To suppose under these circumstances that the Provencal originals of the hundred others have perished seems gratuitous. It is sufficient to say that the chanson de geste, as it is now extant, is the almost exclusive property of northern France. Nor is there much authority for a supposition that the early French poets merely versified with amplifications the stories of chroniclers. On the contrary, chroniclers draw largely from the chansons, and the question of priority between _Roland_ and the pseudo-Turpin, though a hard one to determine, seems to resolve itself in favour of the former. At most we may suppose, with much probability, that personal and family tradition gave a nucleus for at least the earliest. Chansons de Geste. _Chansons de Geste._--Early French narrative poetry was divided by one of its own writers, Jean Bodel, under three heads--poems relating to French history, poems relating to ancient history, and poems of the Arthurian cycle (_Matieres de France, de Bretagne, et de Rome_). To the first only is the term chansons de geste in strictness applicable. The definition of it goes partly by form and partly by matter. A chanson de geste must be written in verses either of ten or twelve syllables, the former being the earlier. These verses have a regular caesura, which, like the end of a line, carries with it the licence of a mute e. The lines are arranged, not in couplets or in stanzas of equal length, but in _laisses_ or _tirades_, consisting of any number of lines from half a dozen to some hundreds. These are, in the earlier examples assonanced,--that is to say, the vowel sound of the last syllables is identical, but the consonants need not agree. Thus, for instance, the final words of a tirade of _Amis et Amiles_ (Il. 199-206) are _erbe_, _nouvelle_, _selles_, _nouvelles_, _traversent_, _arrestent_, _guerre_, _cortege_. Sometimes the tirade is completed by a shorter line, and the later chansons are regularly rhymed. As to the subject, a chanson de geste must be concerned with some event which is, or is supposed to be, historical and French. The tendency of the trouveres was constantly to affiliate their heroes on a particular _geste_ or family. The three chief _gestes_ are those of Charlemagne himself, of Doon de Mayence, and of Garin de Monglane; but there are not a few chansons, notably those concerning the Lorrainers, and the remarkable series sometimes called the _Chevalier au Cygne_, and dealing with the crusades, which lie outside these groups. By this joint definition of form and subject the chansons de geste are separated from the romances of antiquity, from the romances of the Round Table, which are written in octosyllabic couplets, and from the _romans d'aventures_ or later fictitious tales, some of which, such as _Brun de la Montaigne_, are written in pure chanson form. Volume and changes of early epics.