parations for her husband's burial, and her questions are put off with feigned answers. At last the mother cries:
"Ma fille je ne puis le cacher
Le Roi Renaud est décédé!"
The wife dies of grief, or, in other versions, goes into a convent. Now it must be noticed that this ballad, with its three persons, and these couplets of questions and reply, is really a little drama. In the shape of a child's rhyme, it still survives, much mutilated, but recognisable in Scotland.—(Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland.)
Now turn from the puerile sing-song of the Lowlands to Brittany, and you find the lay of the Seigneur Nann, who returns to his wife in evil case, not after a lost battle, but after repelling the love of a fairy. The dialogue between the wife and the mother-in-law follows as a matter of course. (Villemarqué, Barzaz Breiz, i. p. 43.) Brittany thus retains a mark of a famous and very primitive superstition, the belief in the deadly love of the spectral forest women. So wide-spread is this superstition, that a friend of mine declares he has met with it among the savages of New Caledonia, and has known a native who actually died, as he himself said he would, after meeting one of the fairy women of the wild wood. In Le Roi Renaud, then, we have the intermediate form of a popular song. It has not sunk to the decadence of its surviving Scotch form,—it has lost the tragic aberglaube which the Celtic memory preserves. In the villages, where Le Roi Renaud has become Jean Renaud, a wounded soldier, we see, perhaps, the degradation of the legend. The same plot is found in the Venetian folk-song "Conte Anzolin," where the hero is neither wounded in war nor bewitched by a fairy, but simply bitten by a mad dog! I owe these variants to M. de Puymaigre (Chants Populaires dans le Pays Messin), The legend is not found, to my knowledge, in German, Danish, or Romaic popular song, but probably other readers may have met with it in these languages.
The ballad of Germaine (Puymaigre) turns on the most widely spread of all fictitious motives—the motive of the Odyssey—the return of a long-lost husband to his faithful wife, who does not recognize him
