Vernon Lee, in her Euphorion, passes a severe sentence on the romantic affection professed by the minstrels of the Middle Ages for noble ladies. She says it was rank adultery and nothing short. I do not think so. There may have been cases, there no doubt were instances of criminal passion, but in nine cases out of ten these troubadours sang for their bread and butter. They lauded the seigneurs to the skies for their gestes of valour, and their ladies for their transcendent beauty; they laid on their colours with a trowel, and were paid for so doing. That some of them burnt their fingers in playing with fire one cannot doubt, but I hardly think that they set to work in their trifling with the intent of provoking blisters. The husbands of the much-lauded ladies were hardly likely to suffer this sort of fun to proceed beyond romancing. There was always a chance of a minstrel who went too far with his heart into the flames, getting it roasted on a spit and served up à la William de Cabestaing.
Besides, a good many of these much-besung ladies were no young brides, but mature and withering matrons. A troubadour attached himself to a lady as he attached himself to a seigneur, and, as a client of both, fawned on and flattered both. I cannot refer to Petrarch, for I believe his Laura was not a married woman, and the Platonism of his affection is more than questionable. He was not an acknowledged troubadour, but an exile, whom the haughty family of Sade would not suffer Laura to marry. But there is the case of Dante and Beatrice, and of Wolfram of Eschenbach, one of the noblest and purest of singers, who idealised his lady Elizabeth, wife of the Baron of Hartenstein, and with him most undoubtedly the devotion was without tincture of grossness. It is precisely this unreal love, or playing at love-making, that is scoffed at by Cervantes in Don Quixote and the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso.
Why, that unfortunate William de Cabestaing, whose heart was offered to his mistress, sang of her as cold to his suit:—
"Since Adam gathered from the tree
The apple, cause of all our woe,
Christ ne'er inspired so fair a she.
A graceful form, not high nor low,
A model of just symmetry,
A skin whose purity and glow
The rarest amethyst surpass;
So fair is she for whom I sigh.
But vain are all my sighs, alas!
She heeds me not, nor deigns reply."
The Courts of Love held by ladies of high rank were originally courts in which the rules of minstrelsy were laid down, they pronounced on the qualifications of a candidate, they polished and cherished the Langue d'oc in its purity, dictated the subjects upon which the troubadours were to compose their lays, judged their pretensions, settled their controversies, recompensed their merits, and punished by disgrace or exclusion those who violated the laws. In the twelfth century these Courts of Ladies drew up Provençal grammars, in which the rules of the dialect were laid down. One of these is the "Donatus provincialis," another was composed by Raimond Vidal. But these Courts of Love went further. They laid down rules for love; they allowed married women to receive the homage of lovers, and even nicely directed all the symptoms they were to exhibit of reciprocation. But it is quite possible that this was all solemn fooling, and meant no harm.
I wonder whether those golden locks carried off by the taverner had belonged to one of those queens of beauty sung by the troubadours! Probably so, for the church of S. Vincent was their mausoleum.
One of the noble families that owed feudal duty to the Lords of Les Baux was that of Porcelet, and their mansion is one of the very few that is not deserted and ruinous in the little town. It is now occupied by some Sisters of Mercy who keep in it an orphanage. The Porcelets were the first nobles of Arles. King René of Anjou, who was fond of giving nicknames, sometimes flattering, sometimes the reverse to this, entitled the family Grandeur des Porcelets. Other of his designations were Inconstance des Baux, Déloyauté de Beaufort, Envie de Candole, Dissolution de Castelane, Sottise de Grasse, and Opiniâtreté de Sade.
A story is told of one of the sieges of Les Baux which is found elsewhere. The garrison of the castle and the inhabitants of the town were reduced to great straits for food, when orders were issued that everyone should surrender what he had into a common fund, to be doled out in equal portions to all. As none complied with this order, a domiciliary visit was made to every house, when an old woman was found to have a pig, likewise a sack of barley meal. The Sieur des Baux ordered the pig to be given a feed and then to be thrown over the precipice. When the besiegers found that the besieged had a pig so well nourished they thought it was hopeless to reduce the place, and raised the siege.
In the thirteenth century the little eagle's nest of a town numbered three thousand six hundred inhabitants. At the present time it cannot count four hundred. Every two or three years sees another house deserted, and the tenants migrate to the valley or plain.
The houses are, like the castle, partly scooped out of the rock, and partly constructed. Whole chambers, kitchens, cellars are veritable caverns. There can be no doubt that the place has been colonised from prehistoric times, and that many of these caves are the dwellings of a primitive population in the Stone period. Vast quantities of Greek Marseilles medals and of coins of the Empire have been found here, as well as fragments of pottery of every age. A few years ago a beautiful bronze helmet of Greek shape was here discovered.