But if among the _contes dévots_ tales as vivid as that of the proud knight on whom was laid the penance of the cask are rare, there are yet not a few that charm us by their mere sincerity and simplicity, that interest by revealing to us the superstitions and the beliefs of the time. They show us how vividly present to men's minds was the triple division of the world, how concrete that heaven and hell, whence issued on the one side the demons, on the other the Virgin and the saints to take share in the combat on earth for men's temptation and salvation. To turn the pages of a collection of these stories is like looking up at the dim, stiff figures of some early fresco, to see again, say, the strife of angels and devils for souls in The Triumph of Death on the walls of the Campo Santo in Pisa. Just as the spirit of the _fabliaux_ is found again in the farces, so that of the _contes dévots_ continues in the miracle plays. But when, in the fifteenth century, prose drives out verse narrative, all three types of tale cease. In the renaissance and for long after they were neglected. It was in the eighteenth century, with its curiosity concerning the mediæval, that men turned back to the manuscripts so long disregarded. Barbazan brought out a collection of texts, and Legrand d'Aussy published a collection of abridgments of twelfth and thirteenth century tales. Since then, various editors, both French and German, have made the best of the tales available to us. Taken together, apart from the pleasure of the story for the story's sake, they give us a fresh sense of the time in which they were written, its feasts and tourneys bright with the gold and the vair; its wars, its interrupted traffic and barter; its license, its asceticism; its prayers and its visions. More than that, they interest us as standing midway between the old and the new. In them one may look for fragments of vanished stories, bits of myth and folklore, salvage of an age that told its tales instead of writing them; and, at the same time, we find in them the beginnings of modern literature, the first of that long and goodly line, the French short story. For all their simplicity they show the beginnings of a shrewd observation, of delicate description, and above all of compact narrative where no words are wasted. Already there is a conscious artistic pride; Marie de France tells us she has waked many a night in rhyming her verses; and "Know ye," one of the _fabliaux_ charges us, "it is no light thing to tell a goodly tale." Bibliography List of Texts followed in These Translations The Lay of the Bird, _Le Lai de l'Oiselet_, edited by Gaston Paris, Paris, 1884. Privately printed. The Two Lovers, The Woful Knight (Chaitivel), Eliduc: _Die Lais der Marie de France_, edited by Karl Warnke, Halle, 1900. Melion, _Lai d'Ignaurès, Suivi des Lais de Melion et du Trot_, edited by Monmerqué et Francisque Michel, Paris, 1832.