'Here lies Blanchefleur, who loved young Fleur
with tender love and true.'
When all things were now ready, King Fenis, bidding his people beware for their lives of breathing a word to the effect that Blanchefleur, being yet alive, was not buried in this tomb, sent to Montorio, bidding his son return home. Joyfully did Fleur, all unknowing what had passed, obey the summons, and when, after greeting and salutation offered to his parents, he asked for Blanchefleur, and no man dared to answer him, he ran to her mother's chamber and asked where was Blanchefleur, whom he had left there.
'Fleur,' said the mother, 'I know not where she is.'
'Mock me not,' cried he, 'but say where is she whom for these three long weeks I have not seen?'
Then said the lady, 'Blanchefleur is dead and buried.'
At these words spoken Fleur fell stunned and senseless as though from a heavy blow, and the mother in her terror gave a cry, which, being heard throughout the court, brought the King and Queen running in, to behold with horror and dismay their child stretched lifeless on the ground.
When at length Fleur came to himself, neither prayers nor threats availed to calm the violence of his grief, but when he begged to see his beloved's tomb, the Queen his mother led him by the hand to the vault where she was supposed to lie; and, when Fleur read the golden letters that told how Blanchefleur lay within the tomb, he thrice fell fainting on it, and when at length his spirit came again, he cried, kneeling upon the tomb, 'Alas, my Blanchefleur! why have you forsaken me? We who lived and loved, should we not have died together? Woe, woe is me thus left without my love; Oh, cruel Death, to take my dear away! Why tarry now? come, take my life, or I myself will take it, and so pass to those bright fields of light where dwells the soul of Blanchefleur amid the flowers!'
After this lament Fleur arose, and drawing a golden stilus from its case, he said, 'This stilus, her parting gift, and all now left to me of Blanchefleur, shall be my comfort by taking me from a world in which without her I cannot bear to live.' So saying, Fleur would have stabbed himself to the heart with the golden stilus, but the Queen his mother tore it from his hand, crying: 'What madness were it to lose your life for love! Be well assured that never thus could you come to Blanchefleur in her flowery meads; rather would you be sent to dwell in eternal grief and pain with Pyramus and Thisbe, who for a like offence were condemned to seek forever the comfort that they shall never find in love: take heart, therefore, my child, for I have skill to call your Blanchefleur back to life.'