Although by no means the best, the _Chevalier de la Charrette_ is perhaps the most interesting of Chrétien’s extant works, for the reason that we obtain in it our first literary introduction to the story of Lancelot of the Lake. It treats, indeed, of only an episode in that famous knight’s career, but that episode reveals him to us as the lover of Arthur’s queen, and so marks an important stage in the evolution of Arthurian romance. In Chrétien’s poem, Guinevere is abducted by Meleaguant,[98] the son of the king of a land whence no man returns. Her rescue is accomplished by Lancelot, who, in order to achieve his object, has to ride in a cart used as a tumbril to convey prisoners to execution; hence the name given to him and to the poem, ‘The Knight of the Cart.’ Welsh tradition knows nothing whatever of the loves of Lancelot and Guinevere, although, as we have seen, Guinevere did come to have in Welsh folk-lore a doubtful reputation that somewhat debased her name. It is in his Lancelot poem alone that Chrétien suggests that Guinevere was anything but a gracious and loving wife. Whence, then, did he derive the story of her illicit relations with Lancelot? Some see in it the influence of the Tristram legend, in which passionate love breaks every bond. Others attribute the invention of Lancelot as Guinevere’s lover to the personal suggestion of Marie of Champagne, who, according to Chrétien’s own account, furnished him with the material for his poem. Whatever may be the truth about its origin, the story of Lancelot is an obvious, indeed the most signal, example of the way in which the Arthurian legends were adapted to suit the conceptions of chivalry. We have in it a capital instance of what was implied in the cult of “courtly love,” and hence it is not surprising that among mediæval tales women, as Chaucer informs us, held “in ful gret reverence the boke of Lancelot de Lake.”[99] That book was not Chrétien’s poem, but, much more probably, the prose romance of _Lancelot_, usually assigned to Walter Map. The same prose story, or one of its adaptations, was presumably the book in which Paolo and Francesca read, as related by Dante in the Fifth Canto of his _Inferno_.