The smaller range and more delicate--however indelicate--argument of the _fabliaux_ not only invited but almost necessitated a different kind of handling. The story had to draw to point in (on an average) two or three hundred lines at most--there are _fabliaux_ of a thousand lines, and _fabliaux_ of thirty or forty, but the average is as just stated. The incidents had to be adjusted for best effect, neither too many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative--an appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o' the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word is thrown away, and not a word missed that is really wanted. [Sidenote: _The appearance of irony._] The great means for doing this in literature is irony; and irony appears in the _fabliaux_ as it had hardly done since Lucian. Take, for instance, this opening of a piece, the rest of which is at least as irreverent, considerably less quotable, but not much less pointed:-- "Quant Dieus ot estore lo monde, Si con il est a la reonde, Et quanque il convit dedans, Trois ordres establir de genz, Et fist el siecle demoranz Chevalers, clers et laboranz. Les chevalers toz asena As terres, et as clers dona Les aumosnes et les dimages; Puis asena les laborages As laborenz, por laborer. Qant ce ot fet, sanz demeler D'iluec parti, et s'en ala." What two orders were left, and how the difficulty of there being nothing left for them was got over, may be found by the curious in the seventy-sixth _fabliau_ of the third volume of the collection so often quoted. But the citation given will show that there is nothing surprising in the eighteenth-century history, literary or poetical, of a country which could produce such a piece, certainly not later than the thirteenth. Even Voltaire could not put the thing more neatly or with a more complete freedom from superfluous words. [Sidenote: _Fables proper._]