Melusine: A Romance of the Fairy Lusignan

At a forest fountain, the exiled knight Raymondin meets a lady of unearthly beauty who will raise him to the lordship of Lusignan and make him father to a line of kings - on one condition: that he never seek to see her on a Saturday. For Melusine is a fairy, the daughter of a cursed king; and every Saturday she takes, from the waist down, the form of a serpent.For years all is well. Their sons rise to crowns across Cyprus, Armenia, Bohemia and Luxembourg; the fiercest of them, Geoffrey of the Great Tooth, slays giants and burns an abbey to the ground with his own brother inside. Then one Saturday Raymondin looks - and though he keeps her secret, in a fit of grief he breaks his word before the whole court, and Melusine flies from the ramparts, a wailing winged serpent, to return down the centuries whenever one of her blood is near to death.Composed by Jean d'Arras in 1393 for Jean, Duke of Berry, Melusine is the founding legend of a great medieval house and the most enduring of all the tales of the fairy bride. This edition presents the complete romance in the anonymous English translation of about 1500, its spelling and archaic vocabulary lightly modernized for the modern reader - nothing added, and nothing cut.