"In debate as birds are,
Hawk on bough,"
comes the kind sentinel to warn them of a danger. And Nicolette flees,
and leaps into the fosse, and thence escapes into a great forest and
lonely. In the morning she met shepherds merry over their meat, and bade
them tell Aucassin to hunt in that forest, where he should find a deer
whereof one glance would cure him of his malady. The shepherds are
happy, laughing people, who half mock Nicolette, and quite mock Aucassin,
when he comes that way. But at first they took Nicolette for a _fee_,
such a beauty shone so brightly from her, and lit up all the forest.
Aucassin they banter; and indeed the free talk of the peasants to their
lord's son in that feudal age sounds curiously, and may well make us
reconsider our notions of early feudalism.
But Aucassin learns at least that Nicolette is in the wood, and he rides
at adventure after her, till the thorns have ruined his silken surcoat,
and the blood, dripping from his torn body, makes a visible track in the
grass. So, as he wept, he met a monstrous man of the wood, that asked
him why he lamented. And he said he was sorrowing for a lily-white hound
that he had lost. Then the wild man mocked him, and told his own tale.
He was in that estate which Achilles, among the ghosts, preferred to all
the kingship of the dead outworn. He was hind and hireling to a villein,
and he had lost one of the villein's oxen. For that he dared not go into
the town, where a prison awaited him. Moreover, they had dragged the
very bed from under his old mother, to pay the price of the ox, and she
lay on straw; and at that the woodman wept.
A curious touch, is it not, of pity for the people? The old poet is
serious for one moment. "Compare," he says, "the sorrows of sentiment,
of ladies and lovers, praised in song, with the sorrows of the poor, with
troubles that are real and not of the heart!" Even Aucassin the lovelorn
feels it, and gives the hind money to pay for his ox, and so riding on
comes to a lodge that Nicolette has built with blossoms and boughs. And
Aucassin crept in and looked through a gap in the fragrant walls of the
lodge, and saw the stars in heaven, and one that was brighter than the
rest.
Does one not feel it, the cool of that old summer night, the sweet smell
of broken boughs and trodden grass and deep dew, and the shining of the
star?
"Star that I from far behold
That the moon draws to her fold,
Nicolette with thee doth dwell,
My sweet love with locks of gold,"
sings Aucassin. "And when Nicolette heard Aucassin, right so came she
unto him, and passed within the lodge, and cast her arms about his neck
and kissed and embraced him:
"Fair sweet friend, welcome be thou!"
"And thou, fair sweet love, be thou welcome!"
There the story should end, in a dream of a summer's night. But the old
minstrel did not end it so, or some one has continued his work with a
heavier hand. Aucassin rides, he cares not whither, if he has but his
love with him. And they come to a fantastic land of burlesque, such as
Pantagruel's crew touched at many a time. And Nicolette is taken by
Carthaginian pirates, and proves to be daughter to the King of Carthage,
and leaves his court and comes to Beaucaire in the disguise of a
ministrel, and "journeys end in lovers' meeting."
That is all the tale, with its gaps, its careless passages, its
adventures that do not interest the poet. He only cares for youth, love,
spring, flowers, and the song of the birds; the rest, except the passage
about the hind, is mere "business" done casually, because the audience
expects broad jests, hard blows, misadventures, recognitions. What lives
is the touch of poetry, of longing, of tender heart, of humorous
resignation. It lives, and always must live, "while the nature of man is
the same." The poet hopes his tale will gladden sad men. This service
it did for M. Bida, he says, in the dreadful year of 1870-71, when he
translated "Aucassin." This, too, it has done for me in days not
delightful. {6}