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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. 159-184.




TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

by Raimon de Loi




Cover Figure embossed with Gilt knight on horseback.




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Chapter VII

The Trail of a Furious Viscount — II

PÉRIGUEUX TO TOULOUSE

Black and white stylized leaf on a scrolling branch.







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[161]

Chapter VII


1


THE twelfth century was interested in the salvation of both the flesh and the spirit; between the poles of this interest may be ranged all conceivable human activities. Later centuries, lacking that self-sufficiency and intellectual freedom which gave the men of the twelfth century their indiscriminate and almost universal curiosity, passion, and knowledge, became interested in one or more aspects of the flesh — the flesh carnal, for example, in the fourteenth century — or in one or more aspects of the spirit. We of the twentieth century, fascinated by our sudden ability to develop great physical power, have forgotten the meaning of the term “cultivation.” Our interest in physical power has brought with it another interest, an interest in speed. We have tried to annihilate time in order to increase our control of space, and this attempt has involved our conception of the arts. Literature has been reduced to large-scale journalism, and a man’s power is judged by the geographical distribution of his readers rather than by their historical distribution, by their distribution through space rather than their distribution through time. Since we are no longer interested in the spirit, we have discarded the spirit or [162] explained it away. Religion and love have been reduced to the sexual impulse. We have been tamed to civilization, and our civilization has therefore become tame.

Because Bertrand de Born and his friends believed in the real existence of the flesh and the real existence of the spirit and were concerned with the simultaneous salvation of both — although they had great doubts as to the means whereby this salvation was to be effected — they found time, in a life which averaged about half the years our lives average, to achieve two or three times as much as we can achieve, and to achieve this despite physical conditions which would enervate the best athlete we can produce. Thus when I say that Bertrand de Born came from Le Mans to Périgueux as young King Henry's publicity agent, I find it impossible to present an adequate picture of the difficulty of the trip: the danger from bandits, for example, or knights-errant who would be happy to capture a wealthy young viscount and hold him for ransom; the precautions to be taken when passing through or near the territory of an ancient enemy; the polite allusions to his task which must be made when visiting a knight who could, out of friendship for Richard or political ambition, throw Bertrand into prison as a traitor to his overlord and hold him there long years without ransom. It is equally difficult to make clear to one’s self or one’s readers, both bred in a country immersed in the contemplation of its own body, the subtle intellectual sophistication of a time that could make of poetry an art so complicated and withal so precise that future ages have drawn from it their standards of conduct; of a time that could give to social procedure a finesse and a gloss that no other age [163] has approached. I am forced to explain the interest of these people in the art of poetry by analogy to games and interests which the twentieth century can understand and to reduce the sophistication of the twelfth century to its origins, which makes it over-simple and somewhat vulgar.




2



When Bertrand de Born left Périgueux he went east to his own castle of Hautefort and then south, via Brive, Gourdon, Figeac, and Montauban, to Toulouse. If you wish to follow the trail he followed, you must be prepared for many a disappointment and many a surprise. On every hill you will see ruins of fifteenth-century châteaux. Most of these were built on the ruins of twelfth-century castles, which in turn were made from the débris of Saracen fortifications; these were little more than the transformations of Visigothic fortresses which were built on sites occupied by Roman soldiers. It is a warm, mountainous country. Frequently it is arid. It is somnolent. One never tears down. When one is forced by circumstances, one merely adds to the things one already possesses. In the rock caverns of this region you will see the remains of men who lived here during the glacial period. In the cafés, taking their pleasure of a summer evening, you will see the descendants of these same men. The old and the new understand each other. They are all men together. You will penetrate regions which few tourists have penetrated before. You will, no doubt, lose your way, for the castles Bernard visited were frequently isolated, and in order to go from one to the other you will have to follow foot-paths. Bertrand [164] de Born did not mind this, for in his day main traveled roads were frequently worn so deep by the traffic that a foot-path was preferable and offered quicker traveling.

Bertrand left Périgueux as he had entered it, via the Boulevard Bertrand de Born, crossed the river and took the road to Ribeyrol and Cubjac. This road follows a petulant streamlet, the Auvézère, which flows in all directions at once until one feels, when one sees it now on the right and now on the left, flowing first against one and then with one, reflecting indiscriminately the infinite placidity of the sky, and the infinite placidity of a herd of cattle, that the Auvézère would be capable of anything. One is not surprised, therefore, to see half of it disappear at Cubjac to emerge four kilometers away and turn the wheels of a mill, which, fortunately for the mill owner, happens to be situated at that exact spot. Not far from Cubjac, Bertrand passed the ancient hamlets, Ste.-Eulalie-d’Ans and St.-Pantaly-d’Ans. Ste.-Eulalie is the larger; it has 698 souls and St.-Pantaly has only 416, men and women together, which, since St. Pantaly is the patron saint of midwives and doctors, is hard to explain.

How St. Eulalia, who is the patroness of Madrid, crossed the Pyrenees and traveled the rocky roads to this village near Périgueux must be told in another place; but I have my doubts as to the character of St. Pantaly. The orthodox, attested, and accredited history of this redoubtable hero runs somewhat as follows. He is supposed to have lived in the third century and to have been offered the privilege of martyrdom, a great privilege surely, since for a few hours of suffering he might have achieved eternal bliss. But [165] St. Pantaly was a difficult and mercurial martyr. They tried to feed him to the wild beasts on a Roman holiday, but the beasts fawned upon him and demanded his blessing; they tried to break him on the wheel, but the ropes miraculously fell off. They tied a huge stone to him and threw him into the sea, but the stone floated and with it the good saint. When they tried to burn him alive, the torches refused to light; when they tried to chop off his head, the sword broke; when they tried to throw him into a caldron of burning lead, Christ miraculously appeared beside him and the lead hardened. He refused to accept martyrdom until he felt like it. He was particularly fond of the goats and cattle, of new milk, of the fields and rocky places. In a barren and untraveled country, about a hundred miles north of Nice, not far from the Italian border, is celebrated the festival of the Pipes of St. Pantaly; and in a deserted shrine, a day’s journey by foot from this village, is a curious figure with a wizened face and a horned head. St. Pantaly may now be a good Christian, looking with officious eye at the work of midwives and the fertility of flocks; but he was once a Roman god, looking through the rushes and licking his lips with a little red tongue while the maidens bathed in a shady pool.

The old trail follows the trail to Chambon, but the new road cuts straight across one of its loops to Hautefort. There may have been a short cut here in the twelfth century, but the road which was most frequented must have passed Chambon, for this was the place where the archpriest Anzéme founded a priory. Anzème was a modern and was suspected of having been a friend to that liberal, Abelard. The chances [166] are that Anzème would establish his priory not far from the main road which led directly between the castle of the sophisticated and gallant gentleman Bertrand de Born and the important city of Périgueux. When elegant Perigordian poets called on Bertrand, and when Bertrand returned the call, they would stop at the priory for a friendly chat. Thus Anzème pursued a life of religious ease and scholarly meditation.

From Chambon, the two leagues to Hautefort can be covered in a long hour and a half, and Bertrand, on horse, probably covered them in much less. He passed Tourtoirac, which to-day is guarded by a fortified gate of the fourteenth century, as in Bertrand’s time it was guarded by a gate of the tenth century or older. These problems are mysteries. The hills have forgotten the answers, and the people of Tourtoirac, interested in the search for truffles, are singularly uncommunicative.




3



He who looks at Hautefort for the civilization of the twelfth century will be disappointed. The Borns were an up-and-coming, a progressive family. After Bertrand’s death the château was rebuilt many times until some beribboned and beruffled gentleman of the seventeenth century decided that it would do as it was, that the court at Paris was more amusing than the court at Périgueux, and that the levee of the Roi Soleil at Versailles was more exciting than the rising of his humble servant, the sun, at Hautefort. Although the luster of the twelfth century has been obscured by the brilliance of the sixteenth at Hautefort, the [167] names and achievements of Bertrand’s friends still shine undimmed.

One of these friends was Arnaut de Mareuil. There are three accounts of Arnaut’s life, and none of them is particularly trustworthy. It seems that his father had a château at Aix-en-Provence, not far from Marseilles, and falling into poverty was constrained to sell it. Arnaut was born at the Château de Mareuil not far from Périgueux and was put into training for the church; but “finding that he could neither earn his living nor keep himself in good repair by his learning, he set out to travel through the world.” He frequented the company of poets and from them learned how to make poems in the Provençal tongue. The manuscript says that he was very “coming” (advenant) in his manner, that he pleased everybody, and that he knew how to read the romances very effectively. Peire Vidal, one of the most meteoric of the troubadours, knew him well when he was involved with the countess of Béziers and Alfonso II of Aragon. This was at a later period.

Arnaut de Mareuil’s conception of love was very similar to the conception of Bernard de Ventadour, whose first mistress, Agnes de Montluçon, lived with her husband, Ebles II, at Ventadour, not many miles away. For him, love was the chief and only inspiration of poetry, and he carried the art of love and the art of compliment to a high perfection. All other troubadours, he said, insist that their ladies are the most beautiful in the world. “I am well satisfied with this, for thus my honest poems will pass unnoticed amidst their idle boasts. I and love only have been true to our oaths.” If at any time he were tempted to forget his oath, [168] he was reminded of it by a faithful and discreet messenger, his heart, who, by poetic convention, is supposed to have remained behind with his lady when he was sent away.

I am afflicted, lady [he cried], when my eyes are unable to gaze upon your beauty; but my heart has remained with you since the first day I saw you, and it has never left your gracious presence. . . . Day and night it is near you, wherever you may be; day and night it pays court to you. . . . When I think of other things, there is sent to me a courteous message, sent by my heart who is your guest.

This messenger reminds him not only of the high moral virtues of his lady but also of her beauty, and this is the ideal of feminine beauty which was before the eyes of the twelfth century, an ideal not only recorded in poems but painted in hundreds of miniatures hidden in illuminated manuscripts of the time.

The gentle messenger who is my heart displays to me your gracious body, your glorious blond hair, and your forehead more white than a lily; it shows me your beautiful eyes, clear and smiling, your straight and well made nose, and the freshness of your face, which is both white and more ruddy than a rose.

Love takes dominion over him He is unable to speak. He closes his eyes, he sighs, and he lives half asleep in a starry dream.

All of this indicates that Arnaut de Mareuil assumed the attitude and expressed the sentiments which, as defined by such books as “The Art of Honest Loving” and “The Breviary of Love,” written long after this time, when the [169] art was in danger of decay, were considered proper to the aristocratic young man who either from choice or economic necessity found it necessary to keep the restless virgins and the dissatisfied wives who lived in the innumerable castles in this part of the world amused while their husbands, in most cases lads only a few years older than they, were busy defending the sanctity of their own homes or violating the sanctity of others’. That Arnaut de Mareuil happened to be a poet, that he had an exquisite sense of words and a good ear for melody, is to our advantage chiefly because most of his contemporaries had neither sense nor ear.

In another poem this friend of Bertrand de Born presents a picture of the perfect gentleman and the perfect lady. Perfect gentlemen, he says, come from three classes of society: the class of the bourgeoisie, the clerics, or the nobility. The middle-class gentleman, or more properly the independent gentleman, may be brave, but bravery is not part of his profession. He must be courteous and amiable; he must know how to present himself at court; he must know the art of paying compliments to ladies. the art of dancing, and the art of saying agreeable things. If he was wealthy, he must be generous. Clerks, and by clerks Arnaut refers to the members of the religious orders, are distinguished less by their religious sentiments than by their charming manners and their gift of speech. Although knights must be amiable, courteous, brave, and faithful in service to their sovereign, they are most distinguished by their generosity, their largess. It is this theory of largess which made medieval civilization possible. There were in those days no fixed system of coinage and no minimum [170] wage laws. Everything was worth what you had to pay for it, in service, in gold, or in gifts. Nobody ever received a salary for anything, and although you might be put on a pension you were lucky if you could collect a tenth of it. The poet’s job was to please his lord and lady. If he pleased them sufficiently, he would receive gifts of clothing, horses, armor, or golden chains. The chief characteristic of the perfect lady, according to this authority more important than virtue, beauty, agreeable conversation, charming manners, or wealth, was the virtue of knowledge and wisdom, particularly the virtue of discretion. The English, as we have said, have always hoped that their women would be virtuous. Arnaut, a good Frenchman, was content to hope that his mistresses might be discreet.

Although Bertrand de Born may or may not have met Arnaut de Mareuil on this trip, he certainly knew Arnaut, and Arnaut certainly visited Hautefort, on at least one occasion. At Hautefort, Bertrand is supposed to have composed some additional songs for purposes of propaganda, but his stay must have been comparatively short, for he still had a long trip to take before returning to his young king in the north.

He went from Hautefort to Brive probably by the small road that follows the railroad-track rather vaguely as far as Terrasson and then follows the Corrèze River until in the twelfth century the church of St. Martin’s of Brive and the château now destroyed and forgotten rose above the walls and the cluster of houses that clung to them. The walks have been transformed into elm-shaded boulevards, but the streets and many of the houses of Brive are still [171] the same as they were in the twelfth century. Shortly after Bertrand’s visit, the city was besieged by the viscount de Turenne, and for a hundred years Brive was the stake of a small war which the counts of Toulouse waged intermittently with the counts of Malemort, the lords bishops of Limoges. The count of Toulouse had been a good friend of Bertrand’s, but he is listed among the traitors to the young king. It may be that Turenne decided to join the war against Richard but remembered in time Bertrand’s own assurance that the small lords grow fat when the great ones fight and decided to make the best of his opportunity to assure himself of the sovereignty of a rich city.

A single very small road leads through a country that becomes more and more rocky and barren from Brive to Turenne, a city built around a scarped hill surmounted by the ruins of a château. For many years Turenne was able to retain the friendship of both England and France. The kings of both nations exempted it from taxation and the duty of furnishing men and arms, and both granted it the right to coin its own money and make its own laws. The lords of Turenne were shrewd and able, and, as is shown by the history of Brive, when they wanted a thing they went after it.




4



There is only one trail into Turenne and one trail out. The trail in comes from Brive, and the trail out follows the river and the railway to Carrenac, the sometime home of another traitor to young Henry. All that is left of the [172] twelfth century in Carrenac is a few rocks on the hill where the château stood, and around the château streets which are very old and always dirty, and an old man — also dirty — who spoke no French that I could understand, but only the local patois which is very old, much older than the French of your young academicians and your smart Parisian clubs, a language which, when Bertrand and his friends used it, had the glamour of spring, the smartness of a new epigram, the richness of good wine. It was the language of kings. The kings of England knew no other, and although Richard’s ancestor, William the Conqueror, tried to learn English he gave it up after a short time. Richard is said to have mastered in the forty-four years of his disgraceful life only one sentence, and that was more of an exclamation than a sentence. The language of Carrenac has grown old with the town and like the town has changed and decayed. To-day it has the perfume of an old and almost forgotten souvenir, which, if you like to be reminded of past gaieties, is pleasant enough.

The old man with his patois showed me, as he or his son or his grandson will show you, the great statue of Christ with its curious figures of symbolic beasts, carved by some forgotten mason who was not trying — as the sentimental historians affect to believe — to deny the lusts of the flesh, but rather was trying to bring them under the domination of those infinitely more terrible and ruthless lusts, the lusts of the spirit. By these lusts the men of the twelfth century sought to control the body, to make it the disciplined, obsequious, subservient thing it is now. By these they have learned how to substitute commands for [173] deeds, symbols for actions, the imagined formula for the real form. And these men succeeded. When a wife of the twelfth century was annoying, her husband spanked her and sent her bed without any supper; the modern gentleman talks her over with the judge and the reporters and gets a divorce. Once a real world of real passions and enthusiasms, crude and cruel but none the less vital and authentic, a world young in its passions but old in its knowledge of passion, was directed by young men. To-day the disciplined traffic of a puppet world is directed by a puppet policeman. The flesh and the spirit were at war, and this warfare is made manifest in the symbolic and tortured beasts about the Christ in the village of Carrenac, which perhaps no tourist will ever see again until the mistral has worn it away to a memory and a suggestion.

The old trial follows the river from Carrenac to the Grottes de Salpêtre and thence turns south to Gourdon. You may find it, if you are lucky. I failed in two attempts and had pleasant sunny days in the heather and discovered two ruined châteaux which I have not been able to identify. It may be, for this is a mysterious country and many a one before me has wandered in the land of faerie, that they were as unreal as the sky and the yellow stones. I do not know. Gourdon, on a hill overlooking La Bleu River, is real enough. It has an Avenue Gambetta and, I suppose, though I have forgotten, a Place de la République and a very small boy intent on shying a stone at a very fat sparrow.

The present city of Gourdon is fifteenth-century, and the château where Bertrand de Born stopped to sing a song [174] or two is in débris near the church of St-Pierre, which was built largely from the stones of the château.

Between Gourdon and Figeac, the châteaux where Bertrand probably did not stop are more interesting than those where he did. One leaves Gourdon as one entered, by the road which passes Les Capucines and continues until one reaches Peyrebrune. Here one strikes into the mountains, or rather into the rocks which were once mountains but now have a tired and worn look about them, in an attempt to find Ginuillac, which since it is a very small village and perhaps not worth the trouble of looking for is very hard to find. There is only one road to the west out of Ginuillac, past the Cointe Château over the mountains to Le Carlucet Grange and down again to the main road and the village of Bastit. Thence there are two roads, a cycle-path and a donkey-path. The cycle-path to Reillhac must be the better, because I did not follow it; thence, if you are tired, it is only four miles to the railway, or, if you are not, eleven miles to Livernon and the Château d’Assier.




5



In the Château d’Assier, which did not become important in history until four hundred years lager, one might always find in the twelfth century a poet or two, for the chatelain was a courteous and a liberal gentleman and the chatelaine was a charming lady. Arnaut de Mareuil had visited here and also Giraut de Bornelh of Limoges, the man who disdained love and marriage. Giraut once made a poem on one of Arnaut’s themes which is perhaps worth quoting [175] despite the paleness which our stubborn English with its paucity of rimes and absence of inflections gives to the productions of a more gracious tongue.

When my eyes no longer may

Gaze upon your loveliness

I am saddened. Lady, pray

Send to me of your largess

Messages of kindliness.

Bid your guest, my heart, to stay

Still your guest that my distress

May be lightened night and day

By his unfailing courteousness.

He reminds me of the gay

Glamour of your happiness;

Of your smiling eyes;

The way your features show straightforwardness,

And the graceful lines your dress

Falls in when you kneel to pray;

And your pale cheek’s ruddiness

When in tournament or fray

Your hero proves his courteousness.

This message will transform the day,

Make sunlight out of fogginess,

Change January into May,

Translate to sweet my bitterness.

I shall walk in forgetfulness

Of time and season, night and day.

Thinking of your sweet courteousness

I shall pass lords and ladies gay

In a starry dream of happiness.

[176]

Lady, in your kindness, pray,

In your radiant loveliness,

Smile on me this dreary day,

Make happy my unhappiness.

Giraut’s contemporaries vied with each other in praising him; his excellence consisted in his virtuosity in treating difficult forms, a limpidity of language, and a suggestiveness of style, virtues which the translation does not even suggest. Dante, however, preferred the poetry of Arnaut Daniel and when Dante expressed his opinion, a hundred and fifty years later, the tide turned and washed out almost all traces of Giraut’s achievements. The following lines by Giraut are perhaps more characteristic than those quoted above; they may have been addressed to the chatelaine of Limoges, who was kind to Giraut until her husband in sudden fury burned Giraut’s library containing all his manuscripts, or they may have been addressed to one other; it makes no great difference:

When I remember how love can keep

My passionate heart forever true,

I know I was a child, asleep

Before I met my love and you.

Once I dreamed, when the year was new,

Of armies of roses, a thousand deep,

And the fleur-de-lis whispered of you. . . . 

Then I awoke from my boyish sleep.

To her I sing, to her I weep,

I send my prayers to her and you

[177]

In Limousin where you two keep

Splendor and beauty and courtesy too.

Noblest of all great ladies are you,

High-born, well mannered, chaste and sweet,

Kingly and virtuous, learned and true. . . . 

Alas, that I woke from my boyish sleep!

Alas for me, I am forced to keep

My secret hid from the world and you.

Speakers of evil jealously peep

And deride a love that is pure and true.

If I honestly gave you your honest due

The slanderous world which makes love cheap

Would deride the passion I feel for you.

Alas, that I woke from my childish sleep!

But when from the crush of the crowd I creep

Away to the window which looks toward you

I sing in my heart — and that song is true —

Thank God that I woke from my childish sleep.




6



From Assier, whose old château fort has been transformed into a sixteenth-century castle and historic monument, the country road leads southwest of Cardaillac, where it meets the main road, and later to Figeac, which dreams in an amphitheater of wooded and vine-clad hills of a past which was greater than its present. There are, as usual, two cities in Figeac: the old city, on the left bank, clustered around a hill which once bore a château; and the town, on the right bank, which grew around the monastery and the church of the potent St.-Sauveur. This monastery, which [178] originally belonged to the Benedictine order, became in the tenth century one of the important centers of Cluniac reform; and here, as elsewhere, under the influence of that peculiar spiritual renaissance, the arts and sciences flourished and the flesh and spirit dwelt together in the honor of God. The flesh and the spirit, however, were sometimes at war, for the monastics honored God in a way which the pious townspeople sometimes resented. Sometimes the townspeople felt themselves oppressed by the zeal of the clerics; and sometimes the clerics, relying on their right of trial in ecclesiastical courts, would take from the townspeople those pretty and amiable things which all men treasure and which none can deny make manifest to all the world the greatness and goodness of the Creator. About the time that Bertrand entered Figeac with the intention of persuading the knights of that district to supplant the men who held power with the men who would like to hold power, the people of the town and the people of the monastery agreed to compose their differences.

On the Rue Griffoul — unfortunately I do not know what it was called in Bertrand’s day — are still several houses that were new when Bertrand came to town, and near St.-Sauveur is the bridge which he crossed when with his body-guard, his secretary, and his sweet singers he clattered up the hill to the château. The streets are narrow and filled with the ordure of centuries; and one wonders, as one wades through them and escapes by a hair’s breadth the emptying of a chamber-pot from an upstairs window, whether they could possibly have been dirtier a thousand years ago. Ah, well for Bertrand de Born and his friends that they never [179] heard of the germ theory, that cleanliness was not yet placed next to godliness, and that the entire world was more or less democratically dirty.

Three miles to the south is Capdenac, with a modern château but with old, old walls that crown a steep hill. The château is and probably always was at the north gate, which is guarded by two towers. From the top of these towers, a watchman can note the approach of any considerable body of knights, their bright armor heliographing news of their position; and the tourist with an hour or two to spare can look down over the valley of the Lot — on the quiet vineyards of the hills, the rich green of the valleys threaded by chalky white roads.

Somewhere in this sector Bertrand received word from Henry. Exactly how this announcement was made is unknown, but the purport was that Henry had withdrawn his demands upon Richard and with vacillating spirit — now engaged, probably, in some new venture — wished to withdraw from the war. Bertrand sent back a musician instead of a letter. He had coached the musician in a song and sent word that if Henry withdrew the musician would spread this song throughout the length and breadth of the country. The song contained among other things the following complimentary lines:

I’ll help the vassals understand

That Henry the king is a king without land

Because he’s the king of cowards.

I’ll spread the fame throughout the land

Of the doughty king of cowards.

[180]

When the musician returned, he brought word that Henry had declared war on Richard again, and begged his friend to withdraw the insulting poem and substitute for it one more calculated to sooth his master’s vanity. Bertrand sang:

With gaily colored helm and spear

And freshly polished shield

The knights ride in from far and near

And hold their ground

And scorn to yield;

And the horses in thunder

Drag fallen riders through the field.

The Aquitanian castles reel

With the battle’s thunder.

And all the vassals in the fray

And all the true knights wonder

How many heads they’ll break this day.

I do not love my ease and meat,

A soft bed, and good food to eat

As well as when on chargers fleet

Armies intent on battle meet

And riderless horses scream. . . . 

Then shouts of hate and oaths resound,

Foemen’s bodies carpet the ground,

And many a brave one goes to rest

With a long spear growing in his chest

And riderless horses scream.

This is one of those gay, light-hearted relics of the twelfth century which should help us to understand that the age of chivalry was not an age where two gentlemen met on an [181] open field, slapped each other’s wrists, and then retired to a shady grove to drink a dish of tea in honor of their respective mistresses. The age of true chivalry, curiously enough, is always an age or two earlier than the age in which we live. Modern writers think that the age of chivalry is in the twelfth century. Writers of the twelfth century thought that the age of chivalry was the eighth or ninth century, and gentlemen of those years thought, no doubt, that it was still earlier. The twelfth century cannot, however, free itself from responsibility. The men of the twelfth century were the first to record an ideal of chivalric conduct; and this ideal formulation, this dream, this series of euphemisms, prepared for the entertainment of high-born ladies and jeune filles bien élevées and accepted them as amusing articles and pleasant ways of saying unpleasant things, had to wait for the scientific nineteenth century to mistake euphemism for the fact, the dream for the reality. And now the ideal of conduct contained in the poems of the twelfth century — not those written by Bertrand de Born, who was a realist and something of a cynic, but by his friends and companions — has been accepted not only as a social code which directs the actions of all gentlemen — it had always been that — but as a fair picture of the life of the time.




6



The Middle Ages have almost entirely disappeared from Montauban. Hardly a stone is left of the city Bertrand de Born visited when Rixende de Montauban lived in the château which had been begun a hundred years earlier by [182] the counts of Toulouse, which was to be continued by the Black Prince in the fourteenth century and completed by Bishop de Berthier in the seventeenth. Although there was probably a bridge over the Tarn when Bertrand rode out of the city toward Toulouse, the present bridge with seven Gothic arches, well fortified against the attacks of hostile armies from the north and west and warlike monks from the monastery across the river, was built twenty years after Bertrand left the city.

Before there had been a city of Montauban, there had been a town of Montauriol, which had been built sometime after 820 by the great good man St. Theodard; and before there had been a town of Montauriol, there had been, sometime about the year 200 or 300 the Roman camp of Mons Albanus. We must not forget that the four centuries between 820 and 1220 were as long to the people of the Middle Ages as the four centuries between 1520 — when American had been discovered only thirty years — and 1920 are to us. There was trouble of a kind between the monks of the monastery and their vassals. The counts of Toulouse made capital of this quarrel, and realizing that the White Mountain would be an excellent site for a fortress, seized a large part of the monastic lands and founded a town across the river. They made propositions to the tenants of the monastic lands, offered them home-seekers’ rates, freedom from taxation, power rights, and other modern advantages. Most of Montauriol moved to Montauban, and the monks were sorely tempted to use strong language.

When Bertrand was at Montauban, the chatelain was perhaps the same Rixende or Richilde who a few years later [183] inspired a sinister passion in the bosom of the poet Roolet de Gassin. Roolet’s enemies said that he was a babbler, a charlatan, ugly, unpleasant, misanthropic, disagreeable, and afflicted by divers other infirmities. His friends said that he was a remarkable gentleman, handsome of feature, pleasant and gracious of manner, and a good poet in all languages. He was involved in the Albigensian heresy, an interesting form of ultra-fundamentalism. Roolet was “well liked by the ladies and princesses who understood the charms of poetry. They gave him rich gifts of horses, armor, clothing, and gold according to the custom of the time.” At Montpellier, where he was attending a convention, he was “surprised by love of a gentle lady of the Provence called Rixende de Montauban.” She, however, like a false deceiver, made fun of his dress and manners. She laughed at him in public and said unprintable things about him to his friends. Nevertheless, “she was lovely, wise, virtuous, and well learned in the arts of poetry.” Roolet, who was “incredibly taken by his love for this lady, forgot all the art of compliment in which he had excelled and, filled with a poetic furor, made a song against this lady, a song of base ingratitude and deadly insult.” The friends of this “false deceiver” were powerful, and Roolet was persuaded to leave Montpellier suddenly and at night. His future as a poet had been ruined by this hasty and discourteous action. He took refuge in the most austere monastery in the world. Austerity seems not to have agreed with him. At any rate, he left the monastic life a few years later, bought a pleasant château, married a virtuous wife, begot children, burned heretics, and prospered.

[184]

There is a story told to all French children of one Renaut de Montauban who had in his service a great magician and a magic horse that could fly through the air. He is said to have killed the son of Charlemagne with a chess-board, and he and his friends lived in outlawry for many years like Robin Hood, helping the poor and robbing the rich. By a lucky chance, they helped the king of Bordeaux against the Saracens, and Renaut married the king’s sister and lived in the château of Montauban. M. Bédier, whose work on these problems none may question, thinks that the Montauban of this legend is not the one Bertrand de Born visited but another Montauban several hundred miles further west. M. Bédier thinks that the novel was written about the time Bertrand made his trip, and there can be no doubt that the customs and the social situations in the novel were drawn from models furnished by the twelfth century.

From Montauban it is but a step to Toulouse, whence Bertrand turned west for the other two legs of his journey, if he did not return at once to his castle in Hautefort, there or further north to meet young Henry and engage with him in his last and most important war.







Gold embossed guitar from spine of this book.









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