In the field of medieval French studies, before Orality, there was the Formula, and before that, there was nothing, just texts badly written. To the pioneers of Romance philology, the chanson de geste appeared hampered by all those repetitions that modern French aesthetics had taught its pupils to track down and eliminate. Leon Gautier, for instance, who spent most of his academic life studying the chanson de geste, which he admired for its noble and patriotic content, remained somewhat reluctant when it came to judging its style. Speaking of the evolution of the chanson de geste, Gautier can only state that it suffers from the same shortcomings as poetry: the Homeric epithet, the nucleus of what today we would probably call formula: Ces odieux versificateurs de vingtieme ordre, qui regnerent trop longtemps sur la poesie francaise, trouverent un precieux et inestimable avantage dans l'emploi de l'epithete homerique: c'est qu'elle remplissait la moitie d'un vers. Pour ces pauvres imaginations, quelle heureuse rencontre! Ils multiplierent l'epithete de facon a en composer la deuxieme partie de leurs alexandrins, et n'eurent plus se mettre en frais d'invention que pour leur premier hemistiche. Alors commenca le regne de la cheville. (1) This is presumably one of the very first occasions in the history of French studies in which a semantic and metrical entity, a formula, is recognized as a device facilitating versification. It is certainly not a pure coincidence if it occurs in the context of a study on the chanson de geste, a genre to which the formula will remain linked even when everything else has changed. Many things have happened since Leon Gautier, most of them in the fifties, when scholars began to appreciate the poetic potential of the formula and discovered the artistic achievement obtained by the deliberate repetition of certain lines within a given chanson de geste. (2) That was the first step away from the cheville toward something new, something inconceivable, or at least not yet conceived, the first step towards the idea that there could be something more than laziness or incompetence in those texts, an Art epique des jongleurs, as Jean Rychner would entitle his fundamental book on the medieval French epic. (3) In 1955, when his study was published, the title could still almost appear as an oxymoron to all those accustomed to the norms of nineteenth-century writing even if Rychner was less concerned with poetry than with poetic technique, techne, the poet's craft, his ars; his art in the Latin sense of the term. Rychner's book was not only a step away from the cheville in the direction of aesthetics, but also a step toward something that was equally neglected in those days: orality. Cette litterature orale nous est parvenue ecrite, Rychner states plainly in the opening pages of his book. (4) The written word, in the case of the chanson de geste, is secondary and accessory: what counts is the moment in which the poem was recited, or, as we would say today, in which it was performed. Every performance is unique, since there is always an element of improvisation to it. Each written document captures just one given performance, and that is why there are so many differences between the manuscripts. By working on the written documents, the scholar can shed light on the conditions of these recitations, and the elaboration of the texts. What enabled Rychner to overcome and leave far behind him everything that had been written up to that time on the chanson de geste was the fact that he drew on work on poetry undertaken by scholars outside the field of French studies, focusing on professional singers active in the former Yugoslavia. (5) There, Rychner found answers to all the puzzling questions that medievalists had always been asking: those singers could memorize several thousands of lines without difficulty, and when they were asked to sing the same song again a couple of hours later, one would of course hear the same song, but with so many variants that it was impossible even to record them: changes in the order of words, one hemistich replaced by another, and lines added or omitted, exactly as with the medieval chanson de geste. …