The Romance of Biography Volume I Part 2

[11] "Depuis ne fut jamais veue faire bonne chre," says the old chronicle.--I am tempted to add the description of the first and last interview of the Countess and her lover in the exquisite old French, of which the antique simplicity and navet are untranslateable.

"En cet estat fut conduit au port de Trypolly, et l arriv, son compagnon feist (_fit_) entendre la Comtesse la venue du Pelerin malade. La Comtesse estant venue en la nef, prit le pote par la main; et lui, sachant que c'stait la Comtesse, incontinent aprs le doult et gracieux accueil, recouvra ses esprits, la remercia de ce qu'elle lui avait recouvr la vie, et lui dict: 'Trs ill.u.s.tre et vertueuse princesse, je ne plaindrai point la mort oresque'--et ne pouvant achever son propos, sa maladie s'aigrissant et augmentant, rendit l'esprit entre les mains de la Comtesse."--_Vies des plus clbres Potes Provenaux_, p. 24.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LOVES OF THE TROUBADOURS CONTINUED.

In striking contrast to the tender and gentle Rudel, we have the ferocious Bertrand de Born: he, too, was one of the most celebrated Troubadours of his time. As a petty feudal sovereign, he was, partly by the events of the age, more by his own fierce and headlong pa.s.sions, plunged in continual wars. Nature however had made him a poet of the first order. In these days he would have been another Lord Byron; but he lived in a terrible and convulsed state of society, and it was only in the intervals s.n.a.t.c.hed from his usual pursuits,--that is, from burning the castles, and ravaging the lands of his neighbours, and stirring up rebellion, discord, and bloodshed all around him,--that he composed a vast number of _lays_, _sirventes_, and _chansons_; some breathing the most martial, and even merciless spirit; others devoted to the praise and honour of his love, or rather loves, as full of submissive tenderness and chivalrous gallantry.

He first celebrated Elinor Plantagenet, the sister of his friend and brother in arms and song, Richard Coeur de Lion; and we are expressly told that Richard was proud of the poetical homage rendered to the charms of his sister by this knightly Troubadour, and that the Princess was far from being insensible to his admiration. Only one of the many songs addressed to Elinor has been preserved; from which we gather, that it was composed by Bertrand in the field, at a time when his army was threatened with famine, and the poet himself was suffering from the pangs of hunger. Elinor married the Duke of Saxony, and Bertrand chose for his next love the beautiful Maenz de Montagnac, daughter of the Viscount of Turenne, and wife of Talleyrand de Perigord. The lady accepted his service, and acknowledged him as her Knight; but evil tongues having attempted to sow dissension between the lovers, Bertrand addressed to her a song, in which he defends himself from the imputation of inconstancy, in a style altogether characteristic and original. The warrior poet, borrowing from the objects of his daily cares, ambition and pleasures, phrases to ill.u.s.trate and enhance the expression of his love, wishes "that he may lose his favourite hawk in her first flight; that a falcon may stoop and bear her off, as she sits upon his wrist, and tear her in his sight, if the sound of his lady's voice be not dearer to him than all the gifts of love from another."--"That he may stumble with his shield about his neck; that his helmet may gall his brow; that his bridle may be too long, his stirrups too short; that he may be forced to ride a hard trotting horse, and find his groom drunk when he arrives at his gate, if there be a word of truth in the accusations of his enemies:--that he may not have a _denier_ to stake at the gaming-table, and that the dice may never more be favourable to him, if ever he had swerved from his faith:--that he may look on like a dastard, and see his lady wooed and won by another;--that the winds may fail him at sea;--that in the battle he may be the first to fly, if he who has slandered him does not lie in his throat," &c. and so on through seven or eight stanzas.

Bertrand de Born exercised in his time a fatal influence on the counsels and politics of England. A close and ardent friendship existed between him and young Henry Plantagenet, the eldest son of our Henry the Second; and the family dissensions which distracted the English Court, and the unnatural rebellion of Henry and Richard against their father, were his work. It happened some time after the death of Prince Henry, that the King of England besieged Bertrand de Born in one of his castles: the resistance was long and obstinate, but at length the warlike Troubadour was taken prisoner and brought before the King, so justly incensed against him, and from whom he had certainly no mercy to expect. The heart of Henry was still bleeding with the wounds inflicted by his ungrateful children, and he saw before him, and in his power, the primary cause of their misdeeds and his own bitter sufferings. Bertrand was on the point of being led out to death, when by a single word he reminded the King of his lost son, and the tender friendship which had existed between them.[12] The chord was struck which never ceased to vibrate in the parental heart of Henry; bursting into tears, he turned aside, and commanded Bertrand and his followers to be immediately set at liberty: he even restored to Bertrand his castle and his lands, "_in the name of his dead son_." It is such traits as these, occurring at every page, which lend to the chronicles of this stormy period an interest overpowering the horror they would otherwise excite: for then all the best, as well as the worst of human pa.s.sions were called into play. In this tempestuous commingling of all the jarring elements of society, we have those strange approximations of the most opposite sentiments,--implacable revenge and sublime forgiveness;--gross licentiousness and delicate tenderness;--barbarism and refinement;--treachery and fidelity--which remind one of that heterogeneous ma.s.s tossed up by a stormy ocean; heaps of pearls, unvalued gems, wedges of gold, mingled with dead men's bones, and all the slimy, loathsome, and monstrous productions of the deep, which during a calm remain together concealed and unknown in its unfathomed abysses.

To return from this long similitude to Bertrand de Born: he concluded his stormy career in a manner very characteristic of the times; for he turned monk, and died in the odour of sanct.i.ty. But neither his late devotion, nor his warlike heroism, nor his poetic fame, could rescue him from the severe justice of Dante, who has visited his crimes and his violence with so terrible a judgment, that we forget, while we thrill with horror, that the crimes were real, the penance only imaginary.

Dante, in one of the circles of the Inferno, meets Bertrand de Born carrying his severed head, _lantern wise_, in his hand;--the phantom lifts it up by the hair, and the ghastly lips unclose to confess the cause and the justice of this horrible and unheard-of penance.

----Or vedi la pena molesta Tu che spirando vai veggendo i morti; Vedi s'alcuna grande come questa.

E perch tu di me novella porti, Sappi ch' i' son Bertram dal Bornio, quelli Che diedi al Re giovane i ma' conforti.

I' feci 'l padre e 'l figlio in se ribelli:

Perch'io partii cos giunte persone, Part.i.to porto il mio cerebro, la.s.so!

Dal suo principio ch ' 'n questo troncone.

Cos s'osserva in me lo contrappa.s.so.[13]

Now behold This grievous torment, thou, who breathing goest To spy the dead: behold, if any else Be terrible as this,--and that on earth Thou mayst bear tidings of me, know that I Am Bertrand, he of Born, who gave King John The counsel mischievous. Father and son I set at mutual war:---- Spurring them on maliciously to strife.

For parting those so closely knit, my brain Parted, alas! I carry from its source That in this trunk inhabits. Thus the law Of retribution fiercely works in me.[14]

Pierre Vidal, whose description of love I have quoted before, was one of the most extraordinary characters of his time, a kind of poetical Don Quixotte:--his brain was turned with love, poetry, and vanity: he believed himself the beloved of all the fair, the mirror of knighthood, and the prince of Troubadours. Yet in the midst of all his extravagances, he possessed exquisite skill in his art, and was not surpa.s.sed by any of the poets of those days, for the harmony, delicacy, and tenderness of his amatory effusions. He chose for his first love the beautiful wife of the Vicomte de Ma.r.s.eilles: the lady, unlike some of the Princesses of her time, distinguished between the poet and the man, and as he presumed too far on the encouragement bestowed on him in the former capacity, he was banished: he then followed Richard the First to the crusade. The verses he addressed to the lady from the Island of Cyprus are still preserved. The folly of Vidal, or rather the derangement of his imagination, subjected him to some of those mystifications which remind us of Don Quixote and Sancho, in the court of the laughter-loving d.u.c.h.ess. For instance, Richard and his followers amused themselves at Cyprus, by marrying Vidal to a beautiful Greek girl of no immaculate reputation, whom they introduced to him as the niece of the Greek Emperor. Vidal, in right of his wife, immediately took the t.i.tle of Emperor, a.s.sumed the purple, ordered a throne to be carried before him, and played the most fantastic antics of authority. Nor was this the greatest of his extravagances: on his return to Provence, he chose for the second object of his amorous and poetical devotion, a lady whose name happened to be Louve de Penautier: in her honour he a.s.sumed the name of _Loup_, and farther to merit the good graces of his "_Dame_," and to do honour to the name he had adopted, he dressed himself in the hide of a wolf, and caused himself to be hunted in good earnest by a pack of dogs: he was brought back exhausted and half dead to the feet of his mistress, who appears to have been more moved to merriment than to love by this new and ridiculous exploit.

In general, however, the Troubadours had seldom reason to complain of the cruelty of the ladies to whom they devoted their service and their songs. The most virtuous and ill.u.s.trious women thought themselves justified in repaying, with smiles and favours, the poetical adoration of their lovers; and this lasted until the profession of Troubadour was dishonoured by the indiscretions, follies, and vices of those who a.s.sumed it. Thus Peyrols, a famous Provenal poet, who was distinguished in the court of the Dauphin d'Auvergne, fell pa.s.sionately in love with the sister of that Prince, (the Baronne de Mercoeur) and the Dauphin, (himself a Troubadour) proud of the genius of his minstrel and of the poetical devotion paid to his sister, desired her to bestow on her lover all the encouragement and favour which was consistent with her dignity.

The lady, however, either misunderstood her instructions, or found it too difficult to obey them: the seducing talents and tender verses of this _gentil Troubadour_ prevailed over her dignity:--Peyrols was beloved; but he was not sufficiently discreet. The sudden change in the tone and style of his songs betrayed him, and he was banished. A great number of his verses, celebrating the Dame de Mercoeur, are preserved by St. Palaye, and translated by Millot.

Bernard de Ventadour was beloved by Elinor de Guienne, afterwards the wife of our Henry the Second, and the mother of Richard the First:--I have before observed the poetical penchants of all Elinor's children, which they seem to have inherited from their mother.

Sordello of Mantua, whose name is familiar to all the readers of Dante, as occurring in one of the finest pa.s.sages of his great poem,[15] was an Italian, but like all the best poets of his day, wrote in the Provenal tongue: he is said to have carried off the sister of that modern Phalaris, the tyrant Ezzelino of Padua. There is a very elegant ballad (ballata) by Sordello, translated in Millot's collection; it is properly a kind of rondeau, the first line being repeated at the end of every stanza; "Helas! quoi me servent mes yeux?"--"Alas! wherefore have I eyes?"--It describes the pleasures of the Spring, which are to him as nothing, in the absence of the only object on which his eyes can dwell with delight. The arrangement of the rhymes in this pastoral song is singularly elegant and musical.

Lastly, as ill.u.s.trating the history of the amatory poetry of this age, I extract from Nostradamus[16] the story of the young Countess de Die; she loved and was beloved by the Chevalier d'Adhmar: (ancestor I presume to that Chevalier d'Adhmar who figures in the letters of Madame de Sevign.) It was not in this case the lover who celebrated the charms of his mistress, but the lady, who, being an ill.u.s.trious female Troubadour, "docte en posie," celebrated the exploits and magnanimity of her lover.

The Chevalier, proud of such a distinction, caused the verses of his mistress to be beautifully copied, and always carried them in his bosom; and whenever he was in the company of knights and ladies, he enchanted them by singing a couplet in his own praise out of his lady's book. The publicity thus given to their love, was quite in the spirit of the times, and does not appear to have injured the reputation of the Countess for immaculate virtue,[17] which Adhmar would probably have defended with lance and spear, against any slanderous tongue which had dared to defame her.

The conclusion of this romantic story is melancholy. Adhmar heard a false report, that the Countess, whose purity and constancy he had so proudly maintained, had cast away her smiles on a rival: he fell sick with grief and bitterness of heart: the Countess, being informed of his state, set out, accompanied by her _mother_, and a long train of knights and ladies, to visit and comfort him with a.s.surances of her fidelity; but when she appeared at his bed-side, and drew the curtain, it was already too late: Adhmar expired in her arms. The Countess took the veil in the convent of St. Honor, and died the same year _of grief_, says the chronicle;--and to conclude the tragedy characteristically, the mother of the young Countess buried her in the same grave with her lover, and raised a superb monument to the memory of both. The Countess de Die was one of the ten ladies who formed the _Court of Love_, held at Pierrefeu, (about 1194) and in which Estifanie de Baux presided.

These Courts of Love, and the scenes they gave rise to, were certainly open to ridicule; the "belles et subtiles questions d'amour" which were there solemnly discussed, and decided by ladies of rank, were often absurd, and the decisions something worse: still the fanciful influence they gave to women on these subjects, and the gallantry they introduced into the intercourse between the s.e.xes, had a tendency to soften the manners, to refine the language, and to tinge the sentiments and pa.s.sions with a kind of philosophical mysticism. But these gay and gallant Courts of Love, the Provenal Troubadours, their lays, which for two centuries had been the delight of all ranks of people, and had spread music, love, and poetry through the land;--their language, which had been the chosen dialect of gallantry in every court of Europe,--were at once swept from the earth.

The glory of the Provenal literature began when Provence was raised to an independent Fief, under Count Berenger I. about the year 1100; it lasted two entire centuries, and ended when that fine and fertile country became the scene of the horrible crusade against the Albigenses; when the Inquisition sent forth its exterminating fiends to scatter horror and devastation through the land, and the wars and rapacity of Charles of Anjou, its new possessor, almost depopulated the country. The language which had once celebrated deeds of love and heroism, now sang only of desolation and despair. The Troubadours, in a strain worthy of their gentle and n.o.ble calling, generally advocated the part of the Albigenses, and the oppressed of whatever faith; and in many provinces, in Lombardy especially, their language was interdicted, lest it might introduce heretical or rebellious principles; gradually it fell into disuse, and at length into total oblivion. The Troubadours, no longer welcomed in castle or in hall, where once

They poured to lords and ladies gay, The unpremeditated lay,

were degraded to wandering minstrels and itinerant jugglers. An attempt was made, about a century later, (1324) by the inst.i.tution of the Floral Games at Thoulouse, to keep alive this high strain of poetical gallantry. They were formerly celebrated with great splendour, and a shadow of this inst.i.tution is, I believe, still kept up, but it has degenerated into a mere school of affectation. The original race of the Troubadours was extinct long before Clemence d'Isaure and her golden violet were thought of.

I cannot quit the subject of the Troubadours without one or two concluding observations. To these rude bards we owe some new notions of poetical justice, which never seem to have occurred to Horace or Longinus, and are certainly more magnanimous, as well as more true to moral feeling, than those which prevailed among the polished Greeks and Romans. For instance, the generous Hector and the constant Troilus are invariably exalted above the subtle Ulysses and the savage Achilles.

Theseus, Jason, and neas, instead of being represented as cla.s.sical heroes and pious favourites of the G.o.ds, are denounced as recreant knights and false traitors to love and beauty. In the estimation of these chivalrous bards, a woman's tears outweighed the exploits of demi-G.o.ds; all the glory of Theseus is forgotten in sympathy for Ariadne; and neas, in the old ballads and romances, is not, after all his perfidy, dismissed to happiness and victory, but is plagued by the fiends, haunted by poor Dido's "grimly ghost," and, finally, doomed to perish miserably.[18] Nor does Jason fare better at their hands; in all the old poets he is consigned to just execration. In Dante, we have a magnificent and a terrible picture of him, doomed to one of the lowest circles of h.e.l.l, amid a herd of vile seducers, who betrayed the trusting faith, or bartered the charms of women. Demons scourge him up and down, without mercy or respite, in vengeance for the wrongs of Hypsipyle and Medea.

Guarda quel grande che viene E per dolor, non par lagrima spanda; Quanto aspetto reale ancor ritiene!

Quelli Giasone--

--Con segni e con parole ornate Isifile inganno---- Tal colpa a tal martiro lui condanna, Ed anche di MEDEA si fa vendetta.

INFERNO, C. 18.

"Behold that lofty shade, who this way tends, And seems too woe-begone to drop a tear; How yet the regal aspect he retains!

'Tis Jason-- --He who with tokens and fair witching words Hypsipyle beguil'd-- Such is the guilt condemns him to this pain; Here too Medea's injuries are aveng'd!"--

CAREY.

And Chaucer, in relating the same story, begins with a burst of generous indignation:

Thou root[19] of false lovers, Duke Jason, Thou slayer, devourer, and confusion Of gentil women, gentil creatures!

The story of his double perfidy is told and commented on in the same chivalrous feeling: and the old poet concludes with characteristic tenderness and simplicity--

This was the mede of loving, and guerdon That Medea received of Duke Jason, Right for her truth and for her kindnesse, That loved him better than herself I guesse!

And lefte her father and her heritage: And of Jason this is the va.s.salage That in his dayes was never none yfound So false a lover going on the ground.

It is in the same beautiful spirit of reverence to the best virtues of our s.e.x, that Alcestis, the wife of Admetus, who sacrificed her life to prolong that of her husband, is honoured above all other heroines of cla.s.sical story. She has even been elevated into a kind of presiding divinity,--a second Venus, with n.o.bler attributes,--and in her new existence is feigned to be the consort and companion of Love himself.

Another peculiarity of the poetry of the middle ages, was the worship paid to the daisy, (la Marguerite) as symbolical of all that is lovely in women. Why so lowly a flower should take precedence of the queenly lily and the sumptuous rose, is not very clear; but it seems to have originated with one of the old Provenal poets, whose mistress bore the name of Marguerite; and afterwards it became a fashion and a kind of poetical mythology.[20]

Thus in the "Flower and the Leafe" of Chaucer, the ladies and knights of the flower approach singing a chorus in honour of the Daisy, of which the burthen is, "si douce est la Marguerite."

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Le Roi lui demande, "S'il a perdu raison?" il lui rpond, "Helas, oui! c'est depuis la mort du Prince Henri, votre fils!"

[13] Inferno, c. xxviii.

[14] Carey's translation of Dante. Mr. Carey reads Re Giovanni, instead of Re giovane:--King John, instead of Prince Henry.

[15] Purgatorio, c. vi.

[16] Vies des plus clbres potes Provenaux.

[17] Agnes de Navarre, Comtesse de Foix, was beloved by Guillaume de Machaut, a French poet; he became jealous, and she sent her own confessor to him to complain of the injustice of his suspicions, and to swear that she was still faithful to him. She required, also, of her lover, to write and to publish in verse the history of their love; and she preserved, at the same time, in the eyes of her husband and of the world, the character of a virtuous Princess.--_See Foscolo_--_Essays on Petrarch._