brilliant than his troubadour predecessor. His fits of extravagance were
followed by fits of penitence in whose sincerity one may place some
faith, whereas the troubadour was certainly never sad for long, and
apparently not much imbued with religious ardor, even if he did go to
the Holy Land as a pious crusader. Eleanor inherited her grandfather's
temper and his love of literature, music, fighting, and all that made
life worth living, according to the standards of her native land. Let us
look at this land of the troubadours, from which Eleanor came, and try
to picture the environment to which she was accustomed and which she
abandoned to live with the sober, monkish, unlovely French king, whose
court and whose city of Paris did not compare with the gay capital of
Bordeaux, where her father and her grandfather had gathered the most
brilliant poets and musicians of Provence.

While the northern and western portions of France, including even that
muddy _Lutetia Parisorum_ which has become the modern Paris, were for
but a short time, comparatively, under Roman rule, there was a portion
of France, between the Rhone and the Swiss Alps, which was so
distinctively and peculiarly a part of the great empire that it was
called _Provincia_, "the Province," or, as we know it, Provence. It was
in this beautiful land, the French Riviera, that the Roman legions
established their first posts, long before there was a Roman Empire.
Here they found a civilization ready to their hands, for in the centre
of their new Provincia was the famous port of
Massillia--Marseilles--established long before by Greeks and
Phoenicians. To the present day one finds at Aries, at Mimes, at
Avignon, titanic ruins bearing witness to the Roman civilization. It was
a fertile country, glowing with rich fruits and flowers, and favored
with a climate which has made it famous since the days of Rome. While
the north of France was hopelessly barbarized by Teutonic inroads and
long years of barbaric warfare, the civilization of Provence was rather
checked than destroyed. Marseilles was still a port, and the commerce of
the east, of the Mediterranean, of Rome, came through Marseilles, not
only for Gaul but for Britain. The influence of this constant
intercourse, no less than the large infusion of Latin or Hellenic blood,
kept the people of Provence from relapsing into the primitive state of
the people further to the north. They were, moreover, a gay and
pleasure-lovin