CHAPTER VIIIORANGE AND MARTIGUES

"The exaltation of desire, of hope, of self-sacrifice by which love manifests itself and in which it principally consists, could not have any moral merit nor could it become a real incentive to noble actions except on certain conditions. It was to be perfectly spontaneous, receive no law except its own, and could only exist for a single object."

"A woman," he continues, "could only feel her ascendancy and dignity, as a moral being, in relations where everything on her part was a gift, a voluntary favour, and not in relations where she had nothing to refuse."

As an example of the darker threads we may take the career of Guilhelm de Cabestaing, the unfortunate author of the famous canzo, a fragment of which is printed at the head of the chapter. He is one of the most prominent figures in troubadour history. He celebrated the charms of Berengaria des Baux, but his real love was for the wife of the Count of Rousillon, a ferocious person who suspected the troubadour's passion and set to work to entrap him by questions as to the state of his heart. Guilhelm, seeing his danger, admitted that he was seriously in love, but with the wife of another seigneur.

"Ah!" said the Count, pretending great sympathy, "I will help you in your suit; we will go at once to the castle of the fair lady."

Guilhelm had reluctantly to go, dreading the worst; but the lady, realising the situation, played up to the part, acknowledging her love for Guilhelm, and the Count's suspicions were thus allayed, but only to be aroused again by the canzo ("lou douz cossire") which Sermonda asked her lover to write to assure her that his faithlessness was only apparent. The gruesome end of the story, the treacherous slaying of the troubadour, the serving up of the heart at table to the wife, and her suicide on hearing the ghastly truth, illustrates too well the darker side of the life of the epoch.

FARM IN PROVENCE.By Joseph Pennell.

Pons de Chapteuil was a troubadour whose story greatly interested us, partly because of the romantic idea of the two mountain-set castles, one the home of Pons, at Chapteuil, near Le Puy, the other that of Alazais of Mercoeur, about twenty-five miles distant, "as one would measure across the mountains of Auvergne," says Justin Smith in his charming account of the story.

"Really it seems a little strange and eerie," he exclaims, "the romance between these two castles in the sky—a little like a love-affair between the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn."

The story was tender and bright and sad, as love-stories are apt to be, and very characteristic of the time. First the admiration and sympathy and the necessary adoration, then the taking fire of two generous natures; for this time the hero of romance is one to claim our admiration as a noble follower of the laws of chivalry.

"It was his pleasure to defend the weak of every sort, to be brave, true, faithful, liberal, and always to stand for the right."

Alazais had been married, probably by her father or her feudal over-lord, to Count Ozil de Mercoeur, for whom she made no pretence of any feeling, not even of esteem. It was evidently amariage de convenance, as most marriages were in those days, and the love of the Countess of Ozil for her neighbour across the mountains at least did not rob the Count of her affections, since he had never possessed or apparently desired them.

"In essential womanliness," says Justin Smith, "and in the graceful arts of social intercourse, we may think of her as the equal of any lady we have met.... Courtliness was her abiding principle, the true courtliness which consisted in ... graceful speech, in avoiding all that could annoy others, and in doing and saying everything that could make one loved." The mutual attraction of these two, the same writer continues, "penetrated by the fire of two ardent natures, came to be love, as the rich flow of the grape, changing its quality insensibly, acquires in time the sparkle, the bouquet, and the passion that make it wine."

Taking into consideration the times in which theylived, one would suppose that fortune favoured these two, and that for once one should have a nice cheerful story to console us for the many sad ones.

But no; Pons must needs harbour doubts of the sincerity of Alazais, and so he determined to test her by the time-honoured device of exciting jealousy. He therefore proceeded to devote himself ostentatiously to another lady, expecting a "burst of passionate anger" from Alazais. But that lady, one is glad to learn, disdained reproaches and kept a dignified silence. After all, she seems to have argued, Pons was not bound to devote himself to her or to continue to do so if he were tired of it.

So Pons, much astonished and chagrined, "became uneasy," as we are told, "quitted the lady of Roussillon, and returned to pray for pardon." But Alazais apparently thought that trying experiments upon a person one professes to love was somewhat inconsequent, and she intimated that she preferred not to receive Pons. He sent her a song, explaining his conduct.

"Ah, if you ask what urged me to depart," it begins (although, in fact, Alazais had never asked anything of the kind, much to the troubadour's annoyance)—

"'Twas not inconstancy nor fickleness;It was a wish conceived of love's excess,To try the test of absence on your heart.How grieved I, how regretted, when to meThat you were touched nor word nor token proved!But think not that you're free although unmov'd:From you I cannot, will not severed be!"

"'Twas not inconstancy nor fickleness;

It was a wish conceived of love's excess,

To try the test of absence on your heart.

How grieved I, how regretted, when to me

That you were touched nor word nor token proved!

But think not that you're free although unmov'd:

From you I cannot, will not severed be!"

But Alazais replied never a word. His influence over her seemed to have been entirely lost. Pons then "employed three ladies to plead his cause," and they entered so warmly into the undertaking that finally theysucceeded. So Pons made another song, very joyous this time, swearing that "henceforth he will keep strictly to the path of love, without deviating a hair's-breadth."

But in the midst of this new-found happiness Alazais falls ill and dies.

Barbara was much aggrieved. I scarcely liked to read her the end: how Pons wrote a piercing lament, saying he would close his heart and rend his strings, and

"Die tuneless and alone,"

a resolve which he actually carried out. He became a member of one of the military brotherhoods of the day, and died fighting in the Third Crusade.

This story, however, sad as it is, is among the most attractive of the troubadour romances, because the characters of Pons and Alazais were, on the whole, a near approach to the chivalric standard for men and women.

"When Pons" (to quote Justin Smith once more) "rode out of the lists, bearing his lady's glove in triumph, he felt a joy quite fresh in the experience of mankind."

This is, after all, a big fact, and it disposes once and for ever of the depressing doctrine that there is nothing new under the sun. If the twelfth century produced a new and beautiful fact in human history, so can the twentieth.

"Beauty gives men the best hint of ultimate good which their experience as yet can offer.""The Life of Reason"—George Santayana.

"Beauty gives men the best hint of ultimate good which their experience as yet can offer."

"The Life of Reason"—George Santayana.

CHAPTER VIII

ORANGE AND MARTIGUES

Every one who has travelled in mountain regions has been puzzled by the curious fact that the more peaks his journeyings reveal to him the more there are to reveal. The number of the mountains seems to increase in geometrical proportion and the traveller has presently to learn that, in spite of all appearances, the last towering summit that moves into view will presently become the platform from which he must crane his neck to contemplate a still more towering wooer of the clouds and a still grander scene of desolation and primæval silence.

The traveller in Provence receives a similar impression in relation not to material but to historical immensities. No sooner has one spot been explored, than another mountain-peak of tradition comes into sight, luring ever farther afield.

This is one of the pains of the ardent traveller, and it forms a curious analogy with the life-journey itself, in which renunciation after renunciation has to be made, not merely of things far distant and beautiful, but of things beautiful and near, which only need the stretch of the hand to touch, but yet are farther from reach than the Pole-star itself. Among the serious renunciations that had to be made during our Provençal visit must becounted Courthéson, where one of our favourite troubadours, Raimbaut de Vacquciras, spent so many of his early days at the Court of Guilhelm des Baux (of whom more hereafter). Then there was Ventadour—not exactly near, but still within hail—once so brilliant a centre of learning and song; and Salon, the reputed scene of Mary Magdalene's later life. Of this bright little prosperous city, famous for its oil trade, with its dripping fountain and grey donjon, we did catch an early morning glimpseen routefor an inexorable train. Rocamadour, full of romantic beauty; Le Puy, strangest of rock-set cities; ill-fated Béziers, of the Albigensian wars; Dragignan, and a hundred others were one and all alluring and unattainable.

ROMAN GATEWAY AT ORANGE (ON THE LYONS ROAD).By Joseph Pennell.

A few hours between trains permitted a visit to Orange and its great theatre and triumphal arch, which redeem the place from a somewhat featureless commonplace.

LOOKING DOWN THE GRANDE RUE, MARTIGUES.By Joseph Pennell.

We had to ask our way to the theatre, unluckily ofsome perfidious inhabitant whose misdirection would have landed us in the suburbs, had not Fortune, in the shape of a dapper youth in the first rosy flush of a dawning moustache, come to the rescue.

In the pursuit of his father's trade as a corn-dealer, he had travelled and learnt English together with a becoming admiration for the British nation, his enlightenment being assisted by an English mother. It seemed strange to think of an Englishwoman settled down in this little French provincial town, but as our guide chattered on, unconsciously revealing the life of the place, it was clear that French provincial human nature is much the same as any other. Heartburning, gossip, jealousies, stupendous proprieties, "convenances" of the most all-shadowing and abstruse kind made up the dreary existence of the inhabitants. Wretched "jeunes filles" unable to cross a street unattended, mothers on the prowl for husbands for the "jeunes filles" (our young friend intimated delicately that he had a perilous time of it among enterprising parents); the men intent on business and the recreations of thecaféand so forth—it all sounded disheartening enough, and the hopelessness of it seemed to settle on the spirit like a blight.

Our guide regarded his native town with disdain. Its narrow streets and dingy aspect he pointed out with ironical pomp.

"This, you see, is our main street. Magnificent you cannot deny!" Had he not travelled and seen better things?

But the great monuments?

The youth shrugged his shoulders.

For those who liked that sort of thing——!

ON THE GRAND CANAL, MARTIGUES.By Joseph Pennell.

From behind blinds of discreet windows inquiring heads might often be seen peering out at our quaintprocession of three, and our guide would then pull himself up and step out with a brisk experienced stride, as of one who has relations with a world that is not Orange!

But those faces dimly seen behind blinds—one smiled, but they brought a shiver at the same time.

"English tourists often come to have a look at the monuments, and then I always try to act as guide. I like to talk to them—I get so tired of living here. It is terrible!"

CHURCH AT MARTIGUES.By Joseph Pennell.

Poor budding, ambitious youth!

The great Roman theatre stands apart from the rest of the buildings, a vast, blank surface of masonry forming the façade. Inside are the circular tiers of seats, and up these we clambered to the top, looking down into the silent stage and feeling that familiar, bootless longing of the traveller for a glimpse of the scene in the days of its glory.

The Roman arch is at the farther end of the town,standing apart in its majesty, a grand forlorn monument of that wonderful people.

It was hard sometimes to steer among so many possibilities of adventure. It behoved us to choose wisely since time and tide were hastening. But perhaps it was we, not time and tide, that were really hastening. These do not hasten; it is only their unhappy victims who are never ready for their coming. To the truly wise and understanding mind, doubtless, haste would be a thing unknown. Its possessor would be able to meditate serenely between trains at Clapham Junction.

BOATS, MARTIGUES.By Joseph Pennell.

But for less accomplished mortals the sense of limited time with otherwise unlimited opportunity, tends to a certain breathlessness which, however, in our case, gradually gave way before the influences of the country.

THE PORTAL OF THE CHURCH, MARTIGUES.By Joseph Pennell.

One of the places that we had to renounce, might, from all accounts, have been a sort of Finishing Schoolfor students of Serenity. This was Martigues, the little town on the Etang de Berre, where all good painters go when they die. They also wisely go there in swarms before they die. They place here, in opposition to orthodox scholarship, the site of the Garden of Eden. And judging by their records, this, if mistaken, is not surprising. The place induces on a suitable temperament a sort of sketching debauch:—Martigues from the Lagoon; Old Houses, Martigues; Churches, Martigues; Groups of Boats, Martigues; Nooks and Corners, Martigues; the Harbour, Martigues; Sailors and Fishermen, Martigues; Martigues in the Morning; Martigues at Noon; Martigues at Night; Martiguesad infinitum.

Quiet waterways among the mellowest of old houses, churches keeping tranquil guard above the ripple of the lagoon; the silence of the sunny port cheerily broken by cries of sailors and bargemen, by the drowsy life of the place; lights and shadows, colour in every tone, form in a thousand avatars; creepers clambering over decaying walls, flowers in odd crannies; all this offers infinitely more attraction to the artist than all our Horticultural-Gardens-of-Paradise put together. So it is not to Heaven that he goes, if he can help it; he goes to Martigues.

He is never tired of it, as his numerous sketches show.

Not to have seen Martigues is a precious privilege in its way: it is a life-long safeguard against satiety; for then, whatever comes,oneunfulfilled desire at least remains: to see Martigues—and sketch!

1. Marriage cannot be pleaded as an excuse for refusing to love.2. A person who cannot keep a secret can never be a lover.3. No one can really love two people at the same time.4. Love never stands still; it always increases—or diminishes.5. Favours which are yielded unwillingly are tasteless.6. A person of the male sex cannot be considered a lover until he has passed out of boyhood.7. If one of two lovers dies, love must be foresworn for two years by the survivor.8. No one can love unless the soft persuasion of love itself compel him.11. It is not becoming to love those ladies who only love with a view to marriage.13. A love that has once been rendered common and commonplace never, as a rule, endures very long.14. Too easy possession renders love contemptible.15. Every lover is accustomed to grow pale at the sight of his lady-love.16. At the sudden and unexpected prospect of his lady-love, the heart of the true lover invariably palpitates.18. If love once begins to diminish, it quickly fades away and rarely recovers itself.20. Every action of a lover terminates with the thought of the loved one.The Laws of Love accepted by Courts of Love.(As given by Rowbotham.)

The Laws of Love accepted by Courts of Love.(As given by Rowbotham.)

A SQUARE AT NIMES.By Joseph Pennell.

CHAPTER IX

ROMANTIC LOVE

Criticise and condemn as we may the conceptions of the time, the institution of chivalry accomplished a marvellous work of regeneration wherever it was able to establish itself.

One can but turn with emotion and gratitude to the land where it has blossomed into some of its most beautiful forms, where the warm blood of the South took fire and impelled to the following of noble ideals with the ardour of heroes and the steadfastness of saints.

Greek, Celtic, Phœnìcian, Iberian, Ligurian, Saracen blood flows in the veins of the people; and in looking at their faces one can understand why the troubadourssang such sweet and merry songs, and why the country to this day may be called the land

"Of joy, young-heartedness, and love...."

It was the Duke of Acquitaine, himself a troubadour, who gave us those words so descriptive of Southern France, in the gay little verse,—

"A song I'll make you worthy to recall,With ample folly and with sense but small,Of joy, young-heartedness, and love will I compound it all."

"A song I'll make you worthy to recall,

With ample folly and with sense but small,

Of joy, young-heartedness, and love will I compound it all."

In truth it was a wonderful time, full of colour and passion in which there was the shadow of tragedy, but seldom the grey and dust-colour of the sordid and the mean.

For women it was literally a coming-of-age. A modern author speaks about the "advent of woman in man's world," when she "became for the first time something more than a link between two generations."

Love, as a romantic sentiment, became possible between men and women, because the woman's individuality as a human being was recognised, and with it her right to give or to withhold her love. True love and true friendship, as we moderns understand them, may almost claim to take their rise in the age of chivalry.

Fraternity of arms constituted an honoured tie among knights. They received the Sacrament together, exchanged armour, and from that time forth supported one another wherever they went, and at all hazards.

"From this day forward ever moreNeither fail, either for weal or wo,To help other at need.Brother be now true to me,And I shall be as true to thee."

"From this day forward ever more

Neither fail, either for weal or wo,

To help other at need.

Brother be now true to me,

And I shall be as true to thee."

This brotherhood in arms, however, should perhaps be described as a revival of an ancient idea, whereas love, as it developed under the laws of chivalry, was a thing hitherto unknown to mankind. Doubtless there had been obscure precursors of the ideal, for many times must a new thought be uttered before the air vibrates with sufficient strength to awake answering movements in other minds. The first to think and feel a new world into existence—which is the ultimate mission of thinking and feeling—often leaves nothing but that new world behind him; neither name, nor fame, nor fortune. And so we shall never know in what noble hearts the true romantic love between man and woman first sprang into being.

The new mode of thought kindled generous impulses. Often fantastic, not to say ridiculous, they were always graceful and full of the flavour of romance.

"Many a knight," we are told, "would sally forth from a besieged town during a suspension of hostilities and demand whether there was any cavalier of the opposite host who, for love of his lady bright, would do any deed of arms."

"Now let us see if there be any amorous among you," was the usual conclusion of such a challenge. And out would come prancing some armoured knight from the gates of the city, and the two, with much ceremony of salutation, would fall to and hack each other to pieces with the utmost courtesy and mutual respect.

"The air was rent with names of ladies" in the big tournaments of the day. "On, valiant knights, fair eyes behold you!"

The proclamation of the beauty of his lady, as all romances of that day remind us, was one of the serious duties of the knight, and Cervantes only slightly caricatures the custom when he makes Don Quixote "stationhimself in the middle of a high road and refuse to let the merchants of Toledo pass unless they acknowledged there was not in the universe a more beautiful damsel than the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso."

There was also a sort of official post or title,Poursuivant d'Amour, the knight dedicating himself to love as to a religion with solemn fervour. The Duke of Lancaster, says Froissart, "possessed, as part of his inheritance in Champagne, the Castle of Beaufort, of which an English Knight called Poursuivant d'Amour was Captain." It appears that this was a title which knights used to give themselves on account of wearing the portraits or colours of their mistress and challenging each other to fight in her honour.

To be in love was a social necessity. It was hopelessly "bad form" to be otherwise.

"A knight without love is an ear of wheat without grain," says some authority of the day.

It certainly was a lovelorn time! "Love was everything," says Justin Smith, an author whose two large volumes on the troubadours testify to wide study of the subject, "and we cannot wonder that much was made of it. Its hopes and fears were the drama of that day. Sweet and passionate thoughts were the concert and the opera. Tales of successful and unsuccessful wooing were the novels.... Love, as we are to learn, was the shoot of modern culture, and the tree that now overspreads us with its boughs bloomed, even in their time, into a poetry as unsurpassed and as unsurpassable after its kind as the epics of Homer."

But this immense change in the attitude of mind towards life and towards women naturally could not take place without producing a universal upheaval of the current morality: a thorough upsetting of the doctrinesupon which the husband had hitherto founded an authority practically limitless.

IN THE CAMARGUE, FROM THE RAILWAY.By E. M. Synge.

For women obedience and morality had been synonyms. The wife was "good" in proportion as she acknowledged by word and deed her husband's "rights" over her, as over any other of his possessions. Conduct implying independence, an infringement on these "rights," was the acme of wickedness. To act as if she belonged to herself was a sort of embezzlement, and of course this was the case still more unpardonably if she made so free as to bestow her heart on some other man; then they both became involved in the sin of purloining that which belonged to another. To flirt was a sort of petty peculation. It was because she so belonged to him, as real property, that the husband thought his "honour" injured by his wife's conduct, quite irrespective of any wound to his affections. If a man fails to keep a possession, given securely into his hands by law and custom and universal sentiment, he must indeed be a sorry sort of lord and master! Such was the popular view of the case, and the coarser and more brutal the society the more violent was this feeling of wounded vanity or "honour," as it was pompously called. But suddenly—or at least without traceable gradations—this bulwark of marital sovereignty was rent as by an earthquake, and the idea began to get abroad that the woman somewhatbelonged to herself; no longer entirely to her feudal or to her domestic lord. Had this new idea taken complete and undisturbed possession, it would have worked out a modern society very different from the society that now exists. But it did not obtain such mastery. It only shared the field with its predecessor. The confusion of standard was therefore extreme, for nobody paused to separate and choose between the two ideals; they were held simultaneously, nor is it onlyin the time of the troubadours that men and women hold beliefs about social matters that are mutually destructive.

So the old rights of property in the wife continued to hold sway even while she began dimly to feel and inwardly to claim the right to herself, with the resulting right to bestow her love where she pleased, or where she needs must. And that wrought wonderful changes.

One must approach this imaginative, passionate world, if we desire to understand it, with a spirit swift to detect differences and shades of feeling, to muster all the local conditions before the imagination; and one must banish scrupulously all ready-made maxims belonging to our own day, for these at once place us outside the epoch that we are trying to enter. It is this difficulty, this subtlety in the subject, which makes the study of that age and country so keenly interesting to all who are curious of the movements of human thought as it grows and changes under the pressure of its varying destinies.

These new ideals were now universal among kings and princes and all who had any pretensions to cultivation and good breeding. Love-affairs of which a married woman was the heroine were looked upon as essentially belonging to the chivalric order of things.

"These Courts of Love laid down rules for love," says Baring-Gould; "they allowed married women to receive the homage of lovers, and even nicely directed all the symptoms they were to exhibit.... There is the case of Dante and Beatrice, and of Wolfram von Eschenbach, one of the noblest and purest of singers, who idealised the Lady Elizabeth of Harlenstein.... It is precisely this unreal love, or playing at love-making, that is scoffed at by Cervantes in Don Quixote and the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso."

Of course, in this state of things there was much that seemed disorderly and was disorderly if the older view isto remain, in any sense, as a standard. Indeed it was, in some respects, perhaps, disorderly fromanypoint of view, as was inevitable during so vast an upheaval of social conditions. It was a battle of good and evil, but infinitely in advance of the previous state, when there was no battle, because evil was securely enjoying uncontested possession. From that enthroned and law-supported wrong there seemed no escape except through the "moral chaos"—if so it really was—of the troubadour era. Certainly the men and women of that time treated life very boldly and frankly, and they talked more about sentiment and the joy of life than about morality; but the atmosphere which lingers around them, as one feels it in their songs and stories, in all the delicate courtesy of their manners, the dignity and fineness of their sentiments, makes it impossible to think of them as essentially base or unlovable, whatever condemnation their departure from ancient standards may induce moralists to pronounce upon them.

Their ideals may have been false; that is a matter of individual opinion; but they lived in devotion to those ideals with an enthusiasm that has never been surpassed.

Perhaps the long repression, the second-hand vicarious existence suffered for so many ages by women, had made them almost intoxicated with this new experience, this coming of age as human beings, this entering into possession of themselves.

It was like a re-birth, and tempted to all sorts of wild adventures. Rebellion was in the air, and especially was it rife on all questions of love. As a recent writer remarks, men and women began to love each other because they should not have done so.

But love was treated very seriously as well as very fancifully. There was no aspect in which it did not play an importantrôlein this extraordinary age.

It set vielles lightly tinkling and lutes twanging, but it also took possession of great hearts and minds and ruled them for a lifetime. Love was sometimes a "lord of terrible aspect," as Dante has represented him. As women developed personality and individual qualities in their new freedom, thegrande passionbecame for the first time really possible. And their mental and spiritual development tended to promote the growth of the character of men in the same direction.

There seemed a sort of expectation running through the society of that time that a new source of joy had been found, a force that was to redeem and beautify life.

The author of "The Women of the Renaissance" represents the men of this later age—which, however, was still inspired by the chivalric outburst—asking themselves what was the good of learning, money, labour, or even semblances of joy if their hearts were empty.

"The heart," they complain, "makes itself felt above the claims of work, above the intellect, demanding for life a recompense, a goal. We perish for lack of something to love; out of mere self-pity we ought to bestow on ourselves the alms of life, which is love. All is vanity save this vanity, for before our birth, until our death, throughout our whole existence it bears in front of us the torch of life."

Looking back from this point to the Griselda-epoch, we have travelled far indeed!

With such aspirations, such ideas in the air (whether or not they were expressed in a definite way), marriage, which carried Griselda-associations with it, was naturally looked upon as altogether outside the realm of romance or happiness.

"To mingle it with love, the absolute, great enthusiasms of heart or intellect, was to lay up for oneself disasters, or at least certain disappointment," says M. deMaulde de La Clavière, and he instances as the object of ridicule in that era a lady who speaks with a sigh of the "unaccustomed pleasure" of loving the man she married. He defines the Renaissance view of wedlock as "the modest squat suburban villa in which you eat and sleep: passion is a church spire piercing the sky...."

That being the general consensus of opinion on the subject, it is not surprising that nearly all the love-stories of that day are entirely disconnected with the idea of marriage. The holy estate itself was defined as "the suburbs of hell." Marriages were "unions of policy and position." And almost without exception they were arranged by the parents, in accordance with material considerations, the old feudal idea lingering on in this department of life and the daughter being handed over by the father to a suitable (or unsuitable) husband, without his ever dreaming of consulting her views in the matter. She was generally too inexperienced to have any views of importance, and even had she been consulted probably would not, at that time, have been able to make a much better choice than her father made for her.

But clearly if that was the order of things, love and romance must establish their kingdom outside of marriage, and this was exactly what occurred.

"Since love is, by the nature of things, free and spontaneous, rebellion and revolution were inevitable unless womankind were to become something else than human."

The point of view becomes clearer in the light of some of the decisions and rules of the Courts of Love; for even if, as so many writers insist, these tribunals never really existed, the quoted rules and judgments must at any rate represent the ideas that swayed the society of the day.

OLD BRIDGE AT ST. GILLES IN THE CAMARGUE.By E. M. Synge.

These courts were said to be held under the presidency of some great lady of the district, assisted by a council of ladies and knights.

One of the questions submitted to the Court of the Comtesse de Champagne was: "Can true love exist between two persons who are married?"

And the Countess, aided by her councillors, pronounced as follows:—

"Therefore, having examined the said arguments by the aid of sound science, we proceed hereby to enact that love cannot extend his laws over husband and wife, since the gifts of love are voluntary, and husband and wife are the servants of duty. Also between the married can there be in our opinion no jealousy, since between them there can be no love.... This is our decision, formed with much deliberation and with the approval of many dames; and we decree that it be held firm and inviolable."

This decree proved a serious stumbling-block to one betrothed lady who had promised a cavalier that if ever she should find herself at liberty, she would accept his devotion. "Presently she married the lover to whom she was plighted, whereupon the second knight resumed his suit, conceiving—according to the ideas of the day—that the lady was now fully at liberty. She, however, could not be persuaded against the evidence of her feelings, ... and the matter was referred to the queen, Eleanor, wife of Henry II. of England. Her award could not run counter to that of the Countess of Champagne, who has pronounced that love cannot exist between husband and wife. It is our decree, therefore, that the dame aforesaid keep faith with her cavalier."

The only means of evading this decree was for the lady to declare that henceforth she intended to abandon love altogether, but if she did that she was obliged to make up her mind to endure social ostracism, for then "she wassure to be shunned by the gay ladies and gentlemen who then formed the vast majority of the fashionable world." We are not told what the lady decided to do in this most trying dilemma.

Altogether the state of society under the sway of the Courts of Love—or of the sentiment they represent—seems like that of some strange fairy-tale. Nothing could have been more fantastic or romantic; but however ridiculous they may seem to the critical mind, there was always a strain that one can only call noble running through it all. It might be dangerous, impracticable, subversive, "immoral," if one will, but it was never paltry or base.

In their own fashion the reputed Courts of Love upheld a very high ideal. They insisted upon the absolute sacredness of a promise and of the word of honour, which a knight or a lady must keep to the death. They demanded fidelity between lovers, for that was considered "to be the essence of high-toned gallantry."

All this is our own inheritance of to-day. As regards the etiquette of love-making the Court instituted what were called the four degrees of love: "hesitating," "praying," "listening," and "drurerie." "When the lady consented to enter this last stage, she granted the gentleman his first kiss ... after which there could be no withdrawal from the engagement."

The lady was often unwilling to give it, and there are many stories of troubadours who try to obtain it by fraud or artifice. It seems strange that, in that case, in a society with a high sense of honour, it should have possessed any binding value, but apparently it had something of the quality of the marriage ceremony, and therefore, perhaps, something of the idea of a tie which might be enforced against the will of the person concerned.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for the modern eye to see this era exactly as it was. Writers represent it as corrupt and unlovely or as romantic and noble according to their own particular bias. The former attitude is perhaps largely determined by a leaning towards the older order of thought which the advent of chivalry challenged; while the less severe view is apt to accompany sympathy with the newer doctrine, which establishes the woman as an independent being, for good or for evil, and refuses to regard her as the property in any sense whatever—whether by gift or by "contract"—of another person. As this latter ideal is in its infancy even yet, the majority of writers see little in the troubadour epoch but hopeless licence. It is to them merely an outbreak of "immortality," and neither the passionate rebellion against an old and degrading system nor the enthusiastic reaching out towards something better saves it from their severe condemnation. But we have all of us good reason to be thankful for this stage of social upheaval through which our spiritual ancestors passed, and it ill becomes us to cast reproaches at those who have brought us, in one great burst of inspiration, so much farther on our way.

"The name of Arles has raised great discussions.... Some see in it a Greek origin,Agns, others regard it as Latin,Ara lata(raised altar), because the Romans there found an altar consecrated to Diana of the Ephesians by the Phoceans of Marseilles: ... others as CelticAr-lath, moist place, on account of its marshes.... It is sufficiently evident that the name Arelate has not a physiognomy either Greek or Roman; and the radicalArwhich is found ... in the name of the Arekomique Volcians ... the Arnnematici, the Arandunici ... permits one to affirm that this city was contemporary with those ancient peoples, and existed in the fifth century before our era.... Placed between its river and its inland sea, Arles had in fact two ports as she had two cities: on the left bank of the Rhone was the Patrician town, with its temples, its amphitheatre, its theatre, its forum, the baths, triumphal arches, statues.... On the right bank ... was the city of business men, sailors, and the people. Larger in those days than the Patrician city,Trinquetaillesis nothing to-day but the maritime suburb of the modern town. A bridge of boats connected the two towns, and Constantine substituted for it a bridge of masonry of which one can still see the remains on the quays of the Rhone."Translation from Charles Lenthéric.

Translation from Charles Lenthéric.

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