The _trouveres_ did not trouble themselves to work out any complete character among the many whom they grouped round this great personage; but they left none without touches of vivification and verisimilitude. The female beasts--Dame Fiere or Orgueilleuse, the lioness, Hersent, the she-wolf, Hermeline, the vixen, and the rest--are too much tinged with that stock slander of feminine character which was so common in the Middle Ages. And each is rather too much of a type, a fault which may be also found with their lords. Yet all of these--Bruin and Brichemer, Coart and Chanticleer, Tybert and Primaut, Hubert and Roonel--have the liveliest touches, not merely of the coarsely labelling kind, but of the kind that makes a character alive. And, save as concerns the unfortunate capons and _gelines_ whom Renart consumes, so steadily and with such immunity, it cannot be said that their various misfortunes are ever incurred without a valid excuse in poetical justice. Isengrim, the chief of them all, is an especial case in point. Although he is Chief Constable, he is just as much of a rascal and a malefactor as Renart himself, with the additional crime of stupidity. One is disposed to believe that, if domiciliary visits were made to their various abodes, Malpertuis would by no means stand alone as a bad example of a baronial abode. Renart is indeed constantly spoken of as Noble's "baron." Yet it would be a great mistake to take this epic, as it has been sometimes taken, for a protest against baronial suppression. A sense of this, no doubt, counts--as do senses of many other oppressions that are done under the sun. But it is the satire on life as a whole that is uppermost; and that is what makes the poem, or collection of poems, so remarkable. It is hard, coarse, prosaic except for the range and power of its fancy, libellous enough on humanity from behind its stalking-brutes. But it is true, if an exaggeration of the truth; and its constant hugging of the facts of life supplies the strangest possible contrast to the graceful but shadowy land of romance which we have left in former chapters. We all know the burial-scene of Launcelot--later, no doubt, in its finest form, but in suggestion and spirit of the time with which we are dealing. Let us now consider briefly the burial-scene of Renart. [Sidenote: _The burial of Renart._]