a beautiful blue bird, nightly slipped through the barred windows into the arms of his mistress.  But the jealous husband had drawn barbed wire across the window, and the lover, flying away at dawn, bled to death before the eyes of his grief-stricken lady.  The jongleur would tell of the knight who had fallen passionately in love with a beautiful damsel of whom he had but caught a passing glimpse; month after month he worked at digging an underground passage; every night brought him a little nearer to her bower—­she could distinctly hear the dull sounds of his burrowing—­until at last he rose through the ground and took her into his arms.  These and similar tales, doubtless all of them of Celtic origin—­preserved for us in the charming “Lais” of Marie de France—­brought tears to the eyes of many a lonely wife and gave shape to her vague longing.  There was no reason why a man, and a lover to boot, should not transform himself nightly into a blue bird.  Those simple stories in verse fulfilled every desire of the heart; imagination supplied in the north what the south offered in abundant reality.  But Marie de France, the first woman novelist of Europe (about the end of the twelfth century), deserves to be remembered for another reason; she was the first poet voicing woman’s longing for love and romance—­woman’s adventure.  The charming Lai du Chevrefoile ("The Story of the Honeysuckle”) relates an episode from the loves of Tristan and Isolde, the famous lovers, legendary even at that time.  Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Fleur and Blanchefleur—­these were the admired and mythical lovers of whom the poets sang and dreamed.  All the world knew their adventures; all the world repeated them again and again, reverently preserving the identical words and yet unconsciously remoulding them.  At the recital of their loves, hand clasped hand; “on that day we read no more,” confessed Dante’s ill-fated lovers.

The longing, so characteristic of the North of Europe, to see the world and meet with adventures, was in Provence and Italy less pronounced.  These favoured climes possessed so many of the things dreamed of and desired by other countries.  Events, strange as fiction, actually occurred.  Count Raimond of Roussillon, for instance, imprisoned his wife in a tower because the troubadour, Guillem of Cabestann, was in love with and beloved by her.  He waylaid the lover, killed him, cut his heart out of his breast and sent it, roasted, to his countess.  When she had partaken of it, he showed her Guillem’s head and asked her how she had enjoyed the dish.  “So much that no other food shall ever pass my lips,” she replied, casting herself out of the window.  When the story spread abroad, the great nobles rose up in arms against Raimond, and even the King of Aragon made war on him.  He was caught and imprisoned for life, and his estates were confiscated.  Guillem and the countess were buried in the church, and for a long time after men and women travelled long distances to kneel at their grave.  The charming poems of Melusine and the beautiful Magelone, which to this day delight the reader, were composed during the same period.