_Romans d'Aventures._--These are the three earliest developments of French literature on the great scale. They led, however, to a fourth, which, though later in date than all except their latest forms and far more loosely associated as a group, is so closely connected with them by literary and social considerations that it had best be mentioned here. This is the _roman d'aventures_, a title given to those almost avowedly fictitious poems which connect themselves, mainly and centrally, neither with French history, with the Round Table, nor with the heroes of antiquity. These began to be written in the 13th century, and continued until the prose form of fiction became generally preferred. The later forms of the chansons de geste and the Arthurian poems might indeed be well called romans d'aventures themselves. _Hugues Capet_, for instance, a chanson in form and class of subject, is certainly one of this latter kind in treatment; and there is a larger class of semi-Arthurian romance, which so to speak branches off from the main trunk. But for convenience sake the definition we have given is preferable. The style and subject of these romans d'aventures are naturally extremely various. _Guillaume de Palerme_ deals with the adventures of a Sicilian prince who is befriended by a were-wolf; _Le Roman de l'escoufle_, with a heroine whose ring is carried off by a sparrow-hawk (_escoufle_), like Prince Camaralzaman's talisman; _Guy of Warwick_, with one of the most famous of imaginary heroes; _Meraugis de Portleguez_ is a sort of branch or offshoot of the romances of the Round Table; _Cleomades_, the work of the trouvere Adenes le Roi, who also rehandled the old chanson subjects of _Ogier_ and _Berte aux grans pies_, connects itself once more with the _Arabian Nights_ as well as with Chaucer forwards in the introduction of a flying mechanical horse. There is, in short, no possibility of classifying their subjects. The habit of writing in gestes, or of necessarily connecting the new work with an older one, had ceased to be binding, and the instinct of fiction writing was free; yet those romans d'aventures do not rank quite as high in literary importance as the classes which preceded them. This under-valuation arises rather from a lack of originality and distinctness of savour than from any shortcomings in treatment. Their versification, usually octosyllabic, is pleasant enough; but there is not much distinctness of character about them, and their incidents often strike the reader with something of the sameness, but seldom with much of the naivete, of those of the older poems. Nevertheless some of them attained to a very high popularity, such, for instance, as the _Partenopex de Blois_ of Denis Pyramus, which has a motive drawn from the story of _Cupid and Psyche_ and the charming _Floire et Blanchefleur_, giving the woes of a Christian prince and a Saracen slave-girl. With them may be connected a