual fact, and that he positively saw the house where the lady’s son and his wife resided; but on the other hand we find the tale related, in its broad lines, in _Amadis de Gaule_ as being an old-time legend, and in proof of this, it figures in an ancient French poem of the life of St. Gregory, the MS. of which still exists at Tours, and was printed in 1854. In support of the theory that the tale is based on actual fact, the following passage from Millin’s _Antiquités Nationales_ (vol. iii. f. xxviii. p. 6) is quoted-- “In the middle of the nave of the collégial church of Ecouis, in the cross aisle, was found a white marble slab on which was inscribed this epitaph:-- “Hore lies the child, here lies the father, Here lies the sister, here lies the brother, Here lie the wife and the husband, Yet there are but two bodies here.” “The tradition is that a son of Madame d’Écouis had by his mother, without knowing her or being recognised by her, a daughter named Cecilia, whom he afterwards married in Lorraine, she then being in the service of the Duchess of Bar. Thus Cecilia was at one and the same time her husband’s daughter, sister and wife. They were interred together in the same grave at Écouis in 1512.” According to Millin, a similar tradition will be found with variations in different parts of France. For instance, at the church of Alincourt, a village between Amiens and Abbeville, there was to be seen in Millin’s time an epitaph running as follows:-- “Here lies the son, here lies the mother, Here lies the daughter with the father; Here lies the sister, here lies the brother, Here lie the wife and the husband; And there are only three bodies here.”