University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER 1.

In the first conception of the institution of chivalry it was
doubtless a device of great purity, and contemplated none but
highly proper and becoming purposes. Those very features
which, in our more sophisticated era, seem to have been the
most absurd, or at least fantastic, were, perhaps among its best
securities. The sentiment of love, apart from its passion, is what
a very earnest people, in a very selfish period, can not so well
understand; but it was this very separation of interests, which
we now hold to be inseparable, that constituted the peculiarity
of chivalry — the fanciful in its characteristics rendering sentiment
independent of passion, and refining the crude desire by
the exercise and influence of tastes, which do not usually accompany
it. Among the Provençal knights and troubadours, in the
palmy days of their progress, love was really the most innocent
and the most elevated of sentiments. It seems to have been
nursed without guile, and was professed, even when seemingly

in conflict with the rights of others, without the slightest notion
of wrong-doing or offence. It did not vex the temper, or impair
the marital securities of the husband, that the beauties of
his dame were sung with enthusiasm by the youthful poet; on
the contrary, he who gloried in the possession of a jewel, was
scarcely satisfied with fortune unless she brought to a just knowledge
of its splendors, the bard who alone could convey to the
world a similar sense of the value of his treasure. The narrative
which we have gathered from the ancient chronicles of
Provence, and which we take occasion to say is drawn from the
most veracious sources of history, will illustrate the correctness
of these particulars.

One of the most remarkable instances of the sentiment of love,
warmed into passion, yet without evil in its objects, is to be found
in the true and touching history of Guillaume de Cabestaign, a
noble youth of Roussillon. Though noble of birth, Guillaume
was without fortune, and it was not thought improper or humiliating
in those days that he should serve, as a page, the knight
whose ancestors were known to his own as associates. It was
in this capacity that he became the retainer of Raymond, lord
of Roussillon. Raymond, though a haughty baron, was one who
possessed certain generous tastes and sentiments, and who
showed himself capable of appreciating the talents and great
merits of Guillaume de Cabestaign. His endowments, indeed,
were of a character to find ready favor with all parties. The
youth was not only graceful of carriage, and particularly handsome
of face and person, but he possessed graces of mind and
manner which especially commended him to knightly sympathy
and admiration. He belonged to that class of improvvisatori to
whom the people of Provence gave the name of troubadour, and
was quite as ready to sing the praises of his mistress, as he was
to mount horse, and charge with sword and lance in her defence
and honor. His muse, taking her moral aspect from his own,
was pure and modest in her behavior — indulging in no song or
sentiment which would not fall becomingly on the most virgin
ear. His verses were distinguished equally by their delicacy
and fancy, and united to a spirit of the most generous and exulting
life a taste of the utmost simplicity and purity. Not less
gentle than buoyant, he was at once timid in approach, and joygiving

in society; and while he compelled the respect of men
by his frank and fearless manhood, he won the hearts of the
other sex by those gentle graces which, always prompt and
ready, are never obtrusive, and which leave us only to the just
appreciation of their value, when they are withdrawn from our
knowledge and enjoyment.

It happened, unfortunately for our troubadour, that he won
too many hearts. Raised by the lord of Roussillon to the rank
of gentleman-usher to the Lady Marguerite, his young and beautiful
wife, the graces and accomplishments of Guillaume de
Cabestaign, soon became quite as apparent and agreeable to her
as to the meanest of the damsels in her train. She was never
so well satisfied as in his society; and her young and ardent
soul, repelled rather than solicited by the stern nature of Raymond,
her lord, was better prepared and pleased to sympathize
with the more beguiling and accessible spirit of the page. The
tenderest impressions of love, without her own knowledge, soon
seized upon her heart; and she had learned to sigh as she gazed
upon the person that she favored, long before she entertained
the slightest consciousness that he was at all precious to her
eyes. He himself, dutiful as devoted, for a long season beheld
none of these proofs of favor on the part of his noble mistress.
She called him her servant, it is true, and he, as such, sung daily
in her praises the equal language of the lover and the knight.
These were words, however, of a vague conventional meaning,
to which her husband listened with indifferent ear. In those
days every noble lady entertained a lover, who was called her
servant. It was a prerogative of nobility that such should be
the case. It spoke for the courtliness and aristocracy of the
party; and to be without a lover, though in the possession of a
husband, was to be an object of scornful sympathy in the eyes
of the sex. Fashion, in other words, had taken the name of
chivalry; and it was one of her regulations that the noble lady
should possess a lover, who should of necessity be other than
her lord. In this capacity, Raymond of Roussillon, found nothing
of which to complain in the devotion of Guillaume de Cabestaign
to Marguerite, his wife. But the courtiers who gathered
in her train were not so indulgent, or were of keener sight. They
soon felt the preference which she gave, over all others, to our

troubadour. They felt, and they resented in the more readily,
as they were not insensible to his personal superiority. Guillaume
himself, was exceeding slow in arriving at a similar consciousness.
Touched with a fonder sentiment for his mistress
than was compatible with his security, his modesty had never
suffered him to suppose that he had been so fortunate as to inspire
her with a feeling such as he now knew within himself.
It was at a moment when he least looked for it, that he made
the perilous discovery. It was in the course of a discussion upon
the various signs of love — such a discussion as occupied the idle
hours, and the wandering fancies of chivalry — that she said to
him, somewhat abruptly —

“Surely thou, Guillaume, thou, who canst sing of love so tenderly,
and with so much sweetness, thou, of all persons, should
be the one to distinguish between a feigned passion and a real
one. Methinks the eye of him who loves truly, could most certainly
discover, from the eye of the beloved one, whether the
real flame were yet burning in her heart.”

And even as she spoke, the glance of her dark and lustrous
eye settled upon his own with such a dewy and quivering fire,
that his soul at once became enlightened with her secret. The
troubadour was necessarily an improvvisatore. Guillaume de
Cabestaign was admitted to be one of the most spontaneous in
his utterance, of all his order. His lyre took for him the voice
which he could not well have used at that overpowering moment.
He sung wildly and triumphantly, inspired by his new and rapturous
consciousness, even while her eyes were yet fixed upon
him, full still of the involuntary declaration which made the inspiration
of his song. These verses, which embodied the first
impulsive sentiment which he had ever dared to breathe from
his heart of the passion which had long been lurking within it,
have been preserved for us by the damsels of Provence. We
translate them, necessarily to the great detriment of their
melody, from the sweet South, where they had birth, to our
harsher Runic region. The song of Guillaume was an apostrophe.

Such a poem is beyond analysis. It was simply a gush of
enthusiasm — the lyrical overflow of sentiment and passion, such
as a song should be always. The reader will easily understand
that the delicacy of the sentiment, the epigrammatic intenseness of
the expression, is totally lost in the difficulty of subjugating our
more stubborn language to the uses of the poet. A faint and inferior
idea of what was sung at this moment of wild and almost
spasmodical utterance, is all that we design to convey.

The spot in which this scene took place was amid the depth
of umbrageous trees, in the beautiful garden of Chateau Roussillon.
A soft and persuasive silence hung suspended in the atmosphere.
Not a leaf stirred, not a bird chirrupped in the foliage;
and, however passionate was the sentiment expressed by the
troubadour, it scarcely rose beyond a whisper — harmonizing in
the subdued utterance, and the sweet delicacy of its sentiment
with the exquisite repose and languor of the scene. Carried beyond
herself by the emotions of the moment, the feeling of Marguerite
became so far irresistible that she stooped ere the song
of the troubadour had subsided from the ear, and pressed her
lips upon the forehead of her kneeling lover. He seized her
hand at this moment and carried it to his own lips, in an equally
involuntary impulse. This act awakened the noble lady to a
just consciousness of her weakness. She at once recoiled from
his grasp.

“Alas!” she exclaimed, with clasped hands, “what have I
done?”

“Ah, lady!” was the answer of the troubadour, “it is thy
goodness which has at length discovered how my heart is devoted

to thee. It is thy truth, and thy nobleness, dear lady,
which I love and worship.”

“By these shalt thou know me ever, Guillaume of Cabestaign,”
was the response; “and yet I warn thee,” she continued,
“I warn and I entreat thee, dear servant, that thou approach
me not so near again. Thou hast shown to me, and surprised
from me, a most precious but an unhappy secret. Thou hast
too deeply found thy way into my heart. Alas! wherefore!
wherefore!” and the eyes of the amiable and virtuous woman
were suffused with tears, as her innocent soul trembled under
the reproaches of her jealous conscience. She continued —

“I can not help but love thee, Guillaume of Cabestaign, but
it shall never be said that the love of the Lady Marguerite of
Roussillon was other than became the wife of her lord. Thou,
too, shalt know me, by love only, Guillaume; but it shall be
such a love as shall work neither of us trespass. Yet do not
thou cease to love me as before, for, of a truth, dear servant,
the affections of thy heart are needful to the life of mine.”

The voice of the troubadour was only in his lyre. At all
events, his reply has been only preserved to us in song. It was
in the fullness of his joy that he again poured forth his melody:—