Laüstic
narrative lay by Marie de France
"Laüstic", also known as "Le Rossignol", "Le Laustic", "Laostic", and "Aüstic", is a Breton lai by the medieval poet Marie de France. The title comes from the Breton word for "nightingale" (eostig), a symbolic figure in the poem. It is the eighth poem in the collection known as the Lais of Marie de France, and the poem is only found in the manuscript known as Harley 978 (also called manuscript H). Like the other poems in the collection, Laüstic is written in the Anglo-Norman dialect of Old French, in couplets eight syllables long.
Plot summary
Two knights live in adjoining houses in the vicinity of Saint-Malo in Brittany; one is married and one lives as a bachelor. The wife of the married knight enters into a secret relationship with the other knight, but their contact is limited to conversation and the exchange of small gifts, since a "high wall made of dark stone" separates the two households. Typically, the lady rises at night, once her husband is asleep, and goes to the window to converse with her lover; whenever her lover is home, she is kept under close watch.
Her suspicious husband demands to know why she spends her nights at the window, and she says she does so to listen to the nightingale sing. He mocks her, and orders his servants to capture the nightingale. When it is caught he brings it to the lady's chambers, denying her requests to release the bird.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4427935. VIAF identifies the subject as 4425165326537016290003. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Laüstic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.