Preface

A printer is a man to whom packages come. Psalters come to him from the doctors and rhymes from the poets, and he learns to weigh each in his hand before he looks at it. The one I mean to tell of came to my father's shop on the feast of the Nativity, in the year of our Lord fifteen hundred and twenty, and it was heavier than it looked.

A messenger brought it to the door that morning, a wet one, for it had rained all that week and the street ran like a gutter. My father came down to him in his nightgown, coughing the cough he had carried since Martinmas. The man would give no name and take no answer. He had been paid to set the parcel in the master's hand and nothing more, and having done so he went off into the street. Our apprentice Guillaume held the lamp at the door and was sent back to bed.

I was a child at the time and I remember none of the happenings that evening. Our apprentice, however, did, and would often speak of that strange Christmas evening.

Guillaume had stayed with me and had helped me establish my own shop; he had taught me everything my father could not because of his untimely death when I was a boy. One evening Guillaume decided it was time for me to finally turn out my father's chests that had long languished in the bottom of our house. At the bottom of the last, under a year of almanacs gone to mould, I found a small coffer.

The lid of the coffer had swollen with the damp and I had to take a knife to it to force it open. Amongst the discarded items and bric-a-brac there was a box, bound and made safe with cerecloth against the damp.

A small paper in my father's hand lay neatly folded and tucked into the bindings of the box. He recounted the night in some detail and that he had undone the cloth thinking it a gift from some customer. My father had read a leaf from the box, then another, then a third, and had sat with his hands over his mouth until the candle was spent.

The thing was a danger, he wrote, to any house that held it and to any press that took it up, and he could not do the one thing and could not make himself do the other.

I set my father's letter aside and I opened the box, unaware of what I might find. This manuscript lay inside, many leaves closely written and bound with a cord of linen thread. The thread was so finely spun that I took it at first for silk and the cord so well woven that it might have been used in the finest houses.

Beside the manuscript lay a cake of rosin with a violet cut into its back, dried to a dull amber and crazed like old varnish. There was also a small wooden stamp worn smooth with a use that was, at the time, unknown to me. There was a bundle of letters in several hands, tied with thread gone brittle and a leaf of music lay amongst them.

There was a square of fine linen, yellowed and limp with age. Stitched upon it was a lily, so carefully embroidered in a colour so similar to the original linen that my thumb found it before my eye.

There were several curiosities that altogether left me baffled. First there were shards of a plain earthenware cup, tied in a scrap of cloth, and then a thinly worn ring, broken in two, with a crest cut into it that was now unidentifiable. Last of all these was a little glazed pot, of the kind apothecaries keep salves in. A blue ribbon, faded now to the shade of a duck's egg, was wound round it to hold the lid.

I carefully undid the binding and inside was grey dust, and in the dust a scatter of small dry buds that I knew at once for lavender. I took my time to tie it as best I could and placed it to the side.

At the bottom of the box, folded small, was a letter.

I send you what my sister set down. She kept her secret all her life, and guarded it so well that none knew it but those she loved, and I. It was not hers to hide for ever, nor mine. Her story deserves to be told, and I know no one to give it to but one who makes books. Forever yours in Christ, R.

I read the manuscript through the winter evenings, a few leaves at a time, for my heart would hold no more. I had hoped, God forgive me, for a bawdy thing of the kind that sells at the fair and I can say with all sincerity that this was not. A woman was speaking to the future or people now long dead.

The Lady, for I know she was high-born, spoke most frankly about her life from the first letter to the last. I found that it had a depth of feeling I had rarely read, it was earnest and funny in parts, it was tender where it was crude and crude where it was tender. Her words never once ask pardon, though her words and actions will surely leave the reader scandalised.

Some leaves I read once, for their content was most harrowing, and could not read again, though others I read until I knew them by heart, leaving me filled with joy and wonder. More than once I laid it down weeping, and had to leave it for the morrow.

I do not say the matter is fit for every eye, nay, I say that this is perhaps the kind of book one should keep to oneself. All that winter I struggled, as did my father, over what to do, for my first instinct was to put them back in their place and leave them for some descendant to take up the challenge.

Yet the Lady came to me in sleep, most disagreeably and uninvited, and would come most often when I had supped late.

She stood at the foot of my bed with her fingers black with ink and waited, saying nothing but pleading with her bleeding heart. I woke each time knowing that I alone held her, and that if I left it until I was dead the box would pass to some heir who would take it for scrap and perhaps only use it for the bonfire.

So I say to you, dear reader, a life so set down should not be lost. I call her by the name she gives herself in these pages, Massan, and by no other. On my oath, nothing in her hand has been changed, and nothing added to it but this preface to set the stage for the performance. Whatever it costs me, it is done.

Massan's humble servant,
Denis Janot
Paris, 1539