For _Troilus and Criseyde_ carries verse narrative beyond Boccaccio’s scope and beyond his own habit.[30] Perhaps the challenge of the _Filostrato_ was the more provocative because he already suspected the ways of romance. Here was the perennial situation of romance with a new emphasis. Passion, so little realized in French, was presented convincingly; and the lover’s complaint was not the conventional tribute of devotion, but the anguish of disillusionment. Passion, then, left dust and ashes. The French literary lover had been forever wooing a literary goddess; the Italian lover, smitten with the beauty of flesh and blood, won it easily, held it in ecstasy, and could not recover from its loss. As if divining here something truer, which yet was not the whole truth, Chaucer planned one of the few great love-stories. What the romances generally left out of Tristram and Iseult, what only the best of them saw in Lancelot and Guenevere as motive, was the effect of illicit love on character. Passion, stronger than _amour courtois_, was it stronger than the whole social code? And what then? Chaucer lived to present love in other aspects and in other ways; but first Boccaccio’s story moved him to carry the passion of the noble and beautiful through to its bitter end. He composed not at all a French romance, not the lyric Italian story, but a verse narrative at once so realistic and so dramatic that we naturally call it a novel. _Amour courtois_, both conventional and feeble as plot, he relegated to the setting as one of the fictions of high society. Troilus languishes appropriately and writes a complaint. Cressid keeps a proper distance. Pandarus makes allowance for moonshine. What Chrétien had found surely appealing in social romance, the habit of society itself, is appropriated as amply as in _Gawain and the Green Knight_. Medieval rendering of all stories in contemporary terms is here carried into realism. Pandarus, visiting Criseyde, ... fond two othere ladyes sete and she Withinne a paved parlour; and they three Herden a mayden reden hem the geste Of the Sege of Thebes whyl hem leste. Quod Pandarus, “Madame, god you see, With al your book and al the companye.” “Ey! uncle myn, welcome ywis”, quod she; And up she roos and by the hond in hye She took him faste, and seyde, “This night thrye— To goode mote it turne—of yow I mette.” And with that word she doun on bench him sette. II. 81-91. The dialogue is more than realistic; it gives leads for the story. Quod tho Criseyde, “Lat me som wight calle.” “Ey! God forbede that it sholde falle”, Quod Pandarus, “that ye swich foly wroughte! They mighte deme thing they never er thoughte.” III. 760-763.