Oliver, Roland holding out his glove to his Lord God at the moment of
death, etc. The _chansons de geste_ were numerous. Some
commemorated Charlemagne and his comrades, others Arthur, King of
Britain, and his knights, others, as a rule less interesting, were about
the heroes of antiquity, Troy, Alexander, not well known but not
forgotten. The _chansons de geste_ permeated the whole of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries.

JOINVILLE; VILLEHARDOUIN.--In the thirteenth century appeared an
historian, Joinville, friend of St. Louis, who described the crusade in
which he took part with his master. He possessed _naivete_, grace,
naturalness, and picturesqueness. Villehardouin, who described the fourth
crusade, in which he played his part, was a realist--exact, precise,
luminous--in whom the strangeness and grandeur of the things he had
witnessed sometimes inspired a true nobility, simple enough but
singularly impressive.

THE TROUBADOURS.--Lyric poetry barely existed during these centuries
except south of the Loire, in the Latin country, among the poets called
troubadours; nevertheless, in the north, the noble Count Thibaut of
Champagne, to cite only one, wrote songs possessing amiable inspiration
and happily turned. Beside him must be instanced the highly remarkable
Ruteboeuf, narrator, elegiast, lyric orator, admirably gifted, who, to be
a great poet, only needed to live in a more favourable period and to have
at his disposition a more flexible language, one more abundant and more
widely elaborated.

_THE ROMANCES OF RENARD_.--In the fourteenth century, the _Romances of
Renard_ enjoyed remarkably wide popularity and multiplied in
abundance. Each was like a fable by La Fontaine expanded to the