Louis XI. is supposed to have contributed to the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, which collection, however much credit it may do him in a literary point of view, is inexcusably wanting in decency.
A volume of poems by Francis I. exists in MS. in the Imperial Library. It contains, among other interesting matter, a prose letter, and another in verse, written from his prison to one of his mistresses. The king was bad in his orthography, as may be judged from the following portion of a letter written by him to his mother at the raising of the siege of Mézieres:—
"Madame, tout asetheure (à cette heure), yn sy (ainsi) que je me vouloys mettre o lyt (au lit), est arycé (arrivé) Laval, lequel m'a aporté la serteneté (certitude) deu lèvemant du syège de Mésyères."
I presume a schoolboy would be whipped if he wrote as bad a letter as this king.
Louis XIII. had, says his epitaph, "a hundred virtues of a valet, not one of a master;" but he could write sonnets, and compose the music for them. The best, perhaps, is that composed on, or for, Madame de Hautefort,—
"Tu crois, bean soleil!
Qu'à ton éclat rien n'est pareil;
Mais quoi! tu pâlis
Auprès d'Amaryllis,"
—set to music which is charming. But Louis XIII. was more of a barber, gardener, pastrycook, and farmer, than an author.
Louis XIV., beside his translation of Caesar's Commentaries, Book I., composed Memoires historiques, politiques, et militaires; but his writings were not remarkable, as his education had been so neglected by his mother and Mazarin, that, according to La Porte, his valet, he was not allowed to have the history of France read to him, even for the sake of sending him to sleep.
Louis XV. wrote a little treatise on the course of the rivers of Europe, and printed it with his own hands. It consisted of sixty-two pages, and contained nothing which was not perfectly well known before, as, for instance, that the Thames ran into the North Sea or German Ocean, and that the Rhone actually fell into the Mediterranean. In 1766 appeared a description of the forest of Compiègne, and guide to the forest, by Louis, afterward Louis XVI., composed by the unfortunate prince at the age of twelve.
Louis XVIII. wrote an account of a journey from Paris to Coblentz, which was published in 1823.