hem has the peculiar charm, so none has the technical
disqualification (if that be not too strong a word) of _Aucassin et
Nicolette_. The first, shortest, and, save for one or two points, least
remarkable, _L'Empereur Constant_, is a very much abbreviated and in
more than one sense prosaic version of the story out of which Mr.
William Morris made his delightful _The Man Born to be King_. Probably
of Greek or Greek-Eastern origin, it begins with an astrological passage
in which the Emperor, childless except for a girl, becomes informed of
the imminent birth of a man-child, who shall marry his daughter and
succeed him. He discovers the, as it seems, luckless baby; has it
brought to him, and with his own hand attempts to disembowel it, but
allows himself, most improbably,[76] to be dissuaded from finishing the
operation. The benevolent knight who has prevented the completion of the
crime takes the infant to a monastery, where (after a quaint scene of
haggling about fees with the surgeon) the victim is patched up, grows to
be a fine youth, and comes across the Emperor, to whom the abbot
guilelessly, but in this case naturally enough,[77] betrays the secret.
The Emperor's murderous thoughts as naturally revive, and the
frustration of them by means of the Princess's falling in love with the
youth, the changing of "the letters of Bellerophon," and the Emperor's
resignation to the inevitable, follow the same course as in the English
poem. The latter part is better than the earlier; and the writer is
evidently (as how should he not be?) a novice; but his work is the kind
of experiment from which better things will come.

[Sidenote: _Le Roi Flore et la Belle Jehane._]

These marks of the novice are even more noticeable in a much longer
story, _Le Roi Flore et la Belle Jehane_, which is found not only in the
same printed volume, but in the same original MS. The fault of this is
curious, and--if not to a mere reader for pastime, to a student of
fiction--extremely interesting. It is one not at all unknown at the
present day, and capable of being used as an argument in favour of the
doctrine of the Unities: that is to say, the mixture, by arbitrary and
violent process, of two stories which have nothing whatever to do with
each other, except that they are, wilfully and with no reason, buckled
together at the end. The first, thin and uninteresting enough, is of a
certain King Florus, who has a wife, dearly beloved, but barren. After
s