Elaine of Corbenic, and the begetting of Galahad

Lancelot comes to Corbenic, where King Pelles keeps the Grail. Pelles knows something Lancelot does not: it has been prophesied that Lancelot and Pelles's daughter Elaine will conceive a son who will achieve the quest and heal the Maimed King.

Lancelot will not touch any woman but the queen. So the household arranges it.

A servant brings him a ring he believes is Guinevere's, and a message that she is waiting nearby, and gives him a cup of wine that leaves him so assotted and mad that he might make no delay. He goes to Elaine's bed believing she is Guinevere, and the child is conceived.

In the morning the enchantment lifts. He opens a window, sees who is in the bed, takes his sword, and asks her how she has betrayed him — and she asks him to spare her life, and tells him about the child. He does spare her, and he forgives her, and he never forgives the household.

It happens a second time, later, at Camelot, and this time Guinevere finds out. She throws Lancelot out of the court in a fury, and he goes out of his mind — genuinely mad, for two years, wandering and unrecognised. It is Elaine who eventually finds him, and Elaine who has him carried into the chamber where the Grail heals him.

She loves him her whole life and he never returns it.

The important thing here is who does what. The Grail's own guardians, the holiest household in the book, produce their perfect knight by drugging a man and deceiving him into a bed. Malory does not comment on this. He simply records it, in a book he will later fill with the language of purity, and lets the reader notice that the quest for the highest thing in the world begins with a rape by deception arranged by its keepers.