welfth century as the date of the original
draft. It would thus be contemporaneous with the last poems of Chretien
de Troyes (1170-80). The author was probably a minstrel by profession,
but one of more than ordinary taste and talent. For, evidently skilled
in both song and recitation, he so divided his narrative between poetry
and prose that he gave himself ample opportunity to display his powers,
while at the same time he retained more easily, by this variety, the
attention of his audience. He calls his invention--if his invention it
be--a "song-story." The subject he drew probably from reminiscences of
the widely known story of Floire and Blanchefleur; reversing the parts,
so that here it is the hero who is the Christian, while the heroine is a
Saracen captive baptized in her early years. The general outline of the
plot also resembles indistinctly the plot of Floire and Blanchefleur,
though its topography is somewhat indefinite, and a certain amount of
absurd adventure in strange lands is interwoven with it. With these
exceptions, however, few literary productions of the Middle Ages can
rival 'Aucassin and Nicolette' in graceful sentiment and sympathetic
description.

The Paris manuscript gives the music for the poetical parts,--music that
is little more than a modulation. There is a different notation for the
first two lines, but for the other lines this notation is repeated in
couplets, except that the last line of each song or _laisse_--being a
half-line--has a cadence of its own. The lines are all seven syllables
in length, save the final half-lines, and the assonance, which all but
the half-lines observe, tends somewhat towards rhyme.

The story begins with a song which serves as prologue; and then its
prose takes up the narrative, telling how Aucassin, son of Garin, Count
of Beaucaire, so loved Nicolette, a Saracen maiden, who had been sold to
the Viscount of Beaucaire, baptized and adopted by him, that he had
forsaken knighthood and chivalry and even refused to defend his
father's territories against Count Bougart of Valence. Accordingly his
father ordered the Viscount to send away Nicolette, and he walled her up
in a tower of his palace. Later, Aucassin is imprisoned by his father.
But Nicolette escapes, hears him lamenting in his cell, and comforts him
until the warden on the tower warns her of the approach of the town
watch. She flees to the forest outside the gates, and there, in order to
test Aucassin's f