"Is it better to have wisdom or to be irresistible with the ladies?" is one of the recorded subjects.
"Who loves the more, he that is broken by his lady's coldness, or he that is stimulated thereby to distinguish himself the more?"
"Which is harder to bear, debt or love-sickness?"[24]
The jury look in vain to Raimbaut for his usual brilliant judgments. Alazais, we may imagine, had guessed the cause of his silence.
And she knows her own fate as she sits there, beautiful and calm; perhaps accepting it as the will of heaven; perhaps struggling desperately against the thought that the troubadour would go forth into the world and quickly fill the place of love in his heart—perhaps with another love!
"Come, Raimbaut, what is your opinion?" cries one of the young men, "You were not wont to be so moody."
It had to be explained to him that they were discussing the pains and penalties of love, and whether after all it did not offer too much grief and longing and too little reward to make it worth the while of a reasonable being; the proposition of a truly bold spirit in a mediæval Court of Love!
Raimbaut's reply is recorded in the history of his life: "A man forges cold iron who thinks he can make a gain without a loss."
Perhaps he looked back to the scene of his boyhood, the little town of Vacqueiras across the mountains, and recognised how he had enlarged his world by coming here and how he had so lost things dear to him, never to be regained.
And now there was to be another gain—and another loss.