The chief prose works of the fifteenth century in France, by common consent, are the long pseudo-chivalric romance entitled Le Petit Jehan de Saintré, the satire on women called Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage and the collection of tales known as Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. The author of the first work alone names himself: it is Antoine de la Sale, a native of Provence, known also as the author of several didactic works, La Salade, La Salle, Le Réconfort, etc. The author of the Quinze Joyes has hidden his identity in a riddle which has not yet been satisfactorily deciphered. Not even a hint as to the author or editor of the Cent Nouvelles is contained in the manuscript. Led astray by an erroneous interpretation of the riddle, Pottier in 1830 ascribed the Quinze Joyes to La Sale. Le Roux de Lincy did the same for the Cent Nouvelles, in 1841. The first scientific attempt to prove these ascriptions was made by L. Stern in 1870. Stern sought to establish La Sale's authorship of the Cent Nouvelles by a comparison of certain details of style and by the fact, noticed more in detail later, that a “conte” addressed to La Sale appears as one of the hundred tales. This was followed immediately by the paper of E. Gossart, which gave special attention to the Quinze Joyes. Gossart showed that La Sale, in La Salle and in Saintré, had made use of St. Jerome's paraphrase of Theophrastus, also cited in the prologue of the Quinze Joyes. However, as M. Raynaud has pointed out, this epistle of Jerome, with that of Valerius, also cited in the Quinze Joyes, was the chief source of most of the diatribes against marriage in the Middle Ages.
Les cent nouvelles nouvelles
