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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. 291-320.




TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

by Raimon de Loi




Cover Figure embossed with Gilt knight on horseback.




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Chapter XII

The Trail of a Poet Laureate

ABOUT AVIGNON

Black and white stylized leaf on a scrolling branch.







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Black and white drawing by Giovanni Petrina of a small portion of the wall of the medieval castle and town of Avignon.

Avignon

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Chapter XII


1


PETRACCO, Francesco de Petracco’s father, was banished from Florence on the same day as Dante who wrote the “Divine Comedy,” and on the day that Dante and Petracco stormed the gate of Florence on the south side of the city and were repulsed, Francesco was born, which was July 20, 1304. Between the years 1300 and 1400 two Italians were writing rich and fluent poetry, and one of these men was Dante and the other was Petrarch, and both of these men made use of the pleasant devices which the troubadours had discovered; but since they were ignorant of the way in which the troubadours sang their poems, they wrote their words to be read as literature and not to be sung. Mr. Ezra Pound, who has written many good songs in the manner of the troubadours, though his understanding is sometimes clouded by his friendship for one of them, has said that the poems of Campion who lived in England at the time of Shakspere are the half of the troubadours’ art preserved by Dante and Petrarch, and that the musical sonata represents the other half of their art. The troubadours wrote both words and music and intended their songs to be sung. For this reason they were very careful of the words they used in their songs, that each should be fitting [294] to the note at which it was to be uttered. Their music was more philosophical and abstract than any music we know to-day and was written for learned people, for which reason it cannot be played on the phonograph, as the melodies are not suited to the Charleston in which people to-day take great delight.

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

All ye that pass along Love’s trodden way

Pause ye a while and say

If there be any grief like unto mine,

or that other beginning,

Ladies that have intelligence in love,

Of mine own lady I would speak with you,

or that other,

A very pitiful lady, very young,

Exceeding rich in human sympathies,

Stood by, what time I clamored upon death,

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

[295]

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

Petrarch was born when Dante was forty-three years old, and as Dante’s vision was of the heavenly paradise, so Petrarch’s vision was of the earthly paradise. The time in which Petrarch lived was like the time in which Bernard de Ventadour lived, but with this difference, that whereas Bernard saw the earth and its beauty and looked beyond to catch a glimpse of heaven, Petrarch saw heaven and its beauty and looked beyond to catch a glimpse of earth. Petrarch was brought to Carpentras, a city near Avignon, when he was very young, and he spent much of his life [296] between Avignon, Carpentras, and Vaucluse, where he had a summer house. On several occasions he traveled along the Via Tolosa.




2



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

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

Carpentras is one of these towns, only larger than most. [297] It has electric lights in some parts, but in others it has none and no running water. It is on a very high hill. The room where we stayed at Carpentras was at the top of a high narrow house, and the wind howled about the corner, and the moonlight threw into silhouette the jagged roof-line of the town and the crenelated tower of the Porte d’Orange. One cannot make a tour of the walls from the inside of the town, for houses have been built up against them and over them so that at night the lights of the houses smile down on the traveler. Building a house against the wall of a city is a good idea, because it saves putting up one side of the house, and sometimes you can dig back into the city wall and make an extra room or a cellar to keep the butter fresh.

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

Petrarch’s father was modest too. One day at the age [298] of forty-five, Petracco looked in the glass and discovered that there was one white hair on his head. He began shouting and making such an uproar that everybody in the house and street thought he was being murdered and called the watch.

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

The papacy was at Avignon only sixteen miles away, and noble Italian families were living in all the towns of the district. A bishop seems to have lived in every hamlet, [299] and frequently the popes themselves made excursions into the surrounding country, or some important committee would hold conference at Carpentras or at Nîmes. On these occasions life would be interesting. The clerics would come in holiday attire, in silk and satin and many ornaments, and the official business of the church would be postponed while they took great dinners in the episcopal palace; and Petracco, who was a successful lawyer, would be very busy, and Signora Petracco would flushed perhaps and excited. . . .

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




3



At the age of fifteen Petrarch was sent to study at the University of Montpellier, and since he was a young man [300] and was not to succumb to his passion for Laura until he was twenty-seven, he might have enjoyed himself were it not for the fact that he was going to study canon law, which he detested, and were he not journeying even farther away from his beloved Italy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bishop said he would not have believed it if he had not seen it with his own eyes, but the people in the church began shouting and singing hymns, because a miracle had been performed and said to each other: “Yes, sir, he put it over his shoulder and carried it right straight to [302] to the river and said, ‘Here’s the first stone,’ or something like that. I saw him.” Then they went to the river and tried to push the stone to be certain it was as heavy as they thought it was. And that is the way the bridge came to be built.

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

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

Petrarch traveled almost due west along the Via Tolosa until he came to Remoulins, a walled city with an old square tower, whence it was but a step to the Pont du Gard, a Roman aqueduct which, bridging a wide valley, is some nine hundred feet long and five hundred feet high. It is made of three tiers of arches, each one narrower than the [303] one below, and is made of large rocks without cement. It is supposed to have been built by the son-in-law of Augustus, which must have pleased Petrarch immensely. Despite the fact that it is visited yearly by thousands of tourists who go because they are told to go, its lines have great grace and much power.

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

The Nîmes Petrarch visited was a walled city, triangular in shape, with the arena at the apex. Two of the gates are still standing, hidden behind the mass of new houses, but the walls have been transformed into pleasant boulevards. Nîmes was taken in the Middle Ages many times at war, by siege, and by strategem. The most amusing of these strategems is recounted in the adventurous novel [304] called “Le Charroi de Nîmes,” which is too long to be recounted here.

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

[305]

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




4



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

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

Laura, who was distinguished by her own virtues and widely celebrated by my songs, first appeared to my eyes in my early manhood, in the year of Our Lord 1327, upon the sixth day of April, at the first hour, in the Church of Santa Clara at Avignon; in the same city, in the same month of April, and on the same sixth day and at the same first hour, in the year 1348, the light was taken from our day, while I was by chance, at Verona, ignorant, alas! of my fate. The unhappy news reached me at Parma in a letter from my unhappy friend Ludovico, on the morning of the nineteenth of May of the same year. Her chaste and lovely form was laid in the Church of the Franciscans, on the evening of the day upon which she died. I am persuaded that her soul returned to the heaven whence it came. I have experienced a certain satisfaction [306] in writing this bitter record of a cruel event, especially in this place, where it will often come under my eye, for so I can be led to reflect that life can afford me no further pleasures, and the most serious of my temptations being removed, I may be admonished by frequent study of these lines . . . that it is high time to flee from Babylon [Avignon]. This, with God’s grace, will be easy. . . .

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

Her position must have been most trying, for Petrarch was a handsome and rising young man and the friend of the most power families of Avignon. His poems were excellent and were published as soon as written (that is, passed around among friends to become common property). The kind of thing to which Laura was subjected may be seen by reading the subtitles to several of the poems: “He hopes that time will render her more merciful”; “He invites his eyes to feast themselves upon Laura”; “His heart rejected by Laura will perish unless she relent”; “Night brings him no rest”; “Love makes him silent”; “All that he is is due to her . . .” etc. All of these themes, elaborated and varied with innumerable additions in some ninety sonnets and eight canzoni, were not calculated to bring ease and comfort to the chaste heart of a wife or the jealous heart of a husband. Petrarch was a young men, sufficiently well known so that whatever he did was [307] news. If he met Laura walking in the afternoon, he would stop whatever he was saying, bite his lip, turn pale, become morose, walk as if he were in a trance, and conduct himself generally as young men who are obviously in love and like to have it known have conducted themselves ever since. Then he would write a poem about what he had done, and write it so well that even those people who had not been present to see how love had affected him would learn of it in the poem and would repeat the poem over and over again to all their friends and acquaintances. Ballad mongers learned the poems and recited them on the streets. Laura’s husband must have been made glad by them whenever he left the house! Laura, who according to Petrarch’s own admission never gave him any encouragement, must have been an angel to submit to this sort of thing for twenty-one years until death relieved her of her persecutions.

During this time Petrarch became the father of two children by a woman whose name is unknown. This intrigue was not called love, and it bothered the poet’s conscience not at all, whereas his love he regarded not only as a great fault in his character but also as a great sin. Thus, in the fourteenth century, love must have meant something entirely different from what it had meant to the poets in the early stages of troubadourism. The physical basis of love had been entirely spiritualized. Love, which had originally been a coöperative passion in which the poet and his mistress both contributed, became an introspective passion for the man only. Woman had been apotheosized. Petrarch took Woman out of heaven and made her into [308] woman again. He translated her from a symbol into a human being; but his translation was imperfect, and the human being still had about her some remnants of godliness. If Laura could for a moment have been less chaste and virtuous than she was, one cannot imagine Petrarch as anything but irritated with her for spoiling his pretty picture.

But there is one more thing to note. Although Petrarch’s conception of love was entirely different, it was taken directly from the poetry of the troubadours, and Petrarch and his friends thought it was the same. Thus it fell under the ban of the church. Now the church fathers had condemned lust and had condemned adultery — although they were discreetly silent during the twelfth century — and it never occurred to them that a man and a woman could conduct a platonic friendship, or that a man could feel the emotions which Petrarch says he felt for Laura, or that woman could be made the symbol of complete theological beauty which Dante made of Beatrice. Yet Petrarch’s thought was dominated by the doctrines of the church fathers, and he regretted his love bitterly and determined to hate the object of it. Woman was still too divine to be quite human, she was already too human to be quite divine. Love becomes the symbol of earthly beauty, and Laura, the beautiful woman, becomes — at the same time that she is a woman, very real and very alive in his poems — the symbol of earthly beauty, the earthly beauty which the puritanical thirteenth century tried to hate but never could hate. Petrarch, looking at the world through the eyes of his teachers, who were bred in that century, regarded [309] the beauty of the blue sky as a snare and the thrill of the senses as a delusion of the devil.

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




5



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

He had great difficulty in finding a suitable companion for his excursion, a difficulty not unknown in modern times. In running over the list of possible friends, he rejected first those who would take no interest in the trip and [310] whose coldness would dampen his spirits, and then he rejected those whose enthusiasm would be irritating. He finally decided that his brother was the best companion he could find, and the brother was “delighted and gratified beyond measure” at Petrarch’s choice.

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

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

“We soon came to a halt at the top of a certain cliff. Upon starting out again, we went more slowly, and I [311] especially advanced along the rocky path with a more deliberate step. While my brother chose a direct path, straight up a cliff, I weakly took an easier one which really descended.” When he was called back by his companions, he said he had been trying to find an easier path, and did not mind walking farther if he did not need to walk so hard. He became disgusted with himself when he found that he was walking twice as far as his brother, and that while his brother waited for him to come up he could rest, whereas Petrarch grew constantly more weary and irritated. Many times he made good resolutions, and many times he broke them, and always he found that his brother was ahead of him and was resting and fresh. Finally he sat down and said to himself: “What thou hast so frequently experienced to-day in the ascent of this mountain, happens to thee as to many in the journey towards the blessed life. . . .  But nevertheless in the end, after long wanderings, thou must perforce either climb the steeper path, under the burden of tasks foolishly deferred, to its blessed culmination, or lie down in the valley of thy sins and (I shudder to think of it) if the shadow of death overtake thee spend an eternal night amid constant torments.”

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

[312]

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

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

[313]

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

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

[314]


6



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

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

another tribe of manners strange

And uncouth dialect was seen. . . .

[315]

In this band were Arnaut Daniel, Folquet de Marseille, Rambaut d’Orange, Rambaut de Vaquières, Peire Vidal, and

tuneful Rudel who, in moonstruck mood,

O’er the ocean by a flying image led,

In the fantastic chase his canvas spread;

And where he thought his amorous vows to breathe

From Cupid’s bow received the shaft of death.

He had studied carefully the works of several of the troubadours, and whether he took from them merely their ideas, or whether he took their poems too, is still a matter of debate.

Lombez, Petrarch thought, was even less pleasant than other French cities. The speech of the peasants was crude, and their manners were cruder than their speech. “The bishop, however,” he said in effect in the letters which he sent back to friends at home, “is bearing his exile from the wealth and luxury to which he is accustomed with great affability of manner and much charm.” Indeed the bishop might well bear his exile with good grace. It was his first bishopric, he was required to stay there for less than a year, the income was considerable, and he would forever after have the rank of at least a lord of the church. But for the Colonna this was merely a beginning. Petrarch’s task was to make it as pleasant a beginning as possible. Obviously the poet is still the publicity agent; but instead of advertising his master’s proficiency in arms, which is a fair advertisement, since it can be tested easily, or advertising his generosity and largess — for without this largess the poet would starve — instead of paying pretty [316] compliments to a master’s wife and cursing his master’s character when he feels like it, the poet now devotes his attentions entirely to flattery, which is the more perverse because it was supposed to be taken seriously. When a troubadour says a lady is beautiful, the statement stands because it is bad form to think of any lady as anything but beautiful; but when Petrarch calls the king of Naples wise and says that the king’s poetry is immortal and that he is the greatest man of the age, he is telling not only bald-faced lies, but he is telling servile lies, which are, if possible, worse.

The fruits of servility are rich and ripe. A year later the Colonnas furnished Petrarch with the means to travel to Paris and Germany. Later he traveled in Italy and took ship for England. When he saw the shores of that island, however, he had a change of heart. He suddenly felt that his passion for Laura had died and that he might return to Avignon and devote himself again to his studies. He did, and shortly thereafter became the father of a son by the unknown woman. Immediately after this event — that there was a scandal as has been suggested is most improbable, for that kind of error was too frequent in those days to be worthy of notice — he retired to his country house in Vaucluse.




7



The road leads due east from Avignon past Château-neuf, a ruined town on a hill, past Thor, a walled town in the valley, and past L’Isle-sur-Sorgue to a village which is so small that if one could get past the cliffs which surround [317] it one would not notice it at all. This is Vaucluse. On the top of the cliff which faces the town is the ruined château of the bishops of Cavaillon, a small town not far south. The stream skirts the feet of the cliff; and if one follows the river path, worn deep by thousands of honeymoon couples — the grotto of Vaucluse is to southern France what Niagara Falls is to us — one comes finally to the deep and quiet pool hidden in the heart of the mountain which is the source of the Sorgue River.

It is a quiet and a romantic spot, but even before Petrarch came here to live, it was a tourist center. When Petrarch was a small boy his father brought him here on an excursion from Avignon. “The little Francesco had no sooner arrived than he was struck by the beauties of the landscape and cried, ‘Here, now, is a retirement suited to my taste and preferable in my eyes to the greatest and most splendid cities.’ ” If this story is true Petrarch was evidently born a prig and was not made one by the circumstances of his education.

He had two gardens, one secluded on the side of a hill and the other on an island in midstream. The island garden contained a grotto where Petrarch retired to read during the midday heat. In this garden, he says, he tried to establish the Muses and thus incurred the displeasure of the nymphs of the stream who had for many centuries considered the island as their own. They refused to understand why Petrarch should have preferred nine old maids, ugly, arid, and shriveled, to their lovely selves and their eternal youth. Hidden in the stream, their bright eyes peering through the water-weeds, they watched him set his [318] garden in order. Then with musical laugher and splashing of water, they descended on the garden, their naked bodies brilliant in the sunshine, and destroyed all his work. Petrarch tried again, and again he failed, and finally he gave over the attempt.

Occasionally his fine friends would pay him a visit from Avignon, King Robert of Naples, the Colonna, and others. One time on his return from a walk he met a group of people on the road. “The fashion of France has so confounded the dress of the sexes that I could not tell which was which, for all were decked with ribbons and necklaces, pearls and rich head-dresses, rings, jeweled caps, and coats embroidered in purple. We bowed to one another; then — what a pleasant surprise, my dear Guillaume! — I recognized the fair one who causes your heart to beat. . . .”

While Petrarch was living thus in roots and herbs — he was at times a vegetarian — and was completely withdrawn from the world he was surprised one day at receiving two letters each begging him to be crowned poet laureate. One of these letters was from Paris, and the other was from Rome. These were other fruits of servility. No one to this day has advanced a satisfactory reason why this young man, who was known only by some charming and very popular poems in the vulgar tongue, should have been crowned poet laureate. The honor, one imagines, should have been offered only to men who have achieved and have produced some great work, a “Divine Comedy,” for example, and certainly the fourteenth century did not think well enough of love-lyrics, no matter [319] how perfect and charming they might have been, to make their author laureate of Rome. The fact is, of course, that the invitations came because of Petrarch’s skill in making friends rather than because of his skill in making poems. His great Latin epic had hardly been begun.

With the laurel crown, — and you may be sure he was not slow in punning on it with the name of Laura, which was unworthy of him and of her — Petrarch arrived at last at the eminence which he still holds. He was not the last of the troubadours, not the greatest of them, but he served to make popular the code of romantic love which still controls our actions and our thoughts, a code which had been perfected by gallant poets and lovely ladies a hundred years before Petrarch was born.




8



I would not have included the trail of Petrarch among the trails of those poets who died so long before he was born, were it not that Petrarch covered the same ground as they, though with a difference, and were he not one of the men who make them visible to us, though indistinctly and through their own temperament. I wish I might have included Dante and his trails, but they would have led us too far away from France. Dante really understood the troubadours much better than did Petrarch, for Dante was a better poet than Petrarch, which Petrarch knew, and of which he was jealous and is said never to have read “The Divine Comedy.”

But since Petrarch acted like a troubadour in some things, I have tried to show how his manner and comprehension [320] differed from theirs, and that he was neither so gallant as they nor so sharp. Because he took poetry more seriously than they, his discourses sound sometimes like papers read before literary clubs, filled with good morality and pleasant big words about a subject which the author does not understand. But our gratitude is due to Petrarch for his enthusiasm about Latin literature, and had he been equally enthusiastic about Greek literature we should be even more grateful to him. These, however, are matters that concern the school-teacher and therefore do not belong here.

The things which I thought did belong here are the result of a vision of men with golden voices singing pretty songs to ladies at the hour of dawn, standing in the gardens of châteaux and making of life an exquisite thing according to their own idea of exquisiteness, a vision of butterflies in an orchard on a rich summer day, of hummingbirds in a garden. I hope I have caught a faint murmur of their song and a very little of the glamour of their civilization.1

FOOTNOTE

1  Several statements in the preceding pages are based on historical tradition only, in the belief that an unproved tradition represents the point of view of the makers of the tradition better than the unproved historical fact. Since both the tradition and the fact were, in several cases, hypothetical, I chose the tradition.

The routes over which people of the twelfth century traveled in France are a subject which has been somewhat neglected by scholars. It is inevitable, therefore, that others will improve on the itineraries I have suggested. I venture to hope that that improvement will come soon.





Gold embossed guitar from spine of this book.



(end-papers)



Brown and white map of The Land of the Troubadours with a border with stylized trees, ships, and men and women in medieval dress.

The Land of the Troubadours








[The End of Trails of the Troubadours, by Raymond de Loy Jameson.]











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