In addition to the great and heroic subjects, there were lesser, more intimate, and frequently sentimental, romances, especially enjoyed and widely circulated by the ladies. The baron, riding forth, left his young wife at home, shut up in her bower and surrounded by spies; sometimes even physically branded as his property. A prisoner behind bars, her imagination went out--not to the unloved husband who had married her for the sake of her broad acres, and could send her back to her parents as soon as he found a wealthier bride (he had but to maintain that she was related to him in the fifth degree and the Church was ready to annul the marriage), not to him, her lord and master, but to the unknown knight, the passionate lover, who would gladly give his life to win her. A jongleur arrived with stories of the courts where love was the only ruler; where the knights willingly suffered grief and want, if by so doing they could serve their lady; where the lover, in the shape of a beautiful blue bird, nightly slipped through the barred windows into the arms of his mistress. But the jealous husband had drawn barbed wire across the window, and the lover, flying away at dawn, bled to death before the eyes of his grief-stricken lady. The jongleur would tell of the knight who had fallen passionately in love with a beautiful damsel of whom he had but caught a passing glimpse; month after month he worked at digging an underground passage; every night brought him a little nearer to her bower--she could distinctly hear the dull sounds of his burrowing--until at last he rose through the ground and took her into his arms. These and similar tales, doubtless all of them of Celtic origin--preserved for us in the charming "Lais" of Marie de France--brought tears to the eyes of many a lonely wife and gave shape to her vague longing. There was no reason why a man, and a lover to boot, should not transform himself nightly into a blue bird. Those simple stories in verse fulfilled every desire of the heart; imagination supplied in the north what the south offered in abundant reality. But Marie de France, the first woman novelist of Europe (about the end of the twelfth century), deserves to be remembered for another reason; she was the first poet voicing woman's longing for love and romance--woman's adventure. The charming _Lai du Chevrefoile_ ("The Story of the Honeysuckle") relates an episode from the loves of Tristan and Isolde, the famous lovers, legendary even at that time. Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Fleur and Blanchefleur--these were the admired and mythical lovers of whom the poets sang and dreamed. All the world knew their adventures; all the world repeated them again and again, reverently preserving the identical words and yet unconsciously remoulding them. At the recital of their loves, hand clasped hand; "on that day we read no more," confessed Dante's ill-fated lovers.