Still more significant is the fact that the character of French women becomes a jest. Thus, the balladist emphasises the fact that the faithless wife of Garci-Fernández is French; and, again, when Sancho García's mother, likewise French, appears in a _romance_, the singer gives her a blackamoor—an Arab—as a lover. This is primitive man's little way, the world over: he pays off old scores by deriding the virtue of his enemy's wife, mother, daughter, sister; and in primitive Spain the Frenchwoman is the lightning-conductor of international scandals, tolerable by the camp-fire, but tedious in print. In considering early Spanish verse it behoves us to denote facts and to be chary in drawing inferences. Thus, while we admit that the _Poema del Cid_ and the _Chanson de Roland_ belong to the same _genre_, we can go no further. It is not to be assumed that similarity of incident necessarily implies direct imitation. The introduction of the fighting bishop in the Cid poem is a case in point. His presence in the field may be—almost certainly is—an historic event, common enough in days when a militant bishop loved to head a charge; and the chronicler may well have seen the exploits which he records. It by no means follows, and it is extravagant to suppose, that the Spanish _juglar_ merely filches from the _Chanson de Roland_. That he had heard the _Chanson_ is not only probable, but likely; it is not, to say the least, a necessary consequence that he annexed an episode as familiar in Spain as elsewhere. Nothing, if you probe deep enough, is new, and originality is a vain dream. But some margin must be left for personal experience and the hazard of circumstance; and if we take account of the chances of coincidence, the debt of Castilian to French literature will appear in its due perspective. Nor must it be forgotten that from a very early date there are traces of the reflex action of Castilian upon French literature. They are not, indeed, many; but they are authentic beyond carping. In the ancient _Fragment de la Vie de Saint Fidès d'Agen_, which dates from the eleventh century, the Spanish origin is frankly admitted:— "_Canson audi que bellantresca Que fo de razon espanesca_"— "I heard a beauteous song that told of Spanish things." Or, once more, in Adenet le Roi's _Cléomadès_, and in its offshoot the _Méliacin_ of Girard d'Amiens, we meet with the wooden horse (familiar to readers of _Don Quixote_) which bestrides the spheres and curvets among the planets. Borrowed from the East, the story is transmitted to the Greeks, is annexed by the Arabs, and is passed on through them to Spain, whence Adenet le Roi conveys it for presentation to the western world.