rank; they wrote for an exclusive audience, people of much
leisure and great refinement, and they came to value a type of personal
beauty which has in it but little of the influence of the open air and
sunshine. There is a languid Eastern deliciousness in the very scenery
of the story, the full-blown roses, the chamber painted in some
mysterious manner where Nicolette is imprisoned, the cool brown marble,
the almost nameless colours, the odour of plucked grass and flowers.
Nicolette herself well becomes this scenery, and is the best
illustration of the quality I mean--the beautiful, weird, foreign girl,
whom the shepherds take for a fay, who has the knowledge of simples, the
healing and beautifying qualities of leaves and flowers, whose skilful
touch heals Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that he suddenly leaps from
the ground; the mere sight of whose white flesh, as she passed the place
where he lay, healed a pilgrim stricken with sore disease, so that he
rose up, and returned to his own country. With this girl Aucassin is so
deeply in love that he forgets all his knightly duties. At last
Nicolette is shut up to get her out of his way, and perhaps the
prettiest passage in the whole piece is the fragment of prose which
describes her escape from this place:--

"Aucassin was put in prison, as you have heard, and Nicolette remained
shut up in her chamber. It was summer-time, in the month of May, when
the days are warm and long and clear, and the nights coy and serene.

"One night Nicolette, lying on her bed, saw the moon shine clear through
the little window, and heard the nightingale sing in the garden, and
then came the memory of Aucassin, whom she so much loved. She thought of
the Count Garins of Beaucaire, who so mortally hated her, and, to be rid
of her, might at any moment cause her to be burned or drowned. She
perceived that the old woman who kept her company was asleep; she rose
and put on the fairest gown she had; she took the bed-clothes and the
towels, and knotted them together like a cord, as far as they would go.
Then she tied the end to a pillar of the window, and let herself slip
down quite softly into the garden, and passed straight across it, to
reach the town.

"Her hair was yellow in small curls, her smiling eyes blue-green, her
face clear and feat, the little lips very red, the teeth small and
white; and the daisies which she crushed in passing, holding her skirt
high behind and before, looked dark ag