A toy-boy and an older woman may be part of the stock-in-trade of modern romantic fiction, but they are not the first thing that comes to mind when we think of the heroes and heroines of twelfth-century French romance. A more typical pairing might be Erec and Enide, the one in his early twenties and the other still young enough to be unmarried at the start of the romance that bears their names. Or, again, the hero and first heroine of Ille et Galeron, who meet when Ille has been knighted and has spent three years establishing himself, and when Galeron is almost certainly no older than he is. In Partonopeus de Blois, however, the hero is thirteen at the start of the action, and within a matter of days he has been seduced by the empress of Byzantium, a woman several years his senior. The narrator draws attention to the question of the hero's age by stressing that he was only thirteen years old and by insisting that, despite his youth, Partonopeus is fully developed, both morally, physically and socially: