The incident of a husband giving his wife her lover’s heart to eat occurs in a considerable number of tales and poems in literature, and in all is obviously of the same source. Ysolt, in the romance of Tristan, twelfth century, sings a lai how Guirun was slain for love of a lady, and his heart given by the count to his wife to eat. (Michel, III, 39, vv. 781-90.) Ramon de Castel Rossillon (Raimons de Rosillon) cut off the head of Guillems de Cabestaing, lover of his wife, Seremonda (Margarita), took the heart from the body, ‘fetz lo raustir e far pebrada,’ and gave it to his wife to eat. He then told her what she had been eating (showing her Cabestaing’s head), and asked her if it was good. So good, she said, that she would never eat or drink more; hearing which, her husband rushed at her with his sword, and she fled to a balcony, let herself fall (threw herself from a window), and was killed. (Chabaneau, Les Biographies des Troubadours en langue provençale, pp. 99-103, MSS of the thirteenth and the fourteenth century.) Nearly the same story, ‘secondo che raccontano i provenzali,’ in the Decameron, IV, 9, of Messer Guiglielmo Rossiglione and Messer Guiglielmo Guardastagno. The lady says that she liked very much the dish which she had eaten, and the husband, No wonder that you should like when it was dead the thing which you liked best of all when it was living: what you have eaten was Guardastagno’s heart. God forbid, replies the lady, that I should swallow anything else after so noble a repast; then lets herself drop from a high window. In Konrad von Würzburg, ‘Das Herz,’ ‘Das Herzmäre,’ 1260-70, five or six hundred verses, a knight and a lady are inflamed with a mutual passion (tugendhafter mann, reines weib). The lady’s husband conceives that he may break this up by taking her to the Holy Land. In that case, the knight proposes to follow; but the lady prevails upon him to go before her husband shall take this step, with the object of lulling his jealousy and stopping the world’s talk. The knight goes, and dies of the separation. As his end was approaching, he had ordered his attendant to take out his heart, embalm it, enclose it in a gold box, and carry it to the lady. The husband lights upon the emissary, takes away the box, directs his cook to make a choice dish of the heart, and has this set before his wife for her exclusive enjoyment. He asks her how she finds it, and she declares that she has never eaten anything so delicious. She is then told that she has eaten the knight’s heart, sent her by him as a token. God defend, she exclaims, that any ordinary food should pass my mouth after so precious victual, and thereupon dies (von der Hagen’s Gesammtabenteuer, I, 225). The same story is introduced as an “example” in a sermon-book: ‘Quidam miles tutpiter adamavit uxorem alterius militis.’[38] The lady kills herself.