Among other great works, before Mary of France came to Troyes Christian had, toward 1160, written a "Tristan," which is lost. Mary herself, he says, gave him the subject of "Lancelot," with the request or order to make it a lesson of "courteous love," which he obeyed. Courtesy has lost its meaning as well as its charm, and you might find the "Chevalier de la Charette" even more unintelligible than tiresome; but its influence was great in its day, and the lesson of courteous love, under the authority of Mary of Champagne, lasted for centuries as the standard of taste. "Lancelot" was never finished, but later, not long after 1174, Christian wrote a "Perceval," or "Conte du Graal," which must also have been intended to please Mary, and which is interesting because, while the "Lancelot" gave the twelfth-century idea of courteous love, the "Perceval" gave the twelfth-century idea of religious mystery. Mary was certainly concerned with both. "It is for this same Mary," says Gaston Paris, "that Walter of Arras undertook his poem of 'Eracle'; she was the object of the songs of the troubadours as well as of their French imitators; for her use also she caused the translations of books of piety like Genesis, or the paraphrase at great length, in verse, of the psalm 'Eructavit.'" With her theories of courteous love, every one is more or less familiar if only from the ridicule of Cervantes and the follies of Quixote, who, though four hundred years younger, was Lancelot's child; but we never can know how far she took herself and her laws of love seriously, and to speculate on so deep a subject as her seriousness is worse than useless, since she would herself have been as uncertain as her lovers were. Visionary as the courtesy was, the Holy Grail was as practical as any bric-a-brac that has survived of the time. The mystery of Perceval is like that of the Gothic cathedral, illuminated by floods of light, and enlivened by rivers of colour. Unfortunately Christian never told what he meant by the fragment, itself a mystery, in which he narrated the story of the knight who saw the Holy Grail, because the knight, who was warned, as usual, to ask no questions, for once, unlike most knights, obeyed the warning when he should have disregarded it. As knights-errant necessarily did the wrong thing in order to make their adventures possible, Perceval's error cannot be in itself mysterious, nor was the castle in any way mysterious where the miracle occurred, It appeared to him to be the usual castle, and he saw nothing unusual in the manner of his reception by the usual old lord, or in the fact that both seated themselves quite simply before the hall-fire with the usual household. Then, as though it were an everyday habit, the Holy Grail was brought in (Bartsch, "Chrestomathie," 183-85, ed. 1895):--