In their chapter on the concept of visagéité, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari place an episode from Chrétien's Perceval at the centre of their enquiry. In this famous episode, three drops of blood from an injured goose fall on the snow; the formation reminds Perceval of the face of his amie, and he promptly falls into a lengthy reverie. For Deleuze and Guattari, this episode is illustrative of a wider literary phenomenon whereby protagonists lose their names, their identities and their purposes, and of which chivalric romance is an especially pertinent, although far from unique, example. What Deleuze and Guattari identify in this episode and others is none other than visagéité as it is played out in the relationship between a character and their landscape and in the phenomenon of text on a page. For these face theorists, face is a complex concept that describes a variety of interconnected phenomena: the relationship between subjectivity and signification; the way in which particular ‘visages concrets’ and their human subjects are categorised and organised; a system of representation and meaning assignation by which the world at large is understood; and also a process that produces the conditions of its own escape and dismantling. I argue in this chapter that all these facets of visagéité find their productive equivalent in the Roman de la Rose; this prophetic dream narrative of the all-consuming pursuit of a highly unstable love object echoes how Deleuze and Guattari describe courtly literature in terms of visagéité: