FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: All the quotations in this article are from Virgil's
Aeneid, Conington's translation.]

[Footnote 6: See the author's "Story of the Romans."]




FRENCH EPICS


The national epic in France bears the characteristic name of Chanson
de Geste, or song of deed, because the trouvères in the north and the
troubadours in the south wandered from castle to castle singing the
prowesses of the lords and of their ancestors, whose reputations they
thus made or ruined at will.

In their earliest form these Chansons de Geste were invariably in
verse, but in time the most popular were turned into lengthy prose
romances. Many of the hundred or more Chansons de Geste still
preserved were composed in the northern dialect, or langue d'oil, and,
although similar epics did exist in the langue d'oc, they have the
"great defect of being lost," and only fragments of Flamença, etc.,
now exist.

There are three great groups or cycles of French epics: first the
Cycle of France, dealing specially with Charlemagne,--the champion of
Christianity,--who, representing Christ, is depicted surrounded by