Indeed, if it
is difficult to realise the part played by pictures, it is
perhaps even more difficult to realise that played by verses
in the polite and active history of the age. At the siege of
Pontoise, English and French exchanged defiant ballades over
the walls. (2) If a scandal happened, as in the loathsome
thirty-third story of the CENT NOUVELLES NOUVELLES, all the
wits must make rondels and chansonettes, which they would
hand from one to another with an unmanly sneer. Ladies
carried their favourite's ballades in their girdles. (3)
Margaret of Scotland, all the world knows already, kissed
Alain Chartier's lips in honour of the many virtuous thoughts
and golden sayings they had uttered; but it is not so well
known, that this princess was herself the most industrious of
poetasters, that she is supposed to have hastened her death
by her literary vigils, and sometimes wrote as many as twelve
rondels in the day. (4) It was in rhyme, even, that the
young Charles should learn his lessons. He might get all
manner of instruction in the truly noble art of the chase,
not without a smack of ethics by the way, from the
compendious didactic poem of Gace de la Bigne. Nay, and it
was in rhyme that he should learn rhyming: in the verses of
his father's Maitre d'Hotel, Eustache Deschamps, which
treated of "l'art de dictier et de faire chancons, ballades,
virelais et rondeaux," along with many other matters worth
attention, from the courts of Heaven to the misgovernment of
France.
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