The tales fall into three main groups: _lais_, _fabliaux_, and _contes dévots_. The _lais_, like the romances to which they are close akin, belong to the courtly literature of the time and found their audience in hall and castle. Denis Pyramus, a contemporary, in writing of Marie de France, tells us her lays were "beloved and held right dear by counts and barons and knights," and that "ladies likewise took great joy and delight in them." Like the romances which they helped to foster and which superseded them, the lays tell of love and adventure, of enchantment and strange happenings. In them side by side with the knights and squires and ladies move fays and giants and werewolves. Their material is that of folklore and fairy-tale. A knight hunting in the _lande adventureuse_ meets a maiden in the forest who leads him to a castle with green walls and shining towers. There he spends three days, and when he would return home again, learns that three hundred years have gone by, that the king, his uncle is dead and his cities have fallen, and there lingers but a legend of the king's nephew who went out to hunt the white boar and was lost in the forest. Often in such lays the old fairy-tale simplicity, its matter-of-fact narration of the marvellous survives; and yet in their somewhat spare brevity they have a grace and charm that lets one feel the beauty, the wonder, or the tragedy of the story. But the interest in the lays is not always that of the land of faery; sometimes it is human enough, as in The Two Lovers where, despite the old-time test and the magic potion, our delight is all in the maid and the damoiseau "who hath in him no measure." Sometimes, as in Eliduc, we find old, rude material--here a primitive Celtic tale of a man with two wives ill cloaked by its additions of mediæval Christianity--retold with a strange gentleness and sweetness, and turned at moments into a story of emotion and scruple. Both types occur in the lays of Marie de France,--the best that have come down to us. Besides her lays she versified a collection of fables, _Isopet_, and translated from the Latin _The Purgatory of Saint Patrick_,--one of those other-world journeys that preceded the Divine Comedy. Yet apart from her works we have no record of her life. She herself in the prologue of her fables, tells her name: "I am called Marie, and I am of France"; but that is all, and it is only the internal evidence of her writings, their Anglo-Norman dialect, and a few chance hints and phrases that have made scholars decide that she was a Norman, or from that part of the Isle de France which borders upon Normandy, that she lived and wrote in England in the second half of the twelfth century, and that the unnamed king to whom she dedicated the lays was Henry II.