OF SIX MEDIÆVAL WOMEN
or perhaps in but one tower of it, whilst her lord went forth to the chase or to war, his home-coming meaning merely the wine-cup and war-songs, or tedious epic. Many a one must have read or listened to Marie's love idylls, and longed, and perhaps even hoped, as in the story of "Yonec," that a fair and gentle knight, in the form of some beautiful bird, might fly in at her window and bring her some diversion from the outside world. With nothing before us but her own poems and the scant recognition of Denys Pyramus, she seems like some old portrait in which the delicate pigments that once glowed in the face and made it live have, owing to their very delicacy, long since faded away, leaving behind only the stronger and less volatile colours of the dark background from which we in vain try to wrest more than one or two fragments of the secret it holds.
Judging from internal evidence, it would seem that Marie was born in Normandy, about the middle of the twelfth century, but settled in England, where since the Conquest, and indeed since the time of Edward the Confessor, many Norman families had made their home. Not only does she make occasional use of English words, and translate from English into French the fables known as Æsop's, but in the prologue to her Lays, which she dedicates to "the noble King," generally considered to be Henry the Second, she expresses fear lest her work should not find favour in a foreign land. In this prologue she
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