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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Lo, the Sweet Troubadour

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

BY

RAIMON DE LOI

ILLUSTRATED BY

GI OF ANN I PETRINA

PUBLISHED BY THE CENTURY CO.
New York & London

Copyright, 1926, by
THE CENTURY Co*

PRINTED IN U, S. A.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I Lo, THE SWEET TROUBADOUR 3

II THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN 21

Paris to Poitiers

III THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT 49

Ventadour to Poitiers
Caen to London

IV THE TRAIL OF A HOPEFUL POET 79

London to Alengon

V THE TRAIL OF A PETULANT PRINCE 103

Le Mans to Poitiers

VI THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT I 131
Poitiers to Plrigueux

VII THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT II 161

Plrigueux to Toulouse

VIII THE TRAIL OF A BROKEN KING 187

Le Mans to Fontevrault

IX THE TRAIL OF A DESPERATE LOVER 209

Blaye to Toulouse

Mir (iwu.) racist; M

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

X THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET I 243

Les Baux to Aigues-Mortes

XI THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET II 269

Montpdlier to Carcassonne

XII THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE 293

About Avignon

[vi]

ILLUSTRATIONS

Lo, THE SWEET TROUBADOUR Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

CASTLE OF FALAISE WHERE WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR WAS
BORN 49

PRIGUEUX 131

CHINON 187

TOULOUSE 209

MARSEILLES 243

CARCASSONNE 269

AVIGNON 293

[vii]

Chapter I
L<9 5 the Sweet Troubadour

Chapter I

IT is a heavy white road that leads to Carpentras, a road
blanketed with the rich odor of newly pressed grapes, the
acrid smell of dust, of sun-baked tomatoes, of dried grass,
and, in spots, with the tonic perfume of cooling cedars. As
noon passes, the heaps of tomatoes piled outside the doors
of sheds take on a richer red, the dark green of the cedars
turns black, and the road becomes cadaverous.

As we toiled up this road we were suddenly arrested by
the square Tour d'Orange which, silhouetted against a
green sky, towered above the city walls like the upraised
arm of a policeman. A startled wind rustled the leaves of a
neighboring fig-tree. An over-ripe fruit splashed to the
ground. The Lady-Who-Married-Me took my arm and
whispered

"Let's, wait a bit . . . Fm afraid I'm tired . . . Fm
afraid . . ."

We leaned on our sticks in the dusty road and waited.

A gust of wind blew through the Porte d'Orange and
down the white road, raising the dust in our faces. The in-
hospitable spirits were leaving. Then the arched mouth of
the tower lighted up, and in that casual fashion which in-

[3]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

dicates that one housewife after the other is thinking about
supper for her husband, small lights began laughing in the
windows above the city walls.
We proceeded up the hill.

This was the land of the troubadours, and along the
trails we were following had passed many a prince and
poet, and poet-prince, and princely poet who was fre-
quently more powerful than the master he nominally
served. It stretched south to the Mediterranean, west to
the Atlantic, and northwest to the sometime seat of many
an English king Tours and Le Mans.

We had read of the troubadours in the volumes of Ger-
man scholars who thought they were contributing to that
poor thing called human knowledge, and we had read the
songs of the troubadours the first love-songs in western
Europe buried now in gaily illuminated manuscripts;
and we had said :

"Where they wandered, let us wander; where they
loved, let us love ; where they sang, let us sing. Let us get
into direct contact with the mystic earth that bore them.
Let us feel with our hands the rough stones of the towers
from which they threatened to throw themselves and pene-
trate the secret portals which still open inward on lovely
gardens where they entered to find happiness or, in some
cases, death."

We trod trails in southern France that few tourists have
ever trod, and we saw cities that few tourists have ever seen.
"Ah, yes," said our host in one village, "we have frequent
tourists. Two weeks ago a party from Marseilles stopped

[4]

LO, THE SWEET TROUBADOUR

for lunch; a month ago some students came through on
foot/'

The records of the troubadours' lives have been pre-
served, not only in the songs they made about themselves
they were surprisingly lacking in reticence for men as
desperate as they pretended to be but also in the gossip
about them, doubtless elaborated by the fertile brains of
their rivals and enemies.

From these records we know which castles the trouba-
dours liked to visit, and by translating the names of the
castles into their modern equivalents it is possible to re-
construct with reasonable accuracy the itineraries they fol-
lowed northward to London and Paris and eastward to
Rome and Jerusalem.

The cities they visited were not suburban villages but
were built for eternity, and until eternity they will stand
unless torn down to make way for modern factories. This,
however, is improbable. Modern industry has turned away
from most of these cities whose battlements still stand
resisting now the attacks of time as they resisted then the
attacks of armies. Streets that were once so thronged with
courtiers and men-at-arms "that you would have thought
the walls would have burst with the crush" are now tra-
versed at infrequent intervals by the turgid ox bearing a
burden of fire-wood. The large and spacious chambers of
gracious ladies whose beauty was perhaps greater than
their discretion are now populated by a cock and his harem
of peaceful hens. The audience-chamber of a proud prince
is now the home of a meditative ass.

For those of us who get a cynical satisfaction in compar-

[5]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

ing our civilization with the civilizations of others this is
fortunate. The ass and the hens are far less destructive
than their more passionate predecessors, and so long as the
ruins of Les Baux now fortunately protected from demo-
lition by the government and Bollene and many another
village we shall pass presently are occupied by these, they
will be preserved. Nor is it entirely a matter for regret that
perfect automobile roads have replaced the ancient trails.
The ancient roads, though interesting enough to us, were
for the people who used them very bad roads. Indeed one
cannot regret the passing at a ripe old age of a civilization
like that of the troubadours. It did its share for us and left
more than one mark on our habits of thought. The only
thing one can regret is that its monuments are so slightly
known to the modern world which passes through the
troubadour country year after year on its way to the Riviera.
Most of these tourists are peacefully asleep when they
reach the land of the troubadours in the London-Nice
Express. They will breakfast in Marseilles and take din-
ner on the Boulevard des Anglais in Nice. Some of these
tourists are happier asleep and happier leading an English
life among English people in a blessedly un-English climate
than they would be awake and wandering with the poets.
Others, however, are cheated of many a pleasant side-trip
by guide-books which, attempting to present all the infor-
mation about a country, present no information because the
essential facts are buried in a mass of details.

To segregate some of these essential facts about the
Middle Ages and to arrange them as a series of trips through
central France by car, on foot, by cycle, or with a donkey,
[6]

LO, THE SWEET TROUBADOUR

to follow, in these trips, the footsteps of famous men who
made them almost a thousand years ago, is the purpose of
these chapters.

I shall not trouble the reader with large blocks of his-
torical information or descriptions of churches or works of
art. Information and description of this kind are available
elsewhere. I shall rather go with him as he follows the
trail of this or that poet or prince, gossiping with him as the
poet or prince would have gossiped. But because he may
want to know what kind of people these troubadours were,
I shall attempt a very brief reconstruction of the spirit of
the people we shall meet. Then I shall follow the portions
of the trail that were made most vivid by Bernard de
Ventadour, Richard the Lion-Heart, Bertrand de Born,
Jaufre Rudel, and Raimon de Miravel, by Petrarch and
Peire Vidal. Many of the cities they passed were already
a thousand years old when they first entered them. These
greater antiquities will not distract, for they may be found
listed elsewhere for the use of the conscientious tourist.

All of these trails were the roads of the Middle Ages
and lead as all roads led then, to Marseilles, the last
important stop on the way to Rome, the center of the
medieval world.

The color of life in the Middle Ages was a deep, glaring,
and unmitigated red. Life was fast; life was hard; life was
for youth and lived with such energy and enthusiasm that
whatever was done of good or bad was done with an

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

absolute intensity. Richard the Lion-Heart, a writer of
indifferent poems but a great patron of poets particularly
those who wrote poems in his honor was dead when he
was forty-one; before he was eighteen he had conquered a
kingdom. At an age when our modern youth are being
persuaded that virtue is its own reward, the medieval youth
were proving that the essence of virtue is a strong arm,
agile wit, and a cynically realistic conviction that the battle
is, after all, to the swift, the strong, the sure. When they
were not making war or playing at politics, they were play-
ing at love or making poems ; and they made love and poetry
with the same ardor and ruthlessness that they displayed in
the taking of cities and the killing of enemies.

Most of the evil they did has died with them, but the
fruits of their slight leisure, their poetry, and their
philosophy both a kind of game picturing a make-believe
world have survived.

We of modern times frequently confuse the game with
the candle. Because medieval wars were conducted on a
small scale, we think they were of small importance to the
men who were killed in them; because medieval poetry was
very brilliant, we use it to cast a false light on medieval
manners. Galahad is a literary myth created by a popular
novelist of the thirteenth century writing for medieval
flappers. But because love and poetry were games, do not
assume that they were frivolous pastimes. Time in those
golden days was money and was created to be spent to good
advantage. The troubadours worked hard at their play;
they played hard at their work.

A particular group of fashionable young men who fre~
[8]

LO, THE SWEET TROUBADOUR

quented the courts in and about Marseilles, Toulouse, and
Tours were called troubadours. They fashioned for us two
arts : the art of lyric poetry and the art of love, which they
referred to as the "gay science." Although there had been
lyric poetry before the troubadours, it had never been raised
to the perfection to which they raised it. Although there
had been arts of love before the troubadours, they meta-
morphosed those arts and gave them the forms in which
love is practised to-day.

In modern times the art of love has fallen into a decay.
Women are, I suppose, still beautiful, and passion is still
a fluid force in the spirits of men ; but in the affectation of
a scientific interest in emotions we are apt to affect a superi-
ority to the emotions we are analyzing. Whereas men in the
twelfth century affected to be more moved by love than
they could possibly have been, men of the twentieth century
affect to be less moved than we know in fact that they
actually are.

But despite our ingenuous affectation of dispassionate-
ness, the medieval theory of love has become a real part of
our being. It is on record that men, even in modern times,
have compared the women they loved to all the flowers
of the botanical dictionary, that they have insisted that
these women were superior in wisdom to the wise women of
the past, present, and future. Many of us still believe that
the maiden should be coy and the lover despairing, although
we know that lovers are more often despairing because
maidens are not coy enough. The lover's humility which
makes him the slave of the beloved, and his arrogance
which makes him her defender, which we now consider the

[9]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

instinctive equipment of every civilized man, were formu-
lated by the troubadours of the tenth to the thirteenth cen-
turies.

These precepts are contained in exquisite poems, in
lengthy philosophical dissertations on love, and in alle-
gories. The philosophical dissertation on love has, in
modern times, become a psychological monograph on im-
morality; for the allegory we no longer have sufficient
intellectual industry; but the lyric poem remains now as
it was then, a source of delight. For the troubadours sang
of love in the springtime, of the passions and despairs of
lovers, of the beauty and cruelty of women, themes which
still retain for us an enduring interest.

The strangely artificial relation which existed between
the despairing lover and the charming lady, and between
the charming lady and her heavy husband to whom she had
been married for reasons of state, was soon regulated by a
legal code. What this code was has been reported in many
documents, but with particular charm in one called "The
Art of Honest Loving" by Andreas, a chaplain. In general,
the lover must be true to the king and queen of love; he
must fast for love every other day; and he must stir up
others to love.

In particular he must be discreet and secret, for true love
is always clandestine. When the poet writes to his mis-
tress he must refer to her under an assumed name. This
name ultimately became an open secret in the court, yet it
was considered bad form to address a lady with absolute
frankness.

The lover must be constant to one lady; he must be

[10]

LO, THE SWEET TROUBADOUR

patient with her moods; he must be meek and afraid of
being over-bold ; he must be conscious of his inferiority to
his mistress; he must think of nothing unpleasant for her
sake; he must be thoughtful to please her; he must think no
evil of her ; he must keep his person and his dress neat and
clean for her sake; and finally, he must defend her honor
and reputation at all costs. The observance of this rule led
to innumerable difficulties. Frequently the ladies had no
honor, which, as in the case of Loba de Perrautier, led to
tragedy.

To these may be added several other customs. The lover
was supposed to wander alone musing on his lady; he was
supposed to be sleepless when she was cruel, to dream of
enjoying her love, to be wretched in her absence, to be a
master of the language of love and the signs of lovers, and
to maintain his interest in love even when he had grown old.

Only knights, clerks, and ladies of gentle birth were
citizens of the kingdom of love. These citizens were urged
to love one another but, with peculiar naivete, were pro-
hibited from marrying each other. The authors are unani-
mous that love between husband and wife is impossible.
"Though husband and wife be both citizens of the king-
dom of love, they are citizens of different counties, and
between these counties there is constant strife, and each
must be faithful to serve the lord and mistress of his par-
ticular county who are also the vassals of the Lord of
Love."

One of the subtleties of the gay science is illustrated in a
story about Lancelot. Lancelot was on his way to rescue
Guinevere. Guinevere was a lady of questionable reputa-

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

tion who had the habit of getting kidnapped and always
wanted rescuers. One biographer suspects her of being a
shape-shifter who appeared during the day as a lady but
could also assume the form of a snake. At a ford, Lancelot
became engaged with an evil knight of the region (all
knights who were your enemies were then, as they are
to-day, evil knights) and lost his horse. He faced the prob-
lem of transporting himself for some distance clad in several
tons of armor. A peasant with a cart gave him a lift, but
when he appeared before his lady in this ignoble position
she refused to receive him. This adventure was, for the
Middle Ages, as much a social problem as the "Doll's
House" is for us. What is a lady to do when her knight
presents himself in that way*? How can one accept the love
of a knight who does things as impossible as riding in a
peasant's cart? Indeed could a modern lady love a man
who eats with his knife, who is seen with vulgar com-
panions, who is for good reason or bad transported to her
house in a butcher's cart?

But these were refinements.

Thus, my friends, if you should ask seriously, why the
trails' of the troubadours, I should answer you just as
seriously, therefore the trails of the troubadours: because
these men were sophisticated, subtle, and perverse, because
the color of their life was red, and, above all, because they
had a youth and a love of living which they imparted to
the songs they sang and the trails they followed.

These trails led, as you shall see if you turn the next
page, through the land of a virile race, a race which was
destroyed by a great international war.

[12]

L0 5 THE SWEET TROUBADOUR

If you will step over to the moon and look up to see the
earth, a huge globe swinging above your head, you may be
able to distinguish that part occupied by nations which, ten
years ago, engaged in a great military struggle. They will
seem remarkably small and close together. You may won-
der why nations whose domains were separated only by
imaginary lines should have found it necessary to murder
each other.

When we look back through a distance of a thousand
years to southern France we see a similar picture. Southern
France was divided into duchies, kingdoms, and princi-
palities as Europe is divided into kingdoms and republics;
then as now the countries were separated by imaginary lines
and divided by jealousy. It was ruled by a large number of
barons, each baron surrounded by a gay and warlike court
whose business it was to protect the baron's land and to
kill the baron's enemies. Days of peace were treasured
because they were infrequent. The arts of peace were
treasured both because they were exquisite and because they
were in pleasant contrast to the usual business of life. A
society which is engaged in affairs as grim as the affairs of
the Middle Ages devotes its playtime to intense relaxation.
The fever in the blood of these men effervesced in difficult,
charming, and complicated poetry.

The barons and their courts lived in fortified castles on
hills surrounded by moats and capped by towers so arranged
as to afford protection against attack. Knighthood was, at
the beginning of the period we are wandering through, in

[13]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

high flower, although a very different flower from the
picture of it presented in the stories of the Round Table
and the Holy Grail. The knights were not really sensitive
courteous gentlemen who devoted their lives to the rescue
trf kidnapped maidens or the defense of a lady's honor. Too
frequently they were responsible for the kidnapping of the
maidens whom they robbed of all honor. The work of the
troubadours has overcast the morals of the knights of old
with a glamour which they do not in any sense deserve.

The ladies of the castle had their first taste of marriage
while very young. They were frequently betrothed at the
mature age of two, married in the ripe middle age of eight
or nine, and expected to undertake the administration of a
castle when senile decay had set in at the age of fourteen.
The husband was very heavy and exercised absolute rights.
He could confine his wife to her room for years; he could
chastise her with a rod, starve her, humiliate her in a
thousand ways, even make her a servant to his mistress. He
could dispose of her whenever he pleased. As the fathers
of the church had not yet decided whether women had
souls, the rights of women were somewhat hypothetical ; and
although they were probably accorded greater freedom in
fact than they could claim by law, they were, in a very
real sense, the vassals of their husbands. Under these
conditions it is not surprising that the dreams of adolescent
girls should have turned to young squires of the court who
said exquisite things exquisitely; or that they should have
been delighted to hear poems addressed to themselves in
which they, rather than their husbands, were represented as
all powerful. Nor is it surprising that these girls should

[Hi

LO, THE SWEET TROUBADOUR

have found means to betray their husbands, who were
after all busy men engaged in the administration of a
kingdom.

A reading of the work of the earliest troubadours shows
that the poems were written not for the men of the Middle
Ages but for the women; and the society described by the
troubadours when they were serious is not society as it was
but society as they wished it might be. The tradition of
the self-sacrificing melancholy lover which has dominated
lyric poetry for the last thousand years is an effeminate
tradition based on the aspirations of unhappily married
medieval ladies.

The troubadours were a comparatively small corporation
of very fashionable young men. They were, for the most
part, men of gentle birth. If of low birth, they were
awarded, after they had attained position as a troubadour,
the rights and privileges of gentlemen. Richard the Lion-
Heart was king of England. His grandfather, William IX
of Poitiers said to have been the earliest troubadour was
both a poet and duke. And the hundred others, William de
Foix, Bernard de Ventadour, Raymond V of Toulouse, and
the rest, were all men of great power.

But the social position of the troubadour is not entirely
explained by the statement that he is a man of gentle birth
with the talent for writing poetry who chooses love as his
theme and writes to please the ladies of the court. He
perf&rmed another service which made him very valuable
to the society which he graced.

The troubadour was the publicity agent for the court in
which he lived. Please remember that there were in those

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

days no newspapers for the dissemination of scandal and
gossip and no political paragraphers who celebrated the
virtues of politicians. Yet as commerce and industry began
to flourish and life became more and more complicated the
shrewd barons of the south of France found it necessary to
devise means whereby they could attract to their courts a
better kind of fighting-man, make alliances with more
powerful neighbors, and tell the world of the power of their
swords as well as of the beauty of their wives. They found
the troubadours useful in solving this problem.

A lady distinguished a troubadour from among many
other more powerful courtiers because she realized that his
songs about her beauty would attract to her court many
powerful nobles. Her husband, being a medieval gentle-
man, suffered from the old-fashioned vice of jealousy but
was complaisant because he realized that the presence at
his court of many powerful nobles made him formidable
to his enemies. Further he kept a sharp eye on the activities
of his wife, and if she betrayed him he had the right to kill
both her and her lover. This sometimes happened. Occa-
sionally the troubadour mistook the passion he feigned for
a passion which he really felt; and in one instance, he
actually attempted to marry the lady who was the subject
of his verse.

This was very wrong. For in the polite society of those
days it was well enough for gentlemen to write songs prais-
ing the beauty of women above all other things; but a
gentleman should realize that the writing of poetry to a
lady was very different from making that lady his wife.
He might make her either his real or his ideal mistress; but

[16]

LO, THE SWEET TROUBADOUR

if she were his wife their positions would be reversed and
she would be by law and custom his slave.

The people of the Middle Ages have been misrepresented
by romantic critics. Because we knew little about them, we
were led to assume that they knew little about anything;
because most of them could not write, we have been led
to assume that they could not think or that their thought
was simple and childish. Because they lived in manor-
houses we have been convinced that they had what we would
call good manners. Because some of them loved God, we
have assumed that they hated the flesh and the devil.

As a matter of fact these assumptions are all erroneous.
The people of the Middle Ages were wise beyond their years
and ours, and because their thinking was frequently as
direct as a child's it had moments of shattering lucidity.
Although they lived in manor-houses, were the lords of the
universe, and had their own rigid system of etiquette, that
system was not our system. They blew their noses on their
sleeves, ate with their knives and fingers, spat on the floor,
slept without pajamas, spoke in loud voices, killed without
mercy, were lacking in what we like to call a sense of
proper decency, and in general behaved in a manner which
would shock a Billingsgate fishwife. Some of them did
fear God ; most of them loved beautiful women.

4

The troubadours were, as I have pointed out, a special
group in the social organization of the Middle Ages. Dur-
ing the two hundred years through which they flourished

[17]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

(1050-1250) they founded and developed a tradition of
writing and loving which when taken over by Dante and
Petrarch became part of the literary code of all succeeding
generations. This tradition has influenced the work of all
writers of love poems, even the writers of popular ballads in
the music-halls of the present time.

Their home was the south of France, which at that time
was the center of elegance. They wandered from court to
court praising the ladies, disseminating gossip, and carry-
ing out the complicated work of free-lance journalist, adver-
tising agent, ambassador, and warrior. Most of them be-
came acquainted at some time in their careers with the Eng-
lish kings whose residences were in the cities of Aquitania
now known as Touraine. From here the trails led in two
directions. The great military highway went southeast to
Lyons and south along the Rhone to Marseilles. The
poets' road went south to Toulouse and thence east to
Marseilles. The two routes inclosed a large part of France
which when fully explored should yield treasure. But for
the present I shall confine myself to the highways and shall
follow particularly those portions which were made vital by
Bernard de Ventadour, Richard the Lion-Heart, and others
of the gilded youth.

[18]

Chapter II
The Trail of a Troubadour Queen

PARIS TO POITIERS

Chapter II

THERE are trails and trails. When one sits in the cafe
in the place after a long hike, with the tiredness slipping
sweetly down into one's feet, watching a well groomed
woman trying by subtle wiles to keep her son's attention
from the much rouged petite femme who is on the make,
one says, cc To-morrow, it may be, I shall walk through the
fields beside the river, and I shall arrive, in the afternoon,
when the sun is right, at the clean little city of Blois."
One says it calmly, with peace in one's heart, knowing that
by all the laws of probability one will arrive and that the
sun will be right. But there is another kind of a trail,
equally sweet. It is the trail one follows when one says:
cc By St. Anthony of Padua, I shall leave this town of Tours.
It is filled with jeunes files anglaises and vieilles files
americaineS) and char-a-bancs, and guides, and nobody here
does as his ancestors did, and the Tourainians make of their
great past a monkey on a string which they exhibit to ignor-
ant strangers. By St. Anthony, the patron of honest
tramps, I shall leave this place; I like not the laughter of
the English, nor the voices of the Americans, nor the stench

[21]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

of the char-a-bancs, nor the itching palms of the guides, nor
the meretricious inhabitants of this city. I shall leave to-
night, and to-morrow I shall watch the lizards crawling
over the wall at Poitiers, and I shall talk with the patron
of my cafe in the evening about those strange people who,
having a home, leave it to wander over the face of the earth,
for, Think you, monsieur, one is never comfortable save
chez soi! " , And realizing that the impossible -place at
Poitiers is made tolerable only because night has thrown
over it a blanket which hides its glaring and rather cheap
modernity, one will agree. The trail of anger and the trail
of contentment are normal and natural, and one can under-
stand them. But who can understand or justify the trip
taken by Eleanor, queen of the troubadours, when, big with
the child of her lover, she fled, after a hurried divorce, the
court of her husband, King Louis VII of France, by night
marches and in disguise to reach the capital of her own
kingdom, Poitiers the proud, there to meet that lover,
Henry, duke of Anjou, the only man in Europe strong
enough to hold her?

In her career Eleanor had two husbands, and both had
infirmities: the first, King Louis of France, had an ingrow-
ing conscience; the second, King Henry of England he
was Henry of Anjou when she married him had an in-
growing toe-nail. The man with the conscience was beyond
his age and never quite understood it; the man of the toe-
nail was of his time, he reveled in it, he rode on the wave of
it; he was, by all standards of all ages, a strong man. For
years he never knew defeat, in war, in intrigue, or in passion.
His lands were the broadest and his scepter the most power-

[22]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN

ful that Europe had seen in five hundred years. Yet
Eleanor broke him in the end as she had broken Louis of
France in the beginning. She lived to see him robbed of
his lands and his power, robbed even of his clothes and his
jewels, lowered into a grave at Fontevrault, his huge body
covered inadequately by the petticoat of a charitable
prostitute.

In the year of grace 1926 thousands of people traveled
from Paris to Poitiers via Orleans, Blois, and Tours and
looked with more or less indifferent eye on a country which
is now much the same as it was a thousand years ago. If
these people thought at all, one knows well what they
thought. They thought that nature was wonderful, or the
reverse; and they thought that the hotels, the roads, the
sky, the food, were good or bad or dirty; and they placed
a good Anglo-Saxon curse or benediction upon each of these
in turn. Whatever they thought was fairly obvious, and
what Eleanor of Aquitaine, their illustrious precursor,
thought, was probably just as obvious but very different.
The trails which Eleanor, the queen of the troubadours,
followed over the face of the green earth are devious, and
the trails which her mind followed are more devious still;
wherever she went there were loud laughter and song and
intrigue and heartbreak; wherever she went there was a
crowd of exquisites, of poets, of gentlemen, of knights, of
strong men, of hangers-on. She was a whirlwind, and no
man now can tell what she thought when she traveled from

[23]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Paris to Poitiers in 1 152 or why she thought it; but of this
you shall hear more in a moment.

Her grandfather, William IX, puissant duke of Aqui-
taine and first of the troubadours, arranged that on the day
Eleanor married Louis, the young heir apparent to the
throne of France, she should bring him a dowry of lands
twice as large as his kingdom; William arranged further
that the control of these lands should remain forever in her
hands and in the hands of the issue of her body ; and God
arranged that on her marriage day her father-in-law should
die so that this the first of the husbands of Eleanor might
seem to be favored above all other men. When Eleanor's
grandfather had arranged these things to his satisfaction
and had seen that the marriage ceremony was properly
performed Eleanor was a chit of a thing fifteen years old
and her husband a youngster of eighteen he formally
abdicated in her favor : and when she had received homage
from the lords of a country stretching between Tours and
Toulouse, he slipped into a pilgrim's coat and followed the
trail to Compostella, where he died in a rocky cave.

Who knows of what that young thing was thinking
when she was married in great state in the cathedral of St.-
Andre at Bordeaux or to whom she was speaking when she
was caught in the crush at the great door of the cathedral ?
The priests chanted and Louis followed the service with
pious and contrite heart while Eleanor gazed boldly over
the company. Thibaut the poet, count of Blois, was
there, and the count of Champagne. Suger, the cleric and
her husband's best friend, acted as the official representa-
tive of the king of France. Who else? Ebles II of Venta-

[24]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN

dour was, no doubt, of the company, with, perhaps,
Bernard, the poet, in his train; and all the poets and trou-
badours between Bordeaux and Beziers must have partici-
pated in the festivals, the courts of love, and the gossip for
which this great company was the occasion.

She is a gifted youngster, that Eleanor who will be your
companion from Paris to Poitiers. She is supposed to have
been beautiful, but no one can tell at this distance of time.
The testimony of poets is worthless, for poets are notori-
ously liars, and besides, Eleanor was generous and under-
stood the value of a good poet or two in her train. She was
a poet herself ; and by right of inheritance her grandfather
William of Aquitaine was the earliest of the troubadours
and by right of a bitter tongue, a passionate temperament,
and a shrewd intelligence she was recognized as the critic
and arbiter of the poetry of her time. Her good word was
worth a fortune, and her epigram could ruin a career. The
testimony of her lovers means nothing; for he who loved
Eleanor could gain by her favor the right to hold any land
he had been strong enough to win ; and if he won her hand
. . . remember she was a great heiress. And those other
lovers, those whom she had no intention of marrying, what
of them? But none could resist her. What she wanted
she took. Yet in the end Louis preferred dishonorable
poverty to her gay company, and Henry finally shut her
up in a tower for safe-keeping. But this testimony cannot
be denied, the universal testimony that she could both read
and write. This was an accomplishment possessed by few
people, either men or women, of that age. A few of the
poets were able to read poetry and to compose it but were

[25]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURb

unable to write it down in black and white. Many of the
great ones, the self-made men who had begun as poor but
honest inferiors and had left their poverty, honesty, and
inferiority even as men of another time far behind them,
regarded higher education as somewhat effeminate. They
knew what was what and when need arose could hire a
learned clerk for a few pounds a year. Eleanor, however,
was a learned and an accomplished lady; not the heiress
of lands and power only, but the heiress of much of the
wisdom and culture of her time.

The Bastard of Champagne was at her wedding with
Louis, and so too, according to tradition, was her younger
sister Petronilla, and Raoul, count of Vermandois. Now
how Petronilla, a girl of fourteen, should have seduced the
princely Raoul and forced him to divorce his wife, and why
the count of Champagne, who was brother-in-law to the
divorced wife, should have made the pope annul the divorce,
or why Petronilla, the sweet young thing, should have
thought that this annulment increased her dishonor and
should have caused Eleanor to become the enemy of
Thibaut of Blois, I cannot say. Things like this had
happened before, and I suppose they may have happened
since. Eleanor's enmity was effective, and she persuaded
her husband to engage in a new war. Therefore, several
years later, he and his army were storming Vitry. Thirteen
hundred old men, women, and children had taken refuge in
the cathedral. Louis's army set fire to the town. The
cathedral burned, and in it most of the thirteen hundred.
Alas for Eleanor, now twenty-one years old and the mother
of several daughters; alas for Louis! The burning of the

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN

innocents at Vitry was a great scandal. Louis was re-
pentant and made a hasty peace. Eleanor was scornful of
her husband's weakness. She needed a man for a husband,
not a priest. If God permitted a wooden church to burn,
that was God's business. "By God's eyebrows," she cried,
using a sweet maidenly oath in a voice which I fear was
neither soft nor well modulated, "I 'm a better king than
you are." Perhaps she was right. Dear Eleanor !

Suger, Louis's counselor and friend, had at the begin-
ning of the campaign withdrawn from the court. It was
evident that Louis the king could not control Eleanor, and
Suger the priest thought that it was equally evident that he,
the representative of God, could not control her. She was
a hard passionate woman, this girl of twenty-one, and in
God's hands. Suger set to building St.-Denis in Paris.
Perhaps later God would find a way. Then came the burn-
ing of the thirteen hundred innocents at Vitry. Bernard
the saint was in Paris. He expostulated with Suger, and
Suger took a hand. He played upon the sensibilities of
Louis the pious. He pictured to him the torm'ents of helL
Thirteen hundred Christians were not to be burned alive
incontinently at a woman's whim. Louis was repentant.
He gave over the war, shaved off his beard, and cut his
hair. He became more priestly in his habits and more
ascetic in his manner, and Eleanor wanted men around her,
males who could fight and kill and sing songs and pay
compliments, men who were living in this world, eager,
strong, modern. Then St. Bernard preached the second
crusade under the groined vault of the church at
Vezelay.

[27]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

St. Bernard was a man, a great strong man with a square
chin, a ruler of men and a man of his time. "He was hot
in burning love, humble in conversation, a well in flowing
doctrine, a pit in deepness of science and well smelling in
sweetness of fame/ 3 When his mother "bare the third son
which was Bernard in her belly, she saw in her sleep a
dream. . . . Her seemed she had in her belly a whelp, all
white and red upon the back, barking in her belly. And a
. . . holy man . . . prophesying: Thou art mother of a
right noble whelp, which shall be a warden of the house of
God, and shall give great barking against the enemies/'
Bernard was hot in love, but not in the love of women.
One time "when he had holden his eyes and fixed them upon
a woman, he had anon shame in himself and was a cruel
venger of himself. For he leapt anon into a pond full of
water and frozen, and was therein so long that almost he
was frozen. And by the grace of God he was cooled from
his carnal concupiscence/'

He was a worker. He lost no time except when he slept.
When he had eaten he would consider whether he had
eaten more than was his custom or more than he needed to
carry on God's work. When he had done this, if he found
that he had overstepped the limits he had set, he would
punish his mouth so that it lost the power of tasting and
became a great black hole in his face. He would drink oil
and think it was water. He preferred plain clothes to fine
clothes and filth to cleanliness. His sister "was married
into the world, and went into the monastery for to visit

[28]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN

her brethren in a proud estate and great apparel. And he
dreaded her as she had been the devil or his net for to take
souls, nor would not go out for to see her. . . . One of her
brethren said that she was a foul ordure, stinking, wrapped
in gay array."

St. Bernard was a ruler. His rule over men was strong,
his rule over himself was stronger, but strongest of all was
his rule over devils. Never a devil in the world got the
better of St. Bernard. He knew their ways and their tricks.
When he could not drive them out by the words of the
gospel or by holy relics, he got himself into a divine rage;
and with his face all red with anger and his black brows
close together in his fury, he drove them out with a thun-
derous excommunication from his black lips. There was a
woman of Guienne, a countrywoman of Eleanor's, who was
troubled by a devil of the kind that still seems to give the
women of that land much concern. She told St. Bernard
of her devil, weeping bitterly. "He said : Take this staff
which is mine, and lay it in thy bed, and if he may do
anything let him do it. ... And he came anon but durst
not go to his lecherous work accustomed but threatened her
right eagerly." This threat she told to the saint, who
"assembled the people that each man should hold a candle
burning in his hand and went from one to the other and
came at last to this devil and cursed him and excommuni-
cated him and defended that never after he should so do to
her ne to none other."

Call it hypnotism, if you wish, or divine force, or power
of personality or what you will. Certain it is that people
once believed in God and the devil with as much reason

[29]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

as they now believe in germs and internal glandular secre-
tions and "counter-indications" and the scientific method.
And through this welter of belief forty-five-year-old men
like Bernard and twenty-one-year-old girls like Eleanor saw
their vision of the good life gleaming. Bernard fought his
way to a place in the pantheon of the saints and Eleanor to
a grave in the abbey at Fontevrault.

The first time Bernard preached the crusade to Louis
it was in the church at Vezelay; the second time it was in
the great hall of the fortress. Here it was that Louis took
the cross from the hands of the saint; but the crowd was so
great that the multitude was unable to see the king. A
tower was built in the fields outside the fortress. Louis
showed himself on it with the cross on his breast. The
multitude took up the cry, "Praise to God," and all de-
manded crosses. The number that took the cross that day
was so great that Bernard had to tear the clothes from his
back to make crosses for them all ; holy crosses they were,
made of the vestments of the saint who preferred filth to
cleanliness and who wore a hair shirt next to his skin.

4

What of Eleanor on that day, twenty-four years old,
who for nine years had been queen of France, ruling her
husband and his sycophants, his priests and enemies, like
the eternal woman that she was? Hardly had the holy man
left when she appeared with a band of her girl friends,
armed head to foot, riding like warriors astride great
chargers. They performed Amazonian exercises and follies

[30]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN

in public and sent their distaffs, now useless, home to those
knights and nobles they chose to consider as slackers.
Entire villages were deserted by male inhabitants, and the
land was left to be tilled by women and children.

Eleanor with her band of Amazons and Louis with his
lords temporal and spiritual set out on foot and on horse-
back to save the sacred city and to bring back as much of
the wealth of the Orient as they could steal from the good
heathen who erroneously, no doubt, thought that having
worked for it, they deserved to keep it. They went over-
land, young, debonair, gay; some of them saintly and some
of them wicked; an average crowd surrounding a few
personalities which were in their own way either great or
amusing. They arrived, much harassed by the cavalry of
the Arabs, the baggage of the ladies, and the whims of the
queen, at Laodicea. The queen and her ladies were sent on
ahead to occupy a barren hill. At their feet a romantic
valley with lush grasses, flowing streams, and shady trees
invited them. They camped in the valley. The Arabs
camped on the hill and shut the king up in a narrow pass.
Seven thousand knights perished in the affray, and the king
was able to save himself only by climbing a tree. The bag-
gage was lost and the army in confusion.

They turned into Antioch, now ruled by Eleanor's uncle,
Raymond of Poitou, the handsomest man of his time, big,
broad, and black, and expert in his manipulation of ladies
for the purposes of war and politics. Even the confused
army of Louis might be useful in extending the dominions
of Raymond of Poitou. There was intrigue and counter-
intrigue. Raymond plotted with Eleanor and Louis, and

[31]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

with Eleanor against Louis. Eleanor plotted with Ray-
mond and the Saracens; Louis read his breviary, became
pale at the elevation of the host, and meditated. One
chronicler says that Eleanor fell in love with a handsome
Saracen prince, and there has been much controversy as to
the identity of his person. Another chronicler reports that
she forgot herself jusqu'a la foi due au lit conjugal. A
lady of the last century who wrote for the late Queen
Victoria of the lives of that exemplary lady's predecessors
seems to believe these scandals, and implies that Eleanor,
in disgust after seeing her shaven husband up a tree hiding
from his enemies, turned for consolation to her handsome
and dashing uncle. What need had Eleanor of her uncle
of Antioch or of handsome Saracen princes? There were
men enough in her entourage. Finally, Louis stole her
away one night, a protesting and crying female, and was
commended later by Suger for his moderation. Evidently
somebody believed the slander. Somebody always does.

Eleanor was brought back to Paris again with truck-loads
of silks and jewels. She was kept in Paris; she was not
permitted to visit her own country or the courts of love at
Poitiers. She amused herself as best she could at the court
at Paris, now entirely dominated by the clerics. . . . But
there were compensations of a kind. An occasional saint or
two would come storming into her apartments, his black
brows working, his face pale with the whiteness of asceti-
cism, to expostulate with her for her evil worldly ways or,
maybe, to exorcise the devil who was supposed to be her
familiar spirit. "From the Devil," said the English, cc she
came and to the Devil she will return/' There is a tenson

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN

sometimes attributed to her, a gay, scurrilous, light-hearted,
bitter little thing which begins :

If I should marry a cleric,
God forbid . .

and continues in a way which unfortunately cannot be
translated acceptably for the twentieth century.

But why did Eleanor travel in the year 1 152 from Paris
to Orleans and from Orleans to Beaugency, thence, even as
you and I, down the Loire to Blois, to Tours, and further
still to the noble city of Poitiers, where strange things have
happened and strange things happen still? That too is
scandal.

No capital of France could in the Middle Ages fall
entirely under the control of saints and priests. There must
always be politics, there must always be embassies and
lords who pay scant attention to the mass, excommunicate,
maybe, for having seized the lands of a rich abbey, or for
having refused to admit the lords of Rome who came collect-
ing taxes, or for putting off their old wives and putting on
their new. One such embassy which made its entry ten
years later has been described in some detail. It was the
embassy of that young Thomas, later to win sainthood at
Canterbury, but then the young man about town, worldly,
shrewd, and the boon companion of Henry in his vices and
escapades. When the embassy of Thomas entered Paris,

[33]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

the cortege was opened by two hundred and fifty young
people singing national airs and clad in brocade. They
were followed by his dogs, tied together in pairs, and by
eight chariots, each drawn by five horses and driven by
coachmen in black uniforms. Each chariot was covered
with costly furs and protected by two guards and a huge
dog, sometimes chained and sometimes at liberty. Two of
the chariots bore casks of ale to be distributed among the
populace; another carried everything necessary for the
chapel of the young chancellor; a fourth, the furniture of
Ms bedroom; a fifth, the necessaries of his kitchen; a sixth,
his gold and silver plate and his wardrobe; and the last
two carried the luggage of his followers and his companions.
Behind these came twelve sumpter-horses. On the back of
each was a monkey and a kneeling groom. Squires carrying
the shields and leading the battle-horses of their knights
followed; then more squires; then the children of gentlemen
whose education was being completed in the household of
the great man; then the falconers; then the officers of the
household; then the knights and ecclesiastics, mounted
and riding two by two; and finally, at the very end, came
the chancellor himself, carrying on a gay conversation with
several friends and apparently oblivious of the great impres-
sion he was creating.

For these crowds of gentlemen, there must be dinners in
the great halls. There must be exchange of compliments
and inquiries after "the health of our sister Petronilla" and
"What of that Bastard of Champagne?" and gossip about
the young exquisite who tried to maintain in open debate
with the churchmen that a good God could not have created

[34]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN"

hell, and about that other who said that God was a poet
who dreamed the universe or that one who maintained that
the universe had dreamed God. ... At these dinners
Peire Vidal's latest escapade was, no doubt, discussed and a
musician called to sing Peire's latest song, and, perhaps, to
sing that naughty one by Eleanor's grandfather, now dead
these many years in a hermit's cave in Compostella; and
perhaps Eleanor herself, if the company were small enough,
would entertain with one of her own songs. Eleanor prob-
ably had a gay enough life, even in Paris.

One day Geoffrey of Anjou, clad in light armor, rode
through the gate of Paris. Behind him, with many knights,
rode his son Henry, a lad of seventeen. They came to do
homage for the county of Anjou and to see whether some
plot might be arranged against his cousin by marriage,
King Stephen of England. These Angevins were likely
men, as the Angevins still are ; not tall, but ruddy, worldly
and active. Geoffrey was a great scholar; he came from
Eleanor's part of the country; he brought news of friends,
and the movements of her friends the poets; and his
musicians could produce the latest song. They no doubt
argued points of philosophy and esthetics, and to what
extent was a man in love responsible for his actions, and
whether women prefer clerics or soldiers as lovers, and why,
and whether poetry should be written in a language so clear
that a child could understand it or so intricate that only
experts could unravel its complications ; for in the same way
that psychoanalysis and evolution and fundamentalism have
swept the intellectual sea of our time, so similar fashions
swept the intellectual seas of those, furnishing topics of

[35]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

conversation for the afternoons in the great halls when
the sun came through the traceries of the Gothic windows
which then were a new fashion of architecture and very
smart indeed.

There was gossip about Eleanor and "old" Geoffrey he
was about thirty-eight years old at this time, an old man and
past his prime but still hearty and some say that she
forgot herself again. But that is mere gossip and based
upon no evidence whatever. Eleanor was not the kind of
a woman who forgets herself. What she did, she did with
a clear consciousness, and, for all I know, with an equally
clear conscience. Two years later Geoffrey of Anjou died
and his son Henry came to Paris to do homage a second
time for his inheritance, but this time it was his cortege and
not his father's that accompanied him.

That Eleanor was sick of Paris there can be no doubt.
"My husband/' she said, "is more of a monk than a man."
And here was a man at hand, an active man, heir to Anjou,
claimant of Normandy, and pretender to the throne of
England. He was a man who could hold her as no other
man could hold her, who could reform her life for her,
could make her a chaste and virtuous woman, and transform
her passion and gaiety into an implacable hatred. She was
a woman who wanted a ruler; a just providence brought
her, in this stocky red-headed youth, a man who could rule
her. And none could resist this wealthy woman of Aqui-
taine, this clever poet, this superb female, familiar with the
devils of her own country and the devils of the Holy Land,
and with saints and warriors and poets and priests besides.
She is said to have placed her ships and treasures at his

[36]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN

command. "When we are married," she said to him, "you
will see what lovely things I brought from the Holy Land.
I know the seven arts, and the methods of love in the East."
Nor was Henry a man afraid of difficulties. He could take
a castle in a night; he could hold together his rebellious
barons and churchmen and ride three horses to death in a
day. He could hold this woman, and perhaps the very diffi-
culty which she presented attracted him the more. He was
a courageous man, was Henry, unafraid of saints, devils,
and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

When Henry of Anjou left Paris, Eleanor proceeded to
divorce her husband, King Louis. The court, consisting of
trains of mules and cart-loads of baggage and King Louis
and his relatives and friends and her relatives and friends
and prelates and knights and hangers-on, proceeded by slow
journey from Paris to Orleans and from Orleans to Beau-
gency, where the king's marriage was dissolved on March
18, 1152.

To-day when you go from England or America to Tours
and the country of the chateaux, you go from some place on
the coast of Normandy or Flanders eastward to Paris, and
from Paris you return westward to Tours. If you take the
express at seven o'clock in the morning, you reach Orleans
at nine, and by a quarter of ten you are in Beaugency. If
you wish you can be in Tours for lunch and have a late
tea at Poitiers. If you are one of those cynical souls who
go in conducted parties, a large-mouthed guide will explain
to you in demotic English the wonders of the French

[37]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURb

Renaissance. Indeed, the entire country has been covered
by the French Renaissance, which, I suppose, is beautiful
in its way and testifies to the love which the kings of France
and England and their favorites long after the death of
Eleanor and her poets felt for the cooking of Touraine and
the vin rose of Anjou. But if you will look with attentive
eye beneath the flowers of the Renaissance you will find the
bare branches of another age, an age before towers were
thought to be a pretty decoration on a fagade and when
walls had to be built strong and thick if they were to afford
protection against the men-at-arms of a neighbor who cast
envious eyes on one's wife or ox or ass or rich vineyards.
You will, if you are light-hearted, leave Paris in the
morning and get yourself as quickly as you may to Orleans
and the Loire. There you will desert the railway and the
broad highroad in boat or barge or raft to float down the
Loire past La Chapelle, St.-Ay, and Chateau Meung-sur-
Loire to Reaugency.

When Eleanor and her scandalized friends and family
hurried from Orleans to Beaugency they probably followed
the trail which wound beside the river and sent their luggage
down by barge. The trail was very narrow and worn
deeply into the earth. On rainy days it was a small river
of mud, and even on pleasant days it presented difficulties.
The company straggled out for many miles through the
green fields, and there were gossip and jest and high words.
Following behind, perhaps a day's journey, came Louis with
horns well sprouted preparing for his halo, good pious
Louis whose wife was too much for him, surrounded by his
priests, whose shaven heads reflected the weak sunshine of

[38]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN

the early spring, sitting ungainly astride their horses, bob-
bing and nodding among themselves and offering the king
good, wise, and pious counsels, doing observance at the way-
side shrines and performing perhaps a miracle or two for
the glory of God.

Little time was wasted on the divorce at Beaugemry.
The ground given was consanguinity. Eleanor and Louis
had lived together half a lifetime as lives were counted then,
and after fifteen years of tumultuous marriage Louis sud-
denly discovered that his wife was his fourth some say
his seventh cousin and demanded a divorce. For shame !
The queen would have no delay. Her first and eldest son
was to be born in August. She had to dispose of her hus-
band and provide a father for the heir of Aquitaine. The
decree was pronounced with all the solemnity of a church
council : the clerk handed it to the bishop, and the bishop in
his fine robes, standing out from the altar in the shadow of
one of the pillars, made the decree permanent.

Eleanor left at once and in the early evening rode into
the white city of Blois, clean and bright on the river-bank,
but dingy and brown in the city, and straggly and Renais-
sance and nineteenth-century in the narrow streets that run
up to the chateau. There seem always to have been Counts
Thibaut at Blois, and they have been traditionally hospita-
ble. The one who accompanied Eleanor from the church at
Beaugency, sending messengers ahead to prepare the rooms,
and ordering great entertainment for the illustrious grass-
widow, was perhaps not the first to make his hospitality
insistent.

Imagine Eleanor and her company riding down from

[39]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Beaugency. Imagine Thibaut riding at her horse's head ?
making ribald jokes at the expense of Louis, whispering to
her of the declining popularity of his cousin. King Stephen
of England, and reminiscing about Henry of Anjou.

These people had a great deal of talk in them. Being
denied the doubtful benefits of universal education, few of
them could read or write, and even if they could, books
were very scarce and very expensive. As each book had to
be copied carefully on vellum by the hand of monk or clerk,
this was the age of limited editions, each edition being
limited to one copy. Thus the people who took the pains
to write took further pains that the thing written should be
worth reading. There were no head-lines to announce that
somebody's wife had run away with somebody's chauffeur.
That the people in the Middle Ages were interested in these
runnings-away is certain, but their information was con-
fined to gossip in the window-niche. Under these condi-
tions the stories could be elaborated as such stories should
be elaborated, and, since there were no laws of libel, the
story became a tradition, the tradition a saga, and the saga
finally was worked into that curious kind of light literature
which scholars unacquainted with the popular and no doubt
equally bad novels of their own age refer to by the pom-
pous and misleading title of medieval epic. Since most
of the people of the twelfth century were unable to read,
and even if they could, since books were very expensive, the
chief amusement left to them after a strenuous day on the
battle-field was talking. But again, do not be misled.
Their conversations would make a Mississippi boatman
blush with chagrin. It was of a crudeness, of a frankness,

[40]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN

of a vivacity! The coarsest language of to-day is euphe-
mism mere and pale.

Thus I would not tell you if I could what Thibaut said
to Eleanor or she to him as they rode together from Beau-
gency to Blois on a road which, nearer the river than the
present main road, runs directly through Tavers, Lestiou,
Avarai, to Suevres, where it joins the main road for a mo-
ment until it reaches the village of Cour-sur-Loire, where it
joins it again. They left the road a little west of Blois to
ride up the winding path to the old strong castle, a building
which, too stolid for the splendors of the French Renais-
sance, was torn down many years ago. It made way for
that other castle which, now the wonder of all comers, was
inhabited by that other saintly Louis, the twelfth of the
name. It is where Henri II superintended the butchering
of the due de Guise, remarking as he pushed the head away
with his foot, "I had not thought he was so long." As they
approached, the herald rode ahead with his banner and
sounded the call. There was a scurrying within, and the
officers of the castle strode out to welcome their master and
his guests. Eleanor was shown to her room overlooking a
garden of roses transplanted from Jericho, and, wearied by
her day in the divorce court, was provided with a hot bath
and a massage. Thibaut was the brave son of a brave
father and was hospitable to excess. He did the best a
gentleman of those days could do to a wealthy heiress
traveling alone : he asked her to marry him. She refused.
She may have said she would be his sister, and she certainly
intended to become his cousin as soon as she could persuade
Henry of Anjou to leave off burning cities and making

[41]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

widows and orphans long enough to come down and marry
her. But Thibaut was insistent and persuaded Eleanor to
spend several days with him at Blois. And who can blame
her? "He who has not known lilac-time at Blois has not
jet experienced the sweetness of living," says an old French
proverb; and perhaps Eleanor found the gay little city
which reflects its bright clear face in the Loire and the
early spring days and the sound of her own language in her
ears refreshing after the gloom of the capital. Oh, there
were parties, I have no doubt; and debates, and serenades
in the morning, clear-voiced musicians singing to the accom-
paniment of the guitar some new aubade to the rising sun
and the singing of birds.

Then once more came the question, and once more the
refusal. Perhaps Eleanor noted now that she was no
longer permitted to be alone as much as before. Perhaps
she heard orders given; or perhaps she was told simply, for
this reason or that, that it would be wise not to leave her
chambers. At any rate Eleanor disguised herself in the
jerkin of a serving-man and escaped by minutes a plot to
put her into seclusion, there to be kept until she could be
persuaded by courteous or discourteous means to marry the
count of Blois.

7

She left Blois by night and foiled her pursuers by slipping
down the river in a boat. One should drift down the Loire
on a soft spring night before the summer droughts have
made the stream shallow and unpleasant. It is not only
the sweet odor of flowers that makes it sweet, or the odor

[42]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR OUEEN

<y

of the stream and the dankness of the air, but hanging over
all this is the eternal odor of France, a composite of stale
wine, sweaty boatmen, and, in these days, French national
tobacco, than which there is none worse.

When she arrived at Tours, Eleanor said a prayer at the
tomb of St. Martin; for with all her sins, or perhaps be-
cause of them, she believed in the saints. This Martin was
a great good man, and he fought devils until the end of his
life. When he was dying this happened unfortunately in
Poitiers and gave rise to a great struggle, and the Tourain-
ians once again disgraced themselves St. Martin was, for
his holiness, lying on dust and ashes. He asked that his
brethren would remove a little his body that he "might be-
hold more of the heaven than the earth. Saying this he saw
the devil that was there, and St. Martin said to him:
'Wherefore standest thou here, thou cruel beast? Thou
shalt find in me nothing sinful ne mortal/ " After he
died there arose a great altercation between the people of
Poitiers and the people of Tours as to which might have the
body. While the people of Poitiers slept, the Tourainians
hurried the body out of a window and down the steep hill
into a boat and took it down the stream to Tours.

St. Martin was a good man. "He was clad with sharp
clothing, blue, and a great coarse mantle hanging here and
there upon him" ; and he always got what he wanted. Once
there was a duke who, for his sins, refused to see the saint.
Martin made himself lean with fasting, wrapped a haircloth
about him, and threw ashes over his head and sat outside
the palace gate. And simply by making himself as ob-
noxious as he could he forced the duke to receive him.

[43]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Even though he had power over beasts he could make
the dogs stop barking, the hares stop running, and the
snakes stop doing whatever snakes do he had his diffi-
culties with the Tourainians, which, since the saint was a
very abstemious man and the Tourainians wonderfully fond
of their good cooking and their beautiful churches, can
hardly be wondered at.

When Eleanor had said her prayer and rearranged her
toilet and demanded safe-conduct from Henry of Anjou's
younger brother Geoffrey, she seems to have thought herself
safe and proceeded on her way. This part of her trip was
by land. She made a straight line south to Montbazon,
where a huge donjon-keep of the eleventh century rises
above the village, and where, for what reason I know not,
on the topmost rock sings a very small brave bird.

Her path continued south to Port des Piles and the river
again, this time a small rippling stream that might have
sung to Eleanor of safety, but her good angel, according
to her earliest historian, warned her to beware. Henry's
brother Geoffrey was waiting for her, and with Geoffrey
was an armed band of knights-errant out, not indeed to
save the hesitating maiden from the unwelcome attentions
of a cruel enchanter, but to capture the fleeing maiden, lock
her up in the donjon-keep of Montbazon, there to starve
her into submission. This would have served her right, for
according to the code of that day it was not proper for
women to travel alone, unescorted by some member of their
family. The chroniclers seem to know no more than I
how Eleanor evaded Geoffrey and his good intentions, for
they credit her with having turned south down an even

[44]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR QUEEN

smaller stream toward her own dominions. Since she was
already going south and there was no small stream for her
to take, this may have been somewhat difficult. She must
have had a small company of men-at-arms in her train, and
the warning of this good but anonymous angel may have
given them opportunity to screw on their helmets, don a
comfortable shirt of mail or two, and thus defend their
mistress from the threatened attack. Or perhaps the threat
of Geoffrey was mere gossip, and he did no more than plan
the attack. (Poor Geoffrey! He was always planning
attacks and never succeeding in getting very far with them.
His cousin Stephen was too quick and his brother Henry
was too shrewd; although he did succeed now and then in
doing them dirt, which is not to be wondered at, since they
succeeded in doing him much more dirt than he, with the
best of intentions, was ever able to repay.) Eleanor seems
to have escaped Geoffrey, and she must, in due time for
journeys were very slow in those days have reached
Chatellerault, which is a very nineteenth-century city, and
later the proud city of Tours in her own country.

Here she was joined by Bernard de Ventadour, a young
poet who had got into difficulties by his passionate and not
too discreet love for Agnes de Montlugon, and later by
Henry and Geoffrey, all smiles now and politic words ; and
in the high hall of the chateau at Poitiers she arranged for
her second wedding at Bordeaux, many miles away. Her
fine garments which she had stolen from the infidels in the
Holy Land she sent north to Caen, where she was to hold
her first court while she was waiting for her second husband
to steal England from his cousin, Stephen the king.

[45]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Then she went southward in the spring, as all poets of
this time seem to have gone, to a land where gray towers of
an evening rise to a dark-blue sky: and because the sky is
very blue and the towers are very gray and both are very
old, they seem at times to merge and flow into each other.
While one wonders about this, and why it should be just
as it is, and how it is possible, and whether one should
walk to the next town or take the train, the frogs set up
in the grassy moat the same song that they sang under-
neath Eleanor's window, a song as much more permanent
than fche towers as her passionate life was more permanent
than the body which led her astray and is now buried in the
abbey at Fontevrault. One will walk after all.

[46]

Chapter III
The Trail of a Troubadour Errant

VENTADOUR TO POITIERS
CAEN TO LONDON

*

o

Chapter III

BIOGRAPHERS who have treated the rather fluid and
peripatetic life of Bernard de Ventadour have tried to
infuse it with the wine of romance. The romance they
choose is of the wrong vintage. It is the kind the late Lord
Tennyson brewed to beguile the long evenings of a widowed
queen. It is a syrupy draft. Men and women a thousand
years ago are supposed to be something less, or, if you pre-
fer, more, than men and women to-day. Bernard and his
fellow-wanderers under the blue sky are supposed to have
been high-souled English gentlemen whose arms were
strengthened by the purity of their hearts. By committing
wholesale murder, they extricated medieval flappers from
situations in which these flappers should never have become
involved. After having perpetrated this rather brutal
heroic, these gentry, we are told, wandered in virginal and
unchaperoned innocence through the forest, pausing on
occasion to inquire from simple-minded peasants whether
there were, in the neighborhood, knights who required
murdering, while the pure maidens they collected jogged
along behind on demure white asses.

That a certain amount of this kind of romance is ex-

[49]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

tracted from the popular novels of the twelfth century
written by Bernard's friends and contemporaries does not
make it of value as data for the reconstruction of the social
and moral history of the time. For popular novels of the
twelfth century, like popular novels of the twentieth, pic-
tured a world as we would like to have it rather than a
world as it actually was, is, or will be. Galahad, Lancelot,
and Tristan were literary myths created for the entertain-
ment of the medieval flapper. Arthur was a stupid and
complaisant husband, and Guinevere a thoroughly immoral
woman. This immorality and this complaisancy were justi-
fied by various literary devices, some of them credible and
some of them incredible; and out of the hard facts of life
was woven a soft tissue. The authors of these novels pre-
sented certain universal problems and by their skill seemed
to justify certain actions which then as now were recognized
as wrong. Thus the reader was permitted to sin vicari-
ously, and art, holding the mirror up to nature, shows
nature inverted. Though good little girls may dream
about being bad and bad little girls dream about being good,
it is the dream which is preserved in the novels. The girls
themselves are, unfortunately, dead. It is because scholars
are pleased to ignore this truism that, looking at life as it
boils about them, they insist that knee-length skirts cover
less than waist-line morals and that the prevalence of
divorce proves the substitution of individual passion for
domestic patience. As they contemplate the aspirations
toward a better life incorporated in the popular novels of
the Middle Ages, they insist that since the Middle Ages
were romantic, they must also have been pure.

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THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

As a matter of fact, the real men and women were much
the same as we are : they knew what they would have liked
to do if conditions had been different than they must have
been and had they as individuals been different than they
were. But this knowledge did not prevent them from carry-
ing on the necessary and more or less unpleasant business of
life ; therefore Eleanor, the eternal and protean female, of-
fered a poisoned bowl to one Rosamond Clifford whose
youthful intimacy with King Henry II of England,
Eleanor's husband, was apt to prove annoying; and Bernard
the poet seduced the wife of his patron, Ebles II of
Ventadour.

There was scandal in the Chateau de Ventadour, but had
not one of the participants been destined to write the best
poetry Europe had heard in a thousand years, scandal in
Ventadour where there was always more or less scandal
would have been quite unimportant. Ventadour is a small
heap of stones on a small hill some three miles from Egle-
tons, a village of less than two thousand souls, which itself
is from two to four hours distant from Brive if you travel
by what is euphemistically called a train and somewhat
nearer if you walk. But when one has reached Brive, one is
still several hours from Perigueux, which most tourists con-
sider a bit of virginal and untouched France. Thus in
order to reach Ventadour, where there was a nasty scandal
in 1152, the tourist must go beyond the farthest known,
there to find a small heap of stones not nearly so picturesque
as the ruins left by the lesser men of a lesser age.

[51]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

But the stones remember. Ventadour was at one time an
important chateau. It witnessed siege; it housed passion;
it was taken once by treachery and twice by assault; it was,
in 1 145, the home of Agnes de Montlugon, the very young
bride of Ebles II of Ventadour. When she came to be mis-
tress of the chateau she may have been thirteen or fourteen
years old and an accomplished woman. Her husband
Ebles, somewhat older, and in some respects the mirror of
fashion, was one of those fine fighting barons of the Middle
Ages who would knock you down in a tournament in the
morning and take away your horse and armor, write a deli-
cate and sophisticated love poem to your wife in the after-
noon, lay siege to a castle at night, and, if the castle were
weak enough to yield, slaughter the defenders, but return
home in time to sing an aubade to your wife or the wife of
somebody else before sunrise and early mass. He was a
fine cultured gentleman, was Ebles II, but somewhat too old
for Agnes. He seems to have permitted her to play about
with his gifted friend, a lad called Bernard, the son of a
smith, one of the lowest servants in the chateau.

The processes whereby an obscure youth came to be one
of the members of the household of a great lord may be
conjectured. The chateau of those days was a compara-
tively small place, surrounded by a wall and occupied by
the lord, his lady, and the members of their household.
Most of the things that one ate or wore or used were pro-
duced on the grounds. Although the population of the
chateau may not have been larger than two or three hun-
dred, these two or three hundred people lived together with
a certain intimacy. There must have been a considerable

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

amount of fraternizing between the lord and his servants;
and although the lord probably insisted on absolute obedi-
ence his was the power of life and death he must from
sheer boredom have permitted liberties and friendships. In
the main street of the chateau and the village which grew
up around it, tongues must have clacked and gossip spread.
One could be dignified and distant with one's servants in
the city, where one's servants had proper distraction; to be
dignified or distant in the small world of the chateau, where
the increasing size of one's belt was an event known not
only to the tailor and his wife but to all his acquaintances,
and where a smile at a peasant's daughter was magnified to
a grin, to a leer, to a kiss, to what you will, must have
been difficult.

Nor is there any evidence that the country gentry insisted
particularly upon the forms of subserviency; the substance
was enough. The lord ruled by right of ability rather than
by right of inheritance, and if he were too weak to hold
both the land and the respect of his followers, an upstart,
a stronger man would take them away. For these great
lords were realists; they took what they could lay hands on
to build up a duchy, a family, or a kingdom. Justification
could come later; justification was the business of the
scribes, the poets, the monks. But since a failure could not
afford to pay the scribes, the great thing was to be suc-
cessful ; and to be successful, one needed shrewdness, ruth-
lessness, and an ability to discount the manner for the man.

In some way the ability to write poetry possessed by this
youngster Bernard was brought to the attention of Ebles II
of Ventadour, who, being a man of fashion and aware of

[53]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

the value of a poet, may have thought that since his estate
could produce good wine and a fair number of fighting-men>
it might also produce a poet or two. The boy must have
been clever and is said to have been handsome. How close
this friendship was, or when it began, I do not know. Ber-
nard seems to have been made a member of the family, and
he may have traveled with his master to Poitiers and Tou-
louse and Bordeaux. He may even have known William
IX of Aquitaine, the earliest of the troubadours, and have
learned from him much about the art and business of
poetry. Although Ebles engaged in an occasional war to
keep his weapons bright and clean, there were no great
maneuvers to engage his attention at that time. Life was
gay, frank, and sophisticated; and this gaiety, frankness,
and sophistication are shown in Bernard's philosophy, which
he stated in a single sentence: "That man is dead who does
not feel in his heart the sweet savor of love; and he who
lives without love is merely an irritation to his friend."
The society that produced not one but several men of this
creed is not the "society of barbarians who posed as civilized
people," in the unhappy phrase which Mr. Van Loon uses
to characterize the people of this time. It may have been
a decadent, a cruel, an immoral society; but it was not a
barbarous society; for a barbarous people do not devote
their lives consciously to the pleasures of love or produce a
subtle and philosophical lyric poetry. If a man's civiliza-
tion be determined by what he understands rather than by
what he wears, the civilization was in many respects in
advance of the civilization of the nineteenth.

Bernard represents the first phase of troubadourism, the

[54]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

phase in which the poets and their subjects regarded love
lealistically. The time was to come when men writing
about love would be thinking of something else entirely.
The concept of love in the next century was to become pale
and philosophical and the technique of love "scientific."
In the thirteenth century love was theoretically vicarious.
The lover was to obtain complete emotional satisfaction in
looking at his lady. The scandals of that century demon-
strate, nevertheless, that the machinery of love was not
entirely worn out. For Bernard, love was an intense
physical passion with certain delicious emotional and
psychical concomitants. It transformed the landscape and
gave purpose and direction to life. Life without love was
as unnatural and unhealthy as life without war or wine or
those other amenities that civilization has made necessary
to us.

Bernard's philosophy of love may at times threaten the
sanctity of the home "and hearth, and some may hold that
Ebles was ill advised to permit his young wife to play about
with a gifted poet. The inevitable occurred; although
Ebles, the heavy husband, occupied with his own and more
important matters, may not have observed its precise devel-
opment. Bernard's early poems to Agnes were the conven-
tional compliments of the time. The compliments became
less conventional, the avowals less discreet, and when the
humility of the suppliant gave way before the arrogance
and exultation of the victor, tongues clacked and there was
scandal in Ventadour. If you repeat often enough, and
with enough variation, the phrase, "I love you," to a girl
who is cultivated and charming and perhaps beautiful, you

[55]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

may find in the end that sentence has become a sentiment
and the sentiment a passion. And if the girl had been mar-
lied to a man old enough to be her father at a time when
girls of the twentieth century are still playing with dolls,
the girl might believe that you actually did love her and
might actually love you. These were the sinister chances
that poets had to take.

Ebles seems to have been irritated, but his irritation was
directed against his wife rather than against her lover. He
would have been in his rights as they were defined at that
barbarous time, and, I am told, they are still defined in this
civilized twentieth century, had he killed Bernard. Instead
of doing this he spanked his wife and sent her to bed
without supper. Nor was the spanking theoretical ; it was
an actual spanking of his wife, the vicomtesse de Venta-
dour, who had so far forgotten herself as to grant favors
to a poet. The spanking of the vicomtesse requires ex-
planation. Ebles knew and Agnes should have known that
the job of the poet was to make love and make it
exquisitely. If he were exquisite enough, the lady, her hus-
band, and the poet would all profit. The lady would be-
come famous throughout the land and be boosted into the
position of social leader. In an age when there were no
social columns in the newspapers, no descriptions of enter-
tainments or illustrated supplements, ladies expected poets
to act as publicity agents. As songs about them spread
throughout the land and their fame increased, important
gentlemen would be attracted to their courts. They and
their husbands and the poets would increase in power and
wealth. This was an accepted and recognized fact. It was

[56]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

further admitted that since a poet needed a certain amount
of fuel to keep his ardor at white heat, a certain amount was
granted. It is, however, a law of all societies, written in
red letters in all books of etiquette of all time, that a vicom-
tesse, if she be not respectable, must, at least, be discreet;
or if she be indiscreet, that she choose as her companion
a prince sufficiently powerful to protect her against the
not unnatural chagrin of her husband. There were cases,
as we shall see later, where this law was observed with a
minute scrupulosity. When the poet says, "I have loved
you since the day we first played together as children, and
each day of the year my love for you has redoubled"
which Bernard actually did say to Agnes the lady has no
business believing him, even though she may feel a recip-
rocal passion. Bernard was in the right, as Ebles and all
the world knew. He was doing his job, and Agnes was in
the wrong. It was a hard world and a real world, and a
man took what he could get.

Thus was the vicomtesse de Ventadour, the beautiful but
indiscreet inspiration of a rising poet, spanked and locked
up in her room. In parting, Bernard said: "Lady, when
my eyes behold you no longer, remember that my heart
is always near you. When your husband beats your body,
do not let him beat your heart. If he humiliates you, take
care that you humiliate him too. See that you do not
return him good for evil. . . ."

3

Thus Bernard de Ventadour bade farewell to the first
mistress of his heart, the one who according to some biogra-

[57]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

phers retained the first place in his affections throughout
his long career. For be it known that Bernard is supposed
to have been absolutely faithful to at least three women
at the same time. Biographers seem to argue that since
he said he was faithful and is too nice a boy to tell a lie,
therefore he must be faithful, which is as pleasant a way
of looking at life as any I can imagine. When he set out
to seek his fortune in the early spring of 1 152, he turned
north toward Poitiers and that other subject of much gossip
who, too, was faithful in her fashion, Eleanor of Aquitaine,
recently queen of France and now about to become queen
of England. He traveled via Limoges, Bellac, and Chau-
vigny. A broad highway to-day follows the approximate
course that he must have taken, although his actual trail
diverges from it in some places, and to find it one needs a
stout pair of boots and a stout heart.

His first stop was probably Egletons, a village owned
by the counts of Ventadour. In the twelfth century the
citizens of this village built themselves walls strong enough
to stand for several thousands of years; and although the
fashion has somewhat changed in walled cities, one can
still climb the grassy steps on the portion which girds the
western side of the town and look out over the barren
country toward the Monts de Monedieres.

From here Bernard went northwest through a stony and
hilly country to St-Yrieix-le-Dejalat, an old monastic vil-
lage which has forgotten its past and is hopeless of its
future, a village which was begun by a cluster of houses
around the old abbey of St. Yrieix as the people of that
country mispronounce the good name of Aredius the saint

[58]

THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

and which never grew up. Then he crossed the moun-
tains to reach the Vezere River, and on the river, with wall
and gates and ruined castle and old houses, the village of
Treignac. And as he crossed the low hills which are called
mountains, he cursed and detested them.

One must distinguish in the works of these poets between
a true and sincere love of spring in particular and a rather
cold indifference toward nature in general. If one lived
all winter in a castle, which is to say a stone house built
on a hill open to the fiercest blasts and the most penetrating
cold winds and heated by a large though inadequate fire
built in one end of a very large and high room, one would
have reason to rejoice at the return of the flowers in the
spring. And if one traveled afoot or a-horseback three or
four times across the continent of Europe, one could have
reason to curse the mountains. The love of external nature,
the love of the wild and desert places, is a bad habit like
industrialism and democracy bequeathed to us by the senti-
mental nineteenth century. Even our recent ancestors of
the eighteenth century had great difficulty in explaining
why God let mountains grow over an otherwise pleasant
landscape. For these, as for the people of the Middle
Ages, the proper interest of mankind was man; and it was
considered a proof of great holiness when a religiously
minded person went out from the cities and the fraternity
of his fellows there to live by meditation. For the com-
mon man, the house was merely a place to sleep, and the
streets and the market-places, peopled by other interesting
and gossipy common men, the places to live. The gentry
of this period spent most of their time in the great hall of

[59]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

the castle, surrounded by a mob of undisciplined friends,
dogs, servants, hangers-on, clerics, and men-at-arms. There
was no privacy in the Middle Ages, nor did most people
desire privacy. They enjoyed having people around them
and hated loneliness. They hated the mountairs and the
deserts which were tiresome and difficult to cross, and they
loved cities where one might gossip and play politics. Their
admiration for the hermits who renounced the world and
the fellowship of men was in part an admiration for people
who demonstrated by their renunciation that they were
possessed of a stronger will than the Middle Ages or the
modern ages in general can boast of. The twelfth century
loved men and was indifferent to mankind.

Beyond Treignac there is a small wood which is called
a forest, and beyond that Mont Gargan Barnagaud and
St.-Germain-les~Belles, and St.-Bonnet4a-Rix and Chateau-
neuf and Limoges, which Bernard's successor, the powerful
Bertrand de Born, was to visit some thirty years later on
business connected with this same Eleanor whom Bernard
de Ventadour was setting out hopefully to serve.

I do not know what road Bernard followed from Limoges
to Bellac, for the old itineraries are silent, and there are
no streams to give the clue. I suspect that it was the long
road west of the present highway that slips through Nieu
and Blond and chateaux of doubtful interest. I do know
that on the spring evening when I followed this trail the
sky suddenly became verdigris and a cold wind blew down
in my face from the northwest and the rain was spray and
the trees beat the air and the cattle in the fields went gal-
loping with a strange excitement toward home. It was

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THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

one of those magic storms in which, as described by medieval
novelists, the knight strays into a forest for shelter and,
following some strange decoy, is led into the presence of
that curious lady who can make a hundred years seem as one
short night. Scientists, acquainted only with her unlovely
sister who can make one short evening seem like a hundred
years, regard her as a superstition. It transformed the
rather pretty landscape into a thing of beauty and recon-
structed for me the city of Bellac, which, on a hill dominat-
ing the Vincou and surrounded by an amphitheater of hills,
once stood a long siege. First there was a Roman fort.
The fort was transformed into a chateau, and around the
chateau, seeking protection and profit, there grew a large
\illage, then a small city.

The chateau where Bernard stayed has been torn down,
but it was a very old building when he arrived. It had been
built originally by Boson le Vieux three hundred years
earlier, when Boson, by his craft, gained for himself the
kingdom of the Provence. But Boson had enemies, and
one of these was his sometime friend, the king of France,
who set out to break him. Boson retired with Ermengarde,
his wife, to the chateau, and the armies of France gave
it siege. The siege lasted for several years. That means,
of course, that for several years the hostile army was more
or less in evidence about the place. The inmates of the
castle seem to have been able to go and come much as they
pleased, but they were never able to go far away or take
a large number of men or leave the place entirely unde-
fended. Boson grew weary of the siege, and so did the
king of France. They both set out for other worlds to

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

conquer. The king left Boson's brother in charge of the
siege, and Boson left his wife in charge of the castle. She
held out for two years against her importunate brother-in-
law and then surrendered to him. Boson paid her ransom
and freed her from imprisonment when he remembered it.
We in the twentieth century have become legally minded
and talk a great deal of nonsense about women's rights and
fail to distinguish between the rights of women and the
right women; for the right women of all ages and in all
societies seem to have been able to exercise their precious
personalities in any way they pleased.

From Bellac the old trail follows the highroad to Poitiers
as far as the Pont St.-Martin across the Gartempe, where
it branches. If either of the branches were in the Middle
Ages the more important, it was probably the one leading
through Theix, which contains, for those who are interested,
the ruins of four chateaux. Beyond Theix the trail loses
itself again, but the road of the Middle Ages was probably
one of those that followed the Gartempe northward to
Montmorillon, whose chateau and fortifications were de-
stroyed shortly after Bernard's visit and rebuilt to be de-
stroyed a second time. There still remain some old churches
and a curious twelfth-century tower which was, perhaps,
once used as a kitchen. Here again is a main modern road
which leads directly to Poitiers, but the Middle Ages, being
more accustomed to travel than we, probably followed
its course only as far as Lussac-les-Chateaux, where it meets
another river, this time the Vienne.

At Vienne, Bernard probably turned north to Chauvigny,
which huddles about a ruined donjon-keep and a church

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THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

on the cliffs. At Chauvigny, if you are of a trusting spirit,
you may find the ruins of five chateaux. If you are cynical,
however, you may conclude that the small heap of stones
about the donjon is not a chateau but what the masons
forgot to pick up when they did their last job in that part
of the town several centuries ago. But whether there were
four or five chateaux at Chauvigny was of little concern
to Bernard, for there was only one chateau in the town
when he reached it, if indeed he ever did. There were many
lords and ladies along the way in those days who would
welcome a clever poet, and he may have turned off at a
dozen points and taken a dozen short cuts.

Bernard probably never traveled more than a day at
a time, and if the master or the mistress of the castle were
pleasant, he probably spent several days or a week or two
with them. If there were neither castle nor monastery
near where he could spend the night, he took his chances
at an inn; and if the innkeeper were fairly honest, Bernard,
like the rest of us, might count himself fortunate. For the
innkeepers of those days have bequeathed some of their
intention though little of their skill to their descendants
and practised methods of robbery which were less subtle
but more efficient than those practised to-day.

There were two main rooms in these inns: one room
was for eating, and here everybody ate from a large table ;
and the other was for sleeping, and here everybody slept,
men and women together. In the winter when it was cold,
the windows were kept tightly closed, and people slept
without undressing; in the summer when it was hot, the
windows were kept closed just the same, but everybody slept

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

In the nude. A hundred years later a particularly modest
lady was commended for waiting until the light was put
out before she undressed; such modesty was remarkable.
These people thought that love was one thing and naked-
ness was another. When you entered the castle as a visitor,
your host showed you to your room and ordered a bath
for you. The tubs and water would be brought in, and
a maid-servant would stand near to help you off with your
clothes and to rub your back. Sir Percival, one of the
Arthurian knights, protested against this and was laughed
at for his crudeness. The twelfth century thought that we
were all God's creatures together and there was nothing
more immoral about a naked body than about a naked face.
Bernard and his colleagues the troubadours were the first
who, for purely practical reasons, introduced the distinction
between love and lust, a distinction which remained largely
theoretical until some time later, when nature, striving
always to model itself upon art, made it a reality.

At Chauvigny Bernard probably turned west to
Poitiers, unless he followed the Vienne northwest to
Chatellerault where it meets the Clain and then returned
southwest along this river to Poitiers. This, however, is
improbable.

That Bernard, having fallen into disfavor with the lord
of Ventadour, should have turned at once to the court of
the most powerful princess in western Europe is significant
and, when properly understood, may explain a great many
things about Bernard, about the poets, and about the Mid-
dle Ages. To-day, should a rising young poet suddenly
attach himself to the household of one of the powerful

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THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

industrial princesses, his action would be regarded by an
amazed society as somewhat presumptuous ; for this amazed
and highly civilized society believes that people of wealth
have no responsibility toward people of talent, and since
people of wealth have little interest in the arts, their respon-
sibility toward artists, one must admit, should be somewhat
limited.

In the Middle Ages, however, no one would have thought
it presumptuous for Bernard to attach himself to Eleanor,
and that for two reasons. The great ones of those days
were really interested in poetry. Strange as it may seem,
these people actually enjoyed hearing a good poem produced
with skill, finesse, and subtlety as much as we enjoy a game
of bridge or of golf. In those barbarous days, a poet was
something more than a sportsman and something less than
a god. He occupied the position in middle air which at
present is held by that strange creature called the super-
journalist who can ruin a reputation by a misplaced comma
and whose power over his audience and function in society
are similar to the power and function of the medieval poet.
There is, however, this difference, that the art of the jour-
nalist is exercised on less personal material. When the
journalists of the twentieth century have all been forgotten
even the greatest, and some of them are very great indeed
Bernard de Ventadour's cry in a morning song to Agnes,
CC O God, that dawn should come so soon/ 3 will still have
the power to thrill the pure and virtuous. This universal
interest in poetry may have assured Bernard that he would
be given a hearing, and, if his poetry pleased, that he might
find employment either in the household of Eleanor herself

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

or in the household of one of the great lords who congre-
gated about her.

Moreover Bernard may have known Eleanor. His mas-
ter, Ebles of Ventadour, was a friend of her father, Wil-
liam X, and a protege of her grandfather, the earliest trou-
badour. During Ebles's, Bernard's, and Eleanor's peregri-
nations through southern France, they may have met on
this or that occasion and exchanged compliments. Further,
though Bernard was a plebeian by birth, he was a poet by
profession and a gentleman by training. The poems he had
already written, which had been picked up and sung by more
than one wandering minstrel, had already served to make
him and Agnes de Montlu^on known, though perhaps not
famous, as social figures. Eleanor and her courtiers cer-
tainly knew Ebles, and if they did not know Agnes, they
certainly knew her family. Since Bernard was certainly
not in disgrace what gentleman either medieval or modern
could refuse to kiss the vicomtesse de Ventadour if she re-
quested it, she being very young and very charming?
there could be no reason why both her friends and Ebles's
friends should refuse to welcome a poet of known ability
whose broken heart was waiting to be mended should it
find a patron both charming and generous.

This patron it found in Eleanor, whose heart was made
of unbreakable material, and whose generosity to the poets
her colleagues she herself was a poet of no mean achieve-
ments was proverbial. She had recently undergone a
rather trying experience. Her last husband, King Louis
of France, was making difficulties over her proposed mar-
riage to young Henry, duke of Anjou; and Henry, who

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THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

was willing enough to marry her, was busy making war in
the north. A few weeks after Bernard's arrival in Poitiers
she succeeded in marrying young Henry in Bordeaux from
Poitiers to Bordeaux and back was a good two weeks* jour-
ney in those days and during the next year and a half,
Henry having already taken for himself the duchy of Nor-
mandy and formulated serious expectations toward the
scepter of England by means of a strong army provided by
Eleanor and liberal bribes also provided by her, she was
to await the fruition of her husband's plans at Caen, which
is the first important stop between Cherbourg and Paris
and across the bay from the modern city of Le Havre.

When Eleanor held her Norman court in the great chateau
at Caen, on the high hill above the old church of St.-Pierre,
now replaced by a structure of the thirteenth century, it
was in all probability the gayest court in western Europe.
Students of that fashionable young exquisite, Abelard, were
down from Paris. They practically denied the existence
of sin and tried to prove that the world we live in and
the God that made it were good, gay, and happy. And
Eleanor thought that although she did not know a great
deal about God, the world was a pretty fair world and she
would be glad enough to see somebody abolish sin. She
knew that she seemed to get into trouble as the sparks fly
upward, and yet she did not think she had ever done any-
thing which anybody could say was really wrong.

The chateau had been built by Eleanor's great-grand-
father-in-law, William the Bastard, called by an English

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

text-book that "great good man, William the Conqueror/'
who, with an army led by a poet, put the English to flight
at Hastings. He and his wife Matilda built the other
two most Interesting buildings at Caen, the Abbaye-aux-
Hornmes and the Abbaye-aux-Dames, and, desiring to keep
the good monks and nuns out of temptation, built the two
abbeys at opposite ends of the town. These buildings had
been erected as expiations for sin. William and Matilda
were cousins and had married without the sanction of the
church. The churchmen and perhaps God were somewhat
appeased by the dedication to them and Him of these
two pretentious foundations. They had also been erected
as thank-offerings for sinners. William had been successful,
beyond the wildest dreams of the most fortunate brigand,
in his project of stealing England, and, by creating a com-
paratively stable government which the English did not
desire, in assisting the progress of civilization.

William was buried with some difficulty in the Abbaye*
aux-Hommes. He died in Rouen, the traditional capital
of Normandy. As soon as he was dead, his court with the
cry, "Long live the king," set out to intrigue for favor with
one or more of the princes who hoped to succeed to the
throne. The residence was deserted except for the servants,
who, following the custom of the time, set out to plunder
it of jewels, plate, and furniture. When this was accom-
plished, they took from the dead king the clothes he was
wearing and left him naked on the floor. Later his son
Henry found him, and he was transported to Caen for
burial. The royal cortege had just reached the church,
however, when news arrived that fire had broken out in that

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THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

quarter of the town and threatened the abbey. The monks,
ecclesiastics, and nobles, more concerned with the preserva-
tion of the abbey than with the routine of burial, left the
dead king in the middle of the road until the fire had been
extinguished, when the business of interment was resumed.
The body was taken to the altar of the church, and the
priests began to read the service. Then there was another
uproar. This time it was caused by Anselm Fitzarthur,
who forbade the interment. "This spot/' he said, "was
the site of my father's house, which this dead duke took
violently from him, and here, upon part of my inheritance,
founded this church. This ground I therefore challenge;
and I charge ye all, as ye shall answer for it at the great
and dreadful day of judgment, that ye lay not the bones
of the despoiler on the hearth of my fathers." William's
sons, who were probably less concerned with the justice
of the claim than with pacifying the Normans whom they
hoped to make their subjects, bargained with Fitzarthur,
while the priests waited with the service, and finally agreed
to pay him a hundred pounds, which, in those days, was
a fabulous sum of money for a piece of land. In the mean-
time the workmen removed boards which had been placed
over the grave, and the funeral party was assailed with
such a stench that the service was mumbled over and hur-
ried through in any way so that the king could be rolled
in his grave and covered up as soon as possible.

That had happened in 1090. Since then Caen had been
increasing in power and in wealth and in importance. By
1154 these events had been forgotten, and Eleanor was
having a gay time in the chateau, and well she deserved it.

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

It was to be the last of those gay times which made her
famous as the queen of the troubadours. The next years
were to bring a change. The fogs were to subdue her; the
coldness of the English atmosphere was to restrain her
impulses. She was to learn how difficult it is to dissipate
in England with a running nose and to be gay in a strange
language. Many children were to appear and at brief inter-
vals. Henry's dominant will was to put hers into hiberna-
tion, a hibernation that would last for twenty years, from
which it was to emerge strangely different from what it
had been but still formidable.

At Eleanor's court in Caen one might have met the youth
and beauty of the world. Everybody of importance was
there except the young king, now arrived at the mature age
of twenty-one, busy in the northwest with a small revolu-
tion. Students from the north, poets from the south, lords
and squires, ladies and knights and statesmen speaking a
strange medley of Romance languages and dialects, all were
gathered of an afternoon in the great hall at the chateau
on the hill with the city clustering around its feet and the
cathedral spire half-way between it and the earth beneath.
There must have been intrigue, bold words, hilarious voices,
and above it all, a musician singing the latest song of Ber-
nard de Ventadour, a song which sounded over the multi-
tude, a song which said only half of what it meant, which
struggled with the accompaniment, too loud by far, and
which quarreled with the din of the room, a clear-voiced
song with the refrain:

She in this world whom I love most ...
With all my heart and in good faith . . *

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THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

May she hear and grant my prayers,

May she receive and remember my words;

If one can die of too much love

I shall die ...

For in my heart I bear for her
A love so true, such perfect love,
That other love compared to it

Is false and base. . . .

This song or one like it was certainly sung at that court,
and Bernard, standing perhaps a little away from the crowd
where he might catch the queen's eye, may have made clear
to her that this was his homage, and the queen, flattered,
may have said, "You will sing that for us again in Eng-
land"; to which Bernard, since the southern Frenchman
of those days regarded England as a wild country inhab-
ited only by barbarians and not fit for civilized people, may
have muttered, "God save my soul."

All the world that counted knew in the early fall of 1 154
that one of two important events was about to happen in
the history of England : either King Stephen would be de-
posed, or he would die. As death was the less humiliating,
he died; and young Henry, who in two years had risen from
the inconspicuous duchy of Anjou to become the ruler of
the largest territory held by a single man in western Europe,
made great preparations to take his queen, her infant son,
courtiers and poets, and who knows how many scullions,
ladies, servants, dogs, lords, and what not to England for
the coronation.

Channel crossings in those days were much as they are
now, only somewhat worse. The short crossings between

[71]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Calais and Dover were not feasible. To reach Calais a long
and tedious overland journey through hostile or doubtful
territory would have been necessary. The favorite crossing
was either from Honfleur at the mouth of the Seine or from
Barfleur near Cherbourg. One went in a Norman ship, that
is to say, in a boat about twice as large as a Newfoundland
dory, but, even so, small and very much at the mercy of
the wind. A lucky crossing would require no more than
fourteen hours, but if the crossing were unlucky, one might
be tossed about for a day or two.

At one end of the boat was a cabin, richly wainscoted
for the royal party. The masts and the sails were bravely
decorated with pennants and medallions. "When the horses
were in the ship," says a chronicler, speaking of another
embarkation, "our master mariner called to his seamen who
stood in the prow and said, c Are you ready?' and they an-
swered 'Aye, sir let the clerks and priests come forward !'
As soon as these had come forward he called to them,
c Sing for God's sake!' and they all with one voice
chanted. . . .

"Then he called to his seamen, 'Unfurl the sails for God's
sake!' and they did so.

"In a short space the wind had filled our sails and borne
us out of sight of land, so that we saw naught save sky and
water, and every hour the wind carried us farther from the
land where we were born. And these things I tell you that
you may understand how foolhardy is that man who dares,
having other's chattels in his possession, or being in mortal
sin, to place himself in such peril, seeing that, when you
lie down to sleep at night on shipboard, you lie down not

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THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

knowing whether, in the morning, you may find yourself
at the bottom of the sea. . . "

They had to wait an entire month before they dared even
to embark, for, as all the world knows, October and No-
vember are the worst of all the bad months of the year to
cross to England. And when they finally did venture forth,
the wind so separated the fleet of thirty-six ships that when
they arrived at the English coast, the party had to wait
several days until everybody could be collected again.

There were, of course, the usual deck sports: flirting,
drinking, gaming, and intriguing. Many years before, the
famous White Ship containing Henry of Anjou's uncle had
sailed from Barfleur at night, and all the passengers and
crew were so hilariously intoxicated that the ship was sunk
and all were lost. There were investigations, and had there
been a "Times" there would have been letters in it, and new
regulations were passed; but human nature being what it is,
people persisted in distracting themselves as best they might
on the long crossing. In Eleanor's party, too, there must
have been gaiety or as much gaiety as the rough weather
permitted. The only lines in Bernard's writing which seem
to refer to the crossing relate that this poem "has been writ-
ten far beyond the lands of Normandy on the deep and
wild ocean. Although I am far distant from my lady, she
draws me to her as a lover draws his mistress . . . May
God protect her !"

Henry and Eleanor received at Winchester the homage
of the southern lords of England and then proceeded to
Westminster, where "they were blessed to king." It was
a gorgeous coronation. Eleanor, fresh from Paris and be-

[73]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

yond, displayed to the natives the latest fashions in silks,
brocades, and underwear. She had relieved the Saracens
and Constantinopolitans of a great portion of their silks
and had had these made up in novel styles. In the Middle
Ages it was customary for a lady to have in a lifetime no
more than two or three dresses, and these were passed on
as heirlooms from mother to daughter. The amount of
linen a lady had was directly proportionate to her lineage.
As the line grew longer and the blood grew thinner, the
wardrobes grew fatter. The following incident, which
occurred some fifty years later, is illustrative. Joinville,
the friend of St. Louis of France, is speaking :

The king came down after dinner [he says] into the court below
the chapel, and was talking at the entrance of the door to the
Count of Brittany, the father of the Count that now is whom may
God preserve ! when Master Robert of Sorbonne came to fetch me
thither, and took me by the skirt of my mantle and led me to the
king ; and all the other knights came after us. Then I said to Mas-
ter Robert, "Master Robert, what do you want with me V 9 He said,
"I wish to ask you whether, if the king were seated in this court,
and you were to seat yourself on his bench, and at a higher place
than he, ought you to be greatly blamed?" And I said, "Yes."
And he said, "Then are you to be blamed when you go more nobly
appareled than the king, for you dress yourself in fur and green
cloth and the king does not do so." And I replied, "Master Robert,
saving your grace, I do nothing blameworthy when I clothe myself
in green cloth and fur, for this cloth was left to me by my father
and mother. But you are to blame, for you are the son of a common
man and a common woman, and you have abandoned the vesture
worn by your father and mother, and wear richer woolen cloth
than the king himself." Then I took the skirt of his surcoat an8
the surcoat of the king and said, "See if I am not speaking sooth."

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THE TRAIL OF A TROUBADOUR ERRANT

The wealth of the Orient which flowed into Europe as a
result of the Crusades an interesting commercial enterprise
wherein men's original love of God was modified somewhat
by a greed for wealth was bringing about a great sartorial
as well as a tonsorial change. Eleanor and Henry were
among the early fruits of this change. At her coronation,
Eleanor wore a wimple or close veil running over her head
and fastening beneath her chin. Around this was a circlet
of gems. Her dress was a kirtle or close gown gathered at
the throat. Over this was a pelisson or loose outer robe of
brocaded silk lined with ermine; Westminster, where the
coronation was solemnized, was an unheated building. The
brocaded sleeves of this pelisson were very large and showed
the beautiful lawn of the tight sleeves underneath. Her
husband wore mustaches but no beard and an Angevin
doublet or short coat which the English, in those days some-
what provincial, thought ridiculous. His dalmatic or outer
robe was of rich brocade covered with gold embroidery.
The ecclesiastics, too, wore robes of cloth of gold, silk, and
brocade.

Thus here in the old Westminster was crowned this boy
of twenty-one, who knew not a word of English but by
bribes, theft, threat, and promise had made himself the legal
master of a territory stretching from Scotland to Spain.
Beside him was the queen he had stolen a poet, we are
told, though not an authentic work of hers exists and
in her train was at least one and perhaps many another
poet from southern France.

Bernard de Ventadour stayed with Eleanor for four years,
and for two of these, he says, he wrote not a single poem.

[75]

Chapter IV
The Trail of a Hopeful Poet

LONDON TO ALEN^ON

Chapter IV

THERE is the best evidence in the world for concluding that
in the fall of 1158 Bernard de Ventadour, the troubadour,
decided that he would not under any circumstances consent
to spend another winter in England. Northern winters,
he may have argued, are bad enough; but another winter
in England in the service of a queen who has already seen
her best days (in the twelfth century a woman of thirty-six
was an old woman), and is now devoting her time and
energy to the breeding of a group of young princes who are
destined to be the death of their father, is an intolerable
prospect. Since all Englishmen who can afford it go to the
south of France as early in the fall as they can afford to
and stay as long as they can, and since English gentlemen
prove their love for England by spending most of their time
elsewhere, Bernard, who was an adaptable creature, decided
to follow their example.

England in those days was a wealthy and barbaric king-
dom. It was an outpost of civilization, still only partly
civilized. In those days poets were not made welcome in

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

England except at the court England has now corrected
that condition and here, where there were not enough
ladies to go around, poets were likely to be pushed aside by
eager and warlike noblemen. Most of the natives were
unable to understand French, and when they did understand
it the kind of delicate, complimentary, flattering French
Bernard used they were likely to misunderstand it. The
knights thought a compliment was an indecent advance, and
the ladies expected inhuman prowess of a troubadour in
the service of the queen. It is in the English character
to believe that women are pure and in the French tempera-
ment to hope that they will be discreet.

The knights spent their time quarreling and grumbling.
If they were not quarreling with the king or setting up a
new king in the hope that the old one would be killed, they
were quarreling with the church. When they could find
no pretext for a quarrel with the church, the king, or their
wives, they would, out of sheer good nature, set to quar-
reling with each other. Instead of helping a king who, in
his own right and his wife's, controlled the largest empire
in the world all of England and western France from
Scotland to Spain instead of realizing that England was a
little piece of nothing at all tucked away in a corner, good
enough to provide revenue but barbaric and uncivilized,
they earnestly tried to make all the trouble they could for
the foreigners, and their earnestness was not without its
reward.

Centuries before, England had had a civilization. In
the time of Alfred poets and scholars and statesmen had
flocked to the court at Winchester, had transcribed laws
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THE TRAIL OF A HOPEFUL POET

and written histories, and in the green fields had wondered
whether life was worth living and why, and engaged in those
exercises which make man nobler, more civilized, and less
happy than his brethren in the fields, the ox and the ass.
But a decadence had set in, or rather, the English had fallen
behind the French. They were unaware of the perfection
to which the fine art of living had been brought by the
southern Gauls. A hot bath to them was a silly luxury.
Private lavatories and individual bedrooms were vanities.
Pleasant conversation, delicate compliment and intrigue,
were effeminate, which is to say immoral. Theirs was a
manly race, but crude ; they were good fighters, but lacking
in finesse and polish, in civilization.

The English did not take kindly to civilization. Their
consciousness of the superior physical comfort of life among
the Gauls was dimmed by the realization that English
money paid for foreign comforts, that these comforts were
not necessary to keep an honest Englishman alive, and that
if the Gauls thought France was better than England they
could go back to where they came from. But most im-
portant of all, and the fact that irritated them most, was
that the foreigners were collecting and spending the graft
that free-born Englishmen might justly claim by the right
of precedence. England was not the place that an Aqui-
tanian poet would visit unless he had business there, and
to Bernard's credit let it be said that I have no evidence
to prove that he ever wanted to go to England, or ever
would have gone had not circumstances and Queen Eleanor,
who was a circumstance of another order and used to hav-
ing her own way, forced him to.

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Despite the eternal discomforts of life in England under
an English climate, life with Queen Eleanor in her palace
at Bermondsey, which was a country village on the south
bank of the Thames, may have been pleasant enough. The
palace, originally built in the Saxon style, had probably
been rearranged for the Aquitanian princess. Across the
river, on rising ground, encircled by a wall over which
peered the spires of some hundred churches, was the city
of London. On the east was the Tower, newly built; on
the west was the spire of the old St. Paul's and the center
of the life of the city. Beyond that was the old Temple,
the pleasant country road of the Strand, the villas of the
wealthy merchants and gentry, and further still, even as
now, the village of Westminster. As the streets were nar-
row and crowded, and the pleasant country road was not
particularly well built, the best way to get from West-
minster or Bermondsey or from any part of the city to any
other part was by boat; and to conduct almost any business
in London one had to pass by or through old St. Paul's,
which was almost crushed by the press of houses, shops,
and booths that were huddled about it. London was famous
for its "crowds of pimps and bands of gamesters. Its bullies
are more numerous than those of France, and it is full
of actors, buffoons, eunuchs, flatterers, pages, effeminates,
dancing girls, favorites, apothecaries, witches, vultures,
owls, magicians, mimes and mendicants." Evidently Eng-
land was on the highroad to civilization, although this
account, written by a man not friendly to the French, who

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THE TRAIL OF A HOPEFUL POET

seems to have had a slight attack of dyspeptic misanthropy,
may be somewhat exaggerated. With the accession of
Eleanor, brisk trade was made possible with Bordeaux, and
claret dropped to the comfortable price of fourpence a
gallon.

Here for a few months Eleanor seems to have been com-
paratively tranquil. While her husband was rushing from
London to Normandy, to Wales, to Beaucaire, to Poitiers ;
besieging castles, negotiating treaties, chopping off the
heads of those who betrayed him and buying the friendship
of those who were to betray others; conferring with Elea-
nor's mother-in-law, the formidable Matilda, sometime
empress of Germany ; arguing with bishops and clerks, dic-
tating constitutions, setting precedents, building castles,
keeping a wary eye out for federal interference, which in
those days meant interference from Rome, holding his large
possessions together as best he might, reducing his expenses
when he could, increasing his revenues when chance offered,
busy as any president of the United States and much more
active, Eleanor, his wife, spent her time during these years
in London, Westminster, Oxford, Winchester, and Nor-
mandy, raising the children who were to be the death of
their father, who were to avenge her for having married at
her own choice the only man in Europe strong enough to
break her, and entertaining herself with Bernard de Venta-
dour, Bernard the Handsome, Bernard the Hopeful, the
son of the lowest servant in an obscure chateau and one of
the best poets in Europe. She was cultivating the arts and
the artists, and for the first time in her life was keeping her-
self free from scandal. Henry, Rosamond Clifford, young

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Thomas Becket who was to die a saint, and others were
providing that; and she seems to have felt that so long
as one member of the family was scandalous, she might
devote her energies to the production of proud, noisy, med-
dlesome children.

However well London agreed with Eleanor, Bernard de
Ventadour seems to have found it difficult. About 1 158 he
admitted that for two years he had made no new songs,
and this admission is significant, for Bernard was the kind
of person who wrote poetry on any provocation. He says
in one song: "When the blossoms appear beneath the green
leaf, when the air is clear and the sky serene ; when the sweet
birds sing in the woods in their fashion, I too can sing;
I have more joy in my heart than they: all of my days
are joy and song, I think of no other thing."

Many explanations have been advanced to account for
Bernard's silence. The school of literary critics called mete-
orological, because they are not meteoric but believe that
the level of art rises and falls with the barometer, gloat
over Bernard's admission that he needed serene skies and
clear air for the production of poetry. (Last year summer
in England was on a Monday morning and the year before
that on a Wednesday afternoon.) Critics point out that
although there may be occasional perfect days in England
these usually occur when one is safe in the sunshine of
southern France and thus dares to long "to be in England
now that April's there" the enthusiasm with which poets
describe these days proves both their rarity and the need of
recording them for the information of posterity. A boast-
ful contemporary of Bernard's uses the generous phrase

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"on pleasant days" and says that these were sometimes the
occasions of celebrations. Then "the streets are cleaned
and decorated by hangings and garlands ; they are thronged
by rich burgesses in holiday attire and there are entertain-
ments of gleemen and jugglers." Another group of literary
' "scientists," the gastronomes, who say, "Show me what
you write and I will tell you what you eat" a bit of infor-
mation which would seem to be somewhat supererogatory
insist that English cooking is and always was ruinous to the
digestion and point out that there are only three kinds of
vegetables in England and that two of these are cabbage.
This, they say, accounts for the traditionally phlegmatic
temperament of the Englishman and for the silence of
Bernard.

In the winter of 1158 Bernard begins to hint that he is
unhappy. Some critics suggest that he was recalled by
Agnes de Montlucon, vicomtesse de Ventadour and his
first love. They do not think it improbable, and perhaps
they are right, that he was faithful in his fashion to both
the vicomtesse and the queen and that he loved them both
faithfully and both at the same time. I do not suggest that
the queen granted him the liberties that Agnes seems to
have granted. In one place he mentions the "evil speakers,"
but whether these people spoke evil about him and the queen
or about him and somebody else is not clear. Critics believe
that the following lines were addressed to the queen:

My heart is so full of joy that everything seems to have changed
its nature. It seems to me that the cold winter is full of flowers:
white, vermilion, and yellow. My happiness grows with the bitter
wind and the cold rain. I raise my voice. I build my song. My

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prowess increases. I bear in my heart so much of joy and of sweet-
ness that the winter seems to be filled with flowers and the snow
is a green tapestry.

I could go unclothed into the coldness for my perfect love would
protect me against the bitter winds. . . .

But alas! I have placed my hope on her who succors me so
little that I am lifted and dropped like a boat on the waves. . . .

I do not know whither to flee to evade the evils which crush me.
Love has brought me more sorrow than it brought the lover Tristan
in his love for Isolt the blond. . . .

Eleanor spent Christmas day with her husband and
family and full court at Cherbourg, and here, it may be,
Bernard had his minstrels sing to her his farewell song.
As it was as disastrous in the twelfth century as it is now
for an ambitious young man to spend four years away from
his friends in a barbarous country, and as Bernard may have
feared that his acquaintances in the south may have for-
gotten him entirely, he introduced in this song a peculiar
request, a request for a letter of recommendation from the
queen. He said :

I am awakened by the sweet song which the nightingale makes
at night whilst I am slumbering. I am lost in joy; my soul is filled
with amorous dreams; for I have dedicated my life to the love
of joy, and joyously my song begin.

If people knew the joy which is mine and if I could make them
understand, all other joy in the world would be small in comparison
with it. Some vaunt their joy and think they are rich and superior
in perfect love. Their love is equal to only half of mine. . .

Frequently I contemplate in thought the gracious and well made
body of my lady. She is distinguished by her courtesy. She knows
well the art of gentle speech. It would require an entire year for

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me to tell you all the good qualities of my lady. She has so much
courtesy and distinction !

Lady, I am your knight, and I shall be your knight forever,
always ready for your service. You are my first love, and you
will be my last ... as long as life endures.

Those who think I will be separated from her do not know how
easily souls can find each other however distant the bodies may be.

Know, ye speakers of evil, that the best messenger to her that
I have is a thought which reminds me of her beauty.

I leave you and I am melancholy. I do not know when I shall
see you again. It is for you that I have left the king. Grant me
this grace: let me not suffer because of our separation, when I
present myself at a strange court, courteously among knights and
ladies. . . .

One may explain in many ways the departure from the
court of Eleanor of Aquitaine of Bernard the troubadour
poet of Ventadour. Perhaps he was driven away by evil
speakers. Perhaps he had begun to bore her, or perhaps
he had found her tiresome. Perhaps he had found the young
princes a nuisance, or perhaps the climate of England was
too much for him; or perhaps, as his more sentimental biog-
raphers suggest, he actually had received a message from
Agnes de Montlugon, his first passion, and he had set out
for the south, in that naive hopefulness which is the privi-
lege of poets, to find her again or to recreate her image out
of those imperfect details which our senses bring to us and
from which we build the personality of the ideal. For Ber-
nard de Ventadour loved many women in his time. One
he had loved and he had loved her well and calamitously
before he met the English queen at whcse court he re-
mained songless for two years. Others he was to love, great

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ladies and experienced in the arts of courtoisie and belle
farler; but who can say that each was not in some way a
reflection of that image to which he was eternally as faith-
ful as it is fitting that any man should be whose flesh hungers
and thirsts for nourishment and whose spirit hungers and
thirsts for beauty?

There is a quality of prettiness, a sensuous richness as of
butter and eggs, a fecundity, fertility, and smugness in the
undulations of the wooded plain which Normandy throws
out, wave upon wave, toward the British Channel and the
south coast of England. The old Normandy casts an
oblique eye upon her ungrateful daughter England, whose
white chalk cliffs flash back in a triumphant smile. A tall,
brown-haired, blue-eyed Norman peasant said to me as he
drew a glass of sparkling cider one summer day : "Eh bienl
The English ! We're the same blood as they and the same
race/ 3 And a teacher in one of the schools at Argenton
asked: "And your English architecture, whence does it
come? Isn't it after all merely an exaggeration of the
Norman style? Was there an architecture before the Nor-
mans came to England? Was there even an English
nation?"

Many of the towns and most of the country of northern
Normandy through which Bernard passed are English
towns and English country; the people are, in many re-
spects, English people. The Normans gave to the mild
Anglo-Saxons, from whom they stole England, a shrewd-
ness, an intellectual agility, and the gift for playing a game

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which at its best is called diplomacy and at its worst
trickery. English vices and English virtues are also Nor-
man vices and Norman virtues. In Normandy one finds
the same boisterous satire of human vices and human follies
which is to be found in much of the most characteristic
English literature; in the first Butler, Fielding, and
Chaucer. In the churches of Normandy in the spring were
once celebrated curious pagan festivals. In the festival of
the drunken deacons, the deacons elected a * 'bishop of
fools"; they burned before him incense of smoldering
leather; they chanted obscene songs and ate on the altar.
At Evreux the first of May was the festival of St. Vital
and the festival of cuckolds. The priests wore their sur-
plices inside out and threw starch into each other's eyes.
At Beauvais a girl and a child rode an ass into the church,
and the choir chanted as refrain the edifying word "Hee-
haw/' The people of this country and time were a vital
race, whose passions, long suppressed, demanded violent and
boisterous expression.

If Bernard de Ventadour went by land rather than by sea,
his first stop must have been Valognes, whose beauty dates
from the seventeenth rather than the twelfth century. But
even in towns like Valognes one may see here and there, if
one wanders through the small streets or studies the town
plan with an attentive eye, a pile of stones or a bit of wall
or as at Montebourg some eight miles further an old
abbey founded and built by the Norman or Angevin kings,
Bernard's patrons. Beyond this the country flattens out
and becomes a country of lowing cattle, butter and eggs,
and very placid streams over which gnarled trees lean like

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women brushing their bosoms in the water. And all of
these towns through which Bernard must have passed, either
on this trip or on those other trips when he rode with
Eleanor or Henry on their royal business, are towns over
which the great ones of those days growled and fought and
killed each other. Before them many an honest man-at-
arms lost his life; and in the sacking of them, many a
thrifty burgess lost his wife and wealth and daughters in
order that the prestige of the English kings might be raised
and the wealth of the English coffers might increase.
Carentan, the next town on the great main road toward the
south, was taken by Geoffrey Plantagenet after a siege and
was sacked; here he built the chateau in which he never
lived; and beyond Carentan, on a rock hill rising from the
right bank of the river Vire, is St.-L6, which suffered a
disastrous siege in 1 142. Beyond that is Tessy, and still
further, embraced on three sides by the meandering river,
is the ancient city of Vire. On a hill is the donjon built
by the first Henry, the grandfather of Eleanor's husband,
that it might dominate the four valleys of which this is the
center. The donjon and the fortified gates still stand,
and the citizens of Vire are busy in the manufacture of
fresh white sheets.

To the southwest of Vire is the city of Tinchebrai, where
there was once a famous battle of which you will hear more
in a moment; and directly to the south a city which in the
twelfth century was much more important, the city of
Mortain, held, when Bernard passed through, by William
III, the last descendant of the malodorous Stephen from
whom Henry II had taken the crown of England. From

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the earliest times, the county of Mortain was one of the
most important in this part of Normandy. It was always
assigned to one of the brothers of the Norman duke, much
as Wales to-day is assigned to the English crown prince.
When William the Conqueror took England, he granted the
earldom of Cornwall to Robert, count of Mortain. Later
this same Robert rebelled against William's successor,
William Rufus; and Robert's son, William of Mortain,
led the rebellion of the barons against his cousin, Henry I,
Eleanor of Aquitaine's grandf ather-in-law.

The politicians of that age had not yet formulated the
comfortable policy of majority rule, and the minority had
not yet learned to chew the cud of its discomforts placidly
until somebody died. If a minority of those days wanted
a thing badly enough, it would fight for it and die for it if
need be, and sometimes, because the majority of these
majorities is usually made up of people who want to be on
the winning side, it would get what it wanted. In this
famous rebellion the barons lost, not, however, because
their arms were weaker, but because their purpose was less
obdurate.

The first two Henries, kings of England, were shrewd
men. They were the first to discover the advantages of
diplomacy over war and the first to make the king of Eng-
land something more than the first baron of the land. Be-
fore their time the barons had lived together in a more or
less argumentative complacence. They held what they
could hold and stole what they could get. The king was
no more than the chief baron among them, and his actions
were rigidly limited by the good nature of the lords who

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

were willing, from a desire for gain or from vanity, to put
themselves out to help him or to hurt him. Henry I and
Henry II were shrewder than their followers, and before
they died they had succeeded by bribery and murder, which
are dignified in history texts by the emasculate words
"persuasion" and "punishment/ 5 in giving the king of Eng-
land a position which approximated that of a ruler. The
barons were not particularly happy.

In the beginning of the twelfth century Henry I was
waving a precarious scepter over England, and his brother
Robert, ostensibly independent of Henry's sovereignty,
was duke of Normandy. In Robert's castles and the castles
of his friends were a host of malcontents who were pro-
gressives and firm believers in the doctrine of change. Chief
among these were Robert himself and William, count of
Mortain, Henry's cousin. Normandy was a sore whose
suppurations infected the happiness of England, but most
particularly of England's king. It wanted cleaning. The
adventures of the campaign were many, but the dramatic
moment came before Tinchebrai, one of the castles held
by Mortain. Henry took it from its small band of defenders
and left in it his own garrison. Mortain returned, recap-
tured the castle, and locked the garrison up. Then Henry
reappeared and laid siege. Mortain called all his friends,
and when the two armies were assembled, the leaders, the
duke of Normandy and the king of England, began to
discuss terms. As they could not agree on terms, they de-
cided that the quickest way of settling their differences was
to fight them out. Their armies fought for an hour. Dur-
ing the battle the count of Belleme, evidently persuaded by

THE TRAIL OF A HOPEFUL POET

one of Henry's agents, fled. The army of Mortaln and
Normandy surrendered. Henry captured four hundred
knights and ten thousand burgesses, and C no man con-
cerned himself to count the number of their fellows who
fell in the fight/ 3 Henry lost few men of rank and virtu-
ally no knights, and Normandy lost not more than a score
of knights in the battle. The count of Mortain was sen-
tenced to life imprisonment and had both of his eyes put
out. Mortain now is a city of two thousand, and on the
left bank of the river are the vestiges of the old chateau.
Although the progressive and energetic spirit of the Nor-
mans has somewhat obscured the work of the twelfth cen-
tury the Normans frequently prefer, and that not with-
out reason, the comforts of a modern house to the discom-
forts of a medieval castle the town of Domf ront, a few
hours beyond Mortain and in Bernard's time the second or
third most important city of that district, still presents to
the universe a face which is vaguely medieval. It is on a
hill some two hundred feet above the valley; it has a wall
and vine-clad towers, and a ruined chateau. Because it is
in the border-land between Anjou and Normandy, it has
witnessed many sieges and many battles. When William
Rufus, king of England, was having trouble with this same
Robert of Normandy, young Henry, who later became
Henry I, promised Rufus to attack the city of Eu some
miles beyond Dieppe. He left Domfront, where he had
taken refuge to repair his fortunes, and rode out gaily to
the city of Avranches, where he took ship. Instead of
attacking Eu, however, he appeared suddenly in England,
and here, professing friendship to Rufus, he succeeded in

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squeezing from that unhappy monarch supplies of men and
money sufficient to launch his own blow at the English
throne. Matilda, Henry Us mother, also seems to have
thought Domfront a good place in which to be ambitious,
for she and her husband Geoffrey arrived here after Henry
I, her father, died; but Stephen was too quick or Geoffrey
was too slow, and his army from Anjou began quarreling
with the Normans and after a great fight in the streets east
of Domfront was driven out, and with it its ambitious
masters.

The Domfrontains are very friendly and very cordial.
They make you feel that you are doing them a favor by
being there and that you must always be their friend. They
persuaded Henry I and Henry II and several other Eng-
lishmen by adoption always to be their friends and never
to desert them and always to protect them against their
wicked enemies. And the English kings seem to have re-
membered their promises to the Domfrontains. They de-
serted Domfront when they found it profitable, and pro-
tected Domfront when they felt like it, and treated the
town after the manner of the aristocracy, which is with
negligence.

Half of the twenty-four towers that once studded the
city wall silhouette themselves nightly against the western
sky and defy the insidious attack of the small roots which
slip in between the stones, and the cold frost of winter, and
the heat of summer, as they once defied hostile armies or
welcomed ambitious princes. One night as I watched the
sun set there, a stone broke loose and thundered down into
the valley. The stones that were left settled themselves

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comfortably murmuring to await their turn. When they
are all gone and the ugly new church whose yellow skel-
eton screams against the eastern sky has become old for
God, whose wisdom passes the comprehension of men, Is as
tolerant of ugliness as of beauty the Domfrontains will
still gossip in the Place de la Maine. They will tell you
that the new church has already cost them more than a
million and a half francs, which were raised by the sale of
butter and eggs. The hostess of the tavern thinks that a
million and a half francs is a great deal of money and
that the old church did very well. And so do L

Bernard then proceeded southeast, through rolling fields
and over gentle streams to Domfront* s sister city, Alengon.
When Domfront had a new chateau, Alengon had a new
chateau. When Domfront fell before an army, Alencon
also fell. Here William of Normandy, while he was still
William the Bastard and before he had attained to the
eminence of the Conqueror, once avenged bitterly a bitter
insult. William's father was Robert the Devil, and his
mother was pretty Arlette, the daughter of a furrier, who
bore to Robert and others many a count who succeeded
in disturbing the serenity of the Norman landscape. Wil-
liam was besieging Alengon. When the defenders realized
that they could hold out no longer they collected on the
walls and shouted, "A la pel! A la pel!" intending to
humiliate him by reference to his grandfather's occupa-
tion. About fifty years ago before Bernard reached Alen-
Qon, Henry I built the donjon which still stands. Later
he gave the city to the father of the same Thibaut of
Blois who entertained Eleanor on her flight from Paris to

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Poitiers. Once Alencon was held by one William Talvas.
Robert the Devil, who was duke of Normandy at that
time, took it away from him for some offense. William
Talvas, in order to regain it, had to approach Robert the
Devil on his knees and barefooted. He was clad only in
a chemise, and he bore a saddle on his back. This kind of
humiliating punishment was not so childish in the Middle
Ages as it is now. In those days, a man's power depended
largely on his ability to hold the respect of his followers ;
that is, on what passed in the Middle Ages for personal
dignity. You could not have a great deal of respect for
a man whom you had seen groveling on the ground. Later,
William Talvas had his revenge; but that is another
story.

Some hundred years after Bernard visited it, Alengon
was the setting for one of those domestic triangles which
created a certain amount of gossip and finally terminated in
the polite sport of the time, the wager of battle. Attached
to the household of the earl of Alengon were a knight
called John of Carougne and a squire called Jaques de
Grys. Sir John went oversea for the advancement of his
honor, and left his lady in the castle. On his return she
told him that shortly after his departure his friend Jaques
de Grys paid a visit to her, made excuses to be alone
with her, and then, by force, dishonored her. The
knight called his and her friends together and asked their
counsel as to what he should do. He took his complaint
to the earl of Alengon. The squire proved that on four
o'clock of the morning on which the offense was supposed
to have been committed he was at his lord's the earl's

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House, and the earl stated that at the same morning he was
present at the levee. The alibi seemed perfect.

Whereupon the Earl said that she did but dream it, wherefore
he would maintain his squire and commanded the lady to speak
no more of the matter. But the knight, who was of great courage
and well trusted and believed his wife, would not agree to that
opinion, but he went to Paris and showed the matter there to
the parliament.

The contest continued for more than a year and a half.
Finally

the parliament determined that there should be a battle at utterance
between them. . . .

Then the lists were made at a place called St. Katherine behind
the Temple. There was so much people that it was a marvel' to
behold ; and on the one side of the lists there was made great scaf-
folds, that the lords might the better see the battle of the two
champions ; so they both came to the field, armed in all places, and
there each of them was set in their chair.

The Earl of St. Paul governed John of Carougne and the Earl
of Alencon's company was with Jaques de Grys. And when the
knight entered the field he came first to his wife who was sitting
in a chair covered in black, and he said to her thus : Dame, by your
information and your quarrel do I put my life in adventure as to
fight with Jaques de Grys; ye know if the cause be just and true.
Sir, said the lady, it is as I have said; wherefore ye may fight
surely, the cause is good and true. With those words the knight
kissed the lady and then took her by the hand and blessed her, and
so entered into the field. The lady sat still in the black chair in
her prayers to God and the Virgin Mary, humbly praying them,
by their special grace, to send her husband the victory according

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to the right he was in. The lady was in great heaviness for she
was not sure of her life ; for if her husband should have been dis-
comfited she was judged without remedy to be brent and her husband
hanged. I cannot say whether she repented or not, yet the matter
was so forward that both she and her husband were in great peril ;
howbeit finally she must as then abide the adventure. And so these
two champions were set one against the other, and so mounted on
their horses and behaved them nobly, for they knew what pertained
to deeds of arms. There were many knights and lords of France
that were come thither to see that battle : the two champions parted
at their first meeting but neither of them did hurt other ; and upon
the jousts they alighted on foot to perform the battle, and -so fought
valiantly ; and first John of Carougne was hurt in the thigh where-
bye all his friends were in great fear ; but after that he fought so
valiantly he beat down his adversary to the earth, and thrust his
sword in his body and so slew him on the field, and then he de-
manded if he had done his devoir or not; and they answered that
he had valiantly achieved his battle. Then Jaques de Grys was
delivered to the hangman of Paris, and he drew him to the gibbet
of Montfaucon and there hanged him up. Then John of Carougne
came before the king and kneeled down and the king made him to
stand up before him and the same day the king caused to be deliv-
ered to him a thousand francs, and retained him to be one of his
chamber with a pension of two hundred pounds by the year, during
the term of his life; then he thanked the king and the lords and
went to his wife and kissed her and then they went together to the
church of Our Lady of Paris, and made their offering and then
returned to their lodgings.

When John of Carougne plunged his sword into the
body of Jaques de Grys he was defending his property and
not propriety, which is a much later conception; he was
thinking of a real thing, to save his life and kill his enemy,
and not of an abstract thing, such as saving his own face

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and ruining his enemy's reputation. The Middle Ages
knew that there were some women who seduced men be-
cause they were made that way, and since John of Ca-
rougne would make no compromise, the parliament let him
fight it out as best he might. Nor was John of Carougne
needlessly cruel or bloodthirsty. It is much less cruel, in
a way, to kill a man under the blue sky and in public than
it is to shut him up in a room with poisonous gases or tor-
ture him in the electric chair.

From Alengon Bernard went south to Le Mans over
the last trail that his young master Henry II ever fol-
lowed, and thence onward over the trail of Henry's greedy
and poetic son Richard, via Saumur and Poitiers and
thence further and further into the south and into the
spring over trails worn deep by the feet of many poets,
until one morning he found himself on a naked white road.
Above him was a sky of cobalt blue. At his left was a
yellow cottage ; and before him, rising tier upon tier above
the city walls, were the spires of Toulouse. Of the friends
he met there and the things they did, you shall hear later if
you care to read.

[993

Chapter V
The Trail of a Petulant Prince

LE MANS TO POITIERS

Chapter V

THE king fought with his sons. The whelps ate their sire.
There were gatherings of the barons and knights, of the
kings and bishops ; there were leagues against the kings ; the
bishops fought each other; and the barons swayed from
side to side as the gold jingled. Over the fair face of
France was danced a saraband; the dancers slipped across
the English Channel; they danced through the lush green
fields of Normandy; they rushed through Touraine, Li-
mousine, and Aquitaine. They combined with each other;
they broke; they shouted. The age of chivalry was in its
flower. It was a "great sight to see the moats filled with
the bodies of the dead, to see a great charger limping
through the forest with a lance hanging in his side." There
were blood and blows, curses and obscenity. And during
the dance the continental empire of England weakened and
crashed.

There were five principals in this dance, of which the
mazes are so intricate that only the professional historian
can disentangle them or the professional psychologist make
clear the obscure motives which were, no doubt, as little
understood in those days as they are now. Around Poitiers,

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Tours, Le Mans, Perigueux, over as much space as the flat
thumb of a man will cover on a small map in France, the
figures were thickest and the dancing was most intense.
Rushing through this country, with occasional vivid dashes
to Normandy or London on the north, to Paris in the west,
or to Toulouse in the south were four young men, all sons
of King Henry II of England and his wife, Eleanor of
Aquitaine. Richard of the Lion Heart was stupid in poli-
tics but shrewd, cruel, and indomitable in warfare. He was
a maker of poems and was called, by courtesy, a trouba-
dour. Henry, the young king, had been crowned while his
father was still alive to insure succession and to keep the
scepter from the hands of his mother's darling, Richard.
The third of these charming gentlemen was John Lackland,
still a shadowy figure. He pirouetted, frequently alone, in
the marches of Brittany and stepped furtively through the
massed warriors to the court at Paris. The fourth of these
was Count Geoffrey, who supported during these years the
maneuvers of young King Henry. The princes and their
followers formed, in the central part of France, one figure
in the dance. "It is the custom in my family/' said Rich-
ard cynically, "for the sons to make war on their father."
Geoffrey announced, "We hate our father only slightly
more than we hate each other."

The next dancer is the fat king himself, Henry II of
England. He has become so fat that he is grotesque; yet
despite this obesity he is never quiet, he never sits down,
he is always a-horse. "Where will we find a bed large
enough for this creature?" cried the French when he vis-
ited Paris. He is a Falstaffian king, a very mountain of

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flesh. But underneath this is a shrewd hard mind, the
mind of the Middle Ages, eclipsed now by the more mod-
ern intelligence of Philip of France. His secretary said
that he was more violent than a lion ; when he became angry
his blue eyes filled with blood, his face became purple, and
his voice trembled with emotion. In an access of fury
he bit one of his pages in the shoulder. Humet, his favor-
ite, once contradicted him. The king rushed at the courtier,
who fled down the stairs. The king tore up a plank from
the floor and threw it after the knight. "Never," said a
cardinal after a long conversation with the king, "have I
seen a man lie so hardily." Grotesque Henry II, whose
wife and sons were in league against him and against each
other, rushed through Normandy and Aquitaine, followed
by a rout of histriones and parasites, pimps and prostitutes,
men-at-arms, churchmen, and the bully boys of the world.
He was trying to hold his vast kingdoms together against
the attacks of his sons, of his wife, of Philip of France,
of the barons of England and elsewhere, and of the church
at Rome and Avignon, all of whom wanted it for them-
selves. He had held it together for twenty years, but now
the whelps were gouging at his entrails and the king of
France was beating him at every move.

The third, dancing solo, between Le Mans, Saumur,
Chinon, and Poitiers, is a danseuse^ a bitter old hag of a
woman, Eleanor, by the grace of God, queen of England.
She is listed among the troubadours ; she was granddaughter
of one of the earliest and mother of one of the worst. She
made a cuckold of her first husband, the king of France;
then she cast him aside as too weak and chose as her master

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the strongest man she could find, Henry, the young duke
of Anjou. She brought wealth and power, men, ships, and
lands, for his shrewd intelligence to use; but even when
supported by all these, he could not break her. All he
could do was to hold her in leash as he had held his tur-
bulent barons in leash for a span of years. For this she
never forgave him, and her hatred followed him to his
grave. She was too weak herself to master her lord, so she
bred him a race of sons and taught them the custom of
their family. She is now sixty years old and a very old
woman indeed. Eleanor the hag danced, and ever as she
danced she whetted the appetite of her darling son Rich-
ard for the blood of his father. It was grotesque.

The king and his wife and their sons were moderns,
people of their own age. The fourth dancer was ' 'ad-
vanced." He was Philip the crafty, Philip Augustus of
France, the son of Eleanor's first husband. He was a
quiet man but shrewd. He preferred directing battles to
fighting them. When he was a boy on a hunting party he
was separated one day from his companions. He wan-
dered alone in the forest for many hours and was found
overcome by terror. His life was despaired of. Louis
VII, his father and Eleanor's first husband, made a per-
sonal pilgrimage to Canterbury to pray for him. St.
Thomas a Becket, the patron of Canterbury, had once led
a splendid embassy to Paris to treat with King Louis ; the
king now paid his respects to the dead saint. King Henry
II rode all night from London to meet Louis at Dover and
later entertained him at London and Winchester, where
Eleanor was kept safely locked in her tower. As part of

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the celebration, bushels of silver pieces were heaped on the
floor, and the knights were told to take as many as they
pleased. Philip recovered. He played the princes against
the king, the church against them all. He organized a pop-
ular secret society. The members had to vow to protect the
country against foreigners and to preserve the peace. The
costume was a linen hood. In 1183 the organization con-
tained seven thousand tramps and cutthroats and fifteen
hundred prostitutes. "They burned monasteries and
churches and drove along before them the priests and the
nuns. . . ." Their concubines, according to another chron-
icle, made chemises of altar-cloths. They wanted to pro-
tect France against foreigners ; they wanted to preserve the
peace, and they were 100 per cent pure. Mass was chanted
for Philip at all hours of the day and night. Whoever was
the enemy of Henry of England was the friend of Philip
of France.

Finally, Bertrand de Bom, the last of the principals
in this dance, is a slighter figure and less important. If
you will go to hell with Dante you will see him carrying his
head in his arms suffering eternal punishment for having
stirred up strife between Henry and his sons, as though any-
body could stir up strife between those elemental forces
created to make war on each other. Sitting sideways on his
horse, with a cynical smile on his face, he has gone to the
Christmas court at Le Mans where the dancers are massed
for a moment before entering in solemn procession the
great cathedral on the hill where they will celebrate God's
birthday. There is a spark and a flame. Richard spurts
south to Saumur and on to Poitiers, where he prepares

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for a siege. Bertrand de Born pauses to sing a song to
the Princess Matilda. There is another flash. Bertrand
spurs his horse to the southwest, to his great castle at Haute-
fort near Perigueux. As he goes he sings war-songs and
inflames the hatred of the barons against Richard. From
Hautefort he makes the grand circle and sings at every
castle, Ventadour, Cambron, Segur, Turenne, Montfort,
Gordon, Puyguilhem, Clarensac, Astier, Angouleme, Ber-
nay, Givaudon, Armagnac, Tartas, and hundreds of others
in the rough triangle Perigueux, Bordeaux, Toulouse.

The Christmas court began only one of the many move-
ments of the maze and that one not the most important.
You will see the young king die a traitor, and the old king,
broken at last by his wife and her sons, turn his face to
the wall with the words, "He too has deserted me? Let
me die."

The king is holding court at Le Mans. The birthday of
God is being made the occasion of subtle maneuvering for
position. He who can dance longest and quickest will secure
for his pains the sovereignty of western Europe. There
was solemn music in the cathedral which is now all that
remains of the feudal pride of Le Mans. On the summit
of an eminence it looks down on the one side over the Sarthe
and the green valleys and the peasant women washing their
clothes in the river; and on the other side over the modern
city that has grown up at its feet. Opposite the cathedral
was once the chateau where Henry II was born, and down
the street was a house which tradition assigns to Queen

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Berengaria, the wife of Henry's rebellious son, Richard the
Lion-Heart. But to reconstruct these things one must
cut away ruthlessly the pleasant eighteenth-century houses
that cluster around the cathedral and with them the sev-
enteenth, sixteenth, fifteenth, fourteenth, and thirteenth
century foundations upon which the modern houses were
built. One must cut away the transept of the church,
which is thirteenth-century, and leave only the Roman-
esque nave, which is a great church in itself but was in
Henry's time already old-fashioned, out-dated, and in
need of renovation. The old nave was left standing but
was called the transept. The new Gothic nave was built
on to it at right angles. The old nave, now the transept,
is good enough for God, who is very old himself; the new
nave is for the world.

Into the church streamed a motley company of dancers.
The old king waddled on legs bowed with too much riding ;
the young king, Henry, the flower of chivalry, walked
proudly close to his father. There followed Richard,
suspicious of this new amiability of his father's, fearing
and expecting some move to be made against his lordship
over Aquitaine, acquired from his mother, the old queen.
Perhaps Berengaria was there, a saintly maiden and a
figure peculiarly improper in this gallery of rogues. There
too was Bertrand de Born, the troubadour, the journalist,
the trouble-maker. He was a shrewd observer of affairs and
was amusing himself this season with the Princess Matilda,
sister to these violent brethren, who was completing her
education at the court of her father.

Following these come others: nobles, barons, clerks,

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

poets; the rout of prostitutes that always darted like flies
about the courts of Henry and his sons, now crowding into
the church to atone by a moment of prayer for a year of
sin. The church is too small. They need a larger church,
a modern church. The crowd is thick on the steps; it spreads
out into the square. An old woman faints; a cavalier
slips up behind a young wife and whispers in her ear.
She pretends not to hear him. Her lips move in prayer
or in assignation. The sanctus bell rings and announces to
the mob that can neither hear nor see the service that the
host is being elevated. Two monks look slyly at the
choir-boy. There is an angry shout when several knights
who have stepped on each other's toes swear by God's
bonnet that the insult shall be wiped out in blood. Pushing
and worming through the crowd are begging friars, im-
ploring alms for the love of God, and loosening, when they
can, jeweled bits from the brocaded dresses of the knights
and ladies. Henry is restless. The stench of humanity,
unbathed for generations, mingles with incense and floats
out of the door of the cathedral. There is solemn chanting.
Emasculate clerks with the torsos of full-grown men and
the voices of women sing the soprano. Henry is restless.
There are councils to be arranged, barons to be persuaded,
work to be done. . . .The priest chants Nunc Dimittis
"Now let thy servant depart in peace." Then the bene-
diction . . . "In the Name of the Father, the Son . . ."
Henry and his party leave, cross the square to the hall of
the chateau.

In order to understand the kind of square they crossed,
it is necessary to reconstruct to a certain extent the attitude

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of the Middle Ages toward streets and roads. We of the
present time like to look back on the medieval city as a
small, clean, compact place. Then there were no elevated
trains to violate the afternoon; nor did soot from factories
cover your face with a veil when you left the house. One
thinks of neat, clean little Rothenburg, built in the six-
teenth century, and of the polished cobblestones of Mon-
aco on the rock opposite Monte Carlo, and one thinks
wrong. For Rothenburg and Monaco are medieval only
in architecture and not very medieval even in that. The
life of these cities is dominated and directed by the heresies
of the twentieth century, that "cleanliness is next to god-
liness/' and the germ theory. To see the medieval street
in its glory, one should walk fifty miles into the hills behind
Monaco, or into some of the villages near Wiirzburg, Ger-
many, or into the walled cities of China. Here the Middle
Ages still live, worldly, pious, and unashamed. The
streets, like the square which the royal party crossed to
return to the chateau, bear upon their bosoms the filth of
the ages. If one could have dug down deeply enough
through the mud and slime, one would have found cobble-
stones scattered here and there, the refuse from the large
blocks that went into building the houses. The square
was simply the place where nothing had been built. It
was every man's club. It was the place where the common
people lived. The house was the place where they slept.
The square which the royal party crossed was not a bright
clean little square between a picture chateau and a picture
cathedral. It was a medieval square, which is to say, a
dirty square.

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

In the hall of the chateau, a large oblong room, raftered,
with a balcony at one end and windows cut in the thick
walls forming large alcoves, dinner was served; but since
meats of many kinds were the only dishes, Bernard and his
friends called it more properly sitting at meat. Long heavy
tables had been pushed into the center of the room, which
was now filled to overflowing with all manner and ranks
of hungry creatures, flea-bitten dogs, flea-bitten nobles
snarling for charters and grants, unwashed servants, hang-
ers-on, suitors, effeminate young men who hoped to become
favorites of the king and his sons, and other effeminate
young men who were favorites of the king and his sons;
people from all conceivable ranks of society, sitting at
meat with the fat king of the ingrowing toe-nail. The at-
mosphere was uproarious. Everybody was shouting and
wrangling in a dozen different dialects, in all the dialects
of western Europe except English, the language of a con-
quered race which none of its kings of that century could
speak. Ragout was served in large bowls which were
placed at intervals along the table. Everybody dipped in
with his ladle. Everybody spilled it over everybody's
clothes, over the clothes of everybody's neighbor, and spat
upon the floor for the hungry dogs pieces of bone and gris-
tle. The dish was highly spiced. Meat, in the days be-
fore the arts of refrigeration had been developed to their
present subtlety, wanted spices to make it palatable. The
Crusades which were then in progress had brought into
France in a single year more spices than France had im-
ported during the five hundred years preceding. Although
the king of England, fabulously wealthy, could no doubt

THE TRAIL OF A PETULANT PRINCE

have squandered his wealth in spices when an ounce cost
a duke's ransom, now that spices were cheap, his cooks
spiced it with spendthrift hands. The roast meats, smoky
and burned, were served on the spit. The knights whipped
out their knives and began carving. They tore the meat
off with their fingers and stuffed it into their faces.

At the upper end of the room on a slight dais was the
king's table. He stood Henry seldom sat, even at meat
surrounded by his counselors and body-guard. One carved
for him, another tasted for him, and then he ate. While he
ate, he argued fundamentalism with one of his nobles, a
disciple of Abelard's. The fire of fundamentalism, fanned
by the blood and fat of an occasional eager revolutionary
who overstepped the limits of propriety, was burning more
brightly in those days than it is now. In the beginning of
the century, Abelard, a young exquisite of good family,
attempted to rationalize religion. He spoke of the
mysteries of God in terms that the lords and ladies could
understand. He pointed out that a sin committed in igno-
rance is not a sin, that the soldiers who, ignorant of Christ's
nature, nailed him to the cross were not sinning. As
modern liberalists, working with a cruder logic, attempted
to abolish hell, so Abelard, gallant, sophisticated, and
worldly, attempted to abolish sin. Christ's act of redemp-
tion was an act of pure love. Thus God is a kindly gentle-
man, a fastidious judge, and his passion is love. Henry,
with his fat belly, his ingrowing toe-nail, and his gross man-
ners, liked to argue these subtleties with his courtiers and his
clerks. He and his friends built up the civilization, de-
bated the doctrines, and evolved the principles which en-

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

velop us In the twentieth century. The difference is not a
difference of fundamental vision ; it is a difference of tech-
nique.

After meat the tables were cleared and the hall was
transformed into a council-room. The king and his body-
guard, still watchful for attempts at murder, stood on the
dais and argued. Young Henry, about to receive the hom-
age of his barons, stood a little at one side talking to the
ambassador of his good friend the king of France. On
the other side was Richard, cordially hating the world.
Beside him was Matilda, his mother's representative, Ber-
trand de Born, and Marcabrun the troubadour making epi-
grams. "I have never loved," said Marcabrun, "and I
never shall." "Love is a worse curse than war, epidemic,
or famine." "He who makes a bargain with love," he
continued, "makes a bargain with the devil." "Love stings
no more than a mosquito, but the cure is much more dif-
ficult." Other things he said too, things not to be trans-
lated, for the mind of the Middle Ages was of a certain
frankness which has been lost to the mind of the twentieth
century.

A herald announced that young King Henry would re-
ceive the oath of fealty from his barons. The first to be
called was his brother Richard, lord of Aquitaine. There
was a moment of suspense. The break that was coming
had been anticipated by all the world. Some hoped that
young Henry would show a politic disposition and not
demand the oath from his brother. Others like Bertrand
de Born who were made for trouble smiled as Richard
clapped Marcabrun on the back and whispered in his ear.

THE TRAIL OF A PETULANT PRINCE

THe herald called again, and still Richard paid no at-
tention. Henry II, a man of scant ceremony even in
those times, called to him that young Henry was ready to
accept the oath of allegiance. What Richard replied is not
known. His argument, however, was that he held Aqui-
taine by direct gift from his mother. It had come to her
from William IX of Aquitaine with the stipulation that it
was to remain always in her gift. Henry II had served
there merely as regent. Richard was now an independent
duke, and by God's body he would swear allegiance for it
to no b English king. Bertrand de Born was bored
by the crudities of this court. The Princess Matilda was
solicitous. "There is neither true laughter nor gaiety at
this court," said Bertrand, "and a court without these is
merely a park for barons. Boredom and stupidity would
have murdered me without doubt," he continued, "had not
the sweet compassion, the complaisance, and the conversa-
tion of your Highness saved my life."

Richard left the hall and went to the cathedral, there
for a moment he was safe from the attacks of his brother's
friends and refused to see anybody. Several clerics tried
to pacify him, and others tried to pacify young Henry.
"Forgive him his oath," they urged the young king; "to-
day his allegiance is merely a form. He might have taken
the oath with the intention of breaking it. Overlook the
fault."

Young Henry, however, said: "If I forgive him the
oath now, I leave him free to offer it to Philip of France.
Philip, to be sure, is at present my good friend; but he is
equally eager to be the good friend of Richard. Nothing

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

would delight France more than to get control of Aquitaine.
Moreover, if I forgive him now, the shrewd fox my father
will make up to him. I will remain forever a king without
land/ 5 Henry ordered the cathedral surrounded and com-
manded his men to arrest Richard when he tried to leave.
To Richard the peacemakers said: 'What after all is
it that the young king demands? It is merely an oath of
fealty. The young king is powerless and holds his title
in name only. The lord of Aquitaine is rich in money and
men; he is still free to do as he pleases/' Richard finally
consented and sent word that he would take the oath
his father and brother saw fit to force upon him. Henry
refused to accept an oath under these conditions, and Rich-
ard stormed out of the vestiary, broke through the circle
of men-at-arms set to guard him, leaped on his horse, and,
breathing threats and contumely on his brother and father,
fled southward to Saumur.

3

If you wish to follow his route to-day, you must leave
Le Mans by the road that runs along the railroad-track
toward Parigne. Where the road turns toward the left,
you continue straight ahead until the place where the road
branches in three directions. The road at the left is the
short cut to La Fleche, and the road at the right is a more
or less direct road to Tours. The dim bicycle-path between
them, however, which leads through the forests of Les
Mortes CEuvres and Les Guegilets to reach ultimately the
Chateau I'Hermitage and the main road, is the one followed
by Richard the Lion-Heart when he fled from the court

[n6]

THE TRAIL OF A PETULANT PRINCE

of his father and brother that Christmas day. At the Cha-
teau PHermitage he crossed the main road and passed the
modern village of Requeil, where, if you can find the
hostess of the tavern, she may give you a bottle of her own
special vin rouge to drink with your bread and cheese, a
vin rouge which will put wings beneath your feet as you
proceed south by west through green prairies and forests to
La Fleche and an afternoon's walk further to Bauge.

Now there are two Bauges, and let you not be mistaken
by them. One is the modern city, a kind of Manchester,
bustling and busy, gossipy and well fed. The other is
Le Viel Bauge. It too is on the Loire, hardly a village
and hardly worth the attention of the modern tourist ex-
cept for its creeping streets and its general air of somno-
lence. A few kilometers further is the Chateau de Bois
Bure. There is a sleepiness about these cities, disturbed
sometimes when a wealthy American buys them up and
renovates the castle or when a party of tourists, on ex-
cursion from Tours, comes clacking up the quiet hills. Then
for a moment there is tumult in the hills again and the
clicking of cameras. But for the most part, as my hostess
said, "On dort Men id!" And indeed, if one is trying to
follow the turbulent dance danced by those lords a thousand
years ago, one needs to sleep well. . . .

From Le Viel Bauge Richard the Lion-Heart passed
southward another eight leagues to Saumur through the
country of smiles and laziness. Countless favorites of
countless French kings took this country as theirs by right
of nature and covered it thick with chateaux of a compar-
atively modern period. In the middle of August here the

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

fields are as lush and green as in the beginning of May, a
fact which makes the country pleasant to look at; but if
one is fleeing for one's life through the by-paths of the low-
lands, the country is heartbreaking.

The chateau of Saumur, built by Henry II to be a
stronghold for his barons, rises from the plain a stark mon-
ument. When Richard reached there, it was still com-
paratively new and the latest thing in military architec-
ture. Although it has been restored in recent years, its
plan remains much as it was when Richard drove his horse
up the high hill to the great south entrance now closed.
Some fifty years after the conclusion of the saraband in
which Richard participated, there was a dinner in Saumur
which bears description.

It was the year 1242 when Louis of France held

a full court there, and I was there and can testify that it was the
best ordered court that ever I saw. For, at the king's table, ate after
him, the Count of Poitiers, whom he had newly made knight at the
Feast of St. John ; and after the Count of Poitiers ate the Count of
Dreux . . . and before the king's table, opposite the Count of
Dreux, ate my lord the king of Navarre, in tunic and mantle of
samite, well bedight with a belt and clasp, and a cap of gold ; and
I carved before him.

Before the king, the Count of Artois, his brother, served the
meat, and before the king the good Count John of Soissons carved
with the knife. In order to guard the king's table, there were my
lord Imbert of Beaujeu . . . and my lord Enguerra of Coucy, and
my lord Archambaud of Bourbon. Behind these barons stood some
thirty of their knights, in tunics of silken cloth to keep guard over
them; and behind these knights there was a great quantity of
sergeants bearing on their clothing the arms of the Count of Poitiers

THE TRAIL OF A PETULANT PRINCE

embroidered in taffeta. The king was clothed in a tunic of blue
satin, and surcoat and mantle of vermeil samite lined with ermine,
and he had a cotton cap on his head which suited him very badly,
because he was at that time a young man.

The king held his banquets in the great halls of Saumur which
had been built, so it was said, by the great king Henry of England
in order that he might hold his great banquets therein; and this
hall is built after the fashion of the cloisters of the white monks
of the Cistercian order. But I think there is none other hall so
large and by a great deal. And I will tell you why I think so
it is because by the wall of the cloister where the king ate, sur-
rounded by his knights and sergeants who occupied a great space,
there was also room for a great table where ate twenty bishops and
archbishops. The Queen Blanche, the king's mother, ate near their
table at the head of the cloister at the other side from the king.

And to serve the queen there was the Count of Bologne who after-
wards became the king of Portugal, and the good Count Hugh of
St. Paul, and a German the age of eighteen years, who was said
to be the son of St. Elizabeth of Thuringia, for which cause it is
told that the Queen Blanche kissed him on the forehead, as an act
of devotion because she thought that his mother must ofttimes have
kissed him there. . . .

At the end of the cloister on the other side, were the kitchens
and cellars, the pantries and the butteries; from this end were
served to the king and to the queen meats and wine and bread. And
in the wings and in the central court ate the knights in such num-
bers that I knew not how to count them. And many said they
had never at any feast seen together so many surcoats and other
garments, of cloth of gold and of silk; and it was said also that
no less than three thousand knights were there present.

When Richard the Lion-Heart reached Saumur he found
it held by a garrison of barons which his father had left
there in readiness for activities against his restless subjects.

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Richard prepared the castle for siege, and sent out em-
bassies to the comparatively small number of lords in that
part of the country on whose loyalty he could count. Dur-
ing his lifetime Richard had comparatively few friends.
His popularity is largely posthumous. Although the Aqui-
tanian lords feared Henry II, they both hated and feared
Henry's son Richard. Henry was stern but just and had
the gift of winning confidence. Richard was stem, suspi-
cious, and arrogant. Although his virtues show with com-
parative brilliance against the vices of his brother John, his
vices are black against the brilliance of his father's genius.

There are two roads which Richard may have followed
on his angry ride from Saumur to Poitiers. One is now
merely a little country road, well made as all French roads
are, but obscure and unimportant. That it was once a
thoroughfare is indicated by two facts. It runs through
a country dotted by old castles, broken-down monasteries
now used as farm-houses and barns, and churches which
were built in another era. It follows a streamlet called La
Dive out of Saumur, twists from one side to the other,
gets lost in marshland, turns its back on the river, then,
suddenly changing its mind, runs suddenly into it again
near Moncontour, which contains an old donjon and keep.
Since medieval roads cost nothing at all to build, and the
trail which was used least was frequently less worn than
the highroads, the traveler may have turned off, if he fol-
lowed this trail, at a dozen or so chateaux to sow discontent
against his father, to urge the barons to remain loyal to
him, and to build fences.

If Richard went directly southwest on this trail or as

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directly as the trail would permit, he passed within a league
or two of Thouars, which has preserved its walls and a gate
or two. The viscount of Thouars was just then rising to
political power. A few years later he was to play an im-
portant though not a particularly savory part in the fall
of the English continental power. Despite this viscount
Thouars remained English for another two hundred years.
When all of Aquitaine, Poitiers the proud, Angoumois and
Saintonge, had driven out the English and had capitulated
on terms which were very satisfactory to the lords of these
cities, all the loyal English nobles left in the country
gathered at Thouars, where they stood a bitter siege. Du
Guesclin, the French general, agreed to an armistice. "If
help does not reach us before November," said the English,
"we will capitulate." The old king Edward III and the
Black Prince set out from Southampton in the teeth of the
autumn gales. For weeks they struggled against the wind,
and finally, on November i, the day of capitulation, realiz-
ing that the English power in France had finally been
broken, they put back to England.

4

Beyond Moncontour the trail has been made into a
highroad and joins at Mirebeau the national route which
is the other trail Richard may have followed between Sau-
mur and Poitiers. This national route runs east from Sau-
mur, up the Loire, under the hills dotted with caves where
the good red wine of the district is being ripened to a lus-
cious sweetness and smoothness. At Montsorbeau the road
turns south to the famous abbey of Fontevrault.

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

The curious dichotomy in the religious thought of all
times shown by the existence of a religious consciousness
which expresses itself both by elaborate ritual, magnificent
pomp, and display, and also by an insistence on a complete
annihilation of physical demonstration and a denial of rit-
ual and pomp, seems to have been more marked in the
twelfth century than it is to-day only because the twelfth
century failed to reach perfection and balance eight hun-
dred years earlier than we. These eight hundred years are
an imperfect glass through which we see only the extremes
of the Middle Ages. We miss the infinitely small varia-
tions and gradations of thought. God is, after all, both
body and spirit, and both those who exalt God's body and
those who praise his soul may find justification. Thus, in
the century of the troubadours, bishops attired in cloth of
gold studded with precious jewels carved their meat on sil-
ver platters and listened to and loved monks whose bodies
were emaciated by fasting and religious passion. And
the monks loved and listened to the bishops and the
popes.

Robert d'Arbrissel, a Breton, was one of these fanatics.
He understood the soul of God, and he pitied the bodies
of men and women. After mastering the art of debate, he
spent his youth exercising his talents against the lechery
and simony of the prelates his masters. Failing to find
martyrdom in this, he retired from the world. He went
into the forest, built himself a hut of leaves, and, trusting
to the antiseptic love of God, went unbathed for two
years. In a land of superb wines he drank only water, and
when his clothes wore out he covered his nakedness and

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THE TRAIL OF A PETULANT PRINCE

what was left of his emaciated body with a sack. The
keenness of his intellect, his remarkable gift of words, his
acts of faith, as well as the undoubted mercy of God in
protecting and preserving him in his asceticism, attracted
to his retreat a crowd of followers and the notice of Pope
Urban II, who commanded him to evangelize the surround-
ing country.

Imagine him then, Robert the Breton, with matted
beard and sunken eyes, with skinny arms protruding from
a coat of sacking, paddling on bare feet and bare legs
through the mud and slime of the medieval villages of
the district, preaching hell-fire and damnation on the church
steps, exhorting sinners to repentance and performing mir-
acles. His labors were rewarded. He was followed by a
mob of old and young, of men and women. Married wo-
men left their homes and good husbands to follow him;
prostitutes deserted their ancient profession; mothers left
their children. Rich and poor, saints and sinners, left their
accustomed tasks to hang on his words and join in the
halleluiah chorus. But there were, as usual, gossips. Hus-
bands raised some protests when their young wives left
comfortable homes to follow this wild man through the
fields of Aquitaine. Husbands in those days knew what
they knew about wives, and when the young gallants of
the city whom husbands had no reason to trust were also
fired by this religious zeal and joined the mad rout, the
husbands of an age where public morals were controlled
neither by police-court regulations nor societies for the im-
provement of public manners knew what they thought and
said what they knew.

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Robert himself was sensitive on the subject of their
complaints. He therefore chose a "wild and barbarous
desert inhabited only by wild beasts and robbers," half-
way between the important castles of Saumur and Chinon,
and there at Fontevrault established his order. In one
place he built huts of leaves for the women, and some dis-
tance away not more than a four or five minute journey
he built other huts of leaves for the men. The men were
set to work in the fields to support the women, who spent
their time keeping house and singing hymns. Even this ar-
rangement had its drawbacks, and, as the settlement in-
creased, Robert found himself forced to build a stone abbey
for the women and another for the men and to separate
these abbeys by a thick high wall. But another difficulty
arose. For some reason reformed prostitutes began join-
ing the order in large numbers. The "respectable women
of the order" protested, and Robert had to build still an-
other abbey not far away where the magdalens found asy-
lum. The popularity of this abbey increased mightily
during the eleventh century. The Angevin dukes and the
Angevin kings treated it with particular charity, and when
Richard passed it on his trip southward it was an institu-
tion of great fame. Later he was to return to it, and fat
old Henry was to be carried in feet foremost; and bitter old
Eleanor but that is another story.

5

There is a short cut between Fontevrault and Chinon
and a good old road from Chinon to Tours, but Richard
probably pressed southward to the city of Mirebeau where,
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THE TRAIL OF A PETULANT PRINCE

twenty years later, his mother and his friends were to enact
one episode in a great drama. In that strange family,
where all well bred sons spent the greater part of their
lives striking at their parents, it happened that Eleanor,
whose bitter spirit would not face death, found herself one
fine day at Mirebeau besieged by her grandson, the young
Prince Arthur of Brittany, a stripling of sixteen, whose
ambition to be sole lord of western France was supported
by King Philip and opposed by the old queen and her son,
the reigning King John. Young Arthur's army, which
contained a goodly number of rebel knights, had already
penetrated the outer walls of the city when her messengers
reached John at Le Mans. John, by forced marches (he
traveled via Saumur and Fontevrault), covered the forty
leagues between Le Mans and Mirebeau in three days,
and succeeded not only in saving his city and his mother,
but also in capturing many knights and the young Prince
Arthur himself. Those knights who could pay ransom and
take the oath of fealty, which to be sure was little more
than a form, were released. Others were released after
having their arms and legs chopped off; others were killed
outright ; and still others a comparatively small number
were sent to England.

John had promised to save Arthur's life, and what ac-
tually did happen to that impudent young prince is still
a matter for conjecture. Scholars are agreed on only one
point: he never got out of John's hands. Some say that
his eyes were put out and that he finally lost his life in
trying to escape. Others pretend that John murdered
him with his own hands and threw the body into the Seine.

[1253

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

It is rather difficult to be fair both to Prince Arthur and
to King John with the words of Shakspere and the
pathetic and unhistorical figure of the young boy before
us. Yet when one has admitted that John was no more
cruel than his predecessors and contemporaries, one does
not by that declare that John could have learned from
them to look on death with the repugnance of a well bred
English vicar or that his or their manners were those of the
English gentleman of good family. Arthur was a trouble-
maker and must be put out of the way. The fact that he
was only sixteen years old does not count in his favor.
Lads of sixteen in those days were accounted men and
were thought to be responsible for their acts. The Aqui-
tanian revolt was broken, and the great outcry that was
raised by the beaten barons has been the cause for the
shedding of many tears over the fate of the unfortunate
Arthur. Although to this day nobody knows exactly what
happened to the young prince, John is supposed to have
perpetrated terrible atrocities. The putting out of eyes
and the cutting off of legs and arms were among the amen-
ities of chivalrous warfare. The Norman barons, John's
supporters, were disappointed that their king should by
this stroke of luck have acquired sudden power. With
Arthur out of the way, the king's power was no longer
dependent on the affability of his barons. Finally, politi-
cal murder was not a new device then, nor is it entirely
unknown to-day. During the last decade in France two
important parties have carried out successful assassina-
tions, and though both assassins were tried before legal
courts, neither was convicted.

THE TRAIL OF A PETULANT PRINCE

It must have been a great sight to see John's men come
tiding down from Le Mans to Mirebeau, forty leagues in
three days. There must have been a pretty scrap when
Arthur's men found themselves hemmed in between the
outer and the inner walls of the city, caught like rats and
cut down like wheat. There must have been screams and
curses and brave words, Many a young boy there fought
his first battle, and many an old warrior his last. Eleanor
from her tower, part of which is still standing, grinned
down on the battle, bitter old Eleanor, doddering now
through the last steps of her long and tiresome dance.
She had known many a young man in her time; she had
seen many a young man killed. In her girlhood she had
been called queen of the troubadours; in her womanhood
she was queen of France; and now, in her haghood, she
signed herself, Eleanor, by the grace of God, queen of Eng-
land. Poor Eleanor.

All of these things were to happen in twenty years after
Richard the Lion-Heart clattered into MIrebeau vowing,
like a good son, curses and damnation on his father and
worse than that on his brother Henry who was trying to
do him out of a duchy. From Mirebeau it is but a step to
the south to Poitiers the proud, famous for its vipers and
devils, its beautiful women, its good church or two, and its
hospitality to saints and troubadours.

Chapter VI

The Trail of a furious Viscount I
POITIERS TO PERIGUEUX

Pe'rigueux

Chapter VI

WHEN the afternoon sun strikes the west fagade of the
cathedral at Le Mans, it sends through the window a
brilliant ray which collects like liquid light directly in front
of the altar. The dust-motes rise in it and flow upward and
outward through the window. A minor and very senile
cleric loiters about the tomb of St. Julian; an old woman
reminds you that life is bitter; she hints that the chastely
erotic aspirations of her youth were illusory and urges you
to buy a candle in honor of the patron saint both of Le
Mans and her humble self St. Julian, particularly be-
loved by Henry II of England. Unfortunately I cannot
assure you that the ray of light fell in exactly the same way
on that Christmas afternoon when Henry and his whelps
quarreled after parading in pomp through the crowded
church ; nor can I assure you that an old woman bedeviled
some casual Anglo-Saxon visitor who fled from the turmoil
of the great hall for a moment of peace. These things are
dark, and no man may say for certain whether they did or
did not happen. Whatever the facts may be because the
sun strikes the church to-day in much the same way it
struck it in 1 183, and because old women are pure because

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

life is hard, I believe the facts are much as I have sug-
gested this is certain, that when Richard the Lion-Heart,
hating his father and brother, broke through a circle of
men-at-arms and fled from this same church southward to
Poitiers as you have heard, he left in the great hall three
and perhaps four of the dancers who participated in the
tumultuous and in many respects tragic political saraband
of the twelfth century. He left his fat father, King Henry
II of England, the man who had never been defeated, fret-
ting and fuming at the impudence of the young pup. He
left his brother, handsome young Henry, who recently and
arrogantly had been crowned king of England in order
that Richard by treason and trickery might not get pos-
session of the crown as by treason and trickery he ulti-
mately did get it; he left, finally, cynical Bertrand, vis-
count de Born, master of the castle of Hautefort, a young
man well brought up who was at the same time aristocrat
and journalist, patriot and traitor, sycophant and trouble-
maker, man of affairs and time-server.

These three may have taken counsel in one of the re-
cesses of the hall, that is to say in one of the embrasures
formed by cutting the windows in the walls of the build-
ing. These walls were so thick that when a window was
cut it was necessary to make a small alcove in the room, an
alcove large enough to be made into a retiring-room which
could be shut off from the rest of the hall. These win-
dows, the larger ones of the room, always faced the court
of the chateau and looked out upon the manifold activities
of the community, the loitering servants idling about their
work, a groom exercising a horse or a page polishing the

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

armor or sharpening the sword of his master, an Infinite
number of dogs fighting and snarling over bits of refuse
or snapping at the meat being carried from storehouse to
kitchen. Through the windows and into the room came
the noise of activity and the hum of talk, the indescribable
sound of the busy business of keeping one's self human
and amused, the sound of that curious activity character-
istic of all times and places, the activity of being modern
and up-to-date.

Each of these three, the old king, the young king, and
the Viscount Bertrand, were moderns. The old king was
a modern, and for those who care more for events than for
character, he may have been the most modern of the three.
One may say what one likes about the theory of sexual
morality which led or rather followed this man into various
temptations to each of which he seems to have suc-
cumbed not in turn, but simultaneously, he is said to
have violated several of his daughters-in-law and to have
planned to marry one of them himself one may point
out that his religious convictions were peculiar and that
his conversation was not suitable to the modern drawing-
room either in tone or intention; and yet the fact remains
that this mountain of flesh and iniquity did understand
the theory of the modern state better than any of his con-
temporaries, and that out of the anarchy which was Eng-
land when he landed there emerged the English nation.
Philip the comely of France beat old Henry in the end,
and beat him by carrying old Henry's methods a step fur-
ther; but Philip, the son of Henry's old rival in love and
war, represented the new generation that had learned a

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

thing or two from the old. The old king refused to take
sides in this quarrel with his sons. Young Henry, his fa-
vorite, had given him trouble enough ; let the youngster see
what he could do. If the young man were chastened in
the struggle which was to ensue, it would be a valuable
lesson to him; and if Richard were overcome, so much the
worse for Richard. After all, the quarrel was within the
family. The old king jigged northward through Dom-
front and Caen to London, there to watch the progress
of events.

Young Henry too was a modern; but he represented
the social aspect of the modernity of the time. Young
Henry was the fine blossom of chivalry, the hero of the
tournament, the last word in social elegance. To-day in-
stitutions have changed; the tournament has been sup-
planted by the more refined sports of polo and golf, and
chivalry has no more to do with the horse which gave the
rank its original dignity than the rough horse-play which
concludes a bootleg party. The human spirit seeking its
own comfort and aggrandizement has forgotten those things
about the age of chivalry which might be unpleasant and
has remembered only those other things which envelop it
with the oil of unction. The medieval tournaments of
which young Henry was the hero were of a brutality as
much worse than the brutality of a Spanish bull-fight as
the lives of two men are more significant than the life of
a bull. Although it was no doubt pleasant to sit of a
spring day on the bleachers and watch the royal pavilion
thronged with lovely ladies and hear the sonorous herald
and watch the knights ride down the field six abreast with

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THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

lances poised, it may have been less pleasant to see a man
run through the body by a spear, to see the spear by a
thrust which was, no doubt, strong and true run through
a man's throat and break off, and to know that the blare
of the trumpets were to cover his choking cries as he
writhed on the ground like a fantastic thing. Young
Henry was the hero of tournaments. If you killed your
man, you got his horse and armor, which were valuable.
If you were killed you lost your horse and armor, for
which In the nature of things you could have few regrets.
Tournaments were good business.

Bertrand de Born allied himself with young Henry and
took charge of the publicity of the war. He undertook to
urge upon his friends the injustices which they had suf-
fered under Richard, although all concerned knew that
Richard's misrule had been no worse than Henry's would
have been. He kept Henry's ardor at white heat by point-
ing out that although he was king in title he possessed no
lands, castle, or revenue; whereas his brother, Richard, a
mere duke, was in effect the king of a large territory. He
persuaded the young king that all the Aquitanian barons
would rise against Richard if Henry led them into battle.
He himself, Bertrand de Born, the young head of an old
and important family and a poet of some note, promised
by his poetry to inflame the hatred which he said the Aqui-
tanian barons felt for Richard. He placed himself and
his service at Henry's command.

He affected great anger with Richard, whom he called
a profligate, and with the old king, whom he called much
worse. There is in his poetry some faint gleam of that

[135]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

passion which in more recent years has been called
patriotism; but one must not be deceived. The more or
less altruistic love of country which is one of the highest
civic virtues to-day was unknown at a time when the con-
ception of country had not yet been formed. One's coun-
try was one's own estate. The thousand or so castles and
counties that constituted the duchy of Aquitaine were not
united in any common interest except the interest that
each felt in its own aggrandizement. They were no more
than a thousand or so castles and counties that were forced
by expediency to pay more or less unwilling homage to a
central duke. The more frequently the person of the duke
changed, the more frequently would the knights and chat-
elaines by the devious methods of back-stairs politics be
able to enlarge their various rights and powers. "When
the big ones fight," said Bertrand de Born, "the small ones
grow rich."

Young Henry decided upon war; and Bertrand, pre-
tending great fury against Richard and the old king, spent
the next three months traveling, chanting his war-songs
at every chateau, and inflaming the knights and chatelaines
to revolt.

Although there is much doubt as to the exact trail that
he followed, the evidence is clear that he stopped at
Angouleme, Perigueux, his own castle of Hautefort, and
then proceeded south via Rocamadour to Cahors and
thence east to Toulouse. The trail from Hautefort to
Toulouse formed one leg of the triangle. From Toulouse
lie turned westward to Bordeaux along the old Roman
road. Thence he probably turned northeast again to Peri-

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

gueux. The last leg of the triangle is so vague that I am
inclined to think he sent out ambassadors and musicians
to sing in his place and that he returned north by some
shorter route. There is little doubt that Bertrand himself
went as far as Toulouse between Christmas and the early
spring, when the actual fighting began. If an ambassador
was sent to Bordeaux, it may well have been Henry's
brother Geoffrey, who at that time was in love with the
poet Jaufre Rudel, whose own posthumous passion for an
unseen mistress has stimulated the philosophic imaginations
of Robert Browning, Rostand, and others. But of Jaufre
Rudel there will be something to say later.

Shortly after Richard broke away from the crush of
dancers gathered at the chateau of Le Mans to pirouette
southward, the old king with his ingrowing toe-nails
jigged off to England, and Bertrand de Born a day or
two later set off on Richard's trail for the south. There
is no reason why he should not have called on Richard
at Poitiers; they had been friends from boyhood, and
Bertrand had here an opportunity to harden Richard's
heart against Henry and make certain that a war would be
fought, an opportunity which a man like Bertrand de-
lighted to make use of. At Poitiers too he would have the
opportunity of paying his respects to the troubadours who
thronged the court of Richard, and of spending, in order
to cement their friendship, some of the money which Henry
probably gave him. Two of these poets, Gaucelm Faidit

[137]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

and Folquet de Marseille, were certainly with Richard at
this time. A third, Marcabrun, may have been a member
of the party.

Gaucelm Faidit was a fashionable poet and profligate.
His father was a bourgeois and was connected, during
Gaucelm' s boyhood, with the legation at Avignon, which
during this century was the seat of the papacy. He sang,
according to his biographer, "the best of any man in the
world, he composed very well both the words and the music
of the songs, and his contemporaries said that he could
match good words with good sounds." Another biographer
adds that Gaucelm was a c 'man of good cheer, living care-
lessly, for which reason he lost his entire fortune by play-
ing at dice/ 5 He became a "comedian," which means,
probably, an actor manager, and sold the tragedies and
comedies which he made at two or three thousand pounds
and sometimes at more, "according to their invention."
He himself arranged the scene and composed both words
and music. Thus he could take for himself the entire rev-
enue. "He was so liberal, prodigious and gourmand in
his eating and drinking that he spent all the profits of his
poetry and became immeasurably fat." He married a lady
called Guillhaumone de Soliers, whom by his sweet words
he had seduced from a monastery at Aix en Provence.
"For twenty years she followed him through the courts
of the princes, and she was very beautiful, well trained
in all the virtues, and sang very well all the songs which
her Gaucelm made for her. . . . But because of the dis-
solute life they led together she became as fat as he and,
surprised by a malady, she died."

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

Together they wandered over the narrow and friendly
medieval trails, fat Gaucelm with his Gargantuan laughter
and his weakness for the ivories, for pretty words, and for
pretty Guillhaumone, who was connected perhaps intimate-
ly with the proud Soliers of the Chateau de Soliers in
the south. On warm summer afternoons they would lie
under the trees laughing in the sunshine. On cold or rainy
days when Guillhaumone grew tired he would put his
arm around her and help her over the muddy roads. When,
in the days of their poverty, they came to a tavern, they
would enter with a flourish: "I am Gaucelm Faidit the
singer of songs, and this is Guillhaumone de Soliers who
sings divinely." They would do their little act and hope
for a bed and a meal. When Gaucelm lost his money his
reputation as a poet decreased, and when Guillhaumone
left the convent her friends snubbed her. "For a long
time they were unfortunate and miserably poor, receiving
no gifts or honours from any knight until" after Guill-
haumone's death "Duke Richard with whom he lived
until 1189 took pity on him."

Another biographer presents a slightly different ac-
count. Here Gaucelm is said to have been the son of a
bourgeois in Uzerche in the bishopric of Limoges "who
sang the worst of any man in the world" He is said to
have received thirty, fifty, or sixty livres sums more
worthy of credence than the fortunes mentioned by the
other writer for his comedies and tragedies. Both agree
that Gaucelm was immeasurably fat. The second biog-
rapher declares that Gaucelm married une soldade^ a cer-
tain Guillaume d'Alest, whom he seduced from a monas-

[139]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

tery of nuns. After the death of Duke Richard, Gaucelm
stayed with the marquis of Montferrat, who was so
charmed by the comedy, "L'Heregia dais Preyres," that
he gave Gaucelm "rich and precious gifts of clothing and
of harness and put a good price on his inventions." The
best though not the most characteristic of his poems that
I have seen shows a regrettable cynicism. It begins:

Many a man is much more generous
In gifts of evil than gifts of good. . . .

If Gaucelm Faidit represented the Bohemianism of
Richard's court, Folquet de Marseille, like Bertrand de
Born, represented its eminent respectability. Folquet was
the son of a very wealthy merchant of Marseilles. After
his father's death he devoted his time and his fortune to
the services of "valiant men and arrived with them to great
honour." He was extremely wealthy and composed very
well and sweetly in the Provencal tongue, although he is
said to have sung better than he wrote. He was pleasant
and liberal in his manner and beautiful in his person,
which latter fact may account for his friendship with
Richard, who shared his mother's passion for handsome
young men. At one time he, like Peire Vidal, was en-
amoured of the fair Adalasia, the powerful countess of Les
Baux. As she was blessed with an impenetrable chastity
Folquet devoted his talents to the extirpation of heretics
(he was the leader in the prosecution of a group of men
who believed that man was not created in an instant in
the Garden of Eden but was the result of a slower devel-

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

opment) and died, if not in the order of sanctity, at least
enveloped by the odor of respectability, an archbishop of
Toulouse.

Poitiers is no longer the rendezvous for poets, either fat
or respectable, but there must have been a great party
there one spring when that exquisite and fashionable young
gentleman, the viscount de Born, rode over the drawbridge
and, with his secretary and singer, a beautiful lad from
Perigueux whom he was training in the art of poetry, was
shown into the high-raftered hall and welcomed by Duke
Richard. Marcabrun the cynic was probably in the hall
with the others, although whether he was on the side of
Richard or of Bertrand is uncertain. This, however, is re-
corded, that when Richard, Bertrand, and Marcabrun met
on this occasion or another, Richard swore by all the saints
that Marcabrun was a better poet than Bertrand, and
Bertrand swore that he was not. Richard had the two
poets locked in their rooms and gave them forty-eight
hours to show their art. At the critical moment, Bertrand's
inspiration failed him. He spent two days playing
chess with his singer and listening to his rival, in an ad-
joining room, committing his new poem to memory.
Bertrand, too, learned the poem and, requesting that in the
tournament of song he be permitted to sing first, antici-
pated his rival. Marcabrun was furious until Bertrand
pacified him by the explanation that in his zeal to please
Richard he had become so dissatisfied with everything
he had done that he had decided to join his friend Marca-
brun, whom he admitted to be his master in the art of
poetry in doing homage to the puissant duke.

[HI]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

From Poitiers Bertrand de Born proceeded southward
toward Angouleme and the country of the honest Angou-
mois. The trail he probably followed is now covered by a
secondary road, and accompanied now on one side and
now on the other by the railway which leaves it at Sf>
Maurice-la-Clouere on the north side of a river and Gen-
<^ay on the south. St.-Maurice was the sometime home of
a formidable saint, now all but forgotten, and Gengay
was the seat of a powerful castle now in ruins. "Maurice,"
says the Golden Legend, "is of amarus, that is bitter, and
cis, that is to say vomiting odour, or hard, or of us, that is
to say counsellor or hasty. He had bitterness for his evil
idolatry and dilation of his country; he was vomiting by
covetise of things superfluous ; hard and firm to suffer tor-
ments; counsellor by the admonishment of his knights and
fellows; hasty by ardour and multiplying of good works;
black by despising himself." He was one of the 6666
knights who were slain defending Christianity against
Maximian; and the remains of these saints, like those of
the thousand virgins of Cologne, were scattered all over
western Europe and did great miracles. If placed on the
sea during a storm, they will still the waves; they can re-
vive the dead. The relics of Maurice demand a proper
observation of the Sabbath. Once when a "paynim work-
man" insisted on repairing the church where part of
Maurice was buried and insisted on doing this on Sunday,
the only day of the week when he would do any work at
all, and worked during the hour, while mass was being

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

celebrated, the saints appeared to him all shining in light
and beat him and admonished him so that thereafter he
gave up his evil practices and did not work even on Sun-
days and was christened and became a good Christian.

At Gengay the road branches and runs southwest through
Civray and Ruffec, the native home of the mystic truffe
to St.-Amand-de-Boixe, where, five hundred years earlier,
Theodobert, the son of Chilperic, perished, and on to An-
gouleme on the hill.

Angouleme was the home of Gerard, the bishop, who be-
came involved in a quarrel with William of Aquitaine and
the papal authorities and was chastened in a remarkable
manner by St. Bernard. The chateau of Angouleme, ex-
cept a tower and a stairway, has been destroyed to make
room for a modern court-house; and the cathedral, al-
though it still retains much of the grandeur of the Roman-
esque style, has been rebuilt at least twice. However,
when Bertrand de Born, coming in on the road from Ruffec,
climbed the hill to enter the city by the northern gate
and by what is now the Rue de Paris just above the grotto
in the cliffs, where the holy St. Cyprian is said to have
achieved holiness, when he had paid his respects first to the
chatelaine and then to God as was the custom in those
days, he must have felt, if he felt about those things at all,
that the cathedral which was in his time relatively new
and the chateau which was old and formidable were both,
in all respects, adequate.

As one proceeds south from Caen and the Abbaye-aux-
Hommes, for example, to the Mediterranean, the archi-
tecture loses that nervous irritability of spirit which is

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

characteristic of much of the Gothic with its aspiration
after things unknown and its suggestion of architectural
catharsis, to assume broader, more placid, more realistic
expressions. The old wooden church at Angouleme, built
on the site of an older pagan temple, had been destroyed
in the early part of the century; the new stone structure
had been completed only a few years before Bertrand's
arrival. Here as elsewhere there was a sense of newness
about the world: a new poetry was being made; new phi-
losophies were being preached; new churches were being
built in new ways; and every day or two there were new
political bosses. This sense of change which in our own
epoch we dignify by the name of progress, this newness
and freshness that clothed the body of the earth and the
thoughts of men, has led sentimental historians to believe
that the people of the twelfth century were naive and
simple. As a matter of fact, they were simply, even as
you and I, modern and up-to-date.

Although Bertrand evidently persuaded the lords of
Angouleme 1 to participate in the struggle against Richard,
their participation was not whole-hearted. To their de-
fection and Bertrand gives a long list of traitors is at-
tributed the failure of the campaign.

When Bertrand left Angouleme, he traveled east by

3 Angouleme is not the capital of Anjou, as is reported by Henry James
in his "A Little Tour in France/' p. 124, but is the capital of the ancient
duchy of Angoumois. The political geography of France in the twelfth
century in broad outline was as follows: proceeding from north to south,
the duchies were Normandy; Maine (chief city, Le Mans) ; Anjou (chief
city, Angers) ; Poitou, which takes us as close to Mr. Cabell's Poictestne
as any human foot may come (chief city, Poitiers) ; Prigord (chief city,
Perigueux).

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north toward Limoges via a short cut which took him past
the Chateau de Rochefoucauld, where he enlisted the co-
operation in the plot of an early ancestor of the moralist
Rochefoucauld. The warrior lord has been forgotten, al-
though the chateau which he built and the descendant
whom he begot are still ours. He may have been a distant
relative of Bertrand's. From Rouchefoucauld, Bertrand
proceeded to Rochechouart and thence northeast to St.-
Junien, where there are churches and a bridge of the twelfth
century and paper-mills and glove-factories of the twentieth.

Bertrand's next stop, and it was relatively long, was
Limoges, For an entire day, from St.-Junien, he had been
traversing broad and rich forests and green fields in the
rain which raineth every day, the eternal rain of the Limou-
sin. Here and there rising abruptly from the fiat plains are
rounded granite hills with, maybe, a church on top or a small
village with the walls of another civilization still intact,
and at times the fields give way to the purple of the heather.
The north, the center, and the south of France are each
distinguished by a particular landscape and a particular
historic rhythm. In the north one is active and practical.
One builds protections against the winter cold, one creates,
one plays complicated games for the sheer fun of being
alive and alert. The landscape in the summer is rich and
green. In the south one is indolent. One realizes that
nothing, after all, is worth doing; that it is well to sit in a
cafe and sip syrups and to read the "Action Frangaise"
and to grow fat and slightly blasphemous in a world which,

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if not the best possible world, it is, at any rate, tolerable, if
one takes it as it comes, good and bad together. Limoges
is neither of the north nor of the south but of both. The
inhabitants are, in their way, as decent as most, but they
are not quite certain whether it is worth while being decent.
They would like to get out and hustle and do things; but
after they have made a fair start, it occurs to them that
nothing after all is quite worth while doing, or one group
decides that it wants to do one thing and another that it
wants to do another thing. Then there are great arguments
and a broken head or two, and both sides remain just where
they were or go to the tavern to repair their heads and
differences.

When Bertrand came to Limoges there were two towns.
One of them was "the city" ; it was fully fortified, closely
and compactly walled, and had been built many hundreds
of years earlier around the church, now the cathedral of
St.-Etienne. The other was "the town." It had grown
up out of the agglomeration of houses, monasteries, and
chapels which collected about the tomb of that vital saint
called Martin who spent his life in restoring people who
should have remained dead and in carrying on edifying if
somewhat platitudinous conversations with the devils who
caused the ladies of his town much concern.

The tradition of St. Martin is as confused as the other
traditions that cluster about Limoges. The saint is said
to have been one of the crowd that heard Christ preach.
He was a friend of St. Peter and was sent to Limoges to
Christianize the heathen. The governor of Limoges was a
cousin of that Nero whose fondness for feminine finery and

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

violin playing has become proverbial. He is credited with
having burned more martyrs, that is to say with having
made more saints, that is to say with having, by his in-
fluence, converted more pagans, than any other man in
history. He has doubtless been given some suitable reward
in heaven, although I am told that Nero actually burned
fewer Christians than he is credited with and that the claims
of his enthusiastic biographers are somewhat exaggerated.

On his way from Rome to Limoges, St. Martin stopped
at Tulle, where he learned that the lord's daughter was
being persecuted by "an ugly heathen devil." The devil
on seeing the saint approach knew that his time was up
and begged humbly and politely not to be sent to the "ugly
abysm of hell"; and the saint, being at heart a kindly
though a just man, sent him to a "place desert where bird, ne
fowl, ne person dwelleth." He uttered this command in
so terrible a voice that the maiden was literally scared to
death. She fell over lifeless. Death, however, was noth-
ing to this saint. He took the maiden by the hand and
in a kindly voice told her to arise. She arose and was
converted and became a good Christian.

When he arrived at Limoges, where he found many devils
to exorcise, he was taken up by one Susanna, and he healed
one that "was frenetic." He went to the temple, probably
the temple of Jupiter which stood on the site of the present
cathedral, and, like a good Christian and member of a super-
ior civilization, began breaking the idols of ivory and marble
and gold and silver. The priests seem to have been some-
what irritated by this summary method of procedure. They
set upon St. Martin one and all and bound him and put

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him into prison. But the saint was potent. With the help
of God he killed many of the heathen and frightened the
others so badly that they came to him in his cell and began
to bargain with him for his freedom. They said, "If you
bring back our friends to life, we will set you free and
permit you to baptize us." St. Martin agreed and in one
day baptized twelve thousand creatures, men and women
together.

At her death, Susanna commended to the saint's care
her daughter Valerienne, who learned in some mysterious
way that a man called Stephen was coming to Limoges.
Now whether she knew that men called Stephen were dan-
gerous or whether she had heard that this particular Stephen
had designs upon her is not clear ; but as soon as she heard
of his coming, she took protective measures. They were
useless. As soon as Stephen saw her he wanted her. She
explained that she was busy doing other things, but in
vain. Stephen gave orders, and all things stopped together.
His squire, who cut off Valerienne's head, heard angels
singing as her virginal soul was borne into heaven; he came
back to his master and told about it and fell down dead.
Stephen was so frightened by these events that he clad him-
self in hair garments and begged the saint to restore the
squire to life, and the saint did, and Stephen and all his
followers were baptized. Valerienne, the pure maiden,
was permitted to remain dead. The wicked squire was
restored to life.

Even the devils played fair with this saint. Once he
was dedicating a church in Limoges, perhaps the church now
called St.-Michel-des-Lions, and had commanded all the

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

people there assembled to be in a state of perfect chasity.
A knight and a lady evidently possessed of devils were
brought before him. St. Martin said to the devils, "Why
did you take possession of these people?" The devils an-
swered, "You commanded that all your congregation should
be in perfect chastity; but these have been doing evil things,
and we thought that since they had not obeyed you, we
might do as we pleased." Then St. Martin, seeing that
they were civil devils, asked the lord of the country what
should be done. The lord said that the devils should be
driven out, and that the knight and lady had had a good
lesson and would obey the saint next time. The saint drove
the devils to a desert place, where, no doubt, they still re-
main, gibbering through the moor, unhappy, desolate. He
was a potent, pleasant, kindly man, was St. Martin, and
is said to have been the child on whose head Christ laid His
hand when He said, "Except ye be converted and become as
little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of
heaven."

Limoges and the surrounding country of Limousin are
the place where many poets have chosen to be born. Ber-
nard de Rascas, a "sedate and well poised" poet, won
great fame at Avignon after giving himself to the writing
of poetry during his youth. "He despised the state of
marriage, and all the great and learned men who visited
Avignon to see the splendours of the papal court would
call on Rascas to see him and hear him speak." Giraut de
Bondelh was also of Limoges. "He was born of poor par-
ents, was well behaved, had good sense and became the
best poet in the Provengal tongue. He was called the

[H9]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

master of the troubadours and was well liked by all valiant
men and wise, and by the lovely and learned ladies who
knew how to enjoy and make poems in the ProvenQal
tongue. All winter he spent studying poetry and literature,
and in the spring he took with him two excellent musicians
and made the tour of the courts. He always refused to
put himself in the service of the rich princes, but they of-
fered him much money and gave him rich presents. He
said that he disdained both the loves of the most beautiful
ladies of his time and the yoke of matrimony. He was
most sober in words and continent in person, surmounting
in these virtues all the poets who have lived before or
since. . . ."

At Limoges Bertrand de Born was in his own country
and speaking his own dialect. Here he became more than
the ambassador he had pretended to be while surrounded
by men who might be friendly to Richard. Here he knew
his people, and here he began the series of war-songs, the
exhortations, and the arguments that kept the great ones in
the saddle, fighting each other, in some cases, to the death.
The appeal made by the advertising man of the twelfth cen-
tury is strikingly similar to the appeal of his modern de-
scendants. He regretted the brutality of war but insisted
on its necessity. He appealed to self-interest. He called
upon his countrymen to right their own wrongs and to rescue
from misery the unfortunate Eleanor. Self-interest, vanity,
and sentiment were aroused for the cause of Henry. "Do
not believe," he cried in one of his poems, "that my humor
is bellicose merely because I like to see the great ones
charge each other lance in hand. It is only when the great

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

ones fight that the lords and vassals" and perhaps too the
poet ambassadors "are prosperous, for I swear to you that
the great ones are larger of heart, more generous of hand
and more complacent in words when they are at war than
when they are at peace." "The danger is great," he said
in another place, "but the profit is greater."

He sang a song for Eleanor, a song which is the more
irritating because it adds little to our knowledge of Eleanor's
position. All that is known of Eleanor at this period is
that the old king had put her away somewhere for safe-
keeping but that he had been unable to keep her quite safe
enough to prevent her from intriguing with her sons and
supporters. Yet if her sons had wished to see her free
they might easily have done so; but Henry was not his
mother's favorite and had little to hope for from her,
and Richard may have been busy with other things, or,
more probably, had a fairly clear conception of the extent
of his mother's power and was glad enough to keep her
out of his way.

Bertrand's musicians sang:

Rejoice, thou land of Aquitania. Rejoice, ye Poitevin barons.
The scepter of the eagle king [Henry] will be removed. Male-
dictions and curses upon him who has dared to raise his sword
against his master the king of the south.

Tell me, double eagle [Eleanor], tell me where you were when
the eaglets fluttering from the paternal nest dared to bury their
beaks in the bosom of the eagle king. Why have you been raped
from your country and borne away into a strange land? Songs
have been changed to tears. The sound of the cithern has been
replaced by the funeral chant. Nourished during your warm

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youth in royal liberty, you sang with your companions or danced
to the sound of the soft guitar ; hut now you mourn, you weep, you
consume yourself with sorrow. Return if you can, return to your
cities, poor prisoner. . . ,

From Limoges, Bertrand de Born went south to Peri-
gueux. He left by the southwest gate along the road which
is now called Avenue Baudin and followed the Vienne River
westward for a league and a half, where he turned south
into Nexon through a gate which still looks much as it
must have looked when he saw it except that now it has
machicolations and when he entered it was simply a plain
gate in a plain wall. Here he turned west to Chalus, a
poor place, held a few years later by one Vidomar, a sturdy
man who knew well how to stand up for his rights. There
is still something sinister about Chalus. Two ruined keeps
dominate the village, and the village itself fawns about their
feet. When I walked into the tavern there a year ago
thirty-five-odd kilometers is a longish walk on a warm
Indolent spring afternoon I heard the g argon cry: "Mon
Dieu! Un Anglais!" (One must not forget that tourists
who look English are, to these people, Englishmen. Phi-
losophy and the arts died in this region a few years after
Columbus discovered America.) The gar f on led me to a
bedroom with an odor. The odor was hearty and friendly.
It prognosticated hundreds of merry little bedfellows. I
declined with thanks and bought a bottle of wine, a slab
of cheese, and a yard or so of French bread. I washed my
face and hands in the little stream a few yards above
the municipal laundry, where a good wife on hands and

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

knees was transforming her husband's Sunday shirt who
knows how in the muddy water to a pristine whiteness
and proceeded up the hill to the keep. Here I carried on a
one-sided conversation with the present lord of the castle,
a sleepy lizard.

What hospitality Bertrand met in Chalus I do not know;
but some thirty years later, after Remand's little dance
had been danced and the young king and the old king
were both dead, Richard the Lion-Heart came before
Chalus, Richard the Lion-Heart and his faithful queen
Berengaria, Berengaria of the yellow hair. It was the
last trip they took together.

Richard must have been an amiable fellow. His poets,
Gaucelm Faidit and Blondel, whom he paid well for their
work, have said many pleasant things about him; and the
poets who honored him with their friendship, Folquet and
the exquisites who were setting the fashion in singing, fight-
ing, and love-making, found him a good fellow and capable
of anything. He had a witty tongue, and although he could
Ay into insane rages, he was willing to forgive any fault if
it could be made the subject of an epigram. When, upon
his return from the Crusades, he had driven the minions
of his usurping brother John from the kingdom and John
was brought to him for forgiveness, Richard said, "I for-
give you, John, and I wish I could as easily forget your
offense as you will forget my pardon." At another time a
revivalist friar urged Richard to give in marriage his three
evil daughters. "Thou liest," said Richard, "for I have no
daughters." "In sooth," replied the preacher, "thou hast
three evil daughters, Pride and Avarice and Luxury."

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"Then/ 5 said Richard quickly, "I will give my pride to the
Knights Templar, my service to the Cistercian monks* and
my luxury to the bishops."

It was avarice that brought Richard to Chalus. Word
had been sent to him in Poitiers that a peasant of the estate
of Vidomar had, while plowing, discovered a Roman treas-
ure hoard. Richard sent word demanding half the treas-
ure, his due, as overlord of the country. Vidomar an-
swered that the treasure was merely a handful of Roman
coins, to which Richard was welcome. Richard, who in the
nature of things could know nothing at all about it, in-
sisted that the treasure consisted of golden statues of an
emperor and his family seated at a golden table. Accom-
panied by his queen Berengaria and a small body of troops,
Richard paid a visit to Chalus and, if he had been lucky,
would have taken the castle in place of the treasure. While
he was inspecting the fortifications one of Vidomar's men,
whose name was Gourdon, let fly an arrow from the ram-
parts and was fortunate enough to pierce Richard's shoulder.
A wound in the shoulder in those days was of no particular
importance, and it was not until the castle had been taken
that the awkwardness of Richard's doctors came to notice.
The wound began to mortify. Berengaria of the yellow
hair is said to have tried to suck the poison out with her
lips; ladies in those days were capable of acts of devotion,
and Berengaria's faithfulness was proverbial. Richard had
deserted her once for the wild women of Poitiers, the gay
companions of his youth, and after she forgave him, she
took good care that he should never again be out of her
sight.

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

The day the castle fell all the garrison except Gourdon,
who had fired the fatal arrow, were hanged on the walls.
When Gourdon was brought before Richard and questioned,
he boasted of his deed. "It is thou," he said, "who didst
slay my father and my brothers. Now slay me. I do not
fear thy tortures." Richard forgave the man and gave him
a sum of money, a chivalrous action which the sentimental-
ists remember. He sent him with a letter to his lovely
sister, Joanna of Toulouse, whose charm and beauty have
been sung by many a poet. She, with characteristic Angevin
tact, had the skin neatly removed from his body by an art
which is known as "flaying alive," from which operation
Gourdon died. The operation must have required some
skill and a steady hand. It could be performed in two
ways. Sometimes the practitioner began at the shoulders.
The skin was removed in inch strips to the waist. Then
the prisoner was set free and lashed with whips. As he
ran he would trip and fall on his own skin, which hung
down and impeded his flight. Other practitioners began at
the feet and the skin was left comparatively intact. When
the victim became noisy, the apron of skin was thrown up
over his head.

Let you not forget that this is the age of chivalry, the
age when one was as courteous to one's enemies as to
one's friends, when brave knights rescued trembling
maidens, when" irresponsible knights-errant wandered
through the country fighting with anybody who showed re-
sistance, and when steel clanged on steel in fair fight. The
age of chivalry was an age when maidens changed hands
with sometimes alarming frequency. When the knights

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

fought, they won for their pains sometimes a castle or per-
haps merely an armor or a horse, but the point is that when
they won they won something more than the smile of their
sovereign or their mistress. The smile of the sovereign was
of little value unless the sovereign had something to give
away. The age of chivalry, which was also the age of the
troubadours, was a hard-bitten and realistic age, and the
flower of chivalry was a blue flower dreamed about by a
group of rather effeminate poets who sang for the amuse-
ment of young ladies who were resting from the more seri-
ous business of life.

There were no ghosts on that night when Bertrand
de Born stayed at Chalus, but could this viscount who de-
lighted in the misfortunes of his friends and enemies have
foreseen the events which were to happen there later his
spirit would have gloated.

From Chalus Bertrand went on southward through
Thiviers and Savignac-les-Eglises, and what he said I do
not know, and what he saw I have forgotten. Finally he
reached Perigueux. He was ferried across the river Isle
near the present Place de P Abattoir and followed the street
that now bears his name to the chateau, which had been
begun two hundred years before he was born and was not
completed until four hundred years after he was dead. The
Perigordians are an obstinate race. When the Romans
came to the place they built themselves walls and a villa.
Later the Romans were driven out and the Gauls entered;
and they built themselves a villa at exactly the same spot,
and they said, like many a modern Perigordian, "If this
place was good enough for the Romans it is good enough
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THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

for us." But they could never make the place really suit
them. They built and changed and modernized and
brought up-to-date and remodeled and rebuilt until the
Huguenots in fury or despair tore it down a couple of
centuries ago all except two towers.

At Perigueux, Bertrand was kept busy, for the Perigor-
dians are slow to take hold of a new idea. He played upon
their sympathies. "Daughter of Aquitania, raise thy voice
like a trumpet that thy sons may hear it, for thy day
is approaching and thy son shall deliver thee and thou
shalt see again thy native land. Thy tears are thy bread
both day and night. Where is thy royal court? Thy
band of poets? Thy counselors of state? Many of them
have been dragged to a foreign Iand 3 many have suffered
ignominous death, others have been deprived of sight and
wander alone in a strange land. . . ." Under the in-
fluence of Bertrand and his friends, Perigueux entered the
war. When it learned that the forces of Richard were vic-
torious, it withdrew, with characteristic caution, and thus
saved itself the humiliation and expense of defeat. Brave
Perigueux ! It stood two sieges but never was taken.

To-day Perigueux has a dual personality. The old por-
tion, the section of the chateau and St.-Etienne, is no longer
the center of affairs that it must have been in the twelfth
century. Then the town around the chateau was one city ;
and the town around the monastery, now the cathedral of
St.-Front, which, by the way, is very like St. Mark's in
Venice, was another. As the town grew, the old city was
superseded by the monastic town. The busy Perigordians
never tear down. There are the remains of Roman ram-

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

parts and a Roman arena and vestiges of the old wall. On
one of the arches the moss has grown into a pillow, and one
afternoon I shall return there and smoke a pipe or two
between showers under a deep blue sky.

Chapter VII
The Trail of a furious Viscount II

PERIGUEUX TO TOULOUSE

Chapter VII

THE twelfth century was interested in the salvation of both
the flesh and the spirit; between the poles of this interest
may be ranged all conceivable human activities. Later
centuries, lacking that self-sufficiency and intellectual free-
dom which gave the men of the twelfth century their in-
discriminate and almost universal curiosity, passion, and
knowledge, became interested in one or more aspects of the
flesh the flesh carnal, for example, in the fourteenth cen-
tury or in one or more aspects of the spirit- We of the
twentieth century, fascinated by our sudden ability to de-
velop great physical power, have forgotten the meaning of
the term "cultivation." Our interest in physical power has
brought with it another interest, an interest in speed. We
have tried to annihilate time In order to increase our con-
trol of space, and this attempt has involved our conception
of the arts. Literature has been reduced to large-scale
journalism, and a man's power is judged by the geographical
distribution of his readers rather than by their historical
distribution, by their distribution through space rather than
their distribution through time. Since we are no longer
interested in the spirit, we have discarded the spirit or

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explained it away. Religion and love have been reduced
to the sexual impulse. We have been tamed to civiliza-
tion, and our civilization has therefore become tame.

Because Bertrand de Born and his friends believed in
the real existence of the flesh and the real existence of the
spirit and were concerned with the simultaneous salvation
of both although they had great doubts as to the means
whereby this salvation was to be effected they found time,
in a life which averaged about half the years our lives aver-
age, to achieve two or three times as much as we can achieve,
and to achieve this despite physical conditions which would
enervate the best athlete we can produce. Thus when I say
that Bertrand de Born came from Le Mans to Perigueux as
young King Henry's publicity agent, I find it impossible
to present an adequate picture of the difficulty of the trip :
the danger from bandits, for example, or knights-errant
who would be happy to capture a wealthy young viscount
and hold him for ransom; the precautions to be taken when
passing through or near the territory of an ancient enemy;
the politic allusions to his task which must be made when
visiting a knight who could, out of friendship for Richard
or political ambition, throw Bertrand into prison as a traitor
to his overlord and hold him there long years without ran-
som. It is equally difficult to make clear to one's self or
one's readers, both bred in a century immersed in the con-
templation of its own body, the subtle intellectual sophis-
tication of a time that could make of poetry an art so com-
plicated and withal so precise that future ages have drawn
from it their standards of conduct ; of a time that could give
to social procedure a finesse and a gloss that no other age

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

has approached. I am forced to explain the interest of these
people in the art of poetry by analogy to games and in-
terests which the twentieth century can understand and to
reduce the sophistication of the twelfth century to its
origins, which makes it over-simple and somewhat vulgar.

When Bertrand de Born left Perigueux he went east to
his own castle of Hautefort and then south, via Brive,
Gourdon, Figeac, and Montauban, to Toulouse. If you
wish to follow the trail he followed, you must be prepared
for many a disappointment and many a surprise. On every
hill you will see ruins of fifteenth-century chateaux. Most
of these were built on the ruins of twelfth-century castles,
which in turn were made from the debris of Saracen forti-
fications; these were little more than the transformations
of Visigothic fortresses which were built on sites occupied
by Roman soldiers. It is a warm, mountainous country.
Frequently it is arid. It is somnolent. One never tears
down. When one is forced by circumstances, one merely
adds to the things one already possesses. In the rock caverns
of this region you will see the remains of men who lived here
during the glacial period. In the cafes, taking their pleas-
ure of a summer evening, you will see the descendants of
these same men. The old and the new understand each
other. They are all men together. You will penetrate
regions which few tourists have penetrated before. You
will, no doubt, lose your way, for the castles Bertrand
visited were frequently isolated, and in order to go from one
to the other you will have to follow foot-paths. Bertrand

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

de Bom did not mind this, for in his day main traveled
roads were frequently worn so deep by the traffic that a
foot-path was preferable and offered quicker traveling.

Bertrand left Perigueux as he had entered it, via the
Boulevard Bertrand de Born, crossed the river and took the
road to Ribeyrol and Cubjac. This road follows a petulant
streamlet, the Auvezere, which flows in all directions at
once until one feels, when one sees it now on the right and
now on the left, flowing first against one and then with
one, reflecting indiscriminately the infinite placidity of
the sky and the infinite placidity of a herd of cattle, that
the Auvezere would be capable of anything. One is not
surprised, therefore, to see half of it disappear at Cubjac
to emerge four kilometers away and turn the wheels of a
mill, which, fortunately for the mill owner, happens to be
situated at that exact spot. Not far from Cubjac, Bertrand
passed the ancient hamlets, Ste.-Eulalie-d'Ans and St.-
Pantaly-d'Ans. Ste.-Eulalie is the larger; it has 698 souls,
and St.-Pantaly has only 416, men and women together,
which, since St, Pantaly is the patron saint of midwives
and doctors, is hard to explain.

How St. Eulalia, who is the patroness of Madrid, crossed
the Pyrenees and traveled the rocky roads to this village
near Perigueux must be told in another place ; but I have my
doubts as to the character of St. Pantaly. The orthodox,
attested, and accredited history of this redoubtable hero
runs somewhat as follows. He is supposed to have lived
in the third century and to have been offered the privilege
of martyrdom, a great privilege surely, since for a few hours
of suffering he might have achieved eternal bliss. But

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St. Pantaly was a difficult and mercurial martyr. They
tried to feed him to the wild beasts on a Roman holiday,
but the beasts fawned upon him and demanded his blessing;
they tried to break him on the wheel, but the ropes miracu-
lously fell off. They tied a huge stone to him and threw
him into the sea, but the stone floated and with it the
good saint. When they tried to burn him alive, the torches
refused to light; when they tried to chop off his head, the
sword broke; when they tried to throw him into a caldron
of burning lead, Christ miraculously appeared beside him
and the lead hardened. He refused to accept martyrdom
until he felt like it. He was particularly fond of the goats
and cattle, of new milk, of the fields and rocky places. In
a barren and untraveled country, about a hundred miles
north of Nice, not far from the Italian border, is celebrated
the festival of the Pipes of St. Pantaly; and in a deserted
shrine, a day's journey by foot from this^village, is a curi-
ous figure with a wizened face and a homed head. St.
Pantaly may now be a good Christian, looking with offi-
cious eye at the work of midwives and the fertility of flocks;
but he was once a Roman god, looking through the rushes
and licking his lips with a little red tongue while the
maidens bathed in a shady pool. *"**' \

The old trail follows the trail to Chambon, but the new
road cuts straight across one of its loops to Hautef ort. There
may have been a short cut here in the twelfth century, but
the road which was most frequented must have passed Cham-
bon, for this was the place where the archpriest Anzeme
founded a priory. Anzeme was a modern and was suspected
of having been a friend to that liberal, Abelard. The chances

[165]

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are that Anzeme would establish his priory not far from
the main road which led directly between the castle of that
sophisticated and gallant gentleman Bertrand de Born and
the important city of Perigueux. When the elegant Peri-
gordian poets called on Bertrand, and when Bertrand re-
turned the call, they would stop at the priory for a
friendly chat. Thus Anzeme pursued a life of religious
ease and scholarly meditation.

From Chambon, the two leagues to Hautefort can be
covered in a long hour and a half , and Bertrand, on horse,
probably covered them in much less. He passed Tourtoirac,
which to-day is guarded by a fortified gate of the fourteenth
century, as in Bertrand's time it was guarded by a gate
of the tenth century or older. These problems are mys-
teries. The hills have forgotten the answers, and the people
of Tourtoirac, interested in their search for truffles, are
singularly uncommunicative.

3

He who looks at Hautefort for the civilization of the
twelfth century will be disappointed. The Borns were
an up-and-coming, a progressive, family. After Bertrand's
death the chateau was rebuilt many times until some berib-
boned and beruffled gentleman of the seventeenth century
decided that it would do as it was, that the court at Paris
was more amusing than the court at Perigueux, and that the
levee of the Roi Soleil at Versailles was more exciting than
the rising of his humble servant, the sun, at Hautefort.
Although the luster of the twelfth century has been ob-
scured by the brilliance of the sixteenth at Hautefort, the

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

names and achievements of Bertrand's friends still shine un-
dimmed.

One of these friends was Arnaut de Mareuil. There are
three accounts of Arnaut's life, and none of them is par-
ticularly trustworthy. It seems that his father had a
chateau at Aix-en-Provence, not far from Marseilles, and
falling into poverty was constrained to sell it. Arnaut
was born at the Chateau de Mareuil not far from Perigueux
and was put into training for the church; but "finding that
he could neither earn his living nor keep himself in good
repair by his learning, he set out to travel through the
world." He frequented the company of poets and from
them learned how to make poems in the Provengal tongue.
The manuscript says that he was very "coming 55 (advenanf)
in his manner, that he pleased everybody, and that he knew
how to read the romances very effectively. Peire Vidal, one
of the most meteoric of the troubadours, knew him well
when he was involved with the countess of Beziers and
Alfonso II of Aragon. This was at a later period.

Arnaut de MareuiFs conception of love was very similar
to the conception of Bernard de Ventadour, whose first mis-
tress, Agnes de Montlugon, lived with her husband, Ebles
II, at Ventadour, not many miles away. For him, love was
the chief and only inspiration of poetry, and he carried the
art of love and the art of compliment to a high perfection.
All other troubadours, he said, insist that their ladies are
the most beautiful in the world. "I am well satisfied with
this, for thus my honest poems will pass unnoticed amidst
their idle boasts. I and love only have been true to our
oaths." If at any time he were tempted to forget his oath,

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

he was reminded of it by a faithful and discreet messenger,
his heart, who, by poetic convention, is supposed to have
remained behind with his lady when he was sent away.

I am afflicted, lady [he cried], when my eyes are unable to gaze
upon your beauty; but my heart has remained with you since the
day I first saw you, and it has never left your gracious presence.
. . . Day and night it is near you, wherever you may be; day and
night it pays court to you. . . . When I think of other things,
there is sent to me a courteous message, sent by my heart who is
your guest.

This messenger reminds him not only of the high moral
virtues of his lady but also of her beauty, and this is the
ideal of feminine beauty which was before the eyes of the
twelfth century, an ideal not only recorded in poems but
painted in hundreds of miniatures hidden in illuminated
manuscripts of the time.

The gentle messenger who is my heart displays to me your gra-
cious body, your glorious blond hair, and your forehead more white
than a lily; it shows me your beautiful eyes, clear and smiling,
your straight and well made nose, and the freshness of your face,
which is both white and more ruddy than a rose.

Loves takes dominion over him. He is unable to speak.
He closes his eyes, he sighs, and he lives half asleep in a
starry dream.

All of this indicates that Arnaut de Mareuil assumed the

attitude and expressed the sentiments which, as defined by

such books as "The Art of Honest Loving" and 'The

Breviary of Love," written long after this time, when the

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art was in danger of decay, were considered proper to the
aristocratic young man who either from choice or economic
necessity found it necessary to- keep the restless virgins and
the dissatisfied wives who lived in the innumerable castles
in this part of the world amused while their husbands, in
most cases lads only a few years older than they, were busy
defending the sanctity of their own homes or violating the
sanctity of others'. That Arnaut de Mareuil happened to
be a poet, that he had an exquisite sense of words and a good
ear for melody, is to our advantage chiefly because most of
his contemporaries had neither sense nor ear.

In another poem this friend of Bertrand de Born pre-
sents a picture of the perfect gentleman and the perfect
lady. Perfect gentlemen, he says, come from three classes
of society: the class of the bourgeoisie, the clerics, or the
nobility. The middle-class gentleman, or more properly
the independent gentleman, may be brave, but bravery is
not part of his profession. He must be courteous and ami-
able; he must know how to present himself at court; he
must know the art of paying compliments to ladies, the
art of dancing, and the art of saying agreeable things. If
he is wealthy, he must be generous. Clerks, and by
clerks Arnaut refers to members of the religious orders,
are distinguished less by their religious sentiments than by
their charming manners and their gift of speech. Al-
though knights must be amiable, courteous, brave, and faith-
ful in service to their sovereign, they are most distinguished
by their generosity, their largess. It is this theory of
largess which made medieval civilization possible. There
were in those days no fixed system of coinage and no mini-

[169]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

mum wage laws. Everything was worth what you had
to pay for it, in service, in gold, or in gifts. Nobody ever
received a salary for anything, and although you might
be put on a pension you were lucky if you could collect a
tenth of it. The poet's job was to please his lord and lady.
If he pleased them sufficiently, he would receive gifts of
clothing, horses, armor, or golden chains. The chief char*
acteristic of the perfect lady, according to this authority
more important than virtue, beauty, agreeable conversation,
charming manners, or wealth, was the virtue of knowledge
and wisdom, particularly the virtue of discretion. The
English, as we have said, have always hoped that their
women would be virtuous ; Arnaut, a good Frenchman, was
content to hope that his mistresses might be discreet.

Although Bertrand de Born may or may not have met
Amaut de Mareuil on this trip, he certainly knew Arnaut,
and Arnaut certainly visited Hautefort on at least one
occasion- At Hautefort, Bertrand is supposed to have com-
posed some additional songs for purposes of propaganda,
but his stay must have been comparatively short, for he
still had a long trip to take before returning to his young
king in the north.

He went from Hautefort to Brive probably by the small
road that follows the railroad-track rather vaguely as far
as Terrasson and then follows the Correze River until in
the twelfth century the church of St. Martin's of Brive and
the chateau now destroyed and forgotten rose above the
walls and the cluster of houses that clung to them. The
walls have been transformed into elm-shaded boulevards,
but the streets and many of the houses of Brive are still

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tKe same as they were in the twelfth century. Shortly after
Bertrand's visit, the city was besieged by the viscount de
Turenne, and for a hundred years Brive was the stake of
a small war which the counts of Turenne waged intermit-
tently with the counts of Malemort, the lords bishops of
Limoges. The count of Turenne had been a good friend
of Bertrand's, but he is listed among the traitors to the
young king. It may be that Turenne decided to join the
war against Richard but remembered in time Bertrand's
own assurance that the small lords grow fat when the great
ones fight and decided to make the best of his opportunity
to assure himself of the sovereignty of a rich city.

A single very small road leads through a country that
becomes more and more rocky and barren from Brive to
Turenne, a city built around a scarped hill surmounted by
the ruins of a chateau. For many years Turenne was able
to retain the friendship of both England and France. The
kings of both nations exempted it from taxation and the
duty of furnishing men and arms, and both granted it the
right to coin its own money and make its own laws. The
lords of Turenne were shrewd and able, and, as is shown
by the history of Brive, when they wanted a thing they
went after it.

There is only one trail into Turenne and one trail out.
The trail in comes from Brive, and the trail out follows
the river and the railway to Carrenac, the sometime home
of another traitor to young Henry. All that is left of the

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

twelfth century in Carrenac is a few rocks on the hill where
the chateau stood, and around the chateau streets which are
very old and always dirty, and an old man also dirty
who spoke no French that I could understand, but only the
local patois which is also very old, much older than the
French of your academicians and your smart Parisian
clubs, a language which, when Bertrand and his friends
used it, had the glamour of spring, the smartness of a new
epigram, the richness of good wine. It was the language
of kings. The kings of England knew no other, and al-
though Richard's ancestor, William the Conqueror, tried
to learn English he gave it up after a short time. Richard
is said to have mastered in the forty-four years of his dis-
graceful life only one English sentence, and that was more
of an exclamation than a sentence. The language of Car-
renac has grown old with the town and like the town has
changed and decayed. To-day it has the perfume of an
old and almost forgotten souvenir, which, if you like to
be reminded of past gaieties, is pleasant enough.

The old man with his old patois showed me, as he or
his son or his grandson will show you, the great statue of
Christ with its curious figures of symbolic beasts, carved
by some forgotten mason who was not trying as the sen-
timental historians affect to believe to deny the lusts of
the flesh, but rather was trying to bring them under the
domination of those infinitely more terrible and ruthless
lusts, the lusts of the spirit. By these lusts the men of the
twelfth century sought to control the body, to make it the
disciplined, obsequious, subservient thing it is now. By
these they have learned how to substitute commands for

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

deeds, symbols for actions, the imagined formula for the
real form. And these men succeeded. When a wife of
the twelfth century was annoying, her husband spanked
her and sent her to bed without any supper; the modern
gentleman talks her over with the judge and the reporters
and gets a divorce. Once a real world of real passions and
enthusiasms, crude and cruel but none the less vital and
authentic, a world young in its passions but old in its
knowledge of passion, was directed by young men. To-
day the disciplined traffic of a puppet world is directed by a
puppet policeman. The flesh and the spirit were at war,
and this warfare is made manifest in the symbolic and
tortured beasts about the Christ in the village of Carrenac,
which perhaps no tourist will ever see again until the mis-
tral has worn it away to a memory and a suggestion.

The old trail follows the river from Carrenac to the
Grottes de Salpetre and thence turns south to Gourdon.
You may find it, if you are lucky. I failed in two attempts
and had pleasant sunny days in the heather and discovered
two ruined chateaux which I have not been able to identify.
It may be, for this is a mysterious country and many a one
before me has wandered in the land of faerie, that they
were as unreal as the sky and the yellow stones. I do not
know. Gourdon, on a hill overooking La Bleu River, is
real enough. It has an Avenue Gambetta and, I suppose,
though I have forgotten, a Place de la Republique and a
very small boy intent on shying a stone at a very fat spar-
row.

The present city of Gourdon is fifteenth-century, and
the chateau where Bertrand de Born stopped to sing a song

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

or two Is in debris near the church of St.-Pierre, which
was built largely from the stones of the chateau.

Between Gourdon and Figeac, the chateaux where Ber-
trand probably did not stop are more interesting than those
where he did. One leaves Gourdon as one entered, by the
road which passes Les Capucines and continues until one
reaches Peyrebrune. Here one strikes into the mountains,
or rather into the rocks which were once mountains but now
have a tired and worn look about them, in an attempt
to find Ginuillac, which, since it is a very small village
and perhaps not worth the trouble of looking for, is very
hard to find. There is only one road to the west out of
Gkiuillac, past the Cointe Chateau over the mountains to
Le Carlucet Grange and down again to the main road and
the village of Bastit. Thence there are two roads, a cycle-
path and a donkey-path. The cycle-path to Reillhac must
be the better, because I did not follow it; thence, if you are
tired, it is only four miles to the railway, or, if you are not,
eleven miles to Livernon and the Chateau d'Assier.

In the Chateau d'Assier, which did not become important
in history until four hundred years later, one might always
find in the twelfth century a poet or two, for the chatelain
was a courteous and a liberal gentleman and the chatelaine
was a charming lady. Arnaut de Mareuil had visited here,
and also Giraut de Bornelh of Limoges, the man who dis-
dained love and marriage. Giraut once made a poem on
one of Arnaut's themes which is perhaps worth quoting

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

despite the paleness which our stubborn English with its
paucity of rimes and absence of inflections gives to the pro-
ductions of a more gracious tongue:

When my eyes no longer may
Gaze upon your loveliness
I am saddened. Lady, pray
Send to me of your largess
Messages of kindliness.
Bid your guest, my heart, to stay
Still your guest that my distress
May be lightened night and day
By his unfailing courteousness*

He reminds me of the gay

Glamour of your happiness;

Of your smiling eyes ;

The way your features show straightforwardness,

And the graceful lines your dress

Falls in when you kneel to pray;

And your pale cheek's ruddiness

When in tournament or fray

Your hero proves his courteousness.

This message will transform the day,
Make sunlight out of fogginess,
Change January into May,
Translate to sweet my bitterness,
I shall walk In forgetfulness
Of time and season, night and day.
Thinking of your sweet courteousness
I shall pass lords and ladies gay
In a starry dream of happiness.

[175]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Lady, in your kindness, pray,
In your radiant loveliness,
Smile on me this dreary day,
Make happy my unhappiness.

Giraut' s contemporaries vied with each other in praising
him; his excellence consisted in his virtuosity in treating
difficult forms, a limpidity of language, and a suggestive-
ness of style, virtues which the translation does not even
suggest. Dante, however, preferred the poetry of Arnaut
Daniel; and when Dante expressed his opinion, a hundred
and fifty years later, the tide turned and washed out almost
all traces of Giraut's achievements. The following lines
by Giraut are perhaps more characteristic than those quoted
above ; they may have been addressed to the chatelaine of
Limoges, who was kind to Giraut until her husband in
sudden fury burned Giraut's library containing all his
manuscripts, or they may have been addressed to one other;
it makes no great difference :

When I remember how love can keep
My passionate heart forever true,
I know I was a child, asleep
Before I met my love and you.
Once I dreamed, when the year was new,
Of armies of roses, a thousand deep,
And the fleur-de-lis whispered of you. . . .
Then I awoke from my boyish sleep.

To her I sing, to her I weep,

I send my prayers to her and you

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In Limousin where you two keep
Splendor and Beauty and courtesy too.
Noblest of all great ladies are you,
High-born, well mannered, chaste and sweet,
Kindly and virtuous, learned and true. . . .
Alas, that I woke from my boyish sleep I

Alas for me, I am forced to keep

My secret hid from the world and you.

Speakers of evil jealously peep

And deride a love that is pure and true.

If I honestly gave you your honest due

The slanderous world which makes love cheap

Would deride the passion I feel for you.

Alas, that I woke from my childish sleep !

But when from the crush of the crowd I creep
Away to the window which looks toward you
I sing in my heart and that song is true

Thank God that I woke from my childish sleep.

From Assier, whose old chateau fort has been transformed
into a sixteenth-century castle and historic monument, the
country road leads southwest of Cardaillac, where it meets
the main road, and later to Figeac, which dreams in an
amphitheater of wooded and vine-clad hills of a past which
was greater than its present. There are, as usual, two
cities in Figeac: the old city, on the left bank, clustered
around a hill which once bore a chateau ; and the town, on
the right bank, which grew around the monastery and the
church of the potent St.-Sauveur. This monastery, which

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

originally belonged to the Benedictine order, became in the
tenth century one of the important centers of Cluniac re-
form; and here, as elsewhere, under the influence of that
peculiar spiritual renaissance, the arts and sciences flour-
ished and the flesh and spirit dwelt together in the honor
of God. The flesh and the spirit, however, were sometimes
at war, for the monastics honored God in a way which the
pious townspeople sometimes resented. Sometimes, the
townspeople felt themselves oppressed by the zeal of the
clerics; and sometimes the clerics, relying on their right
of trial in ecclesiastical courts, would take from the towns-
people those pretty and amiable things which all men treas-
ure and which none can deny make manifest to all the world
the greatness and goodness of the Creator. About the time
that Bertrand entered Figeac with the intention of persuad-
ing the knights of that district to supplant the men who
held power with the men who would like to hold power,
the people of the town and the people of the monastery
agreed to compose their differences.

On the RUQ Griffoul unfortunately I do not know what
it was called in Bertrand's day are still several houses
that were new when Bertrand came to town, and near St.-
Sauveur is the bridge which he crossed when with his body-
guard, his secretary, and his sweet singers he clattered up
the hill to the chateau. The streets are narrow and filled
with the ordure of centuries; and one wonders, as one wades
through them and escapes by a hair's breadth the emptying
of a chamber-pot from an upstairs window, whether they
could possibly have been dirtier a thousand years ago. Ah,
well for Bertrand de Born and his friends that they never

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

heard of the germ theory, that cleanliness was not yet
placed next to godliness, and that the entire world was
more or less democratically dirty.

Three miles to the south is Capdenac, with a modern
chateau but with old, old walls that crown a steep hill. The
chateau is and probably always was at the north gate, which
is guarded by two towers. From the top of these towers,
a watchman can note the approach of any considerable body
of knights, their bright armor heliographing news of their
position; and the tourist with an hour or two to spare can
look down over the valley of the Lot on the quiet vine-
yards of the hills, the rich green of the valleys threaded by
chalky white roads.

Somewhere in this sector Bertrand received word from
Henry. Exactly how this announcement was made is un-
known, but the purport was that Henry had withdrawn
his demands upon Richard and with vacillating spirit
now engaged, probably, in some new venture wished to
withdraw from the war. Bertrand sent back a musician
instead of a letter. He had coached the musician in a song
and sent word that if Henry withdrew the musician would
spread this song throughout the length and breadth of the
country. The song contained among other things the fol-
lowing complimentary lines:

111 help the vassals understand

That Henry the king is a king without land

Because he's the king of cowards.

Ill spread the fame throughout the land

Of the doughty king of cowards.

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

When the musician returned, he brought word that Henry
had declared the war on Richard again, and begged his
friend to withdraw his insulting poem and substitute for
it one more calculated to' sooth his master's vanity. Ber-
trand sang:

With gaily colored helm and spear
And freshly polished shield
The knights ride in from far and near
And hold their ground,
And scorn to yield;

And the horses in thunder

Drag fallen riders through the field.
The Aquitanian castles reel
With the battle's thunder.
And all the vassals in the fray
And all the true knights wonder

How many heads they'll break this day.

I do not love my ease and meat,
A soft bed, and good food to eat
As well as when on chargers fleet
Armies intent on battle meet

And riderless horses scream. . . ._
Then shouts of hate and oaths resound,
Foemen's bodies carpet the ground,
And many a brave one goes to rest
With a long spear growing in his chest

And riderless horses scream.

This is one of those gay, light-hearted relics of the twelfth
century which should help us to understand that the age
of chivalry was not an age where two gentlemen met on an

THE TRAIL OF A FURIOUS VISCOUNT

open field, slapped each other's wrists, and then retired to
a shady grove to drink a dish of tea in honor of their re-
spective mistresses. The age of true chivalry, curiously
enough, is always an age or two earlier than the age in
which we live. Modern writers think that the age of chiv-
alry is in the twelfth century. Writers of the twelfth cen-
tury thought that the age of chivalry was the eighth or ninth
century, and the gentlemen of those years thought, no doubt,
that it was still earlier. The twelfth century cannot, how-
ever, free itself from responsibility. The men of the twelfth
century were the first to record an ideal of chivalric conduct;
and this ideal formulation, this dream, this series of eu-
phemisms, prepared for the entertainment of high-born
ladies and jeunes files Men elevees and accepted by them
as amusing articles and pleasant ways of saying unpleasant
things, had to wait for the scientific nineteenth century to
mistake euphemism for the fact, the dream for the reality.
And now the ideal of conduct contained in the poems of the
twelfth century not those written by Bertrand de Born,
who was a realist and something of a cynic, but by his
friends and companions has been accepted not only as a
social code which directs the actions of all gentlemen it
had always been that but as a fair picture of the life of
the time,

7

The Middle Ages have almost entirely disappeared from
Montauban. Hardly a stone is left of the city Bertrand
de Born visited when Rixende de Montauban lived in the
chateau which had been begun a hundred years earlier by

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the counts of Toulouse, which was to be continued by the
Black Prince in the fourteenth century and completed by
Bishop de Berthier in the seventeenth. Although there was
probably a bridge over the Tarn when Bertrand rode out
of the city toward Toulouse, the present bridge with seven
Gothic arches, well fortified against the attacks of hostile
armies from the north and west and warlike monks from
the monastery across the river, was built twenty years after
Bertrand left the city.

Before there had been a city of Montauban, there had
been a town of Montauriol, which had been built sometime
after 820 by the great good man St. Theodard ; and before
there had been a town of Montauriol, there had been, some-
time about the year 200 or 300 the Roman camp of Mons
Albanus. We must not forget that the four centuries be-
tween 820 and 1220 were as long to the people of the Mid-
dle Ages as the four centuries between 1520 when America
had been discovered only thirty years and 1920 are to us.
There was trouble of a kind between the monks of the mon-
astery and their vassals. The counts of Toulouse made capi-
tal of this quarrel, and realizing that the White Mountain
would be an excellent site for a fortress, seized a large part
of the monastic lands and founded a town across the river.
They made propositions to the tenants of the monastic
lands, offered them home-seekers* rates, freedom from taxa-
tion, power rights, and other modern advantages. Most
of Montauriol moved to Montauban, and the monks were
sorely tempted to use strong language.

When Bertrand was at Montauban, the chatelaine was
perhaps the same Bixende or Richilde who a few years later

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inspired a sinister passion in the bosom of the poet Roolet
de Gassin. Roolefs enemies said that he was a babbler,
a charlatan, ugly, unpleasant, misanthropic, disagreeable,
and afflicted by divers other infirmities. His friends said
that he was a remarkable gentleman, handsome of feature,
pleasant and gracious of manner, and a good poet in all
languages. He was involved in the Albigensian heresy, an
interesting form of ultra-fundamentalism. Roolet was
"well liked by the ladies and princesses who understood the
charms of poetry. They gave him rich gifts of horses, ar-
mor, clothing, and gold according to the custom of the
time." At Montpellier, where he was attending a conven-
tion, he was "surprised by love of a gentle lady of the Pro-
vence called Rixende de Montauban." She, however, like
a false deceiver, made fun of his dress and manners. She
laughed at him in public and said unprintable things about
him to her friends. Nevertheless, "she was lovely, wise,
virtuous, and well learned in the arts of poetry." Roolet,
who was "incredibly taken by his love for this lady, forgot
all the art of compliment in which he had excelled and,
filled with a poetic furor, made a song against this lady,
a song of base ingratitude and deadly insult." The friends
of this "false deceiver" were powerful, and Roolet was
persuaded to leave Montpellier suddenly and at night. His
future as a poet had been ruined by this hasty and discour-
teous action. He took refuge in the most austere monastery
in the world. Austerity seems not to have agreed with him.
At any rate, he left the monastic life a few years later,
bought a pleasant chateau, married a virtuous wife, begot
children, burned heretics, and prospered.

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There is a story told to all French children of one Renaut
de Montauban who had in his service a great magician and
a magic horse that could fly through the air. He is said
to have killed the son of Charlemagne with a chess-board,
and he and his friends lived in outlawry for many years
like Robin Hood, helping the poor and robbing the rich.
By a lucky chance, they helped the king of Bordeaux against
the Saracens, and Renaut married the king's sister and lived
in the chateau of Montauban. M. Bedier, whose work on
these problems none may question, thinks that the Montau-
ban of this legend is not the one Bertrand de Born visited
but another Montauban several hundred miles further west.
M. Bedier thinks that the novel was written about the time
Bertrand made his trip, and there can be no doubt that
the customs and social situations in the novel were drawn
from models furnished by the twelfth century.

From Montauban it is but a step to Toulouse, whence
Bertrand turned west for the other two legs of his journey,
if he did not return at once to his castle in Hautef ort, there
or further north to meet young Henry and engage with him
In Ms last and most important war.

Chapter VIII

The Trail of a Broken King

IE MANS TO FONTEVRAULT

Chapter VIII

KING Henry II of England, like Humpty-Dumpty, to
whom he bore a striking resemblance both were oval in
body, tending toward the round had a great fall ; and since
bis and Humpty's falls were from the heights, none of his
horses and none of his men could ever put him together
again. When he fell he thought it was God taking ven-
geance on him for his various misdeeds and misdemeanors.
In this thought he failed to do justice to his demoniac wife,
Eleanor of Aquitaine, said to have been born of the devil,
sometime queen of the troubadours, the old woman of the
toweT, who, too weak herself to wreak her spite on her hus-
band, had borne from her body a pack of angry, proud,
noisy, suspicious, and quarrelsome sons, who, as Henry him-
self said, pecked at his heart like young eaglets at raw meat.
Finally the old heart broke, and Henry, breathing defiance
to the God of the Christians, turned his face to the wall.
Henry was the superman of the age of the troubadours,
and his successes were phenomenal and characteristic of
his time. While he was still a young man, he succeeded
where his father had failed in seducing Eleanor of Aqui-
taine, the wealthy wife of King Louis of France. She
threw her wealth in his lap, a toy for him to play with,
a stake for him to throw on the table in his big game which

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

side of Maine while messengers, one after the other, brought
word of the approach of his enemies, closer and closer, under
the leadership of Philip of France and Henry's troubadour
son, Richard the Lion-Heart. He might have done much
for Richard had Richard not been his wife's darling and
therefore his enemy. . . . Again and again he had made
overtures of peace and friendship to Richard. Again and
again these overtures had been rejected. The fat old king
was lonely. He limped up and down the walls of his
castle. A June sunset was upon him. . . .

King Henry in his glorious youth, when every castle fell
before him and the world trembled at his step, made merry
with Thomas a Becket, the young churchman. Becket had
taken orders, but only the first orders. He was still a free
man, free as a bird in his actions, swift as a hawk in his
thought. He became a faithful falcon to the king. Some
chroniclers say that Becket's father was Gilbert, a Saxon
knight, and that his mother was a Saracen woman whom
Gilbert had seduced while on the Crusades. She knew only
two words of English; one of them was "London," and the
other was "Gilbert/ 7 She followed him home from the
Crusades and ran through the streets of London calling his
name and ultimately found him. Thomas had studied at
Bologna and had been a student of a student of Abelard's.
He made himself the king's man and became the king's
chancellor. With a crowd of poets and pimps and wild
women the young king would often descend on Becket in
his sumptuous palace in London. He would sit on the

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table while Becket finished his supper, and together they
would plan wild parties.

Then Becket was made archbishop of Canterbury and
as such the most powerful lord of England. Henry might
subdue his independent barons and bend them to his will,
but the primate, richer and more powerful in his own right
than any baron, had as his support the great moral force
of the church at Rome, The primate could not be subdued.
The strife was long and bitter. The king's fury raged more
fierce at each new impertinence of the archbishop ; the arch-
bishop's obduracy gleamed the brighter with each counter-
move of the king. Becket was exiled from England. After
seven years an apparent reconciliation was effected, and
Thomas returned to Canterbury. His first official act was
to excommunicate all the prelates, bishops, and clerks who
had been friendly to the king. Then he returned to his
palace, and since it was Christmas day and Thursday he
ate meat like all the rest of the world in great high spirits.

Henry received word of these excommunications when
he was at Avranches on December 29. The king cried:
"If all my friends have been excommunicated, by God's
eyes, I'm excommunicated too ! What a pack of fools and
cowards I have nourished in my house, that not a one of
them will avenge me of this one upstart clerk!" Four of
his knights rid him of the upstart clerk, and England had
another martyr and Henry a new difficulty. Henry shut
himself in his room and for three days refused to eat or see
visitors. When the pope heard the news he went into deep
mourning. All the barons in England who had been waiting
for the king to make a false step suddenly discovered that

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

they were true sons of the church and that Henry was their
legitimate enemy. Thomas, the bon vivant and the ob-
durate protector of the church's temporal interests, became
a saint. He had sought martyrdpm, and he had found it.

The old king paced the walls of Le Mans at night waiting
for the knot of his enemies to tighten around him and shear
from him his earthly power and humiliate him before the
world. He thought of many things. He never forgot a
friend and never forgave an enemy. Thomas had been both
friend and enemy. Henry had been responsible for the
death of Thomas; and yet, though he had caused that death,
he had not intended it. He had done penance both as a
king and as a private person. As a king he took oaths and
made promises and gave large gifts of money to Templars.
His private penance he performed three years later when
he returned to England,

He made a pilgrimage to Canterbury. As he came in
sight of the cathedral church he dismounted, and, in bare
feet, forbidding all present to do him honor or treat him as
though he differed in any way from a private pilgrim, he
walked to the church. At the steps where Thomas fell,
he dropped to his knees, kissed the spot, and wept. Then
he came to the tomb of the saint. Here he lay for a long
time weeping and praying. He made formal confession
of his sins and restored all its rights to the see of Canterbury.
All the churchmen present were invited to punish him. He
removed his upper garments, and each priest gave him five
blows with the rod and each monk three blows. He fasted

THE TRAIL OF A BROKEN KING*

all that night, and the next morning before he left for
London was given, as a sign of reconciliation, a drink of
holy water in which some of the saint's blood had been
mixed. That he survived was a miracle of less importance
to the medieval mind than the immediate arrival of news
that the army of Scotland had been defeated and that the
Scottish king, one of Henry's most persistent enemies, had
been captured. Henry, the citizen of England, had purged
his soul; and Thomas the saint had brought a measure of
success to Henry the king.

Thomas had gained a sainthood, and Henry had dreamed
of an empire rivaling that of Rome. His lands were too
vast for him to handle alone, but he had sons. To Richard,
who was popularly believed to have the lion's heart, he gave
the lion's share, Aquitaine. To John he gave Brittany;
and Henry, his oldest son, he made partner in the rule of
England. There were two kings: Henry the father, the
old king; and Henry the son, the young king. "When I
alone had rule of my kingdom," he said, "I let nothing go
of my rights; and now that many are joined in the gov-
ernment of my lands, it were a shame that any part of them
were lost/* The barons, who hated the old king for con-
quering them, flocked to the court of the young; the wife,
who hated her husband for subduing her, spurred the son
to revolt; Philip, the king of France, who envied Henry
his lands and power, invited the son to share in his pleas*
ures, ate with him at the same table, slept with him in the
same bed. . . .

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The day came when Richard refused to recognize the
rights of his elder brother and when Bertrand de Born rode
south breathing hope of death and damnation toward
Richard and the old king. A war was fought between the
two brothers. The old king watched cynically from Lon-
don. Then to preserve his kingdom he threw his forces with
Richard. Henry and Bertrand the troubadour grew des-
perate. They robbed monasteries and pillaged nunneries.
After burning a castle a few miles south of Bertrand's castle,
Hautefort, the young king was seized with dysentery. He
sent a message imploring his father to come to his bedside
and grant forgiveness. Henry, fearing treachery, as well
he might, since he had become now somewhat aware of
the temper of his offspring, refused. The young king died
in sackcloth on a bed of ashes repenting of his sins. Henry
mourned for him as David for Absalom.

Richard was now the heir apparent and with his father
marched through Aquitaine and Touraine punishing the
rebellious vassals. Hautefort, Bertrand de Born's castle,
was taken after stubborn resistance. Bertrand was con-
demned to death. Dante a hundred years later thought
that Bertrand had been the chief cause of the rebellion.
He was brought before the king to show cause why the
sentence of death should not be imposed upon him.

The king said: "Bertrand, Bertrand, thou hast always boasted
that thou hadst never need of more than half of thy intelligence.
It seems to me that to-day thou art in great need of all of it."

"Sire," said Bertrand, "what I have boasted is true, and it is
still true to-day."

THE TRAIL OF A BROKEN KING

But the king said to him, "Indeed it seems to me that to-day thou
hast lost it all."

"Indeed, Sire," replied the poet, "to-day I have none left."

"And how is that*?" asked the king.

"Sire," replied Bertrand, "on the day that the valiant king, thy
son, died, I lost my sense, my knowledge, my reason altogether. 7 *
The king when he heard Bert rand speak thus of his son and when
he saw Bertrand in tears, felt his heart contract so powerfully that
he fainted.

When he had recovered, he cried weeping: "Bertrand, Bertrand,
thou wast right to lose thy reason in the cause of rny son, for there
was never a man in the world whom he loved more dearly than
thee. For love of him, I will not only grant thee thy life and return
to thee thy goods and thy castle, I will add my love and my good
graces and five hundred marks of silver for the damages which
thou hast suffered."

The fat king paced the walls of Le Mans at the hour
before dawn. The armies from Tours had advanced still
further. A village just outside of the town was being
burned. He must decide what was to be done, whether he
should capitulate with his enemies and betray the city of his
birth, or whether with his seven hundred fighting-men he
should make a last and desperate stand. Perhaps he must
think of moving, of flight. He had spent all of his life
in movement. He had seldom stayed a week at a time
in one place.

He had traveled over rough paths, through thickets, over
hills, through marshland and fen, and always as the king
traveled there followed behind him his disorderly court,

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

his army of secretaries, lawyers, knights in mail, barbers,
hucksters, barons each with dozens of retainers ; an arch-
bishop or two with their households, bishops and actors,
judges, suitors, confectioners, "singers, dicers, gamblers,
buffoons, wild women and what not." The court was fre-
quently forced to dine on stale black bread and old beer.
It was forced to sleep in the open, in pigsties, in the mud.

If the king has proclaimed that he intends to stop late in any
place, you may be sure that he will start early in the morning,
and with his sudden haste destroy every one's plans. It often
happens that those who have let blood or taken purges are obliged
at the hazard of their lives to follow. You will see men running
about like mad, urging forward their packhorses, driving their
wagons into one another, everything in confusion as if hell had
broken loose. Whereas, if the king has given out that he will start
early in the morning, he will certainly change his mind and you
may be sure he will snore until noon. You will see the packhorses
drooping under their loads, wagons waiting, drivers nodding, trades-
men fretting, all grumbling at one another. The men hurry to ask
the liquor retailers and loose women who follow the court when the
king will start for these are the people who know most of the
secrets of the court.

At other times when the camp had composed itself to
sleep, a sudden messenger would gallop in with despatches.
The king would order the camp to be broken. Messengers
would be sent ahead to announce the approach of the king,
and the cortege would push forward through the muddy
paths, the cart-loads of heavy state papers foundering and
overturning, the horses struggling in the mire, the wagoners
shouting, the courtiers swearing. . . . Then the king might

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THE TRAIL OF A BROKEN KING

suddenly change his mind and stop for the night at a cabin
in the woods where there was food and lodging for one
man only. "And I believe, if I dare to say so, that he took
delight in our distresses." The knights, separated from
their body-guards, would wander through the thickets in
the darkness and fight to the death for the possession of
some place of shelter which a dog would have disdained.
"O Lord God Almighty," the chronicler concludes, "turn
and convert the heart of the king from this pestilent habit,
that he may know himself to be but man, and that he may
show a royal mercy and human compassion to those that
are driven after him not by ambition but by necessity."

My lord, the king [said another chronicler], is sub-rufus or pale
red; his harness [armor, which he wore very tight in his youth,
for he was vain] hath somewhat changed his color. Of middle
stature he is so that among little men he seemeth not much, nor
among long men seemeth he over little. His head is round as in
token of great wit, and of special high counsel the treasury. His
head of curly hair when clipped square in the forehead showeth
a lyonous visage, the nostrils even and comely according to all the
other features. High vaulted feet, legs able to riding, broad bust,
and long champion arms which telleth him to be strong, light, and
hardy. In the toe of his foot, the nail groweth into the flesh and
in harm to the foot overwaxeth. His hands, through their large
size, showeth negligence, for he utterly leaveth the keeping of them ;
never, but when he beareth hawks, weareth he gloves. Each day
at mass and counsel and other open needs of the realm, throughout
the whole morning he standeth afoot, and yet when he eateth he
never sitteth down. In one day he will if need be ride two or three
journeys, and thus he hath oft circumvented the plots of his ene-
mies, A huge lover of woods is he so that when he ceaseth war
he haunteth places of hunting and hawking. . . . Homely and

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

short clothes weareth he. When once he loveth, scarcely will he
ever hate; when once he hateth, scarcely ever receiveth he into
grace. . . . When he may rest from worldly business, privily he
occupieth himself with learning and reading and from his clerks
he asketh questions . . . none is more honest than our king in
speaking, ne in alms largesse. . . .

Thus he was in his prime, but now he was growing old.
The square form had grown fat. The huge paunch had
bowed the legs still more ; the toe-nail had produced a ha-
bitual limp. The face was lined and worn. . . .

The situation Henry found himself in as he paced the
chateau at Le Mans was no new situation. It was more
critical for him now only because his sons happened to be
leading the rebellious barons and because Philip of France
was outguessing him and because he was growing old and
weary of the struggle. He had dreamed of an empire for
himself and his sons. Henry had died in rebellion against
him. Geoffrey had said to a peacemaker: "Dost thou not
know that it is our proper nature, planted in us by inherit-
ance from our ancestors, that none of us should love other,
but that ever brother should strive against brother and son
against father? I would not that thou shouldst deprive us
of our hereditary right nor vainly seek to rob us of our
nature," Richard was now the darling, not only of Henry's
spiteful wife Eleanor, but of Philip of France. The empire
was broken.

He had had hopes of Richard's friendship after the

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THE TRAIL OF A BROKEN KING

young king had died; but Richard soon showed his temper.
"Give me my rights," he said, "that I may arrange my
kingdom." On formal occasions, Richard, like his elder
brother, insisted that Henry offer him the cup of wine. "It
is fitting," said Richard, "that the son of a king should be
served by the son of a duke." There remained only one
son who had not yet declared himself; it was young John
Lackland. Henry spared no pains in his attempts to ingra-
tiate himself with this young man. In John, Henry thought
he might find an heir who would be loyal to his father's
interests and spare no pains in humbling his proud brothers,
Richard and Geoffrey. At a conference with Philip of
France, Henry proposed to transfer Richard's lordship of
Aquitaine to John. When he heard this, Richard was
standing near Philip. Without a word he ungirt his sword
and stretched out his hands in a dramatic gesture to do
homage to the king of France for England's continental
possessions. The king's horse reared. The court was in
confusion. The knights drew their swords. Henry spurred
his horse to the open and calling to two courtiers said:
"Why should I revere Christ? Why should I think him
worthy of honor who takes from me all honor in my lands
and suffers me thus shamefully to be dishonored before that
camp-follower Philip?"

His son Geoffrey had treated him as badly as Richard.
During one of the frequent filial rebellions, Henry was
parleying with Geoffrey in the market-place of Limoges in
front of the chateau. .Geoffrey's archers aimed a shower
of arrows at the king. One of the arrows pierced the ear
of the king's horse. Henry withdrew the arrow and pre-

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

sented it to Geoffrey, saying, "Tell me, Geoffrey, what has
thy unhapy father done to thee to deserve that thou, his
son, shouldst make him a mark for thine archers?"

His lords were in revolt, and a great solitude fell upon
him. Tours was in the hands of his enemies; Philip and
Richard were approaching from the east; and the fat old
king limped up and down the walls of Le Mans undecided
whether he should flee northward or offer open battle. At
dawn, the enemy set fire to a suburb to the west of Le Mans.
With the enemy to the south and east and fire to the west,
escape to the north would soon be cut off. Henry sum-
moned his fighting-men and rode out, cut his way through
the crowd at the bridge, and rode north. He spurred his
horse up the small hill near the village now called La
Bazogue and looked back on his burning city. He cursed
God, and in his curses there was still the defiance of the
superman- "The city which I have loved best on earth/*
he cried, "the city in which I was born and bred, where my
father lies buried, where is the body of St. Julian this,
Thou, O God, to the heaping up of my confusion, and to
the increase of my shame, hast taken from me in this base
manner ! I therefore will requite as best I can : I will assur-
edly rob Thee too of the thing in me which Thou lovest
best!"

The king and his party rode furiously by by-paths,
through mud and mire, under the scorching sun. They
burned their bridges behind them. Once Richard, spurring
ahead of the pursuers, came up with the fleeing king. One
of the king's men raised his lance. Richard cried : "God's
feet, marshal, do not kill me. I have no hauberk/ 5

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THE TRAIL OF A BROKEN KING

The marshal struck his spear into Richard's horse so that
it fell dead. "No, I will not kill you. Let the devil kill
you," he shouted.

From the hill where Henry, looking back on his burning
city, cursed God, I lose the trail. If there be local tradi-
tions, I have not been able to collect them. There are
a thousand small paths and trails that may or may not
have been made when Henry fled through the country.
It is a land of gentle undulating hills and low valleys, each
with its streamlet and its bit of marshland. The hills are
pleasant, and the valleys are rich, but sometimes in the
heat of June the mist rises from the marshy places, hot and
unpleasant. That night Henry reached La Fresnay. He
threw himself on his couch and refused to allow even Geof-
frey the Bastard, the result of his adventure with Rosamond
Clifford and the only issue of his body that remained faith-
ful to him, to throw a cloak over his shoulders. He
despatched messengers into Normandy to summon the
remnants of his army, and once again, resolutely and with
grave heart, turned his face toward his enemies and marched
southward again to the city of Tours, his ancient heritage.
All the castles on the route were held by his enemies. He
could scarcely find a place to rest for the night.

On June 30, 1 189, his army appeared before Tours, where
the French king and Richard the Lion-Heart were en-
camped. But just as his army glimpsed the towers of the
chateau rising beyond the river, Henry was seized with a
sudden illness. Unable to meet the French king, he fell
back down the river, under the high vine-clad hills where
the wine of Touraine grows into beauty and ripens into

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

richness. He was carried to the fortress of Saumur, where
Richard his son, seven years earlier, in the first flush of the
combat, had summoned a meeting of barons. The French
king cried, "God has delivered mine enemy into my hands."
He commanded Henry to meet him on July 3 at Colom-
bieres, a field south of Tours,

Henry started for the meeting. He traveled back up the
river as far as Ballan and the house of the Knights Temp-
lar. A terrible agony struck him. He leaned against the
wall of the house, trembling in every nerve. His followers
brought him a camp-bed. A messenger was despatched to
Philip, and even Philip was compassionate. Not so Richard,
the true son of his mother, the old woman of the tower,
now tasting her revenge. "He feigns sickness," said Rich-
ard, "to gain time" ; and Philip sent word that Henry must
at any cost meet him the next day, July 4, and hear the
terms of peace.

Henry's followers wished him to ignore the order, but
he insisted on obeying. "Cost what it may," he said, "I will
grant whatever they ask to get them to depart. But this
I tell you of a surety: if I can but live, I will heal my
country from war and win my land back again." On the
fourth of July, through the sultry summer heat, he rode to
Colombieres. On one side of the field, fresh and strong
and in bright armor, surrounded by his arrogant lords, with
Richard at his side, was the French king. A papal delegate
and an English bishop, already suitors to the new rulers,
were prominent among the French lords. The world had
gathered at Colombieres to see the humiliation of fat old
Henry, the man who for fifty years had ruled the world.

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THE TRAIL OF A BROKEN KING

As he rode across the field, he clung to his horse as though
in a last effort. His huge body was wasted, and the skin
hung round him in folds. Philip, struck with a sudden pity,
called for a cloak to be laid on the field, that Henry might
sit for the conference. Once more Henry burst into a rage.
"I will not sit," he cried; "even as I am, I will hear what
you ask of me and why you cut short my lands."

The heat was intolerable. The sky was liquid brass.
High above the conferring monarchs were insubstantial
fleecy heat-clouds. The poplar-trees along the north end
of the field drooped. The very earth was hot to the touch.
The stench of sweaty men and sweaty horses, of leather and
chain-armor, was thick in the air. Hot bitter dust filled
the nostrils of the men.

Philip read his demands. Of a sudden there was a peal
of thunder from the inscrutable sky. The horses reared,
and the monarchs, hearing the voice of God, fell apart.
They spurred their horses together again to continue the
parley, and again there was thunder, more terrible and more
awful than before. And there were no clouds in the sky,
and there was no rain in the air, and there was no wind
from the north, only the two monarchs in the center of the
field, and the proud scornful army on the one side, and the
small handful of men on the other; and one of the kings
was sick unto death ; and an impotent God spoke from a sky
of brass ! Henry reeled on his horse, and his friends rushed
forward to prevent him from falling. He made his sub-
mission. As he turned to ride away he passed close by
Richard his son, and he whispered in a hoarse voice, "May
God not let me die until I have worthily avenged myself

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

on thee !'* Richard thought it was a merry jest and told
it to his companions at the French court.

Henry rode back to Chinon. Never a town in the world
can be lovelier than the town of Chinon. In the center
is a small square, crowded to overflowing with plane-trees
so that in the hottest afternoon the place is cool and dusky
and silent save for the eternal rustling of the leaves. An
occasional wedding party crosses the square to the church
at the west of the town, and the dress of the bride is white
against the black evening-suit of the groom. A cart rattles
up the cobbled stones. A bell tolls, and a funeral crosses
to the church at the east. "Oest la mort" sighs the gargon
on the hotel. But now that the wedding party has reached
the church at the far end of the village, the bells ring out :
tf Cest la vie! Cest la vie." Henry loved the people of
Le Mans, but he loved better the chateau at Chinon which
he had enlarged and rebuilt according to his own plans.

A deputation of monks from Canterbury with a new list
of demands was awaiting Henry's arrival at Chinon. They
forced their way through swords to the king's bed. They
trusted that "in thy afflictions thou mayest pity the afflic-
tions of the church." They forced their way into his pres-
ence. "The convent of Canterbury salutes you as their
lord. . . ." But Henry interrupted: "Their lord have
I been and am still and will be yet, small thanks to you,
ye evil traitors. Now go ye out. I will speak with my
faithful servants."

As the monks filed out, one of them stopped and laid
his curse on the king, who trembled and grew pale at the
terrible words: "The omnipotent God, of his ineffable

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mercy, and for the merits of the blessed martyr Thomas,
if his life and passion have been well pleasing to Him, will
shortly do us justice on thy body." Geoffrey the Bastard
sat at the king's head and drove away the flies that were
collecting on his shrunken face.

The messenger returned from Philip with a list of those
who had conspired against the king, to whom the king had
promised forgiveness. The king commanded that the list
be read. It was handed to Geoffrey. Geoffrey cried: "Sire,
may Jesus Christ help me ! The first name which is written
here is the name of Count John your son!"

The king sat up in his bed. "Is it true," he said, "that
John, my very heart, whom I have loved beyond all my
sons, and for whose gain I have brought upon me all this
misery, has forsaken me?" Then he turned his face to
the wall. "Now hast thou said enough. Let the rest
go as it will. I care no more for myself nor for the world."
He grew delirious. In his delirium, his invincible spirit
broke out in passionate denunciations. He cursed the day
he was born. He cursed his sons and the God that made
them and the wife that bore them; he cursed the blessed
sunshine and the birds and all the creatures that lived or
breathed or swam. "Shame," he muttered. "Shame on a
conquered king!"

He died.

On his feet were put golden shoes with golden spurs, on
his finger a ring of gold, and in his hand a golden scepter,
and on his head a golden crown. He was carried to Fonte-
vrault by the little road that follows the river Vienne as
far as La Rocherau woods it is a few yards to the east of

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the present highway where It turns west and becomes a
country path shaded by huge trees and leads to an ancient
chateau now used as a farm-house. The farmer is very
friendly and will give you a glass of his own wine, which,
if you take the trail in June, you will find welcome. It is

Cool'd a long age in the deep delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!

It is full of the warm south, and beaded bubbles rise to the
brim. From the farm of the chateau, the trail turns north
and winds back and forth and in and out and around,,
skirting this wall and that field until it reaches Fonte-
vrault itself. When they carried Henry along this trail
there were monks chanting and knights in armor; the peas-
ants in the fields no doubt stopped their work to bow their
heads as the procession passed, and irreverent boys ran
along ahead and followed behind.

Richard hurried to Fontevrault from Tours, where he
had been celebrating his victories. When the king's body
was carried into the chapel, it was found shorn of its golden
ornaments; and when Richard demanded them back, the
treasurer as a special favor sent a ring of little value and
an old scepter. As a crown, Henry wore the gold fringe
torn from a prostitute's petticoat, and as a robe, the petti-
coat itself.

Richard prayed before the altar, and as he prayed blood
spurted from the mouth and nose of his dead father. It
was wiped away, and again he prayed, and again the mir-
acle was wrought. Richard shuddered and ran from the
abbey.

[206]

Chapter IX
The Trail of a Desperate Lover

BLAYE TO TOULOUSE

Toulouse

Chapter IX

THE trail of Jaufre Rudel, who died for love of the in-
comparably beautiful lady whom he had never seen, leads
into the garden of Gascony. The swift trail his romance
made through the minds of his contemporaries and suc-
cessors leads into the aromatic garden of romantic love.
One may go into the garden of Gascony by getting on a
boat at New York and getting off at Bordeaux, and if one
does so, one will pass within a few feet of Jaufre's birth-
place, the city of Blaye. To get into the garden of ro-
mantic love, however, is another matter. It is now thought
to be a dangerous garden, in which grow complexes of va-
rious complexions ; and Dr. Freud, the great gardner, swears
that it is haunted by the ghosts of our mothers and that the
sweet maidens we had thought to find are shape-shifting
creatures, born in the caverns of our subconscious.

The Middle Ages had no fear of romantic love, and the
twelfth century thought it quite a novelty and the latest
thing in emotions. The young exquisites about the court
of Gerard II, Jaufre's brother and the reigning prince of
Blaye, those about the courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine and

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Raymond V of Toulouse, exhibited this passion with as
much pride as the gilded youth of to-day parade a passion
for airplaning or surf -bathing. Now exercise is supposed
to be the cure of all human ills; once love was the universal
healer. In those days young men were advised to fall in
love with as much seriousness as they are now advised to
fall out of it. Young ladies in the remoter chateaux looked
forward with longing to the day when, securely married,
they might take a lover in much the same way as our grand-
mothers anticipated the day when they might take a hus-
band or as our daughters long for the triumph of their
first divorce. Love and by that was meant secret and
romantic love for a mistress who was already married, love
which would bring loss of appetite, paleness and a flutter-
ing of the heart, a delicious trembling up and down the
spine, a fear of I know not, what, a nameless hope, love
which delighted in secret words, in rendezvous in moonlit
gardens was a new invention of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, which also produced Gothic architecture, the
modern state, the romantic novel, lyric poetry, modern
commerce a the Crusades, self-government, flush-toilets in
the south of France, the woman movement, and other
trifles. The beautiful ladies and sweet singers of southern
France of the epoch I describe were most decidedly, fla-
grantly, proudly, and obviously in love, and being in love
was something new in the history of the world.

To write that women before the twelfth century did not
love would be to write nonsense; but there is a difference
between loving and being in love, and if you do not know
that difference there is many a medieval treatise that will

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THE TRAIL OF A DESPERATE LOVER

enlighten you better than I can; and if you have forgotten
that difference, there is many an American high-school girl
well read in the popular novel of our own time who with
perhaps a touch of scorn in her voice will remind you.
Plato thought of love as the yearning for the absolute, the
universal desire of man to make himself whole and com-
plete. He made of love a philosophical doctrine without
much of a body. Ovid and the sophisticated Romans
thought love was essentially a physical passion and a pleas-
ant pastime. The differences between the pagan and the
medieval ideals of love are made manifest by a comparison
of Ovid's "Art of Love," or Longus's idyl, "Daphnis and
Chloe," with the story of Aucassin and Nicolette or the
romantic tradition of the passion of Jaufre Rudel, prince
of Blaye.

Ovid treats love with lightness and charm. He smiles
as he discusses the sorrows of lovers, for love will occupy
the attentions of young men but not the meditations of
wise men. The twelfth century wrote of love as seriously
as Ovid had written lightly. The twelfth-century writers
described love as the source of all life, the generator of all
activity, the purpose and sanctification of all being. Love
became a religion, and ultimately religion became love.
Poets expressed their emotions to the Virgin Mary in the
same terms they had used in writing to their mistresses,
and love for a woman became love of Woman, and trou-
badourism decayed, and the thirteenth century came into
existence, with Thomas Aquinas its philosopher, and Dante,
guided by Beatrice, its interpreter.

I have been unable to determine how the difference be-

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

tween loving and being in love was discovered, nor can I
say whether the new woman (now nine hundred years old)
or the troubadours were most responsible in establishing
the cult of love. Both the new woman and the troubadour
had something to do with it. They seem to have been in
alliance, and, having discovered something good, they seem
to have made the best of it. To understand this cult, which
has some importance even to-day when its devotees meet by
the millions in darkened rooms to watch with eager eyes
the shadows of men and women pursuing each other on a
silver screen, a brief examination of both the woman's
movement and troubadourism is necessary.

Marriage seven hundred years ago was pungently de-
scribed by one of its victims, a queen and a charming lady,
as una podrida^ which may be translated briefly as "a
mess/' Youngsters were frequently betrothed before they
were born and were married before they were quite dry be-
hind the ears. Under these conditions, husbands and wives
might have the respect and affection for each other that
brothers and sisters are supposed to have; but a wife who
had seen her husband spanked by a governess could not
easily regard him as a great hero. The object of these
marriages was property. It was easier to win the estates
of a neighbor by paying a priest to pronounce a few words
at the altar than to take the estates by siege or war, which
were frequently dull and sometimes dangerous. But the
wife in whose gift the estate lay was not the entirely sup*

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pliant creature of the legend of Griselda. If the story of
the patient Griselda was told at all in the twelfth century,
it must have been regarded by the women as a merry bur-
lesque. The wife of the twelfth century always had rela-
tives (in this she was not distinguished from the wife of
to-day) ; but the mother who could call in a host of armed
sons to avenge slights, real or fancied, done to her daughter
was perhaps more to be feared than the mother-in-law of
to-day who must be content to call down hosts of angels to
be her witness.

The marital relations of the twelfth century were very
different from marital relations in the Dark Ages, when
marriage by robbery was not infrequent. If the twelfth-
century husband had just cause a bad temper, for example,
indigestion or something of the kind he might without fear
of interruption spank his wife and send her to bed without
any supper. If the cause were really just, the relatives-
in-law would probably say nothing. If he had no cause
and this occurred more frequently than the historians who
delight in showing the differences between the twelfth and
the twentieth centuries like to admit the husband was
called to account for his actions. If he mistreated his wife
he might find a new war on his hands. If his wife had a
clever poet as her ami, he would be held up to ridicule as a
boor, a ridicule which, in the twelfth century, was as much
more terrible than it is now, as personal dignity, which
was the source of a warrior's power over his followers, was
more essential to a civilization of warriors than it is to
a nation of shopkeepers.

Moreover the south of France had been the seat of Euro-

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

pean civilization ever since the youth and beauty of Rome
began spending its winters on the western Riviera and
brought into that country the civilized vices. In those
days, no fashion was so new, no sophistication so subtle,
no perversion so perverse, that it had not been tried first by
the gentry of that country. That civilization had not
been exterminated entirely during the winter of the Dark
Ages, and it flowered anew in the springtide of the twelfth
century. From here it spread eastward to Florence and
Dante and northward to London and Chaucer. Civiliza-
tion means idleness, and idleness means women, and women
mean love. If the women are sophisticated and intelligent
they make use of their natural talents and their economic
position to make love amusing. If the women are dull,
love becomes lust; if they are brilliant, it becomes lustrous
with a thousand implications and subtleties.

The poets of the south of France were gentlemen of
leisure; the women, the products of a long tradition of
civilized living, were intelligent and held an economic
position more firm than their ancestors in preceding cen-
turies. When, as has happened occasionally in the long
centuries which bridge the gulf between them and us, ado-
lescent girls realized that they did not love their husbands,
or, loving them, were not in love with them, the poets came
to their assistance. As a result of poetic collaboration, a
theory of romantic love was evolved. The disorder and
social anarchy of medieval marriage was put into order and
law by a theory and code of rules which constituted the
theory and code of romantic love.

Troubadourism began with William of Aquitaine, Elea-

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THE TRAIL OF A DESPERATE LOVER

nor's grandfather, who regarded love as a physical passion
which was, in its way, pleasant. He was a mighty lover and
honored some of the objects of his devotion by writing
poems to them in the manner of the poems sung by wander-
ing minstrels and professional entertainers. For him love
was essentially a physical passion. The more love there
was in the world, the better was William of Aquitaine sat-
isfied. At one time while quarreling with the church he
threatened to found a convent of prostitutes. The most
beautiful and efficient was to be the "sister superior." In
his songs the doctrine of love is not elaborated. The begin-
nings of it are there, but very faint. His songs are better
than the songs of the professional entertainers because his
mind happened to be better and his talents were superior.
Moreover he was a powerful prince, and whatever he did
was, therefore, memorable.

The second stage is the stage represented by Bernard de
Ventadour. Bernard regarded love as realistically as Wil-
liam of Aquitaine, but he refined his realism. Love was
the most pleasant and delightful passion that he had ex-
perienced. For him, to live was to be in love. He said:

Life without love what is it worth*?
The man whose heart is never fed
With love's sweet food indeed is dead;
He's but a curnbrance on the earth.

Lord, may Thy hatred never move
So fierce against me that I may
Survive a month, a single day,
And have no heart to sing for love.

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

This stage of troubadourism is presented again, but with
a slight difference, by Jauf re Rudel, prince of Blaye, whose
story you will read in a moment. In the third stage, love
which had been an absorbing passion became a religion,
and the Virgin Mary became the prototype of all woman-
hood. In her was found the beauty of all women, woman's
gay laughter, her dark mystery, her enticement. As the
mother of the loving God, she herself became God. I sup-
pose that at this time women were still beautiful and men
still loved ardently; but the civilization which produced
the women and the men was being rent by a great and
terrible civil war. The castles were being razed. A wave
of protestantism swept the country, and those who were
not destroyed by it transferred their love to an eternal
mistress.

The civilized south had achieved tolerance, which is one
of the virtues of civilization. The lords of that country-
said that if a man wanted to be a heretic, that was his busi-
ness, and since he would burn for it hereafter, there was
no good reason to put him on the bonfire now . . . and
these burning questions of religion were, after all, not quite
so important as some people made out. It was more impor-
tant to be a gentleman than to be a Christian. Violence
was bad form. One day the lords found themselves in op-
position to the church. They were called upon either to
betray their friends and save their souls or to save their
honor and protect their friends. Thus because most of
them were not interested in religious matters, they were
surprised to find the world attached greater importance to
these things than they had thought possible. Although

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THE TRAIL OF A DESPERATE LOVER

there were many backsliders, many of them fought and
died like gentlemen for friends with whose opinions they
were not in agreement.

3

Jaufre Rudel, a prince of Blaye, said that he loved the
princess of Tripoli, that she was beautiful beyond compare,
and that he loved her the more dearly because he had never
seen her. His chronicler says that when the time appointed
by the fates was ripe, Jaufre set out to seek his mistress
and that he perished within a few hours after his arrival
at Tripoli. Bald-headed scholars, whose hearts are little
artichokes and whose minds are as keen as razors, bend
over the poetry of Jaufre and the account of his chronicler
and say that both the chronicler and the prince were liars.
They say that Jaufre, writing of his mistress, was thinking
of the church militant, and whoever heard of a man loving
a woman he had never seen, and conclude that he did not
know what he was talking about. His chronicler, they say,
was a sentimental idiot, and people do not die for love,
and there is no mausoleum where the chronicler says there
ought to be, and if Jaufre did love the princess of Tripoli
as he said he did, which princess of Tripoli did he love?
Since I am unable to answer either their questions or their
arguments, I present them to you for what they are worth.
On the one side was the statement of Jaufre, who was the
prince of a reigning house and an honorable gentleman ; and
against this are the statements of the modern scholars.
'Jaufre said, "Far away is the chateau, and in the tower she
sleeps peacefully beside her husband" ; he says, "My malady

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

is dangerous, but It can be cured by one little kiss from the
lips of my lady far away," and the scholars answer that he
is talking about the church militant. You have his word
against theirs. You may choose.

The account of Jaufre's chronicler contains a few de-
tails. It explains that Jaufre, prince of Blaye, became ac-
quainted with Geoffrey of Anjou, one of the brothers of
Richard the Lion-Heart and the son of Henry II of Eng-
land and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Geoffrey was very fond
of the poet and kept him in his service. Jaufre heard of
the lady of Tripoli from pilgrims returning from the Holy
Land and fell in love, and in praise of her composed "many
beautiful songs." Love must have entered Jaufre's heart
through his ears, which is a very important fact to remem-
ber. There are three ways in which love can gain possession
of a person: through the ears by hearing praise, through
the eyes by seeing beauty, or through the mind by medita-
ting on virtues.

Being strongly taken by the desire of seeing this lady, he bade
farewell to his patron, Geoffrey, who did all things possible to
dissuade the poet from the journey, took the habit of a pilgrim and
embarked. During the voyage he was seized by a malady so grave
that those of the boat, thinking he was dead, wished to throw him
into the sea. And in this condition, he was brought into the harbor
of Tripoli; and his arrival was made known to the lady, who left
her friends that she might succor the suffering pilgrim. Being come
to the ship she took the poet by the hand, and he, knowing it was
his Lady, incontinent in the face of this sweet and gracious reception,
recovered his spirit and thanked her that she had restored his life
to him and said to her: "Most gracious and illustrious princess, I
am no longer in fear of death now that . . ." But he was unable

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to complete his compliment. His illness grew and augmented, and
he gave up the ghost in the arms of his mistress, who had him
placed in a rich and honorable sepulcher of porphyry and had
engraved upon it in letters of gold several verses in the Arabian
tongue.

Jaufre's fate raised the philosophical question for the
poets Gerard and Peyronet as to whether one loved best a
lady who was present or one who was absent. Other phil-
osophical spirits debated whether love was stronger when it
entered through the eyes or when it entered through the
ears. Both of these problems were connected with the old
problem as to the origin of love, a problem which a poet
as late as W. Shakspere raises in the poem :

Tell me where is fancy bred,

Or in the heart or in the head 4 ?

How begot? How nourished?

Reply, reply.

It is engender'd in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies. . . .

The hero of a story published in a popular American
magazine is made to assert: "I dreamed of you before I
saw you while I was lying wounded in the trenches, and I
came to New York to search for you. . . . " x The young

1 To illustrate the persistence of this tradition, I quote without permis-
sion, the following passage from a story by I. A. R. Wylie in the "Sat-
urday Evening Post" for May 8, 1926 (p. 32, col. 3) :

" * ... I loved you before I had set eyes on you. . . . When I saw
the reproduction of the Vandyke I thought to myself, "When that little
girl grows up I shall marry her or no one."'

" 'But Roger, the little girl grew up and died hundreds of years ago/

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

man on the silver screen refers to his mistress as "My dream
woman!" Whether Jaufre actually did participate in this
amazing adventure, I do not know. His contemporaries
certainly thought that he did and imagined him as I do, a
young man of great charm and some beauty Geoffrey of
Anjou was particular in these matters setting out from
Blaye, a few miles north of Bordeaux on the Golfe Gi-
ronde, crossing Gascony to Toulouse and beyond to Nar-
bonne, where he took ship for the Holy Land and the lady
of his dreams.

4

Jaufre's birthplace, the city of Blaye, is situated on the
cross-roads. The pagan tripper traveling south in search of
war and booty, the Roman legions traveling north on the
same honorable quest, the medieval pilgrim from Nor-
mandy or Anjou who eased both his soul and his body by
a vacation pilgrimage through the pleasant country of Gas-
cony, as well as the medieval merchant traveling from the
supercivilized and sybaritic south north to London, all
passed through the city of Blaye.

The road to the north begins at the base of the hill which
now bears the citadel which once bore the city. It leads

"*So people think. I knew better. Some instinct stronger than reason
sent me in search of her. And when I saw her I knew.'

"'Knew that I loved you?*

"'Knew that you were the man I'd been waiting for all my life. . . *"
etc. The title of the story is "With Their Eyes Open."

These illustrations could be multiplied a thousandfold from all the
popular magazines of western Europe. They are embroidered by various
kinds of psychological analysis, but they grow from the same rich soil
of human vanity and titillate the same emotions as the story of Jaufre
RudeL

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THE TRAIL OF A DESPERATE LOVER

north through Saintes, Poitiers, Tours, and Paris or Nor-
mandy. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Bernard de Ventadour,
Charlemagne, Pepin, Roland, William of Aquitaine to
name only a few of the thousands of illustrious people who
followed this trail all passed Blaye and stopped there for
a night or two. For the travelers from the north, Blaye
marked one step in a long journey. Here they could take
ship and float to the city of Bordeaux. Thus they could
avoid crossing three rivers which were troublesome and ex-
pensive. From Bordeaux they could turn east to Rome or
the Holy Land or south into Spain.

If, therefore, you had a new scheme of salvation to dis-
pose of, or if you had made the acquaintance of a new or
potent god or saint, you would take up your abode in this
pleasant city. From here your converts would carry the
glad tidings into all parts of the civilized world. Thus
Romans, Saracens, Franks, Aquitanians, and Christians
put their marks on Blaye and built their shrines. The tra-
ditions of the potencies of these various saints and gods
grew with the passing years and with the enthusiastic ex-
aggerations of the tourists. Although the name and history
of a god might be forgotten through the centuries, the tale
of his prowess remained and was attributed to a new saint,
and Blaye became a city of travelers' traditions, than which
there is nothing historically less accurate or philosophically
more true.

St. Martin, of Tours and elsewhere, sent St. Romain
to Blaye to convert the city. After building himself a
hermitage at the bottom of the hill, says his chronicler, the
blessed saint preached with so much fire and performed mir-

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

acles with so much brilliance that he baptized the inhabi-
tants and build a church on the foundations of a temple
to the false God. The church was at the end of the road,
a few yards from the river, and an ideal situation for the
development of a religious cult. St. Romain preserves
travelers from danger and sailors from shipwreck, an ideal
recommendation for a saint in a travelers' city located on
the shores of a broad and stormy gulf. "Never a sailor/'
says the biographer, "has been drowned if he gazes ardently
at the basilica of the saint." "Assure yourself a safe and
pleasant passage," say the biographer's modern brethren,
"by buying . . . " It amounts to much the same thing.
But the tomb of the saint was important for the dead as
well as living. To be buried in soil blessed by the priest
and sanctified by the bones of a saint was, it was thought,
additional insurance for heaven. Roland and Olivier were
buried in the Church of St.-Romain and added luster to
their own virtue and fame to the city, Roland and Olivier,
the followers of Charlemagne who founded France, were
as great heroes to the Frenchman of that time as Washing-
ton is to us or Arthur is to the English. They had taken
an army south into the Pyrenees they followed the old
trail, via Blaye and Bordeaux and joined the army of
Charlemagne and defeated the Saracens at Roncesvalles.
On their return, they were caught in a narrow pass, and
their rear-guard was completely destroyed. It was a great
fight and is well described in that popular novel of the
twelfth century, the * 'Chanson de Roland." The bodies
of Roland and Olivier were brought to Blaye for burial,
and the medieval tourist could see not only the tombs but

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the sword of Roland, the sword Durendal that had drunk
of the blood of many pagans.

After the death of these heroes, Charlemagne sent word
that Olivier's sister, who was Roland's betrothed, be
brought to Blaye, but that the news of Roland's death be
kept from her. The authors describe in great detail the
premonitions of the lovely virgin and her terrible grief
when Charlemagne himself told her the sad truth. She
begged permission to watch for one night at Roland's tomb.
As she watched, a miracle occurred. Roland, accompanied
by an angel, appeared to her and said :

Sweet sister Aude, do not grieve for me;
Weep not, sweet sister, and shed no tears.
You see me now in God's company. . . .

La Belle Aude called Charlemagne and all his knights and
told them of the miracle. Then she made confession of her
sins, the little sins of a beautiful woman surely God must
have treated them gently and died.

This and the story of Jauf re are the kinds of story that
could be elaborated by the travelers as they put behind
them the long weary leagues. Medieval tourists shared
with the modern commercial traveler a love for stories, and
the longer the story the better; but its length must be
counted in miles, not in words.

5

The gulf of the Gironde is wide, and of an evening when
the tide comes in breasting the strong current, it comes as
a wall of water. On either side of the gulf are low brown

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

hills, very low, very brown, and the sun above is very hot.
Three or four hours from Blaye the gulf becomes the Ga-
ronne River, which makes a broad curve and runs through
the heart of Bordeaux.

The heart of that city is not a medieval heart. It is
brilliant with electric lights and opulent and modern. The
Place des Quinconces with its cafes and trees and lights is a
chastened Paris, and the tourist who loves Paris will find
himself at home there, except that Bordeaux is modern
France, and Paris is cosmopolitan France, which is a dif-
ference marked by a great distinction. Except for the
Cathedral of St.-Andre, which was not quite complete when
Eleanor's marriages were performed there, one will find
scarcely a stone in Bordeaux that had been put in the place
it now occupies when Bordeaux was the medieval metropo-
lis of the southwest, exporting, as it still does, hogshead
upon hogshead of claret to pour down the insatiable Brit-
ish throats.

But Bordeaux, like other cities on the main road, is a
city of traditions. One day Charlemagne came to Bor-
deaux. He had recently failed in a filial attack on the life
of his father; and his father, somewhat irritated by the
son's attentions, had banished the young man from Gaul.
Charlemagne went south into Spain along the route we
have been following and there took service with the lord
of Toledo. He performed many brave deeds, not the
bravest of which was his marriage with the lord's daughter,
whom he had converted from paganism and brought to
Bordeaux. Here he built for her a magnificent castle which
you may still see if you go to the Palais Gallien, but if you

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look at the building with even a cursory glance, you will
note that it was not built by Charlemagne, but that it is
the remains of a Roman amphitheater built some five hun-
dred years before Charlemagne was born.

The Church of St.-Seurin, not far from the Palais, was
built in the eleventh century on the foundations of an older
church, which itself was built on the site of a temple to the
false gods. About the history of St. Seurin there is a scan-
dal, not suggested by the Alices Damour but associated
with these alleys of love which happen to be an ancient
cemetery. St. Seurin had been sent out by the famous St.
Martial whose relics are at Blaye. Seurin had been dele-
gated by Martial to convert the good people of Bordeaux,
whose religious beliefs at that time were in a shocking
state. He went to the old temple of the false gods and
built himself his own church and after many years of good
and pious labor rendered up the ghost. He converted not
only the people of Bordeaux, he converted their dead an-
cestors; and in a short time the graves about the church
became known as the graves of Christian saints. Bordeaux
was beginning to compete with Blaye. Now Blaye had the
graves of Roland and Olivier and Martial; but Bordeaux
had only the doubtful palace of Charlemagne, the grave of
St. Seurin, and the graves of a few doubtful pagan-Christ-
ians. A grave is more important than a palace, for the
grave is the enduring while the palace is only the transitory
home of the body. Bordeaux did its best. The clerics
formed a progressive club and took as their motto, "Wake
up, Bordeaux/* and discovered the graves of several power-
ful Christian martyrs in the Gallo-Roman graveyard about

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their church. But even these were not sufficient. One night
the monks left Bordeaux and by stealth stole the authentic
wand of Roland which Charlemagne had deposited at his
grave in Blaye, and they felt that they were making prog-
less. Their greatest and final achievement, however, was
the discovery and proof by such evidence as the twelfth
century found necessary that Christ in the company of
the chief priests of the region had with His own hands ded-
icated and consecrated the soil of the graveyard which is
now Les Allees Damour. They now felt no fear of com-
petition from Blaye, and satisfied with the results of their
labors they were contented, let us hope, to live a long and
useful life in the chapter-house of the church. The busi-
ness of creating legends and writing novels was in the
Middle Ages a kind of municipal advertising and was, all
things considered, not less veracious although its veracity
was of a different kind than the municipal advertising of
the enlightened twentieth century.

Even in Roman times Bordeaux was a city of wealth and
luxury. A Roman princess who loved sea-bathing ordered
that a road be built to the sea twenty-five miles away. She
laid it out herself, and it ran straight as a string, due west.
The cost was defrayed by one of her courtiers, who is re-
puted to have been handsome, cruel, and wealthy.

At St-Andre Eleanor of Aquitaine, who at fifteen had
lived more intensely than many a modern woman has lived
at fifty, bowed her head while the bishop read her marriage
service and her proud sister Petronilla began the seduction
of the princely Raoul. Although there were always poets
at Bordeaux when the Aquitanian princes lived there, Bor-
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deaux is not the chosen home of poets. For many hundreds
of years, Bordeaux was an English city, and the Bordelais
and the English are alike in their love of commerce and their
skill in bargaining. The bourgeois, though he was fre-
quently a mimic of the vices of his master, did not foster
poetry because he did not need poets. His success depended
on the size of his bank-account rather than on the size of his
army, which would be directly proportionate to his fame.
His wife was a thrifty housekeeper and not a high-born
lady. If she wanted amusement she could visit her friends
in the next street, attend her clubs, and gossip. It was
not necessary for her to worship at the shrine of love, and
when she was so indiscreet as to be overcome by love of a
poet and the poets were always worrying her her hus-
band was so far from complaisant that he hit the unhappy
lover over the head so hard that he never stopped running
until he reached the kingdom of Aragon.

The Bordelais have forgotten many things in the last
seven hundred years, but they have not forgotten how to
buy and sell claret, and the sweep of the great river into
the city is still as magnificent as it was a thousand years
ago. The quays are broad boulevards lined by huge old
houses of the eighteenth century, spanned by magnificent
bridges, and on them there is eternal activity and the smell
of boxes and claret and dried prunes. From the cathedral
tower one looks out on the low hills of the northeast, shim-
mering with heat and rich color, covered with vineyards
which are absorbing the southern sun to produce a claret
much better than many people will admit claret can pos-
sibly be.

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The trail which Jaufre and his friends followed from
Bordeaux the inhospitable to Toulouse, where all poets
were made welcome, is the old Roman road. It is a broad
road, and in the summer it is thick with the heavy white
dust of the south. At times there is the flash of a canal at
this side or the other, and that is all as it should be, for a
road without a bit of water gleaming through the trees is
as dull as a cocktail without ice. In the morning and the
evening the air is clear and warm, and sometimes the trees
which line the road fall away to disclose the cliffs of the
\alley rising sheer in the distance, crowned by a church or a
chateau. Sometimes a cold wind from the Pyrenees blows
down through the happy fields and transforms the road to
a cloud of dust. Then one continues one's conversation in
the inner room of the cafe, where with one or two brave
mustachioed Gascons, the descendants no doubt of D'Ar-
tagnan himself, one listens to the chronicle of country
life, the state of the vineyards, and, "Parbleu^ those United
States ! Why do they want poor little France to pay them
so much money?" One realizes that these Gascons have a
sense of humor peculiar to themselves.

The Roman road leaves Bordeaux not far from the Gare
de St.-Jean saints and railway-stations in France are for
some obscure reason, clear no doubt to the logical Latin in-
telligence, frequently associated and follows the river
south for a considerable distance until it chooses to bend
its course southeasterly. This road is supposed to have re-
mained on the left bank of the Garonne, which runs with

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a wide and gracious curve from Toulouse to Bordeaux.
The course of the railway approximates the course of the
road as far as Langon, where the railway crosses the river
to St.-Macaire. The Roman road is supposed not to have
crossed the river but to have continued to Agen, where it
turned south to Auch and thence east to Toulouse. Its
course is fairly clear as far as Langon, but between Langon
and Damazan it has many vicissitudes. All that I can as-
sure you of on this part of the trail is that hundreds of
poets and saints and warriors did travel from Bordeaux
to Toulouse and that they must have traveled on one side
of the river or the other. The country is full of chateaux.
Some of them are mentioned in the songs of the poets, more
of them are not mentioned, and almost all of them are sadly
dilapidated. The troubadour was not a consistent traveler.
He was, in every sense of the word, a drifter. He would
ride out of his way many a mile for a good dinner, and all
I can hope to do in the case of Jaufre and his friends is
to indicate the general direction of the drift and a few
of the towns they may have seen and stopped in.

The road leads a few kilometers west of the river
through the pleasant towns of La Brede, Virelade, and
Podensac, which have all at one time or another given
heroes to France, and on to Langon, where the modern
road crosses to St.-Macaire on a hill with its double row of
walls and towers and in its narrow and dirty streets many
an old house. The old town sleeps quietly, almost deserted
on its hill. At one time the crush and activity of human-
ity was so great that it was a wonder the walls could
hold it all, but to-day a sleepy cat suns itself in the

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place and a donkey blocks the small street so that one
cannot pass.

A day's journey by foot beyond St.-Macaire is Mar-
mande, a "new town" built by Richard the Lion-Heart
when he came to possession of this country in the twelfth
century, a very new town when Jaufre Rudel stopped
there for the night. The significance of these new towns
in the social history of the time is enormous. All of the
south of France from the Atlantic to the Rhone was under-
going the remarkable and pleasant experience of being
rich. It had always been prosperous, but the prosperity
which came over it in the twelfth century was unlike any
prosperity it had known in the past. The country had
been in the hands of the English for only a few decades.
Bordeaux was an excellent harbor, and the peasants of all
that thick neck of land which connects Spain with the con-
tinent floated their wine, olives, fruits, and wool down
the broad backs of the Garonne and the Dordogne to Bor-
deaux, where they were transhipped to London. Com-
merce of this kind and on this scale was new in Europe, and
the peasants were reaping a golden harvest. Old towns
were repaired, and new towns were built "according to
modern scientific plans," with broader, straighter streets
and a "logical arrangement" of municipal buildings.
Around every mill, every farm, every village, were built
high thick walls to keep thieves and robbers out and happi-
ness in.

Agen is a hard day's walk beyond Marmande, and Agen
cares little about the world, and the world cares little about
Agen. These burly Gascons with their bristling mustaches,

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their round oaths, and their epic blasphemies are in them-
selves a world for themselves. The antiquarians have dug
around Agen and discovered that the hill behind the city
was a pre-Roman fort ("SacreJ" says the Gascon; "what
do you think of those Romans building a fort behind our
city?"); they have pried stones loose in the churches and
have scraped the walls and have published many learned
volumes. And all the time, the Gascon peasant sits in his
cafe and curses genially the small things in his world which
are the big things in ours, and speaks reverently of the big
things in his world which are the small things in ours.

The town sat restlessly on its hill. It shifted from one
side to the other and from the hill to the valley. Each time
the town shifted, a new and better chateau was built, and
these are all excellently described in the learned volumes
which you may read if you have a mind to. Agen was the
center of both Roman and medieval roads, and up and down
these roads with his black mouth and golden words and
loving heart ran St. Bernard, and tried to convert the here-
tics who even in his days were infesting the city, and tried
in vain to save them from eternal damnation.

Beyond Agen is Moissac, and beyond that is Montauban,
and further still is Toulouse. The oldest road turned south
at Agen to Lectoure and Auch and thence east to Toulouse,
but the medieval road probably followed the river and the
chateaux.

7

The cities of the south differ from cities of the north.
Commerce and industry have ebbed away from the south.

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

and as they have ebbed they have left the cities much as
they were in the days of their prime. In the north one can
begin with the bones of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance
and find them covered with the flesh and fat of modern
industrialism. But in southern cities, where flesh and fat
exist, it is the flesh and fat of another period. Toulouse
and Montpellier are largely Renaissance. Carcassonne and
Aigues-Mortes are essentially thirteenth and twelfth cen-
tury and are all of a piece. There is hardly a stone in either
of these cities that spoils the style, the unity of conception
and feeling. Industrialism has passed over them like a
cloud. Not even its shadow remains.

Although Toulouse as we find it now is late Renaissance,
it was, when Jaufre and his friends lived there, wholly
medieval and perhaps the most modern and advanced city
in France. Its lords were not only impeccable in their vices,
hypercivilized in their taste for women, and assiduous in
their cultivation of poets; they were in their ways distin-
guished political economists, and their citizens enjoyed an
independence and freedom which made them envied by the
citizens of Carcassonne and Agen. In that great struggle
between lord and merchant which preceded our struggle
between merchant and laborer, the lords of Toulouse
granted privileges which marked them as enlightened if not
incendiary revolutionists. When the Albigensian heresy
burst into flame, or rather when the church representing
the interests of the conservative lords blew it into flame,
the tolerance of the lords of Toulouse brought down
upon them the wrath of organized society and the "dis-
dain of all right-thinking men." In the struggle which

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ensued, the civilization of the south was almost entirely
destroyed.

Toulouse claims to be the oldest city in France and pre-
tends to be modern; but in its modernity there is a slat-
ternly youthfulness. Its dinginess has not aged sufficiently
to become mellow, and the Renaissance buildings that give
the town its character are the worst of their kind, which,
as any traveler knows, can be very bad indeed. To this
Renaissance body, Toulouse has added a bright and for-
ward-looking twentieth-century spirit which makes Ker
somewhat incongruous.

Of the two-hundred-odd troubadours whose names have
been preserved, about a score are connected in some way
with the history of Toulouse. Many were born there, and
others retired to Toulouse or the pleasant monasteries and
courts in the neighborhood to enjoy a mellow old age. The
Raymonds of Toulouse, despite their follies and frequent
immorality, much of which, by the way, is attributable to
the malice of their enemies, were gallant gentlemen and
made full use of the troubadours in the business of love
and politics. The counts of Toulouse were in constant war
with the kings of Aragon on the east coast of Spain, and
between Toulouse and Barcelona traveled, in both direc-
tions, constant streams of poets. A troubadour who dis-
graced himself at the court of Toulouse was welcomed at
the court of Aragon, and when he disgraced himself at Ara-
gon he was welcomed back to Toulouse. Peter of Aragon
and Raymond of Toulouse outdid each other in bidding
for the services of the best, the most fashionable, and the
most skilful of poets.

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Hugues Brunet, a gentleman of Rodez, which is a
pleasant city across the mountains north of Carcassonne,
was an excellent poet, but because he had no voice could
not sing his own songs and was constrained to give them
to another. He was so well liked that the count of Tou-
louse and the king of Aragon both offered him many presents
if he would enter their service, but he refused, being en-
amoured of a gentle lady who would have none of him.
Disappointed here, he turned his attentions to the wife of
his master, the count of Rodez, where he was more suc-
cessful. "The count perceiving this was constrained to
make no sign as if he knew because he took great pleasure
in poesie and because he was well assured of the chastity
of his wife."

Of Remond de Mirevaux there is much to be said. Per-
haps he was too handsome and too talented to be lucky.
Perhaps his artistic gifts were greater than his discretion.
Perhaps his misfortunes were due to an evil thing he did in
his youth. At his father's death, Remond inherited a bare
fourth of the chateau of Mirevaux, whose picturesque ruins
are a few miles north of Carcassonne. "He knew more
about love and courtesy and the other sciences that were
fashionable at his time than any other who has written;
he was loved by Count Raymond of Toulouse, and the inti-
macy between these two became so great that they called
each other by the secret names of lovers. The count gave
him arms and horses and everything that he needed. He
was also loved by Pedro, king of Aragon, and the viscount
of Beziers and Carcassonne, and by Remond de Saissac, and
all the lords and gentlemen of the country. There was not

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a lady or demoyselle in any castle of the Provence but
wanted Remond in her company. They all desired to see
him, to enjoy him, to hear him sing, and to have his friend-
ship and familiarity because he knew very well how to
honor them and pass the time sweetly with them, and no
lady of that country thought she had succeeded socially
unless she had at least one song dedicated to her by Rernond
de Mirevaux. But there was never a scandal about them
or about him . . . and he never received a single lover's
favor from them, and they deceived him shamefully one
and all/' This account errs on two points, as you shall see.
Once Remond de Mirevaux, Peire Vidal, Hugues Brunet,
and other troubadours found themselves at the court of
Loba de Perrautier. (She was, I think, then holding court
at the chateau of her uncle at Cabanet, but that is unim-
portant.) They were all dying for love of her, and she kept
them all at a distance. She would pretend not to under-
stand that the songs sung in the great hall were intended
for her; and when an aubade was chanted at dawn in the
garden, she would send one of her ladies in waiting to the
window, and the lady would smile and blush and bow and
pretend that the serenade was intended for her instead of
for her mistress. Below in the garden the poets would
gnash their teeth and rattle their swords and call upon the
"Putaine de Dieu." She pretended that she preferred
Remond de Mirevaux to her other suitors, for she realized
"that he was a good poet and would make her famous among
all the noble lords of the country, but all the time she was
deceiving him cruelly for she was receiving secret favors
from a knight" ; and while the others were breaking their

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

hearts for her in the garden she was receiving into her room
another whom she seemed to treat with indifference when
others were near. Love, according to the romantic code,
should be kept secret, but there was a limit to secrecy.
Loba's method of procedure made the best poets in France
look like fools and feel worse.

Nothing in the Middle Ages could be kept secret for
long, and one day the entire court knew of her deception,
and the entire court was furious. Remond's friends, who
were also his rivals, turned upon the lady and insisted that
she had acted dishonorably and wrote bitter satires against
her and her lover, who, for shame, was forced to leave the
court. Remond alone pretended to be faithful. "My love
for you is so great," he said, "that I can endure dishonor
itself for your sake. The evil speakers slander you. I be-
lieve no word of it." When no one in the court would sing
to her any more, Remond sang to her; and when none would
walk with her in the shady gardens, Remond was at her
side. This faithfulness was at last rewarded by true love,
of which she made no secret; and while all the court was
marveling that Remond should have succeeded at last,
he treated her shamefully and in a manner that laid her
open to worse scorn than she had received hitherto. He
left her and paid open and obvious court to an obscure
woman in Narbonne and wrote a poem explaining the rea-
sons for his revenge.

All of Remond's great passions turned to dust and
ashes, and his cleverness was never so great as the cleverness
of his mistresses. One time he was paying court to Ada-
lasia, the wife of Bernard de Boisseson of the Chateau

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THE TRAIL OF A DESPERATE LOVER

Lomber. She did all in her power to inspire him to write
for her better songs than he had written for the others. She
would display her knowledge of the art of poetry by ridicul-
ing the poems of Remond's rivals. "Am I not beautiful?"
she would ask as they walked up and down the garden.
Remond would assent. "My ankle," she would say medi-
tatively, "you think it is not well turned." And she would
laise her skirts ever so little so that the smallest of feet and
the most dainty of ankles would appear for a moment.
Remond would protest that by ... "My figure," she
would say and run down a small path to pick a blossom.
"My figure is ugly." Remond insisted that none could
withstand her and that Peter of Aragon himself, who was
taking all the chateaux of the country, would have to ac-
knowledge himself her vassal. She said it was a pretty com-
pliment, and she said he should make a poem about it,
and she said he should send it to Peter in the form of a chal-
lenge, for she thought Peter would be amused. He did
and announced in his poem further that if Peter came,
he would "be treated according to his degree." Peter came
and was treated according to his degree, and the next morn-
ing the entire court knew that Remond had been deceived
again and that he had been used only as a decoy for the
Aragonais.

Remond married Guidairenga, a poetess, in the way of
business, and she too was unfaithful to him. He paid court
to Ermengarde de Castras and wanted to divorce his wife
and marry her. She consented. While he was at his castle
arranging the details he gave the castle as a free gift to
Guidairenga and her lover his affianced bride married

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Olivier de Saissac. In despair and humiliation Remond
retired to a monastery, from which he emerged just before
the Albigensian crusade.

In all of these passionate comings and goings, Remond
and his friends stopped at Toulouse. Sometimes they would
spend a season or two at the court of the powerful Count
Raymond, or at the court of his rival ; sometimes they would
make up week-end parties in the numerous castles of Ray-
mond's powerful vassals.

Peire Remond lo Proux of Toulouse is famous among
poets for having been faithful to one lady for an entire
year, and he wrote a poem lamenting that love would not
let him be faithless to her who treated him with unprece-
dented cruelty. He mentioned the tragedy of Jauf re Rudel
in his great history of tragic love, which has since been lost.
William of Aquitaine, the first troubadour, held the city
of Toulouse for two years until Raymond came back from
the Crusades and drove him out. Bernard de Ventadour,
Bertrand de Born, Guilhem de Cabestanh, Gaucelm Fai-
dit, Folquet de Marseille, and many others lived in and
about Toulouse and made the thick nights musical with
their tinkling songs.

The tradition of troubadourism still flickers in Toulouse,
a feeble flame, in the Consistoire du Gai Savoir, an organi-
zation founded in the fourteenth century when trouba-
dourism had died completely. The founders of the society,
who were "learned, subtle, and discreet," wished to serve
"that excellent and virtuous Lady Science so that she might
furnish and give them the gay art of writing in verse and
teach them to make good poems so that they might speak

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and recite good and remarkable words ... in praise and
honor of God, our Lord, and His glorious Mother and all
the saints of Paradise for the instruction of the ignorant,
for the restraint of foolish lovers, and in order that all
might live in joy and happiness and dispel boredom and
sadness, the enemies of the Gay Science." They mastered
the technique of troubadourism without the troubadour's
felicity. They mastered the body of poetry, but missed
its soul ; for that soul had fled more than a hundred years
earlier when the great families were destroyed by the plague
of puritanism which descended on the south of France.

Modern Toulouse is Renaissance and nineteenth-cen-
tury, all but the cathedral church of St.-Saturnin. In the
early morning or evening it is a splash of rose against dark
violet mists. Its many-storied bell-tower is an intransigent
challenge to the passing of time and the mutation of fash-
ions, whatever those fashions may be.

[239]

Chapter X
The Trail of a Vagabond Poet /

LES BAUX TO AIGUES MORTES

Chapter X
i

THE fashion of troubadourism lasted for two hundred
years. It began between 1050 and 1100 in Aquitaine in
the west of France. It flourished between 1100 and 1200
"throughout the south of France. Between 1200 and 1300
it died in eastern France and western Italy and dying trans-
formed itself into the world poetry of Dante and Petrarch.
Between Aquitaine and Avignon, through the southernmost
part of France, cut a great highway, the Via Tolosa of the
chronicles and the itineraries. It united the great congre-
gations of poets, the western with the eastern. It was a
garden path, and on each side of it blossomed in yellow stone
and ivied walls amid black cypress and silver olive-trees
the chateaux of the lords and ladies who were patrons to
the poets, and the chateaux of the poets themselves. It was
a highway of intrigue and passion and romance. The poets
in their gay clothes, the gifts of complacent patrons, pranced
back and forth beneath the ineffable sky, followed by a
pretty boy singer or two, meditating new subtleties, new
compliments, and pretty graces.

At the western source of the trail were Bordeaux, Tou-
louse, and Blaye, and thence were other paths, cutting

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into the north, Poitiers, Limoges, Tours. At the eastern
head of the path were a cluster of great cities : Avignon,
Aries, the capital of a kingdom, Tarascon, the home of the
ferocious dragon, and Beaucaire, whence Aucassin and the
lovely Nicolette started out on their wanderings. Of a
spring morning the dew is fresh here, and the flowers of the
field still are so white beside a lady's bare foot that one
cannot distinguish the flowers from the foot or the foot
from the flowers, and the figs, in late summer, cold and
fresh, drop into your mouth. But the chateaux are hidden
behind high walls of black cypress, and if you labor the
dead white trail on a summer evening, they will whisper
to you of secret things.

Directly east of the head of this trail, a few miles after
you cross the Rhone at Beaucaire and Tarascon, perched
on a small range known as the Alpines, is the deserted city
of Les Baux, the sometime capital of all this broad country.
One of the barons of Les Baux was the king of the Provence,
and another was the emperor of Constantinople. The ladies
of Les Baux were married by the emperors of the world
and loved by the poets of the south. Azalai's des Baux was
a great lady and the wife of a baron; but Azala'fs would
have been forgotten, as many another great lady has been
forgotten, were it not for the kiss which Peire Vidal stole
from her lips while she slept, or for the songs which Folquet
of Marseilles made in her honor before he turned to the
more profitable business of killing heretics. Few would
remember Berengaria save for the love which Guilhem de
Cabestanh dedicated to her before he transferred it to the
lovely Tricline, who finally ate his heart.

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

The ruins of Les Baux are on the top of a hill. There
are only two roads to this city, one on the north through
St.-Remy and Tarascon, and one on the south through
Paradou and Aries. For four hundred years there has been
no lord of Les Baux, and the great castles are falling back
into the rocks from which they grew. The small mountains
on which the town is built are of smooth white sandstone.
Centuries of quarrying outside the city have made long deep
tunnels into the sides of the hills. The city still retains
the whiteness of this beautiful stone and, when the sun
comes from the right direction, can be dazzling in its bril-
liance. The windows gape at the summer night, and lizards
and rock-rats rustle the small stones as one sits perched
on a broken arch looking over the valley.

I do not know what the ruins of Les Baux looked like
when Les Baux was a flourishing capital; but the ruins of
Les Baux are square ruins, and in the palaces where the
dead and imperturbable doors gape at the gaping tourists
the windows are pointed and Gothic. When the mistral
blows from the northwest, the city seems to shrink together
and become compact, as though it would present a solid
front to its adversary; but in the midday sun, it sprawls
over the top of the hill, its square stones in slatternly, un-
happy balance against other square stones, its windows
empty.

For five hundred years Les Baux was the center of affairs.
When crusading and poetry were the fashion, Les Baux
cultivated crusaders and poets; when asceticism was the
fashion, it cultivated ascetics. The lords of Les Baux were
sufficiently removed from the old Roman road between

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Marseilles and Lyons that great artery of medieval and
ancient France which transported the infirmities of civili-
zation from Marseilles to Lyons and thence by other great
roads northeast to Coblenz, northwest to Cherbourg, and
west to Tours that they could cultivate their aristocracy,
and with little fear of interruption by the vulgar middle
classes could practise the aristocratic vices with the impec-
cability of kings and the precision of poets. The ladies of
Les Baux were beautiful, and one of them, according to
tradition, was chaste.

The traditions of Les Baux are brilliant. Here trouba-
dourism reached its highest, if not its greatest development.
The poems became so subtle that none but the initiated
could understand them, and the poets prided themselves on
this subtlety, for, said they, poetry is an aristocratic art to
be practised by ladies and gentlemen who have the leisure
for study. It is not an art of the people. The populace
has its jongleurs and its minstrels who tell silly stories in
a silly way. We can write poems of fifty lines on two
rimes. We can say a dozen things in a phrase if you are
learned enough to understand what we say. Ours is a
beauty of the intellect; theirs is a beauty of mere passion.
There is much to be said for their point of view, but this
is not the place to say it.

The sestina was a kind of poem particularly popular.
It contained six stanzas, and each stanza contained six lines.
The words which concluded each line of the first stanza con-
cluded each line of every other stanza, and their arrange-
ment followed a definite order. The difficulties of this
form are obvious. The poet was required to write a poem

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of thirty-six lines. Each line must end with one of six
words, and the position of each of these words was rigidly
determined. Moreover the music for the song must follow
these permutations, and the whole must be harmonious.
Evidently the poets who cultivated this form of poetry were
more concerned with saying things well than with saying
them profoundly. Poetry was good form and good man-
ners, and to good form and good manners these poets and
their audiences attached an importance inconceivable to
a race like our own which is concerned with "results."

The exquisites who practised this art foregathered at Les
Baux, and here the adept were sifted from the bunglers.
Behold the poor troubadour, laboring at some obscure cha-
teau, at Mirevaux, at Vaquieres, or elsewhere, to perfect his
poetry. He has learned all the songs of all the poets who
have wandered through his part of the country on business
or love. From them he has learned a few of the difficult
rules of his art. Finally his poems are done. He slings
a bag of them across his shoulder and departs for the great
capital of Les Baux or Toulouse. Here he will be certain
of finding an audience, and here, if he have grace of person
or charm of manner, one will give him a hearing. Azalai's
and her daughter Berengaria des Baux have a weakness for
troubadours, and perhaps their kindness will inspire him
to improvise another canzone. Perhaps they will permit
him to dedicate one to them. If he be competent, he will
be praised; if he be incompetent, he will be ridiculed. The
good will be sorted from the bad. He will find a patron
and fall in love, and his wanderings will continue.

The sorting at Les Baux was done perhaps in the pavilion

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

of love in the garden which lay a few feet below the ruined
city on the hill. On many a summer morning as the city
cast its shadow over the garden the officers of the court
assembled : the Lords of the High Privileges of Love, the
Provost of the Hawthorn, the Seneschal of the Eglantine,
the Marshal of Mourning, the Bailiff of Delight, and pre-
siding over the court was the Queen of Love. The air of
a summer morning can be hot and heavy. The roses drooped
in the shade, and thinly clad the ladies reclined on their
couches, conversing in undertones while the boy singers
chanted sirventes and debates as to the nature of love and
its beauty. The atmosphere was charged with passion and
sensuousness and rich perfumes.

One of the poets of Les Baux was Guilhem de Cabestanh,
who, partly perhaps because of his charming manner and
honeyed words, and partly too perhaps because the Chateau
de Cabestanh was somewhat isolated and dull, had captured
the heart of his master's wife and for reasons best known
to himself found it necessary to travel. He came into Les
Baux one spring evening and within a short time had won
the love and the, as usual, undying d'evotion of pretty Be-
rengaria des Baux, the daughter of the lord of the city. Be-
rengaria was a sweet young thing and very serious, a firm
believer in the proverbs, "Look before you cross the Rubi-
con," and, "When you've captured your man, put salt on
his tail/' and, "A bird in the hand will fly away unless you
hold him tight," and other bits of popular wisdom. She
knew that she loved Guilhem, and apparently he loved her,

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but appearances are deceptive. Marriage was excluded,
both because of the difference in their positions and by the
fact that they loved each other, which latter fact our wise
ancestors of the twelfth century regarded as an inevitable
obstacle to marriage. Berengaria consulted a wise woman.

The wise women of old dwelt in huts, were shape-shifters
appearing sometimes as toads and sometimes as women,
were called witches, had intercourse with the devil, and gave
bad advice. The wise women of to-day live who knows
where, are shape-shifters expert in transformations and
cosmetics, conduct columns in the newspapers, have spiritual
intercourse with "higher things," and give salutary though
frequently futile advice to maidens like Berengaria. The
old woman commanded Berengaria to pluck "several stocks
of the verayre with your own hands, my dear, when the
moon is full and bring them to me." The woman made of
these an infusion, and of the infusion she made a wine. The
next time Guilhem blotted the moonlight of Berengaria's
window, she gave him some of this wine to drink. The
effects were immediate. Guilhem' s face was contorted as
though he were laughing at a terrible and unutterable jest
He writhed on the floor in his silent mirth. He was thought
to be at the point of death. When he recovered his com-
posure sometime later, he discovered that his love for Be-
rengaria had been a mistake, and he left Les Baux to fall
in love with Tricline Carbonelle.

Triciline, a lady full "of science and good virtues, was
the wife of Remond de Seilhans. Guilhem sent her one of
his songs, which, by way of precaution, he addressed to
Remond, her husband, a rude and unpleasant man whose

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only pleasure was in the hunt and in murder. The lady
thus apprised of his love felt a reciprocal passion pierce her
heart, which, her husband observing, awakened in him the
vulgar passion of jealousy/' He invited Guilhem to visit
them as a guest and confronted the two several times but
without success. With Tricline's permission he pretended
to love Tricline's sister, and when the sister was invited to
the chateau he seemed to pay ardent court to her. So crude
and vulgar was this man Remond that he spied upon the
lovers and found proof positive. He kept his information
to himself. One day he and Guilhem went hunting. They
became separated from their comrades, and he treacherously
struck Guilhem to the earth and with great satisfaction
buried his sword in Guilhem's body up to the hilt. He cut
off the head and put it in his hunting-bag. He cut out the
heart and gave it to his cook.

There must have been an interesting dinner at the
Chateau de Seilhans that day: excuses for Guilhem who
had been "called away on urgent business"; obsequious
smirks from the host of poor relatives that battened on the
lord of every castle; Tricline distracted and absent-minded
because Guilhem had not said good-by, and villainous
Remond for once in his life affecting the manners of the
cultivated lords and pretending concern for the health of
his wife.

"You're not feeling very well to-day, my love," he said.

"I never felt better," she answered, looking up at the
raftered ceiling of the hall that she might not meet his eyes.

"You are pale, my love," he said. "You should be more
in the open."

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

"My bower is so pleasant," she answered, "that I should
wish never to leave it." But her face was turned toward
the window, and her eyes followed the white ribbon of the
trail which led into the valley to the hermitage where she
had met Guilhem the day before.

"But you are not eating, my dear," he said. "I fear you
don't care for the game I bagged to-day."

"Indeed, my lord, it is the best I have ever tasted," and
she forced a bite down past the lump that rose in her
throat.

"Quite so," snarled Remond. "That which you have
just eaten is the heart of your paramour." Reaching down
under the table he drew from his hunting-bag the head of
Guilhem, which he held up by the hair close to her face.

"My lord," said Tricline, who was a lady always and
retained her composure even at this difficult moment, "what
J told you was the truth. I have never eaten better meat
and . . ." here she faltered for just a moment . . . "by
God, I shall never eat worse." She drew a steel poignard
from her belt and with it pierced her tender bosom and died.

3

Azalais, the mistress of Les Baux, was celebrated for her
chastity, and if any poet won favors from her the secret
lies buried discreetly with his bones. Once, either before
or after Folquet entered the service of Richard of England,
he was severely smitten by the charms of Azala'is and spent
several seasons at Les Baux paying unsuccessful court to
her. When she died he wrote, according to one chronicler,
an "elegant poem" in her memory.

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Peire Vidal, the tempestuous ne'er-do-well of the trouba-
dours, was less patient. She refused him all favors. When
he made a song to "Pretty Eyes," so phrased that it could
apply only to her and so written that it could come only
from Peire, she affected not to understand. She would not
give him the public kiss on the cheek which would make
him her eternal servant and vassal, and had Peire not been
the bosom crony of Hugues des Baux, Azalai's's husband,
Peire would probably have given over the combat. But
the more he praised Azalais, the more Hugues liked and
petted him; and the more Hugues liked him, the safer was
Peire. Les Baux was a strong city and Hugues a powerful
lord, and there were divers husbands in the surrounding
cities who would have liked to meet Peire on a dark night,
and Azalais was charming, though unfortunately chaste,
and one had to keep in practice. . . .

One night when Hugues was elsewhere, Peire stole into
Azalals's bedroom and implanted upon her ruby lips a kiss,
which was in violation not only of civil and divine law
but also of the law of romantic love, which stated explicitly
and in so many words that the lover must be glad to accept
what his mistress offers him and he must not take from her
anything which she wishes to keep for herself. Azalai's
thought that the kiss was from her husband, or so she said,
and awakened smiling. When she discovered her mistake,
she proceeded to make a tremendous scene. She wanted
Peire killed immediately, but Hugues said it was only a joke
and was very much amused by it. Peire was banished from
Les Baux for a time.

In Peire VidaFs life good and bad luck were mixed in

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

somewhat equal proportions. Whatever he did was dra-
matic. He was "the son of a furrier of Toulouse and he
sang very well and was a sovereign musician. Whatever
he saw pleased him, and whatever pleased him, he thought
ought to be given him. He could write and compose more
quickly than any of his contemporaries and he was a great
boaster. He sang of his follies in love and in arms and
lied about both. A lord of St.-Gilles had Peire's tongue
cut out because Peire had slandered one of the lord's rela-
tives. Fearful of more punishment to follow, he retired
to Hugues of Baux and lived merrily and carefully there
for some time."

When he left Les Baux he took the road that leads down
the steep side of the mountain, through the Val d'Enfer
which Dante is supposed to have described in his Inferno,
until he came to Paradou and the larger trail which led to
the abbey of Mont Major in the suburbs of Aries.

A century and a half later, when troubadourism was all
but dead, an apostate monk left the abbey and made himself
the "scourge of poets/* He wrote the lives of all the trou-
badours, both those whose works he had read and those of
whose works he was ignorant, and then, repenting, he wrote
a long poem in which he admitted that he had left the abbey
to follow a life of good food and voluptuousness and that
all he had said about the poets was untrue, which makes
things somewhat difficult for modern students.

The monastery seems to be a part of the rocks on which
it is built. In the center of it is the church of Our Lady,
and in the center of that the cell which St. Trophimus is
supposed to have occupied while converting the country.

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After he had succeeded, more or less, he went to Aries and
built the great church which still bears his name. The
Arlesians are somewhat boastful and swear that Trophimus
was a friend of St. Paul. Since the Arlesian women are
said to be the most beautiful women in France, one must
be content to take their word about things which happened
long ago.

The Arlesian women admit that they are beautiful, but
they insist that their beauty has a tragic origin and explain
it by a tale which illustrates something of the imaginative
heritage of the proven^al poets. Once upon a time, many,
many years ago, the Greek hero Herakles . . . ("Cetait
tin bon scant, Herakle" said the mother of the house, in-
terrupting her daughter who was telling the story. "~Ecoute<>
maman^ ce rfetcdt pas un saint; c'etait un pdien" "Quoi
done!" grumbled the woman, and asked what I expected
nowadays, and didn't the young people always know best,
and she guessed she knew the difference between a Greek
and a saint, she did. . . .) After this interruption the
Arlesienne proceeded to explain that many, many years ago
Herakles was driving his wild white oxen along the great
highway between Toulouse and Aries. The Rhone was in
flood, and each small river spread into a thousand streams
over the wide plain of the Camargue. At every ford there
was a stampede, and at every stampede the herd became
smaller. There was no food. Herakles labored day and
night, and when the cattle were too weary to go further
he sat on a rock and rested his head on his bare brown arms.

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Finally he came to Aries on a green hill with plenty of
pasturage, and there he met Galatea, the lovely Ligurian
princess who added to her other accomplishments that of
chief shepherdess to her father's flocks. For a long time
they watched their flocks together, living on garlic, onions,
and love.

The time came when Herakles, the divinely ordained
righter of human wrongs ("He was a saint, as I told you/*
said the old woman), remembered his mission. An inex-
orable fate, as demoniac and compelling as that which
drives dipsomaniacs to the bottle or Calvinists to heaven,
forced this unhappy man to do one kind act a day, and now
forced him to do it elsewhere. Galatea the lovely was sleep-
ing in the moonlight, one bare arm under her head, and
her sweet breath redolent with garlic. He left her, col-
lecting his herd with the herdsman's melancholy "Hooho
. . . Hooho ..." and drove them into Greece. When
Galatea awoke she was very unhappy but evidently not
inconsolable, for she was later married to a chief of her
own tribe. She never forgot the divine Herakles, however,
and in her eyes and the eyes of her daughters one may still
see the sadness of a woman who has loved a God.

Aries is a city on the cross-roads, and since the time of
Herakles it has been a city for tourists. In Roman times,
the road between Marseilles and Lyons joined the great
road to Toulouse at Aries. The Romans made Aries a free
city in an attempt to lessen the importance of Marseilles,
dominated by Phenician traditions. They built here a
huge arena and a beautiful Greek theater. Aries was the
last city in the Western Empire to stand before the bar-

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

barian invasions, and when the Romans had finally been
exterminated the barbarians built their town within the
arena. The town expanded and grew rich. The Arlesians
converted the dead in their Gallo-Roman burial-ground
and discovered that Christ had consecrated this one too with
his own hands. The arena, the theater, and the church are,
each in its own way, magnificent, and around them is a net
of narow cobbled streets, the streets of the troubadours.

I have records of no less than thirteen poets who, at one
time or another, partook of the hospitality of the Arlesian
lords or made love to the Arlesian women. Since the Arle-
sian women combined pride with beauty, this love was in
many cases tragic. Hugues de St.-Cyr, a gentleman, loved
a gentle lady of the Provence called Clermonde de Qui-
deram of the city of Aries, who was so accomplished and
brilliant among the women of the country that she com-
pared with none, not only in beauty but also in good sense
and kindliness, in whose praise he made many good songs
in the Provengal tongue. In one of these he said that he
had three great enemies who tortured him to the point of
death every night: his eyes forced him to love a woman
whose station was far higher than his; love held him in
durance and forced him to be faithful to his lady; the third
and most cruel of all was his lady herself, to whom he dared
not confess his passion. What could he do? These cruel
enemies would not permit him to die, but preferred to see
him languish in despair. He sought wild and desolate
places. He wept and sighed and made songs of his distress,
and always, as an accompaniment to his sorrow, he heard
the murmur of the impetuous stream . . . "Sweet Thames,

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

run softly till I end my song . . ." And Hugues de St.-Cyr
hit upon this device some three hundred years before
Spenser.

Gaubert or Gasbert de Puycibot was the son of a gentle-
man of Limoges. At an early age he entered the monastery
of St. Leonard, where he learned how to sing and how to
write poetry and music. In all of these arts he achieved
great proficiency. He had a cousin, and when, under cover
of devotion, she visited the monastery, he would sing his
poems to her very softly so that his brethren might not hear
them, and she, with head bowed, would say to him that it
was a sin and a shame for him to waste his life in this prison
when he might win for himself great glory and fame as
a poet.

He believed her and joined the suite of Savaric de Mau-
leon and with him visited many famous courts along the
Via Tolosa. At one of these he met a beautiful demoiselle
with whom he fell in love, and for whom, as was proper,
he made many beautiful songs. But she would have nothing
to do with the impecunious clerk. Gaubert told his patron
Savaric about his difficulty, and "Savaric, who loved learned
persons and good poets granted him the favor and had him
passed knight and gave him revenue and horses and married
him to the young lady." Now this marriage was accursed,
as some marriages are, and as these young people should
have known had they paid proper attention to the rules of
chivalric love. But they lived in the beginning of the
thirteenth century when the old customs were breaking down
and France was already trembling with the first agonies of
the Albigensian Wars.

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Some time after they had been married, Savaric and his
knights undertook a small war with Raymond of Toulouse
against Aragon. While she was living alone, awaiting the
return of her husband, Madame la Chatelaine de Puycibot
met an English knight probably a tourist with a Cook's
ticket, a thermos bottle, and a Murray doing southern
France on his way to the Riviera and he made violent love
to her in the manner of these gentlemen when they become
aroused. They came to an understanding and fled to the
city of Aries, where they lived for many months in happi-
ness and contentment. When Gaubert returned from the
war he too stopped at Aries and by chance took a room
across the road from the room his former wife was occu-
pying.

She looked out of her window and saw him. Her former
love for him returned, and she was filled with loathing for
the English knight. In the twilight she slipped into Gau-
bert's room, and they sat there together for a long time
looking at each other, saying nothing, and letting Love do
its work in their hearts. . . . The next morning they de-
parted for Avignon and in repentance of their sins entered
the severest religious houses they could find. Gaubert never
sang another song as long as he lived; and his wife, more
beautiful than ever in her nun's costume, turned her eyes
resolutely away when she saw an English knight with a
Cook's ticket and a guide-book striding down from the
Rocher du Dome.

Bertrand de Marseille was related to the viscounts of
Marseille. In his youth he was fat and indolent and re-
mained so until he came to Aries and saw one of the ladies

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of that city of the house of Porcellet, when, by the sovereign
power of love, his fatness and indolence vanished and he
began writing poems to her, which is nothing less than
a miracle, for the writing of Provencal poems is ex-
traordinarily difficult. Despite Bertrand de Marseille's
entreaties, Porcellette de Porcellet remained cold. Later,
she married a gentleman of the Eyguieres and within a
few years bore him twelve beautiful sons. This, how-
ever, is not surprising, because the Porcellets are a
prolific race.

They were originally of Les Baux. An early mother of
the family was once walking on the hill outside the city of
Les Baux when she met an old woman who asked for alms.
The lady was impatient and made some slighting comment
on beggars. The old woman cursed her with a widow's
curse and, pointing to a sow in the middle of the road, said :
"May you have as many sons at one birth as that sow has
at every litter!" Shortly afterward the lady was brought
to bed of nine sons.

When Peire Vidal visited Aries, the church of St.-Tro-
phimus was being repaired with stones taken from the the-
ater and the arena. An unknown sculptor was chiseling
these stones into the hyperbolical symbols of Christianity.
In the figures of the Christ' on the porch and the hypersexual
beasts in the cloister, the stones have bared their souls and
the tortured spirit of history still lives. The stones have
'echoed to the screams of gladiatorial combat; they have
absorbed the great cadences of pagan combat. Now they
glare confusedly at the pretty Arlesian women who perform
their morning devotions.

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Aries sits in the center of a tangle of roads like a beautiful
spider in her net. One line of the old Roman road is fol-
lowed by the modern railway due east to Aix-en-Provence
and on to Frejus. A spur drops down to Marseilles. An-
other leads northeast to the Cottian Alps and Milan. A
third continued up the right bank of the river to Avignon
and Lyons, the Roman capital. Another went northwest
to Nimes, where it joined the true Via Tolosa, which curved
beside the Rhone to a point just opposite Avignon, where
it crossed and joined the road on the left bank. This is the
trail that Petrarch followed when he went to college at
Montpellier. From Nimes he, and perhaps Peire Vidal
before him, went southwest to Lunel and thence to
Montpellier.

But the trip Arles-Nimes-Lunel, if it followed the Roman
road, covered two sides of a triangle. St.-Gilles, directly
west of Aries, was an important city during the Middle
Ages and carried on a considerable commerce. There must
have been a trail between these two cities. Directly west
of St.-Gilles is Vauvert, and there was certainly a trail
between Vauvert and Lunel as early as the fourteenth cen-
tury, and in all probability much earlier. The present road
which connects these two towns hugs the bases of very low
hills which rise directly out of the marshes of the western
Camargue and, if my assumptions are correct, follows the
old trail which ran along the head of the Camargue, due
west to join the Via Tolosa at Lunel.

Flat and marshy as an old pancake, the plain of the

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Camargue stretches south from Aries to the Mediterranean.
Hardly any tree breaks the force of the mistral, the winter
wind which sweeps down from the northwest. Hardly any
leaves give shade and comfort to the traveler under the
summer sun. It is a desert plain, the Camargue, and the
mother of legends. Scattered at great distances are large
farm-houses. Huge walls have been built around them
for protection, and at times a line of black cypresses. The
werwolf haunts the Camargue and the fairy fox; and
whether these spirits lead you to great wealth or to sudden
death, they will lead you finally to madness. At the south-
ern end, built on the sands is the city of the three St. Marys,
Les Saintes Maries. In the spring the Gipsies from all over
Europe gather here to do homage to their patron saint and
every year there are miracles performed in the high fortified
church. St.-Gilles is at the northern extremity of the plain,
a bare four leagues from Aries. It was here that Peire Vidal
lost his tongue for slandering a gentlewoman, and it was
probably not by this road that he traveled from Aries to
Lunel.

The paths on the Camargue are tortuous and lead be-
tween quicksands, and the poets whose names are connected
with these paths led tortuous lives. One of these was the
gentle knight Cadenet, whose castle is now in ruins a dozen
leagues north of Aix-en-Provence. He had a remarkable
passion for a certain Marguerite de Ries and a remarkable
run of bad luck. Unlike many of his fellow-troubadours

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

he was unable to salve his disappointment when she refused
to have him, and, though he tried nobly, was unable to Fall
in love with another mistress.

When Marguerite refused to grant him any favors, he
took service with the marquise de Montferrat, but to his
sorrow, he found himself constantly singing the praises of
the gentle Marguerite, and instead of recovering from his
malady of love, it grew worse each day until, unable to bear
so much suffering, he returned again to the court of his
first love. She granted him certain minor liberties. He
might see her for a few moments each day. On meeting
her in public, he might touch his lips to her hand. He might
not, under any condition, imagine that she accepted his
homage. He might not refer to her as the lady of his
dreams. He might . . . He might not . . . And all the
time that she was exulting in her power over him, she was
laughing at him behind his back. Fashions were changing.
Poetry was on the decline. Young ladies amused them-
selves by arts which were less gracious and less difficult.

Cadenet discovered Marguerite's ill usage and in his
chagrin married a gentle lady who was beautiful and vir-
tuous, but she died within a year. Not only was he unfor-
tunate in love and in domestic arrangements, but now he
had to suffer the attacks of the Galliardes, the speakers of
evil, who said that he deserved to lose his wife because he
had only married her in spite, and that he was really faith-
ful to Marguerite. This angered him so much that he wrote
a very polite song thanking the gossips for attributing such
faithfulness as he had not deserved. He next turned his
attentions to a novice of the convent at Aries, who deceived

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him cruelly. This last deception was too much. He joined
the Templars at St.-Gilles and turned his love to the Mother
of God, "in whose honor he made many pretty songs which
pleased his brethren exceedingly/' He died fighting the
Saracens.

Rostand de Berenguier had the misfortune to fall in
love with a very old woman and a witch, "and she was
the most expert in sorcery that any one has ever seen,
whether in mixing drugs, in observing days of good omen,
or in administering love potions." For some obscure rea-
son, she experimented on her lover and gave him a potion
which transported him beyond sense, and he would have
remained that way forever had not a gentle demoiselle
who was acquainted with him because of a song he had made
in her honor taken pity on him. She was a daughter of
the house of Cybo and lived not far from Marseilles. "He
was restored to his reason and understanding by means of
a drink which she gave him containing a sovereign drug and
antidote, which favor the poet recognized, and he immor-
talized her in a goodly number of songs and became amorous
of her, leaving the witch and retaining the Genoese, who
was a very proper demoiselle, beautiful, virtuous, and well
learned in poetry." She seems to have regretted her kind-
ness to him or to have thought him more attractive as a
madman than as a poet, for as soon as he was cured of his
illness she cast him off. In his anger he wrote a satire
against her, which was an ill natured thing to do and not
in the least courteous. Berenguier then tried to join the
Templars at St.-Gilles, but the Templars, perhaps because
of his notorious conduct with the witch but more likely

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

because of his discourteous conduct toward the Genoese,
refused to admit him to their order. He took revenge upon
them by writing an improper poem called ''Concerning the
False Lives of the Templars/ 3 as a result of which, by
divine punishment, he died.

7

Peire Vidal had every reason in the world to regard
St.-Gilles, where he had lost his tongue, with suspicion.
When he went from Les Baux to Toulouse he must have
traveled by the Roman road northwest to Nimes. The
small city of Bellegarde, the first stop on this route, rises
out of the plain on a small hill which seems twice its height
in comparison with the flatness of the surrounding country.
There is something of magic in Aries, and whenever I leave
it its influence stays with me until, with a kind of shock,
I realize that I am in another town, where life, though it
may have been lived just as intensely, has left for us fewer
records. Thus, as I remember it, the town of Bellegarde
is shabby, and its tower is a poor thing, and though its
position on a hill is dramatic and picturesque, it is too far
from Aries to share its grandeur and too different to be
quite a part of it.

The hills which begin at Bellegarde continue to Nimes
and beyond to the uttermost limits of the Provence. They
are seldom high hills, but they are pleasant, and sometimes
their ruggedness suggests very, very small mountains. They
are covered with grape-vines. The peasants speak Pro-
vengal, a very old language, as different from French as
Spanish or Italian. When they speak French, it is with the

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

accent of the Midi, of which the most notable characteristic
is the pronunciation of the final "e." This gives their
speech softness and languor.

At Nimes the road joins the Via Tolosa, which Peire
Vidal probably and Petrarch and many others certainly
followed southwest to LuneL

Modern Lunel has forgotten all about the twelfth cen-
tury and is no longer aware that it was once an important
city. It occupies itself to-day with its dull and pretty
municipal park and spends as much time as possible in the
cafe and as little as necessary on the wide, hot, and dusty
streets. When the Saracens retreated through southern
France, they left at Lunel, Montpellier, and Narbonne a
large number of learned Jews whose fame spread through-
out Europe.

About the time of Peire Vidal or a little earlier, Jausse-
rande de Lunel, the daughter of a noble prince and his
exemplary wife, was receiving with complaisance the
moralistic love-poems of Guilhelm de Agoult, who, because
he was possessed of a large personal fortune, was described
by his contemporaries as benign, modest, virtuous, and ex-
cellent in knowledge and judgment. Guilhelm disapproved
of the madness of the youth of his day, and he pointed out
their errors to them with an air of gentle reproach. The
true lover, he said, can do nothing that will bring dishonor
upon himself and his mistress; he will not win her by
trickery ; he will not take from his mistress anything which
she does not give him freely, nor will he do any dishonorable
thing for her. One must always remember that the sex
is frail, he concluded, and we must forgive women

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

many of their smaller vices. He wrote a treatise tell-
ing all about it under the title, "La Maniera d'Amar
dal Temps Passat."

8

Directly south of Lunel is Aigues-Mortes, a city which
Peire Vidal certainly did not visit, for it was built some
seventy years after he died; but I mention it here because
it is more entirely in the style and manner of thirteenth-cen-
tury architecture than any other town in France. Aigues-
Mortes is a fortified city built by St. Louis as a seaport in
the midst of the dead waters. Its gray brown walls rise
straight above a brown gray plain. At places the smooth
dead waters of the etang reach to the bases of the walls. At
other places, the plain itself, covered with rough marsh-
grass and dotted with pools invisible except when they
flash the sunlight back into your eyes, stretches out as far
as one can see. It is a dead city in dead waters. The
streets are narrow and white. There is no life in it.

The tide of life has passed and carried with it the boast-
ing Crusaders and the saintly king. The peasants do a
little trading in salt and a little trading in fish. If you
shiver in the cold wind of a winter afternoon, they say
pleasantly, "I/ fait froid" If you perspire on a summer
morning, they say, "II fait cliaud" They ask you whence
you came and tell them, and they answer, "That's very
far from here." Whatever they say is pleasant and quiet
and a little dead. The ctigue comes in from the marshes
around Aigues-Mortes and shakes them. Most of them
die young, but those who survive are very old indeed. . . .

[266]

Chapter XI
The Trail of a Vagabond Poet II

MONTPELLIER TO CARCASSONNE

o

Chapter XI

IN travail and agony, the city of Maguelone bore the
city of Montpellier. All that is left of Maguelone, built
on the sands of the Mediterranean, is a ruined cathedral,
a caretaker, the whisper of the waves on the sands, and the
cry of wild birds flying over the reeds. When the inhabit-
ants of southern France were less civilized than the Indians
who greeted Columbus after his long voyage, Maguelone
was founded as a trading-post by the mysterious Phocseans,
whose civilization has disappeared and taken almost all
records along with it. In Roman times the great cities along
the Via Tolosa were Nimes, Maguelone, Narbonne. The
Roman power decayed, and Maguelone became Christian
and barbarian. The Saracens occupied the city. Some of
the inhabitants remained, but others fled north to the vil-
lage of Montpellier. The Saracens were driven out, but
Maguelone was destroyed in the attempt, and again there
was a migration northward. Maguelone recovered only
to be destroyed once more, and once more Montpellier
profited. With each destruction Maguelone became older
and more feeble, as though a curse had been put on her;
and Montpellier grew in power and pride,

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The road to Maguelone leads over orange sands. At
the left is the blue Mediterranean, and at the right the
leaden etang. The road leads through low pines. Except
for the cathedral all vestiges of the old city have disap-
peared. On each side of the cathedral portal are saints
chiseled in relief, and above the portal is another saint, or
perhaps God himself, with a lion and a little angel. These
three look out over the foam-flecked ocean to remember,
perhaps, the glories of their dedication by the bishops of the
eleventh century and the vagaries of their decline.

When Peire Vidal trod the Via Tolosa, Maguelone had
lost its power. He came into Montpellier over a route now
called the Boulevard de Nimes, which led him to the foot
of a small cliff surmounted by a chateau, which has since
been destroyed and replaced by a quiet Esplanade, which
leads directly to the Place de la Cornedie in the center of the
town. In the center of this -place are three naked ladies
in bronze, which represent, however inadequately, the good
Montpellierite's notion of the Graces. At one end of the
-place is the inevitable municipal theater, where, in the
winter, French and Italian opera is sung very badly; and
around the edge of the place are crowded cafe after cafe
in friendly competition as to which can be the most jovial,
the most pleasant, the most expansive. Peire Vidal found
the city surrounded by walls. It was a city of tortuous
streets and was more or less loyal to his friend and patron
Peter of Aragon. At intervals on the spacious boulevards
that have replaced the old walls and in the narrow by-

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

streets one finds vestiges of the town visited: two towers
at opposite ends of the town, a bit of wall which forms the
back of a livery-stable, the cathedral with its curious
porch. . . .

But Montpellier was more than a great city in the
Middle Ages, it was a center of learning, a university town.
Thousands of students gathered here to listen while their
masters talked to them about medicine and Roman law.
Since a stranger in a strange town had no civil rights, the
students incorporated, formed a city within a city, made
their own laws, tried their own cases, and established com-
plete student self-government. The knowledge of medicine
they gained came largely from the Saracen physicians who
had lived in the city and left much of their wisdom behind
them. The knowledge of law was the result of the experi-
ences of the Montpellierites themselves, who even then were
making difficult and complicated experiments in democratic
government. The city thus became a center for cultivated
people and pedants and, since the lords were generous, a
gathering-place for poets.

Roolet de Gassin met Rixende de Montauban at Mont-
pellier when troubadourism was at its height; and many
years later, when troubadourism was no more than a mem-
ory of a pleasant perfume, Peire Bonifaciis paid assiduous
court to a lady of the house of Andrea de Montpellier,
* c whom he wooed both by poems in the Provengal tongue
and by the arts of magic. Seeing that nothing would ad-
vance his suit he gave himself to the study of alchemy and
searched until he found a stone that had the virtue of con-
verting all metals into gold. He made a song in which

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

he described the magic powers of the Oriental gems, and
he put the diamond at the head of his list, saying that it had
the virtue of making men invincible. He said the Cretan
agate made a man pleasant of speech, amiable, prudent,
agreeable; that the amethyst preserved from drunkenness;
that the cornaline will appease the anger of a judge; that
the 'jacynth 5 provokes sleep; that the pearl brings heart's-
ease; that the cameo when graven in images is efficacious
against hydropsy; that the azure stone when hung on the
necks of children makes them strong; that the Indian ruby
if worn while sleeping preserves against bad dreams. One
cannot experience the virtues of the sapphire unless one is
chaste. The emerald is good for the memory; the topaz
restrains anger and luxury; the turquoise brings luck, and
the beryl increases love. . . /* He was a wise and learned
man, and I would not like to believe that the doctors of
medicine in the present university, who administer glandu-
lar extract to preserve youth and psychoanalysis to prevent
bad dreams, are more learned than Peire Bonif aciis.

Wherever Peire Vidal went he wrote songs to Azalaiis
des Baux and sent them back to her, either by boy singers
in his employ, or by troubadours traveling east along the
Via Tolosa, or in manuscript addressed to his friend Folquet
de Marseille, who was at the same time his rival. At Mont-
pellier his funds seem to have run low, and he wrote a song
ostensibly addressed to Azalais but obviously intended for
a protector whom he calls Dragoman. He sang :

Seigneur Dragoman, If I had a good charger our enemies would
be in a bad way. . . .

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

When, I put on the strong double hauberk and hold in my hand
the sword which Sire Gui gave me a short time ago, the earth
trembles at my step. . . .

For bravery I am equal to Roland and Olivier; for gallantry to
Montdidier. . . .

In all things I am a true knight. I have mastered the art of love.
Never will you see a knight who can be as charming as I in the hall,
or as terrible as I when my sword had left its sheath. . . .

And if I had a horse the king of Aragon could sleep sweetly and
happily, for I would preserve the peace for him at Montpellier, . * .

Lady Vierna, thanks from Montpellier. . . .

Says Peire's biographer, "He sang of his follies in love
and war and boasted about both."
Of the stolen kiss, Vidal sang:

Delicate body, gently molded, have compassion on me. Pity!
Counsel her to pity me for I am distressed and afflicted. Helas!
Lady, do not kill me for it were a shame and a great sin to let
me die in despair. . . .

I would be more happy than any other creature, if the stolen kiss
had been granted freely. Sometimes covetise is the ruin of the
wisest. , . .

Beauty turns wisdom into folly. ... I would be no coward
if I turned my eyes away from your beauty . . . but when you
speak I am unable to leave your side. . . .

The Via Tolosa runs southwest from Montpellier to
Meze, thence northwest to Montagnac, and then southwest
again to Beziers and Narbonne. A medieval itinerary sug-
gests that there may have been a short cut between Meze

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

and Beziers via St.-Thybery, which the author spells St.-
Hybery, for which reason and others I suspect that the
author did not make the trip himself but gathered his in-
formation from others. Misinformation found in guide-
books and due to ignorance is not, by the way, the only
difficulty in tracing the trails of the troubadours. Guide-
books in those days were written like railway travel folders
of the present time, for the purpose of attracting tourists to
important or ambitious monasteries ; that is to say, for the
purpose of advertising. Thus if you were going from
Avignon, for example, to Compostella along the Via Tolosa,
every conceivable inducement would be offered to persuade
you to leave the highway for a day's excursion to monas-
teries which lay just off the beaten track. Both your soul
and the monks' bodies would prosper as a result of your
visit. The authors of these books probably thought that
any fool can follow the broad highway, but even the wisest
will need friendly help and advice if he is to discover the
retreats of his spiritual fathers.

Beziers is the third great city on the route, and Peire
Vidal undoubtedly stopped here for a time. He was a
friend of Beatrice de Beziers, whom all the troubadours
praised, and of the Viscountess Agnes de Montpellier. At
one time in her career, and it was an unhappy time for her,
Beatrice became the wife of the much-married Raymond
of Toulouse, who for a time held the record in large-scale
divorces. His enemies have suggested that he kept a harem
in addition to his various wives. I have no doubt that the
clerks who wrote the histories and were largely in the em-
ploy of the dominant power, the church, have maligned him.

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

The flat tidal plain of the Mediterranean stretches from
Beziers to the sea, and this city, like Bellegarde, achieves
a vicarious dignity by contrast between the flatness of the
plain and the apparent height of its walls. It seems to
reach up, precipice upon precipice, above the road ; and upon
the very summit, above the city ramparts and well fortified
against the attacks of the heretics, is the church of St.-
Nazaire.

During the Middle Ages life in Beziers was agitated.
Like Montpellier, Narbonne, and Toulouse, it was a com-
mercial city. The lords who owned the land were of less
importance than the merchants who carried on the trade.
The inevitable results of a commercial civilization are dem-
ocracy and protestantism. Other civilizations are, for other
reasons, sometimes democratic and sometimes protestant,
but commercial civilizations are so inevitably. Raymond
de Trencavel, lord of Beziers, showed hesitation in grant-
ing the bourgeois all they demanded and was suspected of
treachery toward them. The angry merchants demanded
their rights, and when Raymond fled to a church, hoping
to find sanctuary there, they fell upon him and murdered
him. His son wisely sought safety in flight from the city
but reappeared some time later with an army. The con-
suls of the people negotiated with him and agreed to permit
him to enter if he would grant a general amnesty and not
seek to avenge his father's death. The young man con-
sented, but as soon as he was established he locked the gates
and ordered a general massacre and a looting.

This dastardly action was wiped out by a later Viscount
Raymond de Trencavel, who, a good son of the church

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

himself , sacrificed everything he had, even his life, in pro-
tecting the merchants whose religious opinions he con-
demned. On July 21, 1209, Simon de Montfort, the bishop
of Beziers, and St. Dominic, all bent on the extirpation of
heresy, appeared before the walls of the city with an army.
They commanded the city to yield. It refused and after
a short scuffle was taken. The bishop had a list of those
who were to be burned for their heresy, but in the confusion
there was no time to sort the sheep from the goats. When
asked for advice, he shouted: "Kill them all. God will
recognize his own !"

The massacre was memorable. Everybody rushed for
the cathedral of St.-Nazaire, which offered the protection
of a place that was both holy and well fortified. They
were packed so tightly in the church that they could not
move. Then the soldiers of the crusaders arrived and
guarded every door but one, which they broke down. First
five abreast until they got into the church, and then ten,
twenty, thirty abreast, they worked their way down the
church, systematically killing every one there, men, women,
and children. And all the time the butchery was in progress,
the priests rang the bells as though for a marriage service.
All were killed here, as well as in the other churches and
in the streets. Only a handful escaped to Narbonne. Later
the bishop of Beziers apologized to the pope very mod-
estly for having killed only forty thousand people. The
city was burned, pillaged, ruined. . . .

To-day Beziers is peaceful. The bourgeois spend their
Sunday afternoons parading up and down in the pleasant
parks or on the small square in front of the church over-

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

looking the broad plain. They gaze with blank eyes to-
ward the sea. "Cest bien tranquille ici" they murmur, and
again, as though to make quite certain, "C'est Men tran-
quille. . . *"

Beyond Beziers is Narbonne, famous to those who know,
for its excellent honey, its fine church, and its distinguished
past. This is the city where Ermengarde de Narbonne
lived whenever she was not visiting the country houses of
her friends ; it is the city where Peire Rogier lost his heart
to little Hugette des Baux, and where Peire Vidal wrote
a poem which illustrates the astonishing virtuosity, the pas-
sion for compliment, and the raciness of diction of the trou-
badours. The fifty-six lines of this poem are all written
on one rime, "-ana" and "-ona" (pronounced "-ana 3 * and
"-awna"), with clever variations in the consonantal accom-
paniment. Peire sang:

Dear friend, sweet and sincere, amiable, gracious and good, my
heart spreads itself before you and before you alone. I love you
with a love which is sincere and humble, and I treasure your love
more than the wealth of Lombardy and France.

You are the tree and the branch where the fruit of love ripens.
Your sincere love comforts me. I fear no evil. It takes from me
sadness and sorrow and blesses me with perfect happiness.

With red and white, beauty has fashioned you to bear the crown
of the imperial throne. You are so sweet and so human that the
whole world grants you sovereignty in joy and perfection, in valor
and honor.

She has perfect feet and body, the sweet Lady Guilhelmona. She
deceives not. She betrays not. And she wears no shoes or stockings.

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

I know no gentle citizen sweet as lovely Guilhelmona, not even
Yolanda, daughter of the Lady Constance who taught young men
the art of dancing. [Some kind of a satire is evidently intended
here, but the reference is lost upon rne.]

Not the army of the viscount now could drive me out of Nar-
bonne. Of all the ladies under heaven, not a blonde or a brunette,
not a Christian, Jew or pagan lady can compare with you in beauty.

Rich old hags are nothing to me, if their riches grant no favor or
their invitations are ungracious. But from the gentle Guilhelmona,
I esteem more dear the promise of a lovely laughing body than the
wealth of rancid witches . . .

In the last stanza, which is offensive to twentieth-cen-
tury taste and therefore not to be translated, Peire ex-
presses himself somewhat fully and picturesquely as to the
fate deserved by one who had done the lovely Guilhelmona
a wrong.

In the twelfth century, Narbonne was the great seaport
of the south and the rival of Marseilles. The Romans who
took over the city when it was still a Greek colony de-
flected an arm of the river to run through Narbonne and
keep its harbor from silting up. The dike they built lasted
until the fourteenth century, when it broke. Since then
the Narbonnese have watched the sea recede farther and
farther from its docks. At the time when the troubadours
were making the court gay with their songs, Narbonne was
divided into three towns. One part was governed by the
lords bishops of the church, who naturally hated the here-
tics. A second portion was governed by the viscounts,
closely related to the Trencavels. A third section was the
Jewry. In the Jewry, Moise Khimbki, a learned rabbi,
wrote long commentaries and became so famous that Nar-

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

bonne was a center of Hebrew learning, and in the chateau
Peire and his friends sang about love.

The merchants made treaties with Italy and the Levant.
Jaufre Rudel probably took ship here for Tripoli. The
narrow streets were crowded. Pretty bourgeoises and pretty
Jewesses, gallant and fastidious young men whose fathers
were merchants but who felt themselves destined for better
things, a yellow roof at the end of the street gleaming in
the sunlight, shadowy figures seen through an open window,
human beings in a dusky room, laughter and ribald song
in the inns, exquisites fingering their diminutive swords, a
crowd of dirty students in eager disputation, the smell of
garlic, the sound of wooden shoes tapping on the cobbled
pavement. . . . Then came Simon de Montfort and bare-
footed St. Dominic who begged his bread, both of them
men in whom fanaticism and opportunism were curiously
mingled, and behind them the rabble of puritan crusaders.

Simon de Montfort, one of the mad de Montforts, was
the grandson of the earl of Leicester and the father of the
rebel Montfort in England. Raymond of Toulouse, whom
Simon ruined, is said to have wept at his death and to have
admitted that Simon was possessed of the qualities of a great
soldier and an excellent prince. He was utterly fanatic
and possessed of an energy which is difficult to compre-
hend even to-day, when energetic fanaticisms of other kinds
are being exhibited in various parts of the world. He was
besieging the Chateau de Termes, a stronghold of heresy.
When the chateau capitulated and several of the heretics
offered to join the church, Simon ordered them all burned.
"If they are honest," he said, "the fire will cleanse them

[2793

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

of their sins. If they are liars, they deserve to be burned."

When he overcame Raymond of Toulouse, he insisted
that Raymond promise among other things that he and all
his nobles and all his peasants should wear no clothes of
value and should put on their heads the black cap of serf-
dom; that he demolish all his chateaux and fortifications,
to the very foundations ; that none of the nobles should live
in a town or even in a house, but that they should sleep
in the open fields like villeins; that Montfort and his offi-
cers be permitted to take anything they pleased from any
individual in the former domain of the count of Toulouse,
and that none should offer resistance no matter what the
officers wished to take. After Raymond had promised all
this, he was to make war on the infidels until Simon, at
his pleasure, should recall him. At this time, Folquet de
Marseille, whom we have met before in different company,
was bishop of Toulouse and a lieutenant of Simon's.

All the lords of the Provence declared themselves on the
side of Raymond. A priest said to Simon :

"Your army is small in comparison with the army of
your adversaries, which includes the king of Aragon, who
is skilful and experienced in war. He is followed by many
counts and a numerous army. The battle will not be equal
if fought between a small army like yours and a great army
like his."

At these words Simon drew a letter from his pocket.
"Read that," he said.

It was a letter from the king of Aragon to the wife of a
Toulousan nobleman. The king wrote that he was driving
the crusaders from Toulouse for her sake and paid her many

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

compliments and expressed the hope of an early assigna-
tion.

"What of it?" said the priest, who seems to have been
something of a realist.

"What of it?" cried Simon in a voice of thunder. "Let
me tell you that God will not desert me when I fight a here-
tic who tries to circumvent God's designs for love of a
woman !"

In 1 1 15 he took a title, and the pope confirmed it, mak-
ing him, "By the grace of God, Count of Toulouse, Vis-
count of Beziers and Carcassonne, and Duke of Narbonne."
It was fortunate that this title came by God's grace, for it
certainly did not come by the grace of popular opinion in
these cities which he had ruined so that they never fully
recovered. He died two years later.

After the massacre at Beziers, the few survivors rushed
to Narbonne and with the heretics of that city crowded into
a chateau just outside the city gates. The place was small
and badly provided with food so that the refugees had to
send to Narbonne for supplies. The bishops of Narbonne
preferred the heretics to Simon and his crusading army,
but when they saw he intended to visit them, they helped
him. The massacre at Beziers had been terrible enough
to awaken popular feeling, and Simon was persuaded to
offer amnesty to any who would recant. "Do not fear/'
he said to his friends; "we shan't lose a one of them." He
was right. Not a man or woman recanted. When the
gates opened every man and woman in the fortress ran upon
the knives of their adversaries like sheep to the slaughter.

No civilization could stand spectacles of this kind.

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

Whether the church was right or wrong in its pretensions,
and whether civilization is a blessed or cursed thing, the
fact remains that after the Albigensian Crusade trouba-
dourism died, and troubadourism was merely one aspect of
a broad, rich, and cultivated attitude toward life. Not
only was the economic basis of the civilization of the south
destroyed, but the spectacle of wholesale butchery dehuman-
izes. Even before these crusades, men were, as they are
to-day, sufficiently brutal; but their brutality, like ours,
was controlled by a set of social sanctions which were
rigidly observed. The throwing off of these sanctions
and again the throwing of them off is a symptom rather
than a cause set civilization back for a hundred years.
Man progresses by means of his conventions and not des-
pite them. He goes forward by trying very hard to stay
just where he is. The best way to go backward is to try
to go forward.

Before the crusades, fanaticism had not been character-
istic of the cultivated worldliness of the south. More char-
acteristic and less unpleasant is the pretty scandal the chron-
icler suggests in his account of the life of Peire Rogier, the
poet. "Peyre Rogier was a canon at Clermont, though
some say he was canon at Aries and at Nimes. Having
quitted his position, and realizing that he was young, hand-
some, and of good family, and being assured that he would
profit more in the world than in the church, where he saw
nothing but envy, jealousy, and quarrels among the clergy,
having, as I say left his monastery for the reasons I have
told you, he gave himself to poetry in our vulgar Provencal
tongue and made himself comedian and invented pretty

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

and ingenious comedies which he played with great success
at the courts of the lords and princes/ 5 He was received
favorably wherever he went, but particularly well, it seems,
by the viscountess of Narbonne, who gave him many rich
gifts.

"He fell in love with one of the demoiselles of the
countess called Hugette des Baux, but by her friends, little
Baussette. She was the daughter of Hugues des Baux,"
VidaTs patron, " and married . . . who was the son of ...
who later became . . ." and so on with local gossip. "Peire
Rogier sang for her many good songs, and some say that
he received from her the last favors in love, which scandal
one should not believe, for she says to him in a song which
she sent him that he is mistaken in his suit and that she
finds nothing that he does is pleasant or agreeable. But
others say that this song means nothing and that she only
sent it to him to cover up the love and affection she felt
for him. But this I take to be slander and a great pity "

As one emerges from Narbonne, the horizon to the south
is clouded by the Corbieres Mountains, whence emerges
(according to Professor Bedier, for I was not able to see
it) a solitary rock bearing on its summit the Chateau de
Termes, which was cruelly besieged by Montfort during
the crusades. The Via Tolosa follows the river to Lezig-
nan, a little town surrounded by a swarm of chateaux
and dependent in the twelfth century on the abbey of
La Grasse to the south, where Peire Rogier, the lover of
Baussette, retired in his old age.

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

The road, redolent with traditions, winds wearily to
Carcassonne. On either side are little round hills which
at midday seem to lie on their backs panting beneath the
brilliance of the sun, a brilliance which seems to wipe the
world clean of color except the white of the road and the
grayish brown of the grass. But when the brilliance of
the sun fades, other colors appear. A startling black piles
itself about the bases of the hills. The white and radiant
sky becomes a pale blue; this deepens into mauve, into
intense red, into indigo. These colors catch the dolmens and
the chateaux on the hills. They float above a sea of misty
color. A peasant with white bullocks silhouetted against
the sky becomes a symbol too profound for analysis. He
is Man himself, heritor of the past, victor and victim of
his own traditions, clinging to the final and immutable
reality, the earth which with unmoral fecundity gives him
his daily bread. At this hour, if one has planned one's walk
judiciously, one should come in sight of the walls and towers
of Carcassonne, placid on a hill.

It is more or less as the troubadours left it in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries; a chateau and a town and a
cathedral curtained from the rest of the world by several
walls. The earliest stones in these walls were placed by
Roman captives. Later the walls were repaired and en-
larged by the Visigoths, the Saracens, the Trencavels, who
were also the owners of Beziers, and, in the late thirteenth
century, by St. Louis himself, who built the outer girdle of
walls, made Carcassonne into a fortress, and forced the
citizens to build a new town in the valley.

Roger Trencavel with his wife Agnes de Montpellier

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awaited the approach of Simon de Montfort and his cru-
saders at Carcassonne. He had done his best at Beziers;
he had fortified it and prepared it for a siege and had then
retired, before the approaching army, to Carcassonne, the
seat of his county. From his towers, which commanded a
good view of the approaches to the town, he saw pouring
over the hills by every available road, and even across the
fields, the armies of the crusading hosts, experienced war-
riors clad in pilgrims' cloaks, some of them sincere, some
of them merely avaricious, and all of them eager for blood.
He saw them encamp, and he saw the mushroom-like tents
of the leaders erected at safe distances from the walls. In
the center of Carcassonne, under an elm-tree, were gathered
Roger's dependents, the heretics, whose lives God had con-
fided to his care when He made him suzerain of the country.

Simon de Montfort demanded that Carcassonne capitu-
late. Simon de Montfort boasted of the massacres at Nar-
bonne and Beziers. Simon de Montfort threatened a worse
fate to Carcassonne. He was greeted with derisive shouts
from the walls. The town had no water. A subterranean
passage was dug from within the walls to the river some
three hundred yards away at the base of the hill. Burning
oil and burning lead were poured on the machines of the
crusading hosts. Huge stones were catapulted from the
walls. There were deeds of gallantry on both sides. Simon
de Montfort, at the risk of his own life, rescued a common
soldier who had fallen into the moat and was being cov-
ered by a rain of small stones.

Montfort sent an embassy headed by one of Roger's
relatives. Roger and twelve of his men were offered safe-

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

conduct if they would deliver the rest of the city into the
hands of the enemy.

"You may tell these priests," he shouted, "that I will let
them tear the hair from my chin and head, the nails from
my feet and hands, the teeth from my mouth, my eyes
from my sockets, that I will be skinned alive or burned at
the stake, before I will deliver up to these butchers one of
my people, he be serf, heretic, or felon, which God con-
fided to my charge when he made me suzerain of these
countries."

According to Mrs. Gostling's quotation of Frederick
Soulie, who writes as though he had been a witness 1 of these
events, Roger crossed the courtyard 'of the castle and ar-
rived at the Place of the Elm-tree, where all who were not
guarding the walls had gathered.

"Do you know what the legates of that demon Innocent III have
dared to offer me, your sovereign and defender*? That I should
leave the city, I, the thirteenth, and give the rest of you over to
their mercy."

"And what would that mercy be ?" asked some of the serfs and
women.

"The mercy our brothers of Beziers have obtained," cried Roger,
pale and trembling with rage so he could scarcely find breath to
utter the words, " the butchery of all the men to the last, of all the
women to the last, of the old -people, the children, Catholics,
Protestants, laymen and clerics. For at Beziers, our city of Beziers,
in Beziers, the rich, the noble sister of Carcassonne, not a foot is
left above the soil to come and bear us news, not a hand remains to
sound the alarm. Dead! Dead I To the very last! That is the
mercy of the Legates. . . ."

* Frances M. Gostling, "Rambles around French Chateaus" (London s
1911), p. 255.

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

Of course they got him in the end. They offered him
safe-conduct outside the city walls when the capture of the
city was imminent, in order that he might discuss terms.
Roger knew that they were lying and sent his citizens out
by the water-gate. As soon as his enemies had him in their
power, they forgot their offer for safe-conduct, fell on him,
put him in chains, and threw him into one of his own dun-
geons, where, not long after, he died a natural death as
the result of having eaten poisoned food.

The troubadours regarded all these changes in the for-
tunes of their patrons at first with chagrin and later with
dismay. Peire Vidal, who spent several seasons in Car-
cassonne and the chateaux near it in pursuit of his mistress,
the Wolf, Loba de Perrautier, sang, when these troubles
were just beginning;

Evil has conquered the world.

At Rome the pope and the false doctors have thrown the church
into distress and have irritated God. They are fools and so sinful
that the heretics have become bold. Since they commenced the
trouble, it is difficult that it should be different than it is. But I
will not take sides.

The king of France is insincere with regard to the honor of Our
Lord. He has abandoned the Holy Sepulcher. He buys, sells, and
engages in commerce like a serf or a bourgeois.

Yesterday we knew that the world was bad; to-day we see that
it is worse.

But I am not sad. A pure joy guides me and permits me to
remain in the perfect friendship of her whom I love best. If you
wish to learn her name, inquire in the country of Carcassonne. . . .

Peire's friends sometimes teased him because his father
had been a furrier, and when Loba de Perrautier (Loba,

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

from loupa, wolf) referred to it, he said, "You are my
wolf; permit that I be yours." He dressed himself in wolf-
skins, and the lords and ladies pursued him over the grounds
of the chateau. Unfortunately an envious enemy loosed the
hounds, and Peire, unable to free himself from his dis-
guise, was almost killed before the hounds were pulled
away, Loba herself nursed him back to health. This is
the same Loba who was involved in the unpleasant affair
with Remond de Mirevaux, and Remond may have been
one of the hunting-party.

Carcassonne is almost too medieval to be true. The
restorations leave nothing to be desired; "wherever possible
the original stones have been used in the walls" ; but there
is in Carcassonne something of the theatrical, a sense of
life arrested, that one does not feel in the remoter un-
touched villages, where life continues to be lived on the
classic scale, where churches become stables, and where the
stones from the walls are built into the peasants' bedrooms.
The people of these villages are like the people of the
Middle Ages; scornful of their past and skeptical of their
future, trusting in le bon Dieu to send them rain for their
crops and to bring them safely through another year. The
people of Carcassonne are chiefly interested in their past
and hurl dates and architectural terms at you with the
rapidity of a high-power machine-gun and the composure
of an Oxford don.

The postern-gate is still there through which the trou-
badours slipped trembling at the proximity of their mis-
tresses; the church where the lovely ladies heard mass and
made assignations still stands as it was enlarged in the

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THE TRAIL OF A VAGABOND POET

fourteenth century; and one can still walk around the
walls of the town in thirty minutes or so to catch a view
of the Pyrenees gleaming in the west and the suggestion
of the sea in the east. The walls rise like a curtain of
masonry at the summit of the hill, and one feels that they,
like the true church, will never fail.

Sometimes when Peire Vidal traveled this road he would
go on to Toulouse to pay his respects to Count Raymond.
At other times he would turn south at Carcassonne to visit
the counts of Foix or Peter of Aragon beyond them in
Spain. More than fifty of his poems have been preserved,
and of his life many traditions are current.

He is said to have gone on a crusade with Richard the
Lion-Heart and to have stopped off at Cyprus, where he
met a peasant girl who said she was the daughter of the
emperor of Constantinople. He married her forthwith and
announced to all the lords of Christendom that he claimed
the title of his father-in-law. He returned to France, was
received again at Les Baux, and wandered again, with or
without his wife, over the Via Tolosa. He penetrated
Hungary, and wherever he went he carried with him the
art of song, and wherever he went he made love to the
ladies, and taught his friends how to make poems, and paid
compliments, and was the wonder of the provincial courts,
and committed great follies.

He was alive in 1205, but the date of his death is un-
known.

[289]

Chapter XII
The Trail of a Poet Laureate

ABOUT AVIGNON

Chapter XII

PETRACCO, Francesco de Petracco's father, was banished
from Florence on the same day as Dante who wrote the
"Divine Comedy," and on the day that Dante and Petracco
stormed the gate of Florence on the south side of the city
and were repulsed, Francesco was born, which was July 20,
1304. Between the years 1300 and 1400 two Italians
were writing rich and fluent poetry, and one of these men
was Dante and the other was Petrarch, and both of these
men made use of the pleasant devices which the trouba-
dours had discovered; but since they were ignorant of the
way in which the troubadours sang their poems, they wrote
their words to be read as literature and not to be sung.
Mr. Ezra Pound, who has written many good songs in the
manner of the troubadours, though his understanding is
sometimes clouded by his friendship for one of them, has
said that the poems of Campion who lived in England at
the time of Shakspere are the half of the troubadour's art
preserved by Dante and Petrarch, and that the musical
sonata represents the other half of their art. The trouba-
dours wrote both words and music and intended their songs
to be sung. For this reason they were very careful of the
words they used in their songs, that each should be fitting

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

to the note at which it was to be uttered. Their music was
more philosophical and abstract than any music we know
to-day and was written for learned people, for which reason
it cannot be played on the phonograph, as the melodies are
not suited to the Charleston in which people to-day take
great delight.

Dante learned the manner of writing poems from Guido
Cavalcanti and was well learned in the Provengal tongue.
But the manner he learned was no more than the mold into
which he poured his thoughts, which were melted by the
divine fire of his passions and poured from his lips like
liquid gold. Such was the heat of his nature that his words
still glow and retain much of the inner light which he com-
municated to them, as in the poem beginning.

All ye that pass along Love's trodden way

Pause ye a while and say

If there be any grief like unto mine,

or that other beginning,

Ladies that have intelligence in love,

Of mine own lady I would speak with you,

or that other,

A very pitiful lady, very young,
Exceeding rich in human sympathies
Stood by, what time I clamored upon death,

or indeed any poem which he wrote in honor of his lady,
Beatrice, known to her friends and companions as Bice
Portinari.

THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

Dante's companions who taught him how to write in the
Provencal tongue lived a hundred years after the greatest
troubadours had died, and they no longer remembered the
meanings which these troubadours, Bertrand de Born, Ber-
nard de Ventadour, and Arnaut Daniel, attached to their
words nor how these poets thought about love. Thus they
separated love of the spirit, which they called Love, from
fleshly love which they ignored or called "irregularities of
youth," and love of one's wife which they did not describe
at all but took for granted. Although the troubadours fre-
quently committed "irregularities" and did not think about
them much more than Petrarch or Dante, in their connec-
tion of Love the body and the spirit participated. Thus
Dante and Petrarch misunderstood the nature of the poetry
of the troubadours. This is not to be regretted, for from
this misunderstanding grew Dante's "Vita Nuova" ; and we
cannot imagine whether his poems would have been better
or worse had he written of love as the troubadours wrote,
for had he done so, he would not have been Dante but
would have been some one else.

Petrarch was born when Dante was forty-three years old,
and as Dante's vision was of the heavenly paradise, so
Petrarch's vision was of the earthly paradise. The time
in which Petrarch lived was like the time in which Bernard
de Ventadour lived, but with this difference, that whereas
Bernard saw the earth and its beauty and looked beyond to
catch a glimpse of heaven, Petrarch saw heaven and its
beauty and looked beyond to catch a glimpse of earth.
Petrarch was brought to Carpentras, a city near Avignon,
when he was very young, and he spent much of his life

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

between Avignon, Carpentras, and Vaucluse, where he had
a summer house. On several occasions he traveled along
the Via Tolosa.

The country about Avignon has to-day much the same
appearance that it had when Petrarch lived there. In the
very far distance are the foot-hills of the Alps. Closer
and separated from them by many miles of rich rolling land
is Mont Ventoux, which Petrarch climbed; and some
scholars think that Petrarch was the first man in many hun-
dreds of years to climb a mountain in order to appreciate
nature; others think that these are wrong, for as soon as
Petrarch reached the top of the mountain, which he did
with much difficulty and much wondering of why he had
set out, he turned his back upon the view to think about
himself and read the Confessions of St. Augustine.

Most of the villages in the district are walled villages,
but the walls are very much broken, and the owners of the
chateaux have gone away and left them to the peasants
and cows and horses and chickens which have taken posses-
sion of them or of those parts that seem useful. The vil-
lages of the Middle Ages were small, but these villages are
smaller, and one may wander about in many a deserted
house of the fourteenth century and look out over the walls
of the town to the green fields beyond. The houses are
tall and flat on the roof and narrow, and there are not
enough people left to make it worth while to use the top
stories.

Carpentras is one of these towns, only larger than most.

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THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

It has electric lights in some parts, but in others it has none
and no running water. It is on a very high hill. The room
where we stayed at Carpentras was at the top of a high
narrow house, and the wind howled about the corner, and
the moonlight threw into silhouette the jagged roof -line
of the town and the crenelated tower of the Porte d'Orange.
One cannot make a tour of the walls from the inside of the
town, for houses have been built up against them and over
them so that at night the lights of the houses smile down
on the traveler. Building a house against the wall of a city
is a good idea, because it saves putting up one side of the
house, and sometimes you can dig back into the city
wall and make an extra room or a cellar to keep the
butter fresh.

When Petrarch was in Carpentras he was a little boy and
no doubt played about in the square in front of the cathe-
dral, but he did not run away from his lessons. He was
such a good boy that instead of trying to get out of study-
ing his lessons, he even read the books his teachers were
using and was so assiduous that his father was well pleased
and predicted a brilliant future for him. This, I suppose,
is a very unusual thing for a father to do, for Petrarch
has recorded it and commented about it. Petrarch and his
admirers agree that he was not vain, and Petrarch says he
does not know why the world thought so highly of him.
He spent his life writing a large number of letters to im-
portant people and was an adept in the art of making rich
men feel comfortable after having done things they never
should have done.

Petrarch's father was modest too. One day at the age

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

of forty-five, Petracco looked in the glass and discovered
that there was one white hair on his head. He began
shouting and making such an uproar that everybody in the
house and street thought he was being murdered and called
the watch.

In the courtyard of the bishop's palace is a Roman tri-
umphal arch, but the palace was built in the seventeenth
Century, and I am unable to determine whether the arch
stood in the open when Petrarch was a child in the streets.
Wherever it was, Petrarch must have seen it and dreamed
about it, for he was an Italian and hated France and Car-
pentras and Avignon, and he thought always of Rome.
Whenever he wrote anything that he thought it was im-
portant for posterity to remember, he wrote in Latin. For
many years he wrote two or three of these Latin letters a
day and made copies of them and later edited them very
carefully. They were lengthy Latin essays about important
abstract subjects such as the nature of literature, the good
points in his rich friend's character, and his own experi-
ences. The personal notes were on a separate sheet of paper
and were all destroyed, yet for three or four of these per-
sonal notes, if they were the right ones, I would almost
forgive him the several volumes of his Latin epistles. His
love for Laura, which he considered neither grave enough
nor dignified enough for the language of Cicero, he de-
scribed in Italian poems, yet strangely enough the sonnets
have a dozen readers where the epistles have one.

The papacy was at Avignon only sixteen miles away,
and noble Italian families were living in all of the towns of
the district. A bishop seems to have lived in every ham-

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THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

let, and frequently the popes themselves made excursions
into the surrounding country, or some important committee
would hold conference at Carpentras or at Nimes. On
these occasions life would be interesting. The clerics
would come in holiday attire, in silk and satin and many
ornaments, and the official business of the church would
be postponed while they took great dinners in the episcopal
palace ; and Petracco, who was a successful lawyer, would
be very busy, and Signora Petracco would be flushed per-
haps and excited. * . .

But the charm of Carpentras is not particularly in the
church of St.-Suffren, nor in the Roman arch, nor even
in the little boy that played in the streets a boy of good
family with a round fat face and good eyes who admitted
when he had grown up that he had been handsome in his
youth but rather in the arrogance of a town that is so
old that it refuses to grow old, of a small city that is larger
than many an American metropolis. The population of
Carpentras is not of this generation only; it is of the ages
and counts in its number the six thousand who live there
now and their ancestors back to the first man who built the
first stone hut on the hill in the stone age. These built the
town, have put themselves in it, and live in it still. They
will explain to you about it if your room is on the top
floor of a tall house on a windy moonlit night.

At the age of fifteen Petrarch was sent to study at the
University of Montpellier, and since he was a young man

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

and was not to succumb to his passion for Laura until he
was twenty-seven, he might have enjoyed himself were it
not for the fact that he was going to study canon law, which
he detested, and were he not journeying even farther away
from his beloved Italy.

He traveled southwest on the road to Avignon and passed
Entraigues, where an old tower built by the Templars still
stands, and crossed the river by the newly repaired bridge
of St.-Benezet. This bridge, where On danse, on danse,
sur la pont d'Avignon, was built, you must know, by a little
shepherd boy. One day he was tending his flocks, and a
man clothed in nothing but light appeared to him and told
him to go to Avignon. The little boy said, "But who will
take care of my flocks when I am gone?" The man an-
swered that he was not to worry and that they would be
looked after but that the little boy must come with him.

Benezet started out bravely, and in one hand he held
his shepherd's staff and in the other a bit of moldy bread
which formed his daily fare. When he reached the Rhone
there was no bridge over it and he had to be ferried across.
At first the ferryman, a big black man with a wicked mouth
snd sores on his face, refused to take him because he
thought the little boy didn't have any money. But the boy
said, "You must take me because I'm going to build a
bridge here." This threat of competition made the ferry-
man so angry that in midstream he fell upon the boy and
tried to kill him, but he didn't succeed, for had he killed
him little Benezet could not have built the bridge of which
a part is still standing to-day, so you see that the boy did
get across somehow.

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THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

When he arrived at the cathedral they were saying mass,
but he did not care. He walked right up to the front of
the church and said, "See here, I'm going to build a bridge
across the Rhone." The priests and the people and the
bishop were terribly angry and tried to put him out, but
he said: "No, you can't put me out. M. Jesus Christ all
clothed in light came to me and told me to come here and
build a bridge, and here I am." Then they said he was a
wicked boy to leave his flocks, and please to go away until
they had finished mass. But he said no, he would not go
away, and was going to build a bridge.

Then they said: "So you are going to build a bridge,
are you? So you think you can come in here and interrupt
our services with that kind of cock and bull story, do you?
Well!" And the people around the bishop nodded and
shook their heads and said that the boy was getting a little
of his own back, and that little boys thought they knew too
much these days anyway.

Then the bishop pointed to a big stone in the courtyard
of the church. It was thirty feet long and seven feet broad.
"Take that," said the bishop, "and carry it to the river if
you can."

And the boy picked it up as though it were a shepherd's
staff and carried it to the river. "Here," he said, cc is the
foundation at least."

The bishop said he would not have believed it if he had
not seen it with his own eyes, but the people in the church
began shouting and singing hymns because a miracle
had been performed and said to each other: "Yes, sir,
he put it over his shoulder and carried it right straight to

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

the river and said, 'Here's the first stone/ or something like
that. I saw him." Then they went to the river and tried
to push the stone to be certain it was as heavy as they
thought it was. And that is the way the bridge came to be
built.

The tower of Philippe le Bel, which is across the river
from Avignon at the head of the Via Tolosa, had not yet
been built when Petrarch crossed. Philip, the king of
France, built it later in order to keep a good eye on Avig-
non, which was not part of his kingdom, so that he might
know what the popes and the Templars were about and
be prepared to welcome them if they ever wanted to in-
vade France. Not many years later, the popes built the
walls around the city, which are still in excellent repair
and are nine feet thick and have thirty-four towers al-
though I never counted them in order to keep an eye on
the king and be prepared in case he ever decided to invade
Avignon. Thus mutually protected, neither was much
afraid of the other, and the king and the popes lived to-
gether in mutual distrust.

A little to the north of the tower is an old Carthusian
monastery and the Fort St.-Andre, now deserted but very
new in Petrarch's time, if indeed they had yet been built
when he crossed the river on his way to school in 1319.

Petrarch traveled almost due west along the Via Tolosa
until he came to Remoulins, a walled city with an old
square tower, whence it was but a step to the Pont du Gard,
a Roman aqueduct which, bridging a wide valley, is some
nine hundred feet long and five hundred feet high. It is
made of three tiers of arches, each one narrower than the

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THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

one below, and is made of large rocks without cement. It
is supposed to have been built by the son-in-law of Augus-
tus, which must have pleased Petrarch immensely. Despite
the fact that it is visited yearly by thousands of tourists
who go because they are told to go, its lines have great
grace and much power.

At Nimes, Petrarch found a Roman city in the midst
of France. In the center of the town is a large arena,
smaller but better preserved than the Colosseum at Rome
or the arena at Aries. Not far from the arena is a former
Roman temple, the Maison Carree, still in excellent con-
dition despite the profane uses to which it has been put, as
a church, a warehouse, and a stable. It stood perhaps on
the Roman Forum, and around it are other ruins. Farther
away are Roman baths and a temple to Diana, restored
and fiddled up by the eighteenth century. Here the fif-
teen-year-old Petrarch may have felt again the varied life
of imperial Rome, its brutal power, its compactness, and
its sensuality. Yet I think he felt none of these. The
civilization of Rome was to him essentially a civilization
of the intellect, and he was more attracted by the vision
of virtue which his Roman masters defined but never at-
tained than in the life of blood and bone which they lived.

The Mines Petrarch visited was a walled city, triangu-
lar in shape, with the arena at the apex. Two of the gates
are still standing, hidden behind the mass of new houses,
but the walls have been transformed into pleasant boule-
vards. Nimes was taken in the Middle Ages many times
at war, by siege, and by strategem. The most amusing of
these strategems is recounted in the adventurous novel

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TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

called "Le Charroi de Nimes," which is too long to be re*
counted here.

Uzes, a city which Petrarch probably never saw, is a
few miles north of Nimes. It has a beautiful chateau and
was once the home of the three brothers Uzes, or, to pre-
serve the older spelling, Uzez. "Although Guy d'Uzez
was the sole lord of the chateau, which he inherited from
his father, the revenue was so small that he and his
brothers were unable to subsist on it. Ebles, one of the
brothers, who was an astute man, remonstrated to Guy and
Pierre on the small income they had, which was not enough
to keep them alive, and said that because they knew how
to sing and write poems he thought it would be better for
them to follow the courts of the princes than to stay at
home and starve to death in idleness. His brothers
thought this was a good idea, so they wrote their cousin
Hellyas, a gentleman of the neighborhood who was a good
singer, and begged him to go with them, and he did not
refuse at all. Before they left they decided that the songs
which Guy invented and the sirventes which Ebles created
should be sung by Pierre who was a very good musician,
that they would always stay together, and that Guy would
take care of the money and divide it between them." They
got along very well and prospered until Ebles began writ-
ing about the lives of the tyrants and attacked the misdeeds
of the lords of the country and the bishops of the church.
Then the legate of the pope made them promise not to sing
songs like that any more; "so they refused to sing at all but
retired to their castle, rich and full of goods which they had
acquired by means of their poesy. - . ."

[3043

THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

From Nimes, the Via Tolosa runs southwest to Lunel
and thence to Montpellier, Beziers, and the other cities you
have read about.

Petrarch seems not to have prospered at Montpellier,
for after four years his father removed him to the Uni-
versity of Bologna in the hope that the Italian atmosphere
might encourage the study of law. When he had been
there for three years, he heard of the death of his father,
gave up the study of law, and returned to Avignon. The
next year he fell in love with Laura.

The only trustworthy accounts of this love are by
Petrarch himself, and they are the poems and songs he made
about it in the vulgar tongue, a few references in his Latin
letters, and the following modest entry on the fly-leaf of
his Virgil:

Laura, who was distinguished by her own virtues and widely
celebrated by my songs, first appeared to my eyes in my early man-
hood, in the year of Our Lord 1327, upon the sixth day of April, at
the first hour, in the Church of Santa Clara at Avignon; in the
same city, in the same month of April, and on the same sixth day
and at the same first hour, in the year 1348, the light was taken
from our day, while I was by chance, at Verona, ignorant, alas!
of my fate. The unhappy news reached me at Parma in a letter
from my unhappy friend Ludovico, on the morning of the nine-
teenth of May of the same year. Her chaste and lovely form was
laid in the Church of the Franciscans, on the evening of the day
upon which she died. I am persuaded that her soul returned to
the heaven whence it came. I have experienced a certain satisfaction

[305]

THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

in writing this bitter record of a cruel event, especially in this
place, where it will often come under my eye, for so I can be led to
reflect that life can afford me no further pleasures, and the most
serious of my temptations being removed, I may be admonished by
frequent study of these lines . . . that it is high time to flee from
Babylon [Avignon], This, with God's grace, will be easy. . . .

Little is known for certain of this mysterious and famous
woman. She is supposed to have been married to a certain
de Sade, a man of irascible temper. She was a good wife.
Her conduct toward Petrarch seems to have been exem-
plary, for as soon as he declared his passion she tried to
evade him, kept her face veiled in his presence, and treated
him with honest rigor.

Her position must have been most trying, for Petrarch
was a handsome and rising young man and the friend of the
most powerful families of Avignon. His poems were ex-
cellent and were published as soon as written (that is,
passed around among friends to become common property) .
The kind of thing to which Laura was subjected may be
seen by reading the subtitles to several of the poems : "He
hopes that time will render her more merciful"; cc He
Invites his eyes to feast themselves upon Laura"; "His
heart rejected by Laura will perish unless she relent";
"Night brings him no rest"; "Love makes him silent";
"All that he is is due to her ... " etc. All of these
themes, elaborated and varied with innumerable additions
in some ninety sonnets and eight canzoni, were not calcu-
lated to bring ease and comfort to the chaste heart of a wife
or the jealous heart of a husband. Petrarch was a young
man, sufficiently well known so that whatever he did was

[306]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

news. If he met Laura walking in the afternoon, he would
stop whatever he was saying, bite his lip, turn pale, become
morose, walk as if he were in a trance, and conduct himself
generally as young men who are obviously in love and like
to have it known have conducted themselves ever since.
Then he would write a poem about what he had done, and
write it so well that even those people who had not been
present to see how love had affected him would learn of it
in the poem and would repeat the poem over and over
again to all their friends and acquaintances. Ballad mon-
gers learned the poems and recited them on the streets.
Laura's husband must have been made glad by them when-
ever he left the house ! Laura, who according to Petrarch's
own admission never gave him any encouragement, must
have been an angel to submit to this sort of thing for
twenty-one years until death relieved her of her persecu-
tions.

During this time Petrarch became the father of two chil-
dren by a woman whose name is unknown. This intrigue
was not called love, and it bothered the poet's conscience
not at all, whereas his love he regarded not only as a great
fault in his character but also as a great sin. Thus, in the
fourteenth century, love must have meant something en-
tirely different from what it had meant to the poets in the
early stages of troubadourism. The physical basis of love
had been entirely spiritualized. Love, which had originally
been a cooperative passion in which the poet and his
mistress both contributed, became an introspective pas-
sion for the man only. Woman had been apotheosized.
Petrarch took Woman out of heaven and made her into

[307]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

woman again. He translated her from a symbol into a
human being; but his translation was imperfect, and the
human being still had about her some remnants of godli-
ness. If Laura could for a moment have been less chaste
and virtuous than she was, one cannot imagine Petrarch
as anything but irritated with her for spoiling his pretty
picture.

But there is one more thing to note. Although Petrarch's
conception of love was entirely different, it was taken di-
rectly from the poetry of the troubadours, and Petrarch
and his friends thought it was the same. Thus it fell under
the ban of the church. Now the church fathers had con-
demned lust and had condemned adultery although they
were discreetly silent during the twelfth century and it
never occurred to them that a man and a woman could
conduct a platonic friendship, or that a man could feel
the emotions which Petrarch says he felt for Laura, or that
woman could be made the symbol of complete theological
beauty which Dante made of Beatrice. Yet Petrarch's
thought was dominated by the doctrines of the church
fathers, and he regretted his love bitterly and determined
to hate the object of it. Woman was still too divine to be
quite human, she was already too human to be quite di-
vine. Love becomes the symbol of earthly beauty, and
Laura, the beautiful woman, becomes at the same time
that she is a woman, very real and very alive in his poems
the symbol of earthly beauty, the earthly beauty which
the puritanical thirteenth century tried to hate but never
could hate. Petrarch, looking at the world through the
eyes of his teachers, who were bred in that century, re-

[308]

THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

garded the beauty of the blue sky as a snare and the thrill
of the senses as a delusion of the devil.

Finally, and this is not emphasized frequently enough,
many of Petrarch's poems about Laura are mere literary
exercises. They were pleasant to write, they made him
talked about as a young man of talent, they were a gesture.
They are inferior to the gestures of the troubadours be-
cause Petrarch's virtuosity was inferior. They have a more
lasting hold upon us than the poems of the troubadours
because they represent more nearly the dilemma of the
modern man, for whom love of the spirit and love of the
senses are supposed to be separate for ever and ever and
for all time.

One time when Petrarch was thirty-three years old he
decided to climb Mont Ventoux, and although he apolo-
gizes for his ambition, because he thinks that people may
say he is addicted to worldly vanities, he tells us about his
trip at some length because he derived from it a moral
lesson. He had been reading about Philip of Macedon,
who ascended the Hsemus Mountains, in Thessaly, and
said, "It seems to me that a young man in private life may
well be excused for attempting what an aged king could
undertake without arousing criticism/'

He had great difficulty in finding a suitable companion
for his excursion, a difficulty not unknown in modern
times. In running over the list of possible friends, he re-
jected first those who would take no interest in the trip and

[309]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

whose coldness would dampen his spirits, and then he re-
jected those whose enthusiasm would be irritating. He
finally decided that his brother was the best companion
he could find, and the brother was ''delighted and gratified
beyond measure'" at Petrarch's choice.

They left the house in the morning and by evening had
arrived at Malaucene, which lies on the foot of the mountain
at the north, according to Petrarch, but really at the north-
west. Malaucene is about eleven miles from Carpentras,
and from Malaucene to the top of the mountain is another
eleven miles, although the second eleven is more difficult
than the first. Malaucene is a delightful little town with
a ruined chateau, which stands bravely on a rock and
faces the mountains on the one side and the plain on the
other.

Petrarch said: "We found an old shepherd, in one of
the mountain dales, who tried, at great length, to dissuade
us from the ascent, saying that some fifty years before, he
had, in the same ardor of youth, reached the summit, but
had got for his pains nothing but fatigue and regret, and
clothes and body torn by rocks and briers. No one, so far
as he or his companions knew, had ever tried the ascent
before him. But his counsels increased rather than dimin-
ished our desire to proceed, since youth is suspicious of
warnings/' They started out with good-will, and the
shepherd followed some distance behind, begging and im-
ploring them not to undertake so rash and foolhardy an
adventure.

"We soon came to a halt at the top of a certain cliff.
Upon starting out again, we went more slowly, and I

THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

especially advanced along the rocky path with a more
deliberate step. While my brother chose a direct path,
straight up a cliff, I weakly took an easier one which really
descended." When he was called back by his companions,
he said he had been trying to find an easier path, and did
not mind walking farther if he did not need to walk so
hard. He became disgusted with himself when he found
that he was walking twice as far as his brother, and that
while his brother waited for him to come up he could rest,
whereas Petrarch grew constantly more weary and irri-
tated. Many times he made good resolutions, and many
times he broke them, and always he found that his brother
was ahead of him and was resting and fresh. Finally he sat
down and said to himself: "What thou hast so frequently
experienced to-day in the ascent of this mountain, happens
to thee as to many in the journey towards the blessed life.
. . But nevertheless in the end, after long wanderings,
thou must perforce either climb the steeper path, under
the burden of tasks foolishly deferred, to its blessed cul-
mination, or lie down in the valley of thy sins and (I shud-
der to think of it) if the shadow of death overtake thee
spend an eternal night amid constant torments."

" . . . On the peak of the mountain is a little level space
where we could at last rest our tired feet and bodies." To-
day at the peak of the mountain there is an observatory, a
hotel, and a church, and the automobile road from Car-
pentras which winds up the gentler slopes on the south and
east. The summit of Mont Ventoux is 6254.96 feet high,
and this is what Petrarch thought as he looked over the
country :

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

At first, because of the unaccustomed quality of the air and the
effect of the great sweep of view spread out before me, I stood like
one dazed. I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had
read of Athos and Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself
witnessed the same things from a mountain of less fame. I turned
my eyes toward Italy whither my heart most inclined. The Alps,
nigged and snow-capped, seemed to rise close by, although they
were really at a great distance; the same Alps through which that
fierce enemy of the Roman name once made his way, bursting the
rocks, if we may believe the report, by the application of vinegar.
I sighed, I must confess, for the skies of Italy. ... An inexpres-
sible longing came over me to see once more my friend and my
country. ... At the same time I reproached myself for the double
weakness, springing as it did from a soul not yet steeled to manly
resistance.

He thought of Laura. Did the noble eminence on which
he stood recall to him the nobility of his love or of her char-
acter? Did the pleasant and soft landscape at his feet
suggest thoughts of the softness and sweetness of his
friendship with her? Did he write a poem about her be-
ginning, "I love to think that sometime we may be . . ."
or, "When I am dead . . . "? They did not. He did not.
He thought : "I still love but with shame and heaviness of
heart. I love, but love what I would not love, and what
I would that I might hate. Though loath to do so, though
constrained, though sad and sorrowing, still I do love and
I feel in my miserable self the truth of the well known
words, C I will hate if I can; if not, I will love against my
will/ " Love is a perverse and wicked passion. The
world has evidently changed since the days of the trouba-
dours.

THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

He had almost forgotten where he was, but at last he
determined to dismiss his anxieties and look about him and
see what he could see. "The sinking sun and the lengthen-
ing shadows of the mountain were already warning us that
the time was near at hand when we must go. As if sud-
denly wakened from sleep, I turned about and gazed
toward the west. I was unable to discern the summits of
the Pyrenees . . . not because of any intervening obstacle
that I know of, but simply on account of the insufficiency of
our mortal vision. But I could see with utmost clearness,
off to the right, the mountains about Lyons, and to the
left, the Bay of Marseilles and the waters that lash the
shores of Aigues-Mortes. . . . Under our very eyes flowed
the Rhone."

It occurred to him to open his St. Augustine. "My
brother, waiting to hear something of St. Augustine's from
my lips, stood attentively by. I call him, and God too,
to witness that where I first fixed my eyes it was written:
'And men go about to wonder at the heights of the moun-
tains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep
of the rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolu-
tion of the stars, but themselves they consider not. 3 I was
abashed, and, asking my brother, who was anxious to hear
more, not to annoy me, I closed the book, angry with myself
that I should still be admiring earthly things who might
long ago have learned . . . that nothing is wonderful
but the soul, which, when great in itself, finds nothing
great outside itself." He had seen enough and did not
speak a word until he had reached the bottom of the moun-
tain.

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

6

Petrarch and his brother Gherardo were young men
about town in Avignon in 1326. They were nice young
men who belonged to the best clubs, dressed in the height
of fashion, and were always to be found in the house of
the wealthy Colonna family. Petrarch's hair was curled
by the cc piratical curling-iron," his boots were of the tight-
est, and his clothes were worn so fastidiously that the
slightest puff of wind would disarrange the neat folds.
Avignon was at that time very fashionable, and the popes
and their nephew-cardinals, the poets and ambassadors
and pretty women, must have made it a pleasant spot to
spend a season or two.

The social center that year was the house of the Colonna,
an important Roman family in exile which Petrarch was
very careful to cultivate, with the fortunate result that
the next year he went with one of the Colonna boys, who
had been granted a bishopric, to Lombez, a few leagues
the other side of Toulouse. Although he had ample op-
portunity to become acquainted with classic troubadourism
at Avignon, where the tradition was still being kept alive
by a few sweet singers, his opportunities at Toulouse were
greatly increased. There can be little doubt that he knew
the troubadours fairly well, and in "The Triumph of Love"
he presents a list of those who may be taken as his favor-
ites. First he speaks of the Italian troubadours, and then

another tribe of manners strange
And uncouth dialect was seen. * . .

[an]

THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

In this band were Arnaut Daniel, Folquet de Marseille,
Rambaut d'Orange, Rambaut de Vaquieres, Peire Vidal,
and

tuneful Rudel who, in moonstruck mood,
O'er the ocean by a flying image led,
In the fantastic chase his canvas spread ;
And where he thought his amorous vows to breathe
From Cupid's bow received the shaft of death.

He had studied carefully the works of several of the trou-
badours, and whether he took from them merely their ideas,
or whether he took their poems too, is still a matter of
debate.

Lombez, Petrarch thought, was even less pleasant than
the other French cities. The speech of the peasants was
crude, and their manners were cruder than their speech.
"The bishop, however," he said in effect in the letters
which he sent back to friends at home, cc is bearing his exile
from the wealth and luxury to which he is accustomed
with great affability of manner and much charm/' In-
deed the bishop might well bear his exile with good grace.
It was his first bishopric, he was required to stay there for
less than a year, the income was considerable, and he would
forever after have the rank of at least a lord of the church.
But for the Colonna this was merely a beginning. Pe-
trarch's task was to make it as pleasant a beginning as pos-
sible. Obviously the poet is still the publicity agent; but
instead of advertising his master's proficiency in arms,
which is a fair advertisement, since it can be tested easily,
or advertising his generosity and largess for without this
largess the poet would starve instead of paying pretty

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

compliments to a master's wife and cursing his master's
character when he feels like it, the poet now devotes his
attentions entirely to flattery, which is the more perverse
because it was supposed to be taken seriously. When a
troubadour says a lady is beautiful, the statement stands
because it is bad form to think of any lady as anything but
beautiful ; but when Petrarch calls the king of Naples wise
and says that the king's poetry is immortal and that he is
the greatest man of the age, he is telling not only bald-
faced lies, but he is telling servile lies, which are, if pos-
sible, worse.

The fruits of servility are rich and ripe. A year later
the Colonnas furnished Petrarch with the means to travel
to Paris and Germany. Later he traveled in Italy and
took ship for England. When he saw the shores of that is-
land, however, he had a change of heart. He suddenly
felt that his passion for Laura had died and that he might
return to Avignon and devote himself again to his studies.
He did, and shortly thereafter became the father of a son
by the unknown woman. Immediately after this event
that there was a scandal as has been suggested is most
improbable, for that kind of error was too frequent in those
days to be worthy of notice he retired to his country
house in Vaucluse.

7

The road leads due east from Avignon past Chateau-
neuf, a ruined town on a hill, past Thor, a walled town in
the valley, and past L'Isle-sur-Sorgue to a village which is
so small that if one could get past the cliffs which sur-

[316]

THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

round it one would not notice it at all. This is Vaucluse.
On the top of the cliff which faces the town is the ruined
chateau of the bishops of Cavaillon, a small town not far
south. The stream skirts the feet of the cliff; and if one
follows the river path, worn deep by thousands of honey-
moon couples the grotto of Vaucluse is to southern
France what Niagara Falls is to us one coines finally to
the deep and quiet pool hidden in the heart of the moun-
tain which is the source of the Sorgue River.

It is a quiet and a romantic spot, but even before
Petrarch came here to live, it was a tourist center. When
Petrarch was a small boy his father brought him here on
an excursion from Avignon. "The little Francesco had no
sooner arrived than he was struck by the beauties of the
landscape and cried, 'Here, now, is a retirement suited to
my taste and preferable in my eyes to the greatest and most
splendid cities/ " If this story is true Petrarch was evi-
dently born a prig and was not made one by the circum-
stances of his education.

He had two gardens, one secluded on the side of a hill
and the other on an island in midstream. The island gar-
den contained a grotto where Petrarch retired to read dur-
ing the midday heat. In this garden, he says, he tried to
establish the Muses and thus incurred the displeasure of
the nymphs of the stream who had for many centuries con-
sidered the island as their own. They refused to under-
stand why Petrarch should have preferred nine old maids,
ugly, arid, and shriveled, to their lovely selves and their
eternal youth. Hidden in the stream, their bright eyes
peering through the water-weeds, they watched him set his

[317]

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

garden in order. Then with musical laughter and splash-
ing of water, they descended on the garden, their naked
bodies brilliant in the sunshine, and destroyed all his
work. Petrarch tried again, and again he failed, and
finally he gave over the attempt.

Occasionally his fine friends would pay him a visit from
Avignon, King Robert of Naples, the Colonna, and others.
One time on his return from a walk he met a group of
people on the road. "The fashion of France has so con-
founded the dress of the sexes that I could not tell which
was which, for all were decked with ribbons and neck-
laces, pearls and rich head-dresses, rings, jeweled caps, and
coats embroidered in purple. We bowed to one an-
other; then what a pleasant surprise, my dear Guill-
aume! I recognized the fair one who causes your heart
to beat. ..."

While Petrarch was living thus in roots and herbs
he was at times a vegetarian and was completely with-
drawn from the world he was surprised one day at receiv-
ing two letters each begging him to be crowned poet
laureate. One of these letters was from Paris, and the
other was from Rome. These were other fruits of ser-
vility. No one to this day has advanced a satisfactory
reason why this young man, who was known only by some
charming and very popular poems in the vulgar tongue,
should have been crowned poet laureate. This honor, one
imagines, should have been offered only to men who have
achieved and have produced some great work, a "Divine
Comedy," for example; and certainly the fourteenth cen-
tury did not think well enough of love-lyrics, no matter

THE TRAIL OF A POET LAUREATE

how perfect and charming they might have been, to make
their author laureate of Rome- The fact is, of course* that
the invitations came because of Petrarch's skill in making
friends rather than because of his skill in making poems.
His great Latin epic had hardly been begun.

With the laurel crown and you may be sure he was
not slow in punning on it with the name of Laura, which
was unworthy of him and of her Petrarch arrived at last
at the eminence which he still holds. He was not the last
of the troubadours, not the greatest of them, but he served
to make popular the code of romantic love which still con-
trols our actions and our thoughts, a code which had been
perfected by gallant poets and lovely ladies a hundred
years before Petrarch was born.

8

I would not have included the trail of Petrarch among
the trails of those poets who died so long before he was
born, were it not that Petrarch covered the same ground
as they, though with a difference, and were he not one of
the men who make them visible to us, though indistinctly
and through their own temperament. I wish I might have
included Dante and his trails, but they would have led us
too far away from France. Dante really understood the
troubadours much better than did Petrarch, for Dante was
a better poet than Petrarch, which Petrarch knew, and
for which he was jealous and is said never to have read
"The Divine Comedy/*

But since Petrarch acted like a troubadour in some
things, I have tried to show how his manner and compre-

TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

hension differed from theirs, and that he was neither so
gallant as they nor so sharp. Because he took poetry more
seriously than they, his discourses sound sometimes like
papers read before literary clubs, filled with good moral-
ity and pleasant big words about a subject which the
author does not understand. But our gratitude is due to
Petrarch for his enthusiasm about Latin literature, and
had he been equally enthusiastic about Greek literature
we should be even more grateful to him. These, however,
are matters that concern the school-teacher and therefore
do not belong here.

The things which I thought did belong here are the re-
sult of a vision of men with golden voices singing pretty
songs to ladies at the hour of dawn, standing in the gar-
dens of chateaux and making of life an exquisite thing ac-
cording to their own ideas of exquisiteness, a vision of but-
terflies in an orchard on a rich summer day, of humming-
birds in a garden. I hope I have caught a faint murmur
of their song and a very little of the glamour of their civ-
ilization. 1

1 Several statements in the preceding pages are based on historical tra-
dition only, in the belief that an unproved tradition represents the point
of view of the makers of the tradition better than the unproved historical
fact. Since both the tradition and the fact were, in several cases, hypo-
thetical, I chose the tradition.

The routes over which people of the twelfth century traveled in France
are a subject which has been somewhat neglected by scholars. It is in-
evitable, theerfore, that others will improve on the itineraries I have sug-
gested. I venture to hope that that improvement will come soon.

[320]

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