"Popular gratitude, in its simple and credulous joy, fed itself with marvellous tales of their deeds of arms, exalted their valour, and united in its prayers its generous liberators with even the powers of Heaven. So natural is it for misfortune to deify those who bring it consolation.
"In those old times, as power was a right, courage was of course a virtue. These men, to whom was given, in the end, the name of Knights, carried this virtue to the highest degree. Cowardice was punished amongst them as an unpardonable crime; falsehood they held in horror; perfidy and breach of promise they branded with infamy; nor have the most celebrated legislators of antiquity any thing comparable to their statutes.
"This league of warriors maintained itself for more than a century in all its pristine simplicity, because the circumstances amidst which it rose changed but slowly; but when a great political and religious movement announced the revolution about to take place in the minds of men, then chivalry took a legal form, and a rank amidst authorised institutions.
"The crusades, and the emancipation of the cities which marked the apogee of the feudal government, are the two events which most contributed to the destruction of chivalry. True it is, that then also it found its greatest splendour; but it lost its virtuous independence and its simplicity of manners.
"Kings soon found all the benefit they might derive from an armed association which should hold a middle place between the crown and those too powerful vassals who usurped all its prerogatives. From that time, kings created knights, and bound them to the throne by all the forms used in feudal investiture. But the particular character of those distant times was the pride of privileges; and the crown could not devise any, without the nobility arrogating to itself the same. Thus the possessors of the greater feofs hastened to imitate their monarch. Not only did they create knights, but this title, dear in a nation's gratitude, became their hereditary privilege. This invasion stopped not there, lesser chiefs imitated their sovereigns, and chivalry, losing its ancient unity, became no more than an honourable distinction, the principles of which, however, had for long a happy influence upon the fate of the people."
Such then was the position of France towards the end of the twelfth century. A monarch, with limited revenues and curtailed privileges; a multitude of petty sovereigns, each despotic in his own territories; a chivalrous and ardent nobility; a population of serfs, just learning to dream of liberty; a soil rich, but overgrown with forests, and almost abandoned to itself; an immense body of the inhabitants living by rapine, and a total want of police and of civil government.
The crusade against Saladin was over.--Richard Cœur de Lion was dead, and Constantinople had just fallen into the hands of a body of French knights at the time this tale begins. At the same period, John Lackland held the sceptre of the English kings with a feeble hand, and a poor and dastardly spirit; while Philip Augustus, with grand views, but a limited power, sat firmly on the throne of France; and by the vigorous impulse of a great, though a passionate and irregular mind, hurried forward his kingdom, and Europe along with it, towards days of greatness and civilisation, still remote.
CHAPTER II.
Seven hundred years ago, the same bright summer sun was shining in his glory, that now rolls past before my eyes in all the beneficent majesty of light. It was the month of May, and every thing in nature seemed to breathe of the fresh buoyancy of youth. There was a light breeze in the sky, that carried many a swift shadow over mountain, plain, and wood. There was a springy vigour in the atmosphere, as if the wind itself were young. The earth was full of flowers, and the woods full of voice; and song and perfume shared the air between them.
Such was the morning when a party of travellers took their way slowly up the south-eastern side of the famous Monts d'Or in Auvergne. The road, winding in and out through the immense forest which covered the base of the hills, now showed, now concealed, the abrupt mountain-peaks starting out from their thick vesture of wood, and opposing their cold blue summits to the full blaze of the morning sun. Sometimes, turning round a sharp angle of the rock, the trees would break away and leave the eye full room to roam, past the forest hanging thick upon the edge of the slope, over valleys and hills, and plains beyond, to the far wanderings of the Allier through the distant country. Nor did the view end here; for the plains themselves, lying like a map spread out below, stretched away to the very sky: and even there, a few faint blue shadows, piled up in the form of peaks and cones, left the mind uncertain whether the Alps themselves did not there bound the view, or whether some fantastic clouds did not combine with that bright deceiver, fancy, to cheat the eye.