Puddenum" is,
or used to be, the preferred if corrupt nursery form.] In more elaborate
and adorned narrative the influence, not merely of the name but of the
beautiful name, comes in, and that of the name itself remains. In that
tragic story of Ludlow Castle which was given above (Chap. iv. pp.
84-6), something, for the present writer at least, would have been lost
if the traitor had been merely "a knight" instead of Sir Ernault Lisle
and the victim merely "a damsel" instead of Marion de la Briere. And
would the _bocca bacciata_ of Alaciel itself be as gracious if it was
merely anybody's?

[85] The amazing farce-insets of Lyndsay's _Satire of the Three Estates_
could be paralleled, and were no doubt suggested, by French farces of
older date.

[86] Nobody seems to be entirely certain what this odd title means:
though there have been some obvious and some far-fetched guesses. But it
has, like other _rhetoriqueur_ names of 1450-1550, such as "Traverser of
Perilous Ways" and the like, a kind of fantastic attraction for some
people.

[87] If I remember rightly, my friend the late R. L. Stevenson was wont
to abuse it.

[88] As such, the substance is found in other languages. But the French
itself has been traced by some to an earlier _roman d'aventure_, _Blonde
d'Oxford_, in which an English heiress is carried off by a French
squire.

[89] Perhaps one should guard against a possible repetition of a not
uncommon critical mistake--that of inferring ignorance from absence of
mention. I am quite aware that no exhaustive catalogue of known French
stories in prose has been given; and the failure to supplement a former
glance at the late prose versions of romance is intentional. They have
nothing new in romance-, still less in novel-_character_ for us. The
_Bibliotheque Elzevirienne_ volumes have been dwelt upon, not as a
_corpus_, but because they appear to represent, without any unfair
manipulation or "window-dressing," the kind at the time with a
remarkable combination of interest both individual and contrasted.

CHAPTER VI

RABELAIS

[Sidenote: The anonymity, or at least impersonality, of authorship up to
this point.]

Although--as it is hoped the foregoing chapters may have shown--the
amount of energy and of talent, thrown into the department of French
fiction, had from almost the earliest times been remarkably great;
although French, if not France, had been the mother of almost all
literatures in things f