Bisclavret, taken under royal protection, accompanies the court everywhere, till, on the occasion of a special assemblage of the barons, the man who had married his wife comes into his presence. Straight at his throat leapt the wolf-man, and would have torn him to pieces on the spot had not the king interfered. The obvious hatred of the wolf for this particular man aroused the king's suspicions, and these suspicions were still further intensified when, not long after, the wolf manifested the same violent hatred toward his former wife, now the wife of the knight, biting her and scratching her face in spite of all that could be done. Then, upon the advice of an old knight who remembered the mysterious disappearance of Bisclavret and who knew something of Breton legends, the king put the false wife to torture, and forced from her the confession of the truth. Bisclavret, shut up in a room with the clothes he had worn as a man, is transformed into a man once more and reinstated in his possessions. The unfaithful wife, accompanied by her paramour, is driven from the land, and, as a further retribution, several of her children were born without noses, the wolf having bitten off her nose. As Marie concludes, with triumphant rejoicing in the punishment of the wicked even unto the third and fourth generation, "'tis true, indeed, noseless were they born, and noseless did they live." This paraphrase of Marie's work can, of course, give no idea of its literary value; but the tale itself will serve as a sample of what the first woman in French literature wrote. We have from her also a translation of the famous legend of _Saint Patrick's Purgatory_, of how a knight journeyed into the lower regions and came back to warn the world of the punishments in store for the wicked. Marie represents but a beginning--and yet it is a beginning--of the writing in their mother tongue, which was to make famous many women as well as men of France. In her day, indeed, it was a distinction to write in the mother tongue, for among the classes which we should call literary Latin was considered the only proper vehicle for their wisdom. Long after her day, indeed, Latin still kept French from its birthright, and it will be two centuries before we come to another woman who writes in French. Though the great Héloïse and her letters, written not long before Marie's time, take their place in literature, it is in the literature of scholastic Latin, not of old French. CHAPTER IV WOMEN IN THE AGE OF SAINT LOUIS