In these classes maybe said to be summed up the literature of feudal chivalry in France. They were all, except perhaps the last, composed by one class of persons, the trouvères, and performed by another, the jongleurs. The latter, General characteristics of early narrative. indeed, sometimes presumed to compose for himself, and was denounced as a troveor batard by the indignant members of the superior caste. They were all originally intended to be performed in the palais marberin of the baron to an audience of knights and ladies, and, when reading became more common, to be read by such persons. They dealt therefore chiefly, if not exclusively, with the class to whom they were addressed. The bourgeois and the villain, personages of political nonentity at the time of their early composition, come in for far slighter notice, although occasionally in the few curious instances we have mentioned, and others, persons of a class inferior to the seigneur play an important part. The habit of private wars and of insurrection against the sovereign supply the motives of the chanson de geste, the love of gallantry, adventure and foreign travel those of the romances Arthurian and miscellaneous. None of these motives much affected the lower classes, who were, with the early developed temper of the middle- and lower-class Frenchman, already apt to think and speak cynically enough of tournaments, courts, crusades and the other occupations of the nobility. The communal system was springing up, the towns were receiving royal encouragement as a counterpoise to the authority of the nobles. The corruptions and maladministration of the church attracted the satire rather of the citizens and peasantry who suffered by them, than of the Spread of literary taste. nobles who had less to fear and even something to gain. On the other hand, the gradual spread of learning, inaccurate and ill-digested perhaps, but still learning, not only opened up new classes of subjects, but opened them to new classes of persons. The thousands of students who flocked to the schools of Paris were not all princes or nobles. Hence there arose two new classes of literature, the first consisting of the embodiment of learning of one kind or other in the vulgar tongue. The other, one of the most remarkable developments of sportive literature which the world has seen, produced the second indigenous literary growth of which France can boast, namely, the fabliaux, and the almost more remarkable work which is an immense conglomerate of fabliaux, the great beast-epic of the Roman de Renart.
Fabliaux.—There are few literary products which have more originality and at the same time more diversity than the fabliau. The epic and the drama, even when they are independently produced, are similar in their main characteristics all the world over. But there is nothing in previous literature which exactly corresponds to the fabliau. It comes nearest to the Aesopic fable and its eastern origins or parallels. But differs from these in being less allegorical, less obviously moral (though a moral of some sort is usually if not always enforced), and in having a much more direct personal interest. It is in many degrees further removed from the parable, and many degrees nearer to the novel. The story is the first thing, the moral the second, and the latter is never suffered to interfere with the former. These observations apply only to the fabliaux, properly so called, but the term has been used with considerable looseness. The collectors of those interesting pieces, Barbazan, Méon, Le Grand d’Aussy, have included in their collections large numbers of miscellaneous pieces such as dits (rhymed descriptions of various objects, the most famous known author of which was Baudouin de Condé, 13th century), and débats (discussions between two persons or contrasts of the attributes of two things), sometimes even short romances, farces and mystery plays. Not that the fable proper—the prose classical beast-story of “Aesop”—was neglected. Marie de France—the poetess to be mentioned again for her more strictly poetical work—is the most literary of not a few writers who composed what were often, after the mysterious original poet, named Ysopets. Aesop, Phaedrus, Babrius were translated and imitated in Latin and in the vernacular by this class of writer, and some of the best known of “fablers” date from this time. The fabliau, on the other hand, according to the best definition of it yet achieved, is “the recital, generally comic, of a real or possible incident occurring in ordinary human life.” The comedy, it may be added, is usually of a satiric kind, and occupies itself with every class and rank of men, from the king to the villain. There is no limit to the variety of these lively verse-tales, which are invariably written in eight-syllabled couplets. Now the subject is the misadventure of two Englishmen, whose ignorance of the French language makes them confuse donkey and lamb; now it is the fortunes of an exceedingly foolish knight, who has an amiable and ingenious mother-in-law; now the deserved sufferings of an avaricious or ill-behaved priest; now the bringing of an ungrateful son to a better mind by the wisdom of babes and sucklings. Not a few of the Canterbury Tales are taken directly from fabliaux; indeed, Chaucer, with the possible exception of Prior, is our nearest approach to a fabliau-writer. At the other end of Europe the prose novels of Boccaccio and other Italian tale-tellers are largely based upon fabliaux. But their influence in their own country was the greatest. They were the first expression of the spirit which has since animated the most national and popular developments of French literature. Simple and unpretending as they are in form, the fabliaux announce not merely the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles and the Heptameron, L’Avocat Patelin, and Pantagruel, but also L’Avare and the Roman comique, Gil Blas and Candide. They indeed do more than merely prophesy the spirit of these great performances—they directly lead to them. The prose-tale and the farce are the direct outcomes of the fabliau, and the prose-tale and the farce once given, the novel and the comedy inevitably follow.
The special period of fabliau composition appears to have been the 12th and 13th centuries. It signifies on the one side the growth of a lighter and more sportive spirit than had yet prevailed, on another the rise in importance of Social importance of fabliaux. other and lower orders of men than the priest and the noble, on yet another the consciousness on the part of these lower orders of the defects of the two privileged classes, and of the shortcomings of the system of polity under which these privileged classes enjoyed their privileges. There is, however, in the fabliau proper not so very much of direct satire, this being indeed excluded by the definition given above, and by the thoroughly artistic spirit in which that definition is observed. The fabliaux are so numerous and so various that it is difficult to select any as specially representative. We may, however, mention, both as good examples and as interesting from their subsequent history, Le Vair Palfroi, treated in English by Leigh Hunt and by Peacock; Le Vilain Mire, the original consciously or unconsciously followed in Le Médecin malgré lui; Le Roi d’Angleterre et le jongleur d’Éli; La houce partie; Le Sot Chevalier, an indecorous but extremely amusing story; Les deux bordeors ribaus, a dialogue between two jongleurs of great literary interest, containing allusions to the chansons de geste and romances most in vogue; and Le vilain qui conquist paradis par plait, one of the numerous instances of what has unnecessarily puzzled moderns, the association in medieval times of sincere and unfeigned faith with extremely free handling of its objects. This lightheartedness in other subjects sometimes bubbled over into the fatrasie, an almost pure nonsense-piece, parent of the later amphigouri.
Roman de Renart.—If the fabliaux are not remarkable for direct satire, that element is supplied in more than compensating quantity by an extraordinary composition which is closely related to them. Le Roman de Renart, or History of Reynard the Fox, is a poem, or rather series of poems, which, from the end of the 12th to the middle of the 14th century, served the citizen poets of northern France, not merely as an outlet for literary expression, but also as a vehicle of satirical comment,—now on the general vices and weaknesses of humanity, now on the usual corruptions in church and state, now on the various historical events which occupied public attention from time to time. The enormous popularity of the subject is shown by the long vogue which it had, and by the empire which it exercised over generations of writers who differed from each other widely in style and temper. Nothing can be farther from the allegorical erudition, the political diatribes and the sermonizing moralities of the authors of Renart le Contre-fait than the sly naïveté of the writers of the earlier branches. Yet these and a long and unknown series of intermediate bards the fox-king pressed into his service, and it is scarcely too much to say that, during the two centuries of his reign, there was hardly a thought in the popular mind which, as it rose to the surface, did not find expression in an addition to the huge cycle of Renart.
We shall not deal with the controversies which have been raised as to the origin of the poem and its central idea. The latter may have been a travestie of real persons and actual events, or it may (and much more probably) have been an expression of thoughts and experiences which recur in every generation. France, the Netherlands and Germany have contended for the honour of producing Renart; French, Flemish, German and Latin for the honour of first describing him. It is sufficient to say that the spirit of the work seems to be more that of the borderland between France and Flanders than of any other district, and that, wherever the idea may have originally arisen, it was incomparably more fruitful in France than in any other country. The French poems which we possess on the subject amount in all to nearly 100,000 lines, independently of mere variations, but including the different versions of Renart le Contre-fait. This vast total is divided into four different poems. The most ancient and remarkable is that edited by Méon under the title of Roman du Renart, and containing, with some additions made by M. Chabaille, 37 branches and about 32,000 lines. It must not, however, be supposed that this total forms a continuous poem like the Aeneid or Paradise Lost. Part was pretty certainly written by Pierre de Saint-Cloud, but he was not the author of the whole. On the contrary, the separate branches are the work of different authors, hardly any of whom are known, and, but for their community of subject and to some extent of treatment, might be regarded as separate poems. The history of Renart, his victories over Isengrim, the wolf, Bruin, the bear, and his other unfortunate rivals, his family affection, his outwittings of King Noble the Lion and all the rest, are too well known to need fresh description here. It is perhaps in the subsequent poems, though they are far less known and much less amusing, that the hold which the idea of Renart had obtained on the mind of northern France, and the ingenious uses to which it was put, are best shown. The first of these is Le Couronnement Renart, a poem of between 3000 and 4000 lines, attributed, on no grounds whatever, to the poetess Marie de France, and describing how the hero by his ingenuity got himself crowned king. This poem already shows signs of direct moral application and generalizing. These are still more apparent in Renart le Nouvel, a composition of some 8000 lines, finished in the year 1288 by the Fleming Jacquemart Giélée. Here the personification, of which, in noticing the Roman de la rose, we shall soon have to give extended mention, becomes evident. Instead of or at least beside the lively personal Renart who used to steal sausages, set Isengrim fishing with his tail, or make use of Chanticleer’s comb for a purpose for which it was certainly never intended, we have Renardie, an abstraction of guile and hypocrisy, triumphantly prevailing over other and better qualities. Lastly, as the Roman de la rose of William of Lorris is paralleled by Renart le Nouvel, so its continuation by Jean de Meung is paralleled by the great miscellany of Renart le Contre-fait, which, even in its existing versions, extends to fully 50,000 lines. Here we have, besides floods of miscellaneous erudition and discourse, political argument of the most direct and important kind. The wrongs of the lower orders are bitterly urged. They are almost openly incited to revolt; and it is scarcely too much to say, as M. Lenient has said, that the closely following Jacquerie is but a practical carrying out of the doctrines of the anonymous satirists of Renart le Contre-fait, one of whom (if indeed there was more than one) appears to have been a clerk of Troyes.
Early Lyric Poetry.—Side by side with these two forms of literature, the epics and romances of the higher classes, and the fabliau, which, at least in its original, represented rather the feelings of the lower, there grew up a third kind, consisting of purely lyrical poetry. The song literature of medieval France is extremely abundant and beautiful. From the 12th to the 15th century it received constant accessions, some signed, some anonymous, some purely popular in their character, some the work of more learned writers, others again produced by members of the aristocracy. Of the latter class it may fairly be said that the catalogue of royal and noble authors boasts few if any names superior to those of Thibaut de Champagne, king of Navarre at the beginning of the 13th century, and Charles d’Orléans, the father of Louis XII., at the beginning of the 15th. Although much of this lyric poetry is anonymous, the more popular part of it almost entirely so, yet M. Paulin Paris was able to enumerate some hundreds of French chansonniers between the 11th and the 13th century. The earliest song literature, chiefly known in the delightful collection of Bartsch (Altfranzösische Romanzen und Pastourellen), is mainly sentimental in character. The collector divides it under the two heads of romances and pastourelles, the former being usually the celebration of the loves of a noble knight and maiden, and recounting how Belle Doette or Eglantine or Oriour sat at her windows or in the tourney gallery, or embroidering silk and samite in her chamber, with her thoughts on Gerard or Guy or Henry,—the latter somewhat monotonous but naïve and often picturesque recitals, very often in the first person, of the meeting of an errant knight or minstrel with a shepherdess, and his cavalier but not always successful wooing. With these, some of which date from the 12th century, may be contrasted, at the other end of the medieval period, the more varied and popular collection dating in their present form from the 15th century, and published in 1875 by M. Gaston Paris. In both alike, making allowance for the difference of their age and the state of the language, may be noticed a charming lyrical faculty and great skill in the elaboration of light and suitable metres. Especially remarkable is the abundance of refrains of an admirably melodious kind. It is said that more than 500 of these exist. Among the lyric writers of these four centuries whose names are known may be mentioned Audefroi le Bastard Audefroit le Bastard.
Thibaut de Champagne. (12th century), the author of the charming song of Belle Idoine, and others no way inferior, Quesnes de Bethune, the ancestor of Sully, whose song-writing inclines to a satirical cast in many instances, the Vidame de Chartres, Charles d’Anjou, King John of Brienne, the châtelain de Coucy, Gace Bruslé, Colin Muset, while not a few writers mentioned elsewhere—Guyot de Provins, Adam de la Halle, Jean Bodel and others—were also lyrists. But none of them, except perhaps Audefroi, can compare with Thibaut IV. (1201-1253), who united by his possessions and ancestry a connexion with the north and the south, and who employed the methods of both districts but used the language of the north only. Thibaut was supposed to be the lover of Blanche of Castile, the mother of St Louis, and a great deal of his verse is concerned with his love for her. But while knights and nobles were thus employing lyric poetry in courtly and sentimental verse, lyric forms were being freely employed by others, both of high and low birth, for more general purposes. Blanche and Thibaut themselves came in for contemporary lampoons, and both at this time and in the times immediately following, a cloud of writers composed light verse, sometimes of a lyric sometimes of a narrative kind, and sometimes in a mixture of both. By far the Rutebœf. most remarkable of these is Rutebœuf (a name which is perhaps a nickname), the first of a long series of French poets to whom in recent days the title Bohemian has been applied, who passed their lives between gaiety and misery, and celebrated their lot in both conditions with copious verse. Rutebœuf is among the earliest French writers who tell us their personal history and make personal appeals. But he does not confine himself to these. He discusses the history of his times, upbraids the nobles for their desertion of the Latin empire of Constantinople, considers the expediency of crusading, inveighs against the religious orders, and takes part in the disputes between the pope and the king. He composes pious poetry too, and in at least one poem takes care to distinguish between the church which he venerates and the corrupt churchmen whom he lampoons. Besides Rutebœuf the most characteristic figure of his class and time (about the middle of the 13th century) is Adam de la Halle.
Lais. Adam de la Halle, commonly called the Hunchback of Arras. The earlier poems of Adam are of a sentimental character, the later ones satirical and somewhat ill-tempered. Such, for instance, is his invective against his native city. But his chief importance consists in his jeux, the Jeu de la feuillie, the Jeu de Robin et Marion, dramatic compositions which led the way to the regular dramatic form. Indeed the general tendency of the 13th century is to satire, fable and farce, even more than to serious or sentimental poetry. We should perhaps except the lais, the chief of which are known under the name of Marie de France. These lays are exclusively Breton in origin, though not in application, and the term seems originally to have had reference rather to the music to which they were sung than to the manner or matter of the pieces. Some resemblance to these lays may perhaps be traced in the genuine Breton songs published by M. Luzel. The subjects of the lais are indifferently taken from the Arthurian cycle, from ancient story, and from popular tradition, and, at any rate in Marie’s hands, they give occasion for some passionate, and in the modern sense really romantic, poetry. The most famous of all is the Lay of the Honeysuckle, traditionally assigned to Sir Tristram.
Satiric and Didactic Works.—Among the direct satirists of the middle ages, one of the earliest and foremost is Guyot de Provins, a monk of Clairvaux and Cluny, whose Bible, as he calls it, contains an elaborate satire on the time (the beginning of the 13th century), and who was imitated by others, especially Hugues de Brégy. The same spirit soon betrayed itself in curious travesties of the romances of chivalry, and sometimes invades the later specimens of these romances themselves. One of the earliest examples of this travesty is the remarkable composition entitled Audigier. This poem, half fabliau and half romance, is not so much an instance of the heroi-comic poems which afterwards found so much favour in Italy and elsewhere, as a direct and ferocious parody of the Carlovingian epic. The hero Audigier is a model of cowardice and disloyalty; his father and mother, Turgibus and Rainberge, are deformed and repulsive. The exploits of the hero himself are coarse and hideous failures, and the whole poem can only be taken as a counterblast to the spirit of chivalry. Elsewhere a trouvère, prophetic of Rabelais, describes a vast battle between all the nations of the world, the quarrel being suddenly atoned by the arrival of a holy man bearing a huge flagon of wine. Again, we have the history of a solemn crusade undertaken by the citizens of a country town against the neighbouring castle. As erudition and the fancy for allegory gained ground, satire naturally availed itself of the opportunity thus afforded it; the disputes of Philippe le Bel with the pope and the Templars had an immense literary influence, partly in the concluding portions of the Renart, partly in the Roman de la rose, still to be mentioned, and partly in other satiric allegories of which the chief is the romance of Fauvel, attributed to François de Rues. The hero of this is an allegorical personage, half man and half horse, signifying the union of bestial degradation with human ingenuity and cunning. Fauvel (the name, it may be worth while to recall, occurs in Langland) is a divinity in his way. All the personages of state, from kings and popes to mendicant friars, pay their court to him.
But this serious and discontented spirit betrays itself also in compositions which are not parodies or travesties in form. One of the latest, if not absolutely the latest (for Cuvelier’s still later Chronique de Du Guesclin is only a Baudouin de Sebourc. most interesting imitation of the chanson form adapted to recent events), of the chansons de geste is Baudouin de Sebourc, one of the members of the great romance or cycle of romances dealing with the crusades, and entitled Le Chevalier au Cygne. Baudouin de Sebourc dates from the early years of the 14th century. It is strictly a chanson de geste in form, and also in the general run of its incidents. The hero is dispossessed of his inheritance by the agency of traitors, fights his battle with the world and its injustice, and at last prevails over his enemy Gaufrois, who has succeeded in obtaining the kingdom of Friesland and almost that of France. Gaufrois has as his assistants two personages who were very popular in the poetry of the time,—viz., the Devil, and Money. These two sinister figures pervade the fabliaux, tales and fantastic literature generally of the time. M. Lenient, the historian of French satire, has well remarked that a romance as long as the Renart might be spun out of the separate short poems of this period which have the Devil for hero, and many of which form a very interesting transition between the fabliau and the mystery. But the Devil is in one respect a far inferior hero to Renart. He has an adversary in the Virgin, who constantly upsets his best-laid schemes, and who does not always treat him quite fairly. The abuse of usury at the time, and the exactions of the Jews and Lombards, were severely felt, and Money itself, as personified, figures largely in the popular literature of the time.
Roman de la Rose.—A work of very different importance from all of these, though with seeming touches of the same spirit, a work which deserves to take rank among the most important of the middle ages, is the Roman de la rose,—one William of Lorris. of the few really remarkable books which is the work of two authors, and that not in collaboration but in continuation one of the other. The author of the earlier part was Guillaume de Lorris, who lived in the first half of the 13th century; the author of the later part was Jean de Meung, who was born about the middle of that century, and whose part in the Roman dates at least from its extreme end. This great poem exhibits in its two parts very different characteristics, which yet go to make up a not inharmonious whole. It is a love poem, and yet it is satire. But both gallantry and raillery are treated in an entirely allegorical spirit; and this allegory, while it makes the poem tedious to hasty appetites of to-day, was exactly what gave it its charm in the eyes of the middle ages. It might be described as an Ars amoris crossed with a Quodlibeta. This mixture exactly hit the taste of the time, and continued to hit it for two centuries and a half. When its obvious and gallant meaning was attacked by moralists and theologians, it was easy to quote the example of the Canticles, and to furnish esoteric explanations of the allegory. The writers of the 16th century were never tired of quoting and explaining it. Antoine de Baïf, indeed, gave the simple and obvious meaning, and declared that “La rose c’est d’amours le guerdon gracieux”; but Marot, on the other hand, gives us the choice of four mystical interpretations,—the rose being either the state of wisdom, the state of grace, the state of eternal happiness or the Virgin herself. We cannot here analyse this celebrated poem. It is sufficient to say that the lover meets all sorts of obstacles in his pursuit of the rose, though he has for a guide the metaphorical personage Bel-Accueil. The early part, which belongs to William of Lorris, is remarkable for its gracious Jean de Meung. and fanciful descriptions. Forty years after Lorris’s death, Jean de Meung completed it in an entirely different spirit. He keeps the allegorical form, and indeed introduces two new personages of importance, Nature and Faux-semblant. In the mouths of these personages and of another, Raison, he puts the most extraordinary mixture of erudition and satire. At one time we have the history of classical heroes, at another theories against the hoarding of money, about astronomy, about the duty of mankind to increase and multiply. Accounts of the origin of loyalty, which would have cost the poet his head at some periods of history, and even communistic ideas, are also to be found here. In Faux-semblant we have a real creation of the theatrical hypocrite. All this miscellaneous and apparently incongruous material in fact explains the success of the poem. It has the one characteristic which has at all times secured the popularity of great works of literature. It holds the mirror up firmly and fully to its age. As we find in Rabelais the characteristics of the Renaissance, in Montaigne those of the sceptical reaction from Renaissance and reform alike, in Molière those of the society of France after Richelieu had tamed and levelled it, in Voltaire and Rousseau respectively the two aspects of the great revolt,—so there are to be found in the Roman de la rose the characteristics of the later middle age, its gallantry, its mysticism, its economical and social troubles and problems, its scholastic methods of thought, its naïve acceptance as science of everything that is written, and at the same time its shrewd and indiscriminate criticism of much that the age of criticism has accepted without doubt or question. The Roman de la rose, as might be supposed, set the example of an immense literature of allegorical poetry, which flourished more and more until the Renaissance. Some of these poems we have already mentioned, some will have to be considered under the head of the 15th century. But, as usually happens in such cases and was certain to happen in this case, the allegory which has seemed tedious to many, even in the original, became almost intolerable in the majority of the imitations.
We have observed that, at least in the later section of the Roman de la rose, there is observable a tendency to import into the poem indiscriminate erudition. This tendency is now remote from our poetical habits; but in its own Early didactic verse. day it was only the natural result of the use of poetry for all literary purposes. It was many centuries before prose became recognized as the proper vehicle for instruction, and at a very early date verse was used as well for educational and moral as for recreative and artistic purposes. French verse was the first born of all literary mediums in modern European speech, and the resources of ancient learning were certainly not less accessible in France than in any other country. Dante, in his De vulgari eloquio, acknowledges the excellence of the didactic writers of the Langue d’Oïl. We have already alluded to the Bestiary of Philippe de Thaun, a Norman trouvère who lived and wrote in England during the reign of Henry Beauclerc. Besides the Bestiary, which from its dedication to Queen Adela has been conjectured to belong to the third decade of the 12th century, Philippe wrote also in French a Liber de creaturis, both works being translated from the Latin. These works of mystical and apocryphal physics and zoology became extremely popular in the succeeding centuries, and were frequently imitated. A moralizing turn was also given to them, which was much helped by the importation of several miscellanies of Oriental origin, partly tales, partly didactic in character, the most celebrated of which is the Roman des sept sages, which, under that title and the variant of Dolopathos, received repeated treatment from French writers both in prose and verse. The odd notion of an Ovide moralisé used to be ascribed to Philippe de Vitry, bishop of Meaux (1291?-1391?), a person complimented by Petrarch, but is now assigned to a certain Chrétien Legonais. Art, too, soon demanded exposition in verse, as well as science. The favourite pastime of the chase was repeatedly dealt with, notably in the Roi Modus (1325), mixed prose and verse; the Deduits de la chasse (1387), of Gaston de Foix, prose; and the Tresor de Venerie of Hardouin (1394), verse. Very soon didactic verse extended itself to all the arts and sciences. Vegetius and his military precepts had found a home in French octosyllables as early as the 12th century; the end of the same age saw the ceremonies of knighthood solemnly versified, and napes (maps) du monde also soon appeared. At last, in 1245, Gautier of Metz translated from various Latin works into French verse a sort of encyclopaedia, while another, incongruous but known as L’Image du monde, exists from the same century. Profane knowledge was not the only subject which exercised didactic poets at this time. Religious handbooks and commentaries on the scriptures were common in the 13th and following centuries, and, under the title of Castoiements, Enseignements and Doctrinaux, moral treatises became common. The most famous of these, the Castoiement d’un père à son fils, falls under the class, already mentioned, of works due to oriental influence, being derived from the Indian Panchatantra. In the 14th century the influence of the Roman de la rose helped to render moral verse frequent and popular. The same century, moreover, which witnessed these developments of well-intentioned if not always Artificial forms of verse. judicious erudition witnessed also a considerable change in lyrical poetry. Hitherto such poetry had chiefly been composed in the melodious but unconstrained forms of the romance and the pastourelle. In the 14th century the writers of northern France subjected themselves to severer rules. In this age arose the forms which for so long a time were to occupy French singers,—the ballade, the rondeau, the rondel, the triolet, the chant royal and others. These received considerable alterations as time went on. We possess not a few Artes poëticae, such as that of Eustache Deschamps at the end of the 14th century, that formerly ascribed to Henri de Croy and now to Molinet at the end of the 15th, and that of Thomas Sibilet in the 16th, giving particulars of them, and these particulars show considerable changes. Thus the term rondeau, which since Villon has been chiefly limited to a poem of 15 lines, where the 9th and 15th repeat the first words of the first, was originally applied both to the rondel, a poem of 13 or 14 lines, where the first two are twice repeated integrally, and to the triolet, one of 8 only, where the first line occurs three times and the second twice. The last is an especially popular metre, and is found where we should least expect it, in the dialogue of the early farces, the speakers making up triolets between them. As these three forms are closely connected, so are the ballade and the chant royal, the latter being an extended and more stately and difficult version of the former, and the characteristic of both being the identity of rhyme and refrain in the several stanzas. It is quite uncertain at what time these fashions were first cultivated, but the earliest poets who appear to have practised them extensively were born at the close of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th centuries. Of these Guillaume de Machault (c. 1300-1380) is the oldest. He has left us 80,000 verses, never yet completely printed. Eustache Deschamps (c. 1340-c. 1410) was nearly as prolific, but more fortunate as more meritorious, the Société des anciens Textes having at last provided a complete edition of him. Froissart the historian (1333-1410) was also an agreeable and prolific poet. Deschamps, the most famous as a poet of the three, has left us nearly 1200 ballades and nearly 200 rondeaux, besides much other verse all manifesting very considerable poetical powers. Less known but not less noteworthy, and perhaps the earliest of all, is Jehannot de Lescurel, whose personality is obscure, and most of whose works are lost, but whose remains are full of grace. Froissart appears to have had many countrymen in Hainault and Brabant who devoted themselves to the art of versification; and the Livre des cent ballades of the Marshal Boucicault (1366-1421) and his friends—c. 1390—shows that the French gentleman of the 14th century was as apt at the ballade as his Elizabethan peer in England was at the sonnet.