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The Lamentable Lay of Sir Quatrecentquatre, 404

According to a now-lost tale of Chrétien de Troyes (or perhaps Marie de France) referred to only obliquely in one of the apocryphal writings of St. Hippoplectus the Stupid, Sir Quatrecentquatre, a geriatric knight living into his fifth century by some unexplained miraculous means, and now using simply his age as his name, fared forth into the wilderness in search of the Grail, accompanied only by his faithful page. Like the rest, he entered the woods where they seemed thickest to him, and there he had many wonderful adventures that purified his mind and soul. He was said to be as robust as a man half his age. Alas, in the end, pure as his mind and soul might have been, he overtaxed the capacities of his attenuated body, and a woeful misadventure befell him involving two dragonflies and an intoxicating beverage, of which we will say but little other than that he was vastly outnumbered and overmastered, and so met an unhappy, but hardly untimely, end. His body was eventually discovered and carried home to the court of King Arthur, where it received an honorable funeral, but — and here’s where your present issue comes into play — the page was never found.

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