ed of amorists. And, as a matter of fact, both because of the requirements of his very formal art and because of the demands of his public, a gracefully artificial eroticism had to be the troubadour's main theme. His was a more or less remote variety of lovemaking, "a something- mystical and supersensual," which excellently served its purpose, and which not all poets pressed to so personal an issue as did unfortunate Peire Vidal, to his own repeated disaster.
T was a matter of course, then, that on his return to France, Peire, now a recognized poet and the favorite of a king, should lose no time in selecting a fashionable inspiration for his verse. He was not wholly a novice in these matters. Already he had courted a lady in the contemplation of whose loveliness he declared that roses appeared to him in frost-time, and a blue sky through a storm, and whose speech was like honey. But his present love, according to the story, was the wife of the inhumanly facetious Guillems de Castenel. A jealous enmity must have persisted between the two men; for when Peire became somewhat overassiduous in his attentions to the lady, the knight proved his toleration to be by no means as good-naturedly elastic as that of the ordinary husband of the time, by boring the poet's tongue—"a symbolic punishment," commented Peire's severest critic, that keenly satirical troubadour, the Monk of Montaudon. It may well be imagined that this humiliating incident was a sad check to poor Peire's swelling prestige, for, as the news was swiftly spread abroad, a great laugh—not quite good-humored, for they were at bottom jealous of the successful and boasting minstrel—went up from all the troubadours of Provence. Nor, so long as Peire lived, did the laughter ever quite die out.
It was not long after this that, having wandered, for recuperation perhaps, to the seductive shores of the Mediterranean, Peire found himself within "merry Marseilles." Here Barral de Baux, Viscount of Marseilles and the best of good fellows, discerned the making of an excellent comrade in the lively minstrel, and, becoming his patron, honored him not only with costly gifts, according to custom, but also with his own constant companionship. The two, viscount and troubadour, laughed, drank, rode, and hunted together, wore the same style of dress, and called each other by the same name. Now, as the crown of his treasures, this gracious viscount possessed a wife, the lady Azalais, who was doubtless supremely lovely. At all events, her rank made her a fit subject for rhymed adulation, and she was celebrated in many a verse by the famous poet Folquet of Marseilles, who was also Bishop of Toulouse. So when Peire Vidal likewise began to write canzos—and extremely good they were—in praise of Azalais, under the name of "Vierna," their perfection was good-humoredly applauded by the lord Barral, who declined to take seriously either Peire's extravagant devotion or the lady's objection to it. Meanwhile, Azalais's indifference was naturally a stimulus, and Peire expressed his ostentatious despair at her cruelty, in poems each more exquisite and affecting than the last.
"I am like a bird," he lamented, "which follows the hunter's pipe, although it be to its certain death. So I expose my heart willingly to the thousands of arrows that she hurls at me from her beautiful eyes."
But Peire was ever a man of action, rather than of ineffectual dreams; and it is one of the most notable instances of his capacity for ill-advised ardor that he one day left off rhyming, burst into the lady Azalais's room, and kissed her. For this quite unthinkable presumption he was again to suffer humiliation. Although Barral, misliking separation from his comrade, laughed at the matter as the clumsy jest of a clever fellow, Azalais was inclined to no such tolerance, and demanded that the offending minstrel be banished from the city, unforgiven.
With his habitual easy aptitude for transition, Peire turned, shortly after his expulsion, to thoughts of war. It happened at this time that Richard the Lion-hearted was starting forth on the Third Crusade; and Peire, finding the company and the expedition to his liking, turned
