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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. 19-46.
TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS
by Raimon de Loi
THERE are trails and trails. When one sits in the café in the place after a long hike, with the tiredness slipping sweetly down into one’s feet, watching a well groomed woman trying by subtle wiles to keep her son’s attention from the much rouged petite femme who is on the make, one says, “To-morrow, it may be, I shall walk through the fields beside the river, and I shall arrive, in the afternoon, when the sun is right, at the clean little city of Blois.” One says it calmly, with peace in one’s heart, knowing that by all the laws of probability one will arrive and that the sun will be right. But there is another kind of a trail, equally sweet. It is the trail one follows when one says: “By St. Anthony of Padua, I shall leave this town of Tours. It is filled with jeunes filles anglaises and vielles filles américaines, and char-à-bancs, and guides, and nobody here does as his ancestor did, and the Tourainians make of their great past a monkey on a string which they exhibit to ignorant strangers. By St. Anthony, the patron of honest tramps, I shall leave this place; I like not the laughter of the English, nor the voices of the Americans, nor the stench [22] of the char-à-bancs, nor the itching palms of the guides, nor the meretricious inhabitants of this city. I shall leave to-night, and to-morrow I shall watch the lizards crawling over the wall at Poitiers, and I shall talk with the patrons of my café in the evening about those strange people who, having a home, leave it to wander over the face of the earth, for ‘Think you, monsieur, one is never comfortable save chez soi.’ ” And realizing that the impossible place at Poitiers is made tolerable only because night has thrown over it a blanket which hides its glaring and rather cheap modernity, one will agree. The trail of anger and the trail of contentment are normal and natural, and one can understand them. But who can understand or justify the trip taken by Eleanor, queen of the troubadours, when, big with the child of her lover, she fled, after a hurried divorce, the court of her husband, King Louis VII of France, by night marches and in disguise to reach the capital of her own kingdom, Poitiers the proud, there to meet that lover, Henry, duke of Anjou, the only man in Europe strong enough to hold her?
In her career Eleanor had two husbands, and both had infirmities: the first, King Louis of France, had an ingrowing conscience; the second, King Henry of England — he was Henry of Anjou when she married him — had an ingrowing toe-nail. The man with the conscience was beyond his age and never quite understood it; the man of the toe-nail was of his time, he reveled in it; he rode on the wave of it; he was, by all standards of all ages, a strong man. For years he never knew defeat, in war, in intrigue, or in passion. His lands were the broadest and his scepter the most powerful [23] that Europe had seen in five hundred years. Yet Eleanor broke him in the end as she had broken Louis of France in the beginning. She lived to see him robbed of his lands and his power, robbed even of his clothes and his jewels, lowered into a grave at Fontevrault, his huge body covered inadequately by the petticoat of a charitable prostitute.
In the year of grace 1926 thousands of people traveled from Paris to Poitiers via Orleans, Blois, and Tours and looked with more or less indifferent eye on a country which is now much the same as it was a thousand years ago. If these people thought at all, one knows well what they thought. They thought that nature was wonderful, or the reverse; and they thought that the hotels, the roads, the sky, the food, were good or bad or dirty; and they placed a good Anglo-Saxon curse or benediction upon each of these in turn. Whatever they thought was fairly obvious, and what Eleanor of Aquitaine, their illustrious precursor, thought, was probably just as obvious but very different. The trails which Eleanor, the queen of the troubadours, followed over the face of the green earth are devious, and the trails which her mind followed are more devious still; wherever she went there were loud laughter and song and intrigue and heartbreak; wherever she went there was a crowd of exquisites, of poets, of gentlemen, of knights, of strong men, of hangers-on. She was a whirlwind, and no man now can tell what she thought when she traveled from [24] Paris to Poitiers in 1152 or why she thought it; but of this you shall hear more in a moment.
Her grandfather, William IX, puissant duke of Aquitaine and first of the troubadours, arranged that on the day Eleanor married Louis, the young heir apparent to the throne of France, she should bring him a dowry of lands twice as large as his kingdom; William arranged further that the control of these lands should remain forever in her hands and in the hands of the issue of her body; and God arranged that on her marriage day her father-in-law should die so that this the first of the husbands of Eleanor might seem to be favored above all other men. When Eleanor’s grandfather had arranged these things to his satisfaction and had seen that the marriage ceremony was properly performed — Eleanor was a chit of a thing fifteen years old and her husband a youngster of eighteen — he formally abdicated in her favor: and when she had received homage from the lords of a country stretching between Tours and Toulouse, he slipped into a pilgrim’s coat and followed the trail to Compostella, where he died in a rocky cave.
Who knows of what that young thing was thinking when she married in great state in the cathedral of St.-André at Bordeaux or to whom she was speaking when she was caught in the crush at the great door of the cathedral? The priests chanted and Louis followed the service with pious and contrite heart while Eleanor gazed boldly over the company. Thibaut the poet, count of Blois, was there, and the count of Champagne. Suger, the cleric and her husband’s best friend, acted as the official representative of the king of France. Who else? Ebles II of Ventadour [25] was, no doubt, of the company, with, perhaps, Bernard, the poet, in his train; and all the poets and troubadours between Bordeaux and Béziers must have participated in the festivals, the courts of love, and the gossip for which this great company was the occasion.
She is a gifted youngster, that Eleanor who will be your companion from Paris to Poitiers. She is supposed to have been beautiful, but no one can tell at this distance of time. The testimony of poets is worthless, for poets are notoriously liars, and besides, Eleanor was generous and understood the value of a good poet or two in her train. She was a poet herself; and by right of inheritance — her grandfather William of Aquitaine was the earliest of the troubadours — and by right of a bitter tongue, a passionate temperament, and a shrewd intelligence she was recognized as the critic and arbiter of the poetry of her time. Her good word was worth a fortune, and her epigram could ruin a career. The testimony of her lovers means nothing; for he who loved Eleanor could gain by her favor the right to hold any land he had been strong enough to win; and if he won her hand . . . remember she was a great heiress. And those other lovers, those whom she had no intention of marrying, what of them? But none could resist her. What she wanted she took. Yet in the end Louis preferred dishonorable poverty to her gay company, and Henry finally shut her up in a tower for safe-keeping. But this testimony cannot be denied, the universal testimony that she could both read and write. This was an accomplishment possessed by few people, either men or women, of that age. A few of the poets were able to read poetry and to compose it but were [26] unable to write it down in black and white. Many of the great ones, the self-made men who had begun as poor but honest inferiors and had left their poverty, honesty, and inferiority — even as men of another time — far behind them, regarded higher education as somewhat effeminate. They knew what was what and when need arose could hire a learned clerk for a few pounds a year. Eleanor, however, was a learned and accomplished lady; not the heiress of lands and power only, but the heiress of much of the wisdom and culture of her time.
The Bastard of Champagne was at her wedding with Louis, and so too, according to tradition, was her younger sister Petronilla, and Raoul, count of Vermandois. Now how Petronilla, a girl of fourteen, should have seduced the princely Raoul and forced him to divorce his wife, and why the count of Champagne, who was brother-in-law to the divorced wife, should have made the pope annul the divorce, or why Petronilla, the sweet young thing, should have thought that this annulment increased her dishonor and should have caused Eleanor to become the enemy of Thibaut of Blois I cannot say. Things like this had happened before, and I suppose they may have happened since. Eleanor’s enmity was effective, and she persuaded her husband to engage in a new war. Therefore, several years later, he and his army were storming Vitry. Thirteen hundred old men, women, and children had taken refuge in the cathedral. Louis’s army set fire to the town. The cathedral burned, and in it most of the thirteen hundred. Alas for Eleanor, now twenty-one years old and the mother of several daughters; alas for Louis! The burning of the [27] innocents at Vitry was a great scandal. Louis was repentant and made a hasty peace. Eleanor was scornful of her husband’s weakness. She needed a man for a husband, not a priest. If God permitted a wooden church to burn, that was God’s business. “By God’s eyebrows,” she cried, using a sweet maidenly oath in a voice which I fear was neither soft nor well modulated, “I’m a better king than you are.” Perhaps she was right. Dear Eleanor!
Suger, Louis’s counselor and friend, had at the beginning of the campaign withdrawn from the court. It was evident that Louis the king could not control Eleanor, and Suger the priest thought that it was equally evident that he, the representative of God, could not control her. She was a hard passionate woman, this girl of twenty-one, and in God’s hands. Suger set to building St.-Denis in Paris. Perhaps later God would find a way. Then came the burning of the thirteen hundred innocents at Vitry. Bernard the saint was in Paris. He expostulated with Suger, and Suger took a hand. He played upon the sensibilities of Louis the pious. He pictured to him the torments of hell. Thirteen hundred Christians were not to be buried alive incontinently at a woman’s whim. Louis was repentant. He gave over the war, shaved off his beard, and cut his hair. He became more priestly in his habits and more ascetic in his manner, and Eleanor wanted men around her, males who could fight and kill and sing songs and pay compliments, men who were living in the world, eager, strong, modern. Then St. Bernard preached the second crusade under the groined vault of the church at Vézelay.
[28]St. Bernard was a man, a great strong man with a square chin, a ruler of men and a man of his time. “He was hot in burning love, humble in conversation, a well in flowing doctrine, a pit in deepness of science and well smelling in sweetness of fame.” When his mother “bare the third son which was Bernard in her belly, she saw in her sleep a dream . . . Her seemed she had in her belly a whelp, all white and red upon the back, barking in her belly. And a . . . holy man . . . prophesying: Thou art mother of a right noble whelp, who shall be a warden of the house of God, and shall give great barking against the enemies." Bernard was hot in love, but not in the love of women. One time “when he had holden his eyes and fixed them upon a woman, he had anon shame in himself and was a cruel venger of himself. For he leapt anon into a pond full of water and frozen, and was therein so long that almost he was frozen. And by the grace of God he was cooled from his carnal concupiscence.”
He was a worker. He lost no time except when he slept. When he had eaten he would consider whether he had eaten more than was his custom or more than he needed to carry on God’s work. When he had done this, if he found that he had overstepped the limits he had set, he would punish his mouth so that it lost the power of tasting and became a black hole in his face. He would drink oil and think it was water. He preferred plain clothes to fine cloth and filth to cleanliness. His sister “was married into the world, and went into the monastery for to visit [29] her brethren in a proud estate and great apparel. And he dreaded her as she had been the devil or his net for to take souls, nor would not go out for to see her. . . . One of her brethren said that she was a foul ordure, stinking, wrapped in gay array.”
St. Bernard was a ruler. His rule over men was strong, his rule over himself was stronger, but strongest of all was his rule over devils. Never a devil in the world got the better of St. Bernard. He knew their ways and their tricks. When he could not drive them out by the words of the gospel or by holy relics, he got himself into a divine rage; and with his face all red with anger and his black brows close together in his fury, he drove them out with a thunderous excommunication from his black lips. There was a woman of Guienne, a countrywoman of Eleanor’s, who was troubled by a devil of the kind that still seems to give the women of that land much concern. She told St. Bernard of her devil, weeping bitterly. “He said: Take this staff which is mine, and lay it in thy bed, and if he may do anything let him do it. . . . And he came anon but durst not go to to his lecherous work accustomed but threatened her right eagerly.” This threat she told to the saint, who “assembled the people that each man should hold a candle burning in his hand and went from one to the other and came at last to this devil and cursed him and excommunicated him and defended that never after he should so do to her ne to none other.”
Call it hypnotism, if you wish, or divine force, or power of personality or what you will. Certain it is that people once believed in God and the devil with as much reason [30] as they now believe in germs and internal glandular secretions and “counter-indications” and the scientific method. And through this welter of belief forty-five-year-old men like Bernard and twenty-one-year-old girls like Eleanor saw their vision of the good life gleaming. Bernard fought his way to a place in the pantheon of the saints and Eleanor to a grave in the abbey at Fontevrault.
The first time Bernard preached the crusade to Louis it was in the church at Vézelay; the second time it was in the great hall of the fortress. Here it was that Louis took the cross from the hands of the saint; but the crowd was so great that the multitude was unable to see the king. A tower was built in the fields outside the fortress. Louis showed himself on it with the cross on his breast. The multitude took up the cry, “Praise to God,” and all demanded crosses. The number that took the cross that day was so great that Bernard had to tear the clothes from his back to make crosses for them all; holy crosses they were, made of the vestments of the saint who preferred filth to cleanliness and who wore a hair shirt next to his skin.
What of Eleanor on that day, twenty-four years old, who for nine years had been queen of France, ruling her husband and his sycophants, his priests and enemies, like the eternal woman that she was? Hardly had the holy man left when she appeared with a band of her girl friends, armed head to foot, riding like warriors astride great chargers. They performed Amazonian exercises and follies [31] in public and sent their distaffs, now useless, home to those knights and nobles they chose to consider as slackers. Entire villages were deserted by male inhabitants, and the land was left to be tilled by women and children.
Eleanor with her band of Amazons and Louis with his lords temporal and spiritual set out on foot and on horseback to save the sacred city and to bring back as much of the wealth of the Orient as they could steal from the good heathen who erroneously, no doubt, thought that having worked for it, they deserved to keep it. They went overland, young, debonair, gay; some of them saintly and some of them wicked; an average crowd surrounding a few personalities which were in their own way either great or amusing. They arrived, much harassed by the cavalry of the Arabs, the baggage of the ladies, and the whims of the queen, at Laodicea. The queen and her ladies were sent on ahead to occupy a barren hill. At their feet a romantic valley with lush grasses, flowing streams, and shady trees invited them. They camped in the valley. The Arabs camped on the hill and shut the king up in a narrow pass. Seven thousand knights perished in the affray, and the king was able to save himself only by climbing a tree. The baggage was lost and the army in confusion.
They turned into Antioch, now ruled by Eleanor’s uncle, Raymond of Poitou, the handsomest man of his time, big, broad, and black, and expert in his manipulation of ladies for the purposes of war and politics. Even the confused army of Louis might be useful in extending the dominions of Raymond of Poitou. There was intrigue and counter-intrigue. Raymond plotted with Eleanor and Louis, and [32] with Eleanor against Louis. Eleanor plotted with Raymond and the Saracens; Louis read his breviary, became pale at the elevation of the host, and meditated. One chronicler says that Eleanor fell in love with a handsome Saracen prince, and there has been much controversy as to the identity of his person. Another chronicler reports that she forgot herself jusque’à la foi due au lit conjugal. A lady of the last century who wrote for the late Queen Victoria of the lives of that exemplary lady’s predecessors seems to believe these scandals, and implies that Eleanor, in disgust after seeing her shaven husband up a tree hiding from his enemies, turned for consolation to her handsome and dashing uncle. What need had Eleanor of her uncle of Antioch or of handsome Saracen princes? There were men enough in her entourage. Finally, Louis stole her away one night, a protesting and crying female, and was commended later by Suger for his moderation. Evidently somebody believed the slander. Somebody always does.
Eleanor was brought back to Paris again with truck-loads of silks and jewels. She was kept in Paris; she was not permitted to visit her own country or the courts of love at Poitiers. She amused herself as best she could at the court of Paris, now entirely dominated by clerics. . . . But there were compensations of a kind. An occasional saint or two would come storming into her apartments, his black brows working, his face pale with the whiteness of asceticism, to expostulate with her for her evil worldly ways or, maybe, to exorcise the devil who was supposed to be her familiar spirit. “From the Devil,” said the English, “she came and to the Devil she will return.” There is a tenson [33] sometimes attributed to her, a gay, scurrilous, light-hearted, bitter little thing which begins:
If I should marry a cleric,
God forbid . . .
and continues in a way which unfortunately cannot be translated acceptably for the twentieth century.
But why did Eleanor travel in the year 1152 from Paris to Orléans and from Orléans to Beaugency, thence, even as you and I, down the Loire to Blois, to Tours, and further still to the noble city of Poitiers, where strange things have happened and strange things happen still? That too is scandal.
No capital of France could in the Middle Ages fall entirely under the control of saints and priests. There must always be politics, there must always be embassies and lords who pay scant attention to the mass, excommunicate, maybe, for having seized the lands of a rich abbey, or for having refused to admit the lords of Rome who came collecting taxes, or for putting off their old wives and putting on their new. One such embassy which made its entry ten years later has been described in some detail. It was the embassy of young Thomas, later to win sainthood at Canterbury, but then the young man about town, worldly, shrewd, and the boon companion of Henry in his vices and escapades. When the embassy of Thomas entered Paris, [34] the cortège was opened by two hundred and fifty young people singing national airs and clad in brocade. They were followed by his dogs, tied together in pairs, and by eight chariots, each drawn by five horses and driven by coachmen in black uniforms. Each chariot was covered with costly furs and protected by two guards and a huge dog, sometimes chained and sometimes at liberty. Two of the chariots bore casks of ale to be distributed among the populace; another carried everything necessary for the chapel of the young chancellor; a fourth, the furniture of his bedroom; a fifth, the necessaries of his kitchen; a sixth, his gold and silver plate and his wardrobe; and the last two carried the luggage of his followers and his companions. Behind these came twelve sumpter-horses. On the back of each was a monkey and a kneeling groom. Squires carrying the shields and leading the battle-horses of their knights followed; then more squires; then the children of gentlemen whose education was being completed in the household of the great man; then the falconers; then the officers of the household; then the knights and ecclesiastics, mounted and riding two by two; and finally, at the very end, came the chancellor himself, carrying on a gay conversation with several friends and apparently oblivious of the great impression he was creating.
For these crowds of gentlemen, there must be dinners in the great halls. There must be exchange of compliments and inquiries after “the health of our sister Petronilla” and “What of the Bastard of Champagne?” and gossip about the young exquisite who tried to maintain in open debate with the churchmen that a good God could not have created [35] hell, and about that other who said that God was a poet who dreamed the universe or that one who maintained that the universe had dreamed God. . . . At these dinners Peire Vidal’s latest escapade was, no doubt, discussed and a musician called to sing Peire’s latest song, and, perhaps, to sing that naughty one by Eleanor’s grandfather, now dead these many years in a hermit’s cave in Compostella; and perhaps Eleanor herself, if the company were small enough, would entertain with one of her own songs. Eleanor probably had a gay enough life, even in Paris.
One day Geoffrey of Anjou, clad in light armor, rode through the gate of Paris. Behind him, with many knights, rode his son Henry, a lad of seventeen. They came to do homage for the county of Anjou and to see whether some plot might be arranged against his cousin by marriage, King Stephen of England. These Angevins were likely men, as the Angevins still are; not tall, but ruddy, worldly and active. Geoffrey was a great scholar; he came from Eleanor’s part of the country; he brought news of friends, and the movements of her friends the poets; and his musicians could produce the latest song. They no doubt argued points of philosophy and esthetics, and to what extent was a man in love responsible for his actions, and whether women prefer clerics or soldiers as lovers, and why, and whether poetry should be written in a language so clear that a child could understand it or so intricate that only experts could unravel its complications; for in the same way that psychoanalysis and evolution and fundamentalism have swept the intellectual sea of our time, so similar fashions swept the intellectual seas of those, furnishing topics of [36] conversation in the afternoons in the great halls when the sun came through the traceries of the Gothic windows which then were a new fashion of architecture and very smart indeed.
There was gossip about Eleanor and “old” Geoffrey — he was about thirty-eight years old at this time, an old man and past his prime but still hearty — and some say that she forgot herself again. But that is mere gossip and based upon no evidence whatever. Eleanor was not the kind of woman who forgets herself. What she did, she did with a clear consciousness, and, for all I know, with an equally clear conscience. Two years later Geoffrey of Anjou died and his son Henry came to Paris to do homage a second time for his inheritance, but this time it was his cortège and not his father’s that accompanied him.
That Eleanor was sick of Paris there can be no doubt. “My husband,” she said, “is more of a monk than a man.” And here was a man at hand, an active man, heir to Anjou, claimant of Normandy, and pretender to the throne of England. He was a man who could hold her as no other man could hold her, who could reform her life for her, could make her a chaste and virtuous woman, and transform her passion and gaiety into an implacable hatred. She was a woman who wanted a ruler; a just providence brought her, in this stocky red-headed youth, a man who could rule her. And none could resist this wealthy woman of Aquitaine, this clever poet, this superb female, familiar with the devils of her own country and the devils of the Holy Land, and with saints and warriors and poets and priests besides. She is said to have placed her ships and treasures at his [37] command. “When we are married,” she said to him, “you will see what lovely things I brought from the Holy Land. I know the seven arts, and the methods of love in the East.” Nor was Henry a man afraid of difficulties. He could take a castle in a night; he could hold together his rebellious barons and churchmen and ride three horses to death in a day. He could hold the woman, and perhaps the very difficulty which she presented attracted him the more. He was a courageous man, was Henry, unafraid of saints, devils, and Eleanor of Aquitaine.
When Henry of Anjou left Paris, Eleanor proceeded to divorce her husband, King Louis. The court, consisting of trains of mules and cart-loads of baggage and King Louis and his relatives and friends and prelates and knights and hangers-on, proceeded by slow journey from Paris to Orléans and from Orléans to Beaugency, where the king’s marriage was dissolved on March 18, 1152.
To-day when you go from England or America to Tours and the country of the châteaux, you go from some place on the coast of Normandy or Flanders eastward to Paris, and from Paris you return westward to Tours. If you take the express at seven o’clock in the morning, you reach Orléans at nine, and by a quarter of ten you are in Beaugency. If you wish you can be in Tours for lunch and have a late tea at Poitiers. If you are one of those cynical souls who go in conducted parties, a large-mouthed guide will explain to you in demotic English the wonders of the French [38] Renaissance. Indeed, the entire country has been covered by the French Renaissance, which, I suppose is beautiful in its way and testifies to the love which the kings of France and England and their favorites long after the death of Eleanor and her poets felt for the cooking of Touraine and the vin rosé of Anjou. But if you will look with attentive eye beneath the flowers of the Renaissance you will find the bare branches of another age, an age before towers were thought to be a pretty decoration on a façade and when walls had to be built strong and thick if they were to afford protection against the men-at-arms of a neighbor who cast envious eyes on one’s wife or ox or ass or rich vineyards. You will, if you are light-hearted, leave Paris in the morning and get yourself as quickly as you may to Orléans and the Loire. There you will desert the railway and the broad highroad in boat or barge or raft to float down the Loire past La Chapelle, St.-Ay, and Château Meung-sur-Loire to Beaugency.
When Eleanor and her scandalized friends and family hurried from Orléans to Beaugency they probably followed the trail which wound beside the river and sent their luggage down by barge. The trail was very narrow and worn deeply into the earth. On rainy days it was a small river of mud, and even on pleasant days it presented difficulties. Following behind, perhaps a day’s journey, came Louis with horns well sprouted preparing for his halo, good pious Louis whose wife was too much for him, surrounded by priests, whose shaven heads reflected the weak sunshine of [39] the early spring, sitting ungainly astride their horses, bobbing and nodding among themselves and offering the king good, wise, and pious counsels, doing observance at the wayside shrines and performing perhaps a miracle or two for the glory of God.
Little time was wasted on the divorce at Beaugency. The ground given was consanguinity. Eleanor and Louis had lived together half a lifetime as lives were counted then, and after fifteen years of tumultuous marriage Louis suddenly discovered that his wife was his fourth — some say his seventh — cousin and demanded a divorce. For shame! The queen would have no delay. Her first and eldest son was to be born in August. She had to dispose of her husband and provide a father for the heir of Aquitaine. The decree was pronounced with all the solemnity of a church council: the clerk handed it to the bishop, and the bishop in his fine robes, standing out from the altar in the shadow of one of the pillars, made the decree permanent.
Eleanor left at once and in the early morning rode into the white city of Blois, clean and bright on the river-bank, but dingy and brown in the city, and straggly and Renaissance and nineteenth-century in the narrow streets that run up to the château. There seem always to have been Counts Thibaut at Blois, and they have been traditionally hospitable. The one who accompanied Eleanor from the church at Beaugency, sending messengers ahead to prepare the rooms, and ordering great entertainment for the illustrious grass-widow, was perhaps not the first to make his hospitality insistent.
Imagine Eleanor and her company riding down from [40] Beaugency. Imagine Thibaut riding at her horse’s head, making ribald jokes at the expense of Louis, whispering to her of the declining popularity of his cousin, King Stephen of England, and reminiscing about Henry of Anjou.
These people had a great deal of talk in them. Being denied the doubtful benefits of universal education, few of them could read or write, and even if they could, books were very scarce and very expensive. As each book had to be copied carefully on vellum by the hand of monk or clerk, this was the age of limited editions, each edition being limited to one copy. Thus the people who took the pains to write took further pains that the thing written should be worth reading. There were no head-lines to announce that somebody’s wife had run away with somebody’s chauffeur. That the people in the Middle Ages were interested in these runnings-away is certain, but their information was confined to gossip in the window-niche. Under these conditions the stories could be elaborated as such stories should be elaborated, and, since there were no laws of libel, the story became a tradition, the tradition a saga, and the saga finally was worked into that curious kind of light literature which scholars unacquainted with the popular and no doubt equally bad novels of their own age refer to by the pompous and misleading title of medieval epic. Since most of the people of the twelfth century were unable to read, and even if they could, since books were very expensive, the chief amusement left to them after a strenuous day on the battle-field was talking. But again, do not be misled. Their conversations would make a Mississippi boatman blush with chagrin. It was of a crudeness, of a frankness, [41] of a vivacity! The coarsest language of to-day is euphemism mere and pale.
Thus I would not tell you if I could what Thibaut said to Eleanor or she to him as they rode together from Beaugency to Blois on a road which, nearer the river than the present main road, runs directly through Tavers, Lestiou, Avarai, to Suèvres, where it joins the main road for a moment until it reaches the village of Cour-sur-Loire, where it joins it again. They left the road a little west of Blois to ride up the winding path to the old strong castle, a building which, too stolid for the splendors of the French Renaissance, was torn down many years ago. It made way for that other castle which, now the wonder of all comers, was inhabited by that other saintly Louis, the twelfth of the name. It is where Henri II superintended the butchering of the duc de Guise, remarking as he pushed the head away with his foot, “I had not thought he was so long.” As they approached, the herald rode ahead with his banner and sounded the call. There was a scurrying within, and the officers of the castle strode out to welcome their master and his guests. Eleanor was shown to her room overlooking a garden of roses transplanted from Jericho, and, wearied by her day in the divorce court, was provided with a hot bath and a massage. Thibaut was the brave son of a brave father and was hospitable to excess. He did the best a gentlemen of those days could do to a wealthy heiress traveling alone: he asked her to marry him. She refused. She may have said she would be his sister, and she certainly intended to become his cousin as soon as she could persuade Henry of Anjou to leave off burning cities and making [42] widows and orphans long enough to come down and marry her. But Thibaut was insistent and persuaded Eleanor to spend several days with him at Blois. And who can blame her? “He who has not known lilac-time at Blois has not yet experienced the sweetness of living,” says an old French proverb; and perhaps Eleanor found the gay little city which reflects its bright clear face in the Loire and the early spring days and the sound of her own language in her ears refreshing after the gloom of the capital. Oh, there were parties, I have no doubt; and debates, and serenades in the morning, clear-voiced musicians singing to the accompaniment of the guitar some new aubade to the rising sun and the singing of birds.
Then once more came the question, and once more the refusal. Perhaps Eleanor noted now that she was no longer permitted to be alone as much as before. Perhaps she heard orders given; or perhaps she was told simply, for this reason or that, that it would be wise not to leave her chambers. At any rate Eleanor disguised herself in the jerkin of a serving-man and escaped by minutes a plot to put her into seclusion, there to be kept until she could be persuaded by courteous or discourteous means to marry the count of Blois.
She left Blois by night and foiled her pursuers by slipping down the river in a boat. One should drift down the Loire on a soft spring night before the summer droughts have made the stream shallow and unpleasant. It is not only the sweet odor of flowers that makes it sweet, or the odor [43] of the stream and the dankness of the air, but hanging over all this is the eternal odor of France, a composite of stale wine, sweaty boatmen, and, in these days, French national tobacco, than which there is none worse.
When she arrived at Tours, Eleanor said a prayer at the tomb of St. Martin; for with all her sins, or perhaps because of them, she believed in the saints. This Martin was a great good man, and he fought devils until the end of his life. When he was dying — this happened unfortunately in Poitiers and gave rise to a great struggle, and the Tourainians once again disgraced themselves — St. Martin was, for his holiness, lying on dust and ashes. He asked that his brethren would remove a little his body that he “might behold more of the heaven than the earth. Saying this he saw the devil that was there, and St. Martin said to him: ‘Wherefore standest thou here, thou cruel beast? Thou shalt find in me nothing sinful ne mortal.’ ” After he died there arose a great altercation between the people of Poitiers and the people of Tours as to which might have the body. While the people of Poitiers slept, the Tourainians hurried the body out of a window and down the steep hill into a boat and took it down the stream to Tours.
St. Martin was a good man. “He was clad with sharp clothing, blue, and a great coarse mantle hanging here and there upon him”; and he always got what he wanted. Once there was a duke who, for his sins, refused to to see the saint. Martin made himself lean with fasting, wrapped a haircloth about him, and threw ashes over his head and sat outside the palace gate. And simply by making himself as obnoxious as he could he forced the duke to receive him. [44] Even though he had power over beasts — he could make the dogs stop barking, the hares stop running, and the snakes stop doing whatever snakes do — he had his difficulties with the Tourainians, which, since the saint was a very abstemious man and the Tourainians wonderfully fond of their good cooking and their beautiful churches, can hardly be wondered at.
When Eleanor had said her prayer and rearranged her toilet and demanded safe-conduct from Henry of Anjou’s younger brother Geoffrey, she seems to have thought herself safe and proceeded on her way. This part of her trip was by land. She made a straight line south to Montbazon, where a huge donjon-keep of the eleventh century rises above the village, and where, for what reason I know not, on the topmost rock sings a very small brave bird.
Her path continued south to Port des Piles and the river again, this time a small rippling stream that might have sung to Eleanor of safety, but her good angel, according to her earliest historian, warned her to beware. Henry’s brother Geoffrey was waiting for her, and with Geoffrey was an armed band of knights-errant out, not indeed to save the hesitating maiden from the unwelcome attentions of a cruel enchanter, but to capture the fleeing maiden, lock her up in the donjon-keep of Montbazon, there to starve her into submission. This would have served her right, for according to the code of that day it was not proper for women to travel alone unescorted by some member of their family. The chroniclers seem to know no more than I how Eleanor evaded Geoffrey and his good intentions, for they credit her with having turned south down an even [45] smaller stream toward her own dominions. Since she was already going south and there was no small stream for her to take, this may have been somewhat difficult. She must have had a small company of men-at-arms in her train, and the warning of this good but anonymous angel may have given them opportunity to screw on their helmets, don a comfortable shirt of mail or two, and thus defend their mistress from the threatened attack. Or perhaps the threat of Geoffrey was mere gossip, and he did no more than plan the attack. (Poor Geoffrey! He was always planning attacks and never succeeding in getting very far with them. His cousin Stephen was too quick and his brother Henry was too shrewd; although he did succeed now and then in doing them dirt, which is not to be wondered at, since they succeeded in doing him much more dirt than he, with the best of intentions, was ever able to repay.) Eleanor seems to have escaped Geoffrey, and she must, in due time — for journeys were very slow in those days — have reached Châtellerault, which is a very nineteenth-century city, and later the proud city of Tours in her own country.
Here she was joined by Bernard de Ventadour, a young poet who had got into difficulties by his passionate and not too discreet love for Agnes de Montluçon, and later by Henry and Geoffrey, all smiles now and politic words; and in the high hall at the château at Poitiers she arranged for her second wedding at Bordeaux, many miles away miles away. Her fine garments which she had stolen from the infidels in the Holy Land she sent north to Caen, where she was to hold her first court while she was waiting for her second husband to steal England from his cousin, Stephen the King.
[46]Then she went southward in the spring, as all poets of this time seem to have gone, to a land where gray towers of an evening rise to a dark-blue sky: and because the sky is very blue and the towers are very gray and both are very old, they seem at times to merge and flow into each other. While one wonders about this, and why it should be just as it is, and how it is possible, and whether one should walk to the next town or take the train, the frogs set up — in the grassy moat — the same song that they sang underneath Eleanor’s window, a song as much more permanent than the towers as her passionate life was more permanent than the body which led her astray and is now buried in the abbey at Fontevrault. One will walk after all.
