learn to feel for her, as we read the romance, some part
of the passion that instilled itself into Tristan's veins with the love
draught; but what shall we say when she deliberately plans the murder of
a defenceless woman, and one who had performed service unexampled in its
fidelity and sacrifice?

If Iseut represented the poetic ideal in the age of chivalry, was the
real woman of that age like Iseut? We can answer, unhesitatingly, no.
The conditions of life in the romances were very highly idealized, and
certain forms in the romance became purely conventional. The heroine
must always be more beautiful than tongue can tell, and she must, in the
end, win her lover, or be merciful to him, according as she began in
disdain or in love sickness. Numerous adventures, wildly fantastic in
character, preceded this consummation; but readers even in that day got
to such a point that their jaded palates could no longer be tickled even
by the choicest extravagances. Men knew that in real life they did not
love in that way; and women knew it, too, though they were perhaps
slower to confess it. At any rate, the reaction from the extreme type of
romantic idealization of woman began even while the romance of chivalry
was trying to persuade its readers that all women were like Iseut,
Guinever, Elaine, and that these were angels.

The reaction against the ideal of chivalry in literature took two main
directions, the one, more purely comic or realistic, representing the
woman of the middle classes, the other, more intellectual and satiric,
representing woman in general but especially the lady. The first is
represented, we may say, by the great _Roman du Renard_ and those short
popular tales which strolling minstrels were wont to recite, the
_Fabliaux_. The second we find chiefly in the _Roman de la Rose_ and its
numerous progeny.

Renard is, of course, the central personage in the gigantic beast epic,
but we hear not a little of his wife Hermeline or Erme, of madam wolf,
Dame Hersent, and of Harouge, the leopardess. They play before us a
little game, which we know is the game of life as women lived it in the
days when Renard was still a famous personage. To give but one episode,
from _Renard le Nouveau_, by Jacquemart Gelee, end of the thirteenth
century, Renard becomes the confidant of Noble (the lion), and learns of
his amour with Dame Harouge; forthwith the subtle Renard begins to
intrigue, until at last Harouge becomes his mistress.