ustrate that other element of its
early sweetness, a languid excess of sweetness even, by another story
printed in the same volume of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, and of
about the same date, a story which comes, characteristically, from the
South, and connects itself with the literature of Provence.

The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and the
Aubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few,
for the elect and peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But below
this intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of literature, less
serious and elevated, reaching, by lightness of form and comparative
homeliness of interest, an audience which the concentrated passion of
those higher lyrics left untouched. This literature has long since
perished, or lives only in later French or Italian versions. One such
version, the only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought he
detected in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French
of the latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a unique
manuscript, in the national library of Paris; and there were reasons
which made him divine for it a still more ancient ancestry, traces in it
of an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of some early Arabian
Nights.* The little book loses none of its interest through the
criticism which finds in it only a traditional subject, handed on by one
people to another; for after passing thus from hand to hand, its outline
is still clear, its surface untarnished; and, like many other stories,
books, literary and artistic conceptions of the middle age, it has come
to have in this way a sort of personal history, almost as full of risk
and adventure as that of its own heroes. The writer himself calls the
piece a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but with its incidents and
sentiment helped forward by songs, inserted at irregular intervals. In
the junctions of the story itself there are signs of roughness and want
of skill, which make one suspect that the prose was only put together to
connect a series of songs--a series of songs so moving and attractive
that people wished to heighten and dignify their effect by a regular
framework or setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the simplest kind,
not rhymed even, but only imperfectly assonant, stanzas of twenty or
thirty lines apiece, all ending with a similar vowel sound. And here, as
elsewhere in that early poetry, much of