But in that thirteenth century, when so many new things were struggling to birth, one book stands out above all others as the most perfect illustration of its spirit. The very fact that it is so much less of a story than the anecdotes of the _Gesta Romanorum_ had almost made me pass it over in a more detailed criticism of them, but this same fact perfects it as an example of an artist's attitude in the time of the revival of classical learning. It was almost an accident that let me see these years of novel study and eager wisdom so clearly expressed in the long rhyming narrative of the _Romance of the Rose_, that was known above all other books for a hundred years, that was read by Ronsard, modernised by Marot, and partly translated by Chaucer. The accident was such that I think there is no irrelevance in describing it. [Meung-sur-Loire.] Walking through France with the manuscript of my history on my back, I came at evening of an April day into the little grey French town of Meung, set on the side of a hill above the Loire. Small cobbled streets twisted this way and that, up and down, between the old houses, and walking under the gateway, the Porte d'Amont, with its low arch and narrow windows overhead, I felt I was stepping suddenly from the broad, practical France, whose roadside crucifixes are made of iron a hundred at a time, into a forgotten corner of that older France whose spirit clings about the new, like the breath of lavender in a room where it has once been kept. In the inn where I left my knapsack there was a miller who drank a bottle of wine with me, and talked of old Jean Clopinel, who was born here in Meung those centuries ago. 'And it was a big book he had the writing of too, and a wise book, so they tell me, and good poetry; but it's written in the old French that's not our language any longer; I could not read it if I tried, and why should I? They know all about it in the town.' Indeed the town seemed a piece of the old French itself, with its partly ruined church, and the little château crowned with conical cap-like towers, the broad Loire flowing below. I thought of _The Romance of the Rose_, Jean Clopinel's book, the book that meant so much to the Middle Ages, the book that, unwieldy as it is, is still deliciously alive. I thought of Jean Clopinel and his description of himself, put as a prophecy into the mouth of the God of Love:-- 'Then shall appear Jean Clopinel, Joyous of heart, of body well And fairly built: at Meun shall he Be born where Loire flows peacefully.'[2] I made up my mind to look at the old book again when I should have left the road, and be within reach of a larger library than my own manuscript and a single volume of Defoe. [Jean de Meung.]