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Updated: May 5, 2025
The poets and story writers called themselves Trouveres, and they invented the fabliaux, the dramatic mysteries and romances of ancient chivalry. Born of this legend were some of the best known of modern romances. The word romance, which in the early history of France was used to distinguish the common dialect from the Latin, was later applied to all imaginative and inventive tales.
Some are to be met with in the old fabliaux, in Boccaccio, and in Ariosto, and these very tales which have charmed our infancy, passing from nation to nation through channels frequently unknown, are now familiar to the memory and form the delight of the imagination of half the inhabitants of the globe.
Slight indications, very easily verified, are all that may be set down here; a formal and detailed proof would be altogether too dangerous. Thus, for instance, the old Fabliaux the Farces of the fifteenth century, the story-tellers of the sixteenth reveal one of the sides, one of the veins, so to speak, of our literature.
From the poem entitled "Alexander," the name of Alexandrine verse came to be applied to the measure in which it was written. Another class of romances of chivalry related to the court of Charlemagne. The Fabliaux in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were largely composed of tales of ludicrous adventures.
It includes the first great emotional poetry of the modern world the sense of the greatness and tragedy of human passion has perhaps never been expressed in more moving terms than in the Tristan and Iseult of Thomas or Beroul but it also includes the mordant satire of the Renard poetry and of Jean de Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the Fabliaux.
They are a medley of crude equivocalities, of the grossness of the fabliaux, of Rabelais, and of the delicate preciosity of the seventeenth century.
Besides, this story, as well as that of Grissel and many similar ones, is intended to prove that woman's truth and patience will at last triumph over man's abuse of his superior power, while other novels and fabliaux are, on the other hand, true satires on woman's inconsistency and cunning.
The view of the lake of Bienne, some music of Rossini's, the Madonna of Murillo's now in the possession of General Soult, Lescombat's letters, a few sayings scattered through collections of anecdotes; but most of all the prayers of religious ecstatics, and passages in our fabliaux, these things alone have power to carry me back to the divine heights of my first love.
During a century and a half, from 1150 to 1300, emperors, princes, barons, priests, and minstrels vied with each other in translating and producing lays of love, satiric fables, sacred legends, fabliaux, and metrical romances. Some of the bards were poor, and recited their songs from court to court; but many of them sang merely for pleasure when their swords were unemployed.
Another species of poetry peculiar to this period had at least the merit of being exceedingly amusing. This was the fabliaux, tales written in verse in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They are treasures of invention, simplicity, and gayety, of which other nations can furnish no instances, except by borrowing from the French.
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