The old habit of reading this division of romance in late and travestied versions naturally and necessarily obscured the curious traits of community in form and matter that belong to it, and indeed distinguish it from almost all other departments of literature of the imaginative kind. Its members are frequently spoken of as "the Charlemagne Romances"; and, as a matter of fact, most of them do come into connection with the great prince of the second race in one way or another. Yet Bodel's phrase of _matiere de France_[17] is happier. For they are all still more directly connected with French history, seen through a romantic lens; and even the late and half-burlesque _Hugues Capet_, even the extremely interesting and partly contemporary set on the Crusades, as well as such "little _gestes_" as that of the Lorrainers, _Garin le Loherain_ and the rest, and the three "great _gestes_" of the king, of the southern hero William of Orange (sometimes called the _geste_ of Montglane), and of the family of Doon de Mayence, arrange themselves with no difficulty under this more general heading. And the _chanson de geste_ proper, as Frenchmen are entitled to boast, never quite deserts this _matiere de France_. It is always the _Gesta Francorum_ at home, or the _Gesta Dei per Francos_ in the East, that supply the themes. When this subject or group of subjects palled, the very form of the _chanson de geste_ was lost. It was not applied to other things;[18] it grew obsolete with that which it had helped to make popular. Some of the material--_Huon of Bordeaux_, the _Four Sons of Aymon_, and others--retained a certain vogue in forms quite different, and gave later ages the inexact and bastard notion of "Charlemagne Romance" which has been referred to. But the _chanson de geste_ itself was never, so to speak, "half-known"--except to a very few antiquaries. After its three centuries of flourishing, first alone, then with the other two "matters," it retired altogether, and made its reappearance only after four centuries had passed away. [Footnote 17: Jean Bodel, a _trouvere_ of the thirteenth century, furnished literary history with a valuable stock-quotation in the opening of his _Chanson des Saisnes_ for the three great divisions of Romance:-- "Ne sont que trois matieres a nul home attendant, De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant." --_Chanson des Saxons_, ed. Michel, Paris, 1839, vol. i. p. 1. The lines following, less often quoted, are an interesting early _locus_ for French literary patriotism.] [Footnote 18: Or only in rare cases to later French history itself--Du Guesclin, and the _Combat des Trente_.] [Sidenote: _Mistakes about them._]