of the eighteenth century, by a French scholar, Legrand d’Aussy, who died in 1800. And quite recently, M. L. Tarsot, Chef de Bureau au Ministère de l’Instruction publique, in Paris, who has devoted much of the spare time of a busy life to the preparation of story books, made a choice of some of the best of these fabliaux, and adapted them for juvenile readers. It is M. Tarsot’s text, together with his delightful Introduction, which are given here ; for permission to reprint these, thanks are due both to him and to his publisher, M. Henri Laurens, who has also granted the right of reproduction of a number of the illustrations by M. A. Robida, one of the best known French black-and-white artists.
What was the origin of those tales, so popular throughout mediæval Europe ? Many of them seem to have come from the East. A thousand years B.C., in a less humorous and more didactic form, some of these stories were well known in India. They passed into Europe at or before the time of the Crusades, through Syria, Persia and Byzantium, and the Arabs also imported them into Spain. In Europe they became transformed, Christianised, adapted to the temper and sympathies of the Western races, but without entirely losing their identity. Others originated in Europe, in France itself, and were directly due to the fertile imagination of the Celtic and Latin races, or were founded on some incident of real life, while a few appear as stray offshoots of the epic literature of the period (e.g. La Mule sans Frein).
What poets, what trouvères, did them into rhyme and gave them a permanent form, we can hardly tell ; the fabliaux reproduced here are anonymous, with the
