[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.]