The Afterword

These lives made out of loves that long since were Lives wrought as ours of earth and burning air, Was such not theirs, the twain I take, and give Out of my life to make their dead life live Some days of mine, and blow my living breath Between dead lips forgotten even of death? So many and many of old have given my twain Love and live song and honey-hearted pain.

Thus, rather suddenly, ends our knowledge of the love-business between Perion and Melicent. For at this point, as abruptly as it began, the one existing chronicle of their adventures makes conclusion, like a bit of interrupted music, and thereby affords conjecture no inconsiderable bounds wherein to exercise itself. Yet, in view of the fact that deductions as to what befell these lovers afterward can at best result in free-handed theorising, it seems more profitable in this place to speak very briefly of the fragmentary Roman de Lusignan, since the history of Melicent and Perion as set forth in this book makes no pretensions to be more than a rendering into English of this manuscript, with slight additions from the earliest known printed version of 1546.

2 M. Verville, in his monograph on Nicolas de Caen,[1: Paul Verville, Notice sur la vie de Nicolas de Caen, p. 112 (Rouen, 1911)] considers it probable that the Roman de Lusignan was printed in Bruges by Colard Mansion at about the same time Mansion published the Dizain des Reines. This is possible; but until a copy of the book is discovered, our sole authority for the romance must continue to be the fragmentary MS. No. 503 in the Allonbian Collection.