^
 
 X' Z3 W ^
 
 HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 PEOYENCAL POETEY: 
 
 BY C. C. FAURIEL, 
 
 LATE MEMBER OF THE INSTITCTE OF FRANCE. 
 
 ^ranslalcb from iht ^xtm^, 
 
 WITH OCCASIONAL NOTES AND REFERENCES TO THE AUTHORITIES 
 CITED OR ALLUDED TO IN THE VOLUME, 
 
 SPECIMENS OF YEESES IN THE OEIGINAL, 
 
 AND AN INTRODUCTION ON THE LITERATURE OF THE HISTORY OF 
 
 PROVEN9AL POETRY. 
 
 BY G. J. ADLER, A.M., 
 
 LATE PROFESSOR OP THE GERMAN LANOCTAGB AND LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITT OP THE CITY 
 
 OF NEW YORK. 
 
 "Versi d'amore e prose di romanzi." 
 
 Dahte. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 DERBY & JACKSON, 498 BROADWAY 
 
 1860.
 
 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 18C0, by 
 
 G. J. ADLER, 
 
 In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District 
 
 of New York. 
 
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 PREFACE 
 
 The preparation of the work liere offered to the American 
 reader in his vernacular English was undertaken some six years 
 ago, and constituted the occupation, or rather the amusement, 
 of a temporary interruption of my professional existence by the 
 disorderly proceedings of certain parties in the city here. 
 
 It was a subject, into which some years before I had made 
 some inquiries, in the country itself to which it more especially 
 relates, and in which, during the last forty years, it has been 
 treated with such distinguished ability and success. 
 
 I found, however, when I offered my manuscript for publi- 
 cation, an utter indifference to my undertaking, and the appre- 
 hension of too limited a sale for a work on a literature so little 
 known, not only on the part of publishers, but even among cer- 
 tain professed judges in their confidence or employ, frustrated 
 every attemj^t I made to get it into type for several years. 
 
 Although this indifference was not so surprising to me, when 
 I recollected, that the subject of the book was never a popular 
 one in the English language, as may be inferred from the fact, 
 that nothing of any account has ever been written on it except 
 in France, Germany, and Italy, yet I could not divest myself 
 of the impression, that there was a sufficient number of edu- 
 cated men and women of the English idiom in this part of the 
 world, to warrant the publication of a work, like the one I con- 
 templated giving, connected as it is with one of the most curi- 
 ous and poetical periods of the history of our civilization.
 
 vi Preface. 
 
 It was nnder tliis conviction, that in the autumn of 1858, I 
 announced in a circular my intention to publish it by subscrip- 
 tion. This notice was at once responded to by several gentle- 
 men of distinction in letters, chiefly from Massachusetts and 
 this city, and the encouragement thus held out induced me to 
 open a subscription-list, which tln-ough the aid of some of my 
 friends here I kept increasing, until I found myself in posses- 
 sion of a sufficient guaranty for the production of a limited 
 edition on my own account. I take pleasure to express, in this 
 connection, my obligations to a number of my friends, and 
 more particularly to Messrs. E, A. Duyckinck and Willard L. 
 Felt, of this city, for a variety of favors extended to me in 
 behalf of this subscription. 
 
 Tlie occasional leisure, afforded me by the long delay of pub- 
 lication, enabled me to institute some additional examinations 
 into the original authorities, from which the author derived 
 the materials for the composition of his work, and the result of 
 whicli I hoped might prove a source of pleasure and profit to 
 the more earnest and inquisitive student of literary history. I 
 have thus endeavored, in the notes at the foot of the page 
 marked Ed.^ to trace the references and allusions to other 
 authors, either literary or historical, to the particular works or 
 passages in \vhich they may be found, in order to enable the 
 student to consult them at his leisure, and I have moreover 
 given many of the passages translated or alluded to, in the ori- 
 ginal Latin, Greek, German, Scandinavian, Provengal, or what- 
 ever else it may have been. 
 
 At the suggestion of Mr. W. C. Bryant, of this city, a gentle- 
 man who expressed liimself very politely in favor of my under- 
 taking, I have also added specimens of Provencal versification 
 in the majority of places, where translations of poetical j)assages 
 or ofentire pieces are given in the text. In some instances, how- 
 ever, I was unable to do so, on account of the absence of the
 
 Preface. vii 
 
 manuscripts, from which the passages must have been taken 
 by the author, as they do not occur in any of the printed col- 
 lections, to which alone I could get access here on tliis side of 
 the Atlantic. 
 
 I have, lastly, in an introduction of some length, undertaken 
 to give a general outline of the literature of the history of Pro- 
 vengal poetry, by tracing the principal writers on the subject 
 from the time of the decadence and final extinction of this 
 poetry near the close of the thirteenth century to the present. 
 At the end of this introduction, I have added a list of the most 
 important works, general and special, relating to the topics 
 discussed in the volume, which I hope may be a useful aid, and 
 an incentive to further inquiry on the subject. 
 
 In reerard to the merits of the work now for the first time 
 ofi'ered in the English language, I have no room to add any- 
 thing here to what I have briefly advanced, under the name of 
 Fauriel, in my introduction ; and of the rest I must ask the 
 reader to judge for himself. It is a book, which some years 
 before had been pointed out to me, by one of M. Fauriel's own 
 associates in office and in honors, as the best upon the litera- 
 ture to which it relates, and I have had no occasion, as I hope 
 my Readers may have none, to dissent from this opinion, since 
 my personal acquaintance with its contents. 
 
 I have, in conclusion, to remind the Reader, that the volume 
 now before him is not the whole of the original work, which is 
 in three volumes. It contains only a little over one half of it, 
 that is to say, the preliminary researches on the subject, his- 
 torical and literary, and the history of the lyrical poetry of 
 the Troubadours complete. The remaining half consists of an 
 examination of the Provencal epopee, which in my prospectus 
 
 I have reserved for another occasion. 
 
 G. J. Adler. 
 
 Nm Yorlc, May, 1860.
 
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 Page 136, 15th line from below, read " assume," instead of " assumes." 
 
 " 193, 12th line from below, read " Volmnga Saga," instead of " Vosunga Saga.' 
 
 " 194, 11th line, the same correction. 
 
 " 275, note, read "as the first," instead of "at the first." 
 
 " 2S5, note, last line, read " celare potes," instead of " celere potes." 
 
 " 2S6, note, read " bibentes adeo," instead of " bibentesadeo." 
 
 " 861, 25th line, " of falling short," instead of " in falling short." 
 
 11
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAQB 
 
 Translator's Introdttotion on the Literature of the History 
 OF Provencal Poetrt, xiii. — xxxiii. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 General Outline of PfiovENgAL Literature, .... 1 — 17 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 Influence of PROVENgAL Poetry on the Several Countries of 
 
 Europe, 18 — 34 
 
 OHAPTER_IIL 
 
 Influence of Grecian Civilization on the South of Gaul, . 35 — 54 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Gr^eco-Roman Literature in Gaul, 65 — 73 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The South of France under the Barbarl4.ns, .... 74 — 117 
 
 CHAPTER VL 
 Origin of the Provencal Language, .... 118 — 138 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 The Grammatical Formation of the PROVENgAL, . . , 134 — 149
 
 X Contents. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Earliest Use of the PEOVEugAL as exhibited m the Lite- 
 
 RATUBE OF THE MOXKS, 150 — I'l 
 
 CHAPTEPv IX. 
 
 Walter of Aquitania. — I. Analysis of the Scandinavian 
 
 Songs, 172-194 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 Walter of Aquitania. — II. Analysis of the Nibelungen, . 195 — 219 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 Walter of Aquitania. — III. Analysis of Walter, . . 220 — 243 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 Walter of Aquitania — PROVENgAL origin of Walter, . . 244 — 268 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 The Influence of the Arabs, 2G9 — 288 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 William of Poitiers, 289 — 307 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 Chivalry Coxsidkbed in its Relation to PROVENgAL Poetry, 308 — 350 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadour — I. Amatory Poetry 
 — Bernard dk Ventadour, 351 — 375 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours — II. Amatory 
 Poetry — Arnaud de Marveil and Rambaud de Vaqueiras, 376 — 400
 
 Contents. xi 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours — III. Popular 
 
 Form, 401-421 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours — IV. Pieces Re- 
 lating to the Crusaders — Wars of the Holy Land, . . 422 — 442 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours — V. Pieces Re- 
 lating to the Crusades — Wars against the Arabs of 
 Spain, 443—461 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours — VI. Satire, Moral, 4G2 — 479 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours — VII. Satire, His- 
 torical, 480—496
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 * • « 
 
 ON" THE LITERATUEE OF THE HISTORY OF PROYEN^gAL 
 
 POETRY. 
 
 BY THE TRANSLATOR. 
 
 I. The Teotjbadotjes and their Peotectors. 
 
 In order to form a correct conception of the Literature of Provencal 
 Poetry, it is necessary to premise a rapid sketch of the leading facts con- 
 nected with its history, and then to follow the vestiges of its fate from the 
 time of its origination to the present. It will consequently be necessary to 
 anticipate in a measure its history ; but this wiU be done in the most general 
 manner, and merely for the purpose of showing the extent of its existence, 
 at the time it flourished in the South of Europe. 
 
 The poets of the South of France during the Middle Age, called themselves 
 Trobadors, that is to say, " inventers " or "finders;" and they adapted 
 the langue d''oc, also called the Romansh of the South, or the Provengal, to 
 the expression of poetical sentiments. It is probable that poets of this 
 description existed as early as the formation of the idiom, in which they 
 wrote. At any rate, we know that toward the year 1000, they already 
 enjoyed considerable distinction, although there is scarcely anything now 
 left us from the earliest period of their existence. 
 
 Their first productions were probably the hymns chanted in the temples,, 
 of which specimens are yet extant, and then too amatory songs composed 
 and sung for the amusement of the people. And not only was this poetry 
 in its infancy of a popular character in its tone and sentiments, but we have 
 every reason to believe that it originated among the people, and not among 
 the chevaliers, who originally were extremely ignorant, as far as letters were 
 concerned, and who knew nothing but the barbarous trade of warfare. 
 
 But this state of things did not last long. The castellans and barons soon 
 became subdued by the poetry of the vulgar tongue. The poets became the 
 favorites of the great, who drew them into their society, flattered them and- 
 loaded them with favors, until at last the latter themselves became initiated'
 
 XIV 
 
 Introduction. 
 
 into the secrets of the nascent art, and after a while they even began to 
 appear a.s the rivals of the minstrels, who had tlius far only been employed 
 to coustitute one of the ornaments of their gallant festivities. 
 
 It is thus that we find Count William of Poitiers, King Richard of Eng- 
 land, Alphonse of Arazza, the dauphin of Auvergne, the counts of 
 Toulouse and of Provence, Frederic, prince of Orange, Pierre III, of Ara*gon, 
 and others, proud of having their names recorded among those of the poets 
 of their times. Nor are the names of women wanting on this list, some of 
 which are likewise of distinguished rank either as writers or as patrons of 
 the noble art, and the old collections ofter us a variety of pieces from the 
 pens of fair hands, of which some, however, are notorious for their licentious 
 character. 
 
 William of Poitiers is commonly called the first of the Troubadours, but 
 he can only be said to have been one of the earliest. Several of his pro- 
 ductions became the models fur subsequent elForts, and some have even 
 traced tlie origin of the more modern novella to his invention. The most 
 distinguished poetic talent of the Troubadours was displayed during the 
 twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At that epoch, the Provengal was to the 
 educated and refined society of the courts and castles what the French was 
 during and after the days of Louis the Fourteenth. The chief seats of that 
 language and literary culture were the courts of the counts of Toulouse and 
 Provence, but it was held in equal honor in other parts, as for example by 
 the kings of Castile, Sicily and Aragon, by the dukes of Ferrara and others, 
 all of whom vied in a noble emulation with those counts in paying homage 
 to the representatives of the gay suher. The consequence was, that invita- 
 tions of these poets to foreign courts became quite frequent, and perpetual 
 literary and social communications were thus kept up for a long time 
 throughout the South of Europe. 
 
 Although not ignorant of the Greeks and Romans, the Troubadours yet 
 cannot be said to have adopted anything directly from them. They on the 
 contrary created a purely national poetry for the society of their times, the 
 exponent of the religious ideas, the chivalric manners, the political habits 
 and even of the prejudices of the inhabitants of the South. They excelled 
 in a great variety of poetic compositions, but more especially in that species 
 of lyrical poetry, which aims at the expression of the tender sentiments of 
 the human heart ; and it is no exaggeration to assert, that in the expression 
 of the sentiment of love in all its shades and hues, they exhibit a felicity, a 
 naturalness and a cliarm, winch cannot be said to have been surpassed by 
 the productions of the best Roman elegists. 
 
 The varieties of poetic compositions cultivated by the Troubadours were 
 principally : 
 -' 1. The canso {chant or chanso) in which they most commonly celebrate the 
 beauty or virtue of their ladies, and other sentiments connected with the 
 cultus of chivalric love. It is particularly in this form, that these poets 
 sometimes rise to the elevation of the ancient ode of the Greeks, and on
 
 Introduction. xv 
 
 which they expended all the invention, ingenuity and talent, of which they 
 were capable. 
 
 2. The sirventes or satire, in which, like Horace and Juvenal, they lash 
 the individual, social and political vices of the day with a truthfulness and 
 force rarely equalled, and sometimes greater even than that of the Ancients. 
 It is in this form, that the poets of the South are not only great, but isolated 
 and unique, the German and the French poets of the North having pro- 
 duced nothing of the sort worth the name of satire. 
 
 3. The pastoreta or vaqueyra (pastoral) a popular form, in which they 
 remind us of the idyls of the Ancients. 
 
 4. The epistle, wliich approaches similar productions from the pen of 
 Horace, and abounds in tridy lyrical coloring and beauty. The subjects of 
 these epistles were extremely varied. Their most common theme was love, 
 friendship, acknowledgment for favors, solicitations or requests — but they 
 were frequently also didactic, moral or religious. The donaire, salutz, 
 ensenhamen and conte were subdivisions of this kind. 
 
 5. The Serenas and alias, which were pieces destined to be sung by night 
 or near the break of day, and are often extremely delicate and beau- 
 tiful. 
 
 6. The tallad and the round, popular forms, were their invention, sung 
 generally to the dance, sometimes serious, at other times voluptuous. 
 
 Y. The^jZ«?iA was a sort of elegy, in which the poet was wont to express 
 in the most enchanting manner the disappointments and sorrows of love, or 
 to honor the memory of some fallen chevalier. 
 
 8. The tenson, a poetical dialogue or combat, in which two interlocutors 
 defended, each in his turn and in couplets of the same measure and rhyme, 
 opposite sides of different questions relative to love, chivalric gallantry, 
 ethics, etc. This was a favorite form among the Troubadours, and one in 
 which they often display all the subtilty and refinement, of which their art 
 was capable. The partimen jocx-partitz or partia, and the torneyame?i were 
 subdivisions or varieties of this form. 
 
 y. Historical pieces, generally with reference to the grand events of the 
 times, as for example the crusades, on which there are quite a number of 
 most interesting compositions, either from the pens of the crusaders them- 
 selves or from contemporary witnesses. This species includes the jyrezi- 
 cansa, or poetical exhortation to enterprises of the sort.* 
 
 * The Troubadours employed a number of other terms, either to denote other varieties of 
 poetic compositions, or as mere synonyms of those already enumerated. Thus the terms son, 
 mot, vers, sonet are frequently extended to lyrical productions of every kind. The word cobla 
 sometimes was equivolent to " our couplet or stanza," but it very frequently had the sense of 
 a canso of the amatory kind. The eitampada was a piece composed to a tune already made or 
 in use. The torney and the garlambey turned on the chivalric sports of the tournaments. The 
 carros was an allegorical composition of the gallant sort. The retroensa w^as a poem commonly 
 of five couplets of different measures and rhymes, and terminating in a refrain. Other varieties 
 were the comjai or lover's farewell, the devinalh or poetical enigma, the esconddg or lover's de- 
 fence against unjust accusations. For further particulars I must refer the reader to Raynouard's 
 Choix de poesies des Troubadours, vol. ii. p. 155 seqq.
 
 XV i Introduction. 
 
 The epic or romautic compositions of the Troubadours exhibit another 
 phase of the variety and versatility of their talent. Examples are : 
 
 1. The cansos of de San Gili, which celebrates the exploits of count 
 Raymond of St. Gilles in the East; but a fragment of it is all that is 
 left U9. 
 
 2. Others of a similar character, such as the Gerard de Roussillon, Jaufre, 
 fils de Davon, and Philomena, which, latter, although in prose, nevertheless 
 belongs to the same class of literary compositions. 
 
 3. The romance in the proper sense of the term we find in Bernard de 
 Treviez' La bella Maguelone, admired and reproduced by Petrarch at the 
 time of his residence in Montpellier, and of which Tieck has given us a Ger- 
 man version near the commencement of the present century. 
 
 I pass now to the examination of the principal protectors of Provengal 
 poetry. The feudal seigniors, at whose courts the poets were received and 
 encouraged were : 
 
 " A. First of all the courts of Provence, whicli was the cradle of the gay 
 saber, and especially : 
 
 1. Raimond Berenger II., from 1167 to 1181. 
 
 2. Alphonse II., from 1196 to 1209. 
 
 3. Raimond Berenger IV., from 1209 to 1245. 
 
 B. The second in rank and importance were the counts of Toulouse, of 
 which the most prominent were : 
 
 1. Raimond de Saint-Gilles, who took the cross in the year 1096. 
 
 2. Raimond V., from 1148 to 1194. 
 
 3. Raimond VIL, from 1222 to 1249. 
 
 C. The kings of Aragon, and more especially : 
 
 1. Alphonso II., from 1162 to 1196. 
 
 2. Pedro II., from 1196 to 1213. 
 
 3. Pedro III., from 1276 to 1285. 
 
 D. Several of the kings of Castile, such as : 
 
 1. Alphonso IX., from 1188 to 1229 ; and more especially 
 
 2. Alphonso X., sumamed the Wise, who died in 1284. 
 
 E. Other kings and princes, such as : 
 
 1. Richard Cceur-de-Lion of England, wlio was himself a Troubadour. 
 
 2. Eleanor, the wife of Louis \U., and subsequently of Henry IL of 
 
 England. 
 
 3. Ermengard, the viscountess of Narbonne. 
 
 F. Italian princes, finally, such a.s: 
 
 1. Bonifacius, the marquis of Monferrat, who in 1204 became king of 
 
 Thessalonica. 
 
 2. Azzo d'Este, from 1215 to 1265. 
 
 3. The courts of Verona and of Malaspina. 
 
 G. The German emperors Frederic I. and Frederic Barbarossa, who in 
 their expeditions and during their residence in Sicily kept poets of 
 ^ the Provengal school in their retinue, and in fact first introduced 
 
 them into Italy.
 
 Introduction. xvii 
 
 These indications furnish us the data for determining in the first place 
 the period, during which the poetry in question was in vogue, and secondly 
 the countries, in which it was cultivated. ^ 
 
 The territorial limits, within which Provencal poetry flourished, ex- 
 tended to wherever the langue d^oc was the dominant one, either as a 
 popular dialect or as the language of the courts. This was the case, 
 
 1. In the Provence proper. 
 
 2. In Toulouse, Poitou, the Dauphine, in a word, in all the provinces of 
 France south of the Loire. 
 
 3. In parts of Spain, especially in Catalonia, in the province of Valencia, 
 and in a part of Aragon. 
 
 4. All over the north of Italy, especially in Verona, Montferrat, Este, and' ^"^ 
 Malaspina. 
 
 In regard to the time, within which the poetry of the Trouhadours was 
 in vogue, M. Fauriel assumes only two periods. But it may perhaps he 
 more conveniently divided into three, as follows : / 
 
 1. The first commences with its origin, as a popular poetry, and extends 
 to the time when it became an art and a profession, the poetry of the 
 nobles and the courts, that is to say, from about 1090 to 1140. 
 
 2. The second is the period of its culmination, which extends from the 
 year 1140 to 1250. 
 
 3. The third is the period of its decadence, from 1250 to 1290. 
 
 Of these three periods the first is characterized by a conscious tendency, 
 a manifest struggle to rise from the primitive simplicity of nature to the 
 finish of art. The second is the period of its highest perfection, of the 
 complete realization of the ideals of chivalry and gallantry, and of the most 
 perfect development of the poetic form. It also exhibits the honorable and 
 happy position of the poet in the society, for which he wrote and sung. The 
 third, lastly, manifests a tendency toward the grave and the didactic, a 
 gradual corruption of the form into the insipid and affected, and a diminu- 
 tion of respect for the poets, as a consequence partly of their own venality 
 and licentiousness, partly of the increasing barbarity around them. The 
 poetry of the Proven9als arose, flourished and disappeared an close con- 
 nection with the polished chivalry, the refined manners, and the polite 
 culture, of which in fact it constituted the very soul and most enduring 
 offspring. 
 
 The destruction of the county of Toulouse, in the year 1271, was the 
 death-blow to the existence of the Troubadours. Prom that time they ex- 
 perienced all the disadvantages of having imposed on them a foreign rule 
 instead of a national one, and in connection with that rule a new language 
 opposed to that of their art. The langue (Toil of the North with its poets 
 and its political power advanced on them with an annihilating force, and in 
 place of their former munificent patrons, they had now only enemies to 
 check and to control them. Is was thus, that while their rivals in Cato- 
 lonia and Valencia still cultivated their art in peace and with success the 
 
 B
 
 xviii Introduction. 
 
 poets of the cradle of the gay saler were obliged to contend against a tide 
 of the most disheartening circumstances. 
 
 '^ This distressing situation induced them after a while to associate them- 
 selves into a body, and this movement gave rise to the Academy of the Very 
 Gay Company of the Seven Troubadours of Toulouse, which was founded in 
 1323. At the time of its establisliment this academy issued a poetical cir- 
 cular, iu wliich it invited all the members of the profession to an annual con- 
 vention on tlie first of May.* During the sessions of this convention, literary 
 exercises were held, and prizes distributed for the best productions in their 
 
 art. 
 
 "We are informed, that in 1244, Arnaud Vidal took this prize for the best 
 poem, which usually consisted either of a silver eglantine or a violet of the 
 same metal. 
 
 These annual celebrations were kept up at the expense of the city, the poets 
 continued to be called Troubadours, and the Provencal remained the lan- 
 guage of tlie proceedings and exercises, until the commencement of the six- 
 teeutli century, wlien the langue (Toil, or the French, was at length admit- 
 ted to tlie same privilege with its southern rival, without however supplanting 
 it at any time. The annual festival passed under the name of the Jeux 
 Floraux, and in 1G94 the prize-judges were regularly incorporated into a 
 college, Avith a magnificent endowment from Cleraence Isaure. It may, in 
 fact, be asserted, that the literary exercises, instituted in 1323, were kept up 
 with scarcely any interruption, until the time of the first French revolution, 
 and we find even an attempt to resuscitate them as late as the year 1806. 
 
 But the proceedings of this association were but a faint reflection of the 
 ancient splendor of the poetry which it undertook to perpetuate. And yet 
 its transactions are not without considerable interest to the history of this 
 literature : for the archives of the society, we are told, contain prize essays 
 and poems, which are destined to make their appearance in type. But this 
 is not all. Xot satisfied with the "Donatus Provincialis," nor with the gram- 
 mar composed by one of the earlier Troubadours, Rairaond Vidal, the mem- 
 bers of this Academy charged one of their chancellors, Molinier by name, to 
 prepare for their use a new treatise on rhetoric, which he did with great 
 ability and credit in his " Leys d'amors" — a work which is yet extant, and has 
 recently been publii^hed for the first time. This manual contains the rules 
 for poetical composition, while " Las flors del gay saber " by the same author, 
 
 • This circular ia yet extant, and the reader may find it in Creacimbeni's " Istoria della Tolgar 
 poesla," vol ii., p. 210. It begins thus : 
 
 Als onorables, e als pros 
 Senhers, amies e companhos, 
 Als quals cs donat lo sabers, 
 Don creis als bos gaug, e plazers, 
 Sens, e valors, e cortesia ; 
 La Sobregaja Companhia 
 Dels VII. Trobadors de Tolosa, 
 Salut, e mais vida joiosa, etc., etc.
 
 Introduction. xix 
 
 consists of an essay on grammar and philosophy, no less curious and valuable 
 than the former, more especially in regard to the language of the Trouba- 
 dours. Tlie date of these compositions is supposed to be somewhere be- 
 tween 1324 and 1330. 
 
 The Provencal language still exists, more or less altered and modified, in 
 the different dialects of Valencia, Catalonia, Roussillon, and in fact in all the 
 districts of the south of France, as well as in those of Upper Italy. (Compare 
 Eaynouard's Choix, vol. vi. p. 395). It is even yet cultivated as a medium 
 of poetic composition ; and it has been said with great propriety, that there 
 still are, as indeed there always have been, Troubadours under the charming 
 sky of Provence and of Languedoc. Several of tliese recent poets have even 
 acquired celebrity in our own day, and Jasmin of Agen has been ranked 
 with the great writers of past centuries. / 
 
 III. The Teouvekes of the Noeth. 
 
 In order to give the reader something like an adequate conception of the 
 extent, to whicli the poetic taste and talent prevailed throughout tlie en- 
 tire country of France during the period under consideration, it is necessary 
 to take a rapid glance at tlie Trouveres of the North. 
 
 These poets made their appearance considerably later than the Trouba- 
 dours, and are on that account commonly supposed to have caught the 
 poetic spark from the example of the South. But it is certain, that this 
 poetry, like every other, originated among the people, and was primitively 
 of a popular character, and on that account the time and place of its earliest 
 tentatives must remain open to dispute. All that we know positively is, 
 that it began to be cultivated with success from the commencement of the 
 twelfth century ; but the period of its finished productions did not begin till 
 toward the close of that century. "We also know, that it developed itself 
 almost simultaneously in several provinces of the North, as for example in 
 Normandy, Picardy, Artois, Flanders, Champagne, and a portion of Armo- 
 rica, without our being able to specify any one of these provinces as the 
 cradle of the nascent art. The Anglo-Normans Hkewise had a share in it 
 from the beginning. 
 
 The language of this poetry of the Trouveres was the Romansh of the North, 
 the result of a mixture of the primitive dialects of that region with the cor- 
 rupt Latin of the Gallo-Romans, and perhaps some of the Germanic idioms, 
 and was at that time called the langue d''oil. 
 
 This poetry is in many respects, even more original than that of the South, 
 owing to the fact of its adopting many of the primitive traditions of the Bre- 
 tons, Gauls, and Saxons, and of deriving next to nothing from tiie Grseco- 
 Eoman influences of the South. In proof of this it is customary to cite the 
 romances of Brut, Horn, Haulaf, the Round Table, Saint Graal and others, 
 all of which are referred to a primitive cycle of traditions. 
 
 Like the poets of the South, the Trouveres employed every variety of
 
 XX Introduction. 
 
 rhyme and measure in their compositions, and they display a great deal of 
 invention and imagination, partly in lyrical productions of a light and grace, 
 ful nature, but more especially and preeminently in long epic romances, such as 
 the Perceval, the Chevalier au Lion, Launcelot du Lac, and in William of 
 England, which Ave owe to the distinguished Christian de Troyes. To these 
 we must add many others, such as the Alexandriade, the Koman du Ron, 
 Tristan, and a host of the so-called Chansons de Gestes, which are regular 
 epopees, and some of them almost of oriental dimensions. Many of these 
 were reproduced or imitated on the other side of the Rhine by the German 
 Minne-singers, whose golden epoch runs nearly parallel with that of the 
 French Trouveres. 
 
 To the poets of the North we are also indebted for a host of shorter 
 compositions of the narrative sort, called Failiaux, which were extremely 
 popular for a long time, and subsequently imitated or translated by men like 
 Boccaccio, Rabelais, Molifere and Lafontaine, They have left us also sacred 
 poems, legends in verse, and satires in abundance, as, for example, their 
 Bible-Guiot, their Bible au seigneur de Berge, La complainte de Jerusalem, 
 Le dit du Pape, and many others. The Jeux and Miracles, to which some 
 trace the origin of the subsequent " mysteries," and of the French stage, are 
 said to have been the invention of the Trouveres. 
 
 In the palmy days of their existence, the Trouveres lived in the sunshine 
 of the great of the North, and were fostered by the courts and castles of 
 their country, as had been their rivals of the South. They have been pro- 
 nounced the equals of the latter in genius ; but they are in many respects so 
 mucli like them, that M. Fauriel with others has been inclined to assign to 
 them the rank of mere imitators, and to consider their poetry an off- 
 shoot of the Provencal. And yet it cannot be contested, that they culti- 
 vated by way of preference different kinds of poetry, many of which they 
 even invented, and tliat they excelled in things of which their rivals in the 
 South hnd scarcely any, or at any rate but a very imperfect, conception. 
 Many of these productions were extremely popular for a long time, and 
 found imitators and translators in other languages, as for example, in their 
 own day among the Germans, who adopted next to nothing directly from 
 the Provencals, while they borrowed largely from the epic compositions of 
 the Trouveres, and then at a later period among the Italians and the modern 
 French. 
 
 In regard to its material organization, we find that the poetry of the North 
 had quite a number of points hi common with the South. The Trouveres, 
 in the first place, had their Mencstrels, as the Troubadours had their Jongleurs, 
 to assist them, and with the same difference. The M6nestrel was only the 
 singer or i-eciter of the poetry composed by the master of the art, the 
 Trouvure ; and so fastidious was the North in the maintenance of this 
 distinction, that the member of the subordinate grade of the profession, who 
 undertook to transcend the limits of his sphere was nicknamed Trover 
 lastart, as the plagiarist was called contre rimorieur. The general rule was,
 
 Introduction. xxi 
 
 that the poet only composed, and sometimes sung, by way of exception 
 perhaps, to the music of the harp what he himself had written, while the 
 menestrel was expected only to sing or to recite the poetry of his superiors. 
 
 We find, moreover, that the Gourn d''amour of the South had a rival 
 institution in the North in the Buys d'amour and Gieux sous Vormel of the 
 Trouveres. Here, however, some of the Buys d'' amour gradually assumed 
 the name of Gouts de rhetorique, and toward the close of the fifteenth century 
 the former were entirely abandoned and supplanted by the Palinods, which, 
 like the Jeux Flormix of the South, consisted of literary exercises only. 
 These exercises became extremely popular in all the provinces of the North, 
 where the poetry of the Trouveres had been in vogue, and especially in the 
 cities, nearly all of which were proud to number them among the ornaments 
 of their society. This was particularly the case with Caen, Eouen, Dieppe, 
 Beauvais, Amiens, Arras, Valenciennes. 
 
 It has already been remarked that the poetry of the North was originally 
 a popular one, like that of the South ; that is to say, its earliest poets sprung 
 from the people, and their compositions were addressed to the masses at 
 large. But all this was entirely changed in time. The example of the 
 Troubadours and the fashion of chivalric society gave rise to a lyrical poetry 
 in the North, which was no less ingenious and artistic than that of th© 
 South, of which it appears to be an imitation ; and in the production of this 
 new poetry of art, kings and nobles strove for the honor of a place among 
 the Trouveres of the age. 
 
 The first instance of the kind was Thibault of Champagne (1201-1253), 
 and his example was soon imitated by Jean de Brienne (t 1237), Charles of 
 Anjou ;(t 1284), Henry HI, of Brabant (t 1267), Pierre de Dreux, by the 
 count of Dreux, and many other powerful seigniors of the North. But even 
 at the time of its culmination, the poetry in question did not pass entirely 
 into the hands of the nobles, any more than in the South, and Trouveres 
 from the Bourgeoisie were not uncommon. Proficiency and distinction in 
 the art were here too a passport into the society of the great, and a source 
 of emolument and honor, as elsewhere. 
 
 Nor were the protectors of the poetry of the North any less distinguished 
 than those of the South. It can boast of 
 
 1. The courts of the kings of France and England. 
 
 2. The dukes of Brabant, the covmts of Flanders, Champagne, and of other 
 districts of the North. 
 
 3. The kings of Naples of the house of Anjou, who transplanted the 
 northern exotic into the south of Italy even. 
 
 4. Henry of Burgundy, who carried it with him into Portugal. 
 
 The number of rhymers in the langue d'oil was an immense one. The 
 making of verses seems to have been everybody's business once La the 
 districts of the North ; and a business, in which the monks too seem to 
 have dealt largely in their way. Everything, in fact, seems to have at one 
 time been recorded in rhyme, which we encounter everywhere, on seals,
 
 xxu 
 
 Introduction. 
 
 vases, church- windows, walls, tomb-stones, pavements, etc. As the fruit of a 
 pious industry, there are still on record piles of moralities, prayers to the 
 Viryin, proverbs, miracles, lives of the Saints, etc., all in the shape of 
 poetry. It thus appears, that the poetry of the North was no less exten- 
 sively cultivated than that of the South, and that its popular side was even 
 a more luxuriant one. Tlie number of the strictly artistical court poets 
 must also have been a very large one, as we may infer from the fact, that at 
 this day we are acquainted with the names and works of upward of one 
 hundred and fifty Trouveres, and that the manuscripts of this poetry, yet 
 extant in the libraries of France, amount to several thousand, while those 
 of the southern poetry are comparatively few. 
 
 • III.— PROVENgAL POETKT IN ItALT UNTIL THE TIME OF DaNTE AND PeTKAECH. 
 
 We have already seen, that the petty courts of Upper Italy were among 
 the foyers of the chivalric culture connected with the poetry of the Trou- 
 badours. This phenomenon was the result of the long and intimate relations 
 of a political and commercial nature, which had subsisted from a very early 
 date between the provinces of the south of France and Italy— relations 
 which were founded in a similarity of institutions, and more especially in 
 the organization of the cities of both those countries, which was republican, 
 and full of energy and vitality. 
 
 The emperors of Germany of the twelfth century were the intermediate 
 agents of these relations between the nobles of the south of France and 
 those of Italy. The two Frederics wanted to reign in Provence as kings of 
 Aries, and this attempt of theirs to establish a kingdom of Aries, was 
 attended with perpetual military expeditions in those quarters. It is on 
 this account that Frederic Barbarossa held his court at Turin for a time. 
 
 It is therefore extremely probable, tliat the first Provengal poets were 
 introduced into Italy in connection with Frederic I, and that they were 
 among the number of those that followed this emperor in his expeditions. 
 ' If this is admitted, then the date of that introduction would be about the year 
 ' 1162. At any rate we are certain, that the first Proven9al poet in Italy was 
 Aun-icr do Vienne, who makes allusion to the coronation of Frederic Bar- 
 barossa, Avhich to"ok place in 1154. 
 
 From the year 1180 to that of 1200 we find in the north of Italy at least 
 four of the smaller feudal courts, into which the new poetry had found its 
 ■way ; and these courts were then habitually frequented by members of the 
 gay profession from Provence, and became so many centres of tlie new- 
 culture. They were the courts of Montferrat, of Este, of Verona, and that 
 of Malaspina, which at a later date became immortal through its hospitality 
 
 to Dante. 
 ^ But the poets that frequented these Italian courts were often among the 
 most distinguished, as for example, Bernard do Ventadour at Este, Cadenet 
 at Malaspina and at Montferrat, Rambaud do Vaqueiras at the same.
 
 Introduction. xxiii 
 
 Pierre Vidal may also be included in the list. Of these poets Rambaud de 
 Vaqueiras sometimes "wrote in the dialects of Italy, and there is still extant 
 from him a descort in which several of them are employed. But it must be 
 borne in mind, that these Proven9al poets in Italy were oi*iginally only 
 visitors and guests. The exact number of them is not known. The years 
 of these visits extended from 1150 to 1200. 
 
 "When the ci-usade against the Albigenses shook the civilization of the 
 south of France (1208-1219), the poets fled from their native soil, and 
 sought refuge in Italy, Catalonia, Aragon, CastUe, and in fact wherever they 
 had been received as guests before. Some went even into the north of 
 France for shelter against the storm. Subsequently to that event we find 
 quite a number of them at the courts of Italy already mentioned, as for 
 example, Elias Cairel, Elias de Barjols, Albert de Sisteron, Aimeric de 
 Belenoi, Guillem de Figueiras, Gaucelm Faydit, Aimeric de Peguilhan and 
 others, most of which figure in our collections of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 From the year 1265 till 1270 the Troubadoui's still continued to cross the 
 Alps and to sing at the Italian courts and in the cities, but during the interval 
 between 1270 and 1300 they all at once begin to disappear. The fact is, 
 that subsequently to the year 1250 the poetry once so full of vifality and 
 native vigor had gradually degenerated into a mere metier, a mechanical 
 repetition of the customary forms, and nothing but mediocrities and plati- 
 tudes were produced. 
 
 The presence of these Provencal poets in Italy, which had been an unin- 
 terrupted one for more than a century, gave rise to an Italian school of the 
 gay saber, and the Italians themselves turned poets in imitation of the foreign 
 masters of the art. They thus became in time the successors of the Trouba- 
 dours at tlie courts of their feudal chiefs, and what is quite remarkable, they 
 wrote not in the vernacular dialects of their country, but continued to 
 employ the acquired language of the poetry they undertook to imitate and to 
 perpetuate. 
 
 They probably began to do so as early as the year 1150, but none of them 
 became conspicuous or even known, until Alberto de Malaspina made his 
 appearance, who flourished between tlie years 1180 and 1204. He may 
 therefore be considered as the first of any note. One of the last of this 
 Italian school is Ferrari de Ferrara, who wrote toward the year 1300, or 
 thereabout. During the long interval from 1180 to 1300, there must have 
 been many others, most of whom, however, are now entirely forgotten, with 
 the exception of a half a dozen of some celebrity. They are Sordello of 
 Mantua, Lanfranco Cigala, Bonifaci Calvo of Genoa, Lambertino de Bualello 
 of Bologna, Bartolomeo Zorgi of Venice, and Lanfranchi of Pisa. All these 
 names are considered part and parcel of tlie old Proven9al poetry, and their 
 works are included in the manuscript collections of it, but scarcely any of 
 them rise above the level of mediocrity. Sordello, mentioned by Dante, is 
 perhaps the only exception. 
 
 The Proven9al was thus the dominant language of the courts of Italy till
 
 xxiv Introduction. 
 
 toward the close of the thirteenth century, and scarcely a line of Italian 
 versification is known from any of its poets until toward the commencement 
 of the fourteenth century. After tiie year 1300, however, the reverse came 
 into vogue, and no Italian poet of that epoch is known to have written any 
 Provencal verses, except perhaps incidentally and in connection with others 
 in his own language, as did Dante in the famous passage on Arnaud Daniel. 
 Eat even after this poetry had ceased to be a living one in Italy, it still con- 
 tinued to be an object of literary curiosity and of veneration even, and the 
 memory of its leading representatives remained respected for a long time after 
 its extinction. 
 
 ' This was the state of things in Italy, when Dante made his appearance, 
 whose name commences a new era in the polite literary cultui-e of his 
 country, and in fact of entire Europe. This poet was born in 1265, and lived 
 until the year 1321. That Dante was familiar with the Provengals is mani- 
 fest not only from his lyrical productions, in which the ideal sentiment of 
 love is celebrated, but from direct reference to them in other parts of his 
 writings. In canto XXVI. of his Purgatorio he not only alludes expressly to 
 several of those poets, but the eight concluding verses of that canto, which 
 the poet puts into the mouth of Arnaud Daniel, are in the idiom of the Trou- 
 badours — a proof that he not only understood, but could even venture to 
 write the language of his poetical ancestors.* Dante, however, confounds 
 the Provencal with the Spanish. He says in his treatise " De Vulgari Elo- 
 quio," lib. I. c. 8, "The Spanish, i. e. the Provengal, may boast of having 
 produced men, who cultivated the vernacular poetry in this as in a sweeter 
 and more perfect language ; among whom are Pierre d'Auvergne and others 
 more ancient." In chapter 10th of the same treatise he also speaks of the 
 French, or the language of the Trouv^res, which he correctly asserts to be 
 best adapted to prose narration, and mentions " books compiled in that 
 idiom on the exploits of the Trojans and Romans, the adventures of King 
 Arthur, and many other tales and histories, written for amusement and 
 instruction." Dante very strangely considers Arnaud Daniel as the great 
 patriarch of the Proven9alrause, — a judgment, which is entirely at variance 
 with the testimony of the contemporaries of the Troubadours, and against 
 which modern criticism has again considered itself called upon to protest. 
 
 ♦ The passage seems to havo been a source of great embarrassment to the editors and com- 
 mentators of Dante, who probably did not know exactly what to make of it. It is on that 
 account very corrupt, and dUTerent in nearly every edition. The text of Lombardi is as follows : 
 
 Tan m'abbelis voire cortois deman, 
 
 Chi eu non puous, ne vueil a vos cobrire. 
 leu 6ui Arnaut, che plor e vai cantan 
 
 Con si tost vei la spassada folor, 
 
 Et vie giau sen le ior, che sper denan. 
 Ara vus preu pera chella valor, 
 
 Che vus ghlda al som delle scalina, 
 
 Sovegna vus a temps de ma dolor: 
 Poi s'ascose nel fuoco, che lo affina.
 
 . Introduction. xxv 
 
 Petrarch repeats the opinion of Dante in his " Triumfo d'Amore," when he 
 sajs of Arnaud : 
 
 Pra tutti il primo Arnaldo Daniello, 
 Gran maestro d'araor ch'a la sua terra 
 Ancor fa onor col suo dir nuovo e belle. 
 
 Petrarch flourished between the years 1304 and 1374, and whatever may- 
 be the value of the opinion here advanced, the passage at any rate proves, 
 that in his day the works of the old poets were still read and appreciated. 
 Boccaccio was the contemporary and friend of Petrarch, and one of the 
 public expounders of Dante. His " Decamerone " was composed either after 
 Proven9al models now no longer extant, or perhaps rather in imitation of the 
 fabliaux of the Troveres of the isTorth. 
 
 Tasso and Pulci likewise mention the Proven9als. The latter speaks of 
 Arnaud as the author of a romance on Eenaud (Morgant. Magg. canto 
 XXVII. ott. 80). The former makes their language the same with the Oas- 
 tilian, and speaks of certain romances written in it. He also cites the pas- 
 sage of Dante on Arnaud : 
 
 " Versi d'amore e prose di romanzi." 
 IV. — The MSS. Collections of PEovENgAL Poetry. 
 
 "We have already remarked, that with the decline of chivalry, its proudest 
 ornament, the poetry of its gallant festivities gradually vanished before the 
 advance of a new order of things, and that after the year 1300 no Proven9al 
 verses of any account were any longer written. But we have also seen, that 
 this poetry did not on that account cease to be an object of literary interest, 
 especially in Italy, where it merged itself into the indigenous literature of the 
 country. "We have every reason to believe, that at the period in question, ", 
 that is to say from 1300 to 1400, a host of MSS. collections of various di- 
 mensions must have existed in private and in public hands, and freely 
 circulated in the south of France, in Italy and in the north of Spain ; and 
 there were doubtless the manuscripts, from which the poets of the time 
 derived, as we have seen, their knowledge of their artistic ancestors, and 
 from which the writers of a later date, like Bembo, Nostre Dame and 
 Bastero drew the materials for their works upon the subject. Many of these 
 MSS., however, were unfortunately lost amid the political confusion of the 
 times, as y^Q may inter alia infer from the fate of an extensive collection 
 known to have been in the hands of Nostre Dame prior to the composition of 
 his work ; and the comparatively few now left us, which no doubt gradually 
 had found their way from private hands into the larger public libraries, 
 where they are now preserved, must be the remains of a much larger number^ 
 now no longer extant. 
 
 The places, to which some of the MSS. still existing are known to have 
 formerly belonged, are Caumont, Toulouse, Fleury-sur-Loire, Urfe, La 
 Valliere and Geneva ; several of them are from the old library of the Medicis,
 
 xxvi Introduction. 
 
 some from those of private individuals, as for example, one from Bennedetto 
 Varchi (subsequently in the hands of Carolo Strozzi), and two of them, 
 lastly, bear the name of Fulvio Orsini (No. 3204 of the Imperial library at 
 Paris, and No. 3208 of the library of the Vatican). One of these last men- 
 tioned manuscripts appears to be a copy of an older one, likewise still extant 
 and in tlie same library (No. 7225), and contains the curiosity of having 
 several marginal notes from the hands of Petrarch and of Cardinal Berabo. 
 Tlicir indication gives us some idea of the age of some of these MSS., a 
 number of which are doubtless from the golden period of Provengal litera- 
 ture. 
 / These MSS. with nearly all the rest are now in the larger libraries of 
 Paris, Rome, and Florence. Those of Paris alone (and chiefly the Imperial) 
 contain eight original MSS. and copies of nearly all the rest. At Florence 
 there are seven, of which six belong to the Laurenziana and one to the Ric- 
 cardiana. At Rome there are six, viz., four in the library of the Vatican, 
 one in that of Chigi, and one in that of Berberini. Milan has also one ; 
 and Modena one, which bears the date of 1254. Two of them have found 
 their way into England even, and were, some forty years ago, in the hands 
 of Messrs. Richard Ileber and Francis Douce of London. 
 
 And fortunately the majority of these MSS. are not mere fragmentary co- 
 dices of isolated poets, or otherwise imperfect or mutilated. They are mostly 
 extensive collections, with several hundred specimens of poetry from a large 
 number of authors, to which are sometimes added biographical sketches of 
 the poets, with full indexes of the contents of the volume. Thus, for ex- 
 ample. No. Y226, of the Imperial library, which is considered as the best and 
 adopted as the standard of orthography, contains no less than three hundred 
 and ninety-six folio leaves, with pieces from one hundred and fifty-five 
 Troubadours, an additional number of anonymous specimens and two in- 
 dexes. Biographical notices are found in No. 2701 and No. 7698 of the 
 same library, and in several others. 
 
 These manuscripts constitute the principal sources, from which MSS. 
 copies, the printed collections of this poetry, and other works relative to the 
 language and literary history of the Troubadours have been made since the 
 time of Sainte-Palaye. For additional particulars on this point, I must refer 
 the reader to Raynouard's " Choix de Poes, d. Troub," vol. ii. page cliv.- 
 clixix. 
 
 V. — ^Eakliee Whiters onProven^qal Litekatttee :— Bembo, Nostee Dame, 
 
 CfiESOIilBENI, SaINTE-PaLATE. 
 
 Subsequently to the epoch of Danto and Petrarch, which, extended from 
 about the years 1290 to 1875, we find very little notice taken of the Proven- 
 9als, until about a century after they became an object of historical inquiry. 
 And among the writers, who in the sixteenth century thus interested them- 
 selves, historically or linguistically, in the poetry of the Troubadours, we
 
 Introduction. xxvii 
 
 must first of all mention Cardinal Pietro Bembo, who lived between the 
 years 1470 and 1547. But all that he has given us upon this subject are a few 
 pages of his treatise " Delia VolgarPoesia," in which he endeavors to link the 
 earlier poets of his country to the Provencals, by indicating certain words 
 and phrases borrowed or adopted by the former from the idiom of the 
 latter. 
 
 But nearly at the same time with Bembo, there arose in the very cradle 
 of Provengal poetry another man, who was destined to resuscitate the 
 memoiy of the old poets much more eifectually. This was Jean de ISTostre 
 Dame, a brother of the celebrated astrologer Michael Nostradamus, born in 
 1503 at St. Eemi in Provence. This Nostre Dame was a zealous collector 
 of manuscripts relative to the lives and works of the old poets of his 
 country, and is said to have been in possession of a valuable collection of 
 " books written by hand, in the Latin, as well as in the Provengal style." 
 But in consequence of an unfortunate turn of events, he lost the greater part 
 of these his treasures in 1562. 
 
 Not disheartened, however, by these reverses, Nostre Dame resolved to 
 make the best of the resources still at his command, and composed his 
 work on the lives and writings of the old Provengal poets from the docu- 
 ments rescued from destruction. His work was published at Lyons in 
 1575. An Italian translation of it (which was a French book) appeared in 
 the same year and in the same city. Another and a much better translation 
 into the same language was published at Rome in 1710, from thepenof Cres- 
 cimbeni, the founder and first custos of the academy of the Arcadians of that 
 city, who enriched the original work with many important addilions, espe- - » 
 cially the second edition of 1722. ^^^-^ ^4 .**'^ ^!U^i^4_ •?><.-«>^A^<»-**^ ' 
 
 Nostre Dame contains a host of curious and interesnng particulars rela- 
 tive to the manners and customs of the age of chivalry ; and as he merely 
 repeats the authorities of his time without many pragmatic reflections of 
 his own, his statements are of much greater value to the literary historian, 
 than the imperfect deductions or hasty generalizations of later writers, like 
 Millot. 
 
 "Within one generation after the time of Nostre Dame we have another 
 work from the pen of Cesar Nostre Dame, a nephew of the former, who in his 
 " Histoire de Provence" undertakes to give an account of the ancient poets, 
 with other illustrious personages and families that figured in the history 
 of his country for six entire centuries before him. This work appeared in 
 1614. A similar history of Languedoc was published by Catel in 1633, and 
 two new works on Provence by Papon in 1778-1787, all of which contain 
 some facts of interest to the history of this literature. Nearly at the same 
 time we have from the pen of another native of the South, from Antonio 
 Bastero., a new work on the language of the Troubadours, which, as well as 
 the book of Nostre Dame, constitutes one of the leading authorities on the 
 subject, and is frequently quoted as such. It is]entitled "Crusca Provenzale" 
 and appears to be an attempt to continue what Bembo had undertaken some
 
 XXV iii ■ Introduction. 
 
 time before. It appeared at Rome in 1724. Sundry other inquiries and 
 notices relative to the Proven9als begin to mal<e their appearance toward 
 and after the commencement of the second half of the last century, and 
 several of the earlier volumes of the "Histoire litteraire de la France" (1733- 
 1832) contain the outlines of a history of tliat special literature. 
 
 But an entirely new impulse was given to the study of Proven9al poetry 
 by the enthusiasm of Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye, who was born at Auxerre 
 in 1697, member of the Academy of Inscriptions in 1724, of the Frangaise in 
 1755, dead in 1781. The memoirs of the Academy are indebted to him for 
 many curious and useful contributions on various subjects connected with the 
 history of France. He is the first that undertook to resuscitate an interest 
 in the peculiar institutions of the Middle Age, and with immense industry 
 and zeal examined anew into the military and political characteristics of 
 the long neglected system of chivalry, with reference to which he instituted 
 the most laborious researches in nearly all the principal literary dep6ts of 
 France and Italy. So extensive were his collections of materials on this sub- 
 ject, that the manuscripts containing them are said to have amounted to more 
 than one hundred volumes in folio, many of which are yet preserved in the 
 libraries of Paris, and chiefly in that of the Arsenal. 
 
 But very little of all this was ever arranged or published by the collector 
 himself, except what he has furnished us in his interesting work on chivalry, 
 and his extensive papers on the poetry of the Troubadours were never 
 turned to account by himself, who was too far advanced in life to digest 
 them, after he was done collecting and transcribing. A work of consider- 
 able extent was, however, compiled from them by the Abbe Millot, and they 
 have remained a store-house for the researches of others ever since his 
 day. 
 
 "When Sainte-Palaye commenced his labors, the Royal library at Paris 
 contained but four MSS. collections of Provengal poetry. The rest lay yet 
 buried in the libraries of the South, and principally in those of Italy. Sainte- 
 Palaye's first move was to discover and inspect these curious remains of 
 olden times, and lie repaired in person to Italy for that purpose. An ac- 
 count of this literary expedition is given in the " Nouvelles Litteraires de 
 Florence" of 1740. He there ransacked the libraries of the principal cities, 
 arranged and collated all the MSS. discovered, of wliich he added no less 
 than twenty to the list of those already known at Paris ; so that the lit- 
 terary world now found itself in possession of twenty-four MSS. instead of 
 four. And these were not mere fragments, but most of them collections of 
 considerable extent and in excellent state of preservation. But he did not 
 stop here : he had copies made of all the leading MSS. exhumed by him, 
 and had tliem fitted out for the use of libraries. The result of all these 
 efforts was nothing less than fifteen folios of collections, containing four 
 thousand poetical compositions of various dimensions and twelve fragments. 
 This corpus poetarum is so complete, that we are told there is very little 
 hope of any additional discoveries in that direction in the libraries of Italy
 
 Introduction. xxix 
 
 even, after these thorough and extensive explorations on the part of Sainte- 
 Palaje. 
 
 To this enthusiast then belongs the merit of finding and arranging, with 
 immense expenditure of time and labor, the monuments of the ancient poetry 
 of the South, and of thus directing the attention of other inquirers to the 
 subject. These monuments were now accessible to the researches of the 
 historian or the critic, but the man was yet wanting to make them intelli- 
 gible. For the glossary or lexicon undertaken by Sainte-Palaye was never 
 completed, and the historical work prepared by Millot was so inadequate 
 to the idea of the subject, as to provoke Schlegel to call it an ouvrage tres 
 mediocre. 
 
 VI. — Latee Weitees on Peovenqal Liteeatxjee: — Raynouaed, Faueiel, 
 
 SOHLEGEL, DlEZ, AND OTHEES. 
 
 But such a man really soon arose in the person of M. Raynouard, another 
 native of Provence (born 1761, died 1836), whose name commences a new 
 epoch on the subject of Proveii9al literature. Up to the time of his pub- 
 lications, the language of the Troubadours was as yet but imperfectly under- 
 stood. For although alive yet at this day in the south of France, and even 
 employed for literary purposes, it ig only so in dialects, and the old Pro- 
 vengal is in many respects a dead language. It was Raynouard, that un- 
 dertook the arduous task of removing the obstacles in the way of a correct 
 appreciation of the ancient literary monuments of the South, by his suc- 
 cessful examinations into the character and structure of the old Provengal 
 from the stand-point of philological criticism, as represented during the 
 first decennia of the present century. 
 
 After a variety of literary efforts in other directimis, and a political career 
 of no mean distinction, Raynouard at last resolved to concentrate his richly 
 endowed intellect upon the mediaeval languages and literature of his coun- 
 try; and as the first result of this new effort, he gave us in 1816 his "Re- 
 cherches sur I'anciennete de la langue romane," and in the same volume an 
 examination into the origin and formation of that language, together with a 
 grammar of it. After having thus paved the way for a better comprehen- 
 sion of the poetic monuments of that idiom, he next proceeded to collect 
 and publish the earliest vestiges of the literature in one volume ; and this 
 was soon followed by selections from the writings of the most distinguished 
 Troubadours, in two volumes. To these he added another volume contain- 
 ing the lives of upward of three hundred and fifty Provengal poets, from 
 original documents, with fragmentary extracts from their writings. AU 
 these researches are included in the first five volumes of his " Choix des 
 poesies originales des Troubadours," which he completed in 1821 by the addi- 
 tion of a sixth volume, the result of immense industry, and this was nothing 
 less than a " Grammaire comparee des langues de I'Europe latine." 
 
 But Raynouard's efforts did not stop here. There was as yet no lexicon
 
 XXX Introduction. 
 
 of the Romansh of the South ; and the imperfect glossaries of the idiom 
 were next to no guide to the student of his selections even. Raynouard 
 resolved to remove this last impediment, and devoted nearly the whole of 
 the remainder of his days to the preparation of a work, which was to be 
 the keystone to his previous writings on the subject. But death called him 
 from his labors, before the public could enjoy the benefit of their result ; 
 and his distinguished "Lexique Roman," though completed, did not appear 
 till after his decease (1836-45). In the first volume of this work we have a 
 new examination into the history and grammatical peculiarities of the lan- 
 guage, a new selection of lyrical pieces from a variety of authors, and the 
 text of nearly all the Provengal romances or epopees, either entire or 
 in part.* The sixth volume contains a complete vocabulary of the idiom 
 of the Troubadours, and the four intervening volumes constitute the 
 lexicon proper, in which the signification and use of words is illustrat- 
 ed by perpetual citations and references to the classical writers of the lan- 
 guage. 
 
 Although the anthologies- given us by this philolpgian are very far from 
 being a corpus completum of the poets in question, they are yet sufiiciently 
 copious, to enable us to form a tolerably correct conception of what that 
 curious literature of Provence really was ; and the remark is consequently a 
 just one, that Raynouard is the first man that with the assistance of his 
 excellent books, has enabled us to read with something like a critical accu- 
 racy the principal works of the old poets of the South, instead of being 
 obliged, as we were before his day, to judge of their merits from mere 
 hearsay authority, or to look for specimens of them in dingy and illegible 
 manuscripts. 
 
 Tlie service thus rendered to letters by the author of these books is of so. 
 distinguished a characfer, that it is scarcely extravagant, what a country- 
 man of his has remarked respecting them : "It was the first time," he says, 
 " that philology witnessed an undertaking like this, which was nothing less 
 than an atteinpt, first, to reconstruct a language according to its principles, 
 and to assign to it its place among the remaining languages descended from 
 the Latin ; secondly, to produce and to examine critically the numerous 
 productions emanating from the literature of that language; thirdly, to 
 determine the fonns and the rules of these productions ; and fourthly, to 
 lay a solid foundation for an adequate knowledge of this literature, in a 
 comprehensive critical lexicon of the language." 
 
 Nearly at the same time with Raynouard's first efforts on the subject, and 
 perhaps even before them, France had on its literary list another name, des- 
 tined to shed additional light on the poetry of the Middle Age, by linking 
 this literary culture of a bygone epoch to the general history of our modern 
 civilization. This name was that of Cuaeles Claude Fatjeiel (born in 
 17Y2, t 1844). 
 
 * This he called his " Nouveau Choix," which he intended to make six volumes, but 
 of which unfortunately only this one was completed.
 
 Introduction. xxxi 
 
 Fauriel was educated at the College of Tournon, and subsequently at 
 Lyons under the auspices of the brethren of the Oratoire. In 1792 we find 
 him a soldier in the army of the Pyrenees, in which, however, he remained 
 only a year. During the rule of the Directory he repaired to Paris, and 
 there entered the service of Fouche, then minister of the police, and for- 
 merly of the Oratoire. After the establishment of the empire, Fauriel 
 gave up all connection with administrative ftmctions, and resolved to 
 abandon the idea of public life forever. 
 
 About this time he became a member of the famous society of ideologists 
 at Auteil, which then met in the salons of Madame de Coudorcet and of 
 Destutt de Tracy. It was in connection with this society, that Cabanais 
 addressed his celebrated letter "Sur les causes premieres" to Mr. Fauriel. 
 The latter now began to apply himself with great assiduity to the study of 
 languages, and in the course of these pursuits he undertook an examination 
 into the Komansh idioms of France, for the purpose of getting at the ori- 
 ginal elements of our modern literature. But this is not all. He made col- 
 lections of the vestiges of the Celtic and the Basque, and in order to extend 
 the horizon of his investigations, he applied himself to the study of the 
 Arabic and the Sanscrit. 
 
 But these first studies of his, though varied, patient and profound, scarcely 
 passed beyond the limits of his closet, and remained for a long time without 
 any result to the public. For his earliest publications were only translations, 
 first of a poem of Baggeson (in 1810), who was one of his friends, and then 
 in 1823 of two tragedies of Manzoni, one of which had been dedicated to 
 him by the author. 
 
 During all this long interval we have nothing else from his pen, except 
 occasional articles on archaiology and linguistics, until in 1824-25 he pub- 
 lished his " Chants populaires de la Grece moderne," of which he gave the 
 original text with a translation. Now as this work appeared at the very 
 moment of the popular movement in favor of the liberation of Greece, and 
 as it was admirably calculated to second the heroic struggle of that nation 
 against the ascendency of the Crescent, the author's name was as it were 
 identified with it, and Fauriel became at once known and distinguished 
 throughout entire Europe. 
 
 The revolution of 1830 gave a new impulsion to his literary activity. It 
 carried certain friends of his into power, who knew his industry and abili- 
 ties, and they created a chair of modern literature for him in connection 
 with the Faculty of Letters at Paris. This he filled with great distinction, 
 and it was in this capacity of professor that he gave us his maturest and 
 most finished productions. 
 
 Fauriel considered the south of France as the cradle of all our modern 
 civilization ; he linked the mediaeval literature of the Proven9als to the remi- 
 niscences of Greco-Roman culture, and tbe literature of Spain and Italy di- 
 rectly to that of the Provengals. So great an importance did he attach to 
 the latter, that he considered the German Minnesingers even as the result of
 
 XXXll 
 
 Introduction. 
 
 its influence, wLich through the invasions of the Arabs had extended itself as 
 far as tlie distant East. Under the impulse of this idea, he conceived the plan 
 of writing a complete history of this civilization, to trace it through all the 
 phases of its progressive development. As tlie first result of tliis vast un- 
 dertaking, he published in 1836 bis " IJistoire de la Gaule m6ridionale sous la 
 domination des conquerants germains," in four volumes; a work of immense 
 research, and rare historical sagacity and judgment, which made him a mem- 
 ber of the Academy of Belles-lettres and Inscriptions. Soon after the com- 
 pletion of this elaborate history, we find Fauriel engaged as one of the editors 
 of " nistoire Litt6raire de la France," to which he contributed a variety of 
 articles on literary history, among which there is one on the Trouveres of 
 the north of France, that fills nearly an entire quarto of many hundred 
 pages. Tlie " Revue des deux Mondes " also boasts of several articles from his 
 pen. As assistant conservateur of the MSS. of the royal library he edited for 
 Guizot's collection the historical poem "Lacroisade contre les heretiqnes albi- 
 geois," of which he gave the Proven9al text, with a translation and an intro- 
 duction. During all this time Fauriel continued to lecture from his chair, 
 as professor, on the history of modern literature, and delivered extensive and 
 elaborate courses, not only on the Proven9al, but also on Italian and Spanish 
 literature. But he was removed by death, before any of these discourses 
 were published, and the present history did not appear in type until 1846, 
 two years after his decease. It was edited by one of his associates — M. 
 Mohl, of the Institute. The remaining courses were promised at the same 
 time, and in 1854, the same editor gave us his "Dante et les origines de la 
 langue et la litterature italiennes," a work equally full of original research and 
 interest. A history of Spanish literature is yet to come. 
 
 And these courses of Fauriel are far from being mere repetitions of 
 what bad been written before him, or generalizations founded on other 
 men's opinions or statements ; they bear the imprint of original researches, 
 extensive, unwearied and profound ; they contain a multitude of new facts, 
 new ideas, and new aspects of the subjects he discourses on. That this is 
 really so, tiie reader may convince himself by observing the care with which 
 the author traces the vestiges of Graeco-Eoman influences on the civilization 
 of the south of Gaul in several chapters of this work, or the labor he ex- 
 pends on showing tlie close affinity subsisting between the literary traditions 
 of all the nations of niediioval Europe in liis examination of the Scandina- 
 vian songs, the Ileldenbuch and the Nibelungen, with reference to the curi- 
 ous epos of "Walter, for which he claims Provengal origin. His chapters on 
 the language of the Troubadours are equally remarkable and clear, and on 
 this point too he is so far from indolently acquiescing in the verdict of 
 others, that he takes original ground against men like Raynouard even. His 
 examination of the Proven5al epopee, which fills nearly the whole of the 
 latter half of this course, has been pronounced the first successful attempt 
 of the kind. In fact, nothing connected witli his subject remains unex- 
 plored or unarranged, nothing escapes the searching test of his keen intel-
 
 Introduction. xxxiii 
 
 Ject, which bears every mark of having been trained in the best school of 
 the nineteenth century, and not only familiar with, but oftener in advance of 
 everything known in his day on linguistics, literary history, and criti- 
 cism. 
 
 The new interest imparted to the study of the early literature of France 
 by the labors of men like Kaynouard and Fauriel, gave rise to numerous 
 other attempts in the same direction, and not only in France, but also in 
 Italy, and more especially in Germany. Among the Italians Galvaui, Per- 
 ticari, and the poet Monti have written on this subject. In Germany, Wil- 
 lielra Schlegel was among the first that took notice of the new literary 
 movement in France, and has left us a classical essay in the shape of a re- 
 view of one of Raynouard's publications. Diez devoted many years exclu- 
 sively to this study, and has furnished us not only a very spirited history 
 of Provencal literature, but also a comparative grammar of ail the five lan- 
 guages derived from the Latin, and an etymological lexicon of the same. 
 Fuchs has examined into the relation between the Provengal and the Latin, 
 Mahn has published new editions of some of the writings of the Trouba- 
 dours, and also the biographies of these poets in the original. 
 
 In France itself, these publications are still more numerous. The volumes 
 of the "Histoire Litteraire de la France," the "Journal" des Savants," and 
 the "Memoires" of the Academy of Belles-Lettres and Inscriptions, abound 
 in articles and extracts relative to this particular literature. Sainte-Palaye 
 had already commenced a glossary of the Romansli in 1788, but the revolu- 
 tion had interrupted the publication of it, and only a small part of it ever 
 appeared in type. Roquefort gave us another in 1808. In 1819, Rochegude 
 published an outline of a third, and in the same year his " Parnasse Occi- 
 tanien," a new anthology of Provengal poetry in one volume. In 1840, 
 Guessard collected and edited the MSS. grammars of the thirteenth century, 
 and more recently Gatien-Arnoult published for the first time Chancellor 
 Molinier's " Flors del gay saber," in four volumes. In the year 181:6, two his- 
 tories of Provengal literature appeared in Belgiam, one from the pen of Van 
 Bemmel, the other from that of de Laveleye. Other works on the same 
 subject in the French language were written by Mandet, Lafon, and Bruce 
 "White. The curiosity of philological inquiry has extended even to the 
 patois of France, and we have now several works upon the subject. Cabrie 
 has given us a work on the modern Troubadour, Jacques Jasmin. We thus 
 perceive, that the chivalry and the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth cen- 
 turies are no longer a mere subject of empty declamation or indiscriminate 
 eulogy. They are before us in living monuments, that claim our praise or 
 censure according to their merit. And if a knowledge of the past is a les- 
 son for the future, and a benefit to mankind, then the men who by their 
 genius and industry have led us to a corrector appreciation of its history, 
 must be ranked among the benefactors of our race.
 
 LIST OF THE PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES 
 
 AND OTHER WORKS 
 Relating to the Subjects Treated in this Volume. 
 
 I. Works on the Provencal Language. 
 
 1. MSS. Grammars. — a) The Donatus Provincialis, for an account of which see Raynouard'3 
 Choix des poesies, etc., vol. ii. p. cl. sqq. b) The Grammaire Provengale of the national library of 
 France (ancien fonds latin, no. 7534, — c) Glossaire Provengal of the Laurentian library at 
 Florence. 
 
 2. Grammaires romanes Inedites du 13e sit-cle, par F. Guessard. Paris, 1S40. 
 
 3. Las flors del gay saber estier dichas Las leys d' amors. — This Is a long Provencal treatise on 
 Grammar, Rhetoric, Prosody, etc., composed, between 1.324 and 1330, by Guilliaume Molinier, 
 chancellor of the academy of the gay saber at Toulouse, and recently published, for the first 
 time, by Gatien-Arnoult, in his Monumens de la iitterature romane depuis le 14e siecle. 
 Paris et Toulouse (without date), 4 vols. Svo. 
 
 4. Delia Volgar Lingua, di M. Pietro Bembo Cardinale, (in the 10th, 11th and 12th volumes of the 
 Opere del Cardinale Bembo). Milano, 1810. This worlf contains a notice of some of the Pro- 
 vencal ingredients of the Italian language, adopted by the poets of the nation. 
 
 5. La Crusca Provenzale, overo le voci, frasi, forme e maniere de dire, che la lingua toscana ha 
 presa della provenzale, opera di Antonio Bastero. Koma, 1724, fol. — This is by a native of the 
 parts of the South, in which the Provencal still exists as a popular dialect. 
 
 6. Recherches sur la langue romane. — Ox-igine et formation de la langue romane. — Grammaire 
 Romane, par M. Raynouard (in the 1st vol. of his Choix de poesies des Troubadours). Paris 
 1818. — Resume de la Grammaire Romane, by the same, (in the 1st vol. of his Lexique Roman). 
 Paris, 1S38. These are the first attempts of a critical exposition of the forms and structure of the 
 Provencal language, and are still the leading authority upon the subject,in the French language. 
 
 7. Grammatilf der romanischen Sprachen, von Friedrich Diez. Bonn 1S36-14, 3 vols. 8vo. — 
 This is a grammatical exposition of all the languages derived from the old Roman, i. e., of the 
 Provengal, the Italian, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, and the AVallachian. 
 
 8. Die romanische Spiache in ihrem Verhaltniss zur lateinischen, von A. Fuchs. Ilalle, 
 1849. — On the connection between the Romansh languages and the Latin we have also learned 
 researches from Pott in Hijfer's Zeitschrift fiir die 'Wissenschaft der Spraclie, vol. 3d ; in Aufrecht 
 u. Kiihn's Zeitsch. fiir vergL Sprachforschung, vol. 1st, and in the Zeitsch. fiir Alterthumswisseu- 
 schaft, 1S83. 
 
 9. Observations sur la langue et la litterature provensales, par W. A. Schlegel (in vol. 2d of his 
 (Euvres ecrites en Franjais). Leipzig, 1846. 
 
 10. Etymologische Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der romanischen Sprachen, von C. A. F. Mahn. 
 Berlin, 1855. 
 
 11. Glossaire de I'ancienne langue franfaise, depuis son origins jusqu'au siecle de Louis XIV., 
 par la Curne de Sainte-Palaye. Paris, 1788, fol. 
 
 12. Glossaire de la langue romane, par B. de Roquefort. Paris, 180S. 
 
 13. Essai d'un glossaire occitanien, par Rochegude. Toulouse, 1819, Svo. 
 
 14. Lexique Roman, ou dictionnaire de la langue des Troubadours, comparee avec les autres 
 langues de I'Europe latine, precede de nouvelles recherches historiques et philologiques, d'un 
 resume de la grammaire romane, d' un nouveau choix des poesies originates des Troubadoui-s 
 et d'extraits de poemes divers, par M. Raynouard. Paris, 1838-44. 6 vols. Svo. 
 
 15. Lexicon etymologicum linguarum romanarum, italicae, hispanicae, gallicce. Par. Fred. Diez. 
 Bonn, 1858. Svo. 
 
 16. Histoire de la langue romane, par Francisque Mandet. Puy et Paris, 1840. 
 
 17. Histoire des langues romanes et de leur litterature, par Bruce-White. Paris, 1841. 3 vols. 
 Svo. 
 
 IS. Altromanische Sprachdenkmale, nebst einer Abhandlung iiber den epischen Vers, von Friedr. 
 Diez. Bonn, 1846. 
 
 19. Tableau historique et litteraire de la langue parlee dans le midi de la France et connue sous 
 le nom de langue provenzale, par Marie Lafon. Paris, 1842. 
 
 20. De elementis grammaticis potissimum linguaB francogaUicaj scripsit LudoT. Schacht. Berlin,
 
 xxxvi List of the Principal Authorities. 
 
 21. Grammaire de la langue d'oil, ou grammaire des dialectes frangais aux xiie et xiiie siecles 
 par .1. F. Buiguy. Berlin, 1853-54. 
 
 22. Tableau des idiomes populaires de la France, par J. A. Schnakenburg. Berlin, 1840. 
 
 23. Histoire littSraire, philologique et bibliographique des patois, par Pierquin de Gembloux. 
 PariL;, 1S41. 
 
 24. Articles on the Romansh languages in the Journal des Savants of the years 1855, 1S56, 185T, 
 etc., and in the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions. Vols. xv. xvil. xxiii. and xxiv. (first 
 series). 
 
 25. Glossarium ad scriptores medise et infirnaelatinitatis, cura ac studio C. Du Cange. Parisiis, 1733. 
 6 vols. to\.~and Supplementum ad auctiorera Cangiani editionem, auct. D. P. Carpentier. Pari- 
 siis, 1766. — New edition of both these works by Henschel. Paris, 1840-50. 7 vols. 4to. 
 
 26. Mithridates, oder AUgemeine Sprachenkunde, von Adelung u. Vater. Berlin, 1817. 4 vols. 8vo. 
 
 27. Das Wort in seiner organischen Verwandlung, von K. F. Becker. Frankfort, a. M., 1833. 
 23. Organism der deutschen Sprache, von K. F. Becker. Frankfort, 1841-42. 
 
 29. Parallele des langues de l' Europe et de I'Inde, par F. G. Eichhofif. Paris, 1836. 4to. 
 
 II. — Works relating to Provencal Literature. 
 
 A. The oldest literary monuments of the Provencal language are certain law documents, from 
 the year 960, consisting of a barbarous intermixture of Latin and Provencal terms and phrases, 
 wliich the reader will find printed in the second volume of Raynouard's Choix de poes. des Trou- 
 badours, and also in Diez' work already mentioned (I., No. 18.) 
 
 B. The earliest work known to us, deserving the name of a literary composition in the Proven- 
 cal language, is a poem on Boethius, from the close of the lOlh century, of which a fragment of 
 257 verses is still extant. This fragment, with some other compositions, chiefiy poetical, of a 
 somewhat later date, has been edited by Raynouard in his Choix d. po6s. d. Troub., and also by 
 Diez in his Altromanische Sprachdenkmale. 
 
 C. MSS. collections of Proven(;al poetry, from the golden age of its existence in the south of 
 France, when the Proven(;al was the language par excellence of chivalry and of the courts (i. e., 
 during the 12lh and 13th centuries), made at diiferent epochs and by various hands, are preserved 
 in the different libraries of continental Europe. An account of those manuscripts is furnished us 
 l)y M. Raynouard in hisChoi.xde poes. des Troub., vol. ii. page cliv.-clxiv., vol. vi. Appendix, and 
 in the Index to the 5th volume of his Lexique Roman. An extensive collection of copies of foreign 
 MSS. prepared with great care and labor by M. de Sainte-Palaye, is deposited in the library of the 
 Arsenal, at Paris. 
 
 D. Printed works relating to the subject of Provencal poetry and its history : 
 
 1. Les vies des plus cel^bres et anciens poetes proven(;aux, qui ont fleuri du temps des comtes de 
 Provence, par Jean de Nostre Dame, procureur en la cour du parlement de Provence. Lyon 
 1575. 8vo. 
 
 2. Istoria della volgar poesia, scritta da Giovan Mario Crescimbeni. Roma, 1698, and Venezia, 
 1730-31. 7 vols. 4to, of wliich the second volume contains a translation of the biographical 
 sketches of Nostradamus, with some additions, and a number of specimens of Provencal poetry 
 with an Italian translation opi)()site. 
 
 3. Histoire litleraire des Troubadours, contenant leurs vies, des extraits de leurs pieces, et plusieurs 
 particularity sur les mueurs, les usages et I'histoire du lie et du 13e siecles. Paris, 1774. 
 3 vols. 12mo. This work, which appeared without the name of the author, is from the pen of 
 the Abbe Millot, and redacted from the papers of Sainte-Palaye. 
 
 4. The literary history of the Troubadours, containing their lives, extracts from their works, etc. 
 By Mrs. Dobson. London, 1S07. 12mo — A translation and abridgment of the work of Millot. 
 
 5. Choix des poesies originates des Troubadours, par M. Raynouard. Paris, lSlG-20. 5 vols. 8vo. 
 The first printed collection of Provencal poetry of any note, including a critical examination 
 into the formation of the language, the earliest specimens of its literature, a grammar, and one 
 volume of biographical notices from Provencal sources, with an indication of the number of 
 pieces yet extant in MSS. from the respective poets, of which but a limited number could be ad- 
 mitted into the collection. This is still the most complete work on this branch of the subject. 
 
 0. Nouveau choix des poesies originales des Troubadours, et d'extraits des poemes divers par M. 
 Raynouard (in the 1st vol. of his Lexique Roman). Paris, 1S38. This volume contains the 
 principal poetical romances of the Provencals, either entire or in part, with a number of other 
 pieces. 
 
 7. Le Parnasse Occitanien, ou choix des porsies originales des Troubadours, tirees des manuscrits 
 nationaux (anonymous, but known to be b,v Rochegude). Toulouse, 1819. 8vo. 
 
 8. A general outline of the history of Provencal literature is contained in the " Histoire Litteraire 
 de la France," vol. vii., p. xxx., and vol. xvi., p. 194, sqq. Essays on the different Troubadours, 
 with extracts from their writings, chiefly from the pen of M. Kmeric-David, in vols, xiii., xiv., 
 XV., xvii., xviii., xix., and xx. The whole of vol. xxii. is devoted to an examination of the 
 writings of the Troubadours and Trouvires, and is chiefly from the pen of C. Fauriel. 
 
 9. Die Vi'erke der Troubadours in proveni;alischer Sprache, nach Raynouard, Rochegude, Diez u. 
 nach den llandschriften, herausg. von (3. A. F. Mahu. Berlin, 1840. And by the same editor ; 
 Gedichte der Troubadours, etc. Berlin, 1856. 
 
 10. Die Biographieen der Troubadours in prov. Sprache, herausg. von C. A. F. Mahn. 
 Berlin, 1853. 
 
 11. AltfranziJsische Lieder, bericht. u. erlaut. mit Bezug auf die provengalische, altitalienische u. 
 mittelhochdeutsche Liederdichtung. Von Ed. Martzuer. Berlin, 1853. 12mo. 
 
 12. Romanische Inedita, auf italienischen Bibliotheken gesammelt. Von Paul Heyse. Berlin. 
 1856. 8vo. 
 
 13. Pierre Vidal's Lieder, herausgegeben von 0. Bartsch. Berlin, 1857. 12mo. 
 
 14. Der Roman von Ferabras provenzalisch herausgegeben von Immanuel Bekker. Berlin, 
 1829. 4to.
 
 List of the Principal Authorities. xxxvii 
 
 15. Die Poesie der Troubadours, von Friedrich Diez. Zwickau, 1827, and the same French by 
 Roisin. Lille, 1S45. This is a critical examination of the poetry of the Provenjals, and a his- 
 tory of it. 
 
 16. Osservationi sulla poesia del Trovatori, da G. Galvani. Modena, 1829. Svo. 
 
 17. Fiore di storia letteraria e cavalleresca della Occitania, da G. Galvani. Milano, 1S46. Svo. 
 
 18. De la langue et de la poesie provengales, par ie baron Eugene von Bemmel. Braxelles et 
 Paris, 1846. Svo. 
 
 19. Histoire de la langue et litterature proven^ale, par Emile de Laveleye. Bruxelles et Paris, 
 1846. Svo. 
 
 20. Histoire de 1' epopee du moyen age :— Romans provensaus, par C. Fauriel (in the Revue des 
 deux Mondes of 1832.) 
 
 21. Memoires sur I'ancienne chevallerie, par la Curne de Sainte-Palaye. Paris, 1781. 3 vols., 
 12mo., and 2d ed., avec une introduction et des notes historiques, par C. Nodier. Paris, 1826. 
 2 vols., Svo. English: Memoirs of ancient chivalry, etc., by the translator of the Life of 
 Petrarch. London, 1784. Svo. 
 
 22. Documenti d'amore, del Francisco Barberino. Roma, 1640. 
 
 23. Erotica, sen Amatoria, Andreee Capellani regii, vetustissimi scriptoris, ad venerandum suura 
 amicum Gualterum scripta, etc.. in publicum emissa a Dethmaro Mulhero. Dorpmund;e, 1610. 
 Svo. A notice of this book in Kaynouard's choix, vol. 2d, and in the Hist, litter, de la France, 
 vol. xxi., p. 820. 
 
 24. Ausspriiche der Minnegerichte, aus alten Handschriften, herausg. u. mit. ein. hist. Abhandl. 
 iiber d. Minnegerichte begleitet, von C. Freih. v. Aretin. Munchen, 1803. 
 
 25. Monuments de la litterature romane, depuis le 14e siecle, publies par M. Gatien — Arnoult. 
 Paris et Toulouse (without date), 4 vols., Svo. (of which the 4th vol. contains the prize poems 
 of the academy of the gay saber at Toulouse.) 
 
 26. Notices et extraits de quelques ouvrages ecrits en patois du midi de la France. Paris, 1S40. 
 
 27. Le Troubadour modern (i. e., Jacques Jasmin), par M. Cabrie. Paris, 1840. 
 
 III. Works Relating to the Literature of the Trouveres and to that of 
 
 THE Middle Age in General. 
 
 : et xve. sii^cles, par Barbazan. 
 
 1. Fabliaux et contes des pontes francais de xie, xiie, xiiie, xive i 
 Paris, 1755. 3 vols. Svo. — New edtition by Meon. Paris, 1808. 4 vols. Svo. 
 
 2. Fabliaux et contes, etc., du xiie, et du xiiie siecle, par Legrand d' Aussy. Paris, 1829. 5 vols. 
 Svo. 
 
 3. Nouveau recueil de fabliaux et contes inedits, publies par M. Meon. Paris, 1823. 2 vols. Svo. 
 — This is also the editor of the Roman de la Rose, du Renart and of several others. 
 
 4. De la chanson de Roland, du roman de Tristan, de la Violette, de comte de Poitiers, de Horn, 
 etc., par Francisque Michel. Paris, 1830-87 (in separate volumes). 
 
 5. Lais inedits des xiie et xiiie siecles, d'apres les MSS. de France et d' Angleterre, publies par 
 Francisque Michel. Paris, 1836. 
 
 6. Jongleurs et Trouveres, ou choix des saluts, epitres, etc., des xiiie et xive siecles, par Achilla 
 JubinaL Paris, 1835. Svo. 
 
 7. Nouveau recueil des contes, dits, fabliaux et autres pieces inedites des xiiie, xive, et xve 
 siecles, par A. JubinaL Paris, 1839-42. 3 vols Svo. 
 
 8. Efesais historiques sur les bardes, les jongleurs et les trouveres normands, et anglo-normands, 
 par I'Abbe G. Delarue. Paris, 1834. 3 vols. Svo. 
 
 9. Trouveres, jongleurs et menestrels du nord de la France et du midi de la Belgique, par Arthur 
 Dinaux. Valenciennes et Paris, 1S37-43. 3 vols. Svo. 
 
 10. Les romans en prose des cycles de la table ronde et de Charlemagne, par J. W. Schmidt. 
 -11. Poemes des bardes bretons du vie. siecle, par Villemarque. Paris, 1850. 
 
 -12. Histoire des lettres au moyen-age, par Amedee Duquesnel. Paris, 1842. 4 vols. Svo. 
 
 13. Des fetes du moyen age, civiles, militaires et religieuses, par A. de Matronne. 
 
 14. Poesies populaires latines anterieures au xiie siecle. — And: Poesies populaires latines au 
 moyen age, par E. du MeriL Paris, 1849. Svo. 
 
 15. Poesies inedites du moyen age, par E. du Meril. Paris, 1854. Svo. 
 
 16. Exempla poeseos latinae medii sevi, edita a M. Hauptio lusato. Vindobonfe, 1884. 
 
 17. Latina quaj moedium per ffivum in triviis, necnon in monasterlis vulgabantur, carmina sedulo 
 iterum coUegit E. du Meril. Paris, 1847. 
 
 18. Hymni latini medii sevi, e codd. MSS. edidit et annotationibus illustravit F. J. Mone. Friburgi 
 Brisgovise, 1855. 3 vols. Svo. 
 
 19. Specimens of Latin poetry, secular and religious, from every century of the middle age will be 
 found in Migne's Patrologiie Cursus Completus, in BoUand's and in Mabillon's Acta Sanctorum, 
 in Bouquet, Pertz and other historical collections, indicated in No. V. of this list. 
 
 20. ifitudes sur les mysteres, par Onesime Le Roy. Paris, 1837. Svo. 
 
 21. Mysteres inidits du xve siecle, par A. Jubinal. Paris. 1837. 2 vols. Svo. 
 
 22. Les MSS. frangais de la bibliotheque du Roi, par Paulia Paris. Paris, 1842. 4 vols. Svo. 
 
 IV. — Works on Scandinavian and Germamc Literature, Examined or 
 Referred to in this Volume. 
 
 1. Edda Sffimundar bins Froda, sive Edda rhythmica seu antiquior, vulgo Saemundina dicta. 
 Hafnia;, 1787-1828. 3 parts, 4to. The same from the text of Rask, edited by .•\fzeUus. Uul- 
 mi;e, 1818. Svo.
 
 xxxviii List of tJie ^rinci^al Authorities. 
 
 
 2. K<lda Islandorum per Snoironem Sturlse conscripta. Ed. P. J. Resenius. Haunite, 1665. 4to. 
 I'l'he original text of the younger Edda, with a Danish and I,atin translation'. 
 
 3. Snorra-Edda asamt Skaldu, etc., utgefin af K. K. Rask. Stockholrai, 1818. 8vo. (Younger Edda, 
 critical text). 
 
 4. Die Lieder der alteren Edda erklart durch die Brtider Grimm. Berlin, 1815. 2 vols. Svo. 
 
 5. Die Edda, nebst einer Einleitung iiber nord. Poesie u. Mythologie, von Friedr. Riihs. Berlin, 
 1812. Svo. 
 
 6. Die altere u. jiinpere Edda, nebst den mythischen Erzahlungen der Skalda, ubersetzt von Karl 
 SIrarock. Stuttgart, 1855. Svo. 
 
 7. Lieder der Edda von den Nibelungen, iibersetzt von E. M. L. Ettmiiller. Ziirich, 1837. 
 Svo. 
 
 8. Mallet's Northern Antiquities, translated from the French by Bishop Percy. New edition 
 edited by Blackwell. London, 1847. 12mo. (This contains an account of both Eddas, with 
 some extracts from tliem). 
 
 9. Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, by G. Pigott. London. 
 
 10. Fornaldar Siigur Nortlanda eptir Giimlin handritum utgefnar af C. C. Rafn. Kaufmannahiifn, 
 1829. 3 vols. 8vo.— (Text of the Vosunga-Saga in vol. 1st, p. 114-134). 
 
 11. Wilkina-Saga : sive Historia; Wilkinensium, Theodorici Veronensis, ac Niflungorum, etc., 
 opera Joh. Peringskiold. gtockholmis, 1715. (Original, with a Swedish and a Latin trans- 
 lation). 
 
 12. Saga-Bibliothek, by P. S. Miiller. Copenhagen, 1816. 3 vols. Svo. (An account of the dilTer- 
 ent sagas, with a sort of commentary upon them). 
 
 13. Nordische Heldenromane, iibersetzt von F. H. v. d. Hagen. Berlin, 1814-28. 5 vols. 12mo. 
 (These volumes contain a German version of the Volsunga and Wilkina Sagas >. 
 
 14. Ulfilas : veteris et novi testamenti gothice fragmenta, quse supersunt, ed. XL G. de Gabelentz 
 et J. Lcebe. Lipsia?, 1843-46. 2 vols. 4to. 
 
 15. Die beiden altesten Gedichte aus dem 8ten Tahrh. i. e. Das Lied von Hildebrand u. das 
 Wessebrunner Gebet, herausg. von Jac. Grimra. Cassel, 1812. 4to. 
 
 16. The Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, edited by J. M. Kenible. London, 1835. 2 vols. 12mo. — 
 The same, edited by B. Thorpe, Oxford, 1855 ; and by EttmiJller, Ziirich. 1840. 
 
 17. Altdanische Heldenlieder, Balladen u. Marchen, ubersetzt von W. K. Grimm. Heiderberg, 
 1811. . 
 
 IS. Das Heldefabucn in der Ursprache, herausgegeben von F. H. v. d. Hagen u. Anton Primisser. 
 Berlin, 1S20. 2 theile, 4to. 
 
 19. Deutsche Heldensage, von Wilhelm Grimm. Giittingen. 1829. Svo. 
 
 20. Ueldenbilder aus den Sagenkreisen Karl's des Giossen, Artus, der Tafelrunde u. des 
 Grals, Attila's, der Amelungen u. Nibelungen, von F. H. v. d. Hagen. Breslau, 1S13. 2 vols. 
 12mo. 
 
 21. De prima expeditione Attilje regis Hunnorum in Gallias, ac de rebus gestis Waltharii, Aqui- 
 tanorum principis, ed. F. K. I. Fischer. Lipsiae, 17S0. 
 
 22. Lateinsche Gedichte aus dem lOten Jahrhundert, herausg. von Jacob Grimra u. Schmeller, 
 GiJttingen, 183S, Svo. (This volume contains the text of tlie poem of Walter, the Aquitanian 
 hero, with a critical examination of its contents and history). 
 
 23. Walter, Prinz von Aquitanien ; tin lleldengedicht aus dem 6ten Jahrhundert, aus dem 
 lateinischen Codex iibersetzt von F. Molter. Karlsruhe, 1818. 
 
 24. Das Nibelungen Lied in der altesten Gestalt, herausg. von F. H. v. d. Hagen. Breslau, ISIO, 
 2d ed., 1816. 
 
 25. Der Nibelungen Noth mit der Elage, herausg. von Carl Lachmann. Berlin, 1826. 4to. 
 
 26. Der Nibelungen Lied, Abdruck der Handsch. des Freih. v. Lassberg. Leipzig, 1840. 4to. 
 Modern German versions or translations of this epos by Pfitzer, Biisching, Simrock, Marbach, 
 Uinsberg, Zeune, etc. 
 
 27. The Lay of the last Nibelungers, translated into English verse, by Jonathan Birch. Berlin, 
 1848. Svo. 
 
 28. Illustrations ol Northern Antiquities, from the earliest Teutonic and Scandinavian romances, 
 by II. Weber and R. Jamieson. Edinburgh, 1814. 4to. Ttiis volume contains an abstract of 
 the Nibelungen Lied, by Weber, with occasional metrical versions of ))assages. In it the reader 
 will also find an account of the Ilildebrandslied and of the Heldenbuch, with a.number of other 
 valuable notices relative to the subject of Northern and Germanic literature. An elaborate and 
 spirited examination of the great Teutonic epos of the middle age is furnislied us by Thomas 
 Oarlyle, in his Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Boston, 1838-39. 
 
 . "S. Uber die ursprungliche Ge=talt des Gedichtes von der Nibelungen Noth, von Carl Lachmann. 
 ■ Beilih, 1816. 8vo. 
 SO Des Nibelungen, saga m6rovingienne de la Nierlande, par Louis de Baecker. Paris et Cam- 
 
 brai, 1853. Svo. 
 31. Minnesinger, oder Deutsche Liederdichter des xiiten, xiiiten u. xivten Jahrhunderts, aus den 
 ilandschriften u. friiheren Drucken gesammelt, etc., von F. II. v. d. Hagen. Leipzig, 1838. 
 3 vols., 4to. Earlier edition of the same, by Bodmer, in 2 vols., 4to. 
 32 Lays of the Minhesingers or German Troubadours, by Edgar Taylor, London. 
 
 33. Minnelieder aus dem Schwiibischen Zeilalter,_von Ludwig Tieck. Berlin, 1803. Svo. 
 
 34. Tableau de la litterature du Nord au moyen age en Alleraagne et en Angleterre, en Scandina- 
 vie et en Slavonic, par F. G. EichhofT. Lyon et Paris, 1853. Svo. 
 
 V. — Classical and Historical Works, Collections of Mkdi^tal Chroniclks, 
 
 KTC, RKFEURKI) to IN THIS VOLUMK. 
 
 J. Valpy's edition of the Delphin Classics of the Latin language. London, 1821-23. 141 vols., 
 Svo. Ausonius, Cajsar, Cicero, Julius Florus, Justinus, Livius, Lucanus, Plinius, Suetonius, 
 J'acitus, Valerius Maximus.
 
 List of the Principal Authorities. xxxix 
 
 2. Lemaire's Collection of Latin Classics. Paris. 1S19-26. 140 vols., 8vo. Juvenal, Quintilianus, 
 Seneca, etc. 
 
 3. Juliani imperatoris opera quae supersunt omnia et St. Cyrilli libri x. Lipsise, 1796. 
 2 vols., fol. 
 
 4. Plutarchi Vitae, secundum codd. Parisinos recognovit Theod. Doehner. Parisiis, 1S47. 
 2 vols., Svo. 
 
 5. Strabonis geographicarum rerum libri xvii. Ed. J. P. Siebenkees. Lipsiae, 1746. 6 vols., Svo. 
 
 6. .ifiliani de varia historia libri xiv. Venetiis 1550, fol. and ed. Coray. Paris, 1S05, Svo. 
 
 7. Scriptorum historise Byzantinorum Ct)rpus, ed. Gr. Niebuhr (continued by the Academy at 
 Berlin.) Bonn, 1S2S-53. 48 vols., Svo. Cedrenus, Ephorus, etc. 
 
 8. Isagoge in notitiam scriptorum historise Gallicae, etc. Studio J. Fabricii. Hamburgse, 
 1708. 12mo. 
 
 9. Bibliotheca Latina mediae et infims3 aetatis, ed. J. Fabricius. Hamburgae, 1734-^6. 6 vols., 
 12mo., and new ed., by Ernesti, Leipzig. 3 vols., Svo. 
 
 10. Historiae Francoium Scriptores coi'tanei ab ipsius gentis origine ad regis Philippi IV. tempora, 
 opera ac studio Andreae et Franeisci Du Chesne. Lutetiae Paris. 1639-49. 5 vols., fol. 
 
 11. Rerum Gallicarum et Francicarum Scriptores : seu Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la 
 France, par D. Bouquet et autres bcnedictins (and from the 13th vol. by M. Brial and other 
 members of the Institute of France.) Paris, 173S-1S41. 20 vols, folio.— Eginhard, Nigellus, 
 Chionicon Gaufredi prioris Vosiensis, Oderic Vitalis, Iligord, AVjUiam of Malmesbury, etc. 
 
 12. Monumenta Germanife historica, inde ab anno D. usque ad annum MD., etc. Ed. G. H. Pertz. 
 Hannoverae, 1S26-52. 12 vols, fol.— Eginhard, Charlemagne's capitularies, Carlovingian and 
 other chronicles, Fabulae de Caroli M Expeditione Hispanica, Nigellus, Eklcard's Casus Sancti 
 Galli, Chronicon Novaliciense, etc., etc. 
 
 13. Nova bibliotheca manuscriptorum, ed. Philippus Labbeus. Parisiis, 1657. Ganfredi prioris 
 Vos. chronicon, etc., etc. 
 
 14. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, ed. L. A. Muratori. Mediolani, 1723-51. 29 vols. fol. Chroni- 
 con Novalicience, etc. 
 
 15. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, ex Florentinarum bibliothecarum codicibus. Florent. 1743. 2 
 vols. fol. Gauthier Vinisauf's Itinerarium, etc. 
 
 16. Germanicarum rerum iv. celebres vetustioresque chronographi. Francofurti, 1566, fol. 
 Joannis Turpini chronicon. 
 
 17. Rerum Sileciacarum Scriptores, ed. P. W. Sommersberg. Lipsiae, 1730. 6 vols. fol. Bogu- 
 phall clironicon Polonife. 
 
 18. De Getarum sive Gothorum origine et rebus gestis, scrips. Jornandes. Hamburg!, 1611. 4to. 
 
 19. Capitularia regum Francorum et pactus legis Salicae, ed. E. Baluze. Parisiis, 1780. 
 2 vols. fol. 
 
 20. Recueil des anciennes lois frangaises, depuis I'an 420 jusqu' a la revolution de 17S9, par MM. 
 Jourdan, Decrusy, Isambert et Taillandier. Paris. 29 vols. Svo. 
 
 21. Collection des Memoires relatifs a I'histoire de France, depuis la fondation de la monarchic 
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 27. Gallia Christiana. Parisiis, 1716. 
 
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 English by Roscoe. London. 2 vols. 12mo. 
 
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 Maur, continuee par des membres de I'lnstitut. Paris, 17.33-1852. 22 vols. 4to. 
 
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 vols. 4to.— New edition, London, 1824, 4 vols. Svo. 
 
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 xl List of the Principal Authorities. 
 
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 17. Ancient English metrical romances, edited by Price and Ritson. London, 1802. 
 IS Vite ed elogi d' illustri Italian!, da Galeani Napione. Pisa, 1818. 3 vols. 12mo. 
 
 19. Critical anil miscellaneous essays, by Thomas Carlyle. Boston, 183S-39. 4 vols. 12mo. 
 
 20. Fueros y observancias del reyno de Aragon. Saragossa, 1623. 4to. 
 
 2i. Las siete partidas del rey Don Alfonso el Sabio, por la real Academia de la historia. ISIadrid, 
 ISO". 8 vols. 4to. 
 
 22. Histoire litteraire d' Italic, par P. L. Ginguen^. Paris, 1811-23. 10 vols. 8vo. 
 
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 croisades, coutenant Tanalyse de toutes les chroniques d'orient et d'occident, qui parlent des 
 croisades, par M. Michaud. Paris, 1822. 2 vols. 8vo. 
 
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 1829. 
 
 25. Invasions des Sarrazins en France, Savoie, la Suisse, etc , par J. T. Reinaud. Paris, 1886. 
 8vo. 
 
 26. Histories of the crusades, by contemporary Christian writers, in the 9th, 10th and, in 16-24th 
 volumes of Guizot's Collection of Memoirs (v. No. 21). 
 
 27. Histoire des rcpubliques italiennes du moyen age, par J. 0. D. S. de Sismondi. Paris, 1840. 
 10 vols. Svo. 
 
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 & ia domination romaine, par Amedee Thierry. Paris, 1835. 3 vols. 8vo. 
 80. Histoire de la Gaule meridionale sous la domination des conquerants germains, par C. Fauriel. 
 
 Paris, 1836. 4 vols. 8vo. 
 31. Momoiies de 1' histoire de Languedoc, recueillis de divers auteurs, etc., par Guill. de Catel. 
 
 Tolose, 1633, fol. 
 33. Histoire genoalogique de la maison d'Auvergne, par Baluze. Paris, 1807. 2 vols. fol. 
 
 33. Histoire generale de Provence, par J. P. Papon. Paris, 1777-86. 4 vols. 4to.— Voyage litte- 
 raire de ProvenQC, par le meme. Paris, 1787. 2 vols. 12mo. 
 
 34. Dictionnaire historique et topographique de la Provence, ancienne et moderne, par M. Garcin. 
 Dagrignan, 1833. 2 vols. 
 
 35. Histoire de la ville Marseille, par Ant. de RuflS. Marseille, 1696. 2 vols. fol. 
 
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 6 vols. Svo. 
 
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 anciens poetes, personnages et families illustres, qui ont fleuri depuis six cent ans, etc., par Cesar 
 de Nostre Dame. Lyon, 1614, fol. 
 
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 Dumge. Frankfort, a. M , 1620-22. 4 vols. Svo.
 
 HISTORY OF PROYENCAL POETRY. 
 
 CHAPTEK I. 
 
 GENEEAL OUTLINE OF PEOYENgAL LITEEATUEE. 
 
 The history of Provencal literature divides itself naturally 
 into two parts : the first comprising the revolutions of this 
 literature within the limits of the country itself, in which it 
 originated and flourished ; the second treating of its influence 
 on the literatures of the foreign nations, among which it was 
 introduced. In this chapter I shall confine myself to contem- 
 plating it on its native soil, and independently of its popularity 
 in other quarters. 
 
 The history of Provencal literature, restricted as it ordinarily 
 is, to the poetry of the Troubadours, would only embrace a 
 period of about two hundred and fifty years ; from the end of 
 the eleventh to the middle of the fourteenth centuries. But I 
 think I can trace the origin and the first tentatives of this litera- 
 ture to a much remoter antiquity. I date its birth from the 
 eighth century — from the epoch at which I suppose (as I shall 
 endeavor to prove) the Pomansh idioms of the South to have 
 been substituted for the Latin. 
 
 I shall therefore divide the history of Provencal literature | 
 into two great epochs, of which the one extends from the f 
 second half of the eighth century to the year 1080, and the 
 other from 1080 to 1350. 
 
 Of these two epochs the first is, as we can easily presume, by 
 far the most obscure, the one from w^hich the smallest number 
 of monuments are left us, and concerning which history fur- 
 nishes us the scantiest information. It still however ofi'ers us 
 many curious and interesting facts — facts, by which the litera- 
 ture of the South is linked, on the one hand ^to the culture of 
 
 1
 
 A 
 
 2 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 the ancient Greeks and Romans, and on the other to the glorious 
 epochs of the Middle Age. 
 
 The fundamental fact, to be examined in this first epoch of 
 Provengal literature, is the origin and formation of the idiom 
 which was destined to become its organ. The creation of every 
 language presents to us certain obscure and mysterious phases 
 which will not admit of an absolute explanation. But this 
 being granted, there is perhaps no idiom in the world which 
 furnishes us so many data for the construction of its history, as 
 does the ancient Provengal ; and from this circumstance alone, 
 it is entitled to a particular attention. A careful and critical 
 examination of it enables us to distinguish the various ingredi- 
 ents, which have successively entered into its composition, and 
 the different languages to which these ingredients respectively 
 belong. In the Latin substratum, which constitutes its basis, 
 we find still enough of Greek to attest the long residence of a 
 Grecian population in the countries in whicYi it originated. 
 "We also discover considerable traces of the three most ancient 
 languages of Gaul, all of which are still alive in barbarous or 
 remote countries, which have served them as places of refuge. 
 One of these languages is spoken in France by the inhabitants 
 of Lower Brittany, and in England by the Welsh ; the other in 
 
 ^i^9*x-cf>^cck^^i\\Q mountains of Scotland, and in the interior of Ireland; the 
 
 Oat^<^ . last in the Pyrenees by the Basques. 
 
 -^ ^ Thus, then, the Provengal, independently of the interest 
 
 tr^ ' which it claims of itself alone, as a literary idiom of great 
 refinement, and one which contributed largely to the formation 
 of the French, is moreover possessed of a veritable historical 
 importance from the fact of its including various authentic indi- 
 cations respecting the different races of men, which in the 
 course of centuries occupied successively or simultaneously 
 the soil of Gaul. 
 
 The first attempt to polish the Romano-Provengal, and to 
 render it capable of expressing objects and ideas above the 
 wants and sentiments of ordinary life, was made by the priests 
 and by the monks. During the ninth and tenth centuries, and 
 even much later, the inhabitants of the south of Gaul still 
 clung to usages which they had derived from the paganism of 
 
 ui the Greeks or Romans, to gross reminiscences of the antique 
 
 I arts, and their ancient public amusements. Hankering after 
 
 emotions, enjoyments and occasions for common reunions and 
 mutual exaltations, these people preserved a very lively relish 
 for certain diversions, for certain dramatic farces — degenerate 
 remnants of the theatrical representations of former times. 
 They were passionately addicted to certain dances, which had 
 been transferred from the temples to the churches, from the 
 
 \
 
 General Outline of Provengal Literature. 3 
 
 pagan cultus to the Christian. They still continued to celebrate 
 their funeral rites with an admixture of profane formalities and 
 ceremonies ; their popular poetry, their songs of love still 
 breathed that pagan freedom, from which the austere purity of 
 Christianity revolted. 
 
 The church had already repeatedly but vainly attempted to 
 abolish directly these onerous remnants of the ancient cultus, 
 when the ecclesiastics of the South resolved upon attempting 
 the same reform in a manner more indirect and popular. With- 
 out flattering themselves with being able to eradicate those 
 inveterate pagan habits which had survived the system, they 
 imagined that they were sanctifying them by adapting them to 
 the ceremonies of the Christian cultus. Tliey fitted pious sub- 
 jects into pantomimes and dramas, which were represented in 
 the churches. They permitted or tolerated in honor of their 
 saints, the dances and choruses which formerly had been insti- 
 tuted in honor of the pagan divinities. Among the songs con- 
 secrated by the church, they admitted popular songs in the 
 Romansh idiom or in a Latin but little superior to the Romansh, 
 which the people were yet able to comprehend. Finally, they 
 composed or translated into the vulgar tongue pious legends 
 more marvellous and more touching than the ancient fables of 
 which some traditions might yet be left. 
 
 There is yet extant a great number of these monastic pieces, 
 composed between the ninth and the eleventh centuries, in the 
 Komano-Provengal or in a corrupted Latin, and composed with 
 the intention of humoring the people, and of imposing them as 
 an equivalent for its pagan reminiscences.* It is my purpose 
 to produce some specimens of them ; they will aid us in com- 
 prehending to what extent, and in what manner, the ecclesias- 
 tics of the South contributed to the origination of a popular 
 literature. By thus admitting the Eomano-Provengal into the 
 Christian liturgy, by converting certain popular spectacles into 
 ceremonies of the church, by paganizing, if I may so express 
 myself, the cultus of Christianity, the clergy of the South can- 
 not be said to have attained its purpose ; but it rendered a 
 service which it had neither desired to render, nor even fore- 
 seen. By bringing religious motives to bear on the develop- 
 ment of the Bomansh idiom of the South, which was as yet 
 unsettled and uncouth, it contributed to fix it and to polish it. 
 
 But this monkish poetry, these pious songs in vulgar Latin, 
 authorized to be chanted in the churches, were far from satisfy- 
 ing the imagination of the inhabitants of the South ; and as their 
 language became more supple, it was not long before they them- 
 
 * On these pieces, and on monastic literature in general, see chapter \\i.—Ed.
 
 4 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 selves began to apply it to compositions of a less austere 
 descrij)tion. 
 
 The South liad been the theatre of grand events during the 
 eighth and ninth centuries. The inhabitants of Aquitania and 
 of Provence had shaken off the yoke of the Merovingian con- 
 quest. Assailed anew by the Carlovingians, they had fought 
 long and bravely before being subjected anew. This animated 
 contest between the Franks and the Gallo-Romans of the South 
 had become still more complicated by the more terrible strug- 
 gle of both these nations against the Arab conquerors of Spain. 
 One of the results of this war had been to exalt the imagina- 
 tion, the vanity, the bravery and the religious spirit of the 
 inhabitants of the South. These nations then began to feel the 
 want of a poetry, by which they might celebrate the heroic 
 events, which had left so powerful an imprint on their memory. 
 The monuments of this primitive poetry of the southern parts 
 mediaeval Gaul are rare ; they are, however, not entirely want- 
 ing, and those of them which remain are deserving of our par- 
 ticular notice. 
 
 There is one of them especially of which I shall have to 
 speak with considerable detail, and in behalf of which I shall 
 endeavor to enlist the curiosity and the attention of the reader. 
 This is a poem of which we have but one version, made by 
 a monk in very bad Latin verses, and in which a prince of 
 Aqiiitauia, by the name of Walter, figures as the hero.* 
 
 The work is full of poetical beauties, but these are perhaps 
 not its most remarkable feature. This consists in the fact of its 
 being linked, both by its subject and by its many familiar 
 allusions, to the ancient poetic traditions of Germany. In the 
 absence of precise data with reference to the real origin of this 
 work, the German scholars have connected it with their ancient 
 national poetry. It will, however, be easy for me to prove, 
 when I shall have arrived at that part of my subject, that the 
 poem in question, the moment we wish to seek a historical 
 motive for it, must be considered as an inspiration of the Aqui- 
 tanian spirit of the eighth or ninth century, and as a poetical 
 indication of the national opposition of the inhabitants of Gaul, 
 south of the Loire, to the dominion of the Franks. There was 
 nothing, however, which contributed so largely to awaken the 
 poetic instinct of the populations of the Soutia, as their wars and 
 their relations with the Arabs of Spain. Those valiant Sara- 
 cens, those terrible Moors, who passed the defiles of the Pyrenees 
 on so many occasions, soon took a much stronger hold on the 
 imagination of the inhabitants of Narbonne, of Toulouse and 
 
 * On this poem of Walter, the Aquitanian, see chaps, tx., xi., xii., and xiii — Ed.
 
 General Outline of Provengal Literature. 5 
 
 of Bordeaux than did the barren chronicles of their monks. 
 They figured at an early date in the fabulous legends and in the 
 historical songs, which served as the nucleus for the romantic 
 epopees of a subsequent period. 
 
 These songs and legends are mostly lost; nevertheless we 
 still find, and I have collected, here and there, a fragment, a 
 specimen, a notice which suffices to establish their ancient exist- 
 ence. I shall give an extract from a curious fiction, a real 
 romance, from tne commencement of the eleventh century, the 
 hero of which is a seignior from the vicinity of Toulouse. This 
 seignior suffered shipwreck on his voyage to the Holy Land. 
 Thrown into the midst of the Arabs of Spain and Africa, he 
 wanders about among them for a long time, encountering a 
 series of perpetual adventures. It is a singular feature of these 
 narratives that some of them have reference to clearly estab- 
 lished facts from the contemporary history of the Arabs of 
 Spain, while the rest are evidently borrowed from the Odyssey 
 of Homer. This strange composition, of which, unfortunately, 
 but one rapid and ill-selected extract remains, seems to indicate 
 in a tangible manner the point in history, at which the antique 
 poetry of the Greeks and Romans, and the romantic poetry of 
 the Middle Age, approximated each other once more for a 
 moment in order to separate again forever. 
 
 Tliis rapid glance at the origin and the first epoch of Proven- 
 gal literature will suffice, I hope, to justify the more extended 
 development which I propose to institute in regard to it. Tlie 
 condition of Provencal literature at the end of this epoch may 
 be briefly represented as follows : 
 
 1st. The idiom of this literature, the Romansh of the South, 
 was a language grammatically determined, and already capable 
 of adapting itself to the movements of thought with a certain 
 degree of suppleness. 
 
 2d. This language contained poetical compositions of various 
 kinds. Some of these were based upon the more or less dis- 
 torted reminiscences of certain popular forms of poetry, which 
 had descended from the ancient Greeks and Pomans. Others 
 were the more or less uncouth, but original and spontaneous 
 expression of whatever there was most remarkable or striking 
 in the religious beliefs or in the historical traditions of the age. 
 
 3d. Tlie word trdbar^ to find or invent, was already sanc- 
 tioned by usage to denote the particular act or effort of the 
 mind of which poetry was the result. Tliis word may be said 
 to be the first monument of this poetry ; the first authentic evi- 
 dence of its originality. 
 
 4th. There had already been invented, for the behoof of this 
 same poetry, a system of versification, founded on a combing.-
 
 6 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 tion of the rhyme with the syllabic accent — a system which 
 has since been adopted by all the nations of Europe. 
 
 6th. The poets had probably already commenced to be desig- 
 nated by the name of Troubadours. There is indeed no indica- 
 tion that at that time they constituted a particular class of 
 society, which was exclusively devoted to the cultivation of 
 poetry, and organized with reference to this end. But it is cer- 
 tain that the Jongleurs, a class of men concerning which I shall 
 have many things to say hereafter, were then already exercis- 
 ing the profession of itinerant reciters and singers of poetic 
 compositions. 
 
 Such are, reduced to their most general terms, the results of 
 the first epoch of Provencal literature ; or, in other words, such 
 are the antecedents of the poetry of the Troubadours. 
 
 Considered in its most original and most brilliant phases, the 
 poetry of the Troubadours might be defined to be the expression 
 of the ideas, the sentiments and the acts of chivalry. Its history 
 is therefore essentially connected with that of chivalry, from 
 which it receives, and on which, in return, it sheds a great deal 
 of light. A cursory survey of the institution, the character, the 
 motives and the object of chivalry will, therefore, be the indis- 
 pensable preliminary to all our researches concerning the poetry, 
 which constituted the more or less naive, the more or less ideal 
 expression of it. 
 
 The origin of that singular assemblage of institutions and 
 customs, which is generally designated by the name of chivalry, 
 is one of the most curious problems in the history of the Middle 
 Age. I shall not expressly search after its solution ; my object 
 does not require it ; but I shall perhaps find it in the course of 
 my route. 
 
 Tliis system of chivalry I shall have to consider principally 
 as it existed in the south of France, and in some countries bor- 
 dering on Spain — in Catalonia and Aragon. Now, it is pre- 
 cisely in these countries that those chivalric institutions present 
 themselves the earliest, and with the most consistency — that 
 they have the appearance of having grown out of the very foun- 
 dation of society itself, and that they afford the largest number 
 of historical data for the explanation of their origin ; it is also 
 there that chivalry and Provengal poetry exhibit the most inti- 
 mate union and mutual interjDenetration ; and all these conside- 
 rations will, perhaps, induce us to presume that both of them 
 originated simultaneously in those countries. 
 
 It was in the various kinds of lyrical composition that Pro- 
 vengal poetry first delineated the sentiments peculiar to chi- 
 valry. The songs, in which the Troubadours celebrated their 
 ladies, are the most numerous of their productions, and the best
 
 General Outline of Provenqal Literature. 7 
 
 known ; and they were tbose in which they prided themselves 
 the most on exhibiting proofs of skill and talent. In the system 
 of gallantry, of which these songs are a faithful picture, love is 
 a sort of cultus. It is the principle of all honor and of all merit, 
 the motive for every noble action ; its desires and its enjoy- 
 ments are only legitimate so far as they constitute an mcentive 
 to the arduous duties and to the virtues of chivalry. 
 
 This system was founded, in a great measure, on certain defi- 
 nitely established, and, at the same time, very subtle conven- 
 tions. Everything was subjected to a rigid and fixed cere- 
 monial. The individualities of character and passion could, 
 therefore, have but very little room or free play in the amatory 
 songs inspired by chivalry. These songs could differ but little 
 among themselves, except by the various degrees of eloquence 
 in their accessories and their details ; and a monotony of sub- 
 ject was the inevitable consequence. Indeed, a very small 
 number of the amatory poems of the Troubadours will enable 
 one to form an adequate conception of them all. But reduced 
 with critical judgment and taste to a slender volume, the ama- 
 tory poetry of the Troubadours will perhaps appear as one of 
 the most original and most curious poetic monuments of modern 
 times. 
 
 It is a law of our nature, that every sentiment, when pushed 
 beyond certain limits, provokes, by a sort of reaction, an oppo- 
 site sentiment, which appears as its corrective or its contradic- 
 tion. There were connected with this chivalric love certain 
 exaggerated subtleties and pretensions, which naturally chal- 
 lenged irony and parody, and which gave rise to a class of 
 poetic compositions very ' difierent from those in which the 
 ladies were treated like divinities. There are specimens of one 
 kind still extant. There are some in which the irony is too 
 gross and too bold to admit of being quoted here. But tliere 
 are others in which it does not transgress the limits of pro- 
 priety, and which are nothing more than a tart expression of 
 reality ; and these deserve to be made known. 
 
 The satire of the Provencals, like all their other kinds of 
 poetry, was wholly conceived in the spirit of chivalry. For it 
 was from the idea that had been formed of the duties of a 
 knight, that the more general idea of virtue and of vice was 
 derived. Now, as the principles of chivalry were very fre- 
 quently violated in practice, the Troubadours were never in 
 want of subjects for satire, nor were they ever disposed to suffer 
 such opportunities to escape. This is, in fact, one of the finest 
 phases of Provencal poetry ; and I shall have occasion to point 
 out many an example of the courage and the talent with which 
 the Troubadours were accustomed to lash the ambition, the
 
 ( 
 
 S History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 avarice, the violence and the vices of the feudal chiefs and of 
 the clergy. 
 
 As it was one of the duties of the chevalier to fight for the 
 defence of the Christian faith, so it was one of the functions of 
 the poet to urge him to the fulfillment of that duty. Several of 
 the Provengal songs on the crusades against the Mussulmans, 
 and especially against those of Africa and Spain, are pervaded 
 by the most genuine enthusiasm for religion and for war. The 
 struggle against the latter was the one, in which the Trouba- 
 dours took the liveliest and the most direct interest, and to 
 which were linked their most poetic reminiscences. As late as 
 the twelfth century this struggle had still its critical moments, 
 full of peril to the Christian kingdoms of Spain ; and on these 
 occasions Troubadours of great celebrity gave utterance to noble 
 accents, which we have reason to believe were not without their 
 eflfect on the cause of Christianity. 
 
 Independently of those pieces, in which they celebrated the 
 union of martial prowess and of faith, the Provencal poets often 
 sung of war simply, in the abstract and apart from every parti- 
 cular locality or motive. They lauded, with a sort of bacchic 
 transport, its tumults, its alarms, its dangers, as the true enjoy- 
 ments of the knight. There were distinguished Troubadours, 
 who became so solely tkrough the zeal, with which they in- 
 spired the warlike propensities of their seigniors. Such was, 
 among others, the famous Bertrand de Born, nearly all of 
 whose pieces were a sort of martial dithyrambs, full of ardor, of 
 high-mindedness and of a certain savage impetuosity, which 
 admirably characterizes the undisciplined and adventuresome 
 spirit of chivalry, as it exhibited itself among the lower orders 
 of the feudal chiefs. 
 
 Among these various kinds of lyric compositions, the Trouba- 
 dours made a singular but a characteristic distinction, which 
 divided them into two classes. Love alone appeared to them 
 to be essentially poetical, expressly made to be sung and to 
 inspire the desire of singing. AH other themes, such as 
 morality, war, religion even, seemed to them to be less natural, 
 less elevated subjects for poetic inspiration. Every composition 
 which had not love for its motive, and particularly those of a 
 satiric or sportive type, were comprised under the common 
 denomination of Sirventesc. This term was derived from the 
 word Sirvent, by which they designated the men-at-arms, who 
 were no chevaliers, and which the latter took along with them 
 in their wars. Sirventesc^ therefore, signified a piece of sirvent 
 — that is to say, one of an inferior order, compared with the 
 songs of love, which were, properly speaking, the songs of 
 chivalry, though they were not ordinarily called so.
 
 General Outline of Provenqal Literature. 9 
 
 The lyrical pieces of the Troubadours, however, whether they 
 were chivalric or sirventesque, did not differ in any way with 
 reference to their form. They were all divided into symme- 
 trical strophes ; they were all alike destined to be sung to a 
 music which was composed by the poet himself. But in a 
 general survey like this I cannot explain the mechanism of 
 Jrrovengal versification. All that 1 can say of it here in 
 advance is, that in point of refinement, and in point of intricate 
 difficulties, it surpasses that of any and of every other modern 
 poetry of Europe. No other nation, except the Arabs, has 
 carried the taste for rhyme to such an extent as the Provencals 
 have done. It might be said of their poetry, that is preemi- 
 nently the poetry of rhyme, the one in which this means of 
 producing an effect on the ear has been used and abused the 
 most. 
 
 Another characteristic, common to all the lyrical productions 
 which we have thus far considered, is that they were written in 
 the purest Provencal, and with all the resources, with all the 
 elaborate refinements of which the art of the Troubadours was 
 susceptible. Considered as a whole, they constituted a refined 
 and subtle poetry, which required and presupposed experienced 
 and skillful judges to appreciate it. It was a poetry of courts 
 and castles, and not one of public places or of the streets — a 
 poetry which contained a multitude of things which the people 
 could not comprehend, or in which they could hardly take any 
 interest, even if they did comprehend it. There was, therefore, 
 either no popular j)oetry at all, in the proper sense of the 
 term, in the south of France, or else this poetry was different 
 from the ordinary poetry of the Troubadours. The first of these 
 suppositions is not very probable ; it is contrary to all we know 
 concerning the character and the imagination of the people 
 which spoke the Provencal tongue, and contrary to all I have 
 said concerning the commencement of their literature. In fact, 
 those pious legends, those hymns in vulgar Latin, which from 
 an early date were sung in the churches and in the streets, 
 those romantic histories of Christian knights in search of 
 adventures among the Saracens — all these were incontestably 
 popular, both in regard to form and contents. Finally, it was 
 among the people and in popular setitiments, that the poetry 
 of these countries had originated ; and there is no evidence that 
 while polishing and ennobling itself in the castles, this poetry 
 had entirely vanished from the towns. 
 
 But laying aside the arguments derived from probability, we 
 may directly aflirm that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
 there existed in the south of France a poetry which was essentially 
 popular. This is a fact wliich will appear more obvious in the
 
 10 History of Provengal Podry. 
 
 sequel, but concerning which at present I may give a few hints. 
 Some of tliese are furnished us by the history and by the works 
 of the Troubadours themselves. 
 
 Weary of the effort which they were obliged to make, in 
 order to excel in the artificial poetry of the castles, these Trou- 
 badours, by a sort of instinct which was intimately connected 
 with their very talent, and which, in fact, constituted a proof 
 of it, would sometimes return to nature, and in these occasional 
 visitations of simplicity, they sung for the people of the towns 
 and country. The collections of the best Troubadours offer us 
 some pieces of this kind, which are easily distinguished from all 
 the rest. In the poetic whole of which they constituted a part, 
 they form a particular class, which will deserve a special exami- 
 nation. 
 
 According to a generally -prevalent and strongly accredited 
 opinion, all the poetry of the Provencals would be included in 
 the classes I have just enumerated ; it would be essentially and 
 exclusively lyrical. It would contain nothing of the epic kind, 
 either great or small, and the countries of the Provencal tongue 
 would have remained entire strangers to the invention and the 
 culture of the romantic or chivalric epopee, which, in fact, was 
 the characteristic product of the poetry of the Middle Age. 
 
 This fact, if it were true, would have something strange about 
 it ; and it should have been a matter of greater astonishment 
 than it has been. A poetry entirely lyrical — that is to say, 
 entirely consecrated to the expression of the personal sentiments 
 or ideas of the poet — would, in my opinion, be a phenomenon 
 without example in the history of poetry ; and the phenomenon 
 would be a matter of still greater surprise in a country which 
 has had great w^ars of independence and of religion, among a 
 people which was constantly in motion, and more disposed to 
 be carried away by its impressions from without than to reflect 
 its thoughts and sentiments for any length of time upon itself. 
 
 The hypothesis has not a shadow of probability in its favor ; 
 and the fact is that the Provencals not only had epic composi- 
 tions, but that they had a surprising quantity of them, of every 
 dimension and of every kind. More than this : if we wish to 
 attribute the invention of the romantic epopee to any one of the 
 nations of Europe exclusively, the honor must be given to the 
 Proven gals. 
 
 I think I can adduce conclusive proofs of this assertion, some 
 of which, however, require researches and discussions out of 
 proportion with a summary survey like this. I shall, for the 
 present, limit myself to offering a very few general considera- 
 tions on the history of the Provencal epopee, on which I pro- 
 pose to bestow all the necessary developments in the sequel.
 
 General Outline of Provencal Literature. 11 
 
 In this species of poetic compositions, as in all tlie others, the 
 taste of the Provencals had its epochs and its revolutions, 
 marked by the diversity of the subjects, which successively 
 prevailed. The most ancient epic compositions of a certain 
 length were based either on the ensemble or on the most 
 memorable episodes of the first crusade. The siege of Antioch, 
 for example, a stupendous event, and remarkable for the strange 
 variety of its incidents, was celebrated apart in a poetic narra- 
 tive, probably intermingled with fictions, and which was still 
 popular toward the close of the thirteenth century. 
 
 The system of chivalry existed already at the epoch of the 
 first crusade ; but none of the compositions to which it gave 
 rise have come down to us, and we are unable to say under 
 what colors, or in what measure, the spirit of chivalry mani- 
 fested itself in them. It is, however, very probable that it 
 manifested itself, such as it then still was, that is to say, in a 
 purely religious and martial form, and that the truth of the 
 recent events, well known and marvellous in themselves, was 
 not subjected to any very serious alterations. 
 
 Soon after — that is to say from the commencement of the 
 twelfth century — the Provencal poets began to exaggerate and 
 to adorn, to the best of their ability, the historical songs, the 
 legends, and the traditions, which had grown out of the wars 
 of the Christians against the Saracens of Spain, and out of the 
 rebellions of the dilterent feudal chieftains of the South against 
 the Carlovingian monarchs. They converted them into truly 
 epic romances. In these romances the spirit of chivalric 
 gallantry begins to make its appearance ; love begins to play a 
 prominent part in them, and to exhibit itself with all those 
 niceties and refinements which already constituted its cha- 
 racter.* 
 
 Nevertheless, the prevailing element of these romances is a 
 certain crudity and a certain savage vigor of the imagination. 
 Everything is there painted with the boldest dashes, without 
 details, without any shades, without the slightest appearance 
 of elegance or study. The marvellous does not yet occupy any 
 very conspicuous place in tliem ; everything is undertaken, 
 everything is achieved, by the force and energy of the cha- 
 racters alone. 
 
 The so-called romances of the Bound Table commence 
 another epoch of the romantic epopee.f They furnish us a 
 
 ♦ Specimens of these romances are given by Raynouard, in his "Lexique Roman," vol. 
 1st. An examination of them by M. Fauriel, in the '2d and 3d volume of this work, and 
 also in the " Revue des deux Mondes," of 1832.— £d. 
 
 t Compare Schmidt: Les Romans en prose des cycles de la table ronde et de Charle- 
 magne — Ed.
 
 12 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 picture of chivalry after it had arrived at the utmost limit of 
 its exaggeration and extravagance — in other words, of knight- 
 errantry, in which the quest of dangers, of adventures, of 
 wrongs to redressed, constitute the beau-ideal of the institutions, 
 and the highest glory of the knight. Here the characters are 
 more polished and better shaded, the events more varied and 
 complex, the expenditure of art is more ingenious, and the 
 pretensions more manifest; but it is also true that here the 
 imagination, free from every restraint, and divorced from every 
 historical reminiscence, has already lost itself in the mazes of 
 the marvellous and capricious. 
 
 The romances, which succeeded those of the Round Table, 
 have the history or the mythology of the Greek and Romans for 
 their subject. Tliey will not occupy any of our attention here. 
 Tliey are a caricature of antiquity which indicated the poetic 
 exhaustion of the Middle Age. 
 
 I must now say a word on the deficiencies of Provengal poetry ; 
 for this poetry, rich as it is on some subjects, is nevertheless far 
 from being a complete one. It has no dramatic compositions ; 
 and it is perhaps so much the more astonishing not to find at ] 
 
 least attempts of this kind in the thirteenth century, when we I 
 
 already meet with them in the eleventh. The earliest of these ' 
 
 crude dramas, which have since been denominated mysteries^ i 
 
 can in fact be traced back as far as this latter epoch of Proven- \ 
 
 gal literature. According to certain documents of equivocal | 
 
 authority, there were Provencal works entitled comedies and \ 
 
 tragedies in the fifteenth century and before. But as none of I 
 
 these works have come down to us, we are unable to decide to ; 
 
 what extent or with what propriety they could lay claim to such 
 an appellation. i 
 
 It is certain, and we shall see hereafter, that in the Middle 
 Age there existed throughout the whole of the South of Europe i 
 
 certain fetes, which consisted of a sort of allegorical panto- i 
 
 mimes, dramatizations of certain ideas of gallantry or of chi- , 
 
 valric courtesy. It is possible that language and the dialogue 
 sometimes came to the assistance of the gestures and of the 
 pantomime employed in these representations. This is a point 
 which deserves some investigation, and I shall return to it again. 
 
 To conclude this rapid glance at the history of Provengal 
 literature, it only remains for me now to mention the existence I 
 
 of certain ^productions of a peculiar order, curious as indications 
 of the transition from the purely poetical ej)ochs to the com- 
 mencement of serious curiosity and of science. ' 
 
 To these productions belong certain collections of pieces, com- i 
 
 posed at the close of the thirteenth century, which were desig- i 
 
 nated by the name of Treasuries. This title is undoubtedly a \ 
 
 ^^t^>^ i>!L^^i^*<^ ?^.^,.*:c^'^<^ . C2j.d^ ^ 

 
 General Outline of Provengal Literature. 13 
 
 somewhat ostentatious one, but it sliows what an importance 
 began, at that time, to be attached to knowledge. These were 
 the encyclopedias of the age, the repertories of everything 
 that was then known of physical science, of natural history, of 
 astronomy or of astrology, of philosophy, moral or specula- 
 tive, etc., etc. 
 
 These works are still allied to poetry not only by their form, 
 they being composed in verse, but also by their numerous 
 ingredients of popular fictions of every kind. Nevertheless, 
 they properly belong to the history of the sciences, to which 
 they might perhaps furnish some particulars worth collecting. 
 The most curious work of this description in the Provencal lan- 
 guage was composed in the year 1298 by a monk of Beziers, 
 whose name was Matfred or Mainfroi.* It contains frequent 
 quotations from the learned Arabs, particularly from the astro- 
 nomers or astrologers. 
 
 Among the Proven9al works, which mark the transition from 
 poetry to science, must also be numbered histories or chronicles 
 both in verse and in prose. Among these chronicles there is 
 one in verse, which deserves to be spoken of in detail and on 
 which I propose to bestow some consideration, when I shall 
 have arrived at that point of the history of Provencal literature. 
 The chronicle relates to the war against the Albigenses ; f it is 
 strictly historical in substance, and its style sometimes rises to 
 an elevation, a liveliness and a metaphorical elegance and power, 
 which are quite homeric. 
 
 Considering the degree of culture to which the Troubadours 
 had attained, it would be a matter of astonishment, if they had 
 not formed some theory of their art. It is an established fact 
 that they had such a theory, and it would be worth while to 
 know what it was. Its exposition will be the natural comple- 
 ment to the history of their poetry. Unfortunately, nothing is 
 left us of these literary doctrines of the Provencals except a 
 few scattered hints, to be found here and there in short biogra- 
 phical or historical notices, written in the thirteenth century. 
 But isolated and scattered as they are, these hints are neverthe- 
 less extremely valuable. I shall collect them carefully and the 
 occasion for making them known will present itself most natu- 
 rally in connection with my discussions on the poets or the 
 particular forms of poetry to which they relate. 
 
 We shall then be able to convince ourselves that the public 
 
 * On this Matfre Ermengaud, see Raynouard's Choix des poesies des Troubadours, vol. 
 v., p. 259. — For a specimen of his Breviaire d' amour see 1st vol. of Raynouard's Lexique 
 Roman, p. 515, sqq. An account of another one by Brunetto Latini is given by Paulia 
 Paris in the 2d vol. of " Les MSS. Frangais de la Bibliothfeque du Roi."— £d. 
 
 t This chronicle is printed in Raynouard's Lexique Roman, vol. 1st, p. 225-289. — Ed.
 
 14 Ilistory of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 to which the Troubadours addressed themselves, was possessed 
 of a corrector taste and a more delicate discrimination than we 
 might be disposed to give them credit for. We shall see that 
 they were accustomed to make grave and marked distinctions 
 between pieces, which appear to us modern critics to resemble 
 each other even to monotony. 
 
 It is this same public that had proclaimed the Troubadour 
 Giraud de Borneil the greatest master in his art. Dante appealed 
 from this decision ; he invalidated it, and he transferred the 
 palm of Provengal poetry from its acknowledged chief to 
 Arnaut Daniel. These two Troubadours are of the number of 
 those which will occupy our attention hereafter; it will then be 
 easy for us to satisfy ourselves, that the ancient Provencal 
 opinion was the correct and true one. I have thus far presented 
 the poetry of the Provencals only in its purely intellectual 
 relations, as an ensemhle of more or less ingenious compositions, 
 fulfilling with more or less completeness certain conditions of 
 the poetic art. But I shall have to exhibit it under other aspects, 
 which are no less interesting in regard to the history of civili- 
 zation. 
 
 In the Provence, as formerly in Greece, every poetic produc- 
 tion, of whatever kind it may have been, was destined to be 
 sung with an instrumental accompaniment, and sometimes with 
 mimic gesticulations. Now it was the poet himself who com- 
 posed the music for his verses. The musical invention was the 
 necessary complement of the poetical ; the two arts were united 
 into one. There is also reason to believe, that the earliest 
 Troubadours sung their pieces themselves and that at every 
 epoch of their art, there were those who continued to sing 
 them. 
 
 But since the music and the mimic action contributed greatly 
 to the effect of the poetry, there soon sprung up a particular 
 class of men, whose profession it was to set oif these poetical 
 productions by their vocal and instrumental execution. These 
 men were called Jongleurs. 
 
 Of these Jongleurs some were free and lead an itinerant life, 
 reciting the poems, which they knew by heart, in the streets 
 and in public places. Others were attached to the personal 
 service of distinguished Troubadours, whom they accompanied 
 everywhere to the castles and the courts for the purpose of 
 singing their verses. 
 
 It is thus that regular poetical professions were formed in 
 society, and clearly defined and intimate relations established 
 between these classes and those of the feudal nobles ; — relations 
 which exerted a double influence : on the one hand on the social 
 condition, and on the other on the literature of the country.
 
 General Outline of JProvengal Literature. 15 
 
 The accessories, the method and the variety of these poetic 
 recitations in the chateaux as well as in the public places, are 
 a subject of curious and interesting research, not only in regard 
 to the history of Provencal poetry, but of poetry in general. 
 
 This poetry, so original and so brilliant, was not destined to 
 last very long. It declined rapidly amid the horrors of that war 
 against the Albigenses, which subverted the whole of the south 
 of France and annihilated the higher classes of its society. The 
 teaching of the Justinian code having become more and more 
 important and general in the country, and the establishment of 
 a university at Toulouse* rendered the study of the Latin more 
 and more necessary, and the Provencal was consequently more 
 and more neglected. 
 
 The clergy detested this language, in which so many auda- 
 cious reproaches had been heaped upon them. In a bull of 
 1245, Pope Innocent lY. qualifies it as the language of the 
 heretics and interdicts its usage to the students.f From the 
 second half of the thirteenth century, the decadence of Proven- 
 gal poetry is irreparable, and it is only by way of exception, 
 that one then still finds here and there some Troubadour of 
 genius, who has preserved the traditions of his art. In the 
 fourteenth century, there is nothing more in the whole of the 
 South, that can be said to have any resemblance to poetry. It 
 is true, that in 1323, or perhaps earlier, there was founded, at 
 Toulouse, a Provengal Academy of the gai savoir (i.e., of the 
 gay science^, and which adopted regulations, which it entitled 
 t\\Qlaws o/love. But I believe that these two designations, 
 which were a mere isolated tradition of the civilization already 
 extinct, are all that there was of poetry or of the poetic science 
 in this academy.:}: 
 
 Such are the principal facts which I propose to develop in 
 the order in which, in my opinion,they will shed most light 
 upon each other. But, after all these facts shall have been 
 established in their detail, and in proportion to their importance 
 or their novelty, there will yet remain another to be discussed, 
 and this will not be the least interesting one. 
 
 In all that I have thus far advanced or indicated concerning 
 the literature of the Provencals, and the system of civilization, 
 of which it constituted a part, I have made no allowance for 
 any foreign influences. I have considered this civilization and 
 
 * This iostitution was founded in 1229. — Ed. 
 
 t See the life and letters of Innocent IV., in Labbeus' Sacros. Council, vol. iv., 
 p. 1-3G.— £d. 
 
 X For an account of this Academy see La France Litt^raire, vol. 1st., p. 133, sqq 
 
 "Ea 1323, elle n'fitait composSe que de sept Academiciena, qu'on appelait lea Sept 
 Trobadors. lis ne distribuaient qu'un prix, qui 6tait uae violette d'or, dont le pre- 
 mier fut adjuge k Arnaud Vidal."— £d.
 
 16 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 tliis literature as the result of causes, all of which preexisted in 
 the places where both of them originated. But perhaps this 
 view of the subject has to be modified in some respects, in order 
 to become the correct and true one, otherwise it will conflict 
 against a strongly accredited opinion, which attributes the ori- 
 gin of the poetry of the Provencals, and of their culture in gene- 
 ral, to the influence of the Arabs of Spain. 
 
 It is true that this opinion has thus far remained a mere sup- 
 position ; but I believe that there are facts to be adduced in its 
 favor, and I regard it as certain that the Arabs did exer- 
 cise a certain influence on the civilization of the Provencals. 
 The essential and the difficult part of the question is, to produce 
 some specific proof of this effect, to indicate some points on 
 which the supposed influence was brought to bear. I shall en- 
 deavor to solve this problem ; I shall enter into some considera- 
 tions on the civilization of the Arabs in general, and on that of 
 the Arabs of the Spanish Peninsula in particular ; and we shall 
 see that in more than one respect it presents striking analogies 
 to that of the Provencals. 
 
 Thus we shall find, for example, among the Arabs of Anda- 
 lusia, that same ingenious exaltation of honor, of prowess and 
 of humanity, whic-h constitutes the fundamental characteristic 
 of chivalry. We shall find there a religious order of knights, 
 devoted to the defence of Islamism against the Christians, more 
 than a century before the institution of the Templars in the 
 south of France. We shall find a poetry entirely consecrated, 
 as was that of the Provencals, to the object of celebrating the 
 sentiment of love and military courage, having the same social 
 importance and the same material organization, its poets of the 
 court and its poets of the people, its Raoui and its Jongleurs. 
 
 It is in the refined and accomplished courts of Cordova and 
 of Seville, that we find the first examples of those pantomimes, 
 those half scenic representations, by means of which the Pro- 
 vencals imparted a dramatic effect to their ideas of chivalric 
 gallantry. Finally we shall see, that a number of the usages 
 and several of the most characteristic traits of chivalric etiquette 
 were, in the south of France, designated by names which are 
 derived from the Arabic. 
 
 These points of resemblance, and others, which it would be 
 superfluous to indicate in advance, will appear so much the 
 more real and striking, the more completely they shall have been 
 exposed to view. We will come to the conclusion, that they 
 could only have been the result of frequent communications 
 between the inhabitants of the south of France and the Arabs 
 of Spain. Now, in those communications it was necessarily the 
 latter that gave the example, and the former that followed it.
 
 General Outline of Proven<^al Literature. 17 
 
 "We shall, however, see that this influence of the Arabs on the 
 culture of the Provengals, incontestable as it may be, was never- 
 theless restricted to certain clearly-defined and rather narrow 
 limits ; that it was rather indirect and general than special and 
 immediate ; that it affected rather their manners than their 
 tastes and their ideas ; and it will be curious to observe, even in 
 the most accidental comparisons between the genius of the 
 Arabs and that of the West, the struggle and the inherent an- 
 tagonism of the two.
 
 18 History of Provencal Poetry, 
 
 CHAPTEE n. 
 
 INFLUENCE OF PKO VENIAL POETKY ON THE SEVERAL COUNTRIES OP 
 
 EUROPE. 
 
 The rapidity with wliich tlie taste for Provencal literature 
 spread through the rest of Europe, constitutes one of the phe- 
 nomena of that literature, and an important fact in the history 
 of European civilization. 
 
 From the moment the countries of the Provencal tongue had 
 detached themselves from the Carlovingian monarchy, in order 
 to form independent seigniories, they had ceased to maintain 
 any connection with that monarchy. But the title of King of 
 the Franks having passed to the descendants of Hugh Capet, 
 the chiefs of the larger seigniories of the South gradually 
 entered again into communication with a monarchy, which, 
 feehle and decrepit as it was, could not be the cause of any ap- 
 prehension. From that time we see the counts of Toulouse, of 
 Barcelona, of Provence and of Poitiers, successively contracting 
 family alliances with the different sovereigns, which again 
 brouii-ht the south of France into contact with the rest of Eu- 
 
 o 
 
 rope. 
 
 Toward the year 1000, the King of France, Robert, married 
 Constance, the daughter of William Taillefer, the count of Pro- 
 vence, a princess who had been educated alternately at Tou- 
 louse and in the county of Aries. In 1013, the emperor of 
 Germany, Henry III., married Agnes, tlie daughter of William 
 Vm., the count of Poitiers. In 1080, Raymond Berenger, 
 count of Provence, gave his daughter Matilda in marriage to 
 Roger, the count of Sicily. Other alliances of the same kind 
 were contracted in the course of the same century. 
 
 We shall see, in the sequel, that before the end of that century 
 there already existed Troubadours and a Provencal poetry : 
 compositions in verse, in which the exj)ression of love was 
 already strongly tinged with chivalric gallantry, and men 
 whose profession it was to sing those pieces in the cultivated 
 society of the country. One of the princesses which I have 
 just enumerated, Agnes of Poitou, was the sister of the famous
 
 Its Influence on the several Countries of Eurojpc. 19 
 
 William IX., count of Poitiers, who is reputed, though impro- 
 perly, to have been the most ancient of the Provencal poets. 
 Tlie supposition would therefore not be an absurd one, that the 
 countries and the courts, where the above-named princesses 
 established themselves, must necessarily have acquired on those 
 occasions some general acquaintance with this Provencal poetry, 
 which at a somewhat later date was destined to become the 
 subject of universal interest and admiration. It is true that 
 history says nothing of the sort ; but the facts of this kind are 
 among tliose to which historians, like those of the Middle Age, 
 paid the least attention, and which they were the readiest to 
 neglect. 
 
 it is, however, no mere supposition, that in consequence of 
 the above mentioned alliances the nobles of Aquitania and of 
 Provence gave the tone, and we may say a new code of eti- 
 quette to the courts where they made their appearance. They 
 did so especially at the court of King Robert. Pigord, the his- 
 torian of these epochs, gives a curious portrait of the men of 
 Aries and of Toulouse, who accompanied Constance, the 
 daughter of their seignior, and he briefly describes the efi'ect of 
 their presence in France. 
 
 He represents them as excessively vain and frivolous men, 
 extremely particular and showy in their dress, in their arms 
 and in the ornaments of their horses, in the cut of their hair, and 
 in their mode of shaving the beard, and as odd in their appear- 
 ance as they were corrupt in their morals, as they were desti- 
 tute of probity and fealty. 
 
 " They are men," he finally exclaims, disconsolate — " they 
 are men who have so far seduced the nation of the Burgun- 
 dians, and that of the Franks, which heretofore was the most 
 regular of all, that it has become entirely like them in perversity 
 and turpitude ; and if some pious soul were to attempt to 
 oppose the corrupt men who set such examples, he would be 
 treated like a man of unsound mind." * 
 
 Rigord was a monk and a man of very limited ideas ; he 
 appeared to have been of Prankish origin, and a zealous parti- 
 san of their primitive austerity. His words therefore stand 
 in need of some explanation. They simply mean, that the Pro- 
 vencal nobles were already distinguished for a certain elegance 
 of manners, for certain habits of social refinement, for gaiety of 
 
 * "Quorum itaque nefanda exemplaria, hen! proh dolor! tota pens Francorum, 
 nuper omnium honestissima, ac Burgundiorum sitibunda rapuit, donee omnia foret 
 nequitia; et turpitudinis illorum couformis. Si quislibet vero religiosus ac timens 
 Deum talia gerentes compescere tentavisset. ab eisdem insania notabatur." This pas- 
 sage, however, is not from Rigord's life of Philip Augustus, but from Glabri Rodulphi 
 Historiarum sui temporis libri v., of which the 1st book is printed in Bouquet's Recueil, 
 vol. X., p. 1, sqq., and this passage on p. 42. — Ed.
 
 20 History of ProvenQol Poetry. 
 
 life, for a certain intermixture of civil and military luxury. They 
 were undoubtedly also already remai-kable for that general and 
 disinterested alacrity to please the fair sex, which always 
 presupposes a certain degree of culture and of moral authority 
 in the latter. 
 
 AYe perceive from this, that if the communications, which 
 from the eleventh century had commenced to exist between the 
 south of France and the other countries of Europe, did not 
 then go so far as to impart to the latter a knowledge of Proven- 
 gal literature, they at any rate disposed them to relish it by 
 spreading in advance the sentiments and manners of which it 
 was the portraiture. 
 
 Before the end of the twelfth century there was scarcely a 
 country in Europe, into which the fame of the Troubadours had 
 not penetrated, where their productions were not admired, and 
 where to imitate them was not the highest pretension of art. 
 The poetry of the Provencals had become the poetry of France, 
 of Italy, and of a part of Spain. It had entered through several 
 avenues into England and into Germany. It was known in 
 Bohemia, in Hungary and in Greece. Even in the northern 
 countries, as far as Iceland, it shared the popularity of the 
 Scandinavian traditions, the sagas, the songs of the Eddas, and 
 those of the Skalds. 
 
 I shall not endeavor to trace its progress in all those countries ; 
 I shall confine myself to examining its effect on the litera- 
 tures which have a stronger claim on our interest, and which 
 will occupy our attention in the sequel. They are the litera- 
 tures of Spain, of England, of Germany, and of Italy. The 
 literature of the north of France is excluded from my 
 researches ; nevertheless it is by its origin so closely linked to 
 that of the South, that it will be impossible for me not to say 
 something about it in the course of my remarks. I shall com- 
 mence with Spain. 
 
 During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Christian part 
 of the Peninsula contained three distinct countries; each of 
 which had its little states, its peculiar dialect and its literature. 
 They were Catalonia and Aragon in the east ; Castile in the 
 interior, and Galicia and Portugal in the west. In each of 
 these countries the literature of the Provencals had its particu- 
 lar destiny, and was productive of different effects. 
 
 The court of the kings of Castile was one of those which the 
 Troubadours frequented the most, and were they met with the 
 best reception. They there sung their poetical productions of 
 every kind, which were all more or less applauded, and which 
 thence spread into the smaller courts of the country or among 
 the people. The first Castilian writers who have investigated
 
 Its Influence on the several Countries of Europe. 21 
 
 the origin of their own poetrj have not hesitated to pronounce 
 it an olishoot of the Provencal, or, as they term it, of the poetrj 
 of Limousin. But this is a general assertion which teaches us 
 nothing, unless it is somewhat specified and examined in 
 detail. 
 
 The various kinds of Provencal poetry were not in equal 
 favor among the Castilians, nor were they productive of the 
 same effect on their imagination. Among the ancient monu- 
 ments of their literature we cannot find anything, which might 
 be regarded as even a vague or distant imitation of the amatory 
 poetry of the Troubadours. One might be tempted to believe 
 that the noble Castilians, grave as they naturally were, and 
 always at war with the Arabs, could have but little taste for 
 those subtle conventions, with which the Provencals had over- 
 burdened their gallantry. "Whatever may have been the cause, 
 whether it was their national character or the particular cir- 
 cumstances of their political and social condition, their chivalry 
 did not generally develop itself into the systematic gallantry of 
 the south of France. It there remained wliat it had been ori- 
 ginally, faithful to its purely religious and martial principle. 
 The songs of love, therefore, were not the portion of Proven^-al 
 poetry which it adopted or imitated, but the heroic narratives, 
 the legends, the romantic epoj)ees, in which this poetry had 
 celebrated the wars of the Christians against the infidels, or the 
 voluntary quests of perilous adventures. Moreover, the Cas- 
 tilian imagination did not even adopt these narratives in their 
 original form or entire. It cut them up, it parcelled them out, 
 and disengaged their most salient parts, in order to convert 
 them into popular songs, which were generally short enough to 
 be sung at one time; in fine, it changed them into historical 
 ballads or romanzas, as they were then called, and as ^\•e still 
 term them in our day.* 
 
 The majority of these romanzas do not go as far back as the 
 earliest epochs. But in the extremely varied and unequal 
 ensemble, which they now form, there are some, who through 
 their various successive modifications of language as wxll as 
 of composition, may doubtless be traced as far back as the first 
 half of the thirteenth century. Kow these are mostly based 
 on Provencal romances of every age and of every kind. 
 
 Some of them turn on the incidents of the first crusade, 
 others on the expeditions of the Paladins of Cliarlemagno in 
 Spain, several on the heroes of the Round Table, and some, 
 which it is curious to observe among the rest, are derived from 
 
 * A history and characterization of these Spanish romanzas (more properly romajir^s), 
 or popular ballads, is furnished by Mr. Ticknor, in hia Hist, of Spanish Lit., vol, i., chaps. 
 6th and 6th.— £d.
 
 22 - nistory of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 unknown or lost romances, which however were likewise Pro- 
 vencal, as their subject indicates. 
 
 The Castilian imagination did not rest content with merely bor- 
 rowing the subjects for its romanzas from these difierent branches 
 of the Provengal epopee. Some of these poetic narratives con- 
 tained pretensions which were repugnant to the national pride 
 of the Castilians ; as for example, the one which had reference 
 to the conquest of a part of Spain by Charlemagne. The 
 Spaniards comjjosed a multitude of romanzas, expressly for the 
 purpose of contradicting the Troubadours and the Trouveres 
 of France on this point of their history. They created national 
 heroes, by whom they made Roland and his companions van- 
 quished. They represented Charlemagne as defeated on the 
 banks of the Ebro, and as re])assing \vith great difficulty the 
 defiles of the Pyrenees for the purpose of returning to his own 
 states. Some of the pieces which they composed on these 
 events are very beautiful, and have also the additional merit of 
 coming much nearer to the truth of history than the Pro- 
 vencal romances. They are a more faithful echo of the ancient 
 traditions, relative to that famous expedition of the Franks, 
 which terminated in the disaster at Roncevaux. 
 
 So long as the attention of the Castilians was occupied with 
 the Arabs, the Provencal romances had no other circulation in 
 Spain, except in the form of these popular rhapsodies. And 
 after the Arabs had been vanquished, and society had become 
 established on a firmer basis, the people continued to sing its 
 romanzas ; it made new ones like them, and without any design 
 or even a suspicion of the kind, it may be said to have gradually 
 changed, re-touched and re-created the old ones. The nobles, 
 who were then at leisure, had also their literature by them- 
 selves ; they translated entire romances from the Provencal or 
 from the French ; they imitated them, they exaggerated and 
 subtilized the primitive facts still furtlier, and they became so 
 extravagant in this respect, as to provoke the sublime irony of 
 the Don Quixotte. 
 
 These observations will suffice, I presume, to prove in a 
 general manner the influence of Provencal poetry on the first 
 developments of the poetry of the Castilians. It belongs to 
 the special history of the latter to show how it employed, trans- 
 formed and varied the fictions and the traditions, which it had 
 adopted from the former, and from what causes and by what 
 degrees this primitive poetry became altered, modified and 
 extinct, in order to make room for a learned and polished poetry, 
 M'hich had neither its genius nor its grace. 
 
 Portugal and Galicia are the parts of the Spanish Peninsula 
 concerning whose relations with the south of France, during
 
 Its Influence on the several Countries of Europe. 23 
 
 the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we know the least. The 
 Provencal documents mention but a single Troubadour, who 
 frequented the courts of Portugal, and I presume that the Por- 
 tuguese documents have not much more to saj about the Pro- 
 vencal poets. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is impossible to question the influence of 
 Provengal poetry on the ancient poetry of Portugal. The 
 library of the advocates at Lisbon contains considerable frag- 
 ments of a precious manuscript from the fourteenth century, 
 which has recently been printed in an edition of twenty-five 
 copies only. This manuscript has pieces of poetry, which are 
 manifestly anterior to the age of the manuscript, and which for 
 the most part belong to the thirteenth century. These pieces, 
 to the number of about two hundred and fifty, are all without 
 exception songs of love, composed in the style and tone of those 
 of the Provencals. To say that they are an imitation of the 
 latter is not enough ; we must add that they are a perpetual 
 imitation, and often a mere translation. Their authors, like 
 those of the second, style themselves Trovadors , among the 
 one, as among the others, the composition of such works was 
 called " finding or inventing." Tlie only difi*erence to be ob- 
 served, is, that the system of gallantry, as expressed in the Por- 
 tuguese songs, is but a mutilated copy, a sort of an abstract of 
 that which is contained in the amatory songs of the Trouba- 
 dours i^roper. 
 
 As to the epic romances of the Provencals, we are ignorant 
 of tlie epoch at which they began to be known in Portugal. 
 The fact is, that we do not find any trace of them there in the 
 thirteenth century, cither in entire translations or cut up into 
 romanzas, .'is among the Castilians. It appears, indeed, that 
 the Portuguese, as well as the latter, had their historical roman- 
 zas at an early date. But scarcely any of these romanzas have 
 come down to us; and judging from these of those which are 
 lost, they would all have been of a less epic and less elevated 
 tone than the Castilian romanzas ; they would imply less apti- 
 tude to decompose and to concentrate poetically a long roman- 
 tic narrative into a small number of detached rhapsodies or 
 songs. 
 
 Catalonia and Aragon were in more intimate relations witli 
 the south of France than the other parts of the Peninsula, and 
 this intimacy made itself particularly conspicuous in its litera- 
 ture. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Catalonians 
 had no other literary idiom but the Provencal, and their litera- 
 ture at the epochs in question cannot be distinguished from that 
 of the Provencals ; it constitutes an indivisible part of it. 
 Several of the kings of Aragon and many Catalonian nobles
 
 24 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 figure in tlie general list of the Troubadours, and in the Pro- 
 vencal collections their poetry is found mixed up with that of 
 the national Troubadours. Some of these poems deserve even 
 to be distinguished from the mass of those, of which they con- 
 stitute a part, and are among the number of those compositions 
 which I shall have occasion to speak of hereafter. The identity 
 of the poetic system of the Catalonians and the Provenyals is 
 an evidence that the civilization of both these nations was fun- 
 damentally the same, and that the institution of chivalry had 
 developed itself in the same manner among both.* 
 
 This literary union survived the poetry of the Provencals for 
 a considerable length of time. In 13b8, the academy of the 
 gay science^ which 1 have mentioned before as having been insti- 
 tuted or reorganized at Toulouse in 1323, still enjoyed a certain 
 degree of distinction. John of Aragon, ambitious of the glory 
 of establisliing a similar academy in his own States, sent a 
 solemn deputation to France, for the purpose of inducing two 
 academicians of Toulouse to found poetic colonies of the gay 
 saber in Catalonia. The first academy of the kind was estab- 
 lished at Barcelona, and some time afterward a body of deputies 
 from that city went to Tortosa, to found a second academy 
 after the model of the first. The works of several of these 
 Catalonian academicians are yet extant, some of them in a 
 printed form, and the majority in manuscript. They are writ- 
 ten in the dialect of the country, and are, I believe, the first 
 poetic essays in this dialect. This new poetry, which pretended 
 to be a revival of the Provengal, is linked to it only by feeble 
 reminiscences ; the Troubadours of the preceding centuries are 
 everywhere lauded and quoted, but Dante and Petrarch are 
 still more so, and better imitated. Love speaks no longer 
 any other than a sombre and a mystic language, which ill 
 accords with the name of the gay science. This new poetry of 
 Catalonia is however remarkable in an artistic point of view, and 
 in respect to its diction. It will in the sequel aj^pear to us still 
 more remarkable, as the first in Europe, in which we see the 
 influence of Provengal jjoetry disappear entirely before that of 
 the Italian. 
 
 The Christian inhabitants of Sj'tain were separated from the 
 countries of the Provencal tongue by the Pyrenees. But 
 between the latter and the north of France, properly so called, 
 there was nothing which deserved the name of a barrier. The 
 inhabitants of the two countries belonged mostly to the same 
 race ; they spoke dialects whicli were closely related to each 
 
 * On the connection of the Provengals with Catalonia and Aragon, compare Tick- 
 nor's Hist, of Spanish Lit. vol. i. p. 231-284.— jEc/.
 
 Its Influence on the several Countries of Europe. 25 
 
 other ; tliey had on several occasions been united by the same 
 political ties, and were naturally destined to become so again ; 
 mutual communications had already existed between them for a 
 long time. In fine, the respective situations of the two countries 
 were of such a nature, that the one could scarcely make any 
 considerable progress in civilization witliout affording the other 
 a speedy opportunity for j)articipating in it more or less. 
 
 From the commencement of the twelfth century, the Romansli 
 idiom of the North, which had already become the French, 
 began to be cultivated with consistency and with success. 
 Several more or less remarkable works were composed in this 
 idiom, or translated into it, among which the Chronicles of 
 Wace were by far the most important.* Kearly all these works 
 were composed in verse ; but they had none of the essential 
 requisites of a poem. It is not till toward the end of the 
 twelfth century, that we see the French language exhibit 
 works which were conceived in a poetic spirit and for a poetic 
 end, and which, considered as a whole, constitute a system of 
 poetry. 
 
 A mere glance at this poetry of the north of France is 
 enough to strike any one with its resemblance to, and I had 
 almost said its identity with, that of the South. Both in the 
 one and in the other the same poetic forms are employed to 
 give expression to the same subjects. In the epopee we find 
 the same traditions, the same adventures, and the same heroes. 
 The general tone and the character of the narration arc the 
 same. 
 
 In the lyrical forms, the system of chivalric gallantry is the 
 same ; love speaks the same language, produces itself in the 
 same costume, proceeds with the same armory. 
 
 In the poetry of both nations, the metrical forms and the 
 mechanism are the same. The same things are designated by 
 the same names. At the North as in the South, the whole of 
 the poetic art is summed up in tlie word trouver (to find, invent), 
 and the poets are Trouveres or finders, having as their associates 
 or servants the Jongleurs, who sing their verses from city to 
 city, from court to court.f In both countries this art oi f rid- 
 ing is cultivated alike, not only by those who are Trouveres by 
 profession, but by all the classes of the feudal order. In a 
 word, between these two poetries there appears at first sight to 
 
 * An account of this chronicle, and of other works of Rohert Wace, is furnished by 
 the editors of the " Hist. Litt. de la France," vol. xvii. p. 615-635, and vol. xiii. p. 
 618-530.— JE^tZ. 
 
 t For an account of these Trouveres, see Sismondi's " Lit. of the South of Europe," 
 vol, 1st. Special examinations of their writings in "Hist. Litt. de la France," vols. 
 xv.-xxii. Compare also works of De la Rue, Dinaux, Jubinal, Barbazan, Michel, Le- 
 grand d'Aussy and others indicated at the beginning of this volume. — Ed.
 
 26 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 be scarcely any other difference than that of the dialect which 
 they employed, and this difference even is not a very con- 
 siderable one ; but there is no doubt but that one of these 
 dialects, in so far as it constitutes a literary idiom, was modelled 
 after, and, as it were, copied, from the other. 
 
 But in spite of all these resemblances, a more attentive 
 examination will soon disclose to us important differences. In 
 the poetry of the South, the ideas of chivalric gallantry form a 
 much completer system than in that of the North. The first 
 includes a truer idea of society than the second ; in a word, the 
 common elements of both these poetries are more prominent, 
 more clearly developed and more coherent, in that of the South 
 than in the other ; and this fact, demonstrated and established, 
 as it is susceptible of being, would suflice to prove, if there 
 were any need of it, that the first is an original type and an 
 invention, while the second is but an imitation and a copy. 
 
 But there are simpler and more direct means for establishing 
 the truth of this assertion. The mere approximation of dates 
 is enough. At the epoch of the appearance of Christian of 
 ^ Troyes, who is the first Trouv^re to whom we can with certainty 
 attribute lyrical pieces in the style of the Troubadours, the 
 latter had already flourished for nearly a century, and had 
 already carried their art to its highest perfection. 
 
 In regard to the romantic epopees, there is no doubt but that 
 the majority of those of the north and of the south of France 
 are translations, imitations and variations of each other. But it 
 is more difiicult to determine which of them are the originals 
 and which the copies. This is a literary qnestion of great 
 importance and of extreme complexity. All that I can do 
 here is simply to state it. I shall, however, endeavor to solve 
 it hereafter, and I shall reclaim for the Provencals more than 
 one famous production, which has habitually been produced 
 to enhance the glory of other literatures. 
 
 I now pass on to England, which will occupy our attention 
 but for a short time. 
 
 After the Normans had introduced the Komansh idiom of 
 tlie north of France into that island, there sprung up an Anglo- 
 Norman literature, which may be considered as a branch of 
 the literature of the French. 
 
 This Anglo-Norman literature had two points of contact with 
 the literature of the Provencals, one of which was furnished by 
 its general and indirect relations to France, the other directly 
 through the kings of England, who had becomes dukes of 
 Guienne, and who kept up habitual communications with 
 several of the provinces of the South. The literature of the 
 Provencals had thus two avenues open, by which to penetrate
 
 Its Influence on the several Countries of Eurojpe. 27 
 
 into Great Britain. Henry II. and his sons distinguished 
 themselves by their zeal for the encouragement of the Trouba- 
 dours. His queen, Eleanor of Guienne, drew several of them 
 after her, and among others one of the most distinguished — 
 Bernard de Ventadour. 
 
 But in spite of these favorable circumstances, the poetry of 
 the Proven^'als exercised but a very limited influence on the 
 poetry of the Anglo-Normans. The latter can show nothing 
 which might be compared with the lyrical productions of the 
 first. As to poetical romances, the Anglo-Kormans composed 
 some of them, they translated others, and they were acquainted 
 with several more through French translations ; but there are 
 writers who have wished to attribute to them the invention of 
 nearly all. This is an assertion which it will not even be 
 necessary for me to refute expressly ; it will vanish of itself 
 before the facts, as they will be announced. 
 
 By the side of this Anglo-Norman literature, which was 
 properly that of the court and of the conquerors, there arose 
 another in the language of the country, and this was the litera- 
 ture of the people. The Provencal influence is more apparent 
 in the latter than in the former. It contains several imitations 
 or translations of epic romances from the Provengal, of which 
 I shall have occasion to speak hereafter.* 
 
 I now proceed to broach a question of great interest in the 
 literary history of the Middle Age, and for the solution of 
 which we have principally to look to Great Britain. 
 
 It is a generally admitted opinion, that the original authors 
 of the romances of the Round Table have borrowed the subject 
 from British (or rather Bretoii) traditions. Now, there are 
 two countries which are regarded as the primitive centres of 
 these traditions — Armorican Brittany in France, and the princi- 
 pality of Wales in England. 
 
 As far as Armorican Brittany is concerned, there is nothing 
 to be found there, either orally or in writing, which has any 
 resemblance to the traditions in question, nothing that could 
 have served as the basis for such fictions. All that has been 
 advanced or conjectured on this subject is a pure chimera, a 
 hypothesis which could not be refuted, since it is not sustained 
 by any argument, not even by a bad one. 
 
 In regard to the country of Wales, it is another matter. 
 This country has preserved its ancient language and its national 
 traditions nnich more carefully and completely than Armorica. 
 It has written documents ; and these ought to contain the 
 
 * On the old English metrical romances, the reader may consult Waiton'a "Hist, of 
 English Poetry," vol. 1st.— £i.
 
 28 History of Provcnqdl Poetry. 
 
 proofs of the opinion advanced, if any such exist — and, in fact, 
 these documents do make mention of King Arthur, of Merlin 
 the Enchanter, of Tristran, of Queen Iseult, and of other 
 romantic personages of the Eound Table. But can the state- 
 ments of these Welsh monuments in regard to those personages 
 be regarded as the basis or the germ of the romances in 
 question ? This problem is a precise one, and it is not difficult 
 to solve it. We shall see, that the original authors of these 
 romances, "whoever they may be, have borrowed nothing from 
 the traditions of the primitive Britons, except it be some proper 
 names and a few vague facts. We shall see, that all the 
 developments of these romances, and whatever relates to their 
 character and poetical merit, was either derived entirely from 
 the imagination of the inventors themselves, or else from mo- 
 numents which have no longer any existence anywhere.* ' 
 
 Germany, like England, had a double point of contact with 
 the countries of the Provencal tongue — an indirect one in the 
 north of France, and an immediate and direct one in the king- 
 dom of Aries, which included the whole of the Provence of the 
 Middle Age — 'that is to say, all the country from the Isere to 
 the sea, and from the Pliine to the Alps. Several emperors of 
 the house of Hoheustaufen attempted to establish their authority 
 in this kingdom. Frederic Barbarossa had himself crowned 
 king of it in 1133 ; Otho lY. kept a sort of lieutenant there 
 ■with the title of marshal ; Frederic II. made various attempts 
 to get up a party in his favor within its limits. The literary 
 communications naturally followed the political, and we can 
 point out quite a large number of Troubadours, who frequented 
 the camps and the courts of these emperors in Italy.f 
 
 The eifects of all these direct and indirect communications 
 soon began to manifest themselves in the literature of the 
 Germans. This literature, which had hitherto been confined to 
 ideas of Christian origin and to its ancient national traditions, 
 assumed now, all at once, a wider expansion and a new ap- 
 pearance. It had a lyric poetry, the various forms of which 
 were more or less constructed after the models of the Proven- 
 cals, and among them, as well as among the latter, the noblest 
 form was consecrated to the apotheosis of chivalric love. The 
 writers who cultivated this new poetry, assumed a name which 
 indicated the prominent character and object of their pro- 
 
 * On this subject compare Schmidt's " Los romans en prose ties cycles de la table 
 ronde." An account of the poems of this cycle in the different languages of Europe 
 and the East, is given by Von der Hagen, in the 2d vol. of bis " Minnesinger," svb 
 voce Meister Konrad von Strassburgh.— i'd. 
 
 t An account of the Italian wars of these emperors is given by Von Raumer, in his 
 " Geschichte der Hohenstaufen," q. v. On the kingdom of Aries, see vol. v. p. 76. — 
 Ed. 
 
 X 

 
 Its Influence on the several Countries of Eurojpe. 29 
 
 fession. Tliey called themselves 3finnescmger, or, in other 
 words, singers of love. These Minnessenger began to flourish 
 nearly simultaneously with the Trouveres of the north of France 
 — that is to say, toward the close of the twelfth century — and 
 they likewise continued to sing until the thirteenth. There is, 
 perhaps, not a single one of them, in whom we do not distin- 
 guish traces of Proven^-al influence, and that even in the minutest 
 details of thought and style, and yet we shall find the ex- 
 pression of chivalric gallantry even less complete among them 
 than it was among the Trouveres of France*. The more it 
 receded from its proper centre, and the further it advanced 
 from the South toward the North, the more the poetry of the 
 Provengalfi lost of its peculiar spirit, and of its character as a 
 whole. 
 
 The revolution, which was brought about in the literature of 
 Germany by the introduction of the ideas and sentiments of 
 chivalry, is perhaps still more remarkable in the epopee than it 
 is in the lyric forms. All the ancient national traditions which 
 this poetry had thus far preserved, were then, as it were, cast 
 in a new mold. The uncouth heroism of the barbarous times 
 was tempered by some traits of the kindlier and more generous 
 heroism of chivalry. It was in the thirteenth century that an 
 unknown Minnessenger redacted, in the form in which we 
 now possess it, the poem of the Nibelungen — a poem of vast 
 celebrity, concerning which I shall have to speak more than 
 once hereafter, and in which we shall see the strangest associa- 
 tion of the ancient pagan barbarity with the beliefs and senti- 
 ments of Christianity and the manners of chivalry. 
 
 The same motive, which induced the Germans of the twelfth 
 and thirteenth centuries to modify their ancient heroic poetry 
 according to the ideas and manners of chivalry, prevailed on 
 them to translate the majority of the Provencal and French 
 romances. German literature furnishes us on this point many 
 valuable facts relative to the history of the Provengal. There 
 exist, in fact, in the German long poems, which are nothing 
 more than translations, and, according to the confession of the 
 writers themselves, translations from the Provencal. These 
 
 * Gervinns makes the Troubadours two generations anterior to the Minnesinirers, nnd 
 concedes to them a decided superiority over the latter, not only on account of the 
 greater variety of their lyrical compositions, but more particularly on account of the 
 manly independence of character exhibited by them, both in their writings and in their 
 political relations (Gesch. d. deutschen Dichtung, vol. i. p. 291). But a direct imi- 
 tation of the poets of the Romansh idioms can be shown only in a very few of the Min- 
 nesingers, i. e. in four or five, who lived on the confines of France, either in Switzerland 
 or Belgium (Cf. V. d. Hagen's Minnesinger, vol. ii. p. 50) ; the rest wrote portions of an 
 original national poetry, which in point of delicacy, intensity and ideality of sentiment, 
 is not surpassed by any of the epoch. But they scarcely wrote any sirventes or tensont, 
 and only number about one hundred and sixty, while the Provencal list shows over three 
 hundred and fifty poets. — Ed.
 
 so Jlistory of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 versions, therefore, represent, if not by their form and in their 
 details, at least in their general arrangement and in tlie funda- 
 mental conception, the rroven§al works, from which they were 
 originally taken, and which are now lost. 
 
 There are also poems in the German language, which furnish 
 us no indication whatever respecting their authors, but which 
 contain in themselves, and in their very substance, incontesta- 
 ble marks of their Provengal origin. These are not only 
 curious vestiges of the influence of the literature of southern 
 France, but they are constituent and interesting parts of that 
 literature itself, which we are sure of finding reproduced in the 
 German literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 
 
 It remains now to investigate the traces of Provencal poetry 
 in Italy. This is the country, to which I confess I shall follow 
 it with most curiosity. It is there, where I think I see its influ- 
 ence manifesting itself in its totality and with the greatest 
 effect, and blending in the most intimate and in the most 
 striking manner with the spirit and the tendencies of the coun- 
 try. 
 
 From the end of the eleventh century, new relations of every 
 kind began to spring up between the south of France and 
 Italy. The principal cities of the two countries gave them- 
 selves constitutions nearly equally liberal, and constructed after 
 nearly the same model. 
 
 Tliese cities allied themselves to each other by treaties of 
 amity and of commerce ; they formed a coalition in order to 
 carry on mutually the war against the Arabs of Spain, the 
 common enemy of their faith and of their industry ; they drove 
 them from several islands of the Mediterranean, and they even 
 took several of their most important cities in Spain itself. 
 These political and commercial relations gave rise to others of 
 a social character, so that each of the two nations could adopt 
 from the other whatever it found for its advantage. 
 
 It was during the second half of the twelfth century, that the 
 institutions and manners of chivalry were introduced from the 
 south of France into Italy. They were from the outset adopted 
 with avidity by the nobles of the country, and along with them 
 the whole poetic system, which constituted part and 2")arcel of 
 them. The Provencal then became the literary language of 
 all the smaller courts of Italy,which prided themselves on their 
 chivalric etiquette. The Provencal Troubadours visited these 
 courts ; they there gave lessons in their art, and poets sprang 
 up among the Italians themselves, who sung in the Provencal 
 idiom of love and courtesy. History makes mention of no less 
 than thirty of them, and among that number there are some 
 who were distinguished for their rank and talent.
 
 Its Influence on the several Countries of Europe. 31 
 
 During this first epocli of the Provencal-Italian poetry — that 
 is, during the interval between 1150 and 1220, or thereabouta 
 — Italy cannot be said to have as yet had any poetry of its 
 own ; at least no poetry which was cultivated as an art, and 
 constructed on some artistic principle. The Italian scholars 
 have instituted many researches, and have taken a great deal 
 of pains, in order to discover in their language verses ante- 
 rior to the thirteenth century. But all that they have found 
 are two inscriptions of such a character, that thousands of 
 pieces like them would not constitute the first word of a 
 poem. 
 
 The fact is, that before the thirteenth century, there was no 
 other poetry in Italy but that which exists everywhere, and 
 which is never written : the poetry of nature and of the people ; 
 and surely, beneath a sky like that of Italy, and among a 
 people of so happy an organization, this poetry of nature ought 
 at all times to have produced things more worthy of being col- 
 lected and prized than all the mediocrities of art. 
 
 In regard to the written Italian poetry, it is generally agreed, 
 that the first attempts of the kind were made in Sicily and by 
 Sicilians, at the court and under the auspices of Frederic II. 
 But no satisfactory reason has as yet been assigned, wliy the 
 authors of these essays employed, inst-cad of the Sicilian, the 
 Tuscan idiom of the country, which at this epoch exhibits as 
 yet no vestige of any literary supremacy. However that may 
 be, the attempts in question are all of tliem imitations of the 
 amatory songs of the Proven§als, and these imitations even are 
 uncouth, insipid and servile, little calculated to supplant in 
 Italy the foreign poetry from which they are derived. 
 
 This was the state of aft'airs, when, toward the commence- 
 ment of the thirteenth century, the ideas and usages of 
 chivalry, which had heretofore been confined to the smaller 
 courts of Italy, were introduced into its republics. The mo- 
 ment of this introduction is one of great interest in the history 
 of Italian civilization. 
 
 By the end of the eleventh century, the majority of the cities 
 of Lombardy, of Romagna and of Tuscany made themselves 
 independent of their feudal sovereigns, and they continued 
 their struggles against the feudal order generally, against tlie 
 nobles who had remained within their walls, and against the 
 Beigniors of the boroughs and the castles, until the fourteenth 
 century. It was in the course of these wars, and in order to 
 become triumphant in them, that these Italian republica 
 exerted all the energy and heroism of which they were capa- 
 ble, and that they gave themselves a military organization 
 which was quite peculiar, and which, in the cities of Tuscany,
 
 32 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 and particularly at Florence, attained its highest development 
 toward the middle of the thirteenth century.* 
 
 Nothing can be more curious than this organization and the 
 customs and manners which it exhibits or implies. It breathes 
 a generosity which borders on ostentation, an enthusiasm of 
 honor and of loyalty, which is A^ery frequently superior to 
 party interests — strong and impassioned, as these interests were 
 at the time. I will mention a single instance, because it can 
 be done in a few words. It would have been considered dis- 
 graceful to take an enemy by surprise. They consequently j 
 kept an alarm-bell, which they called Martinella, and which | 
 was rung day and night for a whole month, in order that every 
 enemy of the republic might prepare to defend himself. Every- 
 thing else was conceived in the same spirit. Everything was 
 based upon the principles and usages of chivalry. It was a 
 chivalric democracy to the whole extent, and in the full sense 
 of the term. 
 
 Institutions and manners like these are sufficient evidence of 
 the effect which Provengal poetry, and more especially the epic 
 romances — those of Charlemagne, as well as those of the Kound 
 Table — produced on the imagination of the inhabitants of 
 Italy. These romances had been introduced into Italy since 
 the close of the tw^elfth century; they had rapidly become 
 popular ; they were publicly sung in the theatres ; there were 
 Italian translations of them in verse, and fragments of these 
 versions were sung by the people as a sort of romanzas. 
 
 The popular imagination transferred the scene of several of the 
 events celebrated in these romances into Italy. There is a cave 
 at Fiesole, three miles from Florence, which is called the Cavo 
 of the Fairies. It is there where Koland was said to have been 
 fairied, that is to say, rendered invulnerable, and where the 
 enchanter Maugis, the cousin of Eenaud de Montauban, had 
 learnt the art of necromancy. It was pretended that the sword 
 of Tristan had been found in Lombardy. Mount JEtna waa 
 converted into one of the seats of King Artus, who, according 
 to the romances written about him, was not dead, but had mira- 
 culously disappeared from Britain, where he was expected to 
 reappear, and to reign again at some future day. Everywhere 
 we meet with personages who, instead of the names of the saints, 
 assumed the names of the heroes of knight-errantry, as for ex- 
 ample, those of Merlin, Tristan, Meliadus, of Launcelot and 
 Gau vain. In short, there Avas nothing in the romances of chivalry, 
 which the Italians did not attempt to translate into actual life. 
 
 A poetry, which influenced the manners of the Italians so 
 
 * On the organization, manners and customs of these Italian cities, compare You 
 Bauip.er'i " GescUiclite der Hohenstaufen," vol. v. p. 83, sqq — Ed,
 
 Its Injluence on the several Countries of Europe. 33 
 
 forcibly, miglit be expected to have been imitated in tlieir 
 national language. It was so in Tuscany. Besides the roman- 
 ces translated from the Provengal, the Florentines had original 
 romances, in which they reproduced, and embellislied with a 
 sort of chivalric costume, their ancient national traditions con- 
 cerning the founding of Florence, and concerning the destruc- 
 tion of the ancient Etruscan city Fesules, or Fiesole. The liis- 
 tory of these fictions may, at some future day, become a new 
 and curious subject of research for us. 
 
 As the chivalry of the courts had its lyric poetry at Palermo, 
 80 the chivalry of democracy had its own in the cities of Tus- 
 cany, at the head of which we must put Florence. A laborious 
 and timid imitation of the Provencal, this new Tuscan poetry 
 was wholly devoted to the expression of the tender sentiment, 
 like the former ; and still it differed from it by various pecu- 
 liar characteristics. In the republics of Tuscany, the manners 
 and usages of chivalry were simple, grave, austere, and their 
 gallantry naturally assumed the tinge of these manners. Their 
 love was still more ideal, more disinterested, and more like a 
 religious cultus than that of the courts of Provence.* 
 
 Poets arose in every part of Tuscany to celebrate this new 
 sentiment of love. At least fifty of them are known to have 
 flourished between the years 1220 and 12G5, the epoch at which 
 Dante was born. Their poetry exhibits many fine characteris- 
 tics, but also much that is as yet uncouth and monotonous. It 
 was Dante who converted this early Tuscan poetry, which was 
 still more than half Provencal, into an independent, a vigorous, 
 an Italian poetry. Dante is scarcely ever mentioned as a lyric 
 poet. This is a proof that he is not yet sufficiently known. To 
 be properly appreciated, he must be considered in connection 
 with all that preceded, and in the midst of that which sur- 
 rounded him— as the poetic representative of Italy, at one of 
 the most brilliant and most remarkable epochs in the history of 
 that country. 
 
 "Without surpassing, perhaps without equalling Dante, Pe- 
 trarch did even more tlian the former had done for the advance- 
 ment of Tuscan poetry. He elevated the poetry of love, accord- 
 ing to the ideas of the Middle Age, to the highest degree of 
 elegance and sweetness, of charm and purity ; he added to it all 
 that art and taste could add. Under this general point of view, 
 the works of Petrarch may be regarded as the complement and 
 consummation of the amatory poetry of the Provencals. By 
 considering them in this point of view, and by comparing them 
 
 * On the details of tliis subject the reader may consult the works of Andres, Crescira- 
 beni, Tiraboschi, Ginguen*?, de Sismondi, Bouterweck, and more especially Fauriel's 
 learned work : " Daute, et les origiues de la litterature italienne." Paris, 1854.— ZTd. 
 
 3
 
 34 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 with those of the better Troubadours, we shall find a new occa- 
 sion to convince ourselves of the influence and of the genius of 
 the latter. 
 
 At the epoch when Dante and Petrarch wrote, Provencal 
 poetry was already extinct, and there were no longer any Trou- 
 badours ; but their fame was still alive. Their productions 
 were constantly studied and imitated.* Tlie heroic romances 
 on the exploits of Charlemagne, and of his Paladins, and those 
 on the adventures of the Knights of the Round Table, still cir- 
 culated under various forms among the people and in the 
 castles, as the monuments of an age and of manners which had 
 passed away, but the fresh and vivid reminiscence of which still 
 exerted a powerful influence on their imaginations. 
 
 Tlie great literary revolution occasioned by the taking of 
 Constantinople, consigned the remains of Provencal poetry 
 everywhere to oblivion. No one now thought any longer of 
 the amatory songs of the Troubadours, and the ancient roman- 
 ces of chivalry were abandoned to the people, which preserved, 
 but at the same time altered and mutilated them. No other 
 epopees, but those whose subjects and whose forms were of the 
 antique type, were now demanded. All the taste and elegance 
 which the study of the Greek and Latin models had been able 
 to impart, were now employed in re-producing from the Greek 
 and Latin. 
 
 Still Italy persevered in its noble destiny of purifying and 
 perfecting all the branches of the poetry of the Middle Age. 
 what Dante and Petrarch had done for the lyric forms, other 
 men of a cultivated but of an independent genius, and faithful to 
 the spirit of the Middle Age, did for the romantic epopee. They 
 took up the rough poetic sketches, which the Provencal roman- 
 cists had drawn, of the long struo^gle between Christianity and 
 Islamism on the frontiers of the Pyrenees, and they converted 
 them into epopees, which with the merit of an ingenious com- 
 position, combined all the elegance and graces of a finished 
 style. The " Orlando Amoroso " of Boiardo and of Berni, the 
 "Morgante"of Pulci, the " Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto, replaced 
 as living epopees and classics of a European fame, those old 
 romances on the exploits of Charlemagne, which could no 
 longer satisfy the taste of any one. I tliink, however, that at 
 the present time we may assume a sufficiently elevated point 
 of vision to compare those primitive epopees with the master- 
 works by which they were supplanted, or we shall perhaps dis- 
 cover, in some of them, beauties which are destined to live again. 
 
 * Dante, on encountering Arnaud Daniel, whom he regarded as the patriarch of the 
 Proven(;al muse, expresses the prayer, addressed to him by the latter, in eight Proven- 
 cal verses — (Purgatory, xxvi.) — a proof, that he himself not only read, but could even 
 write, the language of his poetic ancestors. Crescimbeni, in his translation of Notre 
 Dame's work, called the Proven5al3 thejjodri deUa delta poesia volgare, — £d.
 
 Injlitence of Grecian Civilisation on the South of Gaul. 35 
 
 CHAPTER in. 
 
 INFLUENCE OF GKECIAN CIVILIZATION ON THE SOUTH OF GAUL. 
 
 The rapid survey, which I have just taken of the history of 
 Provengal literature, involves as one of its results a general 
 fact of great importance, to which I now return, in order to 
 set it forth more explicitly and completely than I have thus far 
 been able to do. 
 
 The poesy of the Troubadours, that brilliant phenomenon of 
 the Middle Age in the south of France, was by no means an 
 isolated phenomenon in that country. It was but one of the 
 results of a general and an energetic movement in favor of 
 social restoration — of an intense enthusiasm of humanity, react- 
 ing on every side against the compression and the barbarity of 
 the epoch. 
 
 The same sentiment, the same want, that had prompted the 
 men of these times to seek and to find a new poetry, impelled 
 them to seek and to find a new type and new effects in the 
 other arts, particularly in architecture. Side by side, and in 
 conjunction with the poetic monuments, there arose churches 
 and palaces, which were only another manifestation of the same 
 sentiment of vigor and of moral exaltation, which had inspired 
 the former. 
 
 We have already learnt that the development of chivalric 
 heroism, which was for some time regarded as the first and 
 almost the only human virtue, coincided with the epochs of 
 these new inspirations of art. It was at the same time that the 
 inhabitants of the cities, while struggling for their liberty under 
 the name of franchises, organized themselves into communities, 
 for the purpose of self-defence, and that in these efibrts they, 
 consciously or unconsciously, acted a part which was chivalric 
 in every sense of the term. Finally, all these social revolutions 
 were acompanied by corresponding religious revolutions, still 
 bolder and more venturesome than all the others. 
 
 Now, were these changes, whether actually accomplished or 
 only attempted, from the middle of the eleventh to the middle 
 of the twelfth century — were they a mere modification of the
 
 36 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 previous state of things, the direct and simple product of preex- 
 isting causes, more or less ancient ? or, were they rather the ac- 
 cidental result of the unexpected intervention of some external 
 influence in the course of the ideas and the events of the time ? 
 
 These are important questions, -which I, however, cannot 
 think of solving, or even of seriously propounding at present. 
 If their solution is possible, it must proceed from data which 
 are yet to be established, and from facts which are yet to be 
 explained. But these questions are closely related to a remark- 
 able fact, to which I think I can now give the attention which 
 it deserves. 
 
 From whatever point of view we may consider the revolu- 
 tions of which I have spoken, to whatever cause or influence 
 we may attribute them, the most immediate, the most positive 
 and the best established antecedents of these revolutions appear 
 to have been nothing more than alterations, regrets and remi- 
 niscences of the state of things anterior to the German con- 
 quest, or, in other words, of the Gallo-Roman civilization. 
 
 Thus it is very probable, as I have already intimated, and as 
 I hope to show more clearly in the sequel, that several kinds of 
 the poetry of the Troubadours were nothing more than a refine- 
 ment, or a chivalric modification of certain popular forms of the 
 antique poetry, the motive and idea of which had probably 
 been preserved by tradition. 
 
 The language of this new poetry, the Provencal — that idiom, 
 so polished and so original in some of its accessories — is at bot- 
 tom but a new form, and, as it were, a new phase of the Latin. 
 That fantastically sublime and bold taste for architecture, which 
 led to the invention and adoption of the style called the Gothic, 
 was at first directed to the extension and the embellishment of 
 the Roman type, which had thus far been more or less followed. 
 This taste, however, did not confine itself to the Gothic; it 
 sometimes aimed at elegance, variety and grace, and then 
 returned to the genius and the traditions of the architecture of 
 the Greeks. The municii)al government of the principal cities 
 of the South — that government so energetic and so enterpris- 
 ing, that achieved so many heroic deeds which history has un- 
 fortunately not yet attempted to bring to light — appears to have 
 been merely a reorganization of the Roman curia or munici- 
 pality, which had survived the wreck of ancient civilization, 
 and which, modified more or less, according to the variations of 
 time and places, had maintained itself up to that time. As to 
 the new religious ideas which sprung np in the South, they 
 were nothing more than the reproduction, in the costume of 
 the age and country, of some of the primitive heresies of Christ- 
 ianity.
 
 Influence of Grecian Civilization on the South of Gaul. 37 
 
 It is more difficult to discover anything in tbe system of civil- 
 ization, prior to the Germanic conquest, which might be said 
 to be like the manners, the ideas and pretensions of chivalry ; 
 and I do not flatter myself to have made any such discovery. 
 Nevertheless, the accounts which history furnishes us concern- 
 ing the character and the usages of the Gallic chiefs, and of the 
 Gallo-Romans of the South in general, toward the latter days 
 of the empire, contain certain traits which have a striking 
 resemblance to the salient traits of the chivalric character. 
 
 I shall not pursue these indications any further, this being 
 neither the occasion nor the place for doing so. From all that 
 I have thus far said on this point, I wish for the present to 
 draw but one conclusion, and it is this : it is impossible to give 
 an adequate and just conception of the civilization (whether 
 general or literary) of the south of France during the Middle 
 Age, without first considering in what manner and to what ex- 
 tent it is linked to the civilization which preceded it. In order 
 to appreciate properly whatever original or spontaneous ele- 
 ments the former may contain, we must have tirst become 
 acquainted with those which were derived from the second. 1 
 am, therefore, obliged to link the Middle Age of southern 
 France to its antiquity. 
 
 This obligation being established, there are two ways of ful- 
 filling it. 1 might have, in the first place, investigated the be- 
 ginnings of Provencal literature, I might have given an idea 
 of its first attempts, and thence ascended to its antecedents, 
 which would have seemed to me to explain and to determine 
 its origin and character. 
 
 But, on the other hand, it appeared to me, that in setting out 
 from the classical antecedents of Provencal literature, my 
 course would be an easier one, and I should be more at liberty 
 to dwell on such of these antecedents as have the greatest inter- 
 est for us ; and for this reason I have decided to adopt this latter 
 method. 
 
 I propose, therefore, to give, as an introduction to the history 
 of Provencal literature, a sketch of that which already existed 
 at the anterior epochs of Gallic culture, and I shall begin with 
 the moment when the Gauls were first subjected to the influ- 
 ence of other nations of a difierent and a superior civilization. 
 The interval is a great one, but I shall run over it rapidly. 
 
 Every one knows, that at the epoch of the Germanic inva- 
 sions, Gaul was the most civilized and the most Roman of all 
 the provinces of the Western Empire. Every one also knows, 
 that long before the subjugation of that country by the liomans, 
 a Greek tribe, the Phocceans, had there founded the celebrated 
 colony of Massilia, or of the modern Marseilles. It was by the
 
 38 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 action of these two people, which at first was isolated and dis- 
 tinct, and afterward combined or blended, that the primitive 
 condition of the Gauls was changed in every point. The part 
 which the Romans took in this great revolution, having been 
 by far the most conspicuous, is also, on that account, the best 
 known ; and I shall, therefore, be able to be briefer in my ex- 
 position of it. That of the Phocaeans, or of the early settlers of 
 Marseilles, real and interesting as it is, has as yet scarcely 
 been estimated. I shall, therefore, endeavor to examine its 
 details with more minuteness, in order to give a corrector idea 
 of it. 
 
 All that can at present be known concerning the history of 
 the Massilians, concerning their laws, their culture and their 
 manners, is reduced to a few isolated notices, scattered through 
 a large number of Greek and Latin works. To collect these 
 notices, to discuss and to arrange them, would be a task which 
 would too far transcend the limits of my design. I shall, there- 
 fore, confine myself to a mere statement of their results, as far 
 they relate to ray subject. 
 
 From the year 600, before our era, which is the epoch of 
 the foundation of Massilia, to about the time when this city 
 disappeared from history as an independent Greek municipality, 
 there is an interval of eight or nine hundred years, which I 
 divide into three principal epochs.* During the first of these 
 epochs the Massilians, iiaving once established themselves on 
 the coast of Gaul, maintained and extended their power by 
 their own resources, by their own energy, and without any 
 foreign support. During the second, they contracted intimate 
 relations with the Eomans, by whose favor, and under whose 
 auspices, they raised themselves to the maximum of their 
 power and prosperity. Tlie third, which commences with the 
 taking of Massilia by Caesar, is that of their sudden decline. 
 
 The first extends to the second Punic war ; it is the one, con- 
 cerning which we have the least information, and yet it is the 
 most interesting of the three. It was during this interval of 
 three hundred and eighty years, that the Massilians had the 
 most frequent opportunities for exhibiting the activity and tbe 
 constancy of their character, that thev repelled the many 
 attacks of the semi-barbarous tribes in their vicinity : those of 
 
 * Massilia was founded by a Phocjpan colony of merchants, Olymp. xlt., A. Ch. 
 598, according to Eusebius' Chronol. p. 124. Symnusof Chios, vs. 210 sqq. and Solinus, 
 ii. 52, do not differ much from this statement. Plutarch, Solon, c. iii. asserts Protis, 
 a merchant, to have been the leader of the colony and the founder of the city, and to 
 have been extremely popular and honored among the Celts about the Rhone. Justin 
 makes Simos and Protis the joint founders. Livy, v. 34, gives us the same fact, without 
 the name of any leader. An excellent account of the early growth of the colony, and 
 of its influence on the surrounding Barbarians, is given by Justin, Lib. xliii. c. 3, 4, 5. 
 See also Strab. Geograph. lib. iv. c. 5.— Ed.
 
 Influence of Grecian Civilization on the South of Gaul. 3S 
 
 the Carthaginians and of the Etruscans, who were jealous of 
 their settlement ; that they founded their principal colonies, and 
 extended their commerce to the limits of the then known world. 
 It was, moreover, during this same period, that after many revo- 
 lutions their political constitution assumed the definite form, in 
 which it afterward continued with a fixedness of purpose, 
 which attracted the admiration of antiquity. 
 
 Toward the year 218 before our era, Massilia was destined 
 to commence a new career. This republic, though from its 
 very origin an ally of Rome, had never yet sustained any other 
 than transient and general relations toward the latter. But at 
 the commencement of the second Punic war, it entered with 
 ardor and at its own risk into the cause of the Romans, to 
 whom it rendered distinguished services. 
 
 Half a century after this event, the Massilians were assailed 
 by the Oxybii and the Deeiates, Ligurian tribes from the 
 neighborhood of Nicsea and Antibes, and they applied to Rome 
 for assistance. This war led to others, in which the victorious 
 Romans, conquered this portion of Gaul, to which they tlienee- 
 forth gave the name of Gallia Narhonensis^ or of the Provincia. 
 The rebellion of Sertorius involved that of the I^arbonensian 
 Gauls ; and it was necessary to subject them anew. Cajsar 
 came shortly afterward and completed the conquest of Gaul. 
 
 In all these wars, which they had in a measure provoked and 
 determined by their first appeal to the Romans against the 
 populations of Gaul, the Massilians were the zealous and disin- 
 terested auxiliaries of the conquerors, who rewarded them most 
 munificently for their services. It was a part of the policy and 
 the usage of the Romans, to surrender a portion of their con- 
 quests to those who had aided them in making them, and they 
 pursued this conduct toward the Massilians. 
 
 After the war against the Deeiates and the Oxybii had been 
 brought to a close, the Roman Senate ceded to Massilia the 
 two principal cities of those tribes, together with a portion of 
 the adjacent territory. Some time after, it relinquished to the 
 same city the long and narrow strip of land, which extends along 
 in a meandering course between the sea and the mountains, 
 from Genoa as far as the mouth of the Var. After the death of 
 Sertorius and the defeat of his party, Rome again transferred 
 to the Massilians its rights of conquest over the Ilelvians and 
 the Yolcse Arecomici, who had been among tlie number of 
 those that had revolted. Finally, Csesar gave them advantages 
 over the portion of Gaul conquered by him, which were superior 
 to all those they had heretofore obtained from Rome. The 
 picture I propose to draw of the power and the civiliza- 
 tion of the Massilians appertains to this epoch of their highest
 
 40 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 prosperity. After having thus established what they could 
 accomplish, it will be easier to convince ourselves of what they 
 actually did accomplish. 
 
 From the preceding facts it follows that their territorial 
 domain was composed of two distinct portions ; of that which 
 they had received from the Romans, and of that which they 
 had acquired themselves. Tliis latter portion extended princi- 
 pally along the sea-coasts, from the rock of Monaco, formerly 
 celebrated for its temple of Hercules, to the mouth of the 
 Segura, near the middle of the eastern coast of Spain. Within 
 this area, which comprised five degrees of latitude, Massilia 
 ruled, either by right of conquest, or as the metropolis and 
 colony-mother, over twenty-four or twenty-five difi'erent cities. 
 Some of these cities still exist under their ancient names, more 
 or less altered ; as, for example, Monaco, Nice, Antibes, Agde, 
 Ampurias, Denia. But the majority of them have disappeared 
 without leaving us any vestige of their former existence, as 
 Troezcn, Olbia, Athenopolis, Tauroentium, and several others. 
 
 We are not acquainted with any purely Grecian or Phocsean 
 city in the interior of these countries, or even at a short dis- 
 tance from the coast. But the Massilian population extended 
 itself into the Ligurian and Celtic cities which were nearest to 
 the sea, where it gradually increased in number and in power 
 to such an extent, that the historians and geographers of anti- 
 quity designated these cities by the name of Massilian colonies. 
 Avignon and Cavaillon were of that number. The small town 
 of Saint-Remi, which was anciently called Glanum, likewise 
 belonged to the domain of the Massilians. This fact is authen- 
 ticated by a precious medal, recently found in the territory of 
 Saint-Iiemi, with the type of those of Massilia. 
 
 In every part of Provence monuments have been discovered, 
 and are still discovered daily, which go to show that this 
 country was once inhabited and governed by the Massilians. 
 But their dominion or their influence in this country was cer- 
 tainly not the result of a military conquest. There is every 
 indication that they introduced themselves there gradually, 
 and, as it were, by stealth, in the capacity of merchants, of 
 cultivators, or of ingenious innovators in matters appertaining 
 to the wants or the luxuries of life. 
 
 The country of the Helvii, and that of the Volcae Are- 
 comici, the sovereign power over which Rome had ceded 
 to the Massilians, were both conjointly about equal in extent 
 to the Provincia, from which they were only separated by the 
 Rhone. TTiat of the Helvians, which was afterward called 
 Vivarais, and which now constitutes the department of Ardeche, 
 is mostly a mountainous and wild country ; and it appears that
 
 Influence of Grecian Civilization on the South of Gaul. 41 
 
 the Massilians did not attach any very great value to its pos- 
 session. At any rate, there is no monument or liistorical evi- 
 dence of any kind in proof either of their sojourn or their 
 dominion in that country. 
 
 This is not the case with the territory of the Yolcse Are- 
 comici, wliich was richer, more fertile and more accessible to 
 these settlements; it contained, moreover, several cities, the 
 three most important of which were Aries, Nimes and Beziers. 
 The Massilians eagerly embraced the opportunity for establish- 
 ing themselves in these cities. This is a fact which is sustained 
 by incontestable proofs. We still have coins from Beziers, 
 which resemble those of Massilia. Tlie Celtic name of Aries 
 was changed into Thelini, by which the Massilians intended to 
 indicate the fertility of its territory ; and the use of the Greek 
 language became so general in that city, that it continued to be 
 spoken there until it fell into the hands of the Barbarians. 
 Nimes became likewise almost a Greek city. From inscrip- 
 tions, which were found among its ruins, we learn that it had a 
 Greek theatre under the Romans, and that it made use of the 
 Greek on monuments erected in honor of the emperors. 
 
 Whether the different countries belonging to the domain of 
 the Massilians were ever comprised under one common desig- 
 nation or not I am unable to determine. But the primitive 
 portion of this domain, which is situated between the Rhone 
 and the Alps, and wliich corresponds to the modern Provence, 
 is frequently called Massaliotis, or Massilia, by the historians 
 and geographers of the Greeks, and these ancient authors ex- 
 pressly remark that the latter of these names, Massilia, was not 
 only that of a city, but of a country. 
 
 This summary account of the ancient geography of Massi- 
 lia would admit of many developments of great importance 
 and interest in a historical point of view, whic^i, however, I am 
 obliged to dismiss as irrelevant to my subject. What I have 
 said will be sufficient to establish the fact, that none of the 
 Greek republics had a territory of wider extent tlian that of 
 Massilia. If, therefore, anything was wanting to this republic, 
 in order to exercise an influence on Gaul, it certainly was 
 neither authoritj' nor space. 
 
 The Greeks did not always civilize the barbarous tribes, 
 among which they settled. It, on the contrary, happened 
 more than once, that they became as barbarous as those by 
 whom they were surrounded. History has recorded a striking 
 instance of the kind. The Greeks, who had established them- 
 selves in the mountainous districts of lower Italy, had lost, in 
 that isolated situation, the manners and the culture of their 
 native country. A vague and confused recollection was all
 
 42 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 that they had preserved of them. They are said to have met 
 togetlier once a year, for the purpose of lamenting that they 
 were no longer Greeks. 
 
 It was not so with the Phocseans, who had been transplanted 
 into Gaul. Tliey there preserved the genius, the manners, the 
 laws and the arts of their native land in all their purity. The 
 testimony of antiquity on this point is unanimous and solemn ; 
 and it will not be useless to adduce some instances. The fol- 
 lowing, in the first place, is a passage from a discourse which 
 Livy puts into the mouth of Rhodian deputies, pleading in the 
 presence of the Roman Senate, for the liberty of the Greek 
 cities of Asia, against the usurpations of King Eumenes, who 
 claimed sovereignty over them. " These cities," says the Roman 
 orator, " are not so much colonies from Greece, as they are 
 purely Grecian cities.* The change of country has affected 
 neither the manners and customs, nor the genius of the na- 
 tion. Each of these cities, animated by a glorious emula- 
 tion, has dared to vie in point of talent and virtue with its 
 founders. The majority of you have seen the cities of Greece ; 
 they have seen those of Asia. The latter are further away from 
 you ; and in this consists the whole of their disadvantage. 
 Surelv, if the inherent endowments of nature could be con- 
 quered by soil and climate, the Massilians would have become 
 Barbarians long ago, surrounded as they are on every side by 
 nations of ferocious savages. But they have preserved not 
 only their language, not only the costume and the usages, but 
 what is better still than all this, they have preserved the laws, 
 the manners and the genius of Greece in all their purity and 
 free from every defilement from their neighbors ; and you have 
 good reason for bestowing on them the same honor and the 
 same regard, as if they inhabited the very heart of Greece." 
 
 Whether the orator, who uses language of this description, be 
 Livy himself or the deputy from Rhodes, whether he be a 
 Roman or a Greek, is a matter of very little importance ; the 
 historical conclusion to be derived from this testimony in favor 
 of the Massilians remains about the same in either case. Twenty 
 passages miglit be quoted from Cicero in support of my asser- 
 tion ; I will give but one, which I derive from the orator's 
 defence of Flaccus. " I shall invoke," says he, " in favor of 
 
 ♦ "Non, quae in solo modo antiquo sunt, Grsecac magis urbes sunt, quam colonise 
 earum, illinc quondam profecta; in Asiam. Nee terra mutata mutavit genus aut mores. 
 Certare pio certamine cujuslibet bona; artis ac virtutis ausi sumus cum parentibus 
 quceque civitas et conditoribus suis. Adistis Griccia;, adistis Asiae urbes plerique. Nisi 
 quod longius a vobis absumus, nulla vincimur alia re. Massilienses, qtios, si natura 
 insita velut ingenio terrae vinci posset, jam pridem efferassent tot indomita; circumfusae 
 gentes, in eo honore, in ea merito dignitate audimus apud voa esse, ac si medium umbi- 
 Ucum Graecise incolerent." — Liv. Hist. lib. xxxvii. c. 54. — Ed.
 
 Influence of Grecian Civilization 07i the South of Gaul. 43 
 
 Flaccus, a city which has seen him in the capacity of a soldier 
 and of a qiigestor ;* it is Massilia — a city which, in consideration 
 of its discipline and the gravity of its manners, lam inclined to 
 prefer not only to Greece, but to every other nation — the city 
 which, though far removed from the countries in which the 
 language and the arts of Greece are cultivated, surrounded on 
 every side by the tribes of Gaul and assailed by floods of bar- 
 barity, is nevertheless governed by the best of its fellow-citizens 
 and in such a manner, that it is easier to admire than to imitate 
 its example." It is impossible to produce proofs more convinc- 
 ing than these, that the Massilians remained Greeks in the midst 
 of the Gauls. 
 
 The fact, however, though a remarkable one, contains nothing 
 extraordinary and would not require any further explanation. 
 But as the reasons, which account for it, are interesting in 
 themselves, relating as they do to the very foundation of the 
 history of Massilia, I think it incumbent on me to take a rapid 
 glance at some of them. 
 
 The first of these, and perhaps the most important, relates 
 to the origin of the Massilians. The city of Phociea, from which 
 they originally came, was, as every one knows, one of the twelve 
 cities which constituted the Ionian confederation on the coast 
 of Asia Minor. It was one of the least powerful of them ; but 
 it had always been distinguished among the other states of the 
 same league for an austerity of manners and for an energy of 
 character, which formed a strong contrast to the commonplaces 
 of the historians in regard to the eflTeminacy of the lonians. 
 The Phocaeans figure in all the great revolutions of Asiatic 
 Greece, and they always figure in a heroic manner. This is 
 perhaps the only tribe of the Greeks, concerning which history 
 recounts none but magnanimous actions, none but darinor enter- 
 prises ; the only one, in which we find the energy and gravity 
 of the Dorians united with the polish and the vivacity of the 
 lonians. A colony sprung from such a people, and at the finest 
 period of its history, must evidently have had the best possible 
 chances for remaining Greek, wherever it might establish itself. 
 
 In the second place, the same necessity which made mer- 
 chants and navigators of the Massilians, permitted them also to 
 keep up habitual communication of every description with 
 Greece and with the countries occupied by the Greeks. 
 
 * " Neque vero te, Massilia. prsetereo, quae L. Flaccum militem qnaestoremqne cog- 
 nosti; cujus ego civitatis disciplinam atqiie gravitatem non solum Graecia;, sed hand 
 Bcio an cunctis gentibus anteponendara dicam ; quae turn procul a Graecorum omnium 
 regionibus, disciplinis linguaque divisa, cum in ultimis terris cincta Gallorum gentibus, 
 barbariae fluctibus alluatur, sic optimatum consilio gubernatur, ut omnes ejus institata 
 laudare faeilius possint quam emulari." — Cicero pro Flacco, c. 26. — Ed,
 
 44 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 * Tlie Greeks had, as we know, conceived the happy idea 
 of making their coins symbolical monnments destined to 
 perpetuate the memory of tlieir domestic life, and of their 
 
 Sublic transactions with foreign countries. The coins of the 
 [assilians are particularly interesting in this historical point 
 of view. They bear numerous and certain indications of the 
 relations and alliances with a multitude of Greek cities — all of 
 which were more or less celebrated — and particularly with 
 Khodes and Athens, with Velia and with the majority of the 
 other cities of Magna GrjEcia. 
 
 The religion of the Massilians furnished them another motive 
 for keeping up such connections with Greece, as were favorable to 
 the maintenance of their national genius. Their cultus was a dou- 
 ble and as it were a complex one, like that of all the lonians, 
 who, besides their properly Grecian divinities, worshipped 
 Cybele and the Diana of Ephesus, Asiatic divinities which they 
 had found in honor among the inhabitants of Ionia, and which 
 they had adopted among their own. In the Asiatic part of their 
 cultus, the Massilians were dependent on Ephesus, which was 
 the chief seat of it. It was to this city that they went to look 
 for the chief priestess of their Ephesion, a name by which they 
 designated the temples of their Asiatic Diana. They likewise 
 kept up an obligatory connection of a religious nature with 
 the mother city. Still existing inscriptions prove that almost 
 down to the time of our own era, they received the priests and 
 priestesses for some of their temples from Phocaea. But the 
 most solemn religious rendezvous of the Massilians was Delphi. 
 They went there for the purpose of depositing in the temple of 
 Apollo their s_polia oj^ima, or the first fruits of the spoils which 
 they had gained in war, and they there erected monuments in 
 commemoration of their victories. When Pausanias visited 
 the temple at Delphi in the first century of our era, he still 
 found several statues which they had there consecrated to Apollo 
 from the earliest time of their existence. These relations of 
 the Massilians with the principal religious and political centres 
 of Greece undoubtedly contributed to keep alive in them the 
 •y sentiment and the love of whatever was of Greek origin. 
 
 Now the knowledge, which we have thus far acquired respect- 
 ing the character of the Massilians, already tends to the pre- 
 sumption, that the sojourn of such a people among the Gauls 
 could not be without its eff'ect upon the latter. And this is 
 another point in regard to which history does them ample jus- 
 tice. 
 
 In the second century of our era, at an epoch when Rome 
 had already become the mistress of the world, and when Greece 
 was no longer an independent country, the tradition of what
 
 Tnjliience of Grecian Civilization on the South of Gaul. 45 
 
 the Pbocseans had done for the civilization of the barbarians 
 bad not yet ceased to be a living, and to some extent a popular, 
 tradition among the Greeks. The rhetoricians, who undertook 
 to celebrate the ancient glory of Athens, the cradle of the 
 lonians, did not hesitate to enumerate among the services 
 it had rendered to the cause of humanity, that of its having 
 civilized the entire coast of the Mediterranean, from Cadiz to 
 Massilia. But the most classical testimony on this subject is 
 that of Justin. " Tlie Gauls," says this writer, " laying aside 
 their barbarity, learnt the usages of civil life from the Massi- 
 lians ; they learnt the art of cultivating their fields and of sur- 
 rounding their cities with walls. They then began to be 
 governed no longer by the force of arms, but by laws ; to cul- 
 tivate the vine and to plant the olive. So great was the lustre 
 shed on men and things, that one might have said that Gaul 
 had been transplanted into Greece, rather than that Greece had 
 been transplanted into Gaul." * 
 
 It is very probable that Justin, in abridging this passage 
 from Trogus Pompeius, has made of it what it really is, a some- 
 what declamatory passage of rhetoric, that can teach us but a 
 vague and general fact, which it is indispensable to illustrate in 
 detail. History and the monuments fortunately furnish us some 
 means for doing so. It was particularly by their commerce, by 
 their religion and their arts, that the Massilians acted upon the 
 inhabitants of Gaul ; it is therefore with reference to these, that 
 we must examine and ascertain their means of influence. 
 
 No point in ancient history is better established than the 
 celebrity of the Massilians as navigators and as merchants. 
 They are, perhaps, the only Greeks, who in this respect miglit 
 be compared to the Carthaginians. Tlieir vessels pushed tlicir 
 way beyond the Propontis, and probably as far as the Black Sea. 
 They frequented, or at any rate had acquired a knowledge of, the 
 western coast of Africa, as far as, and even beyond, the mouths 
 of the Senegal. Those of their coins which contain the impress 
 of the giraffe and of the hippopotamus, are perhaps the monu- 
 ments, which were intended to perpetuate the memory of their 
 discoveries along these coasts, and of the great river which 
 there discharges itself into the ocean. Toward the north they 
 had passed far beyond the known limits of the Phcenician navi- 
 gators. They had advanced at least as high as Norway. Tlie 
 first geographical notice of the Germanic nations, some of 
 
 * "Ah Tiis igitur Galli et usum vitae cultioris, deposita et mansnefacta 'barbaria, et agro- 
 rum cultus, et urbes mccnibus cingere didiceruiit. Tunc et Icgibus, non armis vivere ; 
 tunc et vitem putare, tunc olivam sercre consueverunt : acleoque mognus et hominibus 
 et rebus impositus est nitor, ut non Grffcia in Galliam emigrasse, sed Gallia ia Graciam 
 translata videretur." — Justin, Hist. Philipp. lib. xliii. c. i.~Ed.
 
 4:6 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 which were scattered along the shores of the Baltic, is based on 
 certain notions in regard to the famous voyage of Pytheas 
 along these coasts. 
 
 But while they were thus devoting themselves to distant ex- 
 plorations, the Massilians had not neglected the interior of 
 Gaul ; they had traversed it in every direction. They had 
 opened a road along the Rhone and the Loire, as far as the 
 coast of Armorica. It was there where they obtained their tin 
 and other productions from Great Britain, which they trans- 
 ported by the same way to the shores of the Mediterranean. 
 They had also communications with the northeast of Gaul, and 
 to all appearances with Germany. But it was especially with 
 the tribes of their immediate vicinity, and with those of the 
 valley of the Rhone, that they kept up habitual commercial 
 relations. The direct effect of these relations on the culture and 
 the social condition of these tribes is not of a nature to be 
 appreciated or measured. But with this general effect there 
 w^ere connected others of a more specific nature, which are 
 more susceptible of a precise historical enumeration. 
 
 IS'o regular communications between the Phocaeans and the 
 aboriginal Gallic tribes could ever take place, except with the 
 aid of a common language. Now in this particular case, as in 
 the majority of similar cases, the most intelligent and the most 
 polished were the men, who gave their idiom to those that were 
 less so. Strabo, speaking of the population in the vicinity of 
 Massilia, informs us that they had adopted the use of the Greek 
 in their contracts, that is to say, in all their voluntary transac- 
 tions between one individual and another.* This fact attests, 
 as expressly as possible, the social ascendant of the Massilians 
 over the aboriginal tribes of their vicinity. 
 
 The introduction of alphabetic writing into the central parts 
 of Gaul was another result of the communications between these 
 countries and the city of Massilia. The system of Druidical 
 doctrines was transmitted orally, and was preserved through 
 the memory alone. Casar says expressly, that the only writing 
 in use among the Druids, both for the purposes of personal and 
 of public affairs, was the Greek. When he came into Hel- 
 vetia, in order to check the population which was already on 
 its way of emigration to the west of Gaul, he there found tab- 
 lets of a census in Greek characters. 
 
 I am unable to say whether these Gallic tribes had money, 
 coined by themselves and for their own use, previously to the 
 arrival of the Phocaeans. I should be inclined to doubt it, and 
 
 * Strabon. Geosjraph. lib. iv. c. 5 : " YiaX <j>i7ieXX7]vac KareaKcvaae (7 noXig) Toi>c 
 TaXdrac;, Cjare /col ru avfijSoXaia 'EXXijviari ypd(j>eiv.^' — Ed.
 
 Influence of Grecian Civilization on the South of Gaul. 4Y 
 
 to believe that the branch of industry in question was one of 
 those which they had learned from the Greeks. But what is 
 beyond a doubt, is, that the inscriptions on their most ancient 
 coins are in the Greek characters. Now, from whom could 
 these Gauls have learnt the use of those characters, unless it was 
 from the Massilians ? These facts are among those which have 
 their weight in the history of civilization. 
 
 There is something more complex and more singular in cer- 
 tain circumstances connected with the religious influence of the 
 Massilians on the Gallic tribes in the immediate proximity of 
 the Mediterranean. I have already spoken of the religion of 
 the Massilians, but I must here return to the same subject for a 
 moment, in order to account, if possible, for the facility with 
 which this religion of theirs appears to have spread at an early 
 date throughout the southern parts of Gaul. 
 
 Besides Cybele and the Ephesian Diana, the Massilians wor- 
 shipped most of the divinities and deified heroes of Greece. The 
 divinities, for which they appear to have had a peculiar vener- 
 ation, were Apollo, Minerva, the Diana of the chase, Bacchus and 
 Venus; and among the heroes, Hercules. The cultus of the lat- 
 ter was one of the first of those introduced into several Gallic 
 cities, where the Massilians were in power. The tradition, 
 which attributes the founding of Nimes to a son of Hercules, 
 appeared to be an indication of the existence of that cultus in 
 this city. Avignon had likewise adopted Hercules as one of its 
 tutelary deities, and had built him a temple, as is proved from 
 an inscription which was found among the ruins of that temple. 
 But the Massilian divinity, whose cultus was most generally 
 adopted by the aboriginal tribes, which had submitted to the 
 power or the influence of the Massilians, was the Diana of 
 Ephesus. Strabo states expressly, that the inhabitants of the 
 southern coast of Spain learnt from them the art of sacrificing, 
 after the manner of the Greeks, in honor of this favorite divi- 
 nity.* The traditions of the south of Gaul, which attribute to 
 Diana the majority of the pagan temples, of which the ruins 
 still exist, appear to be an indication of the ancient popularity, 
 which the cultus of this deity enjoyed among the Gauls in the 
 vicinity of Phocsean towns. Other Greek divinities were wor- 
 shiped in places quite remote from any of the possessions of the 
 Massilians, and between which and the latter we cannot sup- 
 pose any other relations to have existed than those of commerce 
 and of amity. 
 
 There is a curious medal, which has thus far been found only 
 
 * Strabon. Geograph. lib. iv. c. 5. : " Toic "Ifiripaiv, ol^ kqI tu lepd r^g 'E<pealac 
 'ApTeiJ.i.6og TzapiSoaav tu ndrpLa, Ctare 'EiXkriviar^ ^veiv." — Ed.
 
 4:8 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 in the environs of Toulouse, where it is even common. These 
 circumstances seem to indicate that it belongs to that locality. 
 This medal, the inscription of which is in the Greek character 
 and language, bears on one of its faces a tripod, the ordinary 
 symbol of the cultus of Apollo, and could only have been struck 
 by a people, among whom this cultus was established. That 
 this was not a Greek people is evident, both from the name and 
 from the barbarous fabric of the medal. 
 
 Now, in order to explain the facility with wliich the inhabi- 
 tants of the south of Gaul adopted the objects and the ceremo- 
 nial of the Grecian cultus, it is indispensable to enter into some 
 general considerations with reference to the nature and the for- 
 malities of this cultus. 
 
 The religion of the Greeks, taken as a whole, was but a suc- 
 cession of riant festivities, which vied with each other in point 
 of animation and poetic beauty. The finest productions of their 
 national poetry, from the drama to tlie epic or lyric hymn, were 
 composed with reference to the celebration of these fetes. Some 
 hymn in honor of the deity, to which the festival was dedicated, 
 constituted, ordinarily, an essential and a characteristic part of 
 it. But it is impossible to form any conception of the spectacle 
 and the effect produced by these liymns, unless we have pre- 
 viously acquired at least some vague notion of the general na- 
 ture of the poetic execution among the Greeks. 
 
 The poetry of the Greeks was not, like that of modern nations, 
 an isolated art, independent of every other, and producing its 
 effect by being merely read or recited. It required the indis- 
 pensable concurrence of two other arts, distinct from and yet 
 intimately and necessarily connected with it. These arts were 
 in the first place music, and then what the Greeks called 
 orchesis (J^PXV'^'-?) f^nd the Latins saUatio — terms for which our 
 word " dancing " would be but a very imperfect equivalent. 
 This saltation (if we may be permitted to retain its Latin name), 
 was a sort of gesticulation, a characteristic pantomime, by 
 which it was intended to represent to some extent, to the eye, 
 that which the words of the poetry conveyed to the mind. It 
 is thus that every poem was sung, and sung not only with an 
 appropriate accompaniment of instrumental music, but with 
 the additional accompaniment of imitative and descriptive ges- 
 tures. The invention of these gestures, as well as that of the 
 music, constituted a necessary part of the talent of the poet, 
 and the poetic execution was thus composed of three distinct arts, 
 or perhaps rather of three indivisible branches of one and the 
 same art, aspiring in concert after one and tlie same effect. 
 
 The character of this execution and of each one of the several 
 concurrent arts, varied ad infinitum. ]jut all these differences
 
 Influence of Grecian Civilization on the South of Gaul. 49 
 
 and varieties were reduced to three fundamental types or forms : 
 a noble, calm and grave form, called the tragic ; a humorous, 
 burlesque and familiar form, called the comic ; and finally, an 
 agitated, impassioned and enthusiastic form, or the dithyrambic. 
 
 The religious hymns partook of all these forms. They were 
 executed by a more or less numerous body of performers, com- 
 posed either of men or of women exclusively, or of a mixture 
 of men and women both. These companies were called choruses ; 
 and the organization of these choruses varied according to a 
 multitude of circumstances, of which I can only indicate a few 
 of the most general. Tliere were instances, in which the choruses 
 acted under the direction of the priest. But often, and even 
 most generally, they were composed of personages elected by 
 the magistrates for this special purpose, and directed by a leader 
 called a choragus (XopT^ydc). In that event, it was the civil 
 authority which intervened in the exercise of the cultus. 
 
 It would take up too much of our time here, to give even an 
 imperfect conception of all the varieties of religious hymns in 
 use among the Greeks. I shall only distinguish two principal 
 classes of them. The theme or argument of one of these con- 
 sisted of a particular action or determinate trait from the life 
 of some divinity. In these the mimic accompaniment of the 
 words must have been a special pantomime, appropriate to the 
 action expressed by the poem. The hymn was then a sort of 
 drama acted by the chorus. The hymns of the second class 
 were only general praises of the gods, or the more or less detailed 
 expression of their attributes. The mimic accompaniment, 
 with which they were executed, was limited to a simple dance, 
 of a character analogous to that of the words and of the music, 
 and without any pretension to a dramatic imitation in the strict 
 sense of the term. It was most generally a circular dance, 
 which had many points in common with that of the theatrical 
 chorus on the stage. This vague and imperfect sort of choral 
 pantomime was to all appearances the most frequent and the 
 most popular of them all. It did not require, like the others, 
 an especial apprenticeship on the part of the choragus, and the 
 public in general could take part in it. However, all the choral 
 performances of any and of every kind, were regarded by the 
 people as a spectacle, and as one of its most animated and most 
 agreeable diversions. It is therefore not to be wondered at, if 
 the inhabitants of the south of Gaul, especially those who pro- 
 fessed Druidism, abandoned the sombre and barbarous rites of 
 that religion, in order to adopt the more cheerful cultus of the 
 Greeks. In attributing to these people that passionate thirst 
 for pleasure, that vivacity of imagination, and that promptitude 
 of enthusiasm, for which they were distinguished at a later date 
 
 4
 
 50 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 and for whicli they are still remarkable, we can easily conceive, 
 tliat they must have been very sensible to the attractions and 
 the magnificence of those religious festivals of Greece, to 
 which the most charming and the most potent of the arts con- 
 tributed their choicest gifts. 
 
 It remains now to give some idea of the culture, the arts and 
 the literature of the Massilians, and to see what influence they 
 could have exercised by means of them on the Gauls of their 
 neighborhood. 
 
 Tlie Massilians were in the habit of sending statues to Delphi ; 
 they made them for their temples and for their monuments. 
 A large number of those which have been discovered, or which 
 history mentions as having existed in difl'erent parts of Gaul, 
 were in all probability the works of their artists. But by a 
 sort of fatality, none of those that have come down to us bear 
 any certain mark of having been produced by them. A few 
 bass-reliefs, a few small figures in bronze, and their coins or 
 medals, are the only monuments of art, that can be attributed 
 to them with certainty. Several of these monuments are 
 remarkable for their beauty and the exquisite finish of their 
 workmanship. If we were to infer from them the general 
 character of the arts of design at Massilia, we should have to 
 say, that their characteristics were rather grace and elegance 
 than boldness and vigor. 
 
 Some monuments of another kind, if they may also be 
 regarded as the works of the Massilians, would likewise go to 
 sustain this conclusion, and they would prove that the 
 Phocaaans had preserved the riant imagination of Ionia on the 
 coasts of Liguria even. The learned Peiresc has left us a 
 description of a cameo, found in his time near Frejus, among 
 the ruins of a small Massilian temple. Tlie subject of the 
 cameo is a sort of parody — and a parody of the most graceful 
 description — of the gathering of olives, which is a subject quite 
 frequently represented by the Greeks. A company of young 
 maidens, whom Peiresc (for reasons which I am at a loss to 
 explain) calls the nymphs of Homer, are assembled under a 
 tree, and by means of long poles knocking down, by way of 
 fruit, some little amourettes, perched here and there upon the 
 branches. 
 
 The literary and poetical remains of the Massilians are still 
 scarcer than their graven or sculptured monuments, and there 
 is less to be said about them. They are reduced to inscriptions 
 and epitaphs, which merely confirm what has already been 
 attested by history, to wit, that the dialect of the Massilians 
 was closely related to the general dialect of Ionia, Several of 
 these inscriptions, and particularly the epitaphs, still breathe all
 
 Injhience of Grecian Civilization on the South of Gaul. 51 
 
 tlie purity and the simplicity of the Hellenic taste. I can- 
 not refrain from the pleasure of quoting two of them. One of 
 tliem was engraven on the tomb of an unknown couple, and is 
 remarkable for its sentimental conciseness: "There are here 
 two bodies and one soul." But perhaps this touching inscrip- 
 tion was not made expressly for the Massilian tomb from which 
 it was copied ; it was perhaps rather a sort of sepulchral formula 
 in general use among the Greeks. This, however, is not the 
 case with the following one, which was engraven on a sort of 
 cippus. Tlie monument to which it belongs is undoubtedly a 
 local one. Independently of its poetic interest, it is curious for 
 certain allusions to neo-Pythagorean ideas, which were undoubt- 
 edly in vogue among the Massilians at the unknown epoch to 
 which it belongs. It is the epitaph of a mariner, who is sup- 
 posed to address himself to the passers-by in the following 
 terms: "Along the shore which echoes the booming of the 
 waves, I address myself to thee, O traveller — I, a young man and 
 a stranger to hymen, beloved of God, no longer now a mortal, 
 and by my age like the young gods of AmyclfP, the guardians 
 of mariners. Myself a mariner, I led a wandering life on the 
 floods of the sea, and now within this tomb, which I have 
 obtained from the piety of my masters, I am forever exempt 
 from sickness and from toil, from sorrow and fatigue — miseries 
 to which my body was subject among the living. The dead 
 are divided into two classes. Some return to wander over the 
 earth ; but others join in the dances of the stars of heaven. I 
 am one of the latter army, having taken God for my guide."* 
 
 It is perhaps the most striking feature of this little i^iece, so 
 elevated in its tone, so graceful and so pure, that it was made 
 for the monument of a simple sailor who had worked for wages. 
 
 It has often been remarked, and it is even commonly believed, 
 that the Massilians had no theatre, and that they were unac- 
 quainted with dramatic rei^rcsentations. The fact would be a 
 surprising one ; for the theatre and the drama, from the time of 
 
 * The original of this inscription, with a disquisition on its contents, may be found 
 in Chardon de la Rochette's Melanges de Critique et de Philologie, vol. i. ]). 121-143. 
 The first verse of it is restored by Rochette. It is also reprinted in the Histoire Litic- 
 raire de la France, vol. xxi. p. xxvi. It is as follows : 
 
 M^ raxivoicri rraprpxev 'xvem rv/iGov, o^ira, 
 Kovpo^ eyij Ka?.eu ae, Gttj cl>i?.0(, ovketc dvtjrb^, 
 'Hi(^eof, Kovpoiffiv 6/jt]AikIti iravofioio^, 
 U?iUTTiftcjv ffurypaiv, ' AfivK?-a'iovm tieolaiv. 
 
 YlTiUTTjO KaVTUC icJV, TTOVTOV >'' EVl KVfiadL VUOdTJV 
 
 tlvcefiiTj Tpo<^iuv 6e XajaJi' roSe cijua, niTrav/xaL 
 fiovGuv Kul Ka/jiuTOio Kal uxf^eoc t)(^E ttovoio' 
 TavTa yap ev iuojaiv ajLtEi'Mxa aupKFC Exovaiv. 
 'Ev 6e te teSvelCjolv ofnjyvpiEi ye ncXovcnv 
 Aotal, TcJv ETipT] fiEV k7iix(lovir} ■!TE<j)6pTlTai, 
 'H 6' ETEpT] TELOEaai avv aWEpioicL yopevEi' 
 'Hf cTparu/g Ecg elfil, Aa;^;wv Oebv jjyefiov^a. — Ed.
 
 52 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 their invention, were one of tlie cliaracteristie passions of tlie 
 Greeks. Moreover, their tragedy, which had originated in the 
 cultus of Bacchus, always constituted a part of it ; and this 
 cultus was one of those which were honored in Massilia. 
 Finally, there existed, as we shall see, theatres in several of the 
 cities which were subject to the Massilians ; and we cannot see 
 why the latter should have tolerated in their colonies, what they 
 did not allow in their metropolis. 
 J But it would be superfluous to combat any longer an asser- 
 tion which is without any foundation, based as it is on a single 
 misapprehended passage from a Roman author. This author is 
 Valerius Maximus^ who, in eulogizing the characteristic gravity 
 of the Massilians, simply says : " that they did not allow mimic 
 representations on the stage." * The mimics were, as I propose 
 to show with more detail hereafter, a species of short dramas, 
 peculiar to the Romans rather than to the Greeks, and the 
 argument and execution of which gradually degenerated into 
 a revolting indecency. Kow, to say that the Massilians did 
 not permit this particular kind of scenic representations, is sim- 
 ply saying that they had a theatre, and that in that theatre they 
 acted pieces of a character that had been consecrated by the 
 usage and the genius of the Greeks. 
 
 One of the most interesting and the best authenticated facts 
 in the history of the ancient Massilians, is the zeal with which 
 they devoted themselves to the preservation and the study of 
 the poems of Homer. This zeal was the natural consequence 
 of their Phoesean origin. Phocsea was one of the Grecian 
 cities of Asia, which claimed the honor of having given birth 
 to the author of those poems. At any rate, the most ancient 
 traditions assert that he had resided there for a long time, and 
 that he had composed several of his works there. Besides, 
 when the legislators of Greece had recognized Homer as the 
 poet and the historian of Greece, Phocsea was one of the cities 
 in which his memory and his works became the object of a 
 particular veneration ; and this veneration must naturally have 
 transmitted itself to the IMassilians, together with the traditions 
 on which it was based. 
 
 Solon was the first Greek legislator who conceived the idea 
 of purifying and establishing the text of the Iliad and of the 
 Odyssey, and who enjoined their solemn rehearsal at the public 
 festivals. The most enlightened of the Greek cities, following 
 his example, had editions of these poems made, the authorized 
 
 * " Eadem civitas severitatis custos acerrima est: nullum aditum in scenam miraig 
 dando, quorum argumenta majore ex parte stuprorum continent actus ; ne talia 
 Bpcctandi consuetudo etlam imitandi licentiam sumat." Val. Max. Lib. ii., c. 6, 7. — 
 Ed.
 
 Influence of Grecian Civilization on the South of Gaul. 53 
 
 text of which served not only as the basis of those legally pre- 
 scribed recitals on public occasions, but also of that of the 
 voluntary and everyday rehearsals of the Rhapsodists, whose 
 profession it was to sing them to the multitude. Tliese ancient 
 editions of Homer were known under the name of Political 
 or City Editions, in order to distinguish them from the editions 
 of the professed grammarians, which are of a much later date. 
 Massilia was among the first of the Grecian cities to furnish one 
 of these editions, which, under the title of the Massiliotic, en- 
 joyed a particular celebrity. The Alexandrian commentators 
 of Homer quote it frequently, and in a manner which leads us 
 to presume, that they regarded it as one of the most ancient and 
 best accredited of its kind. From this fact we may infer, that 
 Massilia had at an early date its rhetoricians and grammarians, 
 whose business it was to expound scientifically the letter and the 
 spirit of the poems of Homer, and its itinerant rhapsodists, who 
 sung them in those cities of Gaul which were founded or gov- 
 erned by the Phocjeans. 
 
 Tlie Gallic tribes, in the midst and in sight of which the Mas- 
 silians thus cultivated the arts and the literature of Greece, did 
 not on that account become a literary or a very civilized people. 
 This change required time and impulsions, which it w\as not in 
 the power of the Massilians to give them. It was accomplished 
 at a later date and subsequently to the fall of Massilia — that is, 
 toward the commencement of our era. 
 
 But whatever may have been the revolution produced at this 
 latter CiDOch in the civilization of the Gauls, this revolution 
 neither was, nor could have been, a sudden or an abruj^t one. It 
 had been prepared long ago by previous communications be- 
 tween the Gauls and the Massilians. It was in consequence of 
 these communications, that a portion of Gaul had learned of its 
 Phocsean instructors to live in communities with greater regu- 
 larity and comfort ; that it had exclianged the gloomy and bar- 
 barous religion of the Druids for the smiling cultus of Ionia ; 
 that it had learnt the Greek. A multitude of considerations 
 lead to the presumption, that this early period was the one, dur- 
 ing which the language of the southern Gauls adopted tliat 
 host of Greek words and expressions, a number of which it lias 
 retained until the present day. 
 
 This moral and social influence of the Massilians on the Gal- 
 lic population of their vicinity is so much the more easily ac- 
 counted for, as the latter were generally predisposed in its favor. 
 This is the unanimous, though perhaps a somewhat exaggerated 
 testimony of all the Greek and Latin historians of antiqnity. 
 Ephorus characterized the inhabitants of Gaul, and particularly, 
 no doubt, those of the South, by the epithet of Philhellenes.
 
 54 History of Provengal Poeti'y. 
 
 Symnus of Chios, who wrote a century before our era, assures 
 us in still more explicit terms, that the Celts observed many of 
 the usages of the Greeks, and that they had a particular liking 
 for all that was peculiar to them. After all tliese indications 
 we shall perhaps be less surprised when we come to find, at 
 already far advanced epochs of the Middle Age, traces of a still 
 vivid recollection of the ancient impression which the Mas- 
 silians had produced on the manners and the imagination of 
 the southern Gauls. 

 
 Grceco-Eoman Literature in Gaul. 55 
 
 CHAPTER ly. 
 
 GK^COROMAN LITEKATTIEE IN GAtTL. 
 
 After having thus shown, how bj establishing themselves in 
 Gaul, by increasing in number, by acquiring riches and power, 
 the Massilians had attained to a position, in which they were 
 both able and destined to disseminate the germs of civilization, 
 I have now to give a sketch of the epoch at which these germs 
 developed themselves, and when this nascent civilization, till 
 then as yet confined to a few countries of the South, began, by 
 the concurrence of a force superior to the one with which it had 
 commenced, to expand and spread, until it became commen- 
 surate with the entire extent of Gaul. This is the epoch, at 
 which the Massilians interfered in the literary education of the 
 Romans, and at which their influence, thenceforth subordinate 
 to the interests and the ascendant of the latter, was limited to 
 literature and to the arts. • ^ > 
 
 No cultivated nation has perhaps had so long a liter^ry^ 
 infancy as the Romans. For more than three centuries their 
 orators and writers were, in the judgment of their most eminent 
 men of genius, nothing more than semi-barbarous novices. But 
 about a hundred and forty years before our era, the idea 
 occurred to some of them who happened to be in Greece, of fre- 
 quenting the schools of grammar and of rhetoric which the^^ 
 found nourishing there. These became eloquent in Greek. 
 No one would as yet have ventured to attempt to be so in 
 Latin. 
 
 Some years later, a number of Greek grammarians and rheto- 
 ricians opened a school for instruction in their art at Rome. 
 But the Roman aristocracy, hostile to every innovation and to 
 knowledge, for which it had neither taste nor genius, did every- 
 thing in its power to oppose the establishment of these schools. 
 Nevertheless, the party which demanded them, which was the 
 plebeian or the popular party, insisted on having them and had 
 them. The study of grammar was first admitted ; that of rhe- 
 toric with greater difficulty, and at a somewhat later date. But 
 both the one and tlie other, and more especially the latter,
 
 56 nistory of ProveiK^al Poetry. 
 
 remained for a long time an object of suspicion on the part of 
 the autliorities, and the schools where they were taught had hut 
 a precarious existence. 
 
 The precepts of the art of composition and of oratory were at 
 first imparted in Greek and applied to the Greek exclusively. 
 But they were gradually extended to the Latin, and Rome could 
 at last boast of writers and orators who were artists. The consul, 
 Servius Galba, was one of those, whose discourses bear the 
 marks of this difficult and laborious transition. " Servius 
 Galba," says Cicero, " knows how to go beyond the limits of 
 his subject, to look for ornaments in it, to please, to move, to 
 elevate the matter he discourses on."* These few words are 
 admirably characteristic of a great literary revolution. 
 
 This progress of Latin eloquence preceded its theory. It is 
 anterior to all the Latin schools of grammar and of rhetoric. 
 These schools found the same obstacles to their establishment, 
 that had been encountered by the schools of Greece. It was 
 but a half a century before our era, that this rhetoric, which had 
 several times been persecuted and which had always been an 
 object of suspicion, was at last pronounced "useful and honor- 
 able,"t to use the expression of Suetonius. It had thus 
 taken the Romans an entire century, to wrest from their patri- 
 cians the full liberty of teaching and of learning the art of 
 speech. This was the most difficult and the slowest of their 
 conquests. 
 
 The first professor of Latin rhetoric at Rome was a certain 
 Lucius Plotius, who is expressly designated as having been a 
 Gaul by birth. ;}: Two other Gauls, though somewhat younger 
 than the former, still competed with him in the practice of the 
 same profession ; they were Marcus Antonius Gniplio and 
 Valerius Cato. The latter taught only Latin grammar ; but 
 Gnipho, who was equally well versed in the Greek and in the 
 Latin, professed both arts and in both these languages.§ 
 
 * De Clar. Orat. c. 21. "Nimirum is princeps ex Latinis ilia oratorum propria, 
 et quasi legitima opera tractavit, ut egrederetur a proposito ornandi causa, ut delect- 
 arel animos, ut permoveret, ut augerct rem, ut miseratiouibus, ut communibus locia 
 uteretur." — Ed. 
 
 t De Claris Rhetoribus, 1. " Rhetorica quoque apud nos, perinde atque grammatica, 
 sero receptaest, paulo etiam difficilius, quippe quam constat nonnunquam etiam prohi- 
 
 bitam exerceri Paulatim et ipsa utilis konestaque apparuit : multique earn 
 
 praesidii causa et gloria; appetiverunt."— ^d. 
 
 X •' Plotius Gallus primus Roma; Latinam rhetoricam docuit : de quo Cicero sic refert : 
 memoria teneo, pueris nobis priinum Latine docere coepisse Plotiumquendam." — Casau- 
 bon ad Suet, de Clar. Rliet. 2— Ed. 
 
 § '■ Fuisse dicitur ingenii magni, memoria; singularis, nee minus Graece, quam La- 
 
 tine doctus Docuit autera et rhetoricam Scholam ejus claroa 
 
 quoque viros frequentasse aiunt : in his M. Ciceronem, etiam cum prsetura fungeretur." 
 Suet, de Illustr. Graram. 7. Compare also Quint, lib. i. ; Macrobius Saturn, iii. A 
 short account of Valerius Cato is given by Suet, de Illustr. Gramm. 11. That ke wrote 
 poetry, as well as books on grammar, we learn from Catull., Ivi. 1. ; Ovid. Trist. ii. 436. 
 — £d.
 
 GrcBGO-Roinaii Literature in Gaul. 57 
 
 Tims we see three Gauls professing at Rome, nearly at the 
 same time and among the first, the sciences which had recently 
 been introduced among the Romans. There is something sur- 
 prising about this particular. The most probable of the vari- 
 ous suppositions, by which it may be explained, is, that the 
 three professors in question were Gauls from the Provincia 
 Mdrhonensis^ who may have received their training in the schools 
 of Massilia, and subsequently applied their knowledge to the 
 Latin, and communicated it through the same medium. But 
 whatever explanation may be given of it, the fact is a remark- 
 able one. It is a sort of prognostic of the ardor, with which 
 the people of Gaul were soon to devote themselves to the study 
 of Roman letters. 
 
 But even after they had their Latin schools, the Romans did 
 not cease on that account to frequent the Greek schools. They 
 were not even satisfied with those they had at Rome ; they 
 continued to go to Greece to prosecute their studies there, par- 
 ticularly at Athens and at Rhodes. The course of events, how- 
 ever, soon opened to them new Greek schools nearer at home. 
 
 Massilia having espoused the part of the Roman Senate 
 against Ca3sar, the latter, after a memorable siege, took posses- 
 sion of the city. He was exceedingly irritated against it ; 
 nevertheless he treated it leniently, or, at least, affected to do 
 so, in consideration of its antiquity and its renown, as he him- 
 self avows. He left it its independence and its liberty, but he 
 stripped it of all that had heretofore constituted its strength and 
 its prosperity ; he seized its navy, destroyed its arsenals, took 
 immediate possession of several of its colonies, and ftivored the 
 attempts, which the other cities successively made to alienate 
 themselves from it. In fine, he withdrew from them all the 
 jurisdiction over the different countries, which the Senate had 
 conferred on them — all of which escheated again to the Roman 
 government, as parts of the Provincia N^arbonensis. 
 
 From this moment all that portion of their intellecti^fil acti- 
 vity, which the inhabitants of this city had directed to com- 
 merce, to navigation and the cultivation of its collateral 
 sciences, or to the government of their colonies and dependent 
 territories — all this important portion of their energy and intel- 
 ligence became extinct or concentrated itself on the culture of 
 letters, of philosophy and of certain particular sciences, M'hich 
 daily came more and more into vogue, as, for example, the 
 science of medicine. 
 
 In regard to the philosoj)hy, which was at that time taught 
 at Massilia, history gives us no information, nor does it name 
 any of the men who gave instruction in it. The presumption 
 is, that they were neither distinguished for any original ideas,
 
 58 History of Frovengal Poetry. 
 
 nor even for a profounder appreciation of the ancient ideas, but 
 that they adhered to a sort of eclecticism without any definite 
 principle or aim. 
 
 Their physicians are better known. Pliny mentions three oi' 
 them, who flourished at Rome at the commencement of the 
 Christian era, and who enjoyed a prodigious reputation. They 
 are Demosthenes, Crinis and Charmis.* Demosthenes was the 
 author of several valuable works, one of which is on rhe 
 diseases of the eye, from which Galen quotes a number of pas- 
 sages. This work was still extant in the tenth century. The 
 celebrated Gerbert, known as Pope Sylvester 11., possessed a 
 copy of it. There is but one anecdote related about Crinis, 
 which, however, is a curious one, inasmuch as it proves, what 
 an immense fortune a distinguished physician could at that 
 time accumulate at Rome. He gave to his native city for the 
 repairing or the reconstruction of its walls a sum of money to 
 the amount of twelve millions of fi'ancs.f 
 
 The rhetoricians of Massilia were no less celebrated than its 
 doctors ; but we are scarcely acquainted with the names of any, 
 and the works of all of them are lost. 
 
 "When the Romans, who had thus far been obliged to go to 
 Greece, in order to find what they deemed proper to learn of the 
 'literature of Greece, saw that there were masters of this know- 
 ledge at Massilia, they began to frequent their instruction. 
 The concourse of disciples increased the number of the profes- 
 sors, and from the first years of the reign of Augustus, the 
 schools of Massilia were preferred to those of Athens. This 
 preference was at least as much moral as it was scientific. The 
 manners had not as yet had time to change at Massilia. They 
 still preserved, along with their primitive simplicity, the aus- 
 terity which had so long been the object of admiration. 
 
 Julius Agricola, the conqueror of Great Britain, was the 
 first Roman of any note known to have received his educa- 
 tion at Massilia, and it was to this circumstance that Tacitus, 
 his son-in-law and biographer, attributed in a great measure the 
 virtues for which he lauds him. Here are the words of Tacitus 
 himself: " Besides his happy natural disposition, there was one 
 thing in particular, which preserved Agricola from the snares 
 of vice : it was, that from his infancy he had had Massilia for 
 his place of residence and for his school — a city of excellent 
 morals, in which the elegance of Greece was found united to 
 the simplicity of the Province." X 
 
 * Pliny : Nat. Hist., xxix. 5, 8.— Ed. 
 
 t"Nuperque centiea HS. reliquit muris patria?, mcenibusque aliis pxne non 
 minori summa exstructis." Pliny, eodem loco. — £d. 
 i "Arcebat eum ab illecebris peccantium, prseter ipsiua bonam integramque
 
 CrTCBCO- Roman Literature in, Gaul. 59 
 
 The example of the Romans had a decisive influence on the 
 Gauls of the ProvinciaNarbonensis. The caj^ital of this province, 
 Narbonne, had inherited some of the political power and of the 
 commerce of Massilia, and it had, at an early date become one 
 of the most important cities of the empire. It had been founded, 
 or rather rebuilt, a hundred and eighteen years before our era / 
 by a vast colony, composed not of Italian veterans, as were 
 nearly all the other colonies, but of Roman citizens, who had 
 come directly from Rome itself. Its ancient inhabitants hav- 
 ing to some extent participated in the disorders of the pro- 
 vince during the war of Sertorius, the Romans made that rebel- 
 lion a pretext for driving them all away, so that in the city 
 itself and in all the adjacent countries there was nothing but a 
 purely Roman population, which daily increased in numbers, in 
 activity and in wealth. In spite of its remote and isolated 
 situation on the southern limits of the Province, !N^arbonne was 
 destined to become, and, in fact, did become, the principal 
 centre of the. Roman civilization in Gaul. 
 
 Caesar had derived great assistance from the Narbonenses, and 
 from the inhabitants of the Province during his war against the 
 Gauls of the North. Desirous of recompensing them for their 
 services, he had sent a large number of them to the Senate at 
 Rome. He had thus imparted a purely Roman impulse to the 
 Gallic population of Narbonensis. This population had already 
 become accustomed to the sweets of peace ; it had already 
 learnt, from the example of the Massilians, the glory and the 
 advantages of civilization, of the arts and of knowledge, and it 
 sought them with avidity. But after having once been sub- 
 jected to Roman influences, after having adopted the tone of the 
 Romans, and become eager for the distinctions and offices which 
 were distributed at Rome, its highest pretension and ambition 
 was to be Roman. It strove to become so by its talents and 
 studies, as well as by its dignities and honors. It, therefore, 
 began to rival the Romans zealously in the cultivation of Greek 
 letters. 
 
 Nor were they in want of competent masters. Massilia could 
 supply them, as well as the Romans. Among tlio writers of 
 antiquity, Strabo is the one that has given us a minute account 
 of the sort of literary revolution, which at that time was going 
 on in the south of Gaul. He speaks of it in the following 
 terms : "The Gauls, seeing the studious Romans thus frequent- 
 ing the schools of Massilia, and living peaceably in other 
 respects, gladly profited by this leisure to devote themselves to 
 
 riaturam, quod statim parvulus se<lem ac magistram studiornm Masailiam habuit, locnra 
 Grffica comitate et provinciali parsimonia- mistum ad bene compositum." — Tacit. Agri- 
 oola, c i.—£d.
 
 60 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 a similar kind of life ; and tliej did so, not only individually, 
 but collectively. Thus, therefore, the cities, as w-ell as private 
 individuals of wealth, kept their salaried sophists and physi- 
 cians."* The term sophist, as employed here by Strabo, is 
 applicable either to the professors of philosophy, or to those 
 of rhetoric, or to both of them at the same time. But whatever 
 construction we may be inclined to put upon it, the passage 
 quoted attests an equally general zeal for Greek literature in 
 the Gallo-Romans of the South. This was, as it were, a conse- 
 quence of their sympathy with the Phocaeans, who had been 
 their first instructors in the enjoyments and in the arts of civili- 
 zation. 
 
 On the other hand, the study of Latin letters being indispens- 
 able to the Narbonensian Gauls, professors of Latin grammar 
 and of eloquence speedily arose in their province. There were, 
 in the first place, some of them at Massilia itself, in all pro- 
 bability at Narbonne, and then successively in all the other 
 cities, ascending from the South toward the North. 
 
 Among the rhetoricians which flourished at Home during the 
 course of the first century of our era, several, and some of the 
 most illustrious, were Gallo-E,omans, who, in all probability, 
 had commenced their career and their fame in the cities of 
 Gallia Narbonensis. To this number belonged Votienus Mon- 
 tanus of Narbonue, whom Tacitus designates as a man cele- 
 brated for his genius; t Clodius Quirinalis, from Aries ; Satriua 
 Kufus, whose native city is unknown, and Julius Floras, whom 
 Quintilian mentions as the king of Gallic eloquence. X 
 
 Among the celebrated rhetoricians of Gaul, who never left 
 their country, history names Statins Surculus of Toulouse, the 
 schools of which he was the first to render illustrious, and Gabi- 
 nianus, who attained to an equal eminence in his profession, 
 but in what part of the country we know not. 
 
 Toward the end of the first century, Gaul was already full of 
 rhetoricians, and there were schools for the study of rhetoric in 
 every part of it. Tliis was a fact that had become proverbial 
 and to which Juvenal makes satirical allusion in many a pas- 
 
 * Strabon. Geograph. lib. iv. c. 5 : " 'Ev (5t tcj irnpovTc koI tov( -yvupt/iuTUTovc 
 'Pujxaluv TTcTcetKev, uvti tTj^ eic 'A^rjvac uTvoaTiiiiUi' iKelae (poirdv (j>i?iOfJ.a^etg ovrag' 
 opiJvrec ^£ TOVTOvg ol Va^.drai, nal u/ia dpi]VT]v ayovrtr, rf/v cxo'/'.r/v ua/jevoc Trpof.roiif 
 TOLovTQvg dcarl^evTai liiov^t oil kut' dvdpa fiovov, ilXXii kuI Srjfioaia' aocj>itjTuc yovv 
 vnodiYovrat tovc I^^v t<5'?i ■''"^f ^^ *'^ noXeig Koivrj /xia^ov/ievai, KaSdnep /cat 
 laTpov(:.'' — Ed. 
 
 t Anaal. lib. iv. c. 42, where Tacitus relates that Montanus was accused of the crime 
 of lastt majestatis against Tiberius, and, as Eusebius informs us, banished to tho 
 Baleares. Seneca mentions Montanus as a distinguished orator, and Ovid as a poet. — 
 Senec. Cont. vi. prsef. i. ix. — Ed. 
 
 i '-Isfuit Julius Florus, in eloqiieniia Galliarum, quoniam ibi demum exercuit earn, 
 princeps, alioqui inter paucos disertus et diguus ilia propinquitate."— Quint. Inst. Orat. 
 lib. X. c. 3-13 — Ed.
 
 GroBco-Rojnan Literature in Gaul. 61 
 
 eage of his satires. Says he in one of them, addressing liimself 
 to some one who wanted to make a living by his talents : 
 " "Wonldst thou derive a revenue from thy eloquence ? Then 
 go to Gaul !" * " Tlie eloquence of Athens and our own have 
 mvaded the world," says he, in another place. " Deserted 
 Gaul has furnished the isla^nd of Britannia with advocates, and 
 that of Thule already talks of engaging masters of rhetoric. "f ' 
 
 The quinquennial competitions for prizes in eloquence, wliich 
 Caligula instituted at Lyons, are another proof of the progress 
 which the study of literature had made in Gaul. It was then 
 customary to crown the pieces, which in tlie opinion of the 
 iudges, appointed to decide on their merits, had deserved this 
 honor ; but the rhetoricians, who had produced pieces which 
 were unworthy of being presented on such occasions, were 
 obliged to eftace them with their tongue. The confusion and 
 the flurry of the competitors at the moment, when such sentences 
 were pronounced, had become proverbial. " Pale like a 
 rhetorician at the altar of Lyons, says Juvenal in one of his 
 satires ; X and yet it would appear, that the rhetoricians flocked 
 around the formidable altar ! 
 
 From the second century to the end of the fourth, the 
 number of schools for the study of Latin grammar and of 
 rhetoric was constantly increasing in Gaul. At the latter 
 epoch, there was not a single city of any importance left in all 
 the southern part of the country, but what had its own institu- 
 tions of the kind. Those of Toulouse, of Bordeaux, of Nar- 
 bonne, of Yienne, and of Autun, were particularly celebrated. 
 Ausonius has left us a list of the professors, who in his day had 
 rendered themselves illustrious in those of Bordeaux, his native 
 city, and of those who, having been born in this latter city, had 
 risen to eminence in their prolession elsewhere. He enumerates 
 no less than thirty of them, among whom there were some whose 
 reputation was coextensive with that of the empire. § 
 
 The social condition of these professors is a new proof of the 
 value, which was attached to their knowledge. They were 
 elected and salaried by the curia or municipal senate of each 
 
 * ..." Accipiat te 
 
 Gallia, vel potius nutricula causidicorura 
 
 Africa, si placait mercedem poaere lingua;." — Juvenal: Satiravn. v. 148. — Ed. 
 
 •f- " Nunc totus (iraias nostrasque habet orbis Athenas. 
 Gallia causidicos docuit faeunda Britannos : 
 De conducendo loquitur jam rhetore Thule." — Satira xv. v. 111. — Ed. 
 
 j: This is done in his work entitled " Commemoratio Profes3orum Burdigaliensium," a 
 collection of twenty-six poetical compositions, of which the majority are inscribed to 
 the grammaticus, rhetor or orator, whose name the poet intended to perpetuate in his 
 verses. Compare Ausonii Opera, vol. ii. p. 230-275. — Ed. Valpy. 
 
 § " Palleat, ut nudis qui pressit calcibus anguem, 
 Aut Lugdunensem rhetor dicturus ad aram." — Satira i. v. 43. — Ed.
 
 62 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 city. In the fourth century, the salary of a professor of grammar 
 in the larger cities was equivalent to twelve thousand francs of 
 our money, and that of a professor of rhetoric was double that 
 amount. It would appear, that the decurions or municipal 
 magistrates of the cities were wont to pique themselves on 
 their liberality and on their gratitude toward the professors of 
 their choice, however small may have been their merit or 
 renown ; and they frequently erected statues in honor of them 
 during their lifetime even. 
 
 The study of Greek literature kept for some time equal pace 
 with that of Latin letters. During the whole of the first century 
 of our era, and until nearly the middle of the second, the Greek 
 continued to be generally cultivated in Gaul, ^lian, who wrote 
 during the reign of Trajan, speaking of the Gauls, and apparently 
 of the Gauls of his time, says that they had recourse to the Greek, 
 for the purpose of transmitting to posterity the memory of their 
 glorious exploits.* Dio Chrysostomus and Lucian plume 
 themselves in their writings on having visited the nations of 
 Gaul, and on having given them useful lessons in philosophy. 
 Now these lessons, which were given in Greek, coula only have 
 been imparted in places, where there was a sufficient number of 
 persons versed in the study of this language, and devoted to 
 that of philosphy besides. There is, therefore, room for be- 
 lieving, that the schools of Massilia were then still in existence, 
 and that they continued to exercise on the literary culture of 
 the Gauls a direct influence, distinct from that of Home. 
 
 At the end of the second century, Massilia was no longer 
 distinguished for anything, except for the corruption into which 
 it had sunken. It had no longer any schools — at any rate no 
 schools which were frequented by foreigners. To go to Massilia 
 had become a proverbial expression, and was tantamount to 
 abandoning one's self to vice and to effeminacy. To say of any 
 one, that he came from Massilia, was but another mode of 
 branding him with infamy. 
 
 From this moment the literature of Greece was, to the Gauls 
 as well as the Komans themselves, no longer anything more 
 than a supplement or an accessory to the Latin. Greek schools 
 for the disciplines of grammar and of rhetoric were still kept 
 up ; but they gradually decreased in number, and toward the 
 middle of the fourth century there were but a few of them 
 left in some of the principal cities only. Tlie last of these 
 Greek grammarians or rhetoricians, who are known to have 
 professed their art in Gaul, belonged to the schools of Bordeaux, 
 
 * " 'A/I2a Koi TpoTTaia iysipovcrtv, afia re etu toic nenpayf^i^voi^ aefivvfxvofievoi, Kal 
 \mouvT!^mTa uvtuv rfjc uptTrjc uTzoXelnovTeg 'E/l/l;7Vi«wf." — jEliaai Varia Historia, 
 p. US, Ed. CoT&y.—Ed.
 
 GrcBco-Roman Literature in Gaul. 63 
 
 and are of the number of those, whom Ausonius enumerates 
 among his colleagues or his masters. He mentions five or six, 
 the most distinguished of whom was a Sicilian by the name of 
 Cjtharius. He speaks of him as of one, who was the equal of 
 Aristarchus in criticism, and of Simonides in poetry ; as of a 
 man, whose lectures had converted Bordeaux into a vast athe- 
 naeum.* 
 
 Among these last professors of Greek grammar or of rhetoric, 
 who flom-ished in Gaul, there were several who had come there 
 from abroad ; as, for example, the Cytharius, whom I have just 
 named, who was native of Syracuse, and the father of the 
 panegyrist Eumenes, one of the principals of the school at 
 Autun, who was an Athenian. But it is to be presumed that 
 the majority of them were Massilians, who preserved a certain 
 tradition of the knowledge of their ancestors. 
 
 After having said so much of these schools of rhetoric and 
 grammar, both Greek and Latin, with which Gaul was covered 
 under the dominion of the Romans, it will not be superfluous 
 to call to mind briefly in what these two sciences, or these two 
 favorite arts of the Romans, consisted. 
 
 The principal object of grammar was to analyze and to 
 comment certain distinguished works, especially those of the 
 older poets, for the purpose of developing both their literal 
 sense and their aesthetic beauties, in an age when the 
 copies of books were scarce and expensive, the grammatical 
 analysis or elucidation of a work was tantamount to the act of 
 publishing it. There were many persons, whose knowledge of 
 such or such a poem, ancient or modern, was limited to what 
 they had learnt in the grammar schools from the reading and 
 the exposition of it. 
 
 Rhetoric was something higher, more complicated and more 
 artificial than grammar. It consisted of various exercises, the 
 definite aim of which was to impart to a discourse, by means of 
 its forms and its accessories, an importance, which was distinct 
 from its subject and as much as possible superior to the subject- 
 matter itself. It taught, according to Suetonius, the pertinent 
 use of suitable figures of speech, the art of expressing the same 
 thing in several diflerent or opposite ways, and always equally 
 well, always with the same degree of efi*ect; of saying better 
 
 * See the Xlllth carmen of the collection above referred to. The following arc a few 
 
 verses : 
 
 " Esset Aristarchi tibi gloria, Zenodotique, 
 
 Graiorum; antiquus si sequeretur honor. 
 
 Carminibus, quae prima tuis sunt condita in annis, 
 
 Concedit Cei Musa Simonidei. 
 ***** 
 
 Tam generis tibi celsus apex, qnam gloria fandu 
 Gloria Athenai cognita sede loci," etc. — Ed. ^
 
 64: History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 that which already passed for having been said well ; of giving 
 fables the air of truth, and to truth the air of fables ; of eulogizing 
 or of censuring great men. 
 
 The principal compositions of the rhetoricians — those in which 
 they most habitually displayed all the shifts and subtleties of 
 their art — were their controversies and their declamations. The 
 controversies were, as their name indicates, discussions, in which 
 two or several rhetoricians maintained opposite opinions on one 
 and the same question. Their declamations were studied and 
 ostentatious discourses on fanciful subjects. These declamatory 
 exercises soon became public, and constituted one of the favorite 
 amusements of the times. The effect of these discourses de- 
 pended, in a great measure, on the pomp and the art with 
 which they were delivered. We can scarcely, at present, form 
 any conception of an art like this, unless it be from the extra- 
 ordinary care, with which we know the rhetoricians to have 
 exercised their voice. They trained it to run over long oratori- 
 cal scales, from the lowest to the highest, and from the highest 
 to the lowest note of them, and they often practised these 
 exercises in inconvenient and embarrassing positions, as for 
 example, while lying on their back, \n order to acquire so much 
 the more assurance in extraordinary emergencies. 
 
 It follows from all this, that the Romans had endeavored to 
 supply, by means of the practice, the methods and a discipline 
 of the school, their natural lack of aptitude for literature and 
 eloquence. What has been the extent of their success ? This is 
 a question which I am not bound to answer ; I have to confine 
 myself to a rapid survey of the history of the different schools 
 of rhetoric and grammar in Gaul. 
 
 In consequence of the want of direct information respecting 
 the organization of these schools and the works of their most 
 prominent masters, we have but one general and vague fact, by 
 which to form a summary estimate of their doctrines and their 
 services. It must, I think, be admitted as a fact, that all the 
 more or less distinguished men of letters that appeared in Gaul 
 from the commencement of the first century of our era to the 
 end of the fourth, had received their intellectual training in 
 these schools. They may, therefore, be considered as being 
 their result ; and from the general character of the works of the 
 one we may form a tolerably correct idea of the doctrines pro- 
 fessed in the other. Finally, the progress and the revolutions 
 of these schools must, to a certain extent, have been marked by 
 corresponding differences or inequalities among the writers 
 who went forth from them. 
 
 Now, the writers in question are very numerous, and of 
 various kinds ;»they are orators, historians, and poets, the ma-
 
 G-ro&co-Roman IMm^ature in Gaul. 65 
 
 jority of whom are ranked among the most distinguished of their 
 respective epochs. Trogus Pompeius, from the country of the 
 Yocontii, was the most learned liistorian of his time ; Domitius 
 Afer, from Nirnes, was considered the first orator of Rome, 
 at a time wlien the Forum was still full of men of the finest 
 genius ; * at a somewhat later period, Marcus Aper and Julius 
 Secundus, both of them interlocutors in the celebrated dia- 
 logue, attributed to Quintilian, " On the causes of the corrup- 
 tion of eloquence," were likewise numbered among the most 
 distinguished members of the bar. The ingenious satirist, 
 Petronius, to whom we are indebted for so lively and 
 
 Eiquaut a picture of the manners of the Romans during the 
 rst century of our era, may be included in the number of 
 the Latin writers who had been educated in Gaul, The mul- 
 tiplication of these writers was proportionate to that of the 
 Gallic schools of grammar and of rhetoric. In the fourth cen- 
 tury, Gaul was the most flourishing seat of Latin literature. 
 The rhetoricians, who are the panegyrists of the emperors 
 Maximianus, Constantius, of Constantine and Julian, are all, or 
 the majority of them, Gauls. Ausonius of Bordeaux is one of 
 the most polished intellects, and Sulpicius Severus the most 
 elegant of the Christian writers of this epoch. 
 
 All these writers had undoubtedly lost much of the taste, the 
 vigor and the gravity of those of the preceding centuries. But 
 what was really wanting to them was neither zeal, nor know- 
 ledge, nor talent ; it was rather the previous state of things, 
 which had been consigned to irreparable ruin ; it was the glory 
 and the liberty of former times. Such as they were, however, 
 these men were the product and the evidence of a highly re- 
 fined and a very extensive intellectual culture. 
 
 At this same epoch, that is to say, during the fourth century, 
 when Massilia and all the other Greek cities of Gaul had be- 
 come subject to the dominion of the Romans, the Latin lan- 
 guage must have introduced itself there together with that 
 dominion. Nevertheless, the majority of their inhabitants 
 were still Greeks, and retained their ancient idiom. It is there- 
 fore extremely probable, that these cities had not yet entirely 
 renounced their native literature ; but history does not furnish 
 us any very definite notions on this point. The only piece, 
 which I could quote in sujjport of my assertion, would perhaps 
 prove still more conclusively, to what an extent the genius of 
 Greece had then declined among the descendants of the ancient 
 
 * On these orators see Quint. Inst. Orat. lib. x. c. i. p. 118 : " Sunt alii multi diserti, 
 quos persequi longum est : eorum, quos viderim, Domitius Afer et Julius Africanus 
 longe prsestantissiini : arts ille et toto genera dicendi pra;ferendu3, et quem. in numero 
 vetcrum locare non iimeas," etc. On Julius Secundus, compare id. p. I'iO-Ud Ed.
 
 66 Mistory of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 Massilians. It bears the title of Monody, and is a funeral 
 eulogy on Constantino the younger, the brother of Constantino 
 the Great. This young man was assassinated in 311, in the 
 vicinity of the Pyrenees, at the moment when he was about to 
 enter Spain, for the purpose of marrying a young Spanish lady, 
 who had been affianced to him. This murder, which was im- 
 puted to several different persons, and to the great Constantine 
 himself, was a source of great affliction to the inhabitants of 
 Aries, whom, it seems, the prince had inspired witli a great 
 affection. Some rhetorician of the country composed his fune- 
 ral oration. It is but a short and cold declamation, the w^ork 
 of a schoolboy, in which pagan reminiscences and Christian 
 ideas are strangely jumbled up together from one end to the 
 other. 
 
 If, however, this piece was pronounced, as we may be per- 
 mitted to suppose, before the people of Aries on a solemn pub- 
 lic occasion in honor of the deceased prince, it offers us a 
 certain historical interest as an evidence of the fact, that in the 
 fourth century the Greek was still the language of a great part 
 of the Arelatenses ; and a fortiori it must have still been in use 
 at Massilia, at Nicaja, at Antipolis, and in the other cities of Pho- 
 csean origin. 
 
 The literary culture of the Gauls, as I have just now repre- 
 sented it, was a laborious and a refined culture ; it was that of 
 the higher classes of society, of those who had an eye to public 
 honors or to fame. Of all this intellectual light, the masses of 
 the people received nothing more than isolated reflections, 
 which fell from far too high a region to have any great effect 
 on them. But the civilization and the arts of Greece and Rome 
 had a num.ber of material and sensuous sides, by which they 
 must have produced a strong effect on the masses of the popu- 
 lation, into the midst of which they were transplanted. 
 
 I have already elsewhere noticed the facility, with which the 
 Gallic tribes in the vicinity of Massilia took to the pompous 
 gaiety of the religious ceremonies of Greece ; they likewise 
 took to all the various applications of poetry, to the festivals 
 and the habits of domestic life, to the public amusements, to 
 the expression of natural sentiments. The Romans, and more 
 especially the Greeks, had their popular songs for all the 
 usages of society, and I had almost said for every moment of 
 their life. Their most familiar diversions had something pic- 
 turesque and poetical in them. Tlie majority of their popular 
 choruses and of their danses were, like the choruses of their re- 
 ligious festivals, short dramas, in which the poetic word, the 
 music and the mimic art conspired to contribute to the mate- 
 rial representation of an idea, in imitation of some captivating
 
 €rrc&co-12oman Literature m GauL 67 
 
 or some touching adventure. The songs of the night and the 
 epithalamia belonged likewise to the popular class of poetry. 
 
 The lovei^ were m the habit of going beneath the windows 
 of their mistresses by night, for the purpose of singing to them 
 their songs, which assumed various names and a different cha- 
 racter according to the time at which they were sung, which 
 was commonly at midnight or at the break of day?* With all 
 these domestic usages, the Gauls of the South adopted the poe- 
 try which was associated with them, and which constituted 
 their principal charm. Of this we shall find proofs when we 
 shall come to examine certain kinds of poetry composed by the 
 Troubadours, in which we shall recognize traditions of the an- 
 cient poetry, modified in conformity with the spirit of chivalric 
 gallantry. The poems of Homer even became popular among 
 the Gauls of the South, who were made familiar with them either 
 through the recitations of the Massilian rhapsodists or through 
 the Greek instruction given in the schools of grammar or of 
 rhetoric. This is anotlier fact, the certainty of which we shall 
 likewise see established hereafter. 
 
 With this general al acrity on the part of the Gallic people, 
 to adopt from the culture of the Greeks and Romans whatever 
 there was striking or picturesque in it, or whatever was calcu- 
 lated to move their senses, their imagination, or their curiosity, 
 it was impossible, that the dramatic representations and all the 
 other kinds of ancient spectacles should not have likewise pro- 
 duced an equally great effect upon the Gauls. I have already 
 advanced it as very probable, that the Massilians had a theatre. 
 It is at least certain that several of their colonies, among others 
 Nice and Antibes, had one. Inscriptions have been found at 
 Nimes, which likewise attest the existence of a Greek theatre 
 in that city ; and this fact can hardly be explained in any other 
 way than as a consequence of the dominion of the Massilians 
 in the country, of which Nimes was the capital ; but whether 
 this was in accordance with the wishes or the usage of the 
 Massilians, or in spite of them and by way of exception to 
 their discipline, it is nevertheless certain that Greek theatres 
 did exist in southern Gaul, in which Greek pieces of some sort 
 must have been performed, precisely as pieces in the Latin lan- 
 guage were played at Karbonne, at Aries, at Vienne, at Lyon, 
 and in all the other cities, where there were Roman theatres. 
 It may therefore be considered as a settled fact, that there 
 v/ere dramatic representations, as there were other branches of 
 literature and of the arts. The influence of these representa- 
 tions on the manners and the culture of the Gauls must 
 have been, especially in the beginning, a Greek as much as it 
 was a Roman influence.
 
 68 History of Frovengal Poetry. 
 
 Tlie dramatic poetry of the Greeks had not long continued 
 in the original and majestic ensemble of its primitive forms; it 
 had soon become corrupted and disintegrated by a multitude 
 of causes, first in Greece itself, and through the fault of the 
 Greeks ; at a somcAvhat later date at Eome, and through the 
 vices of the Romans. 
 
 The general history of literature and of the arts could not 
 exhibit anything more interesting and more curious than the 
 picture of those revolutions in the dramatic art of classical an- 
 tiquity ; but I can only notice here the principal results of 
 those revolutions, and with the simple view of pointing out 
 their long-protracted influence on the manners and the culture 
 of the Middle Age. 
 
 The two grand forms of theatrical composition, tragedy and 
 comedy, had long before our era been scarcely cultivated or 
 represented anywhere ; they had gradually decomposed them- 
 selves into a multitude of smaller varieties, which had taken 
 their place, and which were nothing more than a shadow or a, 
 parody of the former. 
 
 The mimej which was the oldest, the most elevated and the 
 most popular of these secondary dramatic forms, admitted of 
 all sorts of arguments, serious and comic, graceful and bur- 
 lesque. The lysiodie^ the hilarodie, and the vnagodie were 
 other varieties of shorter dramas, still simpler than the mime. 
 The two first appear to have been nothing more than the brief- 
 est possible imitation of an action, ordinarily a serious one, 
 which was represented by a single actor, accompanied in his 
 performance by one or two instruments, and playing in the 
 costume of a man the personages of both sexes, which concurred 
 in the action. The magodie was likewise acted by a single 
 histrio, who was, however, dressed like a woman, and the 
 action turned most frequently on burlesque scenes from the life 
 of persons from the lower orders of society, or on the ordinary 
 adventures of courtesans. This species of the drama was, there- 
 fore, on an extremely limited ground, an exaggeration of the 
 licenses of comedy, as the two former were a contraction of 
 tragedy. 
 
 Degenerated or mutilated as tliese compositions were, they 
 had, nevertheless, some points in common with the ancient 
 master-works of art ; they preserved some impress of the genius 
 of the Greeks. 
 
 In all of them the imitation was cifccted by the concurrence 
 of the words, the music and the dance. Easy as it had been 
 made in all these little dramas, this association of three distinct 
 arts, for the production of a single and individual eftect, was 
 nevertheless an obstacle to the greatest attainable popularity
 
 GrcBGO- Roman Literature in Gaul. 69 
 
 of these dramatic amussments. This obstacle was removed ; 
 dramas of every kind and of every dimension were composed, 
 in which the picturesque gesticulation or the dance was em- 
 ployed as the only means of imitation. From that time the art 
 of characterizing solely by motions and gestures, even to the 
 most delicate miances, the most accidental modifications of pas- 
 sion, assumed developments and an importance, of which it 
 would be difficult to form any conception at present. 
 
 All these inventions, all these little varieties of the drama 
 had passed successively from the Greeks to the Romans, and 
 the latter had often confounded them under the vague and col- 
 lective denomination of mimes. Now, it was the ordinary lot 
 of the inventions of Greece to lose their primitive simplicity 
 and innocence, or to deteriorate still worse, after they had 
 been transplanted among the Romans. The immense riches of 
 the Romans furnished them with the means of pushing their 
 vices into monstrosities. The mimes and other dramatic 
 sports were among them carried to an excess, where, in order 
 to pique the curiosity of the spectators, it became necessary to 
 add the obscenity of speech to that of the action, and to con- 
 vert into a reality before their very eyes, whatever impurity 
 the imagination had only been accustomed to conceive. 
 
 By an excess of another kind, and still more odious, they hit 
 upon the idea of taking advantage of the execution of criminals, 
 in order to add a little variety to their theatrical emotions. 
 They had pieces composed expressly for the purpose of intrO' 
 ducing or embodying, either in the shape of incident, or as 
 the catastrophe— the punishment of the condemned. One exam- 
 
 Ele of the kind will answer our purpose. Some wretch or other 
 ad been arrested and condemned to death for having commit- 
 ted highway robbery in Sicily, on Mount ^tna, or in its vici- 
 nity. His adventure was dramatized, and a mountain was con- 
 structed on the stage to represent, as well as could be done. Mount 
 ^tna, with its crater and its ravines. The dhiouonent was a 
 picturesque one : the criminal was precipitated into the abyss ! 
 
 In short, the more these theatrical representations degene- 
 rated, the less could the Romans dispense with them. They 
 finally introduced them as domestic amusements into their pri^ 
 vate habitations. There was no family fete, no banquet without 
 some sort of dramatic diversion, without some pantomime, some 
 dance or musical performance. " There are now," says Seneca, 
 " more singers at our feasts than there were formerly spectators 
 in our theatres."* Everjr house of any pretension to wealth had 
 
 * Luc. Ann. Senecae Epistola Ixxxiv. : " In comessationibus nostris plus cantorura 
 (fist, quam in theatris olim spectatorum fuit." Where, however, several editors insist ou 
 reading commisHonibtis, to wliicj^i they attribute the seuse ,of our fljodern cojicerte^-^ 
 JEd,
 
 f 
 
 TO History of ProveTigal Poetry. 
 
 its private stage, wliich was daily frequented by some itinerant 
 artists, by liistrions, by elegant female dancers, by skillful play- 
 ers on the lyre or the flute. 
 
 The theatrical representations of the provinces were probably 
 not carried to the same degree or to the same refinement of cor- 
 ruption, as were those at Rome ; but they pursued the same 
 course, and they experienced the same revolutions, and these 
 revolutions superinduced analogous results. Thus, for example, 
 the dramatic spectacles of Gaul, during the fourth and fifth cen- 
 turies, difi'ered in no essential respect from those of Rome or 
 Italy. The remarks or the hints of the contemporary ecclesi- 
 astical writers respecting them are sufiicient proof, that they 
 were neither less degenerate nor less popular. The ruins of 
 Roman theatres are rare enough at the present time in France ; 
 but there undoubtedly existed many theatres in Gaul, of which 
 no longer any vestiges are left, and everything authorizes us 
 to believe, that there was scarcely a province in which drama- 
 tic representations were not known. 
 
 It appears, however, that the mania for the elaborate refine- 
 ments of the saltation or the imitative dance did not penetrate 
 very far into the north of Gaul. The Emperor Julian gives us 
 an account of a man from Cappadocia, who, having been obliged 
 to flee from his country, became the leader of a company of 
 strolling dancers or mimes, with which he went into Gaul. He 
 produced them at the theatre of Paris— a circumstance, from 
 which we learn, that there was such an establishment there at 
 that epoch. It was the first time that artists of this description 
 were seen there. They were taken for fools and hooted, to the 
 great delight of Julian, who did not like those inventions of 
 civilizatiun, which contributed to the enervation of the soul. 
 The case was a very diflercnt one in the cities of the South. It 
 was customary there to erect monuments in honor of those, who 
 distinguished themselves in this art of saltation, which had be- 
 come the first of the dramatic arts. The ruins of the theatre at 
 Antibos contained an inscription in honor of Septentrio, a 
 young man of fifteen, who, after having appeared twice in suc- 
 cession, and with great success, in this theatre, had died, proba- 
 bly in consequence of the efi'orts he had made to merit this 
 success. 
 
 These remarks on the passion of the Gauls for theatrical 
 representations will easily account for the avidity, with which 
 they hankered after other representations, still more calculated 
 to move an unpolished or a vitiated nniltitude ; I refer to those 
 of the amphitheatre. Tlie ruins of these amphitheatres are at 
 present much more numerous in France than those of the thea- 
 tres. It is a proof that the combats of gladiators and with wild
 
 Gr(BCO-Roman Literature in Gaul. Yl 
 
 beasts were more general and frequent even than tlie amuse- 
 ments of the stage. 
 
 To complete this perhaps too rapid stretch of the Gallo- 
 Koman civilization, I ought, perhaps, to speak of the other arts 
 of the Romans, particularly of their architecture, and of the 
 magnificent monuments with which they covered the soil of 
 Gaul. But the results, at which I might arrive, would be too 
 remotely connected with the ulterior object of my researches. 
 I shall therefore limit myself to a few observations on this 
 point, such as will naturally link themselves to the general sub- 
 ject of this outline. 
 
 Among the prominent monuments of architecture, erected in 
 Gaul under the dominion of the Komans, there were some, as 
 for example, the temple at Nimes, generally known under the 
 name of the maison carree, or the square house, which were ' 
 purely Grecian in their conception and their style, and must > 
 be regarded as the work of Greek artists, as must also the tem- 
 ples and other monuments of the Phocsean cities. The amphi- 
 theatres, the basilicas, the majority of theatres, and the trium- 
 phal arches were monuments of Roman design and workmanship; 
 but they required decorations, paintings, and statuary, for the 
 execution of which the Romans generally employed Greek 
 artists. The supposition is a natural one, that several, perhaps 
 even the majority, of these artists were Greeks of the vicinity 
 or of the country, or in other words, Massilians. This being 
 the case, the latter would have exercised an equally important 
 influence on the art of Gaul, as we have seen them exercising 
 on its literary culture. 
 
 But whether it was by Massilians or by others, certain it is, 
 that numerous monuments of Grecian art were reared in Gaul, 
 by the side of the monuments of Roman art. Some facts would 
 even lead to the presumption, that several of these monuments 
 were of a far superior order to what we are generally inclined 
 to imagine. We know, for example, from the testimony of 
 Pliny, that a Greek statuary by the name of Zenodorus, whose 
 native country is not known, and who was perhaps one of the 
 many unknown Massilian artists, had executed for a temple in 
 the capital of the Arverni (which has since received the name 
 o^Clermont), a colossal statue of Mercury in bronze. This sta- 
 tue, of one hundred and twenty feet in height, passed for one of 
 the wonders of art at an epoch, when art had still retained 
 much of its primitive grandeur. The fame which the artist 
 acquired by this work procured him a call to Rome, where he 
 was to cast a colossal statue of Nero.* Now, if such a work 
 
 ♦ Pliny : Nat. Hist. lib. xzxiv. c. 18 — Ed.
 
 \ 
 
 72 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 adorned a city like that of the Arvemi, which occupied but a 
 secondary place among the cities of Gaul, is it not natural to 
 suppose, that works of a still more elevated kind must have em- 
 bellished the cities of the first order, such as Narbonne, Treves, 
 Toulouse, Vienne and Lyons? 
 
 To these indications it would be easy to add a multitude of 
 others; but this is not essential to my object. I think I have 
 said enough to establish the general fact, in respect to art as 
 well as in respect to literature, that the influence, under which 
 the Gauls acquired their civilization, was a mixed one, partly 
 Greek and partly Roman. 
 
 If now we wish to reduce the foregoing facts or views to a 
 small number of primary results, we must transport ourselves 
 to the end of the fourth century, that being the epoch, at which 
 the culture of the Gallo-Romans had attained to its highest de- 
 velopment and its most .extensive diffusion. 
 
 The primitive population of Gaul was composed of at least 
 three distinct national bodies, different in their origin, their 
 language, their institutions and their manners. Csesar had 
 designated these three nations by the names of the Aquitani, 
 the Celtse and the Belgse. Each of them was subdivided 
 into a multitude of independent tribes or hordes, having no 
 fixed bond of union among themselves, always in motion, 
 always at war with each other, ever ready to follow the first 
 chief who offered to conduct them to the pillage of foreign 
 countries, constantly menacing the existence and the peace of 
 the civilized portion of mankind, which was at that time as yet 
 very small. 
 
 By the end of the fourth century, these three nations and their 
 numerous subsidiary tribes had merged themselves into a single 
 compact mass, subdued into civilization, having the same poli- 
 tical interest, the same government, the same civil laws, the 
 same municipal administration, the same arts, the same intellec- 
 tual culture, and deriving all this from Rome or from Greece, 
 either directly or through the intermediate agency of Rome. 
 The Latin had become the language of the great majority, and 
 an additional bond of union oetween the different races, of 
 which this new nationality was composed. But in some moun- 
 tainous districts, or in such as were remote from the highways 
 of communication, the descendants of the ancient tribes had 
 still preserved their original idioms; so that the three primitive 
 languages of Gaul — that of the Aquitanians, that of the Celts 
 and that of the Belgians — were still spoken in various places. 
 
 History offers us no longer any vestige of the remains of 
 Druidism at the epoch of which we are now speaking. The 
 large majority of the Gallo-Romans professed Christianity, in-
 
 GrcBCO-Eoman Literature in Gaul. Y3 
 
 termingling it, indeed, with many superstitions and customs 
 which were derived from paganism ; but from the Grseco- 
 Roman paganism, and not from the Gallic. Thus the two 
 religions at that time coexistent in Gaul, the one in its decline 
 and near extinction, the other already dominant, were equally 
 the results of Graeco-Roman influences. 
 
 The Bards had disappeared, together with the Druids, and 
 with the former every reminiscence of the ancient national 
 poetry had become extinct. To find some feeble echo, some 
 vague tradition of this poetry, we would have to go to the 
 bardic songs of the insular Britons, to the fragments of the 
 Irish and the Gaelic bards, to look for it. By the close of the 
 fourth century there was no longer any trace of it in Gaul ; it 
 had long been supplanted there by the Graeco-Roman literature, 
 of which I have just taken a cursory survey. 
 
 There is every reason to believe, that the mythological or 
 
 Eoetical traditions respecting the origin of the Gauls and Celts 
 ad perished, together with the Druids and the Bards. Fables 
 invented to please had taken their place. Not satisfied with 
 being Romans by adoption and by their institutions, the Gallo- 
 Romans had arrived at the point, where they could plume them- 
 selves on being so by origin. Such were the pretensions of the 
 Arverni, who called themselves the brothers of the inhabitants 
 of Latium. Others, as, for example, the Aquitanians, had 
 found it more glorious to give themselves a Greek descent. 
 Who can affirm, that these infantile fabrications of Graeco-Ro- 
 man vanity have not deprived history of some important data 
 respecting the origin of the aboriginal tribes of Gaul? 
 
 From the united testimony of these facts, and from the con- 
 siderations connected with them, it will appear, I hope, suffi- 
 ciently evident, that at the end of the fourth century, Gaul was 
 as different as possible from what it had been before the Roman 
 conquest ; that it had become Roman in everything that con- 
 stitutes and characterizes a nation. I do not know whether 
 history offers us another example of so complete a change pro- 
 duced by conquest. 
 
 Nevertheless, to whatever extent the culture and the civiliza- 
 tion of the Romans may have preponderated in Gaul, it appears, 
 that at the bottom of the Gallic or of the Celtic character there 
 always remained a certain individual something, which was not 
 Roman, and which refused to become so. Of this I shall have 
 to give some curious proofs hereafter.
 
 74: History of Provengal Poeti-y. 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 THE SOUTH OF FE^lNCE UNDER THE BAKBAEIiLNS. 
 
 This Gallo-Roman civilization, of wlncli I have just drawn a 
 picture, contained in itself the germs of decadence, or rather, it 
 had already deteriorated very greatly. The means and the 
 chances of a regeneration were perhaps the only resources that 
 were left to it. But the Barbarians were at hand to eliminate 
 all these chances. 
 
 It is not necessary for me to describe the long and fatal strug- 
 gle, in the course of which the Germanic tribes occupied coun- 
 try after country, until they had subjugated the whole of the 
 "Western Empire. It will be sufficient to call to mind in a few 
 words the results of this struggle, as far as they relate to Gaul. 
 Toward the year -il-i this country was entered by the Yisigoths, 
 under the conduct of Ataulphe, the brother-in-law and the 
 successor of Alaric the Great. They established themselves 
 between the Rhone and the Pyrenees, from whence they gradu- 
 ally pushed their conquests as far as the confines of the Loire. 
 Soon after came the Burgundians, who, from the vicinity of the 
 Yosges descended by degrees as far as the right banks of the 
 Durance, and appropriated all the eastern part of Gaul. Several 
 of the provinces of the JSTorth had remained subject to Roman 
 chiefs, and were still regarded as dependent on the empire. 
 But the Frankish tribes, who had long been encamped in the 
 northwest of Belgium, descended to the banks of the Aisne 
 under the command of their young chief Clovis, defeated the 
 Gallo-Romans, and made themselves masters of all their terri- 
 tory as far as the frontiers of the Yisigoths and the Burgun- 
 dians. 
 
 Henceforward the sole possessors of Gaul, the three barba- 
 rian nations, which had come to conquer each a portion of it, 
 began to make war upon each other, in order to decide the 
 question as to which of them the whole was to belong. The 
 last comers, the Franks, were the successful combatants ; they 
 extended their dominion over the whole of Gaul, with the ex- 
 ception of the narrow strip of land included between the
 
 The South of France under the Bo/rbarians. 75 
 
 Cevennes and tlie Mediterranean, -wliicli remained in tlie pos- 
 session of the Visigoths. The events which led to this result 
 comprised an interval of nearly a hundred and thirty years, 
 during which the Gauls had to suffer from invasions, from wars 
 and from political confusions, nearly all that a human society 
 can suffer without being absolutely anihilated. 
 
 It would seem, that in the midst of such long-protracted dis- 
 asters every vestige of Roman civilization should have disap- 
 peared from Gaul. But this was not the case. The Barbarians 
 had no formal design of destroying anything that Rome had 
 created. All that they wanted was to rule in her place, and as 
 far as they were able and knew how, to rule like her, by the 
 same means and with the same forms. They left to the van- 
 quished their religion, their cultus, their language, their civil 
 laws, their municipal government, their arts and their usages of 
 every description. They did more than this ; they became con- 
 verted to Christianity, and thereby submitted to the influence of 
 the clergy, which was at that time the most enlightened and 
 the most powerful class among the vanquished, and the one 
 which was most interested in the maintenance of the ideas and 
 the institutions of the empire. Tlius the fall of the Gallo-Roman 
 civilization was not indeed prevented, but at any rate somewhat 
 retarded. 
 
 In the midst of all the calamities of the fifth century, the 
 Gallo-Romans still preserved the same intellectual culture 
 which they had exhibited in the preceding century. They cul- 
 tivated the same sciences, the same arts, and they cultivated 
 them with the same aptitude and the same ardor. Only the 
 circumstances were much more unfavorable ; and this differ- 
 ence manifested itself in the results. Grammar and rhetoric con- 
 tinued to be the favorite studies of this sorrowful epoch ; but as 
 the empire lost, and the Barbarians gained advantages and 
 ground, the means as well as the motives for devoting them- 
 selves to these studies diminished in proportion. After the 
 middle of the century, the larger cities of the South were almost 
 the only places where schools of grammar or of rhetoric were 
 left. Those of Narbonne, of Toulouse, of Bordeaux, of Aries, of 
 Yienne and of Lyons, less flourishing, doubtless, than during 
 the previous epochs, still continued to maintain themselves un- 
 der the dominion of the Barbarians. Other cities, of less note 
 and power, clubbed together to support a professor in com- 
 mon, who divided his time and his instruction between them. 
 This policy was adopted by those of Agen and of Perigueux, 
 among others. 
 
 The Arverni began to have schools toward the middle of the 
 fifth century. This epoch may be regarded as the term at
 
 76 History of Provengal Poei/ry. 
 
 which the Roman impulsion ceased to influence the literature 
 of Gaul. 
 
 At the head of several of the schools which I have mentioned, 
 there were professors who passed for prodigies of eloquence and 
 talent; such were Sapaudus at Yienne, Lampridius at Bor- 
 deaux, Leo at Narbonne. 
 
 As to philosophy, we cannot suppose it to have been very 
 flourishing in Gaul at the epoch in question ; and yet we here 
 and there perceive better indications of philosophic life and 
 curiosity than during the preceding century. It appears that 
 the opposite doctrines, which have since been designated by the 
 names of Materialism and of Spiritualism, came then into fre- 
 quent and violent collision, and that they in fact divided Gallo- 
 Roman society — a circumstance from which we have reason to 
 conclude, that each of them had its separate schools. 
 
 But we are almost entirely ignorant of these schools ; we 
 know neither their professors nor their disciples, nor even the 
 places in which they were established. There is but one of 
 them on which we can say a few words, on the authority of 
 Sidonius Apollinaris, who had frequented it in his youth. It is 
 the one at Vienne. Toward the commencement of the fifth cen- 
 tury, a Greek by the name of Eusebius had taught there, pro- 
 bably in Greek, the categories and the ethics of Aristotle. At 
 a somewhat later date, it was distinguished for a man, who is 
 better known than the former; and this man was Claudian 
 Mamert, brother to Mamert the bishop of Vienne. He has 
 left several works, the most remarkable of which is a treatise 
 in three books. On the nature of the soul* He there proposes 
 to demonstrate the immateriality of this substance, in opposition 
 to the opinion of those who regard it as something inherent in 
 the organs of the body, and as constituting nothing more than 
 a certain state or modification of these organs. He employs for 
 this purpose several purely metaphysical arguments, which he 
 pretends to have borrowed from the ancient Pythagorean phi- 
 losophers. 
 
 It was with poetry, as it was with eloquence and with philo- 
 sophy ; it still continued to be cultivated, and the only question 
 would be, to know with what degree of merit and success. 
 Many verses were made of every kind and on every subject; 
 odes, comedies, tragedies and satires were composed. But 
 more than ever, the poetic talent had ceased to be a special 
 talent, having its root in some individual peculiarity inherent 
 in the imagination and the sensibility of the poet. It was no 
 longer anything more than a general savoirfaire or knowing 
 
 • This may be found in Migne's " Patrologije Cursus Completus," vol. 53, under tho 
 title of " Mamerti Claudiani Fresbyteri VienneuBia De statu auimaj libri XvQs."^Ed.
 
 The South of France imder the Barbarians. 77 
 
 how, a conventional complement to all literary and scientific 
 culture. The most renowned rhetoricians, grammarians and 
 lawyers had also the reputation of being the best poets. The 
 Leo of ]S[arbonne, whom I have already mentioned as the 
 Cicero of his epoch, was its Yirgil into the bargain. Lampri- 
 dius of Bordeaux, a famous professor of rhetoric and eloquence, 
 passed for no less a famous poet. 
 
 We have no longer any of the works of these poets to com- 
 pare them with their ancient fame. "We may, if we choose, 
 suppose them to be superior in several respects to other con- 
 temporary productions which have come down to us ; but it is 
 scarcely probable, that they had much more imagination or ori- 
 ginality than the latter. The genius of the Eomans had never 
 been purely and frankly poetical, not even in its youth or in 
 the vigor of its manhood ; and these its last eflbrts were but 
 a tedious exaggeration of its primitive defects. We may be 
 permitted to regret the loss of the poetic master-works of the 
 fifth century on account of the infinite variety of characteristic 
 traits, which we would undoubtedly find in them, concerning 
 the men, the events and the manners of this singularly curious 
 and too little known epoch. The loss may therefore be a serious 
 one to history, but certainly not to poetry. 
 
 Sidonius Apollinaris was perhaps the greatest genius of 
 his age, and the last of those writers, who in spite of their 
 defects, nevertheless belong to classical antiquity. Sidonius 
 was from Lyons, and of one of the most illustrious families of 
 the times. His father, Apollinaris, had been prefect of the 
 prsetorium of the Gauls. He married very young, Papianilla, 
 the daughter of Avitus, one of the most prominent men in the 
 province of the Arverni, who, after having been master of the 
 cavalry, was elevated to the rank of emperor, by an intrigue 
 which was half Gallic and half Visigothic. Sidonius, now the 
 son-in-law of an emperor, found himself naturally thrown into 
 the career of ambition and of honors. Involved in the rapid 
 fall of his father-in-law, he entered very largely into a Gallic 
 conspiracy against the emperor Majorian — a conspiracy of 
 which Lyons was the centre. This city however was besieged 
 and taken, and the defeated conspirators dispersed in every 
 direction. Sidonius obtained his pardon by a pompous pane- 
 gyric on Majorian, in which he celebrates, in perhaps a some- 
 what dastardly manner, the victory which the emperor had 
 gained over himself, his friends and fellow-citizens. Some time 
 after, another panegyric on the emperor Anthemius, gained 
 him the dignity of prefect of Kome, which was the second in 
 Italy. Toward the year 472, he was nominated bishop of the 
 church of the Arverni, and he exhibited in this new capacity a
 
 78 History of Provencal Poetry* 
 
 force and dignity of character, of wbicli no one, wlio was 
 acquainted with his previous conduct, would have thought him 
 capable. 
 
 8idonius has left us compositions in prose and verse. Of his 
 verses I shall say nothing; they are only remarkable for their 
 stiffness, their obscurity, their bombast, and for their monoto- 
 nous and pedantic abuse of the fictions of Grecian mythology. 
 But his letters form an extremely interesting collection.* These 
 are full of invaluable information on the principal personages, 
 and on the prominent events of the epoch. The historians 
 have turned them to great advantage ; they have not, however, 
 as yet availed themselves of all the facts, which they are capable 
 of contributing to our knowledge of Gaul during the second 
 half of the fifth century. In a literary point of view, they are 
 a brilliant reflex of the spirit and of the taste of their century. 
 The style of this period is still very refined, but it also exhibits 
 a rapid tendency to a fastidious minuteness and to mannerism. 
 "We everywhere perceive a vast deal of care and labor bestowed 
 on affecting talent, and on giving a pedantic and pretentious 
 tone to serious and noble sentiments. 
 
 I shall quote, as a specimen of the eloquence of Sidonius 
 ApoUinaris, one of his most interesting letters. Its subject is 
 as follows : Toward the year 470, the war between Nepos, the 
 emperor of the West, and Euric, the king of the Visigoths, 
 had broken out. The latter, who coveted the fine province of 
 Auvergne, made several incursions into it for the purpose of 
 effecting its conquest, and in 474 besieged the city of Clermont. 
 Sidonius ApoUinaris had recently been elected bishop of that 
 city. He exhorted the inhabitants to defend themselves 
 bravely, and his brother-in-law Ekdikius, wlio commanded 
 them, accomplished prodigies of audacity and valor, which 
 compelled the Visigoths to raise the siege. But scarcely had 
 the Arverni been delivered from their enemies, when they 
 learnt to their surprise that a peace had been concluded between 
 Euric and the emperor, and that the cession of Auvergne to the 
 Visigoths was one of the conditions of this peace. It was then, 
 that Sidonius, overcome with grief and indignation, addressed 
 the following letter to Grsecus, the Bishop of Marseilles, who 
 was one of the three bishops that had negotiated the peace : 
 
 "The regular bearer of my letters, Amantius, is going to 
 /'regain his port Marseilles (at least, if the passage be a favora- 
 ble one), carrying with him, as usually, the little booty he has 
 
 '• * Sidonius has left us nine books of letters, addressed to various distinguished contem- 
 poraries of his, and a number of lyrical compositions, some of which he terms Carmina 
 and others Panegyrici. Among the printed editions are that of Sirmond, Paris, 1614, 
 and that of Migue, in his Patrol. Curs. Compl.— £d.
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. 79 
 
 made here.* I should seize this opportunity of having a gay 
 chat with you, if it were possible to occupy one's self with 
 gaieties, when one is under the visitations of adversity. ISTow 
 this is precisely our condition in this degraded corner of the 
 land, which, if the report speaks true, will be still more unfor- 
 tunate in consequence of the peace, than it had been during the 
 war. We are required to pay for the liberty of another by our 
 own servitude ; by the servitude of the Arverni ; alas ! of the 
 same Arverni, who anciently were bold enough to call them- 
 selves the brothers of the Latins, and the descendants of the 
 Trojans ! who in our own day have repelled by their own forces 
 the attacks of public enemies, and who frequently, when be- 
 leagured by the Goths, so far from trembling Avithin their walls, 
 have made their adversaries tremble in their camps. 
 
 " They are the same Arverni, who, whenever it was required 
 to face the Barbarians of their vicinity, have at the same time 
 been both generals and soldiers. In the vicissitudes of these 
 wars, you have reaped all the fruit of the success, and they all 
 the disasters of the reverses. They are the men, who, in their 
 zeal for the public good, have not hesitated to surrender to the 
 
 * This is the seventh epistle of Book VII., of -which the original is as follows : " Sidonius 
 domino Papa Grceco Salutem. Ecce iterum Amantiusnugigerulus noster Massiliam suam 
 repetit, aliquid, ut moris est, de manubiis civitatis domura reportaturus, si tamen aut cata- 
 plusarriserit. Per quem joculariter plura garrirera, si pariter unus idemque valeret 
 animus exercere teta, et tristia sustiaere. Siquidem nostri hie nunc est infelicis anguli 
 status : cujus, ut faraa confirmat, melior fuit sub bello, quam sub pace conditio. Facta 
 est servitus nostra pretium securitatis alienje. Arvernorum, proh dolor ! servitus, qui, 
 si prisca replicarentur, audebantse quondam fratres Latio dicere, et sanguine ab Iliaco 
 populos coraputare ; si recentia memorabuntur, ii sunt, qui viribus propriis hostium 
 publicorum arma remorati sunt. Cui saspe populo Gothus non fuit clauso intra moenia 
 formidini, cum vicissim ipse fleret oppugnatoribus positis intra castra terrori. Hi sunt, 
 qui sibi adversus vicinorum aciem tam duces fuere, quam milites. De quorum tamen 
 sorte certaminum, si quid prosperum cessit. vos secunda solata sunt : si quid contrarium, 
 illos adversa fregerunt. llli amore rei publico Seronatum, barbaris provincias propin- 
 antem, non timuere legibus tradere ; quem convictum deinceps respublica vix 
 proesumpsit occidere. Hoccine meruerunt inopia, flamnia, ferrum, pestilentia, pingues 
 caedibus gladii, et macri jejuniis pra;liatores? Propter hujus tamen inclytaj pacis expec- 
 tationem avulsas muralibus rimis herbas in cibum traximus : crebro per ignorantiara 
 venenatis graminibus infecti, quoe indiscretis foliis succisqueviridantia saspe manus fame 
 concolor legit. Pro iis tot tantisque devotionis experimentis nostri (quantum audio) 
 facta jactura est. Pudeat vos precamur hujus foederis, nee utilis, nee decori. Per vos 
 legationes meant. Vobis primum, quanquam Principe absente, non solum tractata 
 reserantur, verum etiam tractanda committuntur. Veniabilis sit, quassumus, apud aures 
 vestras veritatis asperitas, cujus convitii invidiam dolor eripit. Parum incornmune con- 
 sulitis ; et cum in concilio convenitis, non tam curre est publicis mederi periculis, 
 quam privatis studere fortunis. Quod utique sjppe diuque facientes, jam non primi 
 comprovincialium ccepistis esse, sed ultimi. At quousque ista? poterunt durare 
 vestigife? Non enim diutius ipsi majores nostri hoc nomine gloriabuntur, qui niinores 
 incipiunt non habere. Qaapropter vel consilio, quo potestis, statum concordiie tam 
 turpis incidite. Adhuc si necesse est obsideri, adhuc pugnare, adhuc esurire delectat. 
 Si vero tradimur, qui non potuimus viribus obtineri, invenisse vos certum est, quid 
 barbarum suaderetis ignavi. Sed cur dolori nimio frajna laxamus? Quin potius 
 ignoscite afflictis, nee imputate moerentibus. Nam alia rcgio tradita servitium sperat, 
 Arverna supplicium. Sane si medicari nostris ultimis non valetis, saltern hoc efficite 
 prece sedula, ut sanguis vivat, quorum est moritura libertas. Parate exnlibus terram, 
 capiendis redemptionera, viaticum peregrinaturis. Si murus noster aperitur hostibus, 
 non sit clausus vaster hospitalibus." — Ed.
 
 80 History of Provengal Poetm/. 
 
 sword of justice that Seronatiis, who served up at the feasts of the 
 Barbarians the provinces of the empire, and whose sentence of 
 execution the imperial government itself has hardly dared to 
 execute. 
 
 " This peace of which they talk — is this what we have 
 merited by our privations, by the desolation of our walls and 
 fields from fire and sword and pestilence, by the destruction of 
 our famished warriors? Is it in a hope of a peace like this, that 
 we have fed on herbs extracted from the crevices of our ram- 
 parts, not unfrequently empoisoned by deadly plants which we 
 could not distinguish, and gathered by hands as livid as them- 
 selves ? Shall all these acts and similar acts of self-devotion 
 only end, as they assure us, in our ruin ? 
 
 " Oh, do not submit, we do beseech you, to a treaty so fatal 
 and so disgraceful ! You are the intermediate agents of all the 
 communications ; it is to you, that the decisions arrived at and 
 submitted, and the decisions yet to be arrived at, are first com- 
 municated, even in the absence of the prince. Listen then, we 
 do conjure you, listen to a rugged truth, to a reproach for 
 which our sorrow should obtain your pardon. You rarely write, 
 and when you do write, it is not so much to devise a remedy for 
 public evils, as it is to bargain for your private interests. By 
 acts like these, you will soon no longer be the first, but the last 
 of the bishops. The prestige cannot last ; and those will not 
 long retain the quality of superiors, who have already begun to 
 lack inferiors. 
 
 " Prevent therefore, and break at any hazard, a peace so dis- 
 graceful. Or shall we fiHit again? Shall we endure another 
 siege, another famine ? We are prepared for it ; we are con- 
 tent. But if we are betrayed without being vanquished, it will 
 be manifest, that in betraying us, you have devised a cowardly 
 expedient to make your peace with the Barbarians. 
 
 " But what avails it, thus to give the reins to an excessive 
 grief? Excuse those in afiliction. Every other country that 
 surrenders will come oiF with simple servitude, but ours has to 
 expect the rigors of a severer punishment. If, therefore, it is 
 not in your power to preserve us, then save at least by your 
 intercession the life of those, who are doomed to lose their 
 liberty. Prepare lands for the exiles, ransoms for their cap- 
 tives, provisions for those who sliall be forced to emigrate. If 
 our walls are opened to the enemy, let not yours be closed to 
 the stranger and the guest," 
 \ These pages, in spite of the occasional instances of bad taste 
 by which they are disfigured, impress us with the idea of a 
 cultivated intellect, as well as of a noble character, in their 
 author. They are particularly interesting in a historical point
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. 81 
 
 of view. They are, I believe, the last that could be mentioned 
 as having been inspired by an exalted sentiment of Roman 
 patriotism. The war, to which they allude, is the last that was 
 waged for the honor of the Eoman name* For these various 
 reasons they deserved to be quoted in a historical survey of the 
 Roman civilization in Gaul. 
 
 If anything could have imparted to the literature and the 
 eloquence of this fifth century a little of the ancient dignity 
 and simplicity, it would undoubtedly have been Christianity, 
 which, in this Roman society, degraded and ruined by des- 
 potism, had disseminated new ideas respecting the destiny of 
 man and that of nations. The clergy of Gaul preached daily 
 what it called the Government of God to the Gallo-Romans, 
 who had fallen under the yoke of the Barbarians. They 
 endeavored to resuscitate their courage, depressed by the disas- 
 ters of the century. They sought to refute those, who made 
 tliese disasters the pretext for upholding the Pagan doctrine of 
 fatalism against the Christian doctrine of a Providence, mindful 
 of the lot of men and of the course of human events. They pre- 
 tended to find, even in the downfall of the empire, even in the 
 incursions of so many difierent conquerors, indications of the 
 reign of that providence which they proclaimed. They dared 
 to draw a parallel between the government of the empire and 
 that of the Barbarians, and to find in the first more vices, more 
 tyranny and more cruelty than in the second. Without deny- 
 ing the evils and the ravages of those incursions, they pretended 
 that these evils and these ravages were nothing in comparison 
 with those which would naturally and necessarily have attended 
 the triumph of the Barbarians, unless the divine mercy had 
 inspired them with a clemency and a deference toward the 
 conquered, which was neither in their character nor in their 
 habits. 
 
 Saint Augustine had been the first who gave currency to 
 these ideas by his treatise " On the City of God ;" the compo- i 
 sition of which was occasioned by the taking and the pillaging | 
 of Rome by Alaric. Soon after that event the bishops of Gam 
 had frequent occasions to preach them anew. Prosper, of 
 Aquitania, put them into verse ; Salvian, of Marseilles, deve- 
 loped them methodically in a work which he entitled " On the 
 Government of God." 
 
 True or false, illusory or serious, these ideas were new ; they 
 were bold and sublime, and it seems that they ought to have 
 inspired these who were filled with them, and who were so 
 enthusiastic in propagating them with a new eloquence, an 
 eloquence as earnest and as stern, as are the ideas themselves. 
 There was nothing of the kind. The style of Salvian is as 
 
 6
 
 82 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 affected and as tainted with bad taste, as that of the profane 
 rhetoricians of the epoch. The verses of Prosper of Acqui- 
 tania do not breathe a more natural or a more original tone 
 than so many others of tlie same epoch, which treat of vulgar 
 subjects. 
 
 Of the study of the Greek language and literature, which 
 once had been so extensively cultivated in Gaul, there is 
 Bcarcely a vestige to be found in the fifth century. Marseilles 
 itself can show at this epoch but two professors, and both of 
 these were Romans ; both having given instruction in Latin 
 rhetoric. The small number of those who are known to have 
 then and since composed anything at Marseilles, wrote in Latin. 
 It is, howxver, probable that the Greek was still spoken at 
 Marseilles ; but it appears to have been abandoned to the lower 
 classes of the people ; the rest had long ago adopted the use 
 of the Latin. 
 
 There were, however, still some schools for the study of Greek 
 grammar and of rhetoric scattered here and there throughout 
 the South. What I have said on the teaching of philosophy at 
 Yienne, necessarily presupposes in that city a certain number 
 of persons familiar with the Greek. That this language also 
 continued to be taught at Bordeaux, we learn from the testi- 
 mony of Paulin, one of the principal inhabitants of that city, 
 known for the singular reverses of fortune which he experienced 
 during the invasion of the Goths, and of which he has given us 
 a narrative in verse, full of interest and candor. It was, un- 
 doubtedly, the same at Narbonne ; where we find men of 
 genius applying themselves to the study and the composition of 
 the Greek. Cossentius, one of the most illustrious and the 
 most opulent Narbonenses of his time had written odes or 
 some other poems which his friends compared to those of 
 Pindar. 
 
 I have as yet said nothing of the spectacles and the public 
 amusements of every description ; and I have very little to say 
 about them. The amusement of the circus, the gladiatorial 
 combats, and what was called the chase of animals, were in all 
 
 Erobability less frequent in the fifth century than they had 
 een the century before. But they continued to be the favorite 
 spectacle in the amphitheatres of large cities. Salvian, who in 
 all his remarks on the manners and the usages of Gaul, has 
 always particular reference to what he had observed in the 
 South, explains himself on the subject of these spectacles in a 
 manner, which proves that they must have still been very much 
 frequented. " If it haj^pens," says he, " (and it happens very 
 often) that the public sports and one of the festivals of the church 
 occur on the same day : which is the place, I ask, where the
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians, 83 
 
 greatest crowd collects ? Is it the house of Grod, or the amphi- 
 theatre f * The performances of the circus given at Aries, in 
 462, are the last of which history celebrates the display and the 
 magnificence. In regard to the dramatic amusements and 
 representations, there is nothing special to be said here. The 
 testimonies on this point are so vague, that it would be neces- 
 sary to collect and to discuss a large number of them in order 
 to arrive at some definite conclusion of any value in the history 
 of literature or art. I shall limit myself to a general conjecture 
 on the subject ; which is, that the amusements and the repre- 
 sentations in question had gradually degenerated into farces of 
 the mountebank stage. 
 
 These are the most important and the best authenticated 
 indications, that are left us of the literary culture of Gaul at the 
 epochs of the definitive invasion of the country by the Ger- 
 mans- I might now proceed directly from this outline to that 
 of the following periods of the Middle Age, to inquire what 
 had become, in the tenth century, four hundred years after the 
 Barbarian conquest, of all that Graeco-Eoman civilization ; to 
 enumerate and, as it were, to measui'e its ruined remains, in 
 order to be able to recognize them again, if need be, in the new 
 literature of the Middle Age, the antecedents of which I am 
 now investigating. But it appeared to me that this transition 
 would be too abrupt I have, therefore, deemed it, if not 
 necessary, at least convenient, to dwell for a moment on the 
 immediate consequences of the Germanic invasions, to mark a 
 little more minutely the various impressions which the diifer- 
 ent conquerors received from the Gallo-Roman civilization, and 
 the particular share which they unconsciously contributed to 
 its progressive degradation. Up to a certain point it will be 
 sufficient for our purpose to continue this summary review, 
 
 * '* Fi q'aando enim eveaerit, quod scilicet sjepe evenit, at eodem die et festivitas 
 eccleniastsca et ludi pablici agantur; quaero ab omnium conselentia, qnislocua majores 
 christiaEoram virorum copias habeat, eavea ladi puMicL, an atiiura Dei? et templuat 
 omnes magis Ecctentur, an theatrum f dicta evangeliorum magis diligaat, an tiymeli- 
 corum? verba vitai, aa verlsa mortis f verba Christi, an verba mimi? Nou est dubiuai, 
 quin illud naagis ameraus, quod anteponimus. Omni enim feralium ludicrorum die, si 
 quaelibet ecclesiaj festa fuerit, noa solum ad ecclesiaia non veniEnt,qui christiaaos se 
 esse dicuat, sed si qui iRscii forte venerint, dum ia ipsa ecclesia siiEt, si ludos agi 
 audiunt, ecclesiam dereli^quunt. Spernitur Dei templnm, ut curratur ad theatrum. 
 Ecclesia vacatur, circus impletnr," etc., etc. De Gubematiooe Dei, lib. vi. c. vii 
 Compare also c. xi. of the same book, m whick the author brands tkese amuseraentsas 
 relics of pagan idolaltry. This passion for public spectacles of every kind seeias t(» 
 liave been equally great across the Mediterraaean, is the north of Africa, where we find 
 a body of bisheps memorializing oae of the emperors to prohibit these public aneuse- 
 meats ea Sunday, and oa other festivals of the cherch ; and more especially on Easter 
 Suaday, on which, as they allege, more people weat to \ht circus tiian to the churcieg 
 (jnaxime quia Sancti Pascfux octavanun die -papnli ad circum magis quatn ad ecclesiam. 
 conveniunt). Cap. 61 Collect Afric. The fourth council of Carthage menaces with the 
 penalty of excommuaieation those, who, iacoatempt of its prohibition, might persist ia 
 thus pursuing their pleasure, t« the neglect of divine worship, on days consecrated ta 
 religious puTpeses.— £<£.
 
 84: History of Provengal Poei/ry. 
 
 which I have broken of at the fifth century, as far as the sixth, 
 or, in other words, as far as the epoch of the Franks. 
 
 During the whole of this fifth century the Yisigoths and the 
 Burgundians were the only nations among the Barbarians, who 
 could have, and who, in fact, did have any influence on the 
 culture of the Gallo-Komans. Most of the cities, in which the 
 ancient schools of grammar, of eloquence, and of philosophy 
 continued in operation during this century, were subject to one 
 or the other of these two nations : Vienne and Lyons to the 
 Burgundians ; Bordeaux, Narbonne and Toulouse to the Visi- 
 goths. It may be a matter of astonishment to some to find all 
 these cities maintaining, even under their barbarous masters, a 
 degree of culture which is probably but little inferior to that, in 
 which they would have remained under the dominion of the 
 Romans. But our surprise will cease when we come to consult 
 history. 
 
 Of all the Barbarians at war with the Roman empire, the 
 Yisigoths, at the time of their incursion into Gaul, were those 
 who had humanized themselves the most, who had acquired 
 the greatest degree of aptitude for the order and the enjoy- 
 ments of civil life. They willingly obeyed their chiefs — nearly 
 all of whom acquired glory in commanding them. Of the 
 eight, which they had during the century of their dominion in 
 Gaul, five were remarkable men, we might say great men, who 
 to the energy of their barbarous character, added great politi- 
 cal intelligence, and a noble consciousness of the advantages of 
 civilization. 
 
 The first of all of them, and the one who led them to the 
 foot of the Pyrenees, Ataulphe, had by degrees become a com- 
 plete Roman in his sentiments and ideas. He was assassinated 
 at the moment, when lie was preparing to employ all the forces 
 of his nature to uphold the crumbling edifice of Roman 
 grandeur. 
 
 The fourth of these eight chiefs, Theodoric I., was scarcely 
 less distinguished than Ataulphe. It was for the general cause 
 of humanity, and from a motive of political generosity, that he 
 espoused the part of the Romans against Attila. He was killed 
 in the great battle of Chalons, to the winning of which he con- 
 tributed greatly. 
 
 His son, Theodoric II., added to the brilliant qualities of a 
 warlike chief, the manners, the polish and the education of a 
 Roman. According to the assertion of Sidonius, who had 
 known him personally, he took pleasure in the reading of Virgil 
 and of Horace. 
 
 Euric, his younger brother and successor, read neither Virgil 
 nor Horace ; perhaps he did not even understand the Latin.
 
 The South of Frcmce under the Barbarians. 85 
 
 But yet lie was a greater man than his predecessor, and gave 
 surer indications of genius as a civilizer. He ordered an abridg- 
 ment of the Theodosian code to be made, for the benefit of his 
 Roman subjects, together with an interpretation of the laws 
 which required one. To his Visigothic subjects he gave a written 
 code, in which he adopted a multitude of the provisions of the 
 Roman law, to which it seems the Goths conformed without 
 any opposition. He encouraged, at least indirectly, the culture 
 of letters by bestowing honors and oflSces of trust on such 
 Gallo-Romans, as were most distinguished for their talent and 
 acquirements. He sent on several embassies to Constantinople 
 that same Cossentius of Narbonne, whom I have already men- 
 tioned as having had a remarkable talent for Greek poetry. 
 His secretary was that same Leo, likewise from Narbonne, 
 whom we already know as a celebrated orator and poet. The last 
 pieces of Gallic rhetoric, boasted of as master-works, were 
 manifestoes or letters composed by him in the name of Euric, 
 and addressed to the different nations that had chosen this king 
 as their arbitrator. 
 
 Under chiefs like these, though they were Barbarians, and 
 in the midst of an order of things which was still Roman in all 
 its forms, we can easily conceive, that the ancient schools of 
 grammar, of rhetoric and of jurisprudence even, may have still 
 been able to maintain themselves for some time longer. The 
 civilization of the Romans had now become effete ; it had ful- 
 filled its destiny ; its time was past ; it was to fall irrevocably ; 
 but its downfall might be more or less a gentle or a gradual 
 one, and the interval between the moment of this downfall and 
 that of some future regeneration might be a more or less pro- 
 longed one. Now the Visigoths were the particular tribe of 
 all the Barbarians, the dominion of which could afford the best 
 chances for such a change. 
 
 The Burgundians had not made the same progress in civil 
 polity as the Visigoths. Nevertheless they were more humane 
 and more susceptible of discipline than several other German 
 tribes. The majority of their chiefs exhibited a respectful 
 deference toward the Roman authority, as long as it subsisted. 
 Several of them were invested with the title of patricians, and 
 appeared to regard it as their highest honor. Gondcbaud, the 
 most distinguished of all these chiefs, had spent many years in 
 Italy, and always prided himself on appearing as a civilized 
 prince, in private life as well as in his public capacity. In 
 the feuds he had with Clovis, he aflected quite a Roman 
 repugnance to him and to his Franks, on whom he disdainfully 
 bestows the epithet of Barbarians. Of his conduct relatively 
 to literature and the liberal studies we know nothing, but we
 
 86 History cf ProvenQol Poetry. 
 
 have every inducement to presume, that if he meddled with 
 them at all, it was rather to retard than to accelerate their ruin. 
 
 The sixth century produced an entire change of things. The 
 dominion of the Visigoths was transferred beyond the Pyre- 
 nees ; the Burgnndians ceased to have chiefs of their own, and 
 they no longer constituted a separate national hody. The 
 Franks remained sole masters of nearly the whole of Gaul. 
 
 Of the three nations which had established themselves in this 
 country, the Franks were the one, which had most carefully 
 preserved in their primitive purity the manners, the institutions 
 and the spirit of its Germanic ancestors. It was, therefore, 
 \mder them and through them, that these manners, these insti- 
 tutions and this spirit were destined to develop themselves in 
 Gaul with the greatest vigor and effect, and to act npon its 
 interior civilization and cnltnre in the most direct and serious 
 manner. The moment will come, when it will be my duty to 
 appreciate the definitive results of this action. For the present 
 I can only throw out in advance a few general notions, which 
 may hereafter constitute a part of that estimate. 
 
 From the end of the fifth to the middle of the sixth century, 
 the literary decadence of Ganl continued with accelerated 
 rapidity, in consequence of the ravages prodnced by the various 
 expeditions of the Franks against the Goths, both of Italy and 
 of Gaul, and against the Burgnndians. Nevertheless, the ancient 
 studies were by no means entirely abandoned ; grammar schools 
 still continued to exist ; for example, at Lyons, at Vienne and at 
 Clermont there was still a great number of writers, but they all 
 belonged to the ecclesiastical order. Tlie laity had no longer 
 any motive for applying itself to the culture of letters. Saint 
 Csesarius, the bishop of Aries, has left us homilies, which do 
 not seem to be inferior to these of his predecessors. Saint Fer- 
 reol, bishop of Uzes, composed epistles in the style of those of 
 Sidonius ApoUinaris. Tliough Fortunatus, the bishop of Poi- 
 tiers, was not a Gaul by birth, we yet may refer here to the 
 numerous compositions in verse, which he wrote in honor of all 
 the great personages of his time, of kings, queens, dukes, counts 
 and bishops. In point of correctness and elegance of diction 
 these pieces are perhaps the most distinguished productions of 
 the sixth century.* 
 
 But the writer of this period, who has a preeminent claim to 
 our attention, is Gregory of Tours. His works, which were 
 composed nnder the influences of the Germanic barbarism, may 
 
 * The works of Fortunatns, both poetical and prose, may be fonnd in Migne's " Pa- 
 trologise Cursus Completus," vol. 88, page 1-591 ; the homilies, epistles, etc., of St. 
 Caesarius in vol. 67, page 997-1163. The epistles, which Gregory of Tours asserts to have 
 been written after the models of Sidonius, have not been published. Cf. Fabricius 
 Biblioth. Latina, lib. vi. p. 491.
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. 87 
 
 be regarded as the double expression of it; tliey are, in the first 
 place, the formal history of it, and in their character and their 
 defects, they furnish to a certain extent the measure of it. 
 
 Gregory was bora at Clermont between the years 620 and 
 530. His father, Florentius, and his mother, Armentaria, were 
 both descended from those ancient Gallo-Roman families, the 
 members of which had filled some of those high oflices which 
 gave admission to the Senate of Rome, and who continued to 
 call themselves senatorial, long after both the senate and the 
 senators had ceased to exist. 
 
 Gregory had three uncles who were bishops. One of these 
 three, by the name of Gallus, was bishop of Clermont. It was 
 under him that Gregory pursued his studies in grammar and in 
 rhetoric. The dominant trait of his character as a man already 
 began to manifest itself in his childhood. It was the extraordinary 
 facility, with which he believed in miracles, and the desire to wit- 
 ness and to perform them. Never did saint of the primitive ages 
 have so many marvellous visions as he, and never was any one ac- 
 quainted with so many men, who had experienced the same thing. 
 
 After having been made deacon, he was elected to the see of 
 Tours, about the year 566. This was the most fortunate event 
 and the greatest honor that he could possibly desire, owing to 
 his particular veneration for Saint Martin, the first bishop of 
 that city. The duties of liis office he always fulfilled with zeal 
 and sometimes with courage. He died toward the year 594.* 
 
 We have from the pen of Gregory of Tours several works 
 composed for pioue purposes, such as biographies of saints and 
 martyrs, and collections of miracles. I have nothing to say about 
 these works, except that they occasionally contain some inter- 
 esting historical facts. I pass now to the consideration of his 
 history. Of the ten books of which it is composed, I shall pass 
 over the whole of the first, which is nothing more than a uni- 
 versal chronicle from the creation of the world to the death of 
 Saint Martin of Tours, and a compendium of several other 
 chronicles. The nine remaining books constitute a history of 
 Gaul, from the year 395 to that of 591. This is an interval of 
 nearly two centuries, which comprises, summarily or in detail, 
 the different epochs of the dominion of the Romans, the con- 
 quest of Clovis, his reign, and those of his four sons and of his 
 three grandsons. The motives which prompted him to compose 
 this history, cannot be a matter of indifference to us. He 
 himself explains them in his preface, and in the following terms : 
 " While the culture of letters is diminishing or rather becoming 
 
 * A life of Gregory (FWa Sancti Gregorii Episcopi Turonensi$ per Odonem Abbatem) 
 from the pen of a certain Abbot Odo, is prefixed to his collected works in Migne's 
 ^'PatTQlogiae Cursus Completus," voL 71, p. 115-129 — Ed.
 
 88 History of Provenqal Poei/ry. 
 
 entirely extinct in Gaul ; wlnle many events are taking place, 
 gome good and others bad ; while no restraint of any kind is 
 imposed on the unbridled ferocity of nations and on the fury 
 of kings ; while the church is assailed on the one hand by the 
 heretics, and on the other defended by the Catholics, the faith 
 of Christ being cherished with fervor in some places and 
 rebutted with indifference in others ; while churches, enriched 
 by the munificence of pious men, are despoiled by the perverse — 
 there has yet no person been found, conversant with the sciences 
 and with grammar, to recount these things, either in prose or 
 verse. The majority of men, moreover, sigh and say : ' Woe 
 be to our age ! the study of letters has been lost among us, and 
 the people have no longer a man capable of recording the 
 events of the times.' Hearing complaints like these perpe- 
 tually, and desirous of transmitting to posterity the knowledge 
 of the past, I have resolved to publish, though in an uncouth 
 style, the actions of the wicked and the lives of the good ; being 
 especially encouraged to this enterprise by the reflexion, that in 
 our day there are but few persons, who can comprehend a phi- 
 losophic rhetorician, while there are many that can comprehend 
 an ordinary discourser."* All this is summed up in the first 
 sentence of his first book. " I propose," says he, " to recount 
 the wars of the kings with foreign nations, of the martyrs with 
 the pagans, of the church with the heretics."f 
 
 The scientific point of view, in which he has conceived his 
 history, is, as we perceive, sufficiently elevated and sufficiently 
 comprehensive. It is not from a mere motive of piety, that he 
 proposes to delineate the struggle of the churcli against the 
 pagans and the heretics ; it is from a historical motive ; it is 
 because this struggle is one of great significance in the events 
 which he wishes to narrate. But his feebleness of judgment 
 
 * " Decedente, atqoe immo potius pereunte ab nrbibna Gallicanis liberalium cultura 
 litterarum, cum nonnulloe res gererentur vel recte vel improbe, ac feritas gentium 
 desaeviret, regum furor acueretur, ecclesiae impugnarentur ab haereticis, a catholicia 
 tegerenter, fciveret Cbristi fides in pluriniia, refrigeresceret in nonnullis^ ipsse quoqufi 
 ecclesite vel ditarentura devotis, vel nodarentur a perfidis : nee reperiri posset quisquam 
 peritus in arte dialectica grainmaticus, qui ha;c aut stylo prosaico, aut metrico depin- 
 geret versu. Ingemiscebant saepius plerique, dicentea : vse diebus nostris, quia periit 
 studium litterarum a nobis, nee reperitur in populis, qui gesta pra;sentia promulgare 
 possit in paginis. lata enim atque his similia jugiterintuensdici, pro eommemoratione 
 practeritorura, ut notitiam attingerent venientium, etsi inculto affatu, nequivi tamen ob- 
 tegere vel certamina flagitiosorum, vel vitam recte viventium. Et prsesertim his illici- 
 tus stimnlis, quod a noetris fari plerumque miratus sum, quia phiiosophantem rhetorem 
 itttelligunt pauci, loquentem rusticum multi ; Ubuit etiam anjmo, ut pro supputatione 
 annorum ab ipso mundi principle libri primi poneretur initium : cujus capitula deorsum 
 subjeci." Pra>fatio. — Ed. 
 
 t " Scripturus sum bella regum cum gentibus adversis, raartyrum cum paganis^ 
 ecclesiarum cum haereticis," and to convince the reader that this was to be done by a 
 true Catholic, he adds in the same sentence : " Prius fldem meam proferre cupio, ut 
 qui legeret, me non dubitet esse Catholicum." A full confession of his faith follows a 
 few sentences after. S. Gregorii Episc. ToroDv Histoiise Ecclesiaaticaa Francorumlibri 
 decern. Ed. Guigae, Paris, 1849.— £rf.
 
 The South of France under the Barharians. 89 
 
 does not permit him to establish the necessary proportion and 
 harmony among the different elements of his subject. We can- 
 not find in any book of history so many instances of infantile 
 credulity as there are contained in his, or so much faith and 
 piety so gratuitously and so ineptly applied to the appreciation 
 of human events. This is a great and an annoying blemish, 
 which, however, does not in the least affect the historical sub- 
 stance of his work, and which I here admit, at the very outset, 
 and once for all, so as not to be obliged to return to it. 
 
 Gregory of Tours did not possess materials of the same 
 nature, or equally authentic sources of information for the dif- 
 ferent parts of his work. Hence all these parts contain dis- 
 crepancies which, rigorously considered, are very striking, and 
 worth our notice ; but the critical examination of these dis- 
 crepancies would carry me too far from my subject, and I shall 
 not engage in it ; I shall confine myself to a single observation, 
 the consequence of which will find its proper place a little 
 later. 
 
 About the year 573, which was the epoch at which Gregory 
 commenced the composition of his history, an interval of a hun- 
 dred and twenty or a hundred and thirty years had already 
 elapsed, since the majority of the Frankish tribes had first esta- 
 blished themselves on the soil of Gaul. These tribes had un- 
 doubtedly brought along with them to their new home the 
 traditions, the legends and the poetry, which constituted their 
 particular history, or that of the Germans in general. It seems 
 that the Gallo-Romans, after having once become reconciled to 
 the idea of living with the race of their conquerors, must, in 
 their intercourse with the latter, have necessarily learnt from 
 their mouth something of what they knew respecting their 
 origin, their antiquities, their successive migrations and adven- 
 tures, and we shall in the sequel find plausible reasons to be- 
 lieve, that it was really so. 
 
 Notwithstanding all this, Gregory of Tours, having occasion 
 to speak, from the very commencement of his history, of the 
 origin and the antiquities of the Franks, makes no use what- 
 ever of their national traditions. Was he not acquainted with 
 them? Did he put no faith in them? These are questions 
 which I am unable to decide. I merely observe, that not a 
 vestige of them appears in the part of his history, in which he 
 would have naturally been expected to say what he knew or 
 thought of them. All that he relates respecting the Franks, 
 previously to their arrival in Gaul, he had derived from Latin 
 authors but little older than himself, and who appear to have 
 been equally ignorant or suspicious of the Germanic traditions 
 in question. The only point on which I would gladly suspect,
 
 90 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 that Gregory had followed these aboriginal accounts, is that 
 which relates to the history of Childeric, the brother of Clovis, 
 and to his adventure with Basine, the wife of the chief of the 
 Thuringians. I shall perhaps say a word on this adventure 
 elsewhere. For the present I propose to make a few observa- 
 tions on the work of Gregory of Tours, regarded as a whole, and 
 I shall endeavor to form a summary estimate of its character 
 and of the degree of importance to which it is entitled. 
 
 The historians of classical antiquity, the Greeks as well as 
 the Komans, have left us an infinity of details and characteris- 
 tic traits respecting the long struggle of six centuries, in conse- 
 quence of which tiie Barbarians from beyond the Danube and 
 the Rhine established themselves as conquerors in the pro- 
 vinces of the Western Empire. At a later period, in the ninth 
 and tenth centuries of the Middle Age, we shall see the descen- 
 dants of these victorious nations, which had already coalesced, 
 or were ready to coalesce, with the masses of the conquered, 
 enter together with the latter upon a new order of society, of 
 civilization and of ideas. 
 
 But between these two periods there is an interval of four 
 entire centuries, and the most positive and the most interesting 
 information, which we possess in regard to that interval, we owe 
 entirely to Gregory of Tours. It is he and he alone, that has 
 delineated for us consecutively and in detail those Germanic 
 conquerors, and especially the Franks, in the full enjoyment of 
 the power, the benefit and the honors of the conquest ; govern- 
 ing the vanquished, as they knew how or as they pleased, but 
 also governed in their turn by relations of a new description. 
 The cliaracter of the Barbarians, which we have thus far only 
 seen in war and in violent and evanescent situations, unfolds 
 itself here in all its freedom and totality, and history can show 
 nothing, which, in our estimation, could take the place of its 
 delineation. 
 
 Though arranged loosely and without any real plan, the 
 various events recounted by Gregory of Tours may easily and 
 distinctly be reduced to a single leading fact. "Whether eccle- 
 eiastics or laymen, the Gallo-Romans, whom their position or 
 their intelligence gave a certain influence, endeavored to direct 
 the Frankish conquest to the common interest of both the van- 
 quished and vanquishers. But to the barbarous chiefs of these 
 conquerors the power of government was nothing more than 
 a purely personal force, a means for satisfying their unbridled 
 passions, their insatiable cupidity and their brutal eagerness for 
 the mere material enjoyments of life. They consequently made 
 mutual war upon themselves ; they murdered and they plun- 
 dered each other. On the other hand, their vassals, who were
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. 91 
 
 their officers and agents, being very naturally the enemies of a 
 power which was so contrary to all the ideas, to all the habits 
 of the Germanic race, conspired among themselves, resisted 
 their masters, and incessantly aspired to appropriate entirely 
 and fully the revocable part they had received of the honors 
 and advantages of the conquest. Several of them made com- 
 mon cause with the vanquished population, which, under their 
 command, revolted at every instant against the Merovingian 
 monarchs, and ended in withdrawing entirely from their domi- 
 nion. 
 
 Gregory has failed to impart the same degree of perspicuity 
 and prominence to all the phases of this fact. It contains 
 points which he was unable or did not wish to develop ; but 
 even on these he has said more than is necessary to leave no 
 sort of uncertainty in regard to the ensemble and the general- 
 ity of the fact. 
 
 Now, in order to give a general idea of whatever there is 
 original or interesting or profound in the isolated details of this 
 general fact, I shall produce some of them, dwelling, by way 
 of preference, on those which give us the best portraiture of 
 the genius of these Barbarians, as far at least as this genius can 
 be represented by that of the Franks. They will be the preli- 
 minaries to our future discussions. 
 
 The following is, for example, a characteristic trait of the 
 disposition of Thierry, the eldest son of Clovis and king of 
 Austrasia, toward his brother Clotaire, the King of Soissons, 
 and consequently his royal neighbor. 
 
 In 528, Tliierry and Clotaire, who had as yet never had any 
 quarrel with each other (a circumstance which it is important 
 to notice here), engaged in a common campaign against Her- 
 manfried, the king of the Tliuringians, who had committed 
 great cruelties toward the Franks beyond the Khine. The ex- 
 pedition was one of the happiest that had ever been under- 
 taken. The Tliuringians, after a most sanguinary defeat, were 
 obliged to submit to the authority of the Franks. Tliierry, 
 now victorious, and no longer in need of the assistance of his 
 brother, conceived the idea of killing him. Clotaire, having 
 become aware of his danger, escaped from it, and the two bro- 
 thers remained as good friends as they had been before. We 
 will now see, in what terms Gregory recounts the adventure. 
 
 " Thierry, wishing to kill his brother, invited him to meet 
 him at his residence, as if for the purpose of treating with him 
 in secret on some matter of importance.* He had ordered a 
 
 * " Theudericus Clothachariumfratremsunmoccidere voluit. Et pracparatis occulte cnm 
 armis viris, eura ad se vocat, quasi secretins cum eo aliquid tractaturus, expansoque in 
 parte domus illius tentorio, de uno pariete in alterum, armatos post eum stare jubet.
 
 92 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 piece of tapestry to be suspended from one side of the ro om to 
 the other, behind which he had secreted armed warriors. But 
 the tapestry was found to be too short, in consequence of which 
 the feet of these men could be discovered. Clotaire per- 
 ceived them, and ordered another body of armed men to attend 
 him. Thierry, seeing that his brother had penetrated his de- 
 sign, invented some story, and began to converse on whatever 
 happened to come into his head. But wishing afterward to 
 obtain the pardon of his brother, on account of his evil inten- 
 tion, he made him a present of a large silver basin. Clotaire, 
 being satisfied, thanked him and returned to his camp, and 
 Thierry remained to lament with his friends over the silver 
 basin, which he had lost without any advantage to himself. 
 At last, addressing himself to his son Theodobert, he said : ' Go 
 to your uncle and beg him to make you a present of the basin 
 which I have just now given him.' Theodobert went and got 
 the basin. Thierry was very ingenious in the invention of tricks 
 like these." 
 
 The trait is an admirable one, and perhaps requires a little 
 reflection to discover the whole extent of its significance ! A 
 trait like this gives us a sort of presentiment of all the wars, 
 which subsequently divided the descendants of Clovis. It 
 enables us to comprehend the entire value, which a Frankish 
 king could attach to a piece of gold or silver. 
 
 Much has been said about the manner, in which the Franks 
 understood and practised Christianity. They have been found 
 more ferocious after their conversion than before it. They were 
 neither more nor less so. They had changed their religion very 
 readily ; but it was impossible for them not to retain, for some 
 time to come, both in the practice and in the faith of the new 
 creed, the spirit and the habits of the old. One of the facts, 
 which establishes most conclusively what I wish to convey, is a 
 feature in the conduct of Clotilda, the widow of Clovis. Clo- 
 tilda was regarded as a saint by the most pious bishops of her 
 time and by Gregory himself, and yet she had continued to 
 cherish Germanic customs and sentiments, which were entirely 
 incompatible with those of Christianity. Seeing her three sous 
 upon the throne, she said to them one day : *' My dearly be- 
 loved sons, do not make me repent of having educated you with 
 
 Cumque tentorium illud esset brevius, pedes armatornm apparuere detect!. Quod 
 cognoscens Chlothacharius, cum suis armatus ingressus est domum. Theudericus vero 
 inteUigen3 hunc haec cognovisse, fabulam fingit, et alia ex aliis loquitur. Deniquo 
 nesciens qualiter dolum suum deliniret, discum ei magnum argenteum pro gratia dedit. 
 Chlothacharius vero valedicens, et pro munere gratias agens ad metatum regressus est. 
 Theudericusvero queritur ad suos, nulla exstanti causa suum perdidisse catinum: etad 
 filiura suum Theudebertum ait : Vade ad patruum tuum, et roga, ut munus, quod ei dedi, 
 tibi^sua voluntate concedat. Qui abiens, quod petiit impetravit. la talibus enim dolia 
 Theudericus multum callidus erat." Lib. iii. cap. yU — Ed,
 
 The South qf France under the Barharians. 93 
 
 tenderness. Resent, I do beseech you, the injury I have sus- 
 tained, and hasten to avenge courageously the aeath of my 
 father and my mother."* The thing was done, as she had said 
 and as she desired. 
 
 It was true, that her father and her mother had been cruelly 
 put to death by her uncle, Gondebaud, the king of the Burgun- 
 dians. But more than fifty years had elapsed since the crime 
 had been committed, and the author of it was already dead. It 
 was his son, then reigning, and who had never done Clotilda 
 any harm, that was to be exterminated at her request. 
 
 There were indeed moments, usually moments of adversity 
 or of terror, in which the Franks seriously endeavored to be 
 sincere Christians. But even on such occasions, there was still 
 something egotistical and barbarous in their sentiments. When 
 smitten with the malady of which he died, Clotaire I. devoutly 
 exclaimed : " Oh ! what must be this king of Heaven, who 
 makes great monarchs die so wretchedly ?" 
 
 Gregory frequently makes his Barbarians speak, and almost 
 always with an energy so abrupt, so frank and so poetical, that 
 we cannot suppose him to be the author of these discourses, 
 destitute as his writings generally are of all imagination and 
 of coloring. I cannot resist the pleasure of giving an ex- 
 ample. 
 
 In the year 577, Gontran, the king of the Burgundians, con- 
 cluded a treaty of alliance with his nephew Cliildebert, with 
 whom he had thus far been at variance. Having therefore 
 assembled his leudes, that is to say his vassals, he embraced his 
 nephew in the presence of them, and said : " By way of punish- 
 ment for my sins, I have been left without issue ; it is on this 
 account that I desire to adopt this nephew as my son."f Hav- 
 ing thereupon directed Childebert to take his seat, he trans- 
 ferred his kingdom to him by saying: "Let henceforth the 
 same buckler protect, and the same lance defend us. And if 
 ever I should have any sons, you shall, in that event even, 
 always be to me as one of them, and the tenderness which I 
 now pledge to you shall never fail you." 
 
 Some time after this, Gontran delivered a discourse of a dif- 
 ferent kind, and which is so much the more curious, as it gives 
 ns in a few words the most vivid idea of the constantly iucreas- 
 
 * " Chlotechildis vero regina Chlodomerem, vel reliquos Alios suos alloquitur diccns : 
 non me poeniteat, charissimi, vos dulciter eautrisse : Indignaniini, qua;so, injuriam 
 m^amet patris matrisque mea; mortem sagaci studio vindicate." Lib. iii. cap. vi. — Ed. 
 
 t S. Gregorii Hist. Franc, lib. v. c. xviii. : " Evenit impulsu peccatorum meorum, ut 
 absque liberisremanerera : etideo peto, ut hie uepos meusmihi ait tilius. Et imponens 
 eum super cathedram suam, cunctum ei reguum tradidit, dicens: Una nos parma 
 protegat, unaque hasta defendat. Qaod si tilios habuero, te nihilominus— tanquam 
 unum ex his reputabo, ut ilia cum eis, tecumque permaueat charitas, quam tibi hodie 
 ego poUiceor, teste Deo."— l^d.
 
 94r History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 ing jealousy and hatred, which at that time prevailed between 
 the Merovingian chiefs and their vassals. Gontran pronounced 
 the discourse in question before the leudes of Neustria, who in 
 584 were assembled in a cliurch on the occasion of his assuming 
 the guardianship of Clotaire IE., who was then four months of 
 age. This ceremony took place soon after the assassination of 
 Chilperic. "I conjure you," said he to them, " I conjure you, 
 ye men and women who are present here, to be faithful in the 
 observance of your fealty toward me, and not to destroy me as 
 you have recently destroyed my brothers. Permit me to live 
 but three years longer, that I may finish the education of these 
 my nephews, who by adoption have become my sons. Beware 
 of a calamity which God may graciously avert ! Beware, I say, 
 lest if I perish with these children, you likewise perish your- 
 selves, when no one shall be left to reign of our race that has 
 the power to defend it."* 
 
 One might search in vain in Gregory of Tours for the least 
 sentiment of Roman or Gallic patriotism, the least regret be- 
 stowed upon the vanished glory or the power of Rome. The 
 establishment of the Franks in Gaul is to him a consummated 
 fact, for which he has neither murmurs nor reflections. It is to 
 this want of moral and political preoccupation, to this ab- 
 sence of all national pride, that we must in a great measure 
 attribute the truthfulness and the simplicity, the earnestness 
 and the calmness, with which he portrays the manners and the 
 acts of the Barbarians. But to this we must also attribute the 
 little interest and care he takes in characterizing the opposition, 
 which the successors of Clovis encountered at an early day in 
 Gaul, especially in the South, and which ended in the dismem- 
 berment of the latter. 
 
 The sentiment, in accordance with which Gregory of Tours 
 habitually judges of the events which he records, is his religious 
 sentiment, or, as we might more fitly term it, his creed. But 
 his creed is a gloomy and a narrow one, incapable of elevating 
 itself to the lotty standard of Christian morality. 
 
 So long as the Franks gained battles and made conquests 
 over the pagans or the heretics, their pious historian is quite at 
 his ease. He triumphs with them. He explains their success 
 by the orthodoxy of their faith, and even then, when this success 
 is tainted with immorality and barbarity. Clovis assassinates 
 all his nearest relations one after the other, and one through the 
 
 * " Adjaro vos, o viri cum mulieribus qui adcstis, ut mihi fidem inviolatam servare 
 dignemini, nee me, ut fratres meos nuper fecistis, interimatis ; liceatque mihi vel tribua 
 annis nepotes meos, qui mihi adoptivi facti sunt filii, enutrire : ne forte contingat, quod 
 diviaitas aitcrna non patiatur, ut cum illis parvulis, me defuncto. simul pereatis ; cum de 
 genere nostro robustus non fUerit qui defenset." S. Greg. Hiat. Franc, lib. vii. c. 
 viii — Ed,
 
 The, South of France under the Barbarians. 95 
 
 other, and takes possession of their little kingdoms. He thus 
 unites the scattered tribes of the Franks, and incorporates them 
 into one great nation, destined to act a distinguished part in the 
 world. The historian might say that this was marching directly 
 and firmly in the ways of policy and conquest ; Gregory calls 
 it marching in the ways of God. 
 
 But the moment arrives, and very speedily, when these pre- 
 tenders to orthodoxy, carried away by their brutal passions, 
 become divided among themselves ; they tear each other to 
 pieces, and suffer themselves to be beaten by the pagans and 
 the heretics. Then the good bishop is sorely afflicted and 
 incensed. He invokes against the Barbarians all that is social 
 and humane in Christianity. " I am disgusted," says he, at the 
 beginning of his fifth book, " to recount the disorders, into 
 which the nation and the monarchy of the Franks has plunged 
 itself.* We have arrived at the woeful time predicted by our 
 Lord: the father rises against the son, the son against the 
 father, the brother against the brother, the neighbor against the 
 neighbor. Might they not learn then from the reign of the 
 ancient kings, that a kingdom divided against itself must fall 
 into the hands of its enemies ?" 
 
 " What would you have ? What are you looking for ?" he 
 adds, directly apostrophizing the successors of Clovis, "and 
 what are you in want of ? f Have you not an abundance of 
 wine, of oil and of wheat in your cellars ? Do not your trea- 
 suries contain lumps of gold and silver ? Beware of discord I 
 If you lose your army, you will remain without support, and 
 you will fall beneath the blows of hostile nations." 
 
 Sometimes the moral sensibility of Gregory of Tours and his 
 independence as a historian awake as of themselves, quite un- 
 expectedly and with so much the more effect. This hapj)ens to 
 him at the moment, when he comes to relate the death of Chil- 
 peric. This passage, remarkable in several respects, is one of 
 those in which the semi-barbarous historian of the Franks seems 
 all of a sudden to go back several centuries, and to approximate 
 the times of classical latinity. I subjoin here a translation of it, 
 which is as faithful as I could make it. 
 
 * " Taedet me bellorum civilium diversitates, qua5 Fraticornm gentem et rcgnum 
 valde proterunt, memorare : in quo, quod pejus est, tempus illud, quod Dominus do 
 dolorura prredixit initio jam videmus. Consurgit pater inJUium, filius in patrem, fiater 
 infratrcm, proximus in proximum {Matth. x. 21). Debebant enim nos excmpla anteri- 
 orumregum terrere, qui ut divisi, statim ab inimicis suntinterempti." Lib. V. Prologus. 
 Ed. 
 
 t " Quid agitis?quidqua!ritis? quidnonabundatis? In domibus delicia; supercrescunt ; 
 in promptuariis vinum, triticum, oleumque redundat; in thesauris aurum atque argen- 
 tum coacervatur. Unum vobis deest, quod pacem non habentes, Dei gratia indigetis." 
 
 " Cavete discordiam, cavete bella civilia, quae vos populumque vestrum 
 
 expugnant. Quid aliud sperandum erit, nisi cum exercitus vester ceciderit, vos sine 
 solatio relicti, atque a gentibua adversia oppress!, protinus corruatis?" Lib. v. Prologua. 
 —Ed,
 
 96 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 " Meanwhile Chilperic,* the Nero and the Herod of our time, 
 had gone to engage in the amusements of the chase on his country 
 Beat at Chelles, about ten stadia from Paris. One evening, after 
 having returned from his sport at night-fall, as he was descend- 
 ing from his horse, with his hand supported by the shoulder of 
 a slave, some one coming up to him struck nim twice with a 
 knife, the first time into his arm-pit and the second time into 
 his belly ; and the king forthwith gave up his wicked soul, 
 together with the blood that issued from his mouth and from 
 his wound. The mischief he had done is recorded in the preced- 
 ing pages. He devastated and burnt several countries, without 
 experiencing any regret for it, and even with joy, as Nero did 
 in former times, who sung his tragedies in the light of blazing 
 palaces which he himself had kindled. It frequently happened 
 that he condemned the innocent, in order to take away their 
 property, and few clerks in his reign attained to the episcopate. 
 lie was extremely addicted to gluttony, and had made a god of 
 his belly. 
 
 "He was fond of setting up for the most learned of men. 
 "We have by him two books of hymns, composed in the style of 
 those of Sedulius. But the measure of his verses is very bad ; 
 for he employed, out of sheer ignorance, short syllables instead 
 of long ones, and long ones instead of short ones. 
 
 " He had a horror for the interests of the poor, and he never 
 ceased to abuse the priests of God. In the privacy of his 
 familiar intercourse, there were none whom he scandalized and 
 ridiculed so readily as the bishops. The one he found frivolous, 
 the other a swaggerer ; this one was a slave to his comforts, that 
 one a debauchee. Such a one appeared to him vain, another a 
 pedant. He detested the church above all things, and he often 
 said : ' Look at our exhausted fiscus ! Look at our wealth trans- 
 ferred to the churches ! The ofiice of royalty is now vested in 
 the episcopate ; every bishop is a king in his episcopal city.' 
 
 * Hist. Franc, lib. vi. c. xlvi. " His itaque cum hac praeda pergentibns, Chilperi- 
 cns, Nero nostri temporis et Herodes, ad Villain Calensem, quse distat ab urbe Pari- 
 Biaca quasi centum stadiis, accedit, ibique venationes exercet. Quadem vero die 
 regressus de venatione, jam sub obscura nocte, dum de equo susciperetur, et unam 
 manum super scapulam pueri retineret, ads'eniens quidam eum cultro percutit sub 
 ascellam, iteratoque ictu ventrem ejus perforat; statimque profluente copia sanguinis 
 tarn per os quam per aditum vulneris iniquum fudit spiritum. Quam vero malitiamges- 
 serit, superior lectio docet. Nam regiones plurimas sxpius devastavit atque succendit, 
 de quibus nihil doloris, sed Isetitiam magis habebat, sicut quondam Nero, cum inter 
 
 incendia palatii tragajdias decantaret. Causas pauperum exosas 
 
 habebat, sacerdotes Domini assidue blasphemabat ; nee aliunde magis, dum secretua 
 esset, exercebat ridicula vel jocos quam de ecclesiarum episcopis. Ilium ferebat levem, 
 alium superbum ; ilium abundantem, istum luxuriosura ; ilium asserebat elatum, hunc 
 tumidum ; nullum plus odio habens quam ecclesias. Aiebat enim plerumque : Ecce 
 pauper remansit fiscus noster, ecce divitite nostra; ad ecclesias sunt translata;. NuUi 
 penitus, nisi soli episcopi, regnant; periit honor noster, et translatus est ad episcopos 
 
 civitatum. Nullum unquam pure dilexit, a nuUo dilectus est; ideoque 
 
 cum spiritum exhalassat, omnes eum reli^uerunt sui," etc., etc Ed.
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. 97 
 
 Under pretexts like these he often broke the wills that had been 
 made in favor of the churches, and trampled under foot the 
 wishes of his father even, doubtless imagining that the day 
 would come when his own would likewise be respected by 
 no one. 
 
 " With respect to his excesses, the imagination can conceive 
 of nothing which he did not practise. He was always on the 
 alert for new means wherewith to vex the people ; and if he 
 found any one recalcitrant, he had his eyes put out. The man- 
 dates which he addressed to the judges concluded with the fol- 
 lowing formula-: 'And whoever shall disregard our orders, shall 
 have their eyes put out.' He never had an honorable affection 
 for any one and was loved by none. So from the instant he had 
 given up the ghost, he was abandoned by all his followers. 
 Malulfe, the bishop of Senlis, who had been waiting there for 
 three days without being able to speak to him, came to the spot 
 as soon as he had heard the rumor of the assassination. He 
 washed the corpse, enveloped it in more appropriate apparel and 
 had it buried in the church of St. Yincent at Paris." 
 
 The portrait of Chilperic 11. , as delineated here by Gregory, 
 exhibits certain traits to which it is necessary for me to return, 
 and I shall devote a moment to their exposition ; according to 
 this account, one of the manias of Chilperic, and indeed the 
 most conspicuous of all, was that of appearing preeminently 
 wise and learned. And his pretension was founded on some 
 claims. He had composed two books of ecclesiastical hymns, 
 the verses of which, to be sure, were in the opinion of Gregory 
 of Tours, a little weak in their feet and too much addicted to the 
 vice of hobbling ; he had moreover written a treatise on one of 
 the sublimest dogmas of the Catholic creed, on the doctrine of 
 the Trinity, which he comprehended and was anxious to explain 
 after a fashion of his own ; that is to say, in a manner which was 
 not very orthodox. He did not stop here. He had still more 
 strangely conceived the fancy of reforming the Latin alphabet, 
 which he considered defective, by adding to it four new char- 
 acters borrowed from the Greek. He gave orders, that this 
 reform should be introduced into all the schools, and if we -may 
 believe his historian, he directed all the Latin books written 
 according to the ordinary orthography to be obliterated, for the 
 purpose of transcribing them anew. 
 
 In all this, there are appearances of Roman erudition and of 
 culture which are obvious .enough ; these appearances are still 
 more conspicuous in other acts of Chilperic, which have refer- 
 ence to the events of the year 57Y. The spectacles of the amphi- 
 theatre, the amusements of the circus were certainly at that 
 time very rarely given, if indeed they had not entirely vanished 
 
 7
 
 1.1 
 
 98 history of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 from Gaul, except, perhaps, from the larger cities of the South. 
 Ohilperic made the attempt to reestablish them. He had cir- 
 cuses built or repaired (Gregory of Tours says expressly that he 
 had them built) at Soissons and at Paris, in which he gave spec- 
 tacles to the public. 
 
 To these traits in the conduct of Ohilperic we must add the 
 indications of his mode of government and of his civil admi- 
 nistration, all of which go to prove that in these respects he like- 
 wise intended to conform to the precedent of the Romans. 
 
 All these Eoman manners were by no means a particular 
 feature, an individuality of the character of Ohilperic ; they 
 were a common, more or less diversified and salient, but con- 
 stant trait in the character of all the Merovingian chiefs of the 
 Frankish tribes, who did not escape the influences of Roman 
 civilization, any more than those of the Visigoths and the Bur- 
 
 fundians had done. The effect of these influences was only 
 ifferent on the former from what it was on the latter, and was 
 productive of results more varied, more complicated and more 
 serious. 
 
 Transplanted into the heart of Gaul, into a situation which 
 was entirely new to them, the descendants of Meroveus were 
 there assailed by a host of new ideas and new tentatives. Ex- 
 cessively greedy of power and of fame, of treasures and of 
 material enjoyments, they entered into the pursuit of all this 
 with all the energy of their character, and they looked for it as 
 much as possible in the institutions, in the inventions and even 
 in the excesses of the Roman civilization. 
 
 The fact which I have adduced above, of the construction of 
 two amphitheatres by the order of Ohilperic, is surely a remark- 
 able proof of this mania on the part of the Merovingians for be- 
 coming Romans. There was not one of them, not even with 
 the exception of Olovis, but what exhibited among his first 
 acts a similar manifestation of the greedy curiosity, with which 
 the Barbarians searched in the culture of the Romans for the 
 enjoyments which they suspected it was capable of afibrding. 
 Clovis had heard by chance of those mimes or dancers whom I 
 have already noticed, and whose art consisted in rendering by 
 the gestures and the movements of the body whatever poetry 
 could express in words. He took it into his head to have one 
 of these artists at his command. At that time, however, there 
 were none of them to be found in the north of Gaul, and it was 
 Theodoric, then king of Italy, whoamdertook to send him one. 
 The pedantic letter of Cassiodorus, which announced and ac- 
 companied this singular mission, is still extant.* 
 
 • Cassiodori epistolae, xli. This is one of the many epistles written, in the name of 
 Theodoric. It is addressed to Luduin or Clovis, the king of the Franks. After congra-
 
 The South of France under the Ba/rbarians. 99 
 
 All the descendants of Clovis did not pusli their literary 
 vanity so far, as to write bad verses or heterodox prose, like 
 Chilperic. But it appears that the majority of them prided 
 themselves on a correct knowledge of the Latin. Fortunatus 
 compliments the elegance with which Charibert expressed him- 
 self in this language. 
 
 But it is particularly important to observe the Roman ten- 
 dencies of the Merovingian chiefs in their government, and to 
 recognize their effects on it. Bangs of two nations, of which 
 the one differed so widely from the other, these chiefs found 
 themselves in fact invested with two royalties equally distinct, 
 the Roman on the one hand and the Germanic on the other. 
 The former, as the clergy then proclaimed it, was an absolute 
 and despotic royalty. The second, as yet entirely new and ill- 
 defined, was but a sort of military command, which free warriors 
 did not consider themselves bound to obey, except so far as it 
 contributed to their personal interest. 
 
 As the Merovingians were captivated by the convenience of 
 the Roman royalty, complete, all-powerful and respected as 
 it was, so they detested the Germanic, which was always 
 precarious, always contested, however slight might be its depar- 
 ture from the national ideas and the habits of the Franks. 
 
 In this embarrassing situation, the Merovingians attempted 
 at first to assimilate the Germanic royalty to the Roman, or in 
 other words to govern the conqueror portion of their subjects 
 in the same manner and by the same laws, as they did the con- 
 quered. History has preserved us some striking instances of 
 this anti-Germanic tentative on the part of the successors of 
 Clovis. Theodebert, the king of Metz, at the instigation of a 
 shrewd Gallo-Roman or Gallo-Greek financier, by the name of 
 Parthenius, attempted to impose a land-tax on the Frankish inha- 
 bitants of his kingdom. This measure was successful for some 
 time ; but after the decease of Theodebert, Parthenius was cut 
 to pieces by the Franks, and from that time a territorial tax 
 was out of the question. 
 
 We have several constitutions by Childebert and by Clotaire, 
 which were conceived with the still bolder and still more 
 anti-Germanic intent of substituting capital punishment in 
 place of the pecuniary compensations for murder, for rape and 
 even for simple robbery. 
 
 A little later (in 614), Clotaire II. held at Paris a sort of 
 
 tulating him on his recent victory over the Alemanni, and exhorting him to clemency 
 toward the inhabitants of the confines of Italy, he adds ia conclusion : " Citharoedum 
 etiam arte sua doctum pariter destinavimus expeditum, qui ore manibusque consona 
 voce cantando, gloriam vestrae potestatis oblectet. Quem ideo fore crctiimus gratum, 
 quia advoseum judiscastis magnopere dirigendum." — Ed.
 
 100 History of Provengal Poei/ry. 
 
 general council, composed of the bisliops of his realm. He 
 then took or adopted diverse measures for the discipline both 
 of the church and of the state, and he pronounced sentence of 
 death against all transgressors without distinction of nationality 
 or race. These tentatives ended in nothing. The Franks still 
 clung to the manners, the laws and ideas of their Germanic 
 ancestry, and they maintained themselves in their privileged 
 situation of conquerors. The necessary antagonism between 
 the Roman royalty and Germanic liberty then became a direct 
 and open conflict of hostile forces. It is of this desperate strug- 
 gle between the Merovingian kings and the Frankish leudes, 
 that Gregory of Tours describes so many strange and pictur- 
 esque incidents. 
 
 These kings had doubtless but a very imperfect conception 
 of the Roman royalty with which they were so much delighted ; 
 they exercised it in an arbitrary, egotistical, and brutal manner ; 
 so that the conquered portion of their subjects, which alone was 
 affected by its provisions, found itself miserably oppressed and 
 daily degenerated more and more into ignorance and poverty. 
 Upon the whole, however, the mischief came rather from the 
 royal agents, the leudes or vassals of the crown, than from the 
 kings themselves, and there was at the botton of the Merovin- 
 gian monarchy a jDrogressive tendency in favor of the protection 
 of the vanquished, a disposition to adapt itself to their ideas 
 and to regard their interests. Tlie struggle, therefore, between 
 the leudes and the king was, strictly speaking, that of the ancient 
 civilization against the prolonged excesses of the conquest. 
 
 This struggle, at first a vague and partial one, ended in con- 
 centrating and localizing itself; it became that of two distinct 
 countries, of Neustria and Austrasia, that of two masses of 
 population, of which the one was mostly Gallo-Roman, the other 
 principally Frankish. 
 
 The violence and the disasters of this struggle act a promi- 
 nent part in our history, of which they occupy more than a cen- 
 tury. The Neustrian party, at first victorious, treated the leudes 
 with the utmost severity. But the latter, rallying under the Car- 
 lovingians, who had now become their chiefs, were finally the 
 victorious combatants. Their triumph in Gaul had all the 
 appearance and all the consequences of a second Germanic 
 conquest, more violent, more painful and more destructive than 
 the tirst. The Gallo-Roman society was completely disorganized 
 by it, and every vestige of the ancient civilization vanished 
 now entirely. 
 
 Under the Merovingians, at any rate under the first of them, 
 literature and the traditions relating to the grand questions of 
 philosophy, had taken refuge from society in the churches and
 
 TTie South of France under the Barbarians. 101 
 
 in the cloisters, and the clergy had thus preserved the power 
 of a beneficent intervention in the government of the Barba- 
 rians in favor of civilization. Under the first Carlovingians, 
 the greater part of the ecclesiastical lands and dignities were 
 transferred by main force into the hands of the warriors, so 
 that the influential and studious portion of the clergy found 
 itself all at once merged, as it were, in the order of soldiers. 
 Then there was nothing left, to which the name of literature 
 could be applied in any sense. The chronicles were then 
 almost the only kind of literary compositions cultivated to a 
 small extent, and these even exhibit the most deplorable marks 
 of the barbarity which had invaded everything. 
 
 The Carlovingians were the men of an epoch like this — men 
 of war and of conquest — who, before disquieting themselves 
 about the manner in which they might govern the Gallo- 
 Eomans, were first of all to make sure of their obedience. 
 Having soon rallied the entire mass of the Franks and of the 
 Neustrians, they went to work to reconquer the whole of the 
 south of Gaul, which, taking advantage of the last troubles of 
 the Merovingian dynasty, had made itself independent and 
 was commanded by chiefs of its own. The campaigns of 
 Charles Martel, first against the Provencals who had united 
 with the Arabs, and thq^ against the Arabs alone ; those of 
 Pepin against the dukes of Aquitaine were, in military par- 
 lance, grand and glorious enterprises, far superior to any of 
 those of Clovis. However, these enterprises did not inspire 
 the contemporary chroniclers with anything more than arid 
 notices, incoherent and truly barbarous. 
 
 The Gallo-Roman or Prankish writers, who after Gregory of 
 Tours had occupied themselves with the history of the Merovin- 
 gians, had shown themselves much inferior to him. They had 
 interwoven many fables into their narratives ; into those, for 
 example, which relate to the adventures of Childeric, the 
 father of Clovis, and to the marriage of Clovis with Clotilda. 
 But these fables had not altered the substance of the facts ; 
 they were but a sort of poetic development of them. Strictly 
 considered, they even attested a lively interest for the events 
 and names of glorious memory ; they were nothing more than 
 history idealized in the sense and according to the tastes of the 
 people. 
 
 There is nothing of the kind in the Carlovingian chronicles ; 
 they contain neither fiction nor poetry, but what is worse than 
 this, falsehoods and servile concealments. And still these 
 chronicles are works of genius, in comparison with a multitude 
 of others, which furnish us a more exact standard of the general 
 taste and of the ordinary compass of intelligence, as it existed
 
 102 History of ProvenQol Poetry. 
 
 at the close of the seventh century and during the first half of 
 the eighth. Further on, toward the end of the latter century, 
 we still find the events related in the chronicles in question 
 despoiled of everything that constitutes their proper character 
 / or their individuality, and reduced to certain general formulas, 
 abstract and lifeless. Do we wish to know, for example, how 
 one of these chronicles describes the famous battle of 
 Poitiers, which Charles Martel won over the Arabs of Spain ? 
 It is as follows : " In 732 Karle fought against the Saracens, on 
 Saturday, near Poitiers." Have we the curiosity to know what 
 transpired in 722 ? Another chronicle gives us the informa- 
 tion in the following terms: "Great abundance, wars from 
 \ northern quarters." * 
 
 And this even was not the ultimate limit of barbarity in this 
 respect; it arrived at a point where developments like those 
 which I have just indicated, appeared to be either superfluous 
 or too difficult to be written. The chronicles of that period 
 are exclusively composed of the names of the kings and of the 
 figures which mark the date of their accession. 
 
 This was the state of aff'airs, and the last vestiges of the 
 ancient civilization seemed to be on the point of disappearing 
 forever amid the disorders of the Carlovingian conquest, when 
 Charlemagne, inheriting the forces of that conquest, gave them 
 a new and unexpected direction. The course of events had 
 brought Charlemagne into early and intimate relations with the 
 Roman pontificate, the only power which at that time pos- 
 sessed, with some enlightenment and some consistency, the tra- 
 ditions of the Western Empire, and was in a position to make 
 some efforts toward the triumph of those traditions over the 
 barbarity by which they were invaded, and which was con- 
 stantly increasing in Italy as well as elsewhere. 
 
 Though endowed with a marvellous instinct of civilization, 
 Charlemagne had nevertheless in his character many and de- 
 cided traits of the barbaric genius ; he remained a German in 
 more than one respect, and it would be a question to know 
 whether he properly comprehended or really could perform all 
 that the church of Rome suggested to him with reference to 
 the restoration of social order and of civilization in the West. 
 Charlemagne, however, always declared himself the champion 
 of this civilization, and accomplished great things for it. He 
 resuscitated the culture of language and of letters at the mo- 
 ment of their utter abandonment ; he made war against the Bar- 
 
 * 722. " Magna fertilitas et bella contra aquiloniam." 732. " Karlus pugnavit con- 
 tra Saracenos die Sabbato ad Pictavis." 709. " Annus durus et deficiens fructus. 
 Godefrid moritur." Several specimens of these chronicles, or, as they were termed, 
 Annales, may be found in Pertz : Monum. Germ. Historic, vol. i. p. 19, sqq.— £d.
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. 103 
 
 barians beyond the Rhine with a view to converting them to 
 Christianity, and through Christianity to a regular social ex- 
 istence. Finally, by accepting the title of Emperor of the 
 West, he appears to have indicated the desire of elevating the 
 whole of it. 
 
 But the existence and the projects of Charlemagne were but 
 a magnificent exception, a sudden and a powerful interruption 
 of the natural course of things. After him, the struggle be- 
 tween the political ideas and traditions of Rome and the 
 principles of the Germanic conquest commenced anew. The 
 wars of Louis le Debonnaire with his sons, those of his sons, 
 first among themselves and subsequently with their vassals, 
 were but the continuation of this struggle, slightly modified by 
 the peculiar circumstances of the times and by the reigns of 
 Pepin and of Charlemagne. The Germanic spirit was at this 
 time also triumphant. The Carlovingian monarchy v/as dis- 
 membered in its turn, still more completely than had been 
 that of the Merovingians, and by the prolonged action of the 
 same causes. 
 
 The vassals of every rank and of every race established them- 
 selves as absolute hereditary seigniors in the j^rovinces, in the 
 cities, on domains, which they had thus far only possessed as 
 revocable fiefs. This was the definitive result, toward which 
 the Frankish conquest had tended from the beginning. That 
 long period of modern history, which is vulgarly designated by 
 the name of the feudal, commences with, and in consequence 
 of. this dismemberment of Charlemagne's empire. 
 
 This dismemberment, brought on by general causes, was 
 everywhere attended with uniform effects, which were, how- 
 ever, not without many local variations. 1 shall here consider 
 it only in relation to the south of Gaul, and without inquiring 
 for the present, in wliat respects the feudalism of this country 
 may have differed from that of the rest of France and Europe. I 
 may perhaps return to these distinctions on another occa- 
 sion. 
 
 The great feudal seigniories of the South date their existence 
 from the end of the ninth century ; they consolidated them- 
 selves from the commencement of the tenth, and what I have 
 here to say respecting the condition of the countries, which 
 constituted these seigniories, has chiefly reference to the inter- 
 val between 880 and 920. 
 
 By a fortunate concurrence of circumstances, the south of 
 Gaul had never been parcelled out to any very great extent 
 even after it had detached itself from the Frankish conquest. 
 Aquitania, which was by far the largest portion of it, had 
 nearly always constituted but a single state, first as a duchy
 
 104 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 and afterward as a kingdom. Some isolated and smaller 
 parts, such as the Provence and Septimania, corresponded to' 
 the ancient Roman divisions, and had strictly determined phy- 
 sical limits^ which to a certain extent may have served as the 
 motive for their accidental isolation. 
 
 In this new state of things, there could no longer be, and 
 there was in fact no longer^ any territorial division which de- 
 served the name o-f a country, or any group of population 
 ■which could be called a people. All these groups were too* 
 small or too factitious to merit any such denomination. They 
 corresponded to nothing natural or historical. The number of 
 states that had now sprung up was almost equal to that of the 
 cities or the fortresses, and th^ere were as many national divi- 
 sions as there were dukes, counts, suzerains of every denomina- 
 tion and of every rank. 
 
 And yet these millions of men, divided into so many little 
 
 f roups, diifered in no essential respect among themselves, 
 hey had the sam^e faith, and the same cultus ; they were gov- 
 erned by the same civil laws, by the same municipal institu- 
 tions ; they had tlie same manners, the same arts, the same 
 kind and nearly the same degree of culture ; they all spoke 
 the same language; they had the same historical traditions, 
 and they all knew that they had long been united under the 
 same government. In a word, all these people continued to 
 form, in the ninth and tenth centuries, as they had done be- 
 fore, one- and the same society, a mass whieh was homogeneous 
 in every sense of the term. 
 
 What then was the basis of this social unity ? "What were 
 those laws, those institutions, those manners, and those tradi- 
 tions common to all those groups^ which were isolated only by 
 their political chiefs? Tliey were still the laws, the institu- 
 tions, the manners and the traditions of the Romans, greatly 
 modified, undoubtedly, and greatly deteriorated, but neverthe- 
 less recognizable still ; still dear to the people, and destined 
 to live again under new forms at some future day. It thua 
 apj)ears, that even after its live centuries of perpetual struggle 
 against the progressive disorders of the two Prankish conquests^ 
 this ancient and powerful civilization of the Roman world had 
 not yet been totally annihilated in the south of Gaul. Whatever 
 in these countries and during the epochs in question constituted 
 a characteristic trait of national manners, a rule or medium of 
 social order, an exercise of the imagination or of the intellect, or 
 a popular enjoyment — all this had been derived from an 
 anterior civilization, and was only the prolonged consequence 
 of the Grseco-Roman influence. 
 I have no room here for a complete portraiture of the south
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. 105 
 
 of France in this new condition, and I shall limit myself to 
 an outline of the state of literature and of the arts. 
 
 The restoration of learning, which was wrought out by 
 the fostering care of Charlemagne, did not extend to the 
 southern parts of Gaul. Whether churchmen or laymen, 
 the writers who during the reign of this prince distin- 
 guished themselves by their talent, or those who at a later 
 date were trained in the schools founded by him, were 
 nearly all of them either Germans or Gallo-Romans from the 
 North. There is scarcely one that could be designated as hav- 
 ing come from the South. It is true, that in this part of^ 
 Gaul we meet with abbeys and ecclesiastical schools of Charle- 
 manic origin, but these schools do not figure in the literary 
 history of the Middle Age. That of Aniane,* in Septimania, 
 is the only one whose name has come down to us invested with 
 some degree of celebrity ; but this celebrity even is a gratuitous 
 one. The best authenticated historical information respecting 
 this abbey, under the rubric of art, is, that the columns and 
 the marble employed in its construction were derived from one 
 of the ancient monuments of Nimes, which was probably / 
 destroyed on this account. ' 
 
 Louis le Debonnaire, in the capacity of King of Aquitaine, 
 applied himself with more zeal and with greater success than 
 Charlemagne to the reform of both the secular and the regular 
 clergy of the country. The number and the flourishing condition 
 of the Aquitanian monasteries under his reign were spoken of 
 with boastful praise ; and this prosperity had, probably, 
 redounded to the advantage of the studies and the literature of 
 the Latin. But it lasted only for a short time. The perpetual 
 wars and the troubles of every kind, in which Aquitaine was 
 involved under the empire of Louis le Debonnaire and his suc- 
 cessors, soon caused the ruin of its churches and monasteries, so 
 that the Aquitanian clergy, like that of the South in general, 
 were in a short time degraded to the same level of ignorance 
 and of grossness, in which the masses of the population were 
 already buried. This is a fact on which it would be superfluous 
 to dwell, and of which we shall j)reseutly see some very aston- 
 ishing proofs. 
 
 Meanwhile, that which directly follows from this fact with 
 reference to my subject, is, that from the ninth century the 
 Koman literature of the South had almost entirely disappeared, 
 
 * TWs -was probably nothing more than the monasterium Anianense. which in 
 Charlemagne's time was under the direction of a certain Benedictus (Pertz : Mon. Germ. 
 Hist. vol. i. p. 301), and which in the Constitutio de servitio monastei-iorum of Louis I. 
 is enumerated as one of forty-eight institutions of a similar name and character. Pertz, 
 vol. iii., p. 223.— ^d.
 
 106 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 and that the measures of Charlemagne had not been able to 
 resuscitate it. These measures had, on the contrary, displaced 
 the focus of Latin studies and traditions in Gaul ; they had 
 transferred it from the South to the North, and this displace- 
 ment had an influence on the literary destiny of the two coun- 
 tries, which has, perhaps, as yet not been sufficiently considered. 
 
 It is from the time of this displacement, that we begin to per- 
 ceive in the south of France the first efforts of a new local and 
 popular literature disengaging itself from the remains, the 
 reminiscences of the ancient Grseco-Roman literature, which 
 was then expiring, or had already expired. I have promised 
 to make the attempt of giving a complete exposition of this 
 curious transition, and the moment has now arrived for keeping 
 my word. With this end in view, I shall, in the first place, 
 describe the general condition of the manners, the ideas, and 
 the culture, in the midst of which the transition in question was 
 effected, and it will thus become much easier for me to dis- 
 tinguish the accidental or necessary impulsions by which it was 
 determined. And perhaps we shall find in this cursory sur- 
 vey more numerous vestiges of the ancient paganism and of the 
 ancient pagan civilization, than we might have looked for at so 
 advanced an epoch of the Middle Age, as were the ninth and 
 tenth centuries. 
 
 It is commonly supposed, that at the time when the Ger- 
 manic nations took possession of Gaul, Christianity was the 
 only religion of the country. This is an improbable hypothesis, 
 contradicted by positive facts. It is incontestably established, 
 that on severals points of territory, in the remoter provinces 
 and on the mountains, Druidism and other primitive modes of 
 worship, peculiar to the inhabitants of Gaul, had maintained 
 themselves to the last days of the Roman dominion, and had 
 even survived it. It is still more certain, that the Graeco- 
 Roman paganism continued to be the religion of a portion of 
 the Gallo-ilomans under the dominion of tlie Barbarians. The 
 zeal, with which the clergy combated all these remains of 
 idolatry, is attested by history. This war was a long one, and 
 was attended with many singular incidents, especially in the 
 South, where classical paganism had maintained its ascendency 
 much longer and more completely than in the North. 
 
 Toward the middle of the sixth century, Saint Caesarius, 
 bishop of Aries, and one of the most enlightened ecclesiastical 
 chiefs of his time, had been occupied during the whole of his 
 episcopate in combating the anti-Christian superstitions of the 
 inhabitants of his diocese. These superstitions, of which a con- 
 temporary priest has transmitted to us a list, which comprises 
 almost the entire circle of the Graeco-Latin paganism, blended,
 
 The South of France under the Barharians. 107 
 
 perhaps, with some remains of the ancient local paganism. 
 The celebration of the calends, the practice of resorting to 
 harnspices, the belief in auguries, the cultus of fountains and 
 of forests are enumerated among the obnoxious practices. 
 
 Not only did these people then still believe in the false gods, 
 but they continued to immolate victims in honor of them. 
 This is evident from one of the canons of the council of Orleans, 
 pronouncing sentence of excommunication against those, who 
 had participated in the distribution of the viands offered at 
 the sacrifices.* 
 
 Another council, held at Toledo in the year 589, the jurisdic- 
 tion of which extended over all the dioceses of the metropolis of 
 Karbonne, attests the fact, that in these dioceses paganism 
 was no less prevalent than it was in that of Aries. A canon of 
 this council condemns in somewhat vague and general terms 
 the sacrileges of idolatry^ which were practised in all parts of 
 the countries subject to the Yisigoths.f A new council, held 
 at Narbonne that same year, in continuation and in conclusion 
 of the preceding one, points out expressly among all those 
 sacrileges of idolatry, which the latter had proscribed without 
 any specifications, one which was peculiar to the province of 
 Narbonne. It prohibits the celebration of Thursday, the day of 
 Jupiter, unless some Christian solemnity should happen to coin- 
 cide with the day.:J: 
 
 This concurrence of the councils and of the bishops in com- 
 bating everywhere the remains of the ancient idolatry had 
 been productive of some effect ; but the success was far from 
 being a complete one. Sundry religious usages of the Graeco- 
 Roman paganism had been retained in southern Gaul, as in 
 other places, and even to a greater extent, in spite of all the 
 
 Erotestations and the opposition of the clergy. These usages 
 ad, however, gradually lost their primitive character ; they 
 had ceased to be religious acts ; they were no longer living 
 
 *Concil. Aurel. ii., can. xx. : " Catholici, qui ad idolorum cultum non custodita ad 
 integrum accept! gratia, revertuntur, vel qui cibis idolorum cultibus immolatis gustu 
 illicitse prtesumptionis utuntur ab ecclesia; coetibus arceantur," etc. 
 
 t Concil. Tolet. iii. can. xvi. : "Quoniam pene per oranem Hispaniam sive Galliam 
 idolatrice sacrilegium inolevit, hoc, cum consensu gloriosissimi principis, sancta synodus 
 ordinavit, ut omnis sacerdos in loco suo una cum judice territorii sacrilegium memora- 
 tnm studiose perquirat, et exterminare inventum non differat," etc., etc. The penalty 
 of excommunication is attached to the neglect of this requirement. Several of the 
 capitularies of Charlemagne inveigh with great severity against all the remains of 
 Pagan superstition, and exhort the bishops to banish them from their respective dio- 
 ceses : " Ut populus Dei paganias non faciat ; sed ut omnes spurcitias gentilitatis abjiciat 
 et respuat, sive profana sacrificia mortuorum, sive sortileges vel divinos, sive phylac- 
 teria et auguria, sive incantationes, sive hostias immolatitias, quas stulti homines 
 juxta ecclesias ritu paganorum faciunt, sub nomine sanctorum martyrum," etc., etc. 
 — Ed. 
 
 X Concil. Narbon, can. xv. : " Ad nos pervenit, quosdam de populis Catholics fidei 
 execrabili ritu diem quintam feriam, qui et dicitur Jovis, excolere et operationem 
 non facere." A severe penalty is added against this practice. — Ed.
 
 108 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 superstitions blended with, or substituted in the place of, Christ- 
 ianity. The false gods had been gradually forgotten, but the 
 natural desire and the necessity of agreeable emotions, and the 
 social habits to which their cultus had given rise, had nearly 
 all of them survived that cultus. The sports, the songs, the 
 imitative and picturesque dances, which had constituted a part 
 of them, had remained in vogue as the means of reunion, as 
 civic festivals, as popular spectacles. 
 
 These diversions had forced themselves into an association 
 with the ceremonies of Christianity ; they took place on the 
 occasions of Christian solemnities, and they had become in a 
 measure their accessory. Those pagan temples, where they 
 had commenced, continued to be their theatre, transformed 
 into churches, as had been the majority of these temples. The 
 companies of dancers, which represented the antique choruses, 
 were composed (as had been the latter) sometimes of persons 
 of both sexes ; sometimes, and it would seem most frequently, 
 of women and of damsels. Their dances were always accom- 
 panied with songs, and the ordinary burden of these songs con- 
 sisted of sentiments or adventures of love. The writings of the 
 clergy and the laws never mention them without horror, 
 never without branding them as tissues of turpitude and 
 obscenity. 
 
 It was these remains of the ancient choral plays, these 
 dances and tlie songs with which they were accompanied, that 
 the councils of every epoch of the Middle Age proscribed as 
 being yet in vogue ; which they designated as pagan usages, 
 sometimes by new names, invented for this purpose, but more 
 frequently by their ancient epithets, and which they describe 
 in a manner, wJiich proves that these epithets were well 
 applied. 
 
 Charlemagne did his utmost to second the efforts of the coun- 
 cils and bishops for the abolition of these relics of paganism, 
 lie issued on this subject a capitulary, of which 1 shall give a 
 verbal report, because it characterizes the usages condemned by 
 it. It is as follows : " When the people come to the churches, 
 on Sundays or on fast-days, let them not give themselves up to 
 dances, to saltations, or to the chanting of infamous and obscene 
 songs, for these things are the remains of pagan customs." * 
 
 The general council held at Rome in 826, characterizes these 
 profanations still more specifically. " There are persons," says 
 the thirteenth canon of that council, " and especially women, 
 who on the feast of the Nativity, or on other rcHgious occasions 
 repair to the churches, not from any suitable motives, but for 
 
 * Another capitulary is to a similar effect : " Canticum turpe atque luxuriosum circa 
 ecclesias agcre omnino contradicimua. Quodet ubique vitandum est." — Ed,
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. 109 
 
 the purpose of dancing, of chanting scandalons words, of forming 
 and of leading choruses, so that if they have come there with 
 venial sins, they return thence with the heaviest." '^ 
 
 These profane customs, common to all the countries which 
 had been provinces of the Roman Empire, were very generally 
 prevalent and deeply rooted in the south of Gaul, and we en- 
 counter vestiges of them in almost every direction. 
 
 From the year 589, the council of Toledo, to which I have 
 already alluded, prohibited the exhibition of profane dances 
 and of obscene songs during the solemnities of Christian 
 worship, f The practice, which we are told was kept up for a 
 long time at Limoges, is still more curious from the fact of its 
 being more circumstantial. The people of this city were in the 
 habit of interfering on their own account in the celebration of 
 the feast of Saint Martial, who was the apostle and the patron 
 of the country. At the conclusion of each psalm, they sung in 
 place of the words prescribed by the liturgy, a couplet in the 
 vulgar tongue, of which the sense was : " Saint Martial pray 
 for us and Ave will dance for you." And they actually danced 
 while chanting these words. They executed a round, a chorus, 
 and all this in the church itself. 
 
 The festival of the Ascension was likewise celebrated in that 
 city by popular dances, with this difference only, that these 
 dances were not performed in the interior of the church, but on 
 a neighboring meadow. The same thing was practised at 
 Chalons, in the diocese of Lyons. There is one circumstance 
 connected with these usages, which, in the absence of all other 
 proofs, would alone suffice to establish their pagan origin ; it is 
 the care with which the clergy, unable to abolish them, 
 attempted to sanctify them, by adapting them as well as 
 could be done to the Christian cultus. It thus frequently 
 happened, that a priest preluded with some prayer or some pious 
 ceremony to these rounds and these profane songs, in which the 
 people sought their pleasure. 
 
 * Concil. Roman, anai 826, can. xxxv. : " Suntquidam, et maxime mulicrcs, qui fe.stis 
 diebu3 atque sanctorum natalitiis, nou pro eorura, quibus delectantur, desideriis 
 advenire, sed ballando, verba turpia decantando, choreas tenendo et ducendo, pimili- 
 tadinem paganorum peragendo advenire procurant; tales enim, si cum minoribus 
 veniant ad ecclesiam peccatis, cum majoribus revertuntur," etc., etc. Leo IV. enjoins 
 excommunication, if after an admonition the practice is not abandoned. The XlXth 
 canon of the Council of Ceville (a.d. 650) proscribes the same custom, which appears 
 to have been in vogue on all extraordinary occasions, such as dedications of churches, 
 festivals of the martyrs, etc. — Ed. 
 
 t Concil. Tolet. can. xxiii. : " Exterminanda omnino est irreligiosa consuetude, 
 quam vulgus per sanctorum solemnitates agere consuevit ; utpopuli, qui debent ofiBcia 
 divina attendere, saltationibus et turpibus invigilent canticis ; non solum sibi nocentes, 
 sed et religiosorum ofSciia peratrepentes. Hoc etenim, ut ab omni Hispania depellatur, 
 Bacerdotum et judicura a concilio sancto cura2 committatur." Another council of an 
 earlier date issued a similar canon: "Non licet in ecclesia choros srecularium, vel 
 puellarum cantica exercere, nee convivia in ecclesia praeparare," etc — Ed.
 
 110 Histoid/ of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 All these remains of pagan rites reposed on the general 
 groundwork of paganism. Thej" represented the ordinary 
 formalities common to all the ancient festivals, without any- 
 more particular reference to any one of these festivals than to 
 another. At any rate, the testimonies of the ecclesiastics on 
 this point are too vague to distinguish anything more special. 
 Among all these pagan reminiscences of the Middle Age, there 
 are but very few, which it seems possible to refer to any 
 determinate localities or particularities of the ancient cultus. 
 Of these I shall only notice one, which is, however, a singular 
 and a remarkable one, and which seems to me to be connected 
 with the ancient cultus of Flora. 
 
 The inhabitants of Rome adored under this name a divinity, 
 which was supposed to preside over the fecundity of the earth, 
 and over the prosperous growth of vegetation, regarded as a 
 means of sustenance for man. Her festival was celebrated in the 
 beginning of May, by amusements which had become prover- 
 bial for their scandal. The courtesans of the ci ty were collected in 
 the stadium ; and at a given signal they stripped themselves of 
 all their garments, and commenced running races, the prize of 
 which, like that of all the other public sports, was awarded by 
 duly appointed magistrates, and in the name of the people. 
 
 How can we imagine, that a usage like this could have 
 maintained itself, under the Christian empire ? And yet it 
 was kept up, and that for centuries, in several cities of ancient 
 Provence, and more particularly in that of Aries. It was one 
 of the oldest customs of this city to celebrate the feast of Pente- 
 cost by diverse gymnastic exercises, by feats in wrestling, in 
 leaping and in racing — exercises, the taste for, and the habit of 
 which, by the way, the Massilians had left in all the places 
 which had formerly been subject to their sway. These 
 amusements always drew together an immense concourse of 
 people ; they were concluded by races of nude prostitutes, and 
 prizes were awarded to those who had won them ; they were 
 distributed by the magistrates, and at the expense of the com- 
 munity. All this was regulated by the municipal statutes, and 
 all this was not abolished until tlie sixteenth century, in conse- 
 quence of the remonstrance of a capuchin. 
 
 The same thing was practised at' Beaucaire and doubtless in 
 many an other city, whose ancient usages are now forgotten and 
 unknown. The association of sports like these with one of the 
 most solemn festivals of the Christian church has something 
 striking about it. It shows us, how strong the tendency of the 
 people was, to transfer to the austere pomp of the new cultus 
 the obscenest reminiscences of the old. 
 
 As there is no doubt but that these pagan usages became
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. Ill 
 
 more insignificant and of rarer occurrence in proportion to the 
 remoteness of their origin, and that the clergy had redoubled 
 its efforts to abolish or to modify them, we may regard their 
 popularity at comparatively recent epochs as the certain indica- 
 tion of a much more extensive popularity at an earlier period. 
 Thus, for example, the Provencal manners of the seventeenth 
 century still contained a multitude of usages, which authorize 
 us to suppose, that during the ninth and tenth centuries these 
 customs must have been at least half pagan. The following 
 striking illustration I gather from a curious pamphlet, addressed, 
 in the shape of a letter (in 1645), to Gassendi, by a certain 
 Tourangeau, wlio was one of his friends. While on a visit to 
 Provence, this good Tourangeau had been singularly struck by 
 what he had seen there in every part of the country, that 
 appeared to him strange and pagan in the ceremonies of re- 
 ligious worship, and especially in the famous processioh of 
 Corpus Christi at Aix. It was for the purpose of repressing his 
 offence at the scandal, that he addressed to Gassendi the little 
 work to which I have alluded, and which was entitled : " A 
 complaint to Gassendi, with reference to the unchristian usages 
 of his countrymen, the Provencals." The author describes the 
 festival of Saint Lazarus, as he had seen it celebrated at 
 Marseilles, in the following manner : 
 
 " Pagan Marseilles," says he, " had strenuously prohibited all 
 theatrical representations ; but now that it professes the religion, 
 in the eyes of which all the amusements of the stage are crimes, 
 it has ceased to abstain from these amusements. In fact, it 
 celebrates the festival of Saint Lazarus with dances, which, 
 owing to the multitude and the variety of their figures, have all 
 the air of theatrical representations. All the inhabitants, at 
 least those who wish to make the day of their Saint a merry 
 one, meet publicly, both men and women, and wearing grotesque 
 masks, they all commence the most extravagant dances. You 
 would say that Satyrs and Kymphs were carrying on their 
 frolics together. They take each other by the hand, they 
 march through the city to the sound of flutes and violins, and 
 when they form an uninterrupted file bending and winding 
 , its serpetine course through all the turns and passages of the 
 streets, they call this great sport. But why should it be made 
 in honor of Saint Lazarus ? This is a mystery which I am 
 unable to divine, any more than the many other extravagances 
 in which the Provence abounds, and to which the people are so 
 much attached, that if any one were to relax their observance, 
 however slightly, it would be looked upon as a high misde- 
 meanor, which is sometimes punished by the destruction of the 
 property and harvest of the delinquent."
 
 112 History of Promngal Poetry, 
 
 A provincial council of Narbonne held in the year 1551, had 
 not yet done with these obnoxious remains of paganism, which, 
 as we have seen, had been condemned since the year 589 — that 
 is to say, more than nine centuries before. It proscribed anew 
 the practice of dancing, and every other sort of play or repre- 
 sentation in the churches or cemeteries. 
 
 That which took place at the celebration of funerals coincides 
 with all the preceding facts, and confirms all the reflections, 
 which are suggested by them. There is no doubt, but that the 
 clergy of the ISouth had made every eflbrt to obtain the exclusive 
 management of the ceremonies connected with the burial of the 
 dead — in other words, of one of the ofiices of social life, over 
 which religion naturally exerts the greatest amount of influence. 
 ^Nevertheless, it is certain that at the epochs of the Middle Age, 
 now under consideration, the funerals were celebrated with the 
 most incongruous intermixture of Christian and pagan rites. 
 It was still customary, for example, to engage for funeral pro- 
 cessions bands of hired mourners, who by their gestures, their 
 words and their screams, gave all the demonstrations of the 
 intensest grief. Death was celebrated with songs, which 
 were not those of the Christian ritual, but which were 
 composed expressly for the occasion. They were a sort of 
 myriologues, and always executed with a certain formal prepa- 
 ration, often by two alternate choruses of maidens, and with 
 noisy accompaniments of an instrumental music, as profane as 
 the songs themselves with which it was intermingled ; and all 
 this transpired in the church and in the presence of the priests, 
 who were obliged to participate in these acts of heathenism, or 
 at any rate to submit to them ! This latter mode of celebrating 
 funeral solemnities seems to have been rather Greek than 
 lioman. Moreover, the country in which it was generally 
 prevalent and popular during the Middle Age was one, in 
 which the Greek population had predominated for centuries 
 before ; it was the Provence proper. The custom was still in 
 vogue at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and in all 
 probability much later. 
 
 Charlemagne had already attempted to abolish these wholly 
 pagan modes of burying tlie dead. lie had decreed that all 
 those, who attended a funeral procession, and did not know some 
 psalm by heart, should sing the Kyrie eleison aloud. His ob- 
 ject was to substitute something religious, something Christian, 
 'in place of the profane songs in use on such occasions. 
 
 These diflerent traits, which I could easily have multij)lied, 
 reveal several characteristic propensities of the mediagval inha- 
 bitants of the south of France. We perceive, that what they 
 had retained with the greatest tenacity of the paganism of the
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. 113 
 
 Greeks and Romans, was its gayest, its most sensual and its 
 most picturesque side, in sliort, whatever was adapted to cap- 
 tivate the eyes or ear in the shape of an amusement or a 
 spectacle. 
 
 It was perhaps in consequence of the same tendencies, that 
 these people had preserved certain provisions of the civil or 
 penal code of tlie Phocseans, which were incompatible with the 
 purity of the Christian spirit. Tims, for example, in several of 
 the southern cities, and particularly, it would seem, in those 
 which were nearest to the sea-coast, the punishment for adultery 
 was a greater scandal than the crime itself. The culj^able party, 
 if a woman, was placed in a state of nature upon an ass, and 
 thus paraded through the whole city. We have every reason 
 to regard this custom as one of Ionian origin, and introduced 
 into Gaul by the Massilians. At any rate, it is an established 
 fact, that on the northern coasts of Ionia the same crime was 
 punished in exactly the same manner. The woman thus pun- 
 ished was there called onobatis / that is to say, the rider upon 
 an ass. 
 
 Besides these ancient festivals, which they had kept up from 
 the pagan times, the people of the South had amusements of 
 another kind and much more frequent, for which they were 
 likewise indebted to antiquity. One of the commonest of these 
 were the feats of dexterity, of strength, or of agility, which 
 were performed in the open air, either in the streets or on the 
 public places. Among these amusements the various kinds of 
 rope-dancing figured with distinction. 
 
 The invention and the improvement of these sorts of exercise 
 are almost exclusively due to the Greeks, who had become the 
 more passionately addicted to them, in proportion as the nobler 
 and more serious arts, which depended on the varied exercise 
 of thought and sentiment, fell into gradual desuetude among 
 them. The same motives, which had prompted them to invent 
 and to relish them in Greece, had led to their adoption in all the 
 Roman provinces. 
 
 The Greeks, who made a profession of these arts (if frivolous 
 products of a degenerate civilization like these deserve the 
 honor of the name), were designated by various appellations, 
 according to the different exercises to which they more espe- 
 cially applied themselves. But they were all comprised under 
 one common denomination, which was equivalent to that of 
 prodigy-makers. Toward the latter time of the empire they 
 were designated in Latin by the equally generic name of Jocu- 
 latores. These men introduced themselves at an early date into 
 the south of Gaul, where they were called Joglars or Jongleurs, 
 and where they were destined to become at a future day the 
 
 8 '
 
 114: History of Provengal Poett^. 
 
 rhapsodists of the Troubadours and one of the poetic classes of 
 Provencal society. 
 
 Another amusement, as popular as the preceding, and which 
 was likewise and still more intimately connected with the arts 
 of antiquity, consisted in the dramatic or mimic farces and 
 plays, the only and scarcely distinguishable remnant of the 
 ancient theatrical representations. Sucli of these representa- 
 tions, as presupposed a certain degree of literary culture in the 
 spectators, and which required a certain apparatus and the con- 
 venience of a theatre, must, as I have already remarked, have 
 necessarily been discontinued in Gaul at an early day, very 
 probably toward the end of the fourth century at the latest. 
 JBut the dramatic plays of an inferior order, those which could 
 scarcely be said to have required any stage or the cooperation of 
 many actors, certainly continued to be in vogue. Those his- 
 trions, tliose itinerant mimes, who had long since been accus- 
 tomed to travel from city to city, from borough to borough, 
 amusing the populace by their parodies and by their fraginent- 
 ary imitations of the comedy or the pantomime of the larger 
 tlieatres, had their successors, who continued and perpetuated 
 their art. 
 
 No doubt, this art had already miserably degenerated with 
 reference both to the means which it employed and to the end 
 proposed ; no doubt, the traditions and the recollections, on 
 which it was founded, had become more and more distorted and 
 adulterated, the further they had receded from their source ; but 
 they did not become entirely extinct, and there is not an epoch 
 of the Middle Age, in which we could not discover some ves- 
 tiges of them. 
 
 In both tlie civil and the ecclesiastical laws of the Middle 
 Age we find certain provisions, which prove that at this epoch 
 there existed histrions and mimes, who were the successors of 
 the histrions and mimes of the pagan period. These laws pro- 
 nounce against the former the same exclusions, which the Eoman 
 emperors and the ancient councils had pronounced against the 
 latter. They likewise refused them the right of becoming wit- 
 nesses before the tribunals. 
 
 The representations by which they fascinated the uncultured 
 multitude are nowhere specified in the acts which proscribe 
 them, but they are summarily qualified as the wanton plays of 
 infamous and obscene histrions, as the filthy jests of mimes, and 
 by other terms, which leave no uncertainty as to their close alli- 
 ance to the pagan mimes. 
 
 The ecclesiastical authors, who make mention of these repre- 
 sentations, have in all probability spoken of them with so much 
 conciseness and obscurity for no other reason, than because they
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. 115 
 
 did not venture to be more explicit. As far as we can form any 
 conception of them, from such imperfect testimonies, these farces 
 were always of a coarse, and frequently of a licentious, charac- 
 ter, in which one or several actors represented, often by a simple 
 pantomimic play, sometimes also by the aid of speech, certain 
 pleasing or burlesque actions and situations, the majority of 
 which must have belonged to the traditions of antiquity. 
 
 And the mimes, the dramatic histrions, properly so called, 
 were not the only artists of pagan antiquity, which had their 
 representatives in the Middle Age. Those dancers, those musi- 
 cians, those itinerant buffoons of the pagan age, which were 
 invited to the private feasts, to weddings and to banquets, or 
 who introduced themselves, in order to increase and add variety 
 to the amusement, were still to be found during the ninth and 
 tenth centuries, exercising the same profession, leading the 
 same life as their predecessors had done before them, and as 
 welcome as they had been, wherever they presented themselves. 
 
 They are the same personages, which, under their antique 
 names of Thymelici and of buffoons, the Emperor Louis 
 le D^bonnaire, by way of a pious exception to the general 
 usage, thought it his duty to remove from his entertain- 
 ments. 
 
 Among this class of artists there figured certain women, 
 whom contemporary legislations designate as peculiarly dan- 
 gerous. I refer to the dancers and the flute-players, who went 
 about from city to city, and in the country, especially on Sun- 
 days and on festivals, searching in every direction for those 
 whom they might for a moment please or seduce. They were 
 under new and sometimes barbarous names — the ancient Orches- 
 trides, the Aulestrides of the Greeks and of the Romans, save 
 only that they fell far below the talents and the graces of their 
 ancient prototypes. "We shall find them again in the twelfth 
 and thirteenth centuries, in those women who were the itine- 
 rant rivals of the Jongleurs, after the latter had become the 
 rhapsodists or singers ot the Troubadours. 
 
 All these remains, all these traditions of the religion, the arts 
 and the customs of antiquity, necessarily lead to the supposition 
 of equivalent remains and of similar traditions of ancient poetry, 
 with which all of them were more or less intimately connected. 
 It is in fact easy to convince ourselves, that at the epochs under 
 consideration there must have existed, in the south of Gaul, a 
 popular poetry, which was the express and direct reminiscence 
 of that of the ancient paganism, feeble and degraded as that 
 reminiscence may have been. 
 
 And in the first place, those profane dances, the remains of
 
 116 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 ancient religious choruses, wliicli had perpetuated themselves 
 in the Christian solemnities ; those pagan rites, which had been 
 kept up in the funeral ceremonies, were, as we have already 
 Been, always accompanied by analogous songs. These songs 
 are always qualified by the epithet of profanity by the ecclesi- 
 astical writers who have occasion to speak of tliem. They con- 
 sequently did not constitute a part of the Christian liturgy ; nor 
 is it any more probable, that they were pagan hymns. They 
 could at most have been but vague recollections of the latter, 
 composed with more or less energy and vivacity, but without 
 any art and in a ]3opular tone, in an incorrect and barbarous 
 Latin. The funeral songs are those, which it is the easiest to 
 suppose were sometimes possessed of some little inspiration and 
 originality. 
 
 But the real groundwork of all the popular poetry of this 
 epoch, consisted of the various songs, which were required for 
 the usual recreations of domestic life. Love was the common 
 theme of all these songs, and this love, it appears, was expressed 
 with that freedom of imagination and of language, which was 
 so repugnant to the mystical spirit of Christianity. Toward 
 the middle of the sixth century. Saint Caesarius qualified the 
 songs of the peasantry about Aries of both sexes as licentious and 
 diabolical songs of love. The ecclesiastical writers of the sub- 
 sequent centuries speak in nearly the same terms of the same 
 kind of songs, which is a proof that their tone was still the 
 same. 
 
 A large number of these songs were dancing-songs, and the 
 dances were generally of the mimic kind, in which the per- 
 formers imitated by their movements their attitudes and ges- 
 tures, the action or the situation described in the chanted 
 words. The choruses of the Greeks were precisely the same 
 thing ; and hence these dances were designated by the Greek 
 corolas or coranlas — a name which they retained for a long 
 time. 
 
 It was sometimes the case that, for want of an appropriate 
 poetry, these dancing choruses chanted songs which were 
 simply historical. An ecclesiastical writer has preserved ua 
 two couplets of a popular song on one of the expeditions of 
 Clotaire XL against the Saxons, which took place toward the 
 middle of the seventh century. He says expressly, that this 
 Bong, in rustic Latin, was in the mouth of everybody, and that 
 the women made choruses of it, that is to say, they sung it 
 while performing the circular dance or round.* 
 
 * Ex qua victoria carmen publicum, juxta rusticitatem, per omnium pene volitabat
 
 The South of France under the Barbarians. 117 
 
 Such, is the most definite and the clearest idea, which it was 
 in my power to give of the general state of things, and of the 
 manners and customs, in which the first attempts, the rudi- 
 ments of a new literature and of a new idiom originated in the 
 south of France. The extreme scarcity of information respect- 
 ing these obscure times, and particularly when the question 
 turns on facts of an order like those which occupy our attention 
 at present, did not permit me to be more complete or more 
 explicit. 1 hope, however, that my ulterior developments will 
 fetch out more distinctly the antecedents, to which they will 
 successively link themselves. 
 
 But, first of all, it will be necessary for me to speak of the 
 formation and of the history of the Provencal idiom. This is 
 an indispensable preliminary to the history of the literature 
 now under consideration. 
 
 ora, ita canentium, feminseque chores, inde plaudendo, componebant." Author of the 
 life of St. Faron. The song was as follows : 
 
 De Chlotario est canere rege Francorum, 
 
 Qui ivit pugnare in gentem Saxonum. 
 
 Quam graviter provenisset missis Saxonum, 
 
 Si non fuisset inclytus Faro de gente Burgundiorum. 
 
 Quando veniunt in terram Francorum, 
 Faro ubi erat princeps, missi Saxonum, 
 Instinctu Dei transeunt per urbem Meldorum, 
 Ne interficiantur a rege Francorum. — Ed.
 
 118 History of ProvenQoX Poetry. 
 
 CHAPTER TI. 
 
 ORIGIN OF THE PKOVENgAL LANGUAGE. 
 
 I PASS now to the consideration of the origin and formation 
 of the Romansh languages in general, and of that of the Trou- 
 badours, which is the most ancient, the most ingenious) and tho 
 most polished of them all, in particular. It is not without a 
 sort of diffidence and anxiety^ that I approach the investigation 
 of this part of my subject, fearing that it might appear dry and 
 wearisome to the general reader. The subject, however, is on 
 the one hand too important and too intimately connected with 
 the history of modern literature and civilization, to admit of 
 any evasion ; and on the other hand, the ideas generally pre- 
 valent on this point seem to me to be too unsatisfactory to be 
 repeated here without a new examination. 
 
 The Romansh or Neo-Latin languages, that is to say, the 
 ancient Provencal, the French, the Spanish, the Italian and the 
 Portuguese and their respective dialects are commonly supposed 
 to have been formed by a mixture of tlie Latin, corrupted by 
 the Barbarians of Germany, and of the national idioms of the 
 latter. But this solution of the problem is but a superficial 
 one ; it is, as it were, a mere concealment of its real nature and 
 extent. Its proper solution would have required a preliminary 
 inquiry, on the one hand, into the antiquities of the nations 
 among which the languages in question originated, and on the 
 other, into the history of languages in general. 
 
 This is precisely what I would have to do in regard to the 
 Provencal, in order to analyze its original ingredients. But 
 this task, rigorously taken, would exceed at once my means 
 and my design. I am, therefore, less ambitious to furnish a 
 methodical solution of the question than I am to present it 
 under a point of view, which will permit us to embrace it as a 
 whole, and to indicate some of the conditions on which its 
 definitive solution depends. 
 
 The origin of the Provencal goes back far beyond the epoch 
 of the Germanic invasions ; it links itself by various threaas to 
 the history of the ancient languages and of the ancient inhabi-
 
 Origin of the PTovengal Language. 119 
 
 tants of Gaul. Some notions, in regard to tlie latter, are there- 
 fore an indispensable preliminary to our researches on the 
 former. 
 
 I have already had occasion to speak of the aboriginal in- 
 habitants of Gaul, which are mentioned in history. But what 
 I have been able to say casually, and as it were by stealth on 
 this subject, has been by far too rapid to admit of my referring 
 to it now. It is indispensable, that I should resume the con- 
 sideration of it more expressly, in order to discover its relation 
 to the special question which I have now undertaken to dis- 
 cuss. Nevertheless, it w^ill be granted that I shall not be able 
 to say all that might be said on a topic so obscure and so com- 
 plicated as is the one under consideration, without deviating 
 from my purpose ; and I shall be reduced to the necessity of 
 merely giving some of the results without any further discus- 
 sion, and without entering into all the proofs by which they are 
 arrived at. I can, however, assure the reader that I have 
 neglected neither researches nor reflections to convince myself 
 of the truth of these results. 
 
 At the time in which the history of Gaul commences, this 
 country was inhabited by numerous tribes, forming at least 
 three distinct groups, three different national bodies, which the 
 writers of antiquity frequently confounded, sometimes under 
 one name, sometimes under another. Caesar is the first who 
 has expressly distinguished them by different names. To the 
 first of these three nations he gives the name of Aquitani, 
 to the second that of Celtse, and to the third that of 
 Belgce.* 
 
 But positive and valuable as this division may be, it never- 
 theless gives rise to, or rather leaves unsolved, several difficul- 
 ties, of which I will only mention two. 
 
 In the first place, it is not applicable to the whole of Gaul, 
 but only to that portion of the country which was conquered 
 by Caesar. It consequently excludes all the tribes of Gallia 
 Narbonensis, a province of vast extent, which had already been 
 subject to the Roman sway before the conquest of Caesar. "VYe 
 know positively, that the tribes of this province belonged to 
 different races, but it remains to be decided whether these 
 races were the same three national bodies which we have already 
 mentioned, or whether they were of a different origin. 
 
 The first of these two hypotheses is by far the most probable, 
 and I think it can be proved historically, that the tribes of 
 Gallia Karbonensis were all of them, as were those of the rest 
 of Gaul, either Aquitanian or Celtic or Belgic, and that they 
 were thus evidently included in the division of Caesar. 
 
 * De Bello Gallico, lib. i., c. I.— Ed.
 
 120 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 In tlio second place, Csesar expressly affirms a fact which is 
 worth our notice. He says, that the name Celt, which he applies 
 to one of the three nations conquered by him, was the name by 
 which this people was accustomed to designate itself, and he at the 
 same time adds, that the Celts were the same people to wdiich the 
 Komans usually gave the name of Gauls.* It follows from this 
 assertion, that in his time the term Gauls was employed by the 
 Romans in an improper and arbitrary manner- — in a man' 
 ner, which did not corresj)ond to the actual state or usage of 
 the country ; that at that epoch there was no longer any par^ 
 ticular tribe, or any collection of tribes, to which this ancient 
 name of Gauls could strictly be applied. It appears, that in 
 consequence of some unknown revolution a new name had 
 gained the ascendency over the latter, and had caused it to fall 
 into desuetude in its own country even. Now it is necessary 
 to know to which of the three of Caesar's national divisions the 
 name of Gauls had originally been given, and could still be 
 applied with propriety, at least historically. "We have every 
 reason to believe, that it was to the Belgians, and that the 
 name of Belgse was, in Caesar's time, the one which had ob- 
 tained in Gaul as the collective designation of the tribes which 
 had formerly been denominated Gallic. 
 
 Caesar is also the authority from which we learn, what por- 
 tion of the territory of Gaul was inhabited by each of the three 
 nations discovered by him, and there is no doubt but that, upon 
 the whole, and with a few exceptions noticed by others, his 
 division is a just and an important one. According to his ac- 
 count the Aquitanians inhabited the triangular area comprised 
 between the course of the Garonne and the occidental half of 
 the Pyrenean chain. The Celts had chiefly concentrated them- 
 selves in the territory, which was situate between the Garonne 
 and the Seine. The Belgic tribes, or those of the ancient Gal- 
 lic race, occupied the whole of the area extending from the 
 right bank of tlie Seine to the left bank of the Bhine, and to 
 the shores of the Atlantic. Finally, the province of Gallia 
 Narbonensis contained tribes, of which some were affiliated to 
 the Belgae, as for example, the Volcae Arecomici of Nimes, 
 and the Volca? Tectosages of Toulouse ; and others to the Aqui- 
 tanians, as, for example, all the Ligurians and the Iberians on 
 the sea-coast, between the mouths of the Ilhone and the eastern 
 headland of the Pyrenees, Some of those tribes were un- 
 doubtedly Celtic, but we have no positive data, by which we 
 may distinguish them. 
 
 In regard to the characteristic differences, which doubtless 
 
 "Tertiam (partem incolnnt), qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli, appellantur." 
 Id. eodem loco — Ed.
 
 Origin of the Provenqal Language. 121 
 
 exited between the three . nationalities mentioned by Csesar, 
 that^f their languages is the principal one, which it is necessary 
 for ne to notice here ; but it is by no means easy to say any- 
 thingvery definite on this point. Csesar is content with the 
 vague affirmation, that tlie three nations in question differed 
 among themselves in their laws, their customs and their 
 languages.* 
 
 Strabo while adopting the division of Caesar, happily adds some 
 traits, wlich develop) and complete it, at least as far as the 
 Aquitaniais are concerned. " The Aquitanians," says he, " are 
 entirely dflerent from the Gauls, not only with respect to 
 their langmge, but also in their general appearance, which has 
 a greater rtsemblance to that of the Iberians ;" f and by his 
 Iberians, Stiabo here means the masses of the Spanish. When. 
 he comes to '.he special description of Aquitania, he commences; 
 with a passage which is still more explicit than the first:. 
 " The Aquitaiians," says he, " resemble the Iberians more- 
 closely than tley do the Gauls, both in the general conforma- 
 tion of their bcdy and in their language." % 
 
 This fact beiig considered as established, we are certain, that 
 the Aquitanian&and the other tribes of the same race spoke an 
 Iberian idiom, £s different as possible from the Celtic or the 
 Gaulish. In regird to these latter languages, it is equally 
 obvious that thei? mutual difference must certainly have been 
 much more incorsiderable than the difference between them 
 and the Aquitanim ; it was, however, still great enough, to 
 lead Caesar into tlij error of regarding them as two languages, 
 totally distinct fron each other. The inhabitants of Gaul, 
 therefore, spoke p-imitively three different languages, the 
 Aquitanian, the Cdtic and the Gallic, as I prefer to call it 
 instead of the Belgic. 
 
 The Phocseans are the first people,, known to have introduced 
 a new language into »5raul. The tribes of the vicinity of Mar- 
 seilles, as we have aVeady seen, soon learned this new idiom, 
 and their own, whate\^r it was, must sooner or later have been 
 more or less affected b.^ the former. 
 
 Soon after the establishment of the Phocaeans in Gaul, the 
 Komans, having succesiively conquered the different parts of 
 the country, introduced the Latin, which incessantly gained 
 new advantages over t\e Greek, as well as over the ancient 
 national languages, untilthe epoch of the Germanic invasions. 
 
 * "Hi omnes lingua, institutis, igibus inter se difFerunt." Dc Bcllo Gallico, lib. i. 
 C. 1 Ed. 
 
 t " 'ATT/laJf yap ei-keIv^ o'l '' kK.o\TavoX Sia^iipovai tov Ta2.aTiK0v (pvXov, Kara re 
 Ttxf Tuv GuixuTuv KaTaaKEvug, KatKaTu ttjv y'AuTTaV ioiKacri 6t (luXkov 'iPripaiv." — 
 Geograph., lib. iv. c. 2 £d. \ 
 
 i In the same chapter of the samebook. — Ed..
 
 122 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 It is an accredited opinion, tliat. at this epoch the Latii had 
 become the universal, nay, the only, language of the Gauls ; 
 but this opinion has very little intrinsic probability. It has 
 against itself the excessive difficulty, with which languiges are 
 known to become extinct, however little they may b( spoken 
 by numerous masses of men, and in a territory of i certain 
 extent and of some variety of surface. It remains t> be seen, 
 whether it has any facts in its favor ; but it is easr to assure 
 one's self, that it has none. 
 
 The Romans, it is true, undertook to impose thfir language 
 and their laws at the same time on the nations whom they 
 subjugated ; * but in this attempt they cannot be said to have 
 been absolutely successful anywhere. The time for the con- 
 summation of so vast an enterprise was wanting V them every- 
 where ; and when their empire fell, there was perhaps not a 
 single province, but what contained considenble masses of 
 population, which continued to express themsebes in the idiom 
 of their fathers. Thus they spoke Greek in Greece ; Punic and 
 Berber in the province of Africa ; Illyrian on the eastern coast 
 of the Adriatic ; Coptic in Egypt. In the first century of our era, 
 the ancient dialects of several districts of Ita^, at a very short 
 •distance from Rome, as for example the Oscar and the Etruscan, 
 -were still written and spoken both. The same facts, which 
 prove that at that time they were not yet extinct, warrant the 
 presumption that they still continued to exst for a long time 
 after ; so that it is very doubtful, whether the Latin was ever 
 the only language of Italy itself. 
 
 As far as Gaul is concerned, the Latin was certainly never 
 the language of all its inhabitants. Thee are a multitude of 
 facts which go to prove, that in different pa'ts of the country the 
 ancient national idioms and even the G'cek continued in use 
 until the last days of the empire, and thatthey even survived it. 
 
 Saint Jerome states indirectly, that n the fifth century the 
 Gallic was still spoken at Treves and its vicinity — that is to say, 
 in one of the parts of the country, wlifre Roman culture must 
 have exercised the greatest influence f* The same saint re- 
 lates another fact on the authority of V'arro, and his statement 
 would seem to imply, that it was stil so in his own time ; he 
 says, that, besides the Latin and the Greek, a third idiom was 
 spoken at Marseilles and its enviions,:}: which could have 
 
 * " Imperiosa civitas non solum jugum, sed etum lingnam spam gentibus domitig 
 imponebat. — Romani, quocumque pergebant. latinon inferebant linguam." St. Hieron. 
 in Epist. ad Galatas, procem. St. August. De Civt. Dei, lib. xix.—Ed. 
 
 f . . . . " Galatas exceptosermoneGrajco quo omois Oriens loquitur, propn'am 
 linguam eundem peae habere quam Treviros." .... In Epist. ad Gal. lib. ii. c. 
 3 Ed. 
 
 t " Massiliam Phocaei condiderunt : quos ait Tarro trilingues esse, quod et Graece 
 loquantur, et Latine, et Gallice." Id. eodem Uho.—Ed.
 
 Origin of the Provencal Language. 123 
 
 \ 
 
 been none otlier than one of the three primitive idioms of Gaul. 
 Kow the places in question had been subject to the action of 
 Greek and Roman civilization for more than a thousand con- 
 secutive years. From these two facts we may indeed be per- 
 mitted to conclude) that the Latin could not have made any 
 very great progress in the high valleys of the Pyrenees, or on 
 the remote shores of Armorica ; and in support of these facts, 
 we might cite twenty others, if we had the time to do so. / 
 
 It would be a chimerical enterprise, if one were to attempt to 
 draw a precise line of demarcation between the parts of Gaul, 
 where the Latin was spoken at the commencement of the fifth 
 century, and those where the national idioms had continued in 
 use up to the same period. The assertions, which could be 
 hazarded on this subject, would be true only on the condition of 
 being extremely vague. 
 
 At the epoch in question, the three primitive languages of 
 Gaul continued in use, without any doubt, in certain remote 
 cantons, away from the highways of commerce, and from the 
 seats of authority — that is to say, in the mountainous districts of 
 the interior, and on the frontiers. 
 
 As to the -Latin, it must have been generally spoken in the 
 cities and in the greater part of their districts, at least in those 
 populous provinces, which had frequent and regular communi- 
 cations with each other. 
 
 But even there, where the Latin was spoken, it could not 
 have been so to the same extent nor equally well. The person- 
 ages of the higher classes, those, who had frequented the schools 
 of grammar and of rhetoric, no doubt spoke it with correctness.* 
 But we cannot make the same application in regard to the 
 general masses of these populations. 
 
 At Rome itself, there was a great difference between the 
 Latin as established by literary culture, such as the educated 
 classes prided themselves on speaking it, and the Latin of the 
 people generally. There, as everywhere else, the people were 
 m the habit of clipping and of altering the forms of words, and 
 of depriving them of the characeristic endings, which were 
 destined to express the nicer shades of their grammatical value. 
 So men of great sense and erudition have regarded the language 
 of the ancient Roman populace as a vulgar dialect of the Latin, 
 of which the Italian would be the immediate continuation. 
 
 * This is manifest inter alia from a letter of Sidonius, in which he congratulates a 
 friend of his, who was an inhabitant of Auvergne, on his success in instituting public 
 schools for the education of the young nobles of the country : " Celtici sermonis 
 squamam dspositura nobilitas, nunc oratorio stylo, nunc camcenalibus modis imbuitur." 
 But to the misses the Latin of the classical authors must have still remained, what the 
 French of Penelon or Racine is at this very day to the provincial, who knows nothing 
 but hia patois Ed. 
 
 (:^t'~j^^^^ L07v^ a^ ^ Jc ^^4/Kj3_.
 
 124 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 There is undoubtedly some truth in this opinion ; the only 
 difficulty is, that from a general and vague fact they have 
 deduced too special and too precise a consequence. 
 
 As far as Gaul is concerned, the chances for the adulteration 
 of the Latin in the mouth of the lower classes of the people 
 were there obviously greater and more numerous than atKome. 
 In order to learn the Latin, the Gauls were obliged to forget 
 their ancient languages ; and a forgetting of this description, 
 even with the decided determination of succeeding in it, is al- 
 ways for the masses of the people the slowest and the most 
 difficult thing in the world. The national terms and idioms 
 must have become apparent every moment in the Latin of a 
 Celt, a Gaul or an Aquitanian, who had not learnt it syste- 
 matically, but by practice and from sheer necessity. 
 
 This forced mixture, this inevitable collision between the 
 Latin and the primitive idioms of Gaul, must necessarily have 
 given rise to intermediate dialects, to a popular Latin, which I 
 shall henceforth distinguish by the name of Rustic Latin, and 
 to which I shall have occasion to return hereafter. 
 
 It was not in the nature of things, that the infei'ior classes of 
 the Gallo-Roman population should ever succeed in speaking 
 the Latin with all the rigor and in all the purity of its gram- 
 matical correctness. Nevertheless, as Ions as the Roman 
 culture was making progress in Gaul, the Rustic Latin must 
 have had a gradual tendency to approximate the grammatical, 
 and to become more and more assimilated to it. 
 
 The Germanic invasions came to arrest the anterior march 
 of things in this respect, as in every other. In consequence of 
 these invasions, three new idioms were introduced into Gaul, 
 by the Gothic in the southwest, the Bnrgundian in the south- 
 east, and the Frankish in the north. At that time — that is to 
 say, at the end of the fifth century, there were eight or nine 
 diiFerent languages in Gaul. Two centuries later, after the con- 
 quest of Septimania by the Arabs, Narbonne, the primitive 
 centre of the Latin language in Gaul, became the seat of anew 
 authority and of a new language. This is the tenth of those, 
 which history can enumerate up to that time, to say nothing of 
 the unknown varieties of dialects, which were undoubtedly 
 very numerous. 
 
 Different languages, which are brought into accidental contact 
 with each other, naturally tend to modify, to interpenetrate 
 and to supplant each other. Being the organs of moral and 
 political forces, they necessarily show the pretensions and the 
 destinies of these forces ; they triumph or they perish with them. 
 All the languages, which coexisted in Gaul from the end of the 
 fifth to the middle of the eighth centuries were far from having
 
 Origin of the Provencal Language. 125 
 
 equal chances of life and of duration. But it would occupy 
 too much time, and it is not essential for my purpose, to render 
 an account of these chances. It will be sufficient to remark, 
 that before the end of the tenth century, the majority of the 
 languages, of which I have spoken, had already disappeared 
 from the soil of Gaul, some sooner and others later, without our 
 being able to say precisely at what epoch, with respect to any 
 of them. 
 
 One of the most ancient of these languages, the Gaulish or 
 the Gallic, had been one of the first to disappear ; at any rate, 
 the last positive evidence we have of its existence in Gaul, 
 relates to the end of the fourth century ; it is contained in a 
 curious passage from the life of Saint Martin, by Sulpicius 
 Severus. This biography is in the shape of a dialogue. Some 
 Aquitanians, anxious to become acquainted with the life and the 
 miracles of the Saint, requested a certain Gaul, who had been a 
 witness, to give an account of them. But the latter shows a 
 little diffidence and embarrassment about explaining himself in 
 the presence of men of an accomplished and fastidious taste, 
 while he himself is but a Gaul, wdio, moreover, pretends to be 
 somewhat illiterate. " Speak as you please," said thereupon 
 Posthumianus, one of the interlocutors, eager to hear him, 
 " speak Celtic or Gallic if you prefer it, provided you only 
 speak of Martin."* There is no doubt, but that by these 
 denominations of Celtic and of Gallic he meant two of the 
 ancient idioms of Gaul, which were then still spoken, of one of 
 which, however, every vestige is lost from the moment of this 
 accidental notice. 
 
 Subsequently to the sixth century, we find no longer any 
 indication of the use of the Greek. Before the end of the eighth, 
 the Arabic, together with the dominion of the Mussulmans, had 
 been driven back be^^ond the Pyrenees. From the commence- 
 ment of the ninth, the Latin had ceased to be spoken, and was 
 thenceforward only employed as the language of the cultus, / 
 the laws and the administration. Finally, there is every appear- 
 ance, that the Yisigoths and the Burgundians had renounced 
 their Teutonic idioms about the same time. 
 
 By the tenth century, history knows of no more than four 
 different languages within the limits of Gaul. The Frankish 
 was generally spoken on the left banks of the Hhine, in those 
 portions of ancient Belgium, into which the Franks had forced 
 
 * " Dam cogito me hominem Galium inter Aquitanos verba facturum, vereor ne offen- 
 dat vestras nimium urbanas aures sermo rusticior." This is the language put into the 
 mouth of the Celt. To which the Aquitanian interlocutor replies : " Vel ccltice, aut si 
 mavis, gallice loquere, dummodo jam Martinum loquaris," Dial. i. — Ed.
 
 126 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 themselves in a mass, and whence they had expelled the Gallo- 
 Komans. 
 
 In the Armorica of Csesar, which was then called Bretagne, 
 the Celtic still continued to be in use ; it was then or soon after 
 designated by the name of the Breton. 
 
 In the valleys of the western Pyrenees, the ancient Aquita- 
 nian idiom was likewise perpetuated ; it had assumed the name 
 of the Basque, as had also the people, who spoke it. 
 
 In all the rest of the country, the Gallo-Romans spoke a 
 language, which was mostly derived from the Latin, and which 
 I the historians designate by the name of the Lingua liomana 
 \ Pustica, or by that of the Lingua Romana, or Roman language 
 simply. It was, as we shall see more clearly hereafter, this 
 same idiom, which I have already distinguished as the Rustic 
 Latin, and which, at a somewhat later period, was called the 
 Romance or the Romansh. It was divided into various dialects, 
 the most prominent of which, at the two extremities of the 
 country, formed on the one hand the French or the Romansh 
 of the North, and on the other the Provencal or the Romansh 
 of the South. 
 ( It is the origin and the formation of the latter, that I Iiave 
 undertaken to explain, and it is for the want of a sufficient 
 number of direct data on this subject, that I have been obliged 
 to approach it in a very circuitous way. In indicating the 
 various languages, which, from the most ancient times, were 
 simultaneously or successively spoken in the countries, where 
 the Provencal was subsequently formed, I have at the same 
 time, and by that very means, indicated all the possible sources 
 of the latter, all the materials which could enter into its com- 
 position, all the grammatical antecedents that could have deter- 
 mined its character. The question is now, to see, to what 
 extent, considering the Provengal such as it presents itself to 
 us in the written monuments and by oral tradition, we may be 
 able to distinguish the respective influences of the anterior 
 idioms, and to appreciate its greater or less affinity with them. 
 
 There are two things, which constitute a language : its matter, 
 or the sum of words which it employs in designating objects ; 
 and the system or the method, which these words follow in order 
 to express certain relations between the objects designated and 
 our ideas ; they are, in other and more familiar terms, its diction- 
 ary and its grammar. I shall, in the first place, speak of the 
 material substratum of the Provengal, independently of its gram- 
 matical forms, which I propose to consider after the former and 
 in the next chapter. 
 
 The Provencal contains a much larger number of words, 
 foreign to the Latin, than is commonly supposed. I have col-
 
 Origin of the Provengal Language. 127 
 
 lected nearly three thousand of them from the different literarj \ 
 monuments of this language, which I have had occasion to ' 
 consult. Now, considering the small number of these works as 
 compared with the immense number of those which are lost, it 
 is to be presumed, that three thousand words are scarcely more 
 than one-half of those, which might have been gathered from 
 a complete collection of the monuments in question. Never- 
 theless, the number indicated is suflEiciently complete, to give rise 
 to some curious comparisons. 
 
 Of these three thousand Provengal words foreign to the Latin, 
 or at least to the Latin, such as we know it from books, the 
 greater part cannot, to my knowledge, be referred with cer- 
 tainty to any known language. It is impossible for me to 
 say, whether it belongs to the lost portion of the three primitive 
 idioms of Gaul, or to languages, with which we are unacquainted, 
 and on the existence of which history furnishes us no indication. 
 But the remainder of the non-Latin ingredients of the Pro- 
 vencal can very easily, and with more or less certainty, be 
 referred to languages, which are at present still not only known, 
 but spoken and alive, and which could never have contributed 
 words to the Provengal, unless they had been in use before it, 
 and in the country in which it originated. This portion of the 
 Provencal includes many valuable indications, both in regard 
 to its own history, and in regard to that of the ancient inhabi- 
 tants of Gaul, 
 
 Of the languages introduced into Gaul, the Arabic was the \ 
 last, which could have had any influence on the formation of 
 the Provengal. And, indeed, we find in the latter a certain 
 number of terms, which are undoubtedly derived from the for- 
 mer. They could easily have found their way into it, some 
 during the dominion of the Arabs at ISTarbonne, and others in 
 consequence of the numerous relations subsisting between the 
 inhabitants of the South and the Arabs of the Spanish Penin- 
 sula. ^ I shall here confine myself to a simple notice of the fact, 
 to which I shall have occasion to return hereafter ; and I shall 
 return to it for the purpose of explaining other facts, with which 
 the latter is connected. 
 
 After all that I have heretofore said concerning the influence 
 of the Massilians in the south of Gaul, it would be astonishing 
 not to find some vestiges of the Greek in the vulgar idioms of 
 the country. And, indeed, there are to bo found many, and 
 very remarkable ones, especially on the left side of tlie Ehone, 
 in Provence proper, where the settlements of the Massilians 
 were more numerous, and their population more compact, than 
 between the Rhone and the Pyrenees. The language of the 
 inhabitants of the sea-coast contains a very considerable num-
 
 128 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 ber of Greek words, which occur more especially among those 
 wliich have reference to the industry of the country, to the cul- 
 tivation of the soil, and to fishing. In Lower Provence, and 
 even in those parts of the Alps, which during summer are fre- 
 quented by Provencal herdsmen, tliere were at a comparatively 
 recent period (and there are undoubtedly still) villages, where 
 bread was called harto, from the Greek name apro^. In the 
 written Provencal, which represents the state of the language 
 at an epoch, when it was seven to eight centuries nearer to its 
 origin, these Greek terms are still more abundant. There are 
 Troubadours, who call the sea peleh, pelech, jyelagre^ names 
 which are evidently derived from the Greek ixkXayoq. Many 
 of the most ordinary acts of life are likewise expressed by Greek 
 words in the Provencal. 
 
 To dream, to muse, is expressed by pantaizar^ phantayssar^ 
 Greek (pavrd^o). 
 
 To seize, to take by the hand, is called marvir, amarvir, from 
 
 HdpTTTG). 
 
 To eat, to partake of the principal meal of the day, is denoted 
 by the word dipnar^ from the Greek 6ei7:vov^ whence the French 
 diner and the English dinner, are derived. 
 
 To tear, to lacerate, is called sMzar, shissar, from ux^W- 
 
 To strive, endeavor, ponhar, from Troveo, Trovog. 
 
 To conceal one's self, make one's self small, iapinar, from 
 raTreti'or, Taneivooj. 
 
 To fight, to wage war, peleiar, from TrdAf/zof . 
 
 To cut, to divide in two, is entamenar, from refivo), which the 
 French has converted into entamer, by a suppression which de- 
 stroys or disguises the etymology of the word. 
 
 To turn (one's self), is mrar and girar, from yvpoq, yvpevo). 
 
 All these Provencal verbs can, with great facility, be traced 
 to their Greek originals, from which they are derived, as we 
 perceive, with hardly any alterations. 
 
 It is just so with a multitude of other terms, employed to 
 designate objects of ordinary life ; thus for example : 
 
 An arrow, dart, is called pilo, from fieXog. 
 
 Apple, mela^ or melha^ from [irj'Aov. 
 
 Lightning, flash, lampec, or lamps, from Xaixndg, Xdnno). 
 
 Column, stilo, from oTvXog. 
 
 Burin, style, graf, from ypacpelov or ypacpig. 
 
 Pitcher, jug, ydria, from vdpelov. 
 
 Visage, countenance, cara, from Kdpa. 
 
 It is perhaps not out of place here to call to mind, that the 
 Massilians spoke an Ionian dialect, peculiar to Phocsea, their 
 mother city, and to the neighboring isle of Samos. Now, this 
 dialect undoubtedly contained words, which were unknown
 
 Origin of the Provencal Language. 129 
 
 elsewhere, and a number of wliich may have remained in the 
 Provencal, without our liaving at present the means of recog- 
 nizing them. Curious researches might be instituted on this 
 point ; but they would lead too far from my subject. I shall 
 nave but one observation to make in regard to it, and it is this : 
 had history never said a single word with reference to the 
 Greek populations, which flourished for a long time in the south 
 of Gaul, their existence might have been surmised from the 
 vestiges of the Greek that are scattered through the Pro-/ 
 vengal. 
 
 Among the ingredients of this latter idiom there are some, 
 w^hich are more ancient and more curious than the Greek. It 
 contains words which are at present still alive in the Low-Bre- 
 ton and in the Welsh. ISTow there is no doubt, but that these 
 two dialects belong to one of the three primitive languages of 
 Gaul, and to the one which I have designated by the name of 
 the Celtic. It follows from this, that some of the countries, 
 in which the Provencal has since originated, were anciently 
 inhabited by Celtic tribes, and it is principally in sections com- 
 posing the northern half of the basin of the Garonne, that we 
 must look for the source of whatever there is of the Celtic ele- 
 ment in this idiom. 
 
 It would be quite a complicated task for philological criticism 
 to eliminate with certainty and completeness all the Breton or 
 Celtic elements interspersed through the Provencal, and this is 
 not the place for such an undertaking. All that I can do here 
 is simply to affirm, that these words are quite numerous, and 
 to give by way of specimens, some of the most remarkable of 
 them. Thus, for example, in the Provengal 
 
 Vas signifies a tomb. 
 
 Dorn, a clenched hand, or fist. 
 
 Anaf and enaip^ a cup. 
 
 Agre^ a troop, multitude. 
 
 Mans, the earth, the countiy. 
 
 Ruska, the bark of a tree. 
 
 Comba, dale, valley. 
 
 Mahoul, childish, infantine. 
 
 Cuend, graceful, pretty. 
 
 Prim, slender, subtile. 
 
 Truan, vagabond, mendicant. 
 
 Fell, bad, wicked. 
 Now all these words occur in the same signification, and with 
 scarcely any variation of sound in the "Welsh, and in the origi- 
 nal and primitive portion of the Breton. 
 
 This affinity established between the Provengal and the 
 idioms, which may with certainty be regarded as representa- 
 
 9
 
 130 Ilistory of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 tivos of one of the three aboriginal languages of Gaul, naturally 
 suggests other researches of a similar description. 
 
 The countries, in which tlie Provengal was spoken, included 
 the Aquitania of Caesar, and the maritime coast extending from 
 the mouths of the Rhone to the eastern extremity of the Pyre- 
 nees. It can, as I have already remarked, be historically 
 shown, that an Iberian idiom was anciently in use in these 
 countries. Now, after having enumerated Celtic elements in 
 the Provengal, there is nothing strange in the supposition, that 
 we might likewise find in it some traces of this ancient Iberian 
 element, the identity of which and the Basque is a fact, which 
 may be regarded as incontestable. 
 
 The conjecture is not a chimerical one. Both the written 
 Provencal and the derivative idioms, by which it is still repre- 
 sented, actually contain a certain number of very curious words, 
 which they have in common with the Basque. The following 
 are some of them : 
 
 Aonar, to aid, second. 
 
 AsTcOf much. 
 
 Biz, black, dark, sombre. 
 
 Bresca, honey. 
 
 Enoc, sadness, chagrin. 
 
 iV^c, sorrowful, gloomy. 
 
 Gais, evil, misfortunate, etc. 
 
 Gaissar, to injure, ravage. 
 
 /Serra, a mountain. 
 
 Gavarrer, a bush, thicket. 
 
 J2ahi, a current, river. 
 
 Grasal, a vase, porringer. 
 All these words and fifty others, which I could add to the list, 
 have precisely the same signification and the same sound in the 
 Basque as they have in the Provengal. There is no room for 
 the supposition, that the latter boiTowed them from the former. 
 Centuries have elapsed, since the Basque has been relegated 
 into the mountains, and ever since that time, so far from being 
 able to give words to the languages in its vicinity, it has been 
 obliged to adopt from them, in order to express the new rela- 
 tions and ideas introduced among the people, which spoke it. 
 The Provengal could therefore not have taken from the Basque, 
 what it has actually adopted, unless it was in those countries, 
 where formerly the Iberian idiom was used. 
 
 We are now certain, that the dictionary of the Pomansh- 
 Provengal contains words, which are borrowed from two of the 
 primitive languages of Gaul, and we shall presently have 
 occasion to recognize still more remarkable vestiges of the third. 
 
 That the Gaels of Scotland and the Gaihil of Ireland are
 
 Origin of the Provengal Language. 131 
 
 people of the same race as the ancient Gauls properly so-called, 
 and that a language closely related to theirs was formerly spoken 
 in a part of Gaul — these are facts, which have every proba- 
 bility in their favor, and are indicated by the very identity 
 of the national names themselves. But notwithstanding all 
 this, history does not furnish us any direct or positive proof on 
 the subject. The lexicon of the Provengal however may here 
 supply the place of history. It contains a large number of 
 terms, which are found nowhere else, except in the Erse or 
 Irish and in the Gaelic, as the language of the Scottish High- 
 landers is called. I shall not give a list of them for fear of 
 wearying the patience of the reader by quotations of this kind. 
 I shall confine myself to noticing a few of these Gaelic words, 
 the existence of which in Provengal monuments may be re- 
 garded as a curious fact. Such is, for example, the adjective 
 certan^ certana^ in those instances, in which it makes no sense, 
 if we translate it, as we are at first sight tempted to do, by our 
 own homophone " certain," but where it becomes very expres- 
 sive, if we render it after the Gaelic substantive hearty which 
 &\gm.fiQ% justice^ honor ^ rectitude. Many other words, employed 
 by the Troubadours, and those which are the most difiicult of 
 interpretation, are likewise Gaelic words and the remains of the 
 ancient Gallic. And it is a remarkable fact, that the only 
 one of the three j3rimitive idioms of Gaul, which has entirely 
 vanished from the country, and that centuries ago, is precisely 
 the one, of which the Provengal exhibits the most numerous, the 
 most decided and the most characteristic vestiges. 
 
 Inasmuch as I do not consider these questions in a purely 
 historical point of view, it is not necessary for me to inquire 
 expressly, what parts of the south of Gaul the nations, which 
 spoke these Gaulish idioms, may have inhabited. It will be 
 sufficient for my purpose to observe by the way, that the tradi- 
 tions of the fourth century asserted an afiinity between the- 
 Belgae of Caesar and the Yolcse or Volkas Arecomici and, 
 Tectosages, whose capitals were Nimes and Toulouse, and that 
 if the former belonged to the great national body of the Gauls 
 proper, the latter must likewise be related to them. 
 
 To these already sufiiciently diversified sources of the Pro- 
 vengal we must now add the Teutonic. The Visigoths and the 
 Burgundians, which, as we have seen, established tlicmselves,, 
 the former in the southeast, the latter in the southwest of Gaul,, 
 might certainly be expected to have exerted some influence on. 
 the revolutions, which took place in the languages of the 
 country. As we know notliing special respecting tlie idiom of 
 the Burgundians, we have not the means for making a separate'
 
 132 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 account of it in our estimate of the affinity between the Pro- 
 vengal and the Teutonic languages. 
 
 It is not so with the Visigoths. Their dialect is very well 
 known. It is in this dialect that the patriarch of the Grothic 
 nation, Ulphilas, composed, toward the middle of the fourth 
 century, a translation of the Sacred Scriptures, which is the 
 most ancient literary monument of the Teutonic languages, and 
 of which fragments are still extant. It is easy to convince 
 one's self by an inspection of these fragments, that the Visi- 
 goths left traces of their language in the Provinces of Gaul 
 adjacent to the Pyrenees, and that some of them have passed 
 into the Provengal. But these words are not numerous ; I have 
 scarcely been able to count fifteen of them. When we see in 
 history, how readily the Goths in Gaul and Italy submitted to 
 the influences of the Roman civilization, we are not at all sur- 
 prised, that so little of their language should have been left in 
 the countries, which were subject to their sway. 
 
 The majority of the Teutonic words contained in the Proven- 
 gal are in all probability of Frankish origin. It is true, that 
 this people never established itself in masses and at large in 
 southern Gaul ; but it ruled there for a long time and it founded 
 a large number of partial or isolated settlements, and yet the 
 total amount of Provengal words to which we can with certainty 
 assign a Teutonic origin, is not nearly as considerable, as one 
 would be tempted to imagine. I do not believe that it exceeds 
 fifty. The words retained from the ancient national idioms are 
 much more numerous. 
 
 All these dliferent ingredients, however, taken together, con- 
 stitute only a portion, and by far the smallest, of the Provengal 
 lexicon. The real and the capital foundation of this lexicon is 
 incontestably the Latin. But on this point even there is much 
 that miglit be said, and I shall only be able to give a few rapid 
 indications. 
 
 That the great majority of the Provengal words may, without 
 any violence or improbability, be referred to the Latin, is evi- 
 dent enough; but that they are all effectively and directly 
 derived from it, is a question, and one which depends on the 
 solution of another. 
 
 It is necessary for me to return here for a moment to the dis- 
 tinction, which I have above endeavored to established, between 
 the three aboriginal languages of Gaul. I have remarked that 
 the Iberian, the Aquitanian, of which the Basque is an impor- 
 tant relic, had absolutely nothing in common with the Celtic 
 and the Gallic, or with any other known language. Between 
 the Celtic and the Gallic, on the other hand, there were analo-
 
 Origin of the ProvenQol Language. 133 
 
 gies, and these analogies are represented by the relations still 
 existing between the Erse or Irish and the Gaelic of the Scottish 
 Highlands, which are respectively derived from them. ISTow 
 these two languages, though difiering widely from each other, 
 though having each a material basis and a character of its own, 
 are nevertheless idioms of the same family of languages, of 
 which the Sanscrit is regarded as the type, and of which the 
 Greek, the Latin, the Teutonic and Slavonic are collateral 
 branches. 
 
 By reason of this ancient and mysterious relationship, the 
 Gaelic and the Briton exhibit numerous and manifest resem- 
 blances to the Latin, and not only in their vocabulary, but also 
 in their grammatical forms. Similar analogies must doubtless 
 have existed between these same languages, at the epoch, when, 
 under the denomination of the Celtic and the Gaelic, they 
 coexisted on the soil of ancient Gaul. The numerous fragments 
 of the languages of Gaul, which have been transmitted to us 
 by the writers of classical antiquity, present to us a striking 
 collection of marked analogies with the Latin and the Greek. 
 
 From these comparisons it follows, that various Provencal 
 words which have commonly been regarded as derivatives of 
 the Latin, for no other reason than that they are contained in it, 
 may with equal correctness be referred to the Celtic or the 
 Gallic, and may have been derived from the one, as well as 
 from the other. Thus, for example, the word caitieu^ which 
 signifies captive, may as well come from the Celtic caeth, which 
 means the same thing, as from the Latin captivus. The adjec- 
 tive suau, sweet, peaceable, may be derived either from the 
 Latin suavis or from the L'ish suahhais^ which has the same sense. 
 This remark is not without its importance in comparing the 
 unexpected analogies of the Provencal with the primitive idioms 
 of Gaul, However, 1 do not intend to contradict by this remark, 
 what I have above advanced, as a general thesis, that the lexi- 
 cal groundwork of the Provengal is Latin, and directly derived 
 from it. 
 
 After having thus distinguished, as far as a rapid sketch 
 would permit me, the various origins of the material basis of 
 the Provengal, it now remains to indicate in the same manner 
 the origins and the types of its grammatical forms and to con- 
 sider some other points of its history.
 
 134 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 CHAPTER YII. 
 
 THE GRAMMATICAL FORMATION OF THE PROVENCAL. 
 
 In the preceding chapter I have examined tlie material basis 
 of the Rom ano-Pro venial lexicon, which I have considered 
 independently of its grammatical forms. I have endeavored 
 to distinguish the various elements, of which this basis is com- 
 posed, and to refer these elements to their respective sources. 
 I have especially insisted on two points. I have shown, that, 
 among the various ingredients of the Provencal, those, which 
 emanated from Teutonic sources, were extremely limited in num- 
 ber, and that the language exhibited no sign whatever of any 
 very decided influence from that direction. I have moreover 
 pointed out, in the idiom in question, distinct and obvious 
 remains of the primitive languages of Gaul — a fact of great im- 
 portance to its history. 
 
 Finally, I have advanced, that this idiom was not a combina- 
 tion or a mixture of the Teutonic and the Latin, any more than 
 were the other Neo-Latin languages ; that, on the contrary, it 
 was anterior to the Germanic conquest, and the product of 
 various causes, all equally independent of the influences of that 
 conquest ; and I shall now endeavor to produce some proofs in 
 support of this opinion. 
 
 The Provencal and the Neo-Latin languages in general, which 
 have supplanted the Latin, differ from the latter principally in 
 respect to their grammatical forms, and this difference shows 
 itself particularly in what are technically termed the declension 
 of nouns and the conjugation of verbs. The relations, which 
 the Latin expresses, in both these verbal modifications, by 
 simple variations of the endings of the same Avord, are in the 
 Neo-Latin idioms indicated by separate signs, distinct from the 
 word of which they modify the signification. Thus for example, 
 in rendering into English the Latin dative ^Ixwnl fructihus, we 
 say to the fruits I in rendering the verb to love, in the first per- 
 son singular of the preterit amavi, we say / have loved. In 
 the first instance, the termination hus is translated or repre- 
 sented by the preposition to, joined to the plural of the article
 
 Grammatical Formation of the Provengal. 135 
 
 the ; in the second instance, the termination avi, is represented 
 by the first person singular of the present of the verb to have, 
 joined to the passive participle loved. In both these examples, 
 the English* formula is a decomposition, a sort of analysis of 
 the Latin formula, and this fact generalized, characterizes the 
 principal grammatical difference between the Latin and the 
 Neo-Latin languages. Considered under this point of view, 
 and in so far as it unites in one and the same term both the root, 
 which denotes an object or an idea, and the termination, which 
 modifies the signification of the former, the Latin may be called 
 a synthetio language. In so far as the ISTeo-Latin languages 
 represent the termination by a separate sign, thus decomposing 
 a simple term into two or more terms, they may be denominated 
 analytical or decomposing languages. 
 
 This distinction being established, the question respecting the 
 origin and the formation of the ]S^eo-Latin idioms, propounded 
 in rigorous terms, would be as follows : How was this transition 
 of the Latin from its primitive condition of a synthetic lan- 
 guage to the condition of analytical dialects accomplished ? 
 Was this transition merely the result of accidental causes, or 
 was it brought about in virtue of some one of those laws, which 
 are known to preside over the modifications and the successive 
 developments of languages ? This is a very important and a 
 very abstruse question. I will endeavor to answer it by look- 
 ing at it from a somewhat more elevated point of view, and in 
 a more general light. 
 
 It is a singular and apparently a very general fact in the his- 
 tory of languages, that the nearer they are to their origin, the 
 more complicated they are, the more they abound in ingenious 
 and subtle grammatical forms. Among the same people, the 
 most ancient grammatical system of its language is always the one 
 which contains the greatest number of peculiarities and niceties. 
 Among two different and unequally civilized nations, it is almost 
 certain, that the idiom of the most barbarous of the two will be , 
 the one, which will exhibit the most artificial mechanism. 
 
 It appears from this, that the natural procession of languages 
 is from a greater to a less number of forms ; from special and 
 from bolder forms to such as are more general and more defi- 
 nite, or, in other words, from synthesis to decomposition. It is, 
 however, the tendency of civilization and of culture to suspend 
 this course, and to render it as slow and gradual as possible. 
 
 When a language has once submitted to a fixed grammatical 
 system, when it is rich in monuments, and spoken by powerful 
 and cultivated classes of society, the changes which then take 
 
 * The English as well as French, ia which, as a matter of course, the author gives the 
 formal a in the original.
 
 136 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 place in it, can only be of a literary character, indicative of the 
 variations of taste in the art of writing, and not affecting the 
 general basis of its grammatical system. But by the side of 
 these changes, there are always formed a number of dialects 
 less regular and less pure, spoken by the inferior masses of the 
 population, and in which the natural tendency of languages to 
 decompose and impoverish themselves, by becoming easier and 
 clearer, operates with greater liberty and success. If into this 
 state of things some great and sudden revolution is introduced, 
 by which the civilization of the country is destroyed ; if the 
 classes, which spoke the grammatical idiom, and which alone 
 could maintain it in its integrity, are annihilated, then this 
 idiom becomes likewise extinct. It may remain a learned or a 
 sacred language, but it ceases to be spoken for the ordinary pur- 
 poses of life. It becomes supplanted by the popular dialects, 
 and they continue it under a form, which differs more or less 
 from tiie primitive, and in which the principle of decomposi- 
 tion predominates more or less. 
 
 This is not the place for inquiring, which of these two suc- 
 cessive forms is the most perfect in itself, nor for reconciling 
 the idea of an indefinite intellectual perfectibility with the 
 natural tendency of languages toward disintegration and im- 
 poverishment. I shall limit myself to the remark, that the 
 system of decomposition, in reducing the number of grammati- 
 cal formulas, and in employing only those, which have a more 
 general value, becomes by that very means susceptible of a 
 more expeditious and of an easier use, and that to some extent 
 it renders the action of the mind or its ideas more palpable to 
 itself. This will suffice to explain, up to a certain point at 
 least, the progressive decomposition of the synthetic languages. 
 
 The decomposed idioms, however, after having once been sub- 
 stituted in place of the synthetic, assumes very soon an impor- 
 tance, which they never could have had before. They are in 
 their turn polished and systematized, they become the organ 
 of a poetry, of a society, and they then assume something of the 
 fixedness and regularity, as well as of the destiny, of the lan- 
 guages, which they succeeded. 
 
 I should like to illustrate these generalities by a few particu- 
 lar facts ; and there are, I believe, few languages of any anti- 
 quity, and possessed of literary monuments of a certain age, 
 but what could furnish me with the materials. But I shall 
 look, by way of preference, for what I want, to three distin- 
 guished languages, which have so many analogies in common 
 with each other, and the destinies of which are so much alike, 
 that the history of each of them could have no better commen- 
 tary than that of the other two. They are the Sanscrit, the
 
 Grammatical Formation of the Provengal. 137 
 
 Greek and the Latin itself. The material basis and the gram- 
 matical structure of these three languages contain so many and 
 such striking resemblances, that it is impossible to explain 
 them in any other way, than by the hypothesis of a common 
 origin, and of a complete identity at an unknown epoch of 
 antiquity. 
 
 Of these three languages, the Sanscrit is the first that had its 
 monuments, a literature and a system of grammar. "Without 
 pretending to fix the precise date of these monuments, we 
 may confidently aflirm, that they are anterior to the most ancient 
 writings of the Greeks, to those of Homer and of Hesiod. There is 
 one circumstance, which in the absence of every other, I should 
 consider, if necessary, a sufiicient proof of this anteriority ; and 
 it is, that the system of grammatical forms is richer and more 
 complete in the Sanscrit, than in the Greek. This is a certain 
 indication, that the former had been seized and fixed by civili- 
 zation and by science at an epoch much nearer to their com- 
 mon origin. Its declension has eight cases, all of which are 
 indicated by characteristic terminations, and which vary accord- 
 ing to the gender and the form of the radicals. This system of 
 declension is consequently a very rich synthetic one. I sus- 
 pect, however, that at a remoter period it must have been still 
 richer, and that in this respect, even the language had at the 
 time of its present grammatical fixation already lost some of 
 its primitive forms. 
 
 The Sanscrit conjugation, equally rich and equally varied, 
 is likewise composed of synthetic forms ; but here the princi- 
 ple of decomposition has already insinuated itself. There are 
 already certain tenses of the passive voice, where the action is 
 expressed not by a simple verbal radical, modified by certain 
 terminations or by affixes, but by adjectives or participles, 
 which are combined with a verb signifying to he or to make^ 
 precisely as in French or English. This may be regarded as the 
 germ of a revolution introduced into this language. 
 
 At the epoch of its earliest written monuments, the Greek, 
 as compared with the Sanscrit, had already lost several of its 
 primitive forms. Its declension is reduced to five cases ; the 
 sixth, which is called the ablative, difiiering in no respect from 
 the dative, and being only determined by a particle, such as 
 the prepositions in, etc. It thus had three cases less than the 
 Sanscrit ; or in other words, three synthetic forms of declension 
 were supplanted by so many analytical forms. The principle 
 of decomposition had likewise penetrated into the conjugation. 
 The third person plural of the preterit passive was formed by 
 adding the verb to be to a participle. 
 
 The Latin was reduced to writing much later even than the
 
 138 History of ProvenQol Poetry. 
 
 Greek, and when tlie system of decomposed or periphrastic 
 forms had already supplanted several forms of the opposite 
 system. Its declension had remained in the same state as the 
 Greek, but in its conjugation the use of the verb to he, in the 
 capacity of an auxiliary, was more frequent. Entire verbs had 
 been formed by the simple juxtaposition of a substantive or a 
 preposition and the verb sutn, as for example, possum (by 
 euphony instead of pot-sum), ad-sum, prcB-sum. 
 
 After having once been consecrated by religious documents, 
 by national poems, by systems of grammar founded on the ex- 
 amples of the first writers, these three languages were, to a cer- 
 tain extent, regarded as inviolable by the chiefs and the higher 
 classes of the respective nations. Their forms became to 
 them the rule for writing and for speaking. Nevertheless, the 
 natural tendency to the disintegration of these forms was always 
 at work in the masses of the people. I have not examined the 
 Sanscrit for the purpose of discovering traces of the gradual pro- 
 gress of this tendency ; but they are visible in the Latin and in 
 the Greek. We find in the best writers of both these languages 
 examples of the unusual and anti-grammatical employment of 
 periphrastic forms of conjugation, instead of the synthetic forms. 
 They occur in great variety in Cicero, in Pindar, in Herodotus, in 
 Plato, in Sophocles, and without any sort of doubt in other authors. 
 
 Nevertheless, examples of this kind are rare in good writers, 
 and they may be considered as licenses, as exceptions to the 
 general principles of synthetic grammar. They might be said 
 to have been accidental irruptions of the dialect of the multi- 
 tude into that of the learned and polished classes. 
 
 There can in fact be no doubt, but that languages so compli- 
 cated and so rich, as were the Greek, the Latin and the Sans- 
 crit, must have undergone in the mouth of the popular masses 
 numerous and systematic modifications ; which, without exceed- 
 ing certain limits, went nevertheless so far, as to give rise to 
 various subordinate dialects more simple and more variable 
 than the latter, having each its peculiar vocabulary, more or 
 less difterent from the general one, and tending each, in virtue 
 of a certain intellectual indolence or hesitation, to substitute 
 the analytic forms in place of the synthetical. The direct his- 
 torical proofs of the existence of these popular dialects are very 
 scarce, and for no other reason than that the nationality of a 
 people is represented by the idiom cultivated by its chiefs and 
 by the higher classes of its society. It is in this privileged 
 idiom, that its religious doctriries, its laws, its grand poetic monu- 
 ments are composed. But time, sooner or later, introduces 
 revolutions, and thereby brings to light those obscure and 
 despised dialects, which history at first disdained to notice.
 
 Grammatical Formation of the Provengal. 139 
 
 As long as there was a great political power in India, to 
 maintain the institntions and the antique civilization of that 
 vast country, the Sanscrit, which was an essential part of this 
 civilization, remained a living language, distinct from the 
 popular dialects which sprung up under its dominion. But, 
 when in consequence of unknown revolutions and at an un- 
 known epoch, the Brahmins had lost the political government 
 of Hindostan, the Sanscrit ceased to be spoken, and after that 
 became a dead and learned language. In social' life, it was sup- 
 planted by various dialects, and the relations between these 
 dialects and itself are perfectly analogous to those existing be- 
 tween the ISTeo-Latin and the Latin of the classical period. The 
 words have here undergone similar alterations ; the synthetic 
 formulas of declension and of conjugation have here been de- 
 composed in the same spirit, for the same purpose and by the 
 same method. 
 
 At a much later epoch, the precise date of which, however, 
 we are unable to establish, the ancient Greek disappeared in 
 consequence of a similar revolution from the Eastern Empire ; 
 and it was likewise succeeded by a dialect which was by far 
 less complicated, less rich, and less learned, and in which the 
 principle of decomposition that had presided over the formation 
 of the Neo-Hindu dialects prevailed to the same extent and 
 with the same results. 
 
 The invasions and the conquest of these countries undoubt- 
 edly contributed to their linguistic revolutions. By destroying 
 the ancient civilization and the ancient languages of India and 
 of Greece, they thereby transferred the place and the functions 
 of the latter to their respective popular dialects. But they did 
 not introduce these dialects ; they found them already made, 
 and they scarcely added a few words from the language of the 
 conquerors. 
 
 Now the extinction of the Latin, as a spoken language, and 
 the appearance of the Neo-Latin idioms in its place, is a revolu- 
 tion, similar in every respect to those, which occasioned the 
 extinction of the Sanscrit in India and of the Greek in Greece, 
 and which brought the popular dialects of these resj)ective 
 countries into vogue. 
 
 Laying aside whatever there may have been of an accidental 
 or a local character in the history of these dialects, wo find, 
 that they all appear to have been formed in virtue of the same 
 idea, and of the same tendency of the mind. They all result 
 from the development of the same germ of decomposition, in- 
 troduced from the remotest antiquity into the languages, from 
 which they are derived, and introduced by way of an exception 
 and in opposition to the synthetic principle of these languages.
 
 140 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 In all of them the development was brought about, if not to 
 the same extent, at any rate with reference to the same end 
 and by the operation of the same causes. Finally, a closer 
 inspection shows them all to be the identical expression of one 
 and the same general fact, as the secondary form, into which 
 the system of synthetic languages naturally tends to resolve 
 itself. 
 
 I anticipate an objection, in the shape of an easy hypothesis. 
 It will be urgfed, that, in order to account for the existence 
 of the different idioms in question, it is not necessary to sup- 
 pose them anterior to the epoch, when the synthetic languages, 
 of which they are the decomposed forms, were altered or 
 destroyed. They may be the immediate consequence, the pure 
 and simple result of that alteration. 
 
 Many observations might be made in opposition to this hypo- 
 thesis. I shall limit myself to a single fact, which is, however, 
 a remarkable and a decisive one ; it is, that all these idioms 
 include elements of a remote antiquity ; materials, which are 
 foreign to the languages from which they are derived, taking 
 these languages at the moment of their alteration or their dis- 
 appearance. 
 
 Thus, for example, several of the Neo-Hindu idioms contain 
 remains of languages, which were anterior to the conquest of 
 India by the Brahmins. This is a discovery, made by a young 
 orientalist, who is destined to make many others no less inte- 
 resting. Now, it is very evident, that a Hindu idiom, in which 
 such vestiges occur, could not have received them from the 
 Sanscrit, at the moment when the latter ceased to be a living 
 speech. They must of necessity be referred to the unknown 
 epoch, at which the language of the Brahmins was first 
 brought into contact with the conquered population of 
 India. 
 
 The modern Greek has preserved words, which belong to the 
 remotest antiquity, and which were not contained in the classi- 
 cal Greek at the epoch of its extinction. Such is, for example, 
 the word vepb^ water, which in the writted Greek exists only as 
 a derivative in the name of the Nereides or Nymphs. The 
 word oKovTta, which in ancient Greek signifies " skins, hides," 
 has in modern Greek the signification of " garments, clothes." 
 Now, it seems, that it could not have assumed this signification, 
 except at a very distant epoch, when the Greeks clothed them- 
 selves in the skins of animals. The modern Greek contains 
 many other terms, which could only have entered into it during 
 the most ancient period of the language. 
 
 To give an example from a language, which is still nearer to 
 us : the Italian has a large number of words, which do not
 
 Grammatical Formation of the Provengal. 141 
 
 come from tlie Latin, and several of which must be quite as 
 ancient as the latter, or even more so. 
 
 Finally, I have shown that the Romansh idioms of Gaul in- 
 clude many terms from the primitive languages of the country, 
 which could only have entered into them long before the 
 extinction of the Latin. It is evident, that all these dialects of 
 the ancient synthetic languages, in which similar elements 
 occur, must, for a longer or a shorter period, have been contem- 
 porary with these languages themselves. 
 
 I shall add but one observation on the hypothesis, which 
 attributes the origin of the Neo-Latin idioms to the Germanic 
 conquest, and to an intermixture of the Teutonic languages and 
 the Latin ; and in order to keep within the definite limits of 
 my subject, I shall restrict this observation to the Romansh of 
 the South. 
 
 Those, who have advanced the opinion of a Germanic 
 influence in the creation of this idiom, have assumed a collision 
 between the Teutonic and the Latin, of which the Provengal 
 would have been the immediate and the necessary result. It 
 would be easy to show the inexactness of this hypothesis. But 
 the supporters of this hypothesis even ought not, in making it, 
 to have overlooked the anterior collision between the ancient 
 languages of Gaul and the Latin — a collision, which was a 
 forced and prolonged one, and which united all the conditions, 
 necessary for the production of an idiom like the Provengal, 
 occupying a middle ground between the Latin and the ancient 
 languages of the country. 
 
 Unless I am mistaken in all that I have thus far advanced, 
 there can be no uncertainty in regard to the period of time, to 
 which we ought to refer the origin and formation of the Pro- 
 vengal and of the other Neo-Latin idioms. All these idioms 
 doubtless existed, as popular dialects, before the epoch of the 
 Germanic invasions. It is far more diflScult to ascertain, at 
 what particular epochs they succeeded the Latin, and by what 
 a succession of tentatives they were fixed and polished ; in 
 short, how they became what they have long since been, and 
 what they still are. I shall say a few words on these questions, 
 and I shall confine myself as much as possible to the Pro- 
 vengal. 
 
 The most ancient Provengal documents thus far known to us 
 among those, that can shed some light on the history of this 
 idiom, are contained in three different manuscripts. One of 
 these, now in the public library of Orleans, and formerly in that 
 of the Abbey of Fleury sur Loire, contains quite a long frag- 
 ment of a poem or metrical romance on the tragical end of 
 Boethius, the Roman senator, who was condemned to death by
 
 1^2 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 the order of Theodoric, the first Gothic king of Italy. The 
 other two, from the ancient Abbey of Saint Martial at Limoges, 
 are now in the royal library at Paris. Tliey contain, among 
 many Latin pieces, a few in the Provencal, of which I shall 
 have to speak in detail somewhat later. The question here is, 
 simply to determine their date.* 
 
 The first of these three manuscripts, that of the Abbey of 
 rieury, is generally acknowledged to be from the commence- 
 ment of the eleventh century, at the latest ; and those of Saint 
 Martial are scarcely any less ancient. Judging from several 
 characteristics exhibited by them, we may attribute them to 
 the first half of the eleventh century. Kow the Provengal 
 pieces, included in these three manuscripts are, doubtless, of an 
 anterior epoch ; they were transcribed into them from other 
 and more ancient manuscripts. Of this there is a substantial 
 proof, at least in regard to some of them, which however do not 
 even seem to be the most ancient of the number. 
 
 Now, supposing all tliese pieces to be only twenty-five or 
 thirty years older than the manuscripts in which they are pre- 
 served, they would have been composed toward the close of 
 the tenth century, or at the commencement of the eleventh. 
 And these compositions were, doubtless, not the first of their 
 kind. They must have been preceded by many others of an 
 inferior and cruder order, which are now lost. The only one of 
 the documents preserved, which is undoubtedly more ancient 
 than the pieces here described, is the famous oath of 842. I do 
 not believe tliat any very important conclusion could be drawn 
 from this document with reference either to the history of the 
 Provencal, or to tliat of the Romansh languages in general. 
 Nevertheless, as the document is a celebrated one, and as it is 
 customary to quote it in every discussion on the origin of these 
 languages, I consider myself likewise bound to speak of it. I 
 shall speak of it even with a certain minuteness and detail, for 
 the purpose of establishing, on this point, a difierent opinion 
 from the one generally received. 
 
 I must, in the first place, give a general idea of the event to 
 which the document in question relates ; this preliminary is in- 
 dispensable to the proper appreciation of its value in relation 
 to the question, wliich now occupies our attention. 
 
 The dissensions between the three sons of the Emperor Louis 
 le Debonnaire, are a well-known and celebi^ated fact in the 
 history of France. Tliey gave rise, under the dynasty of the 
 Carlovingians, to circumstances, which had a strong resem- 
 
 * An account of these manuscripts is given by M. Raynouard, in tbe second volume 
 of his Choix des Poesies des Troubadours. The fragment on Boethius is printed on 
 p. 4-47. ricccs and fragments derived from the MS. of St. Martial on p. 133-153 — Ed.
 
 Grammatical Formation of the Provengal. 143 
 
 blance to those, in the midst of wliich the Merovingian dynasty 
 had declined and finally become extinct. The eldest of these 
 three brothers, Lothaire, who had received, as his share of tlie 
 paternal inheritance, the title of emperor, together with the 
 majority of the countries subject to the Frankish dominion, 
 was entertaining the project of invading them all, and of plun- 
 dering his two brothers. One of the two, Louis, was then king 
 of Bavaria, and the other, Charles, afterward surnamed the 
 Bald, king of Aquitania. In order to make head against 
 their common enemy, they formed a mutual alliance together; 
 and the two parties, having encountered each other at Fontenay, 
 near Auxerre, there fought the terrible battle which passes 
 under that name. The number of the slain on both sides was 
 more than eighty thousand, and yet the strife was not decided ! 
 The three brothers repaired their enormous losses as well as 
 they could ; they raised new armies, and the war continued 
 with singular and vacillating changes, the details of which 
 have nothing to do with my subject. 
 
 It suffices for our purpose to know, that in the month of 
 March, of the year 842, Lothaire, after various unsuccessful 
 movements, found himself at Tours, entirely at a loss in regard 
 to his future course, while Louis and Charles were efiecting a 
 conjunction of their forces at Argentaria, a small town situated 
 a few miles from the right bank of the Rhine, between Basle 
 and Strasbourg. There the two brothers resolved to make a 
 solemn renewal of their alliance in the presence of the two 
 armies and of their leudes or vassals of every rank, which were 
 all assembled in the open air, and inclosed by the same camp. 
 
 Louis of Germany, being the elder of the two, began to speak 
 first, and pronounced a discourse in which he made a declar- 
 ation of the new wrongs, of which Lothaire had been guilty, 
 both against himself and against his brother Charles, since the 
 battle of Fontenay, and of the firm resolution on the part of 
 the two brothers to consolidate their alliance against Lothaire. 
 In this discourse, Louis addressed himself to his leudes and to 
 his soldiers — all men of the Germanic race, all from the other 
 side of the Rhine, and he spoke in the Teutonic language. 
 Charles the Bald commenced to speak in his turn, and re- 
 peated to his army, word for word, but in the Romansh idiom, 
 the same discourse, which Louis had just addressed to his own 
 in the Germanic. 
 
 After this address to their respective leudes and soldiers, the 
 two kings proceeded to conclude the new alliance between 
 themselves, that is to say, they pronounced the oatlis, which 
 constituted this alliance. The following is an English version 
 of the usual formula of these oaths :
 
 14:4 History of Provengal Poetry, 
 
 " For the love of God, for the Christian people and for our 
 mutual safety, from this day forward, and as long as God shall 
 
 five me power and knowledge, I will defend my brother, and 
 will aid him in every respect, as one ought to defend his 
 brother, provided he does the same toward me, and I shall 
 never wittingly enter into any agreement with Lothaire, which 
 shall be detrimental to this my brother." * 
 
 Louis was the first to pronounce this formula, and he 
 addressed himself not as he had done the first time, to the vassals 
 and the soldiers of his own army, but to those of Charles ; and 
 on that account he spoke in the language of the latter, that is 
 to say in the Romansh. Charles the Bald, binding himself in 
 his turn to the men of his brother, swore in the Germanic 
 tongue. Then the two armies pronounced in their respective 
 languages a special oath, in which each of them promised to 
 the king of the other to refuse obedience to its own, in case he 
 should command anything that might be contrary to the obli- 
 gations of his oath.f 
 
 Nithhard, the grandson of Charlemagne, has left us an inva- 
 luable little work on the whole of this war between the sons of 
 Louis le Debonnaire — a war, in which he himself had figured 
 as an actor. It is he, too, who has transmitted to us the text 
 of the oaths pronounced on this occasion, in both languages. 
 Hy task requires me to occupy myself only with those which 
 are in the Romansh idiom. 
 
 From these circumstances, such as they present themselves 
 at first sight, we might infer, that the language of these oaths 
 was that of all the Gallic nationalities to which they were 
 addressed. But here already the difiiculty presents itself, as to 
 who these nationalities were. I think we may suppose the 
 army, with which Charles the Bald joined his brother Louis at 
 Argentaria, to have been composed of the same national ele- 
 ments as that with which lie had fought at Fontenay. In that 
 event, the oath of Louis the German was taken : 1st, by the 
 Neustrians, that is to say, by the men from the country 
 situate between the Seine and the Loire; 2dly, by the Bur- 
 
 * I add here the original of this oath or pledge, for the purpose of giving the reader 
 some conception of the character of the language here in question. It is as follows : 
 
 " Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, dist di in avant, 
 in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvaraeio cist meon fradre Karlo, et in ad- 
 iudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dist, in o quid il mi 
 altresi fazet : et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai qui, meon vol, cist meon fradre 
 Karle in damno sit." 
 
 t The Romansh of the oath pronounced by the followers of the respective kings, upon 
 the same occasion, is as follows : — " Si Lodhuvigs sagrament que son fradre Karlo jurat, 
 conservat ; et Karlos, meos sendra, de suo part non lo stanit; si io returnar non lint 
 pois ; ne io, ne neuls cui eo returnar int pois, in nulla aiudha contra Lodhuwig nun li 
 iver." Both these formulas, together with the corresponding German or Frankish 
 version, the reader will find in the work referred to in the text, viz.: Nithhardi Hist, 
 lib. iii. c. 5 — Ed.
 
 Grammatical Formation of the Provencal. 145 
 
 gundians ; 3clly, by the Provencals and the Aquitanians ; and 
 among the latter there were inhabitants of Toulouse, of Poitou, 
 of Limousin, and of Auvergne. 
 
 The question now arises, whether these different nationalities, 
 which since have spoken, and which still speak, idioms so 
 different that they can understand each other only with dif- 
 ficulty, even on the simplest matters of ordinary life — whe- 
 ther they, at that time, had but one and the same idiom, that 
 of the oath of 842 ; or whether the idioms under consideration 
 exhibited then already the same differences, or differences pro- 
 portionate to those which we have observed in them since ; 
 and, if the latter be the case, which of those idioms was the 
 one employed in the oath of 842 ? 
 
 To discuss these questions, and others that might suggest 
 themselves, with reference to this document, would, in my 
 opinion, be attributing to the latter a kind and a degree of 
 authority which it does not possess, and which I cannot recog- 
 nize. 
 
 In the first place, Louis the German, who pronounced tlie 
 oaths in question, was born in Aquitania, and probably in that 
 part of the country where the Romansh of the South was used. 
 But we do not know where he was educated ; or whether he 
 spoke the Romansh at all, and if he did, what dialect of it he 
 spoke. And if he really ever spoke some one of these dialects, 
 it is more than probable that Louis had in a great measure for- 
 gotten it, during the twenty years of his residence in Germany, 
 and among the Germans. There is no room for the supposition, 
 that the Romansh which he pronounced in 842, on a jjublic 
 occasion, and from necessity, was a very pure or a very correct 
 Romansh, fit to be regarded as a type of the idiom. In the 
 second place, supposing even the Romansh of Louis the Ger- 
 man to have been very correct, difiiculties of another kind will 
 still present themselves. "We know how difficult it is to indi- 
 cate or to delineate (if we may use the term) in writing the 
 words of an uncultivated language, which has as yet no set- 
 tled orthography. Is there not something contrary to all the 
 principles of philological criticism in the supposition, which is 
 constantly advanced, at least implicitly, that two- formulas of. 
 an oath in an uncouth idiom, accidentally inserted in a book, 
 composed in Latin and by a German, were inscribed there in 
 a manner so as to represent exactly the charaoteristic forms of 
 that idiom, and the delicate shades by which it was distin- 
 guished from the Latin ? 
 
 "We are so much the more authorized to suspect imperfections 
 of orthography in this document from the fact, that its lan- 
 guage is quite indeterminate. We can. hardly conceive, how a> 
 
 la.
 
 146 History of Provengal Poet/ry. 
 
 language like this could ever have sufficed for the ordinary 
 wants and relations of society, however little advanced in civil- 
 ization. In a word, if this oath was really pronounced, such as 
 it is represented to us by the orthography in which we have it 
 now, it is more natural to see in it a Latin disfigured by arbi- 
 trary, and we might say, by individual barbarisms, than of a 
 Latin modified according to the rules and the genius of the 
 Romansh idioms. 
 
 This document, however, is none the less curious for that, nor 
 is its historical importance in the least diminished by the im- 
 perfections of the language. It proves, that from the tirst half 
 of the ninth century, Gaul (with the exception of certain por- 
 tions of ancient Austrasia) had but a single language, divided 
 into dialects, which I for the present leave out of consideration ; 
 and that this language was not that of the German conquerors, 
 but that of the conquered — that of the ancient inhabitants of 
 the country. There is, in fact, no doubt but that this army of 
 Charles the Bald, to which Louis addressed his oath in the E.o- 
 mansh idiom, contained men of the Germanic race. This being 
 the case, we must do one of two things : we must either suppose 
 that this language had become that of the Germans, or that the 
 ancient idiom of the latter was no longer employed as the vehicle 
 of their national transactions, or of the relations of the Frankisli 
 kings to the masses of their subjects. In either case, it was a 
 victory of the Ilomansh over the Teutonic. 
 
 All that we know concerning the existence and the culture 
 of the Romansh dialects previously to the year 842, is derived 
 from historical indications. But several of these historical indi- 
 cations are quite remarkable, I shall presently have to speak 
 of the measures, adopted in the year 813, for tlie application of 
 all these dialects to the religious instruction of the people. 
 Meanwhile, however, I can instance a trait from a Latin poem, 
 composed in 814, on the death of Charlemagne. The priest or 
 monk, who is the author of this piece, exhorts the people of 
 Gaul to share his grief and to celebrate the deceased monarch 
 in Latin and in the Ilomansh idiom. This is an indication, that 
 at least some of the dialects of this language were then more 
 polished and more advanced than that of the oath of 842 ; for 
 any poetic attempt in the latter, however timid and crude we 
 might suppose it, appears to be an impossibility. 
 
 There is, for example, no doubt, but that the Romansh-Pro- 
 vengal was from that time — that is to say, from the eighth and 
 ninth centuries — already possessed of many of those character- 
 istic forms, shades and peculiarities, which at a later period distin- 
 guished it from the other Romansh dialects. A certain, though 
 an indirect and only an implicit proof of this, is to be found
 
 Grrammatical Formation of the Provencal. 147 
 
 in the collection of the civil acts, the legal decisions, and the 
 transactions between private individuals, relating to the epochs 
 in question. The Roman law, which was observed in those 
 provinces, required the records of all these acts to be kept in 
 Latin ; but those who kept these records, had but an imperfect 
 knowledge of the language, which was transmitted by a sort of 
 oral tradition. They were consequently every moment liable 
 to make the strangest blunders in writing that language. These 
 blunders, which are copied after the forms of the vulgar idiom, 
 furnish us, on that very account, invaluable data for the history 
 of the latter.* 
 
 I have noticed quite a large number of them, but it M^ould 
 take too long to cite and to explain them here in detail. It is 
 enough to observe the general fact. I shall add, that this influ- 
 ence of the E-omansh-Provengal on the Latin of the civil transac- 
 tions begins to make its appearance during the eighth century, 
 and goes on constantly increasing until the middle of the 
 eleventh. "We then find civil documents, which are in pure 
 Provencal from one end to the other. From the tenth century 
 they had been intermingled with Romansh phrases, which, as 
 they were destined to be comprehended by everybody, consti- 
 tuted the most essential part of them. 
 
 There is one peculiarity to be observed with reference to 
 these legal acts or documents, and this is, that they are for the 
 most part redacted by the clergy. They consequently furnish 
 us an indication of the measure of knowledge possessed by the 
 latter, as far as the Latin is concerned- In 589, a council of 
 Narbonne had prescribed the rule, that no man should be or- 
 dained a deacon or a priest, who had not received a liberal 
 education,f or in other words, who was not familiar with the 
 correct Latin, the Latin of the books, in contradistinction to the 
 popular dialect of this language, as spoken by the inferior 
 classes of society. Judging from subsequent facts, however, 
 this article of the council of Narbonne was very badly ob- 
 served. 
 
 When from the commencement of the second half of the 
 eighth century we see the priests, the judges and the notaries, 
 that is to say the men, who were required by their profession to 
 know the Latin, knowing it so badly, and writing it in such a 
 barbarous manner, it is natural to suppose, that this language 
 
 * A number of the documents alluded to here hy the author, will be found printed in 
 Raynouard's Choix des Poesies des Troubadours, vol. ii. — Ed. 
 
 t Amodo nuUi liceat episcoporum ordinare diaconum, aut presbyterum literas igno- 
 
 ra)i<eni ; sed si qui ordinati fuerint, cogantur discere et si persevera- 
 
 verit desidiose, et non vult proficere, mittatur in monasterio, quia non potest adifcare 
 populum." Can. xi. At a later date Charlemagne issued capitularies to the same 
 
 effect. In one of them he requires the priest to be able to compose cartas et epistolaa 
 
 Ed.
 
 148 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 was then no longer a living one ; that society already contained 
 no longer any class of men sufficiently cnltivated to speak it ; 
 and finally, that it no longer existed, except nnder the decom- 
 posed and popular form of the Rcmansh. 
 
 It was in those same localities, where the Latin had been 
 spoten most generally and with the greatest correctness, that 
 the Komansh, by which it was replaced, must have preserved 
 more of its original materials and forms, and acquired the cha- 
 racter and the authority of a polished and regular idiom much 
 sooner than anywhere else. This observation, added to a few 
 other comparisons, would point to Narbonne, as the place, 
 which gave birth to the purest, the most homogeneous of those 
 Neo-Latin idioms, to the one which must naturally have served 
 as a model to the rest. 
 
 It is an important fact, and one which has not been suffi- 
 ciently appreciated, that in perpetuating the Latin, the Ro- 
 mansh may be said to have inherited its authority and its privi- 
 leges. It followed up the conquest of the former over those 
 primitive idioms of Gaul, which were then still remaining. It 
 continued to crowd the Basque toward the Pyrenees ; a lan- 
 guage, which at that time was much more extensively spoken 
 than it is now, in the plains and in the valleys of ancient Aqui- 
 taine. Finally, it was under this new form of the Homansh, 
 that the Latin, by triumphing over the Teutonic idioms of en- 
 tire Gaul, became the language of the German conquerors ; all 
 the influence of the latter being confined to the introduction of 
 a few words from their idioms. 
 
 The system of decomposition, which presided over the gram- 
 matical structure of the Neo-Latin languages, did not advance 
 to its utmost limit. The system of these languages still retained 
 a considerable number of synthetic formulas. The wonderful 
 Ibarmony, with which all these languages comport themselves 
 with reference to the Latin, either in aj^proximating or in devi- 
 ating from it, constitutes one of the most striking phenomena 
 of the kind.* 
 
 Thus, for example, in the conjugation of the verb, they all 
 reject the passive form, and they replace it by formulas, com- 
 posed of a passive participle and of the verb to he. In the 
 active voice, they all retain the same synthetic tenses, as for 
 example, the present and the imperfect of the indicative. 
 
 They all decompose the same tenses; for instance, the perfect 
 and the future ; and with reference to the latter, there is this 
 
 * Those of tlie readers of this volume, who may have the curiosity to examine into 
 the details of this interesting subject, will find an invaluable aid in Diez' '• GiTn-.matik 
 der Romanischen Sprachen," which treats of all the languages derived from the Latin. — 
 Ed.
 
 Grammatical Formation of the Provencal. 149 
 
 remarkable, that all the Neo-Latin idioms compound it in pre- 
 cisely the same manner: the infinitive of the verb denoting the 
 action, is joined to the present indicative of the verb to have. 
 
 They all connect an article with nouns, which has the gram- 
 matical value of the Latin pronoun ille^ and which is formed 
 from this pronoun. 
 
 Finally, they all preserve remains and the same remains of the 
 declension of the Latin pronouns. 
 
 These circumstances lead us to observe, that such an agree- 
 ment cannot be the effect either of chance, or of imitation, or of 
 mere convention. It could only take place in virtue of one of 
 those general laws, which preside over the revolutions of all 
 languages. 
 
 The Provengal, taken at the degree of development and 
 refinement, at which the poetry of the Troubadours exhibits it, 
 is richer in grammatical forms, than any other of the Neo-Latin 
 idioms. It has, for example, two conditionals present, both of 
 which are synthetic. It has a remnant of a declension for sub- 
 stantives, a nominative and an accusative case, both of which 
 are capable of assuming two or three dififerent forms, according 
 to that of the noun. Has it preserved all this from tlie Latin, 
 or has it assumed it in the course of its successive develop- 
 ments ? 
 
 I do not hesitate to adopt the latter of these opinions; the 
 other would be liable to too many ditiiculties. The literal Pro- 
 vencal as the poets of the twelfth century wrote it, may have 
 been and probably was spoken in the smaller courts of the 
 South, and by the feudal and chivalric classes. But it cer- 
 tainly never was the language of the multitude at large. The 
 idiom of the latter was undoubtedly of a poorer, a homelier and 
 a cruder kind. There was therefore a rustic Provengal and a 
 grammatical Provencal, as in more ancient times there had 
 been a rustic Latin and a grammatical Latin. The analogy does 
 not stop here. In consequence of tlie disasters, which annihi- 
 lated the Provencal civilization, the polite idiom of the Trouba- 
 dours ceased to be spoken, and the countries, in which it once 
 had flourished, had nothing left but popular dialects, which 
 still continue to exist, though very greatly modified by the 
 French. This was, in miniature, the same revolution with that, 
 which had substituted the Romansh of the South in place of the 
 Latin. 
 
 But these considerations touch already upon other questions. 
 I shall again have occasion to return to them ; but for the pre- 
 sent I shall not pursue them any further ; for I must hasten to 
 the consideration of the first development of a popular litera- 
 ture in the south of France.
 
 150 History of Promnqal Poetry. 
 
 CHAPTEK Vin. 
 
 THE EARLIEST USE OF THE PKOVENgAL AS EXHIBTED IN THE LITERA- 
 TURE OF THE MONKS. 
 
 At the time when the Latin ceased to be a living language 
 in Gaul, that is to say, from the middle of the eighth century 
 to the middle of the ninth, the difference between the popular 
 dialects, by which it was supplanted, was much greater than it 
 has been since. The fragmentary remains of the aboriginal 
 idioms of the country which are still visible in them at the 
 present time, were then more numerous, and more conspicuous, 
 and the Latin, though constituting the foundation of them all, 
 did not predominate in all to the same extent. 
 
 It needed a powerful and a continuous influence, an influence 
 superior to that which the political authority of the age could 
 supply, to subject all these idioms to some degree of approxi- 
 mation, to some common rules, and to adapt them to the 
 expression of some other wants than the urgent and vulgar 
 necessities of ordinary life. It was the authority of the church, 
 which rendered this eminent service to the cause of civilization 
 in France. 
 
 Toward the commencement of the ninth century, the church 
 of the "West, which had preserved the use of the Latin in its 
 liturgy and for the religious instruction of the people, per- 
 ceived, that the Christians under its spiritual direction no 
 longer comprehended that language, and it then reflected on 
 providing a remedy for this serious inconvenience. Tlie first 
 measures which it adopted with reference to this end, date from 
 the year 813, the last year but one of the reign of Charlemagne. 
 
 Sensible of the rapid decline of his strength, and henceforth 
 more occupied witli the affairs of the church than with those 
 of the state, this monarch desired, before his exit from life, to 
 introduce a general plan of reform into the discipline of the 
 churches of his empire, which really were very much in need 
 of it. For this purpose he convoked five provincial councils, 
 which assembled nearly at the same time in five different 
 places of the empire, selected with special reference to the con-
 
 Earliest Use of the Provenqal. 151 
 
 venience of the end proposed. One of these councils was 
 held at Aries, another at Maintz, a third at Kheims, the fourth 
 at Chalons on the Saone, and the fifth at Tours. 
 
 It would not be a matter of indifference to vaj subject, to 
 know the precise date of each one of these councils ; but we 
 are only acquainted with that of the three which I have named 
 first and in the same order of succession. It is commonly sup- 
 posed, but on what evidence I know not, that those of Chalons 
 and Tours were the last. 
 
 We know to a certainty, that all these councils were convoked 
 for the same purpose, and even if we were ignorant of the 
 fact, it might be surmised from the manifest conformity between 
 their respective canons, at least as far as their general purport 
 and their substance is concerned. But the more conspicuous 
 this conformity is in the great majority of points and on the 
 most important of them, the more remarkable and the more 
 difiicult of explanation are its discrepancies on certain parti- 
 cular points and especially on that, by which all these councils 
 link themselves to the historv of the Eomansh idioms of 
 France. 
 
 In a canon of the council of Maintz the bishops are required 
 to adapt their sermons to the capacity of the people, that is to 
 say, to preach to them in the Teutonic idiom. But as the his- 
 tory of this idiom does not enter into my subject, I shall have 
 nothing to say on the council in question. 
 
 That of Rheims enjoined it on the ecclesiastics of its jurisdic- 
 tion to adopt the vulgar language of the country in the religious 
 instruction of the people. The same injunction was made by 
 the council of Tours, and specified with some additional details, 
 which are an evidence of the just importance attached to this 
 measure by the clergy generally. 
 
 The assistant bishops were ordered to employ the Tudesque 
 or Teutonic language in instructing the Frankish inhabitants of 
 their dioceses in the creed and in their duties as Christians, and 
 to make use of the Lingua Romana or the Komansh with the 
 ancient inhabitants of the country. The same decree contains 
 the special provision, that the instruction, which now for the 
 first time was to be conveyed in a language distinct from 
 the Latin, was to discuss the rewards and punishments of a 
 future life, the means of avoiding the one and of obtaining the 
 other, the resurrection of the body and the last judgment. It 
 is particularly interesting to observe, that the homilies to be 
 preached on these various subjects were first to be composed in 
 Latin, and to be afterward translated into the vulgar idiom.* 
 
 * The canons of ttie respective councils referred to by the author are as follows : 
 Concil. Turon. Can, xvii. "Visum est ananimitati nostrae, ut quilibet episcopua
 
 152 Jlistory of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 Tlie canons of the councils of Aries and of Chalons make no 
 provisions of the kind ; they say nothing either of the religions 
 instruction of the people or of the language, in which this 
 instruction was to be convej^ed. But, supposing the omission 
 to have been a real, that is to say, an involuntary one, on the 
 part of the two councils, a remedy was soon after provided 
 for it. 
 
 Charlemagne deemed it proper to confirm by a special capi- 
 tulary all the ecclesiastical reforms ordained by the five coun- 
 cils. As far as the application of the vulgar idioms to the 
 religious instruction of the people was concerned, this capitu- 
 lary was based on the canon of the council of Tours, to which 
 I have alluded, and which from that time became a law of the 
 empire, so that in every part of Gaul the clergy were equally 
 required to use the idiom of their parishioners in their preaching. 
 
 Judging a priori and from probability, these decrees which 
 imposed on the bishops and on the clergy the obligation of cul- 
 tivating the respective dialects of their parishioners, must have 
 had a prompt and a decided influence on the fixation and the 
 culture of these idioms. It is true, that the mass of the clergy 
 was then immersed in an incredible ignorance. Nevertheless, 
 the majority of the priests and many of the monks had still a 
 smattering of Latin grammar. In the north of Gaul, where 
 the restoration of learning, brought about by the efforts of 
 Charlemagne, had been attended with some happy results, there 
 were a number of ecclesiastics, who must have had a tolerable 
 knowledge of the Latin. To this knowledge some of them 
 undoubtedly added a certain degree of intelligence and dis- 
 cernment, and it would seem, that the Romansh idioms could 
 only gain by being spoken, and still more by being written by 
 them. 
 
 I say written, because the council of Tours and the capitulary 
 of Charlemagne made it incumbent on them to translate the 
 exhortations, which they had first composed in Latin, into the 
 Komansh dialect of their hearers. Now, this obligation of thus 
 comparing the mother tongue and the derivative idiom naturally 
 led to the perception and the determination of their analogies. 
 
 habeat homilias continentes necessarias admonitiones, quibns subject! emdiantnr; id 
 
 est de fide Catholica, prout capere possint et ut casdem homilias quisque 
 
 aperte transferre studeat in rusticam Romanam linguam, aut Tlieodiscam, quo facilius 
 cuncti possint inlelligere qu(B dicuntur." Concii. Jlognnt. Can. xxv. '' De officio prse- 
 
 dicationis Nunquam taraen dcsit diobus dominicis aut festivitatibus, qui ver- 
 
 bum Dei predicet, juxta quod intelligere vulgiis possit." Concil. Ehem. ii. Can. xv. 
 " Ut episcopi sermones et nomilias sanctorum patrum, prout omnes intelligere possint, 
 secundum proprietatem lingutB pra;dicare studeat." The capitulary of Charlemagne, by 
 which the injunction of these canons was made a law of the empire, is in the following 
 words : " De officio prcedicationis, ut juxta quod bene vulgaris populus intelligere possit 
 assidue fiat." Capitulare anni regni sui xiii. cap. xiv.. — jEd,
 
 Earliest Use of the Provengal. 153 
 
 There was now a fixed and common standard, to wliicli all the 
 modifications to be made in the Romansh dialects, in order to 
 regulate and to extend their usage, might be naturally and 
 easily referred. From this moment, the Latin was destined to 
 recover, in part at least and as a learned language, the influence, 
 which it lost as a living one. 
 
 In all probability this must have been the course of things. 
 In point of fact, however, we are ignorant of what it really was. 
 So far from being able to say, what influence the councils in 
 question may have exerted on the culture of the Romansh 
 idioms, we do not even know to what extent their canons were 
 observed. 
 
 This ignorance is, perhaps, as we shall see, explainable, as far 
 as the councils of Aries and of Chalons are concerned, which 
 do not make any allusion whatever to the vulgar idioms. It is 
 more remarkable in regard to those of Rheims and of Tours, by 
 which the obligation of preaching to the people in its vernacular 
 dialects is so explicitly and so emphatically enjoined upon the 
 clergy under their jurisdiction. ITot only does the Romansh 
 not contain the least literary fragment, the existence of which 
 might be attributed to the injunctions of the two last-named 
 councils, but there is not even a vestige of historical evidence, 
 that anything of the kind ever existed. 
 
 It is in the course of the eleventh century, that mention is 
 made of some works in the Romansh-French, composed by 
 ecclesiastics for the instruction and edification of the public. 
 We find, for example, allusions to certain lives of the Saints, 
 translated from the Latin into the dialect of Rouen by Tliibaut 
 of Vernon, canon of the church of that city, about the year 
 1053 ; but facts like these are too remote to be referred to the 
 councils of Rheims and of Tours. 
 
 I revert now to the omission, to which I have just alluded, in 
 the two councils of Aries and Chalons. It is too remarkable 
 and too intimately connected with my subject, to allow me to 
 pass it over without a few reflections. This omission having 
 taken place simultaneously in different parts of the country, in 
 two different assemblies, and affecting an object of great general 
 interest, it is not easy to attribute it to a mere inattention or 
 forgetfulness. We are almost obliged to suppose, that if the 
 two councils in question did not prescribe the same rules for 
 the religious instruction of the people, which those of Rheims 
 and of Tours had prescribed, it was because they did not deem 
 this prescription as necessary, as the latter had found it to be. 
 And if we wish to state this somewhat vague hypothesis with a 
 little more precision, we must say, that in the countries, to 
 which the decrees of the two councils had reference, the Latin
 
 154 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 was still generally understood in 813, or else that at that time 
 the vulgar dialects were already applied to the religious instruc- 
 tion of their inhabitants. 
 
 Taken within certain limits, these two hypotheses are by no 
 means incompatible ; and they are both admissible in regard to 
 those countries, which came under the jurisdiction of the coun- 
 cil of Aries. The proofs of this assertion will appear from the 
 subsequent development of facts. 
 
 I have already had more than one occasion to remark, that 
 the results of the restoration of learning, which took place 
 under Charlemagne, important and decisive as they were in 
 the north of Gaul, were scarcely perceptible in the South. 
 One of these results was, to transfer the seat of Latin literature 
 and culture from the latter country into another. Of about a 
 hundred and twenty ecclesiastical personages, more or less 
 known from their Latin writings, from the end of the eighth to 
 the end of the ninth centuries, more than a hundred, some of 
 which are Gallo-Eomans and others Franks, belong to the 
 North ; and these are in every respect the most conspicuous of 
 the number. Now, inasmuch as the professional learning and 
 the duties of the Christian priesthood depended in a great mea- 
 sure on their knowledge of the Latin, the ignorance of the 
 clergy of the South on this point must necessarily have proved 
 pernicious to its discipline. This is a fact to which I have already 
 alluded many times, and the moment has now arrived for giving 
 direct and positive proofs of it ; but this fact partly depends 
 upon another, which I shall now explain in a few words. 
 
 The liturgy of the Christian church was originally not 
 very definitely settled, nor very uniform. On many points of 
 secondary importance, every church had its peculiar usages. 
 Thus, for example, the hymns, which constituted an essential 
 part of the cultus, were nowhere alike. Every priest adopted 
 or composed new ones at his pleasure. 
 
 A license like this, in an age, when the reminiscences of 
 paganism were still alive with all their seductive allurements, 
 was attended with its inconveniences. It could introduce into 
 the Christian liturgy compositions, which were strangely out of 
 place in it ; and indeed accidents of this kind did not fail to 
 happen. It was the Greek priests and even the ])atriarchs, who 
 gave the example of the scandal. The historian Cedrenus 
 reproaches Theophylact for having admitted profane songs 
 among the chants of the church at Constantinople.* 
 
 * Cedrenus represents the entire life of the patriarch as a scandalous insult to reli- 
 gion. He accuses him of having kept over two thousand horses in his stables, which 
 he fed not on hay or cerealia, but on the choicest fruits, seasoned with the most deli- 
 cious wines ; of having introduced the custom of celebrating the festivals of the Sainla
 
 Earliest Use of the Provencal. 155 
 
 From the East the evil made its way to the West, and par- 
 ticularly to those countries, which by reason of their position 
 on the coasts of the Mediterranean, were in direct and frequent 
 communications with the capital of the Greek empire. Toward 
 the end of the sixth century, the bishops of Spain were obliged 
 to expunge from the ritual of several churches hymns composed 
 by private or unclerical authors, and to interdict in the celebra- 
 tion of holy ofhces the use of every book that was not sanctioned 
 as canonical. 
 
 The ecclesiastical history of Gaul does not inform us of what 
 happened there in this respect. But it was probably the same 
 abuse, that provoked one of Charlemagne's capitularies, which 
 condemns all apocryphal histories and proscribes the public 
 reading of any but canonical books, of any pieces, but such as 
 were truely Catholic and sanctioned by venerable authori- 
 ties.* 
 
 In regard to the churches of the South in particular, it is cer- 
 tain, that the abuse in question was carried to a scandalous 
 extent by them. Agobard, the distinguished bishop of Lyons, 
 who died toward the year 840, relates, that, in taking possession 
 of his church, he found an antiphonary, compiled by a cliore- 
 piscopus, by the name of Amalric, and interspersed throughout 
 with pieces, which the compiler had inserted on his own 
 authority and according to his personal caprice. Now, these 
 pieces were so indecent, to use the language of the pious 
 bishop himself, " that no one could read them without being 
 struck with shame, and without blushes in his face." 
 
 The pieces, which I am about to produce as specimens of the 
 literary acquirements and taste of the monks and priests of the 
 South, at the time now under consideration, contain nothing of 
 so scandalous a character. But they are nevertheless striking 
 examples of the prodigious ignorance of those priests and of the 
 astonishing liberty of imagination, which they added to this 
 ignorance. They are found in the two manuscripts from the 
 abbey of Saint-Martial, of which I have spoken in the last 
 chapter, and to which I cannot avoid reverting for a moment 
 here. 
 
 These manuscripts consist of a collection of fragments of 
 
 with orgies and profanities, which Cedrenus says were .yet in vogne in his day ; and 
 finally of having admitted diabolical dances, obscure vociferations, and obscene songs, 
 borrowed from the brothel, into the cultus of the church. — He was killed by a fall 
 from one of his horses. Cedreni Historiarum compendium (Ed. Bekker), vol. ii. p. 
 332-333.— £d. 
 
 • The capitulary is simply : " TJt canonic! libri tantnm legantur ia ecclcsia." But it 
 is made with direct reference to a canon of the council of Laodicca, which, with a num- 
 ber of others, it adopts as a law of the empire. The canon is the 59th : "Non oportet 
 ah idiotis psalmos compositos el vulgares dici in ecclesiis, neque libros, qui sunt extra cano- 
 nem legere, nisi solos canonicos novi et veteris Testament!." The books considered 
 as canonical are then enumerated. — Ed.
 
 156 History of Prove7i(^al Poetry. 
 
 various ages and by different hands, the most important and 
 the most ancient of which date, as I have ab-eady had occasion 
 to remark, fi'om the first half of the eleventh century. These 
 fragments may have successively belonged to different monas- 
 teries or to different churches of the South, The pieces, which 
 they contain, are with few exceptions extracts from the Christ- 
 ian liturgy, some in Latin and others in Romansh. Tliey were 
 all intended to be sung at the celebration of particular festivals 
 or ceremonies, and the majority of them are written with their 
 musical notation under each line. Such of these pieces, as are 
 composed in the vulgar idiom, I shall consider presently; I 
 must, in the first place, say a few words on those that are in 
 Latin. 
 
 The latter are of two kinds. The one class appertains to the 
 liturgy as sanctioned by the more or less general usage of the 
 churches ; the other consists of pieces of imagination — the 
 works of unknown authors, apparently by monks and priests of 
 the South, who at their pleasure introduced them into the 
 ritual of their churches among the number of its hallowed 
 chants and prayers. These pieces being very numerous, I shall 
 only dwell on such as are best calculated to illustrate the facts, 
 which I desire to establish, 
 
 Tliere is one of them, which has nothing remarkable as far 
 as its argument is concerned, but which still deserves some 
 notice on account of its metrical execution. This is a poetical 
 narrative of the heroic adventure of Judith with Holofernes ; 
 and this narrative is in stanzas or couplets of six verses each, 
 irregularly rhymed and composed of a number of syllables, 
 which varies from six to eight. In regard to its diction, the 
 piece is a tissue of the most barbarous blunders from one end 
 to the other. The words are Latin, at least the majority of 
 them, but they are nearly always incorrectly employed, and 
 the sentences are constructed after the manner and the genius 
 of the romances. In regard to its character and tone, the 
 piece is a popular romanza in the strictest sense of the term ; 
 and it is solely on this account, that I have noticed it, as one of 
 the earliest indications of a fact, which is now about to become 
 apparent by degrees. A few couplets of this piece, translated 
 without the slightest change of construction and with the most 
 scrupulous fidelity, save here and there the correction of a 
 barbarism or of a phraseological vice, which it is impossible 
 to reproduce, will suffice to illustrate what I wish to con- 
 vey : 
 
 "Being in the thirtieth year of his reign, — Nebuchadnezzar 
 undertook to raise a war — against the nations and the king- 
 doms — even against Jerusalem." %f^^
 
 Earliest Use of the Provengal. 157 
 
 "Then be summoned Ilolofernes — the commander of his 
 forces : — March against the nations, said he : — march to war 
 against the AVest. — Let tliy hand give grace to no one : — ^let 
 it never sj^are the sword." 
 
 " Hereupon Holofernes assembled — generals and soldiers, — 
 officers and tribunes, — all the archers, and undoing sundry 
 nations, — he marched on to Betulia." 
 
 " Jews, in this citj, — were the multitude : — they adored the 
 God of heaven, — the Saviour of mankind ; — and they drove 
 back Holofernes, — battling bravely in the fray." 
 
 " With fasting and with tears, — in sack-cloth, coarse and 
 rough, — the people were afflicted, — they prayed unto the Lord, 
 — that from the enemy's hand — he might redeem his ser- 
 vants." 
 
 " Upon a certain day, Holofernes, — in a great rage — began 
 to say to his men : — Who are these people ? — Who is this 
 nation, that will not bend — to my commandment ?" etc., etc. 
 
 All the rest is in precisely the same popular style, and with- 
 out any more decided reflection of the oriental tone of the origi- 
 nal story. 
 
 I pass now to another piece, of which I would also like to 
 
 five an idea, if it were possible to do so. This is a sort of 
 ymn, an ode, an idyl ; I do not know exactly how to char- 
 acterize it. In a word, it is a poem, composed by some good old 
 Aquitanian or Provencal monk, with a pious intention, and 
 destined to be sung in the churches. This author, whoever he 
 may be, has aimed at the graces of poetic beauty and of an 
 elegant latinity ; but the more he strives to rise above a trivial 
 and popular tone, the more conclusively he proves, that this 
 tone was soon to become that of the monastic literature of the 
 South. In the first four or five strophes, the author's aim 
 seems to be to describe the celestial choirs, celebrating the 
 wonders of creation and the power of the Creator. The subse- 
 quent strophes contain a sort of a description of spring and an 
 invocation of the nightingale or Philomela, as our classical 
 monk terms the songstress of the grove, — an invocation, in 
 which the attempt at elegance appears in the most grotesque 
 contrast with a congeries of Latin, Greek and Romansh epi- 
 thets, piled one against the other, as if they had been huddled 
 together by the merest caprice of hazard. 
 
 The more strange and barbarous all this appears, the more it 
 is necessary for me to give some notion of it. I therefore sub- 
 join here what I have been able to comprehend of it, and with 
 the sense and the consistency I have been able to put into 
 it, I can only guarantee one thing, and this is, that I have done 
 no injustice to the original.
 
 / 
 
 158 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 " The choirs of angels in the sky make their golden tongues 
 resound." 
 
 " They celebrate perpetually by their canticles the king of 
 ages reigning there ;" 
 
 " riim, who created the twinkling stars of heaven, who separ- 
 ated the land from the waters;" 
 
 " "Who has created all things for his glory ; the reptiles and 
 the birds." 
 
 " Fair spring reigns in the flowering woodland ; the earth 
 produces herbs, the torest puts forth verdant foliage." 
 
 " There sing a multitude of birds ; the smallest is the one 
 which has the greatest, the most brilliant voice." 
 
 " It's Philomela, who having reached some woody eminence 
 and agitating tree-top, continues her melodious complaint, 
 throughout the whole of the dark night." 
 
 " Why, little bird, dost thou not cease to sing so plain- 
 tively? Dost thou desire to vanquish with thy melody the 
 sweet sounds of the lyre ?" 
 
 " The girl who plays the dulcimer stands listening to thee ; 
 and princes lie awake to lend their ear to thee and praise the 
 sweetness of thy song." 
 
 " Weary thy little gorge no longer ! cease to importune with 
 thy warbling notes those who desire to sleep !" 
 
 " But what ! Thou naughty bird, thou dost persist in sing- 
 ing ! Thou dost neglect thy nourishment, wouldst ravish all 
 the world with songs !" 
 
 " All listen to thee, but there are none to bring thee help, 
 save he who has endowed thee with thy voice." 
 
 " But when the summer's come, the bird is silent ; it's only 
 occupied with its young brood ; and it expires amid the frosts 
 of winter." 
 
 It is already a matter of some surprise, that any one should 
 ever have been found capable of producing the text, from 
 which I have just translated a specimen. But what shall we 
 think of the literature and of the discipline of the monks, who 
 could chant such nonsense — chant in churches, during divine 
 service, and carefully record it on parchment, at a time when 
 parchment was denied the writings of Cicero % 
 
 But we have not finished yet. I have to quote one piece 
 more. This, however, ig at least no longer a prodigy of 
 barbarity. The Latin, though insipid and familiar, is yet 
 sufficiently grammatical to admit of an exact rendering, which 
 the piece well deserves on account of its singularity. It is in 
 stanzas of six verses each, and it would seem that we must 
 regard it as a dialogue between two interlocutors, between a 
 lover and his mistress, of whom the former is supposed to
 
 Earliest Use of the Provengal. 159 
 
 pronounce the first four stanzas and the latter the remaining 
 two. 
 
 FIRST mTEKLOCUTOR, OR THE LOVER. 
 
 " Pray come, my charming friend, whom I love as I do my 
 own heart : come to my chamber, which I've embellished with 
 all sorts of ornaments." 
 
 " Seats are arranged for us in it ; it is bedecked with ta- 
 pestry ; it's strewed with flowers intermingled with odoriferous 
 herbs." 
 
 " A table is prepared for us in it, covered with every kind 
 of meats ; a pure wine and the most delicious cheer await us 
 in abundance." 
 
 "The sweet harmony of shrill flutes resounds in it; a young 
 boy and a skillful girl are singing their blithe ditties." 
 
 SECOND INTERLOCUTOR, OR THE LADY-LOVE. 
 
 " I have been solitary in the forest ; I've loved sequestered 
 spots; I have escaped the tumult, avoiding the noisy crowd of 
 men." 
 
 " The snow and ice are already melting ; the grass and foliage 
 are putting on their green. Already Philomela sings her 
 highest airs, and faithful love is languishing in the grottoes." 
 
 I do not intend to dwell on the inconvenience or the impro- 
 priety of pieces like these, in a Christian liturgy ; I am only in 
 search of data for the literary history of the south of France 
 during the Middle Age. 
 
 It is impossible to determine the age of these pieces. The 
 manuscripts, in which they are contained, along with many 
 others, which likewise appertain to the monastic literature of 
 the South, are no older than the first half of the eleventh 
 century. But they were surely not composed for the express 
 purpose of being inserted in these manuscripts, and are un- 
 doubtedly much older. Several of those, with which they are 
 intermingled, may be traced to the commencement of the ninth 
 century, and there is not the slightest ground for the presump- 
 tion, that they themselves are any less ancient. The exact 
 date of these compositions, however, is comparatively of little 
 importance. They are certainly not the only ones, nor the first, 
 of this peculiar style, this tone, this character ; and there is no 
 doubt, but that some of those, which preceded them, must be 
 dated from the beginning of the ninth century, and even from 
 second half of the eighth. 
 
 Now, it is extremely probable, that at these epochs the 
 
 /
 
 160 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 inhabitants of tlio South still comprehended such pieces, which 
 were composed in a vulgar and more than semi-barbarous 
 Latin, already abounding in forms and imitations from the 
 Romansh, with which it finally was confounded. 
 
 It is moreover equally probable, that one of the principal 
 motives, which prompted the clergy of the South to introduce 
 into the Christian liturgy profane songs bordering on scandal, 
 was that of drawing the people to the churches and of interest- 
 ing them in the ceremonies of the cultus. It was a sort of con- 
 cession, made by an ignorant and ill-disciplined clergy, to the 
 pagan reminiscences of the multitude, to the passion for excite- 
 ment and amusement, which these people carried even in^o 
 their religious usages. 
 
 An accommodation of this kind is still more apparent in the 
 assiduity, with which that same clergy sought to give a mate- 
 rial and visible representation of the ideas and facts of Christi- 
 anity, by dramatizing, as well as it could, the solemnities of 
 public worship. We know, for example, that, during the cere- 
 monies of Christmas day, it exhibited the three Magi from the 
 East, arriving under the guidance of the marvellous star at the 
 cradle of the Saviour, for the purpose of knowing and adoring 
 him. During the solemnities of Passion Week, it had a man 
 suspended from the cross for some length of time, in order to 
 represent Jesus Christ dying for the redemption of men. There 
 was scarcely a church, but what had translated the legend of its 
 favorite saint into a sort of pantomime or drama. 
 
 The famous procession of Corpus Christi, instituted at Aixby 
 King Rene, was nothing more than a continuation on a grander 
 scale of this ancient usage, so common among the south- 
 ern clergy, of converting the mysteries of Christianity into a 
 dramatic action and into a scenic spectacle. Now, the first 
 and leading motive on the part of the clergy for a usage like 
 this, which in its principle was wholly pagan, wholly Greek, 
 must certainly have been the intention of attaching to the 
 ceremonies of the Christian cultus a gay and sensual people, 
 which still delighted in the imitative and picturesque dis- 
 play of its former heathenish festivals. 
 
 In behalf of these material representations of the Christian 
 mysteries, the priests and the monks as])ircd to the composition 
 of pieces in verse or prose, in a sort of barbarous Latin ; and 
 these pieces must from the very nature of their design have 
 presented some shades of a dramatic form or intention. 
 
 Nevertheless, I have not been able to discover among all the 
 monuments of the monastic literature of the South a single piece 
 of this description in any kind of Latin. The only one I could 
 quote belongs to a much later epoch ; it is from the eleventh
 
 Earliest Use of the ProvenQol. 161 
 
 century. I ought to add, that it is, or aims to be, in a learned 
 Latin, and that its dramatic side is not very conspicuous. 
 However, as it is certainly not the only nor the first composi- 
 tion of the kind, it may be cited as an indication and a proof 
 of the fact, which I propose to establish. 
 
 The piece in question may be traced to the year 1048. Tliis 
 was the year of the decease of Odilon, the abb6 of Cluni, who 
 died in the monastery of Silviniac, in Auvergne, which was one 
 of the dependencies of Gluni. There is still extant a funeral 
 dirge, composed in honor of this abbot by a certain lotsald, one 
 of the monks of Silviniac. Now, the copies of this dirge contain 
 the intrinsic evidence of its having been written for the express 
 purpose of being sung at the funeral of the sainted abbot ; and 
 we are moreover assured, from other indications, that it was 
 intended to be accompanied by a species of pantomime, where 
 several circumstances from the euloo-y of Odilon were to be 
 represented by corresponding scenic imitations. 
 
 The poem contains, for example, verses, which the deceased 
 is supposed to sing from the depth of his grave, shortly before 
 his resurrection ; and these verses were chanted by a personage, 
 who acted the part of the saint and who actually rose again in 
 his stead. 
 
 But of all the branches of the monastic literature of the 
 South, written in a more or less romanticizing Latin, the most 
 prolific and the most interesting was incontestably that of the 
 marvellous histories and of the legends of saints both in verse 
 and prose. I have found some of them quite interesting on 
 account of the occasional hints they furnish us respecting 
 the nature and extent of the influence, which their continual 
 wars against the Arabs of Spain and their frequent and early 
 relations with the latter were thus exercising on the poetic 
 imagination of the inhabitants of the South, l^ut the remarks 
 I might make concerning these legends and fables are worth a 
 place in a separate chapter. It is sufficient for my purpose to 
 indicate here en passant the existence of the histories in 
 question. 
 
 In recapitulating now what I have just said on the 
 monastic literature of the South from the end of the eighth 
 century to the middle of the ninth, we perceive that it already 
 includes all the germs and rudiments of a new literature. 
 The transition from the habit of making verses or prose in a 
 barbarous Latin, which was already more than half Romansh, 
 to the idea of composing them in the pure Romansh, was an 
 easy and a natural one : it was in fact inevitable. 
 
 From the ninth century to the tenth, the indiscipline and the 
 ignorance of the priests and monks of the South was constantly
 
 162 nisiory of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 increasing. The mass of the clergy became more and more 
 assimilated with the mass of the people, until at last there was 
 no longer any difference. In both these masses, there was the 
 same grossness of manners, the same ignorance, the same wants 
 and the same tendencies of the imagination. If the people had 
 its remains of heathenish habits, there was likewise a tincture 
 of paganism in the inconceivable readiness with which the 
 clergy gave itself np to the practice of singing in the churches 
 its erotic idyls, its invocations of Philomela, or to other inde- 
 cencies, still worse than these, as we learn from the testimony 
 of Agobard, to which I have above alluded. 
 
 In this state of things, a new approximation, and one, wdiicli 
 all the rest had long since tended to bring about, took place 
 between the people and the clergy. The latter made a second 
 concession, a second innovation in the liturgy in favor of the 
 former. Among the Latin prayers and chants sanctioned by 
 usage, and among the profane songs in a more or less barbarous 
 Latin, which they had introduced into it on their own authority, 
 they now admitted other songs in the Romansh idiom. 
 
 AV^hat could have been the motive of the clergy for this new 
 compliance ? Did they think of attaching the people more and 
 more to the ceremonies of the cultus, by allowing them to pray 
 and sing in their own vernacular ? Was it purely from a sym- 
 pathy for the tastes of the people, and v/ithout the intention of, 
 exacting any return for it, that they made this concession? I 
 am inclmed to believe, that both these considerations entered 
 into the motives of the innovation. 
 
 However that may be, the fact is a certain one, and not with- 
 out its importance in the history of the idiom and of the popu- 
 lar literature of the South. It is, in fact, from the admission 
 of this idiom into the Christian liturgy, that we may date the 
 commencement of its culture, and the first literary tentatives 
 in this idiom appear to have been songs or hymns, composed by 
 ecclesiastics, in order to be sung by tlie people in the churches. 
 It was thus, that the transition from the semi-popular poetry in 
 monkish Latin to a decidedly popular poetry in the pure 
 Romansh was accomplished, hi regard to the epoch of this 
 transition, I assign it on conjecture to the beginning of the 
 ninth century. 
 
 The most curious and the most ancient specimens of the kind 
 are contained in those precious manuscripts of Saint Martial, 
 which I have already had occasion to quote several times. We 
 there find a hymn to the Virgin in twelve stanzas of four verses 
 each, composed of six syllables, and rhyming two by two. The 
 piece is one of an extreme simplicity, both in its language and 
 in its ideas. There is nothing remarkable about it, except the :
 
 Earliest Use of the Provencal. 163 
 
 simple fact of its existence, and it is on that account tliat I 
 refrain from speaking of it in detail.* 
 
 The same manuscripts contain a piece, which is much more 
 curious, not indeed intrinsically, but on account of certain 
 accessories, which give us some notion of the manner in which 
 the people participated in the services of divine worship. This 
 is a hjmn on the Nativity, and destined to be sung at the cele- 
 bration of this festival. Its couplets alternate with those of 
 the same hymn in Latin, of which they are only a translation, 
 and not a very faithful one. It appears, that each Latin couplet 
 was chanted by the clergy, and that the people responded to it 
 by a couplet in the Komansh, and so on alternately to the end. 
 
 In other manuscripts there are psalms translated into rhymed 
 Provengal couplets, likewise so arranged as to be sung by a choir 
 composed of the entire congregation, and alternating with tha 
 Latin verses chanted by the priests. 
 
 In nearly all the churches of the South, the people likewise; 
 took a part in the celebration of the Christian festivals by 
 chanting liynms in the Romansh idiom. In some of these; 
 churches, this usage was kept up until a comparatively recent 
 period. We still have a hymn on the martyrdom of St. Stephen,, 
 which it was customary to sing in those of Aix and Agen.f I 
 liave seen in a manuscript of the thirteenth century a very 
 beautiful complaint of the Virgin, on the death of Jesus Christy. 
 which must have been sung for centuries in that of Albi. 
 
 I have already spoken of certain pieces in monkish Latin ^ 
 composed for those dramatic rej^resentations of the Christian 
 Mysteries, by Avhich the clergy had intended to attract the 
 people to the churches. From the moment and for the same 
 reasons, that there were hymns and prayers in the Romansh lan- 
 guage, there must have been, and in fact there soon were in the 
 same language pieces, in which the attempt was made to dra- 
 matize the ideas and the facts of Christianity. We find one in' 
 the manuscripts of Saint Martial, which dates from the end of 
 the tenth century or from the commencement of the eleventh, 
 at the latest, and which at present is undoubtedly the most 
 ancient of the kind. 
 
 This is a dramatic composition of the crudest description, 
 adapted to the service of the Nativity, and representing the 
 evangelical parable of the wise and foolish virgins. If any one 
 should be tempted to glance at the piece, he will find it in the- 
 second volume of Raynouard's collection of the Troubadours.:j: 
 
 It would be difficult to imagine anything simpler or grosser 
 in the shape of a dramatic performance. Its action is so little 
 marked, that it can scarcely be said to have one ; and the piece 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. ii., p. 135. t Id. vol. ii., p 140. ^ Page 139.— £i. ,
 
 164 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 proceeds in sort of helter-skelter fashion, and without the 
 slightest artifice from the beginning to the end. Its dramatis 
 j)erson(B, however, are very numerous. There are, besides the 
 wise and the foolish virgins, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the 
 angel Gabriel, an oil-dealer, and several distinguished person- 
 ages from the Old and the New Testament, among wliich Nebu- 
 chadnezzar and Virgil figure by way of episodes. The virgins 
 and the oil dealer always speak Provencal ; Christ and the 
 angel Gabriel sometimes Provencal and sometimes Latin. In 
 both these idioms the dialogue is composed of rhymed couplets, 
 of which some contain three and others four verses. 
 
 The piece begins with a sort of prologue in six Latin verses, 
 rhyming two by two, wherein the angel Gabriel announces the 
 near advent of the Messiah under the metaphorical name of the 
 bridegroom. The wise virgins now make their appearance, and 
 the angel exhorts them to prej^are for the coming of the bride- 
 groom. The foolish virgins are absent ; but they soon arrive 
 in their turn, lamenting that they had neglected to provide 
 themselves with oil in order to wait for the bridegroom, and 
 •conjuring their sisters to lend them some. The latter reject 
 their prayer, and refer them to an oil-dealer in the neighbor- 
 hood. But the dealer, who is as pitiless as the wise virgins, 
 cannot be prevailed on to accept either gold or silver for a single 
 drop of his oil. 
 
 The foolish virgins thereupon abandon themselves to despair, 
 and meanwhile the bridegroom arrives, singing a Latin couplet 
 of six verses, in which he declares that he does not know them. 
 In a second couplet, which is in the Romansh language, he pro- 
 nounces their sentence, and condemns them to be plunged into 
 the abyss of hell. At this point of the story a number of 
 demons must have made their appearance, in order to execute 
 the sentence, and to drag the foolish virgins into the flames. 
 This catastrophe terminates the only portion of the piece 
 which displays the slightest shadow of a dramatic form. The 
 rest is but a succession of Latin couplets, in M'hich the patri- 
 archs, the pro])hets and Virgil bear witness to all the predictions 
 by which the coming of the Saviour was announced. 
 
 In regard to tiie scenic accessories and the particular execu- 
 tion of pieces of this kind, it docs not appear, that they could 
 have been possessed of much refinement or illusion. The 
 spectators, however, were not very fastidious, and a representa- 
 tion, like the one, of which I have just given an outline, in 
 which angels, demons, virgins, patriarchs and kings successively 
 made their appearance, probably all arrayed in costumes of a 
 certain variety and richness, must have been a grand and 
 magnificent spectacle at the most barbarous epoch of the 
 Middle Age.
 
 Earliest Use of the Provengal. 165 
 
 It remains now to point out the transition from the more or 
 less fabulous histories or monkish legends, in a barbaroua 
 Latin, to the fables and legends of a similar type in the vulgar 
 tongue. These compositions were certainly the most popular 
 of all the tentatives of the nascent Provencal literature. Tliey 
 are those, which exercised the greatest power over the imagi- 
 nation, and which were naturally destined to serve as the basis 
 or the nucleus for the future epopees. They are therefore 
 those, which it is most important for us to know ; but they are 
 unfortunately also those, which time has spared the least, and 
 we have now left nothing of the kind, which might be traced 
 back to the epoch of the lyrical and dramatic attempts, of 
 which I have just spoken. l!s^evertheless, it is a fact attested by 
 history, that the most ancient works in the E.oniansh-Proven§al 
 belonged to this narrative or legendary species. A life of 
 Saint Sacerdot is cited among others, who was bishop of 
 Limoges, during the course of the ninth century. It is written 
 in the language of the country, and immediately after the 
 death of the saint. 
 
 The most ancient specimen of the kind that I can produce, 
 is a prologue to a metrical legend on Saint Fides of Agen, a 
 lady-saint, that formerly was greatly venerated in the south of 
 France. President Fauchet, to whom we are indebted for thia 
 fragment of twenty verses, drew it from a manuscript, which 
 he says belongs to the twelfth century. But the crudeness of 
 its style points to an earlier origin, and the legend of which it 
 constitutes the introduction was probably composed toward tha 
 end of the eleventh century. Inasmuch as this fragment, 
 though a very short one, furnishes us some interesting traits in 
 relation to the history of this monkish poetry, the vestiges of 
 which I am now endeavoring to trace, I shall attempt to make 
 a literal translation of it. The speaker is, as we shall see pre- 
 sently, a person in the character of a jongleur, ready to recite 
 the legend in question, and addressing himself in his own name 
 to the auditory assembled around him for the purpose of lis- 
 tening to his story. 
 
 "Listen to one of the finest songs you ever heard; its subject 
 is not Spanish ; its words are not Greek ; its language is not 
 Saracen, but it is blither and sweeter than honey or any artfully- 
 compounded condiment, and whoever shall recite it well after 
 the fashion of the French, I think he'll reap a great advantage 
 from it, and he will be the better for it in this world.* 
 
 * Canczou audi q'es bell' antresca, E plus que nuls pimcnts q'omm esca, 
 
 Cue fo de razo espanesca ; Qui ben la diz a lei francesca, 
 
 Noa fo de paraula grezesca Cuis? m'en que sos granz pros Ten crcsca, 
 
 Ne de lengua serrazinesca ; E q'en est aegle Ten paresca. 
 Dolz' e suaus es plus que bresca
 
 166 
 
 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 " All the land of the Basques, Aragon, and the country of 
 the G6,scons, will know what this song is, and that it is a true 
 history. I have heard it read to clerks and to learned latinists, 
 from the book, in which the heroic exploits of olden times, 
 and other things may be read. If therefore the air is to your 
 
 likino;, I will continue as I've begun and I will 
 
 sins: 
 
 it to you 
 
 now." 
 
 We perceive from this fragment that the strolling minstrels, 
 who knew these legends by heart, were in the habit of singing 
 them in tlie cities and in other places, in short wherever they 
 could find an assembly of listeners, precisely as they afterward 
 sung the chivalric epopees of a later period. We see moreover, 
 that the poetry of the Provencals during this first epoch of its 
 history, and long before it became that of the Troubadours, en- 
 joyed already a degree of reputation and of popularity on the 
 other side of the Pyrenees, and in the circumjacent countries. 
 
 But these observations do not exactly correspond with my 
 purpose. In speaking of these ancient monkish legends, it is 
 far more important for me to give some idea of the peculiar 
 turn of imagination (which is often a fantastical and bold one) 
 displayed by their authors, and of the strange facility, with 
 which they substituted, in place of the general belief of the 
 6hurch, fables of their own invention, and fictions, which must 
 have had a decided influence on the subsequent developments 
 of Provengal poetry. Among the more modern legends of the 
 kind, which in the absence of more ancient ones can aid us in 
 comprehending what I wish to convey, there are two, which 
 to the merit of their singularity add tliat of being very short. 
 Their substance is as follows: 
 
 The first of these pieces is a sort of amplification or 
 fantastical paraphrase of the vision of Saint Paul, who, as we 
 know, was during his lifetime carried up to heaven by the 
 Spirit, and enabled to contemplate all its joys in anticipation of 
 their fruition. In the fiction, to which 1 have alluded. Saint 
 Paul descends also into hell, in order to contemplate the pun- 
 ishment of the wicked. He passes through it under the gui- 
 dance of the archangel Michael, who shows him the different 
 cantons of the infernal regions, and the difterent classes of 
 sinners, each of which is tormented by a peculiar punishment, 
 adapted to his particular sin. The author undoubtedly did not 
 admit the doctrine of a purgatory, as he docs not make Saint 
 Paul descend into it. 
 
 Tola Basconn' et AraG;ons 
 K r eneontrada dels Gascons 
 Baben quals cs aqi^t canczons, 
 'E s' es ben vera sta razons. 
 Eu r audi legir a clerczons, 
 E agramadis a molt bons 
 
 Si qon o raostra '1 passions 
 En que om lig estas leiczons: 
 E si vos plaz est nostra sons, 
 Aissi col guida 'I primers tons, 
 Eu la vos cantarei en dons. 
 
 Raynouard, vol. ii., p. 144. — Ed,
 
 Earliest Use of the Provencal. 167 
 
 ^ We perceive from this simple statement, tliat the piece in 
 question belongs to that numerous class of mediaeval composi- 
 tions, whose theme was an ideal journey into the mysterious 
 regions of the invisible world, as represented by the Christian 
 system of opinions, and which may have first suggested to the 
 mind of Dante the subject for his Divine Comedy. It has every 
 appearance of being the most ancient of these compositions in 
 tne vulgar tongue. This circumstance alone suffices to invest 
 it with some degree of interest. In other respects it is but a 
 rapid and a dry sketch, which, however, still displays some 
 vigorous and original traits. Its language is remarkably correct, 
 and of a simplicity, which is occasionally so austere and naive^ 
 that it is impossible to translate it. This is a confession I 
 must make before translating the passage, which appears to 
 me to be the most striking part of this little work. 
 . "(And when they beheld Saint Peter and Saint Michael), 
 the sinners which were in hell began to cry out, saying : Have 
 mercy on us, thou blessed Saint Michael, angel of God, and 
 thou, Saint Paul, beloved of the Saviour, go, pray to God in 
 our behalf. 
 
 " And the angel said unto them : Weep on ; Paul and myself 
 are likewise going to weep for you, and God perhaps may pity 
 you and give you a little rest. 
 
 ■ " When those who were in the torments of hell heard these 
 words, they cried with a loud voice, together with thousands 
 of angels, and then the sound of them all was heard saying : 
 Have mercy, have mercy, O Christ ! 
 
 ■ " And Saint Paul then suddenly beheld the heavens moving 
 and the son of God descending. And those in hell cried, still 
 repeating : Have mercy on us, thou Son of the Most High ! 
 
 " And thereupon the voice of God was heard in the midst of 
 all this anguish ; and how can ye ask me for repose — me, who 
 on your account, was smitten with the lance, nailed to the cross 
 with nails ; whose thirst was quenched with gall ? I gave my- 
 self for you in order that ye might come to me ; but you have 
 been liars, misers, envious of riches, slanderous and arrogant. 
 You've done no good, you've given no alms, you've not been 
 penitent ! 
 
 " After these words, Saint Michael and Saint Paul, with 
 myriads of angels, fell on their knees before the Son of God, 
 beseechino; him that those who were in hell might be released 
 from punishment on Sunday. 
 
 "And the Son of God, in answer to the prayers of Saint 
 Michael, of Saint Paul and of the angels, and also out of his 
 own goodness granted them release from suffering, from the 
 hour of noon on Saturday to the hour of pi*ime on Monday.
 
 16S History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 "Thereupon the janitor of hell, whose name was Cherubim, 
 lifted up his head over all the torments of the pit, and ho was 
 sorely afflicted. But all the tormented were exceedingly 
 rejoiced, and cried, saying: Blessed be thou, Son of the Most 
 High God, who hast given us rest for a day and for two nights ! 
 This will be more of a repose to us than we have ever had in 
 the Other world." 
 
 ^he poem, from which I have produced this passage, is un- 
 doubtedly the work of monks ; it contains the internal evidence 
 of having served as a general reading book in the refectories 
 and in the churches. It displays, as we perceive, a liberty of 
 imagination, similar to that of which we have already seen so 
 many proofs. The only difference is, that in this instance 
 the license is of a more elevated and of a more poetical 
 description. 
 
 The other legend, which it now remains for me to discuss, is, 
 like the preceding one, in prose, and a little more extended. 
 It is perhaps less remarkable for force and purity of language, 
 but much more so for its originality of invention. It appears, 
 moreover, to have been a favorite during the Middle Ago, 
 and we find that Troubadours of great celebrity from the 
 twelfth century contain passages, which seem to make allusion 
 to it. 
 
 The fiction is quite a mystical one, and it already exhibits 
 the peculiarity of having for its subject not a personage either 
 human or divine, but the tree, out of which tlie cross of th© 
 Saviour was constructed, and the history of which the author 
 traces back to the first days of creation, in order to interweave 
 it successively with all the grand events connected with religion. 
 To give a proper idea of this singular fiction, it would not be 
 enough to oiFer a mere extract ; I shall therefore intersperse the 
 sketch, which I am about to make of it, with some passages of 
 the text, literally translated. 
 
 The author commences by recounting the banishment of 
 Adam from the terrestrial paradise, his retreat to the valley of 
 Hebron, the murder of Abel and the birth of Seth, and then 
 continues in the following terms : 
 
 " Seth, having now grown up to be a young man, was very 
 obedient to his father. Adam had lived four hundred and 
 tM'enty-two years in the valley of Hebron. One day, when he 
 had watered some young plants, he found himself overpowered 
 with weariness, and leaning on his pillow, he began to lament 
 and to think of the great calamities which he saw ushered into 
 the world in consequence of what ho had done. And bBing 
 sorely afflicted and weary of life, he sent for his son Seth. 
 Dear son, said he to him, I wish to send you to Cherubim, the
 
 Earliest Use of the Provengal. 169 
 
 angel of Paradise, who watches over tlie great tree of life with 
 a two-edged sword. 
 
 " Seth answered him : My father, I am ready to obey your 
 commandment. Teach me only the way which I must follow, 
 and the words lam to address to the angel Cherubim. Adam, 
 his father, thereupon replied : Tell the angel that it afflicts me 
 to live, and beseech him to send me the unction of mercy, 
 which God has promised me in driving me out of Paradise. 
 Take the road to the east, and you will find the valley which 
 will lead you toward Paradise. But in order to be surer of 
 your way, observe the foot-prints, which we made, your mother 
 and myself, when we came into this valley after our exile from 
 Paradise. The earth was singed and withered by them; for 
 our sin had been so great, that never an herb could grow again 
 where our feet had touched the ground." 
 
 Seth then takes leave of his father ; he finds the way ; he 
 meets the ansrel, who after havinc: become informed of tho 
 motives of his mission, commands him to observe from the 
 entrance of the garden a terrestrial Paradise, the objects which 
 were now about to present themselves to his view. 
 
 "And when Seth advanced his head into the garden, as the 
 angel had told him, he saw delights which no tongue could 
 express, every variety of beautiful flowers and fruits, of rejoic- 
 ino-s, of instruments and of sino-ino' birds, and there is nothing 
 that could be compared with the splendor and the sweet odors 
 of the place. In the midst of it he saw a clear fine fountain, 
 from which four great rivers issued .... and on the edge of 
 this fountain, there was a large tree surcharged with branches, 
 but without any bark or leaves. This naked tree was the one 
 which had tempted his father and his mother Eve to sin." 
 
 Seth returns to the angel, in order to give him an account of 
 what he had seen, and he is again sent to the gate of the ter- 
 restrial Paradise and commanded to look anew. Seth obeys, 
 and he then sees an immense serpent coiled around the paternal 
 tree. He comes back to the angel who orders him a third time 
 to the gate of Paradise. This time the tree extended itself 
 aloft into the heavens and bore upon its top an infant enveloped 
 in shining swaddling-clothes. Seth came to tell his new vision 
 to the cherubim, who thereupon addresses him in these words : 
 " This infant, which you have seen, is the son of God, who has 
 commenced to weep over the sins of your father and your 
 mother, and who will blot them out when the time shall be 
 fulfilled. It is he who will give to your father the unction of 
 mercy which God has promised him. . . 
 
 " When Seth was on the point of returning, the angel gave 
 him three seeds from the fruit of the tree of which his father
 
 170 nistoTy of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 had eaten, and he said unto him: Three days after your return, 
 your father will die. And when he shall be dead, you will put 
 these three seeds into his mouth, and they will give rise to three 
 great trees, of which one will be called the cedar, the other the 
 cypress and the third the pine." 
 
 In the imagination of the author, these three trees arc an 
 allusion to the Trinity, and each of them contains its mystical 
 analogies to one of the three persons of the Godhead, What the 
 angel had predicted came to pass and what he had ordered was 
 accomplished. In the time of Abraham, the three sprouts which 
 sprung from the three seeds of the tree of life had not exceeded 
 the height of a fathom. They were discovered by Moses in 
 the valley of Hebron and the sjjirit of God revealed to him 
 what they were. He cut them reverentially, and having inve- 
 loped them in a beautiful piece of silken cloth, he carried them 
 with him, in the shape of relics, during the forty years of his 
 sojourn in the wilderness, and he replanted them, before his 
 death, in a valley which by the mystical romancer is denomi- 
 nated Comfrafort. 
 
 After the lapse of a thousand years, the Holy Spirit directed 
 David to go in search of the three rods and to fetch them to 
 Jerusalem, where they were replanted one after the other, close 
 to the edge of a cistern. There, thriving rapidly, they grew up 
 in the course of thirty years into a single tree of marvellous 
 beauty. It was under the shade of this tree that David wept 
 over his sins and composed his psalms. 
 
 After the death of David, Solomon had his famous temple 
 built. The work was already very far advanced ; he wanted 
 but one additional beam, but a beam of such dimensions that 
 it appeared impossible to find it in any of the forests of tne 
 country. The Sacred tree was the only one that could supply 
 the want, and it was decided that it should be felled. It was 
 cut into the shape of a beam, which by exact measurement was 
 found to be thirty-one cubits in length, and this was exactly one 
 cubit longer than any of the rest. But when they attempted 
 to put it into its place, it was found to be one cubit short. 
 It was taken down again, and by a new measurement, its former 
 length of thirty-one cubits was found to be correct. They 
 wanted to replace it, but it was again found to have no more 
 than twenty-nine cubits in length. After several new attempts, 
 all equally futile, the builders finally came to the conclusion, 
 that the beam cut out of the miraculous tree was not destined 
 to enter into the fabric of the temple. But it was the wish of 
 Solomon that it should be at least enshrined, as an object of 
 veneration. 
 
 And it in fact remained there for a great length of time.
 
 Earliest Use of the Provengal. 171 
 
 But on a certain day, as a woman by the name of Maximilla 
 was leaning against the miraculous post, her garments began 
 to burn like tow, to use the language of the romancer. The 
 woman, being frightened, began to cry out and to prophesy : 
 " Jesus Christ, Son of God, save me !" were her words. Is o 
 sooner had the Jews heard her invoke the name of Christ than 
 they took her to be insane and possessed of the devil, and chased 
 her out of the city. This woman was the first believer, who 
 suifered martyrdom for Jesus Christ. 
 
 The Jews wishing to prevent a new scandal, had the beam 
 dragged out of the temple and threw it into a filthy place, 
 w^iere the priests were in the daily habit of slaughtering their 
 victims for the sacrifices of the temple. But an angel descended 
 from Heaven every night to cleanse the holy beam, which con- 
 tinued to work miracles. 
 
 Perpetually irritated by these wonderful phenomena, the 
 Jews drew it out of the filthy place, in which it was, and threw 
 it after the fashion of a foot-bridge over the brook of Siloa. It 
 was thence, that after many other miraculous adventures it was 
 finally taken to be converted into the cross of the Saviour, 
 
 In the only manuscript, in whicli it is contained, this singular 
 legend is entitled: "A treatise on Original Sin," and there is 
 scarcely any doubt but that the bulk of the clergy of the South 
 took all this in earnest and for theology. 
 
 Compositions of this character are sufficient evidence of the 
 extent, to which this clergy was ignorant, credulous and greedy 
 of fictions, and of the license with which it transformed the 
 earnest faith of Christianity into romantic fables ! And we 
 can easily conceive, that such examples must have had a deci- 
 sive influence on the poj^ular imagination and on the ulterior 
 developments of Provencal poetry.
 
 173 History of ProvenQol Poetry, 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 WALTER OF AQUITANIA. 
 I. ANALYSIS OF THE SCANDINAVIAN SONGS. 
 
 The pions songs, the marvellous legends and the mystical 
 fables of the eighth and ninth centuries, whether they were in 
 the Romansh idiom or in a barbarizing Latin, were intended 
 by their monkish or priestly authors to occupy, and in fact did 
 occupy, a conspicuous place in the imagination of the southern 
 Gallo-Romans. This people however began at that time to have 
 other subjects of interest and emotion, other themes for poetry, 
 and these were of a more human, of a more national character. 
 
 The two centuries, which I have already indicated, were to 
 the south of Gaul a period of great events, one of those periods 
 of trial and of heroism, which have the privilege of eliciting 
 poetic genius, which the latter in its turn always invests with a 
 certain halo of the marvellous, and the very history of which is 
 itself the more poetical, the more it is complete and real. 
 
 The mass of these events constitutes a rigorously connected 
 whole, where all the results are a necessary consequence of all 
 the antecedents. We may, however, for the purpose of distin- 
 guishing certain details or certain characters with greater per- 
 spicuity, divide them into two distinct series, the first comprising 
 the wars between tlie inhabitants of the South and the Arabs of 
 Spain, the second embracing the various incidents of the long 
 struggle between the same people and its Germanic conquerors. 
 
 All the primitive facts of the Provencal epopee are connected 
 with these great struggles, with these two series of events ; and 
 they are so closely interwoven with them, that it is impossible 
 to appreciate the former with any degree of interest or correct- 
 ness without having first acquired a vivid and a definite con- 
 ception of tlie latter. This is a fact which it will be easy for 
 me to establish, when I shall have arrived at the examination 
 of the epic romances of the Middle Age, but which for the 
 present I am obliged to take for granted, having first of all to 
 speak of a work in which I think I perceive a poetic evidence 
 of the reactionary struggle of Aquitaine and of the rest of the 
 South against the two ii'ankish conquests.
 
 Analysis of the Scandinavian Songs. 173 
 
 I have alluded in my general survey of the history of Pro- 
 vencal literature to a Latin poem, having a certain Aquitanian 
 Prince by the name of Walter for its hero.* I have expressed it 
 as my desire and intention to direct, if possible, the curiosity 
 and attention of the reader to this poem. The moment for the 
 execution of my task has now arrived ; but the task is a com- 
 plicated one, and I cannot accomplish my purpose without 
 a preliminary digression of considerable length. 
 
 It is not from its intrinsic merit, however genuine that may 
 be, that the work in question derives its greatest importance to 
 the history of literature; it is on account of something much 
 more 623ecial, much more accidental ; it is on account of its con- 
 nection with the ancient monuments of the Teutonic poetry. 
 The action of the Aquitanian poem links itself by various 
 threads to the action of the famous German epopee, the Nibe- 
 lungen, and the connection is such an intimate one that in 
 attributing, as we are obliged to do, the two poems to two dif- 
 ferent literatures, the supposition of a prolonged contact and of 
 a sort of collision between these two literatures, previously to 
 the ninth century, becomes indispensably necessary. 
 
 It is this ancient contact between the Romansh literature of 
 the South and the contemporaneous literature of the Germans, 
 that I wish to prove and to exhibit in the clearest possible light, 
 as an interesting and a new fact in the history of European 
 literature. But before attempting to do so, I must first of all 
 give some idea of the Germanic poems on the subject of the 
 Nibelungen and of the national traditions on which these poems 
 are founded. 
 
 These traditions were common to all the branches of the 
 Teutonic race ; they circulated orally for centuries, and in each 
 particular locality they underwent changes and modifications 
 of every kind. Their ensemble is at present a very complex 
 and a very confused one, and the poetic monuments, in which 
 they have been collected and fixed, are still very numerous, 
 though it is certain, that many of them have been lost. 
 
 These monuments divide themselves naturally into two dis- 
 tinct series, of which the one pertains to the Scandinavian 
 and the other the Germanic branch of the Teutons. To 
 demonstrate the ancient contact, to which I have just alluded, 
 between the literature of the North and that of the south of 
 Gaul, it would, strictly considered, be only necessary to make 
 known some of the monuments of the latter of these brandies. 
 I have however a direct and positive motive for extending this 
 obligatory excursion into the literature of the North a little 
 
 * See page 4.
 
 174 History of Pvovenqal Poetry. 
 
 further, and for including in my survey of the Germanic versions 
 of the fable of the Nibelungen, the versions of the Scandina- 
 vians. 
 
 The manner in which the same popular traditions, the same 
 poetic fables are modified and altered, decomposed and recom- 
 poscd, combining themselves with new accessories as they 
 increase in age or in extent of circulation, as they pass from 
 one country and from one people to another country and 
 another people, constitutes one of the most curious and inter- 
 esting phenomena in the general history of literature. Now 
 of all tlie poetries known, the ancient poetry of the !North is 
 the one, in which all these things are exhibited in the clearest 
 light, and it is consequently the one, which includes the greatest 
 amount of information and of light, by which we may iUustrate 
 and generalize the corresponding facts of other poetries, includ- 
 ing those of the Provencal poetry itself. 
 
 Among the Teutons or the Germans of the South, the heroic 
 traditions, of which the history of the Nibelungen constitutes 
 the principal part and as it were the nucleus, have been recorded, 
 at different epochs of the Middle K^(d^ in various detached 
 poems which have since been embodied into two distinct collec- 
 tions or cycles, as they are termed. Of these two cycles the 
 one is designated by the expressive title of the " Heldenbuch," or 
 the Book of Heroes, and the other by the special title of the 
 " Song of the Nibelungen."* Among the Scandinavians or the 
 Teutons of the North, the same traditions have been collected 
 and arranged in divers Sagas or chronicles, of which the most 
 interesting two are the Volsunga and the WilJdna Sagas.f 
 
 I shall endeavor to include in one and the same sketch the 
 substance, the common basis of these Germanic poems and of 
 the Scandinavian Sagas, by indicating those points in which the, 
 former differ from tlie latter, with the exception, however, of 
 those variations, which are of but secondary importance. 
 
 At an epoch, which, if we wish to determine its precise chro- 
 nology, may be assigned to about the middle of the fifth cen- 
 tury, the country of Niederland or Frankenland, that is to say 
 the land of the Franks, on the right bank of the Rhine, was 
 governed by a king whose name was Sigmund — a powerful 
 
 * The " Heldenbuch" has been edited by V. d. Hagen and Primisser, Berlin, 1820. An 
 Eairlishaccoiiat of it byWebcr, in the "Illustrations of Xorthcrn Antiquities," Edinburgh, 
 1814. Ofth(3 " NibeUuigen Lied" there are several editions, by Lachmann, V. d. Hagen, 
 etc. Translations into modern German by Pfitzer, Busching, Simrock. An English trans- 
 lation by Birch, Berlin, 184S. A spirited critique by Thomas Carlyle in his essays. — Ed. 
 
 t The Volsunga Saga has been edited by Kafn, in the 1st vol. of his " Fornaldar 
 Sogur Nordlanda," 1S29. The Wilkina Saga by Peringskiold, Stockholm, 1815. A 
 German version of both, of them in v. d. Hagen's Nordische Heldenromane, Berlin, 
 1814-2S. A general account of the different Sagas of the Scandinavians in Miiller's 
 Sagabibliothek, Copenhagen, 1818. — Ed.
 
 Analysis of the Scandinavian Songs. 175 
 
 and a renowned monarch of the heroic race. This king had a 
 son, called Sigurd or Siegfried (as I shall continue to call him 
 in this outline), who was destined to exterminate all the heroes 
 of his race and those of the entire world. 
 
 "When yet quite young, Siegfried already distinguished him- 
 self by his marvellous exploits, the most memorable of which is 
 his victory over the dragon or serpent Fafnir. Fafnir was 
 a dwarf, that is a sort of genius or sprite in the system of 
 northern mythology, having the power of changing his form, 
 and who under that of a dragon or serpent lived in a solitary 
 mountain, in a subterranean palace, w^here he guarded an im- 
 mense treasure. Siegfried, having combated and slain Fafnir, 
 took possession of his treasure. The gold and the silver were 
 but the smallest portion of it ; he there found a sword called 
 Rotter, the very best of sw^ords, and sundry other enchanted 
 objects, the enumeration of which varies considerably among the 
 different authors of the story. 
 
 According to the Germanic traditions, Siegfried renders him- 
 self invulnerable by bathing in the blood of the vanquished 
 dragon. According to the Scandinavian traditions he does not 
 bathe in the blood of Fafnir, nor does he become invulnerable, 
 but he eats the heart of the roasted monster and thenceforth 
 comprehends the secrets of nature, or as the northern chronicles 
 express it, he understands the language of the birds. 
 
 Having put Fafnir's treasure on the back of Gran, his noble 
 charger, Siegfried takes the route toward the Rhine, with the in- 
 tention of entering into a pow^erful kingdom situated along the 
 banks of that river and designated by various names. I adopt that 
 of the kingdom of the Burgundians, which it bears in the Germanic 
 traditions, andAvhich appears to be the most historical of them. 
 
 This kingdom, was governed by three brothers, the three sons 
 of King Gibich. They were Gunther, Hagen and Gudorn or 
 Giselher, ail of them valiant warriors. They had a sister, 
 called Chrimhild in the Germanic poems and Gudruna in the 
 Scandinavian chronicles; I shall use the latter of these names, 
 which is more easily pronounced than the former. 
 
 Gudruna was the most beautiful of women ; the renown of 
 her beauty had spread in every direction, and it w^as for the 
 purpose of seeing her that Siegfried came to Burgundia. 
 
 But while pursuing his journey, he encountered a marvellous 
 adventure which arrested his progress for some time. He dis- 
 covered on a high mountain a young beauty in complete armor 
 and wrapt in a profound sleep. She was called Brunliild, and 
 was a Valkyria, that is to say one of those secondary divinities 
 in the mythology of the North, which assisted the warriors in 
 combat over which they presided.
 
 176 Jlistoi'y of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 Brunliild had vanquished and slain a king, to whom Odin 
 had promised the victory. It was for the purpose of punishing 
 her, that Odin had ]3hniged her by enchantment into a sleep,^ 
 from which she could only be resuscitated by the intrepidity of 
 the bravest of heroes. She had moreover been forbidden to 
 lead the martial life of the Valkyria^ any longer and con- 
 demned to take a husband. But in order to elude or thwart the 
 sentence of Odin, Brunhild had sworn that she would only wed 
 the man who was not afraid of anything in the world, and who 
 would submit to all the trials to which she was going to subject 
 him. 
 
 Siegfried and Brunhild had scarcely met before they were 
 charmed with each other's company and swore eternal tender- 
 ness and mutual love. Nevertheless, Siegfried, after having 
 spent a few days in the society of his fair Valkyrie, resumed 
 his journey to the kingdom of the Burgundians. He arrives 
 there safely and meets with a reception corresponding to his 
 heroic air and his marvellous exploits. He sees Gudruna, and 
 having suddenly lost every recollection of Brunhild in conse- 
 quence of the effects of an enchanted beverage, he becomes 
 desperately enamored of the Burgundiau princess ; he asks and 
 obtains her in marriage. 
 
 The oblivion wrought by the fatal beverage did not stop here. 
 Gunther or Gonnar, the eldest of the three Burgundian chiefs, 
 who is not yet married and who has heard of the vaunted 
 beauty of Brunhild, took it into his head to have her for his wife. 
 He is aware that there are great obstacles to be overcome, and 
 that Brunhild would subject those who aspired to her hand, to 
 the most frightful ordeal. But he hopes, with the aid of Sieg- 
 fried, to get to the end of his adventure, and immediately 
 departs in order to make the attempt. 
 
 Tliis part of the action is one of the strangest, of the most 
 com)>licated and one of those concerning which the different 
 traditions contain the greatest number of discrepancies. I shall 
 not dwell on these variations ; they touch upon details on which 
 propriety forbids too great precision. ItAvill be enough for me 
 to say briefly, that Gunther soon finds himself incapable of sur- 
 mounting the trials to which he is subjected by Brunhild. It 
 is Siegfried, who, invisible or transformed by enchantment, sur- 
 mounts them in his place and who receives Brunhild for his 
 wife. But Gunther had made him take an oath, that he would 
 not violate his honor nor abuse the momentary intimacy in 
 which he would find himself with a young beauty who took 
 him to be her husband. He keeps his oath, thanks perchance 
 to a sword, keen-edged like fire, which he had placed between 
 Brunhild and himsehf during the hours of sleep.
 
 Analysis of the Scandinavian Songs. 177 
 
 Guntherand Siegfried, resuming at last their natural features, 
 return to Burgundia, whither they also conduct Brunhild, as if 
 in triumph. Their return is celebrated with magnificent festi- 
 vals and everything around them is joy and happiness. 
 
 This happiness, however, is not of long duration. Gudruna 
 and Brunhild, who are both women of an impetuous and 
 haughty temperament, become embroiled in a quarrel of vanity, 
 which growing warmer by degrees at last runs into the extreme of 
 a mortal outrage. Gudruna, to whom Siegfried had disclosed 
 all that had taken place between him and Brunhild, reproaches 
 the latter with having been the wife of two men. 
 
 Brunhild seemed disposed to pardon Siegfried's want of faith 
 as an involuntary gnilt and the effect of an enchantment ; but 
 she had not ceased to love him, and her life was full of bitter- 
 ness without him. The affront which Gudruna had offered her 
 is a new cause of spite and of chagrin. She makes a desperate 
 resolve ; and by dint of instigations, of complaints and menaces,, 
 she finally prevails on Gunther to make Siegfried perish by 
 treachery. 
 
 The manner, the circumstances, and the immediate conse- 
 quences of this murder are also one of those parts of the action 
 of the epopee, which contain the greatest number of different 
 or opposite versions. It will sufiice to state here, that sub- 
 sequently to the death of Siegfried, Brunhild disappears entirely 
 from the scene in the Germanic versions. We only know that 
 she is not dead, and that she enjoyed for a long time and with- 
 out remorse the satisfaction of her vengeance. In the Scandi- 
 navian Sagas she dies, being unwilling to survive Siegfried, 
 whose murder she had instigated. 
 
 The despair and grief of Gudruna, her rage against her 
 brothers after the death of Siegfried, may be readily imagined. 
 She passes several years in a sombre melancholy, and the 
 memory of Siegfried continues ever as fresh as it had been on 
 the first day of their meeting. At last Etzel or Attila, the 
 king of the Iluns, sends an embassy for the purpose of demand- 
 ing her in marriage. Gudruna resists his solications for a long 
 time, but she finally yields and passes into the country of the 
 Huns. 
 
 Some time after, Etzel or Attila, the king of the Iluns, in- 
 vites his brothers-in-law, the Burgundian kings, to his court 
 on a visit. They make their appearance there with an immense 
 retinue and with great display, but they are all massacred in a 
 series of combats into which they are forced by the Huns and 
 by the Nibelungen. The latter are Goths under the command 
 of Dietrich of Berne or of Yerona, the most conspicuous hero in 
 the Germanic traditions of the Middle Age, and the poetic 
 
 12
 
 178 • History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 ' reprcssntative of Theodoric, the celebrated monarcli of the 
 Ostrogoths. All the Teutonic traditions speak of hini as being 
 at this epoch an exile at the court of Attila. 
 
 The Germanic poems represent the massacre of the Nibe- 
 lungen or of the Burgundians as a consequence of the treachery 
 and vengeance of Gudruna, In the Sagas of the North, the 
 treachery is the work of Attila himself. Gudruna does all she 
 can to save her brothers. 
 
 Such is, considered independently of the beauty, the origi- 
 nality and the variety of the particular developments and the 
 details, the common basis of the epopee of the Nibelungen, of 
 several poems of the Heldenbuch, of the Scandinavian chronicle, 
 which bears the title of the Volsunga Saga, and finally of the 
 corresponding portion of the Wilkina Saga. 
 
 Considering the elements or subject-matter of these various 
 compositions, we easily can recognize in them two kinds or 
 two classes of traditions combined and blended into one. Of 
 these traditions some are mythological and evidently connected 
 with the religious beliefs of the North, with the cultus of Odin 
 and of other Scandinavian divinities. Tliere are even learned 
 Germans, who have seen in all this nothing more than mere 
 mythology, than theological symbols. They thought they had 
 discovered in the Nibeiungen a grand myth, by which it was 
 intended to express the introduction of evil or of sin and 
 death into the world, through the agency of woman or of 
 beauty. This idea is not deserving of a serious examination ; 
 it can only be cited as an evidence of the excess, to which the 
 mania of symbolism has been carried by some of the Germans 
 of our age. 
 
 In conjunction with the mythological elements, the poetic 
 fable of the Nibelungen doubtless contains others that are 
 properly historical, or at any rate possessed of historic proba- 
 bility, and these relate for the most part to the epoch of the 
 treat migration of the Germanic nations toward the south of 
 lurope. The action of these poems supposes the Franks and 
 the Burgundians to be where they actually were at tlie epoch 
 in question. It speaks of the conquest of Italy by that branch 
 of the Gothic nation, which recognized the race of the Amales 
 as its chief heroes. It makes allusion, though vaguely and 
 anachronistically, to the conquests and even to particular traits 
 of the history of Ilermanric, the famous chief of the Goths. 
 The relations which it represents as existing between the Ger- 
 mans and Attila are of a domestic and a private nature, con- 
 cerning which history is silent, but which contain nothing that 
 is incompatible with the public events attested by the historians 
 of the time.
 
 Analysis of the Scayidinavian Songs. 179 
 
 We may also say, that the intrepidity, the prodigies of bravery 
 and of physical force, attributed to the heroes of this poem, are 
 better accounted for by the epoch already indicated than by any 
 other. The nations commanded by these heroes were at last 
 triumphant in their long struggle with the empire. They had 
 taken Rome twice ; they had conquered Spain, Gaul, and 
 Italy ; they had defeated Attila in the zenith of his glory and 
 power ; they had shattered his yoke immediately after his 
 death. 
 
 Moreover, many of the characteristic traits of the ancient 
 Germanic manners are faithfully reproduced in these poems ; 
 as for example, the point of honor in regard to personal or 
 private vengeance ; the custom of pecuniary compensations for 
 delinquencies and crimes and that of justificative trials or 
 ordeals by water and by fire. The habitual curiosity in regard 
 the future, the respect for, and I had almost said the worship 
 of gold are other traits of Teutonic manners, which the same 
 poems bring out in bold relief. Finally, that which is still 
 more striking than all this, is a certain general tincture of bar- 
 barity, which pervades the whole ; a certain exaltation and a 
 ferocious ruggedness of courage, which takes as much delight 
 in insult and in bravado, as it does in victory. There is a 
 fundamental and a striking resemblance between the heroes of 
 these tragical adventures and the Franks, as they are delineated 
 by Gregory of Tours. The former are in many respects but the 
 poetic ideal of the latter. 
 
 The mythological and historical elements of the action of the 
 Nibelungen are far from being contained in the same propor- 
 tion in the Scandinavian redactions, as they are in the Ger- 
 manic. This will appear more clearly in the sequel. I sliall 
 here confine myself to the general remark, that the myths and 
 the marvellous occupy a much more conspicuous place in the 
 former. The historical data and allusions occupy on the other 
 hand a very subordinate place. 
 
 The converse of all this is true of the Germanic poems ; the 
 marvellous and the mythological in the antecedents of the 
 fundamental action are there, as it were, efiaced or rejected from 
 the beginning in a very general and summary manner. Tlie 
 victory of Siegfried over the dragon and his conquest of the 
 treasure are there related only incidentally, and in the shape of 
 an episode. The narrative is an obscure and a fragmentary 
 one. On this point, the Germanic poems have the air of being 
 but a confused echo of the Scandinavian traditions,* where this 
 
 * On the subject of these refusions of previous legends, compare Wilhelm Grimm' 
 preface to his " Altdanische Heldenlieder, " and his "Deutsche Heldensage," Got-
 
 180 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 marvellons account of Fafnir and liis treasure lias its ground 
 and source in consecrated mytbs. 
 
 It is just so with the cliaracter Brunhild. In the Germanic 
 version, as in the other, she is represented as a prodigy of 
 physical force, as a sort of Bellona ; but in this instance the 
 cause of the phenomenon is not given, as she is but a woman 
 of the race of mortals. 
 
 All the heroes of the Nibelungen are Germans of the ancient 
 type by their ferocity, and Christians by their faith. There is 
 not one of them, not even Attila himself, but what is half a 
 Christian and seems ready to become one entirely. 
 
 The historical or probable data of the action, on the other 
 hand, are much more distinctly developed in the Germanic 
 poems than in the Scandinavian Sagas. This inverse ratio is 
 easily accounted for. 
 
 The Scandinavian nations had no part, at least none that we 
 know of, in the great movements of the Germanic conquests 
 and migrations ; they had no difficulties to settle with Attila ; 
 they had neither been his tributaries nor his conquerors. It 
 was therefore natural, that they should have adopted these 
 distant events only as a sort of new frame-work, to which they 
 might adapt their ancient traditions, more marvellous than 
 these events, and more intimatelv connected with their ancient 
 pagan creed. Siegfried, or as they call him, Sigurd, is a per- 
 sonage of the ancient world, a mythological hero, transferred 
 by a poetic anachronism into a comparatively recent epoch, 
 which was however one that might seem worthy of him. 
 
 The same observations may be made with reference to the 
 character of Brunhild ; she is also, properly speaking, a Scan- 
 dinavian personage. 
 
 In the Germanic fable on the contrary, the heroes, who con- 
 stitute the principal theme of the poems, are manifestly actual 
 ones ; they are the chiefs of the recent conquests. The highest 
 aim of this poetry is to celebrate the vanquishers of the Komans, 
 the allies of Attila. 
 
 After these general considerations on the diflferent versions 
 of the table of the Nibelungcn, it will be easier for me to enter 
 into some details respecting the history of the compositions, to 
 which this grand fiction has given rise. 
 
 The poem of the Nibelungen, properly so called, the portions 
 of the llero-book, and the Icelandic Sagas, which treat of the 
 same argument, have all of them this in common, that every 
 one of these works contains the internal evidence of not being 
 
 tingen, 1829, passim. Also Lachmann, " Uber die urspi'tinglische Gestalt der Nibe- 
 lungen Noth/' Berlin, 1816 Ed.
 
 Aiialysis of the SGandinavian Songs. 181 
 
 a primitive and original composition, but a new redaction 
 of materials supplied by anterior traditions, a more or less bold 
 modification of a subject already old. We are perfectly con- 
 vinced, that their ensemble, as it now exists, could only have 
 been formed at a later period, and that it is composed oi' difter- 
 ent pieces, primitively isolated and independent of each other, 
 though relating to the same subject, though representing but 
 different moments and different incidents of one and the same 
 event. 
 
 In a word, every one of these worhs is but the union, the 
 fusion into a single regular and complete whole of various 
 popular or national songs, more ancient than themselves and 
 composed in an isolated manner, at different times and by 
 diverse authors. 
 
 This assertion is but the enunciation of a very general fact in 
 the history of poetry, and which in the history of the ancient 
 Teutonic poetry is more obvious than in any other. 
 
 "We know historically, that the Germans had national songs, 
 in which they celebrated the glory of their chiefs. Jornandes 
 had those of the Goths before him, and to all appearances ma^e 
 use of them, though very ineptly, in composing his wretched 
 history of that people. 
 
 The emperor Julian speaks of the national songs of the Ger- 
 manic tribes on the right bank of the Rhine. lie had heard 
 them resound terribly in his ears ; he had been struck by their 
 barbarous melody.* 
 
 Charlemagne ordered the historical songs of the Franks to be 
 collected and reduced to writing.f 
 
 That there existed songs similar to all these, isolated epic 
 gongs on the principal incidents connected with the history of 
 the Kibelungen, and that these songs, anterior to all the subse- 
 quent redactions of this history, had served as the common 
 basis of them all — these are facts, which it is easy to prove, 
 especially in regard to the Scandinavian chronicles. In fact, a 
 number of the particular songs, of the poetic fragments, after 
 which these chronicles were composed, are still extant in our 
 day and in precisely the same form, in which they circulated 
 long before the epoch of the latter. 
 
 Nearly all the historical songs of the Elder Edda relate to 
 the history of the Nibelungen, and every one of them has for 
 
 * Oratio I. 'O (51 . . . l^evyl Kaprepu^, licn'kayel^ rhv kTivttov tuv ott^wv. oi'Je rbv 
 IvvukiQv naiuva tC)v crpaT0iii6u)v hna'ka%al^6vTuv ddeu^ ukovuv. So Tacitus, Hist. 
 iv. c. 18. "Ut virorunv (sc. Batavorum) cantu, feminaruin ululatu, sonuit acies." — JEd. 
 
 t " Barbara (i. e. Germanica) et antiquissima carmina, qiiibus veteriim regum actus 
 et bella canebantur, scripsit etmcmoriifi mandavit, Inchoavit et prammaticam patrii 
 sermonis." Einhardi (or EEfinhurdi) vita Caroli M. in Pertz' Moiiumcnta Germ. 
 Hist. vol. il— Ed.
 
 182 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 its argument some one of the principal adventures, wliicli enter 
 into the composition of this history. There is one on the combat 
 of Sigurd with tlie dragon Fafnir and on the conquest of liis 
 treasure, another on the hero's marvellous adventure with 
 Brunhild, the fair warrior-heroine ; a third- on the murder of 
 8igurd ; another one is consecrated to the delineation of Gud- 
 mna's sorrow and despair in consequence of that murder ; in 
 fine, there are not less than twenty of them and they embrace 
 nearly the entire cycle of the Nibelungen.* 
 
 From the examination of these songs, either separately and 
 one by one or in their mutual connection, it manifestly results, 
 that they were not made to be arranged in a regular order, so 
 as to form a consecutive and systematic whole. We see, on the 
 contrary, tliat they were composed as distinct rhapsodies, each 
 of which was intended to be complete in itself, and that they 
 were composed at different times and by different authors. This 
 is a point, on which there cannot be any doubt, when we con- 
 sider, that several of these songs are nothing more than a more 
 or less developed, a more or less embellished repetition of one 
 and the same incident, and that in a single and regular narra- 
 tion they would be a double or a triple redundancy. 
 
 The truth of this position becomes still more apparent, when 
 we observe that in these different songs there are contra- 
 dictions, which prove that their respective authors have fol- 
 lowed different traditions. In some of them, for example, 
 Sigurd is designated as the king of the Iluns, while in others 
 again he figures as king of the Franks. In some of them again 
 we meet with contradictions or variations still more remark- 
 able, and much more closely related to the fundamental con- 
 ception of the legend. Thus, for example, in one of these 
 songs, it is in consequence of her quarrel Avith Gudruna and on 
 account of the insulting reproach, which the latter flung at her, 
 of having been in the arms of Siegfried before becoming the 
 wife of Gunther, that Brunhild forms the resolution of having 
 Siegfried assassinated. Others again and on the contrary con- 
 tain passages, which are incompatible with the idea of a 
 quarrel between the two women, or at any rate this quarrel 
 would have no effect upon the action and would be perfectly 
 superfluous. 
 
 There is, for example, a song entitled " The Predictions of 
 Gripir," in which Sigurd, yet quite young, pays a visit to one 
 
 * These songs the reader will find, in Icelandic and Latin, in the " Edda Ssemundar 
 tins Proda, sive Edda antiquior vulgo Ssemundina dicta." Hafnia;, 1787-1828. Com- 
 pare also Cottle's " Edda translated into English verse :" Ettmiiller's " Lieder der 
 Elda von den Nibelungen," Zurich, 1837, and other works indicated at the beginning 
 of this volume — Ed.
 
 Analysis of the Scandinavia7i Songs. 183 
 
 of his uncles, by the name of Gripir, ^vho is represented as 
 being endowed with the gift of prophecy, in order to consult 
 him respecting tlie future ev^ents of his life.* The latter pre- 
 dicts them exactly, though not in detail ; and these predictions 
 confirmed by the events, form as it were a rapid and consecutive 
 sketch of all the subsequent adventures of Sigurd. There is, 
 however, one point, and an important one, on which the fulfill- 
 ment diflfers from the prophecy. 
 
 The latter conveys the idea, that Brunhild, after being married 
 to Gunther and Sigurd to Gudruna, would be full of regrets and 
 mutual love, when they would come to recollect their former 
 promises of perpetual fidelit3^ Sigurd however remains faithful 
 to Gudruna and resigns himself to suffering in silence. But 
 the impetuous and haughty Brunhild will not be resigned. 
 Finding herself united to a husband, whom she deems unworthy 
 of her hand, she conceives the project of avenging herself and 
 of making Sigurd perish, resolved on following him herself into 
 the other world immediatelj^ after. She consequently instigated 
 Gunther against him, and she does so by accusing herself di- 
 rectly and without any hesitation of having violated her oath 
 and of having abused the error in which she had at first been 
 involved in regard to him, by taking Sigurd for Gunnar, and 
 considering herself his wife. 
 
 This trait, which it is difiicult to reconcile with the quarrel 
 between Gudruna and Bininhild, is not the only one in the 
 songs of the Edda (which seem to point to a particular version 
 of the action of the ISTibelungen), in which the quarrel between 
 Gudruna and Brunhild is either entirely overlooked or treated 
 as a matter of no importance. 
 
 The striking difference of character and tone, which is dis- 
 played by several songs of the Edda, is another proof that they 
 are neither of the same age nor by the same authors, and that 
 they were not composed with reference to any strictly symme- 
 trical arrangement or connection. 
 
 If is generally believed that these songs were collected and 
 committed to writing by a learned ecclesiastic of Iceland, by 
 the name of Ssemund, who lived between the years 1056 and 
 1121. Having undertaken to write the history of his country, 
 Ssemund had naturally occasion to make use of the documents 
 relating to this history ; and it is supposed, on very plausible 
 grounds, that he made this collection of the mythological and 
 poetical traditions of the Scandidavian nations as a sort of 
 preparation for liis historical work. We do not know the pre- 
 
 * This song is the " Quida Sigurdar Fafnisbana I.," on pages 124-143 of the second 
 volume of the Edda Saemundina Ed.
 
 184: History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 cise epoch at which this collection was made ; but if it was the 
 work of Ssemund, as it has every appearance of being, it is ex- 
 tremely probable, that the latter must have occupied himself 
 with it, while in the vigor and maturity of manhood, and not 
 during the later years of his life. It may therefore be safely 
 referred to the end of the eleventh century or to the first years 
 of the twelfth. Up to the epoch, at which Ssemund committed 
 them to writing, these songs had been preserved among the 
 oral traditions of the country, and more especially by the 
 Skalds, the majority of whom appear to have combined with 
 the exercise of their talent as poetic inventors the function of 
 reciters of the ancient poetry. But there is every indication, 
 that at the epoch, at whicli these precious monuments were 
 collected, many of them had already been lost and others 
 mutilated. Some of the songs of what is called Ssemund's Edda 
 are only fragmentary remains of pieces, that were primitively 
 more considerable. 
 
 Now, where and at what epoch were these songs composed ? 
 These questions can only be answered by conjectures; but the 
 data, on which these conjectures are based, are positive enough ; 
 and, as they are closely connected with the general history of 
 Scandinavian literature, they have an additional intrinsic 
 interest of their own. 
 
 The history of the New or Younger Edda, for example, 
 throws considerable light on the songs of the Elder ; and it is 
 on this account that I shall now say a few words on the former. 
 
 The Scandinavians, who had been converted to Christianity at 
 a very late date and very imperfectly, were in the thirteenth 
 century stil) very much attached to their ancient poetical tra- 
 ditions, they had remained pagans by their recollections and 
 their imagination, and the Skalds, though nominally Christians, 
 continued to imitate to the best of tlieir ability their pagan pre- 
 decessors both in the choice of their subjects and in the form 
 and manner of their poetic execution. Nevertheless, the 
 doctrines and the traditions of the heathen times began to lose 
 themselves gradually and the poetry founded on them to become 
 rare. A. Norwegian scholar, Snorro Sturleson, who lived from 
 1179 to 1241, considered it expedient to make a collection of 
 both the one and the other, to serve as a rule and an example 
 to the Skalds of his time. It is this collection, which has been 
 designated by the name of the New Edda or the Prose Edda, 
 in contradistinction to the Ancient Edda of Saemund, com- 
 posed of those poetic songs, of which I have just endeavored 
 to give you an idea.* 
 
 * On the Younger Rdda compare Kask's " Rnorra-Edda asamt Skaldu," Stockholm, 
 1818. — Resenius' ''Edda Islaiidorum per Snorrouem Sturlie conscripta," Haunise,
 
 Analysis of the Scandinavian Songs. 185 
 
 The l^ewEdda consists of two principal parts ; of a collection of \V 
 myths in prose and of a collection of kenningar, in other words 
 of epithets or of poetical periphrases, consecrated by the autho- 
 rity of the ancient Skalds. To comprehend the motive and 
 design of this collection properly, it must be remembered, that 
 in the thirteenth century, and even long before, the poetry of 
 the Scandinavians had become a sort of labored mechanism, 
 the beauty of which consisted in substituting for the proper 
 names of objects and of persons metaphorical synonyms and 
 circumlocutions of every kind, the most fantastical and the most 
 obscure of which were considered the best, provided, however, 
 they were founded on the precedent of some pagan Skald. 
 Thus, for example, ships were called the animals of the sea / 
 the blood was termed the dew of pain / a warrior was an armed 
 tree^ the tree ofhattle / a sword the flame of wounds^ etc. 
 
 A hundred and fifteen different denominations, more or 
 less periphrastic, have been found for Odin alone ; the word 
 island had as many as a hundred and twenty poetic synomyms ; 
 the earth had, I believe, still more. 
 
 The poetic synomj^ms collected in Snorro's Edda are de- 
 rived from the works of more than eighty different Skalds 
 and are illustrated with citations. We know the names of all 
 or nearly all these Skalds, and we also know at what epochs 
 and under what Norwegian kings they flourished. We perceive 
 that they formed an uninterrupted series during three entire 
 centuries, from the tenth until the thirteenth, in which Snorro 
 lived and Wrote. 
 
 Kow, among all the many poets and poetical fragments 
 quoted in the new Edda we cannot find one that may be said 
 to appertain to the songs of the Ancient Edda. There is not 
 one of these latter songs, of which the author is known or 
 mentioned anywhere ; and none of these authors are to be 
 found among the eighty quoted in the collection of poetic 
 synonyms. This is a strong presumption, that they were more 
 ancient than the latter. 
 
 This presumption receives additional force, if we consider the 
 songs of the Ancient Edda in their relation to the end, for 
 which the didactic portion of the New Edda was composed. 
 What Snorro wanted to offer to the Skalds of his time, were 
 examples of the artificialities, of the obscurities, and of the 
 puerile mechanism into which the poetry of his countrymen had 
 then degenerated. Now, the ancient songs in question were 
 grave and simple in their form ; they did not contain enough 
 
 1G65. Simrock, "Die altere u. jungere Edda nebst dea myth. Erzahlungen der 
 Skalda," Stuttgart, 1855, and other works mentioned at the beginning of this volume. 
 — Ed.
 
 186 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 of those poetic spionyms or periphrases of which his contem- 
 poraries made so much account, and those even which they did 
 contain were not out-of-the-way enough, or learned enough, to 
 content the intellects of the age, who had sunk so low as to 
 take the miserable artificialities of diction for the sum and sub- 
 stance of art. 
 
 These considerations seem to me to lead to the result, that the 
 songs of the Elder Edda, in the form in which they have come 
 down to us, are, for the most part, anterior to the tenth century, 
 which is the epoch at which the series of Skalds enumerated 
 and cited in the New Edda began to sing. 
 
 It is a fact, which may be adduced in support of this opinion, 
 that several of the Skalds belonging to this latter series are 
 known to have been familiar with, and to have recited, some 
 of the songs of the Elder Edda. Olaf the Saint, king of Nor- 
 way, who died in 1030, had a Skald, that recited or sung the 
 poem of the Edda on the combat of Siegfried with the dragon 
 Fafnir. 
 
 The precise date of these songs is, however, a matter of com- 
 paratively small importance. To whatever ppoch we may assign 
 them, tliey were certainly then already nothing more than a new 
 redaction, a reproduced form of other songs on the same sub- 
 jects which had preceded them, and the commencement of which 
 it would be as difficult to indicate, as it would be to determine 
 the origin itself of the nation for which they had been made. 
 
 It now remains to give some idea of the poetic character of 
 these songs ; a few passages translated from them will answer 
 our purpose. 
 
 I give licre in the first place a song, which portrays the grief 
 and desolation by which Gudruna is seized immediately after 
 the assassination of Sigurd. 
 
 " Seated by the side of Sigurd's corpse, Gudruna was ready 
 to expire ; she heaved no sighs ; she did not wring her hands, 
 and she lamented not like other women. Men of noble rank in 
 rich hal)ilinients approached her to distract her from her melan- 
 choly thoughts, but Gudruna could not weep, so greatly was 
 heart o])pressed with grief and ready to break !" * 
 
 " Before her there were seated women of high birth, prin- 
 
 * This is the Gudrunar-Quida in fyksta of pp. 270-284, vol. ii. of the Edda Saemun- 
 dina. I add here two couplets of the original. 
 
 Ar var that Gvdrun Gengo jarlar 
 
 Gordiz at deyia Al-snotrir fram 
 
 Er hon sorg-fvU sat Their er hard/, hvgar 
 
 Yfir Sigvrthi. Hana lavtto. 
 
 Gerthit hon hiufra Theygi Gvdrun 
 
 Nehondomsia Grata matti. 
 
 Ne qveina urn Sva var hun mothvg 
 
 Sem konor athrar. Mvndi hon springa, etc. etc. — Ed,
 
 Analysis of the Scandinavian Songs. 187 
 
 cesses adorned with ornaments of gold, and each of them be- 
 gan to relate the cruelties of her aftiictions." 
 
 Guifloga, the sister of Gibich, fii-st spake and said : " No 
 woman upon earth was ever more afflicted than myself. I have 
 lost, one after the other, five husbands, two daughters, three 
 sisters, eight brothers, and I'm now left alone." 
 
 " Gudruna heard these words, but still she could not weep, 
 so greatly was she afflicted by the death of her husband ! So 
 deeply was she wounded by the loss of her hero." 
 
 " The queen of the country of the Huns, Herborga, then 
 commenced : I have the most frightful calamities to relate, said 
 she. My seven sons and my eighth husband were all killed 
 on the battle-field in the countries of the South. My father, 
 my mother and my four brothers have been the sport of the 
 winds at sea, and their vessel was shattered by the waves. I 
 was myself reduced to the necessity of collecting and honor- 
 ino; their remains, of giving: them a burial ! And all this has 
 happened to me in the course of a single year, without my hav- 
 ing received the condolence of any one! Six months after I 
 was taken prisoner in war, and surcharged with fetters. I was 
 condemned to clean the shoes for the wife of the warrior-chief, 
 and to tie them every morning to her feet. She was jealous 
 of me, she menaced me and beat me cruelly ; I never shall find 
 a better master, and never a worse mistress." 
 
 " Gudruna heard these words, and yet she did not weep, so 
 greatly was she afflicted by the death of her sweet spouse, so 
 deeply was she wounded by the murder of the hero." 
 
 " Gullranda, tlie daughter of Gibich, then spoke in her turn : 
 O my nurse," said she, " discreet as 3'ou are, you nevertheless 
 know little of the words to be addressed to a young woman in 
 affliction." 
 
 " And thereupon Gullranda raised the pall spread over the 
 corpse of Sigurd ; she laid it bare, and turned its face toward 
 Gudruna : Look at thy well-beloved spouse, said she ; im- 
 press thy lips upon those of the hero, as thou wouldst do if he 
 were yet alive." 
 
 " Gudruna looked ; she saw the hair of the warrior's head 
 besmeared with gore, his brilliant eyes now dim, his breast 
 pierced with the glaive." 
 
 " Then starting back, Gudruna fell upon her pillow ; the fil- 
 let round her head relaxed, her countenance turned red, the 
 first tear fell upon her cheek." 
 
 " And she began to cry so much, that her tears would no 
 longer cease to flow, and that the geese and the fair fowl 
 which the young queen had raised in the palace-court, gave 
 utterance to plaintive cries at it."
 
 188 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 " Gnllranda, the daughter of Gibich, then resumed : Your 
 love was never equalled among men that tread the dust of 
 earth. Within doors or without, you never, O my sister, could 
 be contented, except you were with Sigurd." 
 
 " My charming JSigurd, said thereupon Gudruna, was as supe- 
 rior to the sons of Gibich, as garlic in blossom is superior to 
 the meadow-weed. Sigurd was the pearl, the diamond of 
 kings." 
 
 " And I myself was, in the eyes of the companions of Sigurd, 
 the first among the dauglitei"S of the royal race. But now that 
 Sigurd is dead, I am no longer of any account ; I am but a 
 withered branch in the forest." 
 
 In another soug, Gudrnna, long after her second marriage to 
 Attila, relates herself the death of Sigurd to Dietrich of Ve- 
 rona. This narrative, which differs essentially from the former, 
 is in other respects no less replete with beauties. The follow- 
 ing are some passages from it : 
 
 " A young maiden, brought up by my mother, I shone 
 among the maidens, loving my brothers tenderly, until Gibich 
 my father adorned and covered me with gold, and gave me to 
 Sigurd as his wife." * 
 
 " Sigurd surpassed the sons of Gibich, as the verdant garlic 
 surpasses the meadow-herb, or as the lofty -footed stag surpasses 
 the other tawny deer, or the reddish gold the pale silver." 
 
 " But my brothers could not endure it, that I should have a 
 husband superior to all the rest ; they could neither sleep nor 
 attend to their affairs, until they had made Sigurd perish." 
 
 " One day 1 heard a great noise ; I saw Gran (the excellent 
 charger) returning from the army, but Sigurd did not return. 
 All tiie horses were stained with blood, they all were smelling 
 blood." 
 
 " I went, bathed in tears, to speak to Gran. His jaws were 
 moist ; I asked the excellent charger for the news ; the excel- 
 lent charger was disconsolate ; he hung his head upon the grass ; 
 he looked about the earth, but the monarch of the earth was 
 dead. The whole retinue was agitated for a long time ; they 
 all were pierced with sorro\<', nor did I dare to question Gun- 
 ther, the king, on the subject of my spouse." 
 
 * This is the Gltdsii-^ar Q jid.v e^i onn'er, of the Eilfla SiEmundina, vol., ii. pp. 290- 
 324. The original of the first two couplets is as follows : 
 
 MiEr var ek mevia Sva var Sigvrthr 
 
 Mothir mik fajddi Of sonom Giuka 
 
 Biort i buri. Sem veri grasnii lavkr 
 
 Vnna ek vel braethrom. Or grasi vaxinn. 
 
 Vnz mik Giuki Ethr hiortr habeinn 
 
 GvUi reifthi Vm hvossom dyrom. 
 
 Gvlli reiftlii Ethr gvll glod-ravtt 
 
 Gaf Sigvrthi. Of gra-silfri, etc., etc. — Ed.
 
 Analysis of the Scandinavian Songs. 189 
 
 " Gunther liimg his head without reply ; but Hagen re- 
 counted to me the cruel death of Sigurd : Sigurd lies stretched 
 upon the ground beyond the stream ; his body has been given 
 to the wolves." 
 
 " Go toward the countries of the South ; there thou wilt 
 hear the ravens croak, the eagles cry, and hungry wolves howl 
 all around thy spouse." 
 
 " O Ilagen ! thou who art so eager to acquaint me with a 
 great calamity, would that the ravens miglit tear thy heart 
 out of thee in some corner of this vast earth !" 
 
 "I left him then, and I went all alone to rescue the remains 
 of Sigurd from the wolves. The night I passed with Sigurd 
 seemed to me a month. I should have deemed the wolves com- 
 passionate, if they had devoured me, 'twould have delighted 
 me to be consumed by fire like a forest of birch trees !" \n 
 
 The character of Brunhild is one of the most striking points 
 of these songs. It is my intention to give passages from one of 
 them, in which this character is developed with the greatest 
 vigor and originality. But in order to comprehend these pas- 
 sages properly, it will be necessary for me to explain some of 
 the preliminaries with ajittle more detail, than I was able to 
 bestow on them above. 
 
 As I have already mentioned, Gunther or Gunnar, the king 
 of the Nibelungen or of the Burgundians, sets out in company 
 with Sigurd on a journey, for the purpose of winning the hand 
 of Brunhild. They betake themselves to Ileimir, the uncle and • 
 guardian of the fair warrior-heroine, whose habitation is in 
 the vicinity of hers. Heimir receives them well, and shows 
 them the palace inhabited by Brunhild, surrounded by a blaz- 
 ing fire, kindled by the power of Odin, and wliich seems to rise 
 up into tlie heavens. The fair Valkyria had declared, that slie 
 would only accept as her husband the man who was intrepid 
 enough to pass through this fire ; in the full persuasion that 
 Sio;urd, who loved and who had disenchanted her, was the 
 only man in the world capable of approaching her across 
 these flames. Gunther offers to pass the ordeal himself, but he 
 immediately shrinks from it. Sigurd thereupon by dint of an 
 enchantment exchanges forms with him, plunges boldly into 
 the flames, gets through them safely ; and aj)pearing before 
 Brunhild under the features of Gunther, he claims the fulfill- 
 ment of her promise. , . . Brunhild becomes resigned, 
 though not without grief and surprise, to the fate of accepting 
 as her consort the man whom she takes to be Gunther. She 
 retains him three days at her palace, and tlien follows Gunther 
 to the land of the Nibelungen. There she sees Sigurd united 
 to Gudruna, and at the sight of this her former love for the
 
 190 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 hero is rekindled into furj. Signrd himself now recollects the 
 solemn promises by which he had formerly been linked to 
 Brmihild, and his lirst love returns, together with its reminis- 
 cences. Nevertheless he observes silence, and is resolved to 
 remain faithful to Gudrana ; but Brunhild cannot curb her 
 passion so easily. It is at this point, that the old Scandinavian 
 poet takes up the thread of the story. 
 
 " One evening, as she was sitting alone in her retirement, 
 Brunhild began to say quite loud : I will have Sigurd, the 
 young hero, in my arms or I will die !"* 
 
 " But afterward, correcting herself immediately, she said : 
 I have uttered a word, of which I now repent. Gudruna is the 
 wife of Sigurd and I of Gunnar. The cruel Korns f have 
 prepared long sufferings for us. Often at evening, at the hour 
 when Sigurd and his fair consort were retiring to rest, Brunhild, 
 with her heart full of bodeful thoughts, was wandering about 
 on mountains covered with ice and snow." 
 
 "It is thus I'm wandering about without a husband and 
 without friends, said she one time ; I needs must rid myself of 
 these cruel thoughts. With her heart full of this bitterness, 
 she commenced to instigate Gunnar to the murder of Sigurd : 
 Renounce my kingdom, renounce myself, said she to him ; I 
 desire to live with thee no longer ; I wish to return to the place 
 from whence I came, to the presence of my parents, unless you 
 make Sigurd die." 
 
 Gunnar, who is troubled by this proposition, hesitates for a 
 great while to consent to it, but weakness and the fear of 
 losing a wife without which it is impossible for him to 
 live, prevail on him at last to resolve upon the act. It is not 
 witiiout some difficulty, that he succeeds in winning his brother 
 llagen in favor of his project, and they together incite Guttorm 
 their younger brother to assassinate Sigurd. Guttorm was 
 naturally ferocious, but not sufficiently so, to strike a hero so 
 valiant as Sigurd ; they therefore fed him for some time on 
 the flesh of wolves and serpents, to render him more sanguinary, 
 
 * The passages on Brunhild here translated are from from the Sigurdar-Qi'ida 
 Fafnisbana 111., in the second vol. of the EddaSa;mundina, p. 212-244. The translation 
 begins with the sixth couplet : 
 
 TI. VII. 
 
 Ein sat hon uti Orth m;cltac nu 
 
 Aptan dags. Ithromk eptir thess. 
 
 Nam hon sva bert ' Qvan or bans Gvdrun 
 
 Vm at maelaz. En ek Gvnnars. 
 
 Ilafa skal ek Sigvrth Liotar nornir 
 
 Ethr tho svelta Skopo oss langa thra, etc. — Ed. 
 
 Mavg frvm-ungau 
 
 Mer a armi. 
 
 The Norns were the Farca or Fates of the Scandinavians.— £d.
 
 Analysis of the Scandinavian Songs. 191 
 
 until Giittorm at last found that he had courage enough to 
 plunge a sword into the heart of Sigurd while the latter was 
 asleep. Sigurd, roused from his slumber by the mortal blow, 
 snatches the sword from the wound and hurls it after Guttorm, 
 who endeavors to escape ; the sword reaches him and cleaves 
 his body in two. Sigurd dies consoling Gudruna, who gives 
 utterance to frightful shrieks. 
 
 I will now recommence my translation : " Wlien Brunhild, 
 the daughter of Budli heard from her couch the shrill cries of 
 Gudruna, she began to laugh, once in her life, with all her 
 heart." * 
 
 " Thou wicked woman, said thereupon King Gunnar ; do not 
 laugh at these lamentations ; they presage no good for thee." 
 
 "• Be not incensed at me and listen to me, Brunhild replied ; 
 I was in the flower of youth, I was free, I was abundantly pro- 
 vided with gold and I desired no man for my master. Ye came, 
 thou and thy brothers, to search me out in my palace, and 
 would to God ye never had made this journey ! 1 had pledged 
 my faith to Sigurd, who excelled you all by the beauty of his 
 eyes and countenance, though ye w^ere likewise princes of the 
 royal blood. . , . All know that I did violence to my heart in 
 marrying you, and that I wanted to be the wife of Sigurd. But 
 one man ought not to be loved by several women, and the 
 death to which I am about to subject myself will show, that a 
 woman who has once been loved by one man ought not to sj^end 
 her life in wedlock with another." 
 
 " King Gunther, tlien arisingfrom his seat, hastened to Brun- 
 hild for the purpose of appeasing her, and he was about to 
 throw his arms around her neck ; all those who \vere attached 
 to him ran likewise up, one after the other, in order to divert 
 her from her resolution ; but she repelled them all and persisted 
 in her determination to die. She ordered all that she possessed 
 to be collected in a heap, she took a look at all her slaves and 
 servants who had just killed themselves on her account, nor 
 would her anguish cease until the moment when she plunged 
 the trenchant sword into her heart." 
 
 Mortally wounded, Brunliild in the first place predicts to 
 Gunther whatever was to happen to him in the future, and then 
 continues in these words : 
 
 " 1 have one more request to make of thee, O Gunther ; and 
 it will be my last request in this world. Command thy men to 
 dig, out in tlie fields, a large ditch, large enough for all of us 
 who are dying now with Sigurd. Bid them inclose it with 
 pavilions and with shields. Let them then burn King Sigurd 
 on one side of me, and on the other my servants adorned with 
 
 * Sigurdar-Quida Fafnisbana iii. Stanzas xxviii, seqq. — Ed.
 
 192 History of Provcngal Poetry. 
 
 necklaces of gold ; at my head two dogs and two owls. All 
 will be equally divided then."* 
 
 " And 1 beseech thee furthermore, to put the sword, adorned 
 with buckles, the sharp-edged steel, between Sigurd and myself, 
 as when we entered, he and myself, the same couch and were 
 considered married." 
 
 " I have said much and I should say still more, if the Creator 
 of the world would leave me time for it ; but my voice is fail- 
 ing me ; my wound is swelling ; what I have said is true, as it 
 \\ is true that I am dying now." .... k 
 
 ^ This combination of ferocity and of tenderness, this indomi- 
 table resolution to destroy the man she loves sooner than to see 
 him united to another, and to die herself after him and for him, 
 are contrasts and phases of refinement, such as we can only 
 expect to meet with in manners and usages as savage, as were 
 those of the ancient Scandinavians. And this complex charac- 
 ter of Brunhild is not the only one of the kind in the songs of 
 the Edda. Gudruna is a character of the same species ; that 
 is to say she is controlled by two contrary passions, which 
 counterpoise each other for a long time. In spite of all the horror 
 with which she is seized for her brothers, after they had assassi- 
 nated Sigurd, she does not cease to love them. So far from 
 accepting the invitation, which Attila had extended to them to 
 come and visit him at his court, as an occasion for revenging 
 herself on tliem, she employs every manner of contrivance and 
 means to save them and to deter them from this fatal journey ; 
 and after the failure of all these attempts to save them, she 
 avenges them on Attila himself, whom she murders in his sleep. 
 
 I have a word to add on the metrical form of these songs of 
 the Edda. It is the primitive form of the Teutonic poetry, and, 
 as far as I have been able to ascertain, exclusively peculiar to 
 this poetry. These songs are in verses of a definite number of 
 syllables, which do not rhyme, but each of which contains at 
 least two alliterations, that is, two words commencing with the 
 same consonant. It was not until a much later period, and 
 after it had become considerably modified by its contact with 
 the methods of the South, that the poetry of the North adopted 
 the use of the rhyme. 
 
 Such are the historical songs of the ancient Edda relative to 
 the action of the Nibelungen, as far as it was possible for me to 
 give an idea of them in a limited sketch like this. 
 
 It is extremely probable, that Sromund, in spite of all the zeal 
 and perseverance, with which we may suppose him to have 
 made the collection of these songs, nevertheless did not suc- 
 
 * Sigurdar-Quida iii. Stanzas Ix.-Lsvi — Ed.
 
 Analysis of the Scandinavian, Songs. 
 
 193 
 
 \ 
 
 ceed in bringing together all of those which still existed in his 
 time. Some of them undoubtedly escaped his researches and 
 continued to circulate orally, to keep alive in the memory of 
 the people and of the Skalds. And even those, which Sa3mund 
 had collected, were not on that account destined to disappear 
 from oral circulation all at once. 
 
 JSTevertheless, as the ideas of Christianity were gradually 
 better known and comprehended, and as the ascendency of 
 Christian manners became more general in Scandinavia, the 
 chances, by which these ancient pagan songs were destined to 
 fall into oblivion, were multiplied in proportion. The ancient 
 poetry had, moreover, prodigiously degenerated ; it was 
 scarcely anything more than a play, the chief merit of which 
 consisted in overcoming a certain purely mechanical difficulty. 
 A taste for severer studies and for the truth of history had 
 been introduced into the country by scholars, and it was in 
 consequence of this taste, that men, whose minds still vacillated 
 in uncertainty between the ancient poetry and nascent history, 
 conceived the idea of classifying and arranging the ancient 
 pagan songs, so as to form a regular whole, a continuous his- 
 torical series in the style and on the plan of the chronicles then 
 in vogue. 
 
 To carry out this design properly, it was not enough to 
 arrange the poetical songs in the chronological order of the 
 events, which constituted their theme. These songs had become 
 obscure in consequence of their antiquity ; they Avere, moreover, 
 replete with traits of a high and vigorous poetry, which the men 
 of the epoch could no longer appreciate or relish ; they were 
 ' consequently translated into current prose, into the prose of 
 the chronicles. 
 
 Thus was composed, we do not know precisely at what epoch, 
 but in all probability toward the commencement of the thir- 
 teenth century, the celebrated chronicle, to which I have 
 already alluded above, and which is known under the name of 
 the Vosunga Saga. This chronicle is nothing more than an 
 abstract, a sort of prose compendium of the poetic songs of 
 ' the Edda relating to the Nibelungen, arranged in the order 
 supposed to represent the succession of the events. 
 
 As these songs, however, are full of variations, of discre- 
 pancies and repetitions, those only of their number could be 
 adopted, which contributed to the unity and consistency of the 
 historical narrative, and several were of necessity excluded, 
 which in a purely poetical point of view are among the most 
 beautiful. 
 
 On the other hand, a number of these songs were fragments, 
 and there were besides blanks or lacuna} between the several 
 
 13
 
 \ 
 
 194: History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 songs and fragments. It is obvious, that the compiler of the 
 prose chronicle did not fill up these lacuncB by matter of his 
 own invention, but by odds and ends borrowed from other 
 poetic songs, which did not enter into the composition of the 
 Edda, and which the compiler had found in his day, either in 
 the mouth of the people, or in some unknown collection, dif- 
 ferent from that of Saemund. 
 
 These remarks would be susceptible of a much more extended 
 development ; but this is not essential to the establishment of 
 the only conclusion at which I desire to arrive, and which is, 
 that the Vosxinga Saga, the most ancient connected redaction 
 of the Nibelungen in Scandinavia, is wholly composed of 
 materials far more ancient than itself; that these materials 
 consist of a multitude of detached and independent songs, in 
 which the same incident of the principal action is treated in 
 several ways or with dift'erent circumstances, varying according 
 to the caprice or the personal conviction of the poet, without 
 however departing from the original substance of the story, 
 which always remains the same and which is only modified in 
 its accessories and details. The more particular and more 
 methodical analysis of the poem of the Nibelungen, which 
 will be the subject of the next chapter, w^ill, however, illustrate 
 and corroborate such of those observations, as are yet in 
 want of it. 
 
 /. 
 
 i-V*-^»^- - 
 
 . ,^^' c^ ^^ ltd /t^^*^ ^-^V /^^^-^ ^^^y_ 
 .^ ' j/r ^ ^.^ A^^- >^C^/. /^,2^ -^l^^^^e^^ 
 
 ./-Wfc-*^ , /I'OJZ^^ /Ay// /l^H^d- U^^ /J ^yt-a^^u. , -^«"?^ ^^^^^ 
 
 'j^:^ ^ r/<w*^/ ^^'-^ /-^'^^---- /-^-^^-^ ^7u^ /^^ 
 
 ^1>»4L-' rfM-^ (/V-*^— "-«-■ ,
 
 Analysis of the Nibelungen, 195 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 WALTER OF AQUITANIA. 
 II. ANALYSIS OF THE NIBELUNGEN. 
 
 I HAVE been led, from considerations, •which I have already 
 explained and to which I shall have occasion to revert again 
 hereafter, into quite a long, but at any rate a curious, digression 
 on the ancient monuments of Northern Literature, relative to 
 the poetic cycle of the Nibelungen. I have spoken in the last 
 chapter of such of these monuments, as appertain to the Scan- 
 dinavian branch of Teutonic literature, and of which the his- 
 torical songs of the Edda are by far the most ancient and the 
 most interesting. I have endeavored to give an outline of 
 these songs, so remarkable for their beauties, for the original, 
 and we might almost say, the local physiognomy under which 
 human nature there appears, and even for their variations and 
 discrepancies, which attest the long traditional life they had 
 already enjoyed before the epoch at which they were collected 
 and recorded. 
 
 I have now to speak of the corresponding monuments of 
 Germanic literature, and more especially of the poem of the 
 Nibelungen, the most prominent of these monuments — the one, 
 which it is the most important for lis to know, and which de- 
 serves the most attention, both on account of its intrinsic 
 beauties and on account of the high renown, which some of the 
 most distinguished minds of Germany have attributed to it, or 
 rather resuscitated, since the commencement of the present 
 century. 
 
 Unfortunately I shall not be able to give to this part of my 
 task all the extension, of which it would admit and which it 
 really deserves. The German poem of the Nibelungen is 
 quite a long one ; it contains nearly six thousand verses. I can 
 therefore only give a general synopsis of its contents, which 
 will necessarily appear somewhat dry. 
 
 Another inconvenience of this analysis will be the repetition 
 of certain details, which must already have struck the reader 
 in the general outline I have given of the fundamental action of
 
 193 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 the Nibclungen. But these repetitions will not be very nume- 
 rous ; and taking for granted, that they will not be very offen- 
 sive, I have not endeavored to avoid them.* 
 
 Toward the middle of the fifth century, there flourished 
 (according to the old poet of the Nibelungen) a kingdom of 
 Burgundia, extending along the two banks of the Middle-Ehine, 
 and'having AVorms for its capital. This kingdom was governed 
 by three brothers, whose names were Gunther, Gemot and 
 Giselher ; all three of them valiant and renowned princes, 
 having uncler them as their vassals other chiefs, as valiant and 
 renowned as themselves. Among these was Ilagen of Troneg, 
 a warrior of extraordinary strength and prowess, but also 
 equally passionate and ferocious. This is one of the principal 
 characters of the terrible drama of the Nibelungen. 
 
 These three princes had a sister by the name of Chrimhild, a 
 young princess of incomparable beauty, whom they loved most 
 tenderly and guarded with the utmost care. 
 
 In the vicinity of the Burgundians, there lived another 
 powerful king, whose name was Sigmund and whose king- 
 dom, called the kingdom of the Niderland, or of the Lower 
 Country, is supposed to have extended along the Lower Rhine, 
 below that of the Burgundians. Sigmund had a son, by the 
 name of Siegfried, who, though as yet in the flower of youth, 
 was already "the strongest, the bravest and the most celebrated 
 of heroes. 
 
 Siegfried had looked about in the world at quite an early age 
 and he had adrcady encountered many a marvellous adventure. 
 
 * Those of the readers of this volume, who may be desirous of following this analysis 
 with the original before them, will find an excellent text in the superbly illustrated 
 edition of this epos, from Baron von Lassberg's MS., Leipzig, 1840. Those unac- 
 quainted withthe original may derive some assistance and pleasure from Birch's trans- 
 lation, Berlin, 1848. I add here only the beginning of the German llias : 
 
 Uns ist in alten ma;ren . wunders vil geseit . 
 
 Von heleden lobehicren . von grozer arebeit . 
 
 Von freude uiit hochgeciten . von weinen unt klagen . 
 
 Von kuner recken striten . muget ir nu wnder horen sagen . 
 
 Ez wuhs in Buregonden . ein vil edel magedin . 
 Paz in alien landen . niht schoners mohte sin . 
 Chrlemhilt geheizen . diu wart ein schone wip . 
 Dar umbe musin degene . vil vcrliesen den lip . 
 
 Legends of bygone times reveal — wonders and prodigies, 
 Of heroes worthy endless fame— of matchless braveries— 
 Of jubilees and festal sports— of tears and sorrow great, 
 And knights, who daring combats fought— the like I now relate. 
 
 In Burgundy there lived and throve— a truly handsome maid ; 
 Such as in all the countries round— was not, might well be said. 
 Chriemhilda fair, the maiden hight— a beauteous dame was she ; 
 On her account did many knight— lose life and high degree. 
 
 V. Lassberg's text and Birch's translation.— -Ed.
 
 Analysis of the Nibelungen. 197 
 
 Among the exploits by •whicli lie liad distinguished himself, he 
 had conquered the treasure of the Nibelungen, hidden in the 
 recesses of a great cavern, in mountains supposed to be situated 
 in the proximity of Niderland ; and he had left this treasure in 
 the charge of Alberich, a dwarf of prodigious strength, whom 
 he had vanquished and compelled to serve him. In this treasure 
 of the Kibelungen he had found the sword of Ealmung, the 
 very best of swords ; he had, moreover, extorted from Alberich 
 a riding-hood or cap of miraculous power, which rendered its 
 wearer invisible, and which added to his natural strength that 
 of a dozen men beside. Siegfried had afterward slain a mon- 
 strous dragon, and had become invulnerable by bathing in his 
 blood. 
 
 The fame of Chrimhild's incomparable beauty made Siegfried 
 fall in love with her, and he resolved to repair to the court of 
 Burgundia, in order to demand her in marriage. Her father 
 and her mother, who have unhappy presentiments in regard 
 to this alliance endeavor to prevent it. But Siegfried it not 
 the man to yield to disquietudes of this description ; he sets 
 out with a small retinue of twelve warriors, and arrives at 
 "Worms, where everybody is amazed at his heroic appearance. 
 He is well received by King Gunther, and spends an entire 
 year at the court of Burgundia without however obtaining an 
 opportunity of seeing Chrimhild. But the latter, who has seen 
 Siegfried on several occasions from her window, is struck by 
 his air and by his j)ersonal beauty ; she has in fact become 
 enamored of him. 
 
 The love of Siegfried and Chrimhild was still at this stage of 
 its progress, when the Saxons and the Danes declared war 
 against Gunther. Siegfried having applied for the command 
 of this war, sets out at the head of only a thousand men ; and 
 at the end of a fews days he returns, leading the two hostile 
 kings as prisoners. Brilliant festivals are now given in com- 
 memoration of this victory, at which Chrimhild also makes her 
 appearance ; and Siegfried, in requital of the important service 
 he had rendered Gunther, obtains permission from the latter 
 to entertain the princess. The reciprocal love of Chrimhild and 
 the hero is increased by these occasions, but Siegfried does not 
 venture as yet to speak of marriage ; a favorable opportunity 
 for explaining his wishes was, however, soon to present itself. 
 
 There was at that time in Iceland, or in some other distant 
 island, a young queen whose name was Brunhild and who was 
 as famous for her beauty as she was for the singularity of her 
 pretensions and her destiny. She was fond of nothing but 
 war and martial exercises ; and there w^as not a man that could 
 approach her in point of physical strength and agility. No one
 
 198 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 could hurl the javelin as well as she; no one could lift a stone 
 of an enormous size as easily as she could fling it to a distance, 
 and at the same time follow it with a bound. She had declared 
 that she would never consent to become the wife of any one 
 save him who could excel her in these exercises, and every 
 pretender to her hand whom she might conquer was doomed 
 to lose his head. Many a valiant warrior had tried his luck 
 in tlie adventure, but all of them had miserably failed and 
 perished. 
 
 When King Gunther, who was as yet unmarried, heard the 
 beauty and strength of Brunhild so highly lauded, he desired 
 in his turn to submit to the perilous trial, and he requested 
 Siegfried to accompany and, if necessary, to aid him in the 
 adventure. The latter engaged to do so, but on the condition 
 of obtaininijr after his return the hand of Chrimhild as his 
 recompense. This being agreed upon, Gunther sets out, accom- 
 panied by two men only, besides Siegfried, that is to say by 
 Hagen and by Dankwart, the brother of the latter. 
 
 The journey was performed by water. Having in the first 
 place descended the Rhine, they entered upon the ocean and 
 at the end of twelve days they landed at Isenstein, the kingdom 
 of Brunhild. Siegfried was the only one of them who knew 
 the country ; he had been there before and he had some reason 
 to apprehend that he would be recognized. To avoid this 
 inconvenience, it was agreed that he should pass for the vassal 
 or the servant of King Gunther, 
 
 The arrival of the four adventurers produced a great sensa- 
 tion at Isenstein. They were, however, well received by Brun- 
 hild, who, on perceiving Siegfried, recognized him at once and 
 said to him: "Be welcome, my Lord Siegfried ! May I know 
 what brought you to this country ?" Siegfried thereupon de- 
 clares the name, the rank and the intentions of Gunther. The 
 trial is no sooner proposed than it is accepted ; Brunhild hastens 
 to put on her armor, and Siegfried on his part hurries to the 
 ship on which he had arrived. He goes to look for his magic 
 cap, of which he presently was to be in perishing need. He 
 returns invisible under this cap and takes his place by the side 
 of (junther. 
 
 Brunhild on her part appeared in a magnificent martial attire. 
 The field in which the trial was to take place is marked and 
 measured. An enormous round stone which twelve men were 
 hardly able to carry, is deposited at the feet of Brunhild. 
 Hagen is so frightened at the sight of it, that he exclaims : 
 " The devil alone could desire a woman for his wife, who is 
 capable of hurling a stone of one quarter the size of this !" 
 Gunther is still more amazed at it ; he turns pale and could
 
 Analysis of the Nihelungen. 199 
 
 have wished himself far off; but Siegfried is invisiblj'- at hand, 
 whispering words of encouragement into his ear. He tells him 
 to make simply the movements, while he himself proposes to 
 perform the act. Thereupon he takes up Guntlier's shield, with 
 which he covers himself and the king, in expectation of the 
 javelin which was already brandished by the haughty Brunhild. 
 The javelin flies ; it pierces Gunther's buckler, and would have 
 upset the two warriors, had it not been for the effect of the 
 magic cap. Nevertheless, Siegfried is shaken by the blow, 
 and streams of blood are issuing from his mouth ; but he soon 
 recovers his foothold, picks up the javelin and sends it home to 
 Brunhild. The latter is prostrated by the shock ; but rising 
 again nimbly, she runs up to the rock which had just been 
 brought to her ; she raises it aloft, hurls it and follows it with 
 a leap which measured the whole of the distance described by 
 the projectile. It is now Gunther's turn ; he makes the motions 
 for lifting the enormous stone ; Siegfried raises it in fact, hurls 
 it and in leaping carries Gunther along with him. He hurls it 
 and he leaps much further than Brunhild had done. 
 
 When Brunhild saw this, she turned to her followers and 
 said : " Approach now, ye, my relatives and my men ; Gunther 
 is henceforth your king," Then taking him by the hand, she 
 courteously recognized him as her master. 
 
 To crown his wishes, Gunther then conducted Brunhild to 
 Worms, and on his arrival at liome gave Chrimhild in marriage 
 to Siegfried, as he had promised. The two marriages were 
 celebrated at the same time ; and for a number of days in suc- 
 cession, the palace and the city were full of fetes, of banquets 
 and of tournaments. Chrimliild and Siegfried were now in 
 the zenith of happiness ; they had never entertained a wish 
 but what was now fulfilled and even surpassed. 
 
 Not so with Gunther and Brunhild. The latter wanted 
 to be a mere nominal wife. The supernatural force with which 
 she had been endowed depended on the condition of her vir- 
 ginity, and there was but one man in the world wlio was 
 capable of triumphing over that force. It was the same indi- 
 vidual that had already triumphed over it once before ; it was 
 Siegfried. Gunther was obliged to apply to him again, and to 
 commission him to break in Brunhild a second time. Still 
 invisible and again taken for Gunther, Siegfried, in a second 
 struggle with Brunhild, achieved a second victory over lier, the 
 advantages of which he had engaged, for the honor of the king, 
 not to push too far. He contented himself with carrying otf 
 Brunhild's girdle and a ring she wore on her finger. But he 
 had the fatal indiscretion of giving this girdle and this ring 
 to Chrimhild, and to inform her how he had obtained them.
 
 200 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 After the consummation of all these ceremonies and festivals, 
 Siegfried conducted Chrimhild into the kingdom of Niderland, 
 the crown of which his father Sigmnnd now resigned in his 
 favor. Ten years passed away, at the end of which he had a 
 son to whom he gave the name of Gunther ; and during the 
 same interval King Gunther .likewise had obtained a son to 
 whom he had given the name of Siegfried. 
 
 Brunhild, however, bore at the bottom of her heart a certain 
 mysterious grief, which she endeavored to suppress, but which 
 returned in spite of her with ever increasing importunity and 
 sharpness. There was something in the destiny of Siegfried 
 and Chrimhild which she did not comprehend and which 
 wounded her. She had really taken Siegfried to be the vassal 
 of Gunther, and had revolted at the siglit of his marriage to 
 Chrimhild. She had then been told, that Siegfried was a king 
 as well as Gunther, and at least as powerful as he ; she had 
 been loth to believe it. She was constantly astonished to see 
 Siegfried tranquil in his realm and never dreaming of perform- 
 ing any act of homage to the monarch of the Surgundians. 
 She tliought herself above Chrimhild, and sighed for an occa- 
 sion to enforce her pretensions. She had also an ardent desire 
 of seeing Siegfried again, as if in the hope of obtaining a solution 
 for the mysterious doubts by which she was tormented on his 
 account. She therefore requested Gunther to invite both of 
 them to Worms on a visit. 
 
 Guntlier extended the invitation with pleasure, and it was 
 accepted in the same manner on the part of Siegfried and 
 Chrimhild, who in the course of a few days arrived at the court 
 of iiurguiidy, followed by a brilliant retinue. At first there 
 was nothing but a succession of festivals and sports ; but the 
 demon of pride and jealousy which tormented Brunhild soon 
 began to disturb the harmony of these fetes. 
 
 A perilous conversation ensued between the two queens. 
 Bruuhihl, in speaking of Gunther and of Siegfried, always 
 affected to regard the latter as the vassal or inferior of the 
 former, and Clirimhild did not fail to repel these pretensions 
 with disdain. The conversation e-raduallv dcfjenerated into a 
 quarrel, and the quarrel soon reached the highest degree of 
 exasperation. Chrimhild discloses the fatal secret in her rage. 
 She re})roaches Brunhild with having been twice subdued by 
 Siegfried, before becoming the submissive wife of Gunther and 
 a woman like others of her sex ; and in proof of her assertion, 
 she exhibits in the presence of her rival the girdle and the ring 
 which the latter had lost in her second encounter. 
 
 At this disclosure, the rage of Brunhild exceeds all bounds ; 
 and the entire court of "Worms, disordered by the quarrel of the
 
 Analysis of the Nihelungen, 201 
 
 two women, is now a scene of desolation and of tumult. Tliougli 
 Siegfried swore, that he had never boasted of any triumph 
 which might offend the pride or honor of Brunhild, the latter 
 nevertheless continues to lament, to cry and to consider herself 
 the most outraged and the most unfortunate of women. 
 
 When Hageu saw the wife of his master in this condition, he 
 swore that he would avenge her, and he immediately plotted a 
 mortal conspiracy against Siegfried, to which King Gunther 
 himself at last consents, and which Giselher, the youngest of 
 Chrimhild's brothers opposes in vain. 
 
 Hagen and his accomplices circulate the rumor, that the 
 Saxons and the Danes, who had already been vanquished by 
 Siegfried, were preparing to revenge themselves and to make a 
 new descent u^^on the Burgundians. Misled by this false rumor, 
 Siegfried, ever generous and eager to embrace every oppor- 
 tunity for distinguishing himself, expresses his readiness to 
 march against them. His services are accepted and the Bur- 
 gundians assemble from all quarters, for the purpose of follow- 
 ing him. When all are ready to depart, Hagen goes in search 
 of Chrimhild, under the pretence of taking leave of her and 
 of receiving her commands. 
 
 Chrimhild, who is at this time more solicitous than usually 
 about Siegfried's departure for the war, tenderly commends 
 her husband to the care of Hagen. When the latter desires to 
 know what sort of service he could render to a warrior like 
 Siegfried, who was invulnerable and invincible, Chrimhild, 
 betrayed into undue confidence by her disquietude, discloses to 
 him a fatal secret. She tells him, that as Siegfried was bathing 
 in the blood of the dragon which rendered him invulnerable, a 
 large willow-leaf had fallen on his back between his two 
 shoulders, and that the spot covered by this leaf had remained 
 vulnerable, 
 
 Hagen promises to remain constantly by the side of Siegfried 
 and to see that no blow should take effect upon the fatal spot. 
 But in order to insure the success of his vigilance, he engages 
 Chrimhild to sew on the coat of the warrior some sign by which 
 he might distinguish the vulnerable spot, and the credulous 
 queen informs him that she would sew a small cross on it. 
 
 Hagen, now in the possession of these precious secrets, retires 
 quite delighted, and immediately circulates the report that the 
 Saxons and the Danes, who had menaced the Burgundians, had 
 renounced their project of an invasion, and retreated to their 
 own country. The question is now no longer of war, but of a 
 brilliant hunting-party for which all the preparations are 
 already made, and to which Siegfried is invited by King 
 Gunther himself.
 
 202 History of Provencal Poetr-y. 
 
 Before setting out for this chase, the hero went to take leave 
 of Chriinhild. The latter, disquieted bj sinister dreams which 
 she had recently had, and full of bodeful presentiments and of 
 regret for having intrusted Hagen with such important secrets, 
 endeavors by all sorts of prayers and caresses to prevent Sieg- 
 fried from joining the projected hunting-part}'^ ; but the hero, 
 smiling at lier fears, tranquillizes her and leaves her with the 
 tenderest adieus. 
 
 The chase took place in a vast and dense forest ; and after 
 the chase a repast was served in the same forest — a repast at 
 which the viands were abundant, but where wine was entirely 
 wanting. It had been forgotten on purpose. Siegfried was 
 mortally thirsty. Ilagen proposes to conduct him and the rest 
 of the party to a fine spring which was quite near there, and 
 where they all might quench their tliirst at pleasure. The in- 
 vitation is gratefully accepted, and they proceed toward the 
 spring. Siegfried puts his sword and bow into the hands 
 of Hagen, places his shield upon the ground, and in a kneel- 
 ing posture bends over the spring from which he is about 
 to drink. Ilagen, seizing the moment, strikes him with his 
 lance on the spot indicated by the cross, and flees, frightened at 
 the blow which he had just inflicted. 
 
 Though mortally wounded, Siegfried rises again, looks for his 
 sword and, failing to And it, starts in pursuit of his murderer 
 without any other weapon except his buckler, which he has 
 picked up from the ground. He hurls it after Hagen with such 
 violence, that the buckler is shattered to pieces and Hagen laid 
 prostrate. But the hero falls likewise into his blood, and 
 breathes out his last with a torrent of imprecations and re- 
 proaclies on his perfidious enemies. 
 
 The nmrderers would probably have left his corpse in the 
 forest ; but Ilagen had his reasons for having it carried into 
 the palace. He ordered it to be thrown, unwashed of its blood, 
 before the door of Chrimhild, and to be placed in such a posi- 
 tion, that it would be the first object to strike the attention of 
 the unhappy queen in the morning, when she would be coming 
 out to church. 
 
 "We can easily imagine the shrieks, the tears and lamen- 
 tations of Chrimhild at a sight like this, and the desolations 
 which the rumor of the horrible news must have spread in the 
 palace, through the city and throughout the entire country. 
 At the obsequies of Siegfried, Chrimliild openly accuses Ilagen 
 of being the assassin, and challenges hini to undergo the ordeal 
 of blood. It was a very generally prevalent belief during the 
 Middle Age, that if a man had iallen as the victim of a secret 
 murder, the wound of the dead body would open again and
 
 Analysis of the Nihelungen. 203 
 
 bleed anew at the approach of the murderer, whose guilt was 
 thus discovered ; and the tribunals of justice had sometimes 
 recourse to this test. Upon the summons of Chrimhild, Hagen 
 advances toward the corpse of Siegfried, from whose wounds 
 the blood immediately begins to stream afresh, Hagen per- 
 ceives it, but he is not the man to be disquieted by things like 
 these. 
 
 Chrimhild having thus become a widow, it was at first her 
 intention to return to the country of her deceased master, for 
 the purpose of spending the remainder of her life there in tears 
 and mourning. But her mother Ute, and her two younger 
 brothers. Gemot and Giselher, who had had no share in the 
 murder of Siegfried, and who loved her tenderly, prevailed on 
 her by their prayers to remain with them at Worms, promising 
 her all the attentions and all the devotion, that brotherly 
 affection could bestow. She had a spacious mansion built in 
 the proximity of the church, and led from that time forward a 
 life of godliness and devotion, without however being able to 
 console herself for her loss. 
 
 An interval of two years passed away, during which she lived 
 in fraternal concord with Gemot and Giselher, but without 
 exchanging a word with Gunther or enduring the sight of 
 Hagen. Finally, however, she became reconciled to Gunther ; 
 the ferocious Hagen was the only one whom she excluded from 
 her pardon, and he indeed could easily do M'ithout it. She had 
 the famous treasure of the Nibelungen brought to Worms, 
 which Alberich, the dwarf, to whom Siegfried has intrusted the 
 care of it, had pronounced to be her property. 
 
 With such a treasure, Chrimhild had a superabundance 
 of means for doing good and winning friends. But Hagen, 
 who has become a sort of an evil genius to her and a perse- 
 cuting demon, envied her this consolation. Having persuaded 
 Gunther, that this fatal treasure in the hands of Chrimhild 
 would be a power she might use to his detriment, he took 
 it upon himself to plunder her of it by main force. He kept 
 it in his own charge for some time, and finally threw it into 
 the Rhine, in the hope of appropriating it at some future time. 
 
 Thirteen years had now elapsed since the death of Siegfried. 
 During this interval, Attila, the King of the Huns, had lost 
 queen Helke, his first wife, and was now on the look-out for a 
 second. Chrimhild's name was mentioned to him ; her beauty 
 was so highly lauded, that he was resolved to demand her iu 
 marriage, although she was a Christian. Rudiger, the margrave 
 of Bechlare on the Danube, one of his most powerful vassals, is 
 charged with the commission of making this demand. 
 
 This Rudiger plays from this moment a conspicuous and an
 
 20i History of Provcngal Poetry. 
 
 interesting part in the action of the Nibehmgen. He is the 
 most amiable and the noblest character of the whole poem, 
 which the poet appears to have drawn with the greatest care, 
 and we might say con amore. This is a fact which I can simply 
 notice here, and of which the reasons will become apparent 
 hereafter. 
 
 Rudi^er arrives at Worms with a magnificent escort and is 
 received there accordingly. He at once explains to Gunther 
 the object of his mission. Gunther demands three days for 
 deliberation. His friend and counsellors are all of the opinion, 
 that he should accept the alliance of Attila, and consent to his 
 marriage with Chrindiild. Hagen alone is of an opposite mind. 
 He is apprehensive of some misfortune from this union ; but 
 Gemot and Giselher, who spoke and acted for the interest of 
 their sister, repel the sinister suspicions and insinuations of 
 Hagen, and it is decided, that Chrimhild should remain the 
 mistress of lier lot. 
 
 Having become informed of the intentions of Attila, the latter 
 at first promptly and positively rejects the proposal, and it is 
 with great difficulty that her two brothers prevail on her to 
 listen at least to Rudiger and to have some explanation with 
 him. Eao;er to succeed in a mission in which his master was 
 80 intensely interested, Itudiger tries every variety of entreaties 
 and of arguments to overcome the obstinate resistance of Chrim- 
 hild ; but the latter persists in her refusal and rejects the advice 
 and prayers of her brothers a second time. Rudiger, how- 
 ever, discovers at last a means of moving her. He represents 
 to her, that by marrying Attila she would have a chance for 
 avenging herself on her enemies, and he pledges himself per- 
 sonally to aid her in this vengeance. The unexpected hope, 
 which these words kindle in her heart, decides the question, 
 and she consents to marry Attila. 
 
 The necessary preparations for the journey are soon made, 
 and Chrimhild, attended by a retinue of Burgundians, who are 
 unwilling to quit her, takes her departure for the land of the 
 Huns, under the escort of Rudiger. Her three brothers accom- 
 pany her to a certain distance. At the moment of separation, 
 she takes the tenderest farewell of Gemot and of Giselher, who 
 have not ceased to love her, and who are still ready to do her 
 every favor. To confirm her reconciliation with Gunther, she 
 embraces him tenderly ; the poet, however, assures us that this 
 was done by the inspiration of the devil. 
 
 Chrimhild and her escort arrive safely at Bechlare, the 
 capital of Rudiger's margraviate, where Gotelind, the wife 
 of the margrave, and the beautiful young Dietelind, his 
 daughter, prepare her a magnificent reception. But nothing
 
 Analysis of the Nihelungen. 205 
 
 can equal the splendor and the joy of the fetes that await her 
 in the land of the Huns, at Vienna, where Attila has come to 
 meet her, and where the royal marriage is to be celebrated. 
 Amusements of every kind, martial sports and banquets, are 
 kept up uninterruptedly for eighteen days in succession. 
 Ohrimhild is very far from finding any pleasure in these festi- 
 vals ; they call to her memory others which were dearer to 
 her — tliose of her marriage with Siegfried — and the compari- 
 son only contributes to increase her melancholy. Nevertheless, 
 she makes an effort to restrain herself, and to reciprocate the 
 assiduity of Attila to the best of her ability. The rejoicings 
 of the nuptial ceremonies being at an end, the king of the 
 Huns, with all his court, retraces his journey, to regain his ordi- 
 nary residence on the lower Danube. 
 
 After the lapse of seven years, Ohrimhild gives birth to a 
 son whom she does not fail to have baptized. Six more years 
 pass away, and Ohrimhild, W'ho daily becomes more popular 
 and beloved among the Huns, who is honored by all the world 
 and in the possession of all the influence and power she could 
 desire, might have been a happy woman, if she could only 
 have forgotten Siegfried. But she does not forget him, she for- 
 gets nothing that has the slightest reference to him; she does 
 not cease to weep, to have ominous dreams and to meditate on 
 projects of revenge, until at last she has decided on one of 
 them. 
 
 Feigning an affectionate desire to see her friends and rela- 
 tions from Burgundia again after so long a separation, she en- 
 treats Attila to invite them to a visit. Attila, who never 
 dreams of any insincerity in her request, immediately commis- 
 sions two of his minstrels as the bearers of a fraternal invita- 
 tion to the three princes of the Burgundians. Ohrimhild does 
 not fail to give her special instructions to the messengers. She 
 studiously enjoins on them not to mention to any one in Bur- 
 gundia, that she was leading a cheerless and an anxious life' in 
 the country of the Iluns, and to convey, in her behalf, the great 
 desire she' had of seeing Hagen on that occasion. 
 
 The minstrels take their departure. They arrive at their 
 place of destination and deliver their message faithfully. Gun- 
 ther demands eight days for reflection, and in the mean time 
 consults his friends. They arc all in favor of undertaking the 
 journey- Hagen alone is of a contrary mind. He is mistrust- 
 ful of Ohrimhild, and apprehends some treacherous design on 
 her part. But Gemot and Giselher, anxious to see their sister, 
 are for accepting the invitation. 
 
 The expedition to the country of the Huns is therefore re- 
 solved upon. It is however determined that they should only
 
 206 History of ProvenQol Poetry. 
 
 proceed with an escort sufficiently strong to guard against the 
 dangers of a stratagem. The princes then set out with a reti- 
 nue consisting of sixty braves or heroes, of a thousand select 
 warriors, and of nine thousand ordinary ones. 
 
 Ila^en, as we may well surmise, does not remain behind. 
 Tlie dangers and fatigues which he foresees, are not the 
 thing to trouble or detain him. Another warrior, nearly as 
 redoubtable as Hagen, and destined to act a conspicuous part 
 in the tragical adventures of this journey, figures among the 
 personages of the martial escort. This is Volker, who is also 
 an excetlent player on the flute, and the minstrel of the little 
 army. 
 
 At the end of twelve days the Burgundians arrived at the 
 banks of the Danube ; but they find there neither boat nor 
 ferryman. Hagen leaves the rest of his companions and walks 
 along the stream in search of some means for crossing it. He 
 first encounters a company of sirens, who are bathing in the 
 waters of the river, and who give utterance to various predic- 
 tions respecting the issue of tlie journey of the Burgundians. 
 " Warrior," says one of them to him, " retrace tliy steps whilst 
 thou hast time to do so. If ye arrive among the Huns, ye are 
 all doomed to perish, thou and thy companions, except the 
 priest which accompanies you." Hagen is unwilling to believe 
 the prediction ; another siren repeats it to him, but he never- 
 theless persists in searching for the means of conveying the 
 company across the stream. 
 
 After a number of adventures, he discover at last a bark 
 lying on the shore, of which he takes immediate possession, and 
 in which he himself ferries the Burgundians to the opposite 
 side. In the midst of the passage, he seizes the priest of the 
 company by tlie throat and throws him overboard into the 
 river. The unfortunate man, who does not know how to swim, 
 is twenty times on the point of being swallowed up by the 
 waves ; but by an actual miracle he escapes at last without in- 
 jury, and having regained the shore which the Burgundians 
 had just left, he proceeds on his way back toward Worms. By 
 drowning the chaplain of the expedition, Hagen had desired 
 to falsify the predictions of the Danubian sirens. He is indeed 
 a little troubled about the issue of his project, but the idea ot 
 returning never occurs to him. 
 
 In passing through Bavaria, along the right bank of the 
 Danube, the Burgundians are obliged to force their way, and 
 to repel the attack of one of the chiefs of the country. Hav- 
 ing arrived at Bechlare, they find Rudiger, who gives them a 
 most generous and hospitable reception. Giselher, the young- 
 est of the Burgundian princes, becomes enamored of the fair 
 
 \
 
 Analysis of the Nihelungen. 207 
 
 Dietelind, and asks her in marriage of the margrave, who con- 
 sents to the proposition. This union is celebrated by four days 
 of feasting and rejoicing, at the end of which the Burgundians 
 again prepare to pursue their journey under the conduct of 
 Rudiger, who desires to present them in person at the court of 
 AttiLa. The lady of the margrave, the good Gotelind, makes 
 magnificent parting-presents to the most prominent of her 
 guests. She gives Hagen a very valuable shield, and Yolker 
 bracelets. 
 
 On their arrival in the land of the Huns, the visitors are re- 
 ceived by Dietrich of Yerona, and by his old and trusty ser- 
 vant Hildebrand, whom Attila had sent ahead to meet them. 
 This Dietrich is, as I have already remarked, the most conspi- 
 cuous and the most popular of the heroes mentioned in the 
 ancient poetic traditions of the Germans. Obliged by circum- 
 stances, of which there can be no question here, to quit the 
 country of the Amalungen, that is to say, Italy, of which he 
 was then king, he had fled with a company of brave followers 
 to the court of Attila, for refuge, where he had since lived for 
 many years, respected by all as the chief of heroes. He is the 
 very ideal of martial honor, of justice and fidelity. He is 
 very uneasy in regard to the consequences of the Burgundian 
 visit to the court of Attila ; and he informs them at the very 
 outset, that Chrimhild is not yet reconciled to the loss of Sieg- 
 fried, which is tantamount to saying that they should be on 
 their guard. 
 
 Disquieted by such an admonition, the Burgundian chiefs 
 take Dietrich aside for the purpose of eliciting from him some 
 further and more special information respecting the intentions 
 of Chrimhild. "What would you that I should tell you?" 
 said Dietrich in reply, " unless it be that I hear her weeping 
 and lamenting every morning V 
 
 This information comes too late. The Burgundians pursue 
 their journey until they finally arrive at the palace of Attila. 
 The Huns, full of curiosity to see the strangers, flock together 
 from every quarter, filling the avenues through which they 
 were expected to pass. Hagen, who had long since been noto- 
 rious among them as the murderer of Siegfried, attracts parti- 
 cular attention. His tall form, his haughty step, his terrible 
 figure strike the eyes of all. 
 
 Attila, who had really and sincerely desired the visit of the 
 Burgundians, had made every preparation for their reception. 
 As for Chrimhild, as soon as she was ushered into the presence 
 of her brothers, she embraced them all most tenderly, and par- 
 ticularly the youngest of them, on whom she showered her 
 most aft'ectionate caresses. But she paid no attention to any
 
 208 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 one else. "When Hagen perceived this, he began to tighten 
 the knots of liis hehnet, and said : " Aha ! they are embrac- 
 ing kings here, and do not even salute their warriors !" Chrim- 
 liild overhearing these words, replied : " Be welcome to who- 
 ever sees you here with pleasure ! But, as for me, what rea- 
 son have I to salute you or to bid you welcome? and what 
 do you bring me from the banks of the Rhine?" "If I had 
 known that you were in want of presents, I should have better 
 provided myself with some," was Ilagen's reply. " But it was 
 quite enough for me to carry my helmet, my cuirass and my 
 trusty sword !" 
 
 " I want none of your presents. I have no need of your 
 gold," replied the queen ; " I have enough of my own, to give 
 to whosoever merits it. But I have suffered from the embezzle- 
 ment of my treasure and from a murder, and this indeed were 
 well worth some indemnity !" 
 
 Thereupon Chrimhild, before ushering the Burgundians into 
 the hall prepared for their accommodation, requests them to 
 surrender their swords and the rest of their arms, promising to 
 return them again afterward. But Ilagen protests and says : 
 " No, no, my charming queen ! This must not be ! You shall 
 not liave the trouble of caring for my buckler or my arms. 
 You are a queen, and I have learnt from my father, that it is 
 the part of armed men to protect their queens." " Alas !" Chrim- 
 hild then exclaimed, " the Burgundians are on their guard ; 
 they nuist have been informed of my design. Oh, could I but 
 know the man who told them ! I should make him perish," 
 
 It is to be supposed that Chrimhild uttered these words aside, 
 and without having had the intention of being understood. 
 Dietrich, however, either heard or divined them, and replied 
 indignantly : " It is I, who have cautioned these noble princes 
 and the valiant Ilagen to be on their guard, and none but a 
 malicious queen, like yourself, could blame me for the deed." 
 
 Chrimhild, abashed and furious at this declaration, retires 
 without uttering a word ; but she darts a glance at the enemies 
 behind her, and in this glance resides the whole of her design. 
 Then Dietrieli, taking Ilagen by the hand, said: "The words 
 just uttered by the queen afflict me and I am sorry to see you 
 liere." " I am prepared for all," replied Ilagen, and thereupon 
 the two warriors separate. 
 
 AVliilst the three princes and their retinue are most fraternally 
 received by Attila, Ilagen and Volker, to whom the ceremo- 
 nies appear tedious, step aside and are about to seat themselves 
 together in front of Chrimhild's apartments, for no other pur- 
 pose than that of defying the queen, who had already been so 
 mortally offended. Chrimhild perceives them ; and on recog-
 
 Analysis of the Nihelungen. 209 
 
 nlzlng Siegfried's sword in the hands of Ilagen, she begins to 
 cry and to lament exceedingly. Some of Attila's men, who 
 are present^ inquire of the queen for the cause of lier chagrin. 
 She accuses Hagen, and exhorts them to avenge her. 
 
 The Huns arm themselves immediately to the number of six- 
 ty. " How now I What ? Sixty of you think of iigliting Hagcn !" 
 Chrimhild then exclaimed : " Arm yourselves in greater num- 
 bers ! Let all of you be armed, as many as are now present 
 here." They then arm themselves to the number of four hun- 
 dred and express themselves ready to march. " AVait yet a 
 moment longer," added the queen, " I wish to appear in person 
 before Hagen, with my crown on my head, and to reproach 
 him in your presence for the wrongs he has done me. He will 
 not deny them, so ferocious and so proud is he ! And then 
 you must do your best to do me justice." 
 
 Hagen and Yolker were fully aware of what was going on 
 against them ; and yet they remained from motives of pride 
 and of defiance ; they dreaded the reproach of being deserters. 
 Chrimhild then advanced at the head of her four hundred men, 
 and addressing herself to Hagen in an angry tone, she said: 
 " Well, now, Hagen ! How couldst thou be so audacious, as 
 to show thy face in a country where I am queen ? How couldst 
 thou be so far wanting in sense as to make thy appearance 
 in my presence ?" Hagen replied : " I have followed my mas- 
 ters, it's not my custom to stay when they are marching." 
 " But hast thou not merited my hatred ?" continued Chrimhild, 
 " didst thou not assassinate Siegfried my husband ?" " A truce 
 to useless words !" replied the warrior ; " yes, my name is 
 Hagen, it is I that murdered Siegfried! He was to pay the 
 tears of Brunhild with his blood. Yes ! and once more yes,, 
 queen! I am responsible for all ycu now impute to me. Let 
 whoever will, man or woman, call me to account ; I shall be 
 guilty of no falsehood for so small a matter !" " Te hear it," 
 said Chrimhild to her men, " ye hear it, my brave warriors ;: 
 do me then justice and revenge me now !" 
 
 At this appeal, the four hundred Huns look at each other, 
 without venturing to commence the combat. The aspect and 
 renown of tlie two champions inspire them with dread. They 
 retreat, and the two champions likewise retire on their part, in 
 order to rejoin their companions in the hall where Attila re- 
 ceived them. 
 
 AVhen the hour for the banquet had arrived, the Amelungen, 
 the Burgundians and the Huns all take their seats at tlic table, 
 and they protract tlieir merriment and feasting until midnight. 
 The Burgundians tlien ask permission to retire, and they are 
 conducted into a hall of vast dimensions, where beds had been 
 
 14
 
 210 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 prepared for tliera. Giselher shows some uneasiness in regard 
 to the designs of Clirimhikl ; but Ilagen and Volker dispel his 
 fears and engage to watch in arms for the common safety 
 throughout the night. 
 
 The precaution was not superfluous, Chrimhild had given 
 directions to some of her devoted followers to massacre Hagen 
 daring the night in the midst of his companions. But Yolker, 
 
 Perceiving one of their casques gleaming in the dark, rouses 
 lagen from his sleejj, and Chrimhild's men retire without mak- 
 ing the attempt. 
 
 At daybreak the Burgundians rise and repair to church in 
 arms. Attila and Chrimhild likewise make their appearance, 
 attended by a powerful escort. Attila is surprised to see his 
 guests completely armed and asks them for the reason. Ilagen 
 simply replies that this was their custom. They are too proud 
 to confess their suspicions and to complain of Chrimhild's 
 attempts, of which Attila is entirely ignorant. 
 
 After the mass — for it was customary among the Huns to 
 say and to attend mass — commence the amusements, the jousts 
 and tournaments, at which the chiefs of the different nations 
 there assembled to vie with each other in distinguishing them- 
 selves. But the festival soon changes into a scene of com- 
 bat. Yolker having deliberately and from a pure caprice of 
 ferocity killed one of Attila's men, a fray ensues between the 
 Huns and the Burgundians, the former wishing to kill Yolker 
 in return and the latter rushing to his defence. It is with 
 great difficulty that Attila restores order and saves the mur- 
 derer. 
 
 Everybody now returns to the palace ; but everybody enters 
 it with defiance, with anger and with feelings of resentment 
 which ^v•ait but for an occasion to burst forth in a blaze. No 
 one is willing to lay aside his arms ; every one expects to be in 
 want of them. Attila protects his guests most generously and 
 utters the most terrible menaces against whoever of his men 
 should venture to attack them. 
 
 Chrimhild, however, more and more incensed, endeavors 
 secretly by all sorts of bribes and promises to gain Attila's 
 warri(irs over to her side, in order to make them the instruments 
 of her vengeance. She addresses herself in the first place to one 
 of the cliiefs of the Amelungen, to old Ilildebrand, who, how- 
 ever, rejects her offers and her prayers with disdain. She is 
 more fortunate with Bloedel, one of Attila's most important 
 vassals. She seduces him by the offer of a beautiful woman and 
 a duchy, and obtains his promise to engage in the battle against 
 the Huns. Contented and full of happy expectations, she 
 enters now the hall, where dinner is already served. They are
 
 Analysis of the Nihelungen. 211 
 
 seated ; and the gaiet j of the occasion commences with good 
 cheer and wine. 
 
 In the course of the banquet, Attila sends for young Orteliebe, 
 his son, and introduces him by way of friendship to the Bar- 
 gundian princes. " Here," says he, " is my son and the son of 
 your sister ; I hope that he will grow up to serve you, and it is 
 my desire that you should take him with you to the Rhine, 
 to bring him up and make a man of him." " And how can we 
 make a man of, and what service can we expect from, an abor- 
 tion like this ?" was Hagen's hasty retort. " I swear that I shall 
 not be seen much in his company at the palace of Worms." 
 This brutal affront shocks the feelings of Attila very much. All 
 the hilarity of the banquet evaporates in the twinkling of an 
 eye. Every one is silent and thoughtful, and his sinister pre- 
 sentiments return. 
 
 But the war had already recommenced from another quarter. 
 Bloedel had kept the promise he had made to Chrimhild. 
 He had assailed the servants of the Burgundians in the separate 
 hall where they were eating their repast, with Hagen's brother, 
 the intrepid Dankwart, at their head. Bloedel is killed at the 
 commencement of the fray, and his warriors are repulsed with a 
 loss of five hundred men. But they return with a reinforce- 
 ment of two thousand, and the nine thousand servants of the 
 Burgundians are all massacred to the very last of them, toge- 
 ther with twelve chosen warriors beside. 
 
 Dankwart alone remaining, defends himself against the flood 
 of his assailants. Forcing a passage to the door of the hall, he 
 plunges out, constantly fighting while retreating toward the 
 hall where the kings were dining, and where no one knew as 
 yet anything of the massacre that had just taken place. He 
 arrives and rushes in, covered with blood, with his sword in his 
 hand and without his shield, at the very moment when the 
 young prince Orteliebe was going about from table to table and 
 introducing himself to guest after guest. 
 
 " You are too much at your ease here, brother Hagen," ex- 
 claimed Dankwart ; " know that all our servants and their 
 twelve chiefs have been butchered by the Huns !" At this 
 announcement, Hagen draws his sword. With the first blow he 
 levels he hews off the head of little Orteliebe, and makes it fly 
 into the lap of its mother ; with a second he kills the governor 
 of the child, and with the third cuts off an arm of the minstrel 
 who is playing the flute for the amusement of the company. 
 " Heceive now," says he to him, " the reward for thy message 
 to the Burgundians," and he continues to strike and to kill to 
 the right and to the left, whilst Volker, his faithful companion, 
 is imitating his example. The Huns defend themselves as well 
 as they can.
 
 213 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 AU this had been done in the twinkling of an eye, and before 
 the three Purgnndian kings had time to prevent the carnage by 
 their interference- Tliey make a momentary attempt to stop it ; 
 but when they see tliat it is impossible to do sp, they themselves 
 draw their swords and likewise commence the work of destruc- 
 tion. The Huns, who had pursued Dankwart to the very 
 entrance of the royal hall, hearing the confusion and the cries 
 of the fray, endeavor to force an entrance for the purpose of 
 aiding their friends. But Dankwart, who is stationed at the 
 door, repulses them and keeps them at bay. 
 
 Attila and Chrimhild are in the most temble agonies at the 
 sight of the combat. Chrimhild then turns to Dietrich and 
 says : "I^Toble chief of the Amelungeu, wnlt thou suffer me to 
 perish without succor?" " And what succor can I bring thee, 
 my noble queen ?" was Dietrich's reply ; " I am in dread for 
 myself and for my friends. Tlie Burguudians are so furious in 
 their carnage, that it is impossible to stop them." Chrimhild 
 renews her entreaties, and Dietrich bestirring himself at last 
 rejoins: " I will try what I can do ;" and thereupon the chief 
 of warriors lifts up his voice of thunder — -a voice which, in the 
 language of the ancient poet, resounded far through the palace 
 like the sound of a buffalo-horn. 
 
 At this voice and at the command of Gunther, the Burguu- 
 dians suspend the combat for a moment. Dietrich then de- 
 mands permission to withdraw his Amelungen and to take along 
 with him whomsoever he pleased. His request is granted. 
 Tlicn, extending one hand to Chrimhild and the other to Attila, 
 he conducts them out of the hall with six hundred men. Budi- 
 ger asks and obtains the same favor. He retires with five 
 hundred of his followers. 
 
 After the departure of these two chiefs, the combat com- 
 mences anew and continues till all the Huns present are 
 completely exterminated. The Burgundians, now victorious, 
 take a few moments' rest, while Volker and Hagen, leaning on 
 their shields at the entrance of the tower wliich led to the hall, 
 insult and defy the Huns who had remained without. 
 
 In this state of affairs, Giselher, under the apprehension that 
 the Burgimdians were going to be assailed again by new floods 
 of the enemy, proposes to clear the hall of the dead bodies with 
 which it was encumbered. Seven thousand of them, either 
 dead or dying, are thrown out of the windows before the very 
 eyes of their friends or relatives, who lament tliat they are 
 obliged to see tlie wounded perish in this manner, whose 
 life might have been saved by a little timely aid. "I have 
 been confidently assured that these Huns are good for nothing 
 cowards," says v olker at the sight ; " look at them, how they are 
 crying like women, instead of taking up and attending to those
 
 Analysis of the Nibelungen. 213 
 
 of tliem who are merely wounded." A noble margrave of the 
 Huns, hearing Volker speak in this manner and taking his 
 advice to be a friendly one, advances for the purpose of carry- 
 ing off one of his relatives whom he perceives wounded amid 
 the pile of the dead, and Volker kills him with an arrow. 
 
 Meanwhile Attila, who is henceforth as furious against his 
 guests, as he had at first been benevolent and generous toward 
 them, has also armed himself and takes his place at the head of 
 his men, while Chrimhild on her part again resorts to tears, to 
 promises and to entreaties in order to excite her warriors 
 against Ilagen. Inflamed by these her exhortations, Iring, a 
 young Danish chief, attached to the service of Attila, demands 
 iiis arms for the purpose of trying his luck against the redoubted 
 Ilagen ; several of his friends propose to follow him, but im- 
 pelled by a generous love of glory, Iring, throwing himself at 
 their feet, conjures them to allow him to fight the enemy alone. 
 
 He first directs his attack against Hagen and Yolker both 
 successively ; and finding himself unable to gain any advantage 
 over them, he falls upon other warriors of whom he kills 
 several ; then suddenly turning again to Ilagen, he wounds 
 him and escapes without any hurt. But he scarcely gives him- 
 self time to breathe. Encouraged by the encomiums of Chrim- 
 hild and challenged by Ilagen, he returns to the combat. But 
 his hour is at hand, and Ilagen strikes him with a mortal blow. 
 Two of his friends, Ii'nfried and Ilaward, advance in order to 
 avenge him, but they are likewise slain. Their men then 
 rallying force a passage into the hall, and the combat com- 
 mences again w^ithin. The new assailants fall, one after the 
 other^ and the Burgundians, wearied by their desperate efforts, 
 repose upon the bodies of the slain. 
 
 Their repose however is soon interrupted. At the behest of 
 Attila and Chrimhild, the Huns precipitate themselves against 
 them ; they defend themselves with the same intrepidity and 
 with the same success, until the hour of midnight strikes. AVlien, 
 on the morning of the following day, they deliberate in regard 
 to their position, they become convinced of the impossibility of 
 offering any further resistance to an enemy, whose numbers 
 they perceive increasing every moment, while their own is 
 necessarily diminishing, and they resolve on making an attempt 
 to come to terms of peace. Gunther and his two brothers come 
 out to treat with Attila and Chrimliild in a conference which 
 the latter had agreed to. But Attila declares, that after all 
 the mischief they had done they had no peace to expect from 
 him. Gemot solicits at least the favor of leaving the hall in 
 which they w^ere shut up, and of dying by fighting in the 
 open air.
 
 21 i History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 Attila and the Iluns would probably have consented to this 
 request, hut Chrimhild refuses to grant it. Giselher renews it 
 in his turn, and craves the pardon of his sister in consideration 
 of the tenderness and affection which he had ever exhibited 
 toward her. " You deserve no pardon," replied the queen, 
 " Since Hagen has murdered my son. Nevertheless, ye are the 
 children of my mother, and I will consent to let you go in 
 peace, if you will but surrender Hagen." " Never !" exclaims 
 Gemot ; " this can never be ! And if there were ten thousand 
 of us, we would sooner perish, all of us, than deliver up a single 
 one of our number !" " Yes, let us die !" adds Giselher. "Ko 
 one can prevent us from dying like brave men." 
 
 The parley being broken off, Chrimhild sets fire to the four 
 corners of the palace, and in an instant the flames envelop the 
 hall of the Burgundians, who are either suflbcated by the smoke 
 or devoured by the heat. Cries of horror and dolorous groans 
 are arising in every direction : " Oh, how frightful it is to 
 perish in the midst of the fire ! How sweet it would be to die 
 fighting in the open air ! — ah ! what a horrid thirst !" 
 
 When Hagen heard these lamentations from the door of the 
 hall, which in conjunction with Yolker he had undertaken to 
 defend, he shouts with a loud voice : "Let him who is athirst 
 drink blood ! In the midst of a conflagration like this, blood 
 is better than wine." At these Avords one of the Burgundians 
 kneels down by the side of a corpse, and undoing his helmet 
 begins to drink of the blood that flowed from its wounds, and 
 though this was the first time he had ever tasted it, he still 
 finds it very excellent. "Thanks for your advice. Sir Hagen," 
 exclaimed the refreshed warrior, as he rose ; " I am much 
 obliged to you ; I have quenched my thirst completely !" And 
 others, who heard him say that the blood was good, drank of 
 it in their turn and felt themselves relieved. 
 
 Meanwhile the flames continue to penetrate into the hall. 
 Tlie Burgundians, driven into the background, protect them- 
 selves with their shields as well as they can, and in order to 
 prevent the bands of their helmets from taking fire, they steep 
 them in blood. The conflagration, however, gradually abates 
 at last. The hall was roofed in such a way as to resist the 
 effect of the flames. But of all the number of the Burgun- 
 dians six hundred only remained ; four hundred had perished 
 either in combat or in the flames. 
 
 After a few hours, which had been a century of inexpressible 
 anguish, Giselher says : " I think it must be nearly daylight, 
 I feel a fresh breeze rising." "Yes," says another, "I perceive 
 the day approaching, but the day will bring us no advantage 
 over the night. Let us j)repare to die with honor !"
 
 Analysis of the Nihelungen. 215 
 
 His word was true ^ for, scarcely had dayliglit made its 
 appearance, before the Burgundians were assailed anew by 
 multitudes of Huns which kept increasing around them every 
 moment. 
 
 Rudiger, the good margrave, touched by their distress, makes 
 a final attempt to reconcile them to Attila. But Dietrich, to 
 whom he addresses himself, declares the king's imwillingness 
 to listen to any proposals of peace. Rudiger is disconsolate ; 
 he is unable to restrain his tears ; he laments the frightful 
 destiny of the valiant warriors, who had been his guests, and 
 one of whom was his son-in-law. One of Attila's men, who wit- 
 nesses this anguish, loudly denounces him to Chrimhild as a 
 traitor and a coward, who only desires peace from a lack of 
 courage to fight and to fulfill his duty as a vassal. Rudiger's 
 grief is quelled for a moment by his anger. He kills his tra- 
 ducer by a blow with his fist, and openly declares that he can 
 not in consistency with good faith fight against men, who had 
 come to the court of Attila under his escort and protection. 
 But Attila reproaches him sharply for this refusal to serve. 
 Chrimhild presses her suit still more urgently ; she reminds 
 him of the promise he had formerly made at Worms to aid her 
 and to avenge her on her enemies, and finally throws herself 
 at his feet to implore his assistance. Attila carries his impor- 
 tunity to the same extent, and the generous Rudiger is thus 
 divided between two contrary duties, both of which are equally 
 imperious and equally painful. " Oh, how unfortunate I am !" 
 he then exclaims in his distress, " to have lived to see a sight 
 like this ! To-day I am compelled to lose my honor, my faith, 
 my probity and all that God has given me. Whichever party 
 I may serve, or whichever I may abandon, I still shall be in 
 the wrong, and if I keep neutral and undivided, I shall be 
 blamed by all." 
 
 Then turning toward Attila, he said ; " My liege and master, 
 take back whatever 1 hold in fief from you ; take back your 
 lands and castles ; I want no more of them. I am going to 
 depart. I shall take my daughter by one hand and my wife 
 by the other, and I shall go begging my bread throughout the 
 country, but I shall never be wanting in my faith and 
 honor." 
 
 Chrimhild and Attila, however, are not yet ready to accept 
 the refusal ; they redouble their entreaties and their prayers,, 
 until at last they succeed in shaking the resolution of Rudiger. 
 *' The matter is therefore settled now," exclaimed the noble 
 margrave, " and I shall have to give my life to-day for the 
 benefits you have conferred on me ! I'll die, then, since you'll 
 have it so ! In a few moments my lands, my castles will revert.
 
 216 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 to you through a hand of which I am«iiow ignorant. I com- 
 mend to you my wife and daughter." 
 
 Then turning to his warriors, he said : " Quick, arm your- 
 selves, ye braves ; let all of you be armed ! We are about to 
 march against the Burgundians." When the latter perceive 
 him advancing at the head of his men, they are struck with 
 surprise and grief. They are now troubled for the first time. 
 The idea of fighting against the generous Kudiger, whom every- 
 body honored, and to whom they themselves were under so 
 many obligations, fills them with horror. 
 
 But Rndigerhas already arrived within speaking-distance of the 
 enemy. He sets his superb buckler down upon the ground for a 
 moment, which was a sign that he had something to say to them. 
 "Defend yourselves, ye valiant Burgundians!" he exclaims, 
 " I am constrained to attack you." Protestations of amity and 
 of regret are interchanged on both sides, and at the moment 
 when the combat was to commence, Hagen suspends it once 
 more by exclaiming : " Noble Rudiger, here is the magnificent 
 shield which your good lady, the margravine, presented to me, 
 and which I carried with me as a precious gift of friendship to 
 the country of the Huns. But see, it is now completely muti- 
 lated by the blows of the Huns. How gladly would I exchange 
 my cuirass for a shield like yours!" "By giving you this 
 shield," says Rudiger, "I shall perhaps offend the queen. But 
 here it is, notwithstanding ! Take it, brave Hagen, and may 
 you safely carry it to the land of the Burgundians !" 
 
 On seeing Iludiger thus depriving himself of his buckler, 
 many warriors who had never wept before, were moved to 
 tears. Hiigen himself was touched, and declared that he would 
 not fight against him. 
 
 Yolker, having witnessed this scene, advances in his turn 
 toward lludiger. " Behold," says he, " behold the bracelets 
 which your kind lady the margravine gave to me, recom- 
 mending me to take them with me to the fetes, when we were 
 coming on. AVill you inform her that I am wearing them?" 
 "Yes, brave Volker," was Rudiger's reply, "I promise you to 
 do so, if I see her again 1" 
 
 " After this admirable incident, the efi'ect of which may be 
 compared to that of a pure ray of the sun in the midst of a most 
 terrible tempest, the combat recommences. Rudiger, after 
 having made great havoc among the Burgundians, is assailed 
 bv Gemot; they both fight for a great while with equal valor, 
 and they conclude by killing each other. After the fall of 
 Rudigei-, all his followers are cut to pieces to the very last of 
 them. 
 
 Meanwhile the rumor of Rudiger's death spreads in every
 
 Analysis of the Nihelungen. 217 
 
 direction, and with this mmor an inexpressible consternation 
 and sorrow. Attiha and Chrinihild particularly are full of 
 despair. Dietrich is nnwilling to credit the odious news. Old 
 Hildebrand is sent to ascertain the truth of it, and he is accom- 
 panied by a numerous troop of Amelungen, all armed and ready 
 for action in case of an emergency. 
 
 Hildebrand sets out, and liaving come within speaking dis- 
 tance of the Burgundians, he asks what had become of Eudiger. 
 The reply was that he was dead, and at this reply the Amelun- 
 gen begin to weep and to lament until their beards and cheeks 
 are completely immdated with their tears. " Kow, then, ye 
 Burgundians," replied Hildebrand with a voice broken with 
 frequent sobs, "give up the body of Eudiger, that we may render 
 the last service to him whom we would have so gladly served 
 alive!" "The body of Eudiger! No one shall bring it to 
 you," replied Volker. " You may come yourselves and take it, 
 as it lies here all besmeared with blood. The service ye wish 
 to render him will be all the more complete for it." 
 
 After these insolent words, the altercation between the Ame- 
 lungen and the Burgundians becomes still sharper, until it 
 finally ends in a combat in which all of Dietrich's warriors are 
 killed, with the single exception of Hildebrand, who retreats, 
 wounded by Hagen. On the side of the Burgundians, Hagen 
 and Gunther are the only warriors left alive. 
 
 Completely covered with blood, Hildebrand returns to Die- 
 trich, who, seeing him wounded, and without giving him time 
 to explain himself, says to him : " You have suffered no more 
 than you have merited ! Why did you break the peace which 
 I had promised to the Burgundians?" "We have only de- 
 manded the body of Eudiger and the Burgundians have refused 
 it." At these words, Dietrich, no longer now in doubt about 
 the death of Eudiger, gives vent to tears and lamentations for 
 the first time in his life. " Give orders to my men to arm 
 themselves at once," he thereupon exhorted Hildebrand ; " and 
 bring me my arms, too; I will proceed myself to question the 
 Burgundians." " You have no other man besides myself, 
 dear master," was Hildebrand's reply ; " all the rest are dead." 
 
 New source of anguish to Dietrich this, who arms himself 
 with all possible speed and then marches with rapid strides to- 
 ward the Burgundians, followed by Hildebrand. Having 
 arrived at the door of the hall where "^ Gunther and Hagen arc 
 stationed, ready to defend themselves, the hero puts his shield 
 upon the ground, as a sign of pacific intentions. He complains 
 of the death of his men, of that c»f Eudiger, and of their refu- 
 sal to give up the body of the latter. " All this," he adds, 
 " requires some reparation. Surrender yourselves therefore at
 
 218 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 discretion into mj hands ; I will protect you with all my influ- 
 ence and power, so that none of the Huns will dare to d;p you 
 the slightest injury. I pledge you my word to reconduct you 
 to your country and to die, if need be, in your defence." " May 
 God forbid," exclaimed Hagen, " that two brave warriors, still 
 in possession of their arms wherewith they may defend them- 
 selv^es, should ever surrender to any man whoever he may be !" 
 "Very well, then, let us see how you will defend yourself!" 
 was Dietrich's reply. 
 
 Hereupon the combat between the two powerful wari'iors 
 commences. Dietrich is at first obliged to employ all his agi- 
 lity and skill to avoid the blows of Hagen and of his redoubt- 
 able Balmung, Siegfried's former sword. But after a while, 
 seizing the moment when the Burgundian exposed his side, 
 he wounds him with a large, deep gash. " There you are 
 wounded, Hagen!" said Dietrich then; "I should acquire but 
 little honor, were I to make an end of you ; I prefer to make 
 you prisoner." While uttering these words, he throws aside his 
 shield, and rushing suddenly upon Hagen incloses him in his 
 iron arms, binds him and carries him thus bound to Chrimhild, 
 saying : " Spare him his life ; who knows but that at some fu- 
 ture day he may, by his faithful services, repair the mischief he 
 has done you ?" 
 
 Chrimhild is filled with joy at a spectacle like this ; and mak- 
 ing Dietrich many acknowledgments, she orders Hagen to be 
 transported into a dark dungeon. Dietrich returns to Gunther, 
 and after a long combat throws him at last upon the ground, 
 surcharges him with fetters and brings him before Chrimhild. 
 " Know, noble lady, know," says he then to her, " that never 
 valiant men like these were delivered prisoners to a queen. 
 Permit my friendship to preserve their lives." Chrimhild 
 assures him that his prayer would be granted, and the hero 
 retires weeping. 
 
 But scarcely had he departed, when the queen ordered Gun- 
 ther and Hagen to be thrown into separate prisons. Then mak- 
 ing her appearance before the latter, she accosted him thus : 
 " Hagen, if you will restore to me the treasure of which you 
 have robbed me, I will permit you to return to the country of 
 the Burgundians." " My noble queen," replied Hagen, " your 
 words are spoken to the wind. I have sworn, that I would 
 never indicate or surrender the treasure of the Nibelungen to 
 any one, as long as one of my masters is alive." 
 
 At these words of Hagen, Chrimhild leaves him ; but after 
 the lapse of a few moments, she returns, holding a bleeding 
 head by its hair. " You have no longer any master," says she 
 to Hagen, as she presents the head to him, "and now you
 
 Analysis of the Nihelungen. 219 
 
 may reveal to me the secret of the treasure." Ilagen, darting 
 a glance at the head, recognizes it at once as that of Gunther, 
 and overwhelmed with the intensest grief, exclaims: "It all 
 has come to pass, as I have wished it. God and myself now 
 only know where the treasure of the Nibelungen is. Thou, de- 
 mon of a woman, wilt never know, nor ever own a particle 
 of it." 
 
 " I shall have at least this sword of it," was Chrimhild's re- 
 ply ; " it is my Siegfried's ; he wore it when I saw him last." 
 She then seizes the sword by the hilt, and liaving drawn it out 
 of the scabbard brandishes it over Hagen and with a single blow 
 cuts off his head. 
 
 Attila, Hildebrand and Dietrich, meanwhile arriving and 
 perceiving what Chrimhild had done, are seized with horror. 
 Hildebrand cannot restrain his anger ; he rushes upon her and 
 strikes her with such violence, that he kills her. Thus ends the 
 barbarous tragedy.* 
 
 * The poet concludes the terrible action of his epopee with the following two stanzas : 
 
 Jne chan inch niht bescheiden . waz sider da geschach . /^^^^a,e^_ ^?r^. "^^ 
 ' ' "'^'^^wan christen unt heiden , weinen man do sach . ' r c^ 
 
 ^A^ 4 ju.-/k^ wibe unt knehte . unt manige schone meit , -^^^-^'^ ' -, ' *^v'» '^/^ 
 
 jy^^^a^a^^ die heten nach ir friunden . diu aller grozisten leit . ' ' ^*^-^ y. - ,.^y^^ 
 
 <^^-.. *^ .4*4/U J-ic^-^^-y^^^ gggg jy jjjj jjjij^^ j^jgj.g _ Yon der grozen not, -^^ ^=-^^^3^ /«--/?. A^^i,_ uc^ *Vi^ . 
 
 ./-. '' /- 7:^/f die da erslagen waren , die lazen ligen tot . ^ / jy^ i^ • r .^ 
 
 ■ t.i4i^ /^ /**x- ^jg jj, ^j^^.j^ j^jj geviengen . sit der Hunen diet.v;-^*-'*''-'^^'^^- . , Y ^'7*^ '^*«-/.vi*v'J2, 
 
 u J.^ >'- hie hat daz meere eln ende . daz iet der • ,'^/A ,^^ ./ /. / , . ^ 
 
 y *.'■ s<f**^t T^A^-a- I cannot tidings give, of what did afterward take place, -**' -''^ ' •'i?- "^*-<2_-^^ ^^ 
 ^^ ^ ./ / Further than this !-^fair wife and knight were seen with weeping faoo; 
 v^U. >i^'M<^<#*k/^ And eke the trusty yeomanry, wept for their friends no less. ^' ^/ / y''y •. 
 
 ff Thus have I brought unto an end The Niblungek's Djstbess^^^^^^''^ • '' -•' •'^*«- *v 
 
 '^ -^V.t^elK^t an? Bi^f ir^u^Utioa-^M/^''^^^^ ^ '"-'^-^"- -^cl iu 
 ■J -r^ . Z' /r A / //'■''■ 
 
 .^i^t.^^-*^ C,^^t,^- LM-^*-*^ ^i^-^t^ e«— e,2'<i:-/2.^_ U ^t^i^;,^.^ .f'l.t^^.x- i^f-cC ,/^^<-^»_ -^ ^ ,' 
 
 i^/u^^ i^;^^i^^ ^^^ 
 
 ^^.a/r >LL.cL.^ .^wl. ^>^^''^/_^ j^yL,. '^/^'v^ ■ ^^^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 J't.'.'^^A^y^.
 
 ,'^^.-ZJ•*-^v 4^ 
 
 .^7^^>f^^ ^l^li/^iLcft^fJ^ 
 
 .L ^/Jj.t,. t/^-^i ^^^y %^^\f \ 
 
 ,A<^«'V i^'f.^\.~. 
 
 
 
 22(J History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 WALTER OF AQUITANIA. 
 III. ANALYSIS OF WALTER. 
 
 The author of the " Song of the Nibelungen " is entirelj un- 
 known. We can only judge, from the dialect and from various 
 features of his work, that he must have belonged to that nume- 
 rous and brilliant series of Minnesingers, which flourished in 
 Suabia from the end of the twelfth to the commencement of the /o o ^ 
 tourteenth centuries. The composition of the poem must there- '^ 
 fore be referred to that interval, and certainly rather to the be- 
 ginning than to the end of it. In fact, we have every reason 
 to suppose it to be from the first half of the thirteenth century. 
 
 Among the different monuments of ancient Germanic poetry, 
 which are by their subject related to the poem of the Nibelun- 
 gen, there are two that are more immediately and more ex- 
 pressly connected with it. The one is vaguely entitled " The 
 Lamentation," and is generally appended to the " Song of the 
 Nibelungeu." It is merely a sort of compendium, a somewhat 
 diversified recapitulation of that portion, of the latter which de- 
 scribes the scenes at the court of Attila. Its merits are in other 
 respects quite indifterent. It is the work of an unknown poet 
 of the fourteenth century.* 
 
 The other work, which forms a sort of counterpart to the lat- 
 ter, is a short poem of seven or eight hundred verses under the 
 title of " The Horned Siegfried," and constitutes a part of the 
 poetic cycle of the " Heldenbuch," or Book of Heroes.f The 
 
 * This poem may be found in Lachmann's edition of the original text of the Nibe- 
 lungen Lied. It is, however, not now generally jirinted in connection with the epos, 
 to which it was ouce regarded as an indispensable appendix. "It is not in the same 
 metre as the Nibelungen Lied, but in eight-syllable couplets, and contains 4560 lines. 
 In the beginning the adventures of the Nibelungen are shortly recapitulated ; after 
 which King p]tzel is introduced, accompanied by Dietrich of Berne and Hildebrand, 
 searching for the fallen heroes among the ashes of tlie hall, where the combat had taken 
 place, and lamenting over every one of them, as they discover their features." Com- 
 pare Henry Weber in the " Illustrations of Northern Antiquities," p. 211. — Ed. 
 
 t The original of this " Hiirnen Seyfried " may be found in the second volume of Von 
 der Hagen and Primisser's " Heldenbuch in der Ursprache," Berlin, 1825. This poem 
 has the same metrical structure as the Nibelungen, and contains 179 stanzas. — Ed.
 
 Analysis of Walter. 221 
 
 poem treats only of the early adventures of Siegfried, of his com- 
 bat with the dragon, and of the antecedents of his marriage to 
 Ohrimhild. There is a prose version of it, which circulates as 
 a popular tale in all the provinces of Germany. It is a favo- 
 rite volume of the hibliotheque hleile (popular literature) on the 
 other side of the Rhine. All these different works are like so 
 many threads, by which the traditions relative to the particular 
 fable of the Nibelungen, link themselves to the great body of 
 the ancient poetic traditions of the Germans. 
 
 The most important peculiarity to be observed in all these 
 poems is, that each of them has its peculiar physlognamy : that 
 in all of them the same substance has undergone a number of 
 characteristic variations, which prove that they are neither the 
 copy nor the imitation of each other, but that each of them de- 
 rives its origin directly and through distinct channels from the 
 common source of the primitive traditions. 
 
 In my remarks on the Scandinavian redaction of the fable of 
 the Nibelungen, such as it is presented to us in the Yolsunga 
 Saga, it was easy for me to show, and I have shown con- 
 clusively, that this poetic chronicle was nothing more than a 
 union or fusion of different popular or national songs on the 
 isolated incidents of the event, which constitutes its sub- 
 ject. 
 
 There is no doubt, but that the great poem of the ISTibelun- 
 gen is likewise only a more extended or more consistenly 
 arranged redaction of several detached songs and poems on the 
 same subject, more ancient than itself. It is however not so 
 easy in this instance to demonstrate this proposition to a cer- 
 tainty.* 
 
 Inasmuch as the Germans were converted to Christianity 
 much sooner than their Scandinavian brethren, the poetic tra- 
 ditions of pagan times must likewise have been lost, and in 
 fact were lost, at a much earlier date among the former than 
 among the latter. The literature of the Germans can show 
 nothing that corresponds or is equivalent to those songs of the i 
 Elder Edda, in which we have recognized the members of the { 
 fable of the Nibelungen in their , primitive, disjected and 1/ 
 detached shape, still forming each of itself a separate and/ 
 independent whole, apart from all the rest. 
 
 The history of Germanic literature, however, exhibits never- 
 theless some vestiges of modifications or of successive transfor- 
 mations, which the same fable has undergone before assuming ' 
 the final form, in which it is now fixed, and in which it seems 
 
 * On this subject consult Wilhelm Grimm's " Deutsche HeUlensage ;" Lachmann's 
 "Nibelungen Lied in seiner urspriinglichen Gestalt;" Grimm's " Altdanische Helden- 
 lieder," Preface; Gervinus' " Deutsche Dichtung," vol. 1st. — Ed.
 
 222 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 destined to remain immortal. These vestiges deserve to be 
 noticed. 
 
 Tlie author of the " Lamentation," or the " Complaint of the 
 Nibehmgen," of which I have just spoken, conchides his work 
 with a very curious historical epilogue, in which he conveys to 
 us the following information : 
 / It was a certain bishop of Passau, in Hungary, by the name 
 of Pelerin, that ordered all the adventures in the history of the 
 Nibelungen to be collected and written out in Latin.* 
 
 The work was undertaken from motives of affection for liis 
 kinsman Rudiger, the margrave of Bechlare. He employed a 
 certain master Conrad for this purpose, but we know not 
 exactly in what capacity ; whether it was as translator or as a 
 simple copyist. 
 
 The author adds, that it was after and on the authority of 
 this first Latin history of the Nibelungen, that various poets, 
 his predecessors, translated the same adventures into German, 
 which afterward became familiar to all the world. 
 
 Pelerin, tlie bishop of Passau, mentioned in this epilogue, lived 
 in the course of the tenth century, until the year 991. Rudi- 
 ger, the margrave of Bechlare, who is designated as his kins- 
 man, died in the year 916. In making this collection of the 
 ancient poetical traditions, relative to the Nibelungen, whicli 
 were then in circulation in the southeast of Germany^ it is sup- 
 posed to liave been his intention to interpolate a eulogy on this 
 margrave Rudiger, who, as we have already seen, really plays 
 a conspicuous and an admirable role in it. 
 
 According to these conjectures, all of which are plausible 
 enough, the present poem of the Nibelungen would have had 
 for its basis a Latin narrative, redacted during the second half 
 of the tentli century (from 960 to 980). 
 
 But this narrative itself was based on old popular songs of 
 the epic kind, on narratives or traditions, which were anterior 
 to itself, and of which we here and there still discover some 
 vestiges. 
 
 Ill a Saxon poem entitled " Beowulf," and composed during 
 the ninth century at thedatest, we find allusions to the history 
 of Siegfried and of the famous dragon Fafnir, which however 
 according to this Saxon tradition was not slain by Siegfried 
 liinisclf, but by his father Sigmund.f 
 
 * Von Pazowe der bischof Pilarerin . dufch liebe der neven sin . 
 hiez schribcn disiu maere . wie cz crgangen wacre . 
 mit latiuischen buochstaben . daz nianz fiir ware solde haben . 
 wan ini seit der videliBre . diti kiintlicliiu masre . 
 wie ez ergienk unde geschach . wan er ez horte unde sach . 
 er unde manic ander man . da'z maere do briefen began . 
 ein schriber, meister Kuonrat . 
 
 Klage, V. 2145-2151.— JE:d. 
 
 •f Tliis precious fragment is printed in Eccard's " Coramentarii de Rebus Franciae
 
 Analysis of Walter. 223 
 
 I have already alluded to those barbaric songs in the Frank- 
 ish idiom, which Cliarlemagne ordered to be collected and 
 committed to writing. No one has said anything concerning 
 the theme of these songs. It is however natural to suppose, 
 that some of them has direct reference to those famous adven- 
 tures of the Kibelungen, which are so intimately connected 
 with the heroic epochs of the Goths, the Burgundians and the 
 Franks themselves. All these songs were lost at a very early 
 day, especially among the Franks of Gaul. The bigoted 
 repugnance, which Louis le Debonnaire exhibited for these 
 remains of the ancient Germanic paganism, may perha^^s have 
 accelerated this oblivion. 
 
 All that is now left to us of the kind, is a single fragment of 
 sixty verses in one of the Germanic dialects, which we mav 
 suppose with considerable probability to have formed a part of 
 the songs collected by Charlemagne, and which might serve to 
 give U8 a general idea of them all. The subject of this pre- 
 cious fragment is an adventure of old Hildebrand, of that va- 
 liant servant of Dietrich of Verona, with whom we are already 
 familiar as one of the most conspicuous characters of the Nibe- 
 lungen, in M^liich he kills the ferocious Chrimhild. Without 
 belonging directly to the ftible of the Kibelungen, the piece is 
 nevertheless connected with it through the medium of this Hil- 
 debrand, and might perhaps be strictly classed among those 
 isolated songs, which at a later period were reproduced in the 
 present form of the fable.* 
 
 In the twelfth century some of these songs were still pre- 
 served by memory. In 1130, a Saxon poet or minstrel apprised 
 Knod, .the duke of Schleswick, of a consj^iracy then plotted 
 against him by singing to him of the treachery, by which 
 Clirimhild attracted her three brothers to the court of Attila. 
 
 In the sixteenth century, or but a short time before it, the 
 Danes still sung their short detached poems on the principal 
 adventures of the Kibelungen. Three of these poems are still 
 preserved in the Danish collections of popular songs. All three 
 of them treat of Chrimhild's revenge, and of the massacre of 
 the Kibelungen among the Huns. It is quite a remarkable 
 fact, that the authors of the three poems or songs in question 
 have followed the Germanic traditions in preference to those of 
 the Korth, although the Danes belong to the Scandinavian 
 branch of the Teutons.f 
 
 Orientalis," torn. i. p. 864, sq.— It has also been edited by Jacob Grimm, in "Die 
 beiden altesten Gediclite aus dem 8ten Jahrhundert," etc., Cassel, 1812.— A reprint of 
 the original text, with a Latin and Enijlish version of it. is furnished us by the author of 
 the "Illustrations of Northern Antiquities," p. 215-220.— /-W. i 
 
 * Ci'Ti_)are Kemble's notes to his edition of Bsowulf. London, 1835. Vol. 1st, pape I 
 25S-233. Also Thorpe's edition of the same, Oxford. 1855. } 
 
 t A few of those Danish songs are giveu us in English bj' one of the authors of the
 
 224 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 There is, however, a great difference between the details of 
 those Danish songs and those portions of the Nibelungen, to 
 which they correspond. They do not appear to have been 
 derived from the latter, but seem rather to ascend, by a living 
 and an uninterrupted tradition, to that primitive mass of shorter 
 epopees, which preceded and entered into the composition of the 
 final and the great one. 
 
 In default of all these indications concerning the different 
 transformations, through which the Germanic fable of the 
 Kibelungen must have passed before it became the celebrated 
 poem, which we now have under this title, an attentive exami- 
 nation of the work will suffice to enable us to discover the 
 successive labor of diverse authors, and the impress of different 
 epochs. The traits of barbarous haughtiness and courage, of 
 indomitable ferocity, of inexorable hatred, must be referred to 
 the primitive elements, to the pagan ingredients of the subject. 
 
 The beliefs and the external practices of Christianity were 
 forced into a violent adaptation to these primitive barbaric 
 elements, we do not know exactly at what time, but very 
 j^robably in the course of the tenth century, when the bishop 
 of Passau ordered the above named collection and Latin trans- 
 lation of all the songs and detached legends concerning the 
 adventures of the Nibelungen, which were afloat in the popular 
 traditions of his day. The ancient Germanic manners had 
 certainly then already lost much of their primitive rudeness. 
 The age had probably commenced to conceive a heroism of a 
 more humane and of a milder type, than that of tlie old Bur- 
 gundians and Huns. I doubt, however, whether the character 
 of Rudigcr, as it is portrayed in the present poem of the 
 JSTibelungen, could have been invented in Germany at the epoch 
 of the Latin redaction, that is to say, between 970 and 980. 
 Several traits of this character were, in all probability, added by 
 the poet, who, in the thirteenth century remolded the narrative 
 composed in the tenth, under the auspices of the bishop of 
 Passau. 
 
 But, that the allusions to tlie manners and usages of chi- 
 valry contained in the poem must all of them be attributed to 
 the unknown Minnesinger, who was its last redactor— this can 
 not be a matter of any doubt. The tinge of gallantry, with which 
 he sometimes invests those parts of his subject, where he treats 
 
 " Illustrations of Northern Antiquities," q. v. — A collection of them, in the German 
 language, in \V. C. Grimm's '• Altdanisuhe Heldenlieder, Balladen, u. Marchen." Thia 
 editor vindicates a high antiquity for these heroic songs, and points out their relation to 
 those of the Germanic tribes, now no longer extant, in his learned preface to the volume : 
 *• Was die Heldenlieder betrift, so tragen wir kein Bedenken, sie fiir uralt auszugeben, 
 uud ihre Eutstehung weit zuriick, in die heidnische Zeit des 5ten u. 6ten Jahrhunderts, 
 iiu schieben. Es lebt der Geist jener furchtbaren alten Zeit in ihnen, unddas Geschlecht 
 der Riesen, welche am Eingange jeder Geschichte stehen,"~^'d.
 
 Analysis of Walter. 225 
 
 of fair princesses, of enamored warriors and of nuptial rejoic- 
 ings, is unquestionably of his own invention. 
 
 I have not the time for carrying these observations any 
 further, but there are soirre of them, to which I shall natu- 
 rally have to return again in the parallel I propose to draw 
 between the poem of the Nibeiungen and that of Walter of 
 Aquitania. The latter is now to occupy our attention ; and I 
 shall endeavor to give such an idea of it, as may serve as a basis 
 fur those ulterior researches and considerations, which a work y 
 of such varied interest and importance requires and deserves.* // 
 
 This poem is not a long one. It has only fourteen hundred 
 and fifty verses. It is, however, still too much to admit of my 
 translating it entire. I shall translate the greater part of it, and 
 of the rest 1 shall add a sufficiently detailed epitome, to indicate 
 the progress and the ensemble of the action with something 
 like completeness. 
 
 Attila, having become king of the Huns, was ambitious of 
 making for himself a great name by his victories, and he 
 accordingly commenced to march at the head of his armies in 
 search of conquest. The Franks were the first enemy he 
 encountered on his expedition. They had a king by the name 
 of Gibich, whose queen had just given birth to a son to whom 
 he gave the name of Guntlier. 
 
 When it w^as announced to him, that an army of Huns had 
 passed the Danube, more numerous than the grains of sand 
 along the stream, and than the stars of heaven, he assembled 
 his counsellors in order to deliberate on what was best to be 
 done. They came to the unanimous conclusion, that they would 
 rather submit, pay tribute, and give hostages, than expose 
 themselves to ruin, or see their country devastated, their infants 
 and their wives led captive. 
 
 There was then among the Franks a noble chief of Trojan 
 descent, having a son called Ilagen, who, though yet a little 
 boy, already promised to become a valiant man. It was 
 decided, that Ilagen should be sent to Attila, as a hostage, in 
 place of Gunther, wdio was as yet an infant at the breast. 
 
 After the conclusion of this peace, Attila directed his course 
 toward the kingdom of the Burgundians, then a flourishing and 
 powerful country under a king called Ilerric. This was a 
 noble king, but he had no other heir to his crown except a little 
 daughter by the name of Hildegunde. 
 
 The Huns had already passed the Rhone and the Saone, and 
 
 * Such of the readers as may chose to follow the author in this analysis with the text 
 of the poem before them, will find it in Grimm's " Lateinische Gedichte aus dem loten 
 ■Jahrhundert,"Gottingeu,183S; fragments of it in the " Chronicon Novaliciense," which 
 isto be founJin Pertz's '•Monumenta Germ. Hist.," vol. ix.. p. 75, in Muratori's "Autiq. 
 Ital." vol. iiiv, col. C'J5. A German translation by Molter, Carlsruhe, 1818.— ^d. 
 
 15
 
 226 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 in scattered bodies were pillaging tlie country. Herri c was at 
 Chalons, when one of his sentinels, directing his looks to the 
 distant fields, began to exclaim : " What a hnge cloud of dust ! 
 This is an enemy advancing. Quick! Close the gates!'* 
 Instead of accepting, however, this call to arms, the king 
 deliberates and decides on treating. Going out of the city, he 
 repairs to the camp of the Huns with immense treasures and 
 concludes a peace, leaving his daughter as hostage ; wliile 
 Attila pursues his march toward the west. 
 
 A prince by the name of Alfer was then reigning in Aqui- 
 tania. He had a son, as yet a little boy, who was called 
 Walter. This king and that of the Burgundians had promised 
 each other that their children should be united in marriage as 
 soon as they were of a proper age. When informed of the 
 approach of the Huns, and of the submission of the Franks 
 and the Burgundians, Alter was in great distress, and gave up 
 the hope of defending himself. " Let us make peace," said he 
 to himself, " we shall not be dishonored for having acted like 
 the Franks and the Burgundians." Tliereupon he sends his 
 tribute and his son Walter as a hostage to the Huns, who hav- 
 ing now arrived at the furthermost limits of the West, resume 
 their journey to their own country with alacrity and joy. 
 
 Attila treated the three children, which he had brought with 
 him as hostages, with the utmost tenderness, and had them 
 educated with the same care as if they were his own- He wanted 
 to have the two young boys constantly under his eye, and he had 
 them instructed in everything, especially in martial exercises, 
 in such a manner, that they soon surpassed in point of bravery 
 and prudence the bravest and the wisest of the Huns.* Attila 
 placed them at the head of his army ; they brought several 
 wars, which happened to occur, to a glorious termination, and 
 the king loved both of them more and more every day. 
 
 Hildegunde, on the other hand, pleased the wife of Attila so 
 much' by her graceful manners, her gentleness and her address, 
 that the queen intrusted her with the care of her treasures; and 
 the young captive was thus herself a queen and the mistress of 
 her own actions.f Meantime, Gibich, the king of the Fi-anks, 
 had died, and his son Gunther, who had succeeded him, broke 
 the treaty of peace with the Huns, by refusing to pay them the 
 stipulated tribute. Hagen was no sooner informed of this than 
 
 * V. 103 : Qui slmul ingenio crescentes mentis et sevo, 
 Kobore vincebant fortes animoque sophistas. 
 Donee jam cunctos superarent fortiter Hunnos. 
 Militiic primos tunc Attila fecerat illos ; 
 Sed non immerito — Ed. 
 
 t V. 114 : Et modicum deest, quin regnet et ipsa ; 
 
 Nam quidquid voloit de rebus fecit et actis,— £d.
 
 Analysis of Walter, 227 
 
 he fled secretly by niglit, and returned for the purpose of 
 rejoining his new monarch. Walter was at this moment carry- 
 ing on war at the head of his Huns, and his movements were 
 everywhere attended with success. 
 
 Ospirn, the queen, having become informed of Ilagen's 
 escape, and fearing that of Walter, who was universally 
 regarded as the pillar of the empire, earnestly exhorted Attila 
 to marry him to a princess selected from the daughters of the 
 Huns, and provided with a rich dowry, in order to be surer of 
 retaining him in his service. The king approved lier advice, 
 and when Walter, who was then away on some campaign, had 
 returned with his army, he offered the young warrior a beauti- 
 ful wife and immense riches. But Walter, who had already 
 other designs in his head, refused, under tlie j^retext of being 
 unwilling to contract an alliance which might divert him from 
 his military life and from the service of the king. A new war- 
 having broken out soon after, Walter again had the command 
 of it, and distinguished himself even more than ordinarily. 
 Upon his return to the capital he is received with great demon- 
 strations of delight on tl\e part of the peoj^le. But the hero 
 withdraws from tlie scene of congratulation and of joy at an 
 early hour, and without thinking of his repose, although very 
 mucli fatigued. 
 
 Having entered the palace, he immediately repaire to tlie 
 apartments of the king, where he finds Plildegunde all alone. 
 Embracing her in the most affectionate manner, he says to her, 
 "I am dying with thirst, go and get me something to drink." 
 They both were aware that they had been affianced to each 
 other from their infancy. Ilildegmido bestirs herself; she im- 
 mediately fills a large and costly goblet with wine, and presents 
 it to Walter. The latter takes it in one hand, while making 
 the sign of the cross ; and with the other he holds and presses 
 that of liis affianced, who, standing before him, looks at him 
 without saying a word. After having quaffed the beverage, 
 the youth returns the empty cup to her with these words : 
 " Our lot is a connnon and a mutual one, Ilildegundo ; we are 
 both of us exiles; we have been betrothed to each other; have 
 the affianced nothing to say to each other ?" 
 
 Hiidegunde, under the impression that AValter was merely 
 jesting, hesitates a moment and then replies: " Why dost thou 
 say what thou really dost not desire and what is not in thy 
 heart? Canst thou still recognize me, poor captive that I am, 
 as thy betrothed ?" 
 
 " Far be it from my intention to trifle with thee," was the 
 joung warrior's replj^, " there is no deceit in what I say, Hiide- 
 gunde. We are alone here, and if I could believe thee pos-
 
 228 Illstoi'y of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 sessed of a little tenderness for me and of confidence in my 
 advice, I should instantly reveal to thee the secrets of my heart." 
 At these words, Hildegundc, courtesying to Walter, said to 
 him : " Command, my lord, and whatever thy command may 
 be, it shall be done with more alacrity than if it were my own 
 desire," " I am weary of exile," rejoined "Walter, " I cannot 
 help thinking every day of Aquitania, my sweet native land. 
 I have therefore resolved to fiee secretly, and I should already 
 have departed, had it not been for the chagrin of abandoning 
 Ilildegunde." " Whatever my master may ordain, pleasure or 
 pain, my love for him will make it all agreeable and sweet to 
 me," was Hildegunde's reply. 
 
 Thereupon Walter, continuing the conversation, said to Hil- 
 degundc in a low voice : " The queen has intrusted thee witli 
 the care of her treasures. Select in the first place, one of the 
 king's helmets, a coat of mail and a cuirass, bearing the mark 
 of its workman. Take then two small boxes and fill each of 
 them with pearls and jewels, to such an extent that you can 
 scarcely carry them. Make four pair of shoes for me and as 
 many for thyself, which thou shalt put into the boxes to fill up 
 the vacant space. Order the queen's workmen to fabricate 
 hooks for catching birds and fishes ; this will be our food on 
 our way, and I shall myself be the fisherman and the fowler. 
 Be careful to have everything ready within a week from now. 
 
 " I will now tell thee how I propose to manage in regard to 
 our flight. Seven days hence, I shall prepare a great banquet 
 to the king, the queen, the princes and all the chiefs of the 
 land. I shall use all the means in my power to make them 
 drink to such an excess, that not one of them shall be capable 
 of perceiving anything around him. Thou shalt drink no more 
 wine than is absolutely necessary to (piench thy thirst, and when 
 they all shall be buried in the sleep of inebriety, we will take 
 our departure for the West." 
 
 Hildegunde did all that her lover had commanded. On the 
 seventh day, Walter i)repares a magnificent feast, of which it 
 would be superfluous to give a descri])tion here. I may also omit 
 relating in detail how all the guests present ended by falling 
 asleep pell-mell, and to such an extent that Walter and Hilde- 
 gunde were the only persons in the palace, that remained in a 
 condition to will or to do a rational thing. 
 
 Walter then calls his lady-love, and orders her to bring the 
 diff'erent articles she had prepared for the way, while he him- 
 self leads forth from the stable his excellent charger, the very 
 best of horses, which from its strength and courage he had 
 called the lion. After having saddled and bridled him, he 
 loads him with some provisions, and with the two boxes filled
 
 Analysis of Walter. 229 
 
 witli precious objects. He himself thereupon dons his cuirass, 
 puts on his helmet, fits his golden greaves to his feet, and girds 
 on two swords, according to the usage of the Huns, a two-edged 
 one on his left side, and a single-edged one on his right. 
 In his right hand he holds a lance, in his left a buckler and a 
 fishing-rod, and thus provided and equipped he sets out on his 
 march, which he begins with somewhat taltering and uncertain 
 steps. Hildegunde follows, leading the horse, that carried their 
 treasure, their baggage and a few arrows, by its bridle.^ 
 
 Thus they commenced and thus they pursued their journey. 
 They were in the habit of travelling all night long ; but at 
 sunrise they sought the w'oods for some sequestered spot where 
 they might hide themselves and take their rest. Poor Hilde- 
 gunde was disquieted by everything. Everything inspired her 
 with dread, the noise of the wind, the rustling of the leaves, 
 the flight of a bird. But she was fleeing from the land of exile, 
 she was returning to her native soil, and this thought was to her 
 a source of strength and hope. They carefully avoided the 
 merry boroughs, the fertile plains, and sought by way of pre- 
 ference the uninhabited and wild places of the mountains and 
 the forests. 
 
 Meanwhile they at the palace of Attila awake at last from 
 their long slumber, and the king himself is the first of the 
 number. He looks for Walter, he orders his attendants to 
 search for him, he inquires of every one, but none can give 
 him any information in regard to him. Nevertheless he has 
 as yet no sinister suspicions, until queen Ospirn, whom the dis- 
 appearance of Hildegunde had enabled to divine the whole, 
 comes to announce the truth of the story to the king. 
 
 Attila, transported with rage at the news, tears his garments, 
 gives utterance to broken and delirious words, and refuses to 
 admit anyone into his presence; he rejects all nourishment 
 and drink. At night he throws himself on his bed, but he can 
 find no rest. He turns over from one side to the other ; he 
 rises suddenly and then falls back again. After having thus 
 passed a restless night, he summons his officers and counsellors 
 in the morning, and he accosts them thus : " Is tliere an}-- one- 
 among you that -can bring me back Walter, bring him back 
 bound, like a dog that has escaped from his master ? If there 
 is, let hiixi show himself and I w^ill cover and overload him with 
 gold." 
 
 Among those present, there were dukes, counts, valiant heroes, 
 ambitious of glory and renown ; there were others again, who- 
 were fond of gold, and yet none of them was bold enough to- 
 venture on the pursuit of Walter, and to run the risk of en- 
 countering him face to face or of having a passage of arms w^itlt
 
 230 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 liim. His valor and his strengtli were too well known to them ; 
 thej had seen him too often cuttinoj down entire troops of war- 
 riors, without even being wounded himself. Tlie king could 
 therefore not prevail on any one to go in pursuit of the fugi- 
 tive. 
 
 And the fugitive continued to pursue his journey by night, 
 and to pass his days in the woods where he occupied himself 
 by catching birds with every kind of snares. But whenever 
 he arrived at the banks of some river, he took out his tackle and 
 began to fish, thus providing, sometimes in one way and some- 
 times in another, food for himself and for his lady-love, with 
 whom he never took the slightest liberty.* 
 
 Forty days had thus elapsed, since the young hero had left 
 Attila's residence, and on the evening of the fortieth day he 
 arrived at the banks of a great river called the Ehine, which 
 flows by a certain city, the capital of a kingdom, called Worms. 
 There Walter gave in payment of his passage some fish which 
 he had caught before in another place, and after having been 
 instantly ferried across the stream, he again pursued his home- 
 ward journey with increased rapidity. 
 
 On the morning of the following day, the boatman, who had 
 conveyed him across the stream, rose at a very early hour, in 
 order to go to AVorms, and there carried the fish, which he had 
 received as payment, to the king's cook. Tlie fish were cooked, 
 and served up on Gunther's table, who on examining them said 
 to his cuisimer : " I never saw such fish before in the country 
 of the Franks ; they must be foreign fish. Pray tell me where 
 they come from."f The cook replied tliat it was the boatman 
 who had given them to him. The king then immediately sends 
 for the latter, who on his arrival recounts the manner in which 
 he had obtained them in the following terms: 
 
 "Yesterday, as I happened to be on the banks of the Rhine, 
 I saw a traveller advancing toward me with rapid strides, who 
 seemed ready for combat, clad in steel from head to foot, his 
 lance in one hand and his buckler in tlie other. He had the 
 appearance of being a man of great strength ; for under the 
 enormous weight of his arms he marched with an easy and a 
 rapid step, lie was followed by a young lady of enclianting 
 beauty, leading a horse by the bridle, surmounted by tAvo boxes 
 which at every movement of the horse emitted a sound similar 
 to the chinking of little bits of silver and of gold. This is all 
 
 * Sicque famis pestem pepulit tolerando laborem. 
 Naiiique toto tempore fuga? se virginis nsu 
 Continuit vir Waltharius, laudabilis hero. — Ed. 
 
 t V. 443 : Ergo istiusmodi pisces mihi Francia nunqnam ostendit, 
 Die mihi quantotius, cuihas homo detulit illos. — Ed.
 
 Analysis of Walter. 231 
 
 tliat I can tell about the man wlio has given me the fish in pay- 
 ment for his passage." 
 
 When Hagen, who was among the nnmber of the guests, 
 heard these words, he exclaimed joyfully : " Congratulate me ! 
 From what I now hear, I am sure that my friend Walter has 
 returned from the country of the Huns !"* " Congratulate me' 
 too !" was King Guntlier's exclamation then, " for God returns 
 me now the treasures which my father long ago was forced to 
 send to Kinc; Attila." 
 
 No sooner has he said these words, than he strikes the 
 table with his foot, and rising abruptly orders his horse to be 
 saddled and brought to him, mounts it and commands twelve 
 of the strongest and most daring of his warriors, with Kagen 
 at their head, to follow him. Hagen, who has not forgotten 
 his old friend and companion in exile, endeavors to divert the 
 king from his design ; but the latter, so far from listening to 
 him, is all the more impatient for it and exclaims : " Quick ! my 
 gallant warriors, make haste ! Let all of you be armed ; put on 
 your coats of mail ; let us not suffer a treasure to escape."t 
 
 In a moment they were all ready ; a moment more and they 
 were on the traces of the king, anxious to overtake Walter, 
 ijager to despoil him of his booty. Hagen alone made another 
 attempt to check the king, but the latter still refused to listen 
 to his advice.:}: 
 
 Meanwhile the brave Aquitanian was advancing further and 
 further from the banks of the Khine, until at last he reached the 
 forest of the Yosges. This was a dense forest of immense extent, 
 full of wild beasts and perpetually resounding with the din of 
 horns and the barking of hounds. In an out-of-the-way part of 
 this forest and in a narrow defile of the mountains there was 
 a cavern, formed not by a subterranean chasm, but by the 
 falling of the mountain-top, and within its limits grew many 
 green herbs which were good to eat. 
 
 " Let us ascend thither," said Walter ; " there I shall at last 
 
 * V. 446 : Congaudete mihi, quaeso, quia talia novi. 
 
 Waltharius, coUega meus, remeavit ab Huais. — Ed. 
 
 f V. 481 : Ne tardate viri ! praecingite corpora ferro! 
 
 3(t 5p ^ 3r *l!r *P 
 
 V. 515 : Accelerate viri ! jam nunc capietis eumdera. 
 
 Numquam hodie effugiet ; furata taleuta relinquet. — Ed. 
 
 % Hagen uses tlie following language in his attempt to divert Guntlier from his 
 
 purpose : 
 
 V. 520 : Si toties tu Waltharium pugnasse videres, 
 
 Quotiens ego nova casde furentem, 
 
 Nunquam tarn facile spoliaudum forte putares, 
 * * * * # * 
 
 V. 527 : Quisquis ei congressus erat, mox Tartara vidit. 
 O rex et comites, experto credite, quantus 
 la clipeum surgat, qua turbine torqueat hastam — Ed.
 
 232 History of Provenqal Poetyy. 
 
 be able to repose at my ease and in safety." And indeed, be 
 was very mncb in want of it ; for ever since tbe commence- 
 ment of bis fligbt be bad never bad any rest except by leaning 
 on bis sbield, and be bad scarcely ever closed bis eyes. Tbis 
 time be lays aside bis armor, and placing bis bead upon tlie 
 'knees of bis affianced, be says to ber: " Be on tby guard, Hil- 
 degunde ; tbe air is pure and bere is a fine prospect over all tbe 
 country. Look carefully on every side, and if tbou seest clouds 
 of dust arising anywbere, tben wake me gently, gently witb a 
 ligbt toucb of tbe band ; and even if tbou sbouldst see a wbole 
 army advancing toward our biding-place, beware, my darling, of 
 rousing me too suddenly." In uttering tbese words be falls asleep. 
 
 Meanwbile Guntber, wbile riding along witb full speed, dis- 
 covers footsteps in tbe dust, and be exclaims, deligbted : " On- 
 ward ! my brave warriors, we've found it ! we've got tbe trea- 
 sure be bas stolen !" But Hagen replied : " My master, badst 
 tbou seen Walter as often as I bave seen bim, witb bis arms in 
 bis bands, tbou wouldst not be in sucb a baste to join bim ; 
 tbou wouldst not deem it so easy to rob bim of wbat be bolds. 
 I bave followed tbe Huns to tbe battlefield ; I bave seen Walter 
 at tlieir bead combating tbe nations botb of tbe Nortb and of 
 tbe Soutb, and I bave witnessed tbe fall of all wlio ventured to 
 attack bim." Ilagen's expostulation was in vain. Tbe king- 
 was constantly advancing closer toward tbe mountain, until 
 Hildegunde from tbe top discovered tbe cloud of dust raised by 
 tbe feet of tbeir borses. Sbe tben awakens Walter gently and 
 by degrees, and tbe warrior, witb bis eyes balf open, asks ber 
 wbetber sbe saw anytbing. " I see," says Hildegunde, " I see 
 sometbing like a troop of men advancing from below." 
 
 Then Walter, sbaking ofi' bis sleep entirely, puts on bis armor, 
 resumes bis lance and buckler, and prepares for combat. At 
 tbis very moment Hildegunde perceives tbe glittering of lances 
 and distinguisbes a body of mounted warriors. " Tbere are tbe 
 Huns !" sbe tben exclaims wbile falling on ber knees, " alas, 
 tbere are tbe Huns ! O, my sweet master, cut oflf my bead ; 
 and let not ber wbo was to be tliine own be toucbed by an- 
 otber !" * " Do not say so, do not speak tbus, my gentle 
 friend," replied tbe youthful hero ; " banisb all fear and let me 
 manage, Hildegunde ! God, wbo bas so often rescued me from 
 danger, will also be my help in tbis emergency." 
 
 While pronouncing tbese words, lie lifts up bis eyes and tben 
 immediately adds witb a' smile : " No, no, tbese are not tbe 
 Huns ; they are Frankisb bandits, men of the country, and I 
 
 Hunos hie, inqnit, habemns. 
 
 Obsecro, mi senior, mea colla .seoentur, 
 
 Ut quse non nierui thalamo tibi sociari, 
 
 Nullius jam ulterius paciar consocia caruis — Ed.
 
 Analysis of Walter. 21)3 
 
 perceive among them my friend Hagen ; I know liim by liis 
 helmet." Thereupon lie takes his position at the extremity of 
 the cavern and continues to encourage Hildegunde who stands 
 trembling behind him. " Ko, no, I venture to predict that not 
 one of the Franks who comes to seek me here will ever 
 return to boast to his wife of having taken anything from 
 me." 
 
 But scarcely had he finished these words, when he condemns 
 them again as too haughty, and on his knees beseeches God to 
 pardon him. He theiT takes a second look at the Franks and 
 examines them more closely. " Of all those whom I see be- 
 low," says he, " I am afraid of none but Hagen. He alone 
 knows my way of fighting, and though I also know his own, I 
 am well aware how strong and brave he is. K I get through 
 with him, I have nothing to fear from the rest, Hildegunde ; I 
 shall then still live for you." 
 
 When Hagen on the other hand saw Walter so well in- 
 trenched, he turns to the king and says : " I beseech you again, 
 my lord, do not provoke this warrior ! Send first a messenger 
 to him to inquire after his name, his family and country ; from 
 whence he came, and whether he would not rather surrender 
 his treasure than risk a hostile encounter with us. If, as I pre- 
 sume, this man is really Walter, Walter is a discreet and pru- 
 dent man, and will perhaps comply with your request from mo- 
 tives of generosity and honor." 
 
 Guntlier approves the advice. He orders Kamelon to go and 
 make this proposal to the stranger. Kamelon was tlie governor 
 of the famous city of Metz. He had been sent there from the 
 country of the Franks and it was then his place of residence. 
 He had come to the court of Gunther for the purpose of bring- 
 ing him some presents, and he had only arrived the day before 
 the news from Walter became known. When he had heard 
 the order of the king, Kamelon flies with the speed of wind ; 
 he traverses the plain, ascends the mountain, and having ap- 
 proached the young warrior within speaking distance, he thus 
 accosts him : "Stranger, tell who thou art, whence thou comest 
 and whither thou art going ?" 
 
 " Tell me thyself first," replied Walter, " whether thou coni- 
 €st of thine own accord or at the behest of another." " It is the 
 powerful King Gunther who sends me to get some information 
 in regard to thy affairs," was Kamelon's reply. "I do not 
 know what inducement thy king could have to inquire into the 
 affairs of travellers," rejoined Walter ; " but I am quite willing 
 to satisfy his curiosity in regard to mine. My name is Walter 
 and I was born in Aquitania. When yet an infant, my father 
 gave me as a hostage to the Huns. I lived among them for a
 
 234: History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 long time ; but I liave left them at last, desirous of revisiting 
 my dear country and my friends." 
 
 " This being so," says Kamelon then, " the king orders thee 
 by my mouth to deliver up this horse, these two boxes and this 
 young lady. If thou obeyest, he will spare thy life and grant 
 thee an unmolested passage." " I do not think that I ever 
 heard such nonsense before," replied Walter with a smile. 
 " What dost thou offer me on the part of thy king? — that, which 
 he as yet does not possess and which will probably be never at 
 his disposal ? Is thy king God, to promise me my life ? Am I 
 in his hands ? Does he keep me in prison with my hands tied 
 behind my back? Listen, however, to my word: if thy mas- 
 ter, whom I can see from here all armed, does not challenge 
 mo to combat, I am willing out of respect for his royal name to 
 offer him a present of a hundred golden bracelets." 
 
 Kamelon leaves, for the purpose of conveying this proposi- 
 tion to the king and his companions. " Accept this hundred 
 of golden bracelets," says Hagen ; " thou wilt then have some- 
 thing wherewith thou mayest make presents to thy men. Ac- 
 cept the bracelets and renounce the combat ! Thou dost not 
 know nor canst thou even imagine the force and courage of this 
 Walter. I had a dream last night, by which I was informed, 
 that all will not turn out according to our wishes, if we fight. 
 Methought I saw thee fighting with a bear, which after a long 
 struggle seized and devoured one of thy legs. I rushed to thy 
 assistance, and then the beast darted at me and robbed me of an 
 eve." 
 
 " How much thou art like Agarim, thy father !" was the 
 king's contemptuous reply. " He too was wont to tremble at 
 every forebodement, and always had his reasons for declining 
 combat." At these words the gallant Hagen is transported 
 with rage. " Very well then, let the rest of you fight ! There 
 is the enemy you are in search of. As for myself, I'll be a 
 looker on, and I'll relinquish to you my share of the spoils." 
 He had scarcely uttered these words, when he dismounted 
 from his horse and ascended a neighboring hill, from which he 
 could conveniently survey the scene that was about to take 
 place. 
 
 Then the king, turning to Kamelon, said to him : " Keturn 
 to the stranger instantly, and tell him that I want all his gold ; 
 and if he still persists in his refusal, if he be brave and valiant 
 like thyself, then fight with him and bring to me the spoils." 
 Kamelon, the duke of Metz, returns at once to the eminence 
 and calls to Walter from a distance : " Holla ! friend, hearken ! 
 The king wants all thy gold, and on that price alone depend 
 thy life and safety." The young warrior makes him repeat
 
 Analysis of Walter. 235 
 
 these words once more and nearer to himself than he had done 
 the first time, and then replies : " Thou art really very impor- 
 tunate, my friend. Have I then robbed King Gunther? Or 
 has this Gunther ever lent me aught, for which he might exact 
 exorbitant usury, like this ? Have I, in passing through your 
 country, committed so many depredations, as to be forced to 
 pay such heavy damages ? But no matter ! Since this people 
 is so greedy after the property of others, I will consent to pay 
 my passage dearly. Instead of one hundred bracelets of gold, 
 I will*itherefore offer two hundred to thy king." 
 
 Kamclon, indignant at these words, retorts : " Xo more of 
 thy empty talk! If I get not thy gold, I'll have thy life." 
 Thereupon, protecting himself with his shield, he hurls the jave- 
 lin, which he was holding in his hand, with all his might. Wal- 
 ter avoids the javelin, which is buried in the ground. "You 
 have desired it," says he, " you have desired to fight; very well 
 then, let us fight ! "While uttering these words, he hurls his 
 javelin in his turn, which, striking Kamelon on his left side and 
 transfixing the hand with which he was endeavoring to draw 
 his sword from its scabbard, nails it to the shoulder of his horse. 
 The wounded animal becomes restless and rears in its agony, 
 endeavoring to throw its rider ; the latter, however, remains 
 riveted to it with one of his hands. Kamelon then throws 
 away his shield and endeavors with his left hand to extract the 
 javelin that had pierced his right; but at this very instant 
 Walter pounces upon him, and after having plunged iiis sword 
 up to the hilt in his body, extracts the javelin himself. The 
 knight and his horse both fall together, one upon the other. 
 
 The description of Walter's contest with eleven of the twelve 
 champions who successively assail him for the purpose of rob- 
 bing him of his treasures is a very long one, and although there 
 is no lack of picturesqueness and variety in its incidents, I yet 
 have thouglit it proper to abridge it considerably. I shall 
 therefore only translate its most characteristic portions. Of the 
 rest it will be sufficient to give an abstract. 
 
 The second champion, that presents himself for combat, is a 
 young man by the name of Kimo, a nephew of Kamclon, whose 
 death he is full of eagerness to revenge. But in spite of his 
 ardor and his bravery he falls after a few moments, and makes 
 room for Gherard, an expert archer, who is also prostrated in 
 liis turn, without having inflicted even a scratch of a wound on 
 AV alter. The fourth assailant is a Saxon by the name of 
 Egfried. At this point of the story the text offers some remark- 
 able peculiarities, which I now propose to translate. 
 
 Gunther is not at all discouraged at the siglit of the three 
 corpses of his warriors. He urges others to march forward to
 
 236 Ilistory of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 the combat. Egfried tlie Saxon advances in his tiim, mounted 
 on a spotted charger. No sooner does Walter perceive him 
 within proper distance and ready to fight, than he exclaims : 
 " Tell me whether thou art a tangible body, a veritable being 
 of flesh and bone, or whether thou art not rather a mere airy 
 phantom ? Never have I seen any one that resembles the sav- 
 age spirits of the woods as much as thou dost." Egfried replies 
 with a smile : " Thy Celtic speech betrays too clearly, that 
 thou art born of that race of men which nature has made buf- 
 foons above all others. If thou approachest within the reach 
 of my sword, thou mayst hereafter relate to the Saxons that 
 thou hast combated a spirit of the woods in one of the moun- 
 tains of the Yosges. But far off as thou art, this javelin will 
 soon tell me whether thou art made of spirit or of flesh." 
 Thereupon he hurls his javelin, the point of which is broken in 
 Walter's shield, and the latter, discharging his missile in his 
 turn, says : " Here, take what the bufloon of Aquitania sends 
 in exchauge to the spirit of the woods." The missile piercing 
 Egfried's buckler and breaking his coat of mail, transfixes his 
 lungs. 
 
 The fifth combat I shall pass over in silence, but the sixth is 
 extremely interesting, A young warrior by the name of Pata- 
 fi-ied, Hagen's nephew, now advances against the Aquitanian 
 hero. 
 
 His uncle, perceiving him from the top of the hill, endeavors 
 to check him and halloas : " Stay, I beseech thee ! Where art 
 thou going, giddy youth ? Dost thou not see that death 's be- 
 fore thee? 'Tis thy presumption that has made thee blind, 
 dear nephew. Thou hast not strength enough to combat Wal- 
 ter." But Patafried is unwilling to listen to the friendly ad- 
 vice ; the love of glory impels him onward, and Hagen's lamen- 
 tations at his obstinacy are in vain. Walter, though yet at a 
 considerable distance, nevertheless perceives the chagrin of his 
 former companion, and addressing himself to Patafried as 
 he advances toward him, he says: "Brave youth, permit me 
 to give thee an advice. Do not listen to thy blind impetuosity, 
 and preserve thyself for a better lot. Look at these corpses 
 here ; they too were gallant men. Renounce this combat, I 
 entreat tliee ; do not constrain mo to deprive thee of thy life ; 
 do not render me odious by thy death." 
 
 " Why dost thou trouble thyself about my death, thou inso- 
 lent Aquitanian V was the youth's reply. " Desist from fur- 
 ther words and be ready to defend thyself." He then launches 
 his pike at the Aquitanian. The latter wards it off" with his 
 own, and the pike flies on until it strikes the ground before the 
 feet of Hildegunde, who in her fright shrieks out aloud ; and
 
 A7ialysis of Walter. 237 
 
 after recovering to some extent from lier agitation, scarcely ven- 
 tures to raise her eyes to see whether her friend was still alive. 
 AValter requests the young man a second time to retreat ; but 
 the latter without replying draws his sword. Walter having at 
 last become incensed, protects himself with his buckler and 
 evades the blow, but the miss stretches his antagonist flat upon 
 the ground. And it would now have been all over with him, if 
 in his movement to parry the blow, Walter had not fallen on 
 his knees. They both rise at the same time. But in the twink- 
 ling of an eye, the obstinate young man falls again to rise no 
 more. 
 
 After the death of Gerwit, the count of Worms, and the sev- 
 enth of the champions immolated by the hand of Walter, the 
 remaining warriors begin to vacillate in their resolution and to 
 beseech the king to refrain from further hostilities. But the 
 king, unable to reconcile himself to the shame of failing in an 
 attempt which he had thought so easy, exhorts them not to lose 
 their courage and to avenge their companions like brave men. 
 Several of them would have proceeded together to attack the 
 invincible Aquitanian, but the position which the latter had 
 adopted did not admit of the approach of more than one at a 
 time. 
 
 AValter, perceiving their hesitation and embarrassment, 
 makes haste to profit by it. He doffs his helmet and suspend- 
 ing it on a tree he wipes his face which was completely covered 
 Avith sweat, and inhales for a moment at his ease the sweet 
 freshness of the air around him. 
 
 But lo ! the hero is attacked by the eighth champion, who 
 darts at him in full gallop before he has had the time to put 
 himself on his guard again or to don his helmet. But in spite 
 of these disadvantages, Walter soon gets the better of the im- 
 portunate assailant without any difficulty. 
 
 The ninth assault has this interesting peculiarity about it, 
 that it presents to us a ])icture of a mode of combat which is 
 quite peculiar to the Franks. Four adversaries unite their 
 efltorts against Walter. Ilelmnod is the first to advance, witli 
 his angon in his hand, which was to be launched at Walter. The 
 angon was a sort of iron trident or triple arrow with recurvate 
 barbs, attached to a long cord or line, the end of which rested 
 in the hand of him who was to hurl it. Ilelmnod's angon was 
 attached to three cords. He hurls it at AValter, and the wea- 
 pon becomes instantly riveted to the hero's buckler, Ilelmnod 
 holding on to one of the cords, while Trogunt and Tenaste, 
 the tenth and the eleventh champions, aided by the king him- 
 self, pull at the three cords at the same time, in order to make 
 the hero fall to the ground. They finally succeed in wresting
 
 238 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 his buckler from him, and they now flatter themselves with the 
 prospect of an easy victory, which appears so much the more 
 certain, as Walter has not yet found leisure to take up his hel- 
 met again. 
 
 But Walter remains erect and immovable, in spite of all the 
 desperate eftbrts of the four champions. Finally, however, irri- 
 tated at a struggle in which he expended his strength in vain, 
 he throws away his buckler and rushing upon the four cham- 
 pions kills Helmnod and Trogunt, before they were able to 
 take up their arms again, which they had laid aside in order to 
 pull at the cord of the angon. Tenaste, though already in pos- 
 session of his lance and buckler, is likewise vanquished and slain. 
 King Gunther alone escapes from the blows of Walter, and 
 having mounted his steed flies straight to Hagen, who from the 
 eminence on which he had remained had been a witness to all 
 these proceedings. Here I shall stop abridging and recommence 
 translating. 
 
 Having come up to Hagen, the king conjures him to come 
 to his assistance, and to join him in his attempt to combat 
 -.-Hagen. " What a requirement," was Hagen's reply ; " am I 
 not a coward ? — a man whose blood is chilled at the approach 
 of danger? Did not my sire turn pale at the sight of an 
 arrow, and did he not always have his reasons for refusing to 
 flght? Hast thou not said all this before my companions in 
 arms ? Yery well ! I owe no longer anything to a king who 
 has spoken after this fashion." 
 
 But Gunther redoubles his entreaties : " In the name of 
 heaven, Hagen, lay aside thy anger, give up thy spite ! I have 
 offended tliee, it is true, and I acknowledge it. But ask any 
 reparation thou mayst see fit, and there is none but what I am 
 willing to make thee. See here thy comrades stretched dead 
 upon the ground ! Ai't thou not ashamed to let them molder 
 without revenge ? Could words have inflicted deeper wounds 
 on thee than the blows which struck them dead ? Alas ! thy 
 resentment ought rather to be directed against him who slew 
 them, and who to-day will j^robably deprive us all of our honor. 
 To have lost all these our gallant men is a great calamity, but 
 to lose our fame and'glory, too, is much worse still. Oh! how 
 shall we wipe away so terrible a disgrace? Where are our 
 chiefs ? the Franks will presently ask us with a derisive smile. 
 What! have all of them been slain by a single man, by a 
 stranger, by an unknown combatant ?" 
 
 Hagen still hesitates in spite of all these prayers ; he thinks 
 of his former friendship toward AValter, and of the years they 
 had spent together ; but he sees his king a suppliant before 
 him, and, more than all, he dreads the loss of his heroic fame,
 
 Analysis of Walter. 239 
 
 in case lie should persist in his resolution not to fight. And yet 
 he at last works up his mind to it : " What is it thou art com- 
 manding, my lord ?" said he to Gunther ; " whatever it may 
 be, I am ready to obey thee. Only let us not attempt the 
 impossible, let us not perpetrate any folly. I know "Walter 
 well ; lie would have made of all of them what he has made of 
 eleven ; he would have accomplished in the open field what he 
 has done in this narrow mountain-pass. Nevertheless, since 
 thou meditatest a new assault, since shame even more than 
 grief impel thee to revenge, I'll sacrifice my sense of gratitude 
 and I'll be ready to assist thee. But let us not combat here. 
 Let us retreat, and let us draw Walter from his vantage-ground. 
 Let us lay an ambuscade somewhere, until, under the impres- 
 sion that we have left, he descends from his eminence and pur- 
 sues his journey across the plain. Then let us attack him from 
 behind with all our force united. Since thou desirest to fight, 
 be careful to be ready for stern efibrt on the occasion. I'll 
 guarantee that Walter will not flee, though he may be assailed 
 by both of us." 
 
 Hagen's advice meets with the approbation of the king. He 
 embraces him with joy, and both of them depart in search of a 
 place where they might hide themselves conveniently and find 
 suitable pasture for their horses. 
 
 At the approach of night, the Aquitanian deliberates within 
 himself whether it was expedient for him to pursue his journey 
 directly across the plain, or whether it was best to spend the 
 night in safety in the mountain cave. He is distrustful of 
 Hagen on account of the embrace which he had seen the king 
 bestow on him. Sometimes he apprehends that his two 
 adversaries might only have returned to the city, in order to 
 return again by night with reinforcements, and to attack him 
 again by daybreak; sometimes he again suspects that they 
 might both be concealed in ambush somewhere in the vicinity. 
 He is moreover totally unacquainted with the by-ways of the 
 forest ; he might go astray, or he might lead his lady-love to 
 the verge of some precipice or to the haunts of savage beasts. 
 After having duly considered all these things, he says to liim- 
 self : "My part is chosen ; I shall pass the night here, and this 
 insolent king shall not be able to say that I've escaped into 
 obscurity like a robber." 
 
 After having uttered these words, lie proceeds to cut bushes, 
 branches and stakes, wherewith he closes the entrance of the 
 defile. This being accomplished, he bends sobbing over the 
 corpses of those whom he had slain, embraces them one after 
 the other, and kneeling with his face toward the east, and his 
 Bword unsheathed in his hand, he pronounces the following
 
 210 nistory of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 prayer : " I thank the Creator of all things, him without whose 
 permission nothing can take place, for having protected me 
 against the attacks and insults of my enemies, and I humbly 
 beseech the Lord, who desires the destruction of evil but not 
 of evil-doers, to permit me to see all these departed eneuoties 
 again in heaven." 
 
 After having finished his prayer, he rises and begins to wattle 
 some small twigs into the shape of ropes, wherewith he fastens 
 the six remaining horses of those which had been brought by 
 Gunther's men. He then disencumbers himself of the weight 
 of his armor, and turning to his young friend consoles her with 
 tender and affectionate words. They take a little nourishment, 
 and Walter, reclining on his shield, commits the first watch of 
 the night to his fair companion, reserving the second, the 
 matinat and the most perilous of the two, for himself. Hilde- 
 gunde, sitting by his side, keeps her vigils according to her 
 custom, warbling various songs in order to keep herself awake. 
 On awaking from his first nap, the Aquitanian invites his love 
 to rest in her turn, while he himself, in a standing attitude and 
 leaning on his lance, keeps watch in his turn by her side._ He 
 thus passes the rest of the night, sometimes listening attentively, 
 in order to assure himself whether he did not hear some noise, 
 either close at hand or afar off, sometimes looking toward the 
 east to watch the approach of day. 
 
 At daybreak, Walter strips the dead, not of their garments, 
 but of their armors, their bracelets, their baldricks, their hel- 
 mets, their swords, and with all this he loads four of the six 
 horses of which he had despoiled his enemies ; he places his 
 afiianced on the fifth and keeps the sixth himself. 
 
 After removing the obstructions from the entrance of the 
 cave, he first advances a short distance for the purpose of recon- 
 noitering the country around him and of listening whether the 
 wind might not bring some noise, that of a horse marching or 
 shaking its bridle, or that of the clashing of steel. He hears 
 nothing, and he decides on setting out. He puts the four horses 
 loaded with the newly-acquired" booty in front; his fair com- 
 panion on her charger follows next, while lie himself in com- 
 plete armor closes the rear, leading the horse, which carried 
 their treasure, by its bridle. 
 
 They had scarcely advanced a thousand paces, when Hilde- 
 gunde began to tremble in every limb ; on looking behind her, 
 she perceived two men descending precipitously from an 
 adjoining eminence. "Alas I our death has only been 
 retarded," she then exclaims; "flee, my lord, flee, they are 
 approaching toward us!" Walter turning around, perceives 
 the two men, and recognizing them at once, exclaims : " No,
 
 Analysis of Walter. 211 
 
 dear Hildegunde, no, I shall not flee. I "would rather fight once 
 more, I would rather die. But we must not yet despair ; I 
 have had many an escape from greater perils than the one 
 before us. Come ! Take Lion by his bridle and retire as quick 
 as possible to the neighboring woods. I will remain here to 
 await the emergency and to reply to those whom I see coming," 
 Hildegunde retires in obedience to his request, while Walter 
 arms himself with hi? shield and brandishing his lance tries the 
 unknown charger he had mounted. 
 
 He had scarcely finished, when the two adversaries were 
 already close at hand ; Hagen behind and King Gunther in 
 advance, who thus accosts the Aquitanian hero : " Here then 
 thou art, fierce enemy of ours, out of the lair, where thou hadst 
 lain concealed and where thou didst grind thy teeth, like a 
 dog! Thou comest here to fight on open ground, and we shall 
 see whether the issue will corresj^ond with thy beginning, 
 whether thou wilt keep the treasure thou hast stolen and which 
 renders thee so brave." 
 
 The Aquitanian hero scarcely deigns to look at the king, nor 
 does he favor him with a reply. Turning to Ila^en then, he 
 thus addresses him : " Listen to me for a moment, Hagen ; thou 
 art the only one I wish to speak to. Tell me, what is it that 
 could have changed thy former amity so suddenly ? What 
 have I done that thou shouldst lift thy sword against me ? 
 Alas! I had expected other things of you! I had imagined, 
 that if peradventure thou shouldst hear of my escape from 
 among the Hims, thou wouldst come forth to meet me with 
 alacrity, in order to congratulate me on my deliverance ; that 
 thou wouldst keep me, that thou wouldst conduct me to the 
 kingdom of thy father. I feared tliat thou mightst detain me 
 too long ! When I was forced to traverse unknown regions, I 
 tried to tranquillize myself; I said to myself : ' No, I have nothing 
 to fear from the Franks ; Hagen is there among them !' Eecall 
 to mind our infancy, our earliest sports, and our first arms. Was 
 there ever any quarrel between us? I loved thy father as I did 
 my own, and I forgot my om'u fair country while I lived in 
 thine. Ah! I conjure thee, do not violate our old friendship, 
 and let us refrain from fighting with eacli other ! Dost thou 
 want gold ? I'll oft'er thee as much as will content thy heart ; 
 I'll fill the hollow of thy shield with it." 
 
 To this discourse Hagen replies with an angry air : " Tliou 
 beginst by striking, Walter, and then resortest to arguments. 
 It is thou that hast broken our former friendship. When so 
 many of my companions and my kindred fell by thy hand, 
 didst thou not know that I was here ? Didst thou not recog- 
 nize me by my arms ? Perhaps I might have pardoned thee 
 
 16
 
 242 Ilislory of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 thy cruelties, except one ; but thou hast smitten with thy sword 
 a youth whom I cherished above all other beings on earth, who 
 was dear to all, amiable and comely, a tender blossom. This is 
 the blow that severed our union ! I do not want thy gold ; I 
 want to know whether thou art the only brave man in the 
 world ; I want to avenge my nephew." 
 
 Having spoken thus, he dismounts his charger with a back- 
 ward leap ; Gunther does the same thing, and Walter is already 
 on liis feet, like themselves. Hagen is the first to launch his 
 terrible javelin, which sweeps the air along its course in whirl- 
 winds. But Walter, perceiving its approach, interposes his 
 buckler obliquely in an instant ; by which, as by the polished 
 face of marble, the gliding steel is turned aside and speeding 
 plunges onward, until it is completely buried in the ground. 
 Gunther in his turn hurls his spear ; but the steel sticks nerveless 
 to the buckler's edge of his antagonist, who with the slightest 
 movement of his arm precipitates it to the ground. 
 
 Enraged by the miscarriage of their blows, the two Franks, 
 protected by their bucklers, endeavor now to assail their adver- 
 sary with their swords in hand. But the latter inspires them 
 with the terror of his own, and repulses them whenever they 
 attempt to approach too close. Gunther then makes the mad 
 attempt to regain his javelin, which still stands firmly rooted 
 in the ground at the feet of the Aquitanian ; but the latter does 
 not permit him to advance. Tlie king tlien beckons to Hagen, 
 to interpose his person between liimself and Walter, in order to 
 intercept tlie movements of the latter, and sheathing instantly 
 his sword again for the purpose of gaining freedom of motion 
 for his light hand, he stoops at last to seize his javelin. But 
 Walter, intent on all the movements of his enemies, gives 
 Hagen a vigorous repulse, and having placed his foot upon the 
 javelin, at the very moment when the king was going to grasp 
 it, he presses it upon the knee of the latter until he crushes it. 
 He would have been a dead man, had not Hagen, instantly 
 advancing to his support, guarded him with his buckler, while 
 he presented the point of his sword to the front of the Aquita- 
 nian. The latter dodges to avoid the blow, and the king 
 seizes the propitious moment to get upon his feet again, still 
 trembling at the danger he had just incurred. 
 
 Tlie combat, which had commenced at the second hour of 
 the day, prolongs itself until the ninth. I deem it necessary 
 to cut short some of its details, whicli might prove trying to 
 the patience of the reader. It may sufiice to know, that Walter 
 and his two adversaries end tlieir encounter by inflicting on 
 each other, blow after blow, tlie most frightful injuries and 
 gashes. The sword of his antagonist carries oflF, at a single
 
 Analysis of Walter. 243 
 
 cut, one-lialf of Guntlier's leg and a foot besides. Walter lias 
 his right hand severed by the glaive of Hagen, whom by a stab 
 of his poniard he in revenge robs of his right eye. The follow- 
 ing is an exact though somewhat curtailed translation of the 
 conclusion of the poem. A few passages only of a somewhat 
 equivocal effect are omitted : 
 
 Wounded and exhausted the three warriors at last cease from 
 their combat. Walter and Plagen maintain a sitting posture ; 
 Gunther lies extended on the ground. The hero of Aquitania 
 then calls his trembling Hildegunde, who approaches the three 
 bleeding combatants, in order to dress their wounds. " Now 
 for a draught of j)ure refreshing wine," says Walter ; " pour 
 first for Hagen, for though he be a faithless friend, he is yet a 
 valiant champion. I shall drink next, as having had more 
 work than all the rest. Gunther, who compels the brave to 
 fight, and who himself does nothing worth the name in combat 
 — shall drink last." 
 
 Hildegunde offers Hagen to drink ; but the latter, although 
 consumed with burning thirst, declines the cup : " Give thine 
 affianced, thy master, first to drink," says he to Hildegunde ; 
 " for he is, I must avow it, not only a better' warrior than I, but 
 the best of warriors." 
 
 The Frank and the Aquitanian thereupon commence to 
 drink and to converse merrily together, in memory of their 
 former friendship ; which finished, they lift np Gunther, who 
 liad thus far remained prostrate on the ground, harassed by tlie 
 aching of his wonnds, and having seated him upon a horse, they , 
 resume their respective routes, the Franks toward Worms and 
 AV^alter toward Aquitania. The reception of the latter was 
 attended with great honor and rejoicings. After the death of 
 his father he reigned in the place of the latter for the space of 
 thirty years, and was greatly beloved by his people. 
 
 The poem concludes with two verses, the purport of which 
 is, that the versifier of the poem, weary of the task he has thus 
 far pursued, is determined to waive the celebration of the for- 
 midable military enterprises and of the many triumphs which 
 were achieved during the reign of this monarch. 
 
 Regarded as a mere oratorical flourish, these lines would be 
 insignificant enough. It appears, however, more probable, that 
 they have a real signification, and in that event they imply a 
 continuation of or a sequel to the poem of Walter, which we no 
 longer possess, and which has shared the fate of the introduc- 
 tory narrative of the epojjee.
 
 244 nUtory of Provengal Poetry, 
 
 CHAPTEE XIL 
 
 WALTER OF AQUITANIA- 
 IV. PKOVENgAL OEIGIN OF THE POEM. 
 
 The links, by wliicli tlie subject of the poem of the Walter oi 
 Aquitania is connected with that of the Nibehingen, appear 
 already sufficiently manifest from several general data, common 
 to both these epopees. Thus both, for example, take alike for 
 granted the existence of a Grermanic kingdom on the left bank 
 of the Rhine, the cajiital of which is Worms, its chief a king 
 called Gunther, the son of another king whose name is Gibich. 
 The Ilagano or Hagen of the Latin poem is identical with the 
 Ilagen of the Nibelungen. There is even this singular coinci- 
 dence, that this latter personage occupies the second rank m 
 both the poems, wherein he also figures as the adversary of the 
 hero. The action, lastly, of the principal scenes in Walter and 
 in the Nibelungen both is carried on in the same places, viz. ; 
 at the court of Attila and in the forests of the Yosges. 
 
 These points of coincidence, however, which we encounter in 
 both these poems are of a vague and general order ; there are 
 others more precise and intimate, which it is important to indi- 
 cate more in detail, and which indeed it is equally easy to 
 establish. y /■ a.^^ ^z U 
 
 The action of the Latm poem is by a number of years ante- 
 rior to that of the Nibelungen ; it is therefore in the latter, that 
 we would be most likely to encounter traces of the connection 
 which may subsist between the one and the other, and it is 
 here where we do really find them to exist. The Nibelungen 
 contain diverse allusions to the adventures of Walter — allusions, 
 the tenor and value of which it is indispensable to estimate 
 with proper circumspection. 
 
 I shall notice in the first place one, which belongs to the 
 passage of the Nibelungen in which Chrimhild's first attempt 
 to destroy Hagen is recounted. Ilagen and Yolker, as the 
 reader may remember, have just seated themselves beneath the 
 window of the queen, from no other motive than the pleasure
 
 Provengal Origin of Walter. 215 
 
 of defying her. Chrimhild dispatches four hundred warriors 
 against them, and tliey are already advancing to assail them. 
 But after having come into the presence of the two champions, 
 their courage fails them ; they begin to reason about the perils 
 of the enterprise, and they at last mutually exhort each other 
 to return as they had come. There is one, among others, who 
 addresses his companion in the following terms: 
 
 "Were one to give me a heap of gold as high as yon tower, 
 I should not be willing to attack that player of the flute, so 
 great is the terror I read in his look. I also know Ilagen, I 
 have known him from my boyhood. Let them say what they 
 may against that brave hero ; I myself have seen him in twenty 
 battles, which have made many a woman weep. Walter and 
 he signalized themselves by grand exploits at the time, when 
 they journeyed hither together, combating for King Attila's 
 honor."* 
 
 Tliis allusion attests in the most explicit manner, what the 
 action of the Latin poem likewise supposes, to wit, that AValter 
 and Hagen had long sojourned among the Huns and had fought 
 together in the service of Attila. The following allusion enters 
 still further into the subject of Walter: 
 
 We liave seen that upon the entrance of the Burgundians into 
 the court of Attila, Hagen and Dietrich of Verona were indulg- 
 ing in an exchange of friendly sentiments. I must add here a 
 particular, which 1 considered myself at liberty to omit in a 
 summary abstract of the Nibelungen. On perceiving Hagen 
 in conversation with Dietrich, Attila is singularly struck with 
 the appearance of the former, and inquires of those around 
 him, who the chief of so martial a person might be. One of 
 the servants of Chrimhild, who happens to be present, eagerly 
 replies that the chief was Hagen of Troneg, the son of Aldrian. 
 Whereupon Attila at once resumes : 
 
 " I knew Aldrian well, Mdien he was my vassal ; he acquired 
 much renown and honor while in my service. I made him a 
 knight, I gave him of my gold, and held him in high esteem on 
 account of his fidelity. I also remember Hagen well. Walter 
 of Spain and he, two noble boys, were my hostages, and attained 
 their age of manhood at my court." I sent hach Ilagen to his 
 home^ and Walter fled with IIildegunde.\ To this the poet 
 
 * This scene is from the xxixth Adventure, which the reader may consult either la 
 the original or in Birch's translation. • I add here the beginning of the passage : 
 
 Do sprach aber ein ander . des selben han ich muot . 
 
 der mir gabe tverne . von rotera golde guot . 
 
 disen videlare . wolde ich niht bestan . 
 
 durch sine swinde bliche . die ich an im gesehen han . — Ed. 
 
 t This scene is described in the concluding verses of the xxviiith Adventure. The 
 allusion to Walter is as follows :
 
 24:6 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 adds, that the king while speaking thus was indulging in rev- 
 eries on olden times, on events that had transpired long ago. 
 
 It is impossible to indicate the principal adventui*e of 
 Walter in a more direct and explicit manner. This adventure, 
 the elopement of the young hero with Hildegunde his affianced, 
 constitutes the groundwork of the entire poem. 
 
 A third passage of the [Nibelungen, relative to Walter, 
 is equally precise and no less remarkable than the preceding, 
 of which it may be called the complement and consummation, 
 for it has reference to the denouement of the poem. This pas- 
 sage is found near the end of the Nibelungen. 
 
 Before attacking Hagen witli his arms in his hands, Dietrich 
 exhorts him to surrender by promising him life and safety. 
 Hagen declines, and Hildebrand, who is witness to the refusal, 
 is amazed at it, and informs the haughty Burgundian, that he 
 would have occasion to repent of it. An altercation then ensues 
 between the two warriors. Ilagen reproaches Hildebrand with 
 having shortly before disgracefully withdra\\Ti from combat. 
 To this reproach Hildebrand retorts with another. " Who is 
 the man," says he to him, " that remained tranquilly seated on 
 his shield before the cave in the Vosges, while Walter of Spain 
 was butchering so many of his friends ?"* 
 
 From these different passages of the IS^ibelungen we may 
 infer with certainty, that prior to the epoch (whatever it may 
 be) in which this poem was composed, the Germans possessed 
 a poetic fable, which was substantially the same with that of 
 Walter the Aquitanian. 
 
 The author of the Nibelungen was familiar with this fable ; 
 it was present before his imagination in all those passages of 
 his work which are analogous to it. His presupposing a gen- 
 eral acquaintance with it authorizes us to believe, that it was 
 in a Germanic dialect. 
 
 This fable was not, however, a mere translation or copy of 
 the actual poem, but rather another version of the same subject 
 with differences and variations in the accessory circumstances 
 and details. The passages quoted from the Kibelungen, how- 
 ever rapid and imperfectly developed, still indicate several of 
 these variations, and necessarily lead us to assume the existence 
 of others. 
 
 Da ich wol erchenne . allez Hagcnen sint . 
 
 ez wrden mine gisel . zwei watlicbiu kint . 
 
 er und von Spane Walther . die wohsen hie zeman . 
 
 Hagenen sande icli widere . Walther rait Hildegunde entran . — Ed. 
 
 * See the xxxviiith or last Adventure of the poem. The passage is as follows : 
 Do sprach meister Hildebrant . zwi verwizzet ir mir daz . 
 nu wer was der uf eime schilde . vor dem Waschen stein saz . 
 do im von Span Walther . so vil der Iriunde sluoc . 
 ouch habt ir noch ze zeigen . an iu selben genuoo . — Ed.
 
 Provengal Origin of Walter. 24:7 
 
 Thus, for example, in the Latin poem Walter is called Walter 
 of Aqnitania, while in the Nibelungen his name is Walter of 
 Spain. 
 
 In the former it is said, that Hagen fled from the court of 
 Attila, where he had received the news of Gibich's death and 
 of Gunther's accession to the throne of Burgundy. In the 
 German poem Attila declares, that he himself had sent back 
 Hagen to his home. In the latter poem the father of Hagen is 
 called Aldrian, in the former Agacien. 
 
 To the author of the Nibelungen, Gunther is a Bnrgundian 
 and king of the Burgundians ; to the author of Walter, Gunther 
 is of Frankish origin and king of the Franks. ^ 
 
 Finally, in spite of the minuteness with which the former -of 
 these two authors enters into the details of Ilagen's history, he 
 yet makes not the slightest allusion to the loss of an eye, which 
 the Burgundian warrior had sustained in his combat with the 
 Aquitanian. This leads us to presume, that in the version of 
 Walter's adventures, which was known to the German poet, the 
 account of the combat in question was dilFerent from that of 
 the Latin poem. 
 
 And the Kibelungen is not the only poem, in which AValter's 
 name occurs. This personage figures likewise in a number of 
 those songs, which enter into the composition of the " Ilelden- 
 buch," or Book of Heroes, and more especially in that which is 
 entitled " The Garden of Roses." * But here, with a singular 
 license of the popular muse, Walter figures as a champion of 
 the Germanic race, as the companion in arms of Siegfried and 
 Hagen, sustaining, in conjunction with them, the glory of the 
 Burgundian name. This poetical naturalization of the Aquita- 
 nian warrior in Germany is another indication, from which, as 
 well as from the above mentioned allusions of the Nibelungen, 
 we may perceive the extent of the popularity, to which the his- 
 tory of this hero had attained on the other side of the Rhine. 
 
 Tlie entire literature of the Germans, however, can shoAv us 
 at present neither a poem nor a fragment of one, of which Wal- 
 ter is properly the hero, and which dwells on his fliglit from 
 the Huns or his combat with the twelve champions of Gunther. 
 These poems have shared the fate of so many others. We find, 
 however, in the Sagas of Iceland curious remains of the same 
 legend. 
 
 Tlie Wilkina-Saga contains a singular version of the legend 
 of Walter, which I deem proper to communicate. It will not be 
 
 * Der Rosengarten, which the reader will find in the first volume of Yonder Hagen's 
 edition of the '• Heldenbuch." Walther is introduced as combatant in the fifteenth 
 rhapsody of the poenu On the two Gardens of Roses, compare "Illustrations of 
 Northern Antiquities," p. 23, 137-166.— ZTd.
 
 248 History of rrovenqal Poetry. 
 
 out of place, however, to say first a few words on tlie clironicle, 
 of which they constitute a part. 
 /: , This Wilkina-Saga* is one of the most singular compilations 
 we {;an conceive of. The author has here collected, trimmed 
 up and coordinated, in a more or less abridged form, all the 
 poetic or romantic fictions, with which he was acquainted, and 
 such as he was acquainted with them, that is to say, very much 
 altered and disfigured. His design was to make one individual 
 whole out of so many difierent pieces, cutting up and parcel- 
 ling out the respective legends for the purpose of embodying 
 them all, of blending and dissolving them into each other. 
 Those of the Korth and those of Germany appear here inter- 
 woven and confounded with others from the South; that of 
 Siegfried with that of Walter ; those whose scene was laid in 
 Spain with others, which had the heart of Scandinavia for their 
 theatre. 
 
 It is generally believed, although without any decisive 
 proofs, that this chronicle was composed about the year 1250, 
 by a Norwegian scholar of Drontheim, by the name of Biorn, 
 who was in the service of Ilakon, the son of Ilakon, king of 
 Norway, who died in 1262, and who was famous for the zeal, 
 with which he patronized the Icelandic translators of chivalric 
 romances, at that time in the zenith of their popularity in 
 Europe. 
 
 Biorn, or whoever else may have been the compiler of the 
 Wilkina-Saga, has added a preface, which is curiovis enough for 
 the traits of naive simplicity in which it abounds. We there 
 perceive, that he had collected all these fictions from a histori- 
 cal motive, and that he regarded them as true. He gravely 
 endeavors to explain, why the heroes of those olden times had 
 such superior swords and such strong arms. He does indeed 
 find something a little strange and supernatural in the exploits 
 and qualities of those heroes. " But God," he observes, " could 
 easily give them all this and even half besides." 
 
 Tlie most interesting trait of this preface, in a literary and 
 historical point of view, is the indication of the sources from 
 which the compiler of the Wilkina-Saga had derived his mate- 
 rials. He expressly declares that he had adopted something 
 from the popular songs of the Scandinavians, but he at the same 
 time confesses to have borrowed and translated the largest por- 
 tion of his work from German sources, and the character and 
 contents of his compilation confirm the truth of his testimony 
 on this point. 
 
 * The Wilkina-Saga, with a Latin translation, -vras published by John PeringskioJd, 
 Stockholm, 1705. An account of this Saga in Jfilller's "Sagabibliothek," vol. ii. A Ger- 
 man version of it is in Von der Hagen's "Nordische Heldenromaue," vols, i., ii., and 
 iii. — Rd.
 
 Provengal Origin of Walter. 249 
 
 Kow, among the Germanic materials of the "Willcina-Saga we 
 must nndoubtedly inchide a particular version of the history of 
 AYalter the Aquitanian. Walter is a person in every respect 
 foreign to the real traditions of the North, to those, which form 
 the groundwork of the Edda, of the Yolsimga-Saga, and of 
 the remaining Scandinavian monuments anterior to the year 
 1250, which may be regarded as the approximative date of the 
 Wilkina-Saga. This Saga, the first and the only one, in which 
 Walter figures, can be nothing more than a translation of a Ger- 
 man narrative (at present no longer extant) of the adventures 
 of the Aquitanian hero, and this narrative may, to a certain ex- 
 tent, be represented by this translation. 
 
 According to this chronicle, Walter is neither an Aquitanian 
 nor the son of an Aquitanian king. He is the nephew of ITer- 
 manrick, and his history is linked from beginning to end to 
 that of the latter, which occupies a conspicuous place in the 
 chronicle. 
 
 Samson of Salerno, a knis^ht of "orodiofious streno-th and cou- 
 rage, who has indeed the air of a poetic representative of one of 
 the Norman conquerors of Sicily — this Samson becomes king of 
 Pouille and of several other countries, which he had conquered 
 by dint of his valor. Hermanrick is the son of Samson ; he 
 succeeds him after his death, adds many new conquests to those 
 he has inherited, and becomes the most powerful monarch of 
 his time. Among the number of his conquests are entire Italy, 
 Greece, and a considerable portion of Spain, rich countries, full 
 of flourishing cities, among which there is one, which the 
 Xorthern romancer designates by the strange and embarrassing 
 name of Waskastein or of Sarcastein, without giving us any ex- 
 plicit information, to which of those countries it belongs. It is 
 to all appearances from this fantastic city, that Walter derives 
 the surname of Wasikhanstein, which he bears in the Icelandic 
 chronicle, and to which I shall have again occasion to advert. 
 
 Hermanrick and Attila enter into a mutual alliance, and on 
 this occasion send each other hostaG:es. Attila mves Hermanrick 
 twelve chevaliers, with Osid, his nephew, at their head. Her- 
 manrick on his part furnished to the king of the Huns twelve 
 other chevaliers, and among them Walter, the son of one of his 
 sisters, then only four years old. 
 
 Walter had already been three years at the court of Attila, 
 when Ilias, the count of Greece, likewise obliged, I knew not 
 for what reason, to give hostages to the king of the Huns, sent 
 him his daughter Hildegunde, seven years of age, which at that 
 time was precisely that of Walter. 
 
 At this same epoch there also resided at the court of Attila 
 a personage of the name of Ilagen ; but the latter was not a
 
 250 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 liostage, and it appears not even a stranger. He was simply a 
 warrior chief in the service of Attila. 
 
 Walter and Hildegunde fell in love with each other at their 
 first interview, and they continued their attachment without 
 the knowledge of Attila, until one day, while walking together 
 in the royal garden, where there was a festival and ball, the 
 two lovers concerted a plan of elopement and of mutual flight 
 into the kingdom of Hermanrick. I propose to give the rest of 
 the story in the language of the German romancer, or rather of 
 his Scandinavian translator. The reader will thus become en- 
 abled to form a better conception of the character of this ver- 
 sion, than he could acquire from an abstract, which might 
 easily become tainted with a tinge of superfluous irony. 
 
 " King Attila did not become apprised of the elopement of 
 the two lovers until the moment when they were already at a 
 great distance fro^ Susat (his capital). They carried a large 
 quantity of gold and precious things away with them, and they 
 fled together without having communicated anything about 
 their project to any of their friends, however intimate. 
 
 " No sooner had the king become assured of the escape of 
 Walter and Hildegunde, than he commanded twelve of his men 
 to pursue them. ' Bring me back all the gold that they have 
 robbed me of,' said he, ' and Walter's head into the bargain.' 
 Among these twelve men there was one who called himself Ha- 
 gen, the son of Aldrian. The twelve knights pursued the fugi- 
 tives with lively speed and soon got within sight of them.* 
 
 " Walter instantly leaps boldly from his steed, deposits Hil- 
 degunde and his trcasur.e on the ground, then mounts upon his 
 saddle again, puts on his helmet and begins to brandish his 
 lance. 'My lord,' says Hildegunde, thereupon, his lady-love, 
 to him, 'it is a pity that thou alone shouldst combat these 
 twelve knights ; flee rather and save thy life.' ' My lady,' was 
 his reply, ' do not weep. Full many a time have I erewhile 
 beheld cleaving of helmets, sundering of shields, cutting of hau- 
 berks and knights dropping headless from their chargers; nay, 
 I myself have even done all this with my own hands. I shall 
 soon have done with these twelve warriors.' 
 
 " Having spoken thus, he spurs on his steed in front of them, 
 and this was the beginning of a rough conflict ; but the combat 
 was already finished before nightfall. Walter had been se- 
 verely wounded, but he had slain eleven of the chevaliers. 
 Ilagen alone had escaped and concealed himself in the forest. 
 
 " Walter returned to his lady and remained in the wood with 
 
 * This account of " Valther af Vaskastccn" is contained in the 85th, 86th, and 87th 
 chapters of the Saga. Compare also Mtiller's remarks in his '' Sagabibliothek," vol. ii., 
 p. 189-199.— £d.
 
 Provengal Origin of Walter. 251 
 
 her. Having elicited sparks from two flints, he lighted a large 
 fire, on which he roasted the haunch of a wild boar. Ililde- 
 gunde and himself then sat down to eat, and they continued 
 until they had consumed all but the bones. While this was 
 passing, Hagen emerged from his place of concealment, and 
 advanced with sword in hand toward the place, where Walter 
 was seated before the fire. He hoped to kill him ; but Hilde- 
 gunde said to Walter : •■ Take care of thyself ! Lo, there comes 
 one of the enemies, whom thou hast combated to-day.' Walter 
 then grasps the bone of the boar, which he had just been pick- 
 ing, and hurling it at Hagen, strikes him with such violence, 
 that he falls prostrate to the ground. But Hagen remains in 
 this position but an instant ; he rises, and mounting his charger 
 again gallops off", to render an account of his expedition to 
 Attila, his royal master. 
 
 " Walter on his part likewise gets to horse again, and con- 
 tinues to ride on with Hildegunde toward the south, across the 
 mountains, until he arrives in the kingdom of Hermanrick." 
 
 We perceive, that this narrative is substantially the same 
 with that of the Latin poem on Walter of Aquitania, and with 
 that other, to which allusion is made in the song of the Nibel- 
 ungen. But in regard to the accessories and details of these 
 three narratives, there are striking and singular discrepancies. 
 It appears to me especially evident, that the Scandinavian ver- 
 sion could not have directly emanated from either of the other 
 two. The points on which it difi'ers from them are salient and 
 numerous. 
 
 It is, however, remarkable enough to find in this Scandina- 
 vian version certain particulars, which seem to have left their 
 imprint on the version known to the author of the Nibelungen 
 — a circumstance, which would lead us to infer, that the former 
 is older than the latter. The Scandinavian version, for exam- 
 ple, contains a peculiarity, which enables us to explain with 
 plausible accuracy, why Walter, who in the Latin poem is 
 Walter of Aquitania, becomes Walter of Spain in the Nibel- 
 ungen. I have already remarked, that in the Wilkina-Saga 
 Hermanrick is represented as ruler over twelve principal cities 
 of Spain. And it was to all appearances on account of some 
 circumstance relative to these twelve cities, or to some one of 
 them, that Walter, the nephew of Hermanrick, received, in tlie 
 Germanic traditions, the surname of Walter of Spain, whicli 
 was retained by the author of the Nibelungen. 
 
 But whatever may be the value of this conjecture, or of those 
 which might be made concerning the remaining variants of 
 Walter's surname, it is manifest, that the Scandinavian version 
 of the history of the Aquitanian hero, when compared with the
 
 252 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 Latin redaction of the same is nothino^ more than a barbarous 
 travesty", an arid resume, destitute of all the interest and charm, 
 by which the details of the latter are pervaded. A poetic 
 fable, however, can only become altered to such an extent and 
 lose so much of its primitive tenor by a traditional circulation 
 of a long period, and this always presupposes a great popularity. 
 And this is an additional reason to believe, that the adventures 
 of AValter of Aquitania were very popular in Germany from an 
 epoch, probably very near that of the composition of the poem, 
 until the thirteenth century. 
 
 And this history did not remain within the confines of Ger- 
 many ; it found its way even to the Slavic nations, who modified 
 or remodelled it after their fashion and appropriated it. Bogu- 
 phali, bishop of Posen, who died in 1253, wrote a chronicle of 
 Poland, in which he gravely inserted the adventures of Walter 
 as a fact in its national history.* 
 
 According to this chronicle, there was " once upon a time" a 
 famous chevalier, by the name of Walter the Strong, possessor 
 of the fortress of Tyneg, in the environs of Cracow. This 
 Walter, while yet in his youth, had crossed the Rhine and had 
 lived for a long time at the court of I know not what king of 
 the Franks, where there was at the same time another young 
 prince, Allman by name, who had come there to acquire the 
 polish of courtly manners. 
 
 This prince sued for the hand of Helgunda, the daughter of 
 the Frankish king ; but the latter could not comply with his 
 request. Walter had already found favor in her eyes ; she 
 loved him and had consented to elope with him to Poland. 
 
 The slighted prince, however, having discovered the project 
 of the two lovers, was firmly resolved to thwart them. Return- 
 ing with all possible speed to his owm country, on the banks 
 of the Rhine, he gives orders to all the boatmen, that they 
 should not convey to the opposite bank any man, that might 
 arrive in company with a woman, for less than a marc of gold 
 as the price of passage, and without instantly informing the 
 king of the event. 
 
 And accordingly when Walter arrived at the bank of the 
 stream and demanded a passage, he was asked a marc of gold 
 and a courier was at once dispatched to convey the intelligence 
 to the king. Walter, not having a marc of gold about him to 
 pay for his passage, crossed the river on horseback Avith Hel- 
 gunda behind him. But when he had arrived on the other 
 side, he there found Allman in arms, and a terrible combat 
 ensued immediately between the two rivals. As long as the 
 
 (] * Bishop Boguphali's travesty of tlie story of Walter is contained in his "Chroni- 
 y con Poloniffi," which forms a part of the " Kerum Silesicarum Scriptores," vol. l&i.— Ed.
 
 pTOvenqal Origin of }Yalter. 253 
 
 prince saw Ilelgunda before liim, and while Walter was fight- 
 ing with his hack to her, the former had the advantage over 
 the latter. But when Walter was driven back, so as to have 
 in his turn Helgunda before him, he cast his eyes upon her, and 
 at the sight of her his strength and fury were augmented to 
 such a degree, that he slew his adversary, and then pursued 
 his journey without any further molestation. 
 
 Up to this point we still recognize a travesty of Walter of 
 Aquitania in this history. But in the whole of the sequel 
 these Polish traditions do not appear to have the slightest con- 
 nection either with the Latin poem concerning Walter, or Avith 
 its different Germanic versions, and I have consequently no- 
 thing further to say about them. 
 
 These are the most unequivocal indications, which I have 
 been able to discover in the Teutonic literature of the Middle 
 Age, concerning the knowledge and the fate of the poem of 
 Walter in Germany. Thus far this poem exhibits every ap- 
 pearance of a work composed by and for the benefit of Ger- 
 mans ; and to these first data respecting the origin of the work, 
 it is necessary to add a circumstance, which up to the present 
 day has been deemed suflicient to augment their weight in the 
 minds of many. The earliest manuscripts, from which the 
 poem of Walter was first made known to the literary Avorld, 
 were discovered in some of the libraries of Germany. 
 
 The first of these manuscripts, which in the course of the last 
 century was found in the archives of one of the Bavarian monas- 
 teries, was designated to be a production of the thirteenth or 
 fourteenth century. And this is all correct. A hundred and 
 sixteen verses, however, are wanting at the end. 
 
 But the greatest curiosity about this manuscript is, that about 
 the year 1780 it fell into the hands of one Jonathan Fischer, 
 who published it at Leipsic in a small quarto volume. To this 
 he added a large medley of notes — most of them superfluous, 
 to say the least — and a preface of admiration, in which he 
 exhibits very little more esprit or discrimination, than in the 
 notes. 
 
 A year or two after, Frederick Molter discovered a secondN 
 manuscript of Walter, in the ducal library at Carlsruhe. This 
 was not only complete, but invaluable on account of its anti- 
 quity. All those, who saw it then, and who have seen it since, 
 are of the unanimous opinion, that it is of the ninth century. 
 From this manuscript Molter made a bad translation of the 
 poem into German verse, which he published in 1782. In 
 1792, twelve years after the publication of Fischer's incomplete 
 text, this same editor added the conclusion of the poem from the 
 manuscript of Carlsruhe.
 
 254 nistory of Proveiu-al Poetry. 
 
 At tlie time, when these discoveries and publications were 
 going on in Germany, the interest, which the literary monu- 
 ments of the Middle Age, both national and foreign, were then 
 inspiring in Germany, was as yet confined to a very limited 
 circle of learned men, generally without any critical discrimi- 
 nation or guiding ideas, who had scarcely a suspicion of the 
 manner, in which these monuments are to be studied, and who 
 not even distinctly knew, what to look for in them. They con- 
 sequently bestowed very little care either upon the text or upon 
 the translation of the poem of Walter ; and no one ever thought 
 of assigning to this composition a definite place in the literary 
 history of the Middle Age. 
 / Some years after, however, when the history of this literature 
 became the object of more general interest and a favorite sub- 
 ject of research among many men of distinguished talent, who 
 endeavored to bring philosophy to the aid of erudition, and 
 who were accustomed to consider the different departments of 
 the history of humanity from a sufficiently elevated point of 
 view, to discover the links, by which they are connected to- 
 gether, so as in fact to form but one and the same history— it 
 was then, I say, that the Latin poem of Walter began to attract 
 more general attention. The different points, by which the ac- 
 tion, which constitutes its subject, is brought in contact with 
 that of the Nibelungen, and through the latter with the ensem- 
 ble of the poetic traditions of Germany, were then for the first 
 time recognized and appreciated. No one now hesitated to 
 perceive in this poem a translation from an original in the Ger- 
 manic dialect, which like the Heldenbuch and the Nibelungen 
 constituted part and parcel of the ancient national poetry of 
 the Germans. 
 
 But notwithstanding all this, a more careful consideration of 
 certain peculiarities, of certain traits, and even of, the general 
 spirt of the work, would liave led to many an objection to this 
 verdict. I shall here only indicate one ; and this is not even 
 the most serious. 
 
 The manuscripts of the poem of Walter, which were disco- 
 vered in Germany, do not offer us any indication repecting the 
 author of this poem. But the style of the work presents certain 
 peculiarities, which, properly* distinguished and appreciated, 
 ought to have led to some doubts in regard to the validity of 
 the opinion, which attributes this work to a German author. 
 In spite of his solemn pretensions to a correct and elegant latin- 
 ity, the versifier of the adventures of Walter of Aquitania has 
 suffered certain barbarisms and forms of expression or phrases, 
 which are foreign to the genius of the Latin language, to escape 
 his pen. These very faults, however, since they unquestionably
 
 ProvenQol Origin of Walter. 255 
 
 proceeded from the vernacular idiom of tlie author, might fur- 
 nish us some light in regard to his country. 
 
 The words of harbaric origin, which occur in the text of 
 the work in question are not numerous ; they do not exceed 
 twelve. Two, at the most, may be of Germanic extraction, 
 though they are likewise found in the Neo-Latin languages. 
 Two are Celtic ; and as for the rest, we do not know exactly, to 
 what language to refer them. It seems, however, more proper 
 and nearer the truth, to attribute them to some one of those 
 ancient Idioms of Gaul, which are now for the most part lost, 
 than to the ancient Germanic dialects, of which considerable 
 remains are yet extant. In support of the former conjecture 
 we may bring another one, still more plausible. 
 
 Besides the barbarisms of individual words, which occur in 
 the text of Walter, there are others, which have reference to its 
 phraseology and style. Now, the majority of these are in ac- 
 cordance with the genius of the Romansh idioms, and appa- 
 rently could have only emanated from the pen of a man, who 
 was accustomed to think and feel in some one of these idioms. 
 From all this it would appear to have been more natural to 
 attribute the poem on Walter of Aquitania to an Italian, a 
 Spaniard, or a Gallo-Roman, than to a German. 
 
 But at the present day, there is no longer any room for con- 
 jecture on this point. Two additional manuscripts of the poem 
 in question, recently discovered, the one in Belgium, in the 
 Municipal Library of Brussels, the other at Paris, in the Royal 
 Library, have made the author of this composition known to us 
 with certainty. The manuscript of Brussels designates a monk 
 of the Abbey of Fleury, or of Saint Benedict on the Loire, by 
 the name of Gerald, as the author, and this statement is con- 
 firmed and developed by the manuscript of the Royal Library. 
 
 In the latter of these manuscripts, the text of the poem is 
 preceded by a dedication of twenty-two leonine verses of the 
 most insipid and semi-barbarous description. The author of 
 this dedication asserts himself to be also that of the poem, and 
 gives his name as Gerald. Though not appearing expressly in 
 the quality of monk, he still gives us to understand, with suf- 
 ficient clearness, that he really was one. Gerald dedicates his 
 work to one of his ecclesiastical brethren, Archambauld or 
 Erkambaldus by name, to whom he gives the title of bishop. 
 " Do not misapprehend," says he to him, " this little book ; it 
 is not the glory of God that is celebrated in it, but the marvel- 
 lous exploits of a warrior called Walter, who was maimed in 
 sev^eral combats." 
 
 We thus perceive it to be a clearly and fully established 
 fact, that the poem of Walter of Aquitania was composed on
 
 256 History of ProvenQol Poetry, 
 
 the banks of the Loire, near the confines of Frankish Ganl and 
 the Aquitania of the Middle Age, and composed by a monk 
 by the name of Gerald, whose vernacular idiom we have every 
 reason to assert to have been a Romansh idiom, and more pro- 
 bably that of the South than that of the North. 
 
 It is much more difficult to determine the date of this com- 
 position. I have just said that the author had a brother bishop 
 or archbishop, whom he calls Archambauld. This circumstance 
 might furnish us a clue to the discovery of the epoch in ques- 
 tion, provided we had a complete list of the bishops of Frankish 
 Gaul ; it might be possible, perhaps, to distinguish among all 
 the bishops, who bore this by no means uncommon name of 
 Archambauld, the particular one to whom this monk Gerald 
 dedicated his verses. But in the present catalogue of bishops, 
 as given in the "Gallia Christiana," I have found but one of the 
 name of Archambauld or Erchenbaldus, and this was the bishop 
 of Strasbourg in 960. 
 
 If, as the scholars of Germany maintain, the manuscript of 
 Walter at the library of Carlsruhe is really of the ninth cen- 
 tury, it is manifest that the Erchenbaldus, to whom this work 
 was dedicated, must have lived at least a century and a half 
 before the personage designated as the bishop of Strasbourg 
 in 960 ; and there are other reasons, which induce us to con- 
 sider the poem in question of an earlier date than the middle 
 of the tenth century. The thoroughly classical and even Vir- 
 gilian pretensions of the author betray an epoch much nearer 
 to the time of Charlemagne and the restoration of Latin letters, 
 which took place under the auspices of this emperor. 
 
 Fischer, on the other hand, the first editor of the poem, 
 undoubtedly goes back too far, when he refers the date of its 
 composition to the sixth century. The inaccuracies and incon- 
 gruities of tlie author's style are of a character which befits the 
 ninth century much better than the sixth. At the latter epocli, 
 the Latin, although already very much degenerated, was still 
 in general use, and it was yet much easier to avoid the influ- 
 ence of the popular idioms. 
 
 But whatever may have been the epoch of Gerald the monk, 
 there is one thing more certain and more important to be estab- 
 lished. It is, that this monk was not exactly the author of the 
 poem ; as he invented neither the action nor the actors. All 
 tiiat he did was, to reduce to verse, and, at the utmost, to am- 
 plify with some ornaments, some classical accessories, a story of 
 a more ancient date and of a more popular tone. This is a fact 
 which monk Gerald himself seems to acknowledge, implicitly 
 at least, toward the close of his work. He concludes with an 
 epilogue of four verses, in which he informs us that what he
 
 Provengal Origin of Walter. 257 
 
 has related concerning the adventures of Walter was but the 
 smallest part of them — was, in fact, nothing more than the be- 
 ginning. During the thirty years of his alleged reign, the hero 
 is supposed to have waged other wars and to have accomplished 
 other prodigies of valor, in the enumeration of which our monk- 
 ish versifier assures us, that he had not the courage to engage. 
 Two verses at the end, which have the appearance of being a 
 postscript of the copyist, likewise contain an allusion to the 
 ancient popularity of the Aquitanian hero : " This," says he, 
 " is the poem of Walter, a man celebrated for his exploits, but 
 terrible." 
 
 The question now arises : When, and in what language, was 
 this first history of Walter composed, which served as a basis 
 to the poem of Gerald ? Was it in the Romansh idiom ? Was 
 it in the Latin ? 
 
 To all these questions we can only reply by conjectures, but 
 these conjectures we shall probably be able to support by sub- 
 sequent investigations. For the present I can only announce 
 them in the most general manner, and I shall confine myself to 
 the simple statement, that the earliest history of Walter must 
 have been written in the course of the seventh century, and in 
 Aquitania. Its language was probably the vulgar or semi- 
 barbarous Latin, which was then still spoken or understood in 
 that country. The peculiarities of style, which we have already 
 noticed in the later version, are in all probability the relics of 
 this popular original, which, as idiomatic forms of the vernacu- 
 lar Romansh, occasionally break through the pedantic pomp 
 of the monkish translation or redaction. 
 
 But whatever may have been the character of this lost orig- 
 inal of Walter, it seems to me that we can scarcely set it entirely 
 aside in an examination of the questions to which the latter 
 may give rise. This point being granted, I proceed at once to 
 broach the most interesting of these questions. "Is there, and 
 in what cense can there be said to be, any historical event at 
 the foundation or in the accessories of the poem concerning 
 Walter?" 
 
 The subject of the poem presents itself in the shape of an 
 episode, as an incident of the grand expedition of Attila into 
 Gaul, which took place in the year 450. This expedition is 
 even briefly described in the first hundred verses of the epos, 
 but this is done in a very unhistorical manner. 
 
 The Burgundians, whom the author already supposes to be 
 established on the Saone, were then still in possession of the 
 tract of country situate between the Bhinc and the Vosges. It 
 is true, that in that situation they offered an impediment to the 
 progress of Attila, but they did not treat with him, nor did 
 
 17
 
 258 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 they give him any hostages ; they were not even exposed to the 
 perplexity of deliberation. Suddenly assailed by the Huns, 
 they were almost completely exterminated, and among the lost 
 was their chief Gundikaire, who, according to the German 
 scholars, was the same personage with the Gunther of the Nibe- 
 lungen. 
 
 From the banks of the Bhine Attila advanced toward the 
 west ; but he did not penetrate into Aquitania, nor did he even 
 pass the Loire. Having laid siege to Orleans, he was obliged 
 to raise it at the approach of Aetius, and to retreat as far as 
 the plains of Chalons on the Marne, on which the famous bat- 
 tle was fought, in which he was completely defeated and 
 obliged to evacuate the country without receiving any hostages, 
 either from Aquitania or from any other province. 
 
 The greater part of Aquitania was then still governed by 
 Roman officers, and still constituted a part of the empire. It 
 was therefore only by a romantic fiction, that the author of 
 Walter could have made of this country in 450 a separate king- 
 dom, with a jjrince-chief of its own by the name of Alfier. The 
 details of the former, therefore, ofi'er us nothing that is proj)erly 
 historical relative to Attila's great occidental expedition. But 
 there are historians who admit a second invasion of the same 
 country by the same conqueror. In support of this opinion 
 they adduce the testimony of Jornandes, who is indeed very 
 explicit on this j)oint. This histoi-ian asserts, without any hesi- 
 tation, that Attila, burning to revenge himself of his defeat at 
 Chalons, on the Visigoths and on the Alani, who as auxiliaries 
 of the empire were then settled on the left bank of the Loire, 
 entered into Gaul a second time ; and on this occasion he might 
 have penetrated into the heart Aquitania. But Thorismund, 
 then king of the Visigoths, hastening to his encounter, is said 
 to have defeated and repulsed him again. 
 
 It is not my business here to discuss the value of the testi- 
 mony of Jornandes, in order to establish a fact, concerning 
 which no other historian says a single word. I have but one 
 observation to make, and it is this, that, even if we were in- 
 clined to regard this second expedition as true as it is improba- 
 ble, the historical allusions contained in the poem of Walter 
 will not square with it any better than with the first. 
 
 There is, therefore, nothing, either in the accessories or in 
 the main groundwork of the poem, which could be admitted as 
 historical, unless it be the fact itself of Attila's expedition into 
 Gaul, in its most general and abstract form. But it is manifest 
 that the poet did not propose the delineation of this event, on 
 which he scarcely ever dwells, as the principal object of his 
 composition ; he only wanted to make it the basis, the frame-
 
 Provenqal Origin of Walter. 259 
 
 work of his real subject, which presents itself to us with all the 
 appearances of a poetic fiction. 
 
 But this very fiction may have a historical aim or motive. 
 Poetry, and more especially the epopee, though outside of the 
 limits of history, is never entirely detached from it, "What- 
 ever it invents, it almost invariably invents for some historical 
 design, in order to celebrate some actual facts, some grand 
 event, some conspicuous personage, some memorable epoch in 
 the life of a nation. 
 
 Supposing now the poem of Walter to have originated in a 
 similar motive, it is important that we should examine into the 
 nature of this motive. 
 
 The hero of the poem, "Walter, is a Gallo-Homan of Aqui- 
 tania, from the country beyond the Loire, and in order that 
 there might be nothing equivocal about the design of the poet, 
 who wishes to distinguish him from the Germans, he makes 
 him speak Celtic, and represents a Frank as reproaching him 
 for belonging to a race which was naturally given to merri- 
 ment and buffoonery — a characteristic at that time generally 
 attributed to the Aquitanians, and especially to the Vascones, 
 who were then the leaders of the ton in Aquitania. 
 • From the beginning of the poem to the end of it, "Walter is 
 represented as the enemy of the Franks, as distrustful of them, 
 and as professing toward them the contempt of a civilized man 
 toward uncouth barbarians. When designating them collec- 
 tively and in a general manner, he calls them bandits and bri- 
 gands of Franks {Franci nebtdones), and he makes many a 
 haughty allusion to their cupidity and love of plunder. He 
 indeed treats with their king, Gunther, for a moment, not how- 
 ever as with a redoubted adversary, but as with a robber, who 
 had taken him at an advantage, and whom it was possible and 
 expedient to get rid of with a little gold. 
 
 But it is especially in point of martial prowess, that the 
 singer of Walter represents his hero as superior to the Ger- 
 mans. Twelve of Gunther's most valiant champions have come 
 in pursuit of him, in order to plunder him. Seven of them 
 assail him, one after the other, and every one of them falls in 
 the combat, which we might be inclined to find too unequal 
 for the glory of the conqueror. At last the three remaining 
 champions, seconded by their king, assail the invincible Aqui- 
 tanian all at once ; but they only tight to meet with tlie fate of 
 their seven comrades in arms, and Gunther can only save him- 
 self by a precipitate flight. 
 
 Hagen, the murderer of Siegfried the hero of the Nibelungen, 
 the warrior, whom certain Germanic fables make the son 
 of an evil genius or demon, in order to account for his fcro-
 
 260 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 cioiis disposition, his bravery and liis prodigious strength — 
 Hagen is the only one among the Franks capable of confronting 
 Walter, and yet he does not venture to challenge him to single 
 combat ; he joins King Gunther in order to attack him, and the 
 two Franks united can obtain no advantage over the Aquita- 
 nian. Finally, as if for the purpose of insuring the rank of the 
 latter on a still firmer basis, the poet proclaims him through 
 tlie mouth of Hagen himself as the strongest and most valiant 
 of warriors. 
 
 There is nothing in all this, I repeat it, which could be con- 
 sidered as positively historical. But it is even more difficult 
 not to perceive in all this a marked poetical intention, the more 
 or less direct, the more or less vague expression of some event 
 or fact. It can not be without design, and as it were by hazard, 
 that a poet, a writer of romances, a subject of the Franks, and 
 perhaps himself of Frankisli origin, in bringing personages of 
 the conquered race in collision with personages from among 
 the conquerors, should have exalted the former at the expense 
 of the latter. It may be assumed as a general truth, that epic 
 poetry has always wished to do what it appears to have done. 
 unless this were so, it would be impossible to connect its his- 
 tory with that of humanity. 
 
 Tliis being taken for granted, it is not difficult to divine the 
 prime intention or the principal m Jtive of the poem of Walter. 
 It was the author's design to celebrate some conspicuous per- 
 sanage of Aquitauia, some chief of the tribes south of the Loire, 
 opposed in point of interest and situation to the Franks, 
 who were the rulers of the rest of Gaul. But although the 
 hypothesis, thus announced, is extremely probable, it is 
 also very vague, and I confess, that it appears to me impos- 
 sible to establish it in such a manner as to give entire satisfac- 
 tion. 
 
 At the epoch in which the action of the poem is supposed to 
 have taken place, the Visigoths were not yet masters of the 
 whole of Aquitauia ; they only occupied the southern strip of 
 it. But, setting aside historical precision on this point, there 
 would be certain reasons to suspect that the first — that is to 
 say, the veritable author of Walter — might really have been a 
 Gallo-Roman or a Visigoth inspired with the idea of celebrating 
 the glory of the exploits of the Visigoths. Tiiis people acted a 
 distinguished part in the invasion of Attila, and contributed 
 more than any other to the winning of the battle at Chalons. 
 We know, moreover, that from the very moment at which they 
 were brought in contact with the Franks, the Visigoths had 
 become their adversaries. Beaten once at Vougle by Clovis, 
 they had exacted more than one revenge for this defeat, and
 
 Provengal Origin of Walter. 261 
 
 Lad maintained themselves in Septimania in spite of all the at- 
 tempts on the part of the Merovingians to dislodge them. 
 
 There is something in these general data, Avhicli at first view 
 seems to square tolerably well with the liistorical motive of 
 the poem of Walter. JBut these data cannot be separated 
 from others, which do not lend themselves so readily to the 
 same supposition. It cannot be admitted, for example, that a 
 poet writing for the purpose of enhancing the glory of the Yisi- 
 goths, should have represented them as paying tribute and 
 giving hostages to Attila, especially as they were those who 
 claimed, and not without just cause, the best part of the honor 
 won by his defeat. Finally, the care with which the panegyrist 
 of Walter characterizes him, as an Aquitanian, as a man of the 
 Celtic race and tongue, does not permit us to attribute to this 
 panegyrist the project of celebrating a Visigothic chief, any 
 more than a Frankish one. It was undoubtedly his design to 
 extol the glory of a Gaul, of a hero of Gallo-Roman origin or 
 sympathy. 
 
 Among the historical personages of the fifth century, who by 
 their exploits against the Barbarians acquired a certain popular 
 celebrity in the empire, and more particularly in Gaul, there 
 are three, who at first sight might appear to have been able to 
 inspire the author of Walter with some such idea. These were 
 the famous Aetius, Ecdicius the Arvernian, son of the emperor 
 Avitus, one of the last of the magistri equitum of the empire, 
 and Count ^gidius, the father of Syagrius, the last Eoman 
 chief in Gaul, who was conquered by Clovis. 
 
 The boyhood of Aetius was similar in every respect to that 
 of Walter the Aquitanian. Surrendered to Attila as a hostage, 
 he was educated at his court, received his first lessons in the 
 art of war there, and contracted relations with the Huns, M'hich 
 exercised a great influence on his subsequent career and des- 
 tiny as general of the empire. 
 
 Ecdicius, who was from the country of the Arverni, and con- 
 sequently an Aquitanian, made heroic efforts to defend his 
 country against Euric, the formidable Icing of the Visigoths. 
 And he Avas also victorious, as long as it was possible for iiim 
 to fight. Hut the Arverni were abandoned to the Barbarians, 
 whom they had always repulsed, by the empire itself. 
 
 As for Count yfigidius, every one knows tliat he was the last 
 of the Roman chiefs that were victorious in Gaul. Successively 
 the ally, the king and the enemy of the Franks, his relations 
 with them were of so complicated and singular a character, that 
 history has never as yet unravelled them completely. 
 
 The careers of these three personages unquestionably present 
 phases, by which it seems that each of them might have become
 
 262 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 the hero of a poem like that of Walter. But each of these 
 three suppositions has also its im2)robable sides, and I could not 
 seriously adopt any one of them. 
 
 It now remains to hazard but one more conjecture — a con- 
 jecture still very vague and unsatisfactory, but nevertheless the 
 only one which I can here consent to notice. It is connected 
 with a long series of events, wliich, for want of space to indi- 
 cate them all, I am obliged to sum up in a single fact. 
 
 From the end of the sixth to the end of the ninth centuries, 
 the history of the Gallo-Roman tribes south of the Loire and 
 the Garonne was but a long succession of struggles against the 
 domination of the Franks — of struggles which were scarcely 
 and but incompletely suspended during the energetic reign of 
 Charlemagne. The first chiefs of these tribes, in this warlike 
 opposition, were men of the country, Gallo-Romans. These 
 were, however, soon joined by other chiefs of the Merovingian 
 race, who assumed the title of dukes of Aquitania, and were in 
 tliis position the natural enemies of the Franks, then masters of 
 the territory north of the Loire. 
 
 Seconded with energy and enthusiasm by the tribes and 
 powerful nobles of the country, they rapidly wrested from the 
 last Merovingians all the provinces situate on the Garonne and 
 Loire, and even the cantons on the left bank of the latter of 
 these rivers. 
 
 It M^as the great task of the Carlovingians, after their acces- 
 sion to power, to reconquer all these provinces and the comple- 
 tion of this task by Pepin, after ten years of a war which 
 absorbed all his forces, all his courage and all his military 
 genius, constituted his chief glory. 
 
 Charlemagne, having become heir to Aquitania reconquered, 
 had no idea of incorporating a country so rebellious, so passion- 
 ately fond of its independence, into the mass of liis states. lie 
 allowed it to remain, as he did Italy, a separate kingdom, to 
 which he assigned a special task, the noble task of coping with 
 the Arabs, and of forcing them back from the southern base of 
 the Pyrenees to the opposite side of the Ebro. But after the 
 death of Charlemagne, Aquitania resumed its natural position ; 
 it again commenced to make war npon the Frankish monarchy, 
 and ended by disengaging itself anew. It was this province 
 that gave the signal for the general dismemberment of the Car- 
 lovingian empire. 
 
 This struggle of four centuries gave rise to the development 
 of an Aquitanian nationality, an Aquitanian pride and interests, 
 which made themselves felt in all tlie great political changes of 
 Gaul, in opposition to the government, that had originated in 
 the Frankish conquest. A rivalry and antipathies became
 
 Provenqal Origin of Walter. 263 
 
 established between the two nations, in consequence of which 
 neither of them saw anytliing but absurdities or vices in the 
 distinctive peculiarities of the other. In the eyes of the Franks, 
 the Aquitanians were a frivolous, conceited, corrupt and pleas- 
 ure-greedy set of men. To the Aquitanians, the Franks were 
 barbarians, men of gross and ferocious passions, ignorant of 
 every art but that of warfare and of pillage. I have already 
 adduced several curious examples of this antipathy, which be- 
 long to the end of the tenth century ; but it is evident that the 
 contrast and the hatred between the two people must have 
 been still greater at the epochs of their struggle. 
 
 But, to return now to the poem of Walter, it appears to me, 
 that if there is anything in the poem in question which might 
 be construed into an allusion, however vague, to certain histo- 
 rical events, the allusion ought to have reference to this ancient 
 struggle between the Aquitanians and Franks. If it was the 
 main intention of the poet to celebrate the glory and the valor 
 of some military leader, it seems to me, that this leader could 
 only be one of the sovereign dukes of Aquitania, who acquired 
 renown in Gaul, from the end of the sixth to the middle of the 
 eighth conturies. 
 
 Of all these chiefs "Waifer, the brave antagonist of Pepin, is 
 the most celebrated, and it is to him that our thoughts are first 
 directed in searching for the hero of our poem among the Aqui- 
 tanian princes. The leading characteristics of the poem, how- 
 ever, appear to me to contain something, that can only be 
 attributed to a personage of a more ancient date than that of 
 Waifer. I should be more inclined to regard Walter as the 
 poetic representative of some one of these earlier Gallo-Rom an 
 dukes of Wasconia or Aquitaine, who took advantage of the 
 decline of the Merovingian monarchy, in oixier to reconquer 
 from it all the territory included between the Loire and the 
 Pyrenees, 
 
 But whatever may be the value of these conjectures, which 
 I shall not pursue any further for fear of becoming tedious, the 
 points, which may be regarded as established with reference to 
 the poem of Walter, are, that this poem is a Gallo-Koman pro- 
 duction of a date anterior to the ninth century ; that it was early 
 known, and for a long time popular in Germany, where it met 
 with the fate of all popular poetry ; that in other words it un- 
 derwent numerous modifications, of which the last were the 
 greatest and the grossest. It has furthermore been shown, that 
 the unknown author of the Nibelungen must have had before 
 him one of the Germanic versions of this poem when he com- 
 posed his own. It is less certain, but nevertheless extremely 
 probable, that the Gallo-Roman author of Walter possessed, on
 
 26i History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 his part, some acquaintance with the poetic traditions of the 
 Germans concerning the tragical adventures of the Nibelungen. 
 His character of Hagen, thougli divested of some of its asperi- 
 ties, is essentially tlie same as that of the latter and there is no 
 evidence, that he himself was the inventor of this character. 
 Finally, it follows from all this, that literary communications 
 existed between Gaul and Germany, as early as the ninth 
 century. 
 
 Germany and Norway, however, were not the only parts of 
 Europe, where the legend of Walter the Aquitanian was so ex- 
 tensively known and popular during the Middle Age ; it is 
 certain, that this legend was scarcely any less renowned in Italy, 
 or at any rate in certain parts of Italy than in the North. 
 
 We still possess fragments of an extensive chronicle of the 
 monastery of Novalese, at the foot of Mount Cenis, which was 
 composed about the year lOGO, by an anonymous monk of that 
 monastery. This monk quotes certain ancient biographies of 
 the principal abbots or friars of his monastery. Several of 
 these biographies were, according to his own account, already 
 lost at the time he wrote, and he only knew them from the tra- 
 ditions of the convent ; but others were still extant, and had 
 furnished him the materials for his chronicle. He had also in 
 his possession a copy of the poem of Walter, in the shape in 
 which it is still known to us, and gives an abstract of it in prose, 
 in which he occasionally interweaves a verse from the text. 
 
 But this is not all. Independently of these extracts, the 
 author of the chronicle relates concerning an ancient monk, 
 whose name was likewise Walter, diverse traditions, which he 
 had collected either from the inmates of the monastery itself, or 
 from the mouth of the inhabitants of the surrounding localities. 
 According to these curious traditions, this monk Walter was 
 the same personage, that had gone through the adventures 
 enumerated in the poem. It was a warrior of royal descent, 
 renowned everywhere for his uncommon strength and bravery. 
 After a reign of many years and exhibitions of prowess with- 
 out number, this warrior, resolved thenceforward to occupy 
 himself exclusively with heaven, had assumed the habit and the 
 staff of a pilgrim, and had gone abroad, visiting all the monas- 
 teries, in search of one well regulated and sufficiently austere, 
 where it was his intention to remain in retirement for the rest 
 of his days. He had already wandered over many a country, 
 when he at last arrived at the monastery of Novalese, which 
 he at once selected as his place of seclusion, and where, as the 
 humblest of all the brethren, he solicited the post of gardener. 
 
 He continued to reside there for a long time, leading a life 
 of holy devotion, but nevertheless finding from time to time
 
 Provenc/il Origin o^ Walter. 265 
 
 occasion for giving proof of his former bravery. Having been 
 sent one day, for example, against a band of robbers, who had 
 phmdered the monastery of a portion of its harvest- crop, he 
 exterminated them all without any other weapon except the 
 shoulder of a calf, v/hich he found grazing in the field, and 
 which he dislimbed with the most admirable dexterity. 
 
 He had thrice, himself alone, repulsed a flood of Saracens, 
 who had come to assail the monastery. The chronicler of 
 Novalese also relates, that there was, and that he himself had 
 seen, in the adjacent parts, a certain marble column in ruins. 
 He adds that tlie villagers, the people of the place, called the 
 column the " hit-a-blow of Walter," because the latter had sent 
 it prostrate to the ground by a blow with his fist.* , 
 
 All these tradittons and others, from which I will save the 
 reader, can scarcely be conceived in any other sense than as 
 reminiscences, as a popular echo, not of the poem of Walter, 
 but of the ancient romantic legend concerning the same per- 
 sonage in Latin or Romansh prose, of which, as we have 
 already seen, the present poem was but a part, but the com- 
 mencement. Among the lives of the celebrated monks of the 
 monastery of Xovalese, which our monastic chronicler alleges 
 to have formerly existed there, and to have been subsequently 
 lost, was that of monk Walter. There is everything to warrant 
 the supposition, that this pretended life was nothing more than 
 the fabulous legend of the Aquitanian hero in its primitive 
 form. The author, according to the conventional usage of his 
 age, had undoubtedly made Walter end his days in a monas- 
 tery, and probably in the very one at Novalese. For the his- 
 torian of this monastery gives us the remarkable piece of infor- 
 mation, worth our notice here, that there was always to be 
 found there a goodly number of illustrious personages from 
 various parts of Gaul. At Novalese, as elsewhere, Walter may 
 have been regarded as a real personage, the legend as a veri- 
 table history, and as soon as the romance was once lost or for- 
 gotten, the traditions, which survived it in the monastery and 
 in the country, could easily have become disfigured to the ex- 
 tent in which we find them, toward the middle of the eleventh 
 century. 
 
 * To these fictions concerning Walter, the Frenchman Rochex adds a still more curi- 
 ous one, and makes the hero a Hungarian ! " Ce Waltharius <;toit Ongre de nation 
 . . conn^table d'Ongrie. . . 11 eut une sainte dame pour femme, preniifere dame 
 de la reine d'Ongrie. . . ils se resolurent d'abandonner la cour. . . ils en sor- 
 tirent done secretement, la femme habillee en habit d'homme, ct se vinrcnt rendre k 
 I'abb^, qui 6toit alors a la Novalfese. . . il leur demanda, quelle 6toit leur profession ; 
 ils r<5pondirent avec respect, qu'ils ne scjavoicnt que celle de jardinier. . . Cette 
 femme, toujours tenue pour un hommc, passa plus de cent ann<5es de vie dans cette 
 abbaye en grande opinion de saintet**, \k oii elle finitses jours. . . etil est de croire, 
 qu'elle fut reconnue etant morte, et que son mary raconta ce qu'ils 6toyeut." — Ed.
 
 266 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 It is to Miiratori that we are indebted for the publication of 
 the fragments, which I have quoted from the chronicle of 
 Kovalese.* They constitute a part of his extensive collection 
 of original authorities on the history of Italy, which appeared 
 during the course of the last century. The scholars of Italy at 
 first paid no attention to these fragments. But immediately 
 after the publication of the text of the poem on "Walter, they 
 began to occupy themselves with the investigation of the sub- 
 ject; and as they then found the documents and traditions, 
 relative to this personage, in Italy, at the foot of Mount Cenis, 
 they readily persuaded themselves that he must have been an 
 Italian, and that the poem, of which he was the hero, had been 
 composed in Italy. 
 
 In 1784, Count ISTapione of Turin, a litterateur of some note, 
 published in a large biographical work on illustrious Piednion- 
 tese a notice of the chronicle of Novalese and of its author, in 
 which notice he naturally had occasion to speak of the poem of 
 Walter.f He does not hesitate to attribute this poem to the 
 chronicle of l^oval^se, assigns the year 800 as the probable date 
 of its composition, and represents it as the first tentative, and, 
 as it were, the archetype of the chivalric romance, thus claim- 
 ing for Italy the honor of this poetic invention.;}: 
 
 Tliese few assertions contain so many critical and logical 
 errors, that it would occupy too much of our time to examine 
 them all. Fortunately, however, there can be nothing less es- 
 sential ; for some of the facts, which I have already announced 
 as certain, are more than sufficient to show the falsity of these 
 assertions, and I shall therefore not dwell on them any longer. 
 
 After having treated the history of the poem of Walter at so 
 ^reat (perhaps too great) a length, I shall scarcely be able to 
 find time to say anything concerning the poem itself. Luckily 
 the subject is a simple, a circumscribed one, and a few rapid 
 observations will suffice to give us some idea of it. "We must 
 not expect to find in "Walter the grandeur, the variety, the ter- 
 rible play of passion, the wild originality, which distinguish 
 the action of the Nibelungen. But in its modest proportions 
 and in its simplicity, the action of this poem is destitute neither 
 of interest nor of character. There is something picturesque 
 and touching in the situation of this young couple, as they are 
 traversing barbarous countries in their flight, travelling only by 
 night, never halting except in deserted places, and reduced to 
 
 * Muratori : " Scriptores Rerum Italic," vol. iii., col. 965. This Chronicon Novalici- 
 ense, with all the fragments relative to Waltharius, has since been edited with admirable 
 care by Bethmann, in Pertz' " Monum. Germ. Hist.," vol. ix., p. 75, sqf^.—Ed. 
 
 t Cf. his " Vita ed Elogi d' illustri Italiani," vol. ii., p. 28, sqq.— £'d. 
 
 X " Essendo questo il piu antico componimento di tal genere, che mostrar possa 1' 
 Italia." Id., p. 28.— £d.
 
 Provengal Origin of Walter. 267 
 
 the necessity of sliunning, like a deadly peril, the encounter of 
 a human face. 
 
 Nevertheless, the interest of the story does not at all increase, 
 until the moment when Gunther, apprised of Walter's elope- 
 ment, sets out in pursuit of him, with the design of robbing him 
 of his treasure and his bride. The quarrel between the king 
 and Hagen could not be more true to nature, nor better intro- 
 duced to motive the part acted by the latter, who, by refusing 
 to join in the combat, suspends the denouement for a while, 
 and gives Walter new opportunities for the exhibition of his 
 heroism. 
 
 The dramatic part of the poem, from the moment when the 
 Aquitanian and the Franks are confronting each other, is, upon 
 the whole, very beautiful. The description of the combat is 
 done with great care, and varied with a great deal of ingenuity. 
 
 In regard to character, Walter is a hero, who has nothing in 
 common with those of the Nibelungen. He is a civilized and 
 Christian hero, who to the strength and intrepidity of the war- 
 rior adds nobleness of heart and humanity. The prayer which 
 he utters, while kneeling over the corpses of those whom he 
 had slain in self-defence, is truly a sublime trait. 
 
 The lay of the Nibelungen likewise contains characters of a 
 noble and humane description ; but these characters are in con- 
 tradiction with the rest, and delineated in accordance with the 
 chivalric manners of the thirteenth century ; they are, in short, 
 such as then actually existed or were imagined to exist in Ger- 
 many. 
 
 It is not so with Walter. Whatever he says or does, that we 
 admire as generous, is nothing more than the natural and sim- 
 ple expression of a heroic soul developed by culture. The 
 ideas, the conventional manners of chivalry are here made of 
 no account. The entire poem does not contain a single allusion 
 to the usages of chivalry. 
 
 The same observation might be applied to the love of AY alter 
 and Hildegunde. Everything about it is simple, natural, con- 
 cise. The two lovers prove that their affection is a genuine 
 one. They barely announce it in few words, witliout any en- 
 thusiasm, without any effort to add passion to their language. 
 Walter has already the air of the master, who one day is ex- 
 pected to command, and Hildegunde that of the spouse, whose 
 duty it will be to obey. In all this there is notliiug that could 
 be said to have the remotest resemblance to the gallantry of 
 chivalry. 
 
 From the whole of this discussion the reader will, I hope, 
 conclude with myself, that this little poem of Walter was really 
 worth reclaiming for the literature of the south of Gaul, to
 
 268 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 which it incontestably belongs. I have conducted this vindi- 
 cation to the best of my ability and without any hesitation. 
 The literature of the Germans and that of the Italians, which 
 have likewise claimed it for themselves, are too rich in their 
 own productions to refuse the politeness of this restitution.* 
 
 * The author has here expended considerable ingenuity in an attempt to vindicate a 
 Provencal origin for the primitive poetical elements, from which the Latin epopee in 
 question was redacted into the form in which it has come down to us. Although he 
 did not fail to notice the fact, that a Germanic origin was asserted by the savans of the 
 other side of the Rhine, yet he has failed to adduce the proofs, direct and conjectural, 
 upon which his Germanic neighbors based their claim. The author of the "CasiM Sancti 
 GallV (Pertz' "Mon. Germ. Hist.," vol. ii., p. 118), Ekkardus IV. (flOTO), states express- 
 ly, that the poetical life of IValtharius manu fortis was composed by his predecessor, 
 Ekkardus I. (t973), who is represented as having written it in his youth, while yet at 
 school, and from the dictation of his master; and that he himself, at the request of Ari- 
 bo, the archbishop of Maintz, corrected the barbarisms and Teutonic peculiarities of 
 the poem, at the time of his residence in the archbishop's city. His language is as fol- 
 lows: After enumerating several other poetical compositions of Ekkardus I., some of 
 which are yet extant, he adds, •' Scripsit et in scolis metrice mogi's/ro, vacillanter quidem, 
 quia in afifectione non in habitu erat puer, vitam IValtharii manu fortis, quam Magontiae 
 positi, Aribone archiepiscopo jubente, pro posse et nosse nostra correximus ; barbaries 
 enim et idiomata ejus Teutonem adhuc affectantem repente latinum fieri non patiuntur. 
 Unde male docere solent discipulos semi-magistri, dicentes : Videte, quomodo disertis- 
 sime coram Teutone aliquo proloqui deceat, et eadera serie in latinum verba vertite. 
 QutE deceptio Ekkehardum in opere illo adhuc puerum fefellit ; sed postea non sic ; ut in 
 lidio Charromannico (i. e., ' Laudes Carlomanni,' which was another poem by the same 
 author)." Pertz, the editor of Ekkard, remarks ad locum, that there seems to be scarcly 
 any room for doubting that the poem here meant is the celebrated epos of Walter the 
 Aquitanian; especially when it is manifest from the context of the work itself, that its 
 author was a young man, a monk, and a Teuton, as appears, 1st, from the conclusion 
 of the poem ; 2dly, from certain passages derived from the regula of St. Benedict ; 3dly, 
 from the word Paliure, which in the German language signifies Hagen. To these proofs 
 Gervinus adds— 4thly (and in direct opposition to what our author has advanced in this 
 chapter), that the character, sentiments, passions, developed in the action of the poem, 
 are of the primitive Germanic type, even more so than those of the Nibelungen, and so 
 remote from the chivalric sentimentality of the period of the Crusades, as to have misled 
 the earlier editor, Molter, into the error of referring the poem to the 6th century of our 
 era C'Geschichte d. deutsch. Dichtung," vol. i., p.88-91). Gervinus asserts it as prob- 
 able, that th? epos in question was composed between the years 920 and 940 A.D., and 
 that it was the joint production of the two monks of St. Gallen here named, i. e., of 
 Ekkard I. and of his master ; that the substance of their Latin redaction was either de- 
 rived from a German poem, in the Lands of the authors, or communicated to them by a 
 German minstrel ; that at a subsequent date, Gerald, the Italian, may have done, what 
 Ekkard IV. reports himself to have undertaken about a century later, i. e., emended 
 and transcribed the production of his monastic ancestors. Ekkard IV. is also known as 
 the Latin translator of Ratpert's poetical eulogy or ode on St. Gallus; and we have 
 thus direct proof of his having been a poet, as well as a writer of chronicles ; but as to 
 whether the text of Walter, now in our possession, is the one redacted bj' him, it is im- 
 possible to decide. For further information on this subject I must refer to Grimm's 
 " Lat. Gedichte aus d. lOten Jahrhundert," and to A. Heyde's article in Haupt's Zeit- 
 Bchrift, 9, 150 sqq., where M. Fauricl's position on this point is examined more particu- 
 larly. Mone likewise maintains Walter an originally German epos, written in the style 
 and measure of the Nibelungen, and subsequently turned into Latin. He finds proofs of 
 it in certain phrases reminding us of passages in the Heldenbucb and other poems of the 
 old Teutonic type. See his extended remarks in the " Archiv. d. Gesellsch. ftir altere 
 deutsche Geschichtkunde," vol. ii., p. 92, sqq.— Ed.
 
 The Influence of the Arabs. 269 
 
 CHAPTEE XIII. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF THE ARABS. 
 
 If what I have advanced in the last chapter with reference 
 to the poem of Walter be true ; if this work is really ^yhat it 
 has appeared to me to be, an inspiration of the Aquitanian 
 spirit, the expression of a Gallo-Roman opposition to the con- 
 quest and the dominion of the Franks, then it may be regarded 
 as the germ of an entire class of Provencal romances, in which 
 it will be impossible for us to mistake the inspiration and the 
 expression, which I am now about to examine more especially. 
 
 I have already remarked, and I shall have more than one 
 occasion to repeat what I had said, that among the events which 
 must have struck the imagination of the inhabitants of the South 
 and furnished them with themes for poetry, it is necessary to 
 include the rebellions and wars, in consequence of which the 
 dignitaries, who with the title of dukes, marquises and counts, 
 were governing the provinces of the Prankish monarchy, suc- 
 ceeded at last in converting these provinces into little inde- 
 pendent kingdoms of their own. Some of these dignitaries 
 were men of distinguished capabilities and of great energy of 
 character, wlio seemed to be much better fitted for the exercise 
 of power than the degenerate descendants of Clovis or of Charle- 
 magne. Some of these had a singular and tragical fiite, as for 
 example, Bernard, the famous Duke of Septimania, who was 
 assassinated by Charles the Bald, of whom he was generally 
 reputed to be the son. Others, like the no less famous Gerard 
 de Roussillon, kept up an adventurous warfare against their 
 kings, in which, victorious and vanquished in their turn, they 
 were obliged to undergo the greatest diversity of fortune. The 
 majority of these revolting chieftains were popular in the pro- 
 vinces which they succeeded in detaching from the monarchy ; 
 and the inhabitants of these provinces sustained them willingly 
 in their attempts to make them independent. This was parti- 
 cularly the case in Aquitania and in the remaining parts of the 
 South, which, having been the last to submit to the dominion 
 of the Carlovingians, were also the first to shake it off.
 
 270 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 The tentatives, the conquests and the misadventures of these 
 military leaders, although they offered little that might be 
 called remarkable or heroic, were still calculated to furnish, and, 
 as we shall see hereafter, actually did furnish noble arguments 
 for the nascent epopee of southern Gaul. 
 
 But by far the most interesting and most popular subjects, 
 adopted by this fruitful branch of mediaeval poetry, were derived 
 from the wars of the Christians against the Arabs of Spain, on 
 the frontiers of the Pyrenees. I now propose to give a sum- 
 mary sketch of the history of these wars.* 
 
 The Arabs, already masters of Spain, made their first descent 
 upon Septimania in 715. In 1019 they made a fruitless at- 
 tempt to reconquer Narbonne, and this is their last invasion of 
 the soil of Gaul with which we are acquainted. Between these 
 two expeditions there is an interval of three hundred years, 
 during which the Mussulman conquerors of Spain, and the in- 
 habitants of the countries north of the Pyrenees, were almost 
 incessantly at war with each other. This long struggle may 
 be divided into four distinct periods. 
 
 From 715 to 732, the year of the battle of Poitiers, the duty 
 of combating Islamism and the Arabs, for the benefit of 
 Europe, devolved chiefly upon the people of the south of Gaul, 
 and more especially upon the Aquitanians, who were then 
 already independent of the Prankish monarchy. Under the con- 
 duct of their brave duke Eudes, they gained several important 
 victories over the enemy, whom they repulsed several times 
 from Aquitania, until in the year 732, Abderrahman (the 
 famous Abderame of the chronicles), defeated Eudes at the 
 walls of Bordeaux, and spread like a torrent over the entire 
 south of Gaul. 
 
 From this date to 778, the Franks, first under the command 
 of Charles Martel, and subsequently under that of Charlemagne, 
 continued in their turn the struggle against the Mussulmans. 
 During this second period of the war Charles Martel expelled the 
 Arabs from Provence, and also deprived them of Septimania, 
 which they had conquered from the Goths. Charlemagne un- 
 dertook his famous expedition to the valley of the Ebro ; but, 
 defeated at Saragossa, he was obliged to retire, and lost the 
 flower of his army at Roncesvalles. In 778 Charlemagne created 
 the kingdom of Aquitania, which was of more extensive dimen- 
 sions than had been the independent duchy of that name. At 
 that time the Gallo-Pomans of the south, in conjunction with 
 the Aquitanians, again undertook the task of combating the 
 Mussulmans ; but the war was henceforth carried on under 
 
 * Compare Michaud, " Histoire des Croisades," and Reinaud's " Invasions des Sar- 
 razins en France, Savoie, La Suisse," etc. — Ed.
 
 The Influence of the Arabs. 271 
 
 leaders of the Frankish race. These leaders are the first who 
 reconquered from the Arabs a number of cantons and cities on 
 the eastern coast of Spain, and established new Christian settle- 
 ments there. 
 
 When the provinces of the South had at length detached 
 themselves definitively from the Carlovingian monarchy, the 
 chiefs and the inhabitants of these provinces continued the war 
 against the Arabs, but rather from a religious zeal, or from the 
 commencement of a chivalric impulse, than from any further 
 necessity of self-defence. Those Moors and Saracens, at first so 
 terrible, were then no longer feared. The reign of the Ommi- 
 ades was nearly at an end, and the country was on the point of 
 relapsing into the same state of anarchy, from which the chiefs 
 of this glorious dynasty had rescued it. 
 
 We perceive from this brief outline, that, with the exception 
 of the period during which Charles Martel, at the head of his 
 Franks, conducted the war against the Arabs in person, this 
 war was always maintained by the Gallo-Komans of the south, 
 by the Aquitanians, the Septimanians, and the inhabitants of 
 Provence. As the natural allies of the Spaniards of Gallicia 
 and of the Asturias, these nations fulfilled, in common with the 
 latter, the special task of repelling the efforts which the Arabs 
 successively made, first to penetrate into the heart of Europe, 
 and subsequently to maintain their power in Spain. 
 
 In this struggle nothing was wanting that could develop and 
 ennoble the poetic instinct, then already awakened in the 
 south of Gaul. Everything there conspired to elevate its im- 
 portance. The enthusiasm of religion and that of glory, the 
 abrupt alternations of victory and defeat, the striking or unex- 
 pected incidents of war, which in an age of faith, of ignorance 
 and of simplicity were readily adopted as miracles ; nay, even 
 the ancient renown of the countries, the mountains, rivers, 
 cities, which were the habitual theatre of this war, all contri- 
 buted to spread a certain special interest, a certain poeti- 
 cal refulgence. 
 
 Equal to the Christians in point of bravery, the Arabs were 
 far in advance of them in civilization ; and it was incontestably 
 from them, that the former, in the course of this war, derived 
 the first examples of heroism, of humanity, of generosity toward 
 the enemy — in short, of something chivalric, though long before 
 chivalry had received its name and its consecrated for- 
 mulas. * 
 
 * On the Influence of the Saracens upon the chivalry and culture of the West, com- 
 pare Von Hammer-Purgstall's "Litteraturgeschichte der Araber," vol. 1st, p.xc.-xcv., 
 and vol. 5th, p. 3 ; says he, " Durch den Verkehr der Kreuzfahrer mit den Syrern und 
 ..(Ggyptern, und den der christlichen Spanier mit den Aral»ern und Mauren ging ara- 
 bische Wissenschaft und Poesie in das mittagige Frankreich und Sicilien uber, und die 
 gothische Baukunst ward durch die saracenische veredelt." — £d.
 
 272 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 In spite of the repugnance, wliich the Gallo-Romans of the 
 South did not cease to cherish toward the Franks, as long as 
 they could only see in them their conquerors and masters, 
 these nations nevertheless loved those valiant chiefs of the 
 Frankish race, who distinguished tliemselves in the contest 
 against the Saracens. They regarded them as their own in a 
 certain sense, and frankly expressed their admiration for ex- 
 ploits, which were achieved for their own benefit and at their 
 head. 
 
 Several of these chiefs have rendered themselves conspicuous 
 in history, but none of them has attained so much popularity 
 and eclat as Duke William, surnamed the Pious. Charlemagne 
 commissioned him, in 780, to command the troops of the king- 
 dom of Aquitania, at a moment when this kingdom was men- 
 aced by a formidable invasion of the Arabs, who were seconded 
 by an insurrection of the Vascones. From this moment to 
 the time when he retired as a monk to a deserted region of 
 the Cevennes, he was always at the head of the Christians 
 against the infidels, and his valor was crowned with glory even 
 on those occasions on which he was defeated. 
 
 These different wars, I mean those, which were waged be- 
 tween the kings and their revolting officers, as well as those of 
 the Arabs against the Christians, were eminently poetical. They 
 were in fact poetry already made, and even the simplest or 
 crudest expression of it was already enough to accomplish some 
 object, to perpetuate some event. That there existed in the 
 south of Gaul, and at an early date, poetical compositions on 
 these wars, written with a view to delineate their principal inci- 
 dents, this cannot be a matter of serious doubt. But we are not 
 now in possession of any of these verses ; we have not even a 
 specimen left us, and it is extremely difficult to form even a 
 conception of them. 
 
 Judging, however, by way of analogy from w^hat we know 
 concerning the origin and development of the epic poetry of 
 other times and in other countries, we may affirm, that the 
 poetical pieces in question neither were, nor could be, anything 
 more than popular songs, the subject of each of which was not 
 a complicated series of events, but a single isolated event, 
 and which were all destined to be sung in the streets and in 
 public places, in the presence of crowds of hearers from the 
 lower classes of society. The very destination of tliis kind of 
 poetry excluded necessarily all long-winded compositions, and 
 even those of moderate extent. 
 
 These songs, preserved by tradition and successively aug- 
 mented bv new accessories, in which the historical inOTedients 
 were more and more supplanted by the marvellous, were gra-
 
 The Infiuence of the Arabs. 273 
 
 dually merged into those primitive epopees of tlie twelfth cen- 
 tury, some of them relating to the wars with the Saracens and 
 others to those of the dukes in rebellion against their kings, of 
 which I shall liave to speak again hereafter. All that I can do 
 here, is to indicate their primordial germ. 
 
 And it is not only on arguments of general probability, that 
 I rely in attributing such an origin to these epopees. Definite 
 facts can be adduced in support of this opinion, which deserve 
 to become known, not as of any importance in themselves, but 
 on account of their connection with a general fact of great 
 moment in the history of poetry. 
 
 There is still extant a manuscript of a French romance, which 
 will occupy our attention at some length hereafter, concerning 
 which, however, it is proper, that I should say a few words at 
 present. This romance, entitled Guillaume au court ncz^ {au 
 cornet) or William with the short nose, is one of the most cele- 
 brated of its kind, and one of those, the history of which it 
 would be most interesting to investigate. The William, who is 
 the principal hero of this poem, is the same Duke William, snr- 
 named the Pious, whom I have characterized above as the 
 Christian chief, that had won the greatest distinction and fame 
 in the wars of the Aquitanians against the Arabs. The work 
 is of enormous extent. Of all the poems of the West, this is, 
 as far as my acquaintance goes, the one, which comes nearest 
 to the colossal dimensions of the Hindu epopee. It contains 
 scarcely less than eighty thousand verses. 
 
 This poem is evidently nothing more than the final amplifica- 
 tion, made probably toward the close of the tliirteenth century, 
 of one and the same subject, which had already been augmented 
 several times in succession, and which, in its original form, con- 
 sisted only of a small number of popular songs, composed in 
 the South, on the very spots which had been the theatre of the 
 glory and piety of the hero. And this is precisely the testimony 
 of the ancient anonymous biographer of William, who in ex- 
 press terms, though somewhat paraphrastically, says the same 
 thing. 
 
 " Where can you find," says he, " a dance among the young, 
 an assembly of people or of men-at-arms and nobles, on the eve 
 of a saint's day, where one may not hear them singing sweetly 
 and in well-modulated words of the goodness and greatness of 
 William, of the glory he achieved in the service of Emperor 
 
 * GuUiiaume au court nez is one of the so-called chanson de gestes, and the work of 
 the Trouvcres of the north of France. This immense epos consists of eighteen branches 
 or grand divisions, of which at the time, when Fauriel wrote, only one had been pub- 
 lished. The rest is still in MSS., in the different libraries of Europe. An account cf 
 this work, from the pen of M. Fauriel himself, is contained in the xxiid. vol. of the " His- 
 toire litt^raire de la France," p. 435-551.— .Cd. 
 
 18
 
 274 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 Charles, of the victories he -won over the infidels, of all that he 
 suffered at their hands, of all that he repaid them ?"* 
 
 It was impossible to attest in plainer terms the existence and 
 the popularity of the primitive songs, of which the exploits of 
 William were the subject. In regard to the epoch, however, to 
 which this testimony and consequently the songs under con- 
 sideration are to be referred, the question is far more doubt- 
 ful. In the opinion of Mabillon, the biography, from which 
 this passage is derived, dates from the ninth century, and this 
 opinion is quite tenable. But what is beyond all doubt, is, that 
 the life in question is anterior to the eleventh century ; there- 
 fore the songs, to which it refers must belong to the tenth, at 
 least, and there is every indication, that at that remote epoch 
 these songs contained already the germs of all, that was after- 
 ward developed and paraphrased in the romances. 
 
 There is no one, but what has either read or heard of the 
 celebrated chronicle, attributed to Turpin. It is a Latin narra- 
 tive of Charlemagne's great expedition to the valley of the 
 Ebro and incorrectly attributed to Turpin or Tilpin, the arch- 
 bishop of Eheims, who died in 800, fourteen years before 
 Charlemagne. It is not anterior to the end of the eleventh 
 century, or to the beginning of the twelfth, and its author is 
 vmknown. He appears, however, to have been a monk. ITie 
 work is not a long one ; it has less than eighty pages ; but it 
 would be difficult to scrape together a greater amount of enor- 
 mous falsehoods and platitudes, than those contained in this 
 small number of sheets. Nevertheless it includes, and is con- 
 nected with, some curious data relating to the literary history 
 of the Middle K^q. 
 
 It contains, in the first place, the proof, that before the epoch, 
 at which it was composed, a species of popular epic songs like 
 those, to which I have just alluded, was in circulation among 
 the inhabitants of Gaul, Chapter XI. presents us with a census 
 of the forces, with which Charlemagne made his descent on 
 Spain and of the different chiefs by whom these forces were 
 commanded. Among these chiefs there is one named Hoel, 
 count of Nantes, with reference to whom the author adds: 
 "There is a song about this count, which is still heard sung in 
 our day, and in which it is said, that he accomplished wonders 
 without number."! A circumstance like this is, by its very 
 
 * Qui chori juvenura, qui conventus populorum. prsccipue militum ac nobilium virorum ; 
 quae vigiliiE sanctorum dulce non resonant et modulatis vocibus decantant, qualia et 
 quantus fuerit (Wilhelmus dux), quam gloriose sub Carolo glorioso militavitj quam for- 
 titer, quamque victoriose barbaros domuit et expuguavit? etc., etc. This biography is 
 printed in Mabillon, Acta Sanct. Ord. Benedict. Ssaec. Quart. Pars. I. p. 67 sqq. — Ed. 
 
 t CEUus comes urbis, qua: vulgo dicitur Nantas, cum duobus millibus heroum. De 
 hoc canitur in cantilena usque in hodiernum diem, quia innumera fecit mirabilia." — It is 
 somewhat curious to notice, in the enumeration of these forces, that the venerable pre-
 
 The Influence of the Arabs. 275 
 
 nature, too indifferent or insignificant, to be either a fiction or a 
 lie. I now proceed, while speaking of this chronicle, to add 
 some other proofs in support of the same fact. 
 
 Jouffroy, a monk of Saint Martial, and prior of Yigeois in" 
 Limousin, has left us a very curious chronicle, of great impor- 
 tance to the history of his age and country, and even to that 
 of the Middle Age in general.* Being desirous of reading 
 the pretended work of Turpin, which every one then took in 
 earnest and as a veritable history, he sent to Spain for a copy 
 of it, which he received and cherished as an invaluable treasure. 
 The letter, which he wrote on this subject to his brethren of the 
 monastery of Saint Martial begins as follows : " I have just 
 had the pleasure to receive the history of the glorious triumphs 
 of the invincible King Charles and of the illustrious Count Ro- 
 land's exploits in Spain. I have corrected them most carefully 
 and ordered a copy to be made of them. I was induced to do 
 so from the consideration, that we have thus far known nothing 
 of these events, excej^t what we could learn from the chansons 
 of the Jongleurs." 
 
 These songs of the Jongleurs, which the prior of Yigeois found 
 so incomplete, compared with the history of Turpin, although 
 itself very short, could only have been songs of the same de- 
 scription with those I have already noticed, that is to say, still 
 shorter and more concise, than the famous history, probably 
 equally false, but more amusing and more poetical. 
 
 I shall now go a little further and hazard a conjecture, which, 
 I confess, appears to me to have much in its favor, and to be 
 extremely probable. I cannot but regard the pretended cho- 
 nicle of Turpin as a sort oi interpolation and monkish amplifi- 
 cation, in bad Latin, of certain popular ballads in the vulgar 
 idiom on Charlemagne's descent on Spain. After having once 
 found their way into the body of the insipid chronicle, the 
 majority of these songs, the bad and the indifi'erent both, must 
 easily have become confounded with it ; and it would be impos- 
 sible to distinguish them now on a ground, with which by their 
 platitude and falsity they find themselves in a sort of harmony. 
 But we also find here and there in this same chronicle some 
 isolated traits, some passages, which, however much altered we 
 may suppose them, still bear the imprint of a certain enthusiastic 
 and savage poetry, by which they stand out in prominent relief 
 from the monkish paraphrase, by which they are enveloped, 
 and in which they are in a measure lost. 
 
 late himself 13 not forgotten among the champions of the expedition. He is put at the 
 first of the list: " E50 Turpiaus Archiepiscopus Rhemensis, qui dignis monitis Chriati 
 fidelem populum ad bellaadum fortem et animatum, et a peccatis absolutum reddebam, 
 et Saracenos propriis armis saepe expugnabam." — Ed. 
 
 * This chronicle is published in Labbajus, Bibliotheca LibrorumManuscriptorum, vol. 
 ii., p. 280. Portions of it may also be found in Bouquet's Recueil dea Historiena dea 
 Gaules et de la France, vol. x., xi., and xii.— £d.
 
 276 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 Sucli appGcirs to me to be, among others, the passage, in 
 which the last moments and the death of Roland are depicted. 
 I shall endeavor to give some idea of it. It is, however, first 
 necessary to remark, in order to render the situation of the hero 
 intelligible, that Charlemagne has repassed the Pyrenees and 
 finds himself already in the plains of Gascony, with the bulk 
 of his army. Twenty thousand Christians, who had remained 
 behind, have been exterminated at Roncesvalles, with the excep- 
 of a hundred, who fled to the woods for refuge. Roland rallies 
 them again by means of his famous ivory horn and plunges a 
 second time into the midst of the Saracens, of whom he slays a 
 large number, King Marsile among others. But in this second 
 encounter the hundred Christians, who had survived the first 
 carnage, all perish, with tlie exception of Roland and three or 
 four others, who again disperse into the woods. I shall now 
 proceed to translate, imitating the ancient style of the chronicle,* 
 as far as my desire to remain intelligible will permit me : 
 
 " Charles had already passed the defiles of the mountains and 
 
 had not the slightest suspicion of what had passed behind him. 
 
 Then Roland, breathless for having fought so long, covered all 
 
 over with bruises from the stones that had been hurled at 
 
 him, and wounded in four places by the lances of his enemies, 
 
 retires from the scene of combat, lamenting beyond all measure 
 
 over the death of so many Christians and of so many valiant 
 
 men. Passing on through the woods and by-paths, he reaches 
 
 at last the foot of mount Cezere. There he dismounts his horse 
 
 and throws himself down under a tree by the side of a huge 
 
 mass of rocks, in the midst of a meadow of the finest grass, above 
 
 the valley of Roncesvalles. He had Durandal, his trusty sword, 
 
 of marvellous lustre and keenness, hanging by his side. He 
 
 drew it from its sheath, and holding it up'before his eyes, he 
 
 began to weep saying : ' O, my fair, my trusty and beloved 
 
 sword ! In whose hands art thou now going to fall? Who will 
 
 become thy master ? Ah ! "Well may he call himself a lucky 
 
 man, he who shall find thee ! He could not but strike terror 
 
 into his enemies in battle, for the least wound made by thee is 
 
 mortal. Oh what a pity, wert thou to come into the hands of 
 
 an ungallant man ! Put how much greater the misfortune, if 
 
 thou shouldst fall into the power of a Saracen !' And thereupon 
 
 he began to dread, lest Durandal might be found by an infidel, 
 
 and he wanted to break it before dying. He struck three blows 
 
 * This passage is found in chapter xxii. of the chronicle attributed to Turpin, of which 
 1 add here a sentence or two, as a specimen of the st3-Ie : " Carolus vero cum suis ex- 
 ercitibua jam mentis fastigia transierat, et qurc post tergum facta, fuerant, ignorabat. 
 Tunc Rolandus, tanto bello fatigatus, de nece Christianorum et tantorum virorum dolens, 
 Baracenorum ictibus magnis et percussionibus acceptis afflictus, usque ad pedem portuum 
 'Cicerse per nemora solus pervenit, et ibi sub arbore .quadem juxta lapidem marmoreum, 
 qui ibi erectus eratin prato optimo super Eonciajvallem, equo desiliit," etc., etc. — Ed.
 
 Tlie Influence of the Arabs. 277 
 
 against the rock, which stood by the side of him, and the rock 
 was cloven in two from top to foot, and yet the sword was left 
 entire." 
 
 If this fragment can be regarded, as seems probable to me, 
 as a relic, more or less mutilated, or at any rate a reflex of some 
 one of those ancient jongleur-ballads on the wars between the 
 Arabs and the Christians of Gaul, it proves something more than 
 the existence of songs of this kind at a very remote period ; it 
 also proves that the wars in question had something about them 
 that was poetical and favorable to poetic inspiration. 
 
 By turning over the pages of this singular chronicle of Tur- 
 pin, I think I could find, scattered here and there, additional 
 traces of a popular poetry, which must have been anterior to 
 its composition. But this attempt might easily become too 
 circumstantial and arbitrary. I shall therefore abandon it, and 
 prefer to search in other chronicles, more ancient, of a graver 
 tone, and really historical in their conception, for surer and more 
 striking proofs of the sort of influence, which I attribute to the 
 Arab, over the poetry of the Middle Age. 
 
 Between the years 791 and 795, that people made several 
 grand incursions into Septimania. The inhabitants fled in 
 great consternation from every part of the lower country, with 
 whatever of their goods and chattels they could carry with 
 them, and withdrew into the mountains. A band of these fu- 
 gitives traversed several branches of the Cevennes, until at last 
 they arrived in a sequestered valley by the name of Conques, 
 not far from the confluence of the Lot and the torrent of Dor- 
 dun. At the head of this band, there was a chief called Datus 
 or Dado, who, in 801 or 802, founded a chapel there, which 
 some years after was destined to become the monastery of Con- 
 ques, one of the most celebrated in all the southern country, 
 and one concerning which I shall have presently occasion to 
 speak again. Thus far everything is historical and extremely 
 probable. But when we come to read the motives from which 
 Datus is alleged to have built the chapel, the poetry and fic- 
 tion already begin to appear, in my opinion, and I can do no- 
 thing more than translate and quote by way of extracts. 
 
 The Saracens having made an invasion into Rouerguc, Datus 
 with his companions took up arms for the purpose of aiding 
 the chiefs of the country to repulse the infidels. But scarcely 
 had he left Conques behind him, when a detachment of Sara- 
 cens penetrated there and carried off" everything, men, women, 
 children and chattels. Meanwhile the army, of which they 
 formed a part, was at last driven out of Kouergue, and the Christ- 
 ians, who had taken up arms against it, all returned to their 
 respective homes, those of Conques included among the rest.
 
 278 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 But what was the surprise and grief of Datus and his com- 
 rades, when, on returning to their firesides, they found that the 
 Saracens had left them nothing ! They had made prisoners of 
 all the inhabitants, and among them was the aged mother of 
 Datus, his sole companion, his only consolation. 
 
 Transported with rage and despair, Datus, at the head of his 
 companions, bereaved and furious like himself, sets out at once 
 in pursuit of the robbers. He follows their trail for some time, 
 but he is not able to join them in the open field ; they have 
 already retired into a fortified castle, where they had deposited 
 their booty in safety. He makes an attempt to take the place ; 
 but it is strong and well guarded, and the assailants, too few in 
 number, are soon repulsed. 
 
 Datus, their chief, had made himself conspicuous among 
 them by his valor, the brilliancy of his armor and the 
 choice beauty of his horse, which was superbly saddled and 
 caparisoned. A Moor, who has eyed him from the height of a 
 turret, accosts him with the following words : " Tell me, young 
 and fair Christian, what has brought thee hither ? Hast thou 
 come to search for, hast thou come to ransom thy mother ? 
 Thou canst easily do so, if thou pleasest. Give me thy fine 
 charger, saddled and caparisoned as he is, and thy mother shall 
 be returned with all the spoils that we have carried away from 
 thee. But, if thou refusest, thou shalt see thy mother welter- 
 ing in her blood before thee." * 
 
 Datus did not credit the proposition, nor the serious menace, 
 or perhaps he regarded them as an insult. However that may 
 be, he retorted with the mad reply : " Do what thou pleasest 
 with my mother, perfidious Moor ! I care naught for thy me- 
 nace ! But this horse, which moves thy envy, this fair horse 
 never shall be thine ; thou art not worthy to touch its bridle." f 
 
 Thereupon the Moor disappeared, but he instantly came for- 
 ward again, leading the mother of Datus on the rampart. 
 There the infuriated enemy, after having first cut oflf the two 
 mammse of the aged lady, struck ofiT her head and hurled it at 
 Datus, exclaiming : Very well, then, keep thy fine charger and 
 receive thy mother without a ransom ; there, take her ! Da- 
 
 * " Date sagax, nostras modo quae res vexit ad arces 
 Te sotiosque tuos, dicito, namqtie precor. 
 Si modo, quo resides, tali pro luiinere nobis 
 Dedere mavis equum, quo faleratus abis, 
 
 Nunc tibi mater eat sospes, seu cetera pra;da ; \ 
 
 Sin autem, ante oculos funera matris habes." 
 
 Lib. i., V. 235-240.— ^d. 
 
 t " Funera matris age ; nee mihi cnra satis ; 
 
 Nam quern poscis equum, non unquam dedere dignor ; 
 Improbe, baud equidem ad tua frena decet." 
 
 v. 241-243.— £:d.
 
 The Influence of the Arabs. 279 
 
 tus, seized with horror at this sight and at the language of his 
 antagonist, runs up and down the field with tlie most frantic 
 agitation, now weeping and then screaming, like one out of his 
 senses. He passes several days in this frenzied condition, and 
 recovers from it only to fall into one of the most melancholy 
 depression. It was then, that he formed the resolution to spend 
 the rest of his days in solitude and penitence, and that he 
 ordered the construction of the hermitage, which was destined 
 to become the monastery of Conques.* 
 
 This narrative, with all these circumstances and details, is to 
 be found in a biography of Louis le Debonnaire, written in La- 
 tin verse by an Aquitanian monk, known under the name of 
 Ermoldus Nigellus.f The work is a very curious one, and 
 although composed in verse, is still seriously and strictly histo- 
 rical. It is not necessary here to examine, from what sources 
 Ermoldus may have derived this narrative, which he certainly 
 did not himself invent. But, whatever may have been its 
 source, it is undoubtedly nothing more than a fable. 
 
 At the epoch, at which the event is supposed to have taken 
 place, the Arabs did not push their expeditions beyond Carcas- 
 sone, where they only stopped to plunder and to devastate the 
 country. They did not advance this time as far as the moun- 
 tains of Rouergue, where they never had any military establish- 
 ment or fortress. The poetic fiction manifests itself in all these 
 details of the adventure, and it manifests itself with consider- 
 able originality and force. A fiction, like this, is an additional 
 fact to prove, how profoundly the imaginations of the south 
 were affected by the invasions of the Arabs, and how much 
 they were disposed to connect the marvellous and the poetical, 
 to which they aspired, with the existence and the influence of 
 these dreaded and admired enemies. 
 
 Tliis adventure of Datus does not exceed the dimensions of a 
 popular song, not even of one of the shortest, so that we have 
 not thus far encountered, in the period now under considera- 
 tion, any vestige of a poetic comj^osition of some length and of 
 anything like a complicated invention. But toward the close 
 
 * " Omnibus amissis, sumptis melioribus armis, 
 
 Incola mox hercmi coepit inesse prius. 
 * * « * * 
 
 Turn rex et Datns primo fundamina Concis 
 Infigunt, monarcbis castra futura parant." 
 
 Id. V. 253-254 and 263-264 Ed. 
 
 t He was one of the intimate friends and flatterers of Pepin, the king of Aquitania. 
 Accused of an attemptat treason against the eraperor, he was banished to Str; sbourg, 
 where, in 826, for the sake of obtaining his pardon, he undertook to celebrate the ex- 
 ploits of Louis in an epos of four books. This being ineflfectual. he composed two ele- 
 gies to Pepin, in which he invokes the latter to defend his innocence and to commise- 
 rate his unhappy lot. All these pieces may be found in Pertz, " Monum. Ger. Hist,," 
 ■vol. ii., p. 464 sqq.— £d.
 
 2S0 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 of the tenth century, or at the commencement of the eleventh, 
 I find certain traces of the existence of a work, to which, were 
 it not in verse, the name of romance or novel in the modern 
 and even quite modern sense of the term,miglit properly be ap- 
 plied ; for it would then be a historical romance. But, ro- 
 mance or poem, the composition in question relates principally 
 to the Arabs of Spain, and the remarks, which I shall have to 
 make upon it, will confirm what I have already said respecting 
 the indications of a literary influence, which the latter exerted 
 upon tlie south of France. But before broaching this subject, it 
 is necessary to make a digression of some length, for which 1 
 now ask the indulgence of the reader. 
 
 Toward the close of the tenth and at the commencement of 
 the eleventh centuries, there lived at Angers a priest by the 
 name of Bernard, who was at the head of the Episcopal church 
 of that city. This priest, it appears, had a great devotion for 
 Saint Fides, the virgin martyr, the object of special veneration 
 in tlie city of Agen and in many other places of the South, 
 Having repaired to Chartres, about the year 1010, he passed 
 some time there, during wliich he frequently visited a chapel, 
 situated outside tlie walls of that city and dedicated to his 
 favorite saint. He there had often occasion to converse with 
 Fulbert, the bishop of the city, who had many things to say 
 about the miracles daily wrought by Saint Fides at the 
 monastery of Conques, of which she was the patroness. These 
 miracles were then creating a great deal of excitement, and 
 surpassing the miracles wrought here and there in other parts 
 of the country to such an extent, that Bernard himself hesitated 
 to belie v'e them. When the renown of these miracles, however, 
 continued unabated, Bernard commenced to be tormented with 
 doubts. He resolved to clear up the mystery of the matter, and 
 to assure himself by personal examination of whatever there 
 was exaggerated or false in the reports he had heard upon the 
 subject. He accordingly made a solemn vow to go on a pil- 
 
 frimage to Conques, in the rugged mountains of Kouerguc. 
 his monastery is the same as the one already known to us 
 from the very poetical legend respecting its foundation, which 
 I have given above, and with which the immediate sequel 
 stands in admirable correspondence. 
 
 Various obstacles at first opposed the accomplishment of 
 Bernard's vow, but he was at last enabled to commence' his 
 journey, to his infinite delight, and arrived safe and sound at 
 Conques. Ko sooner was he on the spot, than he began to 
 inquire about the miracles of Saint Fides ; and he at ojice 
 became acquainted with a multitude of them, all of them more 
 or less surprising, and well authenticated, too, undoubtedly, for
 
 The Injluence of the Arabs. 281 
 
 he no longer exhibited the slightest difficulty about believing 
 them. 
 
 He wrote an account of twenty -two of these miracles on the 
 spots on which they had been wrought, and dedicated this 
 account to Fulbert, the bishop of Chartres. The exact date of 
 this performance we do not know, but it must have been com- 
 posed before 1026, which was the year in which the bishop 
 died.* 
 
 These twenty -two miracles constitute as many histories, the 
 majority of which are trivial enough, and such as Bernard 
 might unquestionably have heard in great abundance at Con- 
 ques or in the adjacent parts. The greater part of these histo- 
 ries he gives as coming from the mouths of the very persons 
 who had experienced them, or from the testimony of witnesses, 
 either ocular or at any rate contemporary, and he represents 
 himself as having been in a situation to convince himself of the 
 truth of the facts related. Finally, he declares to have abridged 
 them all considerably, with the exception of one, which he 
 affirms to have written under the dictation of the hero himself, 
 and that without the slightest alteration or curtailment. 
 
 This history, the only one which he gives entire, is the first 
 of the collection, and although it is very insipid, I am still 
 obliged to say a few words about it, because it probably will 
 furnish us the key to several others, or at any rate to the one 
 to which I propose to direct the attention of the reader. 
 
 Bernard, in the first place, mentions in his account a priest 
 of Rhodez or its neighborhood, by the name of Gerard, whom 
 he represents as still living at the time he wrote. This priest 
 had with him at his house a young man by the name of Wibert 
 or Guibert, who was his nephew or god-son, and who acted as 
 his agent or steward. Guibert being desirous, like so many 
 others of his contemporaries, to pay a visit to Saint Fides, 
 assumed the habit of a pilgrim, or the romieu^ as it was then 
 called in that country, and piously directed his footsteps toward 
 Conques. While on his way, he had the misfortune to meet 
 his godfather, Gerard, who, for reasons not mentioned in the 
 story, was extremely enraged to find the young man in a pil- 
 grim's habit on his way to Conques. Assisted by two or three of 
 his companions, he made an attack upon the unfortunate Wibert, 
 and after having deprived him of botli his eyes, threw him 
 bleeding upon the ground. But Saint Fides was not going to 
 suffer one of her faithful servants to be maltreated in this man- 
 
 ♦ ThisaccountispublishedinBolland's" Acta Sanctorum," Octob. torn. iii. p. 300, sqq. 
 under the title of "Miracula S. Fidis (i. e. Fidei), auctore Bernardo Andegavensia 
 Bcholae magistro conscripta." The dedication is contained in the " Prologus auctoris," 
 on the same page Ed,
 
 282 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 ner, out of love for her. A snow-white dove immediately 
 descended from heaven, picked up the exterminated eyes with 
 her bill and carried them directly to Conques. I refrain from 
 givinfj; all the details of the miracle. It will suffice to know, 
 that Wibert remained blind for an entire year ; but at the end 
 of the year, Saint Fides appeared to him in a dream to inform 
 him, that if he wanted to see his eyes again, he would only 
 have to go to Conques to look for them. He went accordingly 
 and brought them back, not in his hand, but in his head, in 
 their orbits and as good as ever. 
 
 It is not a matter of indifference to know, what "Wibert did 
 during the year in which he went without his eyes. " He prac- 
 tised," says his historian, " the profession of a Jongleur, subsist- 
 ing from the contributions of the public, and gaining so much 
 money and living so well, that he no longer cared about the 
 loss of his sight." * This passage from the life of Wibert is the 
 only one that has a certain bearing on the history of literature. 
 There might be some uncertainty in regard to the signification 
 of the word Jongleur in this connection. But in a man deprived 
 of sight, like Wibert, the profession in question could only 
 mean that of an itinerant singer or reciter of poems of every 
 sort, of legends, of heroic songs, of more or less fabulous 
 accounts of ancient wars. 
 
 This Wibert had himself related the whole of his history to 
 Bernard, and undoubtedly arranged it, too, so that the latter 
 had only the trouble of writing it from dictation. But is this 
 history the only one which the credulous Bernard received on 
 the authority of the Jongleur? This Jongleur unquestionably 
 knew others even more marvellous than liis own, and if among 
 those, which the excellent scholar has left us, there were any 
 one, which bore the manifest traces of poetic fiction, this would 
 be precisely the one to be attributed to the mouth of the blind 
 rhapsodist of Rouergue. And really, among the twenty- 
 two histories in question, there is one which exhibits all the 
 characteristics of a romantic fiction, which Bernard must have 
 found written somewhere, or which was derived either directly 
 or indirectly from the recital of some Jongleur. 
 
 Unluckily, Bernard has only given us some scattered traits 
 of this history without any rigorous connection or development. 
 But these traits are still sufficient to leave no doubt in regard 
 to the character and oddity of this fable. I add it here entire, 
 and, as far as necessary, in the very language of the author.f 
 
 * " lisdemque sanus effectus, eodem anno arte joculari publicum quaeritavit victum, 
 indeque qusestum occoepit; adeo ut (sicut modo aasolet referre) oculos ultra habere 
 non curaret, taata eum et lucri cupiditas, et commodi jocunditas delectabat." Id. p. 
 303, c. 9.— Ed. 
 
 t For th? original of this account see "Acta Sanctorum," Octob. torn, iii., p. 327:— 
 •'De quodaim Raimundo, naufragium passo et S. Fidis auxilio liberato."— £d.
 
 The Influence of the Arabs. 283 
 
 Raimond, a rich and noble personage, seignior of a bourgade 
 or village called Bousqiiet, in the environs of Toulouse, under- 
 took a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. Having first 
 descended into Italy, he travelled over a part of it, and wishing 
 to make the remainder of his journey by sea, he repaired to 
 Luni, an ancient city on the coast of Italian Liguria, which was 
 destroyed in 924 by the Hungarians, but which we must sup- 
 pose still existing at the epoch of Raimond's pilgrimage. 
 
 After having embarked according to his project, our pil- 
 grim found at first the sea and winds propitious. But a 
 tempest having suddenly arisen, the vessel was driven against 
 the rocks and sliattered. Pilot, seamen, passengers, in a word, 
 all on board were lost, with the exception of Raimond and 
 a slave or servant, whom the latter had taken along with him. 
 The slave clung to a plank from the ship and landed safely 
 on the shores of Italy, from whence he returned to Toulouse. 
 Having presented himself before the lady of Bousquet, 
 he gave her an account of his personal adventures, and as he 
 had no doubt but that Raimond had perished in the ship- 
 wreck, he at the same time announced the death of their com- 
 mon master. 
 
 The lady of Bousquet assumed all the airs of affliction cus- 
 tomary on such occasions. But bein^ a woman of a volatile 
 disposition, she was really delighted in her heart to have gotten 
 rid of a husband whom she did not love. She soon found her- 
 self surrounded by a crowd of new admirers, and among them 
 there was one, of whom she became desperately enamored, 
 and to whom she abandoned the manor and the property of 
 Raimond. 
 
 The latter, however, was not dead, as his servant had be- 
 lieved and reported. He had seized a fragment of the shat- 
 tered vessel, and with the assistance of St. Fides, which he 
 incessantly invoked, he floated for three entire days upon the 
 waves, without perceiving a single human being, or a monster 
 of the deep. Driven by the winds toward the coast of Africa, 
 distracted and almost annihilated by exhaustion and anxiety, 
 he was already on the point of perishing, when, according to 
 our legendist, he unexpectedly fell in with a party of pirates 
 from Turlande. The astonished pirates picked him up, and 
 having taken him into their ship, inquired after his name and 
 country. But Raimond, so far from being able, in his 
 state of heaviness and languor, to make any reply to their 
 questions, did not even understand them. Molens volcns, the 
 pirates left him leisure to recover his senses again, and when 
 they had reached the shore, they took him with them to their 
 country.
 
 284 History of Provengal Poeti^y. 
 
 When the nourishment and attention which he received 
 had in a measure restored his strength, he was again questioned, 
 and he replied that he was a Christian. But instead of avow- 
 ing liis rank and his profession of a soldier, he represented him- 
 self as a man accustomed to the labor of the field. After this 
 declaration, a spade was put into his hands and he was set to 
 work on a patch of ground. He Avas, however, soon worn out 
 by a kind of labor to which he was not accustomed, and which 
 his swollen and lacerated hands refused. He consequently 
 acquitted himself badly of his task, and was rudely beaten and 
 maltreated for it. Then recovering his former self again, he 
 solemnlv resolved to know no other occupation but that of war, 
 and to handle no other instruments than arms. His masters 
 wanted at once to know what to make of this declaration. 
 They put him to the test, and finding him wonderfully expert 
 in managhig the lance and shield, and in every other kind of 
 martial exercise, they admitted him into their army. He ac- 
 companied them in several expeditions, and always conducted 
 himself so bravely, that they at last advanced him to the post 
 of a commander. 
 
 Meanwhile a war broke out between the Africans of Tur- 
 lande, among whom Eaimond lived as prisoner, and other 
 Africans, whom the author designates by the name of Barba- 
 rins. To all appearances these are the Berbers, the original 
 inhabitants of northern Africa, whom the author intends to 
 designate by this name ; from which it follows implicitly, that 
 the Turlanders must have been Arabs. In this war the Bar- j 
 barins had the advantage ; they exterminated or dispersed 
 the Turlanders, and Raimond was again made prisoner. 
 
 The new masters of the seignior of Toulouse soon recognized 
 his merit and his bravery. They consequently treated him 
 with honor, and permitted him to join them in all their wars. 
 But these were not intended to be the last of Raimond's adven- 
 tures. 
 
 The Berbers, who had beaten the Turlanders, had, in their 
 turn, some difficulty with tlie Arabs or Saracens of Cordova, 
 who defeated them and took Raimond away from them. 
 
 Among these new masters he found still more abundant and 
 better occasions for giving proofs of his valor, than among the 
 former, and he now rose to still higher honors. There was no 
 perilous conjuncture in which they did not count on him, and 
 never was their reckoning disappointed. Among other enemies 
 which they vanquished by his assistance, our legendist men- | 
 tions the Aglabites, Arab chiefs of a part of Africa, in fre- 
 quent collisions with the Ommiades of Spain. 
 
 But a war soon broke out between the Saracens of Cordova
 
 The InfAience of the Arabs. 285 
 
 and Don Sanclio of Castile, a powerful count and gallant war- 
 rior. The latter was victor, and Raimond was again a pri- 
 soner. Raimond acquainted him with his name, his country, 
 and with all his singular adventures. Don Sancho, amazed 
 and touched by the story of his sufferings, restored him to his 
 liberty, loaded him with presents and honors, and retained him 
 a few days at his residence. 
 
 At the moment when Raimond, delighted at the idea of be- 
 ing free again, was about to return to his own fireside, a celes- 
 tial form appeared to him in a dream, and said to him: "1 am 
 Saint Fides, whose aid thou didst so earnestly invoke in ship- 
 wreck. Depart and remain tranquil; thou shalt recover thy 
 manor." * Rejoiced at this vision, without however being able 
 to comprehend its meaning, he left his benefactor and crossed 
 the Pyrenees, in a state of perfect happiness. "When he had 
 arrived near Bousquet, he was informed that his wife had mar- 
 ried another husband, who was then living with her in his 
 castle. Disconcerted by this news, and scarcely daring to 
 think of it, he resolved to wait and see what Saint Fides was 
 going to do for him, and he kept himself concealed in the cabin 
 of one of his peasants, who did not recognize him, changed as 
 he was from fifteen years of absence and of hardshijjs, and dis- 
 guised in the habit of a pilgrim. 
 
 He had already been in this cabin for some time, when a 
 woman, who had formerly been his concubine, observing him 
 one day while he was taking a bath, recognized him by a cer- 
 tain mark he had on his body. "■ Art thou not," she exclaimed, 
 " that Raimond who formerly went on a pilgrimage to Jeru- 
 salem, and who was re2:>orted to have been lost at sea ?" f Rai- 
 mond was going to deny it, bnt the woman, sure of the testi- 
 mony of her eyes, persisted in taking him for what he was. 
 Once mistress of so important a secret, she was unable to keep 
 it to herself; she ran at once to the chateau in order to inform 
 the lady of Bousquet, that her first husband was not dead ; 
 that, on the contrary, he had returned, and was concealed in a 
 neighboring cabin, which she pointed out. 
 
 Ihe intelligence was a source of great sorrow to the lady, and 
 her mind was immediately occupied with devising some plan 
 for getting rid of this returning husband. But Saint Fides kept 
 a watchful eye upon him, and warned him in a dream to leave 
 the cottage of his serf at once. In obedience to her summons, 
 
 * "Sancta Fides ei dormienti apparuit ; ego sum, inquiens, Sancta Fides, cujus nomen 
 naufragus tarn constanter invocasti ; vade securus, quia amissum honorem recupera- 
 bis." Id. p. 328, c. 18 Ed. 
 
 t " Tune es, ait, ille Eaimundus, qui dudum, Hierosolymam tendens, a^quore mersus 
 credebaris? Quo negante, ilia adjecit : Hoc, inquiens, verum est, nee me tuam prae- 
 sentiam celere poteris, cum qua olim consuevisti." Id. p. 328, c. 19.— £d.
 
 286 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 he left in haste and went to a seignior of the adjacent parts 
 by the name of Escafred, a powerful and generous man, who 
 had always been his friend, and who at this unexpected meet- 
 ing was even more cordial than ever before. He at once as- 
 sembled his vassals, his relations and friends, and at their head 
 went forth to assail the usurper of Bousquet. The latter was 
 driven away disgracefully, and Raimond recovered his estates. 
 
 As to his wife, he would have readily pardoned her having 
 taken another husband in his absence ; but he was unwilling to 
 excuse her project to destroy him, after she had heard of his 
 arrival, and on that account repudiated her. 
 
 Such is the groundwork, the rough sketch of a history, of 
 which the legendist has only indicated the general outlines, thus 
 depriving them of all the interest and character which they 
 might have had in their connection and more complete deve- 
 lopment. There is not one of these outlines in which the arid 
 hand of the abbre viator does not become apparent ; and if there 
 could be any doubt in this respect, this doubt would be dissi- 
 pated by the conclusion of the abstract. This is a sort of jpost- 
 scriptum^ in which the author returns to one, at least, of the 
 numerous particulars omitted in his narrative. He explains 
 himself as follows : " To add a small item to the preceding, it is 
 related that the pirates, who first fell in with Roland, made him 
 drink a potion of a powerful herb, and of such magic virtue, 
 that forgetfulness at once laid hold on those who drank of it, 
 and that they lost all recollection of their family and home."* 
 
 The singularity of this legend arises from the incongruity of 
 its difi'erent data, which makes itself apparent at the first glance. 
 I do not now refer to the invocation and the apparition of 
 saints ; for these are matters of course at every epoch, and more 
 especially at the one in question. It is far more important to 
 remark, that it contains historical allusions of considerable in- 1 
 terest. Such are, for example, those respecting the perjjetual 
 wars of the Arabs and the Berbers, or of the Ommiades of Cor- 
 dova with the Aglabites of Africa. The battle, mentioned in. 
 this account as having taken place between the Arabs of Cor- 
 dova and Count Don Sanclio of Castile, is undoubtedly the 
 battle of Djebal-Quinto, which this count and his ally, Soliman 
 ben el Hakem, chief of the African troops of the Peninsula, 
 gained (in 1009 or 1010), over Mohammed el Mohdi, the king 
 of Cordova. 
 
 To these ingredients of the story. Christian on the one hand 
 
 * "Utautem in snperioribus paucis suppleam, addunt etiam, ilium a primis piratis 
 potionem herba; potentem assumpsisse, et ita magicis pracantationibus lactam, ut 
 semel ex ea bibentesadeo lethea oblivione hebcrcntur, ut nee genus ultra, nee domum 
 meminisse possint." Id., p. 339, c. 20. — Ed.
 
 The Infiucnce of the Arabs, 287 
 
 and historical on. the otlier, must be added those of an antique 
 or Homeric type. The fact is a singular one, but nevertheless 
 beyond a doubt. The principal incidents of the history of Rai- 
 mond of Bousquet, which I have just described, are borrowed 
 from the Odyssey. It is in imitation of Ulysses, that the chev- 
 alier of Toulouse is tossed about for three days on the waves, 
 suspended from a fragment of his shipwrecked vessel, and that 
 he invokes Saint Fides, as tlie Grecian hero did Minerva. The 
 Arab pirates, anxious to retain him in their service after having 
 discovered his military prowess, make him drink the potion of 
 oblivion, which Circe poured out for the hero of Ithaca, in order 
 to deprive him of the memory of Penelope and of his native 
 island. After his return to his home, finding a rival in posses- 
 sion of his chateau, Raimond conceals himself in the cottage of 
 one of his peasants, as Ulysses at the house of his good herd 
 Eumajus. The two heroes, disguised for a time and strangers 
 at their own homes, are recognized in nearly the same manner. 
 In the denouement the imitation is more indirect and vague. 
 Raimond stands in need of the assistance of an old friend, in 
 order to recover his castle and to punish his rival, while Ulysses 
 revenges himself alone on the insolent pretenders, wlio have 
 made themselves the masters of his house. Much is also want- 
 ing to make the lady of Bousquet a PenelojDC ; but characters 
 like this were not in fashion in the age of chivalry, and ladies 
 might be in the wrong in the narratives of the romancers. 
 
 we have quite enough, no doubt, of what this history con- 
 tains, tliat is manifestly borrowed from the Odyssey, to strike 
 and embarrass the writer of a literary history. Whence did our 
 author derive his knowledge of the poem of Homer? This 
 poem had never, to our knowledge, been translated into Latin ; 
 and even if it had, how can we suppose a copy of this transla- 
 tion in the mountains of Rouergue or in the plahis of Toulouse, 
 at the end of the tenth century or at the commencement of the 
 eleventh ? 
 
 There are many things in favor of the supposition, tliat the I 
 imitations, which I liave pointed out above, are not immediate | #> 
 and direct, but mere traditional reminiscences. It is not even '*^^^* 
 necessary to trace these traditions as far back as the epoch, at ^. 
 which the Massilian rhapsodists recited the poems of Homer in =' ^ ^^ ■ 
 the Grecian cities of the south of Gaul. AVe can connect them 
 with a more^recent epoch, when the Iliad and Odyssey served 
 as the basis of instruction in Greek at the schools for the study | 
 of this language, which continued to exist in the south of Gaul 
 until the end of the fourth and even of the fifth centuries. 
 
 Be that, however, as it may ; with the exception of this sin- 
 gularity and of whatever historical elements it may contain.
 
 w 
 
 288 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 this legend of Eaimond of Bousquet, considered in itself and as 
 a whole, appears to me to be nothing more than an abstract of 
 a romantic fiction, invented to please and to amuse, the interest 
 of which depended chiefly on the admiration and the curiosity 
 which the Arabs of Spain at that time excited in all the nations 
 of their vicinity, and particularly in those of the south of France, 
 which then had scarcely any other relations with them than 
 the voluntary intercourse of commerce and of business. I do 
 not hesitate to cite this fiction as a new proof of the influence, 
 which the Andalusian Arabs exercised directly or indirectly on 
 the imagination of the latter. It is still more curious as a con- 
 firmation of a certain filiation, by which, as we have endea- 
 vored to show, the first literary tentatives of the Middle Age 
 linked themselves to the productions of the Latin literature in 
 the last stages of its decadence. It is here where the Antique 
 and the New, the last echo of the pagan Epopee and the first 
 infantine lispings of the Christian and the chivalric are still con- 
 founded, but only in order to become distinct, soon and forever.
 
 William of Poitiers. 289 
 
 CHAPTER Xiy. 
 
 WILLIAM OF POITIEES. 
 
 It is a curious and interesting circumstance, that a prince, 
 and one who was conspicuous among the princes of his time, 
 William IX., Count of Poitiers, should figure at the head of 
 the list of Provengal poets, designated hj the name of Trouba- 
 dours.* This, however, does not imply, that he was the most 
 ancient of these poets ; it will, on the contrary, appear from 
 the sequel, that he was not. It only implies, that he is the first 
 of those whose works, either entire or in fragments, have come 
 down to us. Not only were there before him and in his day, 
 men versed in the art of " finding " (trohar), though the latter 
 was then as yet in its infancy,but there were even schools for 
 instruction in certain traditional maxims of this art. This is a 
 fact, with reference to which I deem it necessary to enter into 
 some explanations, after which I shall resume, and be able to 
 pursue more methodically, what I shall have to say respecting 
 the Count of Poitiers. 
 
 Among the noble families of Limousin, which flourished and 
 enjoyed a certain degree of distinction during the Middle Ag<i, 
 that of the viscounts of Ventadour occupies a conspicuous 
 place.f The first of its members who rendered it illust)ious, 
 was Archambaud the First, viscount of Comborn and of Venta- 
 dour, who died at a very advanced age, subsequent!/ to the 
 year 992. The traditions of the country represent him as 
 figuring in a multitude of battles, where he disting^iishcd him- 
 self under the command of Emperor Otho I. -But tlic most 
 famous and the most glorious of all his exploits was to have 
 defended, in single combat, the honor of the empress, who had 
 been falsely accused of adultery by interested calumniators.^ In 
 all this there is undoubtedly nothing more ^ than fiction, 
 or falsehood, but the people seldom invents fictions, except in 
 honor of those who have already some foundation of renown to 
 support them. 
 
 * Compare Raynouard, vol. v. p. 115.— -Ed. 
 
 t On these viscounts see Gaofredi Chronicon, in Bouquet's Recueil deshist. desGaules 
 et de la France, vol. xil.— £d. 
 
 19
 
 290 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 The third descendant of Archambaud II., Ebles or Ebolus 
 in., who was born about the year 1086, is only known in the ge- 
 nealogical line of the viscounts of Ventadour under the designa- 
 tion of the Cantor or " Singer," a surname, which was bestowed 
 on him on account of his passionate fondness for the new Pro- 
 vencal poetry. It was he that first introduced into his family 
 this taste for polite culture, for which his son, Ebles IV., who 
 died in 1170 at a very advanced age, was particularly distin- 
 guished. The prior of Vigeois, who, in his invaluable chro- 
 nicle, has carefully collected the notices and traditions of the 
 twelfth century relative to the family of the Yentadours, re- 
 marks in characterizing Ebles lY., that even in old age he 
 still continued to love the " verses of alacrity and joy,"* as 
 the prior, with admirable propriety, designates the productions 
 of Provencal poesy. We shall hereafter hear one of the most 
 distinguished Troubadours celebrate the {poetic) school of Ebles 
 lY., a school in which it is extremely probable, that this Trou- 
 badour himself had learnt his art. 
 
 This being granted, I now proceed to show, the Ebles lY. 
 and Ebles III. were not the predecessors, but only the contem- 
 poraries of William of Poitiers, and even somewhat later than 
 the count, t We cannot, therefore, rank them among the num- 
 ber of those who made Provencal verses before the latter. The 
 fact however proves, what will be more clearly established 
 hereafter, that from the first decennia of the twelfth century, 
 the new Provengal poetry was already cultivated at the court 
 of Poitiers, and in the chateaux of Limousin. 
 
 But the idiom of this poetry was not that of Poitou ; it could 
 be nothing more than the literary idiom of its inhabitants, and 
 the same remark is applicable to Limousin, though not in the 
 sai>ae degree ; for the idiom of this latter country was much 
 moi*Q closely related to the literary Provencal, than that of the 
 former. Neither Poitou nor Limousin could therefore have been 
 the cradle of this poetry, though it was cultivated there by the 
 count of Poitiers and the seigniors of Yentadour. It was in- 
 troduced tKere from somewhere else, from some place situated 
 further towaid the south, nearer to the coasts of the Mediterra- 
 nian. But I sVall not advance at present any conjecture in re- 
 gard to its original locality ; all that I shall conclude from 
 this fact is, that in order to allow this Provencal poetry the 
 requisite time to spread from its native place to Yentadour, and 
 especially to Poitiers, we must necessarily suppose it to have 
 
 * Usque ad senectam carmina alacritatis dilexit. 
 
 f Compare the above quoted chronicon of Gaufredus of Vigeois. He says of Ebolus 
 ni. (chapt. 69) : " Erat valde gratiosus in cantilenis. (^ua de re apud Guillelmum 
 est asseculus maximum favorcm ; verumtamen in alterutrum sese invidebant, si quia 
 alteram obnubilare posset inurbaoitatis nota," etc. — Ed.
 
 William of Poitiers. 291 
 
 originated some years before the beginning of the twelfth 
 century. 
 
 William IX., comit of Poitiers and duke of Aquitania, was 
 born m 1071. In 1086, wlien he was scarcely in his fifteenth 
 year, he inherited the domains of his ancestors, which com- 
 prised entire Gascony, nearly all the northern half of Aqui- 
 taine ; moreover, Poitou, Limousin, Berry, and Auvergne. 
 
 His father, Gui Geoft'roi, or William YIU., a j^rince of the 
 most devoted piety and of great austerity of manners, had 
 zealously figured among those numerous nobles of the south of 
 France, whom Pope Gregory VII. had made his devoted cham- 
 pions, and on whose support he depended in the execution of 
 his comprehensive plans of religious and political organization. 
 
 William IX. had none of the inclinations of his father, and 
 followed none of his examples. He either did not comprehend 
 the grand projects of the Roman pontiff, or else he disdained 
 them. Urban II. wrote him frequently, but it was always to 
 complain of him, or to reproach him for some act of violence 
 toward the churches or the priests. 
 
 He was active and brave, because bravery and activity were 
 at that time the indispensable conditions for the acquisition or 
 the maintenance of power. But the most distinctive traits of 
 his character appear to have been a want of respect for the 
 established forms of religion, uncommon in his day, an unbri- 
 dled love of pleasure, and a jocularity, ever ready to degenerate 
 into buffoonery. 
 
 Married very young to a princess of the house of Anjou, he 
 soon repudiated her, in order to make room for his second nup- 
 tials with Philippa, the daughter of William lY., count of Tou- 
 louse, and niece to the famous Eaimond of Saint Gilles. But 
 this marriage, instead of being a bond of peace between the 
 two seigniories, proved on the contrary a cause of perjietual 
 feuds and discord. 
 
 Every one knows that the first crusade was preached at Cler- 
 mont in 1095 ; and it is also known, that nearly all the nobles 
 of the South enlisted in its support under the auspices of Eai- 
 mond of Saint Gilles, who was the most powerful among them, 
 and destined to become their chief. William IX. was of the 
 small number of those, who rendered themselves remarkable 
 by refusing to take the cross, and this position on his part was 
 really somewhat surprising. He was in the flower of manliood, 
 of a robust and healthy constitution, and if he was not suscep- 
 tible of religious enthusiasm, he was at any rate fond of war, 
 of glory and of grand adventures. But he had, as we shall see 
 presently, his reasons for remaining in Aquitaine, while all 
 his neighbors were on their way to Syria.
 
 292 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 In the month of October of the year 1096, Kaimond of 
 Saint Gilles left Europe for the Holy Land at the head of a 
 hundred thousand men, which the historians of the time some- 
 times distinguish by the separate names of Aquitanians, Goths 
 and Provencals, and which at other times they again confound 
 under the latter of these names. Of all the leaders of this cru- 
 sade, Kaimond of Saint Gilles was probably the one who had 
 entered into the religious motives of the enterprise with most 
 enthusiasm. It was never to return again, that he quitted his 
 rich domains, the fair banks of the Rhone, and his magnificent 
 city of Toulouse. He had made a vow to die where Jesus 
 Christ had died, and in consequence of this vow, he had 
 bequeathed all his estates to Bertrand, the eldest of his 
 sons. 
 
 It would occupy too much of our time, and it is, moreover, 
 foreign to my subject, to discuss the character of Bertrand, 
 after his accession to the power of his father. It is sufficient 
 to say, that by this conduct he made a number of powerful ene- 
 mies in his capital, who conspired against him. This quarrel 
 was precisely what the heart of AVilliam of Poitiers longed for. 
 By virtue of his marriage with Philippa, he thought liimself 
 entitled to the county of Toulouse, and he had only waited for 
 the departure of Kaimond in order to assert these claims. He 
 eifected an easy alliance with the faction at variance with Ber- 
 trand, and supported by it in his plans, he took possession of 
 Toulouse, proclaimed himself its count, and established his resi- 
 dence there. He passed two or three years in the unmolested 
 enjoyment of his conquest, and he was still there toward the 
 close of the year 1099. It was there, that he received the great 
 intelligence of the taking of Jerusalem by the crusaders, and of 
 the establishment of a Christian kingdom in Syria. At the re- 
 ceipt of this intelligence, which resounded like a shout of tri- 
 umph and of joy from one end of Europe to the other, fresh 
 bands of crusaders arose in every direction, ready to march to 
 the succor of the small number of those Avho had remained in 
 Syria. At this time William of Poitiers himself was carried 
 away by the universal impulse, or else he did not venture to 
 remain. But we are unable to give the precise moment at 
 which he resolved at last to assume the cross. It is certain, 
 however, that between this moment and that of his departure, 
 he was involved in difficulties which were very unlike prepara- 
 tions for a pilgrimage. 
 
 In the course of the year 1100 he evacuated the city and 
 county of Toulouse. We do not know precisely whether he 
 was driven out by Count Bertrand's party, which might gra- 
 dually have gained the advantage over him, or whether he left
 
 William of Poitiers. 293 
 
 voluntarily, in order to return to Poitou, where the new turn 
 of events had in fact a claim upon his presence. 
 
 Hilarius, the bishop of Poitiers, had just convoked a conven- 
 tion of bishops in that city, at the head of which it was his 
 intention to excommunicate Philip the First, kino; of France, on 
 account of his adulterous connection with the wite of the count 
 of Anjou. The kin^^, having been informed of this project, 
 wrote at once to William, beseeching him not to suffer his 
 suzerain to be excommunicated before his eyes, and William, 
 who on every other occasion cared very little for his duties as a 
 vassal, was firmly decided not to neglect them on this. 
 
 The bishops, in obedience to the summons of Saint Hilarius, 
 met at Poitiers in the course of October, and held their sessions 
 under the presidency of John, the legate of Pope Urban II. 
 They had already had several meetings, and the day, on which 
 the excommunication was to be fulminated against the king, 
 was already decided upon. This was the very day, for which 
 William was waiting, in order to give an exhibition of his cour- 
 age. Followed by a band of men-at-arms, he rushed like a 
 madman into the church, where the bishops were assembled, 
 and with a menacing voice declared to them, that he would not 
 suffer his suzerain to be excommunicated in the very city, which 
 he himself. Count William, held in feoff from him. But legate 
 Jolin was a man above the fear of menaces. He reassures the 
 bishops, exhorts them to perform their duty, and the sentence 
 of excommunication is pronounced in the presence of William 
 and in despite of his opposition. 
 
 Transported with rage and yet not venturing to lay violent 
 hands upon the bishops in the church itself, William leaves it 
 instantly and gives orders to close all the gates of Poitiers, so 
 that no one of the excoramunicators might escape him. The 
 gates were closed accordino^ly, and the bishops remained for 
 some days in the most embarrassing situation. Nevertheless 
 they all succeeded, one after the other, in eluding his vigilance at 
 last, and their escape passed for a miracle. The fact is, that 
 violence and cruelty were not among William's vices, and it is 
 very probable, that he was not in earnest in his endeavors to 
 get possession of the persons of the menaced bishops, and that he 
 saw or suffered them to escape without any chagrin. It was 
 enough for him to have frightened them, and to have given 
 himself, in the eyes of Philip, the air of a devoted vas- 
 sal. 
 
 Meanwhile William had ordered all those of his subjects, 
 whose duty or inclination it was to follow him to the crusade, 
 to repair to Limoges, as their place of rendezvous. By the 
 spring of 1101, they were all assembled there, and he himself
 
 294 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 joined them without any delay. The assembly was a numerous 
 and a brilliant one ; it was composed of thirty thousand com- 
 batants, all Aquitanians or Gascons, exclusive of a host of un- 
 armed pilgrims. There were in connection with all the crusades 
 a multitude of women, who were neither Clorindas nor Her- 
 minias, but it is probable, that there may have been a larger 
 number in a crusade of Aquitanians, commanded by William 
 IX., than in any other ; one historian makes it as high as thirty 
 thousand ; another rests content with the vague statement, that 
 the count of Poitiers recruited swarms of young damsels for 
 his expedition. 
 
 It was at the moment of his departure, at the head of this 
 multitude, that William composed one of those poems, which 
 are still extant, a sort of adieu to his native land and to his eldest 
 son, an infant of three or four years, which M^as born to him at 
 Toulouse, during his residence in that city. Tliis piece is not 
 one, in which we can look for any poetry ; it is, however, never- 
 theless curious, as being t\\Q most ancient in all the collections 
 of the Troubadours, to which we can attach a precise date. 
 Nor is there a lack of a certain moral or historical interest in 
 the grand simplicity, with which the author gives expression to 
 his sentiments in the most serious conjuncture of his life. Here 
 then is the piece, translated as well as the obscurity of certain pas- 
 sages, and the extreme simplicity of the whole would permit me : 
 " A desire to sing has seized me, and I shall sing of that 
 
 which afflicts me. i am going to quit the command of Limou- 
 sin and of Poitou." 
 
 " I shall depart into exile ; I shall leave my son behind me in 
 
 war, in aifright and peril, to the mercy of all those who wish 
 
 him ill." 
 
 " 'Tis a hard thing for me to abandon the seigniory of Poi- 
 tiers ; but it must be so. I leave it, and I commit my domain and 
 
 my son to the care of Folques d'Anjou." 
 
 " Poor infant ! If Folques of Anjou, if the king from whom 
 
 I hold my honors, docs not protect him, the rest, seeing him so 
 
 young and forsaken, will come to assail him." 
 
 " Alas ! If he is not skillful and brave, I once being far from 
 
 him, they will soon have accomplished his ruin, these traitors 
 
 of Angevins and Gascons." 
 
 " I was brave, I was valiant (and well could I have defended 
 
 him) ! but lo ! we must part ; I must go afar off, to visit him, 
 
 to whom the pilgrims go to sue for mercy !" 
 
 " I leave, therefore, all that I loved, my chivalry and my 
 
 joy ; I depart without further delay to the place where sinners 
 
 seek their peace." 
 
 " I implore my companions' mercy. Let them pardon me,
 
 William of Poitiers. 295" 
 
 if I have wronged them ; and may the God of Heaven too par- 
 don me! I beseech him in Romansh and in Latin." 
 
 " I have been gallant and jocund ; but God no longer wishes 
 me to be so. I am unable to support my sadness, so near am I 
 to nvy departure !" 
 
 " I pray all my friends to assist me at the hour of death. 
 Time was when I sought after pleasure and sport, both abroad 
 and in my dwelling." 
 
 " Adieu, now, diversions and sports ! Adieu, now, furred 
 robes of vair and of gray ; adieu, ye fine vestments of silk !"* 
 
 It is manifest enough, that a young prince, bold and gallant, 
 who spoke thus at the moment of joining the crusade, must 
 have yielded but slowly and with an unwilling heart to the 
 
 feneral impulse, to the point of honor demanded by the epoch, 
 he enterprise was far more serious to a man, to whom all 
 that was grave had the air of disorder or of a contradiction. 
 
 William passed through France from the Loire to the Rhine, 
 and having crossed the latter of these rivers, directed his course 
 through Germany and Hungary toward Constantinople. While 
 on his route, he joined two other armies of crusaders, of which 
 one was French, commanded by Hugh, the count of Yerman- 
 dois, brother to Philip the First, kin^ of France, and the other 
 German, under the command of Guelf (Welf), the duke of 
 Bavaria, and of the duchess Ida, his wife. 
 
 These three armies, forming all together a mass of upward of 
 a hundred and fifty thousand men, arrived at Constantinople at 
 the same time. They remained there for several weeks, in order 
 to repair their wasted energies. In the month of June, about 
 the harvest-season, they crossed the strait, and commenced their 
 operations in Asia Minor, eager to reach Jerusalem. But 
 Jerusalem was still far ofi", and the route was difiicult and well 
 guarded by the Turks, who had just destroyed successively, 
 within an interval of fifteen days, two other expeditions of cru- 
 saders as strong as the present, which was the third in the order 
 of arrival, and which ajjpeared under no better ausj)ices than 
 
 * Raynouard : vol. iv. page 83. Piece No. 1. Stroplics 1-11. 
 
 (1) Pus de chantar m'es pres talens, (6) De proeza e de valor fui, 
 Farai uu vers don sui dolens ; ^ , Mais ara nos partem abdui ; 
 Non serai raais obediens y/i^'^.t^ t.J Et ieu vauc m'en lay a selui 
 De Peytau ni deLemozi. ^ ^^^.V^^" mf °e cj'^°^«n P'^'^S". 
 
 (2) leu m'en anarai en eyssilh; •yy'". C^ Xot,z mos amicx prec a la mort 
 Laissarai en guerra men filh, ^-^t*^ Qu'il vengan tuit al meu conort, 
 E gran paor et en parilh ; / Qu'ancse amey joi e deport 
 
 E t'aran li mal siey vezi. /^^r^^i^ Luenh de me et en mon aizi. 
 * * » * * -^ /^-w 
 
 Aissi guerpisc joy e deport 
 
 E var e gris e scmbeli. — Ed.
 
 296 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 the rest. It had scarcely entered upon its march into the 
 country, when the Turks already commenced to burn the har- 
 vest-fields before it, and to obstruct or poison the cisterns, wells 
 and springs with such success, that at the end of a few days the 
 army experienced all the torments of hunger and of thirst. In 
 this condition, it reached at last the valley of the Halys, and no 
 sooner was it at the banks of the river, than the entire mass of 
 men plunged into it precipitately, without any precaution, with- 
 out order or discipline, and with an impetus, of which no words 
 can convey any adequate idea, unless it be perhaps the admira- 
 bly energetic verse of a popular Greek song : " Oh terrible 
 Turks! ^ Allow us now to drink; you'll kill us afterward!" 
 And this was in fact the moment, which the Turks had chosen 
 to pounce upon them. Tlie hardship of the carnage was almost 
 their only one ; but this must still have been considerable, on 
 account of the large number of those who perished. 
 
 William of Poitiers was one of those, who saved themselves. 
 He fled on foot, accompanied by a single man, according to 
 some, and by six, according to others. He directed his course 
 toward the neighboring castle of Tarsus, then in the power of 
 the first crusaders and under the command of a chevalier by the 
 name of Bertrand. The count was well received and passed 
 some days there, endeavoring to forget his recent disaster. 
 Tancred of Normandy no sooner was informed of this, than he 
 invited William, by a courteous message, to his residence at 
 Antioch, of which he was then master. The invitation was 
 accepted with alacrity, and the count spent the winter of 1101- 
 1102 in the splendid and opulent city of Antioch. 
 
 Wlien spring had come, he repaired to Jerusalem in the 
 capacity of a simple pilgrim. After having visited the Holy 
 Sepulchre and having nothing more to do in Syria, he longed 
 with all his heart for his fair native Aquitaine. His plans of a 
 speedy return, however, were thwarted by diverse obstacles, and 
 it was not until toward the end of the year 1102, that he could 
 accomplish his purpose. 
 
 He scarcely had arrived at Poitiers, when he went to work 
 to compose a poem — a piece now probably no longer extant — 
 on the adventures and the issue of his expedition to the Holy 
 Land. 
 
 The subject was certainly not a gay one ; for the enterprise 
 had cost William thousands of his subjects, the elite of his vas- 
 sals and immense riches. All Aquitaine was in mourning; but 
 William had not the faculty of looking at the tragical side of 
 human events. Judging from the poem in question according 
 to the testimony of contemporary authors, it was a burlesque 
 pictm-e of the subject, a piece of indecent buflfoonery, but
 
 William of Poitiers. 297 
 
 probably original and gay, as there were still those who could 
 laugh at it. 
 
 During the interval from his return to the year 1114, history 
 has very little to say about William. It scarcely offers us an 
 occasional glimpse of him, engaged as he was with all his 
 neighbors in a rapid alternation of petty wars and truces of 
 short duration, in which we do not know either what he gained 
 or what he lost. It is quite possible, that in all these quarrels 
 he only sought for occasions to enhance his fame as an excel- 
 lent chevalier. For it is a trait in his character and life, worth 
 our observation, that William IX., count of Poitiers, was one 
 of the first of the great feudal nobles of the south of France, 
 who figure in the history of the Middle Age with pretensions 
 to the glory of chivalry, then still quite in its infancy. 
 
 The events of his life subsequently to the year 1114 begin 
 again to leave some traces in history. It was in the spring of 
 that year that he was excommunicated by the bishop of Poitiers 
 on account of some scandal, in regard to which the historians 
 of the time are not agreed, and which it is of little importance 
 to investigate. But tlie particulars of the excommunication are 
 quite piquant, and they portray the characters of the bishop 
 and of the count so well, that they deserve a place in our ac- 
 count. 
 
 The bishop, after having reprimanded William to his face fer 
 the conduct by which he had incurred the excommunication, 
 was already on the point of pronouncing the dreaded formula, 
 when William, suddenly interrupting, threatened to kill him if 
 he dared to finish.* The bishop, pretending to hesitate, col- 
 lected himself for a moment, and then pronounced the rest of 
 the sentence with additional emphasis. " Strike now," says he 
 to the count, " I have finished." " No," replied William coolly, 
 again quite master of himself, " I do not like you well enough 
 to send you into Paradise. "f And he chased him out of the 
 city. 
 
 It was either shortly before or after this adventure that Wil- 
 liam, finding the circumstances favorable, resumed his former 
 favorite project of gaining possession of the city of Toulouse, 
 There was something in the blood of Raimond of Saint Gilles, 
 which determined all his descendants to go to the Holy Land 
 to combat and to die. The eldest son of Raimond, Bertrand, 
 
 * The Bcene ia described by William of Malmesbury, " De gestis Regum Anglico- 
 rum," book v. : " lUe (i. e., Guillelmus) praicipiti furore percussus crineni antistitis in- 
 volvit, strietumque mucronem vibrans: Jam, inquU, tnorieris nisi me absolvei-is." — Ed. 
 
 t " Ita ofiBcio suo, ut sibi videbatur, peracto .... (episcopus) coUum tetendit: 
 feri, inquiens, feri > At Willelmus refractior consuetum leporem intulit, ut diceret : 
 Tantum certe te odi, ut nee meo te dignor odio. nee coelum unquam intrabis mese 
 manus ministerio." — Ed.
 
 298 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 who had been in the unmolested possession of the county of 
 Toulouse since the year 1100, when "William had evacuated 
 it — Bertrand had embarked for Syria in 1109, with the in- 
 tention never to return again. He had a son, ten or twelve 
 years old, whom he had taken with him. The county of Tou- 
 louse he had transferred to his young brother Alphonse, sur- 
 named Jourdain, from the circumstance, that he was born at 
 Jerusalem, and that his father Raimond had him carried to the 
 Jordan, to be baptized in the waters of the sacred river. 
 
 Alphonse had not yet passed his sixteenth or his seven- 
 teenth year ; and whether he already governed by himself or 
 was still directed by a council of regents, there arose against 
 him in the city of Toulouse a faction, which was determined to 
 upset his authority. William at once formed an alliance with 
 this faction, and with its aid made himself master of Toulouse 
 a second time. 
 
 This city, which had not entirely lost its ancient importance, 
 became now one of the centres of the new civilization, which 
 had commenced to dawn from all parts of the South ; and it 
 would appear, that in the ambition, by which William was im- 
 pelled to its appropriation, there was a certain attraction of the 
 man of culture to the politeness, the literature and the beautiful 
 idiom of its inhabitants. He established his residence there 
 this time as well as the first, but he appears to have been 
 obliged to struggle and intrigue against the party of young 
 Alphonse, which was that of the country itself, and which did 
 not regard itself as vanquished. 
 
 Two or three years passed away in this doubtful state of 
 aifairs, without any serious change either in the fortunes of 
 William or in that of the inhabitants of Toulouse. But about 
 the year 1118 the provinces betAveen the Rhone and the Pyre- 
 nees became involved in a general movement on the part of 
 Spain against the Arabs. 
 
 Alphonso the First, king of Aragon, perceiving the Mussul- 
 man powers of the country more and more divided among 
 themselves, took politic and energetic measures to profit by 
 their contentions and to aggrandize himself at their expense. 
 He made a chivalric appeal to the principal seigniors north of 
 the Pyrenees, and they gallantly responded to it. 
 
 With their forces united to his own, and at the head of both, 
 he besieged, in the year 1119, the great and powerful city of 
 Saragossa, and starved it into a surrender. In the following 
 year he entered the territory of the Mussulmans, and there won 
 the battle of Cotenda, one of the most brilliant and decisive 
 Avliich the Christians had thus far fought against the Arabs. 
 
 William of Poitiers took part in all these expeditions, in
 
 William of Poitiers. 299 
 
 ■wliicli his conduct was that of a gallant chevalier. He had 
 contributed considerable forces, but these forces were levied 
 exclusively in Poitou, or in his other domains. It seems that 
 he did not venture to conduct the Toulousains to this war, or 
 perhaps the latter did not wish to follow him. 
 
 And they really did, from that time, entertain the plan of 
 driving him from the city, and of recalling young Alphonse. 
 In quitting Toulouse, William had left one of his vassals, Wil- 
 liam of Montmorel, to command in his place. The Toulousains, 
 however, soon rebelled against this lieutenant, and obliged him 
 to take refuge in the Chateau N'arbonnais, which constituted a 
 part of the fortified circumvallation of the city, and which was 
 the ordinary residence of the count. 
 
 William heard of this insurrection, while yet on the other 
 side of the Pyrenees, and it was undoubtedly with the intention 
 of suppressing it and of declaring war against Alphonse Jour- 
 dain, that he made an alliance with Raimond Berenger UI., 
 count of Barcelona, who was likewise at variance with Al- 
 phonse, on account of certain difficulties relative to Provence. 
 
 And the war was actually commenced. It appears even that 
 it was a very lively and protracted one, but history has almost 
 nothing to say about it. All that we know about it is, that the 
 Toulousains exhibited considerable enthusiasm for the cause of 
 their young count Alphonse. They laid siege to the Chateau 
 Narbonnais, and forced the lieutenant of William of Poitiers to 
 surrender. After this, when the news reached them that Al- 
 phonse Jourdain was himself besieged in Prague by the count 
 of Barcelona, they marched to his deliverance, and brought 
 him back in triumph to Toulouse, where he afterward remained 
 in the unmolested possession of his power. 
 
 William of Poitiers did probably not abandon the hope of 
 reconquering, at some future day, the city, which he coveted 
 so much. But he did not live long enough to see a third 
 chance to succeed in his project. He died on the tenth of 
 February, 1127. 
 
 I have now given the most interesting and the most positive 
 facts that I have been able to collect relative to the life of Wil- 
 liam IX., count of Poitiers and duke of Aquitania. The 
 writers who were his contemporaries, or nearly so, in speaking 
 of him, are all agreed in what they have to say in regard to the 
 fundamental traits of his character. Geoffrey, the prior of 
 Tigeois, represents him as a man that was carried away by his 
 fondness for the other sex, and on that account incapable of 
 following out any serious design. 
 
 William of Malmesbury malves him a sort of esprit fort, who 
 boldly and with self-complacency denied the existence of a God
 
 300 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 and of a Providence, but who was endowed with the talent of 
 making all those who heard him laugh by his facetiousness and 
 hons mots.* Oderic Vital says in a few words, that he was 
 brave, courageous and excessively jovial, so that in his buf- 
 fooneries he left even the buifoons by profession far behind 
 him.f 
 
 Finally, the extremely valuable biographical traditions of the 
 Troubadours, which were collected during the twelfth century, 
 and which are generally of a purely historical character, repre- 
 sent the count of Poitiers, as one of the most courteous men in 
 the world, and as one of the greatest libertines ; in other res- 
 pects, however, an excellent and gallant chevalier and a man 
 of unbounded liberality. " He understood the art of making 
 verses {II sut hien trouver) and of singing to perfection," they 
 add, " and went about the world a great while, in order to im- 
 pose upon the ladies.":j: 
 
 It was not without design, that I have extended, as far as I 
 could do so without departing from my subject, these notices 
 on the character and life of the count of Poitiers. I wished to 
 be able to affirm, that in this character and in this life there is 
 nothing, that implies a decided poetic instinct. In all, that I 
 have said about William, there is nothing that betrays a poet, 
 much less an original poet, at any rate as far as serious poetry 
 is concerned. This single observation might perhaps suffice to 
 show, that the count of Poitiers could not have been the first 
 of the Troubadours. 
 
 The pieces which are left ns of this author are of a very 
 limited number. Considered in themselves and with reference 
 to their poetical merit, they have no interest whatever, and they 
 might be destroyed without depriving Provengal poetry of a 
 single characteristic trait. There is, therefore, notliing to be\ 
 looked for in these pieces, as far as agreeableness or beauty is con- 
 cerned. If on the other hand, however, we search them for facts 
 or indications with reference to the general history of the Trou- 
 badours and of their poetry, the case is quite a different one. 
 These very pieces, however insignificant in every other respect, 
 
 * "Erat tunc Willelmus comes Pictavorum fatuus et lubricug, qui priusquam de 
 Hierosolyma .... rediit, ita omne vitiorum volutabrum premebat. quasi credent om- 
 nia fortuito agi, rum providentia regi. Nugas porro suas salsa quadam venustate con- 
 diens ad facetias revocabat, audientibus rictus cachinno distendens," etc. "De gestis 
 Regum Angl.," lib. v., p. 170.— Ed. 
 
 t " Hie audax fuit et probus, nimiumque jucundus, facetos etiam kistriones facetiis 
 euperans multiplicibus." Oderici Vitalis "Hist. Eccles." apud Bouquet, vol. xii., p. 
 684, c.—Ed. 
 
 J " Lo corns de Peitieus si fo uns dels maiors cortes del mon, e dels maiors trichadors 
 de dompnas ; e boas cavalliers d'armas, e lares de dompneiar. E saup ben trobar et 
 canlar : e anet lone temps per lo mon per enganar las domnas." Raynouard, vol. v. 
 p. 115. " Parnasse Occitanien," p. 1. Crescimbeni, ■' Istoria della volgar Poesia," vol. ii. 
 p. IW.—Ed.
 
 William of Poitiers. 301 
 
 become invaluable, when regarded in this liglit, for we can de- 
 rive from them a great deal of interesting and reliable informa- 
 tion on the subject of Provencal poetry. It is in this connection, 
 and with a view to this historical purpose, that I have examined 
 them and still propose to speak of them. The facts, to which 
 this examination must be directed, are of a very delicate nature, 
 but nevertheless quite positive, and among the number of those 
 which it is important to observe and to appreciate in investigat- 
 ing new and difficult portions of literary history. 
 
 The different manuscript collections of the poetry of the 
 Troubadours, with wliich we are acquainted, offer us only tea 
 pieces under the name of the count of Poitiers, and these pieces 
 together do not quite contain five hundred verses. It is quite 
 probable, that he composed a larger number of them, exclu- 
 sively even of the lost poem on the Aquitanian crusade. Among 
 the ten pieces, however, which are attributed to him, there are 
 two, which the most unpretending criticism could not admit 
 among the number of his works. For, in the first place, the 
 style differs too greatly from his to be a mere shade or modifi- 
 cation of it ; and secondly, the two poems in question are found 
 in other manuscripts under different names from that of the 
 count of Poitiers. These two circumstances united decide the 
 question. 
 
 In regard to the eight remaining pieces, as all the manuscripts 
 agree in attributing them to the count of Poitiers, and as there 
 is nothing contained in any of them to contradict this testimony 
 of the manuscripts, I do not hesitate to admit and to consider 
 them as productions of William IX. These then are the pieces, 
 which I propose to examine, in order to see what inferences, 
 relative to the history of Provengal poetry, it may be possibley' 
 to derive from them. , 
 
 Of the eight pieces in question, six are of the amatory kind 
 and two only appertain to other species. I have but a word 
 to say about the latter and I shall commence with it. One of 
 these two species is that, of which I have already given a trans- 
 lation, and in which William, at the moment of his departure 
 for the Holy Land, bids adieu to his son and to his seigniory. 
 
 The other is much more fantastical and might prove a source 
 of great embarrassment to one, who took it into his head to 
 look for a serious sense, or even for any sense whatever in it. 
 It is a mere extravaganza, to which I shall revert again here- 
 after. For the present it will be sufficient for my purpose to 
 have simply noticed it. I proceed now to the consideration of 
 the amatory pieces. Of the six poems of this order I can commu- 
 nicate two, and I shall translate them presently. Bnt it is neces- 
 sary to give first some idea of the rest, and here I experience a
 
 302 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 difficulty ; for these pieces are outrageously licentious. I shall 
 confine myself to a rapid exposition of their respective subjects. 
 In one of these pieces, the count of Poitiers unfolds his thepry 
 of love and endeavors to show the folly and the vanity of jea- 
 lousy on the part of husbands and even on the part of lovers. 
 
 The three other pieces properly belong to the narrative class, 
 and there is scarcely a doubt, but that in them the author makes 
 shameless allusions to real adventures of his life. There is 
 one, in wliich he recounts the good luck he had in representing 
 himself dumb to two ladies, whom he accidentally met on a 
 journey into the country. In another he speaks of two ladies, 
 •whom he loved equally, but of which each desired exclusive 
 possession of his heart, under the allegory of two superb coursers, 
 which pleased and suite4 him both. 
 
 Notwithstanding the traits of merriment and drollery, which 
 mitigate to some extent the obscenity of these pieces, they are 
 nevertheless upon the whole the unconstrained and serious ex- 
 pression of a gross depravity, which may have been in part that 
 of the age, but in which there is certainly also much that is 
 purely individual. 
 
 The last two pieces by the count of Poitiers, which still re- 
 main to be examined, are love-longs, like the preceding, but 
 this is all they have in common with them. "We cannot with- 
 out astonishment find productions, so dissimilar in this respect, 
 confounded under the same name. 
 
 I subjoin here a few stanzas* from the first of these two pieces, 
 faithfully translated, except perhaps one or two passages, which 
 I am not sure of having rendered with exactness. 
 
 "I experience such delight in love, that I M'ish to abandon 
 myself entirely to it ; and since I wish to live by love, I ought, 
 if "it were possible, to be completely happy. My new thought 
 shall hereafter be my ornament ; the world shall see and hear 
 
 of it." 
 
 " I ought not to depreciate myself and still I dare not praise 
 me. But if ever the joy of love could fiourish, mine ought to 
 brin«- forth blossoms, above all others. It ought to shine res- 
 plendent over every other, just as the sun upon a cloudy day." 
 
 " All pride must be abased before my lady, and every power 
 
 * Raynouard : vol. iii. p. 3. Piece No. II. Strophes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 
 
 Mout jauzens me prenc en amar Mas, si anc nulhs joys poc florir, 
 
 Un joy don plus mi vuelh aizir ; Aquest deu sobre totz granar, 
 
 E pus en joy vulh revertir, E part los autres esmerar. 
 
 Ben deu, si puesc, al mielhs anar ; Si cum sol brus jorns esclarzir. 
 Quar mielhs or n'am estiers cuiar ***** 
 
 Qu'om puescavczer m auzir. 
 
 leu, so sabetz, no m dey gab_. , 
 
 Ni de grans laus no m say formir ; Mi dons . . . . etc., etc — x-a. 
 
 Totz joys li deu hnmiliar, 
 leu, so sabetz, no m dey gabar, E tota ricors obezir
 
 William of Poitiers. 303 
 
 must obey her, on account of her gracious address, her sweet 
 and charming look." . . . 
 
 " From the joy of such a lady a dying man might revive, and 
 out of grief for her a man, though in the bloom of health, might 
 perish. She can make fools of the wise, render ugly the most 
 handsome, convert the most courteous man into a boor, the boor 
 into a courtier." 
 
 " A fairer one than she cannot be found. Nor eye can see 
 nor mouth can name her equal. I have chosen her as mine, in 
 order to refresh my heart and to renew my body, so that it never 
 may grow old." 
 
 The traits, which constitute the character of this piece, are 
 still more marked and better expressed in the second,* of which 
 the following is nearly the whole : 
 
 " Since we behold again the meadows clad in green, the 
 orchards blooming, the rivulets and fountains, air and winds 
 grown briglit again, it is but just, that every one should cull the 
 part of joy, that falls to him." 
 
 " Of love I cannot but speak well ; and if I should not gain 
 the slightest good by it, no matter ! Perhaps I did not merit 
 any more. And yet it would be such a pleasing joy and so 
 easily bestowed, to obtain a glimpse of hope !" 
 
 " Thus have I always been deceived ! For never yet have I 
 been happy for having loved, and 1 shall never be so. 1 do, 
 however, just as my heart prompts, although I well know, that 
 it IS all m vam. 
 
 " 'Tis thus, that I assume the air of one insensate, longing for 
 what I cannot have. Alas ! The proverb is two true, that, 
 ' He, who has a great desire, has great power : if not, woe be to 
 him !' " 
 
 " Whoever wants to love, must first of all be ready to serve 
 the entire world. He must be skilled in doing noble actions 
 and must beware of speaking vulgarly at court." 
 
 The contrasts between these pieces and those, to which I pre- 
 sently shall scarcely venture to allude, is as striking as it can 
 possibly be. It extends itself to everything about them ; to the 
 form, the tone, the ideas and the sentiments conveyed by them 
 
 * Raynouard : vol. v. page 117. Strophes 1, 2, 4, 
 
 Pas vezem de novelli florir Pero leumens 
 
 Pratz, e vergiers reverdezir Dona gran joi qui be manto 
 
 Rius e fontanas esclarzir, Los aizimens. . . . 
 
 Auras e vens, * * * * ♦ 
 
 Ben deu quascus lo joy jauzir 
 
 Don es jauzens. Obediensa deu portar 
 
 A mantas gens qui vol amar, 
 D' amor non dei dire mas be, E coven 11 que sapcha far 
 
 Quar non ai ni petit ni re, Faigz avinens, 
 
 Quar ben leu plus no m' en cove ; E ques guart en cort de parlar 
 
 Vilanamens. — Ed.
 
 304 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 The love, wliicli constitutes the burden of the latter, has nothing 
 whatever in common with tliat, which is represented in the 
 former. This is an enthusiastic, a delicate and a respectful 
 sentiment, which elevates and deifies its object. In a word, it 
 is chivalric gallantry with all its refinements, its formulas and 
 its characteristic usages. This, however, we shall exhibit in 
 a clearer light hereafter. 
 
 We may be sure, that in the two pieces, which I have just 
 translated, the count of Poitiers did not express sentiments, 
 which w^ere really his own. Nor was the conception of love, 
 as there conveyed, his own. He certainly would have been 
 the last man in the world to imagine such a thing. In speak- 
 ing as he did, he only expressed the sentiments and ideas at 
 that time generally in vogue, at least among the higher classes 
 of society in the South. There was then already a method 
 for the portraiture of these sentiments and ideas, a poetry 
 of a specific character, which was already that of the Trou- 
 badours, still young, perhaps, and as yet incapable of its 
 later loftier flights, but nevertheless older than the count of 
 Poitiers, and constituting already an original system of estab- 
 lished principles and forms. Tliis is an interesting fact in the 
 history of Provencal poetry, and one which I think I can 
 establish to a certainty. I think I can see in the pieces, com- 
 posed by the count of Poitiers, diverse allusions to the poeti- 
 cal system of the Troubadours, all of which oblige us to adopt 
 the supposition, that this system must have been organized 
 and already in vogue for a certain length of time, at the 
 epoch when they were made. 
 
 I have a little while ago sj^oken of a piece by William IX., 
 which I have characterized by the epithet extravagant. In 
 order to justify this qualification, I have only to translate the 
 first stanza, of which the following is a literal rendering : 
 
 " I am about composing a piece of verse about a pure non- 
 entity ; for I shall therein treat neither of myself, nor of an- 
 other ; neither of love, nor of youth, nor of any other matter. 
 It is a long time since I once composed it, while I was sleep- 
 ing on Mount Chenal." 
 
 The piece contains seven or eight additional stanzas symme- 
 trical with this ; they all of them consist of an assemblage of 
 contradictory expressions, associated together for the sole pur- 
 pose of offering to the mind a series of incongruous ideas or 
 images, calculated to surprise or to amuse it for a moment by 
 their extravagance disguised under a serious form. 
 
 We find in the Provencal manuscripts other pieces similar to 
 this. There is one, among others, by Raymbaud of Orange, 
 to which the author gives the singular but very appropriate
 
 WiUiam of Poitiers. 305 
 
 title of ^^ I know not what?'' Troubadours of a graver charac- 
 ter, and of more distinguished talents than either William IX. 
 or Rambaud of Orange, as for example, Giraud de Borneuil, 
 did not disdain this sort of composition. They constitirted, in 
 fact, one of the minor lyrical forms, cultivated by the Trouba- 
 dors, and were a part of their poetic system. 
 
 It is not impossible, although not probable, that the piece by 
 the count of Poitiers, which we have just considered, was the 
 first, and as it were the model of the species. But even if it 
 were, this want of a certain diversion in minds of an eccentric 
 or refined turn might be regarded as a proof, that the serious poet- 
 ry of the Troubadours must have existed long before this time. 
 And there are indeed many things in favor of the supposition, 
 that at the epoch at which oddities, like the one in question, 
 foimd poets and hearers, there must have been already in circu- 
 lation many of those grave and wearisome compositions, which 
 are never wanting in any of the collections of the Troubadours. 
 
 Another species of poetic composition, of frequent occur- 
 rence in these collections, and almost as singular as the preced- 
 ing, but of a more elevated tone, and much more characteristic, 
 is that of the tensons^ or poetic combats. These are pieces, in 
 which two or more interlocutors support opposite sides of some 
 question, connected with some point of chivalric gallantry. 
 The count of Poitiers never composed any tensons ; or rather, 
 he never figures as an interlocutor in any of the pieces which are 
 left us from his pen. But he expressly alludes to them in one 
 of his poems, and this allusion is sufficient to establish the fact, 
 that this sort of poetic challenge was customary in his time, and 
 undoubtedly before him, among the poets of the Provengal 
 tongue. 
 
 We have now discovered three kinds of lyrical productions, 
 peculiar to the Troubadours, all of which are represented in the 
 writings of the count of Poitiers either by formal imitations or 
 by allusions. They are the chivalric love songs, the tensons, 
 and lastly, those incongruous medleys, which never seem to 
 have had any other name except that oi Iknow not what. 
 
 Independently of these allusions, the poems of the count of 
 Poitiers contain others no less significant, on various special 
 and characteristic points relating to the poetics of the Trouba- 
 dours. In this system of poetry, for example, the musical art 
 is inseparably connected with that of the poet. Every poet 
 was his own composer, and generally singer too. There were 
 certain established terms for distinguishing in every poetic 
 composition, the special work to be performed by each of these 
 arts respectively. That of the poetry was denominated Tnots or 
 words, that of the music son or sound. Kow one of the pieces 
 
 20
 
 306 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 of William IX. contains a passage, which alludes to all this as 
 to poetical laws already settled. 
 
 There is another circumstance no less remarkable. The word 
 trobar (French trouver, " to find, invent "), by which the Pro- 
 vencals designate the spontaneous act of the poetic imagination, 
 and the sort of creation which is the result of it, is already em- 
 ploj^ed in this sense in the writings of the count of Poitiers. 
 But this word could only have been used in such a special ac- 
 ceptation at an epoch, when the poetic genius had already 
 acquired, by dint of certain developments, the consciousness of 
 its inherent nobleness and power. K we could ascertain, where 
 and when it was first employed in this sense, we should then 
 know, from this single circumstance, the cradle of the poetry 
 of the Troubadours and the exact date of its birth. But these 
 beginnings involve inquiries which men never think of making 
 in time. 
 
 Finally, we learn from certain passages of the writings of 
 William IX., that the material organization of Provencal poetry 
 at the time of this count, was already fundamentally the same, 
 as we find it at a subsequent epoch ; that is to say, there were 
 two poetical classes or professions, in intimate and necessary 
 relation with each other, and fulfilling each its peculiar part of 
 one common task, to wit, that of the Troubadours or poets and 
 musical composers, and that of the Jongleurs or itinerant singers 
 and reciters of the compositions of the first. 
 
 I shall now endeavor (and the matter is not a difficult one) 
 to recapitulate and to express all these particular facts in one 
 general leading fact. 
 
 If we admit that the count of Poitiers wrote the majority of 
 his pieces from the age of twenty to that of forty, it follows, 
 that the latter were composed during the interval from 1090 to 
 1110 ; and there is every probability, that this was really the 
 case. 
 
 The examination of these pieces furnishes ns evidence, that 
 at that epoch there existed in the south of France two sorts or 
 orders of poetry. 
 
 The one was that primitive Provencal poetry, which origin- 
 ated during the ninth and tenth centuries, from the reminiscen- 
 ces of the Grseco-Roman poetry, and was modified in a Christ- 
 ian sense by the intervention of the priests and monks. It is 
 to this crude, uncouth, spontaneous, but vague and indetermi- 
 nate order of poetry, that we must assign the epic songs, the 
 popular love and dancing songs, the pious hymns, the legends 
 of saints and the romantic narratives, of which I have either 
 spoken historically, or given specimens. 
 
 The second order of poetry existed by the side of the former,
 
 William of Poitiers. SOT 
 
 but it was in every respect distinct from it. This was then an 
 entirely new kind of poetry, systematic, refined, exclusive — a 
 poetry of the courts and castles, of which the only or the princi- 
 pal theme was love, such as the chivalry of the South had made 
 or endeavored to make it. 
 
 These two orders of poetry are clearly to be distinguished in 
 the compositions of the count of Poitiers, who no more invented 
 the one than he did the other, but who cultivated both of them. 
 The older and most popular of the two offered him the liberty 
 of which he stood in need, to express his individual mode of 
 thinking or of feeling, and to recount his personal adventures. 
 The other, more delicate and more ideal, was the poetry in 
 fashion at the courts of the South ; and it was necessary for him 
 to cultivate it likewise, were it from no other motive than from 
 the vanity of being in the ton. 
 
 Subsequently to the epoch of the count of Poitiers, the new 
 poetry of the Troubadours absorbed, gradually and almost en- 
 tirely, the ancient popular poetry, which had preceded it three 
 centuries, and which ended by imprinting its character and 
 imposing its forms upon the former. This is a revolution which 
 I propose to discuss hereafter in- its proper place.
 
 308 History of ProvenQal Poetry. 
 
 CHAPTER XY. 
 
 CHIVALRT CONSIDERED YS ITS RELATIONS TO PEOVENgAL POETRY. 
 
 Before entering npon the examination of the poetry of the 
 Troubadours, I shall have to give some general idea of chivalry, 
 of which the former was only the more or less ideal expression. 
 I am not obliged, however, to treat this subject with anything 
 like completeness ; I have not to write the history of that singu- 
 lar system of institutions, commonly designated by the name 
 of chivalry, to point out its precise origin, or to trace the pro- 
 gress of its development throughout entire Europe. I have 
 only to consider the institution" in question, as it existed in the 
 south of France, and then even I am exempt from embracing it 
 as a whole ; all that is necessary for me is to indicate its con- 
 nection with the poetic system of the Troubadours. But even 
 when thus circumscribed, the subject has still its difficulties and 
 its exigencies, and I do not believe that I shall be able to suc- 
 ceed in my design, without connecting what I have to say on 
 chivalry with a rapid sketch of its general history. 
 
 During the long anarchy, which followed the dissolution of 
 the Carlovingian monarchy, all the remaining moral and social 
 forces were spontaneously called into play in favor of the rees- 
 tablishment of some sort of order. But, in a state of isolation, 
 these forces could accomplish nothing, and some of them, long 
 since the enemies of each other, instead of acting in concert 
 against the general anarchy, only profited by it to exacerbate 
 their mutual hostility. 
 
 Tlius, for example, the military or feudal caste, which had 
 nearly all the political power in its hands, and which, from the 
 commencement of the Frankish conquest, had always been hos- 
 tile to the clergy, was then more opposed to it than ever. More 
 than ever before, did this turbulent and greedy caste now vex 
 or pillage the churches, and menace the independence of the 
 clergy. The latter employed all their energy and care, in order 
 to maintain their possessions and their dignity against these at- 
 tacks, and the history of this struggle is, in a great measure, 
 that of society itself at the epoch in question.
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 309 
 
 Among the numerous ideas suggested to the clergy by the 
 necessity of self-defence, there is one which here deserves our 
 special notice. It was that of creating in the very heart of 
 this feudal caste, which was always ready to trouble society 
 and the church, a party especially devoted to the support of 
 both. The attempt was partially successful, and gave rise to a 
 sort of revolution in the feudal order, which manifested itself 
 in various ways, but more particularly by a characteristic 
 change in the ordinary method of military investitures. 
 
 Among the Germans, the day on which a man was received 
 among the number of the warriors of his tribe, was one of the 
 most solemn in his life, and the occasions for the reception of 
 new warriors were those of great rejoicing to the tribe itself; 
 for they were always attended with a certain display of cere- 
 monies, of the spirit and the motives of which Tacitus has left 
 us so admirable an account.* 
 
 The Germans continued to cherish their ideas and usages on 
 this point, after they had established themselves in the pro- 
 vinces of the empire, and the act of the investiture of arms pre- 
 served among them all its ancient importance. Now as the 
 principal ceremony of this investiture consisted in begirding 
 the young warrior with the sword or with the baldric by which 
 it was suspended, it was from this circumstance that it derived 
 the names by which it was usually designated in the Latin of 
 the time. To take the haldric or to gird about the haldric, were 
 expressions habitually used to designate the act in question. 
 
 At a later period, under Charlemagne and Louis le Debon- 
 naire, the military girdle was considered as the sign or symbol 
 of political capacity. To lose or lay aside the haldric was tan- 
 tamount to a civil degradation. 
 
 The counts, the dukes, the kings, and probably all the mem- 
 bers of the feudal order, without any distinction, preserved this 
 ancient Germanic custom of the investiture of arms, until about 
 the middle of the eleventh century. To give or to receive this 
 investiture still continued to be called to take or to receive the 
 military haldric^ or more simply the military order, the 7nilitia. 
 The term m,iUtia-man or military man {miles, vir militarist 
 was then employed to designate a personage of the feudal caste, 
 as during the first centuries of the conquest the name of Frank 
 had designated a man of the conquering race. ■■' 
 
 The investiture of arms, as long as it remained a traditional 
 usage of ancient Germany, was nothing more than a civil or 
 
 * De Germania, c. xiii. " Sed arma sumere non ante cuiquam moris, qnam civitas 
 sufiFecturam probaverit. Turn in ipso concilio, vel principum aliqnia vel pater vei pro- 
 pinquus scuto frameaque juvenem ornant : haec apud illos toga, hie primus juventae 
 aonoa : ante hoc domua pars videntur, niox reipublicae, etc.— £d.
 
 310 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 political ceremony. It was customary for the young warrior to 
 receive his arms from the hands of another warrior, older than 
 himself; but there is nothing to justify the presumption, that 
 this was done in a place exclusively devoted to that purpose. 
 We do not know whether the young warrior was required to 
 take an oath ; but even if this had been so, the oath could only 
 have been a civil or political one. 
 
 All this was changed during the latter half of the eleventh 
 century, an epoch at which the clergy were attempting to bring 
 about the revolution in the military order, to which I have al- 
 ready referred above. We then find the priests in the posses- 
 sion of the power of investing the youthful warriors of the feu- 
 dal order with their first arms. The ceremony was no longer 
 performed indiscriminately in any place, but in the churches. 
 It was no longer a purely civil or political ceremony, but a 
 mixed one, which now borrowed a part of its solemnity from 
 religion. The neophyte warrior was required to take an oath, 
 and this oath, which was dictated by the Church, distinctly an- 
 nounced, on the part of the latter, the project it entertained in 
 directing or reforming the military caste.* 
 
 The warrior thus instructed by the priest was no longer, or 
 was at any rate no longer supposed to be, the turbulent and 
 haughty warrior, who, measuring his right by his physical 
 strength or courage, regarded everything his own, which he 
 could plunder with impunity. He was now a champion of the 
 Church, who had received his arms only in order to consecrate 
 them to the defence of religion, to the protection of the feeble 
 against the strong, of the oppressed against the oppressor. In 
 short, he was a knight or chevalier in the historical and charac- 
 teristic acceptation of the term. 
 
 We thus perceive, that the institution of chivalry, in its origin 
 and primitive form, was nothing more than an attempt on the 
 part of the clergy to transform the brutal and turbulent force 
 of the feudal soldiery into a well-organized power for the de- 
 fence of the Church and of Society. It was an appeal to what- 
 ever there was generous and humane in the warrior caste in 
 opposition to its perversity, its violence, and its barbarity. 
 
 This attempt on the part of the clergy was connected with 
 others, which were, however, only an expansion of the former ; 
 as for example, the institution of the Peace and of the Truce of 
 God, and the Crusades. But this is not the place for unravel- 
 ling or tracing the threads by which these diiferent events are 
 linked together. 
 
 * On the ceremony of arming or dubbing the knight compare Sainte-Palaye's " Me- 
 moirs of Ancient Chivalry" (English, London, 1784) page 44, sqq. On the military in- 
 vestiture of the Saracens, Hammer-Purgstall's " Litteraturgeschichte der Araber," Yol. 
 i., p. xc.-xcv., and vol. v., p. 3,— Ed.
 
 lU Relations to Chivalry, 311 
 
 But chivalry neither did' nor could remain what the clergy- 
 had originally made it. It soon shook off the sacerdotal influ- 
 ence, and only aspired to virtues, of which some were odious 
 and others indifi'erent to the priests and monks. The institu- 
 tion of chivalry in its earliest form had been a sort of truce or 
 momentary alliance between the clergy and the order of war- 
 riors. But the alliance was but a short-lived one, and the 
 struggle between the two castes soon recommenced with more 
 intensity than ever. 
 
 The passions, the interests, the vices, and the virtues of the 
 feudal order did not find sufficiently free play in the chivalry 
 of the clergy. The religious enthusiasm itself, the grand source 
 of clerical influence and power over the warriors, had among 
 these men something that was uncertain, savage, and unman- 
 ageable. The knight, the feudal soldier, was indeed desirous 
 to serve his religion and his faith, but he was not always in a 
 humor to serve them under the direction and in the interest of 
 a class of men whom he did not like — of a clerg}-, which he re- 
 presents as hankering after lands and treasures, and always 
 ready to cry alarm or to pronounce anathemas against those 
 to whom it was indebted for all it had, however little disposi- 
 tion they might exhibit to take back what they had given. 
 This warrior was sincerely religious, but he was so after his 
 own fashion, with all his ignorance, his pride, his adventurous 
 propensities and his wants, which were always greater than 
 the means at his command for satisfying them. 
 
 On the other hand, the military caste became gradually more 
 civilized in consequence of the general progress of society, and 
 independently of the personal efforts and motives by which the 
 clergy had endeavored to reform it. Now, the views of the 
 Church, as expressed in the institution of chivalry, were quite 
 consistent with the development of several germs of civilization, 
 existing toward the middle of the eleventh century, but not 
 with that of all of them. There was already at tliis epoch in. 
 the south of Europe, and especially of France, a manifest and 
 decided movement of a reviving civilization, which had com- 
 menced under the auspices of the feudal order, and was con- 
 ducted by it. A certain degree of refinement and of politeness 
 began to be regarded as a natural sign of power and elevation 
 of rank. There already existed a sort of respectful considera- 
 tion for the fair sex, a disinterested disposition to admiration 
 and to tenderness, as if there were already a presentiment of 
 the moral ascendency, which woman was destined to hold in 
 society. Finally, display, magnificence, liberality, and a gen- 
 erous use of force, began to be the surest means to the attain- 
 ment of glory and renown among those in power. Chivalry
 
 312 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 was a sort of form for all these sentiments, for all these princi- 
 ples of civilization ; they entered there spontaneously, they daily 
 increased in number and in influence, until at last they be- 
 came the dominant party. It was through these sentiments 
 and principles, that the institution gradually assumed an en- 
 tirely different form from that which the ecclesiastical power 
 had attempted to give to it, and that it eventually became an 
 object of horror to that power. 
 
 This chivalry, however, even at the epoch of its greatest 
 spendor, in the south of France, can manifestly not be considered 
 as a positive, fixed, and regular institution, uniformly under- 
 stood and practised by all those who had adopted it. It is 
 rather a complex and refined system of manners and opinions, 
 pretty generally predominant in feudal society ; a certain ideal 
 of moral, social, and military perfection, quite generally ac- 
 knowledged and respected, but at the same time one to which 
 every one aspired freely, and about the realization of which he 
 was more or less in in earnest, according to his character, his 
 passions, his condition,' and the incidents of his life. 
 
 The system of chivalry, at the time of its first appearance, 
 and while yet in the hands of the clergy, was animated by two 
 sentiments, which, though they did not exclude each other re- 
 ciprocally, were nevertheless distinct, and of which each might 
 inditierently become the dominant or the principal one, accord- 
 ing to the spirit of the times or individuals. They were, on 
 the one hand, a zeal for religion or the creed, and, on the 
 other, that generous interest in opj)ressed weakness, which, 
 when carried to a certain decree of vivacity, will easily deter- 
 mine any man to compromise himself in favor of the weak, 
 and in opposition to the strong. 
 
 It was not the latter of these sentiments that had preponder- 
 ated in the earliest days of the institution ; it had, in fact, no 
 existence there, and was only called into exercise so far as it 
 was implicitly contained in, and, as it were, enveloped by the 
 then more powerful motives of religion and of faith. 
 
 During the twelfth century, however, it was, on the contrary, 
 that generous sympathy for weakness and misfortune in their 
 struggle against the aggressions of unjust and brutal force, that 
 gradually became the dominant sentiment of chivalry. It was 
 the imperious and noble impulse to sustain the oppressed 
 against the oppressor, that became the ideal end of all the 
 actions of the knight. It was, as we shall see hereafter, from 
 this very side, that chivalry developed itself with the greatest 
 degree of energy and originality. 
 
 But notwithstanding its perfect identity in all who adopted 
 it, notwithstanding the unity and the simplicity of its principle,
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 313 
 
 chivalry could nevertheless neither manifest itself nor act pre- 
 cisely in the same manner or in the same degree in all the per- 
 sonages of the feudal order. The difference of rank, of situation, 
 and of power, among these personages, necessarily involved 
 another in their actions, and even in their ideas as chevaliers. 
 A duke, a count, an independent seignior in the possession of 
 lands, of vassals, and of suhjects, had inevitably, in his quality 
 of knight, obligations if not of a different nature at any rate 
 more complex and varied, than the simple feudal warrior, who 
 had no other title than that of knight, no other wealtli except 
 his lance and sword, no other end but that of gaining applause 
 by feats of prowess. 
 
 I shall, in the first place, consider the chivalry of the superior 
 class of the feudal order. In doing so, I shall, however, give 
 to this class the greatest possible extension ; that is to say, I 
 shall include in it all the proprietors of great and small cha- 
 teaux. 
 
 The individuals of this class being born with inclinations, of 
 a more elevated character, most susceptible of culture, most 
 ambitious of renown, were naturally the readiest to adopt the 
 ideas of chivalry. It was through them that these ideas entered 
 more or less into the exercise of feudal power, and into the 
 various relations of the seigniors, either among themselves or 
 toward their vassals, and to society itself. 
 
 From the moment these chivalrous ideas had attained to 
 a certain degree of stability and influence, it was no longer 
 enough for the chief of a seigniory to be powerful and happy, 
 or to enjoy the advantages and privileges of his condition at his 
 leisure. He was bound, by virtue of the principles of chivalry, 
 to make a generous use of his power, to prefer honorable hard- I 
 ship to indolent repose, to interfere for the reparation or the 
 punishment of every injustice committed under his eye, or 
 within the reach of his command. 
 
 The following passage, from a Troubadour of the twelfth cen- 
 tury, gives us a sufficiently correct general idea of the duties of 
 a powerful feudal seignior, pretending to distinction among his 
 equals by the manner in which he undertook to perform his 
 part as a knight : 
 
 " By eating well and sleeping softly," says he, " a man may 
 lead an easy life. But he who wishes to rise to eminence of 
 worth, must needs subject himself to roughest hardship. He 
 must exert his utmost here and there, must take away and give 
 according to the exigency of the time and place." 
 
 At a time when all the laws were equivocal, badly established, 
 and sustained solely by individual forces, every one of which 
 was constantly in operation, constantly ready to assail or to de-
 
 314: History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 fend ; when acts of violence were of daily occurrence, and 
 resulted even more from the necessity of things than from the 
 vices of the individual ; at such a time, I say, the task of main- 
 taining not only one's own rights, but also those of others, those 
 of the weak — in a word, the task of the knight — was the most 
 difficult and hazardous that we can possibly conceive of. The 
 task was even an impossible one ; and the heroism of chivalry 
 consisted in a devotion to duty which acted without reflection, 
 without calculation, and with no other motive than that of 
 obedience to a noble impulse. 
 
 It w^ould be a source of satisfaction to establish this interven- 
 tion on the part of chivalry in the political and social relations 
 of the Middle Age by positive facts, which at the same time 
 might aid us to determine its nature and extent. But facts of 
 this kind are not among those w^hich history collects, when it is 
 written in the shape of chronicles and by ignorant monks. The 
 poetic documents alone offer us some vestiges, which are still 
 precious, in spite of the obscurity by w'hich they are enve- 
 loped. 
 
 Very frequently the acts of violence or oppression, which 
 claimed the intervention of the knight, were domestic transac- 
 tions, acts of conjugal or paternal authority, which, however 
 immoral or unjust they might be, were still performed under 
 the sanction of society and of the law^ The chevalier, however, 
 was never embarrassed by any such consideration. He held 
 himself bound to redress the wrongs of society and of the law, 
 whenever he had the power to do so. 
 
 A singularly curious epistle of Rainbaud de Yaqueiras, one 
 of the most prominent of the Troubadours, to Boniface, the 
 Marquis of Montferrat, recalls several traits from the life of this 
 seignior, who was one of the most celebrated of his time.* 
 Among these traits, there are two which deserve more especially 
 to be quoted here, as illustrative of the chivalric policy of the 
 twelfth century. The first of them I give, somewhat modified 
 and elucidated — less, how^ever, than it stood in need of. 
 
 Boson d'Anguilar, one of the vassals and friends of Boniface, 
 loved a young lady by the name of Isaldina Adhemar. But 
 the parents of the latter were unwilling to let him have her in 
 marriage ; and, fearing undoubtedly lest she might be carried 
 away by violence, they put her under the protection of Albert, 
 the Marquis of Malaspina, one of the ancestors of the Malaspina, 
 who at a later period rendered himself immortal by his hos- 
 pitality to Dante, while the latter was a fugitive and an exile. 
 
 *• An account of this epistle, with a specimen of its versification is given by Ray- 
 nouard, vol. ii. page 259. The different kinds of poetical epistles from the pens of 
 Troubadours are examined page 256-274.— ^d.
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 315 
 
 Boson d'Anguilar, deprived of all he loved, fell sick and lay 
 upon his couch, ready to die. There was but one way to save 
 him. It was to return to him his lady-love ; and in order to do 
 so, it was necessary to go and fetch her by main force from the 
 chateau of Malaspina. This task was undertaken by Boniface 
 in a nocturnal expedition, of which, however, the poet does not 
 give the particulars, though he himself had taken part in it. 
 The Marquis Boniface entered the chateau, found Isaldina, car- 
 ried her away by force, and gave her to the unhappy youth who 
 was perishing from love to her. 
 
 The other trait, which is still more characteristic, is also re- 
 lated with greater perspicuity, with a little more detail ; and its 
 tone is piquant and poetical on account of its naive simplicity. 
 I think I must give it literally translated. " Let me remind 
 you. Seignior Marquis," says Ilambaud to Boniface, " let me 
 remind you of Aimonet the Jongleur, and of the news which 
 he once came to bring you to Montaut, concerning Jacobina, 
 whom they wanted to carry off to Sardinia, and to marry 
 against her wishes. You then began to sigh a little, and you 
 remembered the kiss, which she had given you a few days 
 before, in taking leave of you, after having besought you so 
 graciously to defend her against her uncle, who plotted to dis- 
 inherit her unjustly." 
 
 " And immediately you ordered five of your most valiant 
 knights to get upon the saddle, and we began to ride at night 
 after supper, you, Guyet, Hugonet d'Alfar, Bertaudon, who 
 guided us with admirable skill, and myself (for I must not for- 
 get myself in such a gallant affair.) It was I that rescued 
 Jacobina from the port, at the very moment they were going 
 to embark her," 
 
 " She had scarcely been seized, when a cry suddenly was 
 raised by land and sea, and a host of pedestrians and riders were 
 instantly at our heels. The pursuit was an ardent one, and the 
 way we then decam.ped ! We thought wc had already luckily- 
 escaped from all of them, when those ff^>m Pisa came to assail 
 us in their turn. And as they passed before us, riding in such 
 close array, and when we saw so many cavaliers, so many hau- 
 berks, so many resplendent helmets, when we beheld so many 
 banners floating in the air, let none inquire, whether we were 
 frightened! We concealed ourselves between Albenga and 
 Final, where we heard the blast of many a horn and cornet, the 
 cry of many an ensign all around us. There we remained two 
 days without drinking or eating ; but on the evening of the 
 second day we arrived at the castle of the seignior of Puyclair, 
 who was so delighted with what we had accomplished, and who 
 received us with so much consideration, that he would have
 
 316 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 willingly oifered you liis bright-eyed daughter Aiglette, if you 
 had desired to accept her. On the following morning, you, as 
 seignior and powerful baron, married his son to Jacobina, to 
 whom you compelled them to surrender the entire country of 
 Ventimille, which she was to have inherited after the death of 
 her brother, in spite of the opposition of her uncle, who had 
 desired to deprive her of it." 
 
 After having seen a great knight and seignior exposing him- 
 self without any hesitation to a manifest peril, in order to res- 
 cue an oppressed niece from the hands of an uncle who was her 
 oppressor, or reputed to be such, we will now be sufficiently 
 prepared, I think, to see another compromising himself in order 
 to sustain the ravisher of a new Helena, reclaimed and pursued 
 by a new Menelaus. 
 
 Pierre of Maiinzac, a poor knight of Auvergne, who lived , 
 during the second half of the twelfth century, was at the same 
 time a Troubadour. He celebrated in his songs, and served for 
 some time the lady of Bernard de Tiercy, one of the castellans 
 of the country. The lady did not rest content with his songs 
 and services. For reasons, which the Provengal biographer 
 does not mention, but which were probably of an extraordinary 
 character and not very creditable to the seignior of Tiercy, she 
 suffered or caused herself to be carried away by her lover. 
 This was grand booty for a poor chevalier, who had neither a 
 castle where to deposit it for safety, nor servants-at-arms to 
 defend it. But the ravisher was loved and protected by the 
 dauphin of Auvergne, and according to certain ancient frag- .^ 
 
 ments cf the annals of the Troubadours, this dauphin was one S 
 
 of the wisest and most courteous chevaliers in the world, one 
 of the most generous of men, the best of warriors, and perfectly 
 conversant with all the arts of love and war. With such a 
 patron, Pierre of Maenzac could not consider himself lost. He 
 conducted the lady of Tiercy to one of the dauphin's chateaux, 
 where she was, however, immediately reclaimed by her hus- 
 band. The ravisher an^ his chivalric patron declared that she 
 should not be returned, ai4 this refusal gave rise to a war, and, 
 as far as we can judge from the somewhat dry and too succinct 
 account of the old Provengal \)iographer, to a very serious war. 
 The Church — that is to say, the l)ishop of Clermont — undoubt- 
 edly became interested in favor of the injured husband ; they 
 united their forces and made a common attack upon the dau- 
 phin of Auvergne. The latter, however, defended himself 
 bravely, and the couple, of which he had declared himself pro- 
 tector, was not separated.* 
 
 * Compare Raynouard, vol. v., p. 317 : " Trobava de la moller d'EN Bernat de 
 Tierci. Tant cantet d'ela, e tant la onret e la servi, que la donma se laisset envolar ad
 
 Its Belations to Chivalry. 317 
 
 K we renounce, for a moment at least, the pretension to \ 
 judge these chivalric exploits of the twelfth century according 
 to the standard of our present ideas concerning morality and 
 social order, so as to see them only in the light of facts, we 
 cannot deny them a certain degree of historical importance. 1 
 They show us clearly that the most exalted and most hazardous 
 principles of chivalry are -far from being mere speculations that 
 had only a reality and power in the chivalric fictions of the 
 Middle Age. They prove that the redressers of wrongs, and 
 especially of the wrongs of damsels and of ladies, are really 
 historical personages, which served as the model for those of 
 the romances. In fine, there is nothing wanting in the exploits 
 in question but the details, unfortunately suppressed by writers, 
 who cared nothing for the curiosity or the instruction of future 
 generations, in order to convince us that the real life of the 
 chevaliers of the twelfth century did not leave so much to the 
 imagination of contemporary romancers, as we might be in- 
 clined to think. 
 
 The duty of the knight in regard to the oppressed and the 
 unfortunate was, liowever, not always so laborious or painful. 
 The adversities which he could alleviate by sharing his posses- 
 sions with the needy, were the most ordinary and tlie most nu- 
 merous. And it is indeed true, that next to a courage, which 
 rose superior to every prudential consideration, liberality was 
 the highest virtue of the knight. It would be difficult to exag- 
 gerate the rigor of chivalric morality on this point. 
 
 The manner of acquisition was equally unimportant in the 
 eyes of the knight. To refuse anything was always reputed to 
 be disgraceful in him. It is nothing more than natural artless- 
 ness, very common in the chivalric manners of the twelfth cen- 
 tury, when we hear a knight of considerable rank, such as, for 
 example, the Marquis Albert de Malaspina, repel the charge 
 of robbery preferred against him by the Troubadour Rambaud 
 de Vaqueiras, and justify himself, with the naive conceit that 
 he is doing it to admiration, in the following terms : " Yes, by 
 heavens ! Rambaud, I confess that 1 have many a time taken 
 away by force the i)roperty of others, but I have done so from 
 a desire to give, and not to increase my riches, nor to add to a 
 treasure which I wanted to amass."* 
 
 el ; e mena la ea un castel del Dalfia d'Alverne ; e'l marit la demandet molt com la 
 glesia, e com gran guerra qu'ea fetz : e'l Dalfins lo mantenc si que maia no li la ren- 
 det/'-jEd. 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv., page 9, strophe 3 : 
 
 " Per dieu, Rambautz, de so us port guerentia, 
 Que mantas vetz, per taleii de donar, 
 Ai aver tol, ea noa per manentia 
 Ni per thesaur qu'ieu volgues amassar." — Ed.
 
 318 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 The Troubadours and their commentators can never find 
 terms strong enough to recomTnend or to praise the virtue of 
 liberality in the hero of the Middle Age. The following are a 
 few specimens of the lessons, which one of them addresses to a 
 young noble, who is ambitious to become a distinguished che- 
 valier : " Spend largely, and keep a fine mansion without door 
 and without key. Do not listen to malevolent talkers, and 
 do not put a porter there to strike with his club either squire, 
 or servant, or vagabond, or Jongleur, that may desire to 
 enter." "I consider every baron young," says Bertrand de 
 Born (and h.ere the term young is synonymous with nohle), 
 " when his mansion costs him much. He is young, when he 
 gives largely without measure ; young, w^hen he burns the bow 
 and arrow. But old (that is to say, ignohle and destitute of 
 merit) is every baron, who never puts anything in pledge, and 
 who hoards corn, bacon and wine. He is old, if he has a horse 
 that one might call his own."* It is, moreover, a fact, and one 
 which surprises us still more than the doctrine just advanced, 
 that there were not wanting nobles who adopted it in earnest, 
 and observed it almost to the very letter. 
 
 If in his capacity as a knight, every seignior owed his pro- 
 tection and his services to every man who stood in need of 
 them, he owed them still more especially to his vassals, to those 
 who were immediately dependent on him. He found therefore 
 ordinarily, even within a very limited jurisdiction, enough to 
 do to maintain that justice, that concord and alacrity which 
 he was called npon to maintain everywhere. If to be a ter- 
 ror to the wicked and the strong was always and everywhere 
 an indispensable condition of the ability to serve the good and 
 the feeble, this was still more strictly necessary within the cir- 
 cle of feudal relations. ^ 
 
 And accordingly we find the barons, who prided themselves 
 on their chivalry, extremely jealous and distrustful of every- 
 thing that might infringe upon their rights or power. This is 
 perhaps the only point in which the duties of chivalry were 
 completely in harmony with the personal ambition of the chiefs 
 and the interests of feudalism. The satirical poetry of the 
 Troubadours abounds in bitter ex])ressions of vituperation and 
 contempt toward the barons, who suifered themselves to be 
 robbed by a hostile force of what they had once called their 
 own, and which they would have been praised for giving away 
 or squandering voluntarily. 
 
 By whatever standard we may judge these opinions and 
 
 * This contrast between young and old is carried on in an entire piece (Raynou- 
 ard, vol. iv., p. 261-263), and applied to the dona or lady, as well as to the man or 
 horn. — Ed.
 
 Its Belations to Chivalry. 319 
 
 virtues of chivalry, it is certain, at least, that their practice in 
 general was disinterested and attended with self-denial ; it is 
 certain that the life of the feudal suzerain, whether small or 
 great, which was already of itself a life of amtation, of hard- 
 ships, of abrupt alternations between war and peace, of broils 
 and of intrigues, was rendered still more tempestuous by 
 its complications with the adventurous exigencies of chi- 
 valry. 
 
 The knight stood consequently in need of a powerful and 
 constant internal motive to sustain him in the efforts and sacri- 
 fices which he was incessantly called upon to make, and even 
 to fulfill in part the duties imposed upon him by his oath, to 
 take the side of the oppressed in every emergency. A reli- 
 gious zeal, spontaneous and independent of the infiuence of the 
 clergy, had undoubtedly still great power over the sentiments, 
 the ideas, and the acts of the knight. But nevertheless, this 
 zeal was often wanting ; it had its distractions and its limits. 
 Among the habits and the obligations of the knight, there were 
 some, in which pride and the turbulence of passion acted too 
 conspicuous a part, to make it possible even for the simplest 
 and obtusest conscience to attach any religious motives to them. 
 Men like the chevaliers of the twelfth century, who were still 
 half-savages as far as reason and intelligence were concerned, 
 and whose purest sentiment was nothing more than the gene- 
 rous impulse of military prowess, needed a more immediate, a 
 more tangible — in short, a less elevated motive, than was that 
 of religion, to incite them to the performance of acts of social 
 virtue. This motive chivalry found in love. The chief end of 
 all the enterprises and efforts of the knight was to please a lady, 
 chosen by himself, to be at once the judge and the approver of 
 his merit. 
 
 There has been so much vague discussion about chivalric 
 gallantry, that nothing but a sense of the indispensable neces- 
 sity of saying something about it, in order to give a precise and 
 correct idea of Provencal poetry, could induce me to speak of 
 it again. 
 
 It is an established fact, that during the twelfth century, and 
 in the south of France more tlian anywhere else, the elites of 
 feudal society, who piqued tlicniselves on giving the tone in 
 the manners of the time, and on taking the lead in the progress 
 of social culture and of civilization, had adopted and brought 
 into vogue ideas and conventional usages in all that related to 
 matters of love, which gradually assumed a conspicuous place 
 in the system of chivalry, until they finally became its very 
 essence. That which the monuments of Provencal poetry, the 
 historical documents relative to that poetry, as well as history
 
 320 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 properly so called, permit us to see or to divine concerning the 
 ideas and the usages in question, constitutes a very singular 
 system, of which we have scarcely any suspicion, and which 
 in some respects it is very difficult to expound. I shall, there- 
 fore, in advance, solicit the indulgence of the reader, on account 
 of the vagueness and obscurity, to which the want of space and 
 the reserve of decency alike exposes me. 
 
 In order to be sure of giving a correct conception of this sin- 
 gular theory of chivalric love, it will be necessary for me in the 
 first place, to make a few general remarks on the subject of 
 marriage, as it existed among the higher classes of feudal so- 
 ciety, during the period under consideration. 
 
 In the south of France, the women were legally entitled to 
 hold fiefs and every kind of power attached to them. From 
 this political capacity of woman, it necessarily followed, that 
 the lordly proprietors found marriages the most ordinary and 
 the surest means to increase their domains and their authority ; 
 and as ambition was the dominant passion of these chiefs, every 
 consideration of morality, of sentiment, or of inclination, was 
 excluded from their marriage plans. In general, every baron 
 in search of a wife, sought one from motives of pure political 
 convenience ; and every baron, who gave his daughter in mar- 
 riage, gave her from considerations which were equivalent to 
 those of the suitor. Marriage, therefore, among the members of 
 the feudal caste, was nothing more than a treaty of peace, of 
 amity or alliance between two seigniors, of whom the one 
 took the daughter of the other as his wife. 
 
 Unions thus founded upon the interests of an unbridled am- 
 bition or upon the complicated calculations of convenience, 
 were necessarily very fragile. They found themselves every 
 moment in opposition to new interests, to other unforeseen con- 
 veniences. For this there was but one remedy, a remedy which 
 was, however, an easy one and always in readiness — repudiation. 
 K a noble, already married, had in contemplation some politi- 
 cal arrangement, which could only be efiected by means of a 
 new marriage, he had only to pretend that he was cousin in the 
 fourth degree to the wife he did not want any longer. The 
 Church was then at hand to pronounce his divorce, in order to 
 give him the liberty to enter by a new marriage into a new 
 political situation. It would be difiicult to say to what extent 
 the popes and bishops of the Middle Age contributed to the 
 misery and degradation of married women, by favoring and 
 provoking the most dishonorable repudiations. 
 
 This prolonged barbarity of the feudal marriage relation gave 
 rise to the most singular moral and social phenomena. Of 
 those first germs of civilization, which we have seen fermenting
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 321 
 
 and developing themselves in tlie eleventh century, that new- 
 sentiment, that respectful enthusiasm, which then already 
 tended to become the principle of disinterested actions, was the 
 most deep-rooted and the most energetic. This new sentiment, 
 however, could not manifest itself freely and become a moral 
 force, a principle of heroism, in conjugal relations like those 
 which I have just endeavored to describe. 
 
 Far from it. It was rather in contradistinction to these rela- 
 tions, and as if with a view to compensate for their defects, that 
 the love of chivalry developed itself ; and if anything can aid 
 us in forming a correct conception of the exaggerated preten- 
 sions, the refinements and the subtilties of this love, it is the pre- 
 carious and interested motives of the feudal marriage-tie. The 
 sufferings to which the women were exposed as wives, explain, 
 to a certain extent, the adoration which they exacted and ob- 
 tained as the ladies of the chevaliers. 
 
 In the opinion of the Troubadours, who have expounded, re- 
 expounded, and subtilized its metaphysics in every sense, love 
 is the ultimate and highest principle of all virtue, of all moral 
 merit, of all glory. This they regarded as a fundamental and 
 established doctrinal point, of which they do not even seem to 
 have been very anxious to vary the expression. '^ 
 
 Wherever love exists, and from the very moment of its com- 
 mencement, it manifests itself by a certain disposition of the 
 soul, by a peculiar and distinct impulse, to which the Trouba- 
 dours give the name of joi^ a term for which the English word 
 "joy," in spite of the material identity of the two, would be 
 but an incomplete and incorrect equivalent. 
 
 The ancient Provencal word jot is one of those substantives, 
 which, in consequence of a singular refinement of that language, 
 have two forms, precisely like the adjectives, one masculine 
 and the other feminine, which are not employed indifferently, 
 one for the other, but which, on the contrary, serve to indicate 
 positive differences in the same object, analogous to those 
 which nature has established between the two sexes. Thus, 
 for example, the Provencal word_/oi«, the feminine form oi joi, 
 expresses a state of entertainment or of a purely passive hap- 
 piness, in which the soul only aims at self-concentration and 
 repose. The word joi, on the contrary, taken in the rigorous 
 and philosophical acceptation, which it undoubtedly sometimes 
 has, expresses something expansive and energetic, a certain 
 happy exaltation of the sentiment and charm of life, which 
 tends to manifest itself by actions and efforts worthy of the 
 object loved. 
 
 When manifested by such acts and by such efforts, this im- 
 pulse, this happy exaltation assumes the names of proeza 
 
 21
 
 322 History of Provengal Poeti^y. 
 
 (bravery), valor (manly worth, valor), cortezia (courteous- 
 ness), solatz^ and others still, according to the diversity of the 
 circnmstances under which it may appear. 
 
 The valor or worth of the knight consisted more especially 
 in martial courage, in an adventurous love of peril, in the vo- 
 luntary quest of noble hardships. 
 
 The exercise of valor is always more or less dependent upon 
 chance. "War has its truces, and perils may be wanting, even 
 to the man who seeks for them. But the virtue of cortezia 
 can be practised at all times, and can fill up the necessary in- 
 tervals between the adventures of war. It consists in doing, 
 on every occasion and for whoever may stand in need of it, 
 something beyond the requirements of simple justice or the 
 promptings of mere natural sympathy. 
 
 The joy of love, finally, according to Provengal ideas, is a 
 perennial enthusiasm, which creates occasions for exhibiting 
 itself, when they are not offered accidentally. Hence the chi- 
 valric festivals, the jousts, the tournaments, which I only name 
 in passing, and for the purpose of indicating the moral point of 
 view, from which they present themselves in the theory of chi- 
 valric gallantry. 
 
 Love being thus the principle of all virtue, of all moral worth, 
 the first and the most important business of the chevalier, who 
 was ambitious of being really what every knight desired to ap- 
 pear, was the choice of a lady, whose love and esteem became 
 the end, and at the same time the recompense, of all his actions. 
 
 That in reality and practice, the advantages of beauty, of 
 youth, and of rank had much to do in determining the choice 
 which the chevalier made of his lady, is a fact, about which 
 there can be no doubt. Nevertheless, taking matters as they 
 are presented to us by a multitude of authentic examples, it 
 would appear that the chevalier sought his lady, by way of 
 preference, among those who had attained to the highest renown 
 for virtue, grace, and amiability ; so that ordinarily there was 
 more of morality than sensuality in the motives of his choice. 
 Now the extent of the fiime of a lady depended in general upon 
 the amount of homage, which she received from the Trouba- 
 dours, and also more or less from the celebrity of these Trouba- 
 dours themselves. The lady who was best sung was ordinarily 
 also best served in matters of love ; and this is one of the 
 principal points of contact between chivalry and Provencal 
 poetry. 
 
 From the moment the chevalier had resolved upon the 
 choice of his lady, there was a necessary and marked progres- 
 sion in his relations toward her. The Troubadours, who have 
 expended the greatest care and precision in describing the
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 323 
 
 stages of this progression, differ somewhat in the enumeration 
 which they make of them. They include more or less in the 
 number, according as they have in view the mere theory or the 
 realities beyond the limits of the theory. I shall translate the 
 most positive and at the same time the most curious passage, 
 which I have been able to find on this subject in the gallant 
 metaphysics of these poets. As the English, however, has no 
 precise terms for rendering the distinctions expressed by the 
 Provengal, I must inform the reader, in advance, that those, 
 which I shall employ, must be regarded as mere approxima- 
 tions, which I was obliged to venture in default of better ones. 
 
 "There are," says the Troubadour whom I quote, "four 
 degrees in love ; the first is that of the hesitant {feigneire)^ the 
 second, that of the suppliant {pregair'e)^ the third, that of the 
 accepted 07ie {entendeire), and the fourth, that of the lover {drut). 
 He who would fain love a lady and often goes to court her, 
 without, however, venturing to talk to her of love, such a one 
 is a timid hesitant. But if the lady .does him so much honor and 
 holds out such encouragement to him, that he dare tell her of 
 his anguish, he is then justlytermed suppliant (a suitor). And 
 if by talking and by praying he succeeds so well, that she re- 
 tains him and gives him ribbons, gloves, or girdle, he is then 
 elevated to the rank of an accepted one. If, finally, it pleases 
 the lady to concede her love by means of a kiss to her loyal 
 servant, she then makes him her ainic (friend or lover)." 
 
 It was a moment of very solemn importance in the life of a 
 chevalier, when, after a series of more or less protracted trials, 
 he was at last accepted as her servant by the lady of his choice. 
 The ceremonial, which usually attended this acceptation, would 
 alone suffice to attest the importance attached to it. It was 
 invariably and exactly copied from the one by which the suze- 
 rain and vassal solemnized the occasion, on which they entered 
 into the respective obligations of service, of protection and of 
 fealty, which was one of the most important social transactions 
 at the epochs in question. 
 
 Kneeling before his lady, and with his two hands folded be- 
 tween her own, the chevalier devoted himself entirely to her, 
 swore solemnly that he would serve her faithfully until death, 
 and protect her by every means in his power against harm and 
 insult. The lady, on lier part, declared her willingness to ac- 
 cept his services, pledged him the tcnderest affections of her 
 heart, and as a sign of the union, which thenceforward was to 
 subsist between them, she ordinarily presented to him a ring, 
 and then raising him from the ground, she gave him a kiss, 
 which was always the first, and often the only one he was 
 entitled to receive from her.
 
 S24: History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 All this was called, in the language of the times and of the 
 ceremony, on the part of the lady " retaining a man or cheva- 
 lier," and on the part of the latter, " becoming the man or 
 servant of the lady." And in order that there might be every 
 possible analogy between this vassalage of love and the feudal 
 vassalage, the chevalier was permitted to give, and in fact, 
 very frequently gave the title of " seignior," in the masculine 
 form, to his lady. 
 
 Whatever might be the duration or the consequence of this 
 union, it was never thoughtlessly contracted ; it was always an 
 aflair of the gravest importance in the life of those who en- 
 tered into it. It also happened quite frequently, that recourse 
 was had to the ceremonies of religion, in order to render it 
 more solemn ; and there can be scarcely any doubt, but that 
 the ecclesiastics were in the habit of blessing this union be- 
 tween the ladies and the knights. Once consecrated by a 
 priest, this union was considered inviolable, and could not again 
 be dissolved except by the intervention of a priest. Nothing 
 can attest the solemnity of this union more strongly, than to see 
 how scrupulously, and with what naive singleness of conscience, 
 the guaranties of religion were invoked in forming it. They 
 did not wish, it seems, that an engagement, ordinarily so com- 
 pulsory and melancholy, as was at that time feudal marriage, 
 should have anything more solemn and more sacred than that 
 between a lady and her knight, which was always voluntary 
 and always coveted. 
 
 That the theory and practice of chivalric love tended to 
 reduce marriage to its most immediate and its grossest neces- 
 sity^ will be sufficiently apparent from all that I have thus far 
 said upon the subject. But it is curious to know the ideas by 
 which they had arrived at this result, and by which they 
 thought it could be justified. 
 
 And it was not only to the most active sex, but indifferently 
 to both sexes, that love tlnis had become a necessary motive, 
 the principle of every virtue. Now, according to the ideas of 
 chivalry, the exaltation of desire, of hope, and of self-sacrifice, 
 by which love manifests itself, and in which it principally con- 
 sists, could not have any moral merit, nor could it become a 
 real incentive to noble actions, except on certain conditions. 
 It was to be perfectly spontaneous, receive no law except its 
 own, and could only exist for a single object. 
 
 Every habit or mode of existence tending to blunt it, neces- 
 sarily compromised its moral character as well as its force. To 
 deaden or destroy it, was not only to deprive the soul of its 
 brightest enjoyment — it was running the risk of reducing it to 
 a state of the most degrading inertness ; it was exposing it to
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 325 
 
 the habitual disgusts of society and of life ; it was robbing it of 
 every occasion for feeling, employing, and perfecting the most 
 generous faculties. 
 
 The first consequence of this mode of thinking was, that love, 
 in its genuine sense, was declared impossible in marriage. A 
 woman could only feel her ascendency and dignity, as a moral 
 being, in relations where everything on her part was a gift, a 
 voluntary favor, and not in relations where she had nothing to 
 refuse, or where she could no longer attach a value to anything 
 that might be desirable in her. A favor accorded to a lover 
 might be the reward or the condition of a heroic action, and 
 this favor might, on that account, itself assume the appearance 
 of a moral act. It could not be the same with a favor accorded 
 to a husband ; for, however acceptable it might be to the latter, 
 it was his due. It was equally lost, in this instance, either as 
 an incentive to a noble action, or as a reward for one already 
 accomplished. 
 
 These ideas respecting the incompatibility of love and mar- 
 riage are already sufficiently surprising, and perhaps they even 
 went beyond what I have just endeavored to express. I find 
 in a Provencal piece the following passage, which I translate 
 literally. " A husband would act contrary to the principle of 
 honor if he pretended to act the part of a chevalier toward his 
 lady, as the goodness neither of the one nor of the other could 
 thereby be increased, and as no advantage could result to either 
 of them, which did not already exist dejurey 
 
 But whatever may be our conclusions in regard to the truth 
 or the morality of these ideas, it is certain that they were openly 
 and generally avowed during the twelfth century, wherever 
 there were those who prided themselves on their chivalric cul- 
 ture, and particularly in the south of France. The facts, which 
 go to establish the preponderance of these ideas, are so numer- 
 ous that I could not adduce them all ; I shall therefore select 
 only a few of the most salient. 
 
 The principle, that love could not exist within the limits of 
 wedlock, was so generally acknowledged, tliat it was even 
 deemed impossible to continue between the husband and wife, 
 who had been lovers before thev were married. Several of the 
 decisions of the most ancient cours d amour are founded on this 
 principle, which is there enforced with a rigor bordering on ex- 
 travagance.* I shall give one of them. 
 
 * On the organization and decisions of these cours d' amours, see Bavnouard's "Choix 
 de Vo&i. des Troubad.," vol. ii. p. 79. sqq. Compare also Sisniondi 8 " Hist, de la lit- 
 ter, du midi de I'Europe;" Von Aretin's " Aussprtiche der Minnegerichte aus alten 
 Handschriften ;" Diez' "Die Poesie der Troubadours;' Ginguenii's "Hist, litter, de 
 i'ltalie." Older authorities are Nostre-Dame's "Vies des Poctes Provengaux," and
 
 320 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 A clicvalier loved a ladv, who being already smitten with 
 another love, could not respond to his. Unwilling, however, to 
 deprive him of every hope, she had promised to accept him as 
 her servant, if she should happen to lose the other chevalier, 
 already in possession of lier heart. Shortly after this, she mar- 
 ried the latter of the two, and thereupon the former, to whom 
 she had made the promise, demanded its fulfillment. The mar- 
 ried lady affirmed, that she owed him nothing, since, so far from 
 having lost the chevalier she loved, she had taken him for her 
 husband. This gave rise to a dispute, which the celebrated 
 Eleanor of Poitiers was called upon to decide. She condemned 
 the lady to keep her promise, on the ground that she had really 
 lost her first lover by marrying him.* 
 
 It was therefore really from the manners and opinions, which 
 predominated in the high feudal society of the South, that this 
 anti-conjugal point of chivalric morality passed into the fictions, 
 of the romancers. But we must resort to the latter, if we wisli 
 to find it expressed with a frankness and a naivete, which are 
 truly ideal. 
 
 There is a Provencal romance, entitled Philomenay a crude 
 legend, half-chivalric and half-monkish, composed in the course 
 of the twelfth century, by some monk from the vicinity of the 
 Pyrenees, with a view to celebrate the founding of the famous 
 abbey of Notre-Dame de la Grasse. f In this romance we read 
 of the Moorish king Matran — how he was beleagured in Nor- 
 bonne by the army of Charlemagne. Oriunde, the wife of this 
 Matran, and Paladin Poland have had occasion to see each 
 other, and to see each other so well, as to become enamored 
 of each other, without having even had any conversation. Po- 
 land found the means of sending the queen a ring of gold, 
 wliich she accepted as a pledge of the union of their hearts. 
 It happened one day, that Matran's Saracens after having made 
 a sortie from the city, retreated in great confusion, defeated 
 and pursued by the troops of Charlemagne. Oriunde, already 
 secretly resolved to become baptized out of love for Poland, 
 and delighted with this defeat of the Mussulmans, insults them 
 merrily for their cowardice. I will here let the romancer 
 speak for himself: 
 
 more especially chaplain Andreas' " Liber de arte amandi et de reprobatione amoris.'* 
 —Ed. 
 
 * The language of Eleanor (as quoted by Raynouard from Andreas) is " Coniitissie 
 Campaniae obviare sententise non audemus, qiise firmo judicio diffinivit, non posse inter 
 conjugatos amorem suas extendere vires, ideoque laudamus, ut prsenarrata mulier pol- 
 licitum praestet amorem." — Ed. 
 
 t On this romance and on that of Gerard de Roussillon, see P.aynouard's " Choix de 
 Po6s. des Troubad.," vol. ii. p. 283 ; and his '' Lexique Roman," vol. i. The one is ia 
 prose, the other in verse. These, together with Jaufre, are the only Provencal ro- 
 mances that have come down to us entire, although there are fragments and vestiges of 
 many others. — Ed.
 
 Its Belations to Chivalry. 827 
 
 " And wlien Matran had heard Oriunde, he replied, that she 
 had spoken very badly, and that all that she had said, had been 
 suggested by her love for Roland, which she would have occa- 
 sion to repent on some future day. And the queen, perceiving 
 that Matran only spoke thus from motives of jealousy, replied: 
 My lord, attend to your war, and leave the business of making 
 love to me. You shall reap no dishonor from my conduct, 
 since I love so noble a baron, and one so admirably skilled in 
 arms as Roland, the nephew of Charlemagne, whom I love 
 with a chaste affection ! "When Matran heard this, he retired 
 from the presence of the queen, quite angry and disappointed !" 
 — He had apparently nothing to object to so natural an ex- 
 planation. 
 
 So naive, and one might almost say so crude, a manner of 
 bringing out one of the most perilous points in the theory of 
 chivah-ic love, seems to me to be the strongest possible evi- 
 dence of the popularity and authority of this theory. 
 
 The following passage is in every respect more remarkable, 
 more profound, and more expressive. It is derived from the 
 Provencal romance of Gerard de Rousillon, one of the most 
 beautiful and most curious of its kind, and among the number 
 of those, which have the best claim to a more especial conside- 
 ration hereafter. All that is necessary for us to know here, 
 in order to be able to appreciate the passage, which I propose 
 to quote, is, that Gerard de Rousillon is enamored of a prin- 
 cess, whose name he does not mention, but who becomes em- 
 press by espousing Charles Martel, while he himself is content 
 to marry the sister of the very princess whom he had loved, 
 whom he continues to love, and whom he is happy to see 
 elevated to the highest rank. After their respective marriages, 
 which we must suppose to have been celebrated at the same 
 time, and in the same place, the new empress and her lover 
 Gerard, are on the point of separating for an indefinite period, 
 the former, in order to repair to the court of King Charles, the 
 latter, to return to his county of Rousillon. But they neither 
 could nor desired to part with each other, without first con- 
 firming and consecrating by a suitable ceremony the pure 
 liaison of love, which had long subsisted between them. I 
 will now begin to translate. 
 
 "By the following morning, at daybreak, everybody was 
 to leave. Gerard took the queen aj-jart beneath a tree, and 
 she was attended by two counts and by her sister. Tliere 
 Gerard began to speak, saying : ' Tell me now, lady of the em- 
 peror, what think you of the exchange I have made, b}^ resign- 
 ing you for an object of less value?' — ' Say for a worthy object 
 and one of high value, my lord. But it is really true that you
 
 328 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 have made me queen, and that out of love for me, you have 
 wedded my sister. Be witnesses and guaranties to me, ye two 
 counts Gervais and Bertelais, you too, my dear sister, the con- 
 fidant of my thoughts, and you especially, Jesus Redeemer! 
 Be it known to you all, that I give my love to the duke 
 Gerard, together with this ring, and with this brilliant flower 
 from my necklace. I love him more than I do my father or my 
 husband, and I cannot refrain from tears at his departure.' " 
 
 "Thereupon they separated; but their love remained un- 
 changed ever after, nor did it ever give rise to any impropriety 
 of conduct, nor to anything but tender wishes and secret 
 thoughts." 
 
 Though very brief, this passage nevertheless characterizes 
 admirably the beautiful side of chivalric gallantry. It shows 
 very clearly, with what assurance and with what composedness 
 of conscience, a lady of high rank could swear eternal tender- 
 ness to the friend of her choice, at the very time of her leaving 
 the church where she had just sworn fidelity to a husband, 
 whom she had accepted from mere motives of social conve- 
 nience. It also shows still better, in what conditions of reserve 
 and purity an oath like the latter could be, if not commend- 
 able, at any rate innocent. 
 
 It is an undoubted fact, that in the most elevated theory of 
 chivalric love, every species of sensuality was rigorously ex- 
 cluded from the relations subsisting between the chevalier and 
 his lady. But it must be confessed, that this theory is not the 
 one, of which we encounter the largest number of vestiges in 
 the historical and poetical documents, relating to the chivalric 
 manners of the twelfth century. These documents, on the 
 contrary, ofiier us a multitude of more or less positive passages, 
 of more or less express allusions, all of which indicate a less 
 austere, a less spiritual theory than the one Me liave just con- 
 sidered, but nevertheless one that is still far above the realities 
 of vulgar life. 
 
 Tlie man who is tormented by voluptuousness was declared 
 incapable of love. Tliis principle was strictly in harmony 
 with a system, which excluded from the idea of love every- 
 thing that tended to deaden its enthusiasm. It was, how- 
 ever, inconvenient on the other hand, to deprive desire of every 
 element of sensuality. Between these two extremes, a sort 
 of very tender middle-ground was established, to which the 
 chevaliers and ladies, who earnestly embraced the opinions 
 concerning the nature of chivalric love, confined themselves to 
 the best of their ability. There were consequently lawful 
 favors and enjoyments, which formed a series, graduated ac- 
 cording to certain rules. The poems of the Troubadours are
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry, 329 
 
 full of passages and allusions, which mark this graduation by 
 a multitude of formulas and common-places, the monotony 
 and uniformity of which seem to guarantee their historical 
 reality. 
 
 Nearly all that is characteristic and serious in the poetry of 
 the Troubadours might be cited in support of the ideas which 
 I have just expounded, and of the facts connected with them. 
 I have already given a number of examples, and I might have 
 given many more, had it not been for the excessive difficulty 
 of rendering them exactly into another language. I shall, 
 however, quote one more, from an extremely spirited piece, 
 with which I shall acquaint the reader more especially in 
 another place. The theory of chivalric love, such as I have 
 been able to conceive it, and as I have just expounded it, is 
 found concentrated in nine short verses, which I shall endeavor 
 to translate with the aid of a little paraphrase. 
 
 " He really knows nothing whatever of domnei, that is to 
 say, of love, who desires complete possession of his lady. The 
 love which turns into reality (which ceases to be a matter of 
 sentiment and thought,) is no longer love ; and the heart never 
 bestows itself or any of its favors as a debt. It is sufficient for 
 the lover to have rings and ribbons from his lady, to think 
 himself the equal to the king of Castile. If he receives jewels 
 from her and a kiss, perhaps, occasionally, this is enough (and 
 almost too much) for genuine love. The least thing further is 
 pure mercy." 
 
 In support of this system, and in order to become sure of its 
 practice, various maxims were brought into vogue, some of 
 which were purely speculative and probably of little use ; 
 others, however, were less abstract, to which we may reason- 
 ably attribute a greater and more decisive influence on the 
 relations of chivalric gallantry. Among the latter we may 
 enumerate the opinion, which prohibited the ladies from ac- 
 cepting seigniors of a higher rank than themselves as their 
 chevaliers. 
 
 Regarded under their most favorable aspect, the ideas of 
 chivalry attributed to woman a veritable moral supremacy 
 over man. All that the knight did for his lady was a matter 
 of duty, obligation, justice on his part. His service was a 
 cultus, of which the only certain recompense was the glory 
 and the consciousness of having done something to please the 
 object of his veneration. All that a lady did for her knight 
 was a grace, a favor, a condescension. What she desired was 
 proper, just, and good from the very fact of lier desiring it. 
 She had no other responsibility toward him, whom she had 
 permitted to regard her as the object of his noblest aspirations,
 
 330 History of Prove7igal Poetry. 
 
 than to incite him to good actions. As far as pleasure or hap- 
 piness were concerned, she owed him nothing, and she was well 
 aware, that it was only on the condition of having always 
 something to refuse him, that she could preserve that kind of 
 discretionary power over him, without which her love could 
 never have been anything but a disgraceful and culpable sub- 
 stitute for marriage. 
 
 The generally admitted opinion of this dignity, this moral 
 superiority on the part of woman in the relations of love, natu- 
 rally gave rise to the other, according to which a lady could 
 accept, without compromising herself, the homage of a knight of 
 an inferior rank, and even of one far inferior to her own. In this 
 case, the respect, on which the lady could naturally calculate 
 on account of the superiority of her condition, was considered 
 as a special guaranty on the part of the individual, whose 
 lady she was to pretend to be. The contrary was presumed to 
 take place in cases, where the knight was superior in rank to 
 his lady. It was apprehended, that the latter might not sustain 
 her moral dignity sufficiently well with a chevalier, for whose 
 rank she could not avoid having more or less regard. 
 
 W"e have already been able to infer from several passages of 
 this exposition, and it is proper to repeat it more expressly, 
 that all this theory of chivalric love had a special, fixed, and 
 precise language of its own, as original in every respect as were 
 the ideas which it served to convey. I have already explained 
 a number of its terms, and I shall naturally have occasion 
 to give a more complete idea of it, when I shall endeavor to 
 expound the system of poetry in which it still exists entire, 
 though already full of obscurities and difficulties. For the 
 present, I believe it to be sufficient to revert for a moment to 
 certain characteristic expressions, which I have been obliged to 
 use without being able to dwell upon their explanation. 
 
 The complication of opinions and ideas, of affi^ctions and 
 habits, which prompted the chevalier to devote himself to the 
 service of a lady, and by which he strove to prove to her his 
 love, and to merit hers in return, was expressed, in the lan- 
 guage of the Troubadours, by a single word, by the word dom- 
 nei, a derivation of domna, which may be regarded as an altera- 
 tion of the Latin domina, lady, mistress. This word, which in 
 the French of the i^resent day can only be rendered by the 
 paraphrastic expression of " chivalric gallantry," had in the old 
 French of the thirteenth century its exact equivalent, or per- 
 haps more properly its transcript, in the term donnoy or dom- 
 noy, to which I accordingly shall have recourse in translat- 
 ing it. From domnei was derived the verb domneiar, to in- 
 dicate the act or habit of rendering to the ladies the service,
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 331 
 
 attention, or homage, which was regarded as their due ; and 
 lastly the appellative domneiaire, to qualify the man, devoted 
 to this service and this homage. 
 
 The mere existence of these words is an important and curi- 
 ous fact in the history of modern civilization. They are perhaps 
 the only examples, in the immense repertory of human lan- 
 guages, of terms expressly made for the purpose of denoting 
 and consecrating the respectful submission, the enthusiastic de- 
 votion of force to grace and beauty. 
 
 There is a point on which the chivalry of the south of France 
 differed considerably from that of the North. In the latter 
 countr}'', as well as in Germany and in England, the system of 
 feudalism was legally inseparable from that of chivalry. Those 
 only could become chevaliers, who were already in possession 
 of feudal privileges. The exceptions to this rule, which are now 
 and then recorded in history, only serve to bring out its rigor 
 and its generality into bolder relief. The king alone possessed 
 the right of conferring the rank and privileges of knighthood 
 upon a serf. The barons, who sometimes undertook to exercise 
 the same right, were regarded as invaders of the royal authority, 
 and incurred the risk of punishment, however powerful they 
 might be. In 1280 and 12S1, Gui, the count of Flanders, was 
 condemned by two consecutive decrees of the parliament of 
 Paris, for having made a chevalier of a villein without permis- 
 sion from the king. At a later date, Robert, count of Nevers, 
 was obliged to pay a fine for having conferred the dignity of 
 knighthood on two of his vassals, who, though of noble origin, 
 were not sufficiently entitled to such an elevation. 
 
 The opinion of Germany on this subject was still more rigid 
 than that of France. The law, which authorized the merchants 
 to arm themselves with a sword, as a weapon of self-defence on 
 their journeys, obliged them to carry this sword suspended from 
 their saddle-bow, and not from their girdle, for fear they might 
 be mistaken for knights. The German writers who followed 
 their emperor to Italy, and who have described the wars in that 
 country, found it one of the most surprising curiosities, to wit- 
 ness them decorating with the order of knighthood men from 
 the lowest classes of the peof)le, simple artisans. One of their 
 number, who has left us an account in verse of the quarrels of 
 Frederick Barbarossa with the Lombards, thus concludes the 
 portrait, which he has drawn with considerable detail and ex- 
 actness, of the inhabitants of upper Italy : 
 
 " In order to expel the enemy from their frontiers, and to 
 insure the defence of their country by means of arms, they per- 
 mit every man, however low his rank, to gird about the sword 
 of chivalry, a thing which France accounts disgraceful."
 
 332 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 "With laws and usages like these, chivalry could never trans- 
 cend the limits of the feudal caste, nor could the number of 
 knights ever exceed that of the feudal proprietors. In such a 
 state of things, the privileges and the honors attached to the 
 profession of a chevalier remained identified with that of feu- 
 dalism itself: thej could not extend themselves to any other 
 class of society. This was equally true of the moral ideas, the 
 generous sentiments, the polished manners, in a word, of every 
 element of civilization, which had found its way into the chi- 
 valric institutions. All this, like chivalry itself, remained the 
 exclusive property of the privileged caste. 
 
 It was different in the south of France. There chivalry not 
 only propagated itself beyond the limits of the feudal caste, but 
 it even transcended, as it were, the chivalric order itself. 
 Divested of its name, its formulas, its material accessories, 
 and of the established ceremonial for the creation of its mem- 
 bers ; reduced solely to moral and social impulses, to sentiments, 
 and to that sort of heroism which constituted its soul, its inter- 
 est, and its character, chivalry had in fact become rather the 
 general mode of existence to society in the south of Europe 
 during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, than the particular 
 mode of life of one of the classes or castes of that society. At 
 any rate, it is certain, that in the society in question, the virtues, 
 the qualities, the affections, and the pursuits of chivalry were 
 not always joined to its established attributes or titles ; that on 
 the contrary they were often found independent of this title and 
 these attributes, either in isolated personages, or in the elite of 
 the population of the cities, or even collectively in those small 
 bodies politic, which constituted the free states of this epoch. 
 
 The Proven9al biographies make mention of certain person- 
 ages, who, though they are expressly styled horgues, are 
 nevertheless described with attributes which ordinarily were 
 deemed exclusively appropriate to the character and the pro- 
 fession of chevaliers. It is under this aspect, that they represent 
 a certain Pierre Pelissier, in other respects but little known, 
 and to all appearances of little importance as a Troubadour. 
 " Pierre Pelissier," says his biographer, " was from Marcel, a 
 market-town in the viscounty of Tureune. He was a brave and 
 valiant commoner, full of liberality and courtesy, who by his 
 prowess and his prudence rose so high in the esteem of the vis- 
 count, that the latter made him haile of all his domain.* The 
 Provencal biographer would have employed no other terms in 
 delineating the portrait of a renowned chevalier. 
 
 * "Peire Pelissiers si fo de Marcel, d'un bore del vescomte de Torrena; borges fo 
 valens e pros e lares e cortes; e montet en si gran valor per proesa e per sen qu'el 
 vescoms lo fetz baile de tuta la sua terra." — Raynouard, vol. v. p. 321. — £d.
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 333 
 
 After this brief biographical notice, I will quote a passage 
 which is still more curious, and which may serve as a commen- 
 tary on the former. It belongs to an entirely descriptive or 
 didactic piece by Arnaud de Marveil, in which this elegant 
 Troubadour, while passing in review the different social condi- 
 tions of his time (which was about the close of the twelfth 
 century), describes and estimates them with a good deal of dis- 
 crimination and justice, according to the ideas then in vogue. 
 We will in the first place see in what manner he speaks of the 
 chevaliers, and how he discriminates the different kinds of 
 merit for which they might become distinguished. 
 
 "The chevaliers have diverse merits, as you can readily ima- 
 gine. Some are good warriors, others are good conductors 
 (hospitallers, receiving strangers and travellers, and entertaining 
 them with magnificence) ; some serve the ladies well, and others 
 are distinguished for the brilliancy of their arms and ornaments ; 
 some are brave in chivalric enterprises, and others are agreeable 
 at court. It is difiicult to find all these qualities united in the 
 same person ; but he who possesses the most of them, has the 
 largest amount of merit. But as for him, who possesses none 
 of them, though he may bear the name of chevalier, I neverthe- 
 less do not regard him such for all that." * 
 
 After having thus passed in review the chevaliers, he comes 
 to the commoners, concerning whom he discourses in the fol- 
 lowing terms : " The commoners have likewise several kinds of 
 merit. Some are persons of quality, and distinguish themselves 
 by honorable actions ; others are noble by nature, and comport 
 themselves accordingly. There are others, really gallant, cour- 
 teous, frank, and merry, who, if they are in want, understand 
 the art of pleasing with their clever words, and who frequent 
 the courts to make themselves agreeable ; who, perfectly at 
 home in the ways of loving and serving the ladies, appear in 
 noble attire and figure to advantage at the tournaments and 
 
 * This long piece, in the form of an epistle of the donaire kind, is found entire in Ray- 
 nouard, vol. iv. pp. 405-418. The passage relating to the knights is as follows : 
 
 "Li cavalier an pretz 
 Si cum auzir podetz : 
 Li un son bon guerrier, 
 L'autre bon conduchier; 
 L'un an pretz de servir, 
 L'autre de gen garnir ; 
 L'un son pros cavalier, 
 L'autr' en cort plazentier." 
 etc., etc., etc. 
 
 He next speaks of the ladies : " Las donas eissamens An pretz diversamens ; Las nnas 
 de belleza, Las autras de proeza," etc., etc. Then comes the passage relative to the 
 commoners, here translated: "Li borzes eissamens An pretz diversamens; Li nn son 
 de paratge E fan faitz d'agradatge," etc., etc., and lastly the clergy: "Li clerc, per 
 cui ancse Sab hom lo mal e'l be, Aa pretz, si cum s'esuhai, Aital cum ie us dirai," 
 etc., etc.— £dt
 
 334: History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 martial sports, proving themselves courteous and excellent com- 
 pany to every good judge. Of others, I have not a word to say. 
 I give them up entirely ; for him, who can neither do nor say 
 anything well, I do not include among those whom men esteem 
 or distinguish ; I do not put him into ray verses." 
 
 It would be difficult to institute a more formal and more 
 intimate comparison between that select class of the inhabitants 
 of cities, which was designated by the name of horguesia, and 
 the feudal caste of chevaliers, as far as the tastes, habits, senti- 
 ments, and pretensions of chivalry are concerned. And this 
 species of moral identity, this de facto equality of the two classes 
 was so striking and so generally recognized, that it led, in some 
 cities at least, to a political identity and an equality of privi- 
 leges. At Avignon, for example, the ho7iorable commoners, as 
 they were termed, or those, who, without being knights, still 
 lived after the manner of knights, enjoyed the same rights and 
 the same immunities, as the latter. This fact is proved by an 
 article of the ancient statutes of Avignon. 
 
 This point being established, it will be easier for me to make 
 the reader comprehend what I have still further to say respect- 
 ing the chivalry of the South. I have thus far only considered 
 it in its influence on the chiefs or principal members of the feu- 
 dal caste, rather than on the entire order. But, regarded within 
 these limits, the institution will not become sufficiently known 
 to us. It has other interesting or curious sides, which we could 
 scarcely recognize, if we saw it only at the courts of kings, of 
 great barons, or of wealthy seigniors. 
 
 The sentiments and principles of chivalry had, in fact, some- 
 thing too elevated and too absolute about them, to find their 
 free play and full development M'ithin the somewhat narrow 
 circle of feudal etiquette and its political interests. The higher 
 a knight stood in point of rank and power, the more extensive 
 were his relations, and the less was he able to do all that the 
 laws of chivalry required of him, and to do nothing but what 
 they required. It could happen (in fact it frequently did), 
 that there was a conflict between his ambition as a political 
 chief and his duty as a knight, and in that event, ambition was 
 almost alwaj's destined to carry the day. Such chevaliers ha- 
 bitually compounded, as it were, with the institution ; they 
 adopted of it all that could embellish, enliven, and give variety 
 to their moral and social life, but they were not very particular 
 about it in matters which were opposed to their material in- 
 terests. In short, the position and the conveniences of a great 
 feudal seignior almost necessarily involved something that by 
 its very nature was calculated to impede the free play of the 
 chivalric spirit, to curb it every moment, and on its most heroic
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 335 
 
 sides. It is true, we have seen powerful barons, such as the 
 marquis of Montferrat and the dauphin of Auvergne, adher- 
 ing to the very letter of chivalry, and subordinating grave 
 political interests to it ; but these are curious exceptions to the 
 general rule, against which they prove nothing. 
 
 In order that the principles of chivalry might be carried into 
 practice to its utmost limit, and in order that the institution 
 might approximate, as closely as possible, to its ideal end, it 
 was absolutely necessary that it should extend itself to classes 
 of society more disinterested than the higher feudal classes, and 
 more at liberty to perform whatever the institution commanded 
 that was generous, difficult, or even extravagant. Now such 
 classes existed at an early date in the south of France. 
 
 Even among the feudal nobles of the second and third order, 
 among those more or less powerful vassals, who ordinarily com- 
 posed the court of the great barons, and rendered them military 
 service either in payment for their lands and chateaux or for 
 the offices and titles which they held from them — even among 
 these seignior-vassals, I say, the system of chivalry had already 
 undergone remarkable modiiications from its very origin. 
 
 The title of chevalier being, in the estimation of the feudal 
 caste, the title par excellence, and one which it was customary 
 to add to every other, in order to impart to it a certain moral 
 and poetical lustre, it necessarily followed, that the relations of 
 equality and fraternity, which subsisted between all those who 
 had sought and obtained this title, whether they were suzerains 
 or vassals, must have proved advantageous to the latter. The 
 field of chivalric virtues opened a new career, where the infe- 
 rior had many a chance of equalling or surpassing his superior 
 in renown and glory. The consideration, therefore, which the 
 petty feudatory had acquired in the capacity of a kight, must 
 have proved an additional means for ameliorating his condition 
 as a vassal. 
 
 The fact is, that from the twelfth century, the vassals of the 
 great feudal proprietors had gained considerably in point of 
 moral and political dignity, and that if chivalry was not the 
 only cause of this amelioration of their lot, it nevertheless con- 
 tributed to it considerably. 
 
 The vagueness, the uncertainty, and the mobility of the feu- 
 dal law during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, communi- 
 cated themselves necessarily to all the political transactions of 
 those times, to the division of territory, to the truces, the alli- 
 ances, and the treaties of peace. These transactions IJeing 
 nearly all of them the result of a transient necessity, were nearly 
 all of them violated, as soon as this necessity had disappeared. 
 
 "When it was required to give them a little security, the
 
 336 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 barons, who were the contracting parties, agreed to put them 
 under the respective guaranty of their principal vassals ; and 
 this guaranty was certainly at that time the best that could be 
 given, it being derived from the very force which the contract- 
 ing parties might have been able to employ to violate their 
 contract. There are a number of such treaties, concluded in 
 the course of the twelfth century, between seigniors of the 
 south of France, in which each of them produces as guaranties 
 for his engagements, a certain number of his principal cheva- 
 liers, who declare themselves responsible for the observance of 
 the treaty. Among these treaties, there are some in which it is 
 expressly stipulated, that the chevaliers should declare them- 
 selves against their own suzerain, in case the latter should fail 
 to fulfill his engagements, and that they should compel him by 
 force to keep them. 
 
 According to the ordinary principles of feudal law, every 
 suzerain had the riglit of selecting any of his vassals as hostages 
 for the insurance of his promises, without the latter having any 
 recourse against him in case of treason or breaches of fidelity. 
 The above-named clauses of the treaties, to which I have just 
 alluded, may be regarded as striking exceptions to these prin- 
 ciples ; they are not so much in accordance with the spirit of 
 feudalism as with that of chivalry, in which peace was the ulti- 
 mate object, before which the accidental conventions of political 
 feudalism occasionally vanished into insignificance. 
 
 Among the difl'erent transactions of the kind which I have 
 just described, there were some in which the mediation of the 
 knights of a great baron, as his responsible guaranties, entered 
 still more especially into the spirit and object of chivalry. 
 They were those in which security for the fulfillment of pro- 
 mises, made for the advantage or the honor of a lady, was re- 
 quired. 
 
 I have already noticed elsewhere, with what facility the 
 feudal seigniors repudiated their wives, whenever they could 
 add to their power or their territory by the act. It hence often 
 happened, that women, with a view to diminishing the chances 
 of this dreaded repudiation, would stipulate, in the marriage 
 contracts, for positive guaranties on this subject, and depend 
 upon the chevaliers and vassals of their husbands for the execu- 
 tion of these agreements. Thus, for example, to cite a particu- 
 lar instance of the kind, when William VII., seignior of Mont- 
 pellier, was married to Matilda of Burgundy (in 1156), the 
 latter demanded security for heavy damages, in case she 
 should happen to be repudiated ; and eighteen of the principal 
 chevaliers of William engaged with an oath to interfere with 
 all their power, to guarantee to Matilda the stipulated advan-
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 337 
 
 tages, if she should ever happen to suffer any injustice in this 
 respect. 
 
 In this and in similar cases, which were of frequent occur- 
 rence, chivalry adopted a legal form of action ; the vassals 
 became its organs at the risk of coming into collision with their 
 seigniors, out of love for their favorite institution. This is still 
 another point on which chivalry was in a sort of opposition to 
 feudalism. 
 
 But besides these chevaliers attached in the capacity of feud- 
 atories to their courts, to their government, or to their person, 
 the great feudal proprietors had other chevaliers in their armies, 
 who served them for a stipulated length of time, in considera- 
 tion of a pecuniary reward, and who, not holding any land in 
 fee from them, were simply their men-at-arms, without being 
 properly their vassals. 
 
 These warriors, though most generally of the feudal race, did 
 not strictly belong to the feudal order, in which, or rather by 
 the side of which, they only figured as a sort of appendix or 
 accessory. 
 
 This species of military service was by its very nature more 
 temporary, free, and changeable than that which was made 
 obligatory by territorial vassalage, and the knights who thus 
 enlisted in the service of the kings and counts, formed a numer- 
 ous class in the ensemble of the chivalric order, and one dis- 
 tinct from every other. Instead of being to a certain extent 
 attached to the soil of a feotf, and consequently to the perpetual 
 service of one and the same suzerain, these knights were volun- 
 tary, itinerant, and at liberty to carry their bravery wherever 
 they might be able to employ it to the best advantage. 
 
 The Provencal poems are full of allusions to the chevaliers, 
 who were thus exempt from feudel trammels. They represent 
 them as always ready to quit the seignior, with whom they 
 were displeased, and to look for another one more worthy of 
 them, afraid of nothing but long intervals of peace, upon the 
 watch for every war, and sure to be well received wherever 
 there was one. 
 
 Large numbers of these chevaliers were frequently to be 
 found in the service of the same master, and then they consti- 
 tuted a particular corps of the regular army, of which all the 
 members were, by virtue of their equality of rank, subjected to 
 the same discipline, the same government, bound by the same 
 obligations, and in possession of the same privileges. 
 
 It is to this class of chevaliers, that many of the characteris- 
 tics and usuages, vaguely recorded in historical documents as 
 the characteristics and usages of chivalry, are more especially 
 to be attributed. It was the common rule of their conduct and 
 
 22
 
 338 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 of their service, when a number of them found themselves as- 
 sociated in the pay of the same seignior, that, more than any- 
 thing else, made chivalry a military institution. 
 
 The positive and regulative part of this institution is very 
 little known at present, and we are unable to say to what ex- 
 tent it was uniform or not so in the different countries of 
 Europe, where chivalry was in force. Of all these countries, 
 Spain is perhaps the one which might offer us the most ves- 
 tiges of the organization of these voluntary chevaliers into 
 particular corps of the army, prior to the middle of the thir- 
 teenth century. The collection of laws and usages, compiled 
 by King Alphonso X., under the title of "The Seven Parts" 
 {Las Siete Partidas\ furnishes us a few, on which I shall 
 dwell for a moment, and so much the more readily, as they are 
 not said to belong exclusively to Spain. They have every 
 appearance of representing what was taking place north of the 
 Pyrenees. 
 
 According to this document, the common discipline of the 
 voluntary chevaliers was different in times of peace from what 
 it was in times of war, and extended to the minutest details of 
 their government. Everything was prescribed by law, even 
 to the color of their dress. The red, the yellow, the green, in 
 a word, the lively, striking, and agreeable colors were selected. 
 Everything relating to their mode of life was to contribute to 
 their alacrity and self-confidence. The brown, the grey, and 
 every sombre color would have appeared on them as a sign of 
 sadness or dejection, and dejection was in their estimation tan- 
 tamount to cowardice.* 
 
 Their mode of life in times of war appears to have been 
 strictly regulated and very rigid. They had two repasts a day, 
 one in the morning at a very early hour, the other after sunset 
 in the evening. The first of these repasts was very moderate, 
 so thatj if they should happen to be wounded during the day, 
 their wounds might be attended with less serious consequences. 
 Their evening repast was the principal one. Bat in the even- 
 ing, as well as in tlie morning, they were intentionally supplied 
 with none but viands of the coarsest kind, and with wine of 
 indifferent quality. Between their repasts they drank only 
 water, except in excessively hot weather, when they were 
 allowed to add a little vinegar to their water. 
 
 While they were engaged in active warfare, it was not 
 deemed necessary to talk to them about it ; but in times of 
 peace, the matter seemed less superfluous, and in order to keep 
 
 ♦ Compare Las Siete Partidas del rey Alfonso el Sabio. Madrid, 1807. The laws 
 regulating the actions and life of the knights are contained in the XXIst Titolo of the 
 aecond Partida and are 25 in number. See Vol. II., p. 197-218 — Ed.
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 339 
 
 their courage in a state of exaltation, -which might be called 
 into requisition every moment, a lecture adapted to the pur- 
 pose was delivered before them during their repasts. It was 
 customary to read to them some real or fictitious narrative of 
 ancient wars or of the gallant exploits of the chevaliers of olden 
 times, and in default of written histories of this kind, they had 
 the heroic ballads of the Jongleurs. 
 
 But independently of the particular duties, which resulted 
 from their common organization and service, the voluntary 
 knights, like all the rest, were bound by the generous duties of 
 chivalry, to defend the weak against the strong, to work for 
 the reestablishment of order, wherever they saw it disturbed, 
 to the respectful service of the ladies, and to the defence of re- 
 ligion. There is even a usage, which would seem to indicate a 
 stronger and more considerate intention on their part to fulfill 
 these duties. It was a common custom among them to get an 
 indelible mark imprinted on their right arm with a red-hot 
 iron, the object of which was to remind them of their devoirs. 
 
 These few traits of the ancient common discipline of the vo- 
 luntary knights will suffice to show, that their condition as 
 chevaliers had something more fixed and earnest about it than 
 that of the isolated barons and seigniors of the chateaux. The 
 institution presents itself under a simpler and more austere form 
 among them than among the rest. 
 
 It was, however, after all not in these little corps of the 
 regular army, that chivalry could attain to its highest develop- 
 ment, which it now remains for me to consider. 
 
 There is nothing more characteristic and more striking in the 
 history of civilization in the south of France, than the connec- 
 tion or rather the intimate union between chivalry and poetry. 
 This union took place in every sense and in spite of all the 
 obstacles, which the social and political conveniences seemed 
 to oppose to it. From the moment that love had become a sort 
 of cultus and its songs a species of hymns, the poetic talent 
 became almost the necessary complement of chivalric gallantry 
 and consequently of chivalry itself. Every seignior, great or 
 small, was required to know something about the art of making 
 verses and exerted himself to make some ; he who did not 
 write was at least supposed to like and to appreciate those of 
 others. 
 
 Of nearly five hundred southern Troubadours, whose names 
 have come down to us, one half at least are from the feudal 
 classes. 
 
 This general demand for poetry, in the higher classes of 
 society, proved a strong incitement to the inferior classes to 
 cultivate this art, and every other connected with it. Every
 
 340 Jlistory of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 commoner, the son of every laborer or serf, who might become 
 distinguished in it, was sure of finding it a passport to some 
 one of the petty feudal courts of his time, and of being wel- 
 come wherever he might choose to present himself. 
 
 This social importance of the poets by profession gave rise to 
 something more than mere relations of patronage and amity 
 between these poets and their rivals of the feudal race. It 
 led to an intimate approximation, a sort of amalgamation of 
 the two classes. 
 
 In consequence of the division of property, as prescribed by 
 the laws of inheritance, a multitude of fiefs of moderate extent 
 became at last so comminuted as no longer to afibrd the means 
 of an easy subsistence to its too nemerous proprietors, with 
 whom the merry and brilliant life of chevaliers was conse- 
 quently utterly out of the question. It not unfrequently 
 happened, that the manor of a miserable chateau, the popula- 
 tion of which did not exceed fifty men, was divided between 
 three or four brothers or cousins, who lived there in a state of 
 the most unchivalric anxiety and distress. It was then almost 
 indispensably necessary that some of them should go elsewhere 
 in search of their fortunes, and those that went were invariably 
 such as had the greatest amount of intelligence and energy of 
 character. 
 
 Some, without any other possession but their horse and arms, 
 threw themselves into the adventurous careers of chivalry. 
 Others, to whom the poetical professions appeared more invit- 
 ing, became masters of gallantry and courtesy. Troubadours 
 and Jongleurs even ; and they thus easily found in the chateaux 
 of others the agreeable life and the consideration, which would 
 always have been wanting to them in their own. There is 
 nothing to warrant the suspicion, that the profession of Trouba- 
 dour in a poor feudal proprietor, was ever looked upon as 
 derogatory to his rank as a chevalier. 
 
 On the other hand, a Troubadour by profession, whatever 
 might have been the class of society he was born in, provided he 
 had a certain degree of reputation in his art and a liberal seig- 
 nior for his patron or his friend, could always rise without any 
 difficulty to the rank of a chevalier. All that he was required 
 to do was to express his desire to that efi'ect, and to exhibit a 
 little inclination for war, for tournaments, and for other chival- 
 ric exercises. There was, therefore, in society, a constant 
 transition from the poetical professions to chivalry and from 
 chivalry to the poetical professions. 
 
 These Troubadour chevaliers and chevalier Troubadours, 
 these nobles in whom the poetic genius and that of chivalry 
 were indivisibly united, could never have transcended the
 
 Its Helations to Chivalry. 341 
 
 ordinary limits of their respective classes without a sort of in- 
 dividual energy and originality. There were necessarily 
 among them men of a restless character, of. delicate sentiments 
 and of a lively imagination ; men who were particularly inter- 
 ested in exalting and consolidating the alliance between poetry 
 and military prowess. It would have been difficult for such 
 men not to have carried something of their character, of the 
 exalted turn and poetical tone of their ideas into the usages 
 of chivalry. They naturally constituted the most refined and 
 the most ingenious portion of the chivalric order, consequently 
 the one which was best calculated to introduce into the exer- 
 cises, the practices and opinions of chivalry, the modifications 
 and innovations by which the latter, as a living and changing 
 institution, followed the progressive refinements of society. 
 Too poor to signalize themselves by any acts of prodigality, of 
 liberality or of courtly magnificence, like the chevaliers of the 
 higher classes of the feudal order, they were, by way of com- 
 pensation, independent of all the social and political con- 
 veniences at variance with those of chivalry. "Whatever plans 
 they might conceive for the extension and improvement of the 
 institution, they were at liberty to put in practice. Having no 
 positive interests of their own to manage, and no sacrifices to 
 make to the decorum of an eminent rank, they could with 
 honor, undertake new enterprises, and strange ones even, pro- 
 vided they were only included within the scope of chivalric 
 ideas. 
 
 After what I have said concerning the existence of this 
 almost exclusively poetical class of knights, I think it will be 
 easier to comprehend certain developments of chivalry, which 
 may be denominated its poetical developments. Of these 
 knight-errantry is one of the most prominent. This depart- 
 ment of chivalry, with the idea of which the romances of the 
 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have associated so much 
 ridicule, was nevertheless in its principle nothing more than 
 the most direct and rigorous application of the noblest precept 
 of chivalry, that of protecting the weak against the strong. 
 
 After the institution had extended itself from the class of 
 feudal proprietors to men, who, though for the most part des- 
 cended from the ancient Germanic conquerors, had nevertheless 
 nothing more than a pecuniary salary for their services to 
 depend upon, it was natural that there should be something of 
 more than ordinary enthusiasm and of a more adventuresome 
 disposition among these men, who, instead of waiting on some 
 fixed post for the occasions of defending the oppressed, were 
 prompted to go forth in quest of these occasions. 
 
 It is an undoubted fact, that in all the countries of Europe,
 
 342 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 where there were chevaliers, tliere was a particular class of 
 them which was designated by the title of knights-errant. It 
 is also certain that the motive of this appellation was every- 
 where the same ; that everywhere it was applied to warriors, 
 who, for the purpose of giving proof of their bravery, their 
 strength and intrepidity, went into distant countries in search 
 of opportunities for protecting the oppressed, of braving 
 dangers, in short, of exploits and adventures. 
 
 This usage must have been quite common in 1241 among the 
 Englisli knights, since we find that Henry III. conceived the 
 idea of subjecting it to the same tax with that of the tournaments. 
 It may, therefore, be regarded as certain, that the knights- 
 errant originally passed from reality into the romances, although 
 the latter may have subsequently contributed to impart a 
 greater extent and importance to the functions and profession 
 of the former. 
 
 It is in the poetical monuments of southern France, that I 
 find the most ancient indications of knight-errantry, and it is 
 in the same country that the chivalric manners appear to me 
 to present the most decided tendency to this particular modifi- 
 cation of the system. The allusions to facts and ideas of 
 knight-errantry are not rare in the writings of the Troubadours, 
 but they do not teach us anything of special interest or import- 
 ance on this branch of the institution. Upon the whole we 
 can only conclude from them, that the condition of the knight- 
 errant was rather accidental and transitory than fixed and per- 
 manent, every chevalier being at liberty to put himself in 
 quest of adventures for a limited time, and afterward again to 
 resume the course of his habitual life. The chagrins, the 
 spites, and the caprices of love, to which every knight was 
 more or less subjected, must frequently have become a motive 
 for his courting the hardships and solitude of that savage life, 
 which the redresser of wrongs or the seeker of marvellous 
 adventures was so fond of leading. 
 
 One of the pieces of Eambaud de Yaqueiras, a Troubadour 
 from whom I have already had occasion to quote some verses, 
 contains a very remarkable passage, in which he declares his 
 intention of entering knight-errantry, which he then takes oc- 
 casion to describe in a very precise and lively manner. Says 
 he : " Galloping, trotting, leaping, running, protracted vigils, 
 privations and fatigue shall henceforth be my pastime. Armed 
 with wood, with iron, and with steel, I will endure the ex- 
 tremes of heat and cold. The forests and sequestered paths 
 shall be my dwelling. Descorts and sirventes shall hereafter 
 take the place of my songs of love ; and I'll defend the weak 
 against the strong."
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 34:3 
 
 Tlie allusions of the Pro vengal poets to the existence and condi- 
 tion of knights-errant do not represent them, as do the romances, 
 as always isolated and on the lookout for adventures, where 
 every one is firmly resolved to share neither the glory nor the 
 danger with any one else. They show, on the contrary, that 
 quite frequently several of them travelled together, who, to all 
 appearances, were temporarily associated for a common enter- 
 prise or search ; and it was, in fact, only through the aid of 
 such associations that they had the chance of accomplishing 
 anything of importance for the object of their institution. 
 
 In the poetic descriptions of wars, of encampments, and of 
 battles, in which the Troubadours delighted — descriptions gene- 
 rally full of truth and energy — the idea of knight-errantry pre- 
 sents itself as an ordinary and acknowledged accessory, which; 
 seems to indicate that these chevaliers frequently descended 
 from the eminence of their ideal tasks, as champions for the 
 defence of feebleness and imiocence, in order to participate in 
 the vulgar quarrels between this kings and powerful seigniors, 
 deciding undoubtedly in favor of the one who could offer them 
 the greatest reward ; and this is one of the sides by which knight- 
 errantry was brought into contact with the regular army of the 
 voluntary chevaliers, and where it tended to coalesce with it. ' 
 
 But the poetical and historical monuments of the south of 
 France and of Catalonia make mention of another species of 
 chevaliers, wdiicli seems to have the most direct and intimate 
 resemblance to that of the knights-errant, but which is never- 
 theless distinct from it in something more than the mere name. 
 The historians and j)oets designate these knights with the name 
 of cavalier salvatge^ or savage chevaliers. Tliere are accounts 
 of military expeditions, in which they figure simply as warriors. 
 But there are laws in which they are regarded with disfavor, 
 and in which we perceive a manifest intention to brand and to 
 discourage their mode of life. In 1234, James the First, king 
 of Aragon, prohibited in an express article of certain constitu- 
 tions, which he was then publishing, the practice of making 
 savage knights. Another article of the same constitution seems 
 to put this class of chevaliers upon a level with the Jongleurs ; 
 it prohibits the extension of a gratuity to any Jongleur, 
 whether man or woman, or to any cavalier salvatge. Finally, 
 there is still extant a piece of Provencal poetry, in which the 
 title of Jongleur and that of savage chevalier are likewise asso- 
 ciated, and in such a manner as to lead us to suspect a certain 
 connection between the two. 
 
 The piece in question, which is probably a few years anterior 
 to the constitutions just quoted, is a satirical tenson between 
 Bertrand of Lamanon, a chevalier from the court of the Count
 
 34:4: History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 of Provence, and a Troubadour by the name of Don Guigo, 
 concerning wliom we have very little information. Bertrand 
 reproaches or banters the latter on account of his frequent 
 changes of profession and condition. It begins in the follow- 
 ing strain : 
 
 " Friend Guigo, were I desirous of knowing the secrets of 
 every profession, I should stand in need of thy ability and 
 skill, since thou hast practised all of them. For thou wert, in 
 the first place, and for a long time, corumtier {i.e. go-between), 
 after which thou wast elevated to the rank of servant-at-arms, 
 to rob cattle, goats and sheep, wherever thou couldst find them. 
 Thou next becamst a Jongleur (singer) of verses and of songs, 
 and now we see thee on the pinnacle of honor, since the Count 
 of Provence has created thee kniglit savage."* 
 
 The most probable inference, that we draw from data as 
 vague as these, is, that these savage knights were of an inferior 
 order, who combined the profession of arms with that of itiner- 
 ant singers or reciters of poetry, and who lived by the one or 
 the other, or by both of them at once, as the occasion might 
 require. This was, therefore, an additional point of contact 
 between the poetic professions and the feudal classes. I am, 
 however, inclined to believe that the particular grade of chi- 
 valry designated by the epithet savage., in contradistinction to 
 the courteous., was exclusively reserved for the inferior rank of 
 the poetic class, for that of the Jongleurs ; from which we might 
 conclude that the latter were not admitted, as were the Trouba- 
 dours, to the honors and privileges of chivalry proper. 
 
 The festivals, of which I have already spoken, and of which 
 Z shall have occasion to speak again, where the ideas of chi- 
 valry were reduced to practice and exhibited in the shape of 
 spectacles ; those military exercises, where the adventures of 
 knight-errantry were represented, must all be counted among 
 the number of poetic refinements introduced into chivalry from 
 the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth cen- 
 turies. But these are not the only ones, nor even the most 
 striking. "We must add to them a variety of gallant usages, 
 devised for the benefit of enamored knights, as so many methods 
 of proving their devotion, their loyalty and their admiration 
 for the ladies of their choice. 
 
 ♦ Eaynoaard, vol. v. p. 73 : 
 
 " Amicx Guigo, be m'assant de t03 sens, 
 Car de mestiers vols apenre cals son, 
 Que trotiers fos una longa sazon 
 Pueys auza dir que pugiest a sirven, 
 Qa' emblavas buous, bocxs, fedas e moutos, 
 Pueis fos joglars de dir vers e cliansos ; 
 Ar est poiatz a maior onramen." 
 Etc., etc Ed.
 
 Its lielations to Chivalry. 345 
 
 Sucli is, among others, the custom of challenghig the first 
 comer, for the purpose of sustaining a word pronounced or an 
 opinion advanced in honor of a ladj. These challenges, how- 
 ever extravagant they might be, were none the less in harmony 
 with the spirit of chivalry. At a time when everything was 
 decided and proved by personal force and bravery, there could 
 be nothing strange in the idea that a chevalier should have re- 
 course to them for the purpose of attesting the liveliest and 
 profoundest of his convictions. In the earliest times of chivalry, 
 a knight considered it a distinguished service to the ladies, if 
 he fought to prove the innocence of one who incurred the risk 
 of perishing as the victim of a capital accusation ; but when 
 love had become the chief motive of all chivalric actions, he 
 scarcely thought that he was doing enough for them, if he 
 maintained publicly, at any risk and in the face of every oppo- 
 nent, that they were handsome, discreet, and worthy of adora- 
 tion. 
 
 We find in the thirteenth century another gallant usage, still 
 more singular, more passionately followed, and perhaps as gene- 
 ral as that of those enthusiastic challenges in honor of the ladies, 
 although the Provencal monuments do not offer so many mani- 
 fest traces of its existence. 
 
 This was a quite peculiar mode of consecrating one's self to 
 the services, or, I should rather say, to the cultus of the ladies. 
 It seems to have consisted in a sort of vow, analogous to the 
 religious vows, the visible sign of which was a peculiar cut of 
 the hair, or perhaps a circular tonsure on the top of the head, 
 in imitation of the clerical tonsure. Granet, a chevalier Trou- 
 badour of the middle of the thirteenth century, in a satirical 
 piece directed against Sordel of Mantua, who was then a refu- 
 gee in Provence, advises him to adopt this sort of tonsure, as a 
 means of future success, in imitation of upward of a hundred 
 other chevaliers, who had their heads shaved for the good 
 Countess of Rhodez.* 
 
 These men, who regarded love from such an exalted point of 
 view, were neither great barons nor powerful feudatories ; they 
 were most generally poor chevaliers, with either no fief at all 
 or with one of but trifling value, on whom the changes of poli- 
 tics had scarcely any effect, and who had no better chances for 
 happiness, for fortune and renown than to follow freely the 
 most exalted inspirations of their imagination and their heart. 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. v. p. 172. The passage in question is contained in an envoi to.a 
 piece entitled Coblas d'en Granet. It is as follows : 
 
 " Per la comtessa de Rodes valen 
 An ras lor cap cavalier mais de cen; 
 E s'en Sordel se vol gardar de failla 
 Son cap raira, o ja deus non li vailla." — Ed.
 
 346 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 Tlie biographical fragments relative to the Troubadours furnish 
 us curious particulars in support of this general fact. Of the 
 kniglits mentioned in this fragment, who were more or less dis- 
 tinguished as poets, the majority belonged to the inferior classes 
 of the feudal order, and several are expressly designated as re- 
 markable for their poverty and the obscurity of their situation 
 in life. Now it is precisely to this portion of the chivalric 
 order, which was the most poetical, the most enthusiastic, the 
 most free, and the most disinterested, that nearly all the deli- 
 cate, profound and touching traits, characteristic of chivalric 
 love, must be referred. 
 
 In this middle class of chevaliers we must likewise include, 
 in spite of his princely title, the celebrated Geoifroy Rudel, 
 who from the mere report of the beauty and virtues of the 
 Countess of Tripoli (who was of the house of Toulouse), was 
 seized with such a violent passion for her, that he celebrated 
 her for a long time in his verses. Carried away at last by the 
 desire of seeing her, he embarked for Syria, was taken mor- 
 tally sick at sea and arrived at Tripoli only to breathe his last ; 
 still satisfied, however, to have purchased at this price even the 
 happiness of beholding for a moment the beautiful princess, the 
 object of his long reveries, and to see her touched by his un- 
 timely death.* 
 
 It is only among personages of this condition that we could 
 expect to find examples similar to that of Pons de Capdneilh, 
 a knight from the vicinity of Puy, who after having lost Ade- 
 laide de Mercoeur, the wife of a seignior of Auvergne, whom 
 he had sung, adored and served until her death, felt that there 
 was nothing more left for him to do in this world, except to go 
 to the Holy Land to die with his arms in his hands.f 
 
 It was in these same ranks of chivalry that the ladies had the 
 best chance for finding servants, from whom they could expect 
 prompt obedience to their prohibitions and commands, whom 
 they by a mere word could send to the wars against the in- 
 fidels beyond the sea or beyond the Pyrenees and who did not 
 consider the slightest of their favors over-paid by years of 
 hardship and of perils — servants, whose offences they were all 
 sure of being able to punish, those even which resulted from 
 the excesses, the caprices and the idle curiosities of love. ExA 
 amples analogous to that of William de Balaun and his lady 
 
 * The Proven(;al account of this adventure is found in Ea3nouard, vol. v. page 165. 
 It adds: " Et ella lo fetz honradamen sepellir en la maison del Temple deTripol; e 
 pois en aquel meteis dia ella se rendet monga, per la dolor que ella ac de lui e de la soa 
 raovi."— Ed. 
 
 t The Provencal biographer says : "Et ametper amor ma dona Alazais de Mercuer. 
 . . . . Mout I'amava e la lauzava, e fes de lieis mantas bonas cansos. E tant 
 qnan ela visquet non amet autra ; e quant ela fon morta, el se croset e passet outra mar, 
 e lai moric." Kaynouard, vol. v. p. 353.— jErf.
 
 Its Eelations to Chivalry. 347 
 
 could not have been very rare, and this is an additional reason 
 for inserting it here. 
 
 William de Balaun, from the environs of Montpellier, an 
 excellent chevalier and Troubadour (to use the language of the 
 Provencal documents), loved and served Guillelmina de Ta- 
 viac, the lady of a seignior of that name.* He had obtained 
 from her every favor, that he had ventured to solicit ; but he 
 aspired to the greatest possible felicity in love and was not sure 
 of having as yet attained to it. Under the impression, that the 
 happiness of recovering the love of his lady might be greater 
 than that of obtaining it for the first time, he took it into his 
 head to try the experiment. He accordingly pretended to be 
 angry with Guillelmina, ceased to pay her his customary atten- 
 tions, repelled all the tender efforts by which she endeavored 
 to bend his mind, and repelled them with so much obstinacy 
 and hardness, that the lady finally became indignant and re- 
 solved to abandon the insensate man forever. The just and 
 real indignation of the lady immediately put an end to the 
 feigned anger of the chevalier. He presented himself in order 
 to crave her pardon and to explain the error, but the lady re- 
 fused to listen to him. The quarrel had already lasted for 
 several days, when Bernard of Anduse interposed to put an end 
 to it. After many solicitations, the lady of Taviac replied that 
 she would consent to pardon William, but only on conditions, 
 in the exaction of which she professed herself inexorable ; they 
 were, that William by way of gratitude and as a punishment 
 for his folly, should suffer one of his finger-nails to be pulled 
 out, which he was to present to her on his knees, at the same 
 time confessing his guilt and asking her pardon in a poem 
 which he was to compose expressly for the occasion. All these 
 conditions were accepted and fulfilled by the repenting Wil- 
 liam, who undoubtedly now knew, at this expense, whether 
 the happiness of recovering his lady was greater than that of 
 conquering her, but who prudently kept the discovery to 
 himself* 
 
 Finally, it was still this middle class of knighthood, which 
 introduced the sanction of religion into love, which, regarding 
 the sentimental union of a lady and a chevalier as serious and 
 sacred as marriage itself, employed the intervention of a priest, 
 as in the event of the latter, for its consummation. It was this 
 class, which went to make public prayers and to perform 
 solemn acts of Christian piety over the tomb of those, whom it 
 regarded as martyrs to love. 
 
 It is not necessary for me to recount here in detail the tra- 
 
 * A detailed account of their singular adventure is found in the ProvenQal notice of 
 this poet. Eayn. vol. v. p. 180 seq.— JEd.
 
 348 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 gical adventures of William of Cabestaing. There is no one 
 who has not heard, time and again, how this young chevalier, 
 who was at the same time an elegant Troubadour, was mortally 
 enamored of Sermonde, the lady of Raymond de Roussillon, 
 his master; how moreover the latter, after having killed him 
 from motives of jealousy, tore out his heart and gave it to his 
 wife to eat, and how after having learnt the inhuman proceed- 
 ings, the lady, distracted with sorrow and despair, precipitated 
 herself from one of the windows of her chateau, thus putting 
 an end to her existence. It is possible that some of the par- 
 ticulars of this adventure may be poetical embellishments, but 
 we have no reason to contest its substance ; and the only inci- 
 dent, which I desire to quote here and which is the most curi- 
 ous of all, with reference to the history of chivalric manners, is 
 precisely the one, which contains in itself the greatest degree 
 of historical probability. 
 
 The biographer in the first place relates how the respective 
 parents of William of Cabestaing and of Sermonde, seconded 
 by all the courtly chevaliers of the country and by Alphonso 
 the First, the then reigning king of Aragon, commenced a 
 common war against Raymond de Roussillon, pillaging his 
 lands and destroying the chateau, in which the tragical event 
 had taken place. He then informs us that the remains of the 
 two lovers M'ere, by the order and under the auspices of the 
 king, deposited in the same tomb, near the door of the church 
 of St. John at Perpignan. " And for a long time after this 
 event, all the courtly chevaliers and all the noble ladies of 
 Catalonia, of Roussillon, of Cerdagne, of Confolens and of IS^ar- 
 bonnais were in the habit of coming every year, on the very 
 day on which they had died, to perform a service for their 
 souls, beseeching Our Lord to have mercy upon them,"* 
 
 But notsvithstanding all these traits of chivalric enthusiasm 
 and refinement in matters of love, it must not be imagined 
 that all the engagements between a chevalier and his lady were 
 of so passionate and tender a character. They were sometimes, 
 and perhaps quite frequently engagements of mere convenience, 
 where fashion, usage and social exigencies had as much or 
 even more to do than the desires and sympathies of love. But 
 even in that event they could still be serious and respected, and 
 nothing can demonstrate their habitual morality more conclu- 
 sively than the fact, that they were often independent of the 
 allurements of grace, of beauty or of youth. We are ac- 
 
 * E fon una longa sazo que tug li cortes cavayer e las domnas gentils de Cataluenha 
 e de Rossilho, e de Sardanha, e de Confolen, e de Narbones, venian far cascun an anoal 
 per lur armas aital jorn quan moriro, pregan nostre scnhor que lur agues merce." 
 Raynouard: vol. v., page 189 Ed.
 
 Its Relations to Chivalry. 349 
 
 quainted with more than one, in which fidelity, delicacy and 
 devotion reigned undisturbed, and which could nevertheless 
 have been broken without any grief or even with a view to a 
 new alliance, where the share of desire or of pleasure would 
 have been more complete. We perceive finally — and the fact 
 appeared to me a remarkable one — we perceive chevaliers, who 
 are not enamored of their ladies in the ordinary sense of the 
 term, when ofiiended by them and obliged to separate from 
 them, leaving them only with regret and with sincere demon- 
 strations of tenderness and respect. 
 
 I could adduce a variety of facts in proof of what I have just 
 advanced ; it will sufiice however to mention one, which, as it 
 is a very characteristic one, may take the place of several 
 others. 
 
 Pierre de Barjac, a knight of very little distinction as a poet, 
 the friend and probably the compatriot of the same William of 
 Balauu, whose indiscretion and chastisement I have above re- 
 counted, was chevalier to a noble lady of Javiac, from whom 
 he had obtained every lawful favor. It happened, however, 
 one day that this lady, who had long been so tender toward 
 her chevalier, either out of caprice or from some other un- 
 known motive, drove him ofi:' in the most scandalous manner, 
 declaring that she no longer desired him as her servant. Pierre 
 de Barjac withdrew surprised and disconsolate. But he recovet-ed 
 his courage and returned a few days after with a poem, which 
 he had composed as a reply to the dismissal he had just re- 
 ceived. The following are the three most remarkable strophes 
 of this piece : 
 
 " My lady, I frankly approach you, to take leave of you for- 
 ever. Many thanks for whatever of your love you have deigned 
 to permit me to enjoy as long as it has pleased you. But now, 
 as it pleases you no longer, it is but just that you should take 
 another friend, who may suit you better than myself. I do 
 not wish you any ill for it. So far from that, we will remain 
 on excellent terms, as if nothing had occurred between us." * 
 
 " But I shall always occupy my thoughts about your welfare 
 and 3'our honor. These are things to which I cannot be in- 
 different, and which I wish to keep in memory. I will serve 
 you therefore as I did before, except that I shall be your che- 
 valier no longer. I will release you from the evening you 
 had promised me when you should have occasion. I regret 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 242. 
 
 " Tot francamen, domna, veuh denan V03 
 Penre comjat per tos temps a lezer ; 
 E grans merces, quar anc denhetz voler 
 Qa' ieu mi tengues per vostr' amor plus guai." . . 
 Etc., etc., etc. — Ed.
 
 350 History ofProvengal Poetry. 
 
 it ; but it should have come sooner. The time is passed when 
 I might have been happy." 
 
 " Perhaps, because you see me sad, you'll think me no more 
 in earnest now than 1 am wont to be. But you will soon be 
 convinced that what I say is true." 
 
 " You have chosen, I know, another love, a love which will 
 disappoint you. I, too, have chosen after you ; and the object 
 of my choice will guard my worth and valor. She is on her 
 way to youth, and you are getting out of it. "What if her rank 
 is not as high as youre ? She is, on the other hand, more beau- 
 tiful and better." 
 
 " If our reciprocal promise and engagement are an obstacle 
 to the rupture of our love, let us proceed at once to a priest. 
 Release me ; I will release you too, and we shall then be able, 
 each on our part, to preserve our loves more loyally. If 
 ever I have done aught to afflict you, forgive me, as I am also 
 willing to forgive with joy ; for a pardon, which is not granted 
 cheerfully, is a worthless one." 
 
 This piece contains, in my opinion, neither passion, nor love, 
 nor even much of imagination or of sensibility; but it is all 
 the more remarkable for this deficiency. That a chevalier, 
 outraged without any cause by the lady by whom he thought 
 himself beloved, should address her with such consideration, 
 with such a mixture of tenderness and of regret, which he can 
 scarcely conceal beneath the few traits of spiteful impatience ; 
 that he should thank her so expressly for the favor she had be- 
 stowed on him by accepting him for a time as her servant, and 
 consider himself still and forever bound to cherish the kindest 
 regard for her welfare and her honor, necessarily implies on his 
 part an exalted idea of the duties of the knight to the lady of 
 his choice ; and this idea has here the appearance of being not 
 so much that of the individual, as that of the age and of the 
 institution to which he belonged.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 351 
 
 CHAPTER XYL 
 
 THE LYRICAL POETRY OF THE TROUBADOURS. 
 
 I. AMATORY POETRY. 
 
 BERNARD DE YENTADOUK. 
 
 Those cliivalric ideas and manners, of whicli I have given a 
 general outline in the preceding chapter, were reproduced and 
 developed in the poetry of the Provengals, under two principal 
 forms, the epic and the lyrical. I have already had occasion 
 to remark, that this poetry was unacquainted with the dramatic 
 form. I shall reserve for the end of this course, what I have 
 to say concerning the Provengal epopee proper, and concern- 
 ing its connection with the epopee of the middle age in 
 general. I have already indicated, that I consider this subject 
 as one of the freshest and most important that can at present 
 occupy the attention of the historian of modern literature. 
 
 Meanwhile I propose to treat of the history of the lyrical 
 poesy of the Troubadours. It comprises a great variety of 
 kinds. I will reduce them to three principal species, to wit, 
 the satirical, the martial, and the amatory; and as the last 
 of them is more closely interwoven with the picture I have 
 drawn of the system of chivalric galantry in the South than 
 the other two, I shall commence with it. 
 
 It is not until the beginning of the second half of the 
 twelfth century, from 1150 or thereabout, that the productions 
 of the Troubadours, of this last description, as of every other, 
 begin to be sufficiently numerous and consecutive to admit of 
 methodical discussion in a systematic course of history. And 
 yet, all that precedes this epoch, incomplete and obscure as it 
 • is, is nevertheless far from being destitute of interest, when 
 viewed in its connection with the rest. It is on these antece- 
 dents that I shall first endeavor to shed some light. 
 
 Of the prodigious number of Troubadours, who flourished 
 during the two centuries of Provengal poesy (from 1090 to
 
 352 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 1300), there are scarcely five (we except the Count of Poitiers) 
 that can be said to belong to the first half of the twelfth cen- 
 tury, as far at least as the time of their greatest celebrity is 
 concerned. But there is scarcely a doubt but that these five 
 Troubadours flourished in the midst of many others, whose 
 names and works are now lost. The entire history, therefore, 
 of the Provengal poetry of the eleventh century until 1150, is 
 thus reduced to the little we can know of their lives and works ; 
 a circumstance which gives them a particular importance, in- 
 dependently of their intrinsic merit. 
 
 The Troubadours in question are Cercamons, Marcabrus, Pierre 
 de Valeira, Pierre d'Auvergne, and" Giraud, or Guiraudos le 
 K.OUX, of Toulouse. In speaking of them successively, I shall 
 principally dwell on the particulars by which their life is linked 
 to the general history of their art. 
 
 Cercamons. Of these five Troubadours, Cercamons is un- 
 doubtedly the most ancient. The precise data for fixing the 
 epoch of his birth are wanting ; all that we know of him, how- 
 ever, authorizes us to put it very near the commencement of 
 the twelfth century (from 1100 to 1110). Cercamons must thus 
 have been for some time yet the contemporary of William IX., 
 the count of Poitiers. 
 
 The Provengal traditions concerning him are very succinct ; 
 they inform us, that he was from Gascony, and a Jongleur by 
 profession ; that his name Cercamons, in French Chercnemonde^ 
 was merely a sort of nam de guerre^ a poetical sobriquet^ to 
 designate his predilection for a vagabond life, and the pre- 
 tension he made of having visited a great part of the world 
 at that time considered accessible to adventurers.* On the 
 vignettes of the old manuscripts he is also represented in the 
 costume of a traveller and as journeying, his tucked-up tunic 
 fastened around his belt, a long staff" across his shoulder, and at 
 one of the extremities of the staff" his trifling baggage for the 
 route. 
 
 In the Provencal manuscripts there arc but four or five pieces 
 by him, all of the amatory kind, all in honor of some unknown 
 lady of high rank, whom he adored or pretended to adore. 
 These pieces are too indifferent to bear translation ; they contain 
 nothing original, either in matter or in form ; they are manifestly 
 nothing more than a refusion, a sort of patchwork combination 
 of the commonplaces of chivalric poetry and gallantry, already 
 in vogue in his time, and before him. 
 
 A proof of the small celebrity of these poems is found in the 
 
 * The Provencal account found in Raynouard, vol. v., p. 112, consists only of a few 
 lines : " Cercamons si fos uns Joglars de Gascoingna, e trobet vers e pastoretas a la 
 usanza antiga. E cerquet tot lo mon lai on poc anar, e per so fez se dire Cercamons." 
 — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 353 
 
 fact, that they are not inchided among the works which the 
 Provencal traditions attribute to Cercamons. These traditions 
 make mention of the Troubadour in question only as the author 
 of verses composed, as they say, in the antique style, and espe- 
 cially of pastorals, designated in the Provengal by the name of 
 Fastoretas. This notice, although somewhat vague, does not 
 on that account cease to be extremely interesting. It furnishes 
 us an additional proof in support of a fact, which I believe I 
 have already established, but on which it is important to shed 
 as much light as possible. These versified pieces in the ancient 
 style, these pastorals attributed to Cercamons, on which he ap- 
 pears to have principally founded his poetic renown, belong 
 undoubtedly to the system of popular poetry anterior to that of 
 the Troubadours ; and it was, to all appearances, not until he 
 was well advanced in life, and only for the purpose of yielding 
 to the ascendant of the new poetry of the chivalric type, that 
 Cercamons composed these pieces of gallantry, the only pro- 
 ductions of his pen that have come down to us. 
 
 Marcabrus. — After Cercamons, Marcabrus is the most an- 
 cient of the Troubadours, known to have flourished during the 
 interval from the death of the count of Poitiers (1127) to 1150. 
 This Marcabrus was a personage of original mind and charac- 
 ter, concerning whom it is to be regretted that we possess not 
 more ample and more reliable sources of information. The 
 traditions, existing in regard to him, appear to emanate from 
 two different sources, and they vary on some points, but on 
 points of comparatively small importance. 
 
 According to some, Marcabrus was an orphan, of whom no 
 one ever knew either the parents or tlie place of birth. A 
 castellan of Gascony, Aldric du Vilar, before whose door he 
 had been exposed, had him brought up and carefully educated. 
 Arrived at an age when he could follow the bent of his own 
 taste and choose a profession, Marcabrus chanced to fall in 
 with Cercamons, the Jongleur, of whom I have just spoken. On 
 this occasion, his instinct for the life of a poetic adventurer 
 burst out all of a sudden ; he attached himself to the service 
 of Cercamons, for the purpose of learning of him music and 
 the art of verses, the art of finding (I'art de trouver')^ as it was 
 then called,* 
 
 He wandered about the world for some time with this master, 
 under the burlesque nickname of Pan-perdut^ which at a 
 later date he exchanged for the name of Marcabrus, by which 
 he was destined to be known permanently thereafter. It was 
 not long before he had made himself a reputation and ene- 
 mies by his satiric verses and by his caustic invectives against 
 
 'Compare Kaynouard, vol. v. p. 251. — Ed. 
 23
 
 354 nistory of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 the nobles of his age. The castellans of Guienne, of whom it 
 appears he had said many hard things, conspired to revenge 
 themselves on him, and deprived him of his life, but when or 
 where, or how this was accomplished, does not appear. 
 
 Such are the most precise, and consequently tlie most plau- 
 sible traditions concerning Marcabrus. Other traditions, easily 
 reconciled with the former and likewise collected in the thir- 
 teenth century, represent Marcabrus as the son of a poor 
 woman, Bruna by name, without making any mention of his 
 father, and speak of him as one of the earliest of the Trouba- 
 dours, whose memory was at that time yet alive.* 
 
 Another notice, finally, which, it seems to me, should be re- 
 garded as the title or rubric of the pieces of Marcabrus in 
 some ancient manuscript, is couched in these terms: "Here 
 beginneth that which Marcabrus hath made, who was the first 
 of all the Troubadours." f This testimony must not be taken 
 literally. But in combining these diverse notices, and rectify- 
 ing the one by the aid of the other, there remains no doubt as 
 to Marcabrus' place in the chronological list of the Troubadours. 
 He should figure there as the third, consequently after William 
 of Poitiers and Cercamons. He was in all probability born 
 toward the year 1120 ; that he lived until 1147 is evident from 
 certain pieces of his, wherein he makes allusion to the events of 
 this year. In fine, it is very probable that he outlived the year 
 1150. He frequented the Christian courts beyond the Pyre- 
 nees, particularly that of Portugal, and he is the only one of the 
 Troubadours who is positively known to have visited the latter. 
 
 There are from his pen from forty to fifty pieces in verse, 
 some of which are of unusual length. But the traditions, which 
 I have just cited, make but a fugitive and disdainful mention 
 of all these pieces. 
 
 To explain this disdain is neither difficult nor unprofitable. 
 The verses of Marcabrus contain many allusions to the ideas 
 and maxims of chivalric gallantry, but these allusions are, for 
 the most part, indirect, fugitive and disinterested. Not only 
 was Marcabrus never in love, not only does he never pretend 
 to be so, but he piques himself on his exemption from the ten- 
 der passion, and he more than once unmasks, with a somewhat 
 cynic freedom, the corruption of his age, too often but poorly 
 concealed beneath the external show of knightly gallantry. In 
 fine, considering the tone, the form and the sentiments of these 
 pieces, we perceive that they belong at least as much to the 
 
 ♦ " Marcabrus si fo de Gascoin9;na, flls d'una paubra femna que ac nora Maria Bruna, 
 fii com el dis en son cantar." — Ed. 
 
 t " Aisi comensa so de Marcabrus que fo lo premier trobador que fos." Of the poetry 
 of this Marcabrus there are yet about forty pieces extant.^J^d.
 
 TJie Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 355 
 
 ancient popular poetry as to the new poetry of the courts and 
 castles, and this is more than enough to account for the indiffer- 
 ence with which they were regarded in the thirteenth century. 
 But when we come to treat of the Provencal satires, the class 
 of poetic compositions to which most of the pieces in question 
 belong, we shall see that they are far from deser^-ing the con- 
 tempt of which they were the object. "VVe shall become con- 
 vinced that they are possessed of beauties, depending upon those 
 very characteristics which distinguish them from the productions 
 of contemporary Troubadours. 
 
 Pierre de Yaleira. — This poet was a native of Gascony, as 
 well as Marcabrus, and flourished nearly at the same time. 
 None of his writings have come down to us, except two indiffer- 
 ent pieces of the gallant sort, in which there is nothing worth 
 our notice. All that can be said concerning Pierre de Yaleira, 
 of any interest, is, that the Provencal traditions put him in the 
 same category with Cereamons and Marcabrus,* that is to say, 
 in the category of those, whom they represent as having labored 
 chiefly in the field of poetry at that time already superannuated 
 and abandoned, in consequence of which they were rather 
 semi-Troubadours than real ones, still blending, as they did, un- 
 consciously the freedom, the simplicity and the popular tone 
 of the ancient poetry with the ideas, the refinements and the 
 exigencies of the new. 
 
 It is not useless to observe, that the three personages, of whom 
 I have just spoken, were all from the same country, from Gas- 
 cony, that is to say, from a country, the vulgar idiom of which 
 differed from the literary idiom of the Troubadours. It follows 
 from their having written in the latter idiom, that they must 
 have learned it systematically, as a foreign dialect. This is an 
 incontestable proof, that the cradle of the poetry of the Trouba- 
 dours was not in Gascony, any more than in Poitou, where we 
 have convinced ourselves that it was not. It is a new proof, 
 that long before the middle of the twelfth century this poe- 
 try of the Troubadours, wherever may have been the place 
 of its birth, had since its origin spread throughout the adjacent 
 countries, which had adopted and cultivated it as their own. 
 
 Lastly, the three personages under consideration were Jong- 
 leurs by profession. There is no doubt, but that, since they 
 made verses, they also sang them in their poetical tours, but 
 there is also no doubt, but that, in order to exercise their pro- 
 fession with success and edat^ it was necessary for them to know 
 by heart many more verses than they themselves had composed 
 
 * Joglars fo el temps et en la sazon que fo Marcabrus ; e fez vers tals com hom fazia 
 adoncs, de paubra valor, de foillas e de flors, e de cans e de ausels. Sei cantar non 
 aguen gran valor ni el. — Raynouard, vol. v. p. 333. — Ed.
 
 356 nistoi^ of Provengal Poeto'y. 
 
 or could compose. It is, moreover, extremely probable, that 
 the greater part of the pieces, which these Jongleurs knew and 
 recited, belonged to the new poetry, and that they consisted of 
 songs and rhapsodies, consecrated to the expression of the sen- 
 timents and ideas of knightly gallantry. These ideas and sen- 
 timents then must (or at any rate might be expected to) have 
 spread, from the first half of the twelfth century, in those coun- 
 tries which the Jongleurs in question had visited, that is to say, 
 in Spain, in Portugal, and very probably in Italy and in the 
 north of France. 
 
 Pierre d'Auvergne. — Peter of Auvergne, the fourth of the 
 Troubadours in the order of time, who flourished exclusively or 
 principally during the first half of the twelfth century, is the 
 first of them known as having won an extensive celebrity as a 
 poet. He distinguished himself in his art by successful innova- 
 tions, and he may be regarded as the founder of a new school, 
 tlie influence of which maintained itself until the premature ex- 
 tinction of Provencal poetry. Such a merit entitles him to 
 some attention in the history of this poetry, however compen- 
 dious and philosophical may be its method. 
 
 Peter of Auvergne was not much later than Marcabrus and 
 Peter of Yaleira. He must have been born between 1120 
 and 1130, in all probability nearer the first than the second of 
 these terms. He was the son of a citizen of Clermont, who had 
 him educated under distinguished masters, from whom he 
 learnt letters, that is to say, the Latin, by the aid of which he 
 appears to have acquired a superficial knowledge of some Ro- 
 man authors of prose or verse. He soon applied himself to the 
 study of Provencal poetry, and attained to a reputation which 
 procured liim the most flattering reception in the different 
 countries where this poetry was already in vogue. Among the 
 courts which he is known to have visited are those of the kings 
 of Castile, of the dukes of Normandy, and of the counts of 
 Provence, those of Narbonne and of Melgueul, and many 
 others unknown. 
 
 Peter of Auvergne lived to a very advanced age, and it is on 
 this account that the epithet meux (old) is sometimes appended 
 to his name. A piece is attributed to him, in which allusion is 
 made to the events of 1214, an epoch at which he must have 
 been upward of eighty years of age. It is possible, however, 
 that his name was attached to this piece by a sort of error very 
 common in the Provengal manuscripts. 
 
 These manuscripts contain twenty-five or thirty pieces from 
 his pen ; and these constitute the only standard by which we 
 can judge of the extent to which he merited his high reputa- 
 tion. " Peter of Auvergne was the first Troubadour of any
 
 TKe lAjrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 35 T 
 
 merit beyond the mountain," says his ancient biographer ; and 
 he adds immediately after, " he was the most excellent Trouba- 
 dour in the world, until Giraud de Borneil appeared."* Judg- 
 ing from the data which are left us to determine the value of 
 this decision, it seems to mc to be difficult to entertain, and im- 
 possible to confirm it. 
 
 The innovations by which Peter of Auvergne signalized him- 
 self as Troubadour were of two sorts. They affected both the 
 musical and the poetical part of his art, the diction and the 
 versification. The music which he adapted to one of his pieces, 
 commencing with a verse, which signifies : " Short days are 
 followed hy long nights^'' f is said to have produced an ex- 
 traordinary sensation by its novelty, and to have been the 
 signal of a veritable revolution in that branch of the art. 
 The necessary information is totally wanting to characterize 
 this revolution ; all that can be said of it is, that it must have 
 had some analogy with that accomplished at the same time 
 and by the same Troubadour in the poetic diction of his pre- 
 decessors- 
 
 From 1140 to 1150, the interval, during which we may sup- 
 pose, with the highest degree of probability, that Peter wrote 
 his best pieces, more than a century had already elapsed since 
 the language of the Troubadours had become grammatically 
 fixed, being already precise, rich, and tolerably pliant to the 
 niceties of sentiment and thought. 
 
 The jDoets had already been accustomed to invest their expres- 
 sions with certain ornaments ; they had already felt the neces- 
 sity of striking the ear agreeably. But up to that time they 
 had hardly followed any other law in these attempts than that 
 of the natural instinct left to itself alone, and tlieir diction was 
 yet generally barren and devoid of grace, monotonous and 
 tedious. 
 
 Peter of Auvergne introduced more pretension and more 
 science into his ; he aimed more earnestly than his predecessors 
 at precision, variety and force ; he was bolder and more figura- 
 tive than they. Several of his pieces abound in metapiiors, 
 which one might be tempted to regard as emanations from the 
 genius of the Arabs, He endeavored to Latinize the Provencal, 
 and re-introduced into it words and terms of expression which 
 to all appearances had long before him disappeared from the 
 
 * " Peire d' Alvernhe , . . fo lo premiers bon trobaire que fo el mon en aquel tempp. . . 
 Eteratengutz per lo meillor trobador del mon, tro que venc Guirautz de Borneill." 
 Eaynouard, vol. v. p. 291 Ed. 
 
 t "De josta'ls breus jorns e'ls loncs sers," 
 
 The biographer here adds : " Canson no fctz negima, car en aquel temps negus can- 
 tars no s'apellava cansos, mas vers ; mas pueia en Guirautz de Borneill fetz laprimiera 
 canson que anc fos faita," — Ed.
 
 35S History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 idioms of Gaul. In fine, if anv one wanted to search for tlie 
 earliest specimens, or at any rate for the earliest well charac- 
 terized examples of an artistic diction in the modern literatiire 
 of Europe, of a diction aiming at a definite effect, at an efi^ect 
 distinct from the sentiment or the idea it expresses, he would 
 have to look for these attempts or these examples in the poems 
 of Peter of Auvergne. 
 
 This constitutes, however, the greatest merit of tliis Trouba- 
 dour ; he lacks imagination and sensibility. Like all his pre- 
 decessors, and in compliance with the taste and manners of his 
 age, he composed songs on chivalric love ; but one might look 
 in vain for a shadow of individuality in these songs ; all is there 
 general and abstract, a studied effbrt to give a little more so- 
 lemnity and energy to the conventional formulas of chivalric 
 love is conspicuous throughout.* 
 
 I shall not, therefore, attempt to give an idea of the pieces of 
 Peter of Auvergne. The matter is not sufliciently interesting 
 to attract attention, or even to deserve it. In regard to the 
 form, which constitutes the original and curious part of these 
 compositions, its reproduction in another language would re- 
 
 ?uire a deal of labor and license disproportionate to the result, 
 it is only for the purpose of avoiding to oifer a celebrated 
 Troubadour the affront of producing him entirely mute, that I 
 shall cite from him some isolated fragments, which, in default 
 of entire pieces or longer extracts, may yet give some idea of 
 his taste and style. 
 
 Here is, for example, the first stanza of one of his pieces, in 
 which with a singularly curious mixture of naivete and pe- 
 dantry he declares his pretension to originality, and in which 
 this originality of his makes itself apparent in several traits : 
 
 " I will sing, since sing I must, a ncAV song, which resounds 
 within my breast. 'Tis not without much torment and fatigue, 
 that I have acquired the power to sing, so that vdj song may 
 resemble that of no one else. For never song was good or 
 beautiful, which was the likeness of another." 
 
 * Pierre d'Auverg-ne frequently expresses a consciousness of his o'n-n ability and po- 
 sition iu his art. Says his biographer: "Mout se lauzava en sos cantars e blasmava 
 los auties trobadors, si qu'el dis en una copla d'un sirventes qu'el fes : 
 
 Peire d'Alvernhe a tal votz 
 Que canta de sobr' e de sotz, 
 E siei sons son dous e plazen : 
 E pois es maiestre de totz, 
 Ab q'un pauc esclarzis sos mots. 
 Qu' a penas nulls hora los enten." 
 
 In this sirvente (Raynouard, vol. \v. p. 197) he passes in review a dozen other Troo- 
 badours, on whose merits and demerits he descants without the least reserve. Of the 
 amatorv chansons of Pierre we only find one in the collection of Raynouard (vol. iii. p. 
 327). Of his sirventes, pieces on the crusades, tcasons, etc., there are several in yoK 
 \y.—Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 359 
 
 I have alluded to the oriental boldness of his metaphors, of 
 which I here subjoin two or three examples : 
 
 " Since the air is now renewed (breathes softer now)," says 
 he at the close of one of his strains, " mj heart must also be 
 renewed, and that which germinates within must put its buds 
 and blossoms out.'' 
 
 In a description of spring he speaks of the nightingale, which 
 ^^ shines resjplenderd on the bough." 
 
 In another picture of the same kind he sajs, that the serene 
 air, the warbling birds, the newly budding foliage and flowers 
 in their bloom taught him to gather facile verses. Willing 
 to avow, like many other Troubadours before and after him, 
 that love is the principle of every good, he says that " a man 
 without love is worth no more than the spike without grain." 
 
 The pieces of the amatory kind constitute, however, the 
 minority among the poems of Peter of Auvergne, the greater 
 part of them being either religious or satirical. They present 
 traits worthy of being cited, but this is not the place for them. 
 I shall have occasion to resume the subject elsewhere, if there 
 is room for it, and I now pass to tlie fifth of the Troubadours, 
 known to have written before the year 1150. 
 
 GiRAUD (GuiKAUD OR GuiRAUDOS) SURNAMED LE EoUX. All 
 
 that is known concerning him is what the Prorengal tradi- 
 tion tells us, and this amounts to very little. He was a native 
 of Toulouse, the son of a poor chevalier, and entered quite 
 young the service of the count of Toulouse, his liege, Al- 
 phonse Jourdain, the youngest son of Raimond de Saint-Gilles, 
 of whom I have already spoken in connection with the count 
 of Poitiers. 
 
 " Giraud le Roux was courteous and an excellent singer," 
 says his ancient biographer; he became enamored of the 
 countess, the daughter of his seignior, and the love he bore 
 her taught him to write verses.* 
 
 Alphonse Jourdain had, as far as we know, but one daughter, 
 and this was a natural daughter, whose mother is nowhere 
 mentioned. To all appearances she was educated at the palace 
 of her father, and it is of lier that Giraud became enamored, 
 it is on her account that lie became a poet. 
 
 From 1120, when he recovered his estates from TVllliara of 
 Poitiers, to 1147, w-hen he departed for the second crusade 
 (from which he never returned), Alphonse Jourdain had resided 
 at Toulouse without any interruption. He took his daughter 
 
 * Girandos lo Ros si fo de Tollosa, fills d' un paubre cavalier; e vcnc en la cort de 
 son seingnor lo comte Anfos per servir ; e fon cortes e ben chantans ; ct enamoret se 
 de la comtessa, fiUa de son seingnor; e I'amors qu'el ac en leis renscignet a trobar, e 
 fetz mantas cansos. — Of this poet there are live pieces of the amatory sort published in 
 Eaynouard, vol, iii. p, 5-14, The MSS. contain only seven pieces from his pen.— JS'd.
 
 360 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 with him to Syria, where she met with the strangest adven- 
 tui'es. Having, in the first phice, become prisoner to the cele- 
 brated Noureddin, prince of Aleppo, she ended by becoming his 
 spouse, survived him, and in the capacity of guardian to a son, 
 which she had borne to Noureddin, she governed the little 
 kingdom of Aleppo for some time. 
 
 Giraud le Roux was in the service of the count of Toulouse 
 during the interval between 1120 and 1147, and if we wish to 
 restrict this interval to the time, when Giraud could have made 
 verses for the young princess, it may be reduced to the seven 
 years that elapsed between 1140 and 1147. 
 
 Tlie exact date at which Giraud le Roux retired from the 
 court of Toulouse is not known ; perhaps it was when Count 
 Alphonse and his daughter took their departure for the cru- 
 sade. Certain it is, however, that he did not follow them to 
 Syria. 
 
 It appears from a couplet of a satire on him, that he left 
 Toulouse and his princess, for the purpose of rambling freely 
 about the world in the capacity of Jongleur, singing his own 
 verses and those of others to all who wanted to hear them. 
 
 Of all the Troubadours, thus far enumerated, Giraud is the 
 only one, of whom none but amatory pieces are known to us, 
 who sung for love alone, and concerning whom we are sure, 
 that the lady he adored was not an imaginary personage. There 
 are but seven of his pieces now extant. Of all the poetic com- 
 positions of which I have thus far spoken, his are incontestably 
 those which enter into the spirit and system of chivalric gal- 
 lantry with more delicacy and variety, with more grace and 
 freedom than any other. But still I do not yet find in them 
 enough of individuality or talent to include them among the 
 number of those, to which I consider myself bound to adhere, 
 and on which I can rely in giving a summary idea of the kind. 
 
 I shall now proceed rapidly to recapitulate with some general 
 observations the period of the history of Provengal poetry, 
 which I have just surveyed. 
 
 From the beginning of the eleventh century, when it com- 
 mences for us, to an epoch bordering on 1150, the poetry of the 
 Troubadours, properly so called, although already dominant 
 throughout the South, was still not yet completely disengaged 
 from the old popular poetry, which still continued to exist and 
 independently of the former. 
 
 I have already remarked, and I think I may repeat it, that 
 the monuments which are left us of both these kinds of poetry 
 are evidently very incomplete. During the interval above in- 
 dicated, there were other Troubadours or semi-Troubadours 
 besides those, which I have mentioned ; and in regard to the
 
 The Lyrical Poetiy of the Troubadours. 361 
 
 latter, it is an established fact, that we possess but the smallest 
 portion of their works. It would seem, that in tlie thirteenth 
 century, when collections of the pieces of the Troubadours 
 began to be made, the most ancient of these poems were al- 
 ready lost or slighted, so that they could not gain admission 
 into those collections. 
 
 However, the amatory pieces yet extant of the first half of 
 the twelfth century may in all probability supply the place of 
 those that are lost, and suffice to give us an idea of the general 
 character and tone of this branch of Provencal poetry at the 
 epoch in question. 
 
 The ideas of chivalry and of knightly gallantry were then still 
 in their prime of novelty ; the enthusiasm, with which they were 
 received, was yet in its first fervor. General, monotonous and 
 abstract as was its poetical expression, it still pleased and 
 charmed, as the expression of a new mode of being and of 
 thinking ; it pleased by its generality even. At the first mo- 
 ments of their ascendency, these noble ideas, M'hich tended to 
 make love the motive to glory and to virtue, controlled all the 
 individualities of sentiment and character, and left them but a 
 slender chance for development. In order to discourse well of 
 love, it was enough to dream on it nobly and purely, according 
 to certain established conventions, so that an ideal lady inspired 
 the poet quite as much, and better perhaps, than a real one ; 
 in fact, there was less risk in falling short of the rigorous re- 
 quirements of theory. 
 
 With the beginning of the second half of the twelfth century, 
 the poesy of chivalric love began to assume the phases of deve- 
 lopment and character, by means of which it was enabled to 
 fulfill more or less the conditions of the art. At that time a 
 prodigious number of poets sprung up, all at once, who, 
 though profiting by the lessons of their predecessors and 
 adopting their ideas, were yet impressed with the necessity of 
 putting more art, more variety, and more novelty into their 
 compositions. 
 
 But the task was not without its difficulties. This chivalric 
 love was circumscribed by certain factitious limits ; it was 
 subject to a conventional ceremonial ; it announced itself in 
 formulas, which had something officially established and con- 
 sequently incomplete. These conditions were so many obsta- 
 cles, which excluded from the poetry destined to delineate tliat 
 love, the variety which naturally results from the free ])lay of 
 the passions, from the innumerable incidents of life and human 
 destiny. There is therefore still necessarily a great deal of 
 monotony in the Troubadours of the second half of the twelfth 
 century.
 
 362 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 Nevertheless, the chivah-ic love considered as it was or 
 aitned to be, had its poetic sides, and among so many poets, 
 all of whom sought their glory in experiencing and singing it, 
 there were to be found some of greater originality of talent, 
 whose individuality broke through the barriers of common- 
 place and the systematic generalities of knightly gallantry ; 
 and it is on the authority of these alone, that I have thought I 
 might give an exposition of the amatory poetry of the Trou- 
 badours without becoming either too monotonous or too des- 
 titute of novelty and interest. But before entering on this ex- 
 position I must premise a few observations, without wliich it 
 might appear too incomplete and vague. 
 
 When we shall have acquired an adequate conception of the 
 different elements and the different kinds of Provencal poetry, 
 we sliall perceive many characteristic peculiarities, which de- 
 pend on its material organization, and which can only be 
 appreciated in connection with the latter. Such is, for ex- 
 ample, the to us somewhat monotonous perseverance, with 
 which the Troubadours interweave their pictures of love with 
 the charms and beauties of nature at its revival in spring. Now 
 this taste is, in a great measure, accounted for by the mode of 
 life led by this class of men. 
 
 A Troubadour was accustomed to pass the whole of the fair 
 season away from home, and very frequently at a great dis- 
 tance from it. Alone, if he was obscure and indigent, in com- 
 pany witli one or two other Jongleurs, if he was rich and 
 renowned, he went from castle to castle, from country to 
 country, seeking and finding everywhere both old and new 
 admirers. His was a life of perpetual excitement, a life of 
 constant expectation and of triumph. Every stoppage on his 
 journey was a festival, of which lie was the soul, and at which 
 he was the honored guest of the occasion. 
 
 With tlie approach of winter, all this was changed. Eeturned 
 to his own fireside, the Troubadour relapsed into the difficulties 
 and the obscurity of ordinary life. lie was now obliged to set 
 to work most laboriously, he had to compose new songs for the 
 next poetical campaign. Tlie winter was to him of necessity 
 a time of toil and ennui ; and tliat spring, for the return of 
 which he watched so anxiously, liad for him another charm 
 aside from that of nature. It was the moment, when he was 
 destined to recommence his favorite enjoyments, when he was 
 going to experience the delightful sensation of a life entirely 
 new. Hence the enthusiasm, with which these men, already 
 very sensible to the effects of their beautiful climate, celebrated 
 the return of spring. The verdure, the flowers, the warbling 
 of the birds, the azure of the sky, the fragrance of the air, had
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 363 
 
 become to them the symbols of love and of life, and from the 
 little effort which they made to vary tlieir picture of these 
 objects, we can see, how youthful their imagination had re- 
 mained, and how easy to be satisfied. 
 
 After having premised these explanations, I now return to 
 those choicer Troubadours, which I think can be produced as 
 the representatives of all the rest, at least in the amatory de- 
 partment of their art. Bernard de Ventadour is one of the 
 first in point of merit as well as in point of date ; and I will 
 therefore speak of him with somewhat of detail. 
 
 Bernard de Yentadouk was born in the chateau of the same 
 name, the seat of a viscounty, one of the most ancient seig- 
 niories of Limousin. His father was a man of servile condition, 
 attached to the service of the chateau. 
 
 Nature had endowed Bernard with her choicest favors. In 
 addition to personal beauty and graceful manners, she had 
 furnished him with all the talent, at that time requisite to 
 make a poet : a lively and delicate imagination, an exquisite 
 ear and an agreeable voice.* 
 
 To crown the good fortune of the young poet, this court of 
 the viscounts of Ventadour, under the auspices of which Ber- 
 nard was educated, was one of the most favorable places for 
 the development of his natural talents. 
 
 I have already spoken of Ebles II. ; I have mentioned, that 
 this noble lord cultivated with ardor and until he was very far 
 advanced in life, the incipient poetry of chivalry, or as the 
 prior of Vigeois, his historian, calls it, the songs of merriment ; 
 whence he was surnamed Ehles the singer. 
 
 His son Ebles HI. the master of Bernard, born about 1100, 
 had inherited some of his taste for poetry. It is possible, that 
 he too may have cultivated the art and given Bernard the first 
 lessons in it. At any rate, the latter seems to intimate in a 
 passage of one of his pieces, that he had a personage whom he 
 designates by the name of Ebles for his master. 
 
 However that may be, Ebles III., charmed by the poetic dis- 
 position of young Bernard, fostered it with tenderness and favors 
 of every kind, and with sucli success, that the latter, when yet 
 in the flower of his youth, gave already promise that he would 
 leave all the Troubadours, his predecessors, far behind him. 
 
 The pieces which have come down to us from Bernard are 
 numerous enough : they fill almost a volume. If they are not 
 exactly those of their kind, that contain the largest amount of 
 poetry, or the greatest vigor of thought and expression, they 
 
 * Bels hom era et adregz e saup ben cantar e trobar et era cortes ct ensenhatz. El 
 vescoms. lo sieu senher, de Ventadorn s'abelic molt de lui e de son trobar, e fes li gran 
 hoaor, etc. etc. Provengal biographer. — Ed,
 
 364 Ilistory of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 are incontestably those which excel all others in point of sen- 
 timent and grace, and also in allusions to circumstances from 
 the life of the author. These allusions are so many indications, 
 by the aid of which I shall endeavor to link some of these 
 pieces to the events in Bernard's life, to which they relate and 
 by which they were inspired. 
 
 This attempt is hazardous enough, and in making it I run the 
 risk of deceiving myself more than once, from the want of posi- 
 tive information. But these misprisions can, on the one hand, 
 be attended with no very serious inconvenience, and on the 
 other, when the question is of poets, who, like the Troubadours, 
 only sung or thought they only sung their own emotions, it is 
 indispensable to endeavor, as far as possible, to trace the con- 
 nection between the impressions of their genius and the inci- 
 dents of their lives. 
 
 Bernard de Ventadour had only to feign himself in love in 
 order to have motives to compose his songs of love. Nature 
 had given him one of the tenderest of hearts, one of the 
 promptest to become impassioned by the charms of grace or 
 beauty. He did not stand in need of traversing the world, to 
 find a lady, whom he might celebrate in his verses. His seig- 
 nior and patron, Ebles HI,, had two ladies, the first of whom 
 was Margaret of Turenne and the second Alzais or Adelaide, 
 the daughter of William VL, seignior of Montpellier. It was 
 to tlie latter of these, that Bernard first addressed the homage 
 of his verses, and afterward the bolder homage of his love. He 
 was in the flower of life, he was amiable and handsome ; all 
 that he sung appeared to be the sentiment of his heart. The 
 lady was pleased with him, and he contracted with her one of 
 those chivalric liaisons, which were at bottom nothing more 
 than perilous attempts to keep up the passion of love and de- 
 sire at the highest attainable point of exaltation. 
 
 Mystery and secrecy were at once one of the conditions and 
 one of the difficulties of this cliivalric passion. As the Trouba- 
 dour felt vainly proud, when he could persuade himself that he 
 was loved by a lady of high rank, so he took the greatest pains 
 to conceal the name of the lady whom he worshipped. In his 
 verses he never designated her but by a species of poetic sobri- 
 quet, of which she only knew the value and intention, and 
 which every one, who had the curiosity, interpreted in his own 
 Vfaj. Bernard de Yentadour gave his viscountess the appella- 
 tion of Bel-vezer, which in English signifies " fair to look upon." 
 
 Among the poems, which he composed in honor of her, we 
 can yet easily distinguish several, which from the simplicity of 
 their form and matter we may judge to have been his first at- 
 tempts. They are in all respects inferior to the rest, but they
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 
 
 365 
 
 already contain, here and there, line traits of nature and of sen- 
 timent. I subjoin here as a specimen, a passage from one of 
 these pieces which I consider the first and the feeblest of them alL 
 " I complain to you, my lord, of my lady and my love ; they 
 are two traitors, which make me live in sadness. I have loved 
 my lady since the time when both of us were children, and each 
 day of the year my love for her has since been doubled. But 
 alas ! what boots it to live, when 1 cannot daily see the treasure 
 of my life, when I see her not at her window, fresh and white 
 like the Christmas snow ?"* 
 
 I will give another piece almost entire, wherein the talent of 
 Bernard appears to have arrived at its maturity. It has every 
 indication of being one of those, which he conqjosed for the 
 viscountess of Ventadour. This double enthusiasm of love and 
 nature, one of the characteristics of the poetry of the Trouba- 
 dours, is felt and rendered in the most lively manner, in the 
 commencement of this piece, which is, besides, remarkable for 
 its graceful flashes of sentiment and imagination. 
 
 " When I see the green herb and the leaf appear, and the 
 flowers unfold their bloom through the fields ; when the night- 
 ingale lifts up its voice high and clear and prepares to sing : I 
 am pleased with the nightingale and the flowers, I am pleased 
 with myself, more pleased with my lady fair ; I'm enveloped on 
 ail sides and pressed with delight ; but the joy of love passes 
 all other joys, f 
 
 " Had 1 the power to enchant the world, I would transform 
 my enemies into infants, that none of them could imagine aught 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 51. Piece No. V. 
 
 A vos mi clam, senlior, 
 
 De mi dons e d'amor, 
 
 Qu'aisil dui tiaidor. . , . etc. 
 * * * * 
 
 Las ! e viures que m val, 
 S'ieu noa vey a jornal, 
 
 ■f Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 53. Piece No. 
 
 Quant erba vertz e fuelhapar, 
 
 E I'flor brotonon per verjan, 
 
 E 1' rossinhols autet e clar 
 
 Leva sa votz e mov son chan, 
 Joy ai de luy, e joy ai de la flor ; 
 Joy ai de me, e de mi dons maior. 
 Vas totas partz sui de joy claus e seinhs, 
 Mas iUi es joys que totz los autres vena. 
 
 S'ieu saubes la gent encantar 
 
 Miei enemic foran enfan, 
 
 Que ja hom no pogra pessar 
 
 Ni dir ren que ns tornes a dan. 
 Adoncs sai ieu remirar la gensor, 
 E SOS belhs huelhs e safresca color ; 
 E baizera 'Ih la boca de totz seinhs, 
 Si que dos mea hi paregra lo seings. 
 
 Strophes 2, 4, 5. 
 
 Mon fin joy nutural, 
 En lieit, al fenestral, 
 Blanc' e fresc' atretal 
 Cum par neus a Nadal, 
 Si qu'amdui cominal 
 Mezuressem engal ! — Ed. 
 
 VI. Strophes 1, 4, 5 and 7. 
 
 Alias ! cum muer de cossirar ! 
 
 Que manthas vetz ieu cossir tan 
 
 Lairos me poirian erablar, 
 
 Ja no sabria dir que s fan. 
 Per dieu, amors, be m trobas vensedor 
 Ab panes d'amics e scs autre socor, 
 Quar una vetz tant mi dons non destreinha 
 Enans qu' ieu fos de dezirier esteinha. 
 
 Ben la volgra sola trobar 
 Que dormis o'n fezes semblan, 
 Per qu'ieu I'embles un dous baizar, 
 Pus no valh tan que lo'lh deman. 
 
 Per dieu, dona, pauc esplecham d'amor, 
 
 Vai s'en lo temps e perdem lo melhor ; 
 
 Parlar pogram ab cubertz entreseinhs. 
 
 E pus no i val arditz, valgues nos geiiihs. 
 
 Of the seven strophes, No. 1, 4, 5, 7.— Ed.
 
 366 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 against my lady or myself. Then I would contemplate her 
 beauteous form, her ruby tint, and her fair eyes ; I would im- 
 press a kiss on every portion of her mouth, the mark of which 
 a month could not eft'ace." 
 
 " Oh, how I am consumed by cheerless reveries ! I am 
 at times so mucb absorbed by them, that robbers might kid- 
 nap me without my knowing it. Surely, Cupid, thou hast 
 made an easy conquest of me, deprived of friends and succor ; 
 and when thou hadst made me captive, I languished like a man, 
 in whom all vigor was extinguished by desire." 
 
 " Oh, could I find my lady all alone, sleeping or feigning 
 sleep, that I might steal a kiss, as I have not the courage to 
 demand one ! Oh, my lady, Ave make but little progress in our 
 love ! The time is passing on ; we lose its fairest chance, in- 
 stead of understanding our wish by secret signs, and coming 
 to the aid of boldness by deceit." 
 
 Bernard composed several other songs in honor of the lady of 
 Ventadour in the same style with the one just quoted, which 
 constituted the delight of courts and castles, wherever the 
 Jongleurs introduced them. Never before had any one heard 
 anything of the kind, so delicate, so melodious, so tender. Ber- 
 nard did not dissemble the naive conviction, which he enter- 
 tained, of his superiority over his predecessors or his contempo- 
 raries, nor did he hesitate to explain it. The following are the 
 first two stanzas of a poem, of which they constitute the most 
 remarkable part : " No wonder that I sing better than any 
 other Troubadour, since I am possessed of a heart, more prone 
 to love, and readier to obey its laws. Soul and body, spirit and 
 knowledge, force and power are all enlisted in its cause ; I have 
 made no reserve for any other thing."- 
 
 " He were already dead, who felt not in his heart some blan- 
 dishment to love. "What boots a life without the tenderness of 
 love ? 'Tvvere but an importunity to others ! May God be never 
 so incensed with me, to suffer me to live a month, a day, when I 
 shall cease to love, when I should be but burdensome to others !" 
 
 Whether this liaison between Bernard and the lady of Yen- 
 tadour transgressed the established limits of chivalric decorum, 
 we do not know for certain, and we shall dispense with the in- 
 quiry. It is certain that the viscount of Yentadour saw some- 
 
 ♦ Raynouard : vol. iii. p. 44. Piece No. II. Strophes 1 and 2. 
 
 Non es meravelha s'ieu chan Ben es mortz qui d'amor non sen 
 
 Mielhs de nulh autre chantador ; Al cor qualque doussa sabor ; 
 
 Quar plus trai mos cors ves amor, E que val viure ses amor, 
 
 E mielhs sui faitz a son coman ; Mas per far enueg la gen ? 
 
 Cors e cor e saber e sen Ja dame dieus no m'azir tan 
 
 E fors' e poder hi ai mes ; Que ja pueis viva jorn ni mes. 
 
 Si m tira vas amor lo fres Pus que d'enueg serai repres, 
 
 Qu'a nulh' antra part no m'aten. E d'amor non aurai talan. — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 367 
 
 thing in this connection, that displeased him. He removed Ber- 
 nard from his court and interdicted his appearing there again. 
 The viscountess was shut up, closely watched and menaced. 
 
 We can easily imagine the chagrin of the young poet, at 
 being thus separated from his fair friend without even knowing 
 whether he should ever see her again. There is yet extant a 
 piece by him, which seems to have been written, to give vent 
 to his grief and to console his lady in this sad conjuncture. But 
 the piece is neither as beautiful nor as tender, as might have 
 been expected of Bernard on so touching an occasion. The 
 poet exhibits in it more of enchantment and pride at the thought 
 of being loved by the fair viscountess, than of chagrin for see- 
 ing her thus persecuted on his account. I shall only translate 
 the most characteristic passages. 
 
 " The sweet song of the birds throughout the grove alleviates 
 my pain and makes my heart revive ; and since the birds have 
 cause to sing, well may I also sing, I, who have more delights 
 than they, I, whose every day is a day of song and joy, I, who 
 care for nothing else."* 
 
 " There are men, who, when they chance to meet with great 
 success or good adventure, are rendered haughtier and more 
 barbarous by it. But I am of a better and more generous na- 
 ture ; when God crowns me with blessings, I feel still more of 
 love for those already dear." .... 
 
 " At night wlien 1 retire to rest, I know too well, that I shall 
 find no sleep ; my rest is gone, I lose it at thy remembrance, 
 my lady fair ! There, where his treasure is, man fain would 
 have his heart ; 'tis, thus I act myself ; thus have I put in 
 thee my care and all my thoughts." 
 
 " Yes, lady, know that, though my eyes behold thee not, 
 my heart yet sees thee ; complain no more than I myself com- 
 plain. I know, that they imprison thee on my account. But 
 when the jealous spy knocks at the door, have good care, that 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 65. Piece No. XI. Stroplies 1, 2, 3 and 4. 
 
 Quan par la flors josta'l vert fuelh, Ben sai la nueg quan mi despuclh 
 
 E vei lo temps clar e sere, El lieg que no i dormirai re ; 
 
 E'l dous chan dels auzels per bruelli Lo dormir pert, quar ieu lo m tuclh, 
 
 M'adoussa lo cor e m reve, Domna, quan de vos mi sove. 
 
 Pois I'auzel chanton a lur for, Quar, lai on hom a son thezor, 
 
 leu qu'ai plus de joy en mon cor Vol hom ados tencr son cor : 
 
 Deg ben chantar, car tug li mei jornal Aital fatz ieu, domna, de cui mi qnal ; 
 
 Son joy e chan, qu'ieu no m pens de ren al. Mas mon pessar neguna res no m val. 
 
 Tal n'y a que an mais d'orguelh, Domna, si no us vezon mei huelh, 
 
 Quam grans jois ni grans bes lor ve ; Be sapchatz que mon cor vos vc ; 
 
 Mas ieusui de melhor escuelh, E no us dulhatz plus qu'ieu mi duelh, 
 
 E pus francs, quan deus mi fai be ; Qu'ieu sai qu'om vos destrcuh per me ; 
 
 Quoras qu'ieu fos d'amar en lor, E si'I gilos vos bat defor, 
 
 M es be de lor vengutz al cor, • Ben gardatz que no us bata'l cor. 
 
 Merce, mi dons, non ai par ni engal ; Si us fai enueg, vos a lui atrctal ; 
 
 Res no m sofranh, sol que vos deus mi sal. E ja ab vos no gazanh be per mal. — Ed.
 
 868 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 lie knock not at the heart. If he torments thee, torment thou 
 him again, nor let him gain good in return for evil at thj 
 hands." 
 
 There is reason to believe, that the viscountess was not very- 
 much affected hj the manner in which Bernard bore his mis- 
 fortune. She sent him a request to leave the country, for fear 
 of new persecutions. Afflicted beyond all measure by this 
 order, Bernard regarded it as tantamount to treason or infi- 
 delity on the part of his lady. This is at least the inference to 
 be drawn from sundry of his pieces, in all probability composed 
 on this occasion, to which alone they are adapted, or at any 
 rate better adapted than to any other. I will translate a few 
 stanzas from one of them, one of the finest of Bernard's, but, in 
 my opinion, at the same time one of those which abound in 
 intranslatable delicacies and licenses of diction. In order to 
 appreciate the full force of the simile, derived from the flight 
 of the lark in the beginning of the poem, we must call to mind 
 a popular prejudice of the Middle Age. It was believed that 
 the lark, being enamored of the sun, rose aloft into the splen- 
 dor of his rays, as high as it could possibly ascend, as if for the 
 purpose of approaching him, and that, becoming more and 
 more intoxicated with delight in proportion to its higher 
 ascent, it finally dropt from the sky, forgetful of the use of its 
 wings. I now proceed to give the piece from Bernard : 
 
 " V7hen I behold the sky -lark winging its merry journey 
 toward the sun, and then forgetful of itself, from sudden ine- 
 briety of pleasure, drop down precij)itant ; oh, how I long 
 then for a fate like hers ! IIow much I envy then the joy to 
 which I'm witness ! I am astonished that my heart is not at 
 once dissolved in longing.* 
 
 " Alas ! how little do I know of love, I, who was once de- 
 luded by the conceit of knowing all, unable as I am to resist 
 the charms of her whom I must love in vain, of her who robbed 
 
 * 
 
 Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 68. Piece No. XII. Strophes 1, 2, 3, 5 : 
 
 Quan vey la laudeta mover Anc pueissas non pogui aver 
 
 De joi sas alas contra '1 rai, Do me poder, de lor en sai, 
 
 Que s'oblida e s laissa cazer Qu'ela m fetz a mos huels vezer 
 
 Per la doussor qu'al cor li'n vai ; En un miralh que molt mi plai. 
 
 Ailas ! qual enueia m'en ve, Miralhs ! pois me mirei «n te, 
 
 Cui qu'ieu ne veia jauzion ! M'an mort li sospir de preon 
 
 Meraveillas m'ai, quar desse Qu'aissi m perdei, cum perdet se 
 
 Lo cor de dezirier no m fon. Lo bels Narcezis en la Ion. 
 
 Ailas ! quant cuiava saber Pus ab mi dons no m pot valer 
 
 D'amor, e quant petit en sai! Precs, ni merces, ni'l dregz qu'ieu ai, 
 
 Quar ieu d'amar no m puesc tener Ni a leys no ven a plazer 
 
 Celleis on ja pro non aurai ; Qu' ieu 1' am, jamais non lo i dirai : 
 
 Quar tolt m'a'l cor, e tolt m'a me, Aissi m part d'amor e m recre ; 
 
 E si mezeis, e tot lo raon ; Mort m'a, e per mort li respon, 
 
 E quan si m tolc, no m laisset re E vau m'en, pus illi no m rete, 
 
 Mas dizirier e cor volon. Caitius en yssilh, non sai on Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 369 
 
 me of my faith, my heart, herself and all the world, who left 
 me nothing but desires and regrets. 
 
 " Never have I been able to recover my senses again, since 
 the hour in which she permitted me to look at myself in a mir- 
 ror, too pleasing to me. Ravishing mirror ! 1 have sighed 
 ever since I beheld my image in thee ; I have lost myself, like 
 !Karcissus in the fountain. 
 
 " Since all is over now, as nothing will avail before my lady, 
 nor prayers, nor rightful claim, nor mercy ; since she desires 
 my homage now no longer, I shall have nothing more to say of 
 love. I must renounce — I must abjure it. She has deprived 
 me of my life. I reply to her, as one no longer living, and I 
 depart for exile, I know not whither." 
 
 And in fact, Bernard did quit his native Limousin. It 
 would not be a matter of indifference to the history of Pro- 
 vencal poetry and its propagation beyond the limits of the 
 country to which the Provencal language was indigenous, to 
 know the probable date of his departure. JS^ow Ebles III. had 
 married Azalais of Montpellier about the year 1156, and sup- 
 posing the liaison between Bernard and his lady to have lasted 
 three or four years, it must have been toward 1160 that Ber- 
 nard left his country for the purpose of roving about in quest of 
 adventures. He must then have been about thirty years of age. 
 
 It would seem that at that time the Provencal Troubadours 
 and Jongleurs had already commenced to frequent the pro- 
 vinces of the north of France, and more especially Normandy. 
 It was in the latter that Bernard sought refuge at the court of 
 Henry H., who was then nothing more than a duke. Henry 
 had married, in 1152, the celebrated Eleanor of Guienne, who 
 was the grand-daughter of "William IX., count of Poitiers, and 
 the divorced wife of Louis VH., king of France. Tliis princess, 
 having been brought up amid the elegance and poetical refine- 
 ments of the southern courts, had kept alive a relish for what- 
 ever could resuscitate the memory and the pleasures of her 
 earlier years. Accustomed to the reception of Jongleurs and 
 of Troubadours at her mansion, she extended to Bernard a 
 more honorable and a kindlier welcome than to any other, he 
 being at that time the most distinguished of them all. Eleanor 
 was handsome, still young, and, according to the accounts of 
 the Provencal traditions, an admirable judge of prizes, of 
 honors, and of the blandishments of speech — in other words, of 
 poetry. So much as all this was hardly necessary to inspire 
 Bernard with confidence, to choose her as the subject of his new 
 songs. Eleanor was delighted with the compliment, and in the 
 language of his Provencal biographer, more delighted than the 
 Troubadour could ever have anticipated. " Bernard," says 
 
 24
 
 370 Jlistory of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 tliis author, "remained for a long time at the court of the 
 duchess of ]S"ormandy. He became fond of her and she of 
 him, and he made many a song of it."* 
 
 Some of these songs were composed between the years IICO 
 and 1164, while the lady was yet a duchess and the wife of the 
 duke, others again were written subsequently to the latter of 
 these dates, when Henry 11. was already on the throne of 
 England. But I can scarcely find three or four of them, that 
 bear distinct indications of their motive, and among these even 
 there are none of a sweeter and more original cast than those 
 I have already given. I shall therefore not attempt to trans- 
 late them, for fear of exhausting the degree of interest, due to 
 this branch of Provengal poetry, too fast and prematurely. I 
 shall quote but a single passage, which I have selected not on 
 account of its intrinsic beauty, but as a curious and character- 
 istic instance of chivalric manners. 
 
 " My lady has so much address and artifice, that she always 
 makes me think she loves me. But she deceives me thus agree- 
 ably and she repels me with her sweet pretensions. My lady, 
 leave the guile and artifice; for as thy vassal suffers so will be 
 thy damage." 
 
 " My lady will assuredly do wrong, if she makes me come 
 where she disrobes herself, unless, permitting me to kneel 
 beside her couch, she deigns to extend her foot, commanding 
 me to untie her easy fitting shoes." 
 
 To be present with a lady in her dishabille, to assist her 
 even in undressing and to see her retire, were among the 
 legitimate favors of chivalric etiquette and among those which 
 the Troubadours solicit most frequently and ardently. One 
 might be easily tempted to attribute this usage to motives of 
 a very vulgar sort, but this would be an error, Tlie point in 
 question was nothing further than a consecrated usage of the 
 vassalage of love, a usage adopted, like so many others, from 
 the manners of feudal vassalage. It was quite an ordinary 
 occurrence for vassals to assist and wait upon their suzerains, 
 when the latter were retiring to rest. 
 
 Bernard de Ventadour went to England on several occasions, 
 sometimes in the retinue of Henry 11., and sometimes to accom- 
 pany Queen Eleanor. He is the first of the Troubadours known 
 to have succeeded in propagating some notions of Provengal 
 poetry among the Anglo-Normans (about the year 1165 or 1166). 
 
 Finally, however, for reasons now unknown to us, or per- 
 haps merely to gratify his desire of seeing the countries of the 
 South again, Bernard ceased to be contented in Normandy 
 
 * " Lone temps estet en sa cort, et enamoret se d'ella et ella de lui; e'n fea motas 
 bonas caasos." Raynouard, vol. v. p. 69. — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 371 
 
 and repaired to Toulouse, to tlie court of Raymond Y., which 
 was at that time the most brilliant of the countries, where the 
 Provencal tongue was used. It would appear, that our Trou- 
 badour soon became attached to Kaymond, in whose service 
 he remained for the rest of his life, if we except some transient 
 absentments occasioned by various excursions into Provence, 
 Italy, Spain and Limousin, where duty called him to revisit 
 the objects of his earlier affection. 
 
 Great changes had meanwhile taken place at the chateau of 
 Vcntadour, we do not know exactly at what date, but very 
 probably soon after the year 1160. His former master and 
 patron Ebles III., under the influence of motives of which w^e 
 have no knowledge, had resolved to retire from the world. He 
 had crossed the Alps and retreated to the monastery of Mont- 
 Cassin, where he died in 1170. In regard to the Viscountess 
 Adelaide, the wife of Ebles, we do not know what became of 
 her. The historian says not a word about her. But among 
 the compositions of our poet, there is one which has every ap- 
 pearance of having been written with reference to her, and 
 would go to prove, that Bernard's first attachment was far from 
 being extinct. I shall endeavor to translate a portion of it, 
 in spite of the impossibility of giving in another language the 
 slightest conception of the graceful sweetness of expression, 
 that pervades the original from one end to the other. 
 
 " Fair lady, he is not susceptible of sorrow, he was not made 
 for love, he who can part from thee without a tear." * 
 
 " The season when the birds begin to warble is at hand. I 
 see the flax grow verdant in the fields and the blue violet peep 
 forth behind the bushes, the streamlets rolling clearly o'er the 
 sand, where the white flower-de-lis unfolds its blossoms." 
 
 " I have long since been poor and bereft of the blessings of 
 love, by the fault of a cruel friend, in whose service I'm await- 
 ing my end." 
 
 " My own hand has gathered the rod, wherewith the fairest 
 one that ever lived now slays me. To please her, to obey her, 
 I have long lived an exile from my native soil, 'mid painful 
 desires, severe regrets and sorry recompenses." 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 60. Piece No. IX. 
 
 Bels Monruels, aisselh que s part de vos 
 E non plora, ges non es doloiros, 
 Ni no sembla sia corals amies. . . . 
 Ai ! chant d'auzel comensa sa sazos, 
 Qu'ieu aug chantar las guantas e'ls aigros, 
 E pels cortils vei verdeiar los lis, 
 La blava flor que nais per los boissos, 
 E'ls riu son clar de sobre los sablos, 
 E lay s'espan la blanca flors-de-dis. 
 Etc. etc. etc. — Ed.
 
 373 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 " He loves but little, who is never jealous, loves little who is 
 not generous, loves little who never lost his reason, loves little 
 who is not prone to sadness. Fair tears of love are worth more 
 than its smiles." 
 
 " On my knees, before my lady, while she accuses me and 
 searches me for wrongs, I supplicate for mercy, my eyes suf- 
 fused with tears. Then she heaves, sighs and makes me hope 
 again ; she kisses my mouth and eyes, and the pleasure I then 
 experience is one of the pleasures of paradise." 
 
 "I commend my hope to God; I recall again, by memory, 
 the honor she once bestowed on me beneath the orchard 
 pine, at the time she conquered me ; this souvenir consoles me 
 and makes me live again ; this hope renews the blossoms of 
 my youth." 
 
 The exalted tone of this piece, the disorder, the incoherence 
 of the sentiments, the ideas which pervade it, seem to be the 
 natural effect of a strong and deeply-rooted passion. It con- 
 tains verses and entire couplets of most exquisite melody, and 
 such as one can find but few examples of, in the most cultivated 
 poets of the best periods of literary history. 
 
 I now return for a moment to the excursions of Bernard. We 
 have a piece by him, composed in the year 11T6, and addressed 
 to a princess of the house of Est, to whom he gives the name 
 of Joannah. In this piece our Troubadour makes a very dis- 
 tinct allusion to the battle of Lignano, which was won by the 
 Lombard league over the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, ex- 
 horting the latter in the strongest terms to revenge himself on 
 the Milanese as speedily as possible, unless he wished to for- 
 feit completely his power and his honor. From these indi- 
 cations there is very little doubt but that Bernard visited in 
 Italy the camps of Frederic I., the court of Ferrara, and proba- 
 bly several others. In the Italian documents of the thirteenth 
 century, there are yet to be found traditional vestiges of the 
 great renown, which he had left on the other side of the Alps. 
 
 The time of Bernard's residence at the court of Raymond Y. 
 comprises the largest portion of the life of this Troubadour, who 
 during this interval no doubt had other adventures and other 
 amours, on which he composed new songs, some of which at 
 least must constitute a part of those now left of him. But his 
 life at the period in question is too little known even to make 
 it possible to connect it with any degree of probability to any 
 one of the pieces, of which it was the subject. Nevertheless 
 these pieces possess attractions and beauty of detail enough to 
 merit our notice, apart even from the circumstances, to which 
 they relate and by which they were inspired. But the limits 
 of this cursory survey will not admit of their insertion.
 
 TJie Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 373 
 
 I will, however, translate a very pleasant piece of versifica- 
 tion and of style, wherein our Troubadour appears in a new 
 situation, being disappointed and betrayed by a lady, who had 
 at first accepted his love and services. 
 
 " I have heard the sweet voice of the wild nightingale ; it has 
 entered my heart ; it softens, it allays its cares and the tor- 
 ments, which love has inflicted, and thus I have at least the 
 joy of another to console me." 
 
 " He is indeed a man of abject life, who lives not in joy, 
 who directs not his heart and desires to love, when all are 
 abandoned to joy, when everywhere the songs of amatory glee 
 resound, through meadows, groves, through heath and plains 
 and thicket." 
 
 " And I, alas ! whom love has now forgotten, unhappy wan- 
 derer ! instead of my share of this joy, have but chagrin and 
 thwartings. Do not then deem my conduct vile, if some dis- 
 courteous word escape me now." 
 
 " A false and cruel dame, unfaithful and of wicked lineage 
 betrayed me, and betrayed herself. She chose with her own 
 hand the rod, wherewith she punishes herself; and if any one 
 asks her the reason for her conduct, she charges me with her 
 own self-inflicted wrongs ; she finds it just, that the last comer 
 obtains from her more favors than I could ever gain with all 
 my long attentions." 
 
 " I served her truly to the moment, when her heart became 
 unsteady. But, since she now rejects me, fool were I, did I 
 serve her any longer. The hope of Bretons and an unrequited 
 service were never good but for converting seignior into 
 squire." 
 
 " That God might punish to their desert the bearers of false 
 messages. But for these slanderers, I might have tasted of the 
 fruits of love." 
 
 "But (happy or not so) he is indeed a fool, who quarrels 
 with his lady. Let mine but pardon me and I will pardon her. 
 I hold all those to be impostors, who made me speak of her 
 insultingly." 
 
 " Yet, she has broken faith toward me so grievously, tliat 
 henceforth I abjure her seigniory. I want no more of her ; 
 I'll speak no more of it. But if another speak of it ; I'll listen 
 willingly, and from my very heart rejoice in it." 
 
 It was probably for the benefit of the same lady and on the 
 subject of the same treachery, that Bernard composed another 
 piece of six couplets, in which, wnth inimitable grace and 
 naivete, he expresses his perplexity in regard to the conduct 
 which he ought to maintain toward his unfaithful mistress. I
 
 S74: 
 
 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 shall only translate four of these couplets.* It will be per- 
 ceived from the iirst of them, that the author addresses himself 
 to some one whom he consults in relation to his position, and 
 to whom he attributes the quality of seignior. This was per- 
 haps the count of Toulouse, Raymond Y. himself. 
 
 " Give me an advice, my lord, thou who art possessed of 
 sense and reason. A lady has bestowed on me her love, and I 
 too have loved her long. But I know now, I am certain, that 
 she has chosen another friend. And if ever I suffered from 
 having a compeer elsewhere, I surely must from having one 
 of this sort." 
 
 " One thing I hesitate about and feel uneasy ; if I submit 
 with patience to this wrong my lady does me, I shall expose 
 myself to many suiferings ; if I reproach the unfaithful one for 
 her conduct, I shall consider myself lost to love. I fear, that 
 God will not i^ermit me after that to invent either songs or verses." 
 
 " Those perfidious fair eyes, which looked on me so graciously, 
 look elsewhere now, and in this consists their great injustice. 
 And yet I never can forget the honor they bestowed on me ; I 
 never can forget that there was a time, when among a thousand 
 round them, they would have seen but me." 
 
 " Of the tears which trickle down my eyes I still write greet- 
 ings, the greetings which I send to her, who will ever be to me 
 the fairest and most prepossessing of her kind ; to her, whom I 
 saw once, the time I took my final leave, conceal her counten- 
 ance, unable to give utterance to a word." 
 
 I must cut short now my examination and these extracts from 
 the poems of Bernard of Ventadour. I am aware (and it is a 
 matter of regret to me), that in order to be sure of producing a 
 just appreciation of productions so peculiar in their kind, it would 
 be necessary to exhibit them more closely, more in detail and 
 in their native costume, the only one that fits them, the only 
 
 Eaynouard, vol. iii. p. 
 
 Piece No. XXI. Strophes 1, 3, 5, and 7. 
 
 Acossellatz mi, senhor, 
 Vos qu'avetz saber e sen ; 
 Una domna m det s'amor 
 Ou'ai amada longamen, 
 Mas aras sai per vertat 
 Que'lli a autr'amic privat : 
 Et anc de nulh compantio 
 Companha tan greus no m fo. 
 
 D'una ren sui en error, 
 Et estau en pessamen, 
 Que loncx tempts n'aurai dolor, 
 iS'ieu aquest t«rt li cossen ; 
 E s'ieu ii die son peccat, 
 Tenc mi per dezeretat 
 D'amor ; e ja dieus no m do 
 Pueis faire vers ni clianso. 
 
 Li suei belh huelh traidor, 
 Que m'esguardavan tangen, 
 Aras esguardon alhor, 
 Per que y fan gran faillimen; 
 Mas d'aitan m'an gent honrat, 
 Que s'eron mil ajustat. 
 Plus guardon lai ou ieu so 
 Qu'a selhs que son d'enviro. 
 
 De I'aigua que dels huelhs plor 
 Escriu salutz mais de cen 
 Que tramet e la gensor 
 Et a la plus avinen. 
 Mantas vetz m'es pueis membrat 
 L'amor que m fetz al comjat, 
 Qu'ie'l vi cobrir sa faisso, 
 Qu'anc no m poc dire razo. 
 
 -Ed.
 
 The, Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 375 
 
 one in which their proper physiognomy shows to advantage. 
 But perhaps the mere consideration will be enough to awaken 
 in these poems an interest of a far more elevated nature than 
 that of literary curiosity only, that at the epoch at which these 
 Provengal poets expressed, with so much refinement of art, sen- 
 timents so novel, so delicate and so complex, the rest of Europe 
 was yet immersed in a state of more than semi-barbarity, and 
 that the first sign of poetic life which it exhibited was this en- 
 thusiasm with which it listened to, and reiterated these first 
 accents of the chivalric poetry of the South. We shall see the 
 force of this remark more clearly, when we shall have proceeded 
 a little further. At present I have only a few words to add, to 
 finish what I have to say concerning the life of Bernard de Yen- 
 tadour. 
 
 There is to be found in the manuscripts, and Mr. Eaynouard 
 has published under the name of this Troubadour, a piece writ- 
 ten in Syria during the crusade of Richard Coeur de Lion. But 
 I do not hesitate to believe that this piece is not by Bernard, 
 and that the latter never took the cross. 
 
 He remained at the court of Toulouse until the year 1195, 
 when Raymond Y. ditd. Bernard, now left without a patron, 
 and too far advanced in life to find a new one without difficulty, 
 or to resume the life of an itinerant, retired to the Carthusian 
 monastery of Dalon in Limousin. After this the records of his 
 life are silent. "VYe know that he died there, but that is all. 
 The year of his decease is unknown ; whether it was near the 
 close of the twelfth or at the beginning of the thirteenth cen- 
 tury must still be a mere conjecture. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact, worth our notice at present, and 
 once for all, that the most celebrated Troubadours died nearly 
 all in the cloister and in the habit of monks. Soon worn out by 
 the excitement and the agitations of a factitious, and we might 
 almost call it, an extravagant life, and inevitably seized by re- 
 ligious scruples, they seldom failed, at their decline of life, to 
 take refuge in some monastery of austere seclusion, and to con- 
 secrate to God the remnant of an existence which the world and 
 love were no longer willing to accept.
 
 376 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 CHAPTER xyn. 
 
 THE LYKICAL POETRY OF THE TROUBADOURS. 
 
 II. AMATORY POETRY. 
 
 ARNAUD DE MAR VEIL AND RAIMBAUD DE VAQUEIBAS. 
 
 I HAVE just signalized Bernard de Ventadour as one of the 
 first of the Troubadours possessed of genius and originality. 
 He is, however, not the only representative of his epoch. He 
 had many rivals, somewliat younger than himself, several of 
 which enjoyed quite as much, some even more celebrity than 
 he himself, and amonn' these there are some whom I am not at 
 liberty to pass over m sueuce. 
 
 Such are, in the first place, Giraud de Borneil and Arnaud 
 Daniel, who make their appearance simultaneously, as if they 
 had been summoned by each other, and each claims for himself 
 the palm of Provencal poetry. Borneil has in his favor the 
 judgment of his contemporaries and of those who spoke his lan- 
 guage. In support of Arnaud Daniel we can produce the great 
 authority of Dante and of all the Italian poets of the fourteenth 
 century, who still preserved of Provencal poetry, even after its 
 extinction, an immediate tradition full of interest and admira- 
 tion. 
 
 My plan does not admit of a formal discussion or a solution 
 of this question. It will be necessary for me to speak, and I 
 shall speak in another place, of Arnaud Daniel and of Giraud 
 de Borneil, but this must be done separately, and they must be 
 considered from points of view entirely distinct. My remarks, 
 however, on both these Troubadours will contain, implicitly at 
 least, a very positive answer to the question propounded. 
 
 It is more especially as a writer and as an innovator in the 
 style of Provencal poetry, that Arnaud Daniel claims our con- 
 sideration, and it is therefore in the general survey of that part 
 of my subject that an occasion to speak of him will most natu- 
 rally present itself. I liope to show then, that judging him 
 merely from his productions still in our possession, Arnaud 
 Daniel was but an indifferent poet, destitute of imagination and
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Tronladours. 377 
 
 of sentiment, and one of those who contributed most to the de- 
 terioration of Provencal poetry, by reducing it to a mere 
 mechanism, without any higher aim than that of charming, or 
 at any rate of astonishing, the ear. 
 
 In regard to Giraud de Bomeil, he is, in my opinion, in spite 
 of his defects, the most distinguished of the Troubadours, the 
 one who has contributed most to ennoble the tone of Provencal 
 poetry and to idealize its character. "When, therefore, after 
 having considered historically the principal branches of this 
 poetry, I shall, as I propose, proceed to the attempt to give a 
 general idea of it, by taking it up at its highest degree of per- 
 fection, and by contemplating it as the noblest expression of the 
 civilization of the Middle Age, my task will be a definite and an 
 easy one. 
 
 It will be restricted to the examination of the compositions 
 of Giraud de Borneil. Till then I have nothing to say of this 
 Troubadour, and I shall therefore continue the review of the 
 most celebrated contemporaries of Bernard de Yentadour, 
 
 The four next in distinction to those whom I have just named, 
 are Pierre Roger, Gui d'Uissel, Peirols, and Gaucelm Faydit, 
 of Limousin or of Auvergne. 
 
 In the amatory pieces of Pierre Roger I find nothing of suffi- 
 cient interest to deserve citation. In regard to his life we can 
 hardly have any more motive to make ourselves acquainted 
 with it, the moment we set aside his works. There is one trait, 
 however, exhibited by it, which I must notice, because it illus- 
 trates a general fact of a certain interest in the history of Pro- 
 vencal poetry and culture. 
 
 Pierre Roger had received a distinguished education ; he was 
 a man of letters, and had once been canon of Clermont. At 
 that time this was a position of considerable importance in 
 society. Nevertheless Roger quitted it for the purpose of be- 
 coming a Jongleur ; and, nothing is of more frequent occurrence 
 than to see clerks, and men educated for the priesthood, or even 
 already engaged in the service of the church, renounce their 
 profession to become Troubadours or singers to the Troubadours. 
 Some chose this part from motives of vanity ; others simply be- 
 cause, too miserable and poor in the condition of clerks and 
 priests, they hoped to live a life of greater ease and pleasure in 
 the capacity of poets. 
 
 Gui d'Uissel is a Troubadour, under whose name the manu- 
 scripts contain a score of tolerably elegant pieces. His life 
 presents to us a particular, which is perhaps unique in the his- 
 tory of the Provencal poets. He had two brothers and a cousin, 
 who owned together in joint-tenancy the seigniory of the chateau 
 of Uissel, beside several others. All four of them possessed a
 
 378 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 portion of the talents, the union of which was at that time 
 necessary to constitute a poet. Gui could compose chansons, 
 but no other species of poetry, and he was neither a musician 
 nor a singer. His two brothers likewise only succeeded in one 
 kind of poetic composition, and this was the tenson, which they 
 were unable either to set to music or to sing. It w^as the fourth 
 of their number, the cousin, who, himself unable to make 
 verses, composed the music for, and sung those of the three 
 brothers. It was thus that four distinct individuals by their 
 united talents formed one single Troubadour, and this Trouba- 
 dour even was scarcely a complete one.* 
 
 From the poems of Gui d'Uissel I shall quote but one coup- 
 let, and curious enough it is, in which the author explains tlie 
 reasons why he had not composed as many amatory pieces as 
 he had wished. He says: 
 
 " I should make songs much oftener, but I am sick and weary 
 of constantly repeating that I weep and sigh from love ; for all 
 the world could say as much at least. I fain would make new 
 verses with airs agreeable, but I find nothing which has not al- 
 ready been said. How shall I manage then to supplicate my 
 lady-love ? I'll tell the same things in another fashion, and thus 
 I'll make my song appear original." 
 
 Gui d'Uissel makes here a very naive confession of that which 
 the majority of Troubadours did without any such avowal. But 
 if this is true, the small number of those, who had talent and 
 individuality of character enough to vary to some extent a 
 theme so simple, is so much the more worthy of admiration. 
 
 Peirols is the fourth of the distinguished Troubadors who 
 were contemporary with Bernard de V entadour. But I must 
 exempt myself from speaking of them here, until I shall have 
 reported some highly finished productions of theirs under an- 
 other division of my subject. There remains, therefore, but a 
 word more to be said on Gaucelm Faydit. 
 
 This is one of the Troubadours, of whom we possess the 
 
 freatcst affluence of pieces. These pieces are, for the most part, 
 iglily wrought, of a finish habitually elegant, sometimes per- 
 fect. But there is nothing in them that might be called in- 
 spired, nothing proceeds from an original sentiment ; all is 
 imitation and study for effect. The report of the Provengal 
 traditions, or the impression produced by these pieces on con- 
 temporary minds is quite remarkable. " Gaucelm Faydit," 
 they say, " went about the world for twenty years, without 
 
 *E I'us de 803 fraires avia nom N Ebles c I'autre en Peire, e'l cozin avia nom n 
 Elias. E tng quatre si eron trobador. En Gui si trobava bonas cansos, en Elias bonas 
 tenso3, EN Ebles las malas tensos, en Peire cantava tot quant els trobavan. The bio- 
 grapher adds in conclusion : "Mas lo legatz del Papa li fetz jurar que mais no fezes 
 causos; E per lui laisset lo trobar e'l cantar." Raynouard, vol. v. p. 175 — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 379 
 
 succeeding in making either liis songs or liiraself acceptable and 
 welcome."* This is an evidence that the public of the Trou- 
 badours made much nicer distinctions in their poetry than we 
 could make in our day, and there are many other facts which 
 might be cited in support of this remark. There are yet ex- 
 tant, for example, several amatory pieces from the pen of a 
 Troubadour, Deudes de Prades by name, which modern critics 
 would be tempted to rank among the most agreeable. We 
 will see now, what the judges of the time say in regard to 
 them. " His songs did not proceed from love ; this is the rea- 
 son why they produced no favorable impression on the 
 world ; they were not sung at all."t 
 
 Arnaud de Marveil. — The group of Troubadours, of which 
 I have just spoken, belongs to the northern portion of the 
 countries of the Provencal tongue, to Auvergne namely, and 
 to Limousin, countries, which the inhabitants of the Provence 
 properly so called, those of the banks of the Garonne and of the 
 plain between the Cevennes and the Mediterranean, designated, 
 it would seem, by the name of ultramontane, a denomination 
 perfectly just and appropriate relatively to themselves. 
 
 But although the most ancient Troubadours now known to 
 us are incontestably included in this group, yet these were not 
 the provinces in which the poetry of chivalry had originated. 
 This poetry was there but an adopted one ; it was an acquired 
 poetry, born further toward the South, closer to the shores of 
 the Mediterranean and to the Pyrenees. This is a question to 
 which I shall return j^erhaps hereafter, but which at present I 
 can waive without anv inconvenience. 
 
 It is an indubitable fact, that in the countries, which have 
 since that time been known under the name of Lower Lan^ue- 
 doc, there existed at quite an early day several schools of Pro- 
 vencal poetry, of which the one at Toulouse is the earliest 
 known to us. Giraud le Roux, that knightly Troubadour, 
 whom I have already designated as one of those who composed 
 verses during the first half of the twelfth century, during the 
 interval between the count of Poitiers and Bernard de Y enta- 
 dour, this Giraud le Eoux, I say, belonged to that school ; he 
 is its earliest alumnus, but not its founder. 
 
 Without giving an account of these different schools, and 
 without attempting to distinguish them respectively, one may 
 very aptly form a separate group of the Troubadours, who 
 
 * " Mot fon lone temps desastrucs de dos e d'onor a penre, que plus de XX ans anet 
 per lo men qu'el ni sas causes no foro grazitz ni volgutz." Raynouard, vol. v. p. 158. 
 — Ed. 
 
 t " E fes cansos per sen de trobar ; mas no movian ben d'amor. Per que non avian 
 sabor entre la gen, ni no foron cantados, ni grazidas." Raynouard: vol. v. p. 12G. — 
 Ed.
 
 380 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 received their professional training there during the second half 
 of the twelfth century ; and in this group I think I may include 
 Arnaud de Marveil, notwithstanding he was born out of the 
 Gironde, and this because he spent tlie greater part of his life 
 in Lower Languedoc, because he died there, and composed 
 there all that is now known of him. Of all the Troubadours 
 of this epoch, and of this part of the South, he is the one, in 
 whose compositions we find the greatest amount of sentiment, 
 of sweetness and of elegance. 
 
 Arnaud was from Marveil, a chateau of the diocese of Peri- 
 gord. Though born in an obscure condition and in poverty, 
 he had received all the education which the age afforded, and 
 had learnt the Latin. Having entered by the aid of it the cleri- 
 cal profession, he spent some time in the exercise of it ; but 
 weary at last of the uneasiness, and perhaps of the obscurity in 
 which he vegetated, he resolved to apply himself to the culture 
 of poetry, and set out on his errantry in quest of fortune and 
 adventures.* 
 
 He had already travelled over many a country and visited 
 many a castle, when his good or evil star brought him to the 
 court of Rogers, surnamed Taillefer (the iron-shaped), the vis- 
 count of Biziers, and father to the one whom the count of 
 Montfort consigned to such a wretched end at the commence- 
 ment of the horrible war against the Albigenses. Rogers was 
 a valiant knight, at whose court everybody plumed himself on 
 his elegance of manners and his gallantry. He had married in 
 the year 1171, Adelaide, daughter of Raymond Y., tlie count 
 of Toulouse, to whom he gave the title of Countess de Burlatz, 
 because she had been born in the castle of that name. 
 
 Arnaud entered the service of the countess, but we do not 
 see very v/ell in what capacity. His biographer says, that he 
 was an excellent singer and reader of romances,f words, the 
 precise import of which I do not see, but which seem to sig- 
 nify something foreign to the condition and profession of the 
 Troubadour or Jongleur. It was, however, only by his poetry 
 that he distinguislied himself at tlie court of Beziers. After 
 having become enamored, and very seriously enamored, of 
 the countess, he composed on her several jjieces, remarkable 
 for their grace and tenderness. But unlike the other Trouba- 
 dours in this respect, he neither dared to avow himself the 
 author of these pieces, nor to tell the countess that he had made 
 them out of love to her ; he gave them as the work of an un- 
 known author, and enjoyed in silence the pleasure with which 
 everybody listened to them. 
 
 * Compare the Provencal account, Raynouard, vol. v. p. 45 Ed. 
 
 t " Aquel Arnautz e cantava be e legia be remans." — Ed.
 
 Tlie Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 881 
 
 Among the pieces by Arnaud, which have come down to us, 
 we easily recognize some of those, which he composed during 
 this first period of his amours. I give here two stanzas from 
 one of them, which indicate his situation tolerably well, but in 
 which his poetic talent is not yet fully developed. 
 
 " Fair and pleasant lady, thy great beauty, thy ruddy com- 
 plexion, thy accomplishments and courteous qualities give me 
 the knowledge and the occasion to sing. But my great fear and 
 agitation prevent me from saying, that it is of you I sing ; and 
 I know not what would betide me from my songs, whether it 
 would be for my benefit or my misfortune." 
 
 " Yes lady, I love thee secretly, and no one is aware of this, 
 but Love and I myself. Thou even thyself art ignorant of it ; 
 and since I dare not speak to thee in private, I shall at least 
 address thee in my songs." 
 
 Encouraged by the success of these songs, Arnaud de Mar- 
 veil could not resist the temptation of pursuing the rest of his 
 adventure in his proper name and person. He composed a new 
 song for the countess, quite as impassioned as the others, and 
 of which he avowed himself the author. This was tantamount 
 to declaring himself the author of all the j)revious ones. In 
 spite of a certain naive delicacy of sentiment and expression, 
 this new song is still quite mediocre ; and I should have no- 
 thing to say of it unless it constituted an era in the life of our 
 Troubadour. Here are the first three couplets ; and this is 
 more than is necessary to give its leading idea. 
 
 " Noble lady, thy ingenuous worth, which I cannot forget, thy 
 way of looking and of smiling, thy fair appearances, cause me 
 (better than I know how to express) to heave a sigh from my 
 inmost heart ; and if goodness and mercy plead not in my 
 behalf before you, I know that it will make me die."* 
 
 " I love thee without dissimulation, without deception and 
 with constancy. I love thee more than it is possible to imagine. 
 This is the only thing I could be guilty of against thy wishes. Oh 
 lady of my heart, if in this respect I should appear to err, 
 pardon this fault of mine." 
 
 * Le Parnasse occitanien, page 16. 
 
 " La franca captenensa Al meils qu'om pot pcssar. 
 
 Qu'ieu noa pose oblldar, ' D'aitan nous aua forsar 
 El dos ris e I'esgar, Per vostres mandamens. 
 
 El semblan queus vi far, Ai ! domna cui dezir. 
 
 Mi fan, domna valens, Si conoissetz nius par 
 
 Melhor qu'ieu no sai dir, Que sia fallimens 
 
 Ins el cor suspirar : Quar vos soi be volena, 
 
 E si per me nous vens Sufretz m' aquest fallir." 
 
 Merces e cauzimens, * * * * 
 
 Tern que m n'er a morir." " Domna, per gran temensa, 
 
 Tan vos am eus ten car, 
 
 " Ses gienh e ses falhensa ' Nous aus eatiers pregar." etc.. etc. 
 
 Vos am, e ses cor var — Ed.
 
 382 History of Provenoal Poetry. 
 
 " It is with great fear that I love thee, and I not even ven- 
 ture to ask a favor. Still it is better to love an obscure man, 
 who knows how to please and to conceal the favors love be- 
 stows, and to feel grateful for the honor done him, than some 
 great personage, displeasing and ungrateful, who thinks that all 
 the world is to obey him." 
 
 The countess of Burlatz not only was not offended by this 
 confession of the Troubadour, but, according to the biographer 
 of the latter, whose naive words I cannot do better than 
 reproduce, " She listened to his prayers and received them 
 graciously ; the poet himself she put in harness (that is to say, 
 she furnished him with handsome garments and with horses) 
 and encouraged him to find {irohar) and to sing of her."* 
 
 The majority of the pieces, which we possess of Arnaud de 
 Marveil, were composed in this situation, which permitted him 
 to aspire from wish to wish, from prayer to prayer, up to the 
 highest favors, which his lady was permitted to accord unto her 
 friend ; and this progression of chivalric love is indicated with 
 sufficient clearness in the pieces in question. 
 
 The first of them are still the expression of a timid love, 
 scarcely exhibiting a ray of hope across his many longings. I 
 will select a few passages from them, deciding, as I am accus- 
 tomed to do, less in favor of those which are intrinsically the 
 most beautiful, than of those which offer the greatest facilities 
 for translation. 
 
 " As the fish have their life in the waters, so I have and al- 
 ways shall have mine in love. Love made me choose a lady, 
 through whom I live contented, without expecting any other 
 good. Her value is so high, that I cannot say, whether 1 derive 
 most pride or shame from it ; these are two things which love 
 has both united in me, and that so well, that measure and reason 
 lose nothing by their blending." 
 
 "Fair lady, thou whose steps are guided by joy and youth, 
 wert thou never to love me, I still would love thee always ; 'tis 
 love would have it so, and I cannot resist. 'Tis love, that 
 knowing me to serve thee truly with all my heart, has taught 
 me methods of approaching thee. I touch thy hand in 
 thought and I impress a thousand kisses ; and this delight is 
 sweet ; no jealous rival can deprive me of it."f 
 
 * "E la comtessa non I'esquivet, ans entendet sos precs e los receup c los grazic ; 
 e'l mes en arnes, e set li baiideza de trobar e de cantar d'ella. Rayn. v. p. 45."— £d. 
 
 t Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 207. Piece No. II. Strophes 1. 3, 4. 
 Si cum li peis an en I'aigua lor vida, Tant es valens que, quan ben m'o cossir, 
 
 L'ai ieu en joy e totz temps la i aurai, M'en nays erguelhs e'n creys humilitatz ; 
 
 Qu'amors m'a fait en tal domna chauzir Si s tenon joinz amors e jois amdos 
 Don viu jauzens sol del respieit qu' ieu Que ren no i pert mezura ni razos. 
 n'ai ;
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 383 
 
 " Good lady, endowed with every accomplishment, thou dost 
 surpass the best I am acquainted with so far, that with tlice I 
 should rather long and languish than enjoy from another all that 
 a lover can claim. I am content with this, so much I am afraid 
 of not obtaining more. And yet I do not despair of this 
 entirely ; for I have often seen at powerful courts the j)Oor man 
 overwhelmed with gifts magnificent." 
 
 I now proceed to give a few couplets from another piece of 
 Arnaud's, remarkable for its extremely graceful versification 
 and as being one of those pieces, where that taste for antithesis 
 begins to make its appearance, which at a somewhat later date 
 became a preponderating characteristic in Provencal poetry, 
 from whence it passed over into the poetry of the Italians and 
 Catalonians. 
 
 " My lady, thou art pressing me so sorely, thou and my pas- 
 sion, that I dare not love thee, and still I cannot help it. The 
 one incites, the other stops me ; the one emboldens, the other 
 intimidates. I dare not ask thee for joy or favor. I am like 
 the warrior mortally wounded, who, though he knows he'll die, 
 combats still bravely. I call on thee for mercy from a heart, 
 that is surrendered to despair."* 
 
 " Let thy exalted worth not prove my ruin, the worth which 
 I have done my best to extol and celebrate. From the first 
 moment I beheld thee, I've consecrated all my knowledge and 
 my power to the enhancement of thy fame. Of these I've made 
 men speak and listen in many a noble place ; and if thou 
 wouldst condescend to be a little grateful, I should demand no 
 other guerdon but thy friendship." 
 
 " Dost thou desire to know the wrongs and all the injuries, of 
 W^hich thou canst accuse me and complain ? It is that I have 
 
 Belha domna, cui joj's e jovens guida, Bona domna, de totz bos aips complida, 
 
 .la no m'anietz, totz temps vos araarai, Taat etz valens part las melhors qu'ieu sai, 
 
 Qu' amors o vol ves cui no m puesc Mais am de vos lo talant e'ldezir 
 
 guandir; Qae d'autr' aver tot so qu'a drut s'es- 
 E quar conois qu'ieu am ab cor verai, chai ; 
 
 Mostra m de vos de tal guiza jauzir : D'aisso n'ai pro, quar tem el plus falhir, 
 
 Pensan vos bais e us maney e us embraz ; Pero non sui del tot dezesperatz, 
 
 Aquest domneis m'es dous e cars e bos, Qu'en ricas cortz ai vist mantas sazos 
 
 E no'l me pot vedar negus gelos.. Paubr' enrequir e recebre grans dos. — Ed. 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 223. Strophes 1, 3, 4, 5. 
 
 1. Si m destrenhetz, dona, vos et amors 5. Vostre g&n cora, vostra fresca colors, 
 
 Qa' amar no us aus, ni no m'en puesc E'l dous esguartz plazena que m sabeta 
 
 estraire ; faire 
 
 L'us m'encaussa, I'autre ra fai re- Vos mi fan tan dezirar e voter, 
 
 maner, Qu'ades vos am on plus m'en dezesper; 
 
 L'us m'enardis, e I'autre m fai teraer; E si folhei, quar no m'en sai partir : 
 
 Preyar no us aus per enten de jauzir, Mas quant me peas quals etz que m faitz 
 
 Aissi cum selh qu'es nafratz per murir, languir, 
 
 Sap que mortz es, e pero si s combat, Cosair I'onor, et oblid la foudat, 
 
 Vos clam merce ab cor dezesperat. E fug mon sen, e sec ma voluutat Ed.
 
 334 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 been more charmed and ravished by thee than by any otlier 
 object in the world, it is that I have recognized and celebrated 
 thee as the best and fairest of tliy kind. This constitutes the 
 wronc^, and this is all of which thou canst accuse me." 
 
 " Thy graceful person, thy ruddy hue, thy sweet M^ay of re- 
 garding, constrain me to desire and to love thee, in spite of my 
 despair. I know full well that it's a foolish thing ; but when I 
 consider, what thou art, I at once forget the folly ; I look but at 
 the honor ; then I dismiss my reason and follo\y inclination." 
 
 There is something in the general tone and in several traits 
 of this piece which reminds us somewhat of Petrarch, and 
 which would lead us to presume that the latter had made the 
 works of this Troubadour the subject of particular study. Pe- 
 trarch, in fact, speaks of Arnaud de Marveil, and ranks him 
 among the most celebrated Troubadours, but still he puts him 
 below Arnaud Daniel, from whom he distinguishes him by the 
 expression of " the less famous Arnaud." Petrarch makes here 
 a distinction, which is not to be taken too rigorously. A Trou- 
 badour, who ever and anon reminds us of him, is surely far 
 superior to the heavy and dry Arnaud Daniel. 
 
 Tlie specimens which I have just extracted from the better 
 pieces of Arnaud de Marveil will suffice to give us an idea of 
 his genius. I shall not quote any others, except a few, which 
 may serve to indicate still further the eventual progression of 
 his sentiments, and of the principal incidents of his erotic life. 
 
 Here is, for example, a passage in which he formally requests 
 his lady to take him into her service, by receiving his homage 
 in accordance with the customary ceremonial, which, as we 
 have already seen above, was precisely and in every point that 
 of feudal vassalage. 
 
 " Oh thou, the fairest mortal that ever was born into the 
 world, the hope I entertain of thee is so delightful and so sweet, 
 that I could never bestow my heart on any other. But it is 
 high time that I should call thee my liege and mistress, and 
 that, with hands joined in humility before thee, thou deignedst 
 to receive me as thy knight, as some good seignior deigns to 
 accept his vassal." 
 
 From among the various passages of several pieces, which 
 prove that the prayer of Arnaud had been benignantly received, 
 and that his fair countess had adopted him as her servant and 
 treated him occasionally with tenderness, I will only quote two. 
 The first is contained in a couplet of nine verses, which are per- 
 haps the most spirited and the most brilliant of this author. It 
 is to be remarked beforehand, that they are intranslatable, and 
 the following can only be said to be a faint reflection of their 
 beauty :
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 385 
 
 " Wlien my fair lady addresses me and looks at me, tlie lustre 
 of lier eyes and the sweetness of her breath penetrate my heart 
 together. Therefrom my lips derive such great delight, as 
 I know could never spring from my own nature ; it can only 
 be born of the love which has fixed its abode in my heart." 
 
 The second passage is less poetical, but more positive and 
 clearer than the first. 
 
 " Fair lady, full well didst thou deprive me of my life, the 
 day thou gavcst me the kiss, which left eternal trouble in my 
 heart. But surely I was a fool, I, when I boasted of that kiss ; 
 and I deserve an ignominious death (to be dragged by horses). 
 But oh, sweet object of my love, pardon the criminal! Restore 
 me to my joy and hope again ! For I shall be a cypher in the 
 world, until the day when I shall be again admitted to thy ser- 
 vice." 
 
 Arnaud obtained his pardon and continued to convert the 
 slightest incidents of his love for the countess of Beziers into 
 poems, which w^ere always well received and always replete 
 with pleasant traits. But in a happiness like his there was 
 something too fragile and too adventurous to be lasting. 
 
 The viscount of Beziers was in intimate relations both of in- 
 terest and of friendship with Alphonso I., king of Aragon, wdio 
 paid him several visits, either at Beziers or at Carcassonne. In 
 the course of these visits Alphonso became enamored of the 
 countess, and when he perceived the tenderness wnth which she 
 cherished Arnaud, he became jealous of it, and by his prayers 
 and intrigues prevailed on her so far as to induce her to dismiss 
 the poor Troubadour and to put an interdict upon his celebrat- 
 ing her thereafter in his verses. 
 
 When Arnaud de Marveil heard of his dismissal (says his 
 ancient biographer) he was grieved beyond all grief; and quit- 
 ting the countess and her court, like a man abandoned to des- 
 pair, he went to "William of Montpellier, who was his friend 
 and seignior, and remained with him for a long time. There 
 he gave vent to his complaint, shed many a tear, and wrote the 
 song which says : 
 
 "My thoughts were very sweet indeed," etc. * 
 
 Tliis song is one of those of Arnaud w'hich are still extant, 
 but it is not one of his best. The Troubadour there assures his 
 fair countess, in somewhat common terms, of his inability to 
 cease to love her and to sing of her, and he conjures her to per- 
 
 * " Arnautz de Marueil, quant auzi lo comjat, fo sobre totas dolors dol'ens ; e si s'en 
 parti com horn desesperatz de lieis e de sa cort. Et anet s'en a'N Guillem de Monpes- 
 lier qu'era sos amies e sos senher, e estet gran temps ab lui. E lai plays e ploret, e lai 
 fes aquesta canso que dis: 
 
 Molt eran dous miei cossir." 
 
 Raynouard, vol. v. p. 46 Ed. 
 
 25
 
 386 ■ History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 mit liim to return to her presence. It wonld appear that she 
 made no account of it, however ; and our Troubadour died 
 disconsolate while yet in the bloom of life, at Montpellier or its 
 environs, in one of the chateaux of William. 
 
 Arnaud de Marveil is one of that very limited number of 
 Troubadours who are known to have admired and celebrated 
 one lady only. This unity of object would give an additional 
 interest to his pieces, if all of them were yet extant, or if we 
 could only succeed in arranging those which are left us accord- 
 ing to the order in which they were produced. Sweetness and 
 an elegant correctness constitute the principal characteristics of 
 his poetry. 
 
 Among^ the number of the most original and most distin- 
 guished Troubadors who flourished witli Arnaud de Marveil 
 in the countries which were subject to the authority of the 
 counts of Toulouse, I include Raymond de Miraval, Peter 
 Vidal of Toulouse, William de Cabestaing, so famous for his 
 tragic history, and Hugh Brunet or Brunec of Rhodez. Among 
 their pieces are to be found some of uncommon piquancy of 
 subject, and others again contain exquisite touches of poetry, 
 but these I cannot communicate to the reader for want of 
 space. I regret more especially my inability to narrate what 
 is known to us of the lives of these Troubadours, which are 
 even more poetical than their poetry, and invaluable for the 
 history of the society, in the midst of which they lived. 
 
 The only one of these four Troubadours, concerning whom I 
 think I can afford to say something, is Brunet ; not because he 
 is more interesting or more remarkable than the other three, 
 but simply because he is the one of whom we possess the 
 smallest number of works, and of whose life we know the least. 
 Hugh Brunet was a man of education, and a scholar, a 
 clerk of Ilhodez, who, like so many others of his profession, 
 turned Troubadour and Jongleur, He frequented several courts, 
 but lived principally at that of Rhodez. He was for some 
 time the admirer of a lady of Aurillac, who at first appeared to 
 be pleased with his verses, but who discarded him in tlie end. 
 Brunet was not one of those who only made pretensions to love ; 
 he really loved, and under the influence of the chagrin, which 
 the sternness of his lady caused him, he entered a Carthusian 
 monastery and died there. 
 
 We have but seven or eight pieces from him, wherein we meet 
 with many pleasant things expressed with a wood deal of spirit, 
 but which are particularly remarkable in the history of Pro- 
 vencal poetry, as being the first wherein the amorous language 
 of the Troubadours is found to be modified in a sense, of which 
 I should like to give some conception. The emotions and im-
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 387 
 
 pressions of love are there described, as k were, physically, and 
 in a measure personified, A few short quotations will enable 
 us to comprehend more clearly what 1 wish to convey. And 
 in the first place, the following are three couplets of a piece, 
 wherein he complains, as he was wont to do, of the cruelty of 
 his lady. 
 
 " When love came to assail my heart, in the beginning, my 
 lady told me, she made me hope, that she would share with me 
 the sentiment of love ; but great is now the measure of my an- 
 guish, and that of happiness is small." 
 
 " Ah, what was then the purport of the language of those 
 eyes ? What did they ask of me, that she now compre- 
 hends not my distress, that she mak.es no reply to all my 
 prayers ? Surely her looks were faithless messengers ; and if I 
 had suspected this, by heavens, I never would have opened 
 them my heart." 
 
 " Now they persist in staying there, in spite of all the world, 
 and whenever I regain the mastery of my mind, to divert it 
 elsewhere, love with all its force advances and seizes it anew ; 
 it annihilates my resolutions and makes me tread its path again." 
 
 The characteristic which I have endeavored to signalize in 
 the pieces of Hugh de Rliodez, appears still more prominent in 
 the following couplet, which is the first of another piece. 
 
 " A sweet commotion agitates my heart, which promises me 
 joy, but wjiich will give me pain. But too well knew he how 
 to strike me with his amorous lance, who is a courteous sprite, 
 who only shows himself by fair appearances, who gently darts 
 from eye to eye, from eye to heart, from heart to thought."* 
 
 The same piece contains a passage which expresses a very 
 common idea with studied eleorance and singjular boldness. 
 "Let but my lady," says he, " treasure up my memory in her 
 heart ; the rest I will abide, provided only her looks and smiles 
 exchange caresses, that no repulse may chill the ardor of our 
 love."t ^ 
 
 To all appearances (and it is well not to forget the fact), the 
 passion, expressed in these glowing terms, was a serious and 
 deeply-felt reality. Genius and talent never could invent such 
 things ; but where they find them already invented, they adopt 
 and accommodate themselves to them. 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 315. t E sol qvi'el cor aya de mi membransa, 
 
 Cortezamen mov en mon cor mesclansa ?f ' plus serai atendens e sufrire, 
 
 Que m fai tornar e Tamoros dezire : ^^ *!"<' 1 «^oUar se baizon e ill sospire 
 
 Joya m promet et aporta m cossire, Per qu el dezirs amoros no s estansa. 
 
 Quar en aissi sap ferir de sa lansa ^'^* ®'^" ^'^^ — ^^■> 
 
 Amors, que es us esperitz cortes, 
 Que no s laissa vezer mas per semblans, 
 Quar d' huelh en huelh salh e fai sos dous lans, 
 E d' huelh en cor e de coratge en pes. — Ed.
 
 388 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 Rambaud de Yaqueikas. — Of the Troubadours, which 1 have 
 thus far designated as having rendered themselves illustrious 
 in that species of Provencal poetry, which is consecrated to the 
 expression of knightly gallantry, not one belongs to Provence 
 properly so called, which at that time comprised the whole 
 area extending from the Isere to the sea, and from the Ehone 
 to the Alps. Of the Troubadours of this country I now pro- 
 pose to form a third group, at the head of which 1 think I must 
 put Rambaud de Vaqueiras, he being the most distinguished 
 for originality and talent. 
 
 Rambaud de Vaqueiras is one of those Troubadours, who by 
 dint of their poetic fame rose to the honors of knighthood, and 
 whose life was divided between the lyre and the sword. He 
 was born at Vaqueiras, a village agreeably situated in the vici- 
 nity of Orange. He was the son of a knight, but of a knight 
 who was an idiot and poor, and with w4iom his lot was little 
 better than that of an orphan. 
 
 Being conscious of some taste for poetry, he embraced the 
 profession of Jongleur, which was then the poetic apprentice- 
 ship almost invariably imposed by custom, and then repaired 
 to Orange, to the court of William the Fair, who was the 
 prince ot'that city. William became his patron, and brought 
 him into vogue and honor in all the courts of Provence. 
 
 Already celebrated on this side of the Alps, Rambaud re- 
 solved to seek his fortune in Piement, and accordingly pre- 
 sented himself at the court of the marquis of Montferrat, one 
 of those nobles of the south of Europe, who are so often^ spoken 
 of. Boniface received him very favorably, dubbed him che- 
 valier, and attached him to his service in that capacity. _ He 
 had a sister, Beatrice by name, who was considered amiable 
 -and handsome, and at that time not yet married. Rambaud 
 having become enamored of her, celebrated her charms in ^ his 
 verses, under the poetic name of tlic Belhs Cavaliers., and it is 
 generally believed, adds one of the old biographers of the Ti'ou- 
 badour, that his lady was not indifferent to his addresses. 
 
 Another biographer gives us some particulars in regard to 
 the manner in which this liaison between Beatrice and Ram- 
 baud originated. His narrative is graceful, and he paints the 
 manners of the high feudal classes of the South at that epoch, 
 so admirably, that I think I may be permitted to yield to the 
 temptation of translating a portion of it literally :_ 
 
 " Having become enamored of Madame Beatrice," says the 
 ancient Provencal author, " Rambaud loved and coveted her 
 exceedingly, taking, however, good care to keep the matter 
 secret ; and such was his success, that he procured her great 
 esteem and gained her many a friend among both sexes. But
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Trovhadours. 389 
 
 he was dying with desire and fear, not venturing to ask her to 
 return his love, or to make it appear tliat he had set his heart 
 on her. ^Nevertheless, as a man under the impulse of love, he 
 told her one day that he was enamored of a lady of high 
 worth, that he enjoyed her society familiarly, but still did not 
 venture to disclose his passion, nor to supplicate her favor, so 
 much he stood in awe of her great merit. And he besought 
 her, for God's sake, to give him her advice, and to tell him, 
 whether he ought to make manifest his heart and his desire to 
 the lady or die in love and reticence." 
 
 " And this gentle lady, my lady Beatrice, who had already per- 
 ceived that Rambaud was dying with languishment and longing 
 on her account, when she had heard his words and understood 
 their meaning, was touched v.ith pity and afi'ection and said to 
 him : ' It well behooves, Rambaud, that every faithful friend who 
 loves a noble lady, should dread to disclose to her his passion. 
 But sooner than die, I should advise him to speak and to be- 
 seech the lady to accept him as her servant and her friend. 
 And I assure you, that if she is wise and courteous, she will not 
 take offence at the request nor deem it a dishonor ; but, on the 
 contrary, she will regard him who has made it, as all the bet- 
 ter a man for it. I advise you therefore to tell the lady, whom 
 you love, your mind and the request you have to make of her, 
 and to beseech her to accept you as her knight. Such as you 
 are, there is no lady in the world, but what would gladly re- 
 tain you as her chevalier and servant.' "* 
 
 " When Rambaud heard the advice and the assurance given 
 him by lady Beatrice, he told her that it was she who was the 
 lady he loved so much, and in regard to whom he had en- 
 treated her advice. And my lady Beatrice told him to consi- 
 der himself welcome ; that he had only to exert himself to do 
 well, to speak well, and to be worthy of the honor, and that she 
 was disposed to accept him as her chevalier and servant. Ram- 
 baud did his utmost to advance in merit, and he composed the 
 song which says : 
 
 " Love now demands its customary tribute of me."f 
 
 This piece, of which the ancient biographer only quotes the 
 first verse, is one of those which are still extant of Rambaud 
 de Yaqueiras ; and we may therefore assure ourselves that its 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. v. p. 417. 
 
 t E ma dona Biatritz li dis que be fos el vengut; e que s'esforses de ben far e de ben 
 dire e de valer, e qu'ela lo volia retener per cavayer e per servidor. Don Rairabaat 
 s'esforset d'enansar son pretz tan quan poc, e fes adoncs aquesta canso que dis : 
 
 Era m requier sa custum'e son us 
 
 Amors, per cui planh e sospir e velh etc., etc. 
 
 — Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 258, Piece 11., where it is given entire.— Ed. .
 
 390 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 beauty does not correspond with the interest of its motive ; and 
 indeed we can say as much of the majority of the pieces com- 
 posed in honor of Beatrice. All of them contain fine verses of 
 an energetic and lively turn, but, in order to overcome the 
 inherent monotony of this species of poetry and to surpass ante- 
 rior examples, the author resorted to pedantic accessories, 
 foreign to the character and object of all sentimental 
 poetry. 
 
 There is an interesting circumstance to be noticed in the life 
 of Rambaud de Yaqueiras, This Troubadour had read a large 
 number of romances or chivalric epopees, and he somewhere 
 seems to intimate that he possessed a collection of them. 
 Excessively fond of this kind of reading, he thought he was 
 doing wonders by itvterweaving in his chansons cPamour allu- 
 sions (sometimes of considerable length) to the heroes of those 
 romances and to their adventures. It is true he did nothing 
 more in this respect than follow the example of the earlier 
 Troubadours ; but that which among the latter was but an or- 
 nament and an accessory in their amatory songs, appears to be 
 the principal object of his, to such an extent do they abound 
 in comparisons, similes and allusions derived from the action 
 of the poetic romances at that time in vogue. Tliis is a serious 
 blemish, but a blemish which renders the compositions, in 
 which it occurs, extremely valuable to the history of the Pro- 
 vengal epopee. 
 
 The gallant pieces, in which Eambaud exhibits most talent, 
 are tliose in which \\e gives vent to his spite on account of his 
 frequent misadventures in love ; for he successively became 
 obnoxious and reconciled again, not only to his fair Beatrice, 
 but also to other ladies ; and we are sometimes at a loss in 
 regard to the connection subsisting between these disagree- 
 ments and the diiferent pieces, of which they formed the theme. 
 I shall limit myself to translating two of these pieces, the mo- 
 tive of which is sufficiently clear. In the first of them, he dis- 
 closes his intention of turning knight-errant out of spite against 
 a faithless mistress, who probably was a certain lady de Tor- 
 tone, with whom he is known to have had intrigues and 
 quarrels. 
 
 "Love and my lady have broken faith with me in vain, and 
 put me under ban ; believe not that I on that account forget to 
 sing, that I suffer my honor to be forfeited, that I renounce any 
 glorious enterprise, or that I do not cross the mountains, as I 
 did formerly." 
 
 "Galloping, trotting, leaping, running, vigils, fatigue and 
 hardships will henceforth be my pastime. Armed wuth wood, 
 with iron, steel, I'll brave both heat and cold ; the woods and
 
 TKe Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 391 
 
 by-paths shall be my habitation; sirventes and descorts my 
 songs of love ; I will protect the feeble against the strong."* 
 
 " Yet still it would be an honor for me to find a noble lady, 
 beautiful, engaging, of matchless worth, who would not take 
 delight in my misfortune, who were not volatile nor credulous 
 of scandal ; who would not make one supplicate too long ; I 
 should consent to love her willingly, if so it pleased her ; and 
 to love thus would yet redeem my happiness." 
 
 " My reason has got at last the mastery o'er my folly, which 
 for a whole year possessed me, on account of an unfaithful one 
 of an ignoble heart. The glory of arms has such attractions 
 now, that it suffices to give me joy and to dispel any disap- 
 pointment despite of love, despite my lady and my feeble 
 heart ; I have now shaken off the yoke of all the three, and I 
 shall henceforth learn to act without their aid." 
 
 " I shall learn the art of serving well in war, among emperors 
 and kings, to spread abroad the rumor of my bravery, to bring 
 good with the lance and with the sword. Toward Montferrat, 
 or here, toward Forcalquier, I'll live by warfare, like the chief 
 of a band. Since I derive no benefit from love, I'll bid fare- 
 well to it, and let itself sustain the prejudice." 
 
 The second piece, composed in nearly the same strain of sen- 
 timent as the preceding, is inferior to it neither in point of 
 vivacity nor in point of harmony of expression, and is perhaps 
 still more curious from the fact of its showing us in a stronger 
 light, how much a chevalier even in the greatest paroxysms of 
 amorous disappointment and chagrin would still respect the 
 general ideas of his times on the moral importance and neces- 
 sity of love. I give here three or four of the better couplets : 
 
 " A man may still, if he'll but take the pains, be happy and 
 rise in worth, and yet dispense with love : he has only to guard 
 himself against baseness, and concentrate his powers on doing 
 right. Thus, therefore, though love may fail me, I still persist 
 in acting to the best of my ability ; and for my having lost my 
 love and lady, I would not also lose my price or worth ; without 
 a lady and without love, I wish to live a brave and honored 
 life, I do not wish to make two evils out of one." 
 
 " Yet still, if 1 renounce love entirely, I am aware that I 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. v. p. 419, where only the following strophe of this chanson is 
 given : 
 
 Galop e trot e saut e cors, 
 
 Velhars e inaltrait e afan * 
 
 Seron mei sojorn dert-nan 
 
 E sufrirai fregz e calors, 
 Arniatz de fust e de fer e d'acier ; 
 E raos ostal seran bosc e semdier 
 E mas cansos sirventes e descortz, 
 E mantenrai los frevols contra 'Is fortz. — Ed.
 
 392 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 renounce the highest good. Love betters even the best and 
 can impart a value to the worst. It can make cowards brave, 
 the uncouth boor a graceful, courteous man ; it has made many 
 a poor man rise to power. Since love then is possessed of so 
 great virtue, I willingly would love, I, who am so envious of 
 merit and of honor, would love, if I were loved." 
 
 " Nevertheless, let us leave love alone ! Love delights more 
 in taking than in giving ; for one good he inflicts a hundred 
 ills, and for one pleasure a thousand pangs ; he never confers 
 glory without reverses. But let him manage, as may seem 
 good to him, I want no more either of his smiles or of his tears, 
 either of his pleasures or of his sorrows. Let us be nothing, 
 neither bad nor good ; and let us leave love alone." 
 
 Surely the man who said things like these, who said them 
 nearly seven centuries ago, and above all, who said them in the 
 capacity of master of a most delicate art, in full and sonorous 
 verses, interspersed here and there with the happiest audacities 
 of language and of style, was by no means an ordinary poet. 
 
 From the moment he had entered the service of the marquis 
 of Montferrat, the life of Rambaud de Vaqueiras was a very 
 active and a very stirring one, almost equally divided between 
 poetry and warfare, between the adventures of love and those 
 of chivalry. Of the two the latter are best known, as being 
 connected with the actions of the marquis of Montferrat. Gal- 
 lant, ambitious of renown, enterprising and clever, this seignior 
 acted a part in the transactions of his time, which was far above 
 the material resources of his power. 
 
 In 1202, Thibaut, count of Champagne, having died the 
 moment he was going to depart for Syria as the chief com- 
 mander of a numerous army of crusaders, the barons who had 
 arrayed themselves under his banner were obliged to elect 
 another head. Their choice fell on the marquis of Montferrat, 
 who accepted this honor and deserved it. In 1204, the cru- 
 saders marched on to Venice under his conduct, whence they 
 expected to embark in vessels of the Republic, and with Vene- 
 tian supplies. 
 
 By what singular accidents this army, instead of landing in 
 Syria, directed its course toward Constantinople, how it took 
 that city, how it gained possession of the whole of the Greek 
 empire, and effected a partition of the provinces among its 
 leaders, is already too well known to need repetition here. 
 The marquis of Montferrat received the kingdom of Tliessalo- 
 nica as his share, where he established himself immediately, 
 and whence he made a descent on Greece, and conquered the 
 whole of it. 
 
 Rambaud de Vaqueiras, who had followed the marquis,
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 
 
 893 
 
 served him faithfully in every encounter and in all his wars, 
 and obtained as a reward for his services a vast and rich fief in 
 the new kingdom, thus rising rapidly from the condition of a 
 poor chevalier to that of a puissant lord. 
 
 There was something in this new position wherewith to 
 satisfy the love of glory and the chivalric vanity of Rambaud. 
 Nevertheless, situated as he was so far from his native land, in 
 a perilous state of things, so diiferent from that to which he 
 had been accustomed, in the midst of a people to whose lan- 
 guage and manners he was an entire stranger, he could not 
 help deploring his absence from Provence and from Italy, and 
 to recall to memory with melancholy musings the days that 
 had but too rapidly glided away in the gallant courts of those 
 two countries, in which he had been a welcome, an honored 
 and admired guest, wherever the fame of his songs had pre- 
 ceded him. He remembered more especially his former loves ; 
 they flitted through his mind in a somewhat joromiscuous order 
 and as vividly as ever, and paramount among all these tender 
 souvenirs was that of his Beau Che'valicr, of that amiable Bea- 
 trice, whose tenderness and indulgence had constituted his first 
 incentive to glory. 
 
 This was a thoroughly poetic disposition of mind, and it ap- 
 pears that it actually inspired several pieces, all of which are 
 now unfortunately lost, with the exception of one* only, which 
 on that account is so much the more curious. I propose to 
 translate the whole of it, although it is somewhat long. Its 
 historical interest enhances its poetical still more. 
 
 " Winter nor spring-time, calm weather, nor the foliage of 
 
 Eaynouard, vol. iv. p. 275. Piece XIV. 
 
 No m'agrad'iverns ni pascors, 
 
 Ni clar temps ni fuelhs de guarricx, 
 
 Quar mos enans me par destricx 
 
 E totz mos magers gaugz dolors ; 
 
 E son maltrag tug mei lezer 
 
 E dezesperat mei esper ; 
 
 E si m sol amors e dompneys 
 
 Tener guay plus que I'aigua'I peys ; 
 
 E pus d'amdui me sui partitz, 
 
 Cum hom eyssellatz e marritz, 
 
 Tot'autra vida m sembia mortz 
 
 E tot autre joy desconortz. 
 
 Pus d'amor m'es falhida'l flora 
 
 E'l dous frug e'l gras e I'espicx, 
 
 Don jauzi'ab plazens predicx, 
 
 E pretz m'en en sobrav' et honors, 
 
 E m fazia entr'els pros caber, 
 
 Era m fai d'aut en bas chazer; 
 
 E si no m semblesfols esfreys, 
 
 Qu'ieu for'esteyns e relenquitz 
 
 E perdutz en fagz et en digz, 
 
 Lo jorn que m venc lo desconortz 
 
 Que no m merma, cum que m'esfortz. 
 % * * * 
 
 Strophes 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7. 
 
 6 Anc Alixandres no fetz cors, 
 Ni Karles ni'l reysLodoj'cx 
 
 Tant honrat; ni'l corns n Aimericx, 
 
 Ni Rotlan ab sos ponhedors, 
 
 No saubron tan gen conquerer 
 
 Tan ric emperi per poder 
 
 Cum nos, don pueia nostra leys ; 
 
 Qu'emperadors e ducx e rej-s 
 
 Avem fagz, e castels garnitz 
 
 Pres dels Turcx e dels Arabitz ; 
 
 Et ubertz los camis e'ls portz 
 
 De Brandis tro al bratz Sanh Jortz. 
 
 7 Doncs que m val conquitz ni ricors ? 
 Qu'ieu ja m tenia per plus ricx. 
 Quant era amatz e fis amicx, 
 
 E m payssia cortes'amors ; 
 
 N'amavamaisun sol plazer 
 
 Que sai gran terr'e gran aver ; 
 
 Qu'ades on plus mospoders creys, 
 
 N'ai maior ir'ab me mezeis ; 
 
 Pus mos Belhs Cavaliers grazitz 
 
 E joys m'es lunhatz e faiditz, 
 
 Don no m venra jamais conortz ; 
 
 Fer qu'es mayer I'ira e plus fortz. — Ed.
 
 39i History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 the desert have anght now to delight me. My good adven- 
 tures appear tome misfortunes, mj greatest pleasures sources of 
 grief. All my leisure is fatigue, my expectations are but 
 despair. Love and its service kept me as merry as a fish in 
 the water; but since the time, when, like a man in exile and 
 proscribed, I have divorced myself from love, every other mode 
 of life appears to me a death, every other joy a pain." 
 
 " I have lost my all with love, the flower and sweet fruit, 
 the spike and grain ; my graceful verses gave it formerly to 
 me ; they added glory also to the gift ; they made me count 
 among the valiant and the brave. From such a height must 
 now be needs my fall. Ah ! but for the fear of seeming cowardly, 
 I should have extinguished my lamp of life faster than any 
 flame ; should have desisted from all glorious deeds and words, 
 and bid farewell to every noble enterprise, the day on which I 
 lost the precious boon of love." 
 
 " But sad and dejected as I am, I would not give my enemies 
 the pleasure of seeing me forgetful of glory and of valor. I 
 still can prejudice, I still can render service. Vexed as I am 
 here, among the Latins and the Greeks, I yet can seem con- 
 tent. The marquis, who has begirt me with the sword, is 
 fighting with the Turks and the Bulgarians, and never since 
 the creation of the world has any people accomplished exploits 
 like our own." 
 
 " I daily hear of and witness resplendent arms, redoubted 
 warriors, engines of war ; I see and hear of great battles won, 
 cities beleaguered, high towers overthrown, and ancient walls 
 and new walls levelled with the dust. But I see nothing 
 which can serve me in the place of love. On my proud charger, 
 arrayed in splendid armor, I go, I speed in every direction, in 
 quest of combat, of fierce assaults and warfare ; I always 
 triumph and increase in power : but ever since I've lost the 
 joy of love, the entire world seems but a desert to me, and I 
 cannot console myself to sing." 
 
 " Never did Alexander, or Charlemagne, nor our king Louis 
 keep such a brilliant court as ours. Never did Boland and his 
 comj)anions conquer so valiantly an empire so extensive. We 
 have established our law : we've made an emperor and kings. 
 We have constructed fortresses against the Turks and Arabs, 
 and we have opened all the passages and all the ports from 
 Brindes to the canal of St. George." 
 
 " But what avail me all these conquests and this power ? 
 Alas ! I felt myself much more puissant, when I loved and was 
 loved in return ; when my whole heart was exalted with love. 
 I now possess vast tracts of lands and riches in abundance, but 
 not one solitary joy, and my vexation increases with my seign-
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 395 
 
 iory. I am undone for ever ; I have lost my fair chevalier, 
 and without him I can enjoy nor boon nor pleasure any 
 longer." 
 
 These verses contain a sort of presentiment of the fate which 
 awaited Eamband de Yaqueiras in Eomania. He not to be 
 permitted to see again his native Provence, or Italy, or his fair 
 chevalier. He was killed in one of the battles (which the 
 Latin crusaders lost) against the Turks and the Bulgarians,^ or 
 against the insurgent Greeks, perhaps in the same in which 
 Boniface, the marquis of Montferrat, lost his life, in 1207. 
 
 Of all the countries in which the Troubadours flourished, 
 Provence proper was the one which had the smallest number 
 of them. Tliere is indeed no doubt, but that there, as else- 
 where, the fashion of the times required every man of a cer- 
 tain rank to have a taste for verses, and to compose them if he 
 could, and the number of those, who had this taste and who 
 thus composed, was very great. It is the Troubadours by pro- 
 fession, the men who felt or believed that they had a special 
 vocation for this much cherished art of trouving, who were 
 scarcer there than elsewhere. I can hardly find four or five of 
 them to group around Rambaud de Vaqueiras, in so far at 
 least as he was an author of amatory songs, and among these 
 four or five there is but one, who deserves particular mention. 
 This is Folquet of Marseilles, whose harmless renown as a poet 
 is lost in a measure in the odious celebrity, which he acquired, 
 as bishop of Toulouse, dui-ing the infamous war against the 
 Albigenses. 
 
 Among the best of the Troubadours there is perhaps scarcely 
 one, who surpasses Polquet de Marseilles in delicacy of sen- 
 timent, in elegance and in artistic versatility of diction. But 
 in the midst of this elegance and artificiality one can already 
 perceive the signs of decadence. We perceive, that the mono- 
 tonous but enthusiastic and earnest simplicity of the earlier 
 Troubadours is already supplanted by the refinements of a 
 vitiated taste, by pretensions to subtlety by the mannerism and 
 studied contrivances of an art, which exhausts itself and which, 
 diverted from its proper end, loses itself in the pursuit of the 
 means. A few examples will convey more clearly the force of 
 this remark ; but I must first of all say a few words about the 
 life of Folquet. In the Troubadour who breatiies forth the most 
 ingenious and tenderest verses, it is curious to consider for a 
 ■moment the bishop, who was the auxiliary and accomplice of 
 Monfort, that ruthless butcher of the population of the South, 
 both Albigense and Catholic. 
 
 Folquet was born at Marseilles between the years 1160 and 
 1170. His father was a Genoese merchant, who lived in re-
 
 396 History of ProveriQal Poetry. 
 
 tiremcnt in that city, and wlio, wlien lie died, left hira a con- 
 siderable fortnne. The old biographer of onr Troubadour 
 recounts his entrance into the world in somewhat remarkable 
 terms, and which, though a little vague, already announce in 
 the poet a man, rcsolv^ed on doing his utmost to act a pro- 
 minent part in life. " Folquet," sajs he, " showed himself 
 covetous of honor and renown, and turned to serving the 
 powerful barons, courting their company and intriguing for 
 their favor." 
 
 When Richard Coeur-de-Lion was on his way to Genoa, where 
 he expected to embark for Syria, he made a stay of some 
 length at Marseilles, Folquet took advantage of it to insinuate 
 himself into the good graces of the prince. At that time he 
 was already in great favor with Alphonso II., king of Aragon, 
 with Alphonso VI., king of Castile, and with Raymond Y., the 
 count of Toulouse. But it was more especially with Barral de 
 Beaux, seignior of Marseilles, that he kept np frequent and 
 intimate relations, living almost constantly at his court and 
 quitting it only a short time before his retirement from the 
 world, 
 
 Azalais de Roche-Martine was the wife of Barral, and Folquet 
 himself was also married. But we know that, according to the 
 Provencal code of manners, it was always honorable to love, 
 and that there could be no such thing as love in their sense of 
 the term within the limits of matrimony. Folquet chose 
 Azalais as his lady, and composed in honor of her nearly all the 
 verses we possess by him. 
 
 Here there is a discrepancy in the accounts of Provincial 
 traditions. According to some, Folquet sung and celebrated 
 the lady of his master to no purpose : " He never," say they, 
 " could find any favor, nor obtain any of the advantages ac- 
 corded by the usages of love." According to others, Azalais 
 was not so indifferent to the addresses of Folquet. It is true, 
 she might have given him his co^ige and withdrawn her per- 
 mission to sing of her, but it would appear to have been done 
 out of spite for seeing him too agreeable and eager in his 
 attentions to Laura de Saint Jorlan, the sister of Dom Barral, 
 a person distinguished for beauty and gracefulness of manners. 
 
 Folquet, disconsolate in consequence of this dismissal, ceased 
 to sing, to write verses, and to frequent society ; and the mo- 
 tives of his grief, instead of diminishing, soon assumed a still 
 more aggravated form, Azalais died, and shortly after her 
 died also her husband Barral de Beaux, The kings Richard 
 Coeur de Lion, Alphonso of Aragon, and the count of Toulouse 
 were already dead. Deeply affected by the heavy losses, which 
 he had successively sustained, and, although yet young, already
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 397 
 
 disgusted with the world, he resolved to retire from it. He 
 turned monk, entered the monastry of Toronet in Provence, which 
 was one of the order of Citeaux, and in 1200 he was its abbot. 
 
 It was from this place, that five years afterward he was 
 elevated to the episcopal see of Toulouse, which he occupied 
 till 1231, the year of his death. I pass over this period of his 
 life ; it is foreign to my subject, and I may congratulate my- 
 self on it. It only remains now to give a few specimens of his 
 poetry ; this is much easier to quote and to judge of. I select 
 in the first place purposely one of those pieces,* which were 
 most admired at the time of their novelty. It requires no 
 historical preliminary to appreciate it ; it is enough to suppose 
 that it is one of the first which Folquet composed in honor of 
 Azalais de Beaux. 
 
 '• I am so much pleased with the thought of love, which is 
 come to take up its abode in my heart, that no other thought 
 can find a place there ; none other is agreeable or sweet to me. 
 'Tis vain to think that this thought will kill me ; it seems to me 
 to be the very one which makes me live. Love, which leads 
 me captive by means of fair appearances, alleviates my tor- 
 ments by the boon it promises, but which it is too slow to 
 grant me." 
 
 " Whatever I may do, it is all in vain ; I know it well. How 
 can I help it, if love will ruin me by giving me a longing, 
 which neither can subdue nor be subdued ? I am the only one, 
 that's vanquished. My sighs are wearing out my life little by 
 little, since I receive no aid from her I love, and hope none 
 from another ; unable as I am to have another love." 
 
 " Good lady, be pleased to accept the good I wish thee, and 
 then the ills which I endure will not be able to crush me by 
 their weight. They then will seem to me to be divided be- 
 tween us. Or else, if thou desirest me to love another, put off 
 thy beauty, thy bewitching smile, those charms which rob me 
 of my reason, and I shall then be able to disengage myself 
 from thee." 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 149. Piece No. 1. Strophes 1, 2, 3. 
 
 Tan m'abellis I'amoros pessamens Tot suavet, quar de liey cui dezire 
 
 Que s'es vengutz en mon fin cor assire ; Non ai secors, ni d'aillors no I'aten, 
 
 Per que no i pot nuls autres pens caber, Ni d'autr'amor non puesc aver talen. 
 
 Ni mais negus no m'es dous ni plazens ; 
 
 Qu'adoncs sui sas quanm'ancizo'l cossire : Bona domna, si us platz, siatz sufrens 
 
 E fin'amors m'aleuza mon martire Dels bes qui'ie us vuel, qu'ieu sui dels 
 
 Que m promet joy, martrop lo m dona len, mals sufrire ; 
 
 Qu' ab bel semblan m'a tengut longamen. E pueis li mal nom poiran dan toner, 
 
 Ans m'er semblan qu'els partam cgalraens : 
 
 Ben sai que tot quan fas es dretz niens ; Pero si us platz qu'cn antra part me vire, 
 
 E qu'en puesc mais, s'amors mi vol aucire ! Partetz de vos la beutat e'l dous rire, 
 
 Qu'a escien m'a donat tal voler, E'l gai solas que m'afolleis mos sen. 
 
 Que ja non er vencutz, ni el no vens : Pueis partir m'ai de vos, mon escien. 
 Vencutz si sui, qu'aucir m'an li sospire — Ed.
 
 398 
 
 History of ProvenQol Poetry. 
 
 This is but half of the piece in question ; but it is already more 
 than enough, to give us an idea of the tendency to helesprit 
 and to the finical and affected subtlety, which at the epoch of 
 Folquet already begins to make its appearance in the poetry of 
 the Provengals. 
 
 The writings of this Troubadour contain entire pieces, which 
 are nothing more than long and subtle apostrophes to love. 
 Here is the first stanza of one of them ; it may give us an idea 
 of them all : 
 
 " Pardon ! my Love, pardon ! Pray, do not make me die so 
 often, since thou canst kill me with a single blow. Thou 
 makst me live and die at the same time, and doublest thus 
 my martyrdom. But, though I am half dead, I still rest faith- 
 ful to thy service and deem it preferable a thousand times to 
 any recompense, I might obtain from another." 
 
 All this is far-fetched and affected beyond all measure ; it is, 
 however, just to observe, that Folquet is not always so to the 
 same extent, not even in his most labored pieces, and there 
 are others of a livelier and a lighter tone, wherein the graceful 
 ideal already borders on the artificial, but still is not yet lost in 
 it. The following are three couplets of a little piece, composed 
 in this style, to which the reader, however, should restore in 
 thought the harmony, which I could not preserve in the trans- 
 lation :* 
 
 " I could wish that none might hear the singing of the 
 birds, but the man who is in love. Nothing can charm me as 
 much as the birds in the fields ; but the lady, to which I am 
 devoted, delights me more than songs, more than all graceful 
 trills, or lays of Brittany." 
 
 " She pleases me, she charms me ; but I am none the luckier 
 for that. Every man enjoys with avidity what he has acquired 
 by pains. But what does it avail me^ to have a lady and to love 
 her, if I am not accepted ? Must 1 still love her without re- 
 turn ? Oh yes ! sooner than not occupy my thoughts with 
 her." 
 
 ♦ Eaynouard, vol. iii. p. 156. Piece No. IV. Strophes 1, 2, 3. 
 
 Ja no volgra qu'hom auzis 
 Los doutz chans dels auzelloa 
 Mas cill qui son amoros ; 
 Que res tan no m'esbaudis 
 Co il auzelet per la planha, 
 E ilh belha cui soi aclis ; 
 Cella m platz mais que chansons, 
 Yolta, ui lais de Bretanha. 
 
 Be m'agrada e ra'abellis, 
 Mais no soi aventuros ; 
 Qu'ades es hom cobeitos 
 D'aisso qu'es plus grieu conquis : 
 
 Doncx, que m val ni que m gezainha 
 S'ieu I'am, et ilh no'm grazis ! 
 Amarai doncx en perdos ? 
 Oc leu, anceis que remanha. 
 
 Be m'estera s'ades vis 
 
 Lo sieu bel cors gai joios; 
 
 E quan novei sas faissos, 
 
 Si be m soi en mon pais, 
 
 Cug esserloing en Espanha 
 
 Preon entre Sarazis : 
 
 Sol lo vezer ni'en es bos, 
 
 Q'als Qon aus dir que re m taigna. — Ed,
 
 The, Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 399 
 
 " Macli consolation would I now derive from seeing her, so 
 beautiful, so graceful ! Whene'er I see her not, though I am in 
 my country, I still seem to be far, far off in Spain, and lost 
 among the Saracens. But her sight is all the boon I can re- 
 ceive from her ; I cannot boast of any other favor." 
 
 Such are amono; the Troubadours, the singers of chivalric 
 love, those who in my opinion deserved particular notice. 
 These poets, however, had competitors, which it is impossible 
 for me to pass over without a few remarks. 
 
 These rivals were women. Not only did poetesses or Trou- 
 veresses., as they were styled, exist among the Provencals, but, 
 we shall see hereafter, that there were particular kinds of Pro- 
 vengal poetry, the cultivation of which was exclusively or prin- 
 cipally reserved for these fair Trouveresses. Of all the kinds of 
 this poetry, the songs of love, it would seem, ought to have been 
 the last, in which they would have been tempted to exercise 
 their ingenuity. For them to express the love which they 
 experienced, to celebrate the chevaliers who had succeeded in 
 winning their favor, this was descending from the rank of idols 
 to that of idolatresses, this was subordinating beauty to force, a 
 sort of contradiction of the very ideas of chivalric propriety. 
 But all the ladies were not equally disposed nor equally adapted 
 to play the part of goddesses ; there were a number, who 
 sufiered themselves to be entangled in love, before they had 
 inspired it, and who, in order to inspire it, resorted to the 
 charm of poetic talent, if they possessed or believed to pos- 
 sess it. 
 
 Among tlie poetical works of the Provencal Troubadours arc 
 found pieces by a half a score of women, nearly all of whom 
 flourished within the second half of the twelfth century. 
 Several are from the pens of ladies of high rank and distinction, 
 such as the countess of Provence, the countess of Die, Clara 
 of Anduse, Adelaide of Porcairargues, Lady Capelloza, etc. 
 
 In point of subject and in point of form, the poems of these 
 ladies differ in no respect from those of the Troubadoui*s of the 
 other sex, and still there is a distinction between them, which 
 can be perceived at the first glance. We are made sensible, 
 that beneath their style, which is generally feebler and more 
 negligent, there is concealed more truth, more natural simplicity, 
 more earnest passion. The limits of this chapter will scarcely 
 permit to quote one or two passages from them. They will 
 serve as a contrast to the preceding extracts both in regard to 
 poetry and social usage. 
 
 Here are the two couplets of a piece, in which Clara of 
 Anduse addresses herself to an unknown knight, with
 
 400 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 whom enemies or jealous rivals had endeavored to embroil 
 her.* 
 
 " Those, who blame me and forbid my loving yon, could not 
 render my heart better disj)osed toward yon, nor augment the 
 sweet desire I entertain for you. There is no man, how much 
 soever he may be my enemy, but whom I love, if I but hear him 
 speak well of you, and he who speaks ill of this can never say or 
 do aught that can please me." 
 
 " An ! my fair friend, fear not, that my heart ever shall de- 
 ceive you, or that I ever will accept another friend, and were a 
 hundred ladies to induce me with their prayers, Love, who 
 holds me bound your captive, desires me to keep my heart for 
 you in secret ; and if I could thus hide my body too, such a one, 
 as has it now, would never obtain it." 
 
 I shall now close these short notices of the Provengal poets, 
 who were the most prominent in that kind of poetic exposition, 
 which they denominated canso, and wdiich was to them the 
 highest form of amatory poetry, the poetic form par excellence. 
 
 But this same poetry has other sides and other forms, more 
 varied and more popular than those which I have thus far indi- 
 cated. In the next chapter I shall endeavor to divest them of 
 the vagueness and obscurity in which they are enveloped. 
 
 * 
 
 Eaynouard, vol. iii. p. 335. Strophes 2, 3. 
 
 Selh que m blasma vostr'amor, nim Ja no donetz, belhs amies, eapaven 
 
 defcn Que ja ves vos aia cor trichador, 
 
 Nonpodon far en re mon cor mellor, Ni qu'ie us camge per nul autr'amador, 
 
 Ni'l dous dezir qu'ieu ai de vos major, Si m pregavon d'autras donas un cen ; 
 
 Ni I'enveya ni'l dezir ni'l talen ; Qu'amors, que m te per vos en sa bailia, 
 
 E non es hom, tan mos enemicx sia, Vol que mon cor vos estuy e vos gar, 
 
 S'l n'aug dir ben, que no'! tenha en car ; E farai o ; e, s'ieu pogues emblar 
 
 E, si'nditz mal, mais no m pot dir ni far Mon cors, tals I'a que jamais non I'auria. 
 Neguna re que a plazer me sia. — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troiibadours. 401 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 THE LYRICAL POETRY OF THE TROUBADOURS. 
 III. POPULAR FORM. 
 
 Ik what I have thus far said concerning the amatory poetry of 
 the Troubadours, it has been my principal aim to indicate the 
 most original and the most poetic elements, which the most dis- 
 tinguished of these Troubadours had derived from the system of 
 chivalric gallantry, by closely adhering on the one hand to the 
 rigor of the system, and on the other to the purely lyrical form — 
 that is to say, to the expression of their own sentiments, of their 
 own individuality. 
 
 But it was impossible, that the poetic imagination, however 
 little developed we may suppose it to have been, should 
 not have found itself embarrassed by the restraints imposed by 
 such narrow limits, and that it should not have made continual 
 and varied efforts to extend or overleap them. 
 
 The description of these efforts will constitute half of the 
 history of the form under consideration, and perhaps, according 
 to our present mode of feeling and of judging, the most agree- 
 able and the most interesting half. 
 
 I have already shown, how the consciousness of the limits of 
 this poetry had prompted certain poets, who were possessed of 
 ingenuity and of a delicate imagination, to avoid its monotony 
 by introducing the mannered subtilties of aVitiated taste and of 
 bel-esprit. We must, however, in justice admit, that this same 
 consciousness also acted, at times at least, in a happier and more 
 natural manner. Of the different results of this action 1 now 
 propose to give some idea ; I shall endeavor to show by what 
 succession of modifications the Provencal imagination attempted 
 to vary the expression of chivalric love. 
 
 Of these modifications, some had reference to the poetic form 
 of this expression, others to the subject-matter itself, to the 
 character of the sentiments and ideas. The first, which are the 
 most numerous, are also those which are most intimately con- 
 nected with the history of the amatory poetry of the Trouba- 
 dours, in which in fact they constitute as many particular 
 species. 
 
 26
 
 402 Histomj of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 Weary of the rigor and the exigencies of the lyric form, some 
 Troubadours hit upon the very simple idea of having recourse 
 to the dialogue in order to express their sentiments. They gave 
 themselves one or two interlocutors, who were sometimes Love 
 personified, sometimes the lady-love, and sometimes both at 
 the same time. Owing to the metrical system of the Proven- 
 cals, it was a matter of no little difficulty, to give a free and 
 animated movement to the dialogue, and this is perhaps the 
 reason why the manuscripts contain so few pieces of the inter- 
 locutory form. This is a pity, judging at least from the speci- 
 mens which we possess, most of which are of a pleasing and a 
 graceful turn. Here is for example one by Aimeri Peguilhan 
 of Toulouse, which I shall abridge only of a few verses. The 
 Troubadour in the first place converses with his lady and then 
 proceeds to complain of her to Love, so that there is a shade of 
 dramatic movement in the piece. 
 
 — My lady, I am in cruel torments on your account. 
 
 — My lord, 'tis folly, for I do not thank you for it. 
 
 — My lady, in the name of God, have pity on me. 
 
 — My lord, your prayers are of no avail with me. 
 
 — Fair lady, how I love you so tenderly ! 
 
 — My lord, and I detest you above all men. 
 
 — My lady, it is on this account, my heart's so sad. 
 
 — My lord, and 1 am all the merrier and content for it. 
 
 — My lady, my life is worse than death to me. 
 
 — My lord, I'm glad of it, provided it's not my fault. 
 
 — My lady, you have been but a source of grief to me. 
 • — My lord, do you perforce desire me to love you ? 
 
 — My lady, a single look from you would save me. 
 
 — My lord, expect no hope or consolation of me. 
 
 — My lady, shall I go elsewhere then to cry for mercy ? 
 
 — My lord, go, go : who would detain you ? 
 
 — My lady, 1 cannot ; my love for you detains me. 
 
 — My lord, this really is without my wish or counsel.* 
 (Here the rejected Troubadour addresses himself to Love.) 
 
 — Love, you, you have exposed me to abandonment. 
 
 — My friend, I could do nothing more for you. 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 425, strophes 1-5. 
 
 — Dorana, per vos estauc en greu turmen. — Amors, gitat m'avetz a no m' en cal. 
 
 — Senher, que fols faitz qu'ieu grat no us — Amies, per dieu vos en puesc far ren aL 
 
 en sen. — Amors, e vos ja meretz de tot mal. 
 
 — Donina, per dieu aiatz en chauzimen. — Amies, per so us en trairei san e sal. 
 
 — Senlier, vostres precs y anatz perden. -^ Amors, per que m faitz chauzier don' 
 
 — Bona dona, ja us am leu finamen. aital ? 
 
 — Senher, et ie us vuelh pietz qu'a I'autra — Amies, ieu vos mostrei so que mais val. 
 
 gen. — Amors, no puesc sofrir I'afan coral. 
 
 — Domna, per so n'ai ieu lo cor dolen. — Amies, per so queira m'autre logual. 
 
 — Senher, et ieu alegre e jauzen. Etc., etc. — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troiibadours. 40 1> 
 
 — Love, 'tis you who are the author of my ills. 
 
 — My friend, I'll get you safely out of all of them. 
 
 — Love, why did you then make me choose a lady of this 
 sort? 
 
 — My friend, I've shown you that which was most excellent. 
 
 — Love, I can no longer endure my anguish. 
 
 — My friend, I'll put your heart into another place. 
 
 — Love, you deceive in all you undertake to do. 
 
 — Friend, you insult me and you do me wrong. 
 
 — Love, wily separate me then from my fair lady ? 
 
 — My friend, because I'm gi-ieved to see you die. 
 • — Love, fancy not that e'er I'll choose another. 
 
 — Friend, then make up your mind to suffer patiently. 
 
 — Love, do you think I'll ever reap advantage from this love ? 
 
 — Friend, yes, by suffering bravely, and by serving well. 
 This indirect and almost dramatic manner of embodying the 
 
 sentiment of love is certainly not destitute of animation and of 
 ingenuity, and it exhibits a grace which would not be unwor- 
 thy of any age. 
 
 There is another species of amatory composition, more origi- 
 nal or more capricious than the preceding, in wliich the narra- 
 tive and the dialogue are combined, and in which they mutu- 
 ally interpenetrate each other. These are the pieces in which 
 the Troubadour, having chosen a bird as his messenger, dis- 
 patches it to bear his homage, his vows, his prayers to his lady- 
 love. This bird is sometimes a nightingale, sometimes a starling, 
 at other times again a swallow or a parrot, all of which are 
 favorites of the Troubadours, all expert in conveying messages 
 of love, and always successful, however delicate or difficult the 
 task to be performed. It is perhaps singular enough to see the 
 parrot play a part in the poetic mythology of the Provencals, 
 analogous to that which it plays in the mythology of the Hin- 
 dus, where it serves Cama, the god of love, as an animal for 
 riding. 
 
 Of the two most remarkable pieces of this kind, the one is by 
 Peter of Auvergne, the other by Marcabrus, Trouliadours, of 
 which I have already spoken. One of them is evidently an 
 imitation of the other, and there is nothing to indicate with 
 certainty which of them has been the model. It is probably 
 that of Marcabrus. Nevertheless both pieces are agreeable 
 compositions, and I should like to give an idea of them ; but it 
 seems to me to be impossible. The principal merit of these- 
 poems consists in their extraordinary nimbleness of versifica- 
 tion, and in the kind of harmony which results from the facile 
 and daring combination of verses of very unequal measure. 
 
 The only piece of the kind which I could translate — it being--
 
 404: History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 the shortest, and of a simpler form than tlie preceding — is per- 
 liaps the least poetical. But, by way of compensation, this is a 
 little historical curiosity which merits particular notice. It 
 represents a swallow performing the part of messenger between 
 a lady on this side of the Pyrenees, and a chevalier of Aragon 
 or Catalonia. It is the latter who holds a colloquy with the 
 bird. 
 
 " Swallow, thy song annoys me : what wouldst thou ? What 
 dost thou demand of me ? Why dost thou not suffer me to 
 sleep, me who has never slumbered, since I left Monda? 
 Would that thou brought'st rae a message or greetings from 
 her on wliom I set my hope of happiness. Tlien I should listen 
 to thy speech." 
 
 " My lord and friend, it's to obey the wishes of my lady that 
 I am come to see you ; and if she were too, as I am, a swallow, 
 she would have been present here these full two months, before 
 you near your pillow. But knowing neither the countries nor 
 the road, she sends to you good news by me." 
 
 " O gentle swallow ! I should have given thee a kindlier re- 
 ception, have feasted thee and done thee greater honor. May 
 God protect thee, lie who has rounded off the world, who made 
 the heavens, the earth, and the deep sea. And if I have pre- 
 ferred an unkind word against thee, for pity's sake do not 
 revenge it on me !" 
 
 (It is very probable that a couplet is wanting here, in which 
 the swallow invites the knight to cross the mountain-passes for 
 the purpose of paying his lady a visit, an invitation to which 
 the latter replies :) 
 
 " My swallow, I could not at this moment leave the king, but 
 I must follow him to Toulouse, where I expect and hope (I say 
 it not to vaunt, and let lament it whoever wishes !) to unsaddle 
 many a knight, on tlie fair centre of the bridge of the Ga- 
 ronne." 
 
 "' My lord and friend, may God crown all your wishes with 
 fulfillment ! But as for me, I return now to my lady ; and I am 
 in great fear that she will burn or beat me, for when she comes 
 to learn what you resolve on, her heart will be a troubled storm 
 of grief." 
 
 The knight who was the author of this piece is a personage 
 unknown to us, but there is every indication that he was a 
 chevalier of Pedro I., king of Aragon ; and there is little doubt 
 but that the expedition on which he was about to enter, and in 
 which he was so eager to signalize himself, was the expedition 
 of King Pedro against Simon of Montfort, the date of which 
 was 1213. Simon at that time occupied the small town of Muret, 
 about four leagues above Toulouse, on the banks of the Ga-
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 405 
 
 ronne; and the campaign ended in the battle fought under 
 the walls of this town, a stupendous engagement, where every- 
 thing went on contrary to all previous expectations. Simon de 
 Montfort, who had hardly over twelve hundred men, defeated, 
 killed or routed with this small number, and in the twinkling 
 of an eye, at least forty thousand of the enemy ; and the chev- 
 alier, who through the agency of the messenger-swallow had 
 just made such haughty promises to his lady, was perhaps like- 
 wise among the number of the dead. 
 
 These little colloquial pieces were, or could be, by the very 
 nature of the case, of a much simpler and more familiar tone 
 than the purely lyrical pieces, the chansons, properly so called. 
 Nevertheless, taking matters as they were in general, all these 
 poetic compositions turning on chivalric love, of M'hich I have 
 thus far given a variety of specimens, were, as I have had 
 repeated occasion to remark, the songs of the courts and castles. 
 
 There is no doubt but that they contained obscurities, which 
 were such even to the highest classes of society, to which they 
 addressed themselves, and for whose exclusive benefit they 
 were composed ; and as for the people, the masses in general, 
 they certainly were beyond its comprehension, nor could they in 
 any way derive any sort of pleasure or amusement from them. 
 For, supposing their diction even to have been clear and sim- 
 ple, which was rarely the case, the sentiments and the ideas 
 were far too elevated and too refined for the general under- 
 standing. 
 
 As it had its own method of understanding and of making 
 love, so it had also its peculiar way of singing it, grosser un- 
 doubtedly, but simpler and freer from restraint than that of 
 the chivalric poets. There were therefore two sorts of amatory 
 poetry, that of the Troubadours and that of the peojDle. These 
 two classes of poetry undoubtedly maintained a se])arate and 
 distinct existence for some time, but it was impossible that in 
 the long run they should not exercise a certain influence, one 
 over the other, that they should not in a measure tend to ap- 
 proximate each other and become blended into one. In all 
 that relates to the arts and the enjoyments of civilization, the 
 people always imitates eagerly and to the utmost of its ability 
 the example of the higher classes ; and in order to relish and 
 to adopt the poesy of the Troubadours, the populations, in the 
 midst of which this poetry flourished, had only to find in it some- 
 thing which was within the reach of their intellectual capacity. 
 
 On the other hand, it was impossible that the Troubadours 
 should forever divest themselves of all sympathy for the poetic 
 wants and tastes of the people, that they should never be 
 tempted to apply their art to its amusements and its pleasures. 
 Certain it is, that we are far from being acquainted with all the
 
 406 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 Troubadours ; scarcely anything is left us but the productions 
 and the souvenirs of the most distinguished of them, of those 
 who shone at the courts of kings and of great nobles ; but all 
 did not belong to this privileged portion of their order, all did 
 not sustain such intimate relations with the feudal classes, 
 Tliere were some of them, who either from inclination or from 
 necessity lived among the people and sung for them ; and these 
 must necessarily have sung in tones less sublime and in lan- 
 guage less elevated than their professional brethren of the 
 castles. 
 
 Nay, more than this ; among the latter even there were some, 
 and these were precisely those who were by nature endowed 
 with the greatest affluence of sentiment and genius, who, worn 
 out by the perpetual efforts which they were obliged to make 
 in order to distinguish themselves in the amatory poetry of the 
 castles, returned, at intervals at least, to the ease and the sim- 
 plicity of nature. They composed songs of chivalric love, 
 simpler than the rest, songs of which the peoj^le may have been 
 unable either to relish or to comprehend the sentiments, but of 
 which it understood the words at least, 
 
 Tliis return or tliis tendency to popularity on the part of some 
 of the Troubadours occasioned or strengthened a revolution in 
 chivalric poetry, of which the collections of the writings of the 
 Troubadours exhibit various and frequent vestiges. From that 
 time there were as it were two species, two styles of amatory 
 poetry, the one learned and elevated, in which labored elegance, 
 obscurity and difficulties passed for excellences rather than for 
 faults ; the other natural and clear, one of the greatest merits 
 of which was that of being easily understood. 
 
 Each of these two styles received different names, which na- 
 turally occu]»ied a conspicuous place in the poetics of the Trou- 
 badours. The one of the two, which approximated the popular 
 tone most closely, was designated by the epithets leu^ lettgier^ 
 plan, that is to say, the light, the simple. The studied style, on 
 the other hand, was from its difficulty and labored refinement 
 fitly termed clus, car, that is to say, close, eldboumte, a denomina- 
 tion manifestly opposed to that of popular. Many of the Trou- 
 badours wrote alternately in the one and in the other of these 
 styles ; some of them adopted exclusively the one or the other 
 of the two, and thus formed two opposite schools. 
 
 It is a remarkably singular fact, that the most positive indi- 
 cations of the existence and the opposition of the two schools in 
 question are to be found in Giraud de Borneil, that is to say, in 
 the Troubadour, who of all others is habitually the most ele- 
 vated and the most difficult to comprehend. 
 
 In the beginning of one of his pieces he expresses himself on 
 this subject in the following manner:
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 407 
 
 " I scarcely know how to commence a piece of lighter verse, 
 •which I would fain compose, and on which I have reflected 
 since yesterday. I would like to make it of such a sort that all 
 the world might comprehend it, and that it might be easy to 
 sing ; for it is for sheer amusement that I compose it." 
 
 " I could indeed have made it more elaborate, but a song 
 which is not clear to all the world seems to me to be imperfect. 
 Let him, who will, then take offence at it ; but as for me, I am 
 delighted when I hear one of my songs repeated by emulous 
 voices, clear or hoarse, and when I hear it sung beside the 
 fountain." 
 
 It is impossible to announce in more explicit terms preten- 
 sions to popular aims in poetry more obvious than these. And 
 this passage of Giraud de Borneil is not the only one which at- 
 tests the existence of two styles and of two schools of amatory 
 poetry. 
 
 The same fact likewise appears on a grander scale from the 
 comparison of tlie different countries of the Provencal tongue, 
 wherein the Troubadours flourished. We are convinced by 
 various positive proofs and testimonies, that of these countries 
 some cultiv^ated by way of preference the learned and obscure 
 poetic style, while others again chose the natural and simple. 
 The taste for the latter of these styles preponderated in the 
 countries, which have since been known under the name of 
 lower Languedoc — countries, which from a multitude of con- 
 siderations we must regard as the cradle of chivalric poetry, 
 and in which the poetic instinct was most generally diffused. 
 On the other hand, the taste for the factitious and elaborate 
 style prevailed in the countries north of the Cevennes, where it 
 is certain that Provengal poetry was originally but an adopted 
 and acquired one. 
 
 But, admitting even the existence of these variously shaded 
 gradations from clearness to obscurity, from artless simplicity 
 to studied elegance in the pieces of amatory jDoetry of which I 
 have thus far spoken, there is after all scarcely one among all 
 these pieces which might properly be supposed to have been 
 written for the people, or made for being relished by them with 
 something like a real pleasure. The only amatory poems of the 
 Troubadours, to which, by reason of their tone and destination, 
 the epithet popular can more or less fitly be applied, constitute 
 three small classes, each of which is distinguished by a charac- 
 teristic title. These are the pastorals {pastarollas^ pastoi'etas\ 
 the ballads (balladas), and the aubades {albas), or morning-ser- 
 enades.* 
 
 * On these different forms of popular poetry compare Raynouard, vol. ii. p. 229-248, 
 where specimeus of each of them are given Ed.
 
 40S Ilistory of Pi'ovengal Poetry. 
 
 Tliese three species of composition constitute an entirely dis- 
 tinct and separate group in the system of Provencal poetry — a 
 group which it is worth our curiosity to study for a moment, 
 not so much under the artistic as under the historical point of 
 view. 
 
 Kot one of these three forms in question was invented by the 
 Troubadours, unless I am mistaken. All of them were already 
 in vogue in that primitive Provencal poetry which was anterior 
 to the age of chivalry, and were to all appearances nothing 
 more than a feeble reminiscence, a vague tradition of the 
 ancient Greco-Roman poetry. When the Troubadours came 
 into the field they adopted these forms ; they preserved the 
 motive and idea, and only modified their costume and details 
 according to the spirit of chivalry. In that event, these forms 
 thus modified are one of the points by which the poetry of the 
 Trovibadours, the chivalric poetry of the twelfth century, links 
 itself to the poetic traditions of classical antiquity. It is chiefly 
 with the intention, and in the hope of developing, and if pos- 
 sible, of justifying this assertion, that I propose to enter into 
 some details in regard to the three forms of poetry which I have 
 indicated, and which, aside from this connection and on their 
 own account, are well worth a more particular notice. I shall 
 commence by speaking of the ballads. 
 
 In the Provencal sense of the term, which is the primitive 
 and true one, the ballad was a little poem intended to be sung 
 by an indefinite number of persons, who accompanied the song 
 by dancing. The name halada, hallada^ which comes from the 
 Greek l3aXU(;io, I leap, I dance, is itself already indicative of the 
 ancient origin of this species of poetry in the south of Gaul. 
 There is, in fact, no doubt but that some of the dances at least, 
 to which the ballads of the Troubadours were adapted during 
 the twelfth ct^ntury, were of Greek, or more properly of Massilian, 
 origin. Tiie principal and most popular of these dances were 
 circular dances, akin to those which the Greeks denominated 
 Xopog, and which the south of Europe likewise designated by a 
 name which is a derivative of the Greek, by corole, namely, or 
 less correctly in Italian, by carole. All these dances were 
 mimic, and to some extent dramatic. The words of the song 
 were descriptive of some action or of a succession of different 
 situations, which the dancers reproduced by their gestures. 
 The song was divided into several stanzas, each of which termi- 
 nated in a refrain, which was the same for all. The dancers 
 acted or gesticulated separately, in imitation of the action or 
 situation described in each stanza, and at the refrain they all 
 took each other by the hand and danced around orbicularly 
 with a more or less agitated movement.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 409 
 
 Popular dances, derived from this, and bearing more or less 
 resemblance to it, are still to be found in many parts. Never- 
 theless they have gradually fallen in desuetude, and many of 
 them have already been entirely forgotten. It is in the south 
 of France that they preserve most of their primitive character, 
 and it is undoubtedly there that the Massaliots first taught 
 them to the Gallic tribes of their vicinity. I remember having 
 witnessed some of these dances in Provence, the subject of 
 which appears to be quite ancient ; among others one which 
 imitated successively all the habitual operations of the poor hus- 
 bandman, tilling his ground, sowing his wheat or oats, reaping, 
 and so on to the end. Each of the numerous couplets of the 
 song was sung with a slow and drawling movement, as if to 
 imitate the fatigue and doleful tone of the poor laborer ; and 
 the refrain was of an extremely lively movement, at which the 
 dancers gave themselves up to all their gaiety. 
 
 In the Middle Age the word ballad was undoubtedly applied 
 to dances of a diflferent description from the one which I have 
 just described, but always, I presume, to dances of character, 
 to imitative dances of an antique origin, either national or 
 foreign. 
 
 After this explanation, I think it will appear evident that the 
 Troubadours did not invent the ballad, any more than they had 
 invented the dances to which the ballad was applied. This was 
 a species of popular poetry, not only anterior to them, but one 
 of the very earliest of those in vogue before them in the south 
 of France. All that the Provengal poets of the twelfth century 
 did or could do in appropriating this form, was to bestow on 
 it more care and elegance than it had received before them, 
 without, however, giving it a shajDe contrary to its essentially 
 popular destination. They restricted the subjects and motives 
 to motives and subjects of gallantry, thus making it enter into 
 the moral unity of Provencal poetry. 
 
 The hallads are pieces which rarely occur in the manuscript 
 collections of the Troubadours. This species was neglected as 
 being too exclusively popular. There are even some indica- 
 tions that its culture was abandoned to the women. At any 
 rate, we find that the Provencal traditions represent the wives 
 of Troubadours, themselves poetesses or trouveresses, as occu- 
 pying themselves particularly with songs and dances, and as 
 composing them in honor of their lovers. Among all the 
 pieces of this kind which have come to my notice, I have not 
 found one, the substance of which was sufiiciently interesting 
 or agreeable to have any meaning, after being deprived of the 
 efiect of the measure and the music. My only aim M'as to in- 
 dicate, by way of explanation, the existence of this species of
 
 410 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 poetic composition among the Troubadours ; and I now pass on 
 to the pastoral^ the next in order. 
 
 I have already remarked, and it is well to repeat here, that 
 the only way in which the Provencal traditions make mention 
 of Cercamons, the first of the Troubadours known to us, after 
 William IX. of Poitiers, is that they designate him as the 
 author of pieces in verse and of ])astoretas in the ancient style. 
 Now, these pieces of verse, thus qualified by the epithet ancient 
 at an epoch when chivalric poetry was yet in its infancy, have 
 certainly the appearance of being much anterior to the latter, 
 and consequently of having constituted a part of the species of 
 popular literature, of which that of the Troubadours was but a 
 sort of development or reform. 
 
 This species is therefore another of those links, by which it 
 is probable that chivalric poetry is connected with the traditions 
 of classical antiquity. However, there is but little to be said 
 on the pastoral poetry of the Troubadours, whatever may have 
 been its origin, except that it is perhaps one of the strangest 
 poetic abstractions recorded in the history of literature. 
 
 Among the Greeks and Romans, the classes which inhabited 
 the country and cultivated the soil were generally slaves, or in 
 a condition differing but little from that of servitude ; and 
 there is very little room for supposing that their lot was worthy 
 of being envied. Tliis, however, did not prevent the Greek 
 and Latin poets from delineating their enchanting pictures of 
 rural life, and from representing it as an ideal state of inno- 
 cence, of repose and happiness. These pictures were probably 
 nothing more than an indirect expression of the painful senti- 
 ments which were naturally inspired by the spectacle of a 
 greatly agitated society, as was that of the Ancients ; a sort of 
 poetic reaction of the imagination against the vexations and 
 the melancholy of those scenes. And these observations are 
 also applicable with more or less propriety to the rural poetry 
 of modern nations. 
 
 We cannot say as much of that of the Troubadours, in which 
 we might search in vain for the least idea, the feeblest picture, 
 true or false, of the condition of the inhabitants of the country 
 and of a certain ensemble of rural life. To these Theocriti of 
 the chateaux there are neither husbandmen, nor swains, nor 
 ■flocks, nor fields, nor harvests nor vintages ; they never speak 
 of the country or of rural scenery ; they appear to have never 
 seen either brook or river, forest or mountain, village or 
 cottage. With all this they never have anything to do. The 
 pastoral world of every one of them reduces itself to an isolated 
 shepherdess, watching over a few lambs, or not watching over 
 anything at all, and the adventures of the pastoral world are
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 411 
 
 limited to colloquies between these shepherdesses and the 
 Troubadours, who in riding by them never fail to notice them, 
 and speedily dismount to tell them some gallant tilings or to 
 entreat them for their love. 
 
 Sometimes these compliments and prayers were successful, 
 and the flatterers then obtained what they soUcited. But this 
 case is an exception. Generally these shepherdesses are dis- 
 creet and well-informed lasses, who politely reply to the com- 
 pliments addressed to them, but who know enough to distrust 
 them, and who are careful not to attach to them the value 
 which those who made them hoped they would. This is the 
 framework and the substance of nearly all the pastorals of the 
 Troubadours; and the details, the accessories are not much 
 more interesting or more varied. 
 
 Tlie most remarkable specimens of this kind of poetic com- 
 positions which I have found, are six pieces by Giraud Riquier 
 of Narbonne, a Troubadour of indifferent talent from the second 
 half of the thirteenth century. These pieces constitute a con- 
 nected series, so that one appears as the continuation of the 
 other, and their subject consists of six successive interviews 
 held at six different intervals between the poet and his shep- 
 herdess, which intervals amount to a period of twenty-one 
 years. In consequence of this connection subsisting between 
 them, these pieces form in reality but one and the same lit- 
 tle poem of rather a fantastic description, in which, however, 
 the exposition-scenes and the dialogues succeed and blend with 
 each other with great ease and consistency. The incidents 
 which constitute its subject are so minutely detailed and of 
 such a -vulgar character, that it is impossible to take them for 
 poetic fictions. There is no doubt but that Giraud Riquier 
 actually had the interviews, which he describes, and with the 
 shepherdess, of which he speaks ; and the sense of this reality 
 is sufficient to give his piece a certain interest, the like of which 
 I do not find in any other production of the same kind. It was 
 my purpose to give some idea of it ; but I changed my mind 
 when I came to reflect that in order to do so, it would be neces- 
 sary to make an abstract of considerable detail and out of pro- 
 portion with the importance of the subject. 
 
 Of all the popular forms of the amatory poetry of the Pro- 
 vencals, the one, which it now remains for me to speak of, is 
 by far the most agreeable, the most poetic in its design, and 
 that which the Troubadours have turned to most account. 
 This is the alba or aubade, to which may be added another one 
 closely allied to it, the serena, namely, from which the name of 
 our serenade is derived. That this is one of the most ancient 
 forms cultivated by the Troubadours is a fact attested by still
 
 \N 
 
 412 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 existing proofs ; and it appears to me extremely probable that 
 it is also one of those which, like the ballad, and certainly 
 much more than the pastoral, may be considered as having 
 originated in the traditions of the ancient pagan poetry. 
 
 Among the prodigious variety of popular songs, which the 
 Greeks possessed for all the occasions of private and domestic 
 life, there were some which were designated by the generic 
 name of songs of the night, and which were intended to be 
 sung at night by lovers, under the window or at the door of 
 their lady-loves. Of these songs there were various kinds, 
 according to the hour at which they were expected to be sung. 
 There were those which were sung at midnight ; these were 
 the songs inviting to sleep, and on that account denominated 
 KaTaKoijx7]~iKd, songs of slumber or lullabies, as we should call 
 them. Others again were sung at the dawn of day, and these 
 were termed SteyepriKa, waking-songs. 
 
 The literature of all the nations of southern Europe contains 
 songs which seem to be but an echo of these ancient lays ; and 
 this can be said more particularly of the serenas and the alhas 
 of the Troubadours, which correspond exactly to the night- 
 songs of the Greeks, except that in the former we recognize at 
 the first glance the characteristic modifications of the poetry of 
 chivalry. Thus the aubades of the Troubadours were intended 
 to wake up at the dawn of day the chevalier who had spent the 
 night with his lady, and to admonish him to withdraw speedily, 
 in order to escape detection. The Troubadours sometimes put 
 this song into the mouth of one of the companions of the lucky 
 knight, who acts as his sentinel during the whole of the night, 
 in order to watch and to announce the break of day. At other 
 times again they put it into the mouth of one of the two lovers 
 at the moment of parting. More often still the aubade is in- 
 tended to bs sung by the sentinel, who watches on the top of 
 the bell-tower and who is supposed to be a party to the sleep- 
 ing lovers. These are but so many expedients resorted to, for 
 the purpose of giving a little variety to the form and to the 
 accessories of this species of composition, which is naturally 
 very limited. 
 
 Among the small number of songs of this description, which 
 have come down to us, there are some which are really charm- 
 ing. In none of their other works, perhaps, did the Trouba- 
 dours bestow so much care and delicacy on the melody of the 
 versification, and on the adaptation of this melody to the sub- 
 ject. It is this same elaborate elegance of measure, that makes 
 it impossible for us to give the slightest idea, in a prose version, 
 and I am inclined to add in any version, of some of these pieces, 
 the charm of which depends in a great measure on the musical
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 413 
 
 march of the couplet, and of the refrain in which it always ter- 
 minates. I am acquainted with but two of them, the metre of 
 which, by a sort of exception, is simple enough to admit of 
 translation. These pieces are fortunately among the most 
 agreeable, and I shall endeavor to translate them. 
 
 The first of these is undoubtedly the oldest of the pieces of 
 this kind which are still extant. The extreme simplicity of sen- 
 timent and the impassioned tone, which characterize it, induce 
 me to believe that it was written by a woman. We have but 
 one copy of it, and this copy is not even a correct one. Some 
 of the stanzas are, in my opinion, out of place, and one of them 
 is entirely wanting. I have been able to remedy these defects 
 but very incompletely. I give here the piece,* as I under- 
 stand it. 
 
 " There is a lady graceful and agreeable, whom all the world 
 eyes for her beauty ; she has set her heart on loyal love. May 
 heaven speed the approach of early dawn !" 
 
 " In the orchard under the hawthorn branch, the lady sits, 
 her lover by her side, waiting for the watch to call the break 
 of day. May heaven speed the approach of early dawn !" 
 
 " Ah would to God the night would never end, and that 
 the watch would never see nor dawn nor day, so that my friend 
 might never leave my side ! May heaven speed the approach 
 of early dawn !" 
 
 " Fair lover sweet, let us embrace adown the meadow, where 
 the herb's in bloom. Let us rejoice in spite of jealous eyes. 
 May heaven speed the approach of early dawn !" 
 
 " Fair lover sweet, yet one more amorous sport in yonder 
 garden where the birds are singing ! Lo there the sentinel, 
 who sings his aubade now. May heaven speed the approach 
 of early dawn !" 
 
 " He has left me now, my friend, my fair, my merry, cour- 
 teous friend. But with the balmy air which meets me from 
 below, I still inhale a sweet draught of his breath. May hea- 
 ven speed the approach of early dawn !" 
 
 The following aubade is by the celebrated Giraud de Borneil. 
 It is, I believe, the most graceful of them all, both in respect to 
 the details and in the ensemble. We must suppose it to have 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. ii. page 23G. "Elle eat I'ouvrage d'une femme, dont le nom est 
 inconnu." 
 
 La dompna es agradans e plazens ; Plagues a dieu ja la nueitz non falhis, 
 
 Per sa beutat la garden raantas gens, Ni'l mieus amicx lone de mi no a partis, 
 
 Et a son cor en amar lej'almens, Ni la gayta jorn ni alba no vis. 
 
 Oy dieus ! oy dieus ! de I'alba tan tost ve ! Oy dieus ! oy dieus ! de I'alba tan tost ve ! 
 
 * * * * 
 
 En nn vergier, sotz fuelha d'albespi, Per la doss' aura qu'es venguda de lay 
 
 Tenc la dompna son amic costa si. Pel mien amic belh e cortcs e gay, 
 
 Tro la gayta crida que I'alba vi. Del sieu alen ai begut un dons ray. 
 
 Oy dieus ! Oy dieus ! de I'alba tan tost ve ! Oy dieus ! Oy dieus ! de I'alba tan tost ve ! 
 
 Ed.
 
 414 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 been sung under the window of the apartment, where the for- 
 tunate chevalier is reposing, and by a friend of the latter who 
 has passed the night standing sentinel for him. Tlie first 
 couplet of the piece is a prayer, which will perhaps appear a 
 little too solemn for the occasion. But we know already, how 
 serious the chevaliers of the Middle Age were in all that con- 
 cerned their loves. 
 
 " Thou King of glory, veritable Light, all-powerful Deity, be 
 pleased to succor faithfully my companion ; I have not seen 
 him since the fall of night, and now the morn is near at hand." 
 
 " My fair companion, are you yet asleep ? you've slept 
 enough, awake, the day's approaching ! I have seen bright 
 and clear the orient star which brings the day ; I recognize it 
 well, and now the morn is near at hand." 
 
 " My fair companion, I call you with my song, awake ! I 
 hear the chirping bird which flutters through the grove in search 
 of day, and I'm afraid your rival will surprise you, for now the 
 morn is near at hand." 
 
 " My fair companion, put your head to the little window ; 
 look at the sky and at the stars now turning dim, and you will 
 see that I am a good sentinel. But if you do not listen, you'll 
 fare the worse for it, for now the morn is near at hand." 
 
 " My fair companion, since you have left me, I have not 
 closed my eyes in sleep, nor budged from off my knees, be- 
 seeching God and the Son of Mary, to return me my faithful 
 companion safely, and now the morn is near at hand." 
 
 " My fair companion, from yon high balcony you did con- 
 jure me not to yield to slumber, and to watch well all the night 
 until the break of day, and now you heed not either my song 
 or me, and yet the morn is near at hand." 
 
 Some of these morning-songs are of a very peculiar form, on 
 which I think I ought to say a word or two. These are the 
 aubades, which appear to be incorporated with other songs. 
 There is a piecef by a Troubadour, Cadenet by name, which 
 
 * Eaynouartl, vol. iii. p. 313. Piece No. TV. Strophes 1-7. 
 Kei glories, verais lums e elardatz, Bel companhos, en chantan vos apel, 
 
 Dieu poderos, senher, si a vos platz, Non dormatz plus, qu'ieu aug chautar I'au- 
 
 zel 
 Al mien conipainh sias fizels ajuda, Que vai queren lo jorn per lo boscatge, 
 
 Qu'ieu non lo vi pus la nueitz lo venguda, Et ai paor qu'el gilos vos assatge, 
 Et ades sera I'alba. Et ades sera I'alba. 
 
 Bel companhos, si dormetz o velhatz Bel companhos, iasetz al fenestrel, 
 
 Non dormatz plus, qu'el jorn es apropchatz,Et esgardatz las ensenhas del eel, 
 Qu'en Orien vey I'estela creguda Conoiseretz si us sui fizels messatgc ; 
 
 Qu'adutz lo jorn, qu'ieu I'ai ben conoguda, Si non o faitz, vostreser lo dampnatge, 
 Etades sera I'alba. Et ades sera I'alba. etc., etc. — Ed. 
 
 t Kaynouard, vol. iii. page 251. Piece No. IV. Strophes 1, 2, 3. 
 S' anc fui belha ni prezada, Tot per sa gran manentia ; 
 
 Ar sui d'aut en bas tornada ; E murria, 
 
 Qu'a un vilan sui donada, S'ieu fin amic non avia
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Trouhadours. 
 
 415 
 
 ofters us an example of this kind of amalgam, and as the piece 
 is a beautiful one, I will translate a passage or two from it. It 
 treats of a lady who wa§ unhappily married, and who gives 
 vent to her complaint in the following terms : 
 
 " I am possessed of beauty, and once was honored, but now 
 I'm fallen, alas ! too low from this great eminence. They gave 
 me to a villain, whose only claim to me were his great riches, 
 and I should die, had I not a fair friend, to whom I might re- 
 count my ills, and a complaisant watch, to chant for me the 
 approach of day." 
 
 And thereupon commences a veritable aubade from the 
 mouth of the guette (or watch) herself : 
 
 " I am a courteous sentinel, and I desire not that true and 
 faithful love should be destroyed. This is the reason, why I 
 watch for the early peep of day, that he who sleeps beside his 
 lady-love, may take a tender leave, when 1 see the dawn ap- 
 pear." 
 
 " A long and dark night pleases me the most, the winter- 
 night, which lasts so long, and where, in spite of cold, 1 still 
 continue on my loyal watch," etc., etc. 
 
 These couplets are followed by two more, one of which is 
 from the mouth of the sentinel, and the last from that of the 
 lady, who assures us that the menaces of her husband will never 
 prevent her from keeping her vigils with her lover until the 
 daM'n of morning. 
 
 This search after variety in the form and the accessories 
 of this species of poetry, seems to be an evidence of the care 
 with which the Troubadours applied themselves to it. Never- 
 theless the aubades are by no means plentiful in the collections 
 of their pieces ; and the same can be said of all that there is 
 of a popular description in their amatory poetry ; that is to say, 
 of the ballads, the pastorals, and the messages of love ; for the 
 pieces of the last of these classes can very well be added (as in 
 fact I have already attempted to do), to those which I have 
 specially styled popular. The poems, w^hich preponderate, both 
 in point of number and importance, in all the manuscript col- 
 lections of Provencal poetry, these are the chansons or songs 
 of love properly so called. This was the poetic form par ex- 
 cellence, which above all others constituted the glory of the 
 
 Cuy disses mo marrimen, 
 
 E guaita plazen 
 
 Que mi fes son d'alba. 
 
 leu sui tan corteza guaita, 
 Que no vuelh sia desfaita 
 Leials amors a dreit faita ; 
 Per qu'ieu sui gnarda del dia 
 Si venria, 
 
 E sel qui jay ab s'amia 
 Prenda comjat francamen, 
 
 Baizan, e tenen, 
 
 Qu'ieu crit quan vey I'alba. 
 
 Be m plai longua nueg/, escura, 
 E'l temps d'ivern on plus dura, 
 E no m'en lays per freidura 
 Qu'ieu leials guayta no sia 
 Tota via ; etc., etc. — Ed.
 
 416 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 Troubadours and the delight of castles. And this is the reason, 
 why so many pieces, so many chansons of this kind, which we 
 now regard as productions of a most tedious mediocrity, have 
 in the majority of collections invaded the place of a multitude 
 of aubades and ballads, in which in all probability we should 
 have found a grace and beauty much more analogous to our 
 tastes and our ideas. 
 
 Dante's treatise on vulgar eloquence contains a chapter, full 
 of curious traits, which show very clearly the kind of poetic 
 supremacy at that time attributed to the purely lyrical chanson 
 over all other kinds of amatory poetry. Dante endeavors, in 
 the first place, to demonstrate, that of all the forms of popular 
 poetry, the one which the Provencals had designated by the 
 name of chanson, was the most elevated and important. " This," 
 says he, " can be proved by various considerations. In the first 
 place, although any and every composition in verse may be 
 sung, and might on that account be called a chanson, yet the 
 chanson is the only one which has really assumed that name ; 
 which never could have taken place except in virtue of an an- 
 cient forsight. Besides, whatever of itself alone attains the 
 end for which it was made, is superior to any other thing which 
 stands in need of something exterior to itself. Now, the chan- 
 son accomplishes of itself whatever it is destined to accomplish ; 
 and this is not the case with the ballad, which stands in need 
 of players of instruments in order to fulfill its purpose ; the 
 chanson is consequently nobler than the ballad. Moreover, we 
 esteem those things most noble, which bring most glory to their 
 authors ; therefore the chansons, bringing more honor to those 
 who compose them, than the ballads, are more noble than the 
 latter. Finally, the noblest things are those which are pre- 
 served with the greatest care, but of all the poems sung, the 
 chansons are those which are preserved most preciously, as any 
 one can see by merely glancing at the books." 
 
 I do not know whether Dante gives a good explanation of the 
 fact which he announces, but he at any rate establishes it, and 
 we see that in the collections of poetry with which he was 
 acquainted, as in those which have come down to us, the songs, 
 which were composed for the chateaux and which could please 
 only there, left but very little room for the popular songs or for 
 those, which, without being composed expressly for the people, 
 could nevertheless be relished and enjoyed by it, in some re- 
 spects at least. 
 
 There is still another branch of Provencal poetry, of which I 
 have not yet spoken. This comprises the tensons, partimens, 
 or, as we should term them, the poetic contests (jeux-partis).* 
 
 * On the tenaon or contencio of the Provencals compare Raynouard, toI. ii. p. 186-196.
 
 The, Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 417 
 
 Of all the forms of the amatory poetry of the Troubadours this 
 is the least poetical, the one which has the strongest tendency 
 to lose itself in the didactic forms. Nevertheless it is too cha- 
 racteristic and occupies too conspicuous a place in the ensemble 
 of the poetic system of the Troubadours, to be passed over 
 without some few remarks, and especially as it is not necessary 
 to speak of it at length to give an adequate idea of it. 
 
 The term tenson was apjDlied to colloquial pieces, in which 
 two or more interlocutors maintained contrary opinions on 
 some given thesis. This was commonly a thesis of chivalric 
 gallantry, and it was only by a sort of exception that it some- 
 times extended to questions and subjects of another kind. 
 These tensons always present themselves in the form of a 
 challenge ; a Troubadour first propounds two opposite sentiments 
 on one and the same subject, and then calls on his adversary to 
 sustain whichever of these two sentiments he may choose, he 
 himself offering to maintain and to carry the op^^osite side of the 
 question. The challenged Troubadour having made his choice, 
 the proposed question is debated in six or eight couplets, all of 
 which are symmetrical with the first, that is to say, with the one 
 in which the challenge was proposed. 
 
 It is evident from the very conditions of this kind of poetic 
 debate, that it never could arise except on questions of extreme 
 subtilty, on questions of which the affirmative and negative 
 were nearly equally true, equally doubtful, equally easy to 
 maintain. It is, in fact, clear, that if the challenging Trouba- 
 dour had given his antagonist the option between two opinions, 
 of which the one were plausible and the other absurd or ridicu- 
 lous, he would, in doing so, have infallibly prepared his own 
 defeat. His interest and his cleverness consisted in proj^osing 
 two questions of such a character, that it would be a matter of 
 indifference to him whether he would have to sustain the one or 
 the other. 
 
 And indeed all the questions of the tenson are of this de- 
 scription, questions of such extravagant refinement and subtilty^ 
 that a capricious curiosity alone can attach the slightest interest 
 to them. I will state a few of them, which will suffice to 
 enable us to judge of the majority. 
 
 " Is it better to love a lady, quite young and beautiful and 
 courteous, as yet still ignorant of love, but in the way of learn- 
 ing it. or some fair madame already perfect and experienced in, 
 love ?" 
 
 The question was a practicable one ; it was not anti-chivalric ; 
 
 On Xhz partimen, jocx partitz, and torneyamen, p. 197-206. Specimens of the tenson, 
 vol. iv. p. 1-45. On the cours d^amours, to which the questions discussed in the tenson 
 frequently had reference, see vol. ii. p. ciii.-cxxiv. — £d^ 
 
 27
 
 418 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 but usage had already solved it. A young lady, who accepted 
 a lover, was obliged to wait until she was married before she 
 could grant him even the smallest favor. With a married lady 
 no time was lost by any such delay, and the success of the 
 knight depended on the will of the former alone ; the chance 
 was a better one. But here is a second question, a little more 
 embarrassing than the first. 
 
 "Which is preferable, to be beloved by a lady, to receive 
 from her the most desired proof of it and then to die immediately 
 after, or to love her for many years without being loved by her 
 in return ?" 
 
 The thesis, which constitutes the second part of this question, 
 was the easiest to maintain according to the ideas of chivalry, 
 and it was in fact the one maintained by the Troubadour, to 
 whom the challenge had been given, and who by the way was 
 a monk. " I would rather serve my lady without any recom- 
 pense whatever, than die after the reception of the first. In 
 loving my lady, I shall perform whatever my good love com- 
 mands ; I shall be valiant and brave and I shall signalize 
 myself by many a noble deed." 
 
 Here is a third question of a much gayer description than the 
 two preceding. " Two men are married ; the one has an amia- 
 ble and handsome wife, the other an ugly and disagreeable one. 
 Both of them are jealous ; which of them is the greatest fool ?" 
 
 Among the many futile questions of this kind, there are 
 nevertheless some, which are not without a certain interest. 
 These are the questions, which are in some way or anotlier 
 connected with the history of the opinions, the manners and 
 the poetry even, into which they enter as a constituent element 
 of some importance. I have for example already elsewhere 
 spoken of the existence and the expeditions of knights- 
 errant in the south of France, and among the evidences of this 
 fact we may adduce a tenson from the middle of the thirteenth 
 century, the combatants of which are Lanfranc Cigala, a 
 Genoese Troubadour, and lady Guillaumette de Rosers (which 
 I believe to be St. Gilles on the Rhone). The Troubadour 
 challenges the lady in the following terms : 
 
 " Lady Guillaumette, twenty knights-errant were riding at a 
 distance, in the midst of a terrible storm, and they complained 
 among themselves for not finding any shelter. They were 
 overheard by two barons, who were passing by in great haste 
 on their way to see their ladies. The one of the two barons 
 retraced his steps, to ofter succor to the wandering knights ; 
 the other pursued his journey toward his lady. Which of the 
 two conducted himself best?" 
 
 The following tenson, composed about 1240 at the latest, 
 proves that at that epoch the chivalric romances, in which
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Trovhadours. 419 
 
 enchanted arras are introduced, were already in vogue in the 
 countries of the Provengal tongue, since these enchanted arms 
 were a familiar subject of allusions. " "Which would you pre- 
 fer," asks Guigo, a Provencal Troubadour, of I do not know what 
 other Troubadour by the name of Bernard, " which would you 
 prefer, an enchanted cloak, by the aid of which you might 
 subdue the hearts of all the ladies, or a trenchant iron lance, 
 which would possess the virtue of levelling with the dust every 
 knight that comes within its reach, however valiant and strong^ 
 he might be ?" 
 
 The questions of these poetical combats sometimes allude to 
 facts of history of a still more general and interesting cha- 
 racter than those whicli I have just now mentioned. It hap- 
 pens that some of the Provengal poets discuss in these tensons 
 the claims of certain nations of their acquaintance to distinction 
 and glory. Thus, for example, there is a tenson in which a Trouba- 
 dour by the name of Raimon challenges another to debate the 
 question, whether the Provencals or the Lombards, that is to say, 
 the nations of southern France or the Italians excel the most in 
 war and in other respects. In another tenson the same question 
 is proposed with reference to the Provencals and the French. 
 
 The arguments by which each disputant sustains his side of 
 the question are not always, as we can easily imagine, of the 
 gravest or of the exactest description. But there would have 
 been a fatality or a miracle in their being all absolutely false 
 or equally frivolous, and the truth is, that they contain here and 
 there interesting traits in illustration of the general history of 
 mediaeval life and civilization. Thus, to speak only of the 
 tenson, in which a parallel is drawn between the French and the 
 Provencals, and to say but a few words on the subject, we there 
 perceive that the latter proclaim themselves the inventors and the 
 models of poetry, and thence derive one of their principal titles 
 to national glory. We there perceive, what is elsewhere estab- 
 lished by the unanimous testimony of all the historical docu- 
 ments, that the development of the chivalric spirit had ceased 
 to progress much sooner in France than in the countries of the 
 Provencal tongue, and that, if in the latter, society was freer, 
 more animated and accomplished, it was m the former better 
 disciplined, more serious and energetic. 
 
 "We perceive, therefore, that the Provencal tensons, indefault 
 of a poetic interest, are possessed of a certain historical interest, 
 by reason of which they have a stronger and a different claim 
 to our consideration, than has heretofore been conceded to 
 them. In regard to the composition and the form of this kind 
 of poetry, there are questions which I will simply announce, 
 without attaching any great importance to their solution.
 
 420 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 Among the Troubadours, there are some who are expressly 
 and particularly designated as writers of tensons good and bad. 
 If we were to take this testimony in its rigorous and most 
 natural sense, it would be necessary to suppose, that the tensons 
 in question were each composed entirely by one and the same 
 individual, sustaining both the affirmative and the negative of 
 one and the same question. In that event, these pieces would 
 be but a child's play without any aim or motive. 
 
 This does not prove that there were not really tensons of this 
 kind, but this could only have been by way of exception. 
 Everything authorizes us to suppose, that the tenson was a real 
 debate between two Troubadours, that this debate took place in 
 the chateaux with more or less solemnity and before a sort of 
 public, that it was not prolonged indefinitely, but that it was 
 required to terminate within an interval of limited extent. In 
 fact, a tenson could hardly have any point or interest, except 
 so far as it was to some extent extemporaneous, or at any rate 
 rapidly composed by the two adversaries contending face to 
 face. There was a judge appointed by mutual consent, who 
 decided, which of the two combatants had sustained his thesis 
 with siiccess. 
 
 I shall conclude now this review of the forms of Provengal 
 poetry, which may be regarded as expedients or tentatives to 
 give a little variety to the expression of chivalric love. All of 
 these forms were more or less directly the result, the reflex of 
 the feeling, that there was something monotonous or factitious 
 in the Provengal chanson ; they all originated in a sort of 
 reaction of the poetic imagination against this monotony. 
 
 But this reaction neither could nor did stop there ; it ex- 
 tended itself to the very foundation of the sentiments and the 
 ideas of chivalric gallantry. Precisely as there were Trouba- 
 dours, who were weary of harping on love in the same key and 
 in tlie same poetic form, there were also those who refrained 
 entirely from celebrating a love, wherein they thought they 
 
 {)erceived something too conventional and too equivocal ; a 
 ove which pretended to be a sort of impossible middle term be- 
 tween the natural desires and an absolute purity. 
 
 Some of them were in favor of banishing all sensuality from 
 the domain of love, and to reduce it to a pure interchange of 
 sentiments and thoughts. Others, and these were by far the 
 greater number, divested the sentiment of love of all its enthu- 
 siasm and morality, in order to reduce it to that grosser and 
 more vulgar form, which it so frequently assumes in all ages 
 and in every place. 
 
 We have from this latter class of poets a number of pieces, al- 
 most equally intranslatable, some on account of their unboundq^
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 421 
 
 licentiousness, others because tliey exhibit a vulgarity, which is 
 altogether too undisguised and free. 
 
 I can find but one of them, of which I can translate a part at 
 least. It is by a Troubadour by the name of Perdigon, and 
 reads as follows : 
 
 " I am a loyal lover now, but there is but little time left ; for 
 thus far the rewards of love have given me too little satisfac- 
 tion. But I have just made a conquest of a lady, who will 
 make me sing of her most merrily. Still I wish to love with 
 prudent moderation, and let my lady not imagine, that I shall 
 love her long, if I perceive that she intends to make my pas- 
 sion kill me. I am resolved, if she maltreats me, to pay my 
 addresses to another." 
 
 " I' have been so well schooled in love, my lady fair, that be- 
 fore I will estrange my heart entirely, I'll first see whether I 
 shall not find mercy before you. My heart is mine as yet suf- 
 ficiently, and I can yet withdraw it, etc." 
 
 " I have besought you not to make me sufier, and I have 
 made a declaration of my wishes. Do not imagine, then, that 
 I am going to love you two years or three for nothing. I wish 
 at once to obtain the profit of my suit with you, my lady, whom 
 I love so tenderly ; and I beseech you not to persist day after 
 day in telling me your No. This is a word I hate, and whoever 
 tells it me too frequently is sure to be deserted." 
 
 " I do not say that you are the handsomest woman in the 
 world ; and I beseech you, good lady, not to be offended at my 
 frankness. I am neither count, nor duke, nor marquis, and it 
 seems to me that it would ill befit me to love the flower of wo- 
 men. But you have surely enough of beauty, of youth and 
 merit, for me to be content with, and I will cling to you, if you 
 will but reward me." 
 
 I will excuse the reader from the perusal of the last couplet, 
 in which the disenchanted Troubadour explains himself in the 
 same tone, and with the same platitude of freedom, on a point 
 more delicate than the rest. 
 
 I have, in conclusion of this last chapter on the amatory poetry 
 of the Troubadours, produced such specimen-quotations as will 
 suffice to give us an idea of the decadence of this poetry, as far 
 as art and literary excellence are concerned. Its moral deca- 
 dence is still more strongly marked in the piece which I have 
 just translated. It is thus, that the poetic enthusiasm and the 
 enthusiasm of chivalric love both declined, deteriorated, and 
 finally disappeared together. They had been born one of the 
 other, they had developed themselves one through the other, 
 and they constituted, as long as they coexisted, the most bril- 
 liant phenomenon of the Middle Age in the south of France.
 
 422 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 THE LTKICAL POETRY OF THE TROUBADOUES. 
 
 IV. — PIECES RELATING TO THE CRUSADES. 
 
 WARS OF THE HOLY LAND. 
 
 l^EXT to that of chivalric love, the lyric poetry of the Pro- 
 vencals has no more frequent or more favorite theme than the 
 celebration of martial prowess, as exhibited either in the ordi- 
 nary wars or in those of a religious nature. Among tlie latter 
 it sung particularly those, which under the name of Crusades 
 made so great and so diversified a noise in history. It would 
 indeed appear, that there could scarcely be an argument more 
 suitable than this to the genius of these Troubadours, who thought 
 as much of their religion as they did of their chivalric spirit ; 
 and judging in advance, and on the evidence of general appear- 
 ances merely, one might be tempted to imagine that their cru- 
 sade-songs were the most beautiful of all, or at any rate superior 
 to those in which they celebrated chivalric valor only, and apart 
 from every religious motive. But at the risk of compromising 
 to some extent the religious reputation accorded to the Trouba- 
 dours, I shall be obliged to say, and to prove, that they have 
 celebrated in their songs warfare in general, war for the sake of 
 war, much more poetically than the sacred war of the crusades. 
 I shall begin by speaking of the latter. 
 
 "We certainly now no longer possess all the lyrical pieces of 
 the Troubadours relative to the crusades, but those which are 
 left us are probably the best of them — probably those, which 
 at the time of their first appearance were the most celebrated 
 and productive of the greatest effect — so that they may be sup- 
 posed to represent advantageously those others which may have 
 been lost ; and no serious inconvenience can result from the 
 absence of the latter in a general survey of this branch of Pro- 
 vengal poetry. 
 
 The first crusade must have been the subject of a variety of 
 popular songs, wherever it was preached. But it is only in
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 423 
 
 Italy, and more particularly in Lombardy, that history makes 
 any mention of these songs. It points out at least one of them, 
 which it designates with the epithet Oti ])assage-song {de ultreia), 
 and to which it seems to attribute a powerful influence on the 
 zeal with which the Lombards flocked to the standard of this 
 first crusade. But this is all that we now can say on the subject 
 of this song : not a single word of it has come down to us ; we 
 do not even know whether it was in Latin or in some one of the 
 dialects of the Italian. The first of these suppositions is the 
 most probable. 
 
 There can scarcely be any doubt but that the first crusade, 
 which, as we shall see in its place, had furnished the theme for 
 a number of grand epic compositions in the Proven gal, was 
 likewise made the subject of a variety of songs of shorter dimen- 
 sions, some of which must have belonged to the historical, and 
 others to the lyric species. But all these songs were already 
 lost in the thirteenth century. The only one extant at that 
 time was that of the count of Poitiers, William IX., which I 
 have translated above (p. 294), and in which we can see with 
 what repugnance and with how many regrets this chief, who 
 had but little of the enthusiasm of the crusaders, left his fair 
 duchy of Aquitaine to enter on this expedition for the Holy 
 Land. 
 
 The second crusade commenced in 1146. Everybody knows 
 that St. Bernard was the principal instigator, the all-powerful 
 preacher, the supreme director of this movement, and that it 
 would have depended on himself alone to have become the 
 military chief of it. The assembly at Yazelai, where Louis 
 YII. and the principal seigniors of France were induced, by 
 the voice of the saint, to assume the cross, was nearly as nu- 
 merous as that, for which, fifty years before, Pope Urban II, had 
 preached the holy war for the first time. It was the same cry 
 of Deus vult ! Deus vuU ! (God wishes it !), with which the 
 united nations had responded to the exhortations of the pontifi" 
 at Clermont — with which now for a second time the innumer- 
 able multitude at Vezelai received, as if it had been a man- 
 date from Heaven, the appeal of the Abbe of Citeaux in behalf 
 of a second crusade. 
 
 Kaymond Y., the count of Toulouse, was present at this 
 assembly of Yezelai ; he there took the cross, and tlius induced 
 a large part of the South to join in the movement of this second 
 crusade. But the Troubadours did not interfere with this move- 
 ment ; they did not second it, and their patron even, Raymond 
 Y., took his departure for the Holy Land to die there, without 
 obtaining from them the slightest eulogy for this heroic devo- 
 tion, which had become hereditary in the family of Eaymond
 
 424 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 of St. Gilles. They reserved their songs, as we shall see else- 
 where, for other crusades which about the same time were 
 already preparing against the Arabs of Spain. 
 
 In all the collections of the lyrical poetry of the Provencals, 
 there is, as far at least as I have seen, but a single piece re- 
 lating to the crusade of St. Bernard ; and this even is a piece, 
 which, so far from being a eulogy or sermon on the theme, con- 
 tains only a vague and indirect allusion to it. The poem is by 
 the same Marcabrus, of whom I have already spoken with some 
 detail ; and its style, like that of most of his productions, is not 
 without considerable originality. In composing it, Marcabrus 
 probably never thought either of St. Bernard or of the disas- 
 trous results of his crusade ; but the piece is nevertheless de 
 facto a sort of poetic commentary, naive and bold enough, on 
 certain famous words of the saint. The latter, in his report to 
 Pope Eugene III. on the success of his preaching, had thus 
 briefly recapitulated it : 
 
 " The cities and castles are deserted to such an extent that 
 there is scarcely a man left for seven women : everywhere we 
 see nothing but widows whose husbands are yet alive." * 
 
 I subjoin now the piece by Marcabrus. Its relation to the 
 somewhat venturesome words of the saint will readily suggest 
 itself to the mind of every one. 
 
 " Close to the fountain of the grove, along the sand, beneath 
 a fruit-tree's shade, whereon the birds were singing, I found 
 alone (the other day) her who desires not my happiness."f 
 
 " This was a noble damsel, the daughter of the seignior of a 
 castle. I imagined that she was there to enjoy the newborn 
 season, its verdure, and the song of birds, and I thought she 
 would gladly lend her ear to what I had to say. But the mat- 
 ter was far otherwise." 
 
 " She began to weep at the margin of the fountain ; and, 
 sighing from the bottom of her heart, she exclaimed : ' Jesus, 
 King of the universe, it is for thy sake that I endure such suf- 
 ferings. The insults to which thou wast subjected fall back on 
 me ; for the most valiant of this world are gone to serve thee, 
 beyond the sea, and thou commandedst it!" 
 
 " 'And he too's gone with them, my friend, my fair, my noble, 
 
 * See the collection of St. Bernard's epistles in Migne's Patrol. Cursus Completus, 
 vol. 182.— Ed. 
 t Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 375. Piece No. II., entire : 
 
 A la fontana del vergier, So fon donzelh' ab son cors belh, 
 
 On I'erb'er vertz josta'l gravier, Filha d'un senLor de castelh ; 
 
 A Tonibra d'un fust domesgier, E quant ieu cugey que I'auzelh 
 
 En aiziment de blancas flora Si fesson joi e la verdors, 
 
 E de novelh chan costumier, E pel dous termini novelh, 
 
 Trobey sola, ses companhier, E que entendes mon favelh, 
 
 Selha que no vol mon solatz. Tost li fon sos afars camjatz. 
 
 Etc., etc Ed.
 
 TJie Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 4:25 
 
 valiant friend ; and I remain alone here, to long for bim, to 
 weep and mourn disconsolate. Ah ! what fell thought he enter- 
 tained, Louis our king, to ordain this crusade, which has brought 
 such sorrow to my heart !' " 
 
 " When I heard her lamenting thus inconsolably, I drew on 
 toward her along the limpid brook, and said to her : ' Fair, 
 rosy cheeks and sunny visage are marred by too much weeping. 
 Thou shouldst not yet despair : He who has decked the woods 
 with foliage, can make thee yet rejoice again.'" 
 
 " ' Ah, seignior,' said she, ' I believe indeed that God will yet 
 have mercy on me one day, and in another life, as he has mercy 
 on many another sinner. But meanwhile he bereaves me in this 
 world of him who was my sole delight, of him whom I have 
 kept so short a time, and who is now, alas! so far away 
 from me!' " 
 
 Such a piece added to the silence of the other Troubadours, 
 does not indicate a very lively enthusiasm for the second cru- 
 crade in the countries of the Provencal tongue. 
 
 A different state of things existed during the interval be- 
 tween 1189 and 1193, while the somewhat slow preparations 
 for the third crusade were going on. It was for this expedition, 
 that they composed nearly all the pieces on the subject of the 
 holy wars, which we possess of them ; at least all those which 
 merit something more than ordinary attention in the poetic 
 history of the Middle Age. Their zeal on this occasion is not 
 difficult of explanation. 
 
 In the first place, the third crusade was preached at the most 
 flourishing epoch of Provencal poetry. Never before had there 
 existed so many and such distinguished Troubadours as at that 
 time ; and never had there been such eager emulation among 
 them all. 
 
 Moreover, the high renown of the leader of this enterprise 
 was another and very particular inducement to t1ie Trouba- 
 dours to take an interest in the cause, to enlist in it and to 
 celebrate it in advance. The emperor Frederic Barbarossa and 
 Richard the Lion-hearted were the favorite heroes of these 
 poets. Philip Augustus was not so much to their taste, but 
 Philip Augustus had commenced to gain an ascendant over the 
 South, which could allow no one to be indifferent toward his 
 projects or his actions. 
 
 These reasons combined are sufficient to account for the en- 
 thusiasm with which the Troubadours sung the third crusade. 
 Giraud de Borneil, Rambaud de Vaqueiras, Pierre Cardinal, 
 Bertrand de Born, Pierre Vidal, Gaucelm Faydit, and many 
 others of less distinction have left us poems conmiemorative of 
 this event, which must be numbered among the most remark-
 
 426 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 able of each of them. Several of tliem were not content with 
 preaching the holy war; they wanted to assist in making it ; 
 they followed those whom they had incited to the undertaking ; 
 their poetic enthusiasm was subjected to the ordeal of the 
 events ; we shall see how it came out of it. 
 
 The pieces of the Troubadours relative to the third and to all 
 the subsequent crusades are of two kinds, and they form two 
 classes, distinct from each other by reason of their difference of 
 aim and motive. The one consists of formal exhortations ad- 
 dressed to the public, to assume the cross and to pass out/ror 
 rnm\ that is to say to sail for the Holy Land. Tlie others are 
 songs inspired by personal motives, in which the Troubadours, 
 without concerning themselves about any one's enlisting or not 
 enlisting in the crusades, simply express their own sentiments 
 and resolutions on the subject. The latter class partakes more 
 or less of the character of the ordinary compositions of the Trou- 
 badours, and it is for this reason that I shall dwell on it a little 
 more minutely. It will be sufficient to show by a few examples, 
 how these ideas of the crusades and of the sacred war some- 
 times interfered with the amatory destinies of the Trouba- 
 dours. 
 
 Among those of them, who passed outre-mer^ there were few 
 into whose resolution love did not enter in one way or another 
 as the leading motive. Some went there to get killed out of 
 regret for having lost their lady-loves, others to divert and to 
 console themselves for the grief occasioned by the rigor or the 
 infidelity of theirs ; another still embarked in obedience to the 
 order of his fair one, or in the hope of determining her by this 
 proof of devotion to accord to him at last the love he had thus 
 far sought in vain. But whatever may have been the motive, 
 this adventuresome resolution is ordinarily sufficient to diffuse 
 a certain peculiar charm over the songs, in which it is ex- 
 pressed. 
 
 One of the most graceful of these poems, with which I am 
 acquainted and which it is in my power to quote, is attributed 
 to a Troubadour, named Peirols, of whom I have already 
 spoken. This was a poor chevalier, who loved for a long time 
 a sister of the dauphin of Auvergne, the wife of Beraud de 
 Mercosur, one of the great barons of the country. We do not 
 know precisely at what epoch or in whose company he em- 
 barked for Syria, but it is certain that he went there once at 
 least, and in connection with one of those expeditions, which 
 followed closely upon the grand crusade of Kichard Coeur-de 
 Lion and Philip Augustus, and which constituted, so to speak, 
 its trail. At the moment of departure he composed the fol- 
 lowing piece, which is a dialogue between himself and Love.
 
 The Lyrical Poeti'y of the Troubadours. 
 
 427 
 
 It is in my opinion one of the most graceful and most delicate 
 pieces of its kind,* 
 
 " When Love beheld my heart enfranchised of all thought 
 of him, he assailed me with a quarrel, and I will tell you how : 
 — Friend Peirols, it is a great mistake in thee, to quit me ; 
 when thy thoughts shall be no more of me, when thou shalt 
 sing no more, what wilt thou be then, tell me, what will be 
 thy worth ?" 
 
 " Love, I have served thee long, and thou liadst no com- 
 passion on me ; thou knowst thyself the trifling guerdon I've 
 received from thee ! I'll not accuse thee, but grant me at least 
 substantial peace in future ; I ask no more, and I aspire to 
 nothing sweeter," 
 
 " What ! Peirols, dost thou forget the fair and noble lady, 
 who, at my behest, received thee so graciously and with so 
 much aifection ? Thou hast indeed a thoughtless, frivolous* 
 heart ; though no one would have ever said so from your songs, 
 so full of joy and love dost thou appear in them," 
 
 "Love, I have cherished my lady constantly since I first saw 
 her, and I love her yet, I love her with an earnest, steady 
 thought ; thus she has pleased, thus she has charmed me, from 
 the first moment of our meeting. But the time has come for 
 many lovers to quit with tears their ladies fair, who, were it 
 not for Saladin, might stay with them in blest jocundity." 
 
 "Peirols, the assaults thou art about to make on the 
 tower of David, will not expel from it the Turks or Arabs. 
 Attend and listen to a bit of good advice : Love and sing ! 
 What ! thou wilt join the crusade, when the kings don't join ? 
 Witness the wars they raise among themselves ; witness the 
 barons how they invent their subjects of dispute ! " 
 
 " Love, I have never failed in deference to thee, thou knowst 
 it. But to-day I am constrained to disobey thee. I beseech 
 God to make peace among the kings, and to be my guide. The 
 crusade is deferred too long, and there were great need indeed, 
 that the devout marquis of Montferrat had more companions !" 
 
 Peirols actually took his departure, as he had resolved to do, 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iii. p. 279. Piece No. VI. Strophes 1-6. 
 
 Quant amors trobet partit 
 Mon cor de son pessamen, 
 D'una tenson m'asalhit, 
 E podetz auzir coraen : 
 " Amicx Peyrols, malamen 
 Vos anatz de mi lunhan, 
 E pus en mi ni en chan 
 Non er vostr'entencios, 
 Diguatz pueis que valretz voa?" 
 
 " Amors, tant vos ai servit, 
 E pietatz no us en pren, 
 Cum vos sabetz quan petit 
 
 N'ai aiut de jauzimen ; 
 No us ochaizon de nien, 
 Sol que m fassatz derenan 
 Bona patz, qu'als no us dcman, 
 Que nulhs autres gauzardos 
 No m'en pot esser tan bos." 
 
 "Peyrols, raetetz en oblit 
 La bona domna valen 
 Qui tan gen vos aculhit 
 Et tant amorosamen." 
 
 Etc., etc., etc — Ed.
 
 428 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 in spite of the dissuasions of Love, and we shall presently see 
 ■what sort of a ftirewell he addressed to Syria, after having 
 stayed there for some time. Meanwhile I return to the second 
 class of pieces, which the Troubadours composed with reference 
 to the crusades. 
 
 These pieces were denominated prezies, prezicansas, that is 
 to say, exhortations or sermons ; and this title, which suits them 
 in every respect, leaves no uncertainty in regard to their ob- 
 ject. This was to exhort the masses of the Christian nations, 
 and more especially the chivalric class, to take up arms against 
 the infidels of the Holy Land. There can therefore be no 
 doubt, but that they were sung with a certain expenditure of 
 solemnity in public places, in the streets of the cities, at the 
 gate and in the interior of the castles, in short, in all places 
 where there were gatherings of people. 
 
 The subject-matter itself, the substance of these poetic ser- 
 mons, corresponded in every point with their object and their 
 name. Tlie arguments which the Troubadours used, to incite 
 the people to take the cross or to contribute money to defray 
 the expenses of the crusades, were copied from those which the 
 church made for the same purpose. They were arguments of 
 a pious, theological and mystic caste, which they generally 
 borrowed from the discourses of the monks and priests, al- 
 ready made and in the very formulas in which they found 
 them. 
 
 " God having died upon the cross for the salvation of men, 
 therefore to take the cross and to go to the Holy Land to fight 
 in his cause was the best opportunity for every Christian of re- 
 turning to God love for love, sacrifice for sacrifice. To die in 
 combating the infidels was the most desirable of deaths, it was 
 the certain exchange of the anxieties and miseries of earth for 
 the eternal joys of paradise. It was the height of folly in the 
 great seigniors and kings to engage in pitiless feuds amongst 
 themselves from petty motives of vain-glory or at the utmost to 
 gain a strip of land, instead of marching on with united forces 
 to exterminate the infidels." 
 
 Such are, reduced to their simplest expression, the religious 
 ingredients of nearly all the pieces of Provencal poetry on the 
 crusades. The Troubadours do not seem to have aimed at being 
 anything more than the auxiliaries of the ecclesiastical preach- 
 ers. What the latter said gravely and in prose in their churches, 
 the former repeated in the open air and with the additional 
 charms of music and of versification. 
 
 These pious exhortations, however, did not proceed with 
 equal propriety from the mouths of the ecclesiastics and from 
 those of the Proven9al poets. The church was at its ease in
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 429 
 
 regard to the secular powers ; tliere was no danger to be aj)pre- 
 hended from the grand seigniors and kings ; it had no occasion 
 to flatter their venality, their ambition, their turbulence, their 
 love of glory and of pleasure. More than ever at variance 
 with the nobles, to whose errors it imj)uted the disasters of the 
 preceding crusade, the church by no means thought of flattering 
 them ; and when it sent them to the Holy Land, it piqued it- 
 Gelf particularly on thus ofiering them an opportunity to ex 
 piate the habitual disorders of their chivalric life at home. 
 
 The case could not have been the same with the Troubadours 
 preaching the crusade. They were indeed persuaded of the 
 truth of whatever they uttered on the subject. But by the side 
 of this idea there were others, which it was difficult for them 
 to reconcile with it. For they also believed in chivalry, in 
 glory and in love ; and it was hard, that this creed of theirs, 
 on which their very existence and their genius might be said 
 to depend, should not also manifest itself to some extent on 
 those occasions even, on which they were expected to speak 
 none other than the austere language of religion and of faith. 
 Among the many poetic discourses on this crusade composed by 
 them, there may perhaps be some, in which this language 
 really predominates, sufficiently at least to cover whatever in- 
 congruities they may contain. But in the majority and in the 
 most remarkable of them, the poetic ideas of the Troubadours 
 break through distinctly, and in contrast with the religious 
 idea, which has the appearance of being their principal motive. 
 Hence, the diflferent degrees, shades and varieties of this con- 
 trast constitute the most piquant and the most characteristic 
 points of the species of composition in question. It is by taking 
 them under this point of view that I shall endeavor to give 
 some conception of them. 
 
 Peter Yidal, of Toulouse, composed several pieces of many 
 beauties of detail on the third crusade, in which he himself en- 
 listed in person. I subjoin liere a short passage from one of 
 them: 
 
 " Men ought not to be slow to excel in speech, and still more 
 in their actions, as long as life lasts ; for the world is but an 
 evanescent breath, and he commits the greatest folly who relies 
 the most on it." * This and what follows was serious enough 
 and very appropriate in an exhortation to the crusade. But 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. ir. p. 108. Piece XII. Strophe 3. 
 
 Horn no s deuria tarzar 
 De ben dir e de mielhs far, 
 Tan quan vida li es prezens, 
 Qu'elh segles non es mas vens, 
 E qui mais s'i fia 
 Fai maior follia, etc — Ed.
 
 430 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 Pierre Vidal, who plumed himself on his gcallantry and chival- 
 ric spirit, who had hiinself been knighted by one of his illus- 
 trious patrons, was not the man to speak long in this strain and 
 to lose sight of his favorite sentiments in five or six long stanzas 
 of his poem. I subjoin here the passage which precedes the 
 one I quoted above : 
 
 " If from fatigue or care I were to cease to sing, the world 
 would say, forsooth, my spirit and my valor were no longer 
 what they were wont to be. But I can swear witliout commit- 
 ting perjury, that never youth and chivalry and love and prow- 
 
 "* 
 
 ess delighted me so mucl 
 
 We perceive that the ordinary ideas of gallantry control here 
 the idea of the crusade, while they contrast still more strikingly 
 in the subsequent stanzas, where the poet again returns to speak 
 at great length of his lady-love, and appears to be much more 
 occupied with her than with the deliverance of the sacred 
 sepulchre. 
 
 I add now the two last stanzas of a piece which Rambaud de 
 Vaqueiras composed on the crusade, at the head of which the 
 marquis of Montferrat started for Palestine in the year 1204. 
 
 " Our Master commands us to march on to the conquest of 
 the Holy Sepulchre and of the Cross. Let him, therefore, who 
 wishes to be in His company and to live forever in the heavens, 
 die here below for him. Let him make every eifort to cross 
 the sea and to exterminate the dog-race of the infidels." 
 
 " Fair chevalier, for whom I sing, I know not whether on 
 thy account I ought to keep the cross or to abandon it ; I know 
 not, either, how to go or how to stay. For thy beauty causes 
 me so much suiFering, that I die when I behold thee, and in 
 any other company, where I see thee not, methinks I'm dying 
 in a desert." f 
 
 There is no need of my expatiating on the sort of contradic- 
 tion in which tlie lover-Troubadour involves the Troubadour- 
 crusader in this passage. I will quote another example, which 
 contains a similar instance of inconsistency. 
 
 ♦ The same poem. Strophe 1. 
 
 Si m laissava de chantar Cum esser solia ; 
 
 Per trebalh ni per afar, Mas en ver vos puesc jarar 
 
 Ben leu diria la gens Qu'ancmais no m plac tan jovena 
 
 Que no fos aitals mos sens Ni pretz ni cavallairia 
 
 Ni ma gallardia Ni domneis ni drudaria. — Ed. 
 
 t Raynouard, vol iv. p. 115. Piece No. XIV. The two last stanzas : 
 
 Nostre senher nos mand e ns ditz a totz Bels Cavayers, per cui fas sons e motz, 
 Qu'anem cobrar lo sepulcr'e la crotz : No sai si m lais per vos o m lev la crotz ; 
 
 E qui volra esser de sa companha Ni sai cum m'an, ni non sai com remanha, 
 
 Mueira per lui, si vol vius remaner Quar tan me fai vostre bel cors doler, 
 
 En paradis, e fassa son poder Qu' en muer si us vey, e quan no us puesc 
 
 De passar mar e d'aucir la gen canha. vezer 
 
 Cug murir sols ab tot' antra companha. — 
 
 Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 431 
 
 The famous Bertrand de Born was one of the Provencal 
 poets who preached the crusades. Among other pieces on this 
 subject lie composed one in honor of Conrad of Montferrat, 
 brother to the marquis Boniface, who, while awaiting the arri- 
 val of the kings Richard and Philip Augustus, defended him- 
 self in Syria with distinguished bravery against Saladin. The 
 second stanza of this piece is as follows : 
 
 " Sir Conrad, I commend thee to God, and I should also now 
 be over there with you, I vow, unless the delays of the counts, 
 the dukes, the princes, and the kings had obliged me to re- 
 nounce my project. Since then Pve seen my lady, my fair, 
 blonde lady ! and I have lost all courage to depart ; had this 
 not been, I should have made my voyage more than a year 
 ago." * 
 
 These examples suffice to show with what facility the ordi- 
 nary ideas of love and gallantry recur even in these exhora- 
 tions on the crusades, and in the midst of sentiments and 
 arguments of a religious character, which seemed by their 
 nature destined to exclude them. 
 
 These poetic discourses present also frequently an incongruity 
 of another description. The Troubadours strive to the utmost 
 of their ability to exalt the excellence of Christian ideas as com- 
 pared with the insignificance of worldly grandeur and glory, 
 and still in reality they cannot refrain from attaching the great- 
 est value to this glory, and from regarding the pursuit of it a 
 merit. Hence the pretension, on their part, to reconcile the 
 general ideas of chivalry, the natural tendencies of the chival- 
 ric spirit with the religious character and motives of the cru- 
 sades. 
 
 " What folly," says Pons de Capduelh, " what folly in every 
 doughty baron, not to succor the Cross and the Holy Sepul- 
 chre ! Since with fine armors, with glory, with courtesy, with 
 all that is prepossessing and honorable, we can obtain the joys 
 of Paradise." f 
 
 " We are going to see now," says another with the same assur- 
 ance of enthusiasm, " we are going to see now, who are those 
 who desire at the same time the glory of the world and the 
 glory of God ; for they can gain both the one and the other 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 95. Piece No. VI. Second strophe. 
 
 Seigner Conrat, a Jesu vos coman, Pois vi mi dons bell'e bloia, 
 
 Qu'eu fora lai ab vos, so vos affi, Per que s'anet mos cors afreollan, 
 
 Mas lassei m'en, quar se tarzaven tan Qu'eu fora lai, ben a passat un an. — Ed. 
 Li comt e ill due e ill rei e li princi, 
 
 t Raynonard, vol. iv. p. 92. Piece No. TV. Strophe 5. 
 
 Jamais no y s guap negus bars que pros sia, Et ab tot so qu'es belh et avinen 
 S'ar no socort la crotz e'l monumen, Podem aver honor e jauzimen 
 
 Qu'ab gen garnir, ab pretz, ab cortezia, En paradis; etc., etc. — Ed.
 
 432 
 
 nistory of Prmenqal Poet/ry. 
 
 who will resolutely set out on the pilgrimage to recover the 
 Holy Sepulchre." 
 
 Finally, among the pieces of the Troubadours on the cru- 
 sades, there are those in which the chivalric sentiment prepon- 
 derates over the religious, and these are naturally most in con- 
 formity with the general spirit of Provengal poetry. Such are, 
 for example, those of Giraud de Borneil, on this account the 
 most remarkable of all, those which contain the greatest degree 
 of elevation and unity of sentiment. I will give, from the two 
 finest of them, those passages which I did not find too difiicult 
 to translate, and I will give them as if they constituted but one 
 and the same piece. 
 
 " In honor of God 1 now resume again my songs, which I had 
 quite renounced. It's not the twitter of the birds, it's not the 
 newly budding foliage of spring, it's not my blithesomeness of 
 spirits that invite ray song. I am disheartened and incensed, 
 because I see evil predominate, merit degraded, and iniquity 
 rise." * 
 
 " I am amazed, when I consider to what extent the world is 
 steeped in sleep, how the root of all excellence is withered, and 
 with what exuberance the plant of evil germinates and thrives. 
 The insults offered to our God are scarcely heeded ; and whilst 
 with us the powers are quarrelling amongst themselves, those 
 perfidious, lawless Arabs are the undisturbed masters of Syria." 
 
 " But the moment now is come, when no courageous man, 
 and valiant in arms, can any longer, without disgrace, refuse 
 to serve the cause of God. And since wherever there is a 
 proper disposition, the Holy Spirit adds the power, let every 
 one be on his guard, lest he should compromise the sacred en- 
 terprise. Let those who are responding to the call of God but 
 constitute one single individual force. Success was never seen 
 to spring from wills at variance." 
 
 " The more powerful one is, the more he ought to strive to 
 prove himself acceptable to God. Fine arms and courtesy and 
 
 * Lexique Roman, vol. i. p. 388. 
 
 Al honor Dieu torn en mon chan 
 Don m'era lonhatz et partitz, 
 E no mi torna braitz ni critz 
 D'auzels ni fuelba de verjan, 
 Ni ges no m'esjau en chantan, 
 Aus sui corrossos e marritz 
 
 Qu'en mainz escritz 
 
 Conosc et vey 
 Que podera pechatz, 
 Per que I'alh fes, e sors enequitatz. 
 
 E cossir mout meravelhan 
 Com s'es lo segles endurmltz, 
 E com ben seca la razitz 
 E'l mals s'abriv'e vai poian, 
 Qu'er a penas prez'om ni blan 
 
 Si Dieus es anctatz ni laiditz 
 
 Qu'als Arabitz 
 
 Traitors, sens ley, 
 Keman Suria en patz, 
 E sai tenson entre las poestatz. 
 
 Mais pero ges non es semblan 
 Qu'om valens d'arnias ni arditz, 
 Po3 c'a tal coch'er Dieus falhitz, 
 Ja sens vergonha torn denan ; 
 Mas selh qu'aura pres d'autnii bran 
 De grans colps, e del sieu feritz, 
 
 Er aculhitz 
 
 E de son rey 
 Si tenra per pagatz, 
 Qu'el nou es ges de donar yssarratz. 
 
 Etc., etc Ed'
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 433 
 
 elegant diversions are no longer an evil, the moment the Holy 
 Spirit takes root in them. The gallant man, he who is eager 
 to gain distinction, will not be hated by God on account of his 
 prowess or for the courteous polish of his manners." 
 
 " All noble pleasures, provided only the heart and faith be 
 not at fault, will on some future day be pardoned. A man of 
 lofty nature cannot live in sadness and anxiety. And if youth 
 and joy are now dishonored and proscribed, it is the fault of 
 those ignoble men in power, who know no longer the worth of 
 gifts and hospitality, and who are frightened at every generous 
 act." 
 
 " But let us leave these despicable men ; it is too painful to 
 speak of them ; and let us rather think of destroying the 
 haughty Turks and their nefarious law." 
 
 This wholly poetical and courteous indulgence, as we might 
 term it, with which Giraud de Borneil, however religious in 
 other respects he may appear in these fragments, treats here the 
 tastes and usages of chivalry, is remarkable enough ; and one 
 might be tempted to regard it as the evidence of a manifest 
 tendency to transfer the initiative of the crusades from the 
 clergy to the feudal order ; and this tendency was, in fact, one 
 of those which in the twelftli and thirteenth centuries developed 
 the struggle between the priesthood and the empire. 
 
 Among the Troubadours, who in their predications on the 
 crusades preferred, by way of exception to the general rule, to 
 enforce the arguments of a purely religious and ecclesiastical 
 description, there were some who endeavored at least to appro- 
 priate these arguments, to impart to them the impress of their 
 imagination, to give them a freer turn, a more poetic form. Of 
 this number was Pierre Cardinal, a Troubadour of great distinc- 
 tion, concerning whom I shall have much to say, when we shall 
 have arrived at the consideration of the satiric forms of Pro- 
 vencal poetry. We have from him a piece on the tliird crusade, 
 in which he almost exclusively employs arguments of a pious 
 and mystical character ; but these arguments he endeavors to 
 embellish, sometimes with a more ingenious expression, some- 
 times with images, which have not the appearance of being 
 borrowed from the ordinary language of the church. I think I 
 can quote a few examples of them."^ 
 
 " Of the four extremities of the cross, the one aspires toward 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 444. Piece No. XVI. 
 
 Dels quatre caps que a la cros Que Crist o a tot en poder. 
 Ten I'us sus ves lo firmamen, 
 
 L'autre ves abis qu'es dejos I-^a crotz es lo dreg gofainos 
 
 E l'autre ten ves Orien Del rey cui tot quant es apen. . . . 
 
 E l'autre ten ves Occiden, Etc., etc. — Ed. 
 E per aital entresenlia 
 
 28
 
 43i Jlistory of Provengal Poetry, 
 
 the firmament, the other is directed downward toward the 
 
 abyss ; a third points to the east, the last to the west. The 
 
 cross thus indicates, that the power of Christ extends to all 
 
 parts of the universe." 
 
 " Tlie cross is the true banner of the king on which all things 
 
 depend 
 
 ******** 
 
 " Surely, this was a marvellous event, that the tree, which 
 had borne death, brought us new life and pardon. Everyman, 
 who will seek it, will find upon the cross the true fruit of the 
 tree of knowledge." 
 
 " This fruit so fair, this fruit so sweet, we are all invited to 
 gather in love. Let us then gather while the season lasts: 
 to assume the cross is gathering it." 
 
 In summing up what I have just said on the conduct and 
 the sentiments of the Troubadours in reference to the third cru- 
 sade, or to those which followed it in immediate succession, 
 we see that they exerted themselves at all events in behalf of 
 the success of these expeditions ; and there is everything to 
 warrant the presumption, that these songs were not without 
 their influence on the resolutions of so many gallant chevaliers, 
 who marched on to the relief of the Holy Land, under the ban- 
 ner of Eichard Coeur-de-Lion, of Philip Augustus, of Boniface 
 of Montferrat, and of the legates of Pope Honorus III. 
 
 The result of the crusades, not even excepting the one which 
 Philip Augustus and Richard Cceur-de-Lion commanded in per- 
 son, was by no means commensurate with the enthusiasm and 
 the immense resources with which they had been undertaken. 
 Philip Augustus withdrew as soon as he could do so with some 
 show of honor, and suffered his illustrious rival to exhaust his 
 strength in efforts more brilliant than useful, and which pro- 
 duced no change in the precarious condition of the Christian 
 powers in Syria. 
 
 Matters were still worse in the subsequent crusades, where 
 several instances of over-hasty success served only to bring on 
 irreparable disasters. But I could not do better than quote on 
 this subject a short passage from an elegant writer, to whom 
 we are indebted for the last and best history of the crusades. 
 
 " The third crusade, however unfortunate in its results," says 
 M. Midland, " did not give rise to so many complaints as that 
 of Bernard, for the reason that it was not without glory. 
 Nevertheless it found its censors, and the arguments which 
 were adduced in its defence bear a strong resemblance to those 
 which were employed by the apologists of the second sacred 
 war. ' There are people,' says one of them, ' who reasoning 
 without discernment, have had the audacity to maintain, that
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 435 
 
 the pilgrims had gained nothing in the land of Jerusalem, since 
 the Holy City had been left in the power of the Saracens. But 
 do these men regard the spiritual triumph of a hundred thousand 
 martyrs as nothing ? Who can doubt of the salvation of so 
 many noble warriors, who of their own accord condemned 
 themselves to all sorts of privations, in order to merit heaven, 
 and whom we, we ourselves have seen, in the midst of all those 
 perils, attending daily the mass which their own chaplains cele- 
 brated V Thus," adds M. Michaud, " thus spoke Gauthier Vini- 
 sauf, a contemporary writer. To enumerate among the advan- 
 tages of a crusade the immense number of martyrs which it 
 made, must appear to us a singular idea." 
 
 As to the Troubadours, who were by no means deficient in 
 this religious enthusiasm, as we have had abundant opportuni- 
 ties to see, they still could not reconcile themselves so piously 
 to the results of the expeditions which they had preached with 
 so much ardor. In the midst of such a multitude of martyrs, 
 they could have wished to see a certain number of Christians 
 still alive and victorious. Tliey depicted the evils and the re- 
 verses of the crusades, without any fear or consideration, and 
 attributed them to those to whom they were legitimately to be 
 charged, to the ecclesiastical or military leaders of these enter- 
 prises. The more zeal they had exhibited in their martial ex- 
 hortations, the greater was the boldness and the bitterness of 
 their palinodes ; and when we compare the latter with the- 
 former, it is sometimes necessary to assure ourselves that they 
 are really both the works of one and the same poet. 
 
 The abrupt return of Philip Augustus, which compromised 
 the presumable results of the third crusade, appears to have 
 been one of the incidents, at which the Troubadours took most 
 offence. One of their number, whom I have already q^uoted^ 
 Pierre Yidal of Toulouse, composed a piece, which contains the 
 following passage : 
 
 " The Pope and his false doctors have put the holy church in. 
 such distress, that God himself has become incensed at it. 
 Tlianks to their sins and to their follies, the heretics have risen ; 
 for when they give the example of iniquity, it is difficult to find, 
 one, who'll abstain from it."* 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 105. Piece VI. Strophes 2, 3, 4. 
 
 Quar com an vout en tal pantays E mov de Fransa tot I'esglaya 
 
 L'apostolis e 'Ih fals doctor D'els qui solon esser melhor, 
 
 Sancta gleiza, don dieus s'irays, Qu'el reys non es lis ni verays 
 
 Que tan son fol e peccador Vas pretz ni vas nostre senlior, , 
 
 Per que I'eretge son levat ; Qu'el sepulcre a dezamparat, 
 
 E quar ilh comenso 4 peccat, E compr' e vent e fai m£rcat 
 
 Greu es qui als far en pogues, Atressi cum servs o borges, 
 
 Mas ieu non vuelh esser plagues. Per que son aunit siei Franses. . 
 
 Etc., etc. — Ed.
 
 436 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 "It is from France the wliole disaster comes, from France, 
 which was in times of yore the land of the brave ; but this 
 land has at present a king, who falls short of the requirements of 
 glory and of God ; a king who has abandoned the Holy Sepul- 
 chre ; a king who buys, sells, and holds market like a 
 peasant or a bourgeois, thus making the French the object of 
 contempt." 
 
 " The world goes on in such a fashion, that what was bad 
 yesterday is worse to-day, and since the guide of the warriors 
 of God, the valiant Frederic has perished, we have no longer 
 heard men speak of an emperor glorious or brave." 
 
 The emperor, Henry YI., had not yet ordained the preach- 
 ing of the crusade of 1196, when Peter Yidal expressed him- 
 self in these terms. In speaking of him, subsequently to that 
 crusade, the Troubadour would not have limited himself to a 
 vague and disdainful allusion in regard to him. 
 
 But the most piquant of all the pieces of the Troubadours, 
 relative to the issue of the crusades of this period, is by the 
 same Peirols, from whom I have above translated the graceful 
 colloquy with love which he composed at the epoch of" his de- 
 parture for the Holy Land. The piece now in question is of a 
 later date ; it was written in Syria, immediately after the re- 
 taking of Damietta by the Sultan of Egypt, from whom the 
 Christian crusaders had wrested it the year before, by dint of 
 incredible exertions and hardships. The expedition had been 
 conducted in the name of Frederic IL, and under the com- 
 mand of two of his lieutenants. AVe will now see what Peirols 
 says at the moment of leaving the Holy Land for Provence : 
 
 " I have seen the river Jordan ; I have seen the sepulchre, 
 and I return thee thanks, thou veritable God and Lord of 
 lords, for having shown me the sacred land where thou wast 
 born : this sight has tilled my soul with satisfaction."* 
 
 " I now ask nothing more than a good sea and good winds, a 
 good ship and good pilots, that I may speedily return to Mar- 
 seilles ; hence I will bid adieu to Sur, to St. Jean d'Acre and 
 to Tripoli ; to the hospital, the temple and the sea of Koland." 
 
 " The valiant king Richard was sorrily replaced here ; on a 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 101. Piece No. IX. Strophes 1-5. 
 
 (1) Pus flum Jordan ai vist e 'I monimen Ni qui.faitz revs, ni datz castels ni tors ; 
 
 A voSjVers dieus, qui cs senher dels sen- Quar pus son rics, vos tenon a nien; 
 
 hors Qu'ieu vi antan faire man sagramen 
 
 Ne ren merces, quar vos plac tan d'onors L' emperador, don ar s'en vai camjan, 
 
 Qu'el saucte loc on nasques veramen Quo fes lo guasc que traisses de I'afan. 
 M'avetz mostrat, don ai mon cor jauzen ; 
 
 Quar s'ieu era en Proensa, d'un an (5) Emperador, Daraiata us aten ; 
 
 No m clamarian Sarrazis Johan. E nueg e jorn plora la blanca tors 
 
 * * * * Per vostr' aigla qu'engitet U3 voutors. 
 
 (4) Belh senher dieus, si feyssetz a mon sen, Etc., etc. — Ed. 
 
 Ben guardaratz qui faitz emperadors,
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 437 
 
 sudden France lost its gracious king, and the fleurs-de-lis the 
 good seignior they recently adorned. Spain too had a brave 
 king, which now it has no more ; Montferrat mourns the loss 
 of its good marquis, and the empire that of its valiant emperor. 
 And I know not how their successors will conduct themselves." 
 
 " Good Lord of heaven ! Wert thou to follow my advice, 
 thou wouldst consider well whom thou madest emperor, whom 
 thou madest king, and to whom thou gavest towers and castles. 
 No sooner are they in power, than men no longer make any 
 account of thee, and I have seen the emperor at another time 
 swear many a solemn oath, which to-day he falsifies." 
 
 " Emperor (to Damietta) ! Damietta waits for you ; the 
 white tower weeps by day and night demanding back your 
 eagle, which a vulture has chased away. The eagle, which 
 suffers itself to be beaten by a vulture, is verily a coward. The 
 glory acquired by the Soudan is a disgrace to you ; and apart 
 from your disgrace, it is an evil for us all ; it is a prejudice to 
 our authority." 
 
 This short piece contains perhaps more energy, vivacity and 
 poetic warmth than any other of those, in which the Trouba- 
 dours preached the crusades, and the causes of this phenomenon 
 are not difficult to be accounted for. To poets, who, like the 
 Troubadours, were deficient in intellectual resources and in 
 acquirements, the somewhat varied development of a vague and 
 general idea, like that of the crusades, must have been the 
 most difficult thing in the world. There was nothing, not even 
 their religious belief, but what was in certain respects an 
 obstacle in the way of this development. Scarcely able to con- 
 ceive a language more powerful and consequently more poeti- 
 cal than the simple and precise formulas of their creed, they 
 could not be tempted to deviate from them to any very great 
 extent. 
 
 When, on the other hand, they came to speak of the reverses, 
 the miscalculations, the errors and the vices of the crusaders, 
 they then did nothing more than labor in the field of historical 
 satire, and then their delineations and their allusions participate 
 more or less of the positive interest and of the natural variety 
 of their subjects. 
 
 Apart from its intrinsic merit, the piece by Peirols, whicli I 
 have just quoted, is remarkable for an accidental peculiarity. 
 It was written, as I have already mentioned, about the year 
 1222. It is, I believe, the only piece of its kind, that can be 
 mentioned as having been composed during the interval be- 
 tween 1204, the epoch of the crusade of the marquis of Mont- 
 ferrat, and 1228, the epoch of that of the emperor Frederic 
 n. During this interval of twenty years, the south of France
 
 438 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 had been the theatre of events, which had violently diverted 
 the attention of the Troubadours from the affairs of the East. 
 
 These enthusiastic advocates of the holy wars had learnt, to 
 their surprise and at their own expense, the real nature and the 
 causes of these wars, for which they had before scarcely found 
 enthusiasm enough in their age and country. They had seen 
 the crusades against the Albigenses substituted for the crusades 
 against the Mussulmans, which they had seconded to the utmost 
 of their power. They had seen the population, whether heretic 
 or not, of several of their most flourishing towns butchered by 
 hordes of European crusaders ; they had witnessed the devasta- 
 tion of their fields, the burning or the demolishment of those 
 castles, which had so long been the places of their chief delight ; 
 they had witnessed the massacre, the exile and the spoliation 
 of the flower of the chivalry of the South, of those courteous, 
 polished seigniors, who had been at once their rivals and their 
 patrons. In the midst of the tumult and the desolation of these 
 disorders, they did not cease to sing ; but what a change in the 
 tone, in the character and in the subject of their songs ! 
 
 In the horriblS crisis of this long struggle between their 
 ecclesiastical and political chiefs, they had energetically es- 
 poused the cause of the latter, and the poetry of the Provengals 
 had for a long time been nothing more than a dolorous concert 
 of complaints and imperfections against the clergy. 
 
 After the energy of the Provencals, roused by these misfor- 
 tunes, had succeeded in removing for a moment the scourge of 
 these crusades from their country, and when the tide of crusaders 
 could again resume its natural course toward the countries 
 of the Mussulmans, the Troubadours were no longer so eager to 
 increase this tide, or to contribute to its rapidity. Their 
 religious enthusiasm had become, as it were, isolated from the 
 church and turned against it. Their poetic enthusiasm itself 
 had received some severe shocks from the disasters, which had 
 changed the appearance of the South. 
 
 AVe have but few Provengal songs on the crusades of the 
 emperor Frederic II. ; and those we have are exclusively 
 by Troubadours, who were particularly devoted to Frederic, 
 who preached his crusade in his personal interest and by no 
 means in the general interest of Christianity and of the church. 
 These songs are yet elegant and correct, as far as the diction and 
 versification is concerned, but still they are, at bottom, nothing 
 more than slightly varied repetitions of those which preceded 
 them. They are distinguished from them only by their traits 
 of satire, directly aimed against the clergy. 
 
 " The world, to speak the truth, has grievously degenerated 
 in point of merit," says Folquet de Eomans ; " and the clerks,
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Trovhadours. 439 
 
 who ought to uphold the good, are the worst of all. They love 
 war more than peace ; such pleasure do they find in malice 
 and in sin. I should have been glad to have been a follower of 
 the first crusades ; but nearly everything 1 see in this one, dis- 
 pleases me."* 
 
 I will not dwell upon the crusade of Thibaut, the count of 
 Champagne and king of Navarre, which took place between 
 1232 and 1236. Thibaut himself composed several pieces on 
 this expedition, which are in French, among the oldest or the 
 oldest of the kind. But the Troubadours of the South were not 
 inspired by it. They do not seem to have waked up from 
 their indifference for a single moment, until the announcement 
 of the crusades of St. Louis, to which the personal character of 
 the monarch gave an interest of a particular description. On 
 the various incidents of these expeditions, including the death 
 of St. Louis, which formed their catastrophe, there are yet 
 extant a dozen pieces by different Troubadours, most of whom 
 are quite obscure. 
 
 These pieces exhibit hardly a vestige of the tone and senti- 
 ments of those, which the crusades of Richard and of Philip 
 Augustus had inspired scarcely more than half a century before. 
 They are nothing more than lamentations over the repugnance, 
 which the men of the feudal and chivalric order at that time 
 manifested for this sort of expeditions ; and these lamentations, 
 which were in general as insipid as they were true, attested 
 the rapid decadence of Provengal poetry and at the same time 
 that of the former zeal in favor of the crusades. 
 
 " The knights, who died in Syria, have brought us into great 
 affliction," says Lanfranc Cigala,t " and the harm would be still 
 greater, if God had not received them into his company. But 
 as for the chevaliers on this side of the sea, I do not see them 
 very ardent to recover the sacred heritage. Oh chevaliers ! ye 
 are afraid of death. If the Turks abandoned their banner, they 
 would find multitudes of champions to pursue them ; but, firmly 
 planted at their posts, they find but few assailants." 
 
 " There are many men," says Raymond Graucelm of Beziers. 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 126. Piece No. XX. 1st strophe. 
 
 Tornatz es en pauc de valor Que maia anon guerra que patz, 
 
 Lo segles, qui ver en vol dir, Tan lur play maleza e peccatz ; 
 E'l clergue son ja li peior Per qu'al premier passatge 
 
 Que degran los bes mantenir, M'en volria esser passatz, 
 
 E an un tal usatge Qu'el maia de quan vey mi desplatz — Ed. 
 
 f Raynouard, vol. v. p. 245. 
 
 Grans es lo dols e maior for' assatz Ai ! cavallier, aves de mort paors ! 
 
 Dels cavalliers qui son mort en Suria, Eu crei qu'ill Tare fugisson de la'nseingna, 
 
 Si no'ls agues dieus pres en eompaingnia ; fosson tan com li cerf en Sardeingna 
 
 Mas eels de sai no vey gair'encoratz Qu'il troberan a pro de cassadors ; 
 
 De recobrar las saintas heretatz. Mas qui no s mov a pauc d'envazidor.— ^d.
 
 440 . History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 one of the most indifferent Troubadours, from whom anytliing 
 has come down to us, " there are many men, who pretended to 
 be about to enter on the expedition, but who had really not the 
 least desire. Excuses are not wanting to them. I cannot go 
 without a royal pay, says one ; and I am sick, another ; had I 
 no children, nothing could keep me here, assures a third."* 
 
 The death of St. Louis even, although it filled all France with 
 grief, did not inspire anything more poetical than this. The 
 least insipid of the three pieces which we have on this event, 
 consists of a long and stupid imprecation against the clergy. 
 " A ccursed be Alexandria ! cursed be the clergy, cursed be the 
 Turks !" exclaims the author, not knowing what he should say 
 further, and all this ends at last in groans and lamentations over 
 the loss of all courtesy and chivalry. The poetry of the Pro- 
 vencals was surely in a worse state even than their chivalry, 
 when it produced things like these. 
 
 The only Proven§al piece relative to the crusades of St. Louis, 
 which deserves particular notice in this survey, is somewhat 
 anterior to those, to which I have just alluded. It must have 
 been composed toward the year 1266, four years before the 
 death of St. Louis, and the events to which it principally re- 
 lates, are of the year 1265. 
 
 This year was one of singular disaster to the Christians of 
 Syria. The famous Bibars, who at that time ruled over Egypt 
 under the name of Malek Daher, had gained great advantages 
 over them ; he had defeated their Tartar, Armenian and Persian 
 auxiliaries. He had taken in the first place the city of 
 Coesarea and then the castle of Arsouf, two places which St. 
 Louis had fortified with the utmost care during his sojourn in 
 Palestine. And Bibars, elated by these victories, was wholly 
 intent on gaining fresh laurels ; he menaced the Christian towns 
 of Syria, all of which trembled, considering themselves already 
 lost. 
 
 At this same time, the popes, instead of considering the 
 perilous condition of the Holy Land, ordered the preaching of 
 a crusade against Manfroi, the natural son of Frederic H., who 
 at the death of his father had made himself master of the king- 
 dom of Naples, which they had given to Charles of Anjou, the 
 brother of St. Louis. It was with his head filled and troubled 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 135. Piece No. XXIV. Strophe 3. 
 
 Mas trop d'omes son qu'eras fan semblansa 
 Que passaran, e ges non an dezire ; 
 Don se sabran del pas^ar escondire 
 Ganren d'aquelhs, e diran ses duptansa : 
 leu passera, si'l soutz del rey agues; 
 L'autre diran : leu no sny benanans ; 
 L'autre diran : S'ieu non agues efans, 
 Tost passera, que say no m tengra ies.~ Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 441 
 
 by all these events, that a Provencal templar, whose name is 
 unknown, composed the following piece : 
 
 " Sorrow and anger have taken possession of my soul, and 
 they very nearly kill me. We fall beneath the burden of that 
 very cross, which we had assumed in honor of him, who was 
 attached to it. No cross nor law avails us any longer against 
 these accursed traitors of Turks. It appears on the contrary, 
 and every man can clearly see it, that God sustains them to our 
 misfortune."* 
 
 "They've conquered Csesarea at the outset and taken the 
 strong castle of Arsouf by assault. Lord God ! what will be- 
 come of so many knights, so many squires, so many commoners, 
 who were within the walls of Arsouf ? Alas ! the kingdom of 
 Syria has already lost so many of its sons, that its power is 
 fallen forever." 
 
 "And believe not that they imagine to have accomplish 
 enough, these cursed Turks ! They have sworn most solemnly, 
 that they'll not leave a single man in all those places who be- 
 lieves in Christ ; of the church of St. Mary, they say they'll 
 make a vaahomary. Yery well ! If God, to whom all this 
 should be displeasing, gives his consent to it and finds it good, 
 we too must be content." 
 
 " He therefore is a fool who seeks to quarrel with the Turks, 
 when Jesus Christ allows them everything. What wonder, 
 then, that they have vanquished Franks, Tartars, Armenians 
 and Persians, and that they daily fight us here, us Templars ? 
 God, who was formerly awake, is now asleep ; Mahomet exerts 
 himself to the utmost of his power, and makes his servant Malek 
 Daher work." 
 
 " The Pope is lavish of his indulgences to those of Aries and 
 France against the Germans ; but he is stingy of them here with 
 us. What say I ? Our crosses are exchanged for the crosses of 
 tournaments, and the war of outra-mar for that of Lombardy ; 
 
 * Baynouard, vol. iv. p. 131. Piece XXII. entire. 
 
 (1.) Ira e dolor s'ea dins mon cor asseza, Qne dins los murs d'Assur avia? 
 
 Si qu'a per pane no m'auci denianea, Ailas ! lo regne deSuria 
 
 Quar nos met jos la crotz qu'aviam N'a tant perdut que, qui n vol dir lo 
 
 preza ver, 
 
 En la honor d'aisselh qu'en crotz fos Per tos temps mais n'es mermatz de 
 raes ; poder. 
 
 Que crotz nileynonsvalninsguia 
 
 Contra'ls fels Turcx que dieus (5.) Lo papa fa de perdon gran largueza 
 
 maldia, Contr' Alamans ab Aries e Frances : 
 
 Ans es semblans, segon qu'hom pot E saimest nos mostran gran cobeeza, 
 
 vezer, Quar nostras crotz van per crotz de 
 Qu'a dan de nos los vol dieus mantener. tomes, 
 
 E qui vol camjar romania 
 2.) Al comensar an Cezaria conqueza. Per la guerra de Lombardia, 
 
 E'l fort castelh d'Assur per forsa pres. Nostres legatz, don ieu vos die per ver 
 
 Ai ! senher dieus, e qual via an preza Qu'els vendon dieu e'l perdon per aver. 
 Tan cavalier, tan sirven, tan borzes — Ed.
 
 442 History of ProvenQol Poetry. 
 
 nay, I tell you for a truth, we have legates who vend God and 
 indulgences for money." 
 
 " Seigniors of France, let Lombardy alone ; Alexandria has 
 done you greater harm than Lombardy ; — it was at Alexandria 
 that you were vanquished by the Turks, made prisoners, and 
 compelled to pay your ransom." 
 
 Language of this description, in which the chagrin of a great 
 disappointment appears already to assume a tincture of irony 
 and of religious skepticism, indicates clearly enough that the 
 time of the crusades was over, and that if St. Louis went to 
 Massoura to be made prisoner, and afterward to Africa to die, 
 it was not from a want of indications which ought to have made 
 him anticipate some issue of this kind.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 443 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE LYRICAL POETRY OF THE TROUBADOrRS. 
 
 v. — PIECES RELATING TO THE CRUSADES. 
 
 WARS AGAINST THE ARABS OF SPAIN. 
 
 The crusades were a general movement of Christianity against 
 Islamism. It was therefore impossible that the Arabs of Spain, 
 who were so near the centre of this movement, should not have 
 been affected by it more or. less, should not have had their 
 share of the hurricane which swept against their brethren of 
 the East. 
 
 All the relations subsisting between the Andalusian Arabs 
 and the Christian nations on this side of the Pyrenees, were 
 founded on such powerful antecedents, they were to such an 
 extent the result of time and necessity, that the crusades them- 
 selves could not produce any essential change in them ; and these 
 pious expeditions rather followed, than determined, the impul- 
 sions which had already been given long before tliem. 
 
 For three entire centuries (from 715 till 1019) the popula- 
 tions of the south of France had been obliged to keep up a 
 terrible struggle against the Arabs of Andalusia ; they had 
 divided with the Spaniards of the northwest of the Peninsula 
 the glorious task of repelling the aggressions of Islamism, and 
 of driving it back to that coast of Africa from whence it had 
 first planted its foot on the soil of Europe. But from the year 
 1020 these same populations had ceased to be directly interested 
 in the enterprises of the Arabs ; and in the wars against them 
 they only interfered accidentally, and as the auxiliaries of the 
 Spanish populations. 
 
 From this moment the commercial and business connections, 
 which had commenced long before this time, between Mussul- 
 man Spain and the south of France, were gradually multiplied 
 and consolidated ; and there is every indication, that at the 
 beginning of the twelfth century they had already become 
 pretty generally established and diversified. Nearly all the
 
 444 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 traces of that religions liorror wliicli the two coimtries had felt 
 for each other, amid the intensity of their earlier struggles, had 
 now disappeared. The superiority of the Arabs in all the arts 
 of civilization was generally perceived by the higher classes of 
 society in the South. They were admired ; they were adopted 
 as models ; and this propensity in their favor was generally 
 yielded to without any repugnance. 
 
 Moreover, in the eyes of the Christians, the Arabs of Spain 
 were in general not guilty of the same injustice toward the 
 former as those in Syria. They did not occupy the land where 
 Jesus Christ was born ; they exercised no dominion over the 
 banks of Jordan ; they were not in possession of the Holy Se- 
 pulchre, nor had they ever profaned it. Tliis was a sort of merit 
 for which the Troubadours eagerly gave them credit, even in 
 the heat of their excitement for the crusades ; and there is one 
 of these Troubadours who goes even so far as not to be willing to 
 exempt the Spaniards from the duty of joining in the crusades 
 of Syria, in consideration of their wars against the Mussulmans, 
 their neighbors : " For," says he, " although they are wicked 
 Saracens, they are still not those who have demolished the 
 sacred tomb of Jesus Christ." 
 
 From all these circumstances, we perceive that the crusades 
 against the Arabs of Spain could neither be so animated nor 
 so frequent as those against their brethren in Syria. More 
 than this : there was, properly speaking, not one crusade 
 against the Mahometan conquerors of the I*eninsula, in which 
 some oppressed Mussulman party, which at the moment found 
 its interests identified with those of the Christians, did not figure 
 as the ally of the latter against those very conquerors ; and the 
 grand policy of the crusaders consisted in seizing the occasions 
 for such alliances. 
 
 The first expedition undertaken under the name of a crusade, 
 against the Mussulmans of Spain, corresponds exactly with the 
 crusade of St. Bernard, and has every appearance of having 
 entered into the general plan of the latter, as its accessory. 
 This was the epoch of a great political crisis in the Peninsula. 
 
 The African chiefs, who, under the name of Almoravides, 
 had ruled for nearly a century both in Spain and Africa, were at 
 that time in great danger of losing their authority over these 
 countries. On the other side of tlie strait, they were assailed 
 by a new party, by that of the Almohades ; and in the Penin- 
 sula by the Arabs of Andalusia, who, having been opj^ressed 
 and discontented for a long time, were now revolting on every 
 side for the purpose of recovering their independence. 
 
 The Christian chiefs of Spain, seeing their adversaries at vari- 
 ance with each other, regarded the moment as a propitious one
 
 The Lyrical Poetry cf the Trovhadours. 445 
 
 to aggrandize themselves at their expense. Witli a view to 
 this, they organized a league, of which the king of Castile, 
 Alphonse VII., was elected chief, with the title of Emperor; and 
 this league colluded, or pretended to collude, with the Almora- 
 vides, who, in the desperate condition of their aliairs, had no 
 longer any other choice of expedients. 
 
 All the smaller powers of the coasts of the Mediterranean, 
 Italian as well as Provencal, entered into this league, in which 
 they were expected to act in concert with the count of Barce- 
 lona. The seignior of Marseilles, William de Baux, William 
 VI. of Montpellier, and the celebrated viscountess Ermen- 
 garde of Narbonne, are those of the nobles of the South whom 
 history designates as having figured most actively in this aftair. 
 There is no doubt, but that among the motives from which this 
 episode of a crusade was undertaken, the interests of commerce 
 and of industry were not without their influence. It also ap- 
 pears that the nobles of the interior of the country did not par- 
 ticipate in it ; many of them having, indeed, already enlisted in 
 the contemporary crusade of Raymond V. 
 
 It is not my part to occupy myself with the military and politi- 
 cal results, either of this first crusade against the Mussulmans of 
 Spain, or of those that succeeded it. My task is limited to the in- 
 quiry, what part the Provencal Troubadours took in these expedi- 
 tions ; and they took part in all of them. They sung and preached 
 them all with the same zeal as they did those of Syria, and 
 generally even with a greater degree of talent and success. 
 
 It is not, however, solely on account of their higher or lower 
 literary merit, that the compositions of the Troubadours on the 
 crusades of Spain are entitled to some attention : it is also, 
 and quite as much, on account of the hints which they contain 
 in regard to the relations subsisting between the south of France 
 and Spain, both Mussulman and Christian, at the epoch of their 
 origin. This being understood, I now return to the crusade 
 of Alphonse VU. 
 
 Marcabrus is the only Troubadour who is known to have 
 sung of it. There are yet extant two pieces by him relative to 
 it, which, in spite of the vagueness and the obscurity of many 
 of the details, are nevertheless still curious enough. 
 
 The first is an exhortation, a sort of poetic predication, des- 
 tined to be sung in public, and for the purpose of rousing the 
 imagination of individuals and masses to the importance of the 
 
 frand enterprise projected against the Arabs of Andalusia, 
 he predication in question exhibits only this peculiarity, that it 
 seems to have been primitively destined to be addressed to the 
 inhabitants of Spain ; for the author always designates Spain 
 as the country in which he found himself at the moment he is
 
 446 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 supposed to be speaking. The most probable supposition is, 
 that the piece was sung on both sides of the Pyrenees. 
 
 The poem is essentially religious, but yet the spirit of the 
 Troubadours makes itself felt here and there by some outbursts 
 of admiration or of sympathetic indulgence for the ideas and 
 the manners of chivalry. The war against the infidels is mys- 
 tically represented as a sort of piscina or spiritual lavatory, to 
 which each Christian is invited to hasten, in order to purify 
 himself from his sins ; and as the term lavador {lavatory) re- 
 curs at a certain fixed place in every couplet, the piece has from 
 that circumstance also assumed the title of Lavador. Accord- 
 ing to the Provengal traditions it was quite celebrated among 
 the compositions of the Troubadours. I do not intend either 
 to justify or to explain this celebrity. Nevertheless, as the 
 piece is the most ancient one of its kind, and as there is every 
 appearance of its having served as the model for several of those 
 which were afterward composed for the crusades of Syria ; as, 
 moreover, it contains express indications of the influence, 
 which the revolutions of Mahometan Spain were at that time 
 still exercising over the south of France, I deem it my duty to 
 endeavor to give an analysis of it. I shall translate it as closely 
 as possible, at the inevitable risk of frequently becoming 
 strange and stiflT; and I must notice in the first place, that with 
 an oddity, quite unique in its kind, the piece commences with 
 a Latin verse which has the appearance of having been a for- 
 mula from the liturgy. 
 
 " Pax in nomine Domini. Marcabrus composed this song, 
 the verse and music both. Hear what he says : The Lord, the 
 king of heaven, has in his mercy opened unto us, quite near at 
 hand, a lavatory, the like of which does not exist on this side 
 of the sea, nor even beyond it, along the valley of Jehosaphat. 
 
 " We ought all in obedience to reason, to purify ourselves 
 both evening and morning. Let him therefore, who desires to 
 cleanse himself, while he has life and strength, hasten to the 
 sacred lavatory, which is the source of our health. Woe be to 
 us, if we die before availing ourselves of this advantage ! Far 
 below, in the abyss, shall be assigned to us our abode eternal, 
 by the powers on high !" 
 
 " Avarice and perfidy have banished pleasure and youtli 
 from the world. Ah ! what a sad spectacle, to see each coveting 
 the things, the gain of which will be a hell to him, unless, before 
 closing forever eye and mouth, he hasten to the sacred lava- 
 tory ! Haughty and stern as he may be, still every one will 
 find one stronger than himself in death." 
 
 " The Lord, who knows whatever is, whatever was and shall 
 be, doth promise us his recompense by the voice of the em-
 
 The, Lyrical Poetry of the Trovhadours. 447 
 
 peror (of Spain). Know ye what splendor will be awaiting 
 those, who shall cleanse themselves in the lavatory, who shall 
 avenge God for the insults which the pagans of Arabia have 
 offered him ? Tlieir splendor shall excel that of the star, 
 which guides the mariner." 
 
 " The dog-race of the Prophet, the traitorous followers of the 
 grand impostor are so abundant here (on this side of the moun- 
 tains), that there is no one left to honor the true God. Let us 
 expel them by virtue of the sacred lavatory ; guided by Jesus 
 Christ, let us drive back these catiffs, who believe in witchcraft 
 and in auguries." 
 
 " Let cowards and debauchees, revelling in drunkenness and 
 merry bouts, remain in their pollution ! God only wants the 
 brave and courteous at his lavatory." . . . 
 
 " The marquis and those of the Temple are already sustaining 
 bravely, here in Spain, the weight and strain of pagan in- 
 solence ; and Jesus Christ pours on them from his lavatory the 
 blessings, which will be denied to those base novices in prowess, 
 who have no heart for joy or deport.''''^ 
 
 If Marcabrus was not already in Spain at the time when he 
 composed this piece, he went there immediately after. He then 
 wrote a second piece on the same subject, in which he addresses 
 himself directly to Alphonse YIL. himself, whom he honors with 
 the epithet of emperor. Though less finished and less elaborate 
 in point of metrical construction, this second piece is neverthe- 
 less more interesting than the first. It contains several very 
 direct allusions to the event which constitutes its subject, and 
 to the general relations between the south of France and Spain. 
 Unfortunately these allusions are so concise and couched in 
 terms so general and metaphorical, that there is scarcely any 
 advantage to be derived from them. I will nevertheless sub- 
 join some of the more intelligible passages of the piece : 
 
 " Emperor, I know now from experience how great your 
 prowess is increasing. I did make haste to come and I'm rejoiced 
 to see you nourished with joy, rising in glory, blooming in 
 youth and courtesy." f 
 
 " Since the Son of God calls on you to avenge him on the 
 race of Pharaoh, rejoice in it." 
 
 " And if those from beyond the defiles do not bestii- tliem- 
 
 * Amusement, diversion. 
 
 t Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 129. Piece XXI. entire. 
 
 Emperaire, per mi mezeis, Pois lo fila de dien vos somo 
 
 Sai, quant vostra proeza creis, Qu'el vengetz del ling Farao, 
 
 No m sui jes tardatz del venir, Ben vos en devetz esbaudir ; 
 
 Que jois vos pais e prez vos creis, Contra'ls portz faillon li baro, 
 
 E jovens vos ten baud a freis Li plus de conduich e de do, 
 
 Que fai vostra valor doucir. E ia dieus no'ls en lais jauzir. 
 
 Etc. etc — Ed.
 
 448 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 selves, either for Spain or for the Sepulchre, it becomes your 
 part to assume the task, to expel the Saracens, and to humiliate 
 their pride ; and God will be with you at the decisive mo- 
 ment." 
 
 " The Almoravides are wholly destitute of succor, by reason 
 of the treachery of the seigniors from beyond the mountains, 
 who have set to work to hatch a certain plot of envy and 
 iniquity. Yet each of them is flattering himself that he will 
 get absolved, at the hour of death, from his part of the work." 
 
 " Let us then leave those from the other side the mountains 
 to their own dislionor ; those barons who love the ease and 
 blandishments of life, soft beds and comfortable sleep ; and let 
 us on this side, responding to the call of God, reconquer glo- 
 riously his honor and his land." 
 
 " They rejoice greatly among themselves, these men, in their 
 dishonor, who exempt themselves from the holy pilgrimage ; 
 and as for me, I tell them that the day will come, when they 
 must leave their castles ; but they will leave them with their 
 feet in front, their head behind them." 
 
 " Let but the count of Barcelona persist in his resolve, to- 
 gether with the kings of Portugal and of Navarre, and soon we'll 
 march ahead to pitch our tents beneath the walls of imperial 
 Toledo, and destroy the pagans, who defend it." 
 
 In spite of this haughty assurance of the Troubadour, the 
 success of the crusade of Alphonse VIL was but a partial one 
 and far from being decisive. The Almohades, who had van- 
 quished the Almoravides in Africa, established their power 
 everywhere in place of the latter, in the Peninsula as else- 
 where, and it was this new dynasty of conquerors, with which 
 from that time the Christians of Spain were to continue the ♦ 
 contest. The struggle lasted from 1150 to 1212, when it ter- 
 minated to the advantage of the latter in the plains of Toloza. 
 But during this interval of sixty-two years the Almohades 
 gained several victories over the chiefs of Christian Spain, at 
 which all Europe had occasion to be alarmed. The first was 
 that which they won at Andujar in 1157. The king of Castile, 
 Alphonse VU., died in the same year, and his death was a 
 greater calamity to Spain than a defeat. 
 
 Among the pieces of Peter of Auvergne, there is one which 
 makes allusion to these difierent events and also to I know not 
 what project of an expedition against Africa ; a project in re- 
 gard to which history is silent. The piece must undoubtedly 
 be ranked among those which have reference to the crusades, 
 but everything in it is too vague and too concise to be j)oetical, 
 and I consider it useless to dwell on it. The course of the 
 events introduces us to others of greater interest.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 449 
 
 Yacoub Almanzor having ascended the throne of the Almo- 
 hades in 1184, it was not long before he rendered himself more 
 and more formidable to the Spaniards. Having arrived in 
 Spain with an immense force in 1195, he marched against 
 Alphonso IX., king of Castile, and gained over him two suc- 
 cessive victories, the first of which, that of Alarcos, was one of the 
 most decisive and most glorious the Mussulmans had ever 
 won over the Christians. This latter event is one of those, by 
 which the history of the Troubadours links itself in quite a 
 peculiar manner to that of the crusades of Spain. The ancient 
 Provencal biographer of Folquet de Marseilles contains a pas- 
 sage of great interest with reference to the consequences of the 
 battle of Alarcos ; and I propose to translate the whole of it. 
 
 " When good king Alphonse of Castile had been discomfited 
 by the king of Morocco, whose name was Miramolin, and when 
 the latter had taken Calatrava, Salvaterra and the castle of 
 Tonina, there was great sadness and distress througliout the 
 whole of Spain and among all the noble people, who were in- 
 formed of it, by reason of the dishonor, which it brought on 
 Christendom, and of the damage which the king sustained, who 
 had lost much territory by it ; and the men of Miramolin 
 entered often into his kingdom and made great havoc in it." 
 
 " Tlien good King Alphonse sent his messengers to the pope, 
 in order that the latter might induce the barons of France and 
 England, the king of Ai*agon and the count of Toulouse to 
 succor him." 
 
 " Don Folquet of Marseilles, who was a great friend of the 
 king of Castile, had at that time not yet entered the order of 
 Citeaux. He made a prezicansa, in order to exhort the 
 barons and nobles to help the good king of Castile, showing 
 them the honor, that would accrue to them if they brought 
 such succor to the king, and the pardon which they would re- 
 ceive from God for it." * 
 
 The piece here designated by the biographer is yet extant ; 
 it is curious in a historical point of view, being the only monu- 
 ment now remaining of an attempt at a crusade of which liis- 
 tory makes hardly any mention, and which was not attended 
 with any known result. 
 
 In respect to poetical merit, the piece is not destitute of it- 
 It is one of those in which the common-places of Christian be- 
 lief and piet}', which constitute the groundwork of nearly all 
 of them, are rendered with most elegance and sprightliness;, 
 but still it is not free from traces of the mannered hcl-esprit^ 
 which is one of the characteristics of the poetry of Folquet. 1 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. v., p. 150. — Ed. 
 29
 
 450 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 give here the greater part of it, faithfullj rendered, and only 
 curtailed of a few languid or idle passages. 
 
 " I know no longer any pretext by which hereafter we may 
 excuse ourselves from serving in the cause of God. \Ye have 
 already lost the Holy Sepulchre ; and shall we now permit 
 Spain also to be lost ? In our way to Syria we have found 
 obstacles ; but in passing into Spain we have neither wind nor 
 eea to fear. Alas ! What stronger invitation could God oft'er 
 us, unless it were to redescend from heaven to die for us ?"* 
 
 " God has once given himself for us, when he came, in order 
 to obliterate our sins ; and in redeeming us he has imposed on 
 us here below a debt of gratitude. Let him, then, who desires 
 to live beyond the grave, offer to-day for God that life, which 
 God by dying returned to him. Every one must die, he knows 
 not when. How foolishly he lives, who lives in unappalled 
 security ! Tliis life, of which we are so covetously fond, is but 
 an evil, and to die for God a good." 
 
 " What is the error then by which men are deluded ? This 
 body which none can save, for any price, from death, is cared 
 for tenderly and pampered by each one of us, while no one 
 stands in dread as to his soul, which he could preserve from 
 torments and perdition. Let each one think then in his inmost 
 heart, whether I speak the truth or not ; and then he will have 
 a better will to march on to the service of his God. Let no 
 brave warrior be afflicted at his poverty. Let him but take 
 the first step only ; he'll find God ready to assist him." 
 
 '" One thing at least is possible for every one : 'tis to have 
 courage ; let him then show it ; as for the rest, God will take 
 care of it, and our good king of Aragon. This king, who has 
 never been wanting to any one, will not be wanting to any 
 valiant palmer. BLe certainly will not be peijured before God, 
 at the moment of being crowned, whether here below or on 
 high in the heavens ; for both these crowns are assured to him." 
 
 " And let not the king of Castile listen to foolish arguments ; 
 let him not be discouraged by his losses. Sooner let him ren- 
 der thanks to God, who to-day desires to triumph through his 
 
 arm " 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 110. Piece XIII. Strophes 1, 2, 3, 4. 
 
 (1.) Hueimais no y conosc raze (2.) De si mezeis nos fas do, 
 
 Ab que nos poscam cobrir, Quan venc iiostres tortz deslir ; 
 
 Si ja dieu volcm servir, E fes so sai a grazir, 
 
 Pos tant enquer nostre pro Quan si ns det per rezemso : 
 
 Que son dan en vole sufrir ; Donex qui vol viure ab morir 
 
 •Qu'el sepulcre perdem premeiramen, Er don per dieu sa vid'e la y prezen, 
 
 E ar suefre qu' Espanha s vai perden Qu'cl la donet e la rendet moren, 
 
 "Per so quar lai trobavon ochaizo ; C'atressi deu horn morir no sap quo. 
 
 Mas sai sivals no teniem mar ni ven : Ai ! quant mal viu qui non a espaven ! 
 
 Las ! Cum nos pot plus fort aver somos, Qu'el nostre viures, don em cobeitos, 
 
 Si doncx no fos tornatz morir per nos ! Sabem qu'es mals, et aquel morir bos. 
 
 Etc.; etc., etc. — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of tJie Troubadours. 451 
 
 Let us in thought restore to these words the melody and 
 coloring of their original, of which a translation into prose and 
 into our modern style of language must necessarily deprive 
 them, and it will be admitted that Folquet preached the crusade 
 of Spain at least as well as the other Troubadours could have 
 preached the crusade of Syria. 
 
 But it appears that he found none to listen to his appeal but 
 the men who were just then returning from the third crusade^ 
 discontented, worn out and decimated, and extremely averse 
 to a fourth, which in fact did not take place this time. At any 
 rate, we do not see anything in the history of Spain at this 
 epoch, to which the name of crusade could with propriety be 
 applied. Moreover, the Almohades continued to be the masters 
 of the Peninsula. The only check which they experienced was 
 the loss of Yacoub Almanzor, the most successful and the 
 greatest of their chiefs, who died in 1199, leaving as his suc- 
 cessor his son Mohammed, surnamed El N^assir. 
 
 Under the latter the Spaniards recovered their self-confi- 
 dence ; and it was not long before they were again in commo- 
 tion. Mohammed did not at first seem to pay much attention 
 to their movements. This apparent indifi'erence made them 
 assume a still more menacing attitude ; and the monarch of the 
 Almohades, resolved at last to curb them, began to make zea^ 
 lous preparations for a descent on Spain. These preparations 
 were of such a description, that they appeared to be intended 
 not so much for the maintenance of a conquest already made, 
 as for the conquest of entire Europe. Mohammed El Nassir 
 arrived at Seville in 1210, followed by an army which he had 
 distributed into three divisions, the smallest of which is said to 
 have consisted of 160,000 men, infantry and cavalry. 
 
 Spain had not waited, to be terrified at the levy of such a 
 prodigious force, to see it on this side of the strait. This force 
 had not yet left Africa, when the Christians were already 
 making extensive prei^arations on all sides in order to resist it. 
 All the princes of the Peninsula had united their armies under 
 the general command of Alphouso IX. ; and Roderick, the bishop 
 of Toledo, was scouring France and Italy, imploring every- 
 where the assistance of the kings, the nobles and the people. 
 The Troubadours were as prompt on this as on every previous 
 occasion, to meet the wants of the Christian world ; they 
 seconded with their martial songs the call of the Spanish clergy 
 against the barbarians of Africa. 
 
 The only remaining one of all these songs is that by Gavau- 
 dan the Elder, a Troubadour but very little known, but who 
 deserves to be so more generally, were it only for the song in 
 question. It is in fact the most beautiful and the most ener-
 
 452 
 
 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 getic piece of the kind, the one which is pervaded by the purest 
 inspiration, and the argument of which is managed in its detail 
 with most poetic skill. The only pity is, that it contains one 
 ©r two very difficult passages, which can only be translated in 
 e somewhat hazardous manner. I subjoin here the whole 
 of it. 
 
 " Seigniors, 'tis on account of our sins, that the power of the 
 Saracens is thus increasing. Jerusalem has been taken by 
 Saladin, and it is not yet reconquered ; and all at once the 
 king of Morocco now prepares for war against all Christian 
 kings, with his treacherous Andalusians, with his Arabs armed 
 against the faith of Christ."* 
 
 " lie has assembled all the races of the west, the Mazmudes, 
 the Moors, the Berbers and the Goths. Vigorous or feeble, not 
 ©ne of them has stayed behind ; and never did the rain descend 
 more closely than they pass on, encumbering the plains and 
 famishing each other. They feed uj^on dead bodies, as the 
 eheep on grass, which they devour blade and root." 
 
 " They are so proud of their number, that they consider the 
 world as theirs. When they halt upon the meadows, crammed 
 one against the other, Morocco's hordes against the Marabouts, 
 the Marabouts against the Berbers, then they deride us among 
 themselves. Franks, they say, make room for us ! Toulouse 
 and Provence are ours ; and ours the whole interior of the 
 land, as far as Puy. Was there ever before heard raillery 
 so insolent from the mouth of the false dogs of this lawless 
 race ?" 
 
 " Hear them, O emperor, and you too, king of France, king 
 of the English, and you, the count of Poitiers ! and come to the 
 assistance of the king of Castile. No one had ever such fair 
 opportunity for serving God ; with his aid you'll conquer all 
 these pagans, whom Mahomet deluded, these renegades, this 
 refuse of mankind." 
 
 * Kaynouard, vol. iv. p. 85. Piece No. II. Entire 1-8. 
 
 Senliors, per los nostres peccatz 
 Creys la forsa dels Sarrasis ; 
 Iherusalem pres Saladis, 
 Et encaras non es cobratz ; 
 Per que raanda'l reys de Maroc 
 IJu'ab totz los reys de Crestiaa 
 Se combatra ab dos trefas 
 Andolozitz et Arabitz, 
 Contra la fe de Crist garnitz. 
 
 Totz los Alcavis a mandatz, 
 Masmutz, Maurs, Gotz e Barbaris, 
 E no y reman gras ni mesquis, 
 Que totz no'ls ayon ajostatz ; 
 Anc pus menut ayga non ploc 
 Cum els passon, e prendo'ls plas ; 
 La caraunhada dels niilaa 
 
 Geta'ls paysser com a berbitz, 
 E no y reman brotz ni razitz. 
 
 Tant an d'erguelh sels qu'a triatz 
 Qu'els cuio'l mons lur si'aclis ; 
 Marroquenas, Marrabetis 
 Pauzon anions per mieg los pratz ; 
 Mest lor gabon : " Franc, faiz noa loo 
 Nostr'es Proensa e Tolzas, 
 Entro al Puey totz los meias." 
 Anc tan fers gaps no fon auzitz 
 Dels falses cas, ses ley, marritz. 
 
 Emperayre, vos o auiatz, 
 E'l reys de Fransa, e sos cozis, 
 E'l reys envies, coms peitavia, 
 Qu'al rey d Espanha socorratz. 
 Etc. etc. etc. — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 453 
 
 " Jesus Christ, whose word has called on us to make a happy 
 end, shows us the way to it to-day ; he points us to repentance 
 as the means by which the sin committed in Adam sliall be 
 forgiven us. He promises, if we will but believe it, that he'll 
 be willini; to receive us among the blessed, and to be our guide 
 against these degraded traitors." 
 
 " Let not us, who are the firm possessors of the grand law, 
 let us not abandon our heritage to the black dogs from beyond 
 the sea. Let each one meditate how to avert the danger. Let 
 us not wait until they have reached us here. Tlie Portuguese, 
 the Castilians, those of Galicia, of Navarre and Aragon, wha 
 ere while were a barrier in our van, are now defeated and dis- 
 honored." 
 
 " But, let the noble cnisaders come from Germany, from 
 France, from England, from Brittany, from Anjou, from Beam, 
 from Gascony, and from Provence ; let them unite with us into 
 one solid mass, and with the sword in hand, we'll plunge into 
 the herd of infidels, striking and cutting, until we have exter- 
 minated all of them ; and then we will divide the booty amongst 
 us all." 
 
 " Don Gavaudan will be a prophet ; that which he says will 
 be accomplished ; the dogs will perish, and there, where Ma- 
 homet was invoked, God shall be served and honored." 
 
 And the Troubadour was really a prophet, as he had boasted 
 himself to be. The Christian forces, having encountered those 
 of the Almohades in the vicinity of Toloza in Andalusia, won, 
 in the month of July, 1212, the famous battle, called the battle 
 of Kavas de Toloza, by which the Christians recovered for 
 a time their former preponderance in Spain. Gavaudan ap- 
 pears to have fought there in person, in the midst of sixty 
 thousand auxiliaries, who had flocked together from beyond 
 the Pyrenees ; he was thus one of the heroes of the expedition, 
 to which he had been the Tyrtseus. 
 
 This piece of Gavaudan's is the last of its kind which we find 
 in the Proven(;al manuscripts, as the crusade which it cele- 
 brates also is the last against the Mussulmans beyond the Py- 
 renees. Subsequently to the battle of Navas de Toloza, the 
 Andalusian Arabs maintained their ground in the Peninsula 
 for three centuries longer. But from the date of this great 
 battle, the Christian forces of the country Avere sufficient to re- 
 strict them gradually to closer limits, until the fatal day arrived, 
 when the simple decree of the king of Spain could scud their 
 miserable remnants to perish in Africa. 
 
 I think I may now resume for a moment the consideration of 
 the period of the crusades against the Mussulmans of the Penin- 
 sula.
 
 454 History of ProvenQal Poetry. 
 
 During the whole of this period the condition of the Arabs 
 of Andalusia presented striking analog-ies to that of the Christ- 
 ians, who assailed them. To them, as well as, nay even more 
 than to the latter, this war was a sacred war, a veritable cru- 
 sade under another name. It was, as we know, a duty imposed 
 by his religion on every Mussulman, to fight for the extension 
 of Islamism. Every Mussulman who lost his life in the fulfill- 
 ment of this duty was considered a martyr, and received the 
 appellation and the honors of one. 
 
 Thus far the analogy was a vague and a very general one ; it 
 was coextensive with all the Mussulmans and all the Christians. 
 But between the Arabs of Andalusia and the Christians of the 
 south of France it was more particular and more explicit. 
 
 '■■ The former, as well as the latter, had their poets, their Trou- 
 badours, who likewise preached their sacred war to them, who 
 celebrated their victories over the Infidels, deplored their de- 
 feats, who, in a word, gave utterance to all the national or 
 popular emotions excited by the various chances of this 
 war. 
 
 It would have given me pleasure to make known some of 
 these poems of the Andalusian Arabs relative to their crusades 
 against the Christians ; it would have been curious and inter- 
 esting for us to institute a comparison between them and the 
 corresponding productions of the Troubadours, and to see in 
 what manner the latter would have sustained the parallel. 
 
 . To my great regret, however, my time will not admit of such 
 developments ; and all that 1 can do, in order to give some idea 
 of the poetic compositions of the Arabs of Spain on their wars 
 against the Christians, is to quote one of them, which has been 
 published and translated by M. Grangeret de la Grange in an 
 excellent collection of Arabic poetry, which appeared in 1828. 
 
 ^ The piece in question is from the pen of a celebrated poet by 
 the name of Aboul-baka-Saleh, from the city of Ronda, in the 
 kingdom of Granada. It is a general lamentation over the re- 
 verses and the decline of Islamism in Spain, and more particu- 
 larly over the loss of the powerful city of Seville, which was 
 taken in 1246 by Ferdinand III., the king of Castile. Tlie 
 piece, as I give it here, is somewhat abridged. Though I have 
 availed myself of the excellent translation of M. Grangeret, I 
 still thought that I might be permitted to modify it with refer- 
 ence to my purpose. It is as follows : 
 
 . " Whatever has reached its zenith must decrease ; therefore, 
 O man ! do not permit thyself to be seduced by the blandish- 
 ments of life !" * 
 
 * The piece forms part of an article on the Arabs in Spain by Grangeret de la Grange 
 in the "Journal Asiatique," and is found in vol. iv. of the First Series, p. 367. — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 455- 
 
 " The world is a perpetual revolution ; aud if the present 
 brings an enjoyment, the future will bring sorrows." 
 
 " ^Nothing, here below, persists in the same state. . ." 
 
 " Time destroys the cuirass, on which the lances and the 
 swords were blunted." 
 
 " There is no sword which time does not lay bare (unsheath) 
 and break, and were it even the sword of Dzou-yazen, were it 
 a sword which had the fortress of Gomdan for its scabbard." 
 
 "Where are the powerful monarchs of Yemen? where are 
 their crowns aud diadems ?" 
 \ " The inevitable destiny has seized them." .... 
 
 " This destiny has made kings, kingdoms, and nations what 
 they are now, something that has resemblance to the phantoms 
 of sleep." 
 
 " There are reverses for which one may console himself, but 
 >■ the reverses of Islamism admit of no consolation." 
 
 " A remediless disaster has smitten Andalusia, and with An- 
 . dalusia the whole of Islamism." 
 ^ " Our cities and provinces are deserted. . . ." 
 \ " Ask Valencia what has become of Murcia ; where are Jaen 
 
 and Xativa ?" 
 \ " Ask where Cordova is now, the abode of knowledge, and 
 
 what became of all the men of genius who flourished there ?" 
 ^ " And where is now Seville, with its delights, with its grand 
 
 river of pure sweet water ?" 
 
 " Cities magnificent and proud, ye were the pillars of the 
 land ; must not the country crumble to ruins, when it has lost 
 its pillars ?" 
 
 " As the lover bewails his lady-love, so Islamism bewails its 
 ■* provinces deserted, or inhabited by Infidels." 
 
 " There where the mosques stood, stand now the churches 
 with their bells and crosses." 
 
 " Our sanctuaries are nothing but brute stone, and still they 
 weep ! Our pulpits are but senseless wood, and yet lament!" 
 
 " O thou, who heedest not Fortune's monitions, thou art 
 perhaps asleep, but know that Fortune remains awake !" 
 
 " Thou marchest proud of, and enchanted by thy country ! 
 But can a man still have a country, after the loss of Seville ?" 
 
 " Ah ! this misfortune makes one forget all those M'hicli have 
 preceded ; and none other will ever cause us to forget it." 
 
 " O ye, who mount swift coursers, flying like eagles between 
 the clashing swords ;" 
 
 " O ye, who carry trenchant glaives from India, glittering 
 like fires across the eddying night of dust ;" 
 
 " O all ye, who beyond the sea are living in peace, and 
 finding in your abodes glory and power ;"
 
 456 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 * 
 " And have you then not heard the news from Andalusia ? 
 
 Yet, messengers departed to announce to you our misfortune." 
 
 " How many unlucky men have implored your succor ! But 
 not one of you has risen to assist them, and they are dead or 
 captives." 
 
 "Pray, what does this division signify among you, who all 
 are Mussulmans, all brethren and servants of God ?" 
 
 " Are there not among you proud souls and generous ? And 
 is there no one to defend religion ?" 
 
 " Oh, how they now are humbled by the Infidels, these An- 
 dalusians, ere while so glorious !" 
 
 " Yesterday they were kings in their own homes ; to-day they 
 are slaves in the land of unbelievers." 
 
 " Ah ! hadst thou witnessed how they wept when they were 
 sold, grief would have made thee lose thy reason." 
 
 " Ah ! who could endure to see them thus distracted, with- 
 out a guide, without any raiment but the rags of servitude ?" 
 
 " Who could endure to see mountains between the infant and 
 its mother, like a barrier between soul and body ?" 
 
 " To see, fair as the sun, when it is rising, all coral and all 
 ruby." 
 
 " Young damsels, with tearful eyes, with hearts ready to 
 break, dragged on by the Barbarians to servile labor ?" 
 
 " Oh ! at such sights all hearts would rend with grief, had 
 yet our hearts a vestige of religion left." 
 
 Among the pieces of the Troubadours relating to the wars of 
 the crusades, which might be put in comparison with the Ara- 
 bic piece, I will specify one in particular, of which the reader 
 will doubtless have some recollection. It is that of the Proven- 
 gal Templar, deploring the disasters of the year 1265. These 
 disasters were probably still greater, still more irreparable to the 
 Christian powers of Syria, than was the taking of Seville to the 
 Arabs of Andalusia. And this circumstance is to be marked, 
 as one which is calculated to render the contrast between the 
 two pieces more salient. 
 
 That of the Templar was dictated by spite and anger ; it is a 
 bold and animated satire, in which the humiliated pride of chi- 
 valry blames God himself for its disappointments and reverses, 
 and is ready to suspect the verity of a creed, the defenders of 
 which are defeated in battle by the adherents of another creed. 
 The Arabic piece, on the other hand, is pervaded by a melancholy 
 sentiment of the nothingness of human things, by a religious 
 faith which its material reverses do not shake, by a profound 
 resignation to the decrees of Necessity, a resignation which still 
 does not go so far as to prevent the effusion of the liveliest sym- 
 pathy for the affronts and the misfortunes of the country. We
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the, Troubadours. 457 
 
 discover in tins piece the work of a poet, trained under the in- 
 fluences of a high civilization, while in the piece of the Temp- 
 lar there is something that resembles the relics and reminis- 
 cences of barbarity. 
 
 With respect to the form, the differences between the two 
 pieces is no less marked and no less characteristic ; but here the 
 comparison would perhaps turn out to the advantage of the 
 Provencal piece, the execution of which, though less brilliant, 
 less ingenious, and less refined, is in return much simpler, more 
 lively, and more bold. 
 
 From all that I have said on the religious songs of the Pro- 
 vencals relating to the crusades, it will undoubtedly appear that 
 this subject, taken in earnest, was a little above the lyrical 
 genius of the Troubadours — a genius which was enthusiastic, 
 original and graceful, but at the same time infantile, petulant, 
 and rather believing than religious. 
 
 There were other wars which these poets sung with more 
 partiality and talent than those of the crusades. These were 
 the wars which daily arose between the feudal ])owers of the 
 times, both great and petty. The prowess of chivalry, as ex- 
 hibited in these wars, having nothing to do which required too 
 much calculation, constancy or discipline, could shine in all its 
 splendor, and freely follow its inspirations, nay, its caprices 
 even — always sure of being admired and celebrated, whether it 
 was successful or not so. Such wars were the real theme for 
 the heroic poetry of the Troubadours. 
 
 The pieces which we have from them of this description are 
 very numerous, and in producing examples the choice can be 
 the only source of embarrassment. I shall limit myself to giving 
 a few specimens, selected with a view to show the generic 
 shades of difference by which they vary among themselves, and 
 the decided opposition which distinguishes them from all those 
 in which the preaching of the crusades was the theme. 
 
 I give here, in the first place, a very short one (it contains 
 but thirty verses), from the pen of Bertrand de Born. It would 
 take up too much of our time to determine its historical motive 
 with adequate precision ; but it is sufiicient to know that the 
 question turns on the moment when the war between Philip 
 Augustus and Richard Cojur-de-Lion was about to break out, 
 to the latter of whom Alphonso IX., king of Castile, was ex- 
 pected to bring succor. Transported with the hope of a fine, 
 good war, Bertrand de Born gives vent to his joy in the follow- 
 ing manner : 
 
 " I wish to make a sirvente on the two kings : wo shall soon 
 see which of them has the most chevaliers. Alj)honso, the 
 valiant king of Castile, I hear, comes to assist ; and the king
 
 458 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 Richard is going to spend gold and silver by bushels and by 
 setters / for lie takes pride in spending and in giving, and ia 
 more eagerly intent on war, than the hawk is on the partridge." 
 
 "If the two kings are valiant and brave, we shall soon see 
 the fields strewed with the wrecks of helmets and of shields, of 
 swords and saddle-bows, of heads and shoulders cloven to the 
 belt. We shall see wandering up and down chargers wnthout 
 their riders, lances projecting from the sides and breast of 
 the wounded ; we shall hear laughing and weeping, cries of 
 distress and cries of joy ; great will be the losses and immense 
 the gain !" 
 
 " Trumpets and drums, standards, banners and ensigns, horses 
 both black and white — this is the company we are going to live 
 in ! And a grand time will it be then ! Then will the usurers 
 be pillaged ; nor will the pack-horse on the road be safe ; nor 
 will be seen a commoner, or a merchant coming from France, 
 but what will tremble. Then will be rich whoever dares to 
 take." 
 
 " Let but King Richard be triumphant ! As for myself, I 
 shall either be alive or cut to pieces. If I shall live, how great 
 the pleasure of having conquered ! but if I am in pieces, how 
 charming the deliverance from every care !" 
 
 The species of martial frenzy which inspired these verses does 
 not constitute their only merit. They are remarkable for a 
 harmony, a rotundity and a vivacity of expression, which can- 
 not well be felt except in the original. Bertrand de Born him- 
 self has written few more beautiful than these. 
 
 We have nevertheless pieces from several other Troubadours, 
 which will sustain a comparison with this, and others that are 
 but little inferior to it ; and we may add, that, by a singularity 
 which proves how natural this sort of martial dithyramb came 
 to the Tyrtfauses of chivalry, this kind of Provencal poetry is 
 the only one in which we would be embarrassed to instance a 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 176. Piece No. XVIII. 1-4. 
 
 Miez sirventes vuielh far dels reys amdos, E gang e plor e dol et alegransa ; 
 
 Qu'en brieu veirem q'aura mais cavailhiers Loperdr'ergranz, e'lgasainhzersobriera. 
 
 Del valeu rei de Castella 'N Anfos „, , , . , 
 
 C'aug dir que ven, e volra sodadiers ; Trompas, tabors, seinheras e penos 
 
 Richartz metra a mueis e a sestiers ^^ entresemhs e cayals blancs e niers 
 
 Aur et argent, e ten sa benanansa Verrem en bnen, q'el segles sera bos, 
 
 Metr' e donar, e non vol sa fiansa, §"« hom tolra 1 aver als usuriers, 
 
 Ans vol guerra mala que cailla csparviers. ^ Pe^ canus non anara saumiers 
 
 ° Jorn ansatz, ni borjes ses duptansa, 
 
 „,,.,.. . . Ni mercadiers qui enga dever Fransa, 
 
 S'amdui li rei son pros m corajos, ^^g gera rics qui tolra volontiers. 
 En brieu veirem camps joncatz de quartiers, 
 
 D'elms e d'escuts e de branz e d'arsos, Mas s'el reis ven, ieu ai en dieu fiansa 
 
 E de fendutz per bustz tro als braiers, Qu'ieu sera vius o serai per qartiers ; 
 
 Et a rage veirem anar destriers, E si sui vius, er mi gran benanansa, 
 
 E per costatz e per piecliz mania lansa, E se ieu mueir, er mi grans deliuriers. 
 
 — Ed,
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 459 
 
 really bad or insipid composition, abundant as are such in- 
 stances in all the other kinds. 
 
 And it was not only the great feuds between king and king, or 
 the battles fought by powerful armies, that inspired the Pro- 
 vencal poets with such animated songs of war ; they sung with 
 the same extravagant enthusiasm the wars between seignior 
 and seignior, between chateau and chateau — those petty wars, 
 where one might have counted the blows inflicted by the lance 
 and sword. I have noticed a piece of this kind, which is so 
 much the more curious, as it doubtless represents many others 
 of the same description which have not come down to us. Its 
 author is Blacasset, the son of Blacas, both of whom were Pro- 
 vencal seigniors of great celebrity in the poetic and chivalric 
 traditions of their country. 
 
 The piece is none of the clearest, and the only copy we 
 have of it is incomplete and full of errors. Thus much, however, 
 is evident from its contents, that it was addressed to Amic de 
 Curban and to Seignior d'Agoult, two Provencal castellans, 
 who had a quarrel between themselves, which they were pre- 
 paring to settle by force of arms. The object of the piece is, 
 to exhort the champions to persist nobly in their project Oi 
 bringing the matter to a warlike crisis, and by all means to 
 guard against resorting to the vulgar methods of accommoda- 
 tion. He eulogizes each of them with equal unction ; he 
 naively manifests his eagerness to see them fight, and still more 
 naively declares his resolution to espouse the cause of one of 
 them, without saying which. The first and the last stanza of 
 this piece will suffice to give us a conception of the whole. 
 
 " War's my delight : I like to see it commence ! For 'tis by 
 
 dint of war that brave men rise. War makes the nights pass 
 
 rapidly ; war brings ns presents of stately coursers ; it makes 
 
 the miser turn liberal perforce ; it obliges the powerful man to 
 
 give and take away. War is an excellent dispenser of justice ; 
 
 it's my delight — war without end and without armistice !"* 
 * ■» * * -H- * * 
 
 " Oh, when shall I see, in some commodious field, our adver- 
 saries and ourselves arrayed in battle-line, and serried so closely, 
 that the first fair shock would level with the ground a multi- 
 tude on either side ! Then many a squire would be cut to 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 215. Piece No. XLI. Strophes 1 and 4. 
 
 Gerra mi play quan la vey comensar, Bel m'es q'ieu veia en un bel camp rcngatz 
 
 Qar per gerra vey los pros enansar, Els, et ill nos, per tal bruit ajostatz, 
 
 E per gerra vey mantz destriers donar ; Q'al ben ferir n'i aia de versatz , 
 
 E per gerra vey I'escas larc tornar, Aqi veirem manz sirventz peceiatz, 
 
 E per gerra vey tolre e donar Mantz cavals mortz, mantz cavaliers nafratz ; 
 
 E per gerra vey las nueigz trasnuechar ; Se nulls non torna ja non serai iratz ; 
 
 Don gerra es drechuriera, so m par, Mas vueilh murir qe viure desonratz. 
 
 E gerra m play ses jamais entreugar. — pd.
 
 460 History of ProvenQol Poetry. 
 
 pieces, many a fair charger slain, and many a knight wounded. 
 And were none destined to return, it matters not ; the thought 
 will not distress me : I would rather die than live dishonored." 
 
 The wars which the Troubadours sung and celebrated in this 
 manner were not even always positive and determinate wars, 
 petty or great ; it was sometimes merely war in the abstract, the 
 idea of war itself. The most exalted of all the war-songs of this 
 kind is, perhaps, a piece attributed to Bernard Arnaud of Man- 
 tua, a Knight-troubadour, concerning whom nothing is known, 
 except that he lived in the second half of the twelfth century, 
 and that he was attached to the service of one of the counts of 
 Toulouse. I subjoin here the three best stanzas of this song, 
 which has but five of them. 
 
 " Spring never brings such charms to me, as when it comes 
 accompanied by hurly-burly and by war, by trouble and aftright, 
 by grand displays of cavalry and booty. Then he who thus far 
 was only wont to give advice and sleep, darts forth courageously, 
 his arm already raised to strike." * 
 
 " I like to see the neat-herds and the shepherds wandering 
 through the fields, in such distress that none of them knows 
 where to look for shelter. I like to see rich barons forced to be 
 prodigal of what they had been stingy and avaricious. Then 
 such a one is eager to impart what he had never dreamt of 
 giving. Then such another honors the poor, whom he had 
 been accustomed to despise. War forces every wicked seignior 
 to a kindly disposition toward his own." 
 
 "There is not in the world so great a treasure, nor such 
 exalted power, for which I'd give one of my gloves, were the 
 exchange to turn to my disgrace. The coward lives no longer 
 than the brave man : a life without renown is worse to me than 
 death, and basely hoarded riches are beneath my honor." 
 
 I have now given specimens enough of the martial poetry of 
 the Troubadours, to enable us to perceive how much more freely 
 and more boldly the Provencal imagination displayed itself in 
 these songs of daily warfare, than in the predications of the 
 crusades. 
 
 *Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 254. Piece No. IV. Strophes 1, 2, 4. 
 
 Ancmais tan gen no vi venir pascor, Qu'ara dara tals que cor non avia, 
 
 Qa'el ve guarnitz de solatz e de chan, E montara'l pages qu'aunir solia, 
 
 E ve guarnitz de guerra e de mazan, Que grans guerra, quant horn no i pot gandir, 
 
 E ve guarnitz d'esmay e de paor, Fai mal senhor vas los sieus afranquir. 
 
 E ve guarnitz de gran cavalairia, ***** 
 
 E ve guarnitz d'una gran manentia ; El mon non a thesaurs ni gran ricor 
 
 Que tals sol pro cosaelhar e dormir Que si'aunitz, sapchatz qu'ieu prezunguan 
 
 Qu'ara vay gent bras levat acuLhir. Qu'aitan tost mor, mas non o sabon tan, 
 
 Avols cum bos ; e vida ses valor 
 
 Belli m'es quan vey que boyer e pastor Pretz meyns que mort, a pretz mais tota via 
 
 Van si marrit q'us no sap vas o s'an, Honor e pretz qu'aunida manentia, 
 
 E belh quan vey que'l ric baro metran Quar selh es folhs que se fai escarnir, 
 
 So don eron avar e guillador, E selh savis que se fai gen grazir. 
 
 — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 461 
 
 It remains now to add a few words on the proper use and 
 the special destination of these songs ; for there was scarcely 
 any kind of lyric poetry among the Provencals which was not 
 more or less strictly appropriated to some one of the habits of 
 social or of private life. 
 
 The itinerant Jonglenrs, who made a business of reciting the 
 poetic productions of the Troubadours on their own account, 
 not only frequented the cities, the market-towns and the castles, 
 but they penetrated wherever they were sure of finding as- 
 semblages of men — into the fields, to the walls of beleaguered 
 j)laces, among the marching armies, playing on their different 
 instruments, singing, seeking to rivet for a moment the atten- 
 tion of the men-at-arms. It is possible, that they may have 
 sung there, as elsewhere, poems of every description, chansons 
 of love, satiric A^erses, fragments of epic romances ; but there is 
 scarcely any doubt, but that the songs of war were more especially 
 destined to be executed on occasions of this kind. To such a 
 purpose they were admirably and at all times appropriate, but 
 more especially to circumstances, when it was required to in- 
 flame the courage of the warriors, as for example at the ap- 
 proach of an assault, of a battle, or of any danger whatsoever. 
 Tliese songs were in fact well calculated to enhance, among those 
 who heard them, the sort of savage impetuosity and of martial 
 ardor, which the simple disposition to listen to them already 
 presupposed. It must, however, be borne in mind, that in the 
 motives which made these men find warfare so attractive and 
 so beautiful, this martial ardor, this chivalric enthusiasm were 
 far from constituting the only ingredients. The jwets, the 
 chevaliers, the barons themselves observe, that war obliged 
 the feudal chiefs to treat with particular consideration all 
 those who had it in their power to assist them in making it. 
 They were required to be lavish of their money, their honors 
 and their privileges, or in other words, to divide their power 
 with those, whose services they needed to defend it ; so that 
 the society of this stormy period gained at least in liberty and 
 moral dignity, that which it lost in calmness and repose.
 
 462 History of Provenqdl Poetry. 
 
 CHAPTER XXL 
 
 THE LTEICAL POETRY OF THE TEOUBADOUBS. 
 II. SATIRE. 
 MORAL. 
 
 In tlie monuments of Provencal poetiy anterior to 1150, one 
 might search in vain for the least vestige of a systematic classi- 
 fication. Any and every lyric composition, whatever might 
 have been its subject or extent, was simply denominated vers / 
 and this term was borrowed from the Latin versus, which in the 
 rituals of the Christian churches was used to designate hymns 
 not only rhymed, but constructed with the most elaborate and 
 complicated interlacements of the rhyme and wholly after the 
 manner of the Troubadours. 
 
 In the second half of the twelfth century, when the pieces of 
 lyric poetry had multiplied to an incredible extent, it became 
 necessary to establish some distinction among them. They were 
 divided into two principal classes, the cansos and the syrventes. 
 The first of these denominations comprised the songs of love 
 and of chivalric gallantry, and this was the kind of poetry ^ar 
 excellence, from which the poet derived his chief glory and the 
 high society its most fastidious enjoyments. 
 
 In regard to the name of the syrventes, it is to be remarked, 
 that this was but a vague and we might say a negative term, 
 employed to designate all those pieces which had not love for 
 their subject, or those in which it was not treated with sober 
 earnest. There is but one thing explicitly denoted by this 
 epithet, and that is the moral and poetical inferiority of these 
 pieces, as compared with others, with those which were conven- 
 tionally and preeminently termed chansons, though both the 
 one and the other were alike destined to be set to music and to 
 be sung. 
 
 It thus appears, that this comprehensive name syrventes 
 comprised and confounded several widely different species of 
 lyrical compositions, as for example the crusade-songs and 
 war-songs, which I have already detached into a separate group,
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 463 
 
 and which occupied our attention in the preceding chapter. 
 It now remains for me to detach, in the same manner, the 
 satires in the strict sense of tlie terra. 
 
 Tiie sirventes, to which the name of satire properly belongs, 
 are in the first place so numerous and on the other hand so 
 diversified in their character, that it is indispensable to dis- 
 tribute them into several groups, in order to treat of them sum- 
 marily and with some little method. I shall therefore divide 
 the satirical poetry of the Troubadours into two principal kinds, 
 into the historical and into the ideal or moral satire. I propose 
 to begin with the latter. 
 
 The moral satire of the Troubadours may be subdivided into 
 the general and special, the first being directed against the 
 general vices of mankind and tending to enforce the validity of 
 the universally admitted notions of morality ; and the second 
 against the vices opposed to the local and particular system of 
 morality, at that time predominant in tlie South, in other 
 words, to the system of chivalry. This distinction, however, 
 though a real one, will not be found to be either absolute or 
 even clearly determined, and I shall endeavor to profit by its 
 convenience without attaching too much importance to it. 
 
 As might be readily presumed, and as we have already had 
 occasion to convince ourselves more than once, the moral ideas 
 of the Troubadours were neither very profound, nor very defi- 
 nite. But the disorders and the vices of the society in which 
 they lived were such, that the most ordinary notions of order 
 and of justice were sufficient to enable one to perceive and to 
 qualify them. They did not so much stand in need of precise 
 and positive enlightenment in order to break their lances in the 
 face of vices so unrestrained, so open and so proud of them- 
 selves, as they did of a general instinct of humanity, of a certain 
 degree of moral courage and of social culture. And in these 
 respects the Troubadours were not deficient. 
 
 By celebrating the ideas and the sentiments of chivalry, they 
 had imparted to these ideas and to these sentiments a degree of 
 fixity and of authority, to which they probably would never 
 have risen without them. To have thus brouo;ht the virtues of 
 chivalry into vogue, was already an important advance in 
 social order. But they did not stop short here : they assailed 
 with energy the injustice and the violence of the feudal power 
 wherever they i)erceived it. This constituted the dominant 
 theme of their satire, which, under a very general point of 
 view, may perhaps be regarded as the first protestation, made 
 in the Middle Age in favor of human liberty and dignity 
 against the excesses of brutal force. The Troubadours spared 
 no one; under whatever title a power might present itself,
 
 464 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 whether under that of pope, or king, they assailed it from the 
 moment when in their opinion it dishonored itself or trans- 
 gressed its limits. Several of their number became also the 
 victims of the boldness, with which they expressed themselves 
 at the expense of the great personages of their times. 
 
 In this moral and social point of view the satirical poetry ot 
 the Provencals is a very interesting phenomenon, but one 
 which appertains rather to the history of civilization than to 
 that of literature. In a purely literary connection, it cannot 
 have the same importance. The stiffness and the monotony, 
 which are perceptible more or less in all the forms of Provengal 
 poetry, recur in this too. But here, as elsewhere, these defects 
 are strongly counterbalanced by original beauties, which de- 
 serve to be kno^vn. 
 
 There is a multitude of Troubadours, who have composed 
 satires, more or less vague, more or less general, on the manners 
 and morals of their time ; and so far from being able to make 
 them all known, I cannot even speak of the small number of 
 those who merit this honor more particularly, as for example 
 Pierre d'Auvergne. I have selected as the representative of 
 all of them in general, the one whom I regard as the most 
 distinguished, both in regard to character and talent. This is 
 Pierre Cardinal. 
 
 Pierre Cardinal was born at Puy, in the ancient province of 
 Yelai, and was descended from a very distinguished family of 
 the country. His parents, who designed him for ecclesiastical 
 dignities, had him educated in accordance with this intention. 
 But having arrived at the age of discretion, and feeling himself, 
 says his biographer, handsome, young and gay, Peter gave 
 himself up to the vanities of this world, and turned his attention 
 to inventing {trohar) fine arguments and songs ; or in other 
 words, he embraced the profession of a Troubadour. But he 
 was one of those Troubadours of high rank, who constituted, as 
 it were, the noblesse, the aristocracy of the order, and who had 
 in their pay Jongleurs, whom they sent about everywhere for 
 the purpose of singing their verses, and who made themselves 
 welcome and respected in all the courts.* Pierre Cardinal 
 frequented more especially those of the kings of Aragon and of 
 
 *■ " Et anavaper cortz de reis e de gentils barons, menan ab si son joglar que cantava 
 SOS sirventes. E molt fo onratz egrazitz per mon seignor lo bon rei Jacnie d' Aragon e 
 per lionratz barons." Kaynouard, vol. v. p. 302. Of the estimation, in which the 
 sirventes of this poet were held by his contemporaries, as represented by his biogra- 
 pher, the following passage may serve as an example : "En los cals siventes demons- 
 trava molt de bellas razos e de bels exemples, qui ben los enten, quar molt castiavala 
 foUia d'aquest mon; e los fals clergues reprendia molt, segon que demonstron li sieu 
 sirventes." Of tlie historical sirventes of the Provencal poets Raynouard has given us 
 LVII specimens, of those which the author of this work calls moral, LX specimens, 
 which the student will find in vol. iv. page 139-393. Remarks upon the character of 
 the Birvente with some specimens are contained in vol. ii. p. 206-221. — J^d.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 465 
 
 the counts of Toulouse. He died before the close of the thir- 
 teenth century, and as his biographer affirms, at the advanced 
 age of nearly a hundred years. 
 
 Pierre Cardinal was one of that small number of Provencal 
 poets, who were unacquainted with the charms of love, or who 
 at any rate abstained from singing it. So far was he from do- 
 ing this, that in a piece of his, which is yet extant, he congra- 
 tulates himself, with considerable display of piquancy, on being 
 an exception to his poetic contemporaries in this respect. " 'Tis 
 now," says he, " that I can be content with love ; for now it robs 
 me neither of my appetite nor of my sleep ; I experience neither 
 heat nor cold from it ; I neither gape nor sigh on its account. 
 .... I say not that I love the fairest of the ladies, I do not 
 pay her any homage, and I am not her captive ; I, on the con- 
 trary, boast of exemption from all servitude." 
 
 Pierre Cardinal was a man of a high-minded and generous 
 nature, who could not be a witness to iniquity without being 
 incensed at it, and whose vocation it was to exj^ose and stigma- 
 tize it whenever he saw it — a laborious task in an age in which 
 individual forces were, at every instant, outweighing and con- 
 trolling that of society. He expressed himself nobly in this re- 
 spect in many a passage of his poems. " On the day when I was 
 born," says he somewhere, " the part allotted to me in life was 
 to love the good, and to hate injustice and all wickedness. I 
 thus endure the penalty for the sins of others, and I'm tor- 
 mented by their errors." 
 
 He also shows himself occasionally preoccupied with the 
 dangers to which his frankness was exposing him. " I suffer," 
 says he in anotlier place, " I suffer more than if I wore hair- 
 cloth round my body, when I see wrong and violence done to 
 any one, and that because, from fear of the power and the 
 haughtiness of men, I dare not cry out at the violence or 
 wrong." 
 
 It is probable that Pierre Cardinal exaggerates here modestly 
 his circumspection in regard to his wicked contemporaries.. 
 The satires, which we have of him, no matter whether they are 
 directed against the higher castes of society or against power- 
 ful individuals of these castes, exhibit so much boldness and 
 vivacity, that we can scarcely believe him capable of the cau- 
 tion of which he accuses himself. 
 
 In order to adhere as strictly as possible to the plan of this 
 survey, I sliall choose the specimens, which I can give of the 
 satirical sirventes of Pierre Cardinal, from among those, which 
 treat of the most general subjects. The following is one of con- 
 siderable originality of detail, though its ground-work is vague 
 and common. 
 
 30
 
 463 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 " I have always detested treachery and deceit ; I've taken 
 justice and truth for my guide ; and whatever may be the con- 
 sequences of this my resohition, I shall deem good and be con- 
 tent with whatever may result from it. I know that there are 
 men who are ruined for having been upright, and others who 
 prosper for having been treacherous and perverse ; but I know 
 also, that no one ever rises to this prosperity of the wicked, un- 
 less, it is to fall again sooner or later."^ 
 
 " The men in power have the same compassion for others, 
 which Cain liad for Abel ; there are no wolves more ravenous 
 than they ; there is no abandoned woman that takes more delight 
 in falsity. If one were to stave them in two or three places, 
 believe not that a single verity could come out of them ; 
 nothing but falsehoods would come out ; their heart contains 
 a spring of it, which bursts forth and inundates, like the surges 
 of a torrent." 
 
 " I know many a baron in many a high position, who figures 
 there like glass in a ring ; to take such for diamonds would be 
 an error, like that of buying a wolf for a lamb. There is no 
 standard nor weight, like that of the adulterated currency of 
 Puy — pieces, the face of which exhibits the effigy of the flower 
 and of the cross, but where you find no silver, when you come 
 to test them." 
 
 " I will propose a new agreement to the world, from the ris- 
 ing to the setting sun. To every honest man I'll give a bezan 
 for a nail, which every rogue shall give me. To every courte- 
 ous personage I'll give a mark of gold, for every copper. Tours 
 currency, vi-hich every discourteous man shall give me. Let 
 every liar give me an e^^^ and I will give a mountain of gold 
 to every man of veracity. 
 
 " It would not require a large piece of parchment, on which to 
 write the w^hole of the law, practised by the masses of man- 
 kind. The half of the thumb of my glove would be sufficient 
 for it, A cake would be enough to satisfy tlie appetite of all honest 
 men ; they are not those who raise the price of living. But if 
 any one were to desire to feast the wicked, all he would have 
 to do would be to cry in every direction, w^ithout regard to 
 person : ' Come, come to eat, ye brave men of this world !' " 
 
 The following piece, as general in its character as the last, in 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 347. Piece No. XL, Strophes 1-5. 
 
 Tos temps azir falsetat et enjan, Li ric home an pietat tan gran 
 
 Et ab vertat et ab dreg ni capdelh, De paubra gen, com ac Cayni d' Abelh ; 
 
 E si per so vauc atras o avan, Que mais volon tolre que lop no fan, 
 
 No m'en rancur, ans m' es tot bon e belh, E mais mentir que tozas de bordelh : 
 Qu'els uns dechai lialtatz mantas vetz, Si 'Is crebavatz en dos locx o en tres, 
 E'ls autres sors enjans e mala fes; No us cugessetz que vertatz n'issis ges 
 
 Mas si taut es qu'om per falsetat mon, Mas raessongas, don an al cor tal foa 
 D'aqucl montar dissen pueys en preon. Que sobrevertz cum aigua detoron. 
 
 Etc., etc. — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poet/ry of the Trouhadours. 467 
 
 so far as it likewise relates to a mere abstract collection of indi- 
 viduals, is nevertheless definite and special in the sense of being 
 exclusively directed against a particular vice, against that of 
 falsehood. It is neither less ingenious nor less animated in its 
 details than the preceding, and its diction is perhaps still more 
 elegant and more graceful. Although it must necessarily lose 
 many of its beauties in another costume, I "will nevertheless 
 endeavor to translate it. 
 
 " I never heard a Breton or Bavarian, a Greek, a Scotchman 
 or a Gaul, who was as diflicult to be understood, as is a shame- 
 less liar. There is no Latinist at Paris, but who would stand 
 in need of a diviner, to know when such a man speaks what is 
 true and when he lies."'^ 
 
 " How were it possible, indeed, to comprehend a being en- 
 dowed with speech, whose words are all nonentities, and which 
 we know are false ? By its fruits we know the tree, and by its 
 odor we know the rose without even seeing it. Thus false- 
 hood reveals a heart that is treacherous and base." 
 
 " I am acquainted with more than thirty, whose purposes and 
 thoughts I am utterly unable to comprehend ; for their speech 
 is vanity, their oath is but a snare. No sooner have they sworn 
 that they'll remain, than they make preparations to decamp. 
 May God protect me against their oath !" 
 
 "■ I know a certain man, whose body is replete with false- 
 hoods. He rattles them out three by three, twenty a day, five 
 hundred per month, six thousand by the end of the year. I 
 never saw such an enormous luggage in so small a space, nor 
 such a small space always so full. Each night replenishes the 
 void of every day." 
 
 " Ye master artisans of falsehood ! the air which ye inspired 
 was pure, and free and fresh, but ye exhale it in lies more 
 fetid than manure. Like forgers of base money, ye coin de- 
 ceitful words out of your deceitful inclinations, and from your 
 false proceedings you deserve to reap a false reward." 
 
 The satirical sirventes of Pierre Cardinal contain three or 
 four pieces under the rubric of sermons — a rubric which they 
 deserve in every respect ; for they are moral exhortations which 
 have every appearance of having been intended to be sung in 
 public. One of these pieces is a fiction of great originality, 
 and equally beautiful both in a poetical and in a moral point of 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. v. p. 308. (Fragment). 
 
 Anc no vi Breto ni Baivier ... Al frug conois horn lo fruchier ; 
 
 Que tan mal entendre fezes Si com hom sent podor de lermorier 
 
 Cum fai home lag messorguier ; Al flairar, ses tot lo vezer. 
 
 Qu'a Paris non e latinier, Aissi fai lo mentir parer 
 
 Si vol entendre ni saber, Lo fals coratje torturier. 
 
 Quoras ment ni quoras ditz ver, _ — Ed. 
 
 Que devis non I'aia meatier . . .'
 
 46S History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 view. I propose to translate it ; for this piece, being of a sim- 
 ple and earnest style, can be rendered without losing any 
 thing, except the effect of the versification and of the rhyme, 
 which in this instance is very inconsiderable. 
 
 " There was a city once, I know not which, where fell a rain 
 so marvellous, that people who were caught in it, all lost their 
 reason."* 
 
 " All but a solitary lucky man without companion ; and he 
 escaped, because he slept at home, when the prodigy took 
 place." 
 
 " The rain having ceased, and this man being roused from 
 sleep, he went at large, and found the world around him per- 
 petrating follies." 
 
 " The one was dressed, the other nude ; the one was spitting 
 against heaven, the other hurling stones, the other darts, an- 
 other tore his clothes." 
 
 " This one would strike, that one would push, this other one, 
 imagining himself a king, would hold his sides majestically, 
 and still another one would leap over benches." 
 
 " Such a one menaced, such a one cursed another, such a one 
 would talk, not knowing what he said : another eulogized him- 
 self." ' ^ ' ° 
 
 " Who was amazed, unless it was the man who had remained 
 in his sound senses ? He was indeed aware that they were 
 fools ; he looked above, he looked below, to see if he could find 
 a man of sober mind, but a man of sober mind could not be 
 found." 
 
 " He continued to be amazed at them ; but they were still 
 more amazed at him, imagining that he had lost his reason." 
 
 " AYhatever they did seemed rational to them ; and what the 
 poor sage ventured to do otherwise, they judged insen- 
 sate." 
 
 " They then began to beat him : one strack him on his cheek, 
 another against his neck, half breaking it." 
 
 " Some push him forward, and otliers push him back ; he 
 meditates flight from the midst of them ; but the one pulls and 
 and the other tears him. He receives blow after blow ; he 
 falls, he rises, and he falls again." 
 
 " Constantly falling, constantly rising, constantly fleeing, he 
 reaches at last his home ; a single bound and he is in ! be- 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 366. Piece No. XLIX. (entire). 
 
 Una cieutat fo, no sai quals, Que era dins una maizo 
 
 On cazet una plueia tals On dormia, quant aco fo : 
 
 Que tug I'ome de la cieutat Aquel levet, quant ac dormit 
 
 Que toquet foron dessenat. E Ion se de ploure gequit, 
 
 'lug dessenero, mas sol us ; E venc foras entre las gens 
 
 Aquel escapet e non plus, On tug feiron dessenaniens. 
 
 Etc., Qic.—Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Trovhadours. 469 
 
 smeared with mire, beaten half dead, and still delighted to have 
 effected his escape." 
 
 " This fiction is an image of what passes here below. 
 The unknown city is the world replete with folly. For, to 
 love God, to fear him, and to observe his law, is man's chief 
 excellence and wisdom. But this wisdom is lost in our day : 
 a marvellous rain has fallen ; it has caused to spring up a 
 cupidity, a pride, and a wickedness, which have gained the 
 mastery over all mankind. And if God perchance has saved 
 any one from this calamity, he is considered crazy by all the 
 rest ; they hoot at and maltreat him, because he is not rational 
 in their sense of the term ; the friend of God pronounces them 
 insensate in that they have abandoned the wisdom of God ; and 
 they, in their turn, find him insensate for having renounced the 
 wisdom of the world." 
 
 Does not this fiction contain something grave and profound 
 which does honor to the imagination of Pierre Cardinal, if, as 
 everything authorizes us to presume, it is really of his inven- 
 tion ? Fictions of this character are rare among those of the 
 Troubadours. 
 
 Pierre Cardinal composed a large number of other pieces, 
 several of which are not inferior in any respect to the three, 
 which I have just translated. But these ought to sufiice to give 
 us some notion of his style and talent. Of all the Troubadom*s, 
 he is perhaps the one in whom we might find most esprit^ in a 
 sense approximating the modern acceptation of the term. It 
 seems to me, that the very pieces, which I have given as spe- 
 cimens, exhibit to us more than one trait in proof of this asser- 
 tion ; and among all those, which I have omitted to notice, 
 there is perhaps not one, in which one might not find traits 
 similar to these or even still more piquant. I think I can 
 quote one or two of them. The following, for example, are the 
 first eight verses of a sirvente, of which they constitute the best 
 and most ingenious portion : 
 
 "As men lament over a son, a father or a friend, whom 
 death has snatched away, so I lament the living traitors and 
 evil-doers left in the world. ... I weep o'er every man, 
 however little he may be a debauchee or robber. I weep ex- 
 ceedingly, if he enjoys the advantage of his misdemeanors long ; 
 I weep s'till more, if he's not hung for them."* 
 
 A certain profound sentiment, which is rather indicated than 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. v. p. 305 (Fragment). 
 
 Aissi com hoiu planh son filh o son paire 
 Ho son auiic, quant inort lo I'a tolgut, 
 Plane eu los vius que sai son remazut 
 Fals, desleials, felons e de mal aire. . . . 
 Etc., etc., etc. — Ed.
 
 470 nistory of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 expressed, constitutes the principal merit of these pieces. Here 
 is another passage, where on the contrary the singularity of the 
 expression constitutes the only merit of a very common thought. 
 " A traitor is even worse than a ravisher," says the Trouba- 
 dour, " for as a convert is changed into a shaven monk {moine 
 to7idic), so a traitor is changed into a wretch suspended {un 
 pendu).^^ 
 
 The poetry of Pierre Cardinal would furnish us a multitude 
 of examples and observations of this kind, had we the time to 
 dwell on them. But this is not tlie case here ; and we are obliged 
 to survey from a somewhat more elevated x)oint of view and in 
 larger masses the different divisions of the lyric poetry of the 
 Provencals. 
 
 I have, however, not yet quite finished my observations on 
 Pierre Cardinal. Among the compositions yet extant from him, 
 there is one which is too curious to be passed over without a 
 few remarks. 
 
 The epoch of Pierre Cardinal was not a philosophical epoch, 
 at least not in the south of France. The grand problem of 
 human destiny, which since his time philosophy has pro- 
 pounded and discussed with so much profundity and eloquence, 
 this grand problem, I say, had not yet been propounded and 
 solved except by the Christian religion, in the age and country 
 in question ; and all the world, the poets as well as others, 
 were depending on that solution. 
 
 Pierre Cardinal is the only one who seems to have had some 
 intention of proposing and of solving it, in a sirvente, which an 
 intention like this would alone suffice to render an object of 
 curiosity, but which becomes still more so by virtue of its in- 
 trinsic excellence. I subjoin here the poem entire and in all 
 its naivete.* 
 
 " I wish to begin a new sirvente, which I shall recite on the 
 day of judgment, in the presence of him, who has created me 
 and drawn me out of nothing, in case he intends to accuse me 
 of anything, or in case he wishes to lodge me among the wicked. 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 364. Piece No. XLVIII. (entire). 
 
 (1) Un sirventes novel vuelhcomensar Per que devetz m'arma e mon cors 
 
 Que retrairai aljorn del jutjameu salvar, 
 
 A selh que m fetz e m formet de nien ; E que m valhatz a mon trespassamen ; 
 
 Si'l me cuia de ren ochaizonar, E far vos ai una bella partia, 
 
 E si'l me vol metre en la diablia, Que m tornetz lai don muec lo pre- 
 
 leu li dirai : Senher, merce no sia mier dia, 
 
 Qu'el mal segle trebaliey totz mos ans, O que m siatz de mos tortz perdonans ; 
 
 Eguardatz me, si ua plai, dels turmen- Qu'ieuno'lsfeira, sinofos natz enans. 
 tans. 
 
 ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ (6) S'ieu ai sai mal, et en yfern ardia, 
 
 Segon ma fe, tortz e peccatz seria ; 
 
 (5) leu no mi vuelh de vos dezesperar, Qu'ieu vos puesc be esser recastinans, 
 
 Ans ai en vos mon bon esperameu ; Que per un ben ai de mal mil aitans. 
 
 —Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 471 
 
 I'll tell him : Ko, no, Lord, have compassion ! Be pleased to 
 defend me from the executioners of the pit, me, who have passed 
 the years of all my life in tormenting myself in this wicked 
 world, where thou hadst placed me." 
 
 " All the celestial court will be amazed on hearing my de- 
 fence ; I'll tell God, that it would be wronging his friends to 
 think of destroying them or plunging them into hell. Who- 
 ever loses what he might gain, has no right to complain of 
 poverty ; God, therefore should be lenient and save his souls 
 from death." 
 
 " He ought not to prohibit them from entering Paradise. 
 Such interdiction would be a great dishonor to Saint Peter, 
 who is its porter. It would be just, that every soul, desirous of 
 an entrance, should enter there with joy. The court, where 
 some are weeping and others laughing, is no longer a well re- 
 gulated court. And however powerful a monarch God may be, 
 if he does not receive us, the reason of such refusal will be de- 
 manded of him." 
 
 " He might with great propriety annihilate the devil ; he 
 would gain many a soul by it ; this act of power would be ac- 
 ceptable to all the world ; for my part, I sliould be most grateful 
 for it ; and as for him, he might, we all know, pardon and ab- 
 solve himself for it. Do, therefore, good Lord God, annihilate 
 our ruthless and importunate enemy." 
 
 " I shall not yet despair of thee ; no, far from it ; in thee I 
 put my confidence ; for thou must be my lielp in the hour of 
 my death, and save my soul and body. If this is to be other- 
 wise, then I'll propose the honest alternative : Restore me to 
 the state, in which I was before my birth, and out of which 
 thou took'st me, or else pardon my faults, which I should never 
 have committed, had I not existed," 
 
 " If after having suffered here, I were to burn in hell, this 
 would in my opinion be an injustice ; for I can solemnly assure 
 thee, that for one good, which I shall have enjoyed in life, I 
 have endured a thousand ills." 
 
 We must not misapprehend the character of this singular 
 piece ; we must not see either pleasantry or irony in it. Tlie 
 author did not wish to convey anything of the kind. His lan- 
 guage is popular and frequently borders on the burlesque ; his 
 idea is a vague and confused, but a grave and serious one. We 
 perceive through the impropriety and the vulgarity of his 
 words, that he imagines the existence of evil to bo the conse- 
 quence of a sort of dualism, but of a dualism which might be 
 called an accidental one, and which God might at his pleasure 
 reduce to unity. The piece may be to some extent a reflection 
 of the heresy of the Albigenses, in the midst of which Pierre
 
 472 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 Cardinal lived — a heresy which admitted two principles in the 
 universe. At all events, it was quite natural, that this heresy, 
 fermenting in a multitude of heads, should influence some of 
 them to propose and to solve the grand problem of human des- 
 tiny in a manner differing from that of Christianity. But I 
 have digressed too far from my subject, and I must now return 
 to it. 
 
 The moral satire of the Troubadours, in those cases even, 
 when it is based on the most general ideas of social order and 
 humanity, necessarily contains special allusions to the morality 
 of chivalry. Nevertheless the former, being predominant in 
 the kind of satire in question, determine its character, and 
 ought also to determine its name, if it is to have one. 
 
 But among the satirical sirventes of the Troubadours, there 
 are to be found some very remarkable ones, which properly de- 
 serve the name of chivalric satires. There are those, in which 
 the censure and the praise have direct reference to the ideas 
 and to the principles of chivalry as such. The most interesting 
 of these pieces are from the last years of the twelfth century. 
 If there was any epoch of the Middle Age, in the south of 
 France, to which the epithet chivalric could be applied with 
 greater propriety than to any other, it was undoubtedly this. It 
 was then, in fact, that the majority of the chiefs of the feudal 
 order flourished, who regarded the principles of chivalry in a 
 serious light, and exerted the utmost of their power to apply 
 these principles to the organization ai:d the government of so- 
 ciety. It was then, that the sentiment of love was experienced 
 and celebrated with the greatest enthusiasm, and that the insti- 
 tutions of chivalry were nearest to the point of fonning a 
 systematic whole, exercising, as they did, an influence over the 
 manners and the social relations of life, which was peculiar and 
 distinct from every other. 
 
 And yet all the poets of this epoch, who endeavor to form 
 an abstract idea, a more or less rigid theory of the system of 
 chivalry, by a singular though easily conceived illusion, speak 
 of it as having already lost some of its pristine splendor, and as 
 continuing to decline rapidly. Tliey would have been very 
 much embarrassed to tell, in what place and at what time it had 
 been in a more flourishing state. It was however true, that 
 in reality it did not completely correspond with the ideal 
 they had formed of it ; hence in accordance with the general 
 tradition of mankind, which always dreams of an ideal happi- 
 ness and good in the past and under the form of a historical 
 fact, the Troubadours assumed a golden age of chivalry already 
 far removed from them, and depicted their own epoch as the 
 iron age of the institution. ^
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 473 
 
 Tins poetic illusion manifests itself every moment and in 
 twenty different ways in the poetry of the Troubadours, some- 
 times by rapid and isolated coruscations, sometimes by a full 
 and entire effusion ; often by melancholy regrets of the past, 
 still oftener in accents of anger and of contempt for the pre- 
 sent. It has inspired a great number of the finest verses of 
 Provencal poetry. 
 
 Of all the Troubadonrs Giraud de Borneil is the one who 
 has most freely indulged in this illusion, and who has turned 
 its poetic advantages to the best account. I shall, therefore, 
 borrow from him some examples of the kind of satire to which 
 it has given rise. Bnt I ought in the first place to recall to 
 mind, that of all the Trouljadours wdio deserve translation, 
 Giraud de Borneil is the most difficult to be translated and 
 the one who loses most by it. Here is for example, in the first 
 place, an isolated stanza from one of his pieces, which might 
 serve as an epigraph to many others. 
 
 '' I gladly would, if I but could, but I cannot, forget (that which 
 afflicts me), how the great seigniors have renounced all noble 
 generous doings. Alas ! to what extent a cowardly prudence 
 has gained the mastery over them, which annihilates youth, 
 hunts it down and frightens it away ! I could not have believed, 
 that in a thousand years valor and virtue could have fallen 
 so low, as I perceive them now. Chivalry and love are no 
 longer what they were ; they have ceased to be the charm of 
 noble souls, from the moment they began to pay attention to 
 their misfortunes or their happiness." 
 
 Several of the pieces of Giraud de Borneil are, I repeat it, 
 but a more or less poetic commentary on, the more or less 
 varied development of, this melancholy fancy. The least that 
 I could do, in order to finish my observations on this particular 
 point of Provencal poetry in a suitable manner, will be to 
 translate one of these pieces of Giraud. The following ap- 
 peared to me to be one of tlie finest, besides having the merit 
 of containing several allusions of great interest in regard to the 
 general history of the poetic culture of the South. 
 
 "For a long time I have tried to w^ake up solatz^ from its 
 sleep, and to restore exiled prowess to its home. But I've re- 
 nounced the work, deeming it impracticable, and seeing my 
 force and will more and more subdued by injuries and mis- 
 fortune."t 
 
 * Soulas, i. e. bande, compagnie jnyeuse — Diet. Acad. 
 
 t Ilaynouard, vol. iv. p. 290. Piece No. XX. Strophes 1-7. 
 
 (1) Per solatz revelhar, Mi cuyei trebalhar ; 
 
 Quar es trop endormitz, Mas er m'en siii Riqnitz, 
 
 E per pretz qu'es fayditz Per so quar sui falhitz, 
 
 Aculhir e tornar, Quar non es d'acabar ;
 
 474 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 " This evil will hereafter be difficult to endure. 'Tis I who 
 tell you so, I, who know how courtesy and valor formerly were 
 received. In our day chevaliers ride like villeins, without a 
 lance, without care for adventures." 
 
 " Formerly I was wont to see barons in fine armor giving 
 and following tournaments ; and one might hear them some- 
 times discourse of those, whei^ the finest feats had been ac- 
 complished. Their honor now consists in stealing cattle, sheep 
 and lands. Oli ! shame on every cavalier when he appears be- 
 fore his lady, who with his own hand drives the bleating flocks 
 of sheep, or pillages the churches and the travellers !" 
 
 " The Jongleurs, whom once I saw received so graciously, 
 are now discarded. They have lost the guides with whom 
 they travelled formerly. And now that valor has declined, 1 
 see the Troubadours, who long marched at the head of nu- 
 merous companions, in noble gorgeous attire, now solitary and 
 forsaken." 
 
 " I have seen infant Jongleurs in elegant apparel, going from 
 court to court, for the sole purpose of singing the praises of the 
 ladies ; but now they dare no longer sing, so much has gal- 
 lantry declined ! And instead of hearing the ladies lauded, we 
 hear men speak ill of them. Say it's their own fault, say, that 
 it is the fault of the chevaliers; but I say, it's the fault of all, if 
 there is no longer any faith or glory in love." 
 
 " As for myself, who have heretofore been ever ready to 
 celebrate in my songs every gallant and courteous man, I 
 know no longer which side to taKe, when instead of the accents 
 of joy I hear displeasing cries at all the courts. They now re- 
 ceive at the courts a frivolous tale with equal favor and ap- 
 plause, as they do a noble song on the grand events, on the 
 exploits of past ages." 
 
 '' Moreover, it serves no purpose now, to recall those ancient 
 noble deeds and exploits long forgotten, in order to reanimate 
 hearts, that are sunk too low. I've formed the resolution to 
 remain silent, and I shall keep it ; I shall no longer relapse 
 into the wish, of which I've cured myself, to wake up gallantry 
 and solatz from their sleep. Hereafter it will be enough for 
 me, to turn and to revolve, to balance and to test, in every 
 sense, within my mind, whatever transpires in the world, ap- 
 proving or condemning, according to desert." 
 
 Cum plus m'en ven voluntatz e Ni'ls viels faitz remembrar, 
 
 talans, Que mal es a laissar 
 
 Plus creys de lai lo dampnatges e'l Afar pus es plevitz. 
 
 dans. E'l mal don sui guaritz 
 
 ***** No m qual ja mezinar, 
 
 Mas so qu'om ve, volv e vir en balans, 
 
 (7) Mas a cor afrancar, E prenda e laia e forss' e dams los 
 
 Que se 's trop endurzitz, pans. 
 
 Mon deu hom los oblitz — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Trouhadours. 475 
 
 Leaving aside the historical ilhision, which is the motive of 
 this piece, we cannot help admitting that its melancholy is of 
 a graceful and a poetic caste, and that it presupposes a soul and 
 an imagination of uncommon elevation. The verses are very 
 beautiful, and among those which make us regret that the idiom 
 in which they were written should now be entirely dead. 
 
 Now, whatever may be the shades of difference between tlie 
 several specimens, which I have just given of the moral or 
 ideal satire of the Troubadours, we will still have been able to 
 observe that they are pervaded by a certain identity of style, 
 of taste and sentiment, on the strength of which we may 
 affirm that they all belong to the same school, to the same 
 epoch, to the same country, and that they are the manifestations 
 of one and the same genius. It is however not without import- 
 ance to remark, that there are other Provencal compositions of 
 the kind, in which the general characteristics of the school and 
 of the epoch disappear almost entirely under the impress of an 
 independent and capricious individual genius, ignoring or dis- 
 daining the conventional rules and limits of his art as observed and 
 Dractised in his time. Such are, for example, several pieces of 
 the same Marcabrus, of whom I have already spoken several 
 times, and of whom I would have to speak again here, had I 
 the time to do so. Such are more particularly those of another 
 Troubadour, whom I have named elsewhere and concerning 
 whom it is now proper to say something further. 
 
 This Troubadour was a monk, and is only known under the 
 name of the Monk of Montaudon. He was from the chateau 
 of Vie, near Aurillac in Auvergne. His father, a nobleman of 
 the country, having undoubtedly other sons besides this one, 
 made him enter the celebrated monastery of Aurillac. Tliis 
 was, however, by no means the vocation of the young man ; 
 still he suffered himself to become what his superiors wished, 
 apparently under the consoling conviction, tliat the habit of the 
 monk would not prevent him from leading the life of pleasure 
 for which he felt himself born. 
 
 Soon after having entered the cloister, he was made prior of 
 Montaudon, a monastery in the neighborhood of that of Aurillac, 
 and dependent on it. Being now at liberty to follow his natu- 
 ral bent for poetiy, he there began to compose pieces of verse 
 of every description, and particularly sirventes on the events 
 which excited some talk in the country. These pieces, full of 
 animation and of sprightliness, soon made him known in the 
 neighboring castles. The barons and chevaliers of the country 
 rescued him by a sort of violence from his monastery, and 
 vied with each other in feasting him, and in loading him with 
 presents.
 
 476 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 The monk preferred pleasure to money ; lie used his credit 
 only for the good of his priory, which, poor as he had taken it, 
 he soon had made a rich one. Believing that by these services 
 he had acquired a claim to the indulgence of his abbot, he ad- 
 dressed to him what certainly must be regarded as the strangest 
 request that a monk ever made of his superior ; he asked his 
 permission to lead in future the kind of life which the king of 
 Aragon was anxious to prescribe for him. 
 
 The abbot, who was probably a secular abbot, that is to say, 
 a warrior and chevalier, such as there were many at that time 
 at the head of rich monasteries — the abbot, I say, made no dif- 
 ficulty about complying with his request. 
 
 The king of Aragon, who knew the monk, if not personally, 
 at least by reputation, directed him to live in the world, to in- 
 dulge in good cheer, to compose verses, to sing and to love the 
 ladies. Never was a royal decree better observed than this ; 
 the monk of Montaudon followed more freely than ever his 
 worldly and poetic propensities, and was made seignior of the 
 court of Puy. It was a singular office, this seigniorship of the 
 court of Puy ; and it is so nmch the more natural to say some- 
 thing further about it, as the fact to which it relates is at once 
 very little known and extremely curious in regard to the his- 
 tory of Provencal poetry and civilization. 
 
 Li the twelfth century, and during a part of the thirteenth, 
 Puy, which was then called Puy or Mount St. Mary, was the 
 place where the most chivalric festivals were celebrated peri- 
 odically. The barons, great and small, the chevaliers, the Trou- 
 badours, the Provencal Jongleurs flocked together there from 
 every part of the South, so that for a number of days in succes- 
 sion all the beaut}^ and the gallantry of the country would 
 be united there as at a single court. Besides the martial chal- 
 lenges of the tournaments, there were also poetic challenges on 
 these occasions, or tournaments of the Troubadours, and prizes 
 were awarded to the victors in the latter as well as in the 
 former. 
 
 Festivals like these always involved enormous expenses, and 
 thus furnished the seigniors of the South with opportunities for 
 displaying that magnificent liberality, which was at that time 
 reputed one of the highest virtues of chivalry. Among these 
 seigniors there was always to be found one, who was ready to 
 incur the risk of ruining himself by voluntarily assuming the 
 responsibility of defraying all the expenses of the festival, and 
 there was a regularly established ceremony for declaring one's 
 resolution to this effect. In the midst of a hall of vast dimen- 
 sions, when all the barons who had come to the festival were 
 assembled, there was seated an isolated personage, who was
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 477 
 
 holding a hawk on his fist. Tlie baron, whom his heart 
 prompted to signalize himself by such an act of magnificent liber- 
 ality, stepped forward toward the hawk and took it upon his 
 fist ; and this was the mode of announcing to those j3resent that 
 he pledged himself to meet the expenses of the fete. 
 
 The personage charged v/ith the business of holding and pre- 
 senting the hawk on the day of tlie ceremony described, was 
 called the Seignior of the court of Puy, and this was the oflice 
 conferred upon the monk of Montaudon. The subsequent part 
 of his life is but little known ; we are only informed, that he 
 retired to Spain in the end, where he lived for some time in 
 favor among the kings and barons, and where he died to- 
 ward the middle of the thirteenth century. 
 
 We have from him pieces of various kinds ; but those of the 
 satirical description are the only ones which deserve our par- 
 ticular attention. Some of them exhibit a singularly original 
 and fantastical turn of imagination. Of this description are, 
 among others, the two or three which he wrote against the 
 usage, common among the ladies of his time, of painting their 
 faces to excess, even, as it appears, when they did not stand in 
 any need of any such adventitious ornament, which they applied 
 simply for the purpose of appearing a little handsomer than nature 
 had made them. I shall endeavor to give an analysis of them. 
 
 In one of these pieces, wdiich is the oddest of them all, the 
 monk of Montaudon supposes himself translated into Paradise, 
 not in spirit, but in body and in his friar's frock, and present 
 at the judgment-seat of God, before whom the difterent crea- 
 tures, at variance with each other, are pleading their several 
 causes, some as accusers and others as defendants. 
 
 After the adjustment of several cases on which I need not 
 dwell here, a party of litigants of a very singular description 
 appear in their turn before the supreme judge. Tliey are the 
 walls and vaulted ceilings of houses. These ceilings and these 
 walls are alive ; they speak and they have matters of grave 
 importance to communicate. They come for the purpose of 
 bringing a complaint against the ladies, who by making use of 
 paint to embellish their faces, were no longer leaving any for 
 them. The ladies are present in order to defend themselves, 
 and the monk for the purjjose of reporting the debate and the 
 judgment. 
 
 Tnis idea, in which we might say that there was something 
 Aristophanic, is incontestably the most characteristic and the 
 most striking feature of the piece. Its execution is harsh, dry 
 and crude, but lively and ingenious. The following are some 
 passages from this extravagant production. 
 
 " A litigation has commenced between the ceilings and the 
 ladies ; the ceilings speak first and say :
 
 4:78 ^ History of Provengal Poetry, 
 
 "Ladies, we have been dead and annihilated ever since 
 you've taken away the paint. It is a grave misdemeanor in 
 you to color and varnish yourselves to such excess ; and we have 
 never seen at any other time, that it was customary thus to 
 illuminate one's self." 
 
 " And the ladies replied, that this privilege was conceded to 
 them more than a hundred years before there ever was any 
 such thing as a ceiling in the world, either great or small." 
 
 " There is one lady among the rest, who says to the ceilings : 
 your complaint is an unjust one. Have I not the right to paint 
 the wrinkles below my eyes ? "When they are well eifaced, I 
 still can act the part of haughty dame with many an amorous 
 knight, who takes a fancy to such ornament." 
 
 " God then says to the ceilings : Provided you have no ob- 
 jection, I will accord to the ladies the permission to paint them- 
 selves for twenty years, after their twenty-fifth." 
 
 " But the ceilings demur : We can not consent to this, they 
 say ; but simply to oblige you, we will concede them ten years 
 for painting, and we demand security." 
 
 Thereupon Saint Peter and Saint Andrew interpose be- 
 tween the parties for the purpose of settling the matter in dis- 
 pute. The difference in regard to the times, during which the 
 ladies were to have the privilege of applying rouge, is divided 
 by two ; and it is agreed that the term shall be fifteen years. 
 Under this condition the agreement is concluded : the ladies 
 and the ceilings pledge themselves by oath that they will ob- 
 serve it, and then both parties withdraw. 
 
 But scarcely have they returned to their homes, when the 
 ladies begin again to violate the compact most unscrupulously, 
 by continuing to paint themselves far beyond the term accorded 
 to them. From morning till night they are busily engaged in 
 preparing colors and pastes of various sorts, of which the poet 
 deligently enumerates the nmltitudinous ingredients, the price 
 of ail of which is raised by this sudden increase of the demand. 
 The monk would willingly and patiently submit to this enhance- 
 ment of the price ; but he cannot pardon that of saflron, which 
 has become so scarce that it is no longer possible to find any 
 for the kitchen. 
 
 The following piece is supposed to form the sequel to the 
 foregoing. It is far more elegant in its execution and much 
 clearer in its details — too clear even to make it possible for me 
 to translate the whole of it. But the portion, which I can 
 translate, is worth the trouble, as it furnishes us an example of 
 the excess to which the unlimited freedom of imagination would 
 sometimes carry the Troubadours. 
 
 " The other day, I peradventure was in the parliament of 
 God, where I heard the ceilings lodge a complaint against the
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 479 
 
 ladies, who by painting their visages had enhanced the price of 
 paints." * 
 
 " (I have returned there since) and God told me frankly : 
 Monk, I hear the ceilings are suffering an encroachment on 
 their rights. Go quickly down, for the love you bear me, and 
 in my name command the ladies to desist from painting ; I 
 want no more proceedings on the subject ; and if they continue 
 to paint in spite of my command, I shall myself go and erase 
 their work." 
 
 " Gently ! Lord God ! I then replied, thou oughtst to have a 
 little more indulgence for the ladies. 'Tis nature that prompts 
 them to adorn their countenances ; this ought not to displease 
 thee, and the ceilings ought not to have complained, or 
 quarreled with the ladies on this account, who can no longer 
 endure them." 
 
 " Monk, God then replied to me, it is a great folly and a 
 mistake in you to approve, that my creature should adorn her- 
 self against my wish. The ladies would be as powerful as I am, 
 if, while I make them grow older every day, they could rejuve- 
 nate themselves by painting and by glossing." 
 
 " Lord, thou speakest superbly, because thou knowest thyself 
 in the possession of the power. Nevertheless there is but one way 
 of preventing the ladies from painting themselves ; it is to allow 
 them to retain their beauty until they die, or else to annihilate 
 all paints and every style of painting, so that hereafter there 
 shall be nothing of the kind left in the world." 
 
 The debate is prolonged still further, but it becomes too 
 cynical. I can only say, that the monk persists in his refusal 
 to become the bearer of God's message, who at last resolves to 
 let the ladies do as they please, with the reserve, however, of 
 sending them a certain infirmity, extremely detrimental to their 
 paints. 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 42. Piece No. XX. Strophes 1-5. 
 
 Autra vetz fuy a parlamen Ab que s fan la cara luzir 
 
 El eel, per boa' aventura ; Del tench, com lo degran laissar. 
 
 E'l vout fazion rancura 
 
 De las domnas que s van penhen ; Pero m ditz dieus mot francamen : 
 
 Qu'ieu los u' auzi a dieu clamar Monges, ben aug qu' a tortura 
 
 D'elhas qu'an fag lo tench carzir, Perdon 11 vout lur dreitura. 
 
 Etc., etc. — Ed.
 
 480 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 CHAPTER XXn. 
 
 THE LYKICAL POETRY OF THE TROUBADOURS. 
 
 VI I. SATIRE. 
 
 HISTORICAL. 
 
 From the middle of the twelfth to the end of the thirteenth 
 centuries, there was no lack of historical subjects for the satires 
 of the Troubadours. The manuscripts are full of sirventes, 
 some of which are directed against the men and others against 
 the events of these epochs ; so that the species naturally sub- 
 divides itself into personal and into general satire. ♦ 
 
 I do not intend to dwell on the first ; I have not the leisure 
 for it. But it is not without some regret that I pass over in 
 silence a certain number of compositions of this class, remark- 
 able for the energetic, though sometimes cynical and scurrilous 
 sentiments by which they were inspired. The satires of Wil- 
 liam of Bergnadan, a Catalonian knight, are perhaps the most 
 sprightly and the most poetical, but at the same time the most 
 shameless compositions of the kind. He wrote among others 
 two or three against a certain bishop of Urgel, who appears to 
 have been his personal enemy. They are of such a character, 
 that I should not venture to translate them, if I had room for 
 them. I think, however, that I may be permitted to signalize 
 them historically, as an evidence of the excess to which the 
 reciprocal enmity between the feudal order and the clergy was 
 carried during the thirteenth century, and as a specimen of 
 what the poets dared to write against the priests. And it must 
 not be forgotten, that what the poets wrote at that time was not 
 destined to be looked upon in books, which scarcely any one 
 would have read, scarcely any one knov/ing how to read. These 
 compositions were set to music, and sung in all the castles and 
 even in the cities among the commoners. We therefore scarcely 
 know, which scandal is most to be wondered at, whether that of 
 the vice or that of its revelation and its censure. I pass on to 
 the general or public historical satire of the Troubadours.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 481 
 
 The facts, to whicli they principally relate, are facts of a 
 complex nature, the incidents of which were more or less 
 varied and prolonged. They may be reduced to four principal 
 events : 
 
 1st. Tlie wars of the German emperors against the indepen- 
 dence and the nationality of the Italians. 
 
 2d, The struggle between the kings of France and England 
 for the supremacy in the provinces, at that time dismembered 
 from the French monarchy and subject to English princes. 
 
 3d. The crusade against the Albigenses. 
 
 4th. The establishment of Charles of Anjou in Provence, 
 which was the signal of a great revolution in the culture and in 
 the social condition of that part of the South. 
 
 The Troubadours, who were contemporary with these events, 
 took a more or less passionate interest in all of them. They 
 judged of them after their fashion ; they approved of or con- 
 demned them according to their ideas of morality, of social 
 order and of humanity, and these ideas were sometimes vague 
 and general, and sometimes special and local, or in other 
 words chivalric. I propose to indicate in a very summary 
 manner the impression which these events produced on them,- 
 and what fesults with reference to Provencal poetry attended 
 the manifestion of these impressions. 
 
 And in the first place, with respect to the revolutions in 
 Italy, we need not be surprised to see the Troubadours take a 
 direct and lively interest in them. They were in the habit of 
 frequenting, as we have already seen, the courts and the cities 
 of this country ; they had admirers, disciples and rivals there. 
 Several of their number, after having once descended into the 
 rich plains of Lombardy or into the beautiful cities of Tuscany, 
 were so delighted with them, that they were unwilling to quit 
 them again, and spent the remainder of their life there. There 
 was hardly any need of so many reasons to induce men, who 
 were naturally of such an ardent temperament and of so lively 
 an imagination, to espouse the cause of one or the other of the 
 two parties, which v/ere then contesting their respective claims 
 to the supremacy over Italy. 
 
 Among all the European nations, with which the Troubadours 
 stood in relation, the Germans, who in the Provencal were de- 
 nominated Ties (an alteration of the word Teutseheri), were the 
 one with which the Troubadours had the least sympathy. They 
 found them brutal, coarse and discourteous. They liad particu- 
 larly a great prejudice against their language ; and if any one 
 perchance had told them, that this very language contained 
 verses perhaps as elegant and as sweet as their own, they could 
 scarcely have believed him. I do not remember now which one 
 
 31
 
 482 History of Provencal Poet/ry. 
 
 of them, speaking of this idiom, compares it to the barking of 
 dogs, and ne is not the only one who treats it with this disdain- 
 ful repugnance. 
 
 This being the case, it is not extraordinary that some of the 
 Troubadours should have sided with the Italians against the 
 Germans and against the emperors. Generally speaking, how- 
 ever, these poets were men of the court and of the castle, whose 
 inclinations had nothing in common with democracy. It was 
 particularly from the emperors whom they came to see in Italy, 
 that they expected the best reception and the richest presents. 
 The cause of the latter was therefore the one, which they were 
 the most eager to embrace, and their victories those which they 
 were fondest of celebrating in their songs. Their defeats were 
 a source of astonishment and sadness to them ; it was repugnant 
 to their feelings to see chevaliers, warriors by profession, worsted 
 by the commoners. This did not seem to them to be in order, 
 and if they had been tempted to celebrate these victories of the 
 commoners, the task would have embarrassed them, as a strange 
 and novel one. 
 
 I think I may dispense with translating any of the satirical 
 sirventes of the Troubadours relative to the feuds between the 
 emperors of Germany and the Italian powers. Tkese pieces 
 may be of some interest in civil andpoliticalhistory, but Ihave 
 met few, which were remarkable for any poetical merit, and I 
 experience no very great regret at an omission by which the 
 reader will sustain no loss. 
 
 This is not the case with the Provengal pieces relative to the 
 various incidents, which happened during the struggle of Philip 
 Augustus, first against Henry 11. and subsequently against 
 Richard the Lion-hearted. The majority of these pieces are by 
 Bertrand de Born, one of the five or six most eminent Trouba- 
 dours, who by his talent and his character exercised a more 
 extensive influence over the powers and the events of his time 
 than any other member of his profession. The picture of his 
 life and the examination of his works deserve developments 
 which I am unable to bestow on them. I shall content myself 
 with translating the most important items of information which 
 the Provencal traditions furnish us in regard to him ; it will then 
 be an easy matter to attach to this account a general idea of the 
 satirical pieces of Bertrand. 
 
 " Bertrand de Born," says his ancient biographer, " was a 
 castellan of the bishopric of Perigueux, viscount of Hautefort, 
 a castle with a population of nearly a thousand men. He had 
 a brother by the name of Constantine, who had a great desire to 
 rob and to destroy him, and who would have succeeded in his 
 a,ttempt, had it not been for the king of England (Henry H)."
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 483 
 
 " Bertrand de Born was perpetually at war with all the 
 seigniors of his vicinity, with the count of Perigueux and the 
 viscount of Limoges, with his brother Constantine and with 
 Richard (Cceur-de-Lion), who at that time was as yet only count 
 of Poitiers. Bertrand was an excellent chevalier, an excellent 
 warrior, an excellent Troubadour, an excellent lover of the 
 ladies, well informed and a good talker, and well versed in the 
 art of governing himself both in prosperity and in adver- 
 sity." 
 
 " He was the master of the king of England, Henry H., and 
 of his three sons, as often as he wished to be so. But he always 
 endeavored to embroil them in wars against each other, the 
 sons against the father and the brothers among themselves. He 
 likewise did all in his power to involve the kings of France and 
 England in quarrels ; and during the intervals of peace between 
 these monarchs he composed sirventes, in order to show the 
 dishonor which each of them sustained from the conditions of 
 this peace, and for the purpose of endeavoring to break it. By 
 these means he excited feuds among them, from which he de- 
 rived great advantages and great misfortunes. He composed 
 only two chansons, but many sirventes. The king of Aragon 
 (Alphonse I.) called the chansons of Girard de Borneil the wives 
 of the sirventes of Bertrand de Born."* 
 
 In this notice the old biographer indicates the dominant trait 
 of Bertrand's character very distinctly; it was an unbridled 
 passion for war. He loved it not only as the occasion for ex- 
 hibiting proofs of valor, for acquiring power, and for winning 
 glory, but also and even more on account of its hazards, on 
 account of the exaltation of courage and of life which it pro- 
 duced, nay even for the sake of the tumult, the disorders, and 
 the evils which are accustomed to follow in its train. Bertrand 
 de Born is the ideal of the undisciplined and adventuresome war- 
 rior of the Middle Age, rather than that of the chevalier in the 
 proper sense of the term. The latter engaged in warfare with 
 a moral aim, for social order and for peace, the former solely 
 for the sake of war itself. When Bertrand had arrived at an 
 advanced age he repented of the life which he had led, turned 
 monk, and died in a convent. This pious end did not prevent 
 Dante from assigning to the bellicose Troubadour a very low 
 
 Elace in hell, wliere, as we know, he represents him as carrying 
 is head in his* hand after the manner of a lantern, a punish- 
 
 * The biographer continues : " Et aquel que contava per el avia nom Papiol. Et era 
 azautz e cortes ; e ciamava Rassa lo corns de Bretanha ; e'l rei d'Englaterra Oc e No ; 
 e'l rei jove so fllh, Marinier. E metia tot son sen en mcsclar guerras: e fes mesclar lo 
 paire e'l filh d'Englaterra, tan qu'el rei jove fo mortz d'un cairel en un castel d'EN Ber- 
 tran de Born," etc. The notice of his life and writings is extended from p. 76 to p. 97, 
 of vol. v., Uaynouard's Choix. — Ed.
 
 4:84 History of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 ment symbolical of the crime of having alienated the chief from 
 the members, that is to say, the father from his children. 
 
 The majority of the pieces of Bertrand de Born are a sort of 
 martial dithyrambs, composed for the purpose of rousing to war 
 those nobles over whom he had some influence or ascendant ; 
 and satires against his adversaries, against those whom he 
 charged with cowardice when they did not yield to his instiga- 
 tions. We have already been able to form an idea of the former 
 from what I have quoted in treating of the martial poetry of 
 the Provencals; and this is now the place for giving some 
 specimens of the latter ; but I must forewarn the reader not 
 to expect too much, as these specimens will necessarily be very 
 inadequate. The argument of all the satirical pieces of Ber- 
 trand de Born being based on historical facts, and being even 
 linked, for the most part, to certain curious and very little known 
 particularities of these facts, it is impossible to make them un- 
 derstood or relished without a long commentary. All that I 
 can quote therefore from these pieces will be a few detached 
 passages, and not even those which are the most poetical, but 
 simply those whose motive requires the least explanation. 
 
 I give, in the first place, four stanzas of a sirvente, in which 
 the poet portrays in lively colors the habitual agitation of his 
 life ; it was composed after one of his returns from the perpetual 
 wars which he was waging against the majority of the seigniors 
 in his vicinity : 
 
 " Daily I am obliged to war, to exert and to defend myself, 
 to put myself out of breath ; on all sides they burn and pillage 
 my domain, they uproot my trees and they assart my woods ; 
 they intermingle my grain with straw ; and I have no enemy, 
 coward or brave man, who does not come to assail me." * 
 
 "Daily I readjust, reprune, retouch our barons; I preach to 
 them and urge them, 1 fain would temper their hearts anew. 
 But surely I am a fool for undergoing such fatigue : pretending 
 to reform them is tantamount to hammering the iron of Saint 
 Leonard while it is cold." 
 
 " Talleyrand needs neither war-steed nor stallion ; he never 
 budges from his lair, nor has he anything to do with arrows or 
 with lances. He lives a sort of Lombard-life, so cowardly and 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 142. Piece No. II. Strophes 4-7. 
 
 (4) Tot jorn contend! e m baralh, E lur cug metre cor anzart, 
 M'escrim e m defen e m coralh, E sui ben fols, quan, m'en regart, 
 Com me fond ma terra e la m'art, Qu'ilh son de peior obralha 
 
 E m fai de mos arbres eyssart, Que non es lo fers San Launart, 
 
 E mescla'l gra ab la palha, Per qu'es fola qui s'en trebalha. 
 
 B no i a ardit ni coart (gx Talairans non trota ni salh 
 
 Evemic que no m'assalha. jji no s mov de son artenalh 
 
 (5) Tot jorn ressoli e retalh Etc., etc. — Ed. 
 Los bares, e'ls refou e'ls calh.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 486 
 
 so efFeminate ; and when all others exert their prowess, he wont 
 do anything but stretch liimself and yawn." 
 
 " Mounted on my Bayard, I will appear at Perigueux, so 
 close up to the wall that I might reach it with a beetle-blow ; 
 and if I there encounter some dull-brained Poitevin he'll soon 
 find out how well my sword cuts. FU make a breach in his 
 head, through which the fragments of his helmet shall mingle 
 with his brain," 
 
 I do not see precisely on what occasion Bertrand de Born 
 composed against the barons of Limousin the sirvente commen- 
 cing with the stanza which I am going to quote ; but it was 
 undoubtedly in some conjuncture, when they had but feebly 
 responded to his warlike appeals ; and his verses give an ad- 
 mirable picture of his contempt for those seigniors who were 
 more pacific than himself. 
 
 " I'll make another sirvente still against our lazy barons ; for 
 never will ye hear me praise them. Pve broken more than a 
 thousand spurs on them without being able to make a single 
 one of them either trot or canter. They suffer themselves to be 
 plundered without a murmur ! Oh, curses on these our barons ! 
 And what do they intend to do? There is not one among them 
 but one might shear and shave him like a monk, or shoe him, 
 like a beast, on hand and foot, without the use of trammels." * 
 
 Tlie pieces from which these fragments are extracted have 
 only reference to the private quarrels and wars of Bertrand de 
 Bom. In order to give now some specimens of greater histori- 
 cal importance, I shall select them from the pieces which he 
 composed on the feuds between Philip Augustus and Pichard 
 Coeur-de-Lion. The two sovereigns took the field against each 
 other in the year 1189, and their armies met in the vicinity of 
 Niort, where they were only separated by the river Jaiire. 
 They remained fifteen days in the presence of each other, 
 awaiting the moment of the conflict, and thus gave the ecclesi- 
 astics of both parties time to inteq^ose and to negotiate a truce. 
 Thus terminated, without a blow, a campaign, which was ex- 
 pected to become a bloody and a decisive one. 
 
 An ancient Provencal commentator of Bertrand de Born 
 makes some curious reflections on the consequences of this un- 
 expected peace. " The peace having been concluded," says he, 
 " the two kings became avaricious, and were no longer willing 
 to expend anything on men-at-arms, but only on falcons and 
 
 * Raynonard, vol.iv. p. 147. Piece No. V. Strophe 1. 
 Un sirventes fatz dels malvatz barons, Maldipra'ls dieus ! e que cuian doncs far 
 
 E jamais d'els no m'auziretz parlar; Nostre baron? C'aissi com us confraire 
 
 Qu'en lor ai fraiz mais de mil agulions, No i es una no'l poscatz tondr'e raire, 
 
 Anc non puoic far un correr ni trotar; aes congrenz dels quatre peaferar. — Ed. 
 Ans se laissea sea clam dcseretar.
 
 486 nistory of Provengal Poetry, 
 
 hawks, on dogs and on hare-hounds, on the purchase of lands and 
 domains, and they began to harass their barons to such an ex- 
 tent, that these barons, those of France as well as those of king 
 Richard, felt aggrieved and discontented with this peace, dur- 
 ing which the two kings had become so parsimonious and 
 mean." 
 
 In this state of affairs, Bertrand de Born wrote a piece, of 
 which I can only translate the first two stanzas, the rest being 
 too full of allusions which would require long explanations. 
 But these two stanzas will suffice to show to what extent the 
 Troubadour calculated on the influence of his warlike instiga- 
 tions. 
 
 " The barons being dejected and incensed at the peace, which 
 the two kings have made, I will make such a song, that, when 
 it shall be known and spread abroad, all will be eager to re- 
 commence the war. I do not like to see a spoliated king 
 make peace before he has reconquered the possession of his 
 rights." * 
 
 " The French and the Burgundians have exchanged honor 
 for shame. Oh ! cowardice on the part of a king in arms, to 
 come to negotiate and plead upon the battle-field ! King Philip 
 would, I vow, have done much better to commence the fight, 
 than thus to litigate, all armed, on the hard ground." 
 
 These reproaclies of the Troubadour, which were intended for 
 both kings, were not without their effect. Philip was not 
 moved by them ; but Richard took the field again, attacking, 
 taking, burning both castles and cities of the domain of France. 
 Bertrand de Born, who wanted to set the two kings to fighting 
 at any hazard, wrote the following piece for the purpose of rous- 
 ing king Philip to retaliate. It is of a more elevated tone than 
 the preceding, and being moreover very short, I shall venture 
 to translate it entire. 
 
 " 1 must compose a song which will spread rapidly, since the 
 fire is already kindled and blood spilt by King Richard. I love 
 the war which renders avaricious seigniors liberal ; I like the 
 kings, when they are menacing and proud ; I like to see the 
 construction of palisades and the building of bridges. I like to 
 see them pitching their tents throughout the fields, and cheva- 
 liers in clashing conflict by hundreds and by thousands, so 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 170. Piece No. XV. Strophes 1, 2. 
 
 Pus li baron son irat e lor peza Ben an canijat honor per avoleza, 
 
 D'aquesta patz qu'an faita li duy rey, Sezon qu'aug dir, Berguonhon e Fraucey ; 
 
 Farai chanso tal que, quant e apreza, A rey armat ho ten hom a flaqueza, 
 
 A quadaun sera tart que guerrey : Quant es en camp e vai penre plaidey ; 
 
 E no m'es bel de rey qu'en patz estey E fora mielhs, par la fe qu'ieu vos dey, 
 
 Dezeretatz, e que perda son drey, Al rey Felip que raogues lo desrey 
 
 Tro'l demanda que fai aia conqueza. Que plaideyar armat sobre la gleza — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Trovhadours. 487 
 
 haughtily that men will sing of it when we are gone — they who 
 compose chansons on martial feats." * 
 
 " I ought already to have received blows on my shield and 
 to have dyed my white ensign in vermilion ; to my sorrow I 
 am constrained to stand aloof, and to wait until king Richard 
 will treat me more generously. I can indeed, my helmet on 
 my head, my shield upon my shoulder, combat in person for 
 those I love. But I have no host at my command, no treasures 
 to go warring at a distance." 
 
 " King Philip might have burnt at least one bark before 
 Gisors, or overturned part of its wall. He might have made 
 the attempt to take Rouen, and, beleaguering it from hill and 
 valley, to hem it in so closely, that no messenger could have 
 entered there, except a carrier-pigeon ; one would have seen 
 then that he is truly of the race of Charles, the most glorious of 
 his ancestors, who conquered Apulia and Saxony." 
 
 " War can bring nothing but shame and dishonor to him who 
 conducts himself effeminately. But since King Richard has 
 already achieved such noble feats, since he has taken Cahors 
 and Cairac, let him be careful not to surrender them. Philip 
 would offer him all his treasures as a ransom. With such a 
 heart as he brings to the war, he'll conquer, Munificient and 
 contemptuous of repose, they all will submit to him, both ene- 
 mies and friends." 
 
 I do not venture to multiply extracts, which can neither an- 
 swer my design nor satisfy the expectations of my readers ; and 
 abstracting from the chronological order of events, I pass on to 
 the satirical sirventes to which the accession of Charles of Anjou 
 to the sovereignty of Provence gave rise. 
 
 Charles, a prince of a firm, but of a harsh and despotic cha- 
 racter, introduced into Provence manners, ideas, pretensions 
 and views, which were diametrically opposed to those of the 
 men of the country. His government was also at first but a 
 violent struggle against all the local forces, which assumed the 
 attitude of an abrupt opposition to him, but which, acting in 
 an isolated and disconnected manner, were destined to an ine- 
 
 t Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 177. Piece No. XIX. Strophes 1 2, 3, 4. 
 
 Non estarai mon chantar non esparja, E na encontrem a milliers e a cens, 
 
 Pus N Oc e Non a mes foe e trag sane, Si qu'apres nos en chant hom de la gesta. 
 
 Car gran guerra fai d'escars seuhor larc, ,-■ , , • i, * * • 
 
 Per que m sap bon dels reys, quan vey lur Colps n'agra leu receubutz en ma tarja, 
 
 bomba j ■< ^ •' E fag vermelh de mon gonfainon blanc ; 
 
 Qu'cn aion ops pals e cordas e pon, Mas per aisso m'en sofrisc e m'en pare 
 
 B n sion trap tendut per fors jazer, ^"^^^ ^c e No cono.s q un datz mi plom- 
 
 ^ ^ J ) tja, Etc., etc., etc. 
 
 The words Oc e Non are literally the Proven(;al for the French out et non and the 
 English yes and no. Here, however, and in many of his other pieces, Bertrand employs 
 them as a proper name in disguise for Richard Coeur- de-Lion. See Raynouard, vol. ii. 
 p. 213.— JEd.
 
 488 History of Provengal Poetry. 
 
 vitable defeat. Tliis struggle is but feebly indicated in history. 
 The poetry of the Provencals, however, contains monuments, 
 ■which give us a much livelier idea of it, and which besides this 
 merit, are also possessed of that of an ingenious and poetical 
 execution. Such among others is the following sirvente, com- 
 posed by a Troubadour of the country, by the name of Granet, 
 of whom however the Provengal traditions make no mention. 
 The piece is addressed to Charles of Anjou himself, in the form 
 of a remonstrance, and it portrays with considerable clearness 
 the antagonism at that time existing between the spirit of 
 the Provencals and that of the new chief of the country. The 
 satire is so nmch the more piquant, as it is indirect and a set-off 
 to the advice which is naively and honestly imparted. 
 
 " Count Charles," says the poet, " I wish to make you listen 
 to a sirvente, of which the arguments are all verities. My pro- 
 fession is to praise the good, to reprehend, as they deserve, the 
 wicked, and to expose the iniquity of all the world. It is your 
 duty to defend me in my right ; and if misfortune should result 
 to me from it, it would be your part to see that justice is 
 done me." * 
 
 " 1 will sing then, since this is my profession, and I will begin 
 to sing of you. You are descended from the noblest lineage of 
 the world, you are valiant, and you would be accomplished in 
 everything, if you were but liberal. But you are not so. You 
 have power and territory ; you are fond of gallantry and joy ; 
 you are talented, of prepossessing manners and conversation, so 
 long as you are not asked for anything." 
 
 " Learn, seignior count, that in this country every great baron 
 suffers disgrace, when he allows himself to be robbed of any- 
 thing without resentment. The dauphin has deprived you of 
 your domains. Do therefore no longer seek what you've already 
 found. Depart with all your army. Take lodgings along the 
 rivers, across the fields and meadows, until the dauphin has given 
 you satisfaction, or you have paid him in his own coin." 
 
 " You seem to me to meditate certain war, in which you will 
 have great need of chevaliers and squires. If you wish, there- 
 fore, that the Provencals should serve you loyally, protect them 
 
 *Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 237. Piece No. LII. Strophes 1-5. 
 
 (1) Comte Karle, ie us vuelh far entenden (5) Ar auran luec pro cavalier valen 
 
 Un sirventes qu'es de vera razos : E soudadier ardit e coratjos, 
 
 Mos mestiers es qu'ieu day lauzar los Elmes e brans, tendas e papallos 
 
 pros, Escutz, ausbercx e bon cavalh corren, 
 
 E dci blasmar los croys adr^itamen ; E fortz castelhs desrocar e cazer, 
 
 E devetz me de mon dreitz mantener, E gaug e plor mesclat ab desconortz, 
 
 Quar mos dreitz es que dey blasmar los En batailla cazen, feren, levan 
 
 tortz : E vuelh o ben, e m play, sol qu'ieu no 
 E si d'aisso m'avenia nulh dan, y an. 
 
 Vos per aisso en devetz far deman. — Ed.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 489 
 
 against the violence of your officers, who commit many unne- 
 cessary cruelties. They resort to every expedient for extorting 
 money. Besides, all our barons consider themselves as lost. 
 Those to whom formerly was given, are now despoiled, nor do 
 they dare complain of it to you." 
 
 " Be just, and you shall have a host of knights, of warriors 
 courageous of adventure and of daring prowess ; you shall have 
 helmets and swords, pavilions and tents, shields, liauberks and 
 fleet chargers. Tlien you can battle, and demolish forts and 
 castles ; then you will see fine frays, where some will groan and 
 others shout, where falling, rising, striking, every one will do 
 his best. All this will be delightful ; with all this 1 am pleased, 
 so long as I am out of it." 
 
 This piece of Granet contains but a sort of presentiment of 
 the misfortunes and the vexations which were awaiting the 
 Provence under the dominion of Charles of Anjou. The com- 
 plete expression of the hatred of the Provencals for this domin- 
 ion must be looked for in other poets. Boniface de Castellane, 
 one of the inferior nobles, and one of the Troubadours of the 
 country, has made this the theme of several sirventes, which, if 
 they are not the most elegant and the most poetical, are at any 
 rate the most violent and the most impassioned. The follow- 
 ing are a few characteristic passages from one of them, where 
 the poet expresses nearly as much indignation at tlie patience 
 of the Provengals, as he does at the oppressive conduct of the 
 French : 
 
 "Though the season be not gay, I still intend to make a 
 sirvente of sharp words, against the recreant and the perverse. 
 The French leave neither shirt nor breeches to these impov- 
 erished, sorrowful Provencals, to this craven and degenerate 
 race of men." * 
 
 " Some they ^deprive of lands without any compensation. 
 Others, the knights and squires, are sent as prisoners to the 
 tower of Blaie, where they were wont to send the vilest bandits ; 
 and if they die there, so much the better for the French, who 
 take possession of their property." 
 
 " Cowards and traitors have abandoned me with all their 
 false adherents. But I'm not grieved at it ; I shall not be the 
 weaker for it. I shall maintain myself within my fortress with 
 
 ♦ Raynouard, vol. v. page 109. 
 
 (1) Un sirventes farai ab digz cozens E non o plane, qu'ieu non valray ja 
 
 E cui diray contra totz recrezens mens ; 
 
 Als Proensals paubres e cossiroa E attendrai, qn'enquer ai fortz maizoa 
 
 Que non lur laysson braya Et ai ma gent veraya, 
 
 Esti Frances a I'avol gen savaya. . . . E'ls trahidors van s'en, dieus los des- 
 
 ***** chaya 
 
 (3)De trahidors, de fals e de glotos Etc., etc., etc. 
 
 Si son partita de mi ab lurs fals gens, — Ed.
 
 490 Jlistory of ProvenQol Poetry. 
 
 my gallant companions ; and it matters little that the count is 
 cominff against me with his great forces." 
 
 " Whoever kills shall die. Thus says the Gospel. The day 
 will therefore come, when the count will suffer for what he now 
 inflicts on others." 
 
 " Let them then come to make war on me, and I shall send 
 them back doleful and sorry. I'll bathe my sword in their 
 blood, and I shall wear my lance into a stump upon them." 
 
 We perceive from these fragments, as we also know from 
 history, that Boniface de Castellane attempted to resist the 
 aggressions of the count of Anjou. The latter besieged his 
 castle, captured him, and had him suspended from the gibbet. 
 This was a fine subject for some other Troubadour to make 
 another sirvente on ! 
 
 It only remains now to speak of the satires of the Troubadours 
 relative to the wars against the Albigenses. It will not be ex- 
 pected that I should indulge in any direct considerations on 
 this war. This is a subject of such serious interest, that it is 
 better not to touch it at all, than to rest content with a mere 
 superficial treatment of it. Nevertheless, this history is by 
 so many sides and so closely connected with that of the litera- 
 ture and the civilization of the south of France, that, however 
 limited may be the space left me, I still believe it to be my 
 duty to devote a part of it to a rapid indication of the general 
 connection between these two histories, or, as we might call 
 them, these two parts of the same history. 
 
 There is no doubt but that the immediate and principal cause 
 of the crusade against the Albigenses was of a religious nature. 
 A great heresy had invaded the South ; it became more and 
 more formidable to Catholicism. It was impossible for the 
 latter not to use all the means then in its power to suppress it, 
 and unhappily these means were means of material force, of 
 armies and of crusades ; it was war with all its hazards and all 
 its scourges. But it is no less certain, that this heresy and this 
 war were singularly aggravated by antecedents and by inci- 
 dents which were altogether of a local character. 
 
 This great catastrophe was, in several respects, nothing more 
 than a crisis of the ancient struggle between the feudal order and 
 the clergy. Now, in this struggle, the Troubadours, who were 
 likewise oue of the powers of society, must of necessity have taken 
 the part of feudalism — in other words, of chivalry, of knightly 
 gallantry, of all the themes of the poetry of their age. By re- 
 fusing to embrace the cause of the political chiefs against the 
 clergy, they might be said to have denied their own origin and 
 to have abjured their destination. Such an inconsistency they 
 were very careful to guard against ; the ardor and the unani-
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 491 
 
 mity with which the Provengal poets strove to stigmatize the 
 ecclesiastical power, by the order and in the interest of which 
 this war was carried on, constitute in fact one of the most no- 
 table of the phenomena of the war of the Albigenses. There is 
 to my knowledge but one single Troubadour, mentioned in the 
 Provencal traditions as having sided with the crusaders on this 
 occasion ; and this exception deserves attention as a solemn 
 confirmation of the fact to which it relates. The Troubadour 
 in question was neither deficient in talent nor in fame. His 
 name was Perdigon, and he was born at Lesperon, a small 
 borough of Gevaudan, and consequently subject to the count of 
 Toulouse. The son of a poor fisherman by birth, he had, by a 
 succession of good adventures, attained to the honors of knight- 
 hood ; and he figured for a long time with distinction at the 
 court of the dauphin of Auvergne, who had loaded him with 
 riches. 
 
 He was probably in Provence or on the banks of the Phone 
 in 1208, the epoch at which the famous intrigue against the 
 count of Toulouse, Paymond VI., began to be concerted, 
 which may be considered as the first act of the war against the 
 Albigenses. A deputation went to Pome for the purpose of 
 denouncing the count and the heretics to the pope, and obtained 
 permission to preach a crusade against them. This deputation 
 consisted of William de Baux, prince of Orange (who was at 
 the head of it), of Folquet de Marseille who had exchanged the 
 lyre of the Troubadour for the mitre of Toulouse, and of the 
 abbe of Citeaux, every one of them a personal enemy to Ray- 
 mond VI. Perdigon was attached to the embassy and distin- 
 guished himself by the virulence of his zeal against his liege- 
 lord and against the heretics. After his return to the banks of 
 the Rhone, he composed a poem, in which he preached the 
 crusade which had just been resolved upon, and assuming him- 
 self the cross, he assisted first at the capture and the massacre of 
 Beziers and afterward at the battle of Muret. 
 
 King Pierre of Aragon, who was killed in this battle, had 
 been one of the patrons and benefactors of Perdigon. From 
 this moment, the Troubadour, who had already become odious 
 by reason of all that he had done for the promotion of the cru- 
 sade, became the object of general execration and his life was 
 henceforward but a succession of bitter experiences. He lost, in 
 a short time, one after the other all of his new protectors to 
 whom he had sacrificed his old ones, William de Baux, the count 
 of Montfort and the other leaders of the crusade. The dauphin 
 of Auvergne deprived him of the lands which he had given him. 
 He no longer dared to make his appearance at any court or in
 
 492 nistoinj of Provencal Poetry. 
 
 any fashionable society ; he ceased to make verses, whicli no 
 one would have been willing to sing, had they been known 
 to be by him. Proscribed, dishonored, dying from starvation, 
 he had no other means left to escape the horror wliich his 
 presence inspired, than to retire to some monastery in some 
 secluded spot, and this even was not easily accomplished. He 
 was forced to have recourse to the compassion of a Provengal 
 seignior, of Lambert de Monteil the son-in-law of William de 
 Baux, who procured him admission into Silvabela, an abbey 
 of the order of Citeaux. Tliere he died, we know not at what 
 precise time, without having obtained the forgiveness or re- 
 covered the good will of any one. This melancholy end of the 
 only Troubadour, who had imbrued his hands in the blood of 
 the crusade against the South, will enable us better than any- 
 thing else to understand, to what extent all the rest were 
 opposed to this expedition, which for having been atrocious and 
 sanguinary was none the less chimerical and disgraceful. 
 
 The pieces which the Troubadours composed expressly on this 
 subject, and the incidental allusions which they make to it in 
 their other pieces are very numerous, and nearly all of them 
 directed against the clergy, to whom the disasters of the South 
 were generally imputed. The French are likewise handled 
 with a good deal of animosity ; and this was neither to be 
 wondered at nor was it an injustice, since they were the men 
 who composed the nucleus and who furnished the general of 
 the crusade. But it must be admitted, that the poetical merit 
 of these pieces does not correspond with the energy of sentiment 
 which dictated them. It seems even, that this energy, interested 
 and impassioned as it was, was a particular obstacle in the way 
 of art, and one which was destined to modify its object and 
 effect. Against events and against men, which inspired the 
 highest degree of hatred and indignation, every complaint, 
 every censure, every clamor was good, of itself alone and inde- 
 pendently of the talent of its author. Thus violence too easily 
 usurped the place of beauty. 
 
 Among the multitude of pieces, composed with reference to 
 these melancholy events, there are but few, if we except those 
 by Pierre Cardinal, which are yet pervaded by a certain free- 
 dom of imagination, by a certain elegance of execution ; and 
 it is from these, that I shall borrow a few passages, for the 
 purpose of giving some idea of the species of poetic action and 
 reaction, which took place in the countries of the Provencal 
 tongue against the furious excesses of the crusade. The follow- 
 ing extract from a sirvente relative to this subject contains some 
 very remarkable traits in illustration of it.
 
 The Lyrical Poetry of the Troubadours. 493 
 
 " Who wants to hear a sirvente woven of grief, embroidered 
 with anger? He has only to ask me for it ; I have already 
 spun it, and 1 shall know how to warp and weave it well. I 
 can distinguish the good from evil ; I love the good and the 
 valiant, and I abhor the treacherous and the perverse."* 
 
 " I keep myself aloof from those pei-fidious clerks, who have 
 amassed for their own benefit the haughtiness, the frauds and 
 the cupidity of all the world. Tliey have created a monopoly 
 of treason, and by dint of their indulgences they have extorted 
 from us what little had been left us. And what they once 
 have got possession of, they guard with jealousy. Kor God nor 
 man can see anything more of it." 
 
 " Dream not of being able to correct them : the higher 
 is the rank they hold, the less their faith and the greater 
 their fraud, the fainter their love, the more flagrant their 
 cruelty." 
 
 " Well might we bury all the chevaliers, so that there would 
 be no more talk of them. Henceforth they will be so much 
 detested, that their life will be worse than death to them. They 
 sufier themselves to be trampled on by the priests, to be plun- 
 dered by the kings, and at the rate they now proceed with 
 them, they cannot have much longer to endure." 
 
 " By pillaging the churches, and by invading all the rest, by 
 lying and deceiving, the godless clerks have become the masters 
 of the world and trodden under foot those who should govern 
 them. Charles Martel understood the way to curb them ; but 
 they now see that the kings of our day are stupid kings. They 
 let them do whatever they desire, they suffer them to honor 
 whatsoever should be branded with disgrace." 
 
 The following piece gives us a somewhat more general and 
 more complete idea of the condition of the South at an epoch 
 when the results of the crusade were as yet undetermined, 
 thanks to the activity and the energy with Avhich Raymond 
 VH. had striven to restore what had been lost by the weaknesses 
 and the impolitic conduct of his father : 
 
 " Iniquity and perfidy have declared war against truth and 
 integrity, and have already been victorious. Avarice and 
 treason conspire against munificence and loyalty. Cruelty 
 
 * Lexique Roman, vol. i. p. 446. This piece is by Pierre Cardinal. 
 
 Qui volra sirventes auzir, Dels deslials clergues me mir 
 
 Tescut d'enueitz, d'antas mesclat, Que an tot I'erguelh amassat 
 
 A mi'I deman, qu'ieu I'aifilat, E I'engan e la cobeitat, 
 
 E sai lo teisser et ordir ; Que hom mais elhs no sap trahir ; 
 
 E sai be los savais chauzir, E fan soven perdos venir, 
 
 E conoisser lor malvestat ; Per aver so que ns es restat, 
 
 E plazo mi'I pro e'lh prezat, Et aquo lor es ben gardat, 
 
 E'ls fals e'ls messongiers azir. Que hom ni Dieus non pot jauzir, etc., etc. 
 
 —Ed.
 
 494 
 
 History of Provengal Poet/ry. 
 
 triumphs over love and baseness over honor. Crime is in pursuit 
 of sanctity, and artifice of innocence."* 
 
 " Is there a man who denies God, and whose only care is his 
 own belly ? He is the one that prospers. Whoever loves 
 justice and feels indignant at the workings of iniquity, will 
 often be maltreated. Whoever has undertaken to lead a holy 
 life, will be sorely persecuted. But every deceiver will suc- 
 ceed in his designs. 
 
 " It's but a little while, since many a new usage has come to 
 us from France : — to honor none but those, who have an 
 abundance of good eatables and drinkables, and to despise all 
 those, who may be poor, though courteous — to be rich and pow- 
 erful and to give nothing — to make a magistrate of a dealer in 
 trumpery — to elevate traitors and to humiliate the good." 
 
 "The priests claim our obedience; they exact faith, but on 
 condition that no good work shall be comprised in it. Be not 
 solicitous to watch the moments, when they sin ; they do it 
 every day and every night. Beyond this, they do not hate any 
 one ; they commit no simony ; they love to give and they take 
 nothing but what is just." 
 
 " Count Raymond, duke of I^Tarbonne, marquis of Provence, 
 your gallantry has now reached such an eminence, that it 
 embellishes the world. Were it not for you, a false and 
 felonious race would insolently rule from the sea of Bayonne 
 to Valencia. It is you that commands and governs with no 
 more fear of this inebriate set of Frenchmen tlian a hawk has 
 of a partridge." 
 
 I will cite one more passage from another sirvente, in which 
 the ambition of the clergy is the special object of attack. 
 
 " I see the priests working with might and main to get 
 possession of the world ; and they will gain possession of it, no 
 matter who may fare the worse for it, They 11 have it (in some 
 way or another), be it by dint of taking or by dint of giving, by 
 their indulgences or their hypocrisies, by force of absolutions or 
 by force of eating and of drinking, by preaching or by issuing 
 
 * Eaynouard, vol. iv. p. 338. Piece No. XXXVI. (entire). 
 
 (1) Falsedatz e desmezura 
 
 An batalha empreza 
 Ab vertat et ab dreytura, 
 
 E vens la falseza ; 
 Edeslialtatz si jura 
 
 Contra lialeza ; 
 Et avaretatz s'atura 
 
 Encontra largueza : 
 Feunia vens amor 
 E malvestatz honor, 
 E peccatz cassa sanctor 
 £ baratz simpleza. 
 
 (3) Aras es vengut de Fransa 
 
 Que hom non somona 
 Mas selhs que an aondansa 
 
 De vin e d'anona, 
 E qu'om non aia coindansa 
 
 Ab paubra persona, 
 E aia mais de bobansa 
 
 Aquelh que meyns dona, 
 E qu'om fassa maior 
 D'un gran trafeguador, 
 E qu'om leve la trachor, 
 
 E'ljustdezapona . . etc. 
 
 etc., etc. 
 —Ed.
 
 Tlie Lyrical Poet'ry of the Troubadour's. 495 
 
 prayers, through the agency of God or through the agency of 
 the devil."* 
 
 In the same poem, from which I have derived this fragment, 
 I find the following striking verse, likewise directed against the 
 priests : 
 
 " That which they dare to do, I should not dare to utter."f 
 
 Tlie exposition of the full import of this sally in all its bear- 
 ings and to the whole of its extent would make it necessary for 
 me to adduce certain pieces of Pierre Cardinal, m which he 
 vents his contempt and hatred toward the clergy with still 
 greater freedom than is done in the preceding verses. The 
 reader would then be as much embarrassed as I am to con- 
 ceive of anything he might have said in addition. But if he 
 really knew things about the priests which he did not venture 
 to utter, it is nevertheless certain, that he, as well as many 
 another poet, wrote about them, and there is more than one 
 passage of the kind which I do not venture to translate. 
 
 I conclude here the survey which I intended to make of the 
 principal kinds of lyric poetry among the Provencals, and my 
 course of this year. Space was wanting to me to render this 
 course as complete, as I could have wished it. I was obliged 
 to glide somewhat rapidly over several points of my subject 
 which would have required more extended developments ; 
 there are others, at which I had not even time to arrive and 
 concerning which it is now necessary for me to make a few 
 explanations. 
 
 I have not spoken of the technical part of Provencal poetry, 
 of what might properly be termed the poetics of the Trouba- 
 dours. But this is not a matter of any very grave importance 
 except in regard to one point, on which depend several ques- 
 tions of more or less general interest. This point has reference 
 to the syllabic rhyme and accent, considered as the principles 
 of metre in modern poetry. The Provencal verse was un- 
 doubtedly not the type, after which the different nations of 
 Europe constructed their own, and it is precisely on this ac- 
 count that it would be desirable to have some definite informa- 
 tion concerning the origin of this Provencal verse, and concerning 
 its relation to those which might have served as its model. The 
 
 * Raynouard, vol. iv. p. 337. Piece No. XXXV. Strophe 4. 
 Ab totas mas vey clerguea assajar 
 Que totz lo mens er hirs, cuy que mal sia ; 
 Quar els I'auruu ab tolre o ab dar, 
 O ab perdon, o ab ypocrizia, 
 O ab asout, o ab beur', o ab manjar, 
 O ab prezicx, o ab peiras lansar, 
 O els ab dieu, o els ab diablia. — Ed. 
 
 t Non au3 dire so qu'elhs auzon far. — Ed.
 
 4:96 History of Provenqal Poetry. 
 
 question is a new one still, in spite of the many researches and 
 attempts that have been made to solve it. 
 
 The organization of the Troubadours and Jongleurs into a 
 poetic corporation constitutes another question, still more novel 
 than the preceding and of greater importance. There is always 
 to be observed an intimate and curious connection between 
 any system of poetry and the material means by which this 
 poetry attains its end, and by which it operates upon the society 
 to which it is addressed. Now the connection in question is a 
 very remarkable one in the Provengal system, and the organi- 
 zation of the different poetical orders or professions which this 
 system implies, is one of the most interesting facts of the kind. 
 Nowhere do we find anything to compare with it, except among 
 the ancient Greeks and among the Arabs. This is a fact to 
 which I had intended to invite attention, while concentrating 
 the whole of mine on its exposition. 
 
 I had, finally, also thought of a comparison or summary 
 parallel between the lyric poetry of the Troubadours and that 
 the Trouveres of the north of France. In drawing the parallel 
 I wished to prove, that the latter, both in respect to its form 
 and to its matter, was nothing more than a direct imitation, a 
 sort of counterfeit copy of the former. I proposed to show, 
 that the language of the Trouveres also was but a slight modi- 
 fication of that of the Troubadours, without which it never 
 would have become what it was. 
 
 These points appeared to me to be sufiiciently interesting, to 
 prevent me from abandoning too readily the hope of resuming 
 them for a few moments hereafter. Their discussion will be as 
 much in place after I shall have said what I propose to say con- 
 cerning tlie epopee of the Troubadours, as it would have been 
 here at the close of my remarks on their lyrical poetry. 
 
 However that may be, the history of the Provengal epopee 
 in its connection with that of the Middle Age in general will 
 be the theme, with which it is my purpose to continue the 
 subject of this course of lectures. I have not endeavored to 
 conceal the peculiar importance I attach to this branch of my 
 subject. I have alluded to it more than once, and always with 
 so much earnestness, as to excite the attention and the curiosity 
 of the reader ; and in doing so I have imposed upon myself an 
 additional obligation to treat it with all the diligence and care 
 which it deserves. 
 
 THE END.
 
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