rs.

The troubadours, the true masters and real doctors of the gay science, in
full armor, the visor up, the lance in bucket, rode from keep to keep,
from court to court, from one to another of the long string of castles
that stretched throughout Provence, throughout the English districts on
the Continent, throughout England as well, celebrating as they passed the
beauty of this chatelaine and of that, breaking lances for women, devising
new lays to their eyes, contending with rivals in duels of song,
challenging them in the tourneys, singing and killing with equal
satisfaction, leading generally a life vagabond, prodigal, puerile,
delightful, absurd and humanizing in the extreme.

Previously keeps and castles were lairs of rapine and of brutes,
conditions which chivalry and the Courts of Love remodelled. But the
coincidental influence of poetry expressed by the best and richest men of
the day had an effect so edulcifying that whatever crapulousness the
knight overlooked the troubadour extinguished.

Nothing is perfect. The system like all others had its defects. In keeps,
when tilts, feasts, and entertainments were over, the boudoir's more
relaxing atmosphere, that of the adjoining balconies and outlying gardens
as well, had also their effect. The presence there of a man whose one
object was to sing love and make it, the fact that he was a stranger and
of all men the stranger who but comes and passes, disturbs the
imagination most; the further fact that if he but so pleased he could in
his lays trail the fame of a lady from Northumbria to Lebanon, the
perfectly natural wish for such renown, the equally feminine
disinclination to be ignored when others were praised, the concomitant
desire to have a troubadour or a part of one, as one's very own, these
stimulants had consequences that were not always very ethical.

The troubadour's religion, intoxicating in itself, was love. That was his
creed, his vocation, his life, his death. Song was its vehicle, his
presence its introduction. He exhaled it. The perfume, always heady, but
which in its first fragrance had mended manners, turned acid and ended by
dissolving morals. They melted before it. The social conditions that
prevailed in the Renaissance and later in the Restoration and Regency,
proceeded directly from these poets who, meanwhile, in a cataclysm had
vanished.

Their terrific ablation was due to an interconnection with the Albigenses,
a Languedoc sect who, in a