rn. Meanwhile the Knight returns, and though Marion
replies to his accost--

"Pour Dieu, sire, alez vo chemin,
Si feres moult grant courtoisie,"

he renews his suit, but is again rejected. Returning in a bad temper
he meets Robin and cuffs him soundly, a correction which Robin does
not take in the heroic manner. Marion runs to rescue him, and the
Knight threatens to carry her off--which Robin, even though his
friends have come up, is too cowardly to prevent. She, however, is
constant and escapes; the piece finishing by a long and rather tedious
festival of the clowns. Its drawbacks are obvious, and are those
natural to an experiment which has no patterns before it; but the
figure of Marion is exceedingly graceful and pleasing, and the whole
has promise. It is essentially a comic opera; but that a _trouvere_ of
the thirteenth century should by himself, so far as we can see, have
founded comic opera is not a small thing.

[Sidenote: _The_ Jeu de la Feuillie.]

The _Jus de la Feuillie_ ("the booths"), otherwise _Li Jus Adam_, or
Adam's play, is more ambitious and more complicated, but also more
chaotic. It is, as has been said, an early sketch of a comedy of
manners; but upon this is grafted in the most curious way a fairy
interlude, or rather after-piece. Adam himself opens the piece and
informs his friends with much coolness that he has tried married life,
but intends to go back to "clergy" and then set out for Paris, leaving
his father to take care of his wife. He even replies to the
neighbours' remonstrances by enlarging in the most glowing terms on
the passion he has felt for his wife and on her beauty, adding, with a
crude brutality which has hardly a ghost of atoning fun in it, that
this is all over--

"Car mes fains en est apaies."

His father then appears, and Adam shows himself not more dutiful as a
son than he is grateful as a husband. But old Henri de la Halle, an
easy-going father, has not much reproach for him. The piece, however,
has hardly begun before it goes off into a medley of unconnected
scenes, though each has a sort of _fabliau_ interest of its own. A
doctor is consulted by his clients; a monk demands alms and offerings
in the name of Monseigneur Saint Acaire, promising miracles; a madman
succeeds him; and in the midst enters the _Mainie Hellequin_, "troop
of Hellequin" (a sort of Oberon or fairy king), with Morgue la fee
among them. The fairies end with a song, and the miscellane