Ch. 12 - Nicolette and Marion

C'est d'Aucassins et de Nicolete.

Qui vauroit bons vers oir
Del deport du viel caitiff
De deus biax enfans petis
Nicolete et Aucassins;
Des grans paines qu'il soufri
Et des proueces qu'il fist
For s'amie o le cler vis.
Dox est li cans biax est li dis
Et cortois et bien asis.
Nus hom n'est si esbahis
Tant dolans ni entrepris
De grant mal amaladis
Se il l'oit ne soit garis
Et de joie resbaudis
Tant par est dou-ce.

This is of Aucassins and Nicolette.

Whom would a good ballad please
By the captive from o'er-seas,
A sweet song in children's praise,
Nicolette and Aucassins;
What he bore for her caress,
What he proved of his prowess
For his friend with the bright face?
The song has charm, the tale has grace,
And courtesy and good address.
No man is in such distress,
Such suffering or weariness,
Sick with ever such sickness,
But he shall, if he hear this,
Recover all his happiness,
So sweet it is!

This little thirteenth-century gem is called a "chante-fable," a
story partly in prose, partly in verse, to be sung according to
musical notation accompanying the words in the single manuscript
known, and published in facsimile by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon at Oxford
in 1896. Indeed, few poems, old or new, have in the last few years
been more reprinted, translated, and discussed, than "Aucassins,"
yet the discussion lacks interest to the idle tourist, and tells him
little. Nothing is known of the author or his date. The second line
alone offers a hint, but nothing more. "Caitif" means in the first
place a captive, and secondly any unfortunate or wretched man.
Critics have liked to think that the word means here a captive to
the Saracens, and that the poet, like Cervantes three or four
hundred years later, may have been a prisoner to the infidels. What
the critics can do, we can do. If liberties can be taken with
impunity by scholars, we can take the liberty of supposing that the
poet was a prisoner in the crusade of Coeur-de-Lion and Philippe-
Auguste; that he had recovered his liberty, with his master, in
1194; and that he passed the rest of his life singing to the old
Queen Eleanor or to Richard, at Chinon, and to the lords of all the
chateaux in Guienne, Poitiers, Anjou, and Normandy, not to mention
England. The living was a pleasant one, as the sunny atmosphere of
the Southern poetry proves.

Dox est li cans; biax est li dis,
Et cortois et bien asis.

The poet-troubadour who composed and recited "Aucassins" could not
have been unhappy, but this is the affair of his private life, and
not of ours. What rather interests us is his poetic motive,