ord. But they very soon received the care of M. Paulin
Paris, the most indefatigable student that in a century of examination
of the older European literature any European country has produced,
and after more than half a century of enthusiastic resuscitation by M.
Paris, by his son M. Gaston, and by others, the whole body of them has
been thoroughly overhauled and put at the disposal of those who do not
care to read the original, in the four volumes of the remodelled
edition of M. Leon Gautier's _Epopees Francaises_, while perhaps a
majority of the actual texts are in print. This is as well, for though
a certain monotony is always charged against the _chansons de
geste_[16] by those who do not love them, and may be admitted to some
extent even by those who do, there are few which have not a more or
less distinct character of their own; and even the generic character
is not properly to be perceived until a considerable number have been
studied.

[Footnote 16: This monotony almost follows from the title. For _geste_
in the French is not merely the equivalent of _gesta_, "deeds." It is
used for the record of those deeds, and then for the whole class or
family of performances and records of them. In this last sense the
_gestes_ are in chief three--those of the king, of Doon de Mayence,
and of Garin de Montglane--besides smaller ones.]

[Sidenote: _Their distinguishing character._]

The old habit of reading this division of romance in late and
travestied versions naturally and necessarily obscured the curious
traits of community in form and matter that belong to it, and indeed
distinguish it from almost all other departments of literature of the
imaginative kind. Its members are frequently spoken of as "the
Charlemagne Romances"; and, as a matter of fact, most of them do come
into connection with the great prince of the second race in one way or
another. Yet Bodel's phrase of _matiere de France_[17] is happier. For
they are all still more directly connected with French history, seen
through a romantic lens; and even the late and half-burlesque _Hugues
Capet_, even the extremely interesting and partly contemporary set on
the Crusades, as well as such "little _gestes_" as that of the
Lorrainers, _Garin le Loherain_ and the rest, and the three "great
_gestes_" of the king, of the southern hero William of Orange
(sometimes called the _geste_ of Montglane), and of the family of Doon
de Mayence, arrange themselves with no diffi