Knights of the Round Table in numerous Arthurian tales (notably the Post-Vulgate Cycle), but he is most famous as the protagonist in Chrétien de Troyes' first romance, "Erec and Enide". Because of "Erec and Enide"‘s relationship to the Welsh "Geraint and Enid", Erec and Geraint are often conflated or confused. In Chrétien's story, Erec meets his future wife Enide while on a quest to defeat a knight who had mistreated one of Guinevere's servants. The two fall in love and marry, but rumors spread that Erec no longer cares for knighthood or anything else besides his domestic life. Enide cries about these rumors, causing Erec
King Arthur de Boron, a fact that helped accelerate the decline of Arthur in continental romance. Similarly, Lancelot and his cuckolding of Arthur with Guinevere became one of the classic motifs of the Arthurian legend, although the Lancelot of the prose "Lancelot" () and later texts was a combination of Chrétien's character and that of Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's "Lanzelet". Chrétien's work even appears to feed back into Welsh Arthurian literature, with the result that the romance Arthur began to replace the heroic, active Arthur in Welsh literary tradition. Particularly significant in this development were the three Welsh Arthurian romances, which are closely