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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. 267-290.

Chapter XI

The Trail of a Vagabond Poet — II

MONTPELLIER TO CARCASSONNE

Chapter XI

1

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

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

2

When Peire Vidal trod the Via Tolosa, Maguelone had lost its power. He came into Montpellier over a route now called the Boulevard de Nîmes, which led him to the foot of a small cliff surmounted by a château, which has since been destroyed and replaced by a quiet Esplanade, which leads directly to the Place de la Comédie in the center of the town. In the center of this place are three naked ladies in bronze, which represent, however inadequately, the good Montpellierite’s notion of the Graces. At one end of the place is the inevitable municipal theater, where, in the winter, French and Italian opera is sung very badly; and around the edge of the place are crowded café after café in friendly competition as to which can be the most jovial, the most pleasant, the most expansive. Peire Vidal found the city surrounded by walls. It was a city of tortuous streets and was more or less loyal to his friend and patron Peter of Aragon. At intervals on the spacious boulevards that have replaced the old walls and in the narrow by-streets 271 one finds vestiges of the town he visited: two towers at opposite ends of the town, a bit of wall which forms the back of a livery-stable, the cathedral with its curious porch. . . . 

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

Roolet de Gassin met Rixende de Montauban at Montpellier when troubadourism was at its height; and many years later, when troubadourism was no more than a memory of a pleasant perfume, Peire Bonifaciis paid assiduous court to a lady of the house of Andrea de Montpellier, “whom he wooed both by poems in the Provençal tongue and by the arts of magic. Seeing that nothing would advance his suit he gave himself to the study of alchemy and searched until he found a stone that had the virtue of converting all metals into gold. He made a song in which 272 he described the magic powers of the Oriental gems, and he put the diamond at the head of his list, saying that it had the virtue of making men invincible. He said the Cretan agate made a man pleasant of speech, amiable, prudent, agreeable; that the amethyst preserved from drunkenness; that the cornaline will appease the anger of a judge; that the ‘jacynth’ provokes sleep; that the pearl brings heart’s-ease; that the cameo when graven in images is efficacious against hydropsy; that the azure stone when hung on the necks of children makes them strong; that the Indian ruby if worn while sleeping preserves against bad dreams. One cannot experience the virtues of the sapphire unless one is chaste. The emerald is good for memory; the topaz restrains anger and luxury; turquoise brings luck, and the beryl increases love. . . .” He was a wise and learned man, and I would not like to believe that the doctors of medicine in the present university, who administer glandular extract to preserve youth, and psychoanalysis to prevent bad dreams, are more learned than Peire Bonifaciis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lady Vierna, thanks from Montpellier. . . .

Says Peire’s biographer, “He sang of his follies in love and war and boasted about both.”

Of the stolen kiss, Vidal sang:

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

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

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

3

The Via Tolosa runs southwest from Montpellier to Mèze, thence northwest to Montagnac, and then southwest again to Béziers and Narbonne. A medieval itinerary suggests that there may have been a short cut between Mèze 274 and Béziers via St-Thybery, which the author spells St.-Hybery, for which reason and others I suspect that the author did not make the trip himself but gathered his information from others. Misinformation found in guide-books and due to ignorance is not, by the way, the only difficulty in tracing the trails of the troubadours. Guide-books in those days were written like railway travel folders of the present time, for the purpose of attracting tourists to important or ambitious monasteries; that is to say, for the purpose of advertising. Thus if you were going from Avignon, for example, to Compostella along the Via Tolosa, every conceivable inducement would be offered to persuade you to leave the highway for a day’s excursion to monasteries which lay just off the beaten track. Both your soul and the monks’ bodies would prosper as a result of your visit. The authors of these books probably thought that any fool can follow the broad highway, but even the wisest will need friendly help and advice if he is to discover the retreats of his spiritual fathers.

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

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

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

This dastardly action was wiped out by a later Viscount Raymond de Trencavel, who, a good son of the church 276 himself, sacrificed everything he had, even his life, in protecting the merchants whose religious opinions he condemned. On July 21, 1209, Simon de Montfort, the bishop of Béziers, and St. Dominic, all bent on the extirpation of heresy, appeared before the walls of the city with an army. They commanded the city to yield. It refused and after a short scuffle was taken. The bishop had a list of those who were to be burned for their heresy, but in the confusion there was no time to sort the sheep from the goats. When asked for advice, he shouted: “Kill them all. God will recognize his own!”

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

To-day Béziers is peaceful. The bourgeois spend their Sunday afternoons parading up and down in the pleasant parks or on the small square in front of the church overlooking 277 the broad plain. They gaze with blank eyes toward the sea. “C’est bien tranquille ici,” they murmur, and again, as though to make quite certain, “C’est bien tranquille. . . .”

4

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

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

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

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

She has perfect feet and body, the sweet Lady Guilhelmona. She deceives not. She betrays not. And she wears no shoes or stockings. 278 I know no gentle citizen sweet as lovely Guilhelmona, not even Yolanda, daughter of the Lady Constance who taught young men the art of dancing. [Some kind of satire is evidently intended here, but the reference is lost upon me.]

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

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

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

In the twelfth century, Narbonne was the great seaport of the south and the rival of Marseilles. The Romans who took over the city when it was a Greek colony deflected an arm of the river to run through Narbonne and keep its harbor from silting up. The dike they built lasted until the fourteenth century, when it broke. Since then the Narbonnese have watched the sea recede farther and farther from its docks. At the time when the troubadours were making the court gay with their songs, Narbonne was divided into three towns. One part was governed by the lords bishops of the church, who naturally hated the heretics. A second portion was governed by the viscounts, closely related to the Trencavels. A third section was the Jewry. In the Jewry, Moise Khimbki, a learned rabbi, wrote long commentaries and became to famous that Narbonne 279 was a center of Hebrew learning, and in the château Peire and his friends sang about love.

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

Simon de Montfort, one of the mad de Montforts, was the grandson of the earl of Leicester and the father of the rebel Montfort in England. Raymond of Toulouse, whom Simon ruined, is said to have wept at his death and to have admitted that Simon was possessed of the qualities of a great soldier and an excellent prince. He was utterly fanatic and possessed of an energy which is difficult to comprehend even to-day, when energetic fanaticisms of other kinds are being exhibited in various parts of the world. He was besieging the Château de Termes, a stronghold of heresy. When the château capitulated and several of the heretics offered to join the church, Simon ordered them all burned. “If they are honest,” he said. “the fire will cleanse them 280 of their sins. If they are liars, they deserve to be burned.”

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

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

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

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

It was a letter from the king of Aragon to the wife of a Toulousan nobleman. The king wrote that he was driving the crusaders from Toulouse for her sake and paid her many 281 compliments and expressed the hope of an early assignation.

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

“What of it?” cried Simon in a voice of thunder. “Let me tell you that God will not desert me when I fight a heretic who tries to circumvent God’s designs for love of a woman!”

In 1115 he took a title, and the pope confirmed it, making him, “By the grace of God, Count of Toulouse, Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, and Duke of Narbonne.” It was fortunate that this title came by God’s grace, for it certainly did not come by the grace of popular opinion in these cities which he had ruined so that they never fully recovered. He died two years later.

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

No civilization could stand spectacles of this kind. 282 Whether the church was right or wrong in its pretensions, and whether civilization is a blessed or cursed thing, the fact remains that after the Albigensian Crusade troubadourism died, and troubadourism was merely one aspect of a broad, rich, and cultivated attitude toward life. Not only was the economic basis of the civilization of the south destroyed, but the spectacle of wholesale butchery dehumanizes. Even before these crusades, men were, as they are to-day, sufficiently brutal; but their brutality, like ours, was controlled by a set of social sanctions which were rigidly observed. The throwing off of those sanctions — and again the throwing of them off is a symptom rather than a cause — set civilization back for a hundred years. Man progresses by means of his conventions and not despite them. He goes forward by trying very hard to stay just where he is. The best way to go backward is to try to go forward.

Before the crusades, fanaticism had not been characteristic of the cultivated worldliness of the south. More characteristic and less unpleasant is the pretty scandal the chronicler suggests in his account of the life of Peire Rogier, the poet. “Peyre Rogier was a canon at Clermont, though some say he was canon at Arles and at Nîmes. Having quitted his position, and realizing that he was young, handsome, and of good family, and being assured that he would profit more in the world than in the church, where he saw nothing but envy, jealousy, and quarrels among the clergy, having, as I say left his monastery for the reasons I have told you, he gave himself to poetry in our vulgar Provençal tongue and made himself comedian and invented pretty 283 and ingenious comedies which he played with great success at the courts of the lords and princes.” He was received favorably wherever he went, but particularly well, it seems, by the viscountess of Narbonne, who gave him many rich gifts.

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

5

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

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

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

Roger Trencavel with his wife Agnes de Montpellier 285 awaited the approach of Simon de Montfort and his crusaders at Carcassonne. He had done his best at Béziers; he had fortified it and prepared it for a siege and had then retired, before the approaching army, to Carcassonne, the seat of his county. From his towers, which commanded a good view of the approaches to the town, he saw pouring over the hills by every available road, and even across the fields, the armies of the crusading hosts, experienced warriors clad in pilgrims’ cloaks, some of them sincere, some of them merely avaricious, and all of them eager for blood. He saw them encamp, and he saw the mushroom-like tents of the leaders erected at safe distances from the walls. In the center of Carcassonne, under an elm-tree, were gathered Roger’s dependents, the heretics, whose lives God had confided to his care when He made him suzerain of the country.

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

Montfort sent an embassy headed by one of Roger’s relatives. Roger and twelve of his men were offered safe-conduct 286 if they would deliver the rest of the city into the hands of the enemy.

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

According to Mrs. Gostling’s quotation of Frederick Soulie, who writes as though he had been a witness¹ of these events, Roger crossed the courtyard of the castle and arrived at the Place of the Elm-tree, where all who were not guarding the walls had gathered.

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

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

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

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

The troubadours regarded all these changes in the fortunes of their patrons at first with chagrin and later with dismay. Peire Vidal, who spent several seasons in Carcassonne and the châteaux near it in pursuit of his mistress, the Wolf, Loba de Perrautier, sang, when these troubles were just beginning:

Evil has conquered the world.

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

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

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

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

Peire’s friends sometimes teased him because his father had been a furrier, and when Loba de Perrautier (Loba, 288 from loupa, wolf) referred to it, he said, “You are my wolf; permit that I be yours.” He dressed himself in wolf-skins, and the lords and ladies pursued him over the grounds of the château. Unfortunately an envious enemy loosed the hounds, and Peire, unable to free himself from his disguise, was almost killed before the hounds were pulled away. Loba herself nursed him back to health. This is the same Loba who was involved in the unpleasant affair with Rémond de Mirevaux, and Rémond may have been one of the hunting-party.

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

The postern-gate is still there through which the troubadours slipped trembling at the proximity of their mistresses; the church where the lovely ladies heard mass and made assignations still stands as it was enlarged in the 289 fourteenth century; and one can still walk around the walls of the town in thirty minutes or so to catch a view of the Pyrenees gleaming in the west and the suggestion of the sea in the east. The walls rise like a curtain of masonry at the summit of the hill, and one feels that they, like the true church, will never fail.

FOOTNOTE

¹  Frances M. Gostling, “Rambles around French Chateaus” (London, 1911), p. 255.

6

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

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

He was alive in 1205, but the date of his death is unknown.

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