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.