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Suzette arrived in an entirely new set of garments the "geste" had altered, she said, one had to have a different look, and she was sure the autumn fashions would be even more pronounced. "As you can readily understand, my friend, one cannot be démodé, dans le metier, especially in war time! Naturally I agreed with her .
The book is a harmless picaresque, a geste of innocent rogue-errantry; its place is with Lavengro and The Cloister and the Hearth, in that ancient, endless order of tales which link up age with age and land with land in the unaltering, unfrontiered fellowship of the road that kept the spirit of poetry alive through the Dark Ages.
Various derivations of the Latin name "Tergeste" have been suggested, of which perhaps the most probable is from the Celtic "twr," water or sea, and "geste," colony, establishment. The fact that it was the only city held by the Carni on the sea-coast increases the probability.
Even when the modern languages entered into the inheritance of Latin and Greek, verse held to its ancestral privileges, and the brief tale took the form of the ballad, and the longer narrative called itself a chanson de geste.
Read, for instance, the ballads of the "merrie greenwood men," which gradually collected into the Geste of Robin Hood, and you will understand better, perhaps, than from reading many histories what the common people of England felt and thought while their lords and masters were busy with impossible metrical romances. In these songs speaks the heart of the English folk.
Robert himself could not have explained why grief should have driven him to his father's cigars-box. Perhaps it was just a beau geste of defiance, or a reminder that one day he too would be grown up and free. At any rate, it was still a very large cigar. Though he puffed at it painstakingly, blowing the smoke far out of the window so as to escape detection, the result was not encouraging.
As might be expected, there is much mention of Wicking adventure and of maritime warfare in Saxo. Bertin and the court-poets have lovingly described a ship with gold-broidered sails, gilt masts, and red-dyed rigging. One of his ships has, like the ships in the Chansons de Geste, a carbuncle for a lantern at the masthead. Hedin signals to Frode by a shield at the masthead.
The romance in verse by Baudouin de Sebourc, printed in recent years, was a parody of the Chansons de Geste. In the Moniage Guillaume, and especially in the Moniage Rainouart, in which there is a kind of giant, and occasionally a comic giant, there are situations and scenes which remind us of Rabelais.
One can only conjecture; but my conjecture is that there had always been texts copied out in successive generations in the hands of the curious; for example, in the hands of the Cyclic poets, who knew our Iliad as the late French Cyclic poets knew the earlier Chansons de Geste.
M. Ghil has corrected this very stupid blunder and many others; and his instrumentation in his last volume, "Le Geste Ingénu," may be considered as complete and definitive.
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