# Harper's Magazine/Volume 108/Peire Vidal—Troubadour

Painted for Harper's Magazine by Howard Pyle
"Nothing harms me all the day While her sweet eyes stand before me."
H A R P E R'S Monthly Magazine
Peire Vidal—Troubadour
BY Olivia Howard Dunbar
O the son of a furrier, reared, under more or less prosaic and homely restrictions, in prosperrous twelfth-century Toulouse, yet with an impatient genius always secretly nestling in his bosom, the life of all lives most desirable and enchanting may well have seemed that of the famed troubadours of his own Provence. And it must have been his conscious natural affiliation with these masters of the "gay science" that gave sustenance and color to the otherwise dingy boyhood of one Peire Vidal, who, having uncomfortably little taste for a dark workshop, ill-smelling pelts, the society of his father's dull apprentices, determined, while still a lad, to join the sweet-toned chorus of the poet-adventurers.
Not only was it an inspiriting matter to a youthful poet to feel himself a native of that sunny, magically fecund Provence which recognized no season but spring and no mode of expression but the lyric; but, apart from this, there were two important facts which must have entered prominently into the ambitious lad's calculations. One was the democracy, extraordinary in a feudal age, of the poet's calling. Was not a poet as good as a prince, and were they not often identical? It was a Count of Poitiers who was the first troubadour, after whom the making of verses not only came to be affected by duke and baron, monk and bishop, but was even practised, with a more than kingly excellence, by that darling of romance, Richard of the Lion Heart. On the other hand, equal prestige awaited minstrels of lowlier origin: Arnaud de Marveil, originally a serf, was permitted to address his songs to the Countess Adelaide, daughter of Count Raymond V. of Toulouse, while Bernart de Ventadour, "son of a serving-man," as his biographer has it, wooed first a Viscountess and then a Duchess of Normandy. Moreover, to a lad of quick parts, the acquirement of the technicalities of this courtly art, far from being the dreary and tedious affair that it was, for instance, to serve as a furrier's apprentice, was in itself an infinite solace and delight. If one had a head that was always singing soundless music within itself and a heart that beat riotously, one needed only a torchlight and an undisturbed hour to play at master and apprentice both.
Thus Peire, having diligently studied his models of canzos, sirventes, albas, retroensas, those complex verse-forms but lately borrowed from the Arabs and handled by the Provençal poets with consummate adroitness, learned, in his turn, to weave the soft syllables of the Langue d'Oc into subtly intricate accord, artfully distributing the harmonies throughout the verses, as his masters did, rather than contenting himself with a mere stupid tagging of the lines with ​rhyme, as came to be the way of later and lazier poets.
In sequence of which patient emulation, the time came when the confident graduate of his own instruction bade farewell to the furrier's craft and to Toulouse and strode gayly forth to meet as strange a fortune as poet ever had. "Son of a petty tradesman," as one of his modern biographers has put it, "he became the companion of princes, reckoned five kings among his friends, won fame in as many countries, and, after seven centuries, still lives in fifty songs." Incontestably the most original, perhaps the most gifted, of the group of poets to which he belongs, it is the only too obvious contrast between his wisdom and his folly that still chiefly arouses interest; for human curiosity loves to exercise itself upon such a riddle as the career of this "Don Quixote of troubadours," this earlier prototype, as it has been said of him, of Goldsmith, who "wrote like an angel" but could not live like one. "He sang better than any poet in the world," declares the Provençal chronicler, "and was one of the maddest men that ever lived, for he believed everything to be just as he wished it."
HERE is a tradition—the tale at least fits in with Peire's tumultuous and not too dignified career—that he first introduced himself, in the character of a troubadour, at the gates of the castle of the Seigneur Guillems de Castenel. Now from first to last Peire Vidal was no less an actor than a poet; and nothing could better exemplify the audacity that was the readiest expression of his facile temperament than that, arriving unknown, on foot, destitute of the panoply or the attendance of the successful poet, he should—with a quizzical twist of the mouth, perhaps—have sent word to the seigneur that a poet was his guest. It is true that the isolation of the strongholds of the nobility sufficed to make the troubadour invariably welcome and his approach the signal for unstinted hospitality. Yet the Seigneur de Castenel's hospitality was not large enough to include a bold youth the legitimacy of whose pretensions there was good reason to distrust; and as a playful rebuke for his impertinence it was ordered that the self-styled poet be lowered in a bucket half-way down a well, with the invitation there to compose a poem. If the composition should fail to justify its author's arrogance, the rope was to be cut. The minstrel's hardihood was fully equal to the test; and reading the verses sent up for his inspection, the Seigneur decided that, after all, it were a pity to drown a poet of so very marked resourcefulness.
From the time of this farcical adventure until his death Vidal was a persistent nomad. To most of us, however, the precise itinerary of the vagabond genius whose hasty footprints lie beneath the dust of seven centuries is of less importance than the sufficiently established fact that very early in his career Peire had roamed through a good part of France, Spain, and Italy. Indeed, he had barely escaped from the well of the Seigneur de Castenel when, perhaps from a desire not to put to too severe a test the fate of a prophet in his own country, he journeyed into near-lying Spain. Here, partly through merit, and partly, no doubt, through effrontery, he succeeded in recommending himself to the genial Alfonso of Aragon, one of the most liberal patrons of troubadours, and a monarch of whom Peire—it should be recorded of his constancy—always remained a devoted servitor. The first sirvente, or political poem, that Peire is known to have written is in praise of King Alfonso and of the war which he then happened, somewhat awkwardly for the poet, to be making upon Count Raymond of Toulouse.
Years after, when Alfonso died, Peire dutifully lamented him. "In great affliction," he wrote, "must live he who loses his good master, as I have lost the best to whom death ever came. Certainly," he adds, with a comfortable reliance upon ethical principle, "I should not live if suicide were not a sin."
AT THE GATE OF THE CASTLE
​accomplished of amorists. And, as a matter of fact, both because of the requirements of his very formal art and because of the demands of his public, a gracefully artificial eroticism had to be the troubadour's main theme. His was a more or less remote variety of lovemaking, "a something- mystical and supersensual," which excellently served its purpose, and which not all poets pressed to so personal an issue as did unfortunate Peire Vidal, to his own repeated disaster.
T was a matter of course, then, that on his return to France, Peire, now a recognized poet and the favorite of a king, should lose no time in selecting a fashionable inspiration for his verse. He was not wholly a novice in these matters. Already he had courted a lady in the contemplation of whose loveliness he declared that roses appeared to him in frost-time, and a blue sky through a storm, and whose speech was like honey. But his present love, according to the story, was the wife of the inhumanly facetious Guillems de Castenel. A jealous enmity must have persisted between the two men; for when Peire became somewhat overassiduous in his attentions to the lady, the knight proved his toleration to be by no means as good-naturedly elastic as that of the ordinary husband of the time, by boring the poet's tongue—"a symbolic punishment," commented Peire's severest critic, that keenly satirical troubadour, the Monk of Montaudon. It may well be imagined that this humiliating incident was a sad check to poor Peire's swelling prestige, for, as the news was swiftly spread abroad, a great laugh—not quite good-humored, for they were at bottom jealous of the successful and boasting minstrel—went up from all the troubadours of Provence. Nor, so long as Peire lived, did the laughter ever quite die out.
It was not long after this that, having wandered, for recuperation perhaps, to the seductive shores of the Mediterranean, Peire found himself within "merry Marseilles." Here Barral de Baux, Viscount of Marseilles and the best of good fellows, discerned the making of an excellent comrade in the lively minstrel, and, becoming his patron, honored him not only with costly gifts, according to custom, but also with his own constant companionship. The two, viscount and troubadour, laughed, drank, rode, and hunted together, wore the same style of dress, and called each other by the same name. Now, as the crown of his treasures, this gracious viscount possessed a wife, the lady Azalais, who was doubtless supremely lovely. At all events, her rank made her a fit subject for rhymed adulation, and she was celebrated in many a verse by the famous poet Folquet of Marseilles, who was also Bishop of Toulouse. So when Peire Vidal likewise began to write canzos—and extremely good they were—in praise of Azalais, under the name of "Vierna," their perfection was good-humoredly applauded by the lord Barral, who declined to take seriously either Peire's extravagant devotion or the lady's objection to it. Meanwhile, Azalais's indifference was naturally a stimulus, and Peire expressed his ostentatious despair at her cruelty, in poems each more exquisite and affecting than the last.
"I am like a bird," he lamented, "which follows the hunter's pipe, although it be to its certain death. So I expose my heart willingly to the thousands of arrows that she hurls at me from her beautiful eyes."
But Peire was ever a man of action, rather than of ineffectual dreams; and it is one of the most notable instances of his capacity for ill-advised ardor that he one day left off rhyming, burst into the lady Azalais's room, and kissed her. For this quite unthinkable presumption he was again to suffer humiliation. Although Barral, misliking separation from his comrade, laughed at the matter as the clumsy jest of a clever fellow, Azalais was inclined to no such tolerance, and demanded that the offending minstrel be banished from the city, unforgiven.
VIDAL—POET AND SATIRIST
​his horse's head in the same direction. Of the various startling incidents of this journey, the most memorable is one that almost exhausts an already overstrained credulity. Piere's biographers relate that at Cyprus his route was deflected by meeting a beautiful woman, whom he—alas! in no chivalric spirit—married. Certain persons, it is told, aware of the troubadour's fondness for notoriety, suggested to him that the lady was so nearly related to the Emperor of Greece that marriage with her would entitle him to the practical sovereignty of that kingdom. It is probable that this absurd pretext served Peire as well as any other to indulge his inveterate passion for posing. So it was announced that Sir Peire Vidal—he had already conferred upon himself the dignity of knighthood—had become an emperor and his wife an empress. Ignoring any possible political aspect of their rank, the pair sat upon thrones, wore crowns, and caused themselves to be addressed as "Majesties." This preposterous comedy was highly irritating to Peire's fellow troubadours,—a fact which doubtless increased his own perverse delight in it. However, when, as shortly happened, the flavor of the pastime was spent, he calmly abandoned it, though what became of his passive partner in the imperial farce tradition does not say. It is certain, at least, that she in no way interfered with her husband's subsequent amours, or sought in any way to emphasize the uncomfortable anomalousness of her position as wife of a troubadour.
In Italy, some time after this unromantic incident, the inconstant Peire recalled his abeyant sufferings on the score of the lady Azalais, and set himself to composing an additional series of poems on the always graceful theme of his disappointed love. Although nothing is more untranslatable than Provençal poetry, one example may be given of an attempt at the impossible, in connection with this stage of the poet's career. While hardly poetical, the translation, which is Hueffer's, has the value of great literalness:
With my breath I drink the air That Provence my country sends me; For a message ever lends me Joy, from her most dear and fair. When they praise her. I rejoice, Ask for more, with eager voice, Listen, listen, night and morrow.
For no country 'neath the sun Beats mine, from Rozer to Vensa, From the sea to the Durensa; Nowhere equal joy is won. With my friends, when I did part, And with her I left my heart Who dispelled my deepest sorrow.
Nothing harms me all the day While her sweet eyes stand before me, And her lips, that vapture bore me. If I praise her, no one may Call my rapturous word a lie: For the whole world can descry Nothing wrought in sweeter fashion.
All the good I do or say Only to her grace is owing, For she made me wise and knowing, For she made me true and gay. If in glory I abound To her praise it must redound Who inspires my song with passion.
The news that Peire was still rhyming of the stolen kiss and of Azalais's cruelty in failing to condone the theft came shortly to the ears of Barral and his viscountess. Lord Barral, who had an unconquerable liking for being amused, declared that he could no longer dispense with the amiable Peire's society, and with great difficulty prevailed upon "Vierna" to extend the pardon whose solicitation had inspired so many rhymes. It was grudgingly given, but riotously received, and Peire turned sharply about to accomplish his long-delayed return to Marseilles.
IN THE TRAIN OF KING ALFONSO
​himself one of the doughtiest knights in the world and the most beloved of ladies." Jongleurs escorted him like grooms, recited his poems, played his instruments, aspired assiduously to his worldly glory and mastery of song. He needed no home, since all homes were open to him; and he was an incomparable guest. His dramatic genius availed him showily when he was called upon to improvise in the banqueting-halls of noblemen's castles, and the close of his recitals never failed to invite a shower of those gifts of gold and purple and fine linen which were the luxurious maintenance of the typical troubadour.
On his way back to France, the magnificent youth proclaimed his good fortune with his customary lack of reticence.
"My heart beats high," he sang, "for Barral summons me. Praise be to God and to those that reared me! ... I am of those who do not build fancies nor speak too much of themselves, yet this is true: that I love women and fell knights to earth. Many a fine tournament have I broken up, for I deal such deadly blows that all exclaim, 'That is Sir Peire Vidal, the master of chivalry and the pursuit of love, who performs noble deeds for the sake of his friends, who loves battles and tournaments more than a monk loves bread.'"
Azalais, however, proved no more approachable than before; and, tiring perhaps of the minor note of lamentation, Peire decided after a time that he was "a sillier thing to love her so than the mad shepherd who plays his pipe to a beautiful mountain,"—and withdrew.
N the method that he chose of impressing the heart of the fair Loba de Peinautier, of Carcassonne, who next captured his fugitive affections, Peire carried into execution a fancy that a less literal poet would have turned into a neat stanza;—but it was ever his way to amaze mankind by living his metaphors. Poets are by profession the apologists of unreason; yet few, like Peire, have ever been at the pains to exemplify in their precious persons the extravagance that their rhymes so confidently extol. Acting on the suggestion contained in the meaning of his inamorata's name, the poet now dubbed himself "Lop," changed the arms on his shield to "wolf," dressed himself in wolfskins, and hid in the mountains, whither he summoned shepherds to hunt him with dogs. From this piece of folly Peire barely escaped with his life; in addition, it brought him contemptuous laughter from Loba, jeers from that larger audience of which, despite his defiance, he remained always so sensitively conscious,—and a determination, perhaps, to have done with extravagance.
In spite of the breakneck enthusiasm with which he conducted his amours, Peire was, of course, neither a sincere lover nor yet a sentimentalist. On the contrary, the only plausible explanation of his perplexing contradictions is that he was of an extravagantly satirical temper.
Even in his intervals of apparent lucidity, the same strain of mockery is evident, as in those prose writings of his where he seriously extols all the virtues, those in particular which he always neglected to practise. One of the most singular of literary curiosities is that series of precepts which Peire relates that he formulated for a jongleur who applied to him for advice. It is impossible not to believe that this was still another of his often far-fetched jests.
"Be always suitably dressed," counselled Peire, "but never dandified. Let your garments be well made, and so care for them that they shall seem always new. Have an honest mien. Do not speak too much." Again he says: "Do not condemn other jongleurs. Such critics of their equals have the appearance of low jealousy." And again: "As for you, whatever may be your intellect, your knowledge, or your talents, do not boast of them. Be modest and you will find persons who will help you to succeed."
In the conscientious disregard of all these precepts, Peire Vidal rounded out a venerable age; and died finally—unsympathetic historians allege from too free indulgence in wine—at the court of his royal friend and patron, King Emmerich of Hungary. He did not lack for epitaphs; and his distorted sense of humor would perhaps have derived especial unction from the inadequacy of even the most flattering among them.