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Updated: May 3, 2025
Those were the nights when Puck came dancing up from Tupelo with Titania's fairy rout a-twinkle at his heels; when the great Hindu Raj floated from India in his canopied barge across the moonlit waters of Lake Waban; when Tristram and Iseult, on their way to the court of King Mark, all love distraught, cast anchor in the little cove below Stone Hall and played their passion out; when Nicolette kilted her skirts against the dew and argued of love with Aucassin.
They are splendid in youth, like Aucassin, whose swooning passion for Nicolette is symbolical of their almost painful desire of beauty. In Hand and Soul, Rossetti tells us of Chiaro dell Erma that "he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately persons."
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.
Thereupon he shuts her up in a tower, along with her nurse, where there is but a single window. And the count promises his son that he shall have his "douce mie" if he will go to fight against the mortal enemy of their house, the Count of Vallence. Aucassin believes his father; goes and captures the count. Then the father refuses to fulfil his promise.
Many of us have first found our way into the Realm of Romance, properly so called, through the pages of a little crimson clad volume of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne. Its last pages contain the charming Cante-Fable of Aucassin et Nicolete, which Mr. Walter Pater's praises and Mr. Andrew Lang's brilliant version have made familiar to all lovers of letters.
He says that his son must marry the daughter of a king or of a count; but Aucassin replies that were an empress offered him he would refuse her for Nicolette. Thereat the count goes to the viscount and bids him give up the little maid that he may burn her as a witch. The viscount hesitates, and promises he will put her out of reach of Aucassin.
"Compare," he says, "the sorrows of sentiment, of ladies and lovers, praised in song, with the sorrows of the poor, with troubles that are real and not of the heart!" Even Aucassin the lovelorn feels it, and gives the hind money to pay for his ox, and so riding on comes to a lodge that Nicolette has built with blossoms and boughs.
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