culty under this more
general heading. And the _chanson de geste_ proper, as Frenchmen are
entitled to boast, never quite deserts this _matiere de France_. It is
always the _Gesta Francorum_ at home, or the _Gesta Dei per Francos_
in the East, that supply the themes. When this subject or group of
subjects palled, the very form of the _chanson de geste_ was lost. It
was not applied to other things;[18] it grew obsolete with that which
it had helped to make popular. Some of the material--_Huon of
Bordeaux_, the _Four Sons of Aymon_, and others--retained a certain
vogue in forms quite different, and gave later ages the inexact and
bastard notion of "Charlemagne Romance" which has been referred to.
But the _chanson de geste_ itself was never, so to speak,
"half-known"--except to a very few antiquaries. After its three
centuries of flourishing, first alone, then with the other two
"matters," it retired altogether, and made its reappearance only after
four centuries had passed away.

[Footnote 17: Jean Bodel, a _trouvere_ of the thirteenth century,
furnished literary history with a valuable stock-quotation in the
opening of his _Chanson des Saisnes_ for the three great divisions of
Romance:--

"Ne sont que trois matieres a nul home attendant,
De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant."
--_Chanson des Saxons_, ed. Michel, Paris, 1839, vol. i. p. 1.

The lines following, less often quoted, are an interesting early
_locus_ for French literary patriotism.]

[Footnote 18: Or only in rare cases to later French history itself--Du
Guesclin, and the _Combat des Trente_.]

[Sidenote: _Mistakes about them._]

This fact or set of facts has made the actual nature of the original
Charlemagne Romances the subject of much mistake and misstatement on
the part of general historians of literature. The widely read and
generally accurate Dunlop knew nothing whatever about them, except in
early printed versions representing their very latest form, and in the
hopelessly travestied eighteenth-century _Bibliotheque des Romans_ of
the Comte de Tressan. He therefore assigned to them[19] a position
altogether inferior to their real importance, and actually apologised
for the writers, in that, coming _after_ the Arthurian historians,
they were compelled to imitation. As a matter of fact, it is probable
that all the most striking and original _chansons de geste_, certainly
all those of the best period, were in existence before a