Transcribed from the 1908 Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE
TRANSLATED FROM THE OLD FRENCH
by
FRANCIS WILLIAM BOURDILLON
LONDON
kegan paul, trench, trübner & co. ltd.
dryden house, gerrard street, w.
1908
INTRODUCTION
The story of Love, that simple theme with variations ad libitum, ad infinitum, is never old, never stale, never out-of-date. And as we sometimes seek rest from the brilliant audacities and complex passions of Wagner or Tschaikowsky in the tender simplicity of some ancient English air, so we occasionally turn with relief from the wit and insight and subtlety of our modern novelists to the old uncomplicated tales of faerie or romance, and find them after all more moving, more tender, even more real, than all the laboured realism of these photographic days. And here before us is of all pretty love-stories perhaps the prettiest. Idyllic as Daphnis and Chloe, romantic as Romeo and Juliet, tender as Undine, remote as Cupid and Psyche, yet with perpetual