"The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and the Aubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few, for the elect and peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But below this intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of literature ... reaching ... an audience which the concentrated passion of those higher lyrics left untouched ... the only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought he detected in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French of the latter half of the thirteenth century ... and there were reasons which made him divine for it a still more ancient ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin...."
Walter Pater.
CHAPTER XV
BEAUCAIRE AND ITS LOVE-STORY
Beaucaire, it may be remembered, has a hill-set castle opposite King René's at Tarascon. The two stand frowning at one another across the river, unforgetful of their old feuds.
The town was the property of the Counts of Toulouse, before the Albigensian wars snuffed out that great family, and it had its share of suffering in those desperate persecutions. The Pope gave all their domains to his accomplice, Simon de Montfort, because Raimon VI. of Toulouse—one of the noblest figures of the Middle Ages—had dared to oppose the massacre of the helpless Albigenses.
