You never heard, perhaps, of Geoffrey Rudel, who "died for the charms of an imaginary mistress." He fell in love with the Countess of Tripoli, never having seen her. He loved the very fame of her beauty. He set sail for the East, and endured the agonies of travel of those days. Whether anticipation was better than realisation, we cannot know to-day, having no portrait of the countess; but at least anticipation was more fatal, for it wrought him into such a fever, that when at last Tripoli was reached, he was carried ashore dying. The countess had heard of his pilgrimage, and had hastened to greet him, only to be permitted to clasp his hand and to hear him gasp, with his last breath: "Having seen thee, I die satisfied."
There is a distressing ambiguity about the troubadour's last words.
And so there was the other troubadour, the Châtelain Regnault de Coucy. His mistress was a married woman, whom he left to go to the Third Crusade. In the inveterate siege of Acre, he was mortally wounded before those odious Paynim walls; but, with his dying breath, he begged that his heart be taken from his breast and sent home to her who had owned it. The stupid messenger, arriving at home, betrayed to the husband what it was he had been charged to deliver, and the husband chose a most mediæval revenge: he had the heart of the troubadour cooked and placed before his wife. When she had eaten, he told her what sweetmeat it was she had so relished. Thereafter, she starved herself to death. The same story is told of the troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh; but it is good enough to repeat.
There was another old troubadour, Pierre Vidal, of whom an ancient biographer wrote that he "sang better than any man in the world, and was one of the most foolish men who ever lived, for he believed everything to be just as it pleased him and as he would have it be." But the biographer contradicted his own beautiful portrait by telling how poor Pierre sang once too well to a married woman, whose husband took him, jailed him, and pierced his linnet tongue.
MARTIN LUTHER
If we cannot omit these troubadours, how can we overlook Martin Luther, whose musical attainments the skeptics are wont to minimise, as others deny his claim to that magnificent ejaculation: "Who loves not wine, women, and song remains a fool his whole life long." No one claims that Luther wrote his own compositions, but that he dictated them to trained musicians who wrote down, and then wrote up such melodies as he played upon the flute. But whatsoever may be the truth of his position as a composer, no one can deny him either a passion for music or a domestic romance. The runaway monk told the truth, when he said: "I married a runaway nun."