French epic, flowering later than Germanic, is already in the eleventh century tinged with romance. The French _chansons de geste_ reflect a society distinctly feudal; their communal sense is of a larger community; and they constitute a first chapter in European vernacular poetic. Epic still in characterization and in the youthful zest of their combats against odds, they are swayed by new literary currents. The physical environment is less sharply detailed than in Germanic epic, perhaps because a kindlier nature was more taken for granted. A sharper difference is in style. They have none of that Germanic conventional elaboration which made epic diction a language apart. Much simpler,[3] they are also more diffuse, in both respects nearer to common speech. The movement in detail is of ten-syllable verses gathered into irregular stanzas (_laisses_) by assonance. A more significant distinction is the habit of narrative. _Roland_ presents substantially the same situation as _Maldon_. In Anglo-Saxon it is focused by concentration; in French it is approached as the culmination of a series. Habitually French epic is more extended and fluent, expansive not descriptively but historically, running through more events in a single composition. Whereas Anglo-Saxon epic typically selects and intensifies a crisis, French epic tells the whole story. B. EXPERIMENT AND CONVENTION IN ROMANCE 1. Romance in Latin and in Vernacular Medieval story-tellers in turning to the vernacular found wider opportunity. The Latin poetic that they all studied in school, practised in _historia_, _fabula_, _argumentum_, and at greater length in saint’s legend, was too much absorbed in descriptive elaboration to teach them much of narrative. Outside the cloister, at the regular stations of the pilgrimage routes, waited audiences of increasing size and diversity; and the development of feudalism established the castle hall as a social center. The development of vernacular narrative answered with the more social art of romance. The narrative future was increasingly for the vernacular. Meantime Latin narrative continued not only for its more special audience, but in various interplay. _Exempla_, sketched or summed in Latin, were preached in vernacular. An ugly old legend of folklore, moralized in Latin for an _exemplum_, Chaucer gave back to the wider audience in the exquisite art of his Prioress. Romances and legends of saints interpenetrated. The complicated development of the Grail legend must be followed in both Latin and vernacular. Nevertheless poetic was beckoned into new narrative paths mainly by the wider appeal through the vernacular.