If Iseut represented the poetic ideal in the age of chivalry, was the real woman of that age like Iseut? We can answer, unhesitatingly, no. The conditions of life in the romances were very highly idealized, and certain forms in the romance became purely conventional. The heroine must always be more beautiful than tongue can tell, and she must, in the end, win her lover, or be merciful to him, according as she began in disdain or in love sickness. Numerous adventures, wildly fantastic in character, preceded this consummation; but readers even in that day got to such a point that their jaded palates could no longer be tickled even by the choicest extravagances. Men knew that in real life they did not love in that way; and women knew it, too, though they were perhaps slower to confess it. At any rate, the reaction from the extreme type of romantic idealization of woman began even while the romance of chivalry was trying to persuade its readers that all women were like Iseut, Guinever, Elaine, and that these were angels. The reaction against the ideal of chivalry in literature took two main directions, the one, more purely comic or realistic, representing the woman of the middle classes, the other, more intellectual and satiric, representing woman in general but especially the lady. The first is represented, we may say, by the great _Roman du Renard_ and those short popular tales which strolling minstrels were wont to recite, the _Fabliaux_. The second we find chiefly in the _Roman de la Rose_ and its numerous progeny.