Raoul de Houdenc is an earlier poet than Adenes, and represents the Roman d'Aventures in its infancy, when it still found it necessary to attach itself to the great cycle of the Round Table. His works, besides some shorter poems[94], consist of the _Roman des Eles_ (Ailes), a semi-allegorical composition, describing the wings and feathers of chivalry, that is to say, the great chivalrous virtues, among which Raoul, like a herald as he was, gives Largesse the first place; of _Meraugis de Portlesguez_, an important composition, possessing some marked peculiarities of style; and possibly also of the _Vengeance de Raguidel_, in which the author works out one of the innumerable unfinished episodes of the great epic of _Percevale_. Thus Raoul de Houdenc occupies no mean place in French literature, inasmuch as he indicates the starting-point of two great branches, the Roman d'Aventures and the allegorical poem, and this at a very early date. This date is not known exactly; but it was certainly before 1228, when the Trouvere Huon de Mery alludes to him, and classes him with Chrestien as a master of French verse. He has in truth some very noteworthy peculiarities. The chief of these, which must soon strike any reader of _Meraugis_, is his tendency to _enjambement_ or overlapping of couplets. It is a curious feature in the history of French verse that the isolation of the couplet has constantly recurred in its history, and that as constantly reformers have striven to break up the monotony so produced by this process of _enjambement_. Perhaps Raoul is the earliest who thus, as an indignant critic put it at the first representation of _Hernani_, 'broke up verses, and threw them out of window.' Besides this metrical characteristic, the thing most noteworthy in his poems (as might indeed have been expected from his composition of the _Roman des Eles_) is a tendency to allegorising, and to scholastic disquisitions on points of amatory casuistry. The whole plot of _Meraugis_ indeed turns on the enquiry whether physical or metaphysical love is the sincerest, and on the quarrel which a difference on this point brings on between the hero and Gorvein Cadrus his friend and his rival in the love of the fair Lidoine. [Sidenote: Chief Romans d'Aventures.]