'She had said for him three verses; at the first she confessed, At the second she took sacrament; at the third she expired.’ The music is notable not only for its perfect symmetry and the fidelity with which it expresses the sentiment, but also its discriminating use of the natural and flatted B to produce a plaintive effect. (To both the employment of 'modern’ tonality and the chromatic element in popular song we shall have occasion to return.) The 6/8 rhythm is no less remarkable, giving the piece a crispness and definiteness never attained by mediæval church music. Parallel to the narrative song there developed a lighter genre, as old as the _complainte_ itself, which corresponds to comedy as the latter does to tragedy. Its personages are the same, but stripped of all their sombre aspect; its story has a happy conclusion; its subject is not infrequently comic and satirical. Tiersot quotes, in contrast to the _Chanson de Renaud_, an example which is still heard in the provinces of France.[72] Like the song already quoted, it narrates the return of soldiers from the war, but, where the first has the mark of death upon him, the other returns with a 'rose between his lips.’ It is perhaps not so old as the _Chanson de Renaud_, but equally characteristic and particularly 'Gallic’ in flavor: [Illustration: Music] Trois jeun’ tam-bours S’en re-ve-nant de guer-re, Trois jeun’ tam-bours S’en re-ve-nant de guerre, Et ri et ran, ran pe-ta-plan, S’en re-ve-nant de guer-re. Note the crisp rhythm, the decided major tonality, and the exuberant spirit of the song. Many early melodies show these same characteristics, which at once remind us of that other elemental form of folk music--the dance song, in which rhythm is the essential element. Rhythm is the feature which most of all distinguishes popular song, and secular music in general, from church music. It is the essentially emotional quality of music which the Christian church carefully excluded from its chant. We have seen, however, how people’s primitive instinct causes them to mark the rhythm of a melody (Chap. I) and beheld the women clapping their hands to the tune of the _complainte_ of Clothar II. Dependent upon simple formulas which could be easily grasped and remembered, folk song naturally chose the simplest rhythmic and melodic types. Hence the dance became one of the principal root-stocks of secular music. An element which was never admitted into the narrative form, the refrain, is a distinguishing characteristic of the dance song, and in it we see the germ of the earliest of our modern instrumental forms, the _rondeau_, originally the name of a dance. The dance song was perhaps the most varied in melodies, for the wayfaring musicians of the Middle Ages carried them from village to village and from country to country, so that there was a continuous international exchange.