Alas, things were not exactly as Vidal wished, in spite of his pleasant believings, but he had rosy hours and sang enchanting songs and gave much joy with his gifts and his charm. "Vierna," however, did not at all appreciate him. She gave him a ring and a little perfunctory graciousness, as she was bound to do to sustain her character as a courteous lady; but she appears to have wearied of his songs and his devotion. At last her husband tried to reconcile her to the troubadour, and to induce her to treat him more kindly. Vidal lost heart after a time, and concluded he was a fool.
"But beauty makes the sanest man go mad," he sang or said, and though he had many love-affairs and fancies, they seem to have been of slight seriousness compared with his passion for Azalais. In his erratic life, he haunted the neighbourhood of Carcassonne and Toulouse; visited Albi—whence the luckless Albigenses took their name—and Saissac and Cabaret near Carcassonne. In Provence he had an unpleasant adventure at St. Gilles, where the husband of a lady to whom he addressed love-songs and of whose love he had boasted, became enraged and bored the poet's too eloquent tongue.
In these strange times, the exquisite chivalric civilisation being but newly formed—like a sheet of ice on a dark pool—had very thin places. Vidal's friend Ugo del Baux bore him off—perhaps to his wonderful eyrie in the Alpilles—and nursed him till he was well again.
Vidal's wanderings were far and wide in Languedoc and Provence. We even hear of him singing in the little grey hill-top village of Beuil in the mountains to the north of Nice.
Near Carcassonne lived a famous beauty, Loba de Pegnautier. She inhabited the fortified town of Cabaret, and there knights and troubadours flocked to visit her, among them Pierre Vidal.
The story goes that in order to please her he adopted the crest or emblem of a Wolf in compliment to her name, Loba; and, dressed in a wolf-skin, ran out into the field and had himself hunted by the shepherds with their dogs. But Loba only made fun of him, and it appears that the shepherds hunted him rather too seriously, and altogether the foolish poet came off unhappily in this fantastic scheme of love-making.
He is said to have joined Richard Cœur de Lion in his Crusade, to have visited Spain and Italy, notably the Court of Montferrat, and everywhere to have pursued his troubadour's calling and the will-of-the-wisp of a satisfying love.
He once tried boldness with Azalais and ventured on stealing a kiss one morning while she was sleeping. But he lived to rue the day. She fell into a passion of anger and refused to accept any apology. However, he murmured ancient saws about women and hoped on. Count Barral laughed at his wife for taking the wild poet's doings so seriously. She was not to be appeased, and finally Vidal went off to Cyprus and characteristically married a Princess who claimed the title of Empress of the Eastern Empire. And the two set up an Imperial Court and ordered an expensive throne, and thoroughly enjoyed themselves until Vidal had spent all his money. Presumably the Princess died, or they parted, and then Barral insisted on Vidal's returning to Provence; and he met him joyously at Les Baux, and brought him home to Marseilles where Azalais welcomed him with a freely given kiss as a token of forgiveness. And poor Vidal breaks out into a veritable spring-song of joy and thankfulness. But the Countess tired of him very soon, and never had the least idea of returning his passion.
So he starts again on his wanderings, and goes all over the world with one patron and friend after another, and so ends his strange, brilliant, joyous, troubled, unsatisfied life.
With all his natural susceptibility and need of affection he seems never to have overcome his love for the beautiful Azalais, nor, with all his charm, does he appear to have been able to inspire a serious attachment in any of the innumerable ladies to whom he warbled his graceful canzos. He never seems to have thoroughly grown up, and probably no woman capable of passionate attachment could have bestowed the full flood of it on a nature so immature.