Lo, the Sweet Troubadour
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From Trails of the Troubadours, by Ramon de Loi [pseud. Raymond de Loy Jameson], Illustrated by Giovanni Petrina, New York: The Century Co., 1926; pp. 1-18.
TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS
by Raimon de Loi
Lo, the Sweet Troubadour
IT is a heavy white road that leads to Carpentras, a road blanketed with the rich odor of newly pressed grapes, the acrid smell of dust, of sun-baked tomatoes, of dried grass, and, in spots, with the tonic perfume of cooling cedars. As noon passes, the heaps of tomatoes piled outside the doors of sheds take on a richer red, the dark green of the cedars turns black, and the road becomes cadaverous.
As we toiled up this road we were suddenly arrested by the square Tour d’Orange, which, silhouetted against a green sky, towered above the city walls like the upraised arm of a policeman. A startled wind rustled the leaves of a neighboring fig-tree. An over-ripe fruit splashed to the ground. The Lady-Who-Married-Me took my arm and whispered.
“Let’s wait a bit . . . I’m afraid I’m tired . . . I’m afraid . . .”
We leaned on our sticks in the dusty road and waited.
A gust of wind blew through the Porte d’Orange and down the white road, raising the dust in our faces. The inhospitable spirits were leaving. Then the arched mouth of the tower lighted up, and in that casual fashion which indicates [4] that one housewife after the other is thinking about supper for her husband, small lights began laughing in the windows above the city walls.
We proceeded up the hill.
This was the land of the troubadours, and along the trails we were following had passed many a prince and poet, and poet-prince, and princely poet who was frequently more powerful than the master he nominally served. It stretched south to the Mediterranean, west to the Atlantic, and northwest to the sometime seat of many an English king — Tours and Le Mans.
We had read of the troubadours in the volumes of German scholars who thought they were contributing to that poor thing called human knowledge, and we had read the songs of the troubadours — the first love-songs in western Europe — buried now in gaily illuminated manuscripts; and we had said:
“Where they wandered, let us wander; where they loved, let us love; where they sang, let us sing. Let us get into direct contact with the mystic earth that bore them. Let us feel with our hands the rough stones of the towers from which they threatened to throw themselves and penetrate the secret portals which still open inward on lovely gardens where they entered to find happiness, or, in some cases, death.”
We trod trails in southern France that few tourists have ever trod, and we saw cities that few tourists have ever seen. “Ah, yes,” said our host in one village, “we have frequent tourists. Two weeks ago a party from Marseilles stopped [5] for lunch; a month ago some students came through on foot.”
The records of the troubadours’ lives have been preserved, not only in the songs they made about themselves — they were surprisingly lacking in reticence for men as desperate as they pretended to be — but also in the gossip about them, doubtless elaborated by the fertile brains of their rivals and enemies.
From these records we know which castles the troubadours liked to visit, and by translating the names of the castles into their modern equivalents it is possible to reconstruct with reasonable accuracy the itineraries they followed northward to London and Paris and eastward to Rome and Jerusalem.
The cities they visited were not suburban villages but were built for eternity, and until eternity they will stand unless torn down to make way for modern factories. This, however is improbable. Modern industry has turned away from most of these cities whose battlements still stand resisting now the attacks of time as they resisted then the attacks of armies. Streets that were once so thronged with courtiers and men-at-arms “that you would have thought the walls would have burst with the crush” are now traversed at infrequent intervals by the turgid ox bearing a burden of fire-wood. The large and spacious chambers of gracious ladies whose beauty was perhaps greater than their discretion are now populated by a cock and his harem of peaceful hens. The audience-chamber of a proud prince is now the home of a meditative ass.
For those of us who get a cynical satisfaction in comparing [6] our civilization with the civilizations of others this is fortunate. The ass and the hens are far less destructive than their more passionate predecessors, and so long as the ruins of Les Baux — now fortunately protected from demolition by the government — and Bollène and many another village we shall pass presently are occupied by these, they will be preserved. Nor is it entirely a matter for regret that perfect automobile roads have replaced the ancient trails. The ancient roads, though interesting enough to us, were for the people who used them very bad roads. Indeed one cannot regret the passing at a ripe old age of a civilization like that of the troubadours. It did its share for us and left more than one mark on our habits of thought. The only thing one can regret is that its monuments are so slightly known to the modern world which passes through the troubadour country year after year on its way to the Riviera.
Most of these tourists are peacefully asleep when they reach the land of the troubadours in the London-Nice Express. They will breakfast in Marseilles and take dinner on the Boulevard des Anglais in Nice. Some of these tourists are happier asleep and happier leading an English life among English people in a blessedly un-English climate than they would be awake and wandering with the poets. Others, however, are cheated of many a pleasant side-trip by guide-books which, attempting to present all the information about a country, present no information because the essential facts are buried in a mass of details.
To segregate some of these essential facts about the Middle Ages and to arrange them as a series of trips through central France by car, on foot, by cycle, or with a donkey, [7] to follow, in these trips, the footsteps of famous men who made them almost a thousand years ago, is the purpose of these chapters.
I shall not trouble the reader with large blocks of historical information or descriptions of churches or works of art. Information and description of this kind are available elsewhere. I shall rather go with him as he follows the trail of this or that poet or prince, gossiping with him as the poet or prince would have gossiped. But because he may want to know what kind of people these troubadours were, I shall attempt a very brief reconstruction of the spirit of the people we shall meet. Then I shall follow the portions of the trail that were made most vivid by Bernard de Ventadour, Richard the Lion-Heart, Bertrand de Born, Jaufre Rudel, and Raimon de Miravel, by Petrarch and Peire Vidal. Many of the cities they passed were already a thousand years old when they first entered them. These greater antiquities will not distract, for they may be found listed elsewhere for the use of the conscientious tourist.
All of these trails were roads of the Middle Ages and lead as all roads led then, to Marseilles, the last important stop on the way to Rome, the center of the medieval world.
The color of life in the Middle Ages was a deep, glaring and unmitigated red. Life was fast; life was hard; life was for youth and lived with such energy and enthusiasm that whatever was done of good or bad was done with an [8] absolute intensity. Richard the Lion-Heart, a writer of indifferent poems but a great patron of poets — particularly those who wrote poems in his honor — was dead when he was forty-one; before he was eighteen he had conquered a kingdom. At an age when our modern youth are being persuaded that virtue is its own reward, the medieval youth were proving that the essence of virtue is a strong arm, agile wit, and a cynically realistic conviction that the battle is, after all, to the swift, the strong, the sure. When they were not making war or playing at politics, they were playing at love or making poems; and they made love and poetry with the same ardor and ruthlessness that they displayed in the taking of cities and the killing of enemies.
Most of the evil they did has died with them, but the fruits of their slight leisure, their poetry, and their philosophy — both a kind of game picturing a make-believe world — have survived.
We of modern times frequently confuse the game with the candle. Because medieval wars were conducted on a small scale, we think they were of small importance to the men who were killed in them; because medieval poetry was very brilliant, we use it to cast a false light on medieval manners. Galahad is a literary myth created by a popular novelist of the thirteenth century writing for medieval flappers. But because love and poetry were games, do not assume that they were frivolous pastimes. Time in those golden days was money and was created to be spent to good advantage. The troubadours worked hard at their play; they played hard at their work.
A particular group of fashionable young men who frequented [9] the courts in and about Marseilles, Toulouse, and Tours were called troubadours. They fashioned for us two arts: the art of lyric poetry and the art of love, which they referred to as the “gay science.” Although there had been lyric poetry before the troubadours, it had never been raised to the perfection to which they raised it. Although there had been arts of love before the troubadours, they metamorphosed those arts and gave them the forms in which love is practised to-day.
In modern times the art of love has fallen into a decay. Women are, I suppose, still beautiful, and passion is still a fluid force in the spirits of men; but in the affectation of a scientific interest in emotions we are apt to affect a superiority to the emotions we are analyzing. Whereas men in the twelfth century affected to be more moved by love than they could possibly have been, men of the twentieth century affect to be less moved than we know in fact that they actually are.
But despite our ingenuous affectation of dispassionateness, the medieval theory of love has become a real part of our being. It is on record that men, even in modern times, have compared the women they loved to all the flowers of the botanical dictionary, that they have insisted that these women were superior in wisdom to the wise women of the past, present, and future. Many of us still believe that the maiden should be coy and the lover despairing, although we know that lovers are more often despairing because maidens are not coy enough. The lover’s humility which makes him the slave of the beloved, and his arrogance which makes him her defender, which we now consider the [10] instinctive equipment of every civilized man, were formulated by the troubadours of the tenth to the thirteenth centuries.
These precepts are contained in exquisite poems, in lengthy philosophical dissertations on love, and in allegories. The philosophical dissertation on love has, in modern times, become a psychological monograph on immorality; for the allegory we no longer have sufficient intellectual industry; but the lyric poem remains now as it was then, a source of delight. For the troubadours sang of love in the springtime, of the passions and despairs of lovers, of the beauty and cruelty of women, themes which still retain for us an enduring interest.
The strangely artificial relation which existed between the despairing lover and the charming lady, and between the charming lady and her heavy husband to whom she had been married for reasons of state, was soon regulated by a legal code. What this code was has been reported in many documents, but with particular charm in one called “The Art of Honest Loving” by Andreas, a chaplain. In general, the lover must be true to the king and queen of love; he must fast for love every other day; and he must stir up others to love.
In particular he must be discreet and secret, for true love is always clandestine. When the poet writes to his mistress he must refer to her under an assumed name. This name ultimately became an open secret in the court, yet it was considered bad form to address a lady with absolute frankness.
The lover must be constant to one lady; he must be [11] patient with her moods; he must be meek and afraid of being over-bold; he must be conscious of his inferiority to his mistress; he must think of nothing unpleasant for her sake; he must be thoughtful to please her; he must think no evil of her; he must keep his person and his dress neat and clean for her sake; and finally, he must defend her honor and reputation at all costs. The observance of this rule led to innumerable difficulties. Frequently the ladies had no honor, which, as in the case of Loba de Perrautier, led to tragedy.
To these may be added several other customs. The lover was supposed to wander alone musing on his lady; he was supposed to be sleepless when she was cruel, to dream of enjoying her love, to be wretched in her absence, to be master of the language of love and the signs of lovers, and to maintain his interest in love even when he had grown old.
Only knights, clerks, and ladies of gentle birth were citizens of the kingdom of love. These citizens were urged to love one another but, with peculiar naïveté, were prohibited from marrying each other. The authors are unanimous that love between husband and wife is impossible. “Though husband and wife be both citizens of the kingdom of love, they are citizens of different counties, and between those counties there is constant strife, and each must be faithful to serve the lord and mistress of his particular county who are also the vassals of the Lord of Love.”
One of the subtleties of the gay science is illustrated in a story about Lancelot. Lancelot was on his way to rescue Guinevere. Guinevere was a lady of questionable reputation [12] who had the habit of getting kidnapped and always wanted rescuers. One biographer suspects her of being a shape-shifter who appeared during the day as a lady but could also assume the form of a snake. At a ford, Lancelot became engaged with an evil knight of the region (all knights who were your enemies were then, as they are to-day, evil knights) and lost his horse. He faced the problem of transporting himself for some distance clad in several tons of armor. A peasant with a cart gave him a lift, but when he appeared before his lady in this ignoble position she refused to receive him. This adventure was, for the Middle Ages, as much a social problem as the “Doll’s House” is for us. What is a lady to do when her knight presents himself in that way? How can one accept the love of a knight who does things as impossible as riding in a peasant’s cart? Indeed could a modern lady love a man who eats with his knife, who is seen with vulgar companions, who is for good reason or bad transported to her house in a butcher’s cart?
But these were refinements.
Thus, my friends, if you should ask seriously, why the trails of the troubadours, I should answer you just as seriously, therefore the trails of the troubadours: because these men were sophisticated, subtle, and perverse, because the color of their life was red, and, above all, because they had a youth and a love of living which they imparted to the songs they sang and the trails they followed.
These trails led, as you shall see if you turn the next page, through the land of a virile race, a race which was destroyed by a great international war.
[13]If you will step over to the moon and look up to see the earth, a huge globe swinging above your head, you may be able to distinguish that part occupied by nations which, ten years ago, engaged in a great military struggle. They will seem remarkably small and close together. You may wonder why nations whose domains were separated only by imaginary lines should have found it necessary to murder each other.
When we look back through a distance of a thousand years to southern France we see a similar picture. Southern France was divided into duchies, kingdoms, and principalities as Europe is divided into kingdoms and republics; then as now the countries were separated by imaginary lines and divided by jealousy. It was ruled by a large number of barons, each baron surrounded by a gay and warlike court whose business it was to protect the baron’s land and to kill the baron’s enemies. Days of peace were treasured because they were infrequent. The arts of peace were treasured both because they were exquisite and because they were in pleasant contrast to the usual business of life. A society which is engaged in affairs as grim as the affairs of the Middle Ages devotes its playtime to intense relaxation. The fever in the blood of these men effervesced in difficult, charming, and complicated poetry.
The barons and their courts lived in fortified castles on hills surrounded by moats and capped by towers so arranged as to afford protection against attack. Knighthood was, at the beginning of the period we are wandering through, in [14] high flower, although a very different flower from the picture of it presented in the stories of the Round Table and the Holy Grail. The knights were not really sensitive courteous gentlemen who devoted their lives to the rescue of kidnapped maidens or the defense of a lady’s honor. Too frequently they were responsible for the kidnapping of the maidens whom they robbed of all honor. The work of the troubadours has overcast the morals of the knights of old with a glamour which they do not in any sense deserve.
The ladies of the castle had their first taste of marriage while very young. They were frequently betrothed at the age of two, married in the ripe middle age of eight or nine, and expected to undertake the administration of a castle when senile decay had set in — at the age of fourteen. The husband was very heavy and exercised absolute rights. He could confine his wife to her room for years; he could chastise her with a rod, starve her, humiliate her in a thousand ways, even make her a servant to his mistress. He could dispose of her whenever he pleased. As the fathers of the church had not yet decided whether women had souls, the rights of women were somewhat hypothetical; and although they were probably accorded greater freedom in fact than they could claim by law they were, in a very real sense, the vassals of their husbands. Under these conditions it is not surprising that the dreams of adolescent girls should have turned to young squires of the court who said exquisite things exquisitely; or that they should have been delighted to hear poems addressed to themselves in which they, rather than their husbands, were represented as all powerful. Nor is it surprising that these girls should [15] have found means to betray their husbands, who were after all busy men engaged in the administration of a kingdom.
A reading of the work of the earliest troubadours shows that the poems were written not for the men of the Middle Ages but for the women; and the society described by the troubadours when they were serious is not society as it was but society as they wished it might be. The tradition of the self-sacrificing melancholy lover which has dominated lyric poetry for the last thousand years is an effeminate tradition based on the aspirations of unhappily married medieval ladies.
The troubadours were a comparatively small corporation of very fashionable young men. They were, for the most part, men of gentle birth. If of low birth, they were awarded, after they had attained position as a troubadour, the rights and privileges of gentlemen. Richard the Lion-Heart was king of England. His grandfather, William IX of Poitiers — said to have been the earliest troubadour — was both a poet and duke. And the hundred others, William de Foix, Bernard de Ventadour, Raymond V of Toulouse, and the rest, were all men of great power.
But the social position of the troubadour is not entirely explained by the statement that he is a man of gentle birth with the talent for writing poetry who chooses love as his theme and writes to please the ladies of the court. He performed another service which made him very valuable to the society which he graced.
The troubadour was the publicity agent for the court in which he lived. Please remember that there were in those [16] days no newspapers for the dissemination of scandal and gossip and no political paragraphers who celebrated the virtues of politicians. Yet as commerce and industry began to flourish and life became more and more complicated the shrewd barons of the south of France found it necessary to devise means whereby they could attract to their courts a better kind of fighting-man, make alliances with more powerful neighbors, and tell the world of the power of their swords as well as of the beauty of their wives. They found the troubadours useful in solving this problem.
A lady distinguished a troubadour from among many other more powerful courtiers because she realized that his songs about her beauty would attract to her court many powerful nobles. Her husband, being a medieval gentleman, suffered from the old-fashioned vice of jealousy but was complaisant because he realized that the presence at his court of many powerful nobles made him formidable to his enemies. Further he kept a sharp eye on the activities of his wife, and if she betrayed him he had the right to kill both her and her lover. This sometimes happened. Occasionally the troubadour mistook the passion he feigned for a passion which he really felt; and in one instance, he actually attempted to marry the lady who was the subject of his verse.
This was very wrong. For in the polite society of those days it was well enough for gentlemen to write songs praising the beauty of women above all other things; but a gentleman should realize that the writing of poetry to a lady was very different from making that lady his wife. He might make her either his real or his ideal mistress; but [17] if she were his wife their positions would be reversed and she would be by law and custom his slave.
The people of the Middle Ages have been misrepresented by romantic critics. Because we knew little about them, we were led to assume that they knew little about anything; because most of them could not write, we have been led to assume that they could not think or that their thought was simple and childish. Because they lived in manor-houses we have been convinced that they had what we would call good manners. Because some of them loved God, we have assumed that they hated the flesh and the devil.
As a matter of fact these assumptions are all erroneous. The people of the Middle Ages were wise beyond their years and ours, and because their thinking was frequently as direct as a child’s it had moments of shattering lucidity. Although they lived in manor-houses, were the lords of the universe, and had their own rigid system of etiquette, that system was not our system. They blew their noses on their sleeves, ate with their knives and fingers, spat on the floor, slept without pajamas, spoke in loud voices, killed without mercy, were lacking in what we like to call a sense of proper decency, and in general behaved in a manner which would shock a Billingsgate fishwife. Some of them did fear God; most of them loved beautiful women.
The troubadours were, as I have pointed out, a special group in the social organization of the Middle Ages. During the two hundred years through which they flourished [18] (1050-1250) they founded and developed a tradition of writing and loving which when taken over by Dante and Petrarch became part of the literary code of all succeeding generations. This tradition has influenced the work of all writers of love poems, even the writers of popular ballads in the music-halls of the present time.
Their home was the south of France, which at that time was the center of elegance. They wandered from court to court praising the ladies, disseminating gossip, and carrying out the complicated work of free-lance journalist, advertising agent, ambassador, and warrior. Most ot them became acquainted at some time in their careers with the English kings whose residences were in the cities of Aquitania now known as Touraine. From here the trails led in two directions. The great military highway went southeast to Lyons and south along the Rhone to Marseilles. The poets’ road went south to Toulouse and thence east to Marseilles. The two routes inclosed a large part of France which when fully explored should yield treasure. But for the present I shall confine myself to the highways and shall follow particularly those portions which were made vital by Bernard de Ventadour, Richard the Lion-Heart, and others of the gilded youth.
