lord went forth to the chase or to war, his home-coming meaning merely
the wine-cup and war-songs, or tedious epic. Many a one must have read
or listened to Marie's love idylls, and longed, and perhaps even
hoped, as in the story of "Yonec," that a fair and gentle knight, in
the form of some beautiful bird, might fly in at her window and bring
her some diversion from the outside world. With nothing before us but
her own poems and the scant recognition of Denys Pyramus, she seems
like some old portrait in which the delicate pigments that once glowed
in the face and made it live have, owing to their very delicacy, long
since faded away, leaving behind only the stronger and less volatile
colours of the dark background from which we in vain try to wrest more
than one or two fragments of the secret it holds.

Judging from internal evidence, it would seem that Marie was born in
Normandy, about the middle of the twelfth century, but settled in
England, where since the Conquest, and indeed since the time of Edward
the Confessor, many Norman families had made their home. Not only does
she make occasional use of English words, and translate from English
into French the fables known as AEsop's, but in the prologue to her
_Lays_, which she dedicates to "the noble King," generally considered
to be Henry the Second, she expresses fear lest her work should not
find favour in a foreign land. In this prologue she also gives her
reason for abandoning classical translation, which, as a Latin
scholar, she had contemplated making, not only for the use of the less
learned, but also, as she tells us, for personal discipline, since "he
who would keep himself from sin, should study and learn and undertake
difficult tasks. In suchwise he may the more withdraw him and save
himself from much sorrow." The twelfth century was a time of
extraordinary intellectual activity, and Marie tells us that she
suffered from what we are apt to regard as a special evil of our own
day--the overcrowding of the literary market. So she wisely turned
aside from the Classics and the crowd, and set herself to give
literary expression to the old Celtic folk-lore, hitherto perhaps
unrecorded save in song.

Of Marie's work that has come down to us we have _The Fables_, already
mentioned, dedicated to Count William, surnamed Longsword, and son of
Henry the Second and Fair Rosamond;[11] _The Lays_, dedicated to the
king, Henry the Second, and doubtless read by Fair Rosam