The dedication with which Anthony Le MaÇon prefaces his translation of Boccaccio contains several curious passages. In it Margaret is styled “the most high and most illustrious Princess Margaret of France, only sister of the King, Queen of Navarre, Duchess of AlenÇon and of Berry;” while the author describes himself as “Master Anthoine Le MaÇon, Councillor of the King, Receiver General of his finances in Burgundy, and very humble secretary to this Queen.” He then proceeds to say:—

“You remember, my lady, the time when you made a stay of four or five months in Paris, during which you commanded me, seeing that I had freshly arrived from Florence, where I had sojourned during an entire year, to read to you certain stories of the Decameron of Boccaccio, after which it pleased you to command me to translate the whole book into our French language, assuring me that it would be found beautiful and entertaining. I then made you reply that I felt my powers were too weak to undertake such a work.... My principal and most reasonable excuse was the knowledge that I had of myself, being a native of the land of DauphinÉ, where the maternal language is too far removed from good French.... However, it did not please you to accept any of my excuses, and you showed me that it was not fitting that the Tuscans should be so mistaken as to believe that their Boccaccio could not be rendered in our language as well as it is in theirs, ours having become so rich and so copious since the accession of the King, your brother, to the crown, that nothing has ever been written in any language that could not be expressed in this; and thus your will still was that I should translate it (the Decameron) when I had the leisure to do so. Seeing this and desiring, throughout my life, to do, if I can, even more than is possible to obey you, I began some time afterwards to translate one of the said stories, then two, then three, and finally to the number of ten or twelve, the best that I could choose, which I afterwards showed as much to people of the Tuscan nation as to people of ours, who all made me believe that the stories were, if not perfectly, at least very faithfully translated. Wherefore, allowing myself to be thus pleasantly deceived, if deceit there was, I have since set myself to begin the translation at one end and to finish it at the other....”

This dedicatory preface is followed by an epistle, written in Italian by Emilio Ferretti, and dated from Lyons, May I, 1545; and by a notice to the reader signed by Etienne Rosset, the bookseller, who in the King’s license, dated from St. Germain-en-Laye, Nov. 2, 1544, is described as “Rosset called the Mower, bookseller, residing in Paris, on the bridge of St. Michael, at the sign of the White Rose.” The first edition of Le MaÇon’s translation (1545) was in folio; the subsequent ones of 1548, 1551, and 1553 being in octavo. It should be remembered that Le MaÇon’s was by no means the first French version of the Decameron. Laurent du Premier-Faict had already rendered Boccaccio’s masterpiece into French in the reign of Charles VI., but unfortunately his translation, although of a pleasing naÏvetÉ, was not at all correct, having been made from a Latin version of the original. Manuscript copies of Laurent’s translation were to be found in the royal and most of the princely libraries of the fifteenth century.—Ed.