Now soothly I tell you by this tale ye may know the truth of what befell Prince Hugh, who was right brave and wise. And inasmuch as he found him full valiant, Saladin praised him, and bade great honour be done to him, in that he did good with all his might, for thereby may one win great worth. And I find writ in Latin, good deeds bring a good ending. And now at the end let us pray to him who is without end, that when we come to the end of all things, we may so end that we shall win that pure joy which for the good hath no end. And for him who wrote this, may he dwell with Jesus Christ, and in the love of Saint Mary; amen, amen, saith each and all. Here endeth The Order of Chivalry. Epilogue [Illustration] The tales in this volume are among the earliest examples of the French short story that have come down to us. They grew up in that little renaissance of the XII and XIII centuries, when the tradition that literature must be epic, that it must tell of national heroes or the history of some great house, was passing, and the trouvère was free to take his matter where he found it and make of it what he would. Celtic traditions, stories from the East or the classics, every day happenings, old legends and new manners, all were turned to account, and woven, it might be, into a long romance full of leisurely digressions, or retold in a tale admirably compact. The short stories, like most of the literature of the time, were composed in octo-syllabic rhyming couplets, verse narratives for minstrels to recite. Of their authors for the most part we know nothing. Their very names have vanished save in the few cases where they were wrought into prelude or epilogue, and made part of the text: and to none, with the exception of Marie de France can more than one or two tales be attributed. So impersonal, however, are the stories that their being anonymous matters little. We look to them not for the flavour of any one man's mind, but for an impression of the age in which they were produced, its shows and fashions, its manners, its sentiments and ideals, its inheritance of early legends, of old, word-of-mouth story-telling, stories which the trouvères dressed anew and preserved to us.