There were many ways in which the French epic was degraded at the close of its course--by dilution and expansion, by the growth of a kind of dull parasitic, sapless language over the old stocks, by the general failure of interest, and the transference of favour to other kinds of literature. Reading came into fashion, and the minstrels lost their welcome in the castles, and had to betake themselves to more vulgar society for their livelihood. At the same time, epic made a stand against the new modes and a partial compliance with them; and the _chansons de geste_ were not wholly left to the vagrant reciters, but were sometimes copied out fair in handsome books, and held their own with the romances. The compromise between epic and romance in old French literature is most interesting where romance has invaded a story of the simpler kind like _Raoul de Cambrai_. Stories of war against the infidel, stories like those of William of Orange, were easily made romantic. The poem of the _Prise d'Orange_, for example, an addition to this cycle, is a pure romance of adventure, and a good one, though it has nothing of the more solid epic in it. Where the action is carried on between the knights of France and the Moors, one is prepared for a certain amount of wonder; the palaces and dungeons of the Moors are the right places for strange things to happen, and the epic of the defence of France goes easily off into night excursions and disguises: the Moorish princess also is there, to be won by the hero. All this is natural; but it is rather more paradoxical to find the epic of family feuds, originally sober, grave, and business-like, turning more and more extravagant, as it does in the _Four Sons of Aymon_, which in its original form, no doubt, was something like the more serious parts of _Raoul de Cambrai_ or of the _Lorrains_, but which in the extant version is expanded and made wonderful, a story of wild adventures, yet with traces still of its origin among the realities of the heroic age, the common matters of practical interest to heroes. The case of _Huon of Bordeaux_ is more curious, for there the original sober story has been preserved, and it is one of the best and most coherent of them all,[77] till it is suddenly changed by the sound of Oberon's horn and passes out of the real world altogether. [Footnote 77: Cf. Auguste Longnon, "L'élément historique de Huon de Bordeaux," _Romania_, viii.] The lines of the earlier part of the story are worth following, for there is no better story among the French poems that represent the ruder heroic age--a simple story of feudal rivalries and jealousies, surviving in this strange way as an introduction to the romance of _Oberon_.