ady alluded to. In its first
book (it consists of more than 8000 lines, divided into two books and
many branches) Renart, in consequence of one of his usual quarrels with
Isengrin, gets into trouble with the king, and is besieged in
Maupertuis. But the sense of verisimilitude is now so far lost, that
Maupertuis, instead of being a fox's earth, is an actual feudal castle;
and more than this, the animals which attack and defend it are armed in
panoply, ride horses, and fight like knights of the period. Besides this
the old familiar and homely personages are mixed up with a very strange
set of abstractions in the shape of the seven deadly sins. All this is
curiously blended with reminiscences and rehandlings of the older and
simpler adventures. Another remarkable feature about _Renart le Nouvel_
is that it is full of songs, chiefly love songs, which are given with
the music. Its descriptions, though prolix, and injured by allegorical
phrases, are sometimes vigorous.

[Sidenote: Renart le Contrefait.]

The cycle was finally completed in the second quarter of the fourteenth
century by the singular work or works called _Renart le Contrefait_.
This has, unfortunately, never been printed in full, nor in any but the
most meagre extracts and abstracts. Its length is enormous; though, in
the absence of opportunity for examining it, it is not easy to tell how
much is common to the three manuscripts which contain it. Two of these
are in Paris and one in Vienna, the latter being apparently identical
with one which Menage saw and read in the seventeenth century. One of
the Parisian manuscripts contains about 32,000 verses, the other about
19,000; and the Vienna version seems to consist of from 20,000 to 25,000
lines of verse, and about half that number of prose. The author (who, in
so far as he was a single person, appears to have been a clerk of
Troyes, in Champagne) wrote it, as he says, to avoid idleness, and seems
to have regarded it as a vast commonplace book, in which to insert the
result not merely of his satirical reflection, but of his miscellaneous
reading. A noteworthy point about this poem is that in one place the
writer expressly disowns any concealment of his satirical intention. His
book, he says, has nothing to do with the kind of fox that kills
pullets, has a big brush, and wears a red skin, but with the fox that
has two hands and, what is more, two faces under one hood[64].
Notwithstanding this, however, there are m