There was, indeed, an older French poem than this--perhaps two such--and till the discovery of a fragment of it six years after the publication in 1846 of the great _Roman d'Alixandre_ itself by Michelant, it was supposed that this poem was the original of Lamprecht's German (or of the German by whomsoever it be, for some will have it that Lamprecht is simply Lambert li Tors, _v. infra_). This, however, seems not to be the case. The Alberic fragment[75] (respecting which the philologists, as usual, fight whether it was written by a Besancon man or a Briancon one, or somebody else) is extremely interesting in some ways. For, in the first place, it is written in octosyllabic _tirades_ of single assonance or rhyme, a very rare form; in the second, it is in a dialect of Provencal; and in the third, the author not only does not follow, but distinctly and rather indignantly rejects, the story of Nectanabus:-- "Dicunt alquant estrobatour Quel reys fud filz d'encantatour: Mentent fellon losengetour; Mai en credreyz nec un de lour."[76] [Footnote 75: Ed. Meyer, _op. cit._, i. 1-9.] [Footnote 76: Ll. 27-30.] But the fragment is unluckily so short (105 lines only) that it is impossible to say much of its matter. [Sidenote: _The decasyllabic poem._] Between this and the Alexandrine poem there is another version,[77] curiously intermediate in form, date, and substance. This is in the ordinary form of the older, but not oldest, _chansons de geste_, decasyllabic rhymed _tirades_. There are only about eight hundred lines of it, which have been eked out, by about ten thousand Alexandrines from the later and better known poem, in the MSS. which remain. The decasyllabic part deals with the youth of Alexander, and though the author does not seem, any more than Alberic, to have admitted the scandal about Nectanabus, the death of that person is introduced, and altogether we see a Callisthenic influence. The piece has been very highly praised for literary merit; it seems to me certainly not below, but not surprisingly above, the average of the older _chansons_ in this respect. But in so much of the poem as remains to us no very interesting part of the subject is attacked. [Footnote 77: Meyer, i. 25-59.]