poor and in
misery.' Were God to answer him He would say, 'thou liest!'" To
illustrate the degeneracy of the age, Peire relates a fable, perhaps the
only instance of this literary form among the troubadours, upon the
theme that if all the world were mad, the one sane man would be in a
lunatic asylum: "there was a certain town, I know not where, upon which
a rain fell of such a nature that all the inhabitants upon whom it fell,
lost their reason. All lost their reason except one, who escaped because
he was asleep in his house when the rain came. When he awoke, he rose:
the rain had ceased, and he went out among the people who were all
committing follies. One was clothed, another naked, another was spitting
at the sky: some were throwing sticks and stones, tearing their coats,
striking and pushing... The sane man was deeply surprised and saw that
they were mad; nor could he find a single man in his senses. Yet greater
was their surprise at him, and as they saw that he did not follow their
example, they concluded that he had lost his senses.... So one strikes
him in front, another behind; he is dashed to the ground and trampled
under foot... at length he flees to his house covered with mud, bruised [88]
and half dead and thankful for his escape": The mad town, says Peire
Cardenal, is the present world: the highest form of intelligence is the
love and fear of God, but this has been replaced by greed, pride and
malice; consequently the "sense of God" seems madness to the world and
he who refuses to follow the "sense of the world" is treated as a
madman.

Peire Cardenal is thus by temperament a moral preacher; he is not merely
critical of errors, but has also a positive faith to propound. He is not
an opponent of the papacy as an institution: the confession of faith
which he utters in one of his _sirventes_ shows that he would have been
perfectly satisfied with the Roman ecclesiastical and doctrinal system,
had it been properly worked. In this respect he differs from a
contemporary troubadour, Guillem Figueira, whose violent satire against
Rome shows him as opposed to the whole system from the papacy downwards.
He was a native of Toulouse and migrated to Lombardy and to the court of
Frederick II. when the crusade drove him from his home. "I wonder not,
Rome, that men go astray, for thou hast cast the world into strife and
misery; virtue and good works die and are buried because of thee,
treacherous Rome, thou guiding-star,