The Facétie had a less brilliant fate. Poggio and Cornazano, always dear to the ladies, handed down many of their stories to imitators like Domenichi, Delicado, Boistuau, who in their turn passed them on to Shakespeare, La Fontaine, and others. The old romance continued in high favour—a favour that was so far merited in that the romance combined with the sentimentalism of chivalry sufficient spiciness to induce a good lady to leave it lying on her table. Women doted on the venerable romance of cloak and sword,[233] long, diffuse, and heroic; it had long ago captured Italy. It delighted princesses by its idealism, and peasant girls by its flavour of mystery and marvel. When the efflorescence of humanism, aestheticism and the new ideas was at its height, the _Romaunt of the Rose_ made its reappearance, and year in, year out men saw defiling past, as though resuscitated by some terrible incantation, all the old knights of ecstatic or sorrowful countenance, the champions of the Holy Grail and of Melusina—Lancelot of the Lake and Perceforest, Fier-à-bras and Percival, Ponthus, Meliadus, Pierre de Provence, all that Gothic world which was believed to be dead and buried. With them they brought their friends and relatives—_The Fair Elaine_, _Theseus_, _The Destruction of Troy_, _The Doughty Hector_, _Oedipus_, _Alexander the Great_, these worthy, up to a certain point, of rubbing shoulders with Plato; but also _Baudouin_, _Le Grant Voyage de Jherusalem_, _La Conqueste de Trébisonde_, in an age when people troubled themselves very little about Crusades! Even the Italians went mad over Charlemagne. It was like an electric spark—a reciprocal attraction. France lost her heart to Italy, and Italy opened wide her arms to France; the women of the south, the men of the north. In vain did the platonist men ridicule the event; in vain did their spokesman, Pulci, at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the sanctuary of platonism, empty the vials of their wrath and give the paladins a terribly hot time of it; nothing could stem the tide, and a romance—a shockingly bad one—entitled _I reali di Francia_, became the germ of a whole new literature.