Marseilles
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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. 241-266.
TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS
by Raimon de Loi
Marseilles
THE fashion of troubadourism lasted for two hundred years. It began between 1050 and 1100 in Aquitaine in the west of France. It flourished between 1100 and 1200 throughout the south of France. Between 1200 and 1300 it died in eastern France and western Italy and dying transformed itself into the world poetry of Dante and Petrarch. Between Aquitaine and Avignon, through the southernmost part of France, cut a great highway, the Via Tolosa of the chronicles and the itineraries. It united the great congregations of poets, the western with the eastern. It was a garden path, and on each side of it blossomed in yellow stone and ivied walls amid black cypress and silver olive-trees the châteaux of the lords and ladies who were patrons to the poets, and the châteaux of the poets themselves. It was a highway of intrigue and passion and romance. The poets in their gay clothes, the gifts of complacent patrons, pranced back and forth beneath the ineffable sky, followed by a pretty boy singer or two, meditating new subtleties, new compliments, and pretty graces.
At the western source of the trail were Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Blaye, and thence were other paths, cutting 244 into the north, Poitiers, Limoges, Tours. At the eastern head of the path were a cluster of great cities: Avignon, Arles, the capital of a kingdom, Tarascon, the home of the ferocious dragon, and Beaucaire, whence Aucassin and the lovely Nicolette started out on their wanderings. Of a spring morning the dew is fresh here, and the flowers of the field still are so white beside a lady’s bare foot that one cannot distinguish the flowers from the foot or the foot from the flowers, and the figs, in late summer, cold and fresh, drop into your mouth. But the châteaux are hidden behind high walls of black cypress, and if you labor the dead white trail on a summer evening, they will whisper to you of secret things.
Directly east of the head of this trail, a few miles after you cross the Rhone at Beaucaire and Tarascon, perched on a small range known as the Alpines, is the deserted city of Les Baux, the sometime capital of all this broad country. One of the barons of Les Baux was the king of the Provence, and another was the emperor of Constantinople. The ladies of Les Baux were married by the emperors of the world and loved by the poets of the south. Azalaïs des Baux was a great lady and the wife of a baron; but Azalaïs would have been forgotten, as many another great lady has been forgotten, were it not for the kiss which Peire Vidal stole from her lips while she slept, or for the songs which Folquet of Marseilles made in her honor before he turned to the more profitable business of killing heretics. Few would remember Berengaria save for the love which Guilhelm de Cabestanh dedicated to her before he transferred it to the lovely Tricline, who finally ate his heart.
245The ruins of Les Baux are on the top of a hill. There are only two roads to this city, one on the north through St.-Remy and Tarascon, and one on the south through Paradou and Arles. For four hundred years there has been no lord of Les Baux, and the great castles are falling back into the rocks from which they grew. The small mountains on which the town is built are of smooth white sandstone. Centuries of quarrying outside the city have made long deep tunnels into the sides of the hills. The city still retains the whiteness of this beautiful stone and, when the sun comes from the right direction, can be dazzling in its brilliance. The windows gape at the summer night, and lizards and rock-rats rustle the small stones as one sits perched on a broken arch looking over the valley.
I do not know what the ruins of Les Baux looked like when Les Baux was a flourishing capital; but the ruins of Les Baux are square ruins, and in the palaces where the dead and imperturbable doors gape at the gaping tourists the windows are pointed and Gothic. When the mistral blows from the northwest, the city seems to shrink together and become compact, as thou it would present a solid front to its adversary; but in the midday sun, it sprawls over the top of the hill, its square stones in slatternly, unhappy balance against other square stones, its windows empty.
For five hundred years Les Baux was the center of affairs. When crusading and poetry were the fashion, Les Baux cultivated crusaders and poets; when asceticism was the fashion, it cultivated ascetics. The lords of Les Baux were sufficiently removed from the old Roman road between 246 Marseilles and Lyons — that great artery of medieval and ancient France which transported the infirmities of civilization from Marseilles to Lyons and thence by other great roads northeast to Coblenz, northwest to Cherbourg, and west to Tours — that they could cultivate their aristocracy, and with little fear of interruption by the vulgar middle-classes could practise the aristocratic vices with the impeccability of kings and the precision of poets. The ladies of Les Baux were beautiful, and one of them, according to tradition, was chaste.
The traditions of Les Baux are brilliant. Here troubadourism reached its highest, if not its greatest development. The poems became so subtle that none but the initiated could understand them, and the poets prided themselves on this subtlety, for, said they, poetry is an aristocratic art to be practised by ladies and gentlemen who have the leisure for study. It is not an art of the people. The populace has its jongleurs and its minstrels who tell silly stories in a silly way. We can write poems of fifty lines on two rimes. We can say a dozen things in a phrase if you are learned enough to understand what we say. Ours is a beauty of the intellect, theirs is a beauty of mere passion. There is much to be said for their point of view, but this is not the place to say it.
The sestina was a kind of poem particularly popular. It contained six stanzas and each stanza contained six lines. The words which concluded each line of the first stanza concluded each line of every other stanza, and their arrangement followed a definite order. The difficulties of this form are obvious. The poet was required to write a poem 247 of thirty-six lines. Each line must end with one of six words, and the position of each of these words was rigidly determined. Moreover the music of the song must follow these permutations, and the whole must be harmonious. Evidently the poets who cultivated this form of poetry were more concerned with saying things well than with saying them profoundly. Poetry was good form and good manners, and to good form and good manners these poets and their audiences attached an importance inconceivable to a race like our own which is concerned with “results.”
The exquisites who practised this art foregathered at Les Baux, and here the adept were sifted from the bunglers. Behold the poor troubadour, laboring at some obscure château, at Mirevaux, at Vacquières, or elsewhere, to perfect his poetry. He has learned all the songs of all the poets who have wandered through his part of the country on business or love. From them he has learned a few of the difficult rules of his art. Finally his poems are done. He slings a bag of them across his shoulder and departs for the great capital of Les Baux or Toulouse. Here he will be certain of finding an audience, and here, if he have grace of person or charm of manner, one will give him a hearing. Azalaïs and her daughter Berengaria des Baux have a weakness for troubadours, and perhaps their kindness will inspire him to improvise another canzone. Perhaps they will permit him to dedicate one to them. If he be competent, he will be praised; if he be incompetent, he will be ridiculed. The good will be sorted from the bad. He will find a patron and fall in love, and his wanderings will continue.
The sorting at Les Baux was done perhaps in the pavilion 248 of love in the garden which lay a few feet below the ruined city on the hill. On many a summer morning as the city cast its shadow over the garden the officers of the court assembled: the Lords of the High Privileges of Love, the Provost of the Hawthorn, the Seneschal of the Eglantine, the Marshal of Mourning, the Bailiff of Delight, and presiding over the court was the Queen of Love. The air of a summer morning can be hot and heavy. The roses drooped in the shade, and thinly clad the ladies reclined on their couches, conversing in undertones while the boy singers chanted sirventes and debates as to the nature of love and its beauty. The atmosphere was charged with passion and sensuousness and rich perfumes.
One of the poets of Les Baux was Guilhem de Cabestanh, who, partly perhaps because of his charming manner and honeyed words, and partly too perhaps because the Château de Cabestanh was somewhat isolated and dull, had captured the heart of his master’s wife and for reasons best known to himself found it necessary to travel. He came into Les Baux one spring evening and within a short time had won the love and the, as usual, undying devotion of pretty Berengaria des Baux, the daughter of the lord of the city. Berengaria was a sweet young thing and very serious, a firm believer in the proverbs, “Look before you cross the Rubicon,” and “When you’ve captured your man, put salt on his tail,” and, “A bird in the hand will fly away unless you hold him tight,” and other bits of popular wisdom. She knew that she loved Guilhem, and apparently he loved her, 249 but appearances are deceptive. Marriage was excluded, both because of the difference in their positions and by the fact that they loved each other, which latter fact our wise ancestors of the twelfth century regarded as an inevitable obstacle to marriage. Berengaria consulted a wise woman.
The wise women of old dwelt in huts, were shape-shifters appearing sometimes as toads and sometimes as women, were called witches, had intercourse with the devil, and gave bad advice. The wise women of to-day live who knows where, are shape-shifters — expert in transformations and cosmetics, conduct columns in newspapers, have spiritual intercourse with “higher things,” and give salutary though frequently futile advice to maidens like Berengaria. The old woman commanded Berengaria to pluck “several stocks of the verayre with your own hands, my dear, when the moon is full and bring them to me.” The woman made of these an infusion, and of the infusion she made a wine. The next time Guilhem blotted the moonlight of Berengaria’s window, she gave him some of this wine to drink. The effects were immediate. Guilhem’s face was contorted as though he were laughing at a terrible and unutterable jest. He writhed on the floor in his silent mirth. He was thought to be at the point of death. When he recovered his composure sometime later, he discovered that his live for Berengaria had been a mistake, and he left Les Baux to fall in love with Tricline Carbonelle.
Tricline, a lady “of science and good virtues, was the wife of Rémond de Seilhans. Guilhem sent her one of his songs, which, by way of precaution, he addressed to Rémond, her husband, a rude and unpleasant man whose 250 only pleasure was in the hunt and in murder. The lady thus apprised of his love felt a reciprocal passion pierce her heart, which, her husband observing, awakened in him the vulgar passion of jealousy.” He invited Guilhem to visit them as a guest and confronted the two several times without success. With Tricline’s permission he pretended to love Tricline’s sister, and when the sister was invited to the château he seemed to pay ardent court to her. So crude and vulgar was this man Rémond that he spied upon the lovers and found proof positive. He kept his information to himself. One day he and Guilhem went hunting. They became separated from their comrades, and he treacherously struck Guilhem to the earth and with great satisfaction buried his sword in Guilhem’s body up to the hilt. He cut off the head and put it in his hunting-bag. He cut out the heart and gave it to his cook.
There must have been an interesting dinner at the Château de Seilhans that day: excuses for Guilhem who had been “called away on urgent business”; obsequious smirks from the host of poor relatives that battened on the lord of every castle; Tricline distracted and absent-minded because Guilhem had not said good-by, and villainous Rémond for once in his life affecting the manners of the cultivated lords and pretending concern for the health of his wife.
“You’re not feeling very well to-day, my love,” he said.
“I never felt better,” she answered, looking up at the raftered ceiling of the hall that she might not meet his eyes.
“You are pale, my love,” he said. “You should be more in the open.”
251“My bower is so pleasant,” she answered, “that I should wish never to leave it.” But her face was turned toward the window, and her eyes followed the white ribbon of the trail which led into the valley to the hermitage where she had met Guilhem the day before.
“But you are not eating, my dear,” he said. “I fear you don’t care for the game I bagged to-day.”
“Indeed, my lord, it is the best I have ever tasted,” and she forced a bite down past the lump that rose in her throat.
“Quite so,” snarled Rémond. “That which you have just eaten is the heart of your paramour.” Reaching down under the table he drew from his hunting-bag the head of Guilhem, which he held up by the hair close to her face.
“My lord,” said Tricline, who was a lady always and retained her composure even at this difficult moment, “what I told you was the truth. I have never eaten better meat and . . . ” here she faltered for just a moment . . . “by God, I shall never eat worse.” She drew a steel poignard from her belt and with it pierced her tender bosom and died.
Azalaïs, the mistress of Les Baux, was celebrated for her chastity, and if any poet won favors from her the secret lies buried discreetly with his bones. Once, either before or after Folquet entered the service of Richard of England, he was severely smitten by the charms of Azalaïs and spent several seasons at Les Baux paying unsuccessful court to her. When she died he wrote, according to one chronicler, an “elegant poem” in her memory.
252Peire Vidal, the tempestuous ne’er-do-well of the troubadours, was less patient. She refused him all favors. When he made a song to “Pretty Eyes,” so phrased that it could apply only to her and so written that it could come only from Peire, she affected not to understand. She would not give him the public kiss on the cheek which would make him her eternal servant and vassal, and had Peire not been the bosom crony of Hues de Baux, Azalaïs’s husband, Peire would probably have given over the combat. But the more he praised Azalaïs, the more Hugues liked and petted him; and the more Hugues liked him, the safer was Peire. Les Baux was a strong city and Hugues a powerful lord, and there were divers husbands in the surrounding cities who would have liked to meet Peire on a dark night, and Azalaïs was charming, though unfortunately chaste, and one had to keep in practice. . . .
One night when Hugues was elsewhere, Peire stole into Azalaïs’s bedroom and implanted upon her ruby lips a kiss, which was in violation not only of civil and divine love but also of the law of romantic love, which stated explicitly and in so many words that the lover must be glad to accept what his mistress offers him and he must not take from her anything which she wishes to keep for herself. Azalaïs thought that the kiss was from her husband, or so she said, and awakened smiling. When she discovered her mistake, she proceeded to make a tremendous scene. She wanted Peire killed immediately, but Hugues said it was only a joke and was very much amused by it. Peire was banished from Les Baux for a time.
In Peire Vidal’s life good and back luck were mixed in 253 somewhat equal proportions. Whatever he did was dramatic. He was “the son of a furrier of Toulouse and he sang very well and was a sovereign musician. Whatever he saw pleased him, and whatever pleased him, he thought ought to be given him. He could write and compose more quickly than any of his contemporaries and he was a great boaster. He sang of his follies in love and in arms and lied about both. A lord of St.-Gilles had Peire’s tongue cut out because Peire had slandered one of the lord’s relatives. Fearful of more punishment to follow, he retired to Hugues of Baux and lived merrily and carefully there for some time.”
When he left Les Baux he took the road that leads down the steep side of the mountain, through the Val d’Enfer which Dante is supposed to have described in his Inferno, until he came to Paradou and the larger trail which led to the abbey of Mont Major in the suburbs of Arles.
A century and a half later, when troubadourism was all but dead, an apostate monk left the abbey and made himself the “scourge of poets.” He wrote the lives of all the troubadours, both those whose work he had read and those of who works he was ignorant, and then, repenting, he wrote a long poem in which he admitted that he had left the abbey to follow a life of good food and voluptuousness and that all he had said about the poets was untrue, which makes things somewhat difficult for modern students.
The monastery seems to be a part of the rocks on which it is built. In the center of it is the church of Our Lady, and in the center of that the cell which St. Trophimus is supposed to have occupied while converting the country. 254 After he had succeeded, more or less, he went to Arles and built the great church which still bears his name. The Arlesians are somewhat boastful and swear that Trophimus was a friend of St. Paul. Since the Arlesian women are said to be the most beautiful women in France, one must be content to take their word about things which happened long ago.
The Arlesian women admit that they are beautiful, but they insist that their beauty has a tragic origin and explain it by a tale which illustrates something of the imaginative heritage of the Provençal poets. Once upon a time, many, many years ago, the Greek hero Herakles . . . (“C’était un bon saint, Herakle,” said the mother of the house, interrupting her daughter who was telling the story. “Ecoute, maman, ce n’était pas un saint; c’était un païen.” “Quoi donc!” grumbled the woman, and asked what I expected nowadays, and didn’t the young people always know best, and she guessed that she knew the difference between a Greek and a saint, she did. . . .) After this interruption the Arlesienne proceeded to explain that many, many years ago Herakles was driving his wild white oxen along the great highway between Toulouse and Arles. The Rhone was in flood, and each small river spread into a thousand streams over the wide plain of the Camargue. At every ford there was a stampede, and at every stampede the herd became smaller. There was no food. Herakles labored day and night, and when the cattle were too weary to go further he sat on a rock and rested his head on his bare brown arms. 255 Finally he came to Arles on a green hill with plenty of pasturage, and there he met Galatea, the lovely Ligurian princess who added to her other accomplishments that of chief shepherdess to her father’s flocks. For a long time they watched their flocks together, living on garlic, onions, and love.
The time came when Herakles, the divinely ordained righter of human wrongs (“He was a saint as I told you,” said the old woman), remembered his mission. An inexorable fate, as demoniac and compelling as that which drives dipsomaniacs to the bottle or Calvinists to heaven, forced this unhappy man to do one kind act a day, and now forced him to do it elsewhere. Galatea the lovely was sleeping in the moonlight, one bare arm under her head, and her sweet breath redolent with garlic. He left her, collected his herd with the herdsman’s melancholy “Hooho . . . Hooho . . .” and drove them into Greece. When Galatea awoke she was very unhappy but evidently not inconsolable, for she was later married to a chief of her own tribe. She never forgot the divine Herakles, however, and in her eyes and the eyes of her daughters one may still see the sadness of a woman who has loved a God.
Arles is a city on the cross-roads, and since the time of Herakles it has been a city for tourists. In Roman times, the road between Marseilles and Lyons joined the great road to Toulouse at Arles. The Romans made Arles a free city in an attempt to lessen the importance of Marseilles, dominated by Phenician traditions. They built here a huge arena and a beautiful Greek theater. Arles was the last city in the Western Empire to stand before the barbarian 256 invasions, and when the Romans had finally been exterminated the barbarians built their town within the arena. The town expanded and grew rich. The Arlesians converted the dead in their Gallo-Roman burial-ground and discovered that Christ had consecrated this one too with his own hands. The arena, the theater, and the church are, each in its own way, magnificent, and around them is a net of narrow cobbled streets, the streets of the troubadours.
I have records of no less than thirteen poets who, at one time or another, partook of the hospitality of the Arlesian lords or made love to the Arlesian women. Since the Arlesian women combined pride with beauty, this love was in many cases tragic. Hugues de St.-Cyr, a gentleman, loved a gentle lady of the Provence called Clermonde de Quideram of the city of Arles, who was so accomplished and brilliant among the women of the country that she compared with none, not only in beauty but also in good sense and kindliness, in whose praise he made many good songs in the Provençal tongue. In one of these he said that he had three great enemies who tortured him to the point of death every night: his eyes forced him to love a woman whose station was far higher than his; love held him in durance and forced him to be faithful to his lady; the third and most cruel of all was his lady herself, to whom he dared not confess his passion. What could he do? These cruel enemies would not permit him to die, but preferred to see him languish in despair. He sought wild and desolate places. He wept and sighed and made songs of his distress, and always, as an accompaniment to his sorrow, he heard the murmur of the impetuous stream . . . “Sweet Thames, 257 run softly till I end my song . . . ” And Hugues de St.-Cyr hit upon this device some three hundred years before Spenser.
Gaubert or Gasbert de Puycibot was the son of a gentleman of Limoges. At an early age he entered the monastery of St. Leonard, where he learned how to sing and how to write poetry and music. In all of these arts he achieved great proficiency. He had a cousin, and when, under cover of devotion, she visited the monastery, he would sing his poems to her very softly so that his brethren might not hear them, and she, with head bowed, would say to him that it was a sin and a shame for him to waste his life in this prison when he might win for himself great glory and fame as a poet.
He believed her and joined the suite of Savaric de Mauléon and with him visited many famous courts along the Via Tolosa. At one of these he met a beautiful demoiselle with whom he fell in love, and for whom, as was proper, he made many beautiful songs. But she would have nothing to do with the impecunious clerk. Gaubert told his patron Savaric about his difficulty, and “Savaric, who loved learned persons and good poets granted him the favor and had him passed knight and gave him revenue and horses and married him to the young lady.” Now this marriage was accursed, as some marriages are, and as these young people should have known had they paid proper attention to the rules of chivalric love. But they lived in the beginning of the thirteenth century when the old customs were breaking down and France was already trembling with the first agonies of the Albigensian Wars.
258Some time after they had been married, Savaric and his knights undertook a small war with Raymond of Toulouse against Aragon. While she was living alone, awaiting the return of her husband, Madame la Châtelaine de Puycibot met an English knight — probably a tourist with a Cook’s ticket, a thermos bottle, and a Murray doing southern France on his way to the Riviera — and he made violent love to her in the manner of these gentlemen when they become aroused. They came to an understanding and fled to the city of Arles, where they lived for many months in happiness and contentment. When Gaubert returned from the war he too stopped in Arles and by chance took a room across the road from the room his former wife was occupying.
She looked out of her window and saw him. Her former love for him returned, and she was filled with loathing for the English knight. In the twilight she slipped into Gaubert’s room, and they sat there together for a long time looking at each other, saying nothing, and letting Love do its work in their hearts. . . . The next morning they departed for Avignon and in repentance of their sins entered the severest religious houses they could find. Gaubert never sang another song as long as he lived; and his wife, more beautiful than ever in her nun’s costume, turned her eyes resolutely away when she saw an English knight with a Cook’s ticket and a guide-book striding down from the Rocher du Dôme.
Bertrand de Marseille was related to the viscounts of Marseille. In his youth he was fat and indolent and remained so until he came to Arles and saw one of the ladies 259 of that city of the house of Porcellet, when, by the sovereign power of love, his fatness and indolence vanished and he began writing poems to her, which is nothing less than a miracle, for the writing of Provençal poems is extraordinarily difficult. Despite Bertrand de Marseille’s entreaties, Porcellette de Porcellet remained cold. Later, she married a gentleman of Eyguières and within a few years bore him twelve beautiful sons. This, however, is not surprising because the Porcellets are a prolific race.
They were originally of Les Baux. An early mother of the family was once walking on the hill outside the city of Les Baux when she met an old woman who asked for alms. The lady was impatient and made some slighting comment on beggars. The old woman cursed her with a widow’s curse and, pointing to a sow in the middle of the road, said: “May you have as many sons at one birth as that sow has at every litter!” Shortly afterward the lady was brought to bed of nine sons.
When Peire Vidal visited Arles, the church of St.-Trophimus was being repaired with stones taken from the theater and the arena. An unknown sculptor was chiseling these stones into the hyperbolical symbols of Christianity. In the figures of the Christ on the porch and the hypersexual beasts in the cloister, the stones have bared their souls and the tortured spirit of history still lives. The stones have echoed to the screams of gladiatorial combat; they have absorbed the great cadences of pagan combat. Now they glare confusedly at the pretty Arlesian women who perform their morning devotions.
Arles sits in the center of a tangle of roads like a beautiful spider in her net. One line of the old Roman road is followed by the modern railway due east to Aix-en-Provence and on to Fréjus. A spur drops down to Marseilles. Another leads northeast to the Cottian Alps and Milan. A third continued up the right bank of the river to Avignon and Lyons, the Roman capital. Another went northwest to Nîmes, where it joined the true Via Tolosa, which curved beside the Rhone to a point just opposite Avignon, where it crossed and joined the road on the left bank. This is the trail that Petrarch followed when he went to college at Montpellier. From Nîmes he, and perhaps Peire Vidal before him, went southwest to Lunel and thence to Montpellier.
But the trip Arles-Nimes-Lunel, if it followed the Roman road, covered two sides of a triangle. St.-Gilles, directly west of Arles, was an important city during the Middle Ages and carried on a considerable commerce. There must have been a trail between these two cities. Directly west of St.-Gilles is Vauvert, and there was certainly a trail between Vauvert and Lunel as early as the fourteenth century, and in all probability much earlier. The present road which connects these two towns hugs the bases of very low hills which rise directly out of the marshes of the western Camargue and, if my assumptions are correct, follows the old trail which ran along the head of the Camargue, due west to join the Via Tolosa at Lunel.
Flat and marshy as an old pancake, the plain of the 261 Camargue stretches south from Arles to the Mediterranean. Hardly any tree breaks the force of the mistral, the winter wind which sweeps down from the northwest. Hardly any leaves give shade and comfort to the traveler under the summer sun. It is a desert plain, the Camargue, and the mother of legends. Scattered at great distances are large farm-houses. Huge walls have been built around them for protection, and at times a line of black cypresses. The werwolf haunts the Camargue and the fairy fox; and whether these spirits lead you to great wealth or to sudden death, they will lead you finally to madness. At the southern end, built on the sands is the city of the three St. Marys, Les Saintes Maries. In the spring the Gipsies from all over Europe gather here to do homage to their patron saint and every year there are miracles performed in the high fortified church. St.-Gilles is at the northern extremity of the plain, a bare four leagues from Arles. It was there that Peire Vidal lost his tongue for slandering a gentlewoman, and it was probably not by this road that he traveled from Arles to Lunel.
The paths on the Camargue are tortuous and lead between quicksands, and the poets whose names are connected with these paths led tortuous lives. One of these was the gentle knight Cadenet, whose castle is now in ruins a dozen leagues north of Aix-en-Provence. He had a remarkable passion for a certain Marguerite de Ries and a remarkable run of bad luck. Unlike many of his fellow-troubadours 262 he was unable to salve his disappointment when she refused to have him, and, though he tried nobly, was unable to fall in love with another mistress.
When Marguerite refused to grant him any favors, he took service with the marquise de Montferrat, but to his sorrow, he found himself constantly singing the praises of the gentle Marguerite, and instead of recovering from his malady of love, it grew worse each day until, unable to bear so much suffering, he returned again to the court of his first love. She granted him certain minor liberties. He might see her for a few moments each day. On meeting her in public, he might touch his lips to her hand. He might not, under any condition, imagine that she had accepted his homage. He might not refer to her as the lady of his dreams. He might . . . He might not . . . And all the time that she was exulting in her power over him, she was laughing at him behind his back. Fashions were changing. Poetry was on the decline. Young ladies amused themselves by arts which were less gracious and less difficult.
Cadenet discovered Marguerite’s ill usage and in his chagrin married a gentle lady who was beautiful and virtuous, but she died within a year. Not only was he unfortunate in love and domestic arrangements, but now he had to suffer the attacks of the Galliardes, the speakers of evil, who said that he deserved to lose his wife because he had only married her in spite, and that he was really faithful to Marguerite. This angered him so much that he wrote a very polite song thanking the gossips for attributing such faithfulness as he had not deserved. He next turned his attention to a novice of the convent at Arles, who deceived 263 him cruelly. This last deception was too much. He joined the Templars at St.-Gilles and turned his love to the Mother of God, “in whose honor he made many pretty songs which pleased his brethren exceedingly.” He died fighting the Saracens.
Rostand de Berenguier had the misfortune to fall in love with a very old woman and a witch, “and she was the most expert in sorcery that any one has ever seen, whether in mixing drugs, in observing days of good omen, or in administering love potions.” For some obscure reason, she experimented on her lover and gave him a potion which transported him beyond sense, and he would have remained that way forever had not a gentle demoiselle — who was acquainted with him because of a song he had made in her honor — taken pity on him. She was a daughter of the house of Cybo and lived not far from Marseilles. “He was restored to his reason and understanding by means of a drink which she gave him containing a sovereign drug and antidote, which favor the poet recognized, and he immortalized her in a goodly number of songs and became amorous of her, leaving the witch and retaining the Genoese, who was a very proper demoiselle, beautiful, virtuous, and well learned in poetry.” She seems to have regretted her kindness to him or to have thought him more attractive as a madman than as a poet, for as soon as he was cured of his illness she cast him off. In his anger he wrote a satire against her, which was an ill natured thing to do and not in the least courteous. Berenguier then tried to join the Templars of St.-Gilles, but the Templars, perhaps because of his notorious conduct with the witch but more likely 264 because of his discourteous conduct toward the Genoese, refused to admit him to their order. He took revenge upon them by writing an improper poem called “Concerning the False Lives of the Templars,” as a result of which, by divine punishment, he died.
Peire Vidal had every reason in the world to regard St.-Gilles, where he had lost his tongue, with suspicion. When he went from Les Baux to Toulouse he must have traveled by the Roman road northwest to Nîmes. The small city of Bellegarde, the first stop on this route, rises out of the plain on a small hill which seems twice its height in comparison with the flatness of the surrounding country. There is something of magic in Arles, and whenever I leave it its influence stays with me until, with a kind of shock, I realize that I am in another town, where life, though it may have been lived just as intensely, has left for us fewer records. Thus, as I remember it, the town of Bellegarde is shabby, and its tower is a poor thing, and though its position on a hill is dramatic and picturesque, it is too far from Arles to share its grandeur and too different to be quite a part of it.
The hills which begin at Bellegarde continue to Nîmes and beyond to the uttermost limits of the Provence. They are seldom high hills, but they are pleasant, and sometimes their ruggedness suggests very, very small mountains. They are covered with grape-vines. The peasants speak Provençal, a very old language, as different from French as Spanish or Italian. When they speak French, it is with the 265 accent of the Midi, of which the most notable characteristic is the pronunciation of the final “e,” This gives their speech softness and languor.
At Nîmes the road joins the Via Tolosa, which Peire Vidal probably and Petrarch and many others certainly followed southwest to Lunel.
Modern Lunel has forgotten all about the twelfth century and is no longer aware that it was once an important city. It occupies itself to-day with its dull and pretty municipal park and spends as much time as possible in the café and as little as necessary on the wide, hot, and dusty streets. When the Saracens retreated through southern France, they left at Lunel, Montpellier, and Narbonne a large number of learned Jews whose fame spread throughout Europe.
About the time of Peire Vidal or a little earlier, Jausserande de Lunel, the daughter of a noble prince and his exemplary wife, was receiving with complaisance the moralistic love-poems of Guilhelm de Agoult, who, because he was possessed of a large personal fortune, was described by his contemporaries as benign, modest, virtuous, and excellent in knowledge and judgment. Guilhelm disapproved of the madness of the youth of his day, and he pointed out their errors to them with an air of gentle reproach. The true lover, he said, can do nothing that will bring dishonor upon himself and his mistress; he will not win her by trickery; he will not take from his mistress anything which she does not give him freely, nor will he do any dishonorable thing for her. One must always remember that the sex is frail, he concluded, and we must forgive women 266 many of their smaller vices. He wrote a treatise telling all about it under the title, “La Maniera d’Amar dal Temps Passat.”
Directly south of Lunel is Aigues-Mortes, a city which Peire Vidal certainly did not visit, for it was built some seventy years after he died; but I mention it here because it is more entirely in the style and manner of thirteenth-century architecture than any other town in France. Aigues-Mortes is a fortified city built by St. Louis as a seaport in the midst of the dead waters. Its gray brown walls rise straight above a brown gray plain. At places the smooth dead waters of the “étang” reach to the bases of the walls. At other places, the plain itself, covered with rough marsh-grass and dotted with pools invisible except when they flash the sunlight back into your eyes, stretches out as far as one can see. It is a dead city in dead waters. The streets are narrow and white. There is no life in it.
The tide of life has passed and carried with it the boasting Crusaders and the saintly king. The peasants do a little trading in salt and a little trading in fish. If you shiver in the cold wind of a winter afternoon, they say pleasantly, “Il fait froid.” If you perspire on a summer morning, they say, “Il fait chaud.” They ask you whence you came and tell them, and they answer, “That’s very far from here.” Whatever they say is pleasant and quiet and a little dead. The aigue comes in from the marshes around Aigues-Mortes and shakes them. Most of them die young, but those who survive are very old indeed. . . .
