Toulouse
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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. 208-240.
TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS
by Raimon de Loi
Toulouse
THE trail of Jaufre Rudel, who died for love of the incomparably beautiful lady whom he had never seen, leads into the garden of Gascony. The swift trail his romance made through the minds of his contemporaries and successors leads into the aromatic garden of romantic love. One may go into the garden of Gascony by getting on a boat at New York and getting off at Bordeaux, and if one does so, one will pass within a few feet of Jaufre’s birthplace, the city of Blaye. To get into the garden of romantic love, however, is another matter. It is now thought to be a dangerous garden, in which grow complexes of various complexions; and Dr. Freud the great gardner, swears that it is haunted by the ghosts of our mothers and that the sweet maidens we had thought to find are shape-shifting creatures, born in the caverns of our subconscious.
The Middle Ages had no fear of romantic love, and the twelfth century thought it quite a novelty and the latest thing in emotions. The young exquisites about the court of Gerard II, Jaufre’s brother and the reigning prince of Blaye, those about the courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine and 210 Raymond V of Toulouse, exhibited this passion with as much pride as the gilded youth of to-day parade a passion for airplaning or surf-bathing. Now exercise is supposed to be the cure of all human ills; once love was the universal healer. In those days young men were advised to fall in love with as much seriousness as they are now advised to fall out of it. Young ladies in the remoter châteaux looked forward with longing to the day when, securely married, they might take a lover in much the same ways as our grandmothers anticipated the day when they might take a husband or as our daughters long for the triumph of their first divorce. Love — and by that was meant secret and romantic love for a mistress who was already married, love which would bring loss of appetite, paleness and a fluttering of the heart, a delicious trembling up and down the spine, a fear of I know not what, a nameless hope, love which delighted in secret words, in rendezvous in moonlit gardens — was a new invention of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which also produced Gothic architecture, the modern state, the romantic novel, lyric poetry, modern commerce, the Crusades, self-government, flush-toilets in the south of France, the woman movement, and other trifles. The beautiful ladies and sweet singers of southern France of the epoch I describe were most decidedly, flagrantly, proudly, and obviously in love, and being in love was something new in the history of the world.
To write that women before the twelfth century did not love would be to write nonsense; but there is a difference between loving and being in love, and if you do not know that difference there is many a medieval treatise that will 211 enlighten you better than I can; and if you have forgotten that difference, there is many an American high-school girl well read in the popular novel of our own time who with perhaps a touch of scorn in her voice will remind you. Plato thought of love as the yearning for the absolute, the universal desire of man to make himself whole and complete. He made love a philosophical doctrine without much of a body. Ovid and the sophisticated Romans thought love was essentially a physical passion and a pleasant pastime. The differences between the pagan and the medieval ideals of love are made manifest by a comparison of Ovid’s “Art of Love,” or Longus’s idyl, “Daphnis and Chloe,” with the story of Aucassin and Nicolette or the romantic tradition of the passion of Jaufre Rudel, prince of Blaye.
Ovid treats love with lightness and charm. He smiles as he discusses the sorrows of lovers, for love will occupy the attentions of young men but not the meditations of wise men. The twelfth century wrote of love as seriously as Ovid had written lightly. The twelfth-century writers described love as the source of all life, the generator of all activity, the purpose and sanctification of all being. Love became a religion, and ultimately religion became love. Poets expressed their emotions to the Virgin Mary in the same terms they had used in writing to their mistresses, and love for a woman became love of Woman, and troubadourism decayed, and the thirteenth century came into existence, with Thomas Aquinas its philosopher, and Dante, guided by Beatrice, its interpreter.
I have been unable to determine how the difference between 212 loving and being in love was discovered, nor can I say whether the new woman (now nine hundred years old) or the troubadours were most responsible in establishing the cult of love. Both the new woman and the troubadour had something to do with it. They seem to have been in alliance, and, having discovered something good, they seem to have made the best of it. To understand this cult, which has some importance even to-day when its devotees meet by the millions in darkened rooms to watch with eager eyes the shadows of men and women pursuing each other on a silver screen, a brief examination of the woman’s movement and troubadourism is necessary.
Marriage seven hundred years ago was pungently described by one of its victims, a queen and a charming lady as una podrida, which may be translated briefly as “a mess.” Youngsters were frequently betrothed before they were born and were married before they were quite dry behind the ears. Under these conditions, husbands and wives might have the respect and affection for each other that brothers and sisters are supposed to have; but a wife who had seen her husband spanked by a governess could not easily regard him as a great hero. The object of these marriages was property. It was easier to win the estates of a neighbor by paying a priest to pronounce a few words at the altar than to take the estates by siege or war, which were frequently dull and sometimes dangerous. But the wife in whose gift the estate lay was not the entirely suppliant 213 creature of the legend of Griselda. If the story of the patient Griselda was told at all in the twelfth century, it must have been regarded by the women as a merry burlesque. The wife of the twelfth century always had relatives (in this she was not distinguished from the wife of to-day); but the mother who could call in a host of armed sons to avenge slights, real or fancied, done to her daughter was perhaps more to be feared than the mother-in-law of to-day who must be content to call down hosts of angels to be her witness.
The marital relations of the twelfth century were very different from marital relations in the Dark Ages, when marriage by robbery was not infrequent. If the twelfth-century husband had just cause — a bad temper, for example, indigestion or something of the kind — he might without fear of interruption spank his wife and send her to bed without any supper. If the cause were really just, the relatives-in-law would probably say nothing. If he had no cause — and this occurred more frequently than the historians who delight in showing the differences between the twelfth and the twentieth centuries like to admit — the husband was called to account for his actions. If he mistreated his wife he might find a new war on his hands. If his wife had a clever poet as her ami, he would be held up to ridicule as a boor, a ridicule which, in the twelfth century, was as much more terrible than it is now, as personal dignity, which was the source of a warrior’s power over his followers, was more essential to a civilization of warriors than it is to a nation of shopkeepers.
Moreover the south of France had been the seat of European 214 civilization ever since the youth and beauty of Rome began spending its winters on the western Riviera and brought into that country the civilized vices. In those days, no fashion was so new, no sophistication so subtle, no perversion so perverse, that it had not been tried first by the gentry of that country. That civilization had not been exterminated entirely during the winter of the Dark Ages, and it flowered anew in the springtide of the twelfth century. From here it spread eastward to Florence and Dante and northward to London and Chaucer. Civilization means idleness, and idleness means women, and women mean love. If the women were sophisticated and intelligent they make use of their natural talents and their economic position to make love amusing. If the women are dull, love becomes lust; if they are brilliant, it becomes lustrous with a thousand implications and subtleties.
The poets of the south of France were gentlemen of leisure; the women, the products of a long tradition of civilized living, were intelligent and held an economic position more firm than their ancestors in preceding centuries. When, as has happened occasionally in the long centuries which bridge the gulf between them and us, adolescent girls realized that they did not love their husbands, or, loving them, were not in love with them, the poets came to their assistance. As a result of poetic collaboration, a theory of romantic love was evolved. The disorder and social anarchy of medieval marriage was put into order and law by a theory and code of rules which constituted the theory and code of romantic love.
Troubadourism began with William of Aquitaine, Eleanor’s 215 grandfather, who regarded love as a physical passion which was, in its way, pleasant. He was a mighty lover and honored some of the objects of his devotion by writing poems to them in the manner of the poems sung by wandering minstrels and professional entertainers. For him love was essentially a physical passion. The more love there was in the world, the better was William of Aquitaine satisfied. At one time while quarreling with the church he threatened to found a convent of prostitutes. The most beautiful and efficient was to be the “sister superior.” In his songs the doctrine of love is not elaborated. The beginnings of it are there, but very faint. His songs are better than the songs of the professional entertainers because his mind happened to be better and his talents were superior. Moreover he was a powerful prince, and whatever he did was, therefore, memorable.
The second stage is the stage represented by Bernard de Ventadour. Bernard regarded love as realistically as William of Aquitaine, but he refined his realism. Love was the most pleasant and delightful passion that he had experienced. For him, to live was to be in love. He said:
Life without love — what is it worth?
The man whose heart is never fed
With love’s sweet food indeed is dead;
He’s but a cumbrance on the earth.
Lord, may Thy hatred never move
So fierce against me that I may
Survive a month, a single day,
And have no heart to sing for love.
216This stage of troubadourism is presented again, but with a slight difference, by Jaufre Rudel, prince of Blaye, whose story you will read in a moment. In the third stage, love which had been an absorbing passion became a religion, and the Virgin Mary became the prototype of all womanhood. In her was found the beauty of all women, woman’s gay laughter, her dark mystery, her enticement. As the mother of the loving God, she herself became God. I suppose that at this time women were still beautiful and men still loved ardently; but the civilization which produced the women and the men was being rent by a great and terrible civil war. The castles were being razed. A wave of protestantism swept the country, and those who were not destroyed by it transferred their love to an eternal mistress.
The civilized south had achieved tolerance, which is one of the virtues of civilization. The lords of that country said that if a man wanted to be a heretic, that was his business, and since he would burn for it hereafter, there was no good reason to put him on the bonfire now . . . and these burning questions of religion were, after all, not quite so important as some people made out. It was more important to be a gentleman than to be a Christian. Violence was bad form. One day the lords found themselves in opposition to the church. They were called upon either to betray their friends and save their souls or to save their honor and protect their friends. Thus because most of them were not interested in religious matters, they were surprised to find the world attached greater importance to these things than they had thought possible. Although 217 there were many backsliders, many of them fought and died like gentlemen for friends with whose opinions they were not in agreement.
Jaufre Rudel a prince of Blaye, said that he loved the princess of Tripoli, that she was beautiful beyond compare, and that he loved her the more dearly because he had never seen her. His chronicler says that when the time appointed by the fates was ripe, Jaufre set out to seek his mistress and that he perished within a few hours after his arrival at Tripoli. Bald-headed scholars, whose hearts are little artichokes and whose minds are as keen as razors, bend over the poetry of Jaufre and the account of his chronicler and say that both the chronicler and the prince were liars. They say that Jaufre, writing of his mistress, was thinking of the church militant, and whoever heard of a man loving a woman he had never seen, and conclude that he did not know what he was talking about. His chronicler, they say, was a sentimental idiot, and people do not die for love, and there is no mausoleum where the chronicler says there ought to be, and if Jaufre did love the princess of Tripoli as he said he did, which princess of Tripoli did he love? Since I am unable to answer either their questions or their arguments, I present them to you for what they are worth. On the one side was the statement of Jaufre, who was the prince of a reigning house and an honorable gentleman; and against this are the statements of the modern scholars. Jaufre said, “Far away is the château, and in the tower she sleeps peacefully beside her husband”; he says, “My malady 218 is dangerous, but it can be cured by one little kiss from the lips of my lady far away,” and the scholars answer that he is talking about the church militant. You have his word against theirs. You may choose.
The account of Jaufre’s chronicler contains a few details. It explains that Jaufre, prince of Blaye, became acquainted with Geoffrey of Anjou, one of the brothers of Richard the Lion-Heart and the son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Geoffrey was very fond of the poet and kept him in his service. Jaufre heard of the lady of Tripoli from pilgrims returning from the Holy Land and fell in love, and in praise of her composed “many beautiful songs.” Love must have entered Jaufre’s heart through his ears which is a very important fact to remember. There are three ways in which love can gain possession of a person: through the ears by hearing praise, through the eyes by seeing beauty, or through the mind by meditating on virtues.
Being strongly taken by the desire of seeing this lady, he bade farewell to his patron, Geoffrey, who did all things possible to dissuade the poet from the journey, took the habit of a pilgrim and embarked. During the voyage he was seized by a malady so grave that those of the boat, thinking he was dead, wished to throw him into the sea. And in this condition, he was brought into the harbor of Tripoli; and his arrival was made known to the lady, who left her friends that she might succor the suffering pilgrim. Being come to the ship she took the poet by the hand, and he, knowing it was his Lady, incontinent in the face of this sweet and gracious reception, recovered his spirit and thanked her that she had restored his life to him and said to her: “Most gracious and illustrious princess, I am no longer in fear of death now that . . . ” But he was unable 219 to complete his compliment. His illness grew and augmented and he gave up the ghost in the arms of his mistress, who had him placed in a rich and honorable sepulcher of porphyry and had engraved upon it in letters of gold several verses in the Arabian tongue.
Jaufre’s fate raised the philosophical question for the poets Gérard and Peyronet as to whether one loved best a lady who was present or one who was absent. Other philosophical spirits debated whether love was stronger when it entered through the eyes or when it entered through the ears. Both of these problems were connected with the old problem as to the origin love, a problem which a poet as late as W. Shakspere raises in the poem:
Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot? How nourished?
Reply, reply.
It is engender’d in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies. . . .
The hero of story published in a popular American magazine is made to assert: “I dreamed of you before I saw you while I was lying wounded in the trenches, and I came to New York to search for you. . . . ”1 The young 220 man on the silver screen refers to his mistress as “My dream woman!” Whether Jaufre actually did participate in this amazing adventure, I do not know. His contemporaries certainly thought that he did and imagined him as I do, a young man of great charm and some beauty — Geoffey of Anjou was particular in these matters — setting out from Blaye, a few miles north of Bordeaux on the Golfe Gironde, crossing Gascony to Toulouse and beyond to Narbonne, where he took ship for the Holy Land and the lady of his dreams.
FOOTNOTE
1 To illustrate the persistence of this tradition, I quote without permission the following passage from a story by I. A. R. Wylie in the “Saturday Evening Post” for May 8, 1926 (p. 32, col. 3).
“ ‘. . . I loved you before I had set eyes on you. . . . When I saw the reproduction of the Vandyke I thought to myself, “When that little girl grows up I shall marry her — or no one.” ’
“ ‘But Roger, the little girl grew up and died hundreds of years ago.’
“ ‘So people think. I knew better. Some instinct stronger than reason sent me in search of her. And when I saw her I knew.’
“ ‘Knew that I loved you?’
“ ‘Knew that you were the woman I’d been waiting for all my life . . . ’ ” etc. The title of the story is “With Their Eyes Open.”
These illustrations could be multiplied a thousandfold from all the popular magazines of western Europe. They are embroidered by various kinds of psychological analysis, but grow from the same rich soil of human vanity and titillate the same emotions as the story of Jaufre Rudel.
Jaufre’s birthplace, the city of Blaye, is situated on the cross-roads. The pagan tripper traveling south in search of war and booty, the Roman legions traveling north on the same honorable quest, the medieval pilgrim from Normandy or Anjou who eased both his soul and his body by a vacation pilgrimage through the pleasant country of Gascony, as well as the medieval merchant traveling from the supercivilized and sybaritic south north to London, all passed through the city of Blaye.
The road to the north begins at the base of the hill which now bears the citadel which once bore the city. It leads 221 north through Saintes, Poitiers, Tours, and Paris or Normandy. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Bernard de Ventadour, Charlemagne, Pepin, Roland, William of Aquitaine — to name only a few of the thousands of illustrious people who followed this trail — all passed Blaye and stopped there for a night or two. For the travelers from the north, Blaye marked one step in a long journey. Here they could take ship and float to the city of Bordeaux. Thus they could avoid crossing three rivers which were troublesome and expensive. From Bordeaux they could turn east to Rome or the Holy Land or south into Spain.
If, therefore, you had a new scheme of salvation to dispose of, or if you had made the acquaintance of a new or potent god or saint, you would take up your abode in this pleasant city. From here your converts would carry the glad tidings into all parts of the civilized world. Thus Romans, Saracens, Franks, Aquitanians, and Christians put their marks on Blaye and built their shrines. The traditions of the potencies of these various saints and gods grew with the passing years and with the enthusiastic exaggerations of the tourists. Although the name and history of a god might be forgotten through the centuries, the tale of his prowess remained and was attributed to a new saint, and Blaye became a city of traveler’s traditions, than which there is nothing historically less accurate or philosophically more true.
St. Martin, of Tours and elsewhere, sent St. Romain to Blaye to convert the city. After building himself a hermitage at the bottom of the hill, says his chronicler, the blessed saint preached with so much fire and performed miracles 222 with so much brilliance that he baptized the inhabitants and built a church on the foundations of a temple to the false God. The church was at the end of the road, a few yards from the river, and an ideal situation for the development of a religious cult. St. Romain preserves travelers from danger and sailors from shipwreck, an ideal recommendation for a saint in a travelers’ city located on the stores of a broad and stormy gulf. “Never a sailor” says the biographer, “has been drowned if he gazes ardently at the basilica of the saint.” “Assure yourself a safe and pleasant passage,” say the biographer’s modern brothers, “by buying . . .” It amounts to much the same thing.
But the tomb of the saint was important for the dead as well as living. To be buried in soil blessed by the priest and sanctified by the bones of a saint was, it was thought, additional insurance for heaven. Roland and Olivier were buried in the Church of St.-Romain and added luster to their own virtue and fame to the city. Roland and Olivier, the followers of Charlemagne who founded France, were as great heroes to the Frenchmen of that time as Washington is to us or Arthur is to the English. They had taken an army south into the Pyrenees — they followed the old trail, via Blaye and Bordeaux — and joined the army of Charlemagne and defeated the Saracens at Roncesvalles. On their return, they were caught in a narrow pass, and their rear-guard was completely destroyed. It was a great fight and is well described in that popular novel of the twelfth century, the “Chanson de Roland.” The bodies of Roland and Olivier were brought to Blaye for burial, and the medieval tourist could see not only the tombs but 223 the sword of Roland, the sword Durendal that had drunk of the blood of many pagans.
After the death of these heroes, Charlemagne sent word that Olivier’s sister, who was Roland’s betrothed, be brought to Blaye, but that the news of Roland’s death be kept from her. The authors describe in great detail the premonitions of the lovely virgin and her terrible grief when Charlemagne told her the sad truth. She begged permission to watch for one night at Roland’s tomb. As she watched, a miracle occurred. Roland, accompanied by an angel, appeared to her and said:
Sweet sister Aude, do not grieve for me;
Weep not, sweet sister, and shed no tears.
You see me now in God’s company. . . .
La Belle Aude called Charlemagne and all his knights and told them of the miracle. Then she made confession of her sins, the little sins of a beautiful woman — surely God must have treated them gently — and died.
This and the story of Jaufre are the kinds of story that could be elaborated by the travelers as they put behind them the long weary leagues. Medieval tourists shared with the modern commercial traveler a love for stories, and the longer the story the better; but its length must be counted in miles, not in words.
The gulf of the Gironde is wide, and of an evening when the tide comes in breasting the strong current, it comes as a wall of water. On either side of the gulf are low brown 224 hills, very low, very brown, and the sun above is very hot. Three or four hours from Blaye the gulf becomes the Garonne River, which makes a broad curve and runs through the heart of Bordeaux.
The heart of that city is not a medieval heart. It is brilliant with electric lights and opulent and modern. The Place des Quinconces with its cafés and trees and lights is a chastened Paris, and the tourist who loves Paris will find himself at home there, except that Bordeaux is modern France, and Paris is cosmopolitan France, which is a difference marked by a great distinction. Except for the Cathedral of St.-André, which was not complete when Eleanor’s marriages were performed there, one will find scarcely a stone in Bordeaux that had been put in the place it now occupies when Bordeaux was the medieval metropolis of the southwest, exporting, as it still does, hogshead upon hogshead of claret to pour down the insatiable British throats.
But Bordeaux, like other cities on the main road, is a city of traditions. One day Charlemagne came to Bordeaux. He had recently failed in a filial attack on the life of his father; and his father, somewhat irritated by the son’s attentions, had banished the young man from Gaul. Charlemagne went south into Spain along the route we have been following and there took service with the lord of Toledo. He performed many brave deeds, not the bravest of which was his marriage with the lord’s daughter, whom he had converted from paganism and brought to Bordeaux. Here he built for her a magnificent castle which you may still see if you go to the Palais Gallien, but if you 225 look at the building with even a cursory glance, you will note that it was not built by Charlemagne, but that it is the remains of a Roman amphitheater built some five hundred years before Charlemagne was born.
The church of St.-Seurin, not far from the Palais, was built in the eleventh century on the foundations of an older church, which itself was built on the site of a temple to the false gods. About the history of St. Seurin there is a scandal, not suggested by the Allées Damour but associated with these alleys of love which happen to be an ancient cemetery. St. Seurin had been sent out by the famous St. Martial to convert the good people of Bordeaux, whose religious beliefs at that time were in a shocking state. He went to the old temple of the false gods and built himself his own church and after many years of good and pious labor rendered up the ghost. He converted not only the people of Bordeaux, he converted their dead ancestors; and in a short time the graves about the church became known as the graves of Christian saints. Bordeaux was beginning to compete with Blaye. Now Blaye had the graves of Roland and Olivier and Martial; but Bordeaux had only the doubtful palace of Charlemagne, the grave of St. Seurin, and the graves of a few doubtful pagan-Christians. A grave is more important than a palace, for the grave is the enduring while the palace is only the transitory home of the body. Bordeaux did its best. The clerics formed a progressive club and took as their motto, “Wake up, Bordeaux,” and discovered the graves of several powerful Christian martyrs in the Gallo-Roman graveyard about 226 their church. But even these were not sufficient. One night the monks left Bordeaux and by stealth stole the authentic wand of Roland which Charlemagne had deposited at his grave in Blaye, and they felt that they were making great progress. Their greatest and final achievement, however, was the discovery and proof by such evidence as the twelfth century found necessary that Christ in the company of the chief priests of the region had with His own hands dedicated and consecrated the soil of the graveyard which is now Les Allées Damour. They now felt no fear of competition from Blaye, and satisfied with the results of their labors they were contented, let us hope, to live a long and useful life in the chapter-house of the church. The business of creating legends and writing novels was in the Middle Ages a kind of municipal advertising and was, all things considered, not less veracious — although its veracity was of a different kind — than the municipal advertising of the enlightened twentieth century.
Even in Roman times Bordeaux was a city of wealth and luxury. A Roman princess who loved sea-bathing ordered that a road be built to the sea twenty-five miles away. She laid it out herself, and it ran straight as a string, due west. The cost was defrayed by one of her courtiers, who is reputed to have been handsome, cruel, and wealthy.
At St.-André Eleanor of Aquitaine, who at fifteen had lived more intensely than many a modern women has lived at fifty, bowed her head while the bishop read her marriage service and her proud sister Petronilla began the seduction of the princely Raoul. Although there were always poets at Bordeaux when the Aquitanian princes lived there, Bordeaux 227 is not the chosen home of poets. For many hundreds of years, Bordeaux was an English city, and the Bordelais and the English are alike in their love of commerce and their skill in bargaining. The bourgeois, though he was frequently a mimic of the vices of his master, did not foster poetry because he did not need poets. His success depended on the size of his bank-account rather than the size of his army, which would be directly proportionate to his fame. His wife was a thrifty housekeeper and not a high-born lady. If she wanted amusement she could visit her friends in the next street, attend her clubs, and gossip. It was not necessary for her to worship at the shrine of love, and when she was so indiscreet as to be overcome by love of a poet — and the poets were always worrying her — her husband was so far from complaisant that he hit the unhappy lover over the head so hard that he never stopped running until he reached the kingdom of Aragon.
The Bordelais have forgotten many things in the last seven hundred years, but they have not forgotten how to buy and sell claret, and the sweep of the great river into the city is still as magnificent as it was a thousand years ago. The quays are broad boulevards lined by huge old houses of the eighteenth century, spanned by magnificent bridges, and on them there is eternal activity and the smell of boxes and claret and dried prunes. From the cathedral tower one looks out on the low hills of the northeast, shimmering with heat and rich color, covered with vineyards which are absorbing the southern sun to produce a claret much better than many people will admit claret can possibly be.
The trail which Jaufre and his friends followed from Bordeaux the inhospitable to Toulouse, where all poets were made welcome, is the old Roman road. It is a broad road, and in the summer it is thick with the heavy white dust of the south. At times there is the flash of a canal at this side or the other, and that is all as it should be, for a road without a bit of water gleaming through the trees is as dull as a cocktail without ice. In the morning and the evening the air is clear and warm, and sometimes the trees which line the road fall away to disclose the cliffs of the valley rising sheer in the distance, crowned by a church or a château. Sometimes a cold wind from the Pyrenees blows down through the happy fields and transforms the road to a cloud of dust. Then one continues one’s conversation in the inner room of the café, where with one or two brave mustachioed Gascons, the descendants no doubt of D’Artagnan himself, one listens to the chronicle of country life, the state of the vineyards, and “Parbleu, those United States! Why do they want poor little France to pay them so much money?” One realizes that these Gascons have a sense of humor peculiar to themselves.
The Roman road leaves Bordeaux not far from the Gare de St.-Jean — saints and railway-stations in France are for some obscure reason, clear no doubt to the logical Latin intelligence, frequently associated — and follows the river south for a considerable distance until it chooses to bend its course southeasterly. This road is supposed to have remained on the left bank of the Garonne, which runs with 229 a wide and gracious curve from Toulouse to Bordeaux. The course of the railway approximates the course of the road as far as Langon, where the railway crosses the river to St.-Macaire. The Roman road is supposed not to have crossed the river but to have continued to Agen, where it turned south to Auch and thence east to Toulouse. Its course is fairly clear as far as Langon, but between Landon and Damazan it has many vicissitudes. All that I can assure you of on this part of the trail is that hundreds of poets and saints and warriors did travel from Bordeaux to Toulouse and that they must have traveled on one side of the river or the other. The country is full of châteaux. Some of them are not mentioned in the songs of the poets, more of them are not mentioned, and almost all of them are sadly dilapidated. The troubadour was not a consistent traveler. He was, in every sense of the word, a drifter. He would ride out of his way many a mile for a good dinner, and all I can hope to do in the case of Jaufre and his friends is to indicate the general direction of the drift and a few of the towns they may have seen and stopped in.
The road leads a few kilometers west of the river through the pleasant towns of La Brède, Virelade, and Podensac, which have all at one time or another given heroes to France, and on to Langon, where the modern road crosses to St.-Macaire on a hill with its double row of walls and towers and in its narrow and dirty streets many an old house. The old town sleeps quietly, almost deserted on its hill. At one time the crush and activity of humanity was so great that it was a wonder the walls could hold it all, but to-day a sleepy cat suns itself in the 230 place and a donkey blocks the small street so that one cannot pass.
A day’s journey by foot beyond St.-Macaire is Marmande, a “new town” built by Richard the Lion-Heart when he came to possession of this country in the twelfth century, a very new town when Jaufre Rudel stopped there for the night. The significance of these new towns in the social history of the time is enormous. All of the south of France from the Atlantic to the Rhone was undergoing the remarkable and pleasant experience of being rich. It had always been prosperous, but the prosperity which came over it in the twelfth century was unlike any prosperity it had known in the past. The country had been in the hands of the English for only a few decades. Bordeaux was an excellent harbor, and the peasants of all that thick neck of land which connects Spain with the continent floated their wine, olives, fruits, and wool down the broad backs of the Garonne and the Dordogne to Bordeaux, where they were transhipped to London. Commerce of this kind and on this scale was new in Europe, and the peasants were reaping a golden harvest. Old towns were repaired, and new towns were built “according to modern scientific plans,” with broader, straighter streets and a “logical arrangement” of municipal buildings. Around every mill, every farm, every village, were built high thick walls to keep thieves and robbers out and happiness in.
Agen is a hard day’s walk beyond Marmande, and Agen cares little about the world, and the world cares little about Agen. These burly Gascons with their bristling mustaches, 231 their round oaths, and their epic blasphemies are in themselves a world for themselves. The antiquarians have dug around Agen and discovered that the hill behind the city was a pre-Roman fort (“Sacré!” says the Gascon, “what do you think of those Romans building a fort behind our city?”); they have pried stones loose in the churches and have scraped the walls and have published many learned volumes. And all the time, the Gascon peasant sits in his café and curses genially the small things in his world which are the big things in ours, and speaks reverently of the big things in his world which are the small things in ours.
The town sat restlessly on its hill. It shifted from one side to the other and from the hill to the valley. Each time the town shifted, a new and better château was built, and these are all excellently described in the learned volumes which you may read if you have a mind to. Agen was the center of both Roman and medieval roads, and up and down these roads with his black mouth and golden words and loving heart ran St. Bernard, and tried to convert the heretics who even in his days were infesting the city, and tried in vain to same them from eternal damnation.
Beyond Agen is Moissac, and beyond that is Montauban, and further still is Toulouse. The oldest road turned south at Agen to Lectoure and Auch and thence east to Toulouse, but the medieval road probably followed the river and the châteaux.
The cities of the south differ from cities of the north. Commerce and industry have ebbed away from the south, 232 and as they have ebbed they have left the cities much as they were in the days of their prime. In the north one can begin with the bones of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance and find them covered with the flesh and fat of modern industrialism. But in southern cities, where flesh and fat exist, it is the flesh and fat of another period. Toulouse and Montpellier are largely Renaissance. Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes are essentially thirteenth and twelfth century and are all of a piece. There is hardly a stone in either of these cities that spoils the style, the unity of conception and feeling. Industrialism has passed over them like a cloud. Not even its shadow remains.
Although Toulouse as we find it now is late Renaissance, it was, when Jaufre and his friends lived there, wholly medieval and perhaps the most modern and advanced city in France. Its lords were not only impeccable in their vices, hypercivilized in their taste for women, and assiduous in their cultivation of poets; they were in their ways distinguished political economists, and their citizens enjoyed an independence and freedom which made them envied by the citizens of Carcassonne and Agen. In that great struggle between lord and merchant which preceded our struggle between merchant and laborer, the lords of Toulouse granted privileges which marked them as enlightened if not incendiary revolutionists. When the Albigensian heresy burst into flame, or rather when the church representing the interests of the conservative lords blew it into flame, the tolerance of the lords of Toulouse brought down upon them the wrath of organized society and the “disdain of all right-thinking men.” In the struggle which 233 ensued, the civilization of the south was almost entirely destroyed.
Toulouse claims to be the oldest city in France and pretends to be modern; but in its modernity there is a slatternly youthfulness. Its dinginess has not aged sufficiently to become mellow, and the Renaissance buildings that give the town its character are the worst of their kind, which, as any traveler knows, can very bad indeed. To this Renaissance body, Toulouse has added a bright and forward-looking twentieth-century spirit which makes her somewhat incongruous.
Of the two-hundred-odd troubadours whose names have been preserved, about a score are connected in some way with the history of Toulouse. Many were born there, and others retired to Toulouse or the pleasant monasteries and courts in the neighborhood to enjoy a mellow old age. The Raymonds of Toulouse, despite their follies and frequent immorality, much of which, by the way, is attributable to the malice of their enemies, were gallant gentlemen and made full use of the troubadours in the business of love and politics. The counts of Toulouse were in constant war with the kings of Aragon on the east coast of Spain, and between Toulouse and Barcelona traveled, in both directions, constant streams of poets. A troubadour who disgraced himself at the court of Toulouse was welcomed at the court of Aragon, and when he disgraced himself at Aragon he was welcomed back to Toulouse. Peter of Aragon and Raymond of Toulouse outdid each other in bidding for the services of the best, the most fashionable, and the most skilful of poets.
234Hugues Brunet, a gentleman of Rodez, which is a pleasant city across the mountains north of Carcassonne, was an excellent poet, but because he had no voice could not sing his own songs and was constrained to give them to another. He was so well liked that the count of Toulouse and the king of Aragon both offered him many presents if he would enter their service, but he refused, being enamoured of a gentle lady who would have none of him. Disappointed here, he turned his attentions to the wife of his master, the count of Rodez, where he was more successful. “The count perceiving this was constrained to make no sign as if he knew because he took great pleasure in poesie and because he was well assured of the chastity of his wife.”
Of Rémond de Mirevaux there is much to be said. Perhaps he was too handsome and too talented to be lucky. Perhaps his artistic gifts were greater than his discretion. Perhaps his misfortunes were due to an evil thing he did in his youth. At his father’s death, Rémond inherited a bare fourth of the château of Mirevaux, whose picturesque ruins are a few miles north of Carcassonne. “He knew more about love and courtesy and the other sciences that were fashionable at his time than any other who has written; he was loved by Count Raymond of Toulouse, and the intimacy between these two became so great that they called each other by the secret names of lovers. The count gave him arms and horses and everything that he needed. He was also loved by Pedro, king of Aragon, and the viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, and by Rémond de Saissac, and all the lords and gentlemen of the country. There was not 235 a lady or demoyselle in any castle of the Provence but wanted Rémond in her company. They all desired to see him, to enjoy him, to hear him sing, and to have his friendship and familiarity because he knew very well how to honor them and pass the time sweetly with them, and no lady of that country thought she had succeeded socially unless she had at least one song dedicated to her by Rémond de Mirevaux. But there was never a scandal about them or about him . . . and he never received a single lover’s favor from them, and they deceived him shamefully one and all.” This account errs on two points, as you shall see.
Once Rémond de Mirevaux, Peire Vidal, Hugues Brunet, and other troubadours found themselves at the court of Loba de Perrautier. (She was, I think, then holding court at the château of her uncle at Cabanet, but that is unimportant.) They were all dying for love of her, and she kept them all at a distance. She would pretend not to understand that the songs sung in the great hall were intended for her; and when an aubade was chanted at dawn in the garden, she would send one of her ladies in waiting to the window, and the lady would smile and blush and bow and pretend that the serenade was intended for her instead of for her mistress. Below in the garden the poets would gnash their teeth and rattle their swords and call upon the “Putaine de Dieu.” She pretended that she preferred Rémond de Mirevaux to her other suitors, for she realized “that he was a good poet and would make her famous among all the noble lords of the country, but all the time she was deceiving him cruelly for she was receiving secret favors from a knight”; and while the others were breaking their 236 hearts for her in the garden she was receiving into her room another whom she seemed to treat with indifference when others were near. Love, according to the romantic code, should be kept secret, but there was a limit to secrecy. Loba’s method of procedure made the best poets in France look like fools and feel worse.
Nothing in the Middle Ages could be kept secret for long, and one day the entire court knew of her deception, and the entire court was furious. Rémond’s friends, who were also his rivals, turned upon the lady and insisted that she had acted dishonorably and wrote bitter satires against her and her lover, who, for shame, was forced to leave the court. Rémond alone pretended to be faithful. “My love for you is so great,” he said, “that I can endure dishonor itself for your sake. The evil speakers slander you. I believe no word of it.” When none in the court would sing to her any more, Rémond sang to her; and when no one would walk with her in the shady gardens, Rémond was at her side. This faithfulness was at last rewarded by true love, of which she made no secret; and while all the court was marveling that Rémond should have succeeded at last, he treated her shamefully and in a manner that laid her open to worse scorn than she had received hitherto. He left her and paid open and obvious court to an obscure woman in Narbonne and wrote a poem explaining the reasons for his revenge.
All of Rémond’s great passions turned to dust and ashes, and his cleverness was never so great as the cleverness of his mistresses. One time he was paying court to Adalasia, the wife of Bernard de Boisseson of the Château 237 Lomber. She did all in her power to inspire him to write for her better songs than he had written for the others. She would display her knowledge of the art of poetry by ridiculing the poems of Rémond’s rivals. “Am I not beautiful?” she would ask as they walked up and down the garden. Rémond would assent. “My ankle,” she would say meditatively, “you think it is not well turned.” And she would raise her skirts ever so little so that the smallest of feet and the most dainty of ankles would appear for a moment. Rémond would protest that by . . . “My figure,” she would say and run down a small path to pick a blossom. “My figure is ugly.” Rémond insisted that none could withstand her and that Peter of Aragon himself, who was taking all the châteaux in the country, would have to acknowledge himself her vassal. She said it was a pretty compliment, and she said he should make a poem about it, and she said he should send it to Peter in the form of a challenge, for she thought Peter might be amused. He did and announced in his poem further that if Peter came, he would “be treated according to his degree.” Peter came and was treated according to his degree, and the next morning the entire court knew that Rémond had been deceived again and that he had been used only as a decoy for the Aragonais.
Rémond married Guidairença, a poetess, in the way of business, and she too was unfaithful to him. He paid court to Ermengarde de Castras and wanted to divorce his wife and marry her. She consented. While he was at his castle arranging the details — he gave the castle as a free gift to Guidairença and her lover — his affianced bride married 238 Olivier de Saissac. In despair and humiliation Rémond retired to a monastery, from which he emerged just before the Albigensian crusade.
In all of these passionate comings and goings, Rémond and his friends stopped at Toulouse. Sometimes they would spend a season or two at the court of the powerful Count Raymond, or at the court of his rival; sometimes they would make up week-end parties in the numerous castles of Raymond’s powerful vassals.
Peire Rémond lo Proux of Toulouse is famous among poets for having been faithful to one lady for an entire year and he wrote a poem lamenting that love would not let him be faithless to her who treated him with unprecedented cruelty. He mentioned the tragedy of Jaufre Rudel in his great history of tragic love, which has since been lost. William of Aquitaine, the first troubadour, held the city of Toulouse for two years until Raymond came back from the Crusades and drove him out. Bernard de Ventadour, Bertrand de Born, Guilhem de Cabestanh, Gaucelm Faidit, Folquet de Marseille, and many others lived in and about Toulouse and made the thick nights musical with their tinkling songs.
The tradition of troubadourism still flickers in Toulouse, a feeble flame, in the Consistoire du Gai Savoir, an organization founded in the fourteenth century when troubadourism had died completely. The founders of the society, who were “learned, subtle, and discreet,” wished to serve “that excellent and virtuous Lady Science so that she might furnish and give them the gay art of writing in verse and teach them to make good poems so that they might speak 239 and recite good and remarkable words . . . in praise and honor of God, our Lord, and His glorious Mother and all the saints of Paradise for the instruction of the ignorant, for the restraint of foolish lovers, and in order that all might live in joy and happiness and dispel boredom and sadness, the enemies of the Gay Science.” They mastered the technique of troubadourism without the troubadour’s felicity. They mastered the body of poetry, but missed its soul; for that soul had fled more than a hundred years earlier when the great families were destroyed by the plague of puritanism which descended on the south of France.
Modern Toulouse is Renaissance and nineteenth-century, all but the cathedral church of St.-Saturnin. In the early morning or evening it is a splash of rose against dark violet mists. Its many-storied bell-tower is an intransigent challenge to the passing of time and the mutation of fashions, whatever those fashions may be.
