white or black sails to announce the
result of his entreaty that she should come, his deception, and the
death of his true love upon her lover's corpse. Early in the thirteenth
century was composed a long prose romance, often rehandled and
expanded, upon the same subject, in which Iseut and Tristan meet at
the last moment and die in a close embrace.

_Le Chevrefeuille_ (The Honeysuckle), one of several _lais_ by a
twelfth-century poetess, MARIE, living in England, but a native of
France, tells gracefully of an assignation of Tristan and Iseut, their
meeting in the forest, and their sorrowful farewell. Marie de France
wrote with an exquisite sense of the generosities and delicacy of
the heart, and with a skill in narrative construction which was rare
among the poets of her time. In _Les Deux Amants_, the manly pride
of passion, which in a trial of strength declines the adventitious
aid of a reviving potion, is rewarded by the union in death of the
lover and his beloved. In _Yonec_ and in _Lanval_ tales of love and
chivalry are made beautiful by lore of fairyland, in which the element
of wonder is subdued to beauty. But the most admirable poem by Marie
de France is unquestionably her _Eliduc_. The Breton knight Eliduc
is passionately loved by Guilliadon, the only daughter of the old
King of Exeter, on whose behalf he had waged battle. Her tokens of
affection, girdle and ring, are received by Eliduc in silence; for,
though her passion is returned, he has left in Brittany, unknown to
Guilliadon, a faithful wife. Very beautiful is the self-transcending
love of the wife, who restores her rival from seeming death, and
herself retires into a convent. The lovers are wedded, and live in
charity to the poor, but with a trouble at the heart for the wrong
that they have done. In the end they part; Eliduc embraces the
religious life, and the two loving women are united as sisters in
the same abbey.

Wace, in his romance of the _Brut_ (1155), which renders into verse
the _Historia_ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes the earliest mention
of the Round Table. Whether the Arthurian legends be of Celtic or
of French origin--and the former seems probable--the French romances
of King Arthur owe but the crude material to Celtic sources; they
may be said to begin with CHRETIEN DE TROYES, whose lost poem on
Tristan was composed about 1160. Between that date and 1175 he wrote
his _Erec et Enide_ (a tale known to us through Tennyson's idyll of
Ger