wrote a “Perceval,” or “Conte du Graal,” which must also have been intended to please Mary, and which is interesting because, while the “Lancelot” gave the twelfth-century idea of courteous love, the “Perceval” gave the twelfth-century idea of religious mystery.  Mary was certainly concerned with both.  “It is for this same Mary,” says Gaston Paris, “that Walter of Arras undertook his poem of ‘Eracle’; she was the object of the songs of the troubadours as well as of their French imitators; for her use also she caused the translations of books of piety like Genesis, or the paraphrase at great length, in verse, of the psalm ‘Eructavit.’”

With her theories of courteous love, every one is more or less familiar if only from the ridicule of Cervantes and the follies of Quixote, who, though four hundred years younger, was Lancelot’s child; but we never can know how far she took herself and her laws of love seriously, and to speculate on so deep a subject as her seriousness is worse than useless, since she would herself have been as uncertain as her lovers were.  Visionary as the courtesy was, the Holy Grail was as practical as any bric-a-brac that has survived of the time.  The mystery of Perceval is like that of the Gothic cathedral, illuminated by floods of light, and enlivened by rivers of colour.  Unfortunately Christian never told what he meant by the fragment, itself a mystery, in which he narrated the story of the knight who saw the Holy Grail, because the knight, who was warned, as usual, to ask no questions, for once, unlike most knights, obeyed the warning when he should have disregarded it.  As knights-errant necessarily did the wrong thing in order to make their adventures possible, Perceval’s error cannot be in itself mysterious, nor was the castle in any way mysterious where the miracle occurred, It appeared to him to be the usual castle, and he saw nothing unusual in the manner of his reception by the usual old lord, or in the fact that both seated themselves quite simply before the hall-fire with the usual household.  Then, as though it were an everyday habit, the Holy Grail was brought in (Bartsch, “Chrestomathie,” 183-85, ed. 1895):—­

Et leans avail luminaire
 Si grant con l’an le porrait faire
 De chandoiles a un ostel. 
 Que qu’il parloient d’un et d’el,
 Uns vallez d’une chambre vint
 Qui une blanche lance tint
 Ampoigniee par le mi lieu. 
 Si passa par endroit le feu
 Et cil qui al feu se seoient,
 Et tuit cil de leans veoient
 La lance blanche et le fer blanc. 
 S’issoit une gote de sang
 Del fer de la lance au sommet,
 Et jusqu’a la main au vaslet
 Coroit cele gote vermoille.... 
 A tant dui autre vaslet vindrent
 Qui chandeliers an lors mains tindrent
 De fin or ovrez a neel. 
 Li vaslet estoient moult bel
 Qui les chandeliers aportoient. 
 An chacun chandelier ardoient
 Dous chandoiles a tot le mains. 
 Un graal antre ses dous mains