A True Recipe

TO have a more easy understanding of the present discourse, we will treat it in the form of a Dialogue, in which we will introduce two Persons; the one will ask, the other will answer as follows.

Since we are on the subject of honest delights and pleasures, I can assure you that it has been many days since I began to wander here and there to find some mountainous place, proper and suitable to build a garden to retire to, and to recreate my spirit in times of divorces, plagues, epidemics, and other tribulations, by which we are greatly troubled at this day.

I cannot clearly understand your design, because you say that you are looking for a mountainous place to make a delectable garden. This is an opinion contrary to that of all the Ancients and Moderns: for I know that one commonly seeks flat places to build gardens; also I know well that many, having mounds and burrows in their gardens, go to great expense to level them. This considered, I pray you tell me the reason that moved you to look for a mountainous place to build your garden.

A few days after the unrests and civil wars were appeased, and it had pleased God to send us His Peace, I was one day walking along the meadow of this city of Saintes, near the river Charente; and as I was contemplating the horrible dangers from which God had spared me in the time of the past tumults and horrible troubles, I heard the voice of certain virgins who were sitting under certain bowers, and singing the one hundred and fourth Psalm. And because their voice was sweet and well-tuned, it made me forget my first thoughts, and having stopped to listen to said Psalm, I let go of the pleasure of the voices, and entered into contemplation on the meaning of said Psalm, and having noted its points, I was entirely confused in admiration at the wisdom of the Royal Prophet, saying