Men succumbed to this craze because the women drove them to it. Besides, nations, like widows, love the dear departed. Since chivalry had ceased to exist, people naturally swore by nothing else. The more our activities decline, the more we gloat over the memory of past excesses. Charlemagne, then, filled the horizon; doting looks were cast at rusty old sword-blades, and while works of quite charming beauty left women almost unmoved, spectres had only to appear, to vanquish them. Sometimes these showed themselves naked and unadorned, in all the strange dignity of their powerful frames; at other times an intelligent editor paid some attention to their toilet, smartened them up, decked them with little rosettes of pink or blue. How many times was _Amadis_, perhaps the most famous of these romances, thus tittivated! No one remembered that France had given it birth; it was re-imported into France by way of Spain and Italy through a translation of Herberay des Essarts, with fabulous success: “Any one who spoke ill of the Amadis romances would have been a hissing and a by-word.” Out of four books it grew into a dozen; it might well have lengthened itself indefinitely, like some law-suits in our own time. These old romances are to-day scarcely known except by scholars. If we open any one of them at hazard—_Lancelot of the Lake_ for instance, one of the most classic[234]—we find that the colouring is crude. Side by side with mystic virginities we see the reek of coarse appetites. Wives and maidens have blood in their veins, and, like all persons of rather primitive education, do nothing by halves; her husband has only to turn his back for a moment and queen Guinevere is feeling her way towards a reconciliation with Lancelot (bearded like the pard), and the gallant knight has no need to supplicate to get the window opened. Sir Gawain holds very brief parley with the daughter of the king of North Wales, when he surprises her extended on her ermine couch in a virginal but ravishing deshabille! Arthur very quickly forgets Queen Guinevere amid the solace brought him in his cell by a damsel “courteous and fair of speech.” As it mixed in the best platonist society, the old romance of chivalry picked up more refined manners. King Arthur ends by gathering about him a noble enough company; Roland leaves Charlemagne in the lurch, to hasten after his well-beloved; and (horror of horrors!) Angelica philanders prettily with a Saracen page! The old torrential romance ended like the Rhone—fell into a tranquil lake.